My bodymind has said when this ends.
Not the work or the research or the project but illness and bone marrow energlessness, rest and the rest.
This finishes when I have to finish.
I have no control.
I have shared as much as I could.
As much as I could trace back through.
And I did this as an offering to the response I get when this work is shared in small ways.
When second practice as a concept is shared there is a rush of confession.
About illness and work.
Disability and work.
Feeling invisible.
About disability and meaningless accommodations.
Exhaustion and shame and giving up and giving in.
About not having enough money to live comfortably.
About love and passion for what we do but feeling that we cannot stay in the place of doing any longer.
Fear for the future.
About all of the before and after and during everyday unseens of people's professional creative life.
About having nowhere to put these experiences.
This has been my confession.
This sharing and showing and telling.
And now that my sharing is done I can move to the places I have been wanting to move toward for years.
The places of people.
Second practices has always been about people.
There have been people who have generously carried it with them into the world while I couldn't yet do that...
I made a choice to use the past four years to process and stay with my experiences of second practice so I could connect to people fully and completely when their confessions come.
Now that these five years of time have ended... I will carry second practice with me and share it and look with it and through it with other eyes and lives.
Because... another response I get from this work is
‘What... are my second practices?’
I want to hear and see all of the other words and names and shapes of what I might call second practice... but that must have so many other names and expressions.
I want to spend time supporting others to follow and find and share theirs.