Honor the Bloom
On attention, intention, effort, and grounding
In a walk around the city, everything unfolds. Spring effuses into streets like a suggestion, a message on a breath, a glance in a direction, an aim. Morning wind arrives and speaks a refresh — the air is cool, the sky warm, a balance new and familiar, speaking in the cadence of emergence, on the tongue of potential.
Then, the ground. Soil is ready. Steady earth. One, two, three, four. I’m walking across ground at a steady pace, feet growing temporary roots against the hard earth, manufactured cement, and over hillsides, earth softened. Breath arrives, too. An inhale, and exhale. The neighborhood blooms. Magnolias, pink, cherry flowers, almond trees, soon the oak leaves, soon the heat days, buds on the edge of opening, almost to the tipping point.
But then: patience. A few more weeks until the time where it rains in drenches, when it rains petals, when it pours pink cascading down, carpets of florets, sidewalks dense with pink, pollen spreading. Everything in its right timing.
Birds return and migrate. Warblers come, soon, hint of red, male cardinals. The evening, warm — it encourages this unfolding. Seasonal depression becomes a puddle evaporating into a distant mirage in the increasing heat and light of the sun and the longer days. We’re softening into smiling. If winter is holding inward, intentions like seeds, then spring is the ground softening, the seed, and this moment is the unfolding.Â
Then, warming. A faster pace. One afternoon I open skyward into a back bend, arms and legs the stable base from which to rise. I wrench open uncurling from the winter months, from the hold of density, from doubt like a husk wrapped around the cold season. I am telling the story wrong: I’m leaving out the whole first half of class, how this peak point contained within it the minutes and moments of effort, drops of sweat, repeating poses to get to this place. I didn’t get there without warming up. This is about intentions and pacing. Then, body like a table, back opening, arching toward the wooden ceiling. Opening wide. Everything in its time.
In teaching, I’m often thinking about pacing: whether books, body, or breath, I’m thinking of how we arrive to a class, to each other, what the pace is, where we’re headed, what the aim is, the path we’ll go, and what we’ll need to arrive to our vantage point — how we’ll get there. Like the climate, these experiences shift with the season, and I think of pacing when I feel into spring. Like anything growing, each steady action tends to the ground, the soil, the earth, ideas and intentions like seeds in the ground. Each day a chance to take the stuff of our lives, our vast potential, our beautiful creativities, the things that we care about and tuck them into the ground, and water them with whatever joy, dedication, and action, and care, and energy, and intention that we are able.
How do we listen to our ideas — in our bodies, minds, and communities? How do we listen when they tell us what they need?
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What I come back to in the season of growing, this moment of now, is patience, action, and pacing. Finding a rhythm that works: one, two, three. Measured steps, grounding breath, moments for going fast, and then slowing. In this quick season, we root down into patience. We slow the breath when we can; we kick it up when we need. Let’s turn toward our ideas and each other like the generous ecologies that bring any plant — anything living — up from the dirt into being. Trust the seed, the idea, the action, the intention, and the potential.
In the stretches traveled between apartment and train, along the city sidewalk, I am watching a fig tree — or what I think is a fig tree — near the apartment. This curiosity hangs midair in the unknown like this season. I do not know precisely how this fruit will unfold, but I am curious. For now, I see what’s blooming. For now, the tender pink cherry blossoms. Soon the full leaves and the days even longer, hotter, until we too are full bloom, hot day, dripping with sweat. Everything tunes into life, everything in its own timing. A bee, stuck in the kitchen window, confounded by the clear glass, taps at the glass kicking back pollen from its legs. I’m concerned it won’t know it won’t know how to leave, but an hour later, it finds its way out. When the grasp of urgency unfolds, pause. Pausing is a necessary part of anything growing.
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At night, the day slows. I look out across the lists of the day, what has been created, tended, accomplished. Dusk pours into evening; effort into relief. Eyes lingering on shifting horizons, gaze soft in wonder with the sunset. Purple orange glow stays in the sky longer, blue gold haze, tipping toward night like a painting, breath shifting. I am breathing out in from the day and out into the night, and noticing: this is how I pushed down into the ground of life, this is what watered the seeds, these are things that we care about, this is how we rise up: ideas as stalk and bloom in progress in their entirely. Then, rest comes. Then pouring mind into bed into day. This is where I feel release.
To sustain anything we balance effort and rest. Action and ease. When I reach an edge, a limit, I imagine the moment like rings growing on a tree — concentric — how trees in the forest, gathered together, speaking to each other across microbes and tendrils of time. If we were cut our lives in half and examine ourselves like trees at the center, we’d see the edges of our efforts: the years that were dry and lush, the moments that we were hydrated or not, and the ways we bend like wood in the seasons, softened by the waters of life. Years before, time in lieu of leaves, before branches, before fruit blooms, that tree was a seed, a pinprick. Everything in time.
This week, tune to the ground. What steady steps are you making? What’s growing? What are you paying attention to? What’s moving fast, and needs to, and what can you root into slowly?
from the studio:
nourished by, nourishing:
This week I’m nourishing my eyes — sleeping. Heart, body — with music, walking, skylines. Baking blueberry scones, lemon cardamom glaze; the answer is always yes to cardamom. Paid subscribers, for more voice and more grounding and slowing into this fast season, there’s a new meditation for you over in Field Guides. Do you like an ambient environment, sound to ground down, or to write with music? Here’s a playlist for slowing. In the winter, I planted some seeds for new essays and writing. For anyone who thrives on color, thinks in pink, tend to memories, those arrive soon.
classes and upcoming experiences:
Join in for creative practices with me in NYC and beyond:
4/16 Grounded in Gratitude: Meditation and Journaling, online
4/21 Suminagashi 2: Meditating on the Landscape
4/21 Earth Day Journaling: Writing to Ground
4/24 Bookbinding: Casing In
4/24 Build Your Journaling Practice
4/25 Suminagashi Basics, baltimore
4/30 Journaling for Intention, online
5/5 Build Your Journaling Practice, baltimore
5/15 Suminagashi: Meditative Marbling
three experiences for the earth:
For slowing down, rooting in, and tending to the ecology of your creative life, come to class. Tonight: Grounded in Gratitude, and then Suminagashi II: Meditating on the Landscape, and Earth Day Journaling — a once a year experience. What do you love about the Earth?