my body is morning light

i. return to the act

circles are the shape of everything—a string of words that holds how i see the world and myself in it. i exist as a circle, cycling through my life. i’ve been here before, on every scale at every moment. i am made entirely of cycles. i came from the earth and i will return to the earth, again and again and again. there are immeasurable circles happening simultaneously. relating to any number of them is a function of degree. zoom in, zoom out to any scale and find circular infrastructure.

my awareness of the circle is intentional, and i practice repetition as a way in to this intentionality. an expression of repetition can look like many things. it can be repetition in movement (weaving), in mark making (a daily drawing), in ritual (seasons, new moons) in attentiveness (meditation, the art of Simon Hitchens).1 the expression of repetition and the commitment to its sustained occurrence becomes a sort of prayer, as in prayer is a conversation you keep with something you believe in.2 repetition, prayer, meditation, ritual—these are all words that point to how people across time and space experience embodied practice. there is something reliable within embodied practice that provides access to awareness—the kind of awareness that leads you to sensemaking.

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if i say circles are the shape of everything and that phrase makes sense to me, it is only because i insist on returning to an act that makes me experience cycles everywhere imaginable. the act i insist on returning to is a creative practice of repetition. i intentionally return to repetitive ways of making because they unravel paths for sensemaking within my body. settling in to a slow, cyclic rhythm of making is my own kind of prayer; it is the conversation i keep between breath, body, ground, and existence.    

this is part one: pull in. return to the act.

what is the act? and how do i return to it?

the act is repetition. and the way to the act is with awareness, and then again with subsequent awareness; thus returning to the act is a practice of the act itself. repetition is the structure3 through which awareness is simultaneously fixed and transformed.4 daily life, something art curator Helen Molesworth regards as the quotidian, is “steeped in repetition.”5

during most moments within a creative practice, acts of repetition are looking at you. they are present in so many places and in so many ways. the shift from repetition that happens as a matter of fact to repetition that happens by design is a manner of awareness. repetition as a creative practice means not only noticing when you pull in, but to intentionally seek it, to create it, and to create through it.

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what does pulling in mean? it is a grounding moment: the deep breath, the self-reflexive pause, the sigh out. there is a slowing that brings recognition of sound, of temperature, of place. feel your breath. feel your hands moving. feel your weight responding to gravity. pulling in is the moment you align yourself to your body. it is centered and considered awareness.

this kind of awareness practiced repeatedly is a manner of discipline. and at the hands of discipline comes access to different ways of knowing. if you have come to believe, for example, that circles are the shape of everything, then this is the moment where you see yourself as a circle.

my repetitive creative practice led me to this shape of knowing. by returning to the act of repetition, i come to know something about my existence. artist Sheila Hicks speaks to this practice: “For me, moving around, working, looking out the window causes me to imagine different existences simultaneously. […] to leave yourself so open to the unknown and then to find a way to weave it, to weave it into your daily existence.”6 for Hicks, awareness is practiced through the quotidian movement of walking to do errands. every day, she returns to this act of repetition where she intentionally discovers different ways of knowing, and she brings those uncovered ways back with her into her daily life. she is continuously becoming and existing as more than just one way of knowing.

and why wouldn’t this be possible? why wouldn’t a person be able to hold, to be, to exist as multiple realizations at once? or to exist within the soft space between those fixed realizations? in a podcast discussion between host Helen Molesworth and artist EJ Hill, Molesworth asks Hill what it is about the liminality of in-between spaces that makes him want to be there. Hill responds:

I think maybe because everything in our natural world exists in that space. Everything’s in this constant flux from between here and there, and if we can expand that space into not just a tiny point of the fulcrum, or the liminality […] I feel like everything operates within that kind of liminal space, but for some reason human beings have constructed a system where we are conditioned to believe that we can only exist in single moments at a time. like, my body can only be this, and it’s described this way and it is this perceived monolithic experience where if my experience as an embodied being has a certain set of conditions, then it must be true for everybody. so I feel very locked in to these seemingly fixed spaces of being, and I don’t want to feel like that. I want to feel as expansive and dynamic as the rest of the natural world.7

i believe our bodies are as expansive and dynamic as the rest of the natural world. and as Hill notes, it is only systemic conditioning that could ever make us believe otherwise. if i am as expansive as the rest of the natural world, then of course my body can exist as morning light. of course i can bring myself to this way of knowing by breathing into the sunrise, because my existence is in constant flux between here and there. and of course this experience is the shape of a circle, because the sun and i cycle through it every day.

repetitive creative practice offers space for pulling in toward these beliefs. the more i practice existing as liminal feelings, the more accessible these expansive ways of knowing become. by using my body to practice repetition and awareness to the point of prayer, i unfold further into myself. i have returned to the act.