[Last modified: October, 28 2024 05:42 PM]
Interconnection and embodiment at Momo’s cafe, Gorden Square
Walking into Gordon square, a natural garden space amongst bustling university campuses in central London, I settle at ‘Momo’s café’—a quaint garden kiosk that cultivates an atmosphere of peace, ease and connection. It is a small wooden hut, decorated with signposts and pots with flowers and plants. It serves a variety of hot drinks and fresh cooked food, and is in itself bustling, yet calm, with customers and efficient serving. The cafe has simple wooden seats and tables surrounding it, allowing for people to sit together and enjoy their food in the garden.
This hut somehow symbolises the small, complex and harmonic entities and relationships that make up the living world. It represents an example of the potentials of compatibility of human creation and activity with the natural world, a pertinent statement of our time of anthropogenic imbalance. The grounded essence of the café reminds people to embed themselves into the environment. Its friendliness is inviting, drawing people together and to the park, to eat tasty food or drink warming beverages, encouraging them to connect with their senses in a natural environment of heightened sensitivities. I am therefore interested in how this cafe invokes the values of embodiment and interconnection between human, non-human and natural worlds.
There are a diversity of people who interact with the cafe, in different ways, and all with a notable level of respect and patience for each other. Some come with their friends or colleagues to discuss life or academic topics in between study sessions and lectures, others come alone for a moment of respite, some come into this peaceful space to work and others to eat and enjoy their food. There are two friends who eat mostly in silence, occasionally making conversation but mostly looking up into the trees and admiring their state of embodied connection, at the fruitful intersection of tasting, eating and being with nature.
Reflecting on my notes, I realise some difficulties in engaging with your environment and carrying out detailed observation. Feeling distracted, uninspired and tired on this day, I found myself reflecting on how to be continuously engaged and inspired by the everyday of ethnography? How to find the creativity to make sense of the world and form meaningful stories. In working through this challenge in this exercise, I let the field take the lead in directing my experience and interpretations.