storying
into and as aliveness
January felt like one long stretch of breath, all the way up and through to the sky—thank you, I honor you, my heart receives your magic—and all the way back down to the soils—I am here, awake, my toes listen, now what?
I find myself in a place that feels quite different from how “place” as ever felt before.
For the past many years, my attention has been on noticing the shifting of this “place”—seeing, sensing, wondering, describing, sharing as it emerges. Noticing as a way to find… search, see, seek, want… what is here and feels so close-yet so far.
To say “how we see the sky shapes the sky” or “it’s simpler than we think” or “it’s all matter” is a different place than to stand in/as the breath of its truth.
Sometimes, see is far away from say. And say is far away from be.
But, this “far away,” this distance—it isn’t fixed.
It can feel like solid, impermeable matter when our attention frames it so, with (hidden) layers of false separation filtering our lens. We may feel the matter become more malleable as we learn to un-hide these filters, see, shift, and dissolve them.
Yet even when we learn to play and see our seeing, we (humans) still manage to find all sorts of ways to keep beautiful, loving possibilities at a distance.
Here, too, there’s opportunity in the stuff—the matter—of laughter, contradiction, fall on your face and get up, feel stuck and then hiccup, giggle at that thing you don’t want to do but watch yourself doing it, mix metaphors with delight, fancy a dance with big feelings, shake and scream and run, roll on the floor, find a smiling tuft of dust, surprise your cat whose eyes say what’s up with you?, and a bird lands on a slant of shadow from your favorite tree as you laugh out loud with the worms.
There’s aliveness in the laughter. And laughter is a reminder of the aliveness of everything.
The moment of seeing yourself see something you didn’t see before. The pause of a yawn. One note of a song. Stroke of your toothbrush upon your teeth. A child’s sniffle. Chia seed in your spoon. Moon at twelve degrees Taurus. Your grandmother’s face held in a glimmer. Is that myth or shift of cells?
The distance between where we are and the aliveness of anything/everything isn’t fixed. There’s no distance. Humans (recently) made that up. We are the aliveness of everything.
We may see this. We may say this. We may experience this in temporary slices of time “away” from other “things.” And… here in 2024, we all need moments of disruption and practice as we learn how (remember) to be this.
This place where I find myself now, this place I said feels different, this place I want to describe as clearly as I can, is a place where the see-say-be is close.
Oh, so close.
As close as the last bit of in-breath releases into out.
Close as holding a stone and knowing it’s telling a secret to my bones.
A Venn Diagram’s blink back into circle.
What my soul knows without words.
Thank you, tend as stretch. Thank you, chants as spells. Thank you, reverie as try as always. Thank you, button. Thank you, spider. Thank you, wind. Thank you, octopus. Thank you, children. Thank you, hum. Thank you, angels. Thank you, water. Thank you, honeybee. Thank you for guiding me here.
We are where the arcs create our passage,
where our attunement is the bridge.
The more we see of the matter in our lives—the single points of small—the more space we open for the arcs to do what they do.
I said this last month. This month, it’s closer. The see is say is be.
Story has been storying me.
As is the case with other word-beings who visit me to play, I’ve found surprising aliveness inside the single, small word—story—this word we say all the time and think we know.
I am here now in a place of nested delight, of see-say-be as one,
because of story, because I’m inside story, attuning to its hum,
letting myself be storied.
A story is to share.
I’ve been writing about/with story each week in January (for weekly subscribers). As I tend to storying, I see how much space there is to wonder and play and revise and grow. In this way, the small story project is a playground. I’m not yet sure why story wants to be a project, but story won’t release me from the name or its frame of space.
Story is more than we’ve been told and more than we’ve told of story.
Story is both a place of aliveness and our way into the aliveness.
The matter of story is the matter of small things.
To story is to go into the small.
Not tell about it. Not see it from the outside-in. Not summarize or analyze or generalize.
We go inside.
Release.
Listen—beyond ears or eyes.
Stretch, fall, become.
Attune to the hum.
There’s always a hum.
Each small thing has a hum,
is a hum.
The hum is where we attune.
The hum is the matter the arcs know.
This is the bridge.
We turn ourselves over to the hum,
to the aliveness of every small thing.
We story to be storied.
*
as delight, Melissa
Noticing Matters
What began with essays of how and why noticing matters (in value and relevance) has grown into an exploration of expanded notions of matter. No separation of physical-spiritual, real-imagined, us-them, memory-dream. This moment calls us into new ways of sculpting with matters we are learning to see and feel and be again.
It’s all matter. And it all matters.
We go into the hum, into the aliveness
of every small thing.
You might also like to read this essay…
Learn more:
A book of playful exploration with the smallness—and immensity—of ordinary objects.
