Speaking Atmosphere, Ground of Being
What does the nature of your life say? On water, flow, voice, and communicating
Thank you all for the Odette Press birthday love last week. To celebrate, enjoy 20% off journals and cards, and 20% off paid subscriptions forever through July 30. Share this letter with a friend, share your favorite parts on Instagram, or come to class. If you’re in Brooklyn, sign up for Suminagashi: Meditative Marbling Thursday at McCarren Parkhouse in Greenpoint or Tuesday at Grimm Artisanal Ales in East Williamsburg. See you there with ink, breath, paper, and water.
Morning is blue, gray, or hovering somewhere in between. Bird calls, blue days, daylight. Blue — the color of horizons, throat center, communication. The color of bird wing, Sunday, ocean. Blue the bright spark of the bluejay who comes and calls. Sometimes shout, sometimes softer, singing a loud song for food, for mate, for protection, to punctuate morning and evening; other calls, quiet, a whisper song.
Along the East River’s current and flow, cormorants pause on wave worn stone, their deep black feathers an elegant silhouette of ink against the shifting atmosphere, the days gray, the skies blue, the river in varying tones of shimmer and rain and brightness. Mourning doves perch in pairs, pecking at moss on rocks. Beneath a bridge, a falcon calls, its fierceness hiding among metal. A family of bluejays, equipped with complex social structures, deep familial bonds, and an array of vocal forms, call to each other between leaves. I open lungs, body, mind, running and breathing as each avian being opens their wingspan.
In the early light, I tune into movement. I am weaving body and mind together, fast and slow, from the unfold of sleep into the heat of a sun sky day. I am setting the ground, setting the pace, setting the day, writing and breathing, finding footing and foundation with feet on cement, attention arching upward into the atmosphere, playing with the balance beam of movement, existing somewhere between a quick pace and stillness.
Lately, as I’m starting my days, I’m focusing on atmosphere. What sets the tone of the morning? What grounds the flows of action and thinking? If attention is a river, your practice helps you flow — the steady, sturdy bases we return to. The ground of our existence. The shoreline to our being.
To cultivate attention is to focus a gentle, firm command of our own body-mind space. Not too rigid, not too loose. Let’s imagine, for a minute, we are not our human forms, but animals, waterways, sunlight, landscapes. That our inner worlds are environments, each with their own ecosystems, inflections of plant, flora, shell, rock form, animal, instinctual and inflecting with deep geologic time, built for connection, expression, and balancing. That the stars that light up our inner evenings are spaces to marvel in, these constellations of care. What kind of landscape courses within you? What do the plants and animals speak, call, say? What lights up your night?
Lately, I come to think of the environment. That a creative practice, or contemplative process, or anything is always being co-created: that we are humans in communities, people in places, all in tandem with that which resides within us — our inner landscape. That how we speak to ourselves, how we vocalize to ourselves in word, action, and tone, sets the ground in our bodies, minds. These are spaces that are homes, ecologies, and rooms; we inhabit them. In Tone by Kate Zambreno and Sofia Samatar, they ground into wonder, asking and investigating, “What creates the vibe of a room? The other people inside it: the combined resonance of their voices, shrill or caressing, lengthening and tightening with the shifts in their massed and consolidated feelings, the warms that emanates from their clothes, their hair, the odor of nervousness, of joy or resentment, of an incipient crush.”
Lately, I ground down into the conversation with the environment: the space of room, feeling tone, landscape, page. This dialogue like shoreline, shifting — like ecology, being co-created. We are humans in communities, people in places, alchemizing moments in conversation, a dialogue between our inner landscapes, and the ecologies of the people and places around us. This, the tone of creativity. Musical tone. Tone of voice, room, mind, water.
In that dialogue, between body-heart-mind, how we speak to ourselves, how we vocalize to ourselves in word, action, and tone, sets the ground; that with a stable ground, the ideas and our expressions in life can flow out. How when we need to be bold, our voices fill us deeply into the basins of our bodies, emanating out like bright firelight from the centers of our stomachs, warm and effusing, emanating as day through our hearts, arms, throats, and chest. How when we need to say something with protection or care, we may say it with an alarming tone — as in a bluejay’s call to stay the fuck away — or sometimes with a whisper. Our tone within ourselves matters, and is how we dialogue with life.
I listen in to the sounds and songs of my inner life. Days and nights. As an experiment, I write to a song that feels like a nap on an already gray day, and I want to sleep. Then another, that sounds like sunlight, heat, discovering the frequency that matches what the day needs. Turning inward is a dialogue with inner life: a way of connecting to the inner tendril of voice, quiet and loud, that say, rest, slow, beach or sometimes faster, keep going, be bright, bring heat. I am studying waves and the pacing of feet, how they each move over the earth, how they soften and morph rocks, shifting. “Perhaps the study of tone requires attention to positions and how feeling moves between them,” Zambreno and Samatar write. “Something is radiating, pulsing, attempting to move across.” Whether breath, sound, or page, communicating is a way to connect. A call to move toward or away. Sometimes loud, sometimes bright; sometimes a whisper, midnight.
When I run, write, breathe, I move and settle, I flow with the practice of effort and stillness. There, in the steady fluid dance of noise, that internal quiet place, I find the softness of my own inner environment. I feel the strength, too, coexisting. A myriad ecology, like a city on the water, wild and quiet, vibrant and humming, seagrass growing along the shoreline, cattails, steady and flowing. Sunlight on water, bright.
When you sit, write, and practice, notice the tone of your inner world. Is it a hot day, calm ocean, ink night? As obstacles come, be water, and flow around them. Be the shorelines and basin that steady to ground and hold the waters of your life. Be cloud, be rain, and embody your own sunlight. Ask, “What do I need for today to set the foundation so the ideas, actions, and expressions can flow?”
Write to yourself in the morning. Breathe deeply into your daylight and your evening. Notice your inner voice, what it says: joy cry, friend call, alarm, whisper song. Notice your inner dialogue, atmosphere, tone. Notice what speaks to you in the world — color, texture, sense, taste, light.
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