Iridescence study from Michiko Theurer on Vimeo.
I’ve been hesitating for a long time in starting this blog. Hesitation is something I’ve tried to train out of myself. It makes me tight, or my mistrust of it makes me tight: my shoulders curl forward in knots the same way they do when I think about Challenges, the system from an orchestral festival I participated in years ago where each person in the section would have to stand up and play a selected passage in front of one another (anonymously, but of course it was never anonymously) and be voted up or down by our peers. (I hesitate now—is this really where I want to start this? It’s such a small part of such a vast world. . .).
A breath. How are you? I don’t know you, or maybe I do—either way, I miss you. Writing feels like a hopeful gesture in the midst of mutual isolation.
I’m currently living in the house where I grew up, in a pandemic-tight bubble that holds my partner and me and our dear anxious cat, together with a spare bedroom crammed with heavy stacks of 22x30” framed paintings from my high school and earlier college years. When we got here in June, my partner patiently helped me lift the paintings down from the walls, where they had hung in crowded grids that made my parents’ ranch-style house feel like it was being swallowed from the inside out. (I know there’s so much love in their weight, and I imagine a spell that would allow me to hold the one and release the other . . .)
“To hesitate is to open an interval for a memory of the present,” writes Alia Al-Saji, “a memory that reconfigures the remnants and fragments of the past so as to render that past half-open, allow breathing room to live it and to live differently according to it.”
Breathing room.
This year I’ve learned a lot about love, from legends whom I’ve met through their words and social leadership (Audre Lorde, adrienne maree brown) to those I’ve had the fortune to interact with and learn from in long-distance collaboration. Just before the election in November, in the middle of a life-changing course taught by Haruna Lee, I had this huge, visceral, charged feeling of just how underrated and capacious and strong and complex love is, how much it can hold; how much it can allow us to feel the weight of our ongoing and varied social and ecological crises. Now I’m back to Instagram and dissertation-paralysis, but sometimes when I can’t fall asleep (often) I feel the same dark stirring— hope?
I wonder if hesitation is slow-motion iridescence. I wonder if spelling out each shade of uncertainty might eventually flicker into the moving image of a butterfly’s wings, if instead of hating my uncertainties and hesitations I could find a way to love them into motion. . .
This blog is an experiment and an invitation. I’ve shifted my center of gravity a lot in the past thirty-two years, and I’m not sure what centers still hold. I’d like to begin a lattice work from my experiences as a violinist, visual/intermedia artist, chronic academic, and friend, some strands that I hope might invite connections with other stories. If you connect with something, I’d love to hear from you, and perhaps we can begin to weave together some of our strands.
A ritual for letting go of bitterness:
Invite a firefly into your hands.
When you are ready, release it with your breath.
A breath. How are you? I don’t know you, or maybe I do—either way, I miss you. Writing feels like a hopeful gesture in the midst of mutual isolation.
I’m currently living in the house where I grew up, in a pandemic-tight bubble that holds my partner and me and our dear anxious cat, together with a spare bedroom crammed with heavy stacks of 22x30” framed paintings from my high school and earlier college years. When we got here in June, my partner patiently helped me lift the paintings down from the walls, where they had hung in crowded grids that made my parents’ ranch-style house feel like it was being swallowed from the inside out. (I know there’s so much love in their weight, and I imagine a spell that would allow me to hold the one and release the other . . .)
“To hesitate is to open an interval for a memory of the present,” writes Alia Al-Saji, “a memory that reconfigures the remnants and fragments of the past so as to render that past half-open, allow breathing room to live it and to live differently according to it.”
Breathing room.
This year I’ve learned a lot about love, from legends whom I’ve met through their words and social leadership (Audre Lorde, adrienne maree brown) to those I’ve had the fortune to interact with and learn from in long-distance collaboration. Just before the election in November, in the middle of a life-changing course taught by Haruna Lee, I had this huge, visceral, charged feeling of just how underrated and capacious and strong and complex love is, how much it can hold; how much it can allow us to feel the weight of our ongoing and varied social and ecological crises. Now I’m back to Instagram and dissertation-paralysis, but sometimes when I can’t fall asleep (often) I feel the same dark stirring— hope?
I wonder if hesitation is slow-motion iridescence. I wonder if spelling out each shade of uncertainty might eventually flicker into the moving image of a butterfly’s wings, if instead of hating my uncertainties and hesitations I could find a way to love them into motion. . .
This blog is an experiment and an invitation. I’ve shifted my center of gravity a lot in the past thirty-two years, and I’m not sure what centers still hold. I’d like to begin a lattice work from my experiences as a violinist, visual/intermedia artist, chronic academic, and friend, some strands that I hope might invite connections with other stories. If you connect with something, I’d love to hear from you, and perhaps we can begin to weave together some of our strands.
A ritual for letting go of bitterness:
Invite a firefly into your hands.
When you are ready, release it with your breath.
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