Eyes, Opening
Grounding Into Now, and 'Writing and Being'
Ground into your creative practice this season. Join in for a workshops in NYC and Baltimore in May. To start, strengthen, or sustain a creative writing or meditation practice, schedule a virtual 1:1 session. As always, listen to these essays in podcast form here, share with a friend, upgrade, or pair your creative practice with a journal from Odette Press.
“Oh! to earth heart
Calling our Presence together”
— Allen Ginsberg, ‘Wales Visitation’
Morning. Morning when the bright green leaves new to the world roam and sway. Morning when blue sky lightens, the hours just before heat. When new birds, migrating, flit between branches. When the ground covered over by dusk emerges.
Walking the line from the train to my apartment, I watch as sunlight connects in radiant threads to growing fig leaves and how in leaving the city for the span of the weekend, the fruit and leaves have all grown exponentially. Time, and warmth, speak the language of Spring.
I write and I breathe. I give over moment to gravity. Breath, body, and mind exhale to gravity not as in weight but as in ground — ground as in a steadiness and a stillness and stability. Breath speaks in necessary rhythms, in the gift of continuing, while each day we experience the thousands and thousands of movements of mind. Writing and breath give pace to our experiences, teeming like earth in the dialogue between stillness and momentum.
What does it mean to still? How to ground? As I write, I notice the rhythm of hands, breathing, ground, and the language of season. Hands become extensions for feeling, making, sensing, for creating language. A hand is a language: a palm to halt, to stop, to cup, to open, to bring forward, flowering open in gesture, an insistence to greet pen and page, and encourage the dialogue between writing, breathing, and meditating. Connecting eyes, heart, eye of mind, and your resonant felt experience you choose the language of what you aim to express. Your palms may meet doorways, open pollen coated windows, cup the gentle tender ends of plants as they shoot up slow from the ground, pointing to petals, or hold gentle grip steady and flowing against a pen, or you may turn your eyes toward the increased light in Spring sky in noticing. Sitting to breathe, back to wall or subway car or tree, I recall the images carved in stone of the Buddha’s hand, palm cupped open and up as if bloom, up toward the sky to receive, while gaze and hand point toward the ground —touching.
Eyes bloom opening to idea, delight, surprise and I find language on streets and trails in multi petalled meanings. Roses unfold, first pink, while Upstate, moss soaks up revival in mornings coated in rain. Walking the streets through impermanent seasons, waking eyes draw light of day, to equal parts dusk and dawn, while eyes and hands gather sensation and meaning. There is continuity, a steady forwardness in the process of noticing, feeling for resonance, and writing accordingly: the surprise of the first pink rose around the block of my apartment; the way gazes, eyes, and smiles emerge as they heat starts to unfold; dogs and ideas both bounding forward. In this way, the whole sacred vessel of the body — noticing, perceiving, resonating, sensing — becomes the instrument for writing. Then, life grounds, blooms, sings.
“Language is a mystery and a miracle that has been given to us we know not why,” writes G. Lynn Nelson in Writing and Being:
“No one knows why, some time between one hundred thousand and forty thousand years ago, the cerebral cortex blossomed in the human cranial cavity like some exotic flower and why along with it came language — this amazing ability to make sounds and marks that enable us to convey meaning to one another and with which we might explore the universe within and without.”
“The gift of language emerges within us and waits there for us to find its power.” Nelson continues. Through writing and feeling, senses open, and focus, and eyes notice. We have our languages, in sound, word, image, shape, and that which we feel and want to express, and the many paths those expression could take. Something in us dances between that which resonates and bounds forward, and that which grounds; words are formed, ideas coalesce, colors meet page, and we notice our thinking, watering the idea, and feel our way into expressing. A seed, containing the essence at the root, roots down and expands out; likewise your language may be bud, may be growing, may be pressured and contained, then warmed, cooled, loved, challenged, and cared for, until it finds some way out from the ground: grows a stem, into flower, expressing.
Writing, breathing, and grounding into being brings clarity. Nelson goes on to share that being in your writing practice brings a greater sensitivity — that “you will become more alert, you will see more,” Nelson continues, rooting into how, as we write and feel, the benefit includes sensing life more fully. “Little things will begin to blossom with meaning and beauty. It is all there, waiting.” As I write this, I think of Spring, and feel into the burgeoning sunlight. The heart becomes watered, another lotus, another rose, another dogwood, another flower, when safe and warm in the ground of your practice. The petals of your ideas form bud, pressure, then spin in a gentle opening momentum. You radiate out from the center, in bloom. There in the earth of your practice, can you feel it? That ground; that gravity — the way you are constantly connected.
Language can shrink, can plant, can nurture, can expand, can be plant and sound and colors, and the symbols, sentences, textures, tastes, sounds, postures, shapes we make give us language beyond the eye of mind stringing thoughts, ideas, and sentences together. Grounding, we emerge creative into the feeling world. Expression can be an antidote to that which depresses, and so to write or create or express is in some way, no matter how small, one way to alleviate the pressures of your own weight, density, so as to arrive to lightness. There is some dirt, some wind, some light, some water, some sky, and enough lightness so as to encourage bloom, petal, blossom, idea, intention, heart, eye, to bright, to open.
What starts your practice? What inspires you? It may be question, person, place, song, sound, shape action. It may be response, intention, or reaction, but all ideas start as some seed, some place. What is the language that grounds you? Is it color, texture, shape, sound, taste, sentence? It is made between your body and the earth? The conversation in Spring? I watch the season, feeling the rise in histamine, watching the skyline turn from wide open straight seeing to the city from the window of my apartment to a horizon new and glowing with unfolding green. The language of heat, of starting.
Nourished by, Nourishing:
Rooting into embodied practice with Scott Tusa on How to Release Anxiety and Find Groundedness — read my recent conversation with Scott here. Reading Writing and Being: Taking Back Our Lives Through the Power of Language by G. Lynn Nelson, Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, and On Beauty and Being Just by Elaine Scarry. Brewing green tea, passionflower, nettle for this Spring season. Listening to bright grooves, courtesy of Reverberation Radio.
