Temporary shelter
All that you touch you change, hand to god
All that you touch you Change. All that you Change Changes you. The lasting truth is Change. God is Change. Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower
If I wasn’t listening closely I may have missed it. They said it quickly and effortlessly. Contained ever so perfectly within the middle of a sentence. I paraphrase: Quilt making is a little more art making for me, but knitting, especially without a pattern or a shawl with increases, is very much hand to god. For me it’s a tetheredness to something. A practice that’s for the process and not the goal. And now I have a bunch of shawls. Shawls that I need to figure out what to do with. Wear them maybe?
Wear them or not. Gift them or not. Hand to god is about the practice not the finish line. It’s being nowhere else but in the expressed confidence and pleasure of somatic work—a channel. Deep down you know there’s no such thing as a finish line anyway. In keeping the hands active and the mind engaged, spaces of the heart may settle and stay. What is comes forth. And at times this means more shawls and interconnected loops of yarn.
Whatever the task may be, mundane or otherwise, no one’s fit to judge the worthiness of baking the muffins, knitting the shawls, threading needle point, drawing, cooking, tinkering, pruning, or weeding. The dance is dancing me. In the act something is set in motion. It’s a doorway in, a ladder down, the path through, the realization that there’s a particular climate to our surroundings. And that it needn’t be interrupted. In the winter months I replace the pleasure I experience from watering, weeding, and dead heading in my garden with stews and cakes and soups. Hand to god.
While paying attention to what’s a couple feet from the eyes is relevant and at times necessary, I think the same is true for noticing the big broad background of our life. The container, the climate, the context, or, as poet David Whyte so eloquently expresses in Background, the surrounding life*.
“Background is always what we start to pay attention to when we start to pay real attention. In Zen practice, one of the signs of deepening states of presence and intimacy with our surrounding reality is the way background stops being background: the way we stop choosing between near and far, past and present, near objects and those that seem to lie over the horizon of our understanding.”
Yesterday, the 3rd of March, I finished up the late winter/early spring pruning. Which for me is hand to god. There’s a pleasure of honing in, tools in hand (clippers, sheers, small pruning saw), poised and ready to make meticulous, selective cuts. I get into a groove. After a while I hear whispers, my lips forming words—thoughts, ideas, musings arising from within. The conversation collects in the branches of the rose, the grapevine, the peach tree, the few hearty shrubs, and the ornamental grasses. The plants thrive from the gesture and my humming. What I’m paying attention to is the foreground, yet in doing so I’m affecting the background of my life. I pause and step back. I feel a presence. There’s a welcomed sense of lightness in my surroundings—a brightening. I’m reverent and grateful.
That night I slept well. Finally. Then at the earliest hours of dawn was wide awake. What I can only believe was a nudge from the surrounding spirits of this place, I received a wake up call. I slipped outside quietly. The sky was dark with purples and indigo yet luminescent. Full of the glow only present at dawn. The moon was full and bright and had not yet set in the west. It took me a moment to see it, the round shadow of the earth moving off to the right. Perhaps the moon wanted me to see the last minutes of the show. Not knowing it was even happening until that very moment, I caught the tail end of the lunar eclipse.
Temporary shelter by (me) Erin Johnson inspired by class What is set in motion by the motion itself? A place to reside, temporarily. Is it remembering what I’d thought I’d lost? Time uninterrupted. Attention itself has other homes. As in a closet full of shawls or a simple meal cooked at home. The point is to not remain interrupted, but rather stay. I’m going for staying. My hands are dry and strong with dirt under the fingernails. They bear history and tolerance for working in the space between making the mind not empty but a place of shelter, sparsely furnished.
There’s as much to glean from focused, intentional work as there is from opening up to the diversity and spaciousness of what surrounds us.
Yours, Erin
What I’m paying attention to | What’s coming alive
> Listening to the beautiful melodies of Harpspace by Saltbreaker, a Michigan-based ambient music project creating immersive, wordless soundscapes designed for reflection, healing, and deep listening.
> I met Ileana Gomez maybe twenty years ago. For a time we ran in the same social circle. Which meant I was able to experience her dance in the most intimate of house parties. She’s a powerhouse. A badass. Now living in Madrid, Spain I check in on what she’s up to. Always inspired!
> *I literally was saying out loud yes, yup, agreed as I read Background. David Whyte, as he so often does, articulated so beautifully our surrounding life. I find it meaningful, maybe even serendipitous, as it’s the eponymous name of my business: Surround Life Design.