Time is not what I think it is

Invitation for tea & time 

I sometimes have trouble falling asleep and staying asleep. When this happens I find it comforting to listen to science and history videos I’ve already watched. I put on my eye mask, put the volume to barely audible, and drift to sleep to The Planets: Ice Worlds, Decoding da Vinci, or After Stonehenge. One night it was The Fabric of the Cosmos: The Illusion of Time with physicist Brian Greene and since then I keep wondering about the meaning of time.

With just about all of my time being spent in the house, my sense of time is warped. If time is measured by a repetitive action- then my time is no longer in intervals of school bells, but is now measured by the perpetual feeding of my children snacks and checking email.

After 14 years (no joke) I finally finished this embroidery project.

I think my strong urge to write and draw is in reaction to this new schedule of working at home. Time spent drawing and writing is pleasurable, personal, and private. Creative Time is slow and focused. It gives me an experience of intensity. It makes time spent slow and large, like a magnifying glass on the tip of a pencil in slow motion.

To make better use of my time and balance personal goals with work and home responsibilities, I attempted to streamline my time by combining the art I want to make with things I can do with my children and the assignments I do for school via remote learning. It all started off well enough with images dancing in my mind of my children happy to work quietly next to me while I created the title illustrations for my children’s book and uploaded work to Google Classroom for my students. 

Balloon Bath Time 

Now a month later and the illustration still incomplete, I realize streamlining Creative Time with two children stuck at home when we all have schoolwork to do was just me being delusional from improper sleep. Even the most balanced of kids with stable homes are going off the deep end periodically with lack of being physically near their friends. Two days ago my girls found a bag of balloons I was going to do a paper maché project with. They blew them all up, wrote names on them in Sharpie and said it was their balloon family. They gave the balloons a bath and have been running in and out, around the house, playing some weird balloon-napping game. I could see this as creative coping or perhaps a strange version of Cast Away.

Every night is Friday Movie Night

Somewhere in the beginning of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, by D. H. Lawrence, there’s a line about how “now there are no smooth roads.” I read it as a teenager, but that line pops up in my head every once in a while. I think the line was meant as a metaphor to the disrepair of relationships and life after war. But I always liked to think of the phrase in and of itself, as just life is organic and irregular. So my new plan is to ride Time with a vision of less end/point/goal in mind, but of slow making, discovery, and running with the balloon family.