Cartwheels in the Sun: The Practice of Being Alive
When do you feel most alive?
That might seem a strange question to ask right now, given how difficult and upsetting it is to live under this current regime.
But the awfulness of these times makes that question all the more important.
Feeling fully alive gives us energy to resist. To feel empathy. To create. To deeply appreciate this gorgeous and troubled world.
Feeling alive is not an emotion—it’s a state, which you can experience when you feel joy or anger, sadness or wonder, jealousy or love. I have felt fully alive when:
I felt awe, standing under a dancing sky of northern lights.
I felt grief, holding my brother’s hand while he was dying.
I felt powerful, at seven years old doing cartwheels in the sun.
I felt delight, correctly identifying the song of a Bewick’s Wren.
These moments pierced the veils of numbness that sometimes descend on my life. I don’t want to sleepwalk through my days.
Wild Writing is a practice that wakes us up. When I encourage writers to keep the pen moving, to say yes to whatever arises, I’m guiding them to be present and to express it. Why? This way of writing gives us an opportunity to see more clearly what we think and feel. To learn more about who we are. The practice invites us to show up. Maybe we revisit the same stories again and again because we still need to heal, or maybe we start telling those stories in different ways because we are changing. It’s all welcome around the table. We do not comment or try to fix or soothe each other—we witness each other.
So back to the question, when do you feel most alive? In my classes, I’ve recently used poems with these jump-off lines:
“Be of service to your own
Bright spot on the moon.”
“It all begins with knowing
Nothing lasts forever,
So, you might as well start packing now.
But in the meantime,
Practice being alive…"
Feel free to use any of these lines as prompts and take five or ten minutes and write. Or take a walk and think about where these lines land in you. Our aliveness matters. Because we are here now, and because, as Mary Oliver writes, “it is, a serious thing just to be alive on this fresh morning in the broken world.”
Love,
Dayna
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Writing circles begin again in September! I decided to take summers off after I wrote in one of my circles about the last day of 5th grade, when the bell rang and I ran out on to the playground filled with crazy joy because the whole summer lay ahead, and I thought, yes! Why not!
I will open up registration sometime this summer. I’ll be teaching Tuesdays on Zoom, and in my Bay Area home on Fridays. If you are interested, drop me a line. Classes will fill up. And if we haven’t written together before, let’s connect!
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Oh do you have time
to linger
for just a little while
out of your busy
and very important day
for the goldfinches
that have gathered
in a field of thistles
for a musical battle,
to see who can sing
the highest note,
or the lowest,
or the most expressive of mirth,
or the most tender?
Their strong, blunt beaks
drink the air
as they strive
melodiously
not for your sake
and not for mine
and not for the sake of winning
but for sheer delight and gratitude—
believe us, they say,
it is a serious thing
just to be alive
on this fresh morning
in the broken world.
I beg of you,
do not walk by
without pausing
to attend to this
rather ridiculous performance.
It could mean something.
It could mean everything.
It could be what Rilke meant, when he wrote:
You must change your life.