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June’s Theme is Reverie.

When your gaze softens around the edges, where does your mind travel? What thoughts arise unbidden? Reverie beckons us to dream while awake, spinning loose associations that seem to emerge from somewhere not entirely inside or outside of you. Our woolgathering summons past memories and nascent fantasies. We turn them over and over, like smooth stones in our hand, making meaning.

Neuroscientists have found that daydreaming ignites your brain’s default mode network. Counterintuitively, this unfocused part of the mind is where many creative breakthroughs take place — think Archimedes‘ fluid mechanics in a bathtub and Newton’s gravity under the apple tree. When you’re not preoccupied with solving a problem and chaining yourself to your desk in a fit of productivity, your mind is free to drift, roaming for the pieces that might complete the puzzle unexpectedly.

Pay attention to what lulls you into reverie. What conditions disarm your focus? Let your thoughts float and not settle on anything, but drift like a cloud, or a child skipping across a sidewalk on a hot summer day.

May ’s Theme is Acceptance.

Acceptance is the act of surrendering to our reality, without judgment or fear. There are many things in our lives that cause us discomfort or pain. We attempt to change or resist them, to no effect. So we wave a big stick, keeping them at bay like a wounded animal. 

Acceptance is weaving into your story what once caused you pain — and still might, to this day. You welcome that creature into your home, tend to its wounds, and feed it out of your hand. Acceptance is knowing that this feral animal lives side by side with your tender house cat of a heart, always.

April ’s Theme is Movement.

The body in motion is a thing of beauty. Our cells shake kinetic energy through the finely articulated instruments of muscle, ligament, and bone. We blink, we pulse, we dance. Some even pull off feats of human athleticism and daring, from which we can hardly look away.

Movement is a universal state of being. Even at rest, the matter we’re composed of is in motion — subatomic particles whir about at dizzying speeds, to create the sense of solidity. The things that appear still — the earth beneath us, the trunk of a tree above us, is but a trick of the eye. They move slowly but at a staggering scale.

March ’s Theme is Corruption

Corruption can start innocently, like favoring someone you know over someone you don’t. Or recalling a gift they once sent, and repay them with a project for that sweetness. Corruption is a spectrum, rewarding social connections and financial advantages over the rules of fair play. It exists in every society and every institution. 

Some people survive through corruption, the labyrinthine bureaucracies where they live making it literally impossible otherwise. But while they survive, others perish. Rising plumes of toxic chemicals, collapsing buildings not constructed to code, we owe the calamities all around us to those who cared more about profit than people and gain over the greater good. 

February ’s Theme is Touch

Across the years when we had to stay apart to keep one another safe, skin hungered for the sensation of being pressed against another. The longing for touch was deeply felt. 

Unlike sight or sound, the senses we primarily rely on for information, touch cannot be conveyed across distance through screens and speakers. Touch invites us to slow down, pay attention, and come closer. 

When we open ourselves to the ineffable — what cannot be transmitted through words — touch emerges as a language unto itself. The grit of the soil under our bare feet, the clay slip enrobing a potter’s wheel, the sun-warmed fur of a beloved pet — these sensations can be healing.