Portrait of a Place Through Sensing
A City on the edge of Summer
In the aftermath of rain, streets become soundscapes and perfume. Places tell the stories of weather and seasons, wet and floral — a cool breeze carrying fig, rose, metal, pine, and cement, some days, quiet and loud in others.
Sunlight is a liquid gold shimmering across the river, light stretching out longer with the seasons. Train cars’ metal yelling announces the arrival of the crepuscular commutes punctuating the silence of the night dawn. If we were to paint an imprint of place like a picture it would shift in color, texture, tone from corner to corner, from season to season.
I get to know the city and each place across this landscape through the senses, standing stunned under the looming mirrored quiet of sky scrapers on a Sunday, or crossing under the N train with sunlight drenched like honey across the sidewalk on a Thursday, sensing how the soothing light contends with the rhythmic clattering of steel trains and car horns, sound and sensations which cause rippling of dissonance in the body. Or the joy of passing by the bright, vibrant bouquets piled together in dripping buckets on corners. Or dullness of stale pretzels and the tired faces selling. The way summer announces its arrival by pulling wind like a whisper through the lush green leaves, a symphony in comparison to the bare of winter.
To intimate with a place on the level of the street and go by train or by sidewalk or by foot is to feel, sense, and become close with a shifting environment; to notice from moment to moment. To become habituated is a meditation on sameness, one where we pull ourselves into the present moment through our senses. Across the city and throughout these storied walls are the whole, intricate lives of human nature and the nature of life being unfolded, felt, and discovered, told in the ephemera of smells, textures, glimpses, senses, each an invitation back to presence.
I’m reminded of the time of day through the sounds and smells in the apartment building. I walk down the marble staircase, sensing the arrivals of dinners and lunches as the smells of rice, cumin, garlic, onion, or bread being baked spiral upward from the neighbors on the ground level. I know I am almost home when I turn the corner and I smell sugar and butter, and hear the clamor of service in the cafe nearby, passing past the restaurant blasting house music, body in sync with the thump of bass for three bars of 4/4 time. These are the sounds, textures, smells, senses of familiarity. This is how I know I am home, in the right place.
If your day had a smell, a color, a line, shape, what would it be? If you told a story of your own habituations — the places you inhabit, the places you frequent, what would they say? If you gave your senses voice, how would they speak, and what would they tell you in tone and texture? Presence with place can shape us as we dialogue with our environments and senses. Pick one point to connect with — taste on tongue, breeze on your bare arms, feet on the soft earth of yard or hard texture of concrete, the feeling and hum of brief seconds of sound, the rise and fall of sensation of breath. What do you notice? Does it shift and change? Do you notice when it fades away?
“Notice what you notice,” my teacher says, a thread back to the moment and breath. “Notice what you notice,” Allen Ginsberg writes. “Catch yourself thinking.” This week, your invitation: sense what you’re sensing.
PS. If you’re curious to heighten your senses, you’ll love Taste + Write. Think: journaling, grounding down, and slowing into your senses. The first is this Thursday Bring a journal, and come for writing, slowing into your senses, and connecting over a table full of snacks. The second, in two weeks: join in for Taste + Write, a night for writing, meditation, and wine at Heaven and Earth in Greenpoint. “Like a psychedelic experience without the psychedelics,” one student said recently, and “very relaxing”. Sign up for a grounding, enlivening experience.
