Through the Sky Window

blue sky, birds, and practices of periphery

Let’s practice: sign up for an upcoming, in person workshop if you’re in NYC. As summer approaches, let’s slow down and look to our pages for practice; the next seasonal session for Paid Subscribers lands on 6/21! Thank you for being here.

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city view, sky blue pocket journals | www.odettepress.us

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On the edge of summer, heat season comes. Sun sits high and bright. Sweat is a constant damp morning dew. Heat season arrives and brings with it the leaves. Spring’s growth comes on the path to summer months arriving in increments at a time, until finally — there, deep green on the edges of the trees — the leaves open wide into the cover of full canopies.

Already in the span of a few weeks the leaves are full, dense, and darkened. They have changed the view for us: the perception, periphery. What we focus on and what we allow in. These leaves are at once bliss and burden: a cool place to land for anything or anyone sun-worn, a shielding from the sun, and a disruption to morning birding. Even more, we turn towards the view we find through the window of sky to locate.

Here, I write by another window. I write this with a view to the hazy blue gray bright sky of this city in June thinking back to the mornings of birding. I think to the the evenings under skylights, to the memories of time and its unfolding. This horizon on the edge of summer in the daylight is a gray, dense blue — the color of city and humidity. I can feel the humidity in my skin and how it lingers. As the day grows, the colors shift. Fading layers of lightness and density. I watch how, with time, the color moves.

In the parks, windows to the bright blue sky between trees are a way to map ourselves to the birds. This practice of birding asks us for slowness, to be in a receptive state: slow the mind down, strengthen your body upward — your neck and back an archway like bridge upward into the atmosphere — and tune in with a softening gaze. By finding these patches of blue sky, we drop out of the mind, into the body and become curious, our eyes and perception tuned into the depth of the tree. This patch of blue space between the growing green is a map. It’s a way of way finding.

fig finding, foraging, 2024

Finding birds, finding words, and locating our breath in our bodies — these are slow and steady practices that ask us for a wide, diffused gaze. In return, these practices return us to our depths. They give us our sense of perception. They become windows into slowness: moments for pausing and noticing. The basins for our receptiveness. From these practices rises our senses. From there, we open, rooted, widened into a sense of clarity.

This window of sky break in the canopy that allows us the space to map. By mapping we find the bird. I think about this with writing; the denser the thoughts, then, like the leaf cover, the more difficult it becomes to find the bird.

This is to say: slow down. This is to say: soften the sharp hold, grip, the rigidity of a day or a gaze. Whether pen, thought, bare eye, body, or binocular, we slow ourselves to map our way through a moment and into the dimensions of experiences and dimensions of forest. The recipe does not always work, but we rejoice and savor, when we reach the insight, navigate the challenge, or find the warbler.

I have mapped my way back to breath, body, and being often under other windows of sky throughout my life and will likely find myself repeating this process for as long as I’m tethered to this earth. The first moment I think of is a memory from a decade ago in a darkened museum gallery taking in a James Turrell piece. My first moments of contact with these pieces were slow. I was alone in a darkened gallery room sitting in a corner staring into a projection. Lights spanned across the distance of the room.

Turrell’s work is a dance with shape, form, and light — a window into a moment in time — and it taught and teaches me about slowing. His work “paints with light,” and whether sky piece, hologram, or projection, it deepens with time. This is the power and beauty of his work: the longer you stay, the more perception begins to shift.

The second instance of mapping under a window of sky is now: each week, or any chance I make to show up and ground into mediating. On Sundays, I am laying under another window, this one literal, this one a skylight. I take in my breath and relax into the wood floors. I am watching this light make its impressions of the city. These nights, like in many of Turrell’s pieces, show the moment in time through colors. They become a meditation.

Under the building’s skylight, I notice how gray blue light from the night rises; how the light stretches longer entering into this burgeoning summer season; how headlights and brake lights are yellow, white, red staccatos painted against the evening.

In each instance, teacher, moment, patch of blue sky, view of the horizon, and light-laden piece become the guides to map back into body and breath, to return to the dimension of being. The more that we return to these practices, the more they are strengthened. We find the windows of sky in our mind and return. We find the windows of sky in the park and find the bird. Each become a chance and a way to organize breath, body, thought, and a way of returning to presence. A way of locating ourselves within the rush of living in this moment in time. How with slowness, we give ourselves back our depth.

some favorite skies: astoria, yesterday. somewhere in california. el morro, many years ago.

When I think about the practices of perception — birdwatching, image making, time, writing, light, meditation — at the center of my thinking is an emphasis on focus, attention, and depth. These practices are windows, pathways, and portals out of the dense insistency of capitalism and urgency into a return to our humanity. To pause and be with bird. To pause and be with breath. To pause and notice the words. To pair these practices with patience and time deepens our perception. Write to the surface of something, and then dive deep.

What I mean to highlight here are the ways we focus in. Focus in, and then surrender to the wide sky — of your mind, your eyes, your sensing bodies, your peripheries. This is the conversation of life. We look close, look far, breathe in deeply, hold it in, and then let it go. Take your hands and make a box. This gives you a window. This gives you a place to notice what you are focusing on: a way to map out a shot, or notice what you are looking at.

Here’s what I notice when I focus in and give myself to the moment, the wide view and and the details: there is a whole inner world inside of each of us unfurling. There is a whole beautiful world outside of us unfurling, too. Here’s what I notice when I widen my view. I look up to see a patch of sky between the hot brick of apartment buildings, cherry trees, piles of fruit on sale, and fig trees, ripening. I’m looking upward at just the right time to find the bird or see fruit, to see the near summer unfolding.

As I walk, I wonder about the impact and the effects of place on perceiving. How being in a big city, my view becomes held between the perceptual parenthesis of buildings. How this view affects what I write about, what I see, based what I am sensing, experiencing, and what’s in view. How each of us meanders through the world with our own sense, blocks, crops, and perceptions. That the focused closeness of these buildings condenses each moment of sky, bird, breath and nature in life down, thereby increasing the gratitude I feel when they come into presence and view.

Often the practice of birdwatching, or taking in any art, or any part of the nature of life, is about turning our attention: brush stroke, bird call, flight pattern, patch of light. Notice how they shift with time. Notice how they gain in dimensions, color, texture, shape depending on the the season or time of day.

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classes and upcoming experiences

creative practice classes in nyc and beyond

6/5 Suminagashi Cards outdoors
6/8 Open House: A Market for the Home, market
6/12 Coptic Stitch
6/12 Pamphlet Stitch
6/13 Taste and Write: Meditating on the Senses, outdoors
6/19 Suminagashi, outdoors
6/21 Contemplative Bookbinding
6/25 Taste and Write: A Ritual to Sip on Life

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nourished by, nourishing,

Thinking about how the winds of curiosity pull us. This week, turning to a wide view, and finding fig trees — I found four more bright and full of fruit on my way to the store today, along with a pear tree, apple, and sour cherries. This interview with Patti Smith on attention. Bright season. Interview Magazine in conversation with Turrell, here. Parks, a picnic.

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from a past season,

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for paid subscribers,

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