The Museum of Healing Attention, Birthday Edition
On awe, trust, and glittering frescos
Hello friend,
Over the past few weeks, people I love keep sending me the link to something called the Museum of Healing Attention.
(My heart may have stopped for a beat when I first saw that title.)
The Museum of Healing Attention is a guided visit of an imagined museum space that supports healing in visitors. It is the fruit of a collaboration between Jessi Rado, a therapist and integrative artist, and Jackie Armstrong, a MoMA museum educator, both of whom explore trauma and trauma-informed spaces in their work.
The result is beautiful, cheeky, and moving.
My minor heart palpitations occurred, I think, because this project offered exciting words and images to an idea I’ve been exploring for the past year and a half: how we pay attention to our lives can lead to healing, and museums can be places to practice those skills.
Attention is powerful because it centers on our encounters with experience, which is more the realm of the body than the mind. And our bodies are so very wise, they know which way we need to go. So navigating healing—or even things like identity, belonging, and desire—through playing with new ways of paying attention allows embodied experience to lead us in good and true directions.
Experience, I am coming to discover, is one of our most powerful teachers.
It was my birthday a few days ago. Despite wanting to be someone who doesn’t care about them, birthdays are a big deal to me. They become these moments of clarity where a veil is lifted and I can clearly see the alignment between my heart and the life I’m living.
So in preparation for Birthday 2023, and with a flare for the dramatic, I decided to abstain from social media for a week to cleanse my attentional palate. I wanted to get still, opening myself up to receive what the experience of this birthday had to reveal about my current state of affairs.
On the day before my birthday, I crawled through a bushy thicket to get to a river.
It was a spot I discovered last summer by accident, on the route from my child’s preschool to the office where I work. I come here sometimes to take a deep breath before facing the engagements of the day.
As I tried not to slip on the snow, I felt the warmth of excitement. This would be a delicious day for river gazing; I could tell by the glimmering sunlight catching the ice crystals that covered every vegetal surface in the thicket.
I emerged at the riverbank, scanning the familiar view for what it was serving on this glorious winter day. Large sections of the river’s surface were frozen solid, but others were denuded and steaming where they came into contact with the cold air. The sky was a brilliant blue and the shadows cast on the snow were an impossible periwinkle.
Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.
I felt myself turning to leave, pulled by the tasks of the day, but something in me told me to pause and hold my gaze a beat longer. Longer than felt comfortable.
And that’s when I noticed that the snow was glittering.
Glittering.
Dancing in the light as if it were alive. Absolutely magical.
How was I just noticing this now?
This was not the first time I have been surprised by glitter.
In May, on the route from a season of survival to one of homecoming, I hid myself away for a deep breath in Florence. It was another moment of attentional cleansing. I was using my time in Italy to rest—or rather, to learn through experience what rest even looked like for me.
I made a pilgrimage to one of my favorite places in the world, San Marco, a jewel of a museum housed in a medieval monastery and plastered with frescos by Fra Angelico. I made my way up the wide stairs that lead to where the monks used to sleep, rounding the corner to be met with Fra Angelico’s magistral Annunciation at the top.
I stood in front of that fresco, taking it in like a deep gulp of water. I decided not to take any photos; letting my experience of that painting in that moment be the only thing I paid attention to.
I put my nose in the fresco and explored the details of the vegetation in the garden, the colors in the angel’s wings, the shape of Mary’s elongated hands.
Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.
But as I stayed rooted in front of the artwork, staying still a beat longer than I usually would, I noticed that the paint was glittering. This fresco, painted by a friar in the fifteenth century, was sparkling more than the eye shadow I wore in middle school.
It had taken almost half an hour of looking at the painting, but all of a sudden I saw that it was alive and dancing with light.
You can only be surprised by glitter so many times before you realize something more is going on.
In front of the glittering fresco, in front of the glittering snow, I was struck by awe. Awe that there was more going on than what I initially knew. Awe that I could still be surprised in such familiar places. Awe that I wasn’t in control of these encounters.
Beyond the stories we tell ourselves about our experience, there is always an aliveness waiting to meet us.
It’s like when you take the time to enjoy the colors of the clouds at sunset—and maybe even to call them beautiful—then hold your attention long enough to actually become aware that they are moving slowly across the sky.
So this was the healing attention I paid to my birthday.
I noticed the stories I was telling myself,
held on for a beat longer,
and sensed the aliveness coursing below.
And I was able to shift how I am choosing to frame the narrative of my life in this season of transition. I practiced noticing the stories I am telling myself about the unknowns and open-ended questions—while holding my attention until I could sense the intangible forces that I trust are holding me together. The forces of love, belonging, beauty, courage, and hope. In other words, the aliveness.
It is one thing to understand these things intellectually, but the power of embodied experience helps integrate them deep in our bones. Awe and trust and healing attention are strong medicines.
Some Personal Updates
I was on my first podcast! I had the pleasure of speaking with Claire Bown on The Art Engager Podcast. We talked about how to look at daily life like a work of art. (Claire has a gorgeous free resource for looking at art slowly that you can get here.)
I had a video go viral on Instagram “Tired Moms in the Met Museum” got over 3.5 million views. Wild. It was fun to see it shared by caregivers all over the world with variations of messages like: “so relatable”, “moms are so strong!”, and (my personal favorite) “put me in a museum”.
I was part of a panel discussion on the theme of ‘the art we live with’, and the need to prioritize, make, and seek beauty in our everyday lives. (Watch the recording here, my presentation starts at 26:09)
Perhaps I am burying the lede by sharing that I am deep in the weeds with my Museum Studies PhD dissertation (which explains this newsletter turning into more of a pop-up event than a monthly letter). I am thankful to have a research question that excites me, a supportive team around me, and a view of the finish line that is getting closer and closer.
I hope the coming weeks are filled with many opportunities for healing attention in your life.
Warmly,
I had the same moment noticing glittering snow about a week ago. I wanted desperately to photograph it, but it's something a camera can't capture. Actual magic. ✨
"Awe and trust and healing attention are strong medicines." - YES. Happy belated birthday, friend.