Pick up the Path
Orienting, reorienting, and intention
Attention is, at times, a wild thing: moth to a flame, river flowing through earth, sand scattered across the desert blown by gusts of wind and endless in all directions. There’s the attention of our inner worlds; the collective attention that we build together when connecting with another person; and attention that’s even more external, shared globally or universally. Attention is a current of energy, conscious or not, and these days, often a hot commodity.
I think today about the heat of summer, fading, mesmerized at lunchtime by garlic and broccoli cooking. As the season shifts, summer fades, and cooler days are taking form. I notice my mind wandering. I notice the sunset inching earlier toward the horizon. I notice my own internal shifting, readying for the new season.
My attention wanders back and forth: back through the days of summer’s wild heat, bright and loud and thriving — city streets thick and sticky with basketballs, open hydrants, melted ice cream — through the moment of now in this transition season, kids’ screaming in the street is subdued now that school’s set in, leaves readying for their color shifting and quick descent to the ground. And then my mind goes to the future in glimpses and the unknown of the months ahead. As summer sunlight fades, the pop of heat goes with it and so does the season’s excitement; I grow all the more internal with my attention.
I am making lunch as I start this letter. I did not have the attention this morning to rise quickly, to jump out of bed and start writing, and I tell myself today that’s okay, that ease is safe to access, that my own creative experience arises often from a relaxed state. Attention, like the flow of a river, follows where we let it and where we guide it and reminding ourselves of our own creative agency is an important part of expression. Using an intention like an anchor, a seed, an arc to follow, an aim, gives us a sense of knowing where we stand in our lives, knowing where we’re going in our lives. Intentions become a way of orienting and reorienting, focusing and refocusing, no matter what comes up — a way of grounding down into something that we care about regardless of what comes up throughout the day.
I set the intention of ease last week and notice the moments when it’s present. I pay attention to its absence, and root into some kind of ease when I can. I start to see that ease is all around me and it becomes something I can more easily access. To me ease is rebellion against urgency, something I am attempting to reject and refuse embodying these days. I pay attention to the storylines and tendrils of thought that want me to believe the flow of attention simply cannot be easy and I try to set a mental boundary. Today, between the sounds of oil meeting water, a loud pop and ambient sizzle, cooking down broccoli and smells of caramelizing garlic, I think of what it is I want to say to you and what the aim is, the thread of what I care about — creativity and nourishment, which is also true of most weeks — and how to express that care.
Like tuning into the seasonal turn, my senses at lunch tell me the broccoli’s done and on the verge of burning so I pull it off the stove. I don’t want to force this creative expression, this letter, this connection, so I take a break from writing, let my mind wander, notice what arises, and tune into the food, the sense and the sense of timing. My body is in the flow with what it knows — salt, oil in the pan, dance of the heat — and so my mind can spread wide across the horizon, dip into the past, imagine the future, curl up in tendrils of delight and intrigue as if those forces are like this new season moving in cooling down the heatwaves, picking up particles of ideas like sand spinning in some unseen wind.
If intentions are the forcefields keeping our consciousness ordered1 and our senses the guides that tell us how to orient, organize, and refocus, then writing can be a path that brings us back. Setting an intention can act as the grounding place for our thoughts, feelings, and actions to go, a way for us to map our way throughout our weeks, seasons, and lives. Writing these intentions, then remembering them, and embodying them off the page builds that guiding force as it is magnetized and gathering.
Lately, after work, or sometimes in the mornings, I walk around. I look up to the ornate buildings, how their chartreuse and blues reflect the colors of the sky, the shift in green leaves on the ends of the trees, and I orient again to the change in the season. I feel the sun, getting cooler throughout the days consider how these streets that are so new to me connect, overlap, and intersect. I drive around dropping packages at the post office. Later, I walk down the same streets I wound around in rush hour, and feel the moments where these same streets start to connect internally, coalesce, weave together, and I understand them — they make sense. Like writing, paired with the sense to orient my own trust in the channel of life, something clicks and I delight in knowing, understanding, and orienting to where I am. I find ease there, too, in those moments of learning and returning, grounded by finding my way back from uncertainty to familiar ground.
As you’re writing, being:
If it feels good, wake up and write about an intention. Or think about it. You could try it as you wind down before bed. Or try it once a year or once a season. Or talk about it with a friend. What do you care about? How do you want to channel your attention? Try writing with the threads of “my intention is…” or i’m interested in… or “i want…”
If you get distracted, remind yourself that you’re a human and consciousness can only be ordered so much — we have approximately ten thousand thoughts a day and not all of them have equal weight, so find lightness and compassion, compassion, compassion. Get curious. Ask, “What do distractions tell me about what I’m enjoying, desiring, or needing?” How can they be part of the process, too?
Let intentions be focal points of enjoyment, not mental prisons. Let your values ground you, bring you back, and your desires lead. As a friend told me years ago one winter in Mexico on the beach, we always have some kind of choice — that’s where the creative agency comes in. Trust the guiding part of you will always bring you back.
september, october:
September 23 | A new Seasonal Session drops for paid subscribers
October 5 | Bookbinding: Pamphlet Stitch
October 7 | Bookbinding: French Link Stitch
October 15 | Taste & Write: Meditating on the Senses
October 26 | Build Your Journaling Practice
check out the experience calendar + shop the recording library for guided journaling sessions on ideas, values, intentions — writing for getting to know yourself!
this week:
We’re celebrating the shift in the seasons. Paid subscribers, a new guided practice arrives for you this weekend — a way to ground down into now, savor the lingering drops of summer, and envision the arcs of aims for the months ahead. Write, enjoy, reflect. Brooklyn readers, come write and taste and meditate on sense experience and find inspiration in the month ahead.
From Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
