Spring, arriving, means new workshops are arriving. As the season grows, teaching is expanding: sign up for workshops in NYC + Chicago in April. Flow with ink, breath, wonder, paper in an upcoming class. Sign up here. To start, strengthen, or sustain a creative journaling or meditation practice, try a virtual 1:1 session. As always, listen to these essays in podcast form here. Pair your creative practice with a journal or card from Odette Press. Thank you for reading!
“Writing comes as an urge or a pulse, not to say something, but to be with words as they arise and then to shape or craft them. The words could be wood. It makes no difference.
One beats through me, pushes its way to the forefront and appears on a page. I care about this. I care about the clarity of myself as a vessel, the utensils used, the paper as receptor and the way the whole process unfolds. Silence for me is replete with possibility.”
— Gail Sher, One Continuous Mistake: The Four Noble Truths for Writers
Lunchtime. Sound of metal. A reverberation radiating out. A hit cascading, sound across the atmosphere. A temporary ringing in an otherwise quiet room.
I’m making lunch in the kitchen when the steel of knife and the still aluminum bowl make contact. They meet and reverberate. The sound brings me back to attention, cutting onions, cutting almonds, pressing garlic and chopping down, a rhythm against soft wood on the counter.
The kitchen in that moment, in the afternoon, is still. Still, there is some movement, and for a moment, in sound, I hear only the low hum of the fridge, a constant sound that holds the room in sonic form, alongside the whispered hints of oil sparkling in the heated oven. Otherwise, only the smell and the steadiness of gas flame and the rise of the ambient heat in the room let me know the eggplant is cooking. No sirens, no sounds from outside, at least for some time. No trains.
Crossed lines cut straight across the eggplant meet, overlap, and intersect, forming diamonds. Olive oil, chartreuse and bright, drops down, pooling into places where the lines form. Then the silent drops of soy onto the eggplant, an ink wash of ferment and salt. Then miso, pulled through the soft slopes, spread from the back of a spoon, pressed into the crevice of eggplant, to find the groove.
I’d taken the eggplant, earlier, and sliced it lengthwise. I took the knife and traced it sharp along the long edge to reveal the inside. Look to the cut half, that inner space: see the seeds, the soft swath of skin, the full moon bright white oblong halves coated in fine salt, glimmering with the smallest hint of moisture. I’d paused to let the eggplant rest; bring moisture to surface, and give mind and ideas time to coalesce and clarify; three ingredients that can make cooking and writing sing are resting, refining, and time.
Now my ingredient is time, eggplant buried in the mouth of heat. I hear the oven; oil spits and starts heating. I think about silence, about rest, about noise, about the growing of idea and intention, each resonating with its own vibrancy, each reverberating out, when the train passes by, silver, quickening, shining in the growing light, noise, fast, and loud, the corn blue bright sky, the day, the light. The oven timer goes off. Momentary noise, all at once: edge of listening, of wonder, and back to presence. Open the oven. Heat on face. Check for char, check for taste. Take a finger and feel for tenderness.
Past the walls of my apartment, the song of lunch expands out in an unseen radius, aromas silent like reverberations seeping past the walls and the doorways. Knife hits the bowl and rings out as if a reminder, a gong, and we know resonance, and what sings in life, and can know that which nourishes us by the way they linger with us. Smells stay in the hallway, in the granite tile floors, the sloped hallways of this steady building.
There is a rhythm in cooking, in breathing, in being, and writing. A silence, a pause, a noise, a passing of time, and a return. Silence meets noise, and each resonate out. I cook more, and often, on the days that I write because each need the language of attention and time. Hunger is a thunder through me, like word, a sound resounding, a taste radiating out, growing like daylight, like season, body asking for word and nourishment and pacing. A hunger for texture, for wonder, for serene being; a process of coalescing oil, salt, thought and feeling and gathering it all into bowl, plate, idea. An insistent joy in the balance of eating and language. An appetite, for word, for taste, for texture, for rhythm and sentence.
Resonance is something felt. A way of noticing, and relating to your experience. You smell, you taste, you sound, you noise and silence, and notice what ripples out in the the sensations of your experience. As oil and eggplant cook down, crossing the space of time, I feel into memories of smells, sounds, songs, sensations, moments, books, plates, phrases that run through me. They rhythm: they take me and expand me out, finding both center and capacity, and return me to the nourishing solace of inner song and silence. Lately, give me white beans, spinach, hot rice, garlic, plenty. Give me Ondaatje, Nin, Solnit. Remind me of the beauty of rhythm, of poetry, of winter turning spring, of silence and sound, of spaciousness.
To know our resonance, we develop a sense of understanding. In Deep Listening, Pauline Oliveros writes about the distinction between hearing and listening: “To hear is the physical means that enables perception. To listen is to give attention to what is perceived both acoustically and psychologically”. We tune into our sounds and stories, and pause, so as to feel and sense that space of our inner understanding. Time slows when we pause, and there is power in resting. Pausing to feel, for taste, to hear, for word, for silence, for that which can return you to the spaciousness of life: the basin, the bowl, the empty space from which to feel, and sense, and notice.
Thinking, being, breathing, eating. These are predictable rhythms that repeat, and moments where we can pause to give space to our own thinking. What do you feed yourself, as in bowl, or vegetable, or plate? As in word, story, affirmation? What causes a dullness? What helps you find that resounding yes and vibrancy with life?
Sitting on a park bench in the morning in a dense fog, I watch as breath leaves as exhale from body. It exhales and forms shapes, as if smoke into the atmosphere, forming cloud; silent. It shows me the power of pausing: to embody a wholeness, to nourish the sensing body, to give form to breath, and life to inspiration. Run, wind, sit, steady, silence. Emptiness and form, each inform, and when we are nourished, either filled up with sound, attention, bowl of food, or the clarity of silence and stillness, we return to ourselves, and give ourselves the capacity to become non-reactive. We pause, whether in quiet or noise, and tune in deeply into a state of resonance. Life rhythms through us: it reverberates out, and we understand with greater clarity what it is we are sensing and feeling. Pausing to turn inward, rest is an ingredient in quiet, one that gives more form for the capacity to look, feel, sense, and reach out. A place of stillness lets you know when something is a resounding rhythm, a flow, a yes.
Back in the apartment I sit down to write. Steam rises over a bowl of white beans, eggplant. Later, smells and taste of granola, of oat and vanilla, take place, into the ambience of the kitchen. Long after the oven is off, and the kitchen cools, and the symphony of lunch will continue. Silence and noise, each can each be plate, mouth, bowl of food. Deeply nourishing.
Nourished By, Nourishing:
Longer daylight, song, sound, words that resound. Reading A Man and His Symbols by Carl Jung, listening to backlogs of Reverberation Radio, baking a variation on the Eleven Madison Park granola for this week, and listening to the growing birdsong.
From A Past Season:
