It’s been recently brought to my attention that not everybody is familiar with fascination. Like, familiar in the way that they know what to do with it. How to dance with it.
Do you know how to dance with fascination? Do I? I think I do. I think this gesture right here, of letting the words that are on repeat in my head out in a stream, making room for new and newer words, is a key gesture that I use to dance with my enchantment. I do indeed get hung-up with the words I hear on repeat until I let them out, starting the flow.
The gesture of how to engage with fascination is often a simple one. Perhaps, it could be considered mindless, in the way that it doesn’t require much thot. It makes more room for the fascination to take over. Like, tracing a gorgeous shadow on the paper. Getting to revel in the edge, and the places where it blurs and you kind of have to make it up. But, it’s not mindless in the sense of dumb or trivial or disengaged. No. It’s a heightened engagement. It’s flow. The part of the brain turns off that is thinking about later and hunger and pee and that conversation where I maybe didn’t say the most polite thing. That all shuts off, or at least, goes very dim. That kind of mindless. Which makes room for the higher mind. The mind that feels connected to the shadow’s edge, to the stream of inspiration, to the grace, the deepening urges. It’s when we become a channel. Whoosh!
I’ve been lucky enough, and made my own luck enough, to have a deep relationship with fascination. I’ve made a whole lot of room in my life to follow those urges, and I’m working, daily, on making even more room. Because letting that channel flow, opening that creative portal, so to speak, allows for inspiration about all other areas of my life to flow in. And I mean creative portal in a broad sense. Not like, fascination must equal art, or that art must equal paper and paint and a smock. Not at all. Creative in the sense that when we turn towards our fascination, when we reach out our hands and our eyes and become willing to it, all the energy we bring towards situations as Creators comes to play, too. I start to see how I’m creating the situation anew with my interest, my willingness, my succumbing to the lure.
Creating the situation, like, being so curious about the way my body swings and bounces as I run that I find a way to run with my body’s jiggles that makes it feel even easier, lighter, more fun. Turning toward the sensation in my legs as I bike, with my breath, where I let the burning flow and churn and pulse and inspire. Enchanted by the way the rain drips down the window, catching other drips and making streams, and I follow it with my eyes and become the streams. Fascination, like we have all seen in small children, like my sweet one-year old putting the cherry tomato in a bottle cap, pouring it out, putting it back in, again and again and again.
In talking about my own fascinations, and those of wee children, it’s utterly important to say that we don’t have to be fascinated by the thing someone else is fascinated by. I’m often not engaged in my baby’s obsession with beads or the little knob on the floor. And likewise, I don’t have to find crochet appealing just because my friend does. What captures our unique fancies and the ways we feel inspired to engage with it are so exquisitely all about US, the flavor that only we can bring to the world. The reason we’re fucking here.
For me, that meant sewing pieces of trash together for a long-ass time. I was so into it. And giving myself wholeheartedly to that phase has led me to where I am now, which I’m so deep in, I don’t think it’s even ready for words, except for these words right here, my love note to you, to the you that is deeply engaged in your own fascination.
{Coming soon: Key Gestures in the Dance of Fascination // An Info-Doodle}
A prompt: What is something you’ve found interesting, engaging, appealing, or fascinating today? What is one way that you could engage with it?
Good Morning! 