Teacher

Touch into a feeling that is disappearing fast. It has never been that way before. Edges of a sound that are waning, tempering and leaning into an exegesis that has lost all markings of a contour. It is feeling its way in the dark- a pin-point of light from the light-up screen of a mobile phone not needed for ringing anybody at all. The screen-saver is irrelevant. Only the glow that touches this or that strand of grass in each single step that is a hesitation in the run of things and so becomes not walking at all but simply a momentary alert that is there, not there. And maybe this is what walking is- this blinking on-off pulsation between putting down and taking off again. It's a pressure gradient that is stroked out of the footedness of the ground. They are known in one step. And no sooner known are lost again. We stumble against the unevenness of the terrain. Air currents cross our cheeks and pass. They are there but also in the trees; the scrambling of tangled threads of cloud moving and spinning across and around the bulk of the moon. It winks and we wink back. Or rather the wink happens all of a piece so that there is no messenger and no destination where the message gets through. In that way even with the pin-point glimmer of a mobile phone and the wide but evasive bulk of the moon naked or part-concealed as it is, we are blind and are feelingly caressing into the dips and tumults of the land beneath us; the ebb and flow of a voice of wordless sounds; of movements out of the tail-ends of bodies gone from the scene. It's about balance and falling into the moment whilst watching it happening. Again and again what is still there and what is moving past? We are all of a piece streaming as one. Your face in mine and then it is gone. My face in hers and then it is gone. His face in yours and then it is gone.

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*Written after a teaching workshop with James Low at a camping weekend in East Sussex