‘My daughter’ said the elderly man on the bus, beaming, gesturing to the woman next to him.
A bit further on, towards town, a middle aged man links arms with his mother and they stride towards us, she pulling a shopping trolley.
Overheard/observed on bus to Bradford, Friday 8th November.
I am trying to practice active mindfulness to pull myself out of the swamp of my brain which thinks too much, and is too distracted, and forgets to pay attention to the present. Recently, occasionally, the white noise of my thoughts abates and I become aware of the wide open moment moment: now. I’m slowly noticing more. Conversations on buses, gestures, colour, light, shapes, mood.
I started following writer Ian Macmillan on Twitter https://twitter.com/IMcMillan. His tweets are observations, mini stories, poems. Example from this morning:
Early stroll: many leaves fallen; many, many still to fall. Two people walk up to a lamp-post, walk one on either side, light and geometry.
When I got to the Arts Lab on Friday last week, and I looked at the set on the table, I thought about being present to the richness of stories all around me, weaving them into the narratives I’m making. As I played with the cardboard set, combining photocopies, found images, family photos, acetate, with frames, albums, light – I thought about what I had seen on the bus, and wondered
Is everything, in the end, about family?
Final thought from my literary hero, David Foster Wallace (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Foster_Wallace)
‘You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t’
We (myself, Caroline Hick and Jez Coram, who are For The Love of People) are documenting our collaboration at Fabric Arts Lab this month on this Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/jeanmcewanfortheloveofpeo…
