Shark Cage

Posted on Apr 04th 2025

What points of connection might we find between mindfulness and creativity?

As a practitioner and teacher in both, I find sitting with this question offers insights on the individual practices as well as on the crossovers. The two are intertwined, profoundly. Might they even be the same thing? 

My interest continues to deepen in the fact that so much mindfulness practice and teaching includes poetry, as opposed to other artforms. Are meditation and poetry somehow the same activity – paying attention to that which is emerging in our experience, moment by moment? Memories, fears, emotions, bodily sensations: all in the mix.

It seems clear to me that what both offer is the opportunity to get up as close as is possible – as is tolerable – to what is going on in our experience. To explore it, to be in it without being swept away, overwhelmed, or destroyed, by the painful and difficult; or indeed by the ecstatic and oceanic.

 

I go down.

Rung after rung and still

the oxygen immerses me

the blue light

the clear atoms

of our human air.

I go down.

My flippers cripple me,

I crawl like an insect down the ladder

and there is no one

to tell me when the ocean

will begin.

From Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich

 

In art, as in mindfulness, we don the wetsuit, we acknowledge our vulnerable humanity. Held within a construction, a framework, a practice – which we may call ‘art’ or ‘mindfulness’ – we explore ourselves.

We create a shark cage in which we are safely held, knowing we can return to the boat unharmed.

We see and experience and share what is most frightening, most unmooring, and learn to know it for what it is. The stories we tell ourselves.

We see and know us.