Mike Curran
Kaya Lovestrand
Attuning to [practice]
Take a deep breath.
Once more, listening to the sound of the air entering and leaving your body. Notice how you’re standing, or sitting; where is your weight distributed? What shape is the curve of your spine? How are your limbs hanging, or not? Can you ask these questions without adding commentary about what is good or bad, just noticing what is?
Use your attention to your breath to tune into the rhythms you’re always making: the in and out of air, the steady undercurrent of your pulse, the blinking of your eyes. Think about the more than half of your body that is water: tuning into the fact that you are never truly still, as layers of activity hum and flow with different cadence. Repeat from the beginning.
Can you strive to listen to all this activity, while understanding the impossibility of that goal? Can you find the joy in this impossibility, instead of judging it as a failure?
As if the complexity of your body wasn’t enough, can you expand the circle of your attention? Notice the surface against your feet, the texture of whatever is closest to your skin, where there are gaps and where there are not. Can you feel warmth from the sun? from a light? Air passing over you, or the lack of it? No matter where you are, the sound around you is overwhelming: there may be rustling, buzzing, talking, humming, rattling. Have you noticed new sounds now that you’ve started to pay attention? Have they been there all along? Remember to remember the sound of your own breathing. What if we could tune our attention into all of this in equal measure—attending to both the loud and quiet without one overtaking the other, feeling the fullness of how astonishingly complex it all is?
︎
Categorization can be a valuable tool to make the world digestible to our limited mental capacity. It helps us build memories, make comparisons, give form to everything. And yet, if you zoom in close enough, could you still see the place where your feet end and the soil begins? What if you zoom out far enough? Though they are undoubtedly useful and necessary, we too often forget our borders aren’t as real as they seem. The molecular structures of hemoglobin and chlorophyll are remarkably similar, after all.
Once you have a category, it’s easy to build a hierarchy. It’s easy to say that we humans are one thing, that trees are another, and that the former could have dominion over the latter. That what happens to the latter won’t impact the former. Often a profound experience of love, loss, or insight can rattle or chip away at these hierarchies. Disorientation has a way of making things that felt certain lose their edges. But what if we were to take these lessons into our everyday, and contrary to all the forces pushing to reinforce walls and categories and hierarchies we practiced an expansive knowing? What if all this took was just to deeply pay attention? This isn’t about creating a mirage, or an escape. Rather, it’s about looking close enough to see the actual arbitrariness of it all—and instead of meeting that receding structure with fear, what if we felt its beauty, liberation, fullness, resilience?
Once more, listening to the sound of the air entering and leaving your body. Notice how you’re standing, or sitting; where is your weight distributed? What shape is the curve of your spine? How are your limbs hanging, or not? Can you ask these questions without adding commentary about what is good or bad, just noticing what is?
Use your attention to your breath to tune into the rhythms you’re always making: the in and out of air, the steady undercurrent of your pulse, the blinking of your eyes. Think about the more than half of your body that is water: tuning into the fact that you are never truly still, as layers of activity hum and flow with different cadence. Repeat from the beginning.
Can you strive to listen to all this activity, while understanding the impossibility of that goal? Can you find the joy in this impossibility, instead of judging it as a failure?
As if the complexity of your body wasn’t enough, can you expand the circle of your attention? Notice the surface against your feet, the texture of whatever is closest to your skin, where there are gaps and where there are not. Can you feel warmth from the sun? from a light? Air passing over you, or the lack of it? No matter where you are, the sound around you is overwhelming: there may be rustling, buzzing, talking, humming, rattling. Have you noticed new sounds now that you’ve started to pay attention? Have they been there all along? Remember to remember the sound of your own breathing. What if we could tune our attention into all of this in equal measure—attending to both the loud and quiet without one overtaking the other, feeling the fullness of how astonishingly complex it all is?
︎
Categorization can be a valuable tool to make the world digestible to our limited mental capacity. It helps us build memories, make comparisons, give form to everything. And yet, if you zoom in close enough, could you still see the place where your feet end and the soil begins? What if you zoom out far enough? Though they are undoubtedly useful and necessary, we too often forget our borders aren’t as real as they seem. The molecular structures of hemoglobin and chlorophyll are remarkably similar, after all.
Once you have a category, it’s easy to build a hierarchy. It’s easy to say that we humans are one thing, that trees are another, and that the former could have dominion over the latter. That what happens to the latter won’t impact the former. Often a profound experience of love, loss, or insight can rattle or chip away at these hierarchies. Disorientation has a way of making things that felt certain lose their edges. But what if we were to take these lessons into our everyday, and contrary to all the forces pushing to reinforce walls and categories and hierarchies we practiced an expansive knowing? What if all this took was just to deeply pay attention? This isn’t about creating a mirage, or an escape. Rather, it’s about looking close enough to see the actual arbitrariness of it all—and instead of meeting that receding structure with fear, what if we felt its beauty, liberation, fullness, resilience?
Kaya Lovestrand is an artist currently living and working in the Twin Cities. She has performed with a range of wonderful choreographers and a growing number of visual artists. Having studied ecology and visual art in addition to dance, Kaya continues to incorporate a multi-disciplinary approach to her creative projects and rarely turns down the opportunity to learn about something new. She loves working on projects that provide an excuse to collaborate with others.