Join Me for a Year of Noticing

Reflections on practice on my blogaversary

The Sound of Real Life Happening consists of a very simple premise: Showing up for 11 days in a row, four times a year, to write 11 things, with a small cohort of fellow travelers. We do our writing in a private Facebook group and see each other on Zoom once per session.

That is the whole practice. Its simplicity is by design. Throughout the year, you will discover that noticing and writing what you notice does not have to be complicated.

Lucky for you, there are a few spots left for the 2024 cohort of this group – and a few days left to sign up!

“11s are a tender and powerful writing practice.” ~ Mair Dundon

Here are a few recent examples from folks who’ve learned this form with me and made it their own (aka what I affectionately think of as “11s in the wild”):

* Reflections and moving forward: 11 Things to Keep From 2023 by Lisa Gray
* Wintering in the Shadows by Mair Dundon
* I am Running into a New Year (by me, not Lucille Clifton) by Erin Best

Dates: January 11-21, April 11-21, July 11-21, October 11-21 (Zoom on the 20th of those months)
Cost: $150 every three months (four payments total)

I’m always happy to answer any other questions you might have, so don’t hesitate to reach out.

And now, a little reflection on an anniversary of sorts.

My meditation practice these days is all about consistency: I've been sitting for five minutes every morning. It is not a big ceremonious thing, just five minutes in silence, with or without a timer, noticing how busy and predictable my mind is and returning to the breath (breathing in, breathing out) over and over and over.

Today, I sat on the floor. Chalupa did a very intense sniff of my face; I could feel her breath each time she exhaled and then after a long while she gave me the teensiest lick before turning around. Then she sat with me, at one point resting her chin in my hip crease.

After, I did my morning pages and continued my retrospective of the last decade. While yes, there have been many, many big sweeps, high and low alike, what I saw today as I wrote was that it's the micro-moments that stay with me most, that culminate, that shape a life.

What is the shape of a life? Is it jagged or curved, elongated or compressed? Many years ago, I watched a video someone had made. I think it might have been called simply "moments." And it was so moving in its ordinary rendering of how full and fast life is, and that the more we can cultivate noticing each moment, the more present we can be to ourselves and our surroundings and each other.

It sounds so simple and it is and of course, it's also one of the steepest mountains because the mind wants to pull us away – anywhere but here, anything but this – or to feed us story loops of failure or fantasy, and the world brings no shortage of actual stressors and demands – bills and illness and all manner of fuckery.

I meditated for the first time in college, so 30-ish years ago, and have been wildly inconsistent. I've also been wildly consistent. How are both of these things true? I will tell you what my dear friend Miv said to me once, when I was lamenting about my erratic practice of drifting away for long stretches only to come back and begin again. "That is your practice." I have no doubt shared this nugget of wisdom before, and I find that revisiting it from time to time is useful for me. Maybe it can be for you, too.

I'm writing these words on the 17th anniversary of my blogging days. At age 32, with a toddler and a nursing baby, I created an online place for myself to practice – not only writing but writing in such a way that I didn't have to be perfect, didn't have to achieve anything special, didn't have to prove myself, didn't have to get accolades or a gold star or a prize or a pat on the back, didn't have to knock it out of the park, didn't have to measure up, didn't have to make sure every post was clever and compelling enough to publish, but rather could just write.

What was the point, you ask? I think about this, too. I still think about it, all these years later, since in many ways, I am doing largely the same thing and a critical part of myself says, that's it? Don't you want to get somewhere with all of this, make something of yourself? And to this part, I say, oh hi. It's you. I see you have come along for this whole dang ride. Have some coffee.

Everything has been changing all along and continues to change. The parts that remain consistent? The returning. Again and again. To the practices, the sitting, the writing without a goal, the loving my people, the stumbling and fumbling, the ebbing and flowing, the expanding and contracting, the inhaling and exhaling.

Peaks and valleys come and go. Money comes and goes. Moods come and go. In the end, none of this stays. But the moments, the ones that we are most likely to dismiss as insignificant on the one hand or see as defining on the other, matter. How we meet them matters. How we meet ourselves matters. How we meet each other and the world matters.

My small meditation practice helps me remember this, releasing me from the binds of the past and freeing me from an unknown future. For a breath, I get to be here and only here. And in this very moment, as Miv also has reminded me over the years, I have everything I need. And in the spirit of how I've practiced writing all these years, I hit "post" without reading over these words to fix or improve them.

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