How do I Start?

A smaller & deeper question

I’ve published 256 essays on Substack from the Sunday I began in February 2021.

Starting is the most challenging part of every one of those 256 essays. I usually know where the essay is going, and sometimes, I know how it ends, but the question I ask myself the most is, “How do I start or where should I start?” Every. Single. Week. this question is a companion.

Often, I make a lot of false starts that end up evaporating by the power of the delete button. Sometimes, I give up starting and skip to the middle, the lines, the words, and the heart of what I want to write. Beginnings are hard. Some groundwork must be laid, an invitation to be offered, and an invitation to engage.

This week, the question, how do I start sparked and caught my attention.

You’ve probably asked how do I start (or a similar version) yourself recently. How should I start this project? How should I start cleaning up after the holiday? Where do I start with this laundry? Where do I start cleaning the kitchen?

This most common question often passes by before I even have a chance to engage with it. It’s part of the hum of my active, constantly whirling, observing, seeing, strategizing brain.

Smaller and deeper is about pausing with the most common and ordinary and seeing where the depth is. It looks to see where grace, intention, wisdom, and blessing are hiding in plain sight.

Intentional breathing directions often invite the one breathing to give their attention to the breath and notice the brief pause between the inhalation and exhalation. How do I start feels like a question that hides in brief pauses, a cousin to the inhalation and exhalations pause. It’s so subtle that it often passes without engagement or even knowledge. And yet, it’s so frequently present.

How questions are tactical or process questions. When I ask myself a question that begins with “how,” I’m looking for a process or a plan. My how questions have answers rooted in guidance or an understanding of the conditions or event at hand.

How do I start is a gentle, companionable question rooted in humility and curiosity. It’s not pushy or overpowering—it’s a pondering-slow question.

How do I start is a question enlivened by intention. The nature of the question is intentionality. I ask myself this question when I want what I’m working on or doing to be meaningful, wise, and well done. I ask this question because I care about the end result.

How do I start? I work with this question, and I ask and answer it so often that I mostly overlook it. However, this week, these four words shimmered and whispered, “Take a deeper look.”

A Blessing for Starting

How do I start? We bow to your guidance, wisdom, and gentle invitation to pause and begin with intention. May we notice all the ways we begin and begin again each day. May our starts be seasoned with grace, infused with intention, and deepened by wisdom.

How do I start could easily be seen as relating to January 1st: the day we move from 2024 to 2025. I’ve written about celebrating the New Year at the times of the year that make the most sense personally. (I find that’s often in September, the start of a new school year-My life still revolves around the school calendar!)

New Year Energy

Another New Year Perspective

There are so many lists of questions, guidance, help, suggestions, tools for starting 2025 floating around right now-this isn’t my attempt to add anything to that conversation.

The one question I’m asking myself is: What do I want to be planting and helping grow into readiness in the dark, stillness of winter, so when spring and newness comes, I’ll be ready to start…then.)

Photo by Kamala Bright on Unsplash

December 2024 marked our 44th(!!!) recorded haiku conversation-there were at least 12 conversations that didn’t get recorded-we are well over 50! I never thought five years later I would still be Zooming with my pals Michael and Davin. (We also published a book- Framing the Moment with one year of our haiku and haibun.)

We have so much fun with these conversations, I hope you’ll take a listen. This converstation covers shadows, owls and teen delusions. It’s always delightful to see how seeminly random topics fit together.

See our December Haikus at Profound Living (Michael publishes our haiku’s on his excellent website-check them out.)

Photo by Adarsh Kummur on Unsplash

I found the following poem in Poetry of Presence edited by Cole-Dia and Wilson. It captured my attentnion and imagination as I read it. I hope maybe the words will do the same for you.

• As you read the poem, go slow.

• Notice if a word or phrase catches your attention.

• Hold onto that phrase as you go through the upcoming week. See what wisdom it might unfold for you.

Also…

• How does this poem cause you to look at the trees outside your window differently?

• What guidance, wisdom or lesson might the trees have for you, that this poem points you towards?

Trees

by Howard Nemerov

To be a giant and keep quiet about it,
To stay in one's own place;
To stand for the constant presence of process
And always to seem the same;
To be steady as a rock and always trembling,
Having the hard appearance of death
With the soft, fluent nature of growth,
One's Being deceptively armored,
One's Becoming deceptively vulnerable;
To be so tough, and take the light so well,
Freely providing forbidden knowledge
Of so many things about heaven and earth
For which we should otherwise have no word—
Poems or people are rarely so lovely,
And even when they have great qualities
They tend to tell you rather than exemplify
What they believe themselves to be about,
While from the moving silence of trees,
Whether in storm or calm, in leaf and naked,
Night or day, we draw conclusions of our own,
Sustaining and unnoticed as our breath,
And perilous also—though there has never been
A critical tree—about the nature of things.