Attention, Intention, & Following our Yearning

Disrupting Distraction with Childlike Wonder

Recently we interviewed Day Schildkret who is an artist, author, and creator of Morning Altars. Day describes himself as a meaning maker and someone who invites others into meaning making through ritual.

During a period of deep grief he was walking his dog one day and decided to pause under a tree by his house and create a temporary altar using mushrooms, flowers, and other found items. He then dedicated some time first thing in the morning for the next month to make his morning altars with items found in nature that caught his attention. It’s now been 10+ years of morning altars for Day, a couple of books, 100s of workshops, and more offerings that are centered around attention, intention, and helping folks follow their yearning.

Talking to Day was a breath of fresh air and a lifeline for me during a particularly hard season. After taking a huge risk and moving to France last summer we recently found out that we’d be moving back home rather suddenly. Things have not turned out the way we had planned and we are preparing to move home with very little notice, hauling two newly rooted in France teenagers, 1 dog, two elderly cats, and all our worldly possessions back with us.

It is an immensely disrupting moment in time for us and I would be lying if I said I’d handled things very well in the beginning. In fact, I was spiraling into anxiety and avoidance while also trying to control everything, a pattern that I know all too well is not going to lead me anywhere hopeful or good. I’ve been struggling with presence and with finding meaning in this disorienting space.

A few weeks ago we decided to take a break from the figuring out of all the things and we went on a family trip to Normandy. It is a beautiful part of France that suffered so deeply during WWII. The town we stayed in Saint-Lô was over 95% percent destroyed during the war, the town was so devastated in fact that it received the nickname "Capital of Ruins”. We visited Utah beach, where my husband’s grandpa landed, we saw Omaha, and the American Cemetery there where over 9,000 young men are buried.

It was one of the most beautiful parts of France we’ve seen, all the flowers were in bloom, there’s farms and trees everywhere, and also the level of suffering that this region has gone through is unimaginable.

As we walked on Utah Beach I thought of our conversation with Day, about the importance of meaning making, pausing, and following our attention. I spent a little while making my own altar out of shells and during that process I caught the attention of a little boy who looked to be about seven, he didn’t speak any English and my French is piss poor. We couldn’t communicate through words, but he saw what I was doing and helped me gather shells quietly. It was a sweet exchange that made me remember that children are always following their own attention and engaging in meaning making. We all start off in life with those abilities and it’s so imperative as adults that we reengage with our inherent childlike curiosity and creativity. My new friend and I collected shells for a while and then we started to put them together. It was tender and thoughtful work that we both paused to admire when we were through. I watched as he scampered back off down the beach and was grateful for his quiet solidarity and his open heart.

Making the shell altar didn’t change anything about my circumstances, we’re still being uprooted and are immersed in the unknown. But what it did do, was invite me back to a childlike center, the most me version of me, if you will. The one that knows how to pause for the seashells, to feel the sand and ocean water on my skin, to be delighted by the crabs scuttling this way and that, to sit in amazement at some of the shells I discovered, to make a new friend even though we didn’t speak the same language, to put my whole heart into the present moment, into creating something beautiful and temporary all by following my own deep yearning.

I asked someone the other day how they knew they needed to write a book about their life and they replied with something along the lines of -I don’t know exactly how I knew to do it, but I knew without a doubt I couldn’t not do it. It was calling to me.

I don’t know why I paused to create and meaning make in a space that’s seen so much sadness during a day where I was experiencing my own sadness and uncertainty, I just knew I had to do it. I listened to the call of my heart and it healed something in me and helped me center back around myself.

I’ve made a few altars since then and each one was because I knew I couldn’t not do it. The practice, the ritual of it all, just keeps calling me.

I don’t have a lot of answers for where I am or what the path forward is but I have my heart, my attention, my yearning and I trust those things implicitly to act as a compass guiding me back to self and to the next part of my journey.

If you are in the middle of it today, I invite you to pause, to listen to your heart, and to create something out of whatever is calling to you. You never know where it might lead and what friends and magic might be found along the way.

You can find Day Schildkret’s work here, on Instagram at @morningaltars , and on our next episode of Radical Sacred coming out this Wednesday.

*the top two images in this post are examples of Day’s beautiful work, the bottom one is my shell altar from Utah Beach.