Today I felt like a ghost as I wondered through the city.
I sensed the pull and push of some invisible tide. The tide of my past maybe? Or just the vast dark ocean of the city, ebbing and flowing just below consciousness, licking at my awareness, reaching in and out to expose the stony beach beneath. The unforgiving beach was my body, being scoured and gouged by the surf.
It was one of those odd days when I sensed my normal awareness or attention had to take a back seat. I just rolled with the pavements and weaved down streets, felt that slight, breathy exhilaration as I descended down a narrow close, only to be immediately swept up again on the crest of a cobbled hill.
Walking in a town or a city is just as much a physical experience as a visual or auditory one of course. But I think we underplay the physical mapping of the city on our own bodies and how this shapes our perception and mood in very subtle ways. The yanks and tugs of gravity, the myriad muscle compensations, the accelerations and decelerations of nerve and sinew - the motor responses writing the maps of emotional awareness for our minds to follow.
When we are alone in the city (without a companion/s to divert and dilute attention) as I was today, when the mind lets the body take control, the architecture and geology of place take us with them and we become the city, breathing and beating with its own, and our own, unique urban rhythm.
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