Making Connections
In touch with practice, and making good contact
When I am connected with creative practice, and make the effort to be close to the earth, I find it hard to feel separate. I am stitched together intricately: word, dirt, thought, sky, page. Solitude becomes a prismatic place of possibility. Each moment is teeming with tenderness, new shoots, sensations, and potential.
In each moment there are colors, textures, smells to delight or revel in, or moments like counterweights to push up against for challenge or rebellion. Fig trees unfold and fruit forms. Rain slides down pine, oak, and juniper, brushing finger tips against the cold water, momentary invitations hanging on the edge of the branches. Feet bounce back against the upward force of gravity and sidewalks in the city. Delight follows. Some challenge. Some strength. Some practices in contact.
A technicolor sky ripples out across the city’s distance as I write this, and just when I think the sky show has ended, another wave of color takes form — deeper blues, deeper reds, until the sky fades to black, like the day is an ending scene. This is a practice for noticing, time, duration, and staying with, building capacity for enjoyment. A momentary connection but a connection nonetheless. A dance of attention, and duration.
When I say make contact I mean connect to something living. Something that restores or inspires, something that nourishes or energizes or is grounding. A way to root in. A plant connects to the earth, brings its potential, gathers nutrients, and in the right conditions, begins the process of unfolding. We are like the plants; so are our ideas.
This is a process yielding collaboration, not one of separateness. When I saw make contact I mean the way it feels to hold a thought in mind, hold our hand to paper, eyes to the horizon, feet to the soil, a hand to the shoulder of a friend, or connect to something creative in conversation. A force of care, where creativity stirs up or settles down in the process in this process of connecting. When it’s depleting, you’ll know it. When it’s generative — vital and alive — you’ll feel it, too.
Creativity and nature, like body and breath, are natural pairs. Each teaches and guides us in endeavors of sensitivity, and in that sensitivity, we nourish strength. Each offer up chances to formalize our focus.
The benefits of a formalized, seated meditation practice, one where we generate our attention and focus it, steady, repeatedly on the breath, is one way of connecting to life where we become more stable, strong, and clear in the process. In meditation, it’s said our practices contain the two wings of the bird: study, and practice. We go to class, and we practice in the world.
I like to think about this in terms of writing, art, and creative expression. We have study: museums, pages, walks, songs, each other. Then, we practice. We connect to the page, we connect with our lives, and find that moment is a seed for source material.
Mostly, I look to the sky. Lately I study the birds with a similar fervor to the interest in the breath, and each teach how to curious, adaptive, how to flow and glide on the winds of life, and how to be tender. One morning, I walk to the water, surprised to find a shock of bright orange red darting out on the branches of a tree. It’s migration season, springtime; finally, a scarlet tanager. An effused gaze on the birds in a tree teach us how to pay attention, how to follow, how to take our fixed gazes and soften, how to be grateful for the flash of something bright found even if only briefly, hold it in presence and practice, then how to thank it for the wonder and delight we feel before an impulse calls and the bird, or attention spans, fly away. Connected to the earth, there is always something to reflect on, to connect with, to learn from. Some soil, some cement to connect with. Some water from river, the ocean, from our eyes, from life to find hydration. Some sunlight to bask in. Landscape as teacher, a reminder, guide.
Creativity pulls us curiously into connection with the world. It takes our attention like a cord and plugs us in. Sometimes those connections cause friction; our lived experiences strike match against matchbox and disrupt our thinking and generate heat in the process. Sometimes that contact is a river, flowing from state to state, softening hard stone, gliding with gravity, dripping with ease. Sometimes that contact is expansive, particles of thought like firework, first thought, confetti, ideas radiating out from some seed of material, a starburst formed from combustion. On sidewalks, in streets, across screens, on pages, in kitchens and conversations, our commutes and our homes and our studios — we make these connections. They are constant. We strengthen the bonds the more we return and become bonded, steady, and and strong with ourselves and each other in the process the more we continue.
Creative process is a practices of making contact, and being in conversation with life. We root our attention down, and become strengthened us as we push up from the soil of our existence. We pause, and make space for silence.
Stitch together your attention with paper, pen, person, page. Find a conversation that resonates like a harmonic. Fit your hands under feet in a forward fold to find the places where it feels good. Find some color you can’t let go of; find the places of where contact informs your creative spark from the forms and shapes of ourselves and our experiences. Our minds, hands, hearts, thoughts bend like tree limbs, like softening sand to cup a glass or hold a shell, or hold our ideas or form like clay around the slope of a friend’s shoulder or back. This is where the connection is. This is where the strength is.
Whatever you’re connected to, notice what you generate in the process. Notice what is being generated in these collaborations. Turn to life and your connections like a teacher. Turn to the page like friend, companion. Write, draw, sit, breathe, bask, ask. What are you connected with? What ideas are you returning to again and again? What feels generative and sustainable in the process? What does your creative life, your body and mind, yearn for, require, and need? What are the nutrients that will help you grow in the process?
PS. If you’ve been looking for ways to get out of your thinking mind, into the body of creative practice, and connect to others in the process, come along for a workshop. Connected is what one student said she felt after this past weekend’s paper marbling class, pictured below. Sign up for this weekend’s experiences: Ink/Play, a meditative experience tying together drawing with ink and abstraction, or Suminagashi — paper marbling using water, breath, ink. Tomorrow, online, Build Your Journaling Practice
classes and upcoming experiences
creative practice classes in nyc and beyond
5/8 Build Your Journaling Practice, online
5/12 Suminagashi Basics
5/12 Ink/Play
5/15 Suminagashi: Meditative Marbling
5/16 Bookbinding: Pamphlet Stitch
5/16 Bookbinding: Coptic Stitch
5/20 Taste + Write: Meditating on the Senses, outdoors
Nourished by, nourishing
what’s inspiring this piece
Here’s what I have felt connected to this week: roses on the sidewalk, strawberries on sale for a dollar piled up like a small mountain at the intersection by the fruit stand and the pharmacy — a sweet beacon beaming on the sidewalk — friendship, and immersion in the color green and the lull of a rain day. I made a video on my travel practices, watch here. This week, many praises for blueberries, profusely mashed down and transformed, cold and hold, cascading over crepes and enjoyed in smoothies. On anticipation, I’m excited to make, write, create with everyone in this month’s classes, and the inevitable burst of color and flavor at farmer’s markets. I’m glad you’re here, and grateful for everyone who came to a class this weekend.
On Color,
a new series for paid subscribers
