Archive: Leonor Fini painting (bark and white broken egg shell);
EJ Letter to Iris Tree (talks of time, anthropocene, projection, earth, evolution).
Others: Peter Wohlleben, Heartbeat of Trees, on Deep Time/Human Time (anthropocene).
Location: Buriton Hangar, Phyllis Down Wood, Bushy Piece
Neat.
Felled stumps amongst evenly spaced beech with occasional cypresses.
Ground growing bluebells and wood anemone.
Time as a concept that was industrialised to organise, measure, distance, separate, control.
It has components of scale – seconds, minutes, hours, years, decades, millenia…
We can put all sorts of things into time, away from now.
We can put blame into time – to the past industries and industrialisation of relationships (and relationships to it)
We can put the future into time, away from now and what we do each day that makes it.
The nature of things have their own time.
The question is not what to measure, or how, but what for?
Walking from the chilgrove road down to hooks way, reflecting on time. Time is an-‘other’ a construct, a concept, in terms of the mind there are all the people before who have got us to where we are today, I’m thinking about the economic, climate, and health crises. We are connected to them, to the ancestors, and if you go back far enough in time we all came from the same thing (whether your view is we are spirit or dust). Edward James letter to Iris Tree describes the ‘golden age’ as when there was no sense of the individual. On one level, we are being asked to look across time, beyond the individual through the personal, because it is always through the filters of our own experience, of what we’ve learned before. Walks in nature that consider the science, spirit, and the personal experience, how much of the personal is relevant in/out of time?
Distortions – seeing through the slants of time
The distortion resonates with ideas of perception, of the gap between experience and ‘picture’.
The plantation comes to a sudden hush as the breeze falls. I can hear a road, and a plane. Then a second plane. Nature is constantly changing at a pace too slow for us to notice. Almost. We live so fast, our minds and thoughts like a constant wind rustling up a need for this or lack of that or judgement on another. There is a still-life painting in the EJ collection by Leonor Fini in oil, mostly brown background, of a brown cypress bark that is in decay. It looks like the head, eye and beak of a bird. Standing out beside it is a broken white egg shell. The bark speaks of grief, of death, of parent bird. I think of mum, we say that grief is healed ‘over time’. What about ‘under time’? What happens there?
Lunch is eaten in the conifers, thoughts shake up in jumbles. Just beyond is the hanger, a lime green fringe to the grand stands of red bark and dark green leaves. I’m feeling disappointed with myself, with the world, and invite some exercises to help with this inspired by past experiences and hope.
Exercise One
Sit in nature. Notice how you feel about the nature around you, notice any emotions, thoughts, intensity. Just make some notes or a drawing, key words or expressive marks.
