I walk across the glen to the shops today, just walking through to the shops and back. Homeward bound I have a backpack full of aromatics, basil, coriander, dill, parsley – lovely company all round. I think about how things are so different a year on, how the first shocking silence happened when life was surging forth in the Glen, and the quiet felt more profound in this, our human presence more tentative, so delicately connected. I try to imagine what it must have been like across the globe in Tasmania, their emergency coming as nature’s life force was dwindling back – a different kind of gasp. They were through pandemic restrictions and ‘back to normal’ more smoothly than here, still now only tentatively returning baby steps to ‘normality,’ listening to Bec their human interactions were hardly stalled at all.
Our pause came like that missed beat in a musical bar and then refrained in ever diminishing echoes until it tangled into something else more frayed and fraying, a fractal pause turned inward, where the noise seems louder, constant and ever more insistent. The noise is inside our heads now and worming into the very DNA of us, like it will never recede.And I miss the big O of that first real pause. This project I had thought I might sustain every day a rhythm, sticking to it and building a flow. I’ve been caught up in the long times spent and the daily commitment but found it wearing now, repetitive I hear my voice saying nothing new, for days I’ve struggled to keep it going, the experience layered in with the daily contact on social media with the FotG, which has become more fraught with the plights and opinions of others and encroaching into that initial intimate intent, to connect more basically. The daily ribbon of photos have coiled up into an indecipherable mass, a conglomerate – much like that fractal echo that misses the silence, repeated swathes of greens and blues and greys and whites and browns, I had thought to make a sequence, a stop motion collage of the year for now it is squared up and heavy in the cloud. I would like it to rain and be done.
