#21 Re-embodiment

Dear reader, thank you for your precious attention, subscriptions, and support. I hope you find something you like in this new 10-point format experiment!

My energy has been on writing and recording new Mutual Benefit songs at a turtle's pace, preparing for two upcoming shows that haven't been announced yet, teaching creative unblocking (feel free to get in touch!), and visiting the park recovering my innate ability to do nothing.

How are you? Have you made or come across something you'd like to share? I'm genuinely asking.

1) In Byung-Chul Han’s book, The Scent of Time, he describes an incense clock that some Chinese temples utilized to tell time through aroma a millennium ago. It used multiple levels of maze-like indentations loaded with different types of incense to orient the day through smell. 

2) Today was the first morning chilly enough to forgo the shade and seek the sunny side of the street in my gridded Brooklyn neighborhood, creating a new mental map and a slightly different routine in anticipation of the new season.

3) I read a fascinating story about the the African Union’s attempt to get countries to stop using the Mercator Map (the most common 2D depiction of the world) because it distorts land masses to the point that Greenland looks to be the same size as Africa even though it is 14 times smaller. The problem is, since the Earth is an orb, any attempt at 2D depiction leads to some sort of distortion, making the process quite political.

4) My book recommendation for the month would be Is A River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane. The author travels to a cloud forest in Ecuador, an industrial zone in India, and the far north of Canada to link up with activists, many of which are indigenous, fighting to change legal frameworks to give rivers their own set of rights so they can’t be polluted and destroyed. 

5) Some dear friends visited for a week and taught me to become more aware of synchronicities. While listening to new and old music, I randomly heard two songs about watching clouds in a row. The wistful Slow Skies by the Motifs and A Fish Called Wanda by Wao which somehow sounds like how watching clouds in the park feels.

6) Byung-Chul Han refers to smell as the “the scaffolding of memory” and provocatively calls time spent on digital devices “scentless time” due to the fact that it is only visual and auditory in nature. It is time that feels imploded without the foundation for lasting memory to build upon. (Do I agree with this? Do you?)

7) I recently saw the hilarious and deeply trippy new Julian Glander movie Boys Go To Jupiter where the main characters are nihilistic teens in a Florida suburb and the plot revolves around the absurd alienation and exploitation of Uber-like food delivery workers and... a literal alien. 

8) In the movie you see the delivery driver protagonist disconnected from his employer through his phone screen, the orderer of the food disconnected from the place cooking the food, the meal eaten alone. I was reminded of the influential idea of how calling something a commodity can mask the web of human relationships that brings that object to be.

9) I wonder if the many cruel abstractions that happen around us could be noticed and countered with an experience of embodied (as opposed to scentless) time? When I first started practicing Zen a couple years ago I was confused why so much of the practice was focused on the breath and letting thought-chatter dissipate but I’m starting to see that using mindfulness of the body to fully exist in the present is a way to make the world far more inhabited, time more spacious, things more real.

10) In Is A River Alive? I was most inspired by Yuvan Aves in India. In his hometown of Chennai, he was painstakingly working to provide new maps to the city to prove that more land needed to be ecologically protected in a process called counter-mapping. In an area that many others would see as a polluted wasteland, he tells the author "barrenness is a state of mind".

Gratitude Overflow, Jordan

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