Feeling open, still here, heading o/s

Dear Void,

Just logging in to post quickly to say I’m still here and . . . 

Sometimes I think of travel. It’s uncomfortable to think on. Sometimes I crave it. Sometimes it scares me. To think on travel is worse than traveling. Today the mood is mild here at my desk at uni (image of my window above). Clouds drifting across the sky in no particular hurry. Mooching clouds. I have headphones over my ears but I’ve only just noticed that I’m not playing anything through them so the sounds of the room, the distant traffic heading up Parramatta Road, are all dulled but present. I turn the internet radio to BBC 6 which is playing Lauren Laverne’s morning show. It’s 4:57pm here in Sydney and I remember that I’ll be traveling to the home of that music station in a week and a half. Craving, scared.

Our passports are arranged, our flights are booked. Click here for the backstory on how I had to muddle through to get these sorted and the quick turnaround since being scheduled to talk at a conference at University of Warwick in May. Oh hey! We’re in May now !! 😊 Cue, McCartney singing Got to Get You Into My Life. Thanks, Lauren!

The notion of connection occurs to me, and I feel open. 

I’ve been gathering extracts from my exegesis and from the creative part of my Doctoral project to present at the conference. It’s been 3 years since I started and sometimes I look at what I’ve written and it’s so unfamiliar to me that I think I must have lifted it from some other text. Sometimes I have. This is the thrill of working on such a long form research project. What was once so familiar becomes unfamiliar. Or perhaps it was not yet even familiar. It’s true that we really don’t know what we think until we write through it. Even then, we may need to keep writing through what we’ve already written to get to a place that is stable and true. To write out text that we can say we truly own. Even if we take quotes from others, there’s work to be done to subsume those quotes and, as Erasmus says of this process, get that material ‘into the veins of the mind’.

Typing this up, alone, mulling over things; I have no problems. 

So, the countdown begins, Void. Yours, in preparation of travel,

Jx

PS. A lot has happened since I last posted so the next few will be catching up on my visits to State Library of NSW, University of Sydney Archives, and some elements fitting nicely into place.