8th grade 2nd period Altered Time

When I read I notice the margin. A blog page doesn’t give access to the margin. But in my reading usually there is a margin. And I always have my journal page with which to experiment. So in the margin jot down any even momentary notion you experience. When you attend to sensations they become easier to spot. They also take on a value when considering how they influence perception. Two notes jotted in the margin can introduce a new set of relationships to explore.

(A book by an author who shares an Acadian name with a man whose laugh I enjoy in winter/ A small boy describing the middle of a swimming pool.)

Notes can be by different readers or by the same one at different times.

An exercise related to taking time to recognize patterns comes from collecting shark’s teeth on the beach. A friend once told me to look for fossilized sharks teeth along the coast near Topsail, North Carolina. I would struggle to find one during a week spent each summer. Sometimes I would forget until late in the vacation. One year I found a few teeth and noticed that there was something about the black shiny color that seemed to distinguish the teeth from other objects on the beach. The color spoke. Something about the shape and size held my mind in a different state. A certain edge alerted me to a tooth even mostly submerged in sand. Suddenly, subtly, we converse. The teeth and my mind’s pattern recognition center communicate in some nonverbal language across eons as I comb the beach. The rush of delight I feel in entering this collecting state disconnects me from linear space and time and reconnects me in a seemingly timeless dialogue. The humor I feel, considering my hunt and the time since these teeth actually helped a shark hunt adds to the peculiarity of my pursuit. Each time I return I have to remember to suspend preconceived notions of searching and resume the special pattern perception dialogue. Now I realize that far more fossils exist than fossilized teeth on the beach. The raven within me delights in the black shine.

Time Exercise#2: Time forms Patterns

Hunt for some object by suspending the direct search and by selecting a characteristic that the mind can hold while the rest of our attention disengages from the outcome.





I’ve been wondering if whale and dolphin spotting along the coast follows a similar focusing and accommodation of perception.