Toward an Expansive Solitude
A Summer Guest Essay from Writer and Artist Heather McCabe on Creating Livable Futures by Attending to the Textures of the World
Greetings Livable Futures community!
I have landed back in Germany where I spend about half the year now and the azaleas of late spring and early summer are in full bloom. I hope you there are many lovely blooms in your life as well!
Finding Inspiration in Community
The summer break from teaching offers more time to reflect on our projects this year and I am excited to start sharing even more great content with you all including a series of guest posts by recent collaborators and others we support through our re-granting programs!
Please feel free to share this publication widely and give us a like to help more folks find us!
Heather McCabe: A Writer's Perspective on Livable Futures
Over the past two years, I've been experimenting with new courses, workshops, and gatherings for Livable Futures. This has brought me into community with some extraordinary people, including several creative writers from Ohio State’s graduate programs.
One such writer is Heather McCabe. While primarily a non-fiction writer, Heather extends her work through practices like ceramics, gardening and generous attention to the world's textures. She finds livability in
“community spaces, crowds singing at concerts, the shared understanding that passes through an unexpected moment of eye contact. Every act of creation remakes the world. I find livable futures in the open spaces that co-creation reveals.”
This brief reflection alone feels like a gift as it does every time I read Heather’s words. We first published her writing as the opening to our eBook and if you haven’t had a chance to enjoy this yet, get the PDF here.
Cultivating a Garden of Possibility
We requested an offering from Heather to share with you all and to kick off some of our summer meditations and meanderings.
In her short piece, Toward an Expansive Solitude, Heather reflects on the importance of the imagination in creating livable futures but also, as she says,
“the question becomes one of next steps: What are we to do after imagining? [We can] cultivate a sense of possibility in which these ideas can take root and grow. Think of amending the soil at the start of a new gardening season: by providing the right conditions, we make a livable future all the more possible.”
She also cultivates this sense of possibility through studying and developing her own “noticing” practices, something that many of us in this community find vital.
An Invitation to Reach Out: Deepening Our Presence
Heather's summer essay, part poem, part non-fiction, part memoir, flows like the rivers she loves. She reflects on interconnectedness, reminding us that we are all composed of experiences with people, non-human beings, and the animate and inanimate world both remembered and forgotten. This invites a re-imagination of ourselves and our place in a vast and timeless existence.
She emphasizes living fully in her body and with the world, through activities like gardening and heightened touch awareness. This is captured beautifully in the line about tending to her sun-scorched pepper plant:
"grasping the translucent, ghostly leaf... I understand it will be okay. But first I have to hold it."
It's a reminder of the importance of care and attention, even in uncertain times.
Touching the World
The full essay, available here on our Idea Archive, is a lovely read, inviting us into ourselves and the pleasures and interdependency of being alive even in these challenging times, perhaps especially in these challenging times.
Heather encourages us to literally and figuratively reach out,
“each new experience of touch adds to the catalog of known and unknown things, expanding ourselves and deepening our presence in the world. So it’s with that old combination of curiosity and hope that I keep reaching out my hands.”
I reach out my hands too. I touch the leaves of the peppers on my balcony, I touch my own skin on my arm, and notice the chair I am sitting on and how it is touching me back.
And finally, as is our custom, Heather offers a sustaining practice for our Livable Futures community. Her Get Up Close practice encourages us to find a textured surface and explore it with heightened awareness. This simple act deepens our connection with the world, inviting exploration and fostering a sense of wonder. I had fun with it and hope you will too!
Love to you all,
Norah
Sustaining Practice
Get Up Close
an offering from Heather McCabe
Find a safe place to get as close to a textured surface as you can.
Maybe you lay down in the grass or investigate the striated bark of a tree or find new cobwebs between the slats of a picnic table. Get closer than you usually would. Get even closer. Consider the contours of the world you’ve discovered.
Note who you meet. Touch as gently as you can.
More Reading and Listening
Heather references the wonderful work of sound artist Pauline Oliveros and her work on deep listening. I’ll do a full post on Oliveros one of these days soon, she is one of our chosen ancestors for Livable Futures and has many wonderful practices to share.
For a text on noticing that is a lovely complement to Heather’s work, check out Anna Tsing's wild and influential book from 2015, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. There is a new 2021 edition out and it is great summer reading if you’re looking for something that
1. turns toward the conditions at hand and
2. offers creative lines of flight into change and better futures: my favorite combination.
Enjoy and be well!