Sit Spots

(view from my potential Sit Spot)

Avram and I spent the morning yesterday with Charlie and Ginger at the new headquarters of the Natural History Society of Maryland. It is always a treat to listen to Charlie.

This time he told us about a place, a technique, and an experience called a Sit Spot.

A Sit Spot is perhaps best described as a daily discipline of awareness of place; a mindful meditation in which we return again and again to the same spot on the land close to us so we can see, hear and discover the hidden vibrancy of place that lies right in our own backyard.

For a month, a season or a year, we sit there, fifteen minutes a day, and simply be - silent, still and alert.

This act of constancy and faithfulness allows us to know our chosen place in all its varying moods and moments.

And there is a bonus in this commitment, a plus that is often part of the unspoken gift of place: as we see the place in all its varying moods and moments, so the place sees us, and reflects us back to ourselves, in all our varying moods and moments. So we loop: self reading place reading self.

I have heard of art exercises where the students draw the same vase or bowl one hundred times. I can imagine the flow of freshness, repetition, boredom, tedium, discovery, delight circling round and back on itself.

Sit Spots employ the same technique, with changing light, changing temperature, changing seasons and a changing self. In a Sit Spot, we become part of the landscape, as constant and as changing as a leaf, a flower or a passing deer. Because of the growing familiarity of ourselves to the place and the place to ourselves, things we have overlooked, or things that were too timid to reveal themselves to us, suddenly appear.

This exercise is a portable discipline, valuable at home and at work, in love and in politics. It is tzimtzum, a reduction of ego, of moving over and out of the way, of making space for the other, of failing to call attention to ourselves, so that we may see more, learn more, feel more and become more.

It sounds so simple, and yet is so very hard to do. Perhaps I will try.