Weekly Awareness at Our Quiet Day Retreat

By Paul Roberts

Somewhere in the middle of our first Day Retreat on Friday, while working our way through the Grow Me a Story toolkit along with several prayer practices, on a search for our own inner peace and quiet,  Carol turned to Julia Cameron for some wisdom and read the following passage to the four women that had joined us for a time of quiet retreat in our backyard gardens:

“While writing about attention, I see that I have written a good deal about pain. This is no coincidence. It may be different for others, but pain is what it took to teach me to pay attention. In times of pain, when the future is too terrifying to contemplate and the past too painful to remember, I have learned to pay attention to right now. The precise moment I was in was always the only safe place for me. Each moment, taken alone, was always bearable. In the exact now, we are all, always, all right…just at the moment, just now…I am breathing in and out. Realizing this, I began to notice that each moment was not without its beauty.” (pg. 54, The Artist’s Way, by Julia Cameron)

During one stage of the retreat we asked the participants to join us in a half an hour “awareness time” by focusing on each one of the five senses for 30 minutes and “sowing seed” or journaling during the experience. I’d like for you to look back at some of my journal entry with me, and see just a bit of the joy and beauty of getting lost in the now.

Taste and see that the Lord, He is good.

Breeze blowing in from the southwest here on this north side of the house. No linden aroma here - wait…there it was. Dappled warm sunlight in the shade of the beech queen.

My feet feel a bit pinched by my shoes and socks. Time to shed them. Ahhhh. Cool paving stones under my feet, gently rough, just right for scratching the itch on my heels and toes.

Will I get too hot in my long sleeve shirt today? I hope not. I like the long, soft sleeves.

The taste of the coffee cooled in my decadent (ten sided) cup doesn’t feel like it’s going to be enough to keep me awake. Will I get a nap before the next party goers show up? Carol would wake me up if she saw me sleeping now. My eyelids are heavy. If my head tips back against the tall adirondack chair back, I’ll be done…

Carol’s cough woke me. Did I hear a car door close? I’m going to hear Cleo gnawing on her stick in just a moment…there it is.

With my head tipped back, I feel more sun…

Chickadee on a wire…

Bee buzzing in my ear…

Aphid on my paper…

Happy chickadee in the same place still…

What does it feel like to fall asleep? Can I know?

It was right about there that my chronoception kicked in and told me that my 30 minutes was about up. That, plus the fact that I saw Carol checking her phone.

Many scientists like to insist that we humans have more than just the five senses of taste, touch, smell, hearing, and sight. I suppose it could be argued that most of those additional senses are just somehow facets of the original five, but when I am focused on now during a time set aside for Weekly Awareness, the concept of chronoception, or our sense of the passing of time, seems significant.

Personally, our recommended Weekly Awareness time can sometimes feel like time I can’t afford. But I am learning to think differently. Twenty minutes of aimlessness? No. I’m learning to call it twenty minutes of attentiveness. Julia Cameron likes to say that “the creative life involves great swathes of attention. Attention is a way to connect and survive.”

We connect with other human beings and the world around us through our senses. And not just taste, touch, smell, hearing, and sight. Chronoception, equilibrioception, thermoception, nociception, kinaesthesia…I could go on, but I’ll let you take your own deep dive into the world of Weekly Awareness.

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Share your own experience with our community of creatives about your own time of Weekly Awareness.

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