Greer Pester - Poem for the Pool Care of the Wild and Kind
This text was commissioned as part of ‘call + response 4: DONOR’
Image: Greer Pester - Pool Care, 2021
I placed my cold feet into the pond and let the slimy foreign textures brush my skin. I’ve been thinking about disconnection and the ways humanity has become so distracted from the deep undergrowth and the far corners of our humanness.
From our pooled blood.
From the collective watery and fluid bath of our being.
From the ebb and flow and ripples of our merging yokes.
The expansive tides of a pond and the resonating platelets of activity that quietly react and expand. The awe vibration of music and sweet bodily serenade.
Cultivating care is a radiant practice in a system that perhaps has warped our perspective and attention to what ‘care’ looks like. Our waters are stagnant; our ripples conformed. Exchange of care and free nurture is something that has been an innate part of our condition since the beginning of time, our ancestor’s priorities were perhaps less complex then.
A stubby and solid pyramid of human needs in relation to food, shelter, care and reproduction. Our needs were intrinsically linked to our natural and local surroundings, our cycles, our landscapes and the fruits of the wild.
The conquering, capital human ego appears to have superseded our intrinsic code and severed us from the umbilical cord of our wild connection, shifting our perspective to a more limited impression of ourselves, our singular murky reflections in the puddle.
Stretched across continents with a digital man made web, we grip slabs of glass, plastic and altered minerals. We carry man made portals - invisible umbrellas of connection, pixel led vampires awaiting the red lights of notification, or to count red dopamine doses - hearts of admiration, reassuring ourselves of our never-ending curated connections.
Everyday we fuel a broad and unsustainable interweb of production to feed our growing populations and needs. We’ve taken our rich and sensuous surroundings and we’ve carved them into artificial sculptures of ourselves, to reflect and to feed our surface desires.
It is a hunger, however, that is never satisfied. This way of being does not speak to our true human longings, to our tender human need for connection, nurture and nature, to the inter-relational, non transactional.
The kind of connection that comes when you embrace your shell into the contours of someone else’s and feel your heartbeats sync. Inflated with joy and giggles as you wrap your limbs around and into the slots.
When you notice the soft changes of the seasons, the resilience of plants and wildlife, the perseverance of water whittling through mountains, soothing gashes in the land; a mother and host to miraculous life, weaving its magic through cycles of life and death. It perseveres.
Or when you rub the torso of someone as they let all their streams of despair tumble out of their orifices. Gripping soft hands and shoulders through grief and struggle in solidarity and fortitude.
Gently holding them with your presence and your ears. Spilling your love around each other.
Donate your focus. Cast your eyes to take in the forest clouds, re attune your ears to the birdsong that marks the melodies of spring and delicate time passing. Take a moment to sense the deeply complex mycelium of our interconnected underworld that lies under your feet; the answer and satiation of our meandering. Take a breath.
Spreading your attention like soft warm butter flowing into the cracks and wells of lack in our society and systems. Surrender your thoughts, your energy, your excess blood, your passionate compassion. Let yourself expand into your earthly instinctive being and feel your connection to that which is much bigger than us.
Breathing through the feelings of overwhelm and tickling the threads of empathy. Percolate in your humble potential. Be as a power- fountain- community- cluster - a small cosmic pin prick gaggle, surviving, despite it all - dilated - open eyed to the universe, digesting the light and the dark of fleshy space.
Give freely and know that to be enough, trust in the resonating reciprocity of care. The trust that nurturing others and the world around you is also an act of nurturing yourself. It is a generous connection.
Leaving something better than when you arrived at it and allowing it to flow back into the folds of you, aligning your sense of self and purpose and precious place. Re rooting back into the magic of life, belonging and to the sparkle of a species soul.
Arrive in assemblages of meaning within our bio diversity, our colours and forms
and our potential as a wild and kind
- human-kind.
Greer is a visual and social artist based in Glasgow. She studied at Edinburgh College Of Art. Her practice explores human intimacy and states of connection with nature, she is curious about creative play, life and death cycles, rituals, food and ecstatic experience. Bordered by colours and shapes that can often refer us to the infantile and feminine. Her work is material led. She works with collage, painting, tactile sculpture and text.
You can find more of her work at her website http://www.greerpester.com or @greerpest on Instagram.