The sidewalk offers an endless supply of things to consider; the darkened patch of fossilized gum, the ghost of a once existent piece of tape, the various forms of others DNA. More often then not these things have no particular claim on our attention, mostly they are stepped on, passed by, unregistered and if acknowledged at all, immediately forgotten. But every once in a while they become strangely intimate, as though the ground has been quietly absorbing the weight of every passing life.

 

In the garden, days are measured differently. There is always something to be done, though the work never seems finished. A plant must be moved, a branch cut back, a patch of earth left alone. Things return when they are not expected to, and other things, carefully tended, disappear. The garden has its failures, its triumphs, its seasons of looking forward to something that may not come. Growing things seem to possess a knowledge that people have difficulty acquiring - how to remain in one place and yet continually change.

 

One comes from the public world, from the incidental marks of strangers and the passing of time; the other from a private place, where the same person may return day after day to observe a familiar corner of ground. Both are drawn to surfaces that tell stories indirectly and  in both paying attention becomes a form of intimacy. 

 

There are ways of looking that require a certain patience, and perhaps a willingness to accept that not everything will be understood. The sidewalk does not reveal what caused the damage or why it has been marked. The garden does not explain why one plant flourishes while another disappears. There are things that happen without a lesson being attached to them. Still, we look, we remember. We notice what remains. And for a moment, the ordinary world seems to be telling us something even as it busily makes and unmakes itself - not a story with a beginning and an end, but one that has been going on for some time, whether we have been paying attention or not.