AND THE SUN

This is AND THE SUN, a newsletter about creative, artistic, and inventive approaches to meditation. Welcome to post one. Thrilled to have you here!

🧘‍♂️

Who’s writing this? Me – Avery. Hey! Thanks for being here with me. Let me tell you how this newsletter came to be.

Several months ago I began writing a book about using meditation as a tool to help find our sense of authentic self. I’m writing it because I’ve lived that journey myself these last few years (it doesn’t have to take that long; I wandered). Living and feeling authentically are sometimes tough these days, yet they’re both immensely rewarding – and wow is there a lot to discover about ourselves when we apply the tools of meditation.

A big part of the book project, which will feature 30-40 guided meditations, is an endeavor to improve how meditations are guided in writing by designing interactive guided meditations for the book. I want to find a format that helps the meditations really click for people, because coming into ourselves is a beautiful part of our journey as humans.

Another reason I’m pursuing interactive meditations is because, for a long time, I’ve been interested in creative ways of understanding and guiding experience — as a practice of art, a practice of invention, and I suppose a practice of embodied philosophy, too. I’ve been wanting a home for this way of seeing things. AND THE SUN is that home.

And – yes, part of the newsletter’s intention is to build a readership for the book by previewing book content, sharing breadcrumbs from the writing and meditation design process, etc. – a book benefits from an audience, I suppose. 😌 

But AND THE SUN will also be more than that! I’m hoping to show you the broader vision with this first post. Below, I write about an ongoing collaboration between my talented artist friend, David B. Smith, and me, in which we’re exploring his amazing sculptures through the lenses of movement and meditation. For more on that, read on.

Also, as a regular fixture of the newsletter, you’ll find a short guided meditation in the next section just below. This week’s meditation is inspired by my collaboration with David.

Lastly, a big shoutout to Ivan Langesfeld, the Producer of this newsletter and collaborator on the book project as well. Ivan is the kind of producer who can manufacture serendipity and spot opportunities really, really well. He’s also a creative maestro in his own right. Ivan, I’m grateful to be teaming up with you to bring this vision to life. 😊 

Guided Meditation

Every week, I’ll share a short guided meditation. They’ll be creative. These are yours to use and share.

Inspired by the post below about the “Green Things” sculpture (read on for more), this week’s meditation is about exploring the subtle emotions we feel around large objects – like the ways we feel cared for, held by our environment, and so on. It will be relaxing, it will tune you into positive emotion, and you’ll come into more intimate contact with the environment around you.

Hope you enjoy. If you do, please feel free to share the newsletter with someone else!

The Green Things

Recently I’ve been collaborating with my friend David, a multimedia artist and a really multifacted guy. We’ve been exploring awareness and movement in the context of his delightful, striking, malleable green sculptures. The green sculptures are made of the eponymous “Green Things”.

Several years ago I visited the famous upstate New York sculpture park, Storm King. Storm King’s sculptures are all bigger than you are. Some of them you can even walk through. The sculptures were so big and so expressive that I felt a desire to move around them, with them, through them. Since then I’ve wanted to explore a sculptural dance practice.

I met David B. Smith in his studio during this year’s Greenpoint Open Studios weekend in Brooklyn. David makes fabric-based photo-sculpture, installations, and sound performances. It turned out that, like me, he often sees art through a lens of “awareness” or “presence”, and thinks about the relationship between art and our unconscious structures of mind.

When I walked into David’s studio, I saw a large green sculpture. It was fortuitous – if not, dare I say, synchronistic – because not an hour before I had been stopped in my tracks by two smaller versions of the very same sculpture in a store display nearby (but not that nearby). I was instantly taken by their simultaneously simple yet detailed form, the way I felt their presence as quasi-organic entities. With the Storm King-sourced sculpture/dance concept in mind, I pitched David on a collaboration right then and there. Amazingly, he took my off-the-cuff request in stride, and agreed.

The Sculptures

David’s sculptures are composed of multiple soft but structured, reshapable, green fabric tubes. (Legs.) (Beams.) (Processes.) Green Things. To give you a sense for their mechanics, consider that if you hold a Green Thing horizontally and bounce your arms a little bit, the ends of the Green Thing will also bounce, and you can easily find the resonant frequency of the structure’s movement. It’s springy.

Because the Green Things can be reshaped, David can create these sculptures over and over, shaping and combining the Green Things in different ways each time. One thing I came to realize, by the way, is that David has a great instinct for shape.

Working Session

David and I had several calls in which it became apparent we have that elusive creative chemistry. So, we scheduled a working session in David’s studio.

In our calls, we came up with some ideas to explore, mainly around how particular details of the sculptures’ forms elicit certain emotions – how does it feel to apprehend a human-sized soft thing with dimples and ripples not so unlike a human, with a soft outside and a hard skeleton inside you can feel only by patting the outside?

The day of the workshop, we had David shaping and reshaping the sculptures, David on camera, me moving, and the two of us co-directing.

Our working session lasted two hours. We conducted our exploration progressively, starting with a single Green Thing and expanding from there. During the exploration, I narrated my internal experience out loud, describing the phenomenological inquiry into what it was like to do things with the sculpture, how it made me feel, what impulses I was feeling.

In addition to documenting through photos and videos, we recorded audio to capture both my narration, and the ideas David and I came up with as they were emerging. Below, I’ll share some moments from the working session, and some commentary.

Forms 

We started simply, with one Green Thing, and progressively made the sculpture more complex. For images of the most complex version, using four Green Things, you’ll have to play I-Spy in the collage above.

One Green Thing

First, we placed one Green Thing on the floor. This Green Thing already had a slight bend in it and didn’t want to be straightened – David had told me in advance that the Green Things have character, and as soon as I picked one up I saw he was right. It feels like lifting someone’s limb, if you’ve ever tried; there are certain ways it wants to move, and certain ways it doesn’t. This Green Thing wanted to be a little bent, and that was just fine.

I paced carefully around this Green Thing for a while, noticing how the subtle details of the Green Thing’s shape influenced my movements. I then started a game in which I imagined my thumb and index fingers pinching a string that was attached to the knee of the same side. This led to interesting body shapes because movements around the Green Thing were defined both by the shape of the Thing, and the “mechanics” of the imagined string-hand connections.

As part of my experiential inquiry, I brought an eye to understanding how characteristics of sculptural shape influence movement and mind. From this first simple sculpture, where I was paying attention to the shape and allowing it to influence my movement, I noticed that the naturalness of my movement depended largely on the spacing between noteworthy features that captured my attention, like large bends or dimples. If the features were spaced at a comfortable distance, I would step naturally from one to the other. If they weren’t, things would get a little awkward in my body.

One Green Thing, bent

David then put a bend in the shape, giving it some height. It acquired more of a presence that way, and it provoked a desire to engage with it more intimately. Before, it was distanced curiosity. Now, intimacy.

Below, you can see a photograph where I was playing with what it felt like to stand aligned with the vertical part of the sculpture, relative to the position of the camera. When I look at this photograph, I get the sense that the sculpture is an extension, or aspect, of my body. What’s interesting to me is how my chest and head are tilted slightly upwards, in such a way that the sculpture’s downward section acquires the feeling of being the structural support bearing my off-balance weight, as though my weight were transferred through the diagonal leg of the sculpture into the ground.

Three Green Things

This photo is aesthetically and conceptually one of my favorites. The word that jumps to mind is “drape”. I’m draped over the sculpture; the green arm is at just the right angle to absorb me, energetically-speaking.

And, this one, where I felt intertwined, really quite held by it. Cared for, where my arm hooks around the bend. The sculpture’s shape, and its softness, give it the capacity for care.

Three Green Things and a meditation

Now, for some meditation action. This was the most interesting part of the session for me contemplatively. I lied down on the floor right under the mass of the sculpture – that knot in the middle felt like its heart – and started drifting off to liminal spaces. From my meditation practice I have some degree of control over increasing and decreasing the depth of these liminal states (I’m not very good at it). While up and down the ladder of liminality (more-or-less), I described out loud how I was experiencing the sculpture’s presence.

Here are some excerpts from my description of the experience, transcribed from the audio recording:

“[When you close your eyes], after a couple minutes, things get darker. You know what I’m talking about? I’m there now.”

“Its presence [now that things are darker] is a little bit hazier. It’s not muted, but it’s like, there’s some sort of distortion over its presence relative to before the eye-darkening.” 

“Now I’m even further into the eye darkening. I’m sort of, like, identifying less with my body now. It almost feels like my body and the sculpture around it and the room and the sound and the light are kind of floating a little bit, in a bigger space.”

“I’m feeling less aware of the sculpture, but in an interesting way. It almost feels like it has molded into the background so that it is less differentiated from the background space than it was before. So it’s not that it’s disappeared, it’s just kind of, like, unified into a blob of existence with the rest of the space in the room.”

“The world itself is almost turned into, like, a big heap of clay without much differentiation. There isn’t much texture to it. It’s more just like… a presence with a subtle sense of being shaped.” 

Three Green Things, and now we’re friends

This was a special moment that came maybe three quarters of the way through the session. I had sat down next to the sculpture and suddenly felt a sense of intimate connection with the sculpture. Like I was sitting there with it, as a friend or a protector. There was entity, something or someone I could connect to with my heart. I didn’t want to get up.

Reflections

Three dimensional form is potent: its subtle details noticeably influence the body and the psyche alike, especially when the form is body-sized or bigger.

These influences are there and available for you any time you slow down enough to look (it can take a few minutes for these perceptions to come online). Trees do this. Furniture does this. Cars do this. Trash cans on the street do this. Parasols, doorways, staircases and railings, and on and on.

🪷

I’m hoping to grow the newsletter!

Use the referral link below to send AND THE SUN to one person in your close circle, and one person further away, who you think will enjoy it. If you refer two people (referral link below 👇), I have an early access authenticity meditation from my book that I’ll send your way! 🧘‍♂️ 😏