"We finger the world around us with our senses...Our bodies serve to introduce the world to us." ~Anne Truitt, Turn
Life is so full and so easy to miss. Please, I beg of myself, slow down just for a moment. As James Baldwin wrote in Nothing Personal,
"For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock."
How do I slow the ever shifting, changing, grinding quality of life? I pause to pay attention with my senses and I record what has delighted me. It’s so simple and because it is, it works. It’s a meditation with the body, bringing in the world as it is in a particular moment, and a meditation on delight through journaling.
I would love for you to join me friends for the month of May: 31 days of paying close attention through our senses. For paid subscribers, starting tomorrow through May, you’ll receive a chat thread with my own observation and delight. If you have the Substack app on your phone and you enable notifications, the chat will pop up for you each morning. If you don’t have the app, the chat will still come as an email.
I’m thinking especially about sound as I start this week. The way sound can both alert and soothe us, bring us into the present and take us into a memory of the past. My cats purr holds me in an ocean of steadying sound. A sudden clack of a tree limb makes me jump. A track of Leaving on a Jet Plane at once makes me nostalgic and longing—I am older than the age I remember my mother singing this song as I sat at her feet and yet I can feel that four year old me curling up to listen to her voice and guitar.
Stop what you’re doing right now. For me, that’s typing (which is a sound I love—the sound of clacking from a keyboard). Take in a breath to bring yourself alive to this moment. What do you hear? Take the next minute to close your eyes and just listen. Notice how the sounds make you feel, what memories and thoughts they elicit.
For me, this activity in establishing presence and delight through the senses is a meditation on peace. Peace isn’t a passive thing we just talk about or think about—it’s an active state we can work for. That work really begins in the patience that exists in creating a pause. So friends, I’m sharing with you a yoga practice that is intended to offer you presence and strength, as an offering toward creating the kind of awareness that can allow you to step into this week ready to listen deeply to life.
Would you like to join me for these next 31 days to “finger the world around us with our senses” and record theses experiences with delight? I’d love to see how we feel by the end of the 31 days. And I’d love to hear from you over the course of them. So please, download the app, receive the chats, and share your own responses directly within.