I'm not particularly poetic, and I don't have a green thumb.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we've been in lockdown for months.  I can't access the University of Melbourne Southbank Campus where I'm based.  I work and teach from home. At some point in the past couple weeks, we're allowed to go out for exercise for more than 2 hours, but I'm now so used to staying at home which has been transformed into flexible working and living space, actually and imaginarily. Sometimes, candles and one of those aroma infusers help to trick my brain that I've been in various places. A scent of Japanese cypress reminds me of ​Shinonome Shrine in Matsuyama....

Through my PhD research project, I've been developing a set of perceptual tools for improvisation and using an emergent strategy for dance making.  The perceptual tools are, not only central around the awareness of the interior of my body, but also integrate sensorial inputs/stimuli from my environment and my intersubjective space with plants, animals and eventually human beings.These tools take to account my memory, historicity, curiosity, imaginative faculties to create a mode of attention that is fractal and emergent.This makes me exercise my sensory organs, eyes, ears, skin, tastebuds, etc. As I venture into my backyard, the vegetation in a tangent element in the research, one of which is the harvesting of the peppermint.

As I mentioned, I'm not good at growing things, so the peppermint was put to the ground by my partner Matt while initially I took on the role of executing caterpillars who tried to eat the leaves. Just before the lockdowns, Matt put the peppermint into a new plant box and we've had a bumper crop ever since. I am pondering this process of us having peppermint tea through the lens of my favourite theorist, Prof Carlo Rovelli, a theoretical physicist at Aix-Merseille University.

Plants, including peppermint, have a different temporality from us. You might not find it's fun to watch peppermint grow but it does grow when you're not looking. This bush of peppermint has become a bumper crop under particular conditions where the environment enables it flourishing.  These conditions are: in a pot plants receiving sunlight pretty much all day; the pot plant is near something that drives the butterfly away so there is hardly a caterpillar to eat the leaves.  

...Fingers crossed...

If I leave the peppermint on the ground, it would flower and die. This bush of peppermint undergoes a process of interaction with me as I cut a grown branch, dry them for a few days and make tea out of them. In the words of Rovelli, the peppermint tea emerges from a particularity including interaction and processes, so the plant becomes something else other than itself its fertilisers.

The practice of waiting for the peppermint to grow and harvesting them for tea has become a part of my dance practice at home. Peppermint tea itself is refreshing, giving me a sense of something new as it goes down my oesophagus. It shifts the state of my body from being in front of the computer into another body ready to be attentive and explore my perceptual tools.

I like a quote by John Cage, 

"When you're working, everybody is in your studio – the past, your friends, the art world, and above all, your own ideas – all are there.  But as you continue working, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone.  Then, if you are lucky, even you leave."

Quoted in Guston, by Robert Storr, Abbeville Press Publishers, 1986, p.62.​