THE BEAUTY OF IMPERMANENCE

VOL.15

A deeper look at what it means to be present.

Over the last few days, I've kind of been thinking of the idea of presence. This is an idea that comes up within my life, within my relationships; it is also one of the pillars of The Ritual: this idea of cultivating presence in order to allow for a deeper embodiment because we can only really move on from our stories if we’re embodied, only then can we become empowered and be free from it. The Awaken by the Ritual Course (which is currently getting a facelift! Stay tuned!) is literally constructed to awaken you to who you are through the art of presence and acceptance.

It is now commonplace to remove oneself from our day to day and to invest ourselves in an immersion in which we learn and take in practices and discover the foundations that allow us to become more embodied and present. With the overstimulation we are currently living amongst, it’s amazing that we can delve into a journey and experience something collectively, but that journey that we choose to experience is not everyday life. What I mean to say is that everyday life is not an immersion or journey. Beyond the space and time we take to meet ourselves and others like us, we have a different, less controlled life on the outside where we have responsibilities: we have to get back to work, we have to get back to family, if you’re a parent, we have to get back to raising our children… we have to get back to all the things that we have to do every day – we have to get back to the mundane, the regular. Because life itself is an immersion and a journey.

Contrary to what you might think by the immersions that I create and the teachings that I share, I am not in a complete state of presence at every second of every day – that’s just not humanly possible. You know, sometimes a girl needs to sit down and fucking dream! Sometimes you need to watch a Netflix series and numb out! There is nothing wrong with that. It’s when we do these things every day that it becomes an issue. And so, while it might be the case that there are times I just need to chill the fuck out, other days (when I cannot permit it) there are other ways in which I practise what I like to call a return to sacred. And the way I like to return to sacred is in the way I curate my surroundings.

I recently purchased a new desk because I didn't want to work at the standing desk that is in my Atelier. I didn’t want to be amongst my production and be surrounded by boxes of glass jars and labels and packaging. I wanted to be able to see something beautiful and have sculptures around me without it being chaos. So, I found a new desk that was affordable and sleek and could fit in the middle of the room. And I’ve done this same thing with almost every room of my house. I’ve always lived this way. With children, of course, it can become quite difficult because while I like things to be a certain way there’s clutter from toys and things. Truthfully, while they’re away at school, I like to go into my children's wardrobes and rearrange things – I space out the coat hangers (yes, I'm one of those people) and move things around so that it looks nice.

The reason that I curate my home and my surroundings is to limit clutter. I need things to feel clear. And it has affected my style of parenting. It means that the children have toys, and they have things, but they don't have crates of them. They have a selection of beautiful things that would last a lifetime, made of natural materials, except for the connetix, that is the only thing that they have that is plastic and this is prompted less from an environmental point of view and more from a tactile point of view. For me, it’s always been more important to consider how something feels in my hand.

I am looking at this lovely Figuier Diptyque candle that my friend from France recently gifted me and if I hold it in my hand, it feels heavy; the glass is heavy. I like things to have weight and density to them. And if you think about how I often say that the densest part of ourselves is our bodies, that's the bit that we can see, we must consider too that there is also so much that we can't see because it isn't held together with cells and atoms and things like that. Rather it’s in the energy realm. When you think of objects like wood, stone, cottons, linens and how much heavier they are than polyesters or even a tree branch or my stack of moleskins sitting here beside me, or the pen that I write with… all these things have a weight to them. And that weight, invokes that weighted feeling within me, and not in a dark night of the soul way but rather a presence. I take a breath, roll my shoulders back, sit up in my chair and feel the sheepskin that I am sitting on top of all reminding me of the weight of my body and the stillness within that weight and that heaviness pulling me back into the earth. Therefore, the way that I curate my space, or the objects that I procure (my new favourite word, lately) are all moments and invitations to be mindful and present.

I really have so much reverence for Japanese culture. I have never been to Japan; I was going to move there when I was younger, but I went to London instead. In Japanese culture, they have this word wabi sabi and it’s completely untranslatable, but it refers to the subtleties of natural beauty, the subdued natural world around you. And in my mind, I would say that it’s like seeing through the eyes of austerity. So, if you were to break this down in a sentence it would be that beauty stems from the passing of time. We have busy, hectic crazy lives (I get it I know I have 40 to 50 hours of work to do every week in only 3 hours of every day -- it's overwhelming and it's challenging at the best of times) coupled with the rising cost of living in a lot of countries (in Australia this has been felt drastically) and we’re still having to keep up in order to be kept up.

And as much as I like things to look a certain way, it would be impossible to maintain a home to look like an IKEA showroom (as fun as that would be – my children are obsessed with IKEA. We hardly go there but they love it!) or a Crate&Barrel showroom. That’s not life. Life isn't about lots of semi affordable cushions being thrown onto a couch that stay looking that way. Things need to be lived in, they need to have, as the wabi sabi word implies, this beauty that comes from the passing of time as objects that stand still.

One of the things that I really would love to learn in this life is the art of bonsai. I love bonsais and for me, it's not just how the bonsai looks but rather the care that's taken into caring for it and how within this bonsai, especially if it's a deciduous tree, you can see the seasons pass through it and it’s happening right before your eyes. For me, through the way that I set up my house and the plants that I put in my garden, the bonsai would be a beautiful, tangible way to be reminded of that passing of time. I imagine that when I am busy, I would turn to face this bonsai and notice one leaf drop over the unfolding of time, over several days until there are only branches remaining. I would then take some time to trim those branches and trust that I'm not going to over prune them, that it will bloom again. It is a highly fragile, little eco system that’s just for me. It would become a kind of exploration of the psyche.

This is just one of many practices that I admire within Japanese culture. There is a slowness in the articulation of movements and this preciseness that I find so beautiful and it's something that I've been trying to apply to my life for a long time. My husband is trained as an architectural designer and both he and I have thought about the way the cultivation of spaces can make you feel. A few years ago, while I was pregnant with my youngest, I was helping him, and we were working together designing spaces and I would talk to him and guide him about the feelings that I would want to walk in from the door to another room and how I would want those to guide me through an experience. A kind of gentle ushering, leading from one space into another despite the walls and doors.

If you think of words like impermanent, imperfect and incomplete they imply the beauty that is the passing of time. For example, the wall that I'm looking at right now is the one I painted two days ago so that it would feel fresh and so that it would be nice for me to sit here. And to my right there’s these French doors that need to have their paint stripped off them because they're antique but I can see the silky oak creeping through, which has this beautiful, flickered texture to it. So, before there is a wall of incompleteness, of something being almost done. Impermanent, imperfect, and incomplete. These would allow us to think about the way we want to see beauty in the world. Because things that are perfect, complete, and permanent aren’t ever really all those things combined. Even these beautiful statues that you find in museums in Italy are not perfect; they are crumbling and changing over the decades and time in the same way that nature is always changing through the seasons.

As you might know from my most recent relaunch of Moon Mail, I prefer to focus on what's happening throughout the seasons. In many ways, I had to re-evaluate how the offering was being delivered and received and to consider how what I was sharing wasn't what I was doing in my own life anymore. It was outdated for me, and I had to accept that it wasn't permanent and that it needed to change. Just like those rooms, I was wanting to be ushered to the next chapter.

I often find myself thinking about this idea of imperfection, impermanence, incompleteness around social media. I still often must remind myself of the impermanence of social media and it took me a long time to realise that it doesn’t have to be perfect, or complete. And I share what I share and do what I do, and I keep going and curating with this idea in mind. Because without it, I fall into the trap of comparison, of wondering why I don’t appear to be receiving the same support I see other people receiving. I can often shed a lot of tears from the fact that I feel invisible doing what I do, wondering if perhaps what I share doesn’t have value or doesn’t resonate with people because I am not skinny enough or young enough or as willing to share every part of my waking life through short videos. All these numerated thoughts that can easily consume my mind on a bad day.

And yet through it all, through this impermanent and fleeting way of communicating (that further aggravates my trust issues because as a child, my mother shamed and ridiculed me and caused me a lot of confusion and trust issues within myself and within my relationships with others), I find solace in acknowledging the collection of feelings that I place in the things that we collect around us. And I am reminded through the density of my body and everything that it has endured and overcome - it makes the heaviness of the heart feel light. It allows me to pay attention to what's happening, and this is what the practice of presence does. When you are feeling the heaviness of your body and you're feeling something tactile, when you can feel the weight of objects it's like you’re feeling the weight of yourself. And when that happens, somehow the heart is lifted, it doesn’t feel as heavy. I feel rooted and I feel grounded in my existence. And I don't feel emptiness anymore and I don't feel suffering anymore. This presence from acknowledging the densest things around me keeps me on Earth, it keeps me out of my head where I would otherwise create stories from other people’s actions. It allows me to understand that any exchange I have with someone whether online or in person is incomplete, but I am not going to let my mind play with that. Rather, it becomes an invitation to connect with my intuition. We are governed so much by wanting to please, by wanting to be accepted, to be seen, to be heard, to be valued that we don't take a step back and allow our intuition to just step in.

We are governed so much by wanting to please, by wanting to be accepted, to be seen, to be heard, to be valued that we don't take a step back and allow our intuition to just step in.

So, this presence that we can cultivate through the objects that we surround ourselves with, through the density that we observe and the feelings that they evoke for us, allows us to live more calmly, more mindfully because the way that we design our outside space changes and shifts our inside space. Our personal outside landscape governs the inside landscape.

Alternatively, we have a culture that loves to accumulate an abundance of objects when really, what the mind and the heart want is simplicity and meaning: meaning where we live, where we work, where we explore and play. This word beauty that I talk about and share because it’s the essence of what I do has nothing to do with products. It is instead about the beauty in everyday things. I often ask myself how I can make something beautiful with what I have right now. It might be a feeling, it might be a state of mind, it might literally be organising yours or your children’s things, it might be making a beautiful drink for yourself or a meal, a hug; it might be getting some books (cookbooks, design books, any kind of book really). Having something natural without pretence, creating something beautiful through the eyes of grace and freedom and tranquillity and simplicity.

This week, I invite you to think a little further about how you can simplify the life around you so that you in turn simplify the life within you. How you can move towards an abundant life from minimal, simple, graceful moments in time.

As always, thank you for being here.

So much love,

Brooke xx