The Practice Before The Practice

“… a sitting before the incomprehensible long enough to feel and sometimes understand the mystery each instrument and craft is designed to invoke.” For me, the instrument is my body and its faculties. I rush into using them, trying hard to “stitch together [my] experience” into meaning and certitude. These days, I’m traveling from state to stare, meeting people whose beliefs and principles are unfamiliar to ne. My mind ceaselessly try to stitch together the fabric pieces of our collective griefs and rage and aspirations. Maybe my practice is observing thoughts as they come and go, or to write and draw and sing to make peace with my cognitive dissonance. Yet before I reach for the breath or the pen, there is the practice before the practice, of softening my gaze, of exhaling into the mystery of stars on a clear night, of inhaling someone’s shampoo or generous food given to me again and again from wild trees and untamed people. This practice before the practice is without a goal. I come back to the perfect revolutions of the planets, before shifting again into my self-improvement projects. I don’t yet understand fully what deep progress mean. I love what Tenneson Woolf shared, to “love something enough to be with it again and again in all the moods of our soul”. Perhaps deep progress for me is learning something new each moment about how I relate to the world, regardless of how good or bad things seem to be. That gives me life.

This is so beautiful Kang, practising with no goal and yet feeling in tune with the rhythm.