everything feeds process

After focusing on sensory awareness, I will be turning the focus towards personal awareness and mindfulness.

For today’s exercise, I would like to create a “Postcard from my Found Present.” This exercise is inspired, in large part, by Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons. In this book, Stein wrote brief prose poems about the objects, foods, and rooms of her life in Paris.  These were largely imagistic and they created a larger picture of her domestic life. I am especially fond of the “Objects” section, which elevated the everyday object into the extraordinary.

In my “Postcard from my Found Present”, I will pick an object from my life and create a postcard out of it. While I would prefer this to be a poem, it can be created any medium.

After focusing on sensory awareness, I will be turning the focus towards personal awareness and mindfulness.

For the next leg of my mindfulness month exercises, I will be shifting my focus from sensory awareness to personal awareness.  Personal awareness begins (in my mind) in the acknowledgement and documentation of the past.  After all, events in the past shape future experience.

For today’s exercise, I will create a “Postcard from My Remembered Past.” I say “remembered,” because my memories are influenced by my knowledge of my present life.  How I choose to document my past tells me more about my present than anything else.  For the postcard, I can focus on any mediums at my disposal: poetry, photography, collage or video.

The root of mindfulness in a creative practice, in my mind, is in sensory awareness. For the next five days, I will focus on body awareness.  While body awareness is rooted in many of the senses I have already covered, I think it is most often captured through touch.  As someone who often lives in her head, this is the most challenging sense to articulate.

Whenever I think of poems about the body, two lines automatically come into my head. It’s almost a simultaneous response. The first is from e.e. cummings:  “I like your body when it is with your / body. it is so quite a new thing.” The second is from Walt Whitman: “I sing the body electric.”  For me, these poems encapsulate all that is good about writing about the body, because they address the body as a physical entity but also as a spiritual entity.

While I don’t think I can ever reach the quality of these poems, my exercise for today is to write about the body, both physically and emotionally or spiritually.