Kantras: Love Being Outside

Sentences held at one remove

There are sentences I like the look of but can't quite live inside. "I love being outside" was one of them — accurate as a description, but flat compared to actually standing under a tree with wind moving through it. The words pointed at something my body knew, but holding them in mind kept me at one remove.

So I started playing with reduction — dropping pieces of the phrase one at a time and noticing what happened in the body as each piece fell away. The dropped pieces were never lost; the meaning concentrated. I think of these as kantras.

The walk

The kantra walks like this:

I love being outside

love being outside

love being

being

When the "I" dropped, the leaning-forward into the phrase did too. There was no one left to be doing the loving, but the loving was still there — just not pointing back toward anyone. "Love being outside" became more like a fire I could warm my hands with than a statement of preference.

"Love being" lost the outside and kept the warmth. The meaning didn't survive in the words; it survived in what they pointed at, which the body could then reach without translation.

Being

And then "being." Which the body recognizes as itself, the way it recognizes weight or breath.

The silence afterward is part of the kantra, not what comes after it. It's the part that isn't language — where whatever the words pointed at is inhabited without them.

What sentence have you been holding at one remove?