Friends,
Do you remember the beloved country of your own body? I certainly have struggled to over the years, but I’m trying to now. That’s one of the durable gifts of art and poetry and music: to lead us back into our own lives, to ground us, to remind us of our breathing bodies. The writer Hallie Waugh has been exploring these topics in her writing and her recent interview series on embodiment and the arts.
I was honored to participate in her “Sensory Series.” You can read some of the conversation below, and head over to her newsletter Weekend Exhale to watch the whole thing.
Hallie writes meditative essays and poetry about embodiment, faith, and creativity—in other words, the things that help us stay human. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Seattle Pacific, and her poetry and essays have been published in or are forthcoming from New York Quarterly, Windhover, Ekstasis, Fathom, Mom Egg Review, and Motherwell. You can connect with her on Substack or Instagram.
Take care,
Michael
How do the senses deepen and expand our art? Our attention? In Sensory Series—conversations with creatives about the body—we sit with and meander among these sorts of questions. You can watch this interview in full on Weekend Exhale—a monthly newsletter exploring the creative margins of writing, motherhood, and embodied attention:
Hallie: You write a lot about poetry in your Still Life letters. You’re sourcing poems a lot, and I’d like to hear a little bit about that: how poetry is embodied, and about your own relationship to poems.
Michael: First, I love that poem you shared. Could you send it to me afterwards? I would love to really reflect more on those lines (see “Love Letter” below). The first line that stuck out to me is “the feel of sunlight”—not something you only see, but you actually get the feeling of it, the warmth of it on your body. It brought to mind an early childhood memory of honeysuckle. I remember being in kindergarten in Nashville, running out to the edge of the playground by the fences, finding honeysuckle and taking the little droplets of honey out of the flowers.
And then that line “do you remember the beloved country of your body”...Well, I have not. I've done a very bad job over the years of attending to my own body. There's a great Theodore Roetke line in his poem “The Manifestation” where he says “we come to something without knowing why.” For me, I think poems are always like a few steps ahead of me. I don't always know why I'm drawn to the poem, but that work of sitting with the language, the imagery of it, the sound of it, the feeling of it.
Jane Hirshfield has been a favorite of mine for a long time. And I don't understand some of her poems at first, but that’s the joy. Let's sit with that lack of understanding and see where it goes, see where it takes us. So poems have been a way to try to remember and recover that “beloved country of the body,” to recover a more sensory and embodied way of living in the world that for many years I’ve struggled to find.
I think I started living in my head at a very early age, and even though I’m going to the gym now and learning more about how to be embodied, my brain is still the strongest muscle of my body, you know? But I’m not just my brain. So I like how poetry slows us down, helps us remember with specificity where we are in the world, where other people are in the world, and that space that we share.
Hallie: I absolutely relate, and I think that’s why I'm so drawn to writing and practices around the body. Because it hasn't been first nature for me. Historically, I have lived in the country of my mind or in religious or spiritual realms—in the country of the spirit, where I’ve tried to get above and beyond my body. To supersede it, to view my body as this thing that I have to control or ignore so that I can be more spiritual or a more mentally sound person. But of course you can't really do that forever. The body needs to be attended to, and it will make itself known.
Michael: Yes, that's very true. I have a teacher who talks about “spiritual bypassing,” how we can think deep thoughts but deeply miss the point. As someone who studied art in seminary, I was reading a lot of stuff, but it was often staying at the level of the intellect. At the same time, I was also experiencing a lot of pain in my body, and I was not even fully aware of it until it made itself known. And that's true even now.
I'm going to a meditation center about once a week, and every time I sit, I can start feeling tears starting to rise. I can start to feel this tension and clenching in my body that I didn't know was there. And that's very valuable bodily knowledge. There’s a certain kind of wisdom that I've ignored for a very long time at the expense of living a smaller life. That’s what living in our heads is: a smaller life. And so yes, poems and paintings and theater and film and any of the arts—when it’s good, it draws us back into the world in a fuller, more embodied way. I’m always looking for that kind of work, you know?
Hallie: Yes, I agree. And I think one of the ways poems feel more embodied to me is because it has that same kind of space of stillness. The posture I take if I'm meditating is a very similar posture if I'm reading a poem. I’m being still and open, and I'm receptive to the input of the words on the page and also to what my own body and my surroundings are telling me. I was just speaking with a friend recently about why we keep writing, and for her it was the chance to live in a fantasy world.
But then that kind of writing can lead to staying in your head. What we’re talking about is art that brings you back further into your life. When I'm writing, it makes me more receptive to the life around me and in my own body than I otherwise would. Otherwise I can become a productivity machine. My niece calls it “tippy tapping at the email factory.” I can become that, but the work of creativity and engaging art can bring us back into our lives.
Michael: Yes, that’s true–if the creative practice or artwork we’re exploring points in that direction. There’s this dynamic interpretive loop that can happen. We read something, it informs our lives, then we live our lives, and then we return to reading. So we're in a dialogue that has a kind of a spiraling quality to it, but there's plenty of times where that loop turns inward instead of outward. I remember years ago trying to cram the abstract language of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets into pop songs I was writing. It wasn’t working! Why? Because that dynamic loop was spiraling into abstraction, into my own head.
And so I think that art and poetry and music and all that stuff that we humans make amplify our lives, but it’s important for us to take a step back and ask ourselves—amplifying in what direction? Here’s another example: for a long time, I was really into watching lots of zombie shows. Of course, that was amplifying my anxieties and my fears. I started looking around the corner and looking over my shoulder and feeling xenophobic. Of course there's not going to be a zombie around the corner. But then in the arts, you're rehearsing your life, and then you take that out into the world. Rehearse embodiment, you’ll be more embodied. Rehearse anxiety and fear, and you’ll be more anxious and fearful. I realized I should probably stop watching so much of this stuff—it wasn’t good for my spirit. It's not good to over-index on fear; it’s not fully accurate to how the world actually is. So I'm trying to go toward this other direction instead, you know?
Hallie: That's a really important distinction. Do you remember when the show Black Mirror was all the rage? I loved it, but then it was also tapping into some of my most existential fears—I had to stop watching it. It was too close to home. My brain can spiral too, taking a thing and exaggerating it. I don't need that reflected back to me.
Michael: Yes, I do enough of that reflection myself, thank you very much. I'm doing a very good job spiraling on my own, and I don't need help!
Hallie: That's helpful to think about which direction the art points toward. Are there artists that you return to because they point you toward the world in a more healthy way?
Michael: The first that comes to mind (and Lindsey will laugh if she hears this since I mention this artist so much) is Corita Kent. She’s an artist I’ve really been obsessed with for a long time. For years I was studying art in seminary, reading books and learning from professors going to conferences around the globe, and it dawned on me: wait, there are galleries…..here in Los Angeles. I know it sounds silly, but I realized “the arts” weren’t only in some far off place or in history books. The arts are a human thing happening here and now, with people and places and histories and institutions.
So there was a museum across the street, and I discovered an exhibition of Corita Kent’s work. She was a nun and teacher working in the 60s who got inspired by pop art and Andy Warhol’s work in particular. She took a detour away from liturgical art and started making art that was playful and embodied and more about enticing people to look at the world in a new way. She’s always inspired me with that kind of generosity.
And I think that’s the throughline—the artists and poets and writers I really like have that kind of generosity about them. A fullness to their life and work that I want too.
Here’s another example. I remember at my small Christian college in Arkansas, the poet Naomi Shihab Nye came and did a reading. She was reading poems about her own background and her own Muslim experience. The room was electric with her presence, and we all aligned around the poems she was reading. Everyone’s presence was available, and her presence was available. And we were all in this room together and you could just feel the energy of it. She was so generous. I talked to her afterwards, and she said earlier in the afternoon she walked the whole two miles from a Walmart to the campus, just taking notes and talking to people along the way. I thought, “What is this? What does she have? How is she this way? I want that, and I want to be that way, too.” So that's another person that comes to mind.
Back to Jane Hirshfield, she was an early exposure to me of poetry and spirituality being part of the same exploration. She was deeply involved in the beginning of Zen Buddhist practice in the 60s in America, and she spent many years at Tassajara Monastery. She's not writing poems about the Buddha as subject matter—she's writing poems that are deeply mindful and trying to engage the world with as few filters as possible. And so her spiritual practice and her creative practice are woven together into the same thing. I find that really compelling.
And then I was listening to Woodland, the new album from Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. It has some gorgeous plaintive songs. You hear that music and you can feel their longing for a better world, for another time when we traded so much of our lives for shallow things in the present. There's some nostalgia and some yearning and wisdom in those songs that compass me. And then there’s R.A.P. Ferreira, a hip-hop artist I’m really into. He’s a Nashville-based rapper and entrepreneur, and he started a rap-only vinyl store. I've just been so impressed with all of it. Everything I've learned about him, the way his lyrics stretch me. It's a listening experience I didn't really have growing up, and it’s like he’s enticing me to grow into a direction that I've not been before. So I really like his work.
[...]
Hallie: Is there anything else that you want to add to our conversation? Anything you’re working on or excited about as we finish?
Michael: Yes. About a year ago, I realized that I had spent many years trying to solve a problem that wasn't mine to solve, to try to resolve the tensions that I felt inside me. My friends and I grew up at the intersections of art and church, two worlds that don’t always intersect well now. For years I’ve thought, “if I just really put my mind to it and read enough and write enough, then we can solve this problem.” I felt like both spaces would benefit from one another, and I was just going to write my way towards solving this. I wrote my way into a lot of burnout, and I’m learning this is not my problem to solve.
As writers, as creative people, as artists, as leaders, it can be very easy to feel responsible for wanting the world to experience the same things we're experiencing. Like, why would they not listen to this album? Like, why would they not read this book? Why would they not listen to this poem? Why are there only 10 people at this author’s reading? There should be thousands! It can be really easy to get caught up in this, but it’s the wrong approach, since it’s not our responsibility to fix anything. That has been really freeing for me. What that has meant is I don't have to try and prove to anyone that a creative life and a spiritual life can be the same thing. I can just live my life and invite people into it. That’s it.
Nothing has to be “solved,” and contradictory things can just coexist. The Buddhist wisdom I'm reading in Thich Nhat Hanh's books and Jane Hirshfield’s poetry can coexist with the Catholic art of Corita Kent. The distance between Folk music and rap music and genres I’ve never listened to before don’t need to be “solved.”
I guess what I'm trying to get at is this: If you’ve made it this far in a conversation, then you obviously really care about the arts and thinking deeply and being more embodied. I just want all of us to have a little more freedom and maybe relinquish a little bit of that need to feel like we have to control the outcome of what we make or share. We can trust these beautiful and vulnerable and weak and hidden things in the corners of life, and that’s enough. They're there for a reason, let's just keep exploring those things and finding them and sharing them with one another, okay?
“Love Letter” by Julie Sumner Do you remember the beloved country of your own body? The one even now rising and falling dutifully as you sit and stare at this screen? How kind your lungs, soldiering on in silence, your sturdy spine, stoic as an oak tree grown from your chair. Do you recall how you belong to another world, beyond this glass rectangle? The world of hot asphalt, cool earth, exhaust fumes, honeysuckle, the world full of the feel of sunlight like a waterfall as it pours over your hair, your head, your shoulders, a warmth wild and shining and free.
Thanks to Hallie for gathering this week’s links:
Maria Popova’s book, The Universe in Verse, released this week
Benjamin Zander on the emotional power of classical music
Sending appreciation for the conversation. It's where my heart and soul lives as a body intellectual. Please consider honoring Earth life by remembering that we do not have bodies. We are bodies. English language talks about body as a thing. The body, My body. It's a language of separation. Every bit of us is physical- mind head constructs imagination. Even soul on earth-- embodied. Please consider that the fear of embodying fully is largely created by the anti-body wisdom we inherited and that the joy of creative, contribution, play and rest (CPR) is radically fun.