Rituals

Day -2: May 5 early

Life is full of rituals.

Hello, my name is....

How do you do?

Excuse me, but....

Oh, sorry....

Everyone's life has them, and some (not that I'll mention names) have more than others: ritual is what psychiatrists call what obsessive-compulsive personalities have to do to survive.


Day -1: May 6 late

I've been depending on my daily routine/ritual to get through the last 70-plus days: it's kept me relatively clean and fed, although the home, until the last week or so, um, definitely wasn't the former.

But I'm wasn't sure it was making much of a difference emotionally until the last two weeks, which I've spent my weekdays in a very organized fashion, knitting five solid hours a day, repeating a very simple pattern, and having that structure imposed on my day.


Day 5: May 13 mid-afternoon

Truth be told, I've appreciated it, as well as sitting in a light-filled glass box, with minimal decoration and interruption, and, perhaps most importantly it has helped me focus my thoughts for when I'm outside the box, literally.


Day 6: May 16 late lunch

The only downside has been the earworms I've found myself being sucked into, and some of them have been just incessant. (Trust me, until you've had Olivia Newton-John's Please Mister Please running through your brain for hours on end, you don't know what torture is.)


Day 10: May 20 late

But the project down at EPCOR Centre has gone well, with the knitting finished dead on schedule, the photographs framed and delivered to Fish Creek Environmental Learning Centre, and the arrival of the invitation for The Forest Show arriving at The Leighton Centre, where it opens on June 4.

I've got some ideas for new work that I want to do and send off to calls in autumn, a list of residencies to apply for, and, finally, a lack of constant hysteria in my brain.

Life still ain't great, but it doesn't feel like it's permanently oppressive either.