Notices by Kate (katebowles@mastodon.social), page 12

@Avalon

Metaphor for so much. Some days all our stilts need fixing.

@ginnungagap Here the sun is setting just after 4 (it sets earlier with us than in Sydney as we live along the coastal flank of a big escarpment). That image is very sustaining, thank you!

@matt
Yes, it was the light that drew me in. So it was looking that made me notice the family, the only ones there. At first I was looking at how they were scattered but near each other. So far, a photograph of sorts.

And then because I was watching I found myself thinking about them, who they were, how they made sense to me. While I was watching them, they were thinking and doing.

This shift from image to narrative, is it always there?

@matt

Just now. I wanted to capture the late afternoon winter light making shadows in hollows in the sand at the beach, the way the pines lit up green.

I wanted to make sense of the family waiting on the beach for the kid on the surfboard, the way the dad whistled and the kid heard over the sound of the surf, and headed in.

Breathing it in.

@bea @jk I think it’s also in our sense of place. Being in places where we just were, five minutes or five years ago, and the place is there — the building, the bench — but we are not there, and the body we were in is also no longer there.

I remember when one of the girls was a baby I suddenly understood how the adult she would become depended on this baby no longer existing. I was overwhelmed with confusion as you are.

@tellio @dogtrax @Tdorey @lauraritchie @paralithode @RussSharek @dadegroot

Well, that escalated quickly!

@blueberry Welcome! The violin mention immediate brought @lauraritchie to mind. I am so here for the mastodon orchestra pit.

Winter afternoon, walking on the beach, watching a family of five (two adults three kids) rock fishing.

Nothing stays still.

For work reasons I’ve just been reading a gorgeous bit of US political science from 1909, on publics, crowds and the manipulation of public sentiment.

With a couple of tweaks in language, we’d all recognise our lives, our talk, our social platforms, in his lens.

The key point he makes is familiar: we are in many publics, each trying to get our opinions to the top of the pile. Public opinion is not one simple thing; what matters is who makes the loudest claim to own it.

@dogtrax @Tdorey @lauraritchie @paralithode

“it feels like a more nurturing space for writing” sums it up for me too.

I feel I am freer here to pull at the puzzle of writing, to fail at it while learning.

A while back I watched @RussSharek return again and again to the challenge of planking with a small clown on his back, and this resilience really stayed with me as a model for writing: the self coaching the self to keep trying.

@dogtrax @Tdorey @lauraritchie @paralithode

More on being with in this space: being with @tellio teaches me eye for detail, @RussSharek persuades me of the patience and strength-building of #clownwisdom, the gardeners of mastodon give me all the ideas, and @dadegroot makes me think about the craft of hands.

#smallstories here make me feel hopeful.

All of tiny acts of graceful compassion here, the tactful reminders, are the best of being with.

@dogtrax @Tdorey @lauraritchie that’s very interesting — I am more often on Twitter in the mornings when I’m bracing myself for the day, and here in the evenings when I’m thinking.

That sense of having more commitment and focus here is true. I have a wish to not waste another’s time.

It’s a compositional practice @paralithode modelled for me early on, and I followed it. Then I saw it in others, and learned more.

@Tdorey @dogtrax @lauraritchie

Final thought: I care more about this. I care that it works.

Twitter is convenient and expansive and I don’t think its problems are within my capacity to fix, nor does it care about me except as an attention point, a tiny bit of attention plankton in an ocean of stuff to trawl and use.

@sikkdays Small steps are good steps, honestly.