This is one of 12 artifacts from season 2 of Labyrinth Library. This is an excerpted sample of the full artifact, which is 15 minutes long.
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Purpose:
to ****create space for comfort and pleasure in the here and now, in relationship to the environment, the body, and the present moment.
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Guiding Question:
how do you make yourself as comfortable as possible — to ground and luxuriate in wherever you are?
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Excerpt of Artifact (4 min)
Practice Guidelines
included in the full artifact
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Hi friends, welcome to our second artifact of Taurus season, a season in which we're practicing embodiment, finding grounding and pleasure in the body and the here and now.
Personally, I love carrying picnic blankets whenever I travel or have any intentions of going to a park — because I want to be prepared for those moments in which I just want to linger, luxuriate in a shady spot and to be with myself, wherever I am.
Picnic blankets don't really have to be an ordeal. They could be as light and casual to carry around as a pair of sunglasses, but what it does is that it opens space for stillness. It gives you permission to stop running around and the possibility to settle. It creates a container for leisure, pleasure, slowness.
You can nap, read a book, journal, sketch, rest, enjoy the liminal space between wakefulness and sleep, have a conversation, have a meal, be in nature, drink wine, think about ideas, cloud watch, people watch. The options are endless.
When I find that it's a distinctly different sensation — it changes the texture and quality of all of these activities. There's a slow, unhurried, leisurely quality to what unfolds on a picnic blanket. In that sense, there's resemblance to a hammock in that it turns the outdoors into a portable, lightweight bed. It's making space for the self to be leisurely in the world. There's an intimacy in this encounter, this in-betweenness of private and public spaces.
The purpose of this artifact is to create open space for comfort and embodied presence in the here and now in relationship to our environments and the atmosphere.
The guiding question is: how do you make yourself as comfortable and feel held so that you can ground in and luxuriate in wherever you are?
Our trail marker word for this artifact is ‣.
There's also an element of ‣. We have to prepare to pack picnic blankets with us. It takes a moment of foresight. To have a picnic blanket in your bag is a practice of care.
Let's explore the picnic blanket as a specific and deliberate orientation to place, body, and time.
A picnic blanket changes your relationship with a place. How you use it, how you lay it out, is dependent on the weather and the environment. Think about finding a shady spot in an urban park on a hot summer day versus finding a sunlit spot on the cool banks of a river or on a sandy beach in a wild forest. These are drastically different experiences. How we find comfort is dependent on temperature, weather, our own moods.
There's a process of engagement.
Preparation — It begins with preparation, packing the blanket.
Surveying — Then once we arrive there, there's a moment of surveying, looking for a comfortable place, whether that's a specific texture of the ground, proximity to other people, to noise, to stimulation. It requires us to read the landscape. Is this patch of grass wet from morning dew? Are the rocks and twigs on the ground going to bother my back?
Making Surface Contact - ****And then once we decide to lay it on the ground, tugging the four corners, once we sit down, we establish direct surface contact with the terrain. We can feel the texture of the ground. And at the same time, there's this supported boundary. The layer of the blanket provides a sense of familiarity and comfort. It's a simultaneous settling and being completely open to the changing environment around you. How the clouds shift, how the sun falls on the blanket, how the wind blows things away.
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This is an excerpt of this artifact.