holding time
Dear reader,
This week I want to bring you the happy news that finally, finally, time has slowed down. The days are long and sleepy; reading for pleasure is back, and makes the hot, white-light afternoons slip easily into cool, long evenings; that fabled, fictitious work/life separation is automatic, now, like oil floating inevitably away from water.
overall: I am happy, and life is good.
i am bringing you, this time, an interview, a poem, some readings, and some art. keep writing to me, and telling me what you think.
”I’m anxious even in my dreams”
I’ve been anxious all my life, since my earliest memory.
It is nerve-wracking and exhausting some days, but it also pushes me to do things, like allows me to have two jobs I love at once. I’m also a dog trainer and canine and feline behavorist. I can’t imagine myself without all these things.
I think I’ll always find something to be anxious about. I’m anxious even in my dreams.
But there are points at which if I’m able to completely focus on something without anxiety, that’s a good space for me. That’s where doing pottery helps me, or being with animals. Especially when it comes to dog training or even taking a walk with your dog. If you do it correctly, you’re completely focused on your dog, you’re looking at how the dog is walking and responding to you as you are holding the leash. There’s nothing else. You can’t even listen to music. Otherwise usually when it comes to my anxiety I need to be doing one or two things simultaneously. If I can focus on one thing at a time, that’s a good situation for me, where I’m focused enough not to let anxiety permeate.”
Anyhow how are things?
Are you still somewhere
With your long legs
And twitching smile under
Your blue hat walking
Across a place? Or am
I greedy to make you up
Again out of memory?
- W. S. Graham
Some Sides
The Feminist Killjoy Handbook, by Sara Ahmed, recommended by Raj
The Shape of Thunder by Jasmine Warga
Bindu and the Mirror, by Atul Dodiya
love,
shreya