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CHAPTER FOUR

Part Seven

I know I can't solve capitalism from my bed...

 One day in bed... I decide to slowly and softly completely lean into what I had been attuning to.

Centering the practitioner.
Centering the practitioner's lived experience and situated perspectives; person and process over production. 
Centering the practitioner decenters the cycle of design... but this is not enough.
I let go of the design cycle (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Figure 1: Fourteen small, individual, and unique line drawings float independently. They are made up of a mix of thin and thick, abstract black lines. They surround a centred, grainy, black-and-white image of a person in a nightgown lying on their right side. Their hands are together next to their head. Their knees are slightly bent, and their feet are together. Layered arrangements of crumpled blankets in pastel colours—blue, pink, green, yellow, light blue, and red—surround the person in the centre. Watercolours from the pastel, crumpled blankets have expanded beyond their individual forms, extending further outward into diffuse shadow. Each colour represents a different bodymind experience. The image has a white background.

"Disability alters, generates, and dismantles method" (Mills & Sanchez, 2023).I can bring the design cycle back into the centre with me when I want to think with it... but it is no longer a foundation.I let go of its laws and expectations and assumptions of my bodymind.I let go of what is shackled.What is obligation.What is conditioned.What is old.What is a counter to me.What is associated with morality.What is compliance or over compliance.I become my own practice compass. 

"Under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world" (Halberstam, 2021, p.1).

In July 2022, I write down the words "no more pushing through or pushing towards. No more contorting".

I let go of all the practice systems I have learned and dissolve them through centering the practitioner day after day.

Disintegrating institutional and industrial thinking, doing, sharing and their entire value systems.
My contortions and distortions begin to dissolve too.

I find in the months, years ahead, unlearning, undoing imposed systems of production is unfolding myself from what I folded into and moves me away from what I was bending, bowing towards.
I stop trying to force connections.

I stop translations.

I stop holding my breath.

I stop collaborating with its resistance of me.
It makes sense that if you are undoing a paradigm... then you can't bring it with you.
It falls off like a scab.
I move within the disability as method methodologies emerging from me.
I move away from painful and exhaustive stop and start directions.
I move within the hopes for this shift work... centering my experiences and needs (Grocott, 2022).
I move with the everyday chaos.
I move within the complexity of my everyday second practices.
I don't want any more exiles. I follow. I stay with sickness. I stay with my bed.
I am unhiding the hidden. 

Expanding assemblages of attunement into sensitive geographies and mappings of invisible bodymind experiences of everyday unseens, in relational movements with systemic environmental everyday unseens, allows me to see that what I have been collecting and nurturing and privileging are second practices.

Invisible bodymind.
Everyday unseens.
Multiple apertures.
Bed mappings.
Long exposures.
Expansions.
Assemblages of attunement.
Centering the practitioner.
Embodiminded sustainability.

And taking this time to explore my last years of sick practice experience shows me how second practice didn't suddenly exist and fall out of me.
There were years of undeclared, unseen, micro shifts.
Years of bed practice.
Years of unseen creative labour. 

Expanding my assemblages as a kind of political/relational in-movement attunements have helped me to notice that even though I am in bed, that as well as spending time with my everyday unseens through my situated invisible bodymind, I am in constant relation with the world... and I need to be constantly acknowledging the everyday unseen of the world. To be noticing the effects and affects they have on the everyday unseen of me. But I can now notice these experiences from the inside out with my experiences as the centre. Through my environment. 

I safely expand out into the world from my bed.
I can have a relationship with noticing where me and the world can be in non-binary conversations.

Where staying with can enact long exposures at micro and macro scales.

Long multitudinal exposures of noticing the conditioning, socialising, habitus construction of ableism.
Complex staying with attuning as a noticing environment sustains the spaces needed for my everyday unseens to be whole and in whole interdependent relational ecologies.

Dissolving boundaries around me.

A centering that is an opening of thresholds.
Any resistance of me is not from me.

It is from whatever denies me or excludes me or will not see me. 

I notice and hold the everyday unseen of systems and their unseen affects accountable for the everyday inaccessibility, resistance and harm.
I am challenging and questioning this noticing every day and exploring it from my scale and through my system. When there are points or places or spaces of resistance against my wants or needs or experiences in the world, when my everyday experiences are othered, when I am on the outside I will put myself right in the centre of it before my eyes have even opened. My bodymind will scale up to the everyday systems and environments... and everyday systems and environments will take on the scale of my bodymind. This is my soft and slow resistance.

I used to be intrigued by how design affects people... but now I am interested with how people can affect the seemingly unquestioned principles of design at its core.

What does it mean to be doing what we need to be doing in our own ways all the time?
What does that look like?
What does your system move like?
How does your bodymind environment and ecology move?
How does your bodymind environment and ecology need to move... want to move? 

In August 2022, I write the words, "I demand a negotiable gravity of the centre."These words fell out of me as a plea while writing about compost and losing control and the sadness of embodiminded waste and of healing. In my practice, centering the practitioner is affording negotiable gravities, eccentric growths, gestalts that are part rheology; articulations and contractions that move and dissolve asynchronously and relationally.

Understanding my second practice experiences of doing allows me to begin folding it with dimensions of embodiminded creativity, surfacing and developing my own practice landscapes and languages. An assemblage that privileges and affords bloated, voluminous, uncertain, messy, wild, idiosyncratic topographies and textures through a pace that is mine. An assemblage that celebrates impermanency, temporalities, unknowing, unplace and everyday complexity. An embodiminded sustainability. Nothing of us... of our creativity has to be lost. 

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