A History of Kindness

Posted: Monday May 27, 2024

Drawing stars back in the sky, Kirstie McKinnon

“Always make a definition or sketch of what presents itself to your mind, so you can see it stripped bare to its essential nature and identify it clearly, in whole and in all its parts, and can tell yourself its proper name and the names of those elements of which it is compounded and into which it will be dissolved.”

~ Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 3:11.

Sometimes numbers only make sense when we start to draw them, shift them around on the page, try to find the balance point. Or when we move. During a time of great stress, which felt like mourning, I decided to walk to the beach and watch the sunrise for 40 days, just to see, with my own body, what this number is. If it is anything?

I saw rocks turn from black to silver in predawn light. I saw pale slashes of red bloom in the grey for seconds only. On clear mornings, palest blue washed the background sky, while a radiation of gold condensed at the horizon. Then the arc, the first crest of the sun, this brilliant burning. It’s hard to describe the jolt of joy every time I saw that arc. On some mornings shafts of light crossed the water and lit my feet. Other days I’d be on the beach in the dark asking: is it ever coming up?

For the first time in my life it occurred to me: the sun has been coming up for millennia. Something Ekhart Tolle wrote flickered in my peripheral vision: there is no time.

One precious day, the full moon sank to the west while the sun rose in the east. I was on the rocks as usual, waiting-meditating (for the war to end, a war which had only just started). My dogs milled about eager for something to happen. I looked over my shoulder at the full moon and thought: if I run over to that patch of beach, I’ll be able to stand between the sun and the moon, for a moment. So I ran with the dogs to a sand dune where a line sprang between the sun and the moon, and I stood on that line.

My body understood: I am on a planet moving through space.

Remembered joy. I feel it now, writing this, a radiation which starts at my feet and emanates from my chest, and I have to tell you this surprises me at this moment, I thought I could only feel it then: on that line between the sun and the moon.

Recently, I tried Fleur Wood’s idea of 100 days of creativity. My rule for this one was simple: make something every day for 100 days. Sometimes it was only two rows of knitting. I painted, drew and wrote, some of the writing exists here in my last three posts. I re-drafted and sent eight new chapters of the novel I thought I’d never finish (still haven’t) to my dear friend Elena. I noticed: fear wasn’t around so often as it used to be. Performance and getting-it-right drifted into the background in the light of: just-make-something.

Continue reading:  Drawing stars back in the sky - by Kirstie McKinnon (substack.com)