Birds and Clocks and a Lifetime of Being Yourself

Also it was my birthday

My first delight of the morning is the shadow of the birds against the orange building. I love the way these shadow birds fly, pressed up against the concrete, and then how they disappear into the sky. These shadows, in many ways, are reverse birds – birds (positive) being things of sky and not of brick.

Shadows, I think, have always been of interest to me. It is an enjoyable perspective, when the right day allows for it, to get to see the world as its reaction.

Today is one of those days, the kind where light and darkness have agreed, it seems, to split the afternoon. Every person walking carries a person-shaped patch of darkness attached at the ankles. I write this in the sun and my hand creates another hand, identical in almost every way (besides dimension and autonomy).

A note from Prospect Park, November 3rd 2024

I love the fall because of the light and when I say the light I mean the darkness and the way it lets us see the light, finally after all these months of trying to shelter from the sun. It appears I am becoming less interested in summer as I grow up.

Time, this week, has been a theme, although I suppose it is impossible for time not to be a theme, at least until we find a way to untether ourselves from its movement. This constant of time, more specifically, has been the theme – the way that even the sprawling mess of our hearts is affected by some variable that can be tracked by a single AA battery. I have reacted to this acute awareness regarding the rigidity of time in two ways:

1. Everything is a Clock, 2024

This is a series of clocks I made to conceptualize the inevitability of time. Some highlights include Plotter Clock, which draws a continuous circle as time passes, Clock Box Clock which is a clock made out of the box that it came in, and Pizza Clock which is actually just a piece of pizza but no more exempt from the passage of time than anything else. Clocks, as we know them, are just one way to point to an automatic motion. What does the same motion look like as told to us by the other things of the world who know it just as well?

2. The Gift of a Day

The second reaction produced by my growing interest in time was a wonderful day of my life. It was my birthday yesterday, and what I wanted more than anything was a day to be. To meet the world on my own accord, to let myself feel outside the bounds of what is practical. My gift to myself was to turn off my phone for two days, to take a moment to live in the moment, to feel time as it happens. I am, of course, doing this to some degree every day, but there is a certain operational punctuality required to live a life bigger than oneself. I miss this demand, when I spend too long in space, and I have learned to find comfort in that fact – that I need people just the same as everyone else.

And so I can let a day like the one I spent yesterday feel like a miracle. I cried on the ferry to Governor’s Island and I cried under the sun in the grass on a blanket I love and I cried at the light of the evening on the wings of the birds and the layers of clouds in the sky with the moon and the same sky, pink and in the water – the fact that we can see the sky in the water! – and the way that I’ve learned myself well enough to know where to find a day with as much joy as this one. I cried at the way I have learned to let myself feel, I cried on the top of the return ferry, surrounded by sunset and sea air, with my notebook and toy camera like a tourist to being alive and in many ways, I was. A visitor to the moment, exempt from all things bigger than now. I cried at the way I have learned to delight in a thing that will never leave, and the way I have learned to love the simple act of being myself.

To let myself live as myself is the gift of my life. I cried very hard as I wrote this, because it is true. What a gift, on my birthday, to inherit 27 years of meeting the person I am.

This, I suspect, is the upside to the inevitability of time. This, I suspect, is the meaning that blooms from such an absolute constraint. This, I suspect is the reason that a morning like the one I am in now, sitting in the sun with my notebook and my life sized shadow, can feel like the reason for it all.