💚 Stay close to the body

Email Read Time: 55 seconds
Pause/Prompt/Practice Time: 15 minutes

Announcements:

—This week’s Daily Nourishment Pauses, Prompts, and Practices are new contributions from Catherine Ricketts. (Thanks, Cat!) Cat is one of our SDW Fellows for 2024, so you’ll be seeing her words here often this year. She’s also one of our speakers for the 1/27/2024 Seminar for Motherhood and Writing. Learn more here.

—All of our Co-Writing Invocations and Blessings this month are from Black Liturgies by Cole Arthur Riley. This book comes out on January 15, and it is phenomenal. One way to pre-order is to sign up for the paid Thoughtful Readers Gathering with Cole Arthur Riley on January 21. There’s also a free option. Everyone is welcome!

—Birmingham Writers: Join us for the Paris Avenue Writers’ Group with Tania De’Shawn on the 2nd Sunday of each month at my house. Tania is great, and I can’t wait to receive good things from her!

—Thanks so much for subscribing to SDW Daily Nourishment.

“Stay close to the body.” — Kitsi Watterson

Pause.

Set a timer for two minutes and look at the painting It Was a Season of Change, and In Retrospect, I Knew by Catherine Repko.

Prompt.

Writers can learn from painters like Repko, grounding emotion the imagery of the body—sensation, gesture, touch. In the memoir Stranger Care by Sarah Sentilles, the author recalls her grief after being separated from the infant she’d fostered and expected to adopt.

She writes with bodily language as she remembers, “Day after day, my teeth ached. My jaw ached. I walked into a door and a bruise bloomed on my cheek. Somehow I bruised my forearm and both shinbones. My hips hurt. My eyelids swelled. My eyeballs were tender. My back knotted. Eric refused to wash Coco’s clothes. He put them in a bag in his closet. He carried them around.”

Recall a time of intense emotion. Write about how this moment felt in your body.

Practice.

Sit in a comfortable position, close your eyes, and establish a comfortable rhythm of breath. Then scan your body, beginning with your toes and moving slowly to the top of your head, noticing how each part of your body is feeling right now. When you have finished, take three deep breaths and open your eyes.

Want More?
Read all of Stranger Care: A Memoir of Loving What Isn't Ours by Sarah Sentilles.

Catherine Ricketts

Catherine Ricketts writes about the arts, grief, joy, and spirituality. Her book about motherhood and artistic practice, titled The Mother Artist: Portraits of Ambition, Limitation, and Creativity, comes out April 16 and is available for preorder here and via our Thoughtful Readers Gathering scheduled for May 5.

Find her on Instagram at @bycatherinericketts.

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