Hello beautiful human,
It’s true that not much gets done in a day, and somehow a lot happens in a year. Or even in four and a half months. One of the unlooked for benefits of asking An Inviting Space’s paid subscribers to help me go through the archives and select material for a future project—podcast, book or other development—is that it allows me to see how far I’ve come with this Space.
Here’s my first small made thing, from February 1, 2024:
Hello beautiful human, let’s take a moment at the start of a new month to breathe.
That’s it.
Set a timer for two minutes and just…breathe.
There’ll be time in the coming days for more words. We don’t need to force anything here at the start.
Breath as a river, breath as an ocean, breath as mercy that is not strained, but falleth as the gentle dew from heaven (thanks Shakespeare), breath as a magic carpet ride back to yourself.
Each breath is a gift. Can we remember that?
That’s it. In its entirety.
And while I had some idea I needed to get back to myself, that this project (I promised myself I’d write daily for the month of February and then assess) would give me a way to begin that work. I didn’t yet know what the Space would be or become. I thought a month of small, simple prompts would be good for me as much as anyone. And I notice in this first small made thing that the focus is not on the writing at all but on inviting readers into physical experience and the act of returning to the body. It’s permission to become present and to start very small. I’m reassuring myself as well as anyone else.
Over four months of daily writing, how much has changed.
Feeling my way back into language, my sentences have gotten more complex. My imagery is beginning to grow richer once again. Even my grammatical and purposefully non-grammatical structures are gaining complexity. Cities are rising from the plains or maybe I’d rather go with trees and gardens where once was simply grass and a single dirt track. I’m inviting experiences through not just overt invitation (those are still always included Mondays and Fridays behind the paywall every other day) but through the act of writing/reading itself.
To catch myself in the act of traversing the Grieflands, of literally writing myself back to fullness, sentence by sentence, is rather profound for an ordinary Thursday and I would not have been able to do any of this without the community of readers, writers, creatives and visionaries that share this Space with me. I am so grateful to you and for you.
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Your time and attention are the true gifts. Thank you. xoS
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