Assignment 14: The Quiet
Breath, clouds, blue, bird song, galaxies
Hello friends,
Today your assignment is:
Assignment 14: The Quiet
Go outside and lay down in a place where you can look at the sky. If you’re not able to do this, a window will do. Look at the sky. Breathe. Stay there until you have stopped thinking about time.
Recently I was absolutely floored by this image from the European Space Agency’s Euclid, showing: “1000 galaxies belonging to the Perseus Cluster, and more than 100,000 additional galaxies further away in the background, each containing up to hundreds of billions of stars.” Take a few minutes and really look at this:
I think about this image every day and try to comprehend what it shows us. An immensity so profound… I’m mostly just left in blank wonder. My fist-sized brain with all its own microscopic infinities can’t quite put together the implications of these countless points of light. I’m zooming from my human body laying in the sunshine on my back porch surrounded by the sounds of birds and trucks on the nearby highway—to this incomprehensible everything—back down again. Breathing.
In this slingshot I’m reminded of the film created in 1977 by the Eames studio, Powers of Ten. Not so long ago, when we consider that some of the galaxies pictured above “…are so distant that their light has taken 10 billion years to reach us.” (source)
I noticed that many of the assignments that I’ve written here are about shifting your perspective. Assignment 13 asks you to crawl on your hands and knees, observing your world from 2 feet off the ground instead of 5 or 6. Assignment 12 asks you to visualize sound. Assignment 7 asks you to go somewhere new. Assignment 6 to make visible the paths you create in your daily life. Assignment 3 to let your path be determined by birds.
I think so much of creativity is about this perspective shift. The mammal within us creates bubbles of the safe and known, bubbles that can become echo chambers if we are not active in seeking out alternative perspectives. I believe we can find love—compassion—empathy in this shifting. And those, alongside creativity, are qualities we desperately need to foster as a planet. So, breathe under the vast sky and begin.
P.S. May was a quiet month for me on Substack. In April, I wrote to you about my unfolding discovery of likely ADHD (in testing now), and boy howdy—it’s been a doozy. I’ve cancelled MANY things. I’m distinctly aware of the intense consequences of doing one too many things in a day. I’m living small right now. It’s deeply uncomfortable. I’m the kind of person who says YES to everything, and I’m learning how to say NO more often to protect my mind and body.
What’s blooming: prairie coreopsis, spiderwort, showy penstemon. Columbines, wild geranium, and woodland phlox are starting to drop seeds.
Thanks for being here,
Sara
Wonderful
So absolutely beautiful - a galaxy, a star, a flower, a seed, you, me, .....