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« Low +Charlie Parr @ Mohawk 10/3/2007 | Main | The Dazzling Architecture of the Uninhabitable... »
Nothing Matters Except This Anthill
October 21, 2007
It has been an interesting weekend. Aside from a midnight movie on Friday, I have been focusing on doing art and cleaning the house and preparing for Coley's birthday party next week. I even canceled a date in part because I just don't want to be bothered with time constraints (and in part because, if I were to be bothered with them, the time constraint being suggested was wholly uninteresting to me, but that's another post altogether...one that I am trynig to restrain myself from writing, to be honest.)
At any rate, a little while ago, I brought in some laundry and was folding it on my bed when I noticed a tiny little jumping spider. He must've taken up residence in the laundry while it was out on the line. He leapt impossibly far to land on my laptop, and sat there, seeming to observe me as I went about my laundry folding, casting sidelong glances between the spider and the stupid self-help video I for some reason chose to watch from Netflix. And the spider started to build a web! Right in front of my eyes!
Well, needless to say, I quickly lost ALL interest in the video and watched the spider, instead. I giggled as he jumped cutely from the plastic tub on my little bedside table to the frame of the canvas that was leaning against the wall. Covering my mouth so as not to accidentally blow him to spider kingdom come with my exhalations of delight. I tried to even take a little video of him, but he was so tiny and my focusing skills are still embarrassingly inadequate, so I doubt it turned out well. And anyway, he seemed to have some degree of stage fright, because when I whipped out the camera all construction ceased and he just hung there on the end of a strand, twisting and looking, I am sure, like a tiny little booger on the end of a string through the lens of my camera. Oh well, I guess some things are best observed directly. I mean, I could probably rent a zillion videos made by professional documentarians and videographers that would depict spiderweb building, but how often to I get to observe it in my very own house?
So I guess I watched him building his web for about half an hour before he seemed to take a break and I lost interest in waiting for him to do something interesting again. The thought of sharing my bedroom with my spider friend is not thrilling to me, but I can't bring myself to remove him. I'm sure he'll vacate on his own at some point.
The cool thing is that later, when I had all but forgotten about my little 8-legged friend, I was reading the new issue of King Cat Comics and Stories, and John P had a couple of different comics in which he became so absorbed in observing life around him that, for that time, those little details were all that mattered. The first one depicted him squatting down to watch ants, without words save the last frame which contained a thought balloon of John saying "Nothing matters except tis anthill."
It's something I am really trying to put into practice, and can be a good exercise for everything from making sure you are fully present with people or just fully present to experience in general. It works for listening to silly kids' stories, observing bees and bugs in a bush, marking the miracle of clouds and birds in the sky, sex, productive conversation, and communing with spiders.
I dunno. I've never been a huge fan of the idea of meditation or journeying inward for the sake of being inside myself. I find that I spend far too much time there anyway, and I get distracted from experiencing things by tending to return there for safety. Instead, I think it's nice to be fully outside of myself for a change. Not thinking about what came before or what comes next, but just enjoying what is in front of me.
Later, I was thinking about how this applied to art. About how artists take those tiny moments...or my favorite artists do, anyway...and make them neverending. I guess, the flip side is that some artists can take huge concepts and distill them down into something digestible. I like that, too. But right now, it seems like distilling things down oversimplifies things. I'd rather appreciate fleeting moments and tiny things. I'd rather that nothing matter except this anthill.
And I'm so thankful that there are people in this world like John P to remind me of that. :) <3
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