my body is morning light

ii. become the act

Repetition is a fascinating thing. We do it all the time, mostly unconsciously: every breath, every step, every blink. When we learn something new — driving a car, mastering a technique — we focus on every small move, repeat it until one day it just works on its own. Our body and brain are marvelous, aren’t they? But we can also choose to return to awareness. By repeating a mantra or simply observing the breath, mindfulness and meditation shift repetition into clarity. Focusing on these cycles can clear the mind, calm us down, and bring us back to a pure state of being. You are aware, and at the same time you are just the act itself.8
—Thoth Adan

you are just the act itself. repetition as a practice affords the time necessary to sink into a movement. when i start making something with my hands, there is an immediate recognition of my body. this self-perception eventually fades as it blurs into embodiment. i am not separate from the practice, i am the practice.

this is part two: settle. become the act.

there is reverence here. to sink into a movement so thoroughly that you become your own creative thought. this idea is present in many forms of craft, of the kind of making where body and meaning come together in an act that narrates the human experience. you know them, crafts like basketry, woodworking, weaving, embroidery, knitting, ceramics. it is within this pairing of a practice of body with a practice of sensemaking that allows for a deeper understanding of both.

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it is important to recognize that this practice of sensemaking is not in service to truth but is in search of meaning. truth and meaning, of course, not being the same thing. the distinction is clarified by Hannah Arendt, who elaborates on Immanuel Kant distinguishing truth from meaning: “[…] truth is located in the evidence of the senses. But that is by no means the case with meaning and with the faculty of thought, which searches for it; the latter does not ask what something is or whether it exists at all—its existence is always taken for granted—but what it means for it to be.”9

truth is firm, fixed; it is everything we already think we know. but meaning is flowing; it is the active and flexible search for knowing.

Arendt’s explanation is further refined by Janneke Wesseling, who notes that the difference between truth and meaning is that truth is a product of intellect while meaning is a practice of reason.10 Wesseling writes that intellect expects criteria and proof, whereas reason “has a self-contained objective; it is the pure activity of thinking and the simultaneous awareness of this activity while we are thinking.”11 so while intellect serves the human desire for verification, reason has no ambition beyond itself; we search for meaning and the search responds to itself. this is becoming the act.

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using Arendt and Wesseling’s lines of thought, i better understand the practice of sensemaking to be one of abstract and flowing curiosity. i am not using my embodied perceptions as evidence in some case being made for a firmer truth. i am also not questioning whether i do in fact exist as morning light—that question does not even materialize—i take my existence as morning light for granted so i may pass through this small, daily moment as the rising sun, setting myself wide open to awareness and the practice of wondering on anything at all—how i am a bird, how the air drinks me in, how that flower knows my name. there is no question to be answered, only the practice of thought and its unbothered exploration of meaning.

there is much meaning to discover, but we cannot access all meaning from the boundaries of the mind alone. in her book The Extended Mind, Annie Murphy Paul provides guidance on how to think outside of our heads. she writes, “As long as we settle for thinking inside the brain, we’ll remain bound by the limits of that organ. But when we reach outside it with intention and skill, our thinking can be transformed. It can become as dynamic as our bodies, as airy as our spaces, as rich as our relationships—as capacious as the whole wide world.”12

this is how i come to know my body is morning light. in the moment, i am not thinking with my brain to generate the thought, but rather encountering with my body the meaning the thought contains. it is an idea that the body speaks, not the brain. rendering this experience into writing is tricky; it is difficult to translate the embodied experience into a worded one, but we carry on with trying nevertheless.

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in my best effort to carry on with trying, i return to repetition.

as a practice, repetition allows you to slip wholly into your body. here, within the settled space of becoming the act, is where the meaning a thought contains exists. this form of meaning speaks in what punk novelist Kathy Acker called the language of the body.13 Acker wrote on how repetition through the practice of bodybuilding creates an opportunity to happen upon meaning: "When I reduce verbal language to minimal meaning, to repetition, I close the body’s outer windows. Meaning approaches breath as I bodybuild, as I begin to move through the body’s labyrinths, to meet, if only for a second, that which my consciousness ordinarily cannot see.”14

when thought begins speaking in the language of the body, meaning is uncovered through movement. this is how you become your own creative thought.

what happens when you become your own creative thought? to settle into a movement so thoroughly that “meaning and making merge into one continuous process rather than being separate forms of production?”15 i could never answer on your behalf and can only sometimes answer on my own. sometimes, a flow state occurs. sometimes, a memory renews itself. sometimes, lots of other things. i know for certain there is no single block of possibilities for me to walk you around. the experience is always changing because how we think we know something is never the same for long.

but, if you have come to believe that circles are the shape of everything, then this is the moment where you see yourself as a point on a circle, not the center. here is where you continue coming to know something about your existence. when you become this perspective, you become the act.