Attunement
Jenn and I try to meet up once a week to spend time together in Joyful Practice. We often weave work conversations with reflections on our personal lives and the state of the world. Mostly that looks like sitting and drawing together and jotting down whatever impressions and questions arise while our hands and minds are busy playing with images and colors. Every time we meet, I find clarity around something that’s been getting mulled over in that place in my body where unformed ideas like to roll around until they are ready to slide into consciousness.
Yesterday, we spent our JP time walking and drawing at the Woodard Bay nature preserve. I know we talked about plants and attunement, but I can’t recall the specifics of the conversation because it unfolded in the dreamy haze that happens when we draw together: opening our senses to the landscape around us, softening into a shared endeavor, and slipping in and out of each other’s stream-of-consciousness. The rush of anxiety I felt all morning dissolved when Jenn and I started talking and drawing together.
What is it to be vulnerable?/When can we be vulnerable?
Jenn and I sat by the water’s edge, sketching and listening to seals barking as they lounged on deserted railroad tracks that are rotting into the bay. Our words and drawings wandered and intersected on our sketchpads.
This work is teaching me to pay attention to the ways I choose to be creatively vulnerable. This work is leading me towards a more nuanced understanding of the ways I choose vulnerability in other parts of my life, as well.
Everything is a Potential Drawing.
Earlier this week, Yme and I spent three days on the Washington coast, near Willapa Bay. I took photos of shells and seaweed and dead crabs tumbled by the rising tide and the remains of a whale that Jenn also stumbled upon back in May. Its flesh is now almost entirely decomposed–skin stretched tight over vertebrae, tail fin sinking into the sand.
Everything is a potential drawing. I am building an archive of images. Maybe someday I will sketch them all. In the meantime, Jenn and I are fantasizing about having enough space away from our daily lives to take a road trip to the whale before the sea and the scavengers devour it. We want to draw it in person, whatever is left.
