many days she felt unwell. specifically it was violent nauseating whiplash. as the tissues of her body acclimated in staccato fits and starts to the evolution-gift, she found herself out of sorts, out of sync, out of time, out of place, out of body. it was sensory overload, often. the evolution caused her body to experience time differently: there was no longer a linear past-present-future but an everything-everywhere-all-at-once. she had to learn how to toggle between scales of attention, like how our eyes adjust between the micro and the macro, between light and dark. one particular technology of that time, the camera, is a helpful analogy; different lenses provided different perspectives. photographers might use lens with fast apertures to foreground a certain subject while blurring the background into indistinct disks of dreamy colors and soft gradients. they might use the tilt-shift lens, which manipulates the planes of focus, creating the effect of miniaturizing everything. they might even use holography to split beams of light, capturing two moments and creating a three-dimensional re-presentation in two-dimensional form. it wasn't just her eyes learning to toggle across scales but her ears, nose, tongue, the hairs on her arm and the back of her neck, the nerves humming throughout.
the more feedback she had to adjust to, the less words she had readily available--the more strain she felt to attend to multiple simultaneous realities. in the midst of a conversation, her attention was drawn instead to the five deer grazing in the underbrush or the tiny iridescent beetle down the way, the bombs across the world. the clicking cicadas in the canopy of the oak trees whose leaves were feeding the western tussock moth caterpillar undulating lazily with its colorful bristles erect. the website trafficking drugs to assault women on camera. the bright blue scrub jay with its round white belly, and the high-pitched ruby-throated hummingbirds zipping about. the prattling on of people around her vying for attention from the gatekeeper-researchers. morning light spilling around the small girth of young redwood trees. the yelling of someone on the trail called the jungle and the crowing roosters. the iridescent feathers of large wild turkey roaming about. astronauts re-acclimating to gravity; their poetic ballads from the far side of the moon attempting to distract from the smell of schools and hospitals in smoking rubble. the startled baby garter snake. the smell of rain soaked earth and freshly uprooted invasive grasses, fading from her hands. the ruptures fractures fissures ripping arresting of relationship, the sound of urgency and crisis-doing/thinking, the sound of dissociation and disconnection, of trauma transporting bodies out of time and place.
so she found her attention recoiling into her body like a turtle, seeking the safety and comfort of bodily sensation. once it was quiet enough she could hear the hum of her nervous system and the drum of her heart and the waves in her ears.
thinking with: glissant (tremors), whyte (crisis epistemology), sound of silence podcast from unexplainable