Solstice, A Bridge
on cities, connecting, and the nature of practice
Get into the creative waters: sign up for Suminagasi: Meditative Marbling, tomorrow. Stitch life together and learn to make a book this Friday. Come taste the tart, sweet, bright and let’s write: sign up for Taste + Write: A Ritual to Sip On Life next Tuesday. Paid subscribers, another seasonal session arrives for the solstice. Read on to learn about two new experiences — two meditations on nature and paper and practice.
Curiosity is the river I step into. Wonder, a current. It draws me out of mind, out of the apartment. Into the city and body. With curiosity, an invitation to open. An invite in for the sensate experience: city, noise, smell, sweat, infinite sensation. Steps to the train. Steps to the park. Rhythms in the city. Heat rising on the day. Sunlight. Sweat on the edges of our lips as we step into another season on this precipice of solstice.
From the apex of the bridge I watch the water glimmer. The river is unknowable from this angle, high. From this height I imagine I am bird looking out and soaring and I see wider. I am gull at the shoreline, hawk in the sky. Curiosity is a gust of wind, ideas pushed up and down on the forces of a breezes. Gentle winds, gusts of them. I learn to glide, fly when I can. I find an idea I like and stay there like it’s a perch or a place to land.
Two miles. I wander two miles on Saturday afternoon to the next bridge to walk across. I’ve set the intention to walk across as many of these metal wonders as possible, an\ aim with no date and no end. A practice to play with — a thing to turn to with wonder, a practice to notice and befriend. A curious tension and release. A practice repeated for joy, out of necessity, practicality, and for my own sanity. A way to be with life.
Looking down, the river is a mystery. I can only know the texture of the water by imagination, but what I want to do is walk to the shoreline and be like the cormorant that morning: float for a bit, then dive in. Instead, I am walking, watching as the glimmers of this essay start to form. Stitching one moment, breath, one step, one idea to the next, watching how practice informs living. Graffiti marks and concrete. Sunlight, horizon, cloud. I whisper wonder and awe as a dedication, invitation, incantation to the now.
Curiosity alchemized these two miles into thirteen. That day, heat and walking in the day was a way to shake off and let go. I walk and I write to process and to be with. Some days the practices are practical, tangible — noticeable in their imprints. Some days I feel like sunlight and oceans and waves and I am floating, flowing, basking in it and other days, I am the shadow in the alleyway behind a building, the metal building standing too rigid, wheels on the subway ear piercing and loud. All in the body and mind. With practice, I learn to be with everything. Simple, sure, and not always easy. Ease isn’t point; the point is practice.
The first time I walked across a bridge year it was years ago I was terrified. It was night time. I was cold and exhausted from selling books in the city. I had weariness and rainwater dread and dampness heavy on the fibers of being. Bridging the gap between work and hotel, aimless, solitude. I didn’t like heights. It was frigid, December. Rainwater. Danger was the loud voice — the one that said, stay home, it’s safer, stay back. I am a woman walking alone. I don’t take that for granted. Those were part truth, stories. They were also resistance like something spun and repeated in the mind and strengthened without being questioned. But then I started to question. Curiosity was an opening; a doorway. Possibility was an ingredient folded together with trust and curiosity and strength that night. Fear was the heat that activated. This walk was a meditation on fear to see how everything would rise. I turned the stories of terror into possibility. I watched it transform that night.
***
Our minds are water, adaptive and fluid. Our bodies are water, strong and pliable, tiding. Practices like walking and meditation remind us to mind the waves, not resist them. They remind us we are ocean, not the waves. They are the pathways we take from one moment in time into the next. Sit with yourself and watch how you sway. We can be bridges for each other, too. You can be steady, sturdy, structured, a place for another to travel and move across. We can hold each other — wonder, structure, tension, sway.
I often look to the bridges. In a city built on them, how could I not? I look to the metal and think of all the hands, hours, labor often invisible that went into crafting these cities over years and maintaining. Ladders and wires, years of trying, failing, and experimenting. That’s a practice, too.
I walk and write to bridge the space between what is known and unknown, to practice tenacity, to gather the strength of duration that walking and sitting teaches. This is the practice: we come back and come back again.
Writing also gives us a bridge to walk across, and walking can be slow, and writing can be slow, too. From under the bridge, I am washed in sound, receiver for the city like a sound bath. The sound fills everything up. Under the bridge, a wall of sound so loud that for an instant, there is no noise in the mind.
I walk, I feel my heart break at times. In a city built on the labor of many, in a time that bridges into the hottest season, how could I not? On ground, I think about opening and closing, presence and returning, titrating between comfort and emergence into newness and novelty in the maze of the city. Temperatures rising, predictions of heatwaves. Sweat rising on the edges of skin.
I think about how hot it must be for sparrows, pigeons, bluejays, the plums, pears, and cherries on the trees, ripening, the roses growing. For the folks whose homes are found on church steps, benches, pathways of concrete, bridging the gaps in hot days in the cool hum of subways. Of celebrating the heat blooming, summer, sun, solstice, and emergence, and how the heat comes back. Rebecca Solnit writes, “Inside the word ‘emergency’ is ‘emerge’; from an emergency new things come forth. The old certainties are crumbling fast, but danger and possibility are sisters”.
A bridge connects two land masses. A bridge practice is a meditation. Walking practice is a bridge practice. A writing practice is a bridge. They are the steady bases we turn to in the moments between. They are the practices we turn to between stillness and emerging into the world. Theses are bridge practices that we stitch together between body and mind. They are all about connecting — to mind, to senses, to breath and to each other. So that we can go out into the world and emerge and connect with each other. With wind, bird, fruit, stillness, noise, with other human beings. Isn’t that what we all need? To be stitched together, heard and held, connected?
Writing and walking are ways of holding ourselves. Meditating is a way of holding ourselves and noticing our breath, sturdy and steady and stable. Like bridges, they are the structure that give us a way to travel from one point to the next. They are the earth of our practice.
Writing practice is personal, practical, a path to the possibility of holding ourselves, as is meditation. They are practices that are there for us to hold ourselves, and practices to turn to when it is too hard to hold. Tears are the oceans. Drops fall to the ground. A taste of nature, body an ocean, a path to one’s sanity and salinity. Presence with practice gives us back ourselves. It strengthens possibilities.
***
I find my way under tunnel, bridge between one borough to the beach and anchor my body into the warm sand. A necessary rest, daylight and ocean, Sunday. Mind like a wave, a day to held by the landscape, to hold the wide horizon. Earth a refuge. Writing and meditation will do that for us, too — give us the space to be. Nothing to do. Nothing to strive for. Body on the ground, breathing. Feet on the earth. Rhythm in breath. We are remembering and returning.
Consider your practice. As we bridge between Spring and Summer, consider what you’re bridging between one day and one moment and the next. Consider the questions that pull you onward and outward into the world, consider curious states. Solstice is a bridge, a day between one season and the next. An arc in time. A time to perch and stand still. A time to stretch slowing from one day into the next. If you like to write, but don’t know where to start, start somewhere that feels celebratory. Or small. Small is often more sustainable. I’m guiding a seasonal session for paid subscribers arriving this week. Let your writing and breathing be the warm, soft earth, the strong place to return to.
classes and upcoming experiences
creative practice classes in nyc and beyond
6/19 Suminagashi: Meditative Marbling
6/21 Contemplative Bookbinding
6/20 Seasonal Session: Summer for paid subscribers
6/25 Taste and Write: A Ritual to Sip on Life
6/26 Suminagashi Basics
6/27 Bookbinding: Pamphlet Stitch
7/1 Suminagashi Cards
7/8 Suminagashi Yard Party: Large Scale Marbling
nourished by, nourishing
Things I’m grateful for: friendship and therapy. Sunday at the beach. Befriending the bluejay on my fire escape. Finding fruit trees — now I’m insatiable; there are so many. Peaches, grapes, figs of course, pears, more cherries. Getting together to practice with everyone Monday nights for Cultivating Curiosity. Digging into Dr. Ellen Langer’s work. Isometric resistance for long stretches of working. Heart openers, and knowing when to turn in. Tending to the thoracic. A playlist for the month, below.
new, in bloom this summer
Excited to share two new experiences for you this Summer in Brooklyn. This July, we’re meeting at The Brooklyn Brainery — learn how to make your own marbled paper roses, or flow with ink, breath, and paper as we expand into large scale prints.
come, let’s practice
Taste life. Feel it deeply. Savor sweet, bitter, fruit, tart, fresh and all. Bring a journal, send to a friend, and save your spaces for this ritual at Heaven and Earth next week.
