MINUTE OF MONTH NO. 30 AUGUST 2022
Channel: Sarah Bay Gachot
Date: 2023-01-13

#minuteofmonth No. 30, August, 2022. Many people took care of us this month. Our pH was off, sleep rattled, drinks schedule too full, antennas out for conspiracies, diet severely malnourished. It’s no wonder we went a little crazy. We settled in at light speed in Berlin, Marrakech, Southeast UK, and the Peloponnese with adventures and explorations, rock hunting, art seeing, make-your-face-hurt humor, deep discussions, concern and support, feasts, and intoxicating nips — yet something in me kept draining to nothing despite it all. I found myself missing my friends, mourning the inevitable departure to come, despite them being right there in front of me. It was too much for a human to escape unscathed. Too intense not to cause complications. The month began in Venice, if you remember from last month, which I have to say feels like a chip from the wrong plate that got glued onto our current wabi-sabi special repair project. Then we were in Berlin, but with a moment where L drove us into Poland for a few hours to walk through a market and have some pierogis. That day, we also visited a large grassy place away from the city with a honeybee wagon and a gajillion blackberry bushes he and B will dream up so they can look at stars and gather with friends. (This was another underlying motif of the month — our friends having a place away from something else, usually the aggression of a city.) Later that week, they gave me a motorboat ride for my birthday around one of the Berlin lakes I kept hearing about, a ridiculously good cake melting in our hands as we ate it, champagne, then a sleepover on the roof at another friends’ on the lake. . . . then a hard goodbye I’m still recovering from. We flew to Morocco on the invitation of a new friend. We had a day and a half to explore with a guide she supplied and lots of time to get to know her. But it was brief. Then we flew to the UK and drove east to visit J, who took us far and wide across Kent in cars and on bikes, made us soups and other meals to eat to music, talked us down from the rafters of our psyches, told us about his plans to root down, dipped into mind-meld healing discussions. He gave me the diaries of Derek Jarman, which I’m now reading, incredulous he took us to Jarman’s Prospect cottage and garden in Dungeness where he wrote these diaries, an ageless and ancient place all at once, the wind, waves, and shingle beach turning the place over in the minds of whoever goes there, a slow unfolding you can watch forever but only minorly participate in. But I didn’t video this. My captures slowed this month. We said goodbye again. . . . And we returned to Greece to Leonidio and I slept for 11 hours. Our friends who had Covid last time we were here did not have Covid this time and neither did we. They picked up the baton of our repair, carefully addressing and dressing the wounded, addled minds we’ve bruised after this pinball-like fling we’ve been on, feeding us and making us healthier. The slowness, all the time on the pebbles next to the Myrtoan sea, more long meals, healing, talking, the concern, the gentle nudging, the forceful concern, the serious urging. How could I stop? We’re on our way to something a little more stable. Back to the U.S.A soon. Originally posted on: https://www.instagram.com/reel/CiTIJZBj9hi/