WELCOME TO WEEK TWO!
A quick reminder that any creative time is time well spent. You always know something at the end of it that you didn’t know before. Making anything is an energy and a whole vibe, even if the vibe isn’t vibing and life is doing too much life-ing. Even if you give it all of 60 seconds. Give yourself a break, let yourself be. Creativity doesn’t have to be about output all the damn time.
With that in mind, here’s a little reading and a little prompting for Day 8 of 28 x 20. Enjoy.
LATIF ASKIA BA
Being physically disabled, I had internalized the habit of equating my self-worth with my intellect. To get what I needed I couldn’t rely on physical ability; I had to use my mind. This rather crude survival mechanism got me in the habit of running away from my body. Seeing it as a spastic cage, I conditioned myself to escape through imagination, entertainment, other people, and whatever other distractions I could find. The ineffability of the ultimate reality that the Buddha pointed to was something I never really appreciated. When I finally learned about mindfulness, it changed not only my ability to appreciate the moment, but to appreciate this very body.
This crucial attention to the “now” has been widely appropriated and at times diluted or oversimplified to suggest that only the present moment matters and nothing else. This New Age embrace of eastern philosophical underpinnings such as the concept of none-self (the interconnected nature of the universe) or the concept of “only now” combined with good-old American miseducation can even lead to the reinforcement of violent hegemonic assumptions: “Why should we discuss historical oppression of specific minority groups if we are all one, man?” or “Let’s not dwell on the past… it’s just a concept.”
The word mindful is translated from the Pali sati, which comes from the Sanskrit smṛti, meaning “memory.” When I share mindfulness-oriented writing exercises, I don’t want people to turn away from the past or future; I want them to turn toward it as just another fleeting phenomenon of the present moment. To be mindful is to remember one’s own aliveness.
From Waking Up in the Body: Writing with the Energy of Mindfulness, The Poetry Foundation, 2025
