A new collection of journals arrived this week: meet the Inner Landscape collection. Curious to grow your meditative writing? Reach out to schedule a virtual one-on-one session. Pair your creative practice with a journal, or sign up for upcoming workshops in person in Chicago.
In the imprint of my earliest memories, I envision landscape. Looking out into green grey dusk, I watch through the dark light of mind as a shape of landscape forms. Contour of hills, sloped and soft green grey hold the blurred shape of terrain, grounding shadowed line, a presence implying a depth of forest. I see the clear glow of the whole moon sitting still in eastern patch of sky.
I am among the immeasurable masses of those magnetized to the shorelines of Lake Michigan. Light from all seasons reflects into depths, refracting back turquoise and cerulean off the surfaces of infinite constancy of waves. Fresh water makes a rhythm up against rocks, cement formed to barriers, soft slopes of sand. I watch as foxtail barley sways in blushing iridescence along the lake front path, captured by landscape that frames the constancy of this massive body of water.
A new body of work came this summer, rising first from gazing intently in quiet conversation with sensing, feeling, and the lake. Moved by blue and water undulating, back in my studio, I mixed ink, made designs on the surface of water, marbling paper.
As the season grew, another facet of landscape emerged. Recalling immersion in oak, elm, ash, pine, and hikes traced along steady, worn ground pressed by weight and time, I brought to brush and color variations of forest drawn from moments of looking up into immersions of deep and deeper greens in canopies, walking steadily in rhythms around limestone paths here in Illinois. An exhale forms in feeling alone bringing trails and canopies to mind; I brought brush to ink, water, and paper again, from which another facet and pattern formed.
In suminagashi, ink floats on water. Brushes touches, and the thinnest point of pigment connects, expanding out from the end of the brush, moving and expressing color, line, shape, and form across the water bath. Looking into waves of lake, faces of flowers, steady canopies of forests, and the depths of night sky, I found resonance in facets of nature.
In the language of color, to notice is your relationship, that conversation. I bring eyes, hands, and all senses to earth, touching ink on water. Lilies, bursting forward from the ground in saffron-bright orange red, growing next to roses—soft, salt spray and many-petaled cultivated forms—bloomed alongside iris, milkweed, wild bergamot, sunflower, and the immeasurable myriad of flowers that form. Recalling, flowers, I mixed colors, aspiring to shapes to evoke and revere these wonders in their myriad effusing forms.
I brought to mind the night sky. How a day, fading to black, fading to depth of color, or a gathering together of all star—all matter, all depth, all bright—into the ink starkness of midnight first speaks in dusk of lilac, violet, whisper, fading, a black made from cerulean and indigo day and purple gray. Through through brush, and the spark of ink on water, I sipped up from the memory of evenings making constellations of color, recalling camping nights in New Mexico, evenings of cicada calls, cricket, starlight, the immensity of distance, and color felt in the dusk walks across cities.
What do you feel in nature, and what moves you? Moved by earth, and learning, which is an opening to the world, and its own kind of conversation. To learn or to create is to slough off the exterior shell of what we come to see as self and emerge new, clearer. Last week, I released a collection of journals along with nature writing prompts and poems—the Inner Landscape collection—prompted by the generous guidance of my late mentor, who asked, “How will you grow your business this summer?”
On the inner landscape, Barry Lopez writes, “The interior landscape responds to the character and subtlety of an exterior landscape; the shape of the individual mind is affected by land as it is by genes.” Filmmaker Werner Herzog notes that for him, “a true landscape is not just a representation of a desert or a forest. It shows an inner state of mind, literally inner landscapes”.
“Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone,” states David Whyte1. From Annie Dillard: “The interior life expands and fills; it approaches the edge of skin; it thickens with its own vivid story; it even begins to hear rumors of the world”2. For Pico Iyer3, “the great adventure is the inner world.” He says, “I think anybody who travels knows that you’re not really doing so in order to move around—you’re traveling in order to be moved.”
LAKE
FOREST
NIGHT SKY
First, I felt a pull toward Lake Michigan. Next, I recalled hikes on nearby forest preserve trails. In distant memory, I saw a vision of the awe and power and deep serenity of sleeping, camping below a night sky, pausing to breathe in the desert. I felt brightness, looking across seasons into growth and the faces of flowers. Now, I share this collection with you, with the aim, seed, hope, and intention that that hold, inspire, support you in your own life, feeling, breathing, traveling, stilling, learning, connecting, writing.
Each notebook starts with with ink, breath, water, evoking facets of the earth’s terrains, colors mixed and made in reverence to place; each journals is one of a kind. All are sewn by hand, and none were made in full aloneness: all were created, instead, in effort and support with the landscapes, people, and places of this earth. All come with a poem, and guided writing prompts created alongside these landscapes. To be in landscape, and commune with the world as the world of you, the conversation deepens.
Reading Living By Vow by Shohaku Okumura. Watching walls of rain, pink of Chicago summer hazy skies, and storms.
“Everything is Waiting For You”
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