Getting Granular
Slowness details, tasting life, and letting it linger
Let’s take a trip. Take something like chocolate, like citrus, like a sound, a color, an emotion, a memory, a song. Place it in your mind and experience it. Sense it in the beacon of your body, and hold it soft on your tongue.
Don’t rush. Be with the moment, the full moment, the whole of the the experience. What rises up from the broad strokes and the details? What are you curious about, and how does curiosity feel? What do you want to linger with? Can you go deeper? Notice how all sensations arrive, rise, peak, and fade away. Each moment ephemeral.
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The first glimpses of day arrive and I see them through the lens of waking. First, window. Early morning moon is crescent smiling at dawn, turned glow against the sky and the distant navy. Then the alarm. Then the sun. Then all the thoughts come. So many thoughts — which to focus on? Which to blur or turn away from?
In the early moments of waking, lately, I am trying to savor the day. Reaching first for phone, then quickly, pen. The intention is slowing; I want to savor the soft thoughts before task lists and train rides and use the moments of morning to set the pace, space, and feeling for the day, and to ground down. I turn to breathing to feel embodied. I write to tune the mind.
Attention is an instrument. Practice tightens or loosens the strings of focus and we repeat it over time. Practice grounds the day into a sturdy, steady, base from which to draw from. Take the soft focus of the first sun, linger broadly on what the dream state has to say. Then let the half sleep mind wake up through writing. Mind like a pitcher poured onto page.
I write in the morning to choose the lens I look through for the day. A thought is a lens, a color, a texture, a taste. What we bring to our minds informs how we take action. If I think a thought, and I believe it, that belief informs the actions I take.
I forget sometimes that I have the agency to choose, to dig into the roots before an action, notice the quality of attention or belief that moment is rooted in. If it’s a lens of love, interest, balance, or care, anxiety, fear, or friend. The lenses of our lives add color, texture, dimension, pacing to perception. They deepen curiosity, they develop our taste. Through creativity, curiosity, slowing down, and intention, we can choose where and how to focus in, when to widen the gaze, when to soften the lens, and how to choose. We take the particulars of our life — ideas like particles, and parse them down, follow them to the root — we learn from them.
Spring arrives. Suddenly, the world grows. Each day shows progress in increments. We track migrations of birds, arrivals and departures of emotions, plants rooted in the ground, growing. I’m thinking in particles, about specific, about particulars, about grains of time.
Granularity visits first, in the kitchen, as I obsess over grains in baking, then tastes in wine, then olives, coffee, chocolate. Spelt, oat, rye, castelvetrano, Ethiopian, dark chocolate, a tart red. In the details, a moment becomes a prism. Granularity is an opportunity, and lens to focus in, and widen — one that can give us us expansive language for what we feel, sense taste.
A lens, a focus, a detail — a moment that can be fine-tuned, and tuned in. Listen in: to the particles of your body rippling, to what sensations rise up as a wonders, boredoms, challenges, as strong yes, and sharp no. Part of the practice of getting granular in life is slowing down, and tuning in. So we notice.
With a wide view, our knowledge becomes broad, like or paint strokes become intricate, detail oriented. Bird becomes migrating, common, robin. Plant becomes leaf, poisonous, edible, invasive, fig, shiso. Focus, soften, wide to the horizon and sky. Tune into the granular. What gets yielded in the details?
Finding the grains of emotions takes widens the view of a feeling and shakes it through a sieve. Anger becomes criticism, becomes skepticism. Happiness travels the path to optimism and lands at inspiration and hope. gives us greater understanding, intentionality, and language. Attention to detail give our lives texture and dimension. They give us options. That’s something abundant.
To linger longer in the details is an opportunity — a gift savor life and do so slowly. Look wide to the bird, the branch, the blue sky, the thickening leaves, and breathe in, taste the details, notice the broad strokes, the fields of colors, feel the feelings, the tides and horizons. Savor the texture and flavor. Lick the plate of life clean. What do you taste, see, smell, savor, wonder? What do you want to linger longer? What are you noticing?
When we can slow, linger, pause, ground, and take a breath, we can feel into life in its details, forms, textures. Now, tune in. Tune into the grains of emotion. Watch the growth patterns of your inner life. Watch what takes form. Write that. Feel there. Taste that. Tune in.
PS. If you’ve been craving moments to slow down, be with your life, and feel creative, and connect to others in the process, come along for a workshop. “Empowered” is what one person said they felt after class last week. This week, bring together the threads of thought, process, taste, writing and tactile practice: make a book in Pamphlet Stitch and Hardcover Coptic Stitch on May 16. Taste + Write: Meditating on the Senses meets May 20. Pick from the full menu of May experiences below.
classes and upcoming experiences
creative practice classes in nyc and beyond
5/15 Suminagashi
5/16 Bookbinding: Pamphlet Stitch
5/16 Bookbinding: Coptic Stitch
5/19 Little Big Market at Grimm Ales
5/20 Taste + Write: Meditating on the Senses, outdoors
5/22 Suminagashi
5/24 Bookbinding: French Link Stitch
5/28 Bookbinding: Hardcovers
5/29 Hand Sewn Journals
nourished by, nourishing
what’s inspiring this piece
Sunlit wanders, binoculars, bird mornings, bursts of energy, catching the train, The English Patient and this study on emotions, roses growing, charts on emotional granularity, wine aromas, and taste. This playlist for spring, memories of coffee and olives with the warmth of friends, and Linger by the Cranberries, marbling, and making inventory for our upcoming market. Shop the full Odette Press collection in person this Sunday
