Practice Moon
Practice Makes Life
This year, to challenge myself to write more regularly, I send out dispatches around each new moon to comment on the personal and collective themes I feel pulled to share for each lunation.
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Happy New(ish) moon cycle. Happy Gemini season! How are you weathering the gale-force winds of these times?
Pardon the lateness on this missive, patient reader. I traveled to a conference this past weekend, and literal high winds caused me to pull my first all-nighter since college while I waited for a flight home. Needless to say, my best laid plans to “write on the plane” were scuttled. All that time in the close, liminal spaces of airports, hotel ballrooms, and public transit terminals did give me pause to consider what I really needed to hear myself say and affirm as I started the next cycle. What came through at 3 am while I practiced my deep breathing and patience (say it with me: we don’t yell at service staff because flights get cancelled) was this phrase:
PRACTICE MAKES LIFE.
Not practice makes perfect. Not practice makes progress, even. Practice makes life. Simply put, I think that means you are what you do. Shoutout to my spouse for that particular adage: you are what you do.
If you’ve been here with me for a few cycles, you know I’m an etymology nerd. You know I love digging my fingernails into the linguistic soil of a key word. Call it the English teacher in me.
Etymology of practice, and my personal definitions.
Practice is both a noun and a verb. A state of being and an action.
Douglas Harper, author and curator of Etymonline tells us the story of the word. The noun came first: we can trace it through Old French, Medieval Latin, and all the way back to Greek praktikē “of or pertaining to actions, concerned with action or business”(as opposed to “theoretical”); fem. of praktikos “done; to be done.” The noun practice(n.) early 15c., practise, “practical aspect or application,” originally spoke especially of medicine but also alchemy, education, etc. The sense of the word being a sense of “habit, frequent or customary performance” is from c. 1500.
The verb form can be traced back to the alte 14c., practisen, “to follow or employ” a course of action; From mid-15c. we find the sense “to perform, work at, exercise.”
Practice is sometimes erroneously used for experience, which is a much broader word. Practice is the repetition of an act : as, to become a skilled marksman by practice. Experience is, by derivation, a going clear through, and may mean action, but much oftener views the person as acted upon, taught, disciplined, by what befalls him. [Century Dictionary, via Etymonline]
This trip down word memory lane helped me contextualize why this phrase is coming to me know. The time for thinking, ruminating, wondering how to begin, is over. The time for action. Time to become a skilled marksman. I am done with waiting and doubting. That was fun, for a while, but now I’m ready to try something.
The imperative I arrived at, as I sat clutching a coffee at 4am in an international airport is:
Practice makes practice, makes actions that form a life as a being-in-in-motion. You can’t shoot a free throw, breathe your way through frustration, or play an instrument without practice. Practice what you preach, return to the practices that guide you, steady you, deepen you into the felt understanding that you are of the Earth. Literally, your mitochondria, your eyeballs, your ligaments, the sodium that helps your axons fire: all of those literally exist because the Earth fed, watered and held countless generations of life that coalesced to form you. Think of evolution as life practicing living.
Ask someone you respect and admire what they practice, precisely how they do it, and how long. You can trace the shape of their success and impact this way. You are what you do, not what you believe. It’s very tempting to fall into the trap of thinking you are what you believe, but being is a practice, not a thought-form. Thinking harder doesn’t give the body practice in a skill. Knowledge development is useful, to be sure, as is access to quality, accurate information, but it isn’t practice. It doesn’t build skills. I experience this in my work as an educator. You can’t think your way into drawing a vase of flowers. You actually have to try (and perhaps somewhat fail) and doing it with your mortal hands. Even meditation requires doing, at first: watching the breath, watching the self who watches the breath.
Before I was stuck in that airport, I had the immense privilege to take part in a union-sponsored training and organizing conference in New Orleans and I learned how to design a campaign. There’s a lot of details to it, but it all comes down to: Identify the things that must be done. Identify who can do the things. Make sure that’s not just one person. Start doing the things until organizing around values and taking collective actions upon them feels like deep breathing through frustration. It’s a practice, a reciprocal practice, a practice of hope in action, life affirmation, belief in the only thing we have-each other. We may not have a lot of things, but we have habit and people power.
Practices I am returning to now:
Organizing people around issues that matter to take actions that move us towards that expansive future. Sending emails and texts and making small asks doesn’t always feel like a practice, but it is, and I don’t want “the rich boys club” doing it for me due to my lack of diligent practice. Role playing difficult conversations is a practical way to do this! Embrace the cringe. Become ungovernable.
Ensō- the practice of concentration, mindfulness. This is the zen art of drawing circles with ink and brush. This is a long-time on-again-off again practice of mine, and it feels like coming home everytime I pick it back up again.
Hydration. After being in the humidity of the Gulf, I am reminded how grateful I am to be a desert rat. But even rats need to drink water!
Dancing in the morning to welcome myself back to life, giving thanks to the sun before I leave on my daily commute.
Being kinder to myself and the people around me. It’s so easy to snap, to use harsh words and tone, to get angry on the commute. It takes discipline to exercise equanimity.
What makes something easier and more fun to practice?
Ritual. Partnership, buddy system. Sensory delights. Patience. Asking for help from guides and guardians and well-wishers. Solidarity. A 1000 mile-up perspective. Remember, you are part of something bigger here. We are practicing together. Practices can ground us into our visions for the future that is ours not the billionaires. Practices to embody your knowing what must be done. Practices to anchor you to the present and expansive future before the craziness of Gemini season fully takes over.
Thank you for being my practice buddy, for this newsletter too, is a practice. A practice in writing, listening to the still, small voice that says “hey, this is important. Share this now.”
These are beautiful musings and I love your commitment to the monthly practice! Keep going! Thank you!