Workshops for August have arrived — learn the art of marbling in my in person experiences. To start, strengthen, or sustain a creative writing or meditation practice, schedule a virtual 1:1 session. As always, listen to these essays in podcast form here, share with a friend, support by upgrading, or pair your creative practice with a journal from Odette Press.
“The desire to go home that is a desire to be whole, to know where you are, to be the point of intersection of all the lines drawn through all the stars, to be the constellation-maker and the center of the world, that center called love. To awaken from sleep, to rest from awakening, to tame the animal, to let the soul go wild, to shelter in darkness and blaze with light, to cease to speak and be perfectly understood.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics
The flowers emerge into my view in a second: small, bright, and white, glowing radiant from the shadows. Daylight is honey gold and waning. Earth tilts toward evening. The pinhead small blooms hang still in the shadows emerging from the shade into the ray of a sunbeam. Small, growing, white, the flowers dot the vine, extending up from a dense layering of leaves and trees, their forms a line of bright in contrast to the overlaps of almond-shaped green, curling up, quiet, toward the sky. Driving home, the sun is a full circle. It is heat and a stark red glow against the soft rose sky, a radiant beacon rising behind the convergence of oncoming buildings.
There is an atmosphere of mourning in August’s light, one where you celebrate that which bursts forth fully, as in flowers in bloom, while noting the way the sun begins its descent to the horizon in earlier increments as the month progresses. The light looks your way with equal parts eagerness, and an air of an already nostalgia.
Summer, like breath and thought rises, peaks, dissolves, and in the days that follow this sunlight seen from the highway, I will cup my hands around the glow of my phone, stare back at the sun, and sip slowly from these slivers of time, staring into the circle of light I’d gathered, images as altars to particles of light and memory.
If you pause in the middle of the day or the haze of the August sun and look across the horizon of your mind just to see what’s in your view — simply to witness what is there and be with it, as if watching the sky unfold — you will notice all your thoughts, feelings, stories, and sensations take form. They will cloud and bright, and you will notice how they shift and reform, and how nothing is static, and most certainly not the season. Your inner sight becomes a lens, and as you begin this practice of noticing, the light of your attentiveness will show you more; with time, your insight grows, shifting as if a season or sunlight.
Each morning, sitting on my buckwheat cushion, I watch my mind. Sensations ripple out through my skin and cells. An idea or insight will rise like the sun, or else find itself obscured by a cloud. The light we place on our embodied horizons generates a greater illumination: a way of lighting up our understanding, so wisdom is a flower growing.
From the stillness of sitting in the moving car and watching the sunlight, I felt I heard the stories of what my own inner season had been trying to say. I had been telling myself stories about lack of inspiration, lack of light, lack of insight and on the drive I saw how they were patterns, and unkind, agitating their way up through the skin of my thinking, sweating through to the August surface. There is nothing, there is something, and from this nothing comes something, and this something dissolves into everything; yet, earlier that day, the air flew into my lungs, and my eyes caught sign of the light, and from a sliver of attentiveness, I noticed the flower, and in the days since, I have not stopped thinking back to that moment, those tiny imperceptible buds that I would have missed if I hadn’t looked up when I did.
The flower is a weed, I’d come to learn, but nonetheless beautiful. And those stories I’d told myself were reverberations of the past, seeds rooted in times before me, in ground of old stories — the kind that feel in the body like constriction, which is really a tendril-like thread of resistance, which, when followed back to root and the origin is the loud, clear, frightened cry of fear.
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Still, I remind myself there is something. In August, the fields nearby are blooming, and attention is drawn by what is quiet, as in flowers, yet bright. Sitting by the water, I sit. I ask questions to the daylight. I walk in the heat and watch the clouds depart from my mind, body, horizon. The idea lands, and it is a ray of sunlight. It is soft orange monarch resting, landing on the edge of a leaf, and the bow of the branch swaying underneath in the gentle winged weight. It is walking into a field, and first perceiving the whole field as weeds, nothing, empty, dead, dried, only to realize the field is full of flower after flower after flower in bloom. Revived.
The way the sunlight works is it continues, and it continues, and it continues. Rays shine steady, and return. The sun enters the day as if walking into a room bright but quiet: you can sense it is there, and yet it says nothing when compared to the voice of downpour, wind that yells through the leaves, lightning that shatters skies, or the shouts of Summer thunder. Though the rain cascades down and stands too firm for a time as a wall, so too does the daylight pour down onto ground, where each day, something like that light-laden pokeweed grows.It is the sun’s return that offers some solace.
An insight rises, and takes up its space slow, like the glow of Sunday’s red sun, or evening’s expanding moon. That maybe it’s not about gulping down sunlight, for the hopes of some ecstasy, or the times when you embody some peak place, or feel those places where you stand high and holy and hot and yearn for grandiose visions. Maybe, instead, it’s the way plants grow, their roots anchoring down, as they rise up slow through the soil — steady, and slow, and sipping up sunlight.
As you move through the season, and each turn of the earth, what do you notice? What is growing? What do you admire in the season of Sun?
Nourished by, Nourishing:
Reading “How Can I Write At A Time Like This” by
and a revisit to One Continuous Mistake: The Four Noble Truths for Writers by Gail Sher. I loved reading this piece by — an inspiring reflection on what we lose to AI. I loved what she writes about the practices of ‘honoring lineage’. Baking buckwheat chocolate chip cookies this week, and looking often to the sky.
From A Past Season:
Sensing: July
Sensing the Month is an exploration into the sensory nature of living — what I’m seeing, smelling, tasting, noticing, feeling throughout the month, with prompts for your creative writing practice.
Heat Season
"What was drenched is dry after an hour in direct light. "Be careful in the heat, we say. Words pour into each other. You speak words as if water, sentences that remind or catalyze reverence for your own body and another’s, a sound spoken to replenish, while syllables impart invocations for care."
