2015.07.26 _ 4

Entering the dance on day 4, as unsure and shy as Aphrodite. Visitors coming and going, rescheduling. Cooked zucchini flowers again for dinner. For a few weeks every summer, I cook zucchini flowers on Saturdays, as I come back from the farmers market. Every summer. Continuity. Laughed at Raffi's television reference of "continuity." PaB as a continuity series in my life from November 2nd of 2009 to now, a little bit after midnight on July 26th 2015.

My novel about time--a friend nicknamed it my "Rose of never ending time"-- is now finished: I'm willing to let go of timetables and go with the flow.

feeling a little frustrated for sleeping not well and a computer with problems. Costs me three hours of time I don't have .. I just have enough time to do my afternoon meditations, at least that shows continuity edited 14:37, 26 Jul 2015

Continuity - in any individual or group - seems to require memory (or am I confusing 'continuity' with 'consistency'?) Neuro-scientists tell us that every memory is a new 'construction' - maybe, even, a new 'creation':

“We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust’s jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and re-categorized with every act of recollection.”
“Remembering is not the re-excitation of innumerable fixed, lifeless and fragmentary traces. It is an imaginative reconstruction built out of the relation of our attitude towards a whole active mass of organized past reactions or experience. . . . It is thus hardly ever really exact.”
-- Oliver Sacks “HALLUCINATIONS”

In today's "Day 4" collage, the top left image is Day 2's "Spiral." The subsequent 15 images are "memories" of that first graphic mis-adventure. If you look for it, you'll see a 'distant cousin' family resemblance in every image - each involving minor tweaks of their common ancestor's digital DNA. Are we suspicious about the 'accuracy' of such 'memories'? Do we welcome and celebrate the creative contribution that each new image brings? Is our 'choice' between those two options simply another 'construction'? Is continuity itself an imaginative construction? edited 16:22, 26 Jul 2015

I have become (often painfully) aware that change trumps continuity. Nothing stays the same. This is what I focus on as I sit, telling myself to "let it go," staring change in the face, accepting things I cannot control.

There is something the zucchini flowers and Bruce's circular images have in common, a deep centre point around which the vortex expands and envelopes. edited 17:54, 26 Jul 2015

Today is a slow day for me, spending the evening by myself. On my dining room table sits a wall clock that I got at a yard sale somewhere around 20 years ago. Even though I have been in my new apartment for a little over a year I have not put anything up on the walls. I sat for some time this afternoon looking at that clock and remembering all the years that it has seen with me. Happy and sad times, joyful and devastating times.

time

it moves
the hands turn slowly round and around
seconds to minutes to hours to days

so many possibilities
exciting to contemplate

A clock, time, is continuity
change is continuity
nothing can ever remain the same

everything moves

time moves

and I too will move from this apartment which is only a transient place
a moment in time

a movement of the clock

for me the continuity is not in the concrete event, nor in the accuracy of the memory. The continuity to me is in the action of continuously creating space in where similar actions can take place. Continuity to me is in change, not containing what is already there. And change comes from the continuation of actions which slowly deepens the experience.

Change though can be good or bad edited 21:14, 26 Jul 2015

Afterthought: I just posted a one-minute video on YouTube that attempts to explain how each of the sixteen spiral images in the collage [posted earlier today] was made. Is this not a sort of 'continuity'? -- Variations upon a spiral theme:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMckbendjlw&feature=youtu.be edited 22:12, 26 Jul 2015

Time staring today also, waiting for a visitor who never arrived. Discovered an opening in the branches of the tree that hugs the balcony of our stepping stone apartment (picture attached above). I'm not sure why it was so refreshing, that opening, but I felt a whoosh of expansion and happiness. Maybe because it let sunlight through, or simply was unexpected after a long day of rain. Nice balances.

Stared a while at zucchini flowers too... tasks and attentions that make a day memorable, sparkly.
What makes the heart sing? Puzzles and patterns? Unexpectations?

Yesterday I finally sorted through a file box I'd avoided, even while ruthlessly paring down over the last few years. I'm not sure how all those papers fit into a two sectioned file box before, when it took a large garbage bag to contain them on the way out. The whole place feels different, with those papers gone, and only what seems precious now, preserved.

Sorry the photo attached sideways. No idea why. Tilt to the left to share my view. :) edited 22:41, 26 Jul 2015

Hmm, "an opening in the branches of the tree", like in the branches of our lives... discovering that seems like continuity, space opening to whatever happens (like "continuously creating space"?), perhaps even more so with feeling of gratitude or devotion toward that.

Lots of fear in "opening to opening", so that's a path walked in high but gentle alert.