Hi readers —
In truth: I didn’t have much planned for this newsletter until this very morning. In the aim of committing to my READERS <3 and also practicing a more drafty type of existence (as opposed to perfectionism) it is pretty much unedited and was written in one sitting. With that in mind, please excuse any errors or lack of conclusion.
This month I didn’t read all that much and only shared one short piece to the blog (also written in one sitting, also still unedited….)
From a productivity perspective, my time has crumbled into segments of disuse, but from a summer vacation perspective, I am happy to report that it was a great month.
I’ve been reflecting a lot on the concept of a knowing-feeling that arises as a feeling in the body, leading one to an answer, or something that feels right. Some call it intuition.
When I personally experience this feeling, I really trust it. Historically it has been pretty helpful for me. As a person has always struggled with indecision and anxiety, I am in a more relaxed flow-state when I’m able to surrender my own rational choice and let my body decide. Often it is simple, what do I want to do tonight, for example, or what do I need to prioritize working on?
I’m sure you know what I’m getting at without me having to describe it—and I’m sure it is different for everyone—but sometimes it feels immediate: a warmness or indication towards one thing over another that might arise feelings of tightness in your stomach or throat. Sometimes it takes more time, with discernment or quiet reflection to reach. With internal space, there’s room for something to bubble up and reveal itself.
I think is as simple as requiring a change in perspective, or a small surrender of your mind’s control, a moment out of your regular brain and into a quieter one.
In the book How God Becomes Real, religious scholar and anthropologist T.M. Luhermann strives to understand how Christians believe prayer to actually be effective, and how therefore it sometimes is.
“This feeling of realness is facilitated not only by absorption (an experiential orientation toward inner and outer sensation) but by the way people imagine the relationship between inner and outer.”
He argues that prayer requires a reorienting of the attention towards a place of quiet absorption, where regular rational thought is put aside and we are more conscious of our being on a spiritual and physical level. Luhrmann’s research looks specifically at Evangelical Christian prayer, but this state is also be achieved through meditation, silent worship, mindfulness, or other more extreme spiritual examples.
These more extreme examples were in my mind after listening to three episodes of the Otherworld podcast yesterday. As recommended by a friend, two were interviews with the clairvoyant Wendy Tividad and the third was an interview with spiritual artist Gabi Abrão, each of which touched on this abstract notion of tapping in. For Wendy, this was more of an external sensation, connecting to the light of the universe, which would deliver messages through her body in a process she referred to as “deep trance channeling.” For Gabi it seems more intuitively or internally based, resulting in achieving astral projections and successfully casting spells.
This all sounds kind of hokey, but hearing it firsthand as a personal experience from these interview subjects, it sounds pretty real. The podcast host, Jack Wagner, is also a disbeliever, and discusses an actual study by the CIA in 1983 that describes how this sort of knowing is scientifically is actually based on a higher frequency of vibration (and how it could be learned by government officials to spy on the Soviet Union). Wagner concludes, with his Harvard PhD friend, that these higher vibrations are scientifically true, and his interviewees are likely actually sensing these higher vibrations in the universe. It is a state that can be reached, but also doesn’t need to be so intensely experienced.
From an architectural angle, it is like leaving the windows open in the front and the back of your home, and standing in the center of it and being able to feel the breeze passing through. Maybe there is a smell on the breeze and you can pick it up.
Like this breeze through our home, there are things that move through us, can give us signals and messages if we are open to feeling the breeze in the first place.
We may not want to feel this breeze all the time, we may need to focus on our work, or take care of our responsibilities, or just hand out with our friends — we can always close a window. The windows can be opened sometimes, when we want to experience that feeling, when we want to not feel stale in our homes or our lives or our minds. It feels good to surrender sometimes, but all the time could be far too much, taking you away from real life, real things.
Last night I finished the book Lolly Willowes: Or the Loving Huntsman, about a woman in the 1920s who rejects the place society has given her and isolates in the country side. Throughout the book, Laura’s imagination and intuition serve as the plot driver of her story— for example, when her senses transport her from a flower shop in London to a sweet smelling garden in the country side, she realizes in an instant how trapped she had been in her brother’s home for so many years and decides at once to move to the town where the flowers from the shop had been picked.
Laura’s sensitivity is heightened even more after her move to a rural village. Feeling led to discard a map she once used down a well, Laura spends her days on long and winding walks, and becomes highly attuned to her environment:
“She sockets herself in woodland. ‘This was her domain.’ The domain, furthermore, is as much network as conservation zone.’ She laid her cheek against a tree and shut her eyes to listen. She expected to hear the tree drumming like a telegraph pole.’ She wants signals as much as sensations. The ‘far-off pulsation’ of a goods train labouring up an incline – another drumbeat – seems to ‘inform’ rather than wash over her, as though sending a message. She is now so fully in circuit with this environment that her mood changes once the train has reached the top of the incline and the drumbeat modulates. The red on the map – a diagram of a system of communication – matters almost as much as the green.”
From a review in the London Review of Books by David Trotter
(I’m about to spoil the end a little bit, but I absolutely still recommend you read this book and the review linked above for some pulpy 1920s lesbian drama of the author.)
Laura’s connection with the sensations in her environment ultimately lead her to realize she is in communion with the Devil. She later connects all these moments of sensation in the woods with the Devil speaking to and taking ownership of her, which ultimately frees her:
“A closer darkness upon her slumber, a deeper voice in the murmuring leaves overhead—that would be all she would know of his undesiring and unjudging gaze, his satisfied but profoundly indifferent ownership.”
I loved this twist because it read so similarly to Christian accounts of god or Jesus, and this sense of freedom in trusting oneself over to another entity that can protect and guide you. In Laura’s case, the devil. In the spiritualists case, the light of the universe. Maybe it doesn’t matter what it is we’re attuned to, but that we each have this power, through our senses, to trust and believe in nonetheless.
I love to think how every religious or spiritual tradition has their own version of reaching this sense of knowing within, and it invites me further contemplate my own understanding of intuition and this state of receiving.
It is state of surrender, of checking in with the self, or the higher self, or god, or the devil, or whatever non-physical entity I may trust with my life, something I want to believe has more agency than I have access to in this earthly realm. So I wonder:
How can we be open to things coming through us? What can I know? Do we always need to listen? Are they sent from one source? Does it even matter the source?
Okay, well, just some contemplations on a Monday for you. Didn’t see this getting so abstract, but here we are!
You can expect more on architecture and design in August.
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That’s all for now. Until next month!
XO
Nora