painting of my period by Emma Fitzgerald

Emma:
I don’t have my period at the moment and I’m glad. I’m appreciating the dry state I have right now.
I look at having a period as having extra work to do. When the flow is in motion I have to keep an awareness in my crotch and check if my tampon is absorbing the blood or if there is a leak in process. Many times I’ve blessed the inventor of the tampon. It keeps things a lot cleaner – swabs the blood in the bud…
I don’t keep a calendar check on my cycle – I usually just have a vague idea of when in the month it is.
What I appreciate most about my period is that it brings increased sensitivity and awareness. I don’t feel as inclined to put up with time-wasting or lies. I don’t numb myself out from feeling sadness or anger and although I don’t welcome these emotions with open arms they do reveal personal truth in my landscape. All feelings bring information about how to negotiate my life – so its good that my body “takes me to school” in this way once a month.
A major feature of the period is increased water retention. I’ve been thinking about water meditations lately and here in hot New York I’m drinking a lot more water than usual to stay hydrated. I’ve heard this story from a few different people – about a guy who meditated on water and then looked at it under a microscope. I think he did it over a set length of time – then he had some water which he didn’t meditate on at all and he just tucked it into the back of the fridge. When the water samples were looked at under the ‘scope the water which had been meditated on was full of beautiful molecular structures, described to me by my sources as symmetrical and beautiful. The water which had been ignored was higher in bacteria and had broken patterns.
So this encourages me to meditate on the water I put into my body because I like the idea of being able to communicate with it. On the other hand when I think about symmetry and beauty something in me says – hey, bacteria have to live too and they probably find the broken molecular patterns of home beautiful too.
That’s wisdom from the hole folks! enough! my original rumination was about the potential of the water retentive period to fill my body with symmetrical beautiful molecular designs…melon bell.

It’s been a week. For the first three days there was no AC and nobody got anything done. Instead we got drunk and fixed our bikes, drank coffee, got to know each other, went to concerts, read books and hung out. Now, though, everything’s different: we are a hivemind of horizontal exchange and creative labour. Well. Sort of.

Some of us are working on specific projects; some of us are keeping the process fluid. We did make soup and eat it, in homage to the great relational aestheticists; we summoned sky-spirits with feathers and a peacepipe; we went out to a dance party and Emma had a melancholy-off with some guy who challenged her: Irish folk songs vs Russian folk songs. Some of us got dressed up as sacred primitivist clowns. There was a discussion about the definition of political in the artistic context.

Basically, it’s all business as [un]usual.