May: Before Words
It’s strange putting any words to this month’s spell…Word choices are political. Words aim to connect, but can be used to create division, too. Language is polarizing, with the power to clarify as much as confound. These paradoxes are at the core of language just as storytelling is at the core of who we are as humans. But the stability of the stories we tell ourselves erode as they devolve into buzzwords. As physicist Richard Feynman warns, knowing the word for something doesn’t mean we understand it. Knowing the name of a rare bird tells me precisely what some humans have decided to call it, but it can’t tell me anything about how that bird experiences the world, how it mates or migrates or learns how to sing. No matter how precise and subtle we get with our language, the reality we point at with words is always just out of reach. What is is always more complex, more in flux, more dense, and more flung out in all directions than we can encapsulate in words like “Ruffed Grouse” or “biosphere” or “Coronavirus” or “safety.”
Right now, what so many of us crave is certainty—not complex, in flux, or flung out chaos, thank you very much. Please, just deliver to us clear expectations and accurate information—a timeline for when this threat will be over. But we don’t get certainty. Not yet, and maybe not ever. Pervasive uncertainty is always with us; and it’s times like these, when uncertainty is revealed as the bedrock under our river of stories, that we may seek out something more stable than language.
About the Spell
To work with this spell, we ask you to consider what exists before words…
Many tens of thousands of years ago, before we had a language of our own, our ancestors were immersed in birdsong and related to the world through the sophisticated instrument of embodied intelligence... In infancy, our undifferentiated universe of timeless experience was responsible for growing a felt-sense of safety and belonging in ourselves and our world... In countless, recurring moments, our minds are full of images, feelings, and associations that we do not yet have language for.
This spell is about stitching ourselves back into the fabric of direct experience. In this web of sensation and perception, we find a bridge to connect us to resources we desperately need right now: the feeling of being, the aliveness that can express itself clearly and coherently through our senses. So much stress arises when we think language can keep us safe. This month, we encourage you to entrust your feelings of safety and connectedness to the realm of your body and not to your talking head. We have many senses we don’t have names for in English—what an offering it can be to our nervous systems to explore these wordless realms and open to their wisdom. For language is not all that connects us—experience is what brings us into as direct contact with reality as we can get in these lives.
We are currently living through something that is so layered and convoluted. There is good reason to find the language to connect and make sense of things, to package our thoughts and feelings into sentences like the ones we’re writing here for you. But there is profound and incomparable medicine in sinking down beneath cognitive function and reconnecting our many senses to the world—as it is, as it was before we put names on it all, and as it will be once these pandemic times have passed.
Meditation on Before Words
For this meditation, please find a comfortable place to be. Let your eyes wander and drift, landing one place, then another. Let your breath come into your awareness without needing to change it one bit. Let your skin come into your awareness; the feeling of fabric or air on your skin, of your feet on the ground or in your shoes, your weight on your seat or your feet… How are you feeling right now? Rather than think too hard about it, see if you can send your question down into your chest and belly and listen for the answer… can the answer come to you without words? See if you can let your feelings and sensations come to you in an expression far more dimensional and personal than language. It’s fine, of course, if you notice yourself translating your experience into words, that will happen automatically most of the time. But perhaps you can postpone that process and suspend yourself in the field of sensation. Spend as long as you’d like swimming out away from words into the sea of your being. You could close your eyes and plunge into the feelings inside; or you can open your eyes and notice shapes and colors, just as they appear to you, not as you would categorize them in your thoughts. Either way, stretch out into the space you take up and feel as much of it as you can. Imagine that every sensation, every moment of perception is a point of connection with reality providing contact, communication, support. Rather than bring this meditation to a close, see if you can keep it in the background, like a web to catch you anytime you wish you fall away from words and connect to what came before them.
About the painting:
Corina: So, we wanted to do this giant fuzzy cow face. Like, the softest and most serene and overpowering cow presence. Like you can smell the milky-straw-grassy smell of their breath. A different side of the Taurus bull. And this being Taurus season, we needed flowers and a pollinator for those flowers. Basically, everything happening in this picture is in a state of physical calm, joy, and excitement that needs no words to convey.
Jocelyn: On one hand, this one is holy to me—every time I see a cow, I want to get this close to its face and gaze into it’s huge, liquidy eyes. Rub noses, etc. Painting this friend was so calming, and I felt such a supportive presence from it as I painted. On the other hand, I felt like there was an invisible force keeping me from painting these flowers the way I know how to paint flowers. Usually when that happens, I get the sense I should go to sleep and work on it again in the morning. In this case, I came back to it again and again and felt the same block. Ultimately, I gave up and trusted that, if the flowers were too beautiful, they may somehow draw attention away from the intimate, face-to-face interaction this image offers us!
This month:
The first 25 orders we get in our Etsy store, starting May 7th, will receive a free postcard of this image. But to make sure we know it’s you, please leave us a note in the order that says FREE POSTCARD and we’ll include it!
As always, you can follow our shenanigans at @abacuscorvus on Instagram. And you can find out what each of us is up to by following @corinadross and @jocelyncorvus