Recipe #3 – for Listening, for Expansion

Jorgie Ingram, executed by you, by us.
First drafted in a process with Fana Fraser.

Step 1.
Hold a piece of fruit in your left hand.
Roll it around once, twice, three, twenty five times.
Feel the notches and canyons in its skin.
Feel the notches and canyons in your own hand’s skin.
Start to peel it. Slowly. Take as long as you can,
and then take even longer.

 

 

 

Step 2.
Taste something – sometime, anytime.
Lather the salt on your tongue.
Feel the liquid roll down your throat, your esophagus.
Listen to the crunch between your teeth,
the squeeze of your cheeks.
Listen to all the hands that touched it before yours. The roads it traveled to get to your lips.
Count minutes, hours, days it sits on your tongue,
sits in your nose.

 

 

 

Step 3.
Feel many things – sometime, anytime, always.
Ask what it needs.
Let it tell you.
weep to you.
laugh to you.
Laugh with it.
Smile to it.
Hold it in the palm of your
hands and at the soles of your feet. Let it go when it needs to;
Slither down the drain and
pool in the rain clouds above
You.
Watch its droplets water the cracks in the sidewalks, the grass, the trees, the concrete.

 

 

 

Step 4.
Where are my feet?
Where are my lungs and my heart and my love
and my blood and my breath and my wonder.

 

 

 

Step 9.
Alternate the numbered steps often, consistently, and with care.

 

 

 

Step 6:
Look yourself in the eyes.

 

 

 

Step 7.
Look into the flame of a candle for 23 minutes and write down everything it has to say to you.

 

 

 

Step 8.
Which way does your ear lean?
North, east, south, or west?
Up? Down? To ______?
Underneath?
To your heart?
To the light?
To which you’re certain?

 

 

 

Step 9.
Alternate the numbered steps often, consistently, and with care.

 

 

 

Step 10.
Run fast.
Faster.
Walk slow.
Slower.
How does it sound?
How does your heart beat?
How does your breath heave, billow into your ribs, your back, your chest, your belly?
Oh, how it softens.

 

 

 

Step 11.
Wade into the ocean
float — let the current tell you.
The push and pull of the tide,
The ancient grains of sand,
The moon,
The reflection of the sky. Directions converge and pull you closer to yourself so
you might know which way to go.

 

 

 

Step 12.
Wade into the lake.
Float — feel what the topography underneath looks like —
Through the water, you touch it all at once.

 

 

 

Step 13.