some kind of amoeba
The students were given vague instructions. Their Painting tutor, Dr. Kelda Le Guin asked that they meet at the entrance of the Keppa Forest early that morning. The instructions were to wander the area for thirty minutes before finding a spot they preferred to sit and look at a space for an hour and a half, after the hour and a half they are to come and meet everyone at the entrance again. Her students were not very talkative; there were a few who scrunched their faces before commencing but most of them just did as they were told.
When they arrived back at the entrance, all accounted for, she dismissed the class that day without saying anything of the past two hours. Most began to gather their belongings and leave, and few were perplexed and didn’t move but looked at each other, some who shared their confusion looked at one another, and one quickly darted her face toward the tutor sharply raised her hand and asked,
Excuse me, Dr. Le Guin, what was the point of class today?
Hi Suzu, yes, that is for you to decide. The point is yours to create.
Suzu was not impressed, she nodded and looked at her tutor with an unspoken firm upper lip where she clearly expressed bullshit and she left. There were a few others who seemed to not care so much. Others were either confused or unbothered or preoccupied with matters not within the forest and some just appreciated being out in fresh air, sitting amongst glorious sunshine and clouds. There were only a few who understood the tutor.
Kelda found it hard to trust people who didn’t look at things for a long time. She would look at something for what seemed to be a substantial amount of time, but even then, she felt it was not enough exposure to understand it truly and completely, she sometimes felt it was not possible. To be able to look at it and see it instantly was a skill only monks or people who do not move for a long time could achieve, those who meditate, and have the time and space to do so. During her life very rarely could she keep still for that long and so throughout her life she rarely trusted anything that she saw. This day was one where she didn’t even trust herself to teach, she wanted the young artists to come to this realization themselves to see the significance of just being there for that long focusing on one point and digesting it countless times could give to them. It was also an opportunity to see how their brain was in this state of looking to take account their own interior movements and maybe reflect on how it manifests in their works. Though this might have been helpful to say at the end or beginning she decided to let them think about it themselves, let them be their own guide, since that is all they have at the end of the day - knowing this might fail miserably for majority of them at this point in their lives, but could potentially, and unconsciously, benefit them in years to come.
When Kelda sent the students away to wander and look, she herself joined them, and climbed up a tree. She sat on a sturdy branch about halfway up where another branch crossed her chest and she placed her arms on top of this one and rested her head on herself for a while. She gazed at the peculiar tilted perspective across the branch ahead of her nose. Listening more so to the wind and hearing some of the students move down below her, and then silence, then the wind, then more wind, and the wind seemed to create it’s own rhythm and the forest followed suit as if they were an orchestra.
Kelda gave little credit to how well she deeply she felt the world and witnessed events and moments, images in her life, she could truly see things when given enough time, but she missed something that day. While she sat there, she did have a sense that the sun felt more intense than she ever noticed before. It felt this way because it was this way. Something had changed in the Forest at that exact moment that everyone settled in to actively see for an hour and a half, and though everyone felt, as programmed biologically the feeling was minimized and dismissed almost immediately, some just experiencing it as a shiver or tremor inside their body that lasted for a split second.
There was also a cloud in the sky that no one noticed. It danced back and forth across the sky. It looked like giant white-liquid amoeba exploring the atmosphere and curling and expanding itself for several miles, before it separated and swallowed by the sky, no where to be detected.
