I found myself positioned under a giant sunflower. Ten concentric circles of glowing light undulating in front of my eyes and consciousness.
Salmon roe turned to seaglass as the sounds of seagulls turned to cicadas. They brought me to earthly scenes without seeing them. I felt them. I knew exactly where I was.
The nostalgia of wild nature cradled me into a deep sense of comfort that took me somewhere entirely different.
It didn’t make a difference if my eyes were open or closed. I felt myself on the edge of two realities—one organic in the truest sense, the other cosmically digital. The sounds vacillating between feeling rooted in the world I know and one constructed entirely by computer.
I watched the universe expand in front of me. Observed my three dimensional plane from an external vantage.
Saw it stretch like a deerhide.
Teetering between two realities I considered coming back. But what was the rush? I let myself linger. Seesaw on that very literal edge of digitized construction and biological creation. Breath in life and death. Say hello to all of it.
Explore together.
…
…
…
After what felt like hours, but what could have been minutes, I stood up a different person than I had been when I laid down.
As my soul slowly made its way back to my body I saw the scene from more of a distance. The moon, radiating through a hazy night onto the sunflower. Bodies looking into its glowing seeds.
A scene of a scene watching myself watch the space I had just finished inhabiting.
What just happened?
A few days later I find myself being rolled into a computed tomography scanner.
I’ve been in this exact room at least four times before. It’s become familiar in the way that any strange room that you visit with yearly regularity becomes familiar. Moving through the scanner, there is an eight and a half by eleven inch image of a window printed on cheap paper taped to the wall. On a sticky note affixed to the window are, what I have always interpreted as two birds drawn in the most simplistic manner possible. A line curving in then out to represent wings and not much else.
This bizarre picture and illustration have been there for several years at this point. I never think about their presence until I see them again at which point I experience the now innate confounding they always bring me.
I imagine one of the technicians reading a study that says “seeing images of nature calms patients as they go through the scanner” and deciding that a tiny window with a childlike bird illustration would create that calm.
Whatever the intention, the artwork certainly pulls me away from the whirring scanning device as my annual visit with it never ceases to send me down a rabbithole of inquiry.
The machine instructs me to “hold…your breath” in a cadence that is as polite as a computer can be.
“DO NOT LOOK INTO THE LASER” reads two stickers stuck symmetrically in front of my face.
I close my eyes and I’m back with my sunflower.
Laying in the same position
once again
wondering
how much of my spirit
is still with it?
i feel comfortable
letting it teeter and linger
letting it learn and play
take your time spirit
i’ll be here.
- - -
This piece was written after experiencing Ketleflower by New Orleans based artist Josh Pitts.
Thank you JoJo.