being let inside the shrine

I’ve followed Sadie’s Word Layout for a long time, and her commonplacing is a big part of why I journal the way I do. The way she gathers quotes and images and lets them sit together on a page taught me half of what I know about a good spread. So when she started a journaling club, I was in immediately, and getting to make something in response to her work felt like a small full-circle moment.

The first prompt is landscapes, and I want to be honest: my first reaction was a small internal groan. Landscapes felt like the safe choice. Grass, sky, a mountain doing mountain things. They’ve always been my easy option, the thing I reach for when I want something forgiving, and I never expected the wide open earth to ask anything of me in return.

Then I started reading, and the groan turned into a two-page spread.

the spread

Two pages, filed under the subjects I keep in my commonplace: Literature: essays & poetry, and Philosophy. The theme kept splitting into two things for me. One is the earth itself. The other is what we do when we try to hold it still and look at it.

Everything you see on the page is from the sticker sheet Sadie provided with the prompt. I arranged the three landscape scenes and the small bird, kept the palette to the reds and deep greens the images were already giving me, and let the writing fill the space around them. The oval woodland scene in the middle with the blackberry bramble beside it is my favorite corner of the whole thing. It looks like a window someone cut into the page.

It’s also well outside my usual color palette. I tend to live in softer, cooler tones, but I wanted to actually use the fall-themed sheet rather than admire it and default to my comfort colors. So the whole spread leaned warm, all rusts and deep greens, and I love how it turned out. Sometimes the constraint is the best part.

The rest is quotes. I didn’t set out to make a poetry page. I set out to figure out why landscapes stopped bothering me, and every answer I found was already written down by someone smarter, so I copied them out by hand and let them do the arguing.

what changed my mind

Seneca got the top of the page. He talks about being grateful to nature not when he sees the side of her open to the world, but when he’s permitted to enter her shrine. That’s the shift, right there. A landscape stops being a backdrop the moment you stop looking at it and start being let inside it.

For myself, I am grateful to nature, not so much when I see her on the side that is open to the world, as when I am permitted to enter her shrine.

Seneca, Natural Questions

Then Rilke, who has incredible insight into the link between the internal and external. This one I copied out almost in full because I couldn’t find a place to cut it. He tells you not to be afraid of the heaviness, to return the weight of things to the earth. Mountains are heavy. The seas are heavy. Even the trees you planted as a child grew too heavy to carry. And then he lets go of all of it and points at the air, the space, the part you can’t hold at all.

Don’t be afraid to suffer the heaviness, give it back to the weight of the earth; mountains are heavy, the seas are heavy.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Ahead of All Parting

On the right page, Mary Oliver, because of course. When I Am Among the Trees, the part where the trees basically tell her the whole assignment: you too have come into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled with light, and to shine. She writes it like it’s the simplest concept, which is exactly what gets me.

and they call again, ‘It’s simple,’ they say, ‘and you too have come into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled with light, and to shine.’

Mary Oliver, When I Am Among the Trees

And Marcus Aurelius, noticing that even the things that come after nature’s main event, the byproducts, the leftovers, have their own quiet appeal. The cracked bread crust. The overripe fig.

We ought to observe also that even the things which follow after the things which are produced according to nature contain something pleasing and attractive.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book III, Section 2

Once I noticed the pattern, I started pulling in the ones that live in the same neighborhood. Marcus Aurelius again, somewhere else in the Meditations, telling himself to look up: dwell on the beauty of life, watch the stars, see yourself running with them. A stoic emperor giving himself permission to be astonished by the sky.

Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

And then Mary Oliver one more time, because if there’s a thesis for this entire theme she already wrote it, in three lines, as instructions. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it. That’s not just how you look at a landscape. That’s the whole assignment for being alive near one.

Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.

Mary Oliver, Sometimes

where i landed

Sadie’s prompt asks what experience made you feel connected to the earth. I don’t have a single lightning-strike moment to hand you. What I have is this: I used to think a landscape had nothing to say because everyone already knows what grass and sky look like. Reading these four in one sitting, I realized the earth was never the thing I was bored by. I just hadn’t been let inside the shrine yet.

I used to reach for landscapes because they were easy. Grass, sky, a horizon that forgives a lot. This theme reminded me there’s more there than a shortcut. So much variability, so much beauty, so much weight. The same attention I never thought to give them is the attention they were asking for the whole time. Landscapes stopped being wallpaper the second I decided to actually look.

If you want to see the prompt that started all this, it’s over at Sadie’s Word Layout journaling club. If you’re doing the club too, I’d love to see where the theme took you. And if landscapes made you groan the way they made me groan, may I gently recommend one Mary Oliver poem and an afternoon. It worked on me.