On Stable Ground

This week’s piece is a revisit to a former essay, originally sent in 2023. To support this work, and read through the full archive of essays, prompts, and practices, consider becoming a paid subscriber. 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, and flow with creativity together this season.

I can’t stomach it, I think. Grief that rises up welling like a wave. Until the arc forms and bends finding its way again to the ground of shoreline. Remember body; feel breath; remember shoreline; give way to ground.

All waves rise then fade, settling.

Years ago I had a dream where I saw my view dissolve down into a void, dark as ink, midnight. In this dream I came to a place in the night and stared out straight into darkness—and from this place, stretched out like a vast night sky, a cave, I heard a voice, my own, but different, that said, “return to your core and your dreams will follow,” in a tone solid and clear, sounding out and settling as if a wave reaching out toward solid ground.

Transverse abdominis are the muscles of the deep core. Think of the muscle like hands, strong, holding you upright in life. This is the place felt in a cough, or laugh, a place of stability that grounds the body in toward itself. Felt in near-tears laughter, or the deepest sorrowful cry, or while walking or running, this is the place from which breaths exhale and rise, the place that grounds you as you sit upright. Think of the last time you laughed deep into the depths of you, or a moment where grief pushed a salted wall of wave into you, and you gasp for air, and gulp up water, and feel it there in your gut. Deep in the core, you find stability. Grounded in the strength of the body, you become your container.

For years I have held this dream in me as a guiding question, and for years I have sought from the sentence and dream what comprises core? I feel this walking, running, sitting, standing, and in the depths of a flow state—the place when a deeply rooted idea takes form and moves out body, mind, heart, mouth, eyes, ink, lungs, voice, page. Could it be the heart of living, the fierce joy of endurance, the forwardness of something courageous or bold, or the felt sense of stability? Or as simple as sky, sleep, breath? The body becomes a channel for the river of creativity to flow: the inner, deep, intricate muscles take form, become the strong ground for holding, and help to keep us upright, as an idea emerges into life.

Like anything new or newly forming, this growth takes you to the edge of mind, body or muscle. I shake as I do this work. I feel the tenderness of shifting, the growth, and discomfort, as does a sprout or stem just pushed up from the earth and flowing in the wind. What rises familiar dissolves into the unknown again. Yet the ground remains; water comes still; and sun shines in its constancy again and again. Over time, a new leaf grows; the stem grows strong, and pushes up steady toward the sky.

When you create, you drop into your experience. Colors, sounds, words take you into feeling plunging you first into your depths, either by walking slowly and wading, or diving headfirst into the waters of your life. Feeling memory, dream, emotion, you tune to the current of living, hear a word or a sentence, then being the ground through which idea flows: it becomes expressed, through whatever your instrument, making sound, radiating out. Practice becomes the ground you go to, the shoreline on which you find respite, solace and rest; practice is the place you return.

Creativity drops you down into your existence. You feel, letting idea or feeling flow within you, you pay attention. As if embodying asana, you turn inward and outward at the same time in a kind of conversation with life. Attentiveness becomes focus and strengthens presence, bringing to mind a core of caring into the ground of life: in physicality, fluency, in the act of being in body, heart, mind.

“Just at dusk I seat myself cross-legged in my wooden chair,” Gail Sher writes in One Continuous Mistake. “I am straight-backed, warm, well-supported. I close my eyes and begin with a prayer. I relax into the luxury of here, the richness of space, the soft light, the pure quiet.” Later, a reminder to sit well, and sit up straight: “As soon as you bend your back, you lose power.”

Steady, stable, clear: inhale and exhale from the core. Sit in your life, still and upright. Let the force of creativity come to you, greet you, move you, and move through you in this conversation with life. Build the core of your life like the muscle you tend to and build—in repetition. Stability rises from having a good ground: you sit, and still, and breathe, and return to each day, greeting your practice.

Parts of this piece were first published July 2023, as “A Shaking Place” — today’s piece is an edit, a reiteration.

Share

Reading Winter Count by Barry Lopez. Finding joy with birds, together, on the beach, by the lake. In honor and deep reverence of my great guide and teacher, Gail Sher, for her life, her depth, heart, practice, courage, and insistence, I bow deeply. Gratitude becomes the infinite night sky, and knows no bounds.

Share