all from small

framing our practice with everyday matters

I’ve always loved a blank page, an empty shelf, as close to silence as it can get, the number zero, a perfect circle, open field, no edge of horizon, the going into—suspended and hovering.

For me, the everything has always been in the nothing. Since I was a little girl. I arrived with this knowing. Only now is the veil so thin that I can see how I saw the world then, when I was small, how I played, what I was remembering in my pretend and daydream.

We’ve all been remembering

what it is to be alive,

how to get back to the nothing—

simplicity laid bare,

what’s here now, not more or else,

the essence of matter and what matters.

Human tendency is to try hard—to see over the horizon, assemble all the parts, hold the whole.

Yet the whole is in each part.

The essence is always here.

There’s nowhere else for it to be.

This isn’t metaphor. It’s matter.

When you walk into Pleiades by James Turrell, you go into the darkness, you think you’re there to see what’s out there, yet what you find is yourself, how you see, how you want to see, what you (can’t) let yourself un-see and re-see about seeing.

When you listen to John Cage’s musical composition of 4’33” (watch | read | NPR story), you go into what you expect music to be, what you believe about silence, and perhaps—you turn yourself over to it, let yourself relax, shift, surrender to the empty and full.

When you walk a labyrinth there’s a point at which you no longer know the placement of your footsteps, the where and how of your walking turns into something else, more than the space inside the spiral, more than yourself.

The frame matters.

The limit.

A simple frame lets the too big-too daunting-too abstract become accessible.

Look close here… even closer than you thought possible.

Go into this… even deeper, there’s always more to find.

Listen to one flower in a garden.

Watch a child’s pencil move across a page.

Feel yourself pull one thread through fabric.

Trace the arc of your breath.

We notice small to get closer to the essence.

To access the immensity.

This isn’t theory. It’s practice.

Everything we need is here. For community, justice, care, unity, curiosity, love.

When this feels lofty, theoretical, or far away, remember: the distance isn’t fixed, and it takes practice to shift our frames, to notice our noticing, to learn to access the expanse of what’s here.

So, we practice.

We practice especially in the places where the “everything we need” feels far away:

A community of caregivers who want to support children’s play but feel overwhelmed by the density of systems, the noise, and the mess.
A board room searching for meaningful action, yet weighted down by the breadth of options, strategies, timelines.
A studio of creatives longing to express what wants to come through even when it feels too big and with too much ache.
A classroom where a child struggles to belong and needs a way to express all the feelings inside.
A neighborhood meeting divided by strong ideas and lines drawn.
Your body, your mind, your home, where things keep circling, pulling you this way or that, perhaps not quite close enough to where you want to be.

The practice we need is always exactly where we are.

This isn’t far away. It’s every day, ordinary, now.

Our thoughts, feelings, dispositions, and inclinations are the material for our practice.

Yet, because we live in this material and are so entwined with it, it’s hard to see the world (its systems, policies, organizations, interactions, connections) that we’re constructing. We are creating this world around us (consciously or not). How we see the sky shapes the sky.

The frame matters.

Our lenses, their aperture, where and how we attune, the resonance of our hums—this matters.

This creates the matter.

Small frames are gifts to help us see what we too often forget to see.

They guide us to listen, trust, allow, and connect with the aliveness all around us, the small matters easily missed when we try too hard to control and hold the whole.

They let us return to simplicity laid bare,

and we remember:

the whole is alive in every small thing.

as delight, Melissa