Tag Archives: remember

Today

I lost one of my bracelets.

I don’t wear a lot of jewelry. I have some beautiful things that my mom has made, that I’ve made myself and that have been given to me. But I still don’t wear a lot of jewelry.

However, friendship bracelets are my favourite for a few reasons. They always have stories. They remind me of people I love. I don’t have to remember to put them on. I believe in the philosophy of wearing them until they fall off, no longer or shorter. I have trouble letting go of things and this is always a nice reminder. I can lose the symbols of friendship without losing the friendships. I can remember or forget and be okay with that. Everything has a lifespan.

Stories and streets are powerful venues for contradicting the imminent doom of loneliness. The public art we make of ourselves in the street, the languages of our bodies tracing postures and assuming them, the paths of our eyes grazing each other,  are either participatory or resistant. Here, in public, we can choose to change our immediate world by remaking our myths and telling our own stories, by remembering how to ask and listen, and by learning to show our most real faces to each other and celebrating them. Show your warts, and you defy the very process of airbrushing the truth. Risk smiling at the person sitting next to you on the bus, and immediately the message of isolation is undermined. Not just for the two of you, but also for these watching this unusual event unfold. The moment we notice that we can meake fresh choices every minute the moment we take Funky’s advice and think for ourselves, it’s easy to see that we’re all in this together. Isolation was somebody else’s bad idea.

pg 43-44 from ‘off the map’

There are so many ideas I agree with outlined in this piece. So many. I miss doing my own writing.