Hi everyone,

Good evening... it's almost time for bed here in New York City.

Whenever I am stuck, my friend Dan tells me to sit on the floor and not do anything until I have a good idea of what to do next. So sometimes I am thinking, resting, and honestly doing nothing on the floor for a long time. During this time, often I look at the ceiling.

I like looking at the ceiling because I imagine a new world, or a world already inside of ours, just not seen by many people simply because of orientation.

I used to do something similar as a kid. I would lay on my back, looking at the ceiling... and move my fingers as if I were a person jumping from place to place. The home I grew up in was somewhat modern, so it had weird ceilings with angles, making it a fun terrain for me to explore and hop around in.

For the past few months I've been pretty into some of these long ambient sound videos on YouTube. So I made one the background track for my latest mix, which features rain on a tent in a sleepy sort of way. The mix starts with Enya's version of Silent Night ... "Oíche Chiúin (Chorale)".

Before this summer, I actually didn't know much about Enya at all. Then a friend told me that the reason her music is so soothing is because she grew up in a large household with many siblings, where it was always loud. As an adult, she simply craved the opposite.

I am also someone who seeks out soothing environments, although, unlike Enya, I didn't grow up in a large household. My childhood was relatively calm, exploratory, and fun. I remember having a lot of time to explore whatever I was interested in, and I also literally explored my backyard which turned into a forest. I caught lots of bugs and kept some as pets. I remember wanting to be a biologist and live in Australia.

I wonder where my interest in calm came from...

I wonder if it has to do with nature, since as a kid, I was often watching nature shows on TV or outside observing in the forest. Maybe calm has to do with nature's default state — laziness, ease. Physical systems perform the minimal amount of work necessary.

I think a lot about my interest in mystery and how it pairs with curiosity. Too much mystery, it's esoteric. But just the right amount of mystery actually makes something more accessible since it encourages further curiosity. And mystery seems to need a sort of calm. Calm paired with mystery feels like an ideal learning environment to me... one that is both boring and interesting at the same time. That is, I need to feel both at ease but also curious and charged with questions to explore.

So going back again...

Looking at my ceiling makes me feel calm.

Seeing its texture immediately gives me a sort of brain massage. I'm thankful for the thought and energy put into the texture, especially when it's time for bed.

The texture also helps me imagine a new terrain, like zoomed out, as if I'm flying overhead some bumpy field. Which reminds me that another one of my favorite self-soothing exercises is imagining myself from birds-eye-view, like a character in a game. Sometimes when I'm having trouble sleeping, I think of myself as a sim and imagine myself breathing, but from up high. I see my belly contracting and expanding. As Larissa Pham says, "Externalizing myself helps me take care of myself."

***

I find textures / patterns on surfaces so related and necessary for remembering environments and our memories inside them. They can also remind us to zoom out, to think about something else or from a different perspective. Often textures / patterns are meant to not designed to be a focal point, but rather something quietly in the background, so simply shifting to thinking about them is an act of shifting perspective.

As a child, I would stare at this wallpaper over and over again, specifically looking closely at these colored, painted brush-stroked blobs. I saw a mallard duck. I couldn't unsee it. When I recently asked my boyfriend if he also saw “duck,” he had trouble. I must have imprinted "duck" into my memory year after year of spending time contemplating these abstract forms by myself.

The abstract and somewhat ambiguous nature of this wallpaper helped it become "sticky for memory". In other words, me deciding the abstract forms together were ducks helped me attach a memory to it...

This wallpaper lives in the guest bathroom. It’s the guest bathroom that has the most beautiful light in the whole house because of a well-placed skylight. I remember spending more time than usual inside this bathroom. Maybe I was relaxed — it was spring break each time we’d visit, so I was on break from school and feeling at ease. Or maybe it was the special quality of light and the large mirror reflecting it. I remember taking showers inside this bathroom with my cousins, drawing pictures of animals with our fingers through the glass’s condensation. And in my periphery, there were always these softly colored blobs on the walls ... some of them ducks.

Recently my parents bought my grandparents' old home. They will eventually move into it. Shortly before I took this picture of the wallpaper, I was walking around the house, thinking about parts I wanted to "save" because my parents will soon start redoing parts of this Florida home to make it their own.

I hope we as a family can work on this together — as there are certain details, like this wallpaper, that would be nice to carry on... even though to an outsider it might look trendy for its time in the 80s and therefore cliché and disposable or forgettable.

***

texture as soothing instrument ...

texture as memory holder ...

texture as way to zoom out ...

texture as portal into the unconscious

what effect does a texture have on a lifetime?

...

Zzz,

Laurel

p.s. Just for the record, here again is my fall 2020 mix. Recommended for more soothing yet energized times...

Oíche Chiúin (Chorale), Enya
Allegri’s Miserere Mei, King’s College Choir
Someone To Call My Lover, Janet Jackson
麻醉 (Remix), Faye Wong
Spinning Away, Brian Eno & John Cale
Aloha ‘Oe, Korea Ukulele Ensemble of Korea
Morning Dew, Eddie Kamae
Thursday Afternoon (excerpt), Brian Eno
Sleep in the tent on a rainy day, dreamy sound on YouTube

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