Go Ahead Stay in Bed
Because resting is work
... dream-awakened, dream-born, dream-built, dream-created, dream-crossed, dream-fed, dream-haunted, dream-perturbed, dream- ridden. —Oxford English Dictionary
O I had such high hopes for this week. For all I would accomplish, all that I was going to explain to you about what I have been researching. Especially, I was going to write about the straggler colours of last year’s plants and silt and cast-offs that I collected, first in a frozen creek that passed under a highway and then on an industrial site at the mouth of the Don River. I wanted to show you the Columbian nut or was it a gall? that Vivian dropped off for me. I was in bare feet and my new green t-shirt and the dog was going crazy, but still I boiled that foraged thing up and tried the resultant liquid on a new paper made especially to keep the ink from absorbing into the cotton for as long as possible. On the same paper, a blob of ink of the dried petals of the poinsettia. I had this idea for suspending microplastics in a kind of amber gum too. I’ve been full of new thinkings for the new year and thought I’d make a kind of itinerary for the Colour Lab going forward, a shared place and syllabus for us to unravel together. And I did start. But then I went back to bed. What I thought was a bad cold became some heavy-limbed, Ricola-tested COVID variant that brought down first my family and then me. The flu laughed at all my plans. And I was almost going to call in a sick day today. But then again, why not celebrate the bed-ridden world of half-awake thoughts, of crisp white sheets and Alpine herb infused lozenges with a bedridden moodboard. At first that felt lazy, like rolling over and retreating back into hibernation. But the thing is that even when you aren’t sick you’re probably logging a 40 or 50 hour workweek of horizontal life. There is work to be done in bed—it just isn’t capitalist work. Instead resting follows own mycelial fever-dream logic into the unknown. —Jason
