ocean liner, slowly turning

moving slowly is moving

When you need to go to ground, you can. When you need to, rip yourself out of your timeline. Time is for wasting, life is for staying alive in.

I’ve been reading a book called Correspondences by anthropologist Tim Ingold - essays about philosophy and art and life. In a piece about shelter he talks about shelter as a place-holder for life, not a container. A place through which an inhabitant comes and goes. Shelter always alternates with exposure, he writes.

A disguise can be a refuge. Change your own shape to find solitude in it. Make it unrecognisable as a shelter. You can find shelter in a disguised ground, or a disguised self. Underneath the ground is more of it, and it is its own cover.

Ingold writes of a solitude - it is not isolating when it is grounded in attentiveness to your surroundings, ‘an attentiveness that can extend to deep and sympathetic companionship’. To others. To yourself, to your work, or the things around you. To be in search of shelter is to be alive to the world and searching within it.

I’ve been looking up how fast cargo ships go. “It depends on the cargo, and fuel economy is usually the bottom line.” says angus on quora. If you dump the cargo you can turn around faster. Go to ground, get unperceived. Build the world new. Planet finding.

People around me keep talking about burnout. What to do with it, how to overcome it. One of many answers: every artist has unreleased projects, and they should. That is success. I get the songs in my head and I enjoy them, mine. Go to ground, find refuge in your attention to the world and to yourself.

Success can be a lot of things. It can be liking the things you make, or the people you respect liking those things, it can be sustainability in that thing supporting itself. Success can also be happiness, wasting your time, staying alive.

I am an ocean liner, slowly turning.

nice big engine