Telling All One's Heart

Sometimes I think an act of courage is crossing the threshold from one space to another.  It can seem so much easier to remain where you are.  Especially right now, the season of growing darkness and cold, it can seem almost impossible to move.  First thing in the morning, you can be stuck in the bed, dreading the sharp transition to cool open spaces.  When you step into the kitchen, you have to move from sleepy ease to activity, from stillness to movement, from dreaming to decisions.    

And sometimes I think that it can be a great and important act of courage just to stay where you are, say in a conversation that is getting heated or one that is getting silent.  Sometimes it is all you can do to stay in the room.  Courage has it’s roots in the word for heart.  From Brené Brown:

“The root of the word courage is cor—the Latin word for heart. In one of its earliest forms, the word courage had a very different definition than it does today. Courage originally meant “To speak one's mind by telling all one's heart.”

“Telling all one’s heart” can seem terribly scary, and like a very tall order.  Yet, there is a kind of relief that is only possible when you drop from your head into your heart and let body and mind speak together from there.  And you can often see the relief on the face of someone you may be speaking to.  They can, in fact, tell when you are “telling” all of your heart and when you are holding back. 

Telling, in a way, requests “witnessing” from the listener, a kind of engagement that our culture is not so used to.  We usually want to be talking, telling as it were, without regard for whether anyone is actually hearing what we are saying.  So much do we do this and value it culturally that we have created Twitter, a very “telling” medium.   What happens when we “tell” from the heart is of a very different order.  When we speak from the heart, we invite witnessing, we invite others to see us in our truth, in our authenticity.  Witnessing invites us to listen from our hearts just as someone else speaks from theirs.  Can you drop your mind into your heart? Can you speak from there?  What does that feel like?

  In Chinese medicine the heart is also the residence of the mind.  The brain may be the place where we process information, but the heart is where the spirit resides, where we can know what is true for us in a given moment.  When you speak from the heart, you allow the spirit to enter the conversation.  When you listen from the heart you allow the spirit to rest in the space with you.  Everyone can tell. 

Positive Pressure

I’ve always said that I am not a fan of pressure; time pressure, peer pressure or foot pressure, for that matter. Especially vexing can be the pressure for things to change, a pressure that often shows up as illness or accident. Yet there is a way that pressure is what maintains us, maintains our bodies, our minds, and our health. A healthy blood pressure, for example, is maintained by the proper amount of fluid flowing through our blood vessels. A healthy mind has the pressure of contemplating how to say what you feel and a healthy body overall is maintained by the perfect pressure of exercise and rest in some combination. In some ways our world is always exerting pressure on us, even just the pressure of the climate, if nothing else.

What I like to call a positive pressure is created by connection, whether it be a connection to a friend, to a job or to yourself, your creativity, or your feelings. Connections help to hold you, place you in your world. Without connection, we can’t survive. A connection to meaning and purpose can sustain human beings sometimes through the worst life has to offer.

Alternatively, a negative pressure is created by expectation or demand. In my experience this kind of negative pressure most often takes the form of ideas about outcome. When we think we can expect or demand a certain outcome, we pressure ourselves or those around us in ways that can paralyze us, depress us or even break us under the pressure. One of my favorite quips from Buddhist nun Pema Chödron is a twist on a phrase that comes from Buddhist mind training. The original phrase is translated as “change your expectations and relax as it is”. Nice advice, but Pema says “lower your expectations and relax as it is!” Really, give yourself a break and don’t wait for circumstances to make you break.

All pressure has an element of tension. Too much tension and we break easily. Too little tension and we do not feel supported. Applying a bit of pressure is the way we can begin to experience what degree of tension is already there. When we apply a bit of pressure, say in a question or a hand on our neck, we begin to know how we are. Our feelings surface in response. A certain kind of tension, as well as a certain amount of pressure, are necessary for any structure to be maintained and to respond to the stress of life.

How do you create a positive pressure, a vital relationship with life? How do you recognize the negative pressure, where you are interjecting expectation, even demand, into the equation? Pressure will not work if it is constant. Significantly and not surprisingly, pressure and release works to both inform and relax how we function. Think about how it works with your muscles, how when someone touches you with some amount of pressure you relax, and with another amount, you may tighten. Apply that same idea to your emotions, your thoughts. Observe how the pressure of your self-reflection and self-examination works positively or negatively for you. Observe how you respond to your own inquiry. Is the inquiry positive for you, the right amount of pressure? What would the right amount of pressure feel like?

For me, the right amount of pressure feels like love, care. And the wrong amount of pressure feels like irritation, distraction, even invasion. This week’s experiment; how can you create exactly the right amount pressure, how can you discover where is too loose, where is too tense and how can you engender the sensation of love and care for yourself, no matter where you are or what you are doing?

Tasting Life

Life is bitter sweet.  Life is salty sour. Life is sometimes bland, without inclination in any particular direction.  This can seem obvious. But so much of the time, we aren’t really tasting life, we aren’t really letting a given taste take over, teach us, tell us what is up. Taste is the way the world, the outside world and especially the plant world, communicates with us, letting us know what might be in store if we fully take what the world is offering.  

In each taste there is a message, an important message.  Bitter, for example, is the taste of toxicity, proximity to death.  A very interesting paradox. We love and hate bitter. We love our coffee, our chocolate, our negronis.  Yet, we don’t want to talk about our ever-present proximity to death.

Sour says step back and consider. Might not be too harmful, but take it in a little bit at a time. Conserve, take care.  Sour protects us from moving too fast into life. Salty says relax, give over, settle in. Salty says we will be nourished deeply, at our core. And most of us want to use salt a lot. We’ve been told that too much salt is harmful.  In a way, the harm of too much only comes from the loss of the ability to detect what exactly is too much. And then there is bland, the humdrum, daily, water-moving, almost undetectable experience of bland. Bland is what it is like to rest easily in the moment without any ambition to go anywhere.

If we have full possession of our taste buds, and our ability to smell ( a whole discussion on its own, but not unrelated, as smell is crucial to how we taste as well) we won’t miss the moment when enough is enough.   Unfortunately, often we have obliterated our taste buds with too much sweet and the moment is gone. [Here is the research documenting just how sweet taste does exactly that, blocks our ability to taste anything else]

Sweet is everywhere, as if we can’t bear our world without a heavy dose of sugar. We find sugar in the least obvious of places; in our drinks, in our mayonnaise, our tomato sauce. The ubiquitous sweet taste; of sugar, brown sugar, coconut sugar, maple sugar, molasses, honey, maple syrup, stevia, erythritol, xylitol. 

Even the fakest of sugars is still a sweet taste. Sweet taste is all about comfort, softness, buffer. Sweet taste reassures us, salves our wounds and bucks us up for the next bit of trouble. Sweet is the taste of the earth in Chinese medical thinking, the taste that nourishes, harmonizes, brings things together.  Sweet is the center but not the center of attention. Sweet is the way we live into ourselves if we are gentle and the way we touch another when we are paying attention. Sweet is the taste of home.  

Too much sweet, however, can bring things to a halt, make them sticky, stuck.  Too much sweet can make things impossibly murky, soft, cloudy. Too much sweet takes away our ability to discern other flavors, numbs us to other happenings in our world. Here in late Summer, understandably, we often want to bring things to a halt. We want to stop and savor this season of transition with its last vestiges of heat and light before the darkness takes precedence. 

It is hard not to love late Summer; the sultry invitation of the damp hot days, the melancholy softness that clings to the grass in morning and evening, the colors as they ripen into the almost unbearable yellows, reds, purples. There is in late Summer an abundance of sweet; tomatoes and squash, apples and grapes, evenings on the porch with friends, all sweet. Yet, when is it too much, when is it enough?  Can we taste the moment when things are turning, turning from ripe and sweet to cloying and overdone, gone, time to let go? Do you know?

The Meaning of Taste by Steve Godwin
 
1.
Sweet is always first in line,
or would like to be.
Heaven is probably the kind of place
where you’re expected to have dessert first.
But, leaving heaven to heaven,
search no further
than this very world to receive
the love letter made of chocolate,
the songbird’s praise
for the deep blue day,
the scent of lilac, cloying
yet irresistible.
A memory of someone’s lap
you used to curl in,
the taste of being good.
 
2.
The note in the melody
you weren’t expecting,
sour lives on the part of tongue
that detects the joke
amid all the muttering,
savors irony, enjoys the sting.
It’s the one at the edge
of the crowd, making faces
like the uncle in plaid
who always liked a pickle
with every meal.
Yet it’s known
in serious circles too:
sour’s the only taste
that ages well, the only one
that goes vintage.

3.
Bitter is a wind
that robs you of all you don’t need.
It is the taste that teaches us
that pain teaches us.
A taste hard to acquire,
it may at times mix with sweet,
but don’t count on it.
Count on lying dormant
till the pill wears off,
dreaming of the day
when you will get up,
throw clean water in your face,
put on a new suit of clothes.
 
4.
Salt is the story of life.
It walks with us through every door,
turns every corner we turn.
All our paths are salted,
beginning middle and end.
It seasons us the way
a good tool wears in the hand,
the way our bodies
enter the world every day.
Perhaps because we came from the sea,
it is the taste our bodies make.
Do we weep for our former home?
Isn’t there a life somewhere more mythic
we’d rather be living, the flavor
of which is said to be of the earth?

Steve Godwin is a graphic designer, book artist and poet, with a BA from UNC-Chapel Hill and a BFA from Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, DC. He studied book binding at The Penland School of Craft in western N.C. in 2005. His artist books have been included in exhibitions at Bookworks in Asheville and at The Design Gallery in Burnsville, N.C. Steve was awarded poetry residencies at The Vermont Studio Center in 2006 and 2008. In 2010 he co-published a book of his poems coupled with photographs by Rick Ruggles. Steve currently is working on a collaboration with a photographer focusing on the N.C. Museum of Art.  stvgodwin@gmail.com www.artistbooks.ning.com/profile/SteveGodwin