16th August 2022 – Tuesday – 8.15pm. Start at Bridge No. 1.

A calm still evening with wee whisps of wind now and then

Cloudy sky

It is quiet

Two men are fishing

Joggers, cyclists, saunterers and dog walkers

Walkers and talkers

It is gentle

The water is dark

The canal has filled with yesterday’s rain

It barely ripples

Kneeling on the edge by the bridge I see me and the reflection of the houses opposite

Cobwebs on the underside of the bridge

So thick they feel like fabric

Rough stone

Some of it crumbly

Little holes to hang on with my fingers

I smell people’s dinner cooking

A leaf floats by

I follow it

go at its pace

Not a ripple on the water but the leaf turns on its axis facing different ways,

changing facets but still moving in the same direction – west

The canal tonight is flowing west

The leaf is moving so so smoothly

and slowly

It is an exercise

of mindful

being to move

as its companion

To feel the flow of the flow

Canal time

I hang on the walls of the gardens of the houses that border the tow path

Dance down the tow path because it is empty and invites me

As darkness falls

Lights twinkle along each edge

It’s magical this pathway

There are wild flowers on the edge

That are taller than me

The peace is palpable as darkness falls

and orange lights from the houses twinkle on the water

Savouring this open-ended space and time

Free access

Chance encounters

Folks who look because I look

Smiling folks

Folks glancing back

Living in one’s own time

Choosing or not choosing

How do we want to live in our cities?

And who do we rub up against?

Thinking of the work of social psychologist Stanley Miligram

Behavioural Contagion

We see others doing something like gazing at the sky

And thinking today of the politics of the body and its movement

The ways in which we move in public space and the ways in which we don’t

How two dimensional we are

Rigid, repetitive, compliant, privileging, quantifying

tight over soft

set over improvised

rigid over fluid

programmed over spontaneous

The manicured over the messy

measuring up over felt experience

We limit what we know of ourselves

and what we know

of the places

who share

themselves

with us

Do we gentrify our bodies

as we gentrify our spaces, and

places of living

Wednesday 16th August – Start: Entrance to Harrison Park by the steps, 4pm