Mind, body, moment, matter
Connecting, shorelines, and intentions
I am standing under the bridge. I’ve reached the end of the earth; I’ve returned to the familiar rhythm of a morning, a day, gray, heavy, fog in the mind and sky — cold with no sun. A day I’d rather delete and swap out for sun, but learn to stay with instead. The intention is movement. My feet touch the earth and I am talking to a friend and it’s grounding. Her voice is tucked into my ear through the phone’s screen. We are tethered together through technology, excitement. In the distance the currents rip through the river, and the channel through the heart comes shared between us, and I hear the joy in her cadence swell and she shares, rising into her stories, ideas, what matters. What matters?
I reach the shoreline, reach the edge of the land and look out into the distance toward those rising buildings stretching toward the sky, taking in a deep wide breath and the breadth of the whole skyline. The water ripples. It hums. We are tuning in. Overhead is a constant hum of traffic: a drone, metallic, cars passing by in measured sameness, a loud unending chaotic, tires on vaulted highways with cement as a temporary ceiling crafting reverberations on these monumental structures, mountings of metal and matter crafted together, measured and determined in their holding.
There is a swell of sound as I walk and stand underneath and take it all in. Breathe deeply. The vibration fills my entire body — poured like a hot drink into my senses, this vessel of existence. I feel it pour from scalp through torso to toe’s edges — and feel as the sound rises, peaks, and passes. I turn my attention to the ground, where feathers lay strewn, where lingering weeds struggle through the cold and the concrete, where seagulls perch at the level of the eye and stare, waiting, preflight on the metal railing coated tired and dense with years of peeling paint; one by one they fly away.
Attenuating the pulsing, sensing, matter of our bodies with our environments, ecologies, and the pulse of the world, gives us clues as to where to go, what to listen to, what’s present, and how to move next. I think about resistance to flow, fog mind, dense bodies, and the moments where we teem and overflow with the big yes to life.
“Intention is the force that keeps consciousness ordered,” Milhaly Czentmilhaly writes in Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, writing that an intention is a “magnetic field” drawing us toward some things and away from others. That morning, I am drawn wordlessly to the water. I need its sound around me, want to feel the spray of the water, and endeavor to get there. A flow state constitutes both ease of movement and a level of friction, discomfort, or challenge; when well-balanced, these ingredients for life make it such that flow, or flow state, can flourish. What happens when the obstacles occur? What it feels like a thing you want to flow toward? How do you know?
To me, writing is a bridge practice. Walking is a practice that takes us there, too. These practices take us on the cusp of something and gives us a place to land, give us the stuff of life to dig into. I am writing this to you in a room enveloped in rain and blue as the evening subsumes. Writing brings us into the rhythm of life — the torrents, the silence, the space in between. The effort breaks like a rain sky and falls to the ground of the earth.
Take a blank page this week and tune into your surroundings. Determine what has density, lightness; use your inner tuning to determine what matters. What do you feel drawn toward? What do you aspire to —what’s your aim? Where do you feel it, and where are you now, and what do you notice? What is the weight and the density of what we care about? What matters to you now, and what do your senses say? This week, ground into your experience. One foot, then the other, then the next step, then the next.
nourished by, nourishing:
Reading | Ripped through McGlue by Ottessa Moshfegh to start the year off, now onto Ideal Suggestions: Essays in Divinatory Poetics by Selah Saterstrom
Eating | hot chicken gyros with tahini from halal carts winding through Astoria at night, winding under the N train; in the morning, toast with citrus
Writing | not much! I am tired from moving, as I wrote about last week. I shared more on my current lineup of notebooks, though, for inquiring minds; watch here.
Watching | The Color of Pomegranates (1969) by Sergei Parajanov
upcoming experiences:
1/10 Suminagashi Basics
1/15 Bookbinding: Casing In
1/17 Beginner’s Journaling
1/24 Taste + Write: Meditating on the Senses
1/31 Bookbinding: Pamphlet Stitch