CHAPTER FIVE
Part Two
Second practicing a slow truth
I want to know my sustainability edges.
What is comfortable for me?
I begin with slow as seems to be my way. It is my first second practice. It is my first expression of the intuition for embodiminded sustainability and I scale slow up as a possible practice centre in itself because I can't think of a situation where I won't be practicing with slowness.
I am slow when I first touch material after a year of rehabilitation and rest. I roll a piece of A4 paper from its bottom left-hand corner very slowly for fifteen minutes. Doing this action with paper begins to block the rolling motion. The paper is stalling. This happens within four minutes. There is not enough friction or force to fold inwards. The paper instead is pushing as a whole into one point. Paper inertia. In the following eleven minutes... I keep trying to push it forward. Trying the same slow movement over and over. But it remains stopped (Figure 1).
Figure 1.
I'm not really listening to slow. Instead... I apply it as a type of romantic intervention, performing slowness as I had been performing wellness. I want these slow actions to act as a pestle softening bulky grains of shame-slow and releasing fine oils of good-slow into my practice. A handmade lubrication for pace solace. I want the idea of savior-slow to soak into my sick slow body. For slow to be even more slow. I want slow to bring me back to my small creative room again.
In design... process is read as part of progress. Processes are progressing toward the end of a processual sequence. Slow might offer me different and individual meanings of process.
I do not own a pestle and mortar.