Jen Knox's Blog, page 7
January 6, 2025
walking meditation
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“The ground's generosity takes in our compost and grows beauty! Try to be more like the ground.” —Rumi
January 4, 2025
On the strange tower & week 34 of 52
YOU are invited to join me (updated) Feb 1, 2025. I’m offering a Writing and Meditation Live at 9 a.m. ET / 2 p.m. GMT / 6 a.m. PT. RSVP or show up @ Insight Timer. Oh, and if you’ve been practicing the Creative Flourishing meditations, #4 (the final day) might not have found your inbox, but it is here. Okay, story time …
Have you ever had an idea that sounds amazing in your head?
The intentions are solid, the plan is doable, and a few weeks in advance, everything feels right. Then the day comes …
Well, my husband and I drove 11 hours from Ohio to Western Massachusetts to surprise my father shortly after Christmas. I decided to take this lengthy drive since we hadn’t connected at Thanksgiving like usual, and I couldn’t wait.
The pop-in visit was made possible by some co-conspiring with my stepmom. But a week before I planned to go, my kitchen flooded. A few days later, I felt my allergies coming on. Despite it all, this trip was compelling me forward because it was the kind of thing I would not ordinarily do. It was a whim, a bit silly, and undeniably what I’d do if I had 18 weeks to live.
When I arrived with my husband and two dogs, my father was thrilled. He kept saying how shocked he was. I felt good, but I was also starting to feel bad in all new ways. My allergies had morphed into a full-blown cold complete with a stuffed nose and increasing pressure in my cheeks; my body ached and my dogs needed exercise. My dad offered to take me to a park where he said there was a strange old tower and a much shorter walk than we’d ordinarily take.
Strange and cool places are par for the course with my father. He has a knack for finding interesting spots to photograph or sketch (an artist as long as I’ve known him, my dad). I was eager to see it. My delight wilted, however, when we got to the “strange old tower,” my father had talked about. It was a concrete—yes, tower, covered in graffiti and rather difficult to get to with crumbling steps leading the way to a small door at the base of the tower where old liquor bottles were piled up.
“Another side to Scott Tower” m.r. knoxMy entire body ached. My nose was now leaking faster than my kitchen. I leaned against a derogatory piece of concrete, worried I might get my father sick, as he and my husband walked around the tower and took a few minutes to take pictures.
When my dad came back around, he was beaming. I told him I wasn’t impressed by the place but I enjoyed the walk. I also apologized for showing up sick. I needed to go back to take a nap. He nodded and led me and the pups home. Just before my nap, my youngest dog, Potato, vomited her “pup cup” under his kitchen table.
After a short rest, I woke to a ding on my phone with a series of images. I was feeling better—good enough to get dinner—and my father had sent me a few artsy pictures of the tower that isolated the graffitied line “creativity is the gateway to wisdom” (see below) and made the run-down lookout site appear beautiful. “There’s more to Scott Tower than what you see at first glance,” he wrote.
When I was growing up, my father, an artist, always looked for beauty in places that seemed devoid of it. He told me on that trip how incredible it was that I’d come to visit and, sure, I got sick and things didn’t turn out perfect, but he’d never been so delightfully surprised. Despite my hacking and general grossness, he’d seen the effort I put in and my intention as something beautiful.
He’d seen and appreciated that intent over the external circumstances that hit us. It was a good lesson for a woman of action. Effort and positive intention alone can touch a person in a way that no fancy dinner or hike in the woods would’ve made better. All these details added to the memory of the story. I’m glad to have had this short time with my father.
“Another side to Scott Tower” m.r. knoxAYTL:
Create an offering of gratitude for someone who does not expect it, and do it even if—especially if—you’re not sure things will go perfectly.
Writing prompt:
Write about duality. What is the difference between intent, stated intent, and action? Interpret in any genre.
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December 30, 2024
Day 3: Creative Flourish
As we head into the new year in a few days, it might be a good time to pose a simple question that will help us to trust we are moving forward in the right direction. We’ll do just that.
Today's session includes a meditation focused on tapping our sense of self-trust. This will lead to a journaling exercise that will allow you to investigate the process of knowing your next best step.
Photo by Mathew Schwartz on Unsplash
December 29, 2024
Day 2: Impostor Syndrome
Learn to celebrate!
“It’s all about falling in love with yourself and sharing that love with someone who appreciates you, rather than looking for love to compensate for a self-love deficit.” — Eartha Kitt
Sometimes we don't acknowledge our successes or feel we'll be “found out if” anyone looks closely enough. We think we are always "faking it" and never "making it." The truth is that every small and large success should be celebrated fully, and by learning to celebrate, we learn to understand our worth.
As creatives.
As people.
Cheering you on, whether you’re failing up or succeeding.
xo
Photo by Florian Klauer
Resolve to love yourself right now exactly as you are & week 33 of 52
Writing exercise:
Write something totally for yourself, and when you’ve completed it, take a breath, reread it, and toss it out. It'll resurface all the stronger if it’s meant to be shared. I promise.
Photo by Kelly Sikkema
December 28, 2024
Day 1 of 4: Meditations to Flourish
“The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.”
– Michel de Montaigne
Happy New Year, friends!
To bring in 2025, I wanted to offer a four-day meditation program that will accompany my weekly posts. The first session is open to everyone. If you are completing the full program, I recommend practicing at the same time each day and having a notebook handy.
This meditation is centered on creating a foundation of strength and awareness from which you can build a sense of self-trust and self-love. To cultivate awareness, we will use visualization and reflection. The meditation set the stage for the rest of this 4-day journey.
xo
Photo by Natalia Y. If you enjoy what I’m offering here, please consider supporting my work by becoming a paid subscriber. If you cannot afford this but would like access, request it here. If you are a paid subscriber, the next episode will be available next week.
December 22, 2024
On the magnificent and its hiding places & week 32 of 52
On the energy scale, I generally sit on the low side and ride intermittent adrenaline highs till they taper out.
Because I fluctuate between having virtually no energy and feeling the creative charge to write, I often talk myself out of going to things or starting small talk when I could be writing. I need to stay home, I tell myself. I need to spend all my limited energy creating.
"The more you show up, the more the muse shows up." —Isabel Allende
As I write this, my kitchen is sectioned off with a barrier of thick plastic and duct tape. The isolated space contains three industrial fans, a dehumidifier, and a HEPA filter to counteract the demo of my vinyl and moisture in the subfloor.
Oh, and the muse is here with me.
Over the last few days, as a parade of plumbers and insurance people filtered in and out of my house causing varying reactions from Potato and Ahti, I found myself hard-pressed to live in the moment and create joy. Chris was out of town, and I was tired of hearing fans and banging.
It would’ve been easy to think it was all just bad luck. But in the spirit of this AYTL experiment, augmented by a recent podcast interview I hosted with Stoic philosopher William B. Irvine (for the day job), I reframed my thought process to clarify my focus on the ephemeral even more.
As Irvine suggests, acknowledging that all experiences will move and change and, ultimately, cease to exist, can be freeing. This means treating every encounter (as I can remember to do so) as though it were the last time.
Of course, this is the point of the year-to-live experiment, only magnified. And it’s about more than living in the moment. It’s about exploring the moment.
“Should you shield the canyons from the windstorms you would never see the true beauty of their carvings.” ― Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
So I did all I could think to do. I began asking questions about the plumbing, the trade, the odd things plumbers see on the job, and what everyone liked to read. I heard some great stories and gained insights, including the way one master plumber characterizes various customers by profession (educators generally follow instructions and leave equipment alone, so I was immediately liked; doctors and engineers tend to move the equipment, thereby slowing the mitigation process; lawyers and salespeople are the best with insurance companies).
I enjoyed hearing these stories, and while the fans whirred in my house and Potato howled at various workers, some of whom began to howl back when they got used to her, I began to find it all rather amusing. I told myself that the whirring was quite similar to white noise, which I claimed to some agreement when teaching a qigong session with it in the backdrop on Insight Timer.
In An Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron suggested taking ourselves on artist dates for a reason—she wanted to break us from our routines.
A plumbing issue can offer just as much of the unexpected as a trip to a new cafe or a local play—if only we had the right mindset. Exploring the world with a curious eye, no matter the view is to find the spectacular: the stories that live everywhere around us.
As artists, we don’t have to do anything crazy. Sometimes we can move the tiniest rock and find some form of ignorance waiting to be addressed. For instance, how much do we take for granted when we turn on the faucet?
So if you have 20 weeks to live and a parade of people in a small home, why not get to know some of them? Everyone has a story, after all. Most have quite a few, but not many people ask.
So this week, I suppose my lesson was to inquire about something that could otherwise be seen as a problem. After all, there is alchemy in the exploration of the everyday.
Writing prompt : Write about missed connections or the story that goes unshared due to inconvenience.AYTL prompt: Do the thing you’d otherwise talk yourself out of. Show up with curiosity this week, and see what happens. If you don’t have any invitations or unlikely events, make one for yourself. Show up in places and spaces you’ve rarely been.
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December 15, 2024
On creative focus & week 31 of 52
“To understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole.” —Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
A tiny bit.
There is nothing like the struggle to recreate a bowl of fruit with heavy oil paints as part of a community center art class in Newark, Ohio. After twenty minutes, I started watching the clock. Every additional paint stroke made my situation worse.
Even though I come from a family of artists, I never found myself naturally inclined to draw or paint anything that resembled reality. I’d occasionally have fun throwing paint on canvas in various patterns and positions to see what would happen. Still, when trying to recreate something intricate like a human hand or a fruit bowl, I usually just found myself frustrated.
I felt the same sense of defeat creeping up at this art class/date with my husband. My apple looked like a deflated dog toy. My bowl was too big, and my background was all odd angles and uneven lines.
The teacher, who I hadn’t thought much of, said, “Jen, here, let me show you something.” She told me to cut a small hole in the middle of a piece of paper. She then asked me to look through that tiny hole and recreate what I saw. Move it slightly, she said, and repeat.
In other words, she helped me to focus. It was a seminal moment.
When attempting to recreate or fully understand what I saw, I was too busy looking at the big picture (a proclivity for many writers) and trying to process all aspects of an image at once.
This habit has shown up in my writing as well. And it seems to be a crippling force that arrives with the onslaught of information constantly coming at us from our online haunts. We micro-dose news and trade pseudo-psychological diagnoses with social media friends. We worry over political decisions and wars.
When we sit down to write—or do anything some days—it’s easy to feel the head spin to the point of intellectual dizziness. We’re overwhelmed by noise, and we might benefit more than we can imagine by doing something as simple as narrowing input and looking at one aspect at a time.
AYTL exercise: Close your eyes for a few seconds and take a deep breath while you tune in to the sounds around you. When you open your eyes again, focus on one thing—whatever is right in front of you. Do this once daily, and see if it helps slow down your mind. If you’re like me, consider doing the digital version by keeping only one tab open at a time (*gasp*, I know).
Writing exercise: Revise an older piece of fiction or an older poem by taking one line and expanding it into a piece of its own.
December 12, 2024
December 8, 2024
On the seven (7) thoughts revisited & week 30 of 52
We are always changing. Inside, we’re always recalibrating, finding a slightly different balance point as our bodies regenerate one cell at a time. As we age, the way we see the world is in flux.
Let’s do a thought experiment.
Where were you and what did you look like this time last year? What did you think about most, and why?
Around this time last year, I wanted to complete a new writing project after my essay collection. Specifically, I wanted to create something influenced by vision and presence rather than memory (forward momentum, not backward). And I wondered if the tone of my writing voice would still resonate if I changed course.
I wrote here about John O’Donohue’s concept of the 7 thoughts and shared a few of my own. Rereading them just now brought me back and made me realize how different I am today. Just a year removed.
As O’Donohue said, our thoughts exist in the darkness, where no one else can see. Our “doing” or accomplishments are only a fraction of who we are and often have little to do with our artistic expression.
What lives behind the silence, behind the polite smile, is what feeds our art. And what’s living there sure can change.
If you were with me here on the blog last year, let’s do this again. If you weren’t, here’s some background: O'Donohue suggested challenging ourselves to think about the 7 thoughts that dominate our inner lives. A year ago, I asked … If there are 7 dominant thoughts, and we change them, will that change our work [as writers]?
So take a moment and ask yourself what 7 thoughts dominate your inner landscape right now.
A year ago, I thought about the beauty of small moments, the discomfort of being copied as a writer and not being given credit, the journey of my life and whether I’d leave anything of value, and how I needed to show more gratitude. In my private journals, I realized some of my regular thoughts were quite negative. I found worry and pain in the messaging. I doubt this is unique.
A year later, there’s still a mix. Here are my dominate thoughts in November 2024:
I'm grateful.
I need to relax.
Teaching is the most rewarding thing I've ever done. I hope I do it well [today, this week, this workshop].
Suffering connects us, but is it necessary? Is that why all this is happening?
Honest words will be rarer and all the more precious each day.
Reach out more to the people I love.
I should probably be writing, but I think I’ll walk the dogs first.
So much of what sustains our mental space daily can be encapsulated in 7 or so recurring thoughts. Maybe more or fewer, but if you can distill things down to 7, it’s a self-study practice like no other I’ve done.
It allows us to ask ourselves where we can benefit from change. The call to action is that our most transcendent capabilities lie within our projection of the world.
When we are stagnant or carry forward certain thought patterns, it might be because we haven’t yet fully explored what’s behind them. I truly believe that repeating ideas is not a mental illness but a mental technique. We repeat ideas to lessen their power over us.
AYTL exercise: What are your 7 thoughts now, and what do you most want to create? What would you like these thoughts to be? Keep them somewhere safe, and revisit them toward the end of 2025.
Writing prompt: Write a poem that leverages these 7 thoughts and distills each into a unique image.
I would love to know what came up for you. If you feel safe to do so, share one or two below.
