Throughout the month of July, I worked on putting together an index of the different kinds of movement I encountered from day to day. I cataloged one example of movement I noticed each day by completing a worksheet I'd made to give such observations a place to land. On the worksheet, I described the context of the encounter as well as the shape, direction, and pace of the movement itself. I notated the movement with a simple drawing, considered what region of the body it lent itself to, and then translated it into a kind of motion I could experience in my own body.
I began to notice how often I was drawn to the movement of light: the way a shadow danced on the wall of my bedroom or how the stream of the shower flickered in the light of a sunbeam. I found that quite a few worksheets captured different moments of the wind as it animated various forms: stalks of milkweed jostling in my front yard, the flowering tops of queen anne’s lace quivering in the field across the street, the leaves of a maple tree upturned and waving along the sidewalk. Of course, I also indexed a wide variety of the ways I watched humans move too: a man reaching his hand out with confidence to ensure the bus stopped for his friend or the library patron in a perfect forward fold as her arms dangled down into her backpack to dig out a slip of paper. And, I suppose it's no surprise that throughout the process of noticing kinds of movement, I grew to be more attentive to kinds of stillness too.
The index was an exercise in getting to know the movement that surrounds me in my home and neighborhood, along my walks and bus routes through the city. It was a way to grow familiar with material already in arm's reach. Now I sit beside a stack of worksheets, a collection of thirty-one gestures simple enough to perform in the studio corner of my home. I'm not certain what will become of these movements, if I will assemble them into sequences or weave the written descriptions into prose. Regardless, I’ve enjoyed the process of gathering them.
