Longest days
The longest night has passed and hope is returning slowly, a minute a day. We miss daylight. My dog and I are in hibernation. It is natural for animals to sleep longer in winter.
I have been thinking about lists, self-confidence, time, moss. Everything might be easier if all writing took the form of lists. I read an article about lists. It discussed lists versus narratives. List and narrative are on a spectrum. The visible spectrum goes from longest to shortest wavelength, from red to violet. In childhood, ‘shortest day’ and ‘longest night’ had a mystical quality. A day is a day, however long it lasts. Some days are shorter than others. Some nights are the longest.
There is a poem by Pasternak about the days of solstice. The word solstice has standing still at its root, and the Russian word is sun-standing-still and in the poem time stands still. A chain of singular repeated unrepeatable days, each longer than a century.
Is there a list of days.
Slow days. Streets become emptier, people leave for holidays.
Sad days. Everyone in the northern hemisphere should take vitamin D in winter. There is not enough light.
These short days are the longest.
Green is roughly in the middle of the colour spectrum. Halfway point. We are halfway through the darkness now. Moss is green and I read that the human eye can see more shades of green than any other colour. There is also luminous moss. We see more in the middle of things. Between the long and the short, there is endless variation.
In these cold days my dog looks for warmth. In every room he enters, he finds where the heat comes from, and arranges himself near it. He knows what blankets are for. He disappears under the duvet.
The word list originally meant a narrow strip of paper or cloth, border, hem, edge. There is a connection to weaving. There is a similarity of form.
Some time ago I read about weaving as a style of communication and I haven’t stoped thinking about it. It occurred to me that confidence depends on belonging, and belonging depends on confidence, and it is a circle, or a spiral. Then there is also vulnerability, which provides an entry point, or a mid-point. And uncertainty, and hesitation, which might be the opposite of confidence. Or is there a spectrum of uncertainty, hesitating between confidence and vulnerability. The frequency of oscillation determines the colour.
I want to keep weaving. I want to follow threads, tangle them up, unravel, intertwine, mix colours, textures, metaphors, lose words, find words, re-invent words, find silence, walk, stay still, listen, look. I want thought to follow thought. I want sentences to be soft. Fragments exchanged. Pauses shared. No expectations. In this space between.
