Dear Rita,
You had some time today, alone in the studio. It’s almost as though when you give yourself to time, you can expand it. It is yours. Time belongs to you, that is what you felt today… not only as something which marks beginnings and endings, deadlines and birthdays, years and minutes but as a way to experience a kind of spaciousness:
You wonder how animals experience time, like the cats, which come to glance at what you are doing through the studio door. A ginger cat and a black cat. They stare at you for a moment, suspended, and then turn and run. You realise it isn’t you but rather their fascination or shock at seeing themselves in the glass ‘mirror’ of the door. Time must be tied up in various rituals of eating for these cats and other animals. Suddenly you are hungry, it’s 3pm and you haven’t eaten lunch but you like not adhering to time specific markers for eating, for sleeping, for waking up, for working. However, you do like rhythm and rhythm cannot exist without time, you think.
Can anything exist out of time?
You fantasise about getting lost in time or out of time. The sensation of sometimes drifting in a half awake half asleep state in an aeroplane might be the closest to this feeling. That was a long time ago now.
I count the months. Six.
Time changes or we are changing in relationship to time. Drifting. Drifting now and thinking about some vague landscapes to paint with watercolours. Waiting also arrives in these thoughts from somewhere behind you because it does seem like these are waiting days. Waiting also exists on the sidelines of time as it were, because the waiting is for something to start or to happen, something scheduled. The train is either ‘on time’ or not, as is the person you are waiting to meet or the answer to the message you just sent. You like waiting, you like dreaming, you like drifting, all seem unpredictable in the spinning of time.