Spacious Solidarity Blog: Day 93

Today I realized I’ve been having a lot more spontaneous phone calls. I never used to do that.

It reminds me of when I was a teenager and as soon as I got home from school I’d be up in my room on the phone to my friends straight away. I can’t remember what we talked about but it was always something really “deep and meaningful”.

Back then we memorized one another’s phone numbers and that was the only way to get a hold of them, by landline. Then came pagers, then email, then mobile phones.

But somehow I adulted into scheduling everything. All my time neatly doled out to different people in different locations all over the world.

I’d also do a lot of going from one mtg to another all over London.

West London Buddhist Centre for a weekly mtg with friends and sometimes to teach, North London Buddhist Centre to teach and for council mtgs, Bethnal Green to meet good friends, London Fields to swim and go to the farmers market, often with a good friend, the Barbican when I was having radiation everyday at different times that could change from one day to the next.

I applied for a grant sitting in those comfy chairs at the Barbican. I was working towards a deadline and it didn’t make sense to go home after my treatment ‘cause it was date night and I was mtg my partner nearby.

I love that place. I don’t know anything about it but the architecture is both absolutely stunning and kind of frightening. You can be standing anywhere and be seen from almost everywhere else in the place, or at least it’s designed to make you feel that way.

And it’s also really hard to get from where you’re standing to where you want to be in the opposite corner one floor up.

Brutalist is it?

But back to spontaneous phone calls.

Now I’m not saying that I’m not still scheduled, but there are also just the spur of the moment, hey I want to talk to them and I go for it and they answer because most of us are just sitting around at home desperate for some distraction from burning down the patriarchy!

 And I also get more spontaneous calls. This week alone I’ve already had five and it’s only Tuesday.

And they’ve all been delightful. I feel like a teenager again. I keep telling myself I don’t have to worry so much about getting around to my work because I know when I’m ready I’ll get there.

And I know I already work too hard so it’s actually a skillful practice for me to stop, go for a walk, take some cool pics, come home, have a bath and then start writing. I confess there will most likely be a bowl of crisps in there somewhere.

At the beginning of lockdown, actually before I knew there was going to be a global pandemic that meant you couldn’t touch anyone or go anywhere or have any sort of life out there in the real world, I bought a bunch of books.

They were all for research for my book, even though I’d already written three quarters of it. The writing process had raised areas of enquiry I wanted to dive into more deeply.

But since the middle of March while I’ve been responding to the moment as best I can, I had to drop all that so they’ve basically been collecting dust.

But today I picked up one of them and what a fucking delight! Pleasure Activism by adrienne maree brown. There’s a whole chapter on Beyoncé.

One thing she writes about is taking pleasure in walking around the house naked. Well it’s been so goddamn hot in London that that doesn’t really sound that bad to me. The only danger would be inadvertently walking behind my partner while they’re on a Zoom call.

They do Zoom a lot in the bedroom so that’s not entirely impossible.

But back to the Barbican. I went to see a friend perform in a piece there last year. It was amazing. It had something like a 200 person chorus. It was based on Homer’s Illiad and at one point they were just singing about all the thousands and thousands of lives that have been lost over the thousands and thousands of years of war.

They sang it over and over, thousands and thousands of leaves falling.