This Week in Joyful Practice: I Am My Body, and My Body is Me.

prompts for paying attention

High tide sea anemones. Hug Point State Park, Oregon.

I’m in the milk and the milk’s in me! The other night, while shaping the dough for this week’s bread, I found myself thinking about this line from Maurice Sendak’s book In the Night Kitchen, probably because in the story, a little boy named Mickey shapes himself an airplane out of bread dough.

Here’s a fun reading of In the Night Kitchen (with animation!) in case you’ve forgotten about Mickey and how he wakes up in the middle of the night to a noisy racket, falls down, down into the darkness, and progressively loses his clothes, until he lands, naked, in the night kitchen, where he is promptly added to the batter for the morning cake: In the Night Kitchen.

Image from Maurice Sendak’s book In the Night Kitchen.

I’m in the milk and the milk’s in me! I love this moment in the story where Mickey dives into a bottle of milk, half-cooked cake batter falling from his body. When he first lands in the Night Kitchen, and the bakers add him to their cake batter, grumpy Mickey yells, “I’m not the milk and the milk’s not me! I’m Mickey!” But by the end of the story, Mickey has found his Night Kitchen groove and allows himself to fully enjoy the pleasure of his body consumed by (and consuming) the milk.

In her newsletter, The Marginalian, Maria Popova talks about the controversy swirling around In the Night Kitchen when it was published: “In 1972…a school librarian burned a copy of the book in an act of micro-censorship against Sendak’s depiction of his fictional little boy in the nude.” As recently as last year, a Florida school district was formally challenged by a local chapter of Moms for Liberty, and “little shorts” were drawn over nakey Mickey. Apparently, showing children images of other children falling naked through the night and diving into milk is pornographic, although, from what I know about kids, there’s not much that tops getting naked. When I visited my sister in January, I had the great fortune of witnessing her toddler discover how to rip off her diaper. It was an ecstatic moment–a true liberation, as my naked niece ran towards me yelling, bye-bye-bye-bye! I imagine that is how Mickey felt when he dove into the milk bottle. Bye-bye-bye-bye!

Image from Maurice Sendak’s book In the Night Kitchen.

In another of Popova’s newsletters, I learned about the psychoanalyst, Marion Milner, who, in 1934 and under the pen name Joanna Field, wrote A Life of One’s Own. The book is a reflection on Milner’s seven-year experiment trying to ascertain the basis of happiness. Committed to unraveling the discrepancy between what we think makes us happy versus what actually makes us happy, she turned the lens on herself, which meant observing closely what brought her happiness and what removed her from it. Popova explains the method Milner used to observe herself as “a matter of recalibrating her habits of perceiving, looking not directly at an object of attention but taking in a fuller picture with a diffuse awareness that is ‘more like a spreading of invisible sentient feelers, as a sea anemone spreads wide its feathery fingers.’” As I re-read this quote from Milner, I see little Mickey, cake batter falling from his skin, sinking deeper into the milk and experiencing the autonomy of his own naked body.

Milner wrote about a similar type of immersion in her body’s perception of itself and the world as observing with a “wide focus,” or “knowing with the whole of my body.” She writes, “It was the wide focus…that made me happy.” Here again, is Mickey, naked, falling into the magic of the Night Kitchen, falling into a way of seeing and being that isn’t a part of the shames and fears of the adult world. I’m in the milk and the milk’s in me. And how can you be in the milk, really experience it with the whole of your body, if you are wearing “little shorts”? To be naked in the milk is to be wide focused and happy.

All week, I’ve had Mickey stuck in my head: I’m in the milk and the milk’s in me. Pretty quickly, a new refrain was added to my chant: I am my body and my body is me. When I returned from Portland last week, I was looking forward to getting back into a springtime rhythm–baking bread, getting my hands dirty in the garden, working out–but my body had different ideas. When a cold comes calling, especially when Crohn’s answers the call with its own inflammatory response, everything slows down. My initial response to getting sick is always denial–pretend I’m fine until I have to admit to feeling like shit and last minute cancel working out with a friend, let the grading pile up for a few days, and resentfully rest instead of planting potatoes.

Here’s an experiment I am going to try right now. In a few minutes, I’m going to walk away from this computer screen and take a nap. Rather than thinking about all of the things I’m not doing because I’m resting, I’m going to remind myself that I am my body and my body is me. I’m going to try to perceive my rest through Milner’s wide focus.

One of the things Crohn’s likes to do when I get sick is make my skin feel achy, like a whole-body bruise, and when I allow my senses to feather out like a sea anemone’s fingers, I feel that achiness acutely and also the raw burning of my sinuses and throat. When I extend my senses a little further, I feel the sun on my hands and smell last summer’s heat stored in the dried plants scattered throughout my studio. The sun moves up and over my chest and neck, and my attention is drawn to the dust flitting in the light, to the crow walking across the studio roof, conversing with someone I can’t see or hear. And now my body (which is me) is telling me to stop returning my attention to this screen. It’s time for a nap. Getting into bed might feel a little bit like diving into the milk with Mickey. We are both being held, and in that holding, there is an opportunity to be absolutely present.

---

prompts for paying attention

• Think about a time when you felt like Mickey (I’m in the milk and the milk’s in me!) How old were you? What were you doing? What did it feel like to let your senses feather out like a sea anemone?

• How can you strengthen your wide focus muscle of perception and know with the whole of your body?

Comments are open! We always love hearing about how the ideas we’re playing with here at The Scrap Heap inspire your own experience of joyful practice.