Offerings, Gifts, and Invitations

Nourished by an Adjacent Source

I stepped off the last step onto the marble floor. 

We walked down the hallway. 

Looking to the right, I saw Caravaggio’s Medusa. Even though we were making our way toward the exit, I had to make a detour and see this painting up close. 

Several steps later I stood before the plexiglass between me and the Medusa. The image was gruesome but also beautiful. I looked at the other paintings in this room and saw a few heads on trays and a fair bit of blood. 

These are pretty graphic, said my husband. 

I nodded. I wondered whether Caravaggio had been drawn to blood or had been commissioned to depict these gruesome scenes. 

Maybe it was a bit of both. 

Then I thought about the time. 

We better get going, I said. 

We made our way out of the museum, through the crowds of people standing at the front. Now back on the street as we navigate between groups of people, cars, and Vespas, I notice a sense of calm welling up within me.

What was loud hours before is now permeated with a quality of stillness. As the bustle of Florence moves around me - I notice a sense of quiet within me. It's not that I don't hear things, more that the noise doesn't impact me the way it usually does. I feel held in a larger space of stillness. 

For the past few hours, we've been in the Uffizi. We'd made our way from room to room in the museum, taking in countless images and artefacts. On each of the three floors were paintings and sculptures dating back as far as 1200. There had also been crowds of people from around the world. 

When I re-emerged onto the street, I was surprised to feel so calm. Usually, being in any kind of crowd and taking in lots of visual inputs leaves me feeling stimulated and sometimes buzzy. In these instances, it will take me time to return to a sense of being rooted in my own being. 

Today was different. Leaving the museum, I felt more rooted in my being. 

As we made our way back to the vespa we'd rented, I wondered what it was about this experience that led me to experience something different. 

Bringing my attention to the sense of calm I was feeling, I noticed a depth to it—one that I could sink into, one that felt nourishing. This wasn't the breezy kind of calm that flows in momentarily along with a thought or feeling. It was much more expansive and enduring.

At that moment, as I focused on the grounded quiet, I noticed it was rooted in something far beyond the constraints of my identity. It felt much more vast in both space and time.

At that moment, Botticelli's Birth of Venus flashed through my mind. I saw the serene expression on Venus's face.

As I continued to walk down the sidewalk, I thought about how I've returned to this painting again and again ever since I saw it for the first time as a child. Something about it holds my attention, moves me at a level that is difficult to explain in words, and maybe that layer was holding and nourishing me today.

With that image in the background of my awareness, I noticed how, as I moved through the streets of Florence, I simultaneously felt connected to a deeper sense of time—one that extended far beyond the vespas, car horns, and the fast-paced buzzing of modernity. I felt nourished, fortified by something greater.

It was a sense of history but also something else. Something about the images themselves contributed to this sense of nourishment. I wondered if it was their beauty. Philosophers, scholars, and poets, like Goethe, Simone Weil, and Keats, say that beauty has the ability to bring us closer to the truth.

What exactly did I find most beautiful about the pieces I'd seen? The colours of the paintings, the soft curves of the marble and the expressions on the faces all came to mind.

I thought about the artists’ experience creating these pieces. I wondered what attitude informed their work - I imagined how they must have been informed by a sense of dedication or even devotion. How could they create such magnificent pieces without aligning their attention with a purpose that invited them to move beyond what might seem possible?

Nourishment describes being provided with the inputs and sustenance that foster health in a system. In this scenario, my being was the system. We can also nourish a thought or feeling by keeping it within our being and tending to it by giving it our care and attention over a period of time. For example, tending to an idea can be seen as a form of nourishment.

We crossed the street. I noticed the sound of a vespa honking just ahead of me. I looked up at a billboard with an image of a woman holding a Ferragamo handbag.

Then I thought, not all sensory input I take in is nourishing. Some leave me wired, depleted, or, in the case of many soundbites on social media, with the feeling that I need to consume more to be satiated. It's a lot like eating popcorn or chips.

But today, I felt nourished - I recognised the feeling through a sense of being fortified, rooted in something larger than my everyday identity, deeply calm and simultaneously awake.

We got to our Vespa. As I put my helmet on, I wondered if part of the nourishment came from the dedication and devotion that emanated from many of the paintings—was this contributing to the sense of stillness I felt swelling within me?

What I'm Reading

An Inquiry into the Good - Kitaro Nishida

In this book Nishida explores the concept of "pure experience," a state of direct perception that exists before intellectual abstractions and emotional reactions. He suggests that this dimension of experience forms the basis for all understanding.

This book was written during Japan's Meiji Restoration, a time characterized by rapid industrialization and Western influence. Nishida grappled with the alienation felt by many in Japanese society. He believed these experiences stemmed from the influence of rational, scientific thought on traditional Japanese cultural values. I was drawn to this book because, in some ways, the tensions Nishida grapples with are at play today through what some people call the dominance of the right brain or the machine paradigm as well as the influence of AI.

Nishida seeks to address the fragmentation of human experience. To do so, he focuses on a principle of unity that transcends dualistic oppositions, such as the separation between subject and object.

Letting Go by David R. Hawkins

This book explores practices and perspective shifts for engaging with the challenges that hold us back. Drawing upon his background in clinical psychiatry, Hawkins considers how we can transmute the blocks that keep us stuck and inhibit our experiences of joy, ease and fulfilment.

Pattern Literacy: Group Supervision

• Friday June 27th 8:00-10:00 am AEST - SOLD OUT

• Thursday, June 26th, 8:00-10:00 am AEST

Pattern literacy is a 2-hour group supervision session. During the session each participant will have the opportunity to bring a question or case they wish to explore from multiple angles. The session is called Pattern Literacy, because hearing multiple cases can help hone our pattern recognition; our ability to notice themes across diverse cases and expressions of human experience.

I have been offering these sessions through my PhD studies because they are one of my favourite spaces for learning. Each session I am struck by the depth of participants' work and the wisdom they share with others who are present. Learn more and register here