On Settling

I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace. - Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space.


 

I have been creating space for myself in a new place.

This new place is wildly, and intoxicatingly expansive.

And the most ordinary moments-- the commute to work, the changing of day into night, turns in the weather-- feel extraordinary. I have been trying to hold onto those ephemeral and exquisite flashes of the extra-ordinary, to capture and bundle them in words, and thread, and sounds. There is something to this practice of gathering and keeping. Even science seems to agree that pleasure comes from the remarkable but ordinary. And so the collection of these fleeting glimpses grows. Bundles accrete. And, as I arrange all these captured moments home space emerges. And dreaming, dreaming opens wild.

some images by SHM, some by DBP