Look Closer

musings on intuition and presence

Hello friends. I am returning to you from a lovely couple of weeks of spending time with my family. First my daughter and I traveled to the tippy top of Michigan to see my mom for her 81st birthday. To have that many days with my daughter by my side is about my favourite thing, and then to see family as well? It’s like winning the lottery. We stayed with my brother and his family and just had the most wonderful time all together.

Just a few days after we arrived home, we welcomed my dad and step-mom who flew in from Texas for my 62nd birthday. We have just finished the week with them and had such a marvellous time. How special to spend so much time with my daughter, see both of my parents, my brother, sister-in-law and niece within a couple weeks time. This so rarely happens, and I feel incredibly lucky.

Now it’s back to normal, and normal is pretty wonderful, too, all things considered. I am still struggling with pain and health issues, trying to get medications straightened out and finding my way into more ease with this other new normal of chronic pain. With the occasional help of prednisone, I am having more good days than bad days and for that I am grateful, and hopeful with some new treatments to move away from the steroids, beginning this week. All in all, friends, there are glimmers. Oh! My notebook has been plumping up nicely the past few days, too. That is always a positive sign, and I want to share some of it with you here, today. I hope you don’t mind a chatty offering.

I have been musing about intuition not as certainty, but as a kind of seeing that happens before language arrives. It’s more like a quieter form of knowing, not dramatic or mystical in the way people often mean it. I feel like it’s more like the way a deer pauses in the woods and lifts its head toward something almost imperceptible, the body noticing before the mind understands.

As I often do, I pulled three tarot cards the other morning as an experiment, though perhaps experiment is the wrong word. It felt more like placing a few stones in a circle and waiting to see what appeared before me. My friend Janet sent me a very special deck recently, and I have been finding it such a good companion when I need to explore my thoughts a bit further.

The first card was the Nine of Air. It shows a pale cat walking forward through darkness, alert and deliberate. Serendipitously, the word Intuition is actually written on the card. The image had me thinking about how cats move through darkness without hesitation. They don’t need the lights turned on before taking the next step, but trust their senses enough to continue. As someone who has lived with cats for her entire life, I’ve seen it, and I envy it sometimes, too.

There have been many times, for me, where intuition has become difficult to hear or even recognise because the world and its circumstances are too loud, or more recently because pain becomes so loud. Illness can do this to me, and grief can, too. Anxiety and fear certainly can. My nervous system feels like it contracts, or narrows, until all attention is focused on survival, and then my old friend Curiosity—the gentle reaching outward toward mystery—begins to disappear. I stop listening for the subtle things because I am simply trying to get through the day.

I think, though, that beneath all of that noise, something quieter does remain. These are not answers, because I don’t think intuition is the same thing as answers. This is more like a small turning inside the body toward something that is true, and a soft internal flinch when something is wrong. I am trying very hard to pay more attention to those subtle signals.

The second card I pulled was the Scout of Air, with the word Alignment written on it. A scout goes ahead. A scout listens to the landscape. She pays attention to patterns, weather, and tracks in the earth. She understands that finding the right path is less about forcing things and more about perceiving the way forward. This card felt deeply connected to my creative practice, which is not about performance or productivity, but really a way of noticing what’s right in front me and responding in an authentic way, a sort of co-creative relationship to my tools and materials, my subject matter and the universal creative energy that surrounds us all if we are open to it. My practice, at its best, is especially good at alerting me to when my actions start to spin out of alignment with my soul or nature.

Sometimes I think my notebooks have served this purpose more faithfully than almost anything else in my life, the simple act of sitting down with a sharpened pencil, a familiar pen, a page waiting quietly in the morning light. This practice has never been about producing something, but more about nurturing my ability to listen long enough to hear myself more clearly, find myself again, within the chaos.

The older I get, the less interested I am in certainty and the more interested I am in resonance. Does this choice open something in me or close it? Can my body rest while I am doing it? Can I breathe a little more freely there? Maybe alignment is not a fixed destination at all, but an ongoing conversation between my inner life and the outer world.

The final card was from another deck that showcases single words and short sayings and it simply said, I see. Such a small sentence, but it landed in me with surprising force. If you were to distill the purpose of my whole vocation as a teacher of creative practice, it might be the words to see.

To truly see is an act of presence. It requires us to stop looking at life only through utility, speed, productivity, or fear. It asks something gentler and more difficult of us; it asks for our attention, for our feet to be firmly on the ground, right here where we are. I think this may be what I am searching for lately more than anything else. Not transcendence, and not really escape, but more like the ability to remain awake to my own life while I am inside it, even when it’s more difficult.

What does this look like? It’s noticing the shimmer on the stainless steel dishwasher as well as the exhaustion in my own hands. It’s embracing the way grief and beauty continue to sit beside one another at the same table, even leaning on one another for support. It’s that small glimmer of intuition that says, quietly, even in the middle of a very difficult day, this matters. It all matters. There is beauty here, too. Look! Go this way. Look closer, still.