M: Hi, it’s been a long time not seeing you on this train.

The last time we met was half year ago. 

The snowstorm made the train stop for a long time, long enough for us to start to talk.

J: Given from Oxford Dictionary, ‘Talk’ verb.

speak in order to give information or express ideas or feelings; communicate by spoken words.

M: As I woke up this morning, I watched as her hand danced in the water, flowing through the pipe and back into the sink, splashing droplets onto my reflection in the mirror.

J: Given from Oxford Dictionary, ‘Mirror’ noun.

a reflective surface

Given from Mirrorworld blog, ‘Mirror’ noun.

A spiritual symbolism; symbolize the threshold between the conscious mind and the unconscious mind.

M: It reminded me of the instinctual urge we have to reach out and touch the rain, to feel the earth beneath our fingertips, to become one with our surroundings. 

It's as if these actions are ingrained in our bodies, a fundamental part of our being that we cannot resist.

J: Here comes a difference. 

If ‘body’ is a noun, it is the physical structure.

If ‘body’ is a verb, it means give material form to something abstract.

Is ‘body’ all about materiality? How can we communicate things without a ‘body’?

M: This makes me think about a bridge. Last night, I found myself standing on this iron bridge, on the left side. On the other side, a man wearing a safety vest rode a bike, with his left hand behind his ear and his right hand held high, waving. He opened and closed his mouth as he called out to someone. 

No one knew that, 

under the moonlight at half past ten in the evening, 

there was a man who reached out and caught the wind, flying forward quickly. 

Except for me.

J: How can we translate the form of memory to others in the form of history? 

What if it does not include in history, only because it doesn’t have materiality? 

Then you call me crazy. 

M: To be honest, it's hard to say if my hand truly constitutes a part of myself. 

While the palm and back of my hand form a cohesive whole, we must distinguish between its anterior and posterior surfaces. Despite this differentiation, there is no noticeable separation between the two sides.

J: Gap is where the ghost lives in our body. 

We distinguish, in order to provide ghosts a home. 

At a moment, you have a feeling. 

You feel strange, alienated, and a little bit furious.

But you don’t allow yourself to have it.

Then the ghost resides there. 

M: I remember I was walking in the underground of our city. There’re stairs connecting three floors of the city. On the bottom tier, the wind howled through the automatic doors, blowing whistles, endlessly swirling. On the second , there’s a hole in a safety net, and a glass beer bottle has been stuffed inside. 

I couldn’t help but wonder how someone managed to access this stairway by the roadside and tear through the mesh with their hands, precisely calculating the angle to throw the bottle into such a tiny hole. 

J: A present hole. 

Leads to 

A previous action

Leads to 

An abrupt motivation

Leads to 

A desire

Leads to 

A Body 

Body

Then I cannot stop. 

Have you bored yet?

M: You know what happened on the third floor? 

I won't tell you, you should think about it yourself. 

Think about what kind of world you've been living in for so long. 

Maybe we shouldn't rely on our hands to think.

J: Thinking doesn’t make any change. 

Then you hang out, and you trust your eyes. 

M: You already know that I have a great eyesight. 

One day, before the snowfall in spring, I saw a tiny green cube, only a cubic millimeter in size, behind someone’s left ear. 

I think she had planted a sequoia seedling in her spine. 

She picked one most suitable for Chicago’s weather from King’s Valley. 

Carefully placed it in the gap between the fifth and fourth joints, and hid this towering existence within her body. 

However, even the tiniest seedling could not be concealed within a human body. 

The topmost leaf poked out, swaying in the wind.

Do you see anything that only happens in spring?

J: Are you sure you want to categorize things this way?

When you analyze everything carefully enough, you will no longer be able to tell what kind of tree it is. You think the two trees in front of you are both sequoias. If you observe them more, it turns out that one tree has three nests, and the other tree has none. The longer you spend, the more you find that your current classification is wrong and incomplete. We manipulate language and we trapped ourselves.

What makes them the same?

You tried to think,

You wake up again.

What makes you different?

M: I have a secret, would you like to hear it? 

She still lives in my mind. 

I imagine my body always being next to hers, searching for her breath, imitating her footsteps and her gaze. 

She always makes me moist. 

I stand in the center of the city with cars passing by, feeling like she's constantly stepping on my footprints.

I still hold onto the recording from our volcano hike a few years ago. We lost in the fog, she leaned on the rock ledge, trying to reach out others with the walkie-talkie. 

The wind shipped away all the noises. 

The wind carried away her voice. 

As we walked further, we crossed the altitude of four thousand meters. 

It was a territory with no more tress.

J: So what was the tree replaced by?

M: We didn’t go any further.

What would stop you from walking forward? When do you feel like, ah, it’s time to go back?

J: I don't know when we are walking forward, because wherever we walk, we are walking forward. Maybe this choice made me happier, or sadder; a longer lifespan, or a shorter lifespan, I don't know. All I get is one result, because I only have one body. My body, in terms of materiality, has its single way of recording time. So I need you. 

M: I often ponder on how there are so many things in this world that are much larger than humans

Our bodies are contained within so many larger entities.

J: A Moving train, cannot find in space or time

Watershed Art&Ecology, 1821 S. Racine Ave, a 2500 sqft architecture, built in 1906

Chicago, 607.44 km2, a city, emerged in 1837

Earth, a terrestrial planet, has a diameter of approximately 12,742 kilometers and a mass of 5.97 x 10^24(The 24th power of 10) kilograms; estimated 8.7 million living species, 4.5 billion years old

And that’s my current limit of creativity. 

M & J: Thank you all. Happy earth day.