#6: Field Notes
On sunbathing and sacred amnesia
-Max Ernst, Delicate Arch (Zion National Park), 1946
Hi friend,
How was your week?
How were your dreams?
How’s your family?
How much is too little and how little is too much?
🏮 Field Notes at your service. 🏮
Onward and inward:
I. A piece + practice
This week I read Utsav Mamoria’s essay How to live an intellectually rich life. A layered, beautifully visceral meditation on curiosity, metaphor, and self-invention.
One concept that stayed with me was Dhoop Sekna: a Hindi expression that literally means "to bask / enjoy the warmth of the sun."
Mamoria writes:
“A practice which we are losing with urban living… Imagine yourself sitting on a chatai or a chair in cold weather, in a verandah or on a terrace. It’s early morning and the sun has come up, gently beginning to warm your body. You’re enveloped by silence, occasionally punctuated by the sounds of birds. A sense of coziness starts building. Time passes leisurely, and you sit without a care in the world.”
We talk so much about practice. Prioritizing sun basking seems like a sure-fire way to commune with the divine.
II. A video
Peter Kingsley… Where to begin…
“We romanticize every sacred tradition, except our own.”
-Good moment at 08:45
The West isn’t inherently spiritually bankrupt, just amnesiac!
“Once we’re grounded in our own sacred tradition, we can finally meet others from theirs. That’s where real Oneness begins—not in theory, but in lived mutual recognition.”
This idea parallel a sentiment I wrote about in Stop Ruining It for the Rest of Us. How we tend to carry an internalized shame here in the West and project that shame outward. We love outsourcing holiness to monks in the East, while ignoring forgotten roots tangled in our own backyard. Hello Piper, White Lotus.
There’s so much more to say about Kingsley & don’t worry, I will. :)
III. A Poem
From The Book of Hours (Rilke)
“You, darkness, of whom I am born—
I love you more than the flame
that limits the world
to the circle it illumines
and excludes all the rest.
But the dark embraces everything:
shapes and shadows, creatures and me,
people, nations—just as they are.”
Addendum: Dark basking feels just as important as sun basking.
winds in the east,
Lida 🎐
