'The body is a butter brain' by Laura McCoy & Lucas Regazzi at Calaboose, Montreal

If you feel good when you first wake up it’s because it’s an opportunity to exercise discernment. The inner critic and inner amnesiac squabbling in the sun. 

Thriving is persisting with doubt.

Look, your eyes can be raw and useful, or comforting little spoons. Blinking is medicine and fertilizer for whatever range of motion is for you. Making some art is rehearsing for being. Sometimes you rehearse in the window or on your phone, for whoever happens to be out there. Squatting and reaching. It’s important to rest before you sleep. 

Wound up, as when I am like a toy with a key, or whatever fear or food or height gets the heart rate up, I can be wound down. Laid in a box like a paper doll or fork. My heart announcing its faltering range of motion. 

Vital can still be fearful, can still be shy.

Or, just like a duck swimming. Ducklings rehearse being a lot. Young things do. Perhaps new objects do. Hair and nails are dead, insensitive; they collect the day’s material, and grow. 

All postures for reading heavy objects in bed challenge you. Ditto laptops. Keep it moving! Make your ass switch tabs. Record and dictate. Or just sense yourself as a heap. 

This pillow is welcoming and cold. I make you feel welcome by leaving out raw fruit. I sleep energetically beside dishes of sugar water that empty mysteriously in the night.

I mishear that spring comes etymologically from ants springing out of the earth. It was actually plants.

There’s so much to be retrieved from the garden, under the bed, in the recesses of our tender bodies. More and more and more than we know, even with the old pains of digging. 

Pain is a hovering gesture. Love is, differently, too.

— Lena Suksi