I Can See Clearly Now...Later? Who Knows

When the crystal bowls start singing, that’s the cue for the mind to shut its clamoring trap. 

That’s the aim, anyway. Much like a toddler hopped up on too many juice boxes, my mind doesn’t take direction that well. I sense the other bodies around me begin to relax, but I’m still fidgeting all over my yoga mat as the bell-like tones drift across the room.

“Our bodies are our home, and we are at home in that creation,” intones Savannah’s resident mystic Jacilyn Ledford, gently punctuating the blanket of sound emanating from bowls that she’s producing by turning a mallet along the edges. “Breathe.”

I experience a brief sense of stillness as I inhale, but by the exhale my mind’s already back obsessing about all the back-to-college crap Liberty needs on Amazon Prime Day and why cicadas sound louder when it’s hot and how my right pinky toenail needs trimming.  

“Focus on the sacral chakra,” says Jacilyn, reminding me to direct my attention to my lower belly, the body’s energetic center of creativity, sexuality, and self-worth, represented by the color orange. I imagine a warm tangerine glow settling under my navel and spreading through my hips and ovaries which lasts for about three seconds before I’m worrying that my last column needed way more editing and wondering how many more moon cycles until I am finally free of stupid menstrual cramps forever.      

But the next breath always brings another chance to settle down. Jacilyn, a devotee of Eastern spiritual practices and a down-to-earth deva incarnate, hosts these Sacred Sound Baths monthly at The Clearing House Center for Art + Spirit, where seekers gather for 90 minutes of her melodious bowls, hypnotic harmonium, sacred chanting, and other sonorous objects that can help the monkey-minded access a deeper sense of peace. Each session honors one of the seven chakras, working from the red hot root in our butts up to the pure purple crown above our brains, balancing the unknown forces operating over our heads and the material gravity constantly pulling at our feet. In my experience, this alignment is eternally elusive and frustratingly temporary — Dammit, I just got my chakras balanced and then the dishwasher broke and the dog puked on the carpet and now I gotta start all over again!      

The lovely Jacilyn and her many instruments

While the work takes place internally, it sure helps to practice in a beautiful space. The Clearing House’s immaculate tranquility sets a perfect stage for serenity with its golden heart pine floors and low windows that frame the live oaks of Greene Square, giving quiet respite from the circling trolleys and downtown thrum. Built in 1899 as part of the free kindergarten movement and basically empty save a statue of goddess Quan Yin, a blooming orchid, and a very happy fiddle leaf fig, the sunny room is a soothing balm for busy minds. 

Husband-and-wife founders James Lough and Jennefer Morris — both longtime SCAD professors and mindfulness practitioners — share a belief in the connection between creativity and spiritual practice. Citing inspiration from fellow prolific meditators like visionary Swedish painter Hilma af Kilmt, abstract pioneer Vasily Kandinsky, and mindmelding filmmaker David Lynch, the couple opened the Clearing House in the spring of 2021 to “merge art and personal cultivation.” 

“We don’t need any more excuses to get into and entertain our brains,” explains Jennefer, a prolific performing arts coach and voice actor. “We need to access the deeper wisdom of the body.”

While Savannah has its art spaces and spiritual places, this combination yields a unique line-up: Current offerings include restorative yoga with the wonderfully reposeful Lynn Geddes, somatic movement led by corporeal sage Janet Kaylo, qi gong, sitting meditation, and ecstatic dance as well as Jacilyn’s second Sunday sound baths, creative writing, and art workshops. Like any evolving person or project, the schedule continues to bloom with new petals.

“What we mean by ‘clearing house’ is clearing space, clearing the time to come and practice, clearing out the bullshit in our heads and the obstacles in our bodies,” muses James, who retired from teaching writing last year and leads Whole Heart Breathwork on Mondays. 

“It’s about building community and loosening the soil for creative inspiration.”

Also on the drawing board is a destination tour about the glorious brick building’s origins as a Kay Baldwin Free Kindergarten, one of several built in Savannah at the turn of the 20th century based on the principles of progressive 1800s German educator Freidrich Froebel. Froebel, who tragically lost his mother as a baby, advocated for children to come together and learn by playing with simple tools called “gifts,” serving as the precursor to Montessori and Waldorf schools and inspiring Savannah education pioneers Juliette Gordon Low and Nina Anderson Pape. 

James points out that Froebel also laid the groundwork for modern feminism by hiring only women as teachers rather than the strict male headmasters of his day, and the tour will feature more of the movement’s astonishing international and local historical touch points and some of the meditative activities of those first kindergartens. (By the way, “kindergarten” translates as “garden of children,” which either evokes a giggling wonderland of fingerpainting and graham crackers or a frightening forest inhabited by hyperactive gnomes kicking at your shins, depending on whose children you’re thinking about.) 

For now, the Clearing House presents plenty of ways to keep a mind and body busy; or rather, the opposite. 

“I could sense that this space was special,” says June Parina, a recent West Coast transplant who has attended various classes on the sunlit corner over the last couple of months. “I’d been looking for ways to take my meditation and yoga practices to the next level, and it’s here.”

My meditation practice doesn’t have levels so much as uneven potholes; most of the time when I hear a bell or bowl or chant it feels like I’m starting all over again. But I have noticed after decades of irregular bouts and half-hearted discipline that on some days, for a few hours at a time, I’m free from the neurotic chatter that used to plague me constantly. I have to believe it is the cumulative effect of returning to the breath, to the moment, to the quest of balancing my personal chakra rainbow over and over again. 

Still, there are times when existential angst feels like my forever mood. Is it worse to buy from Amazon or burn gas to drive to IKEA? Can mushrooms really save the planet from our disgusting pollutant ways? Why are our bodies so fragile and unpredictable? What’s the point of caring and loving and trying and creating and cleaning when it’ll all be over sooner or later for all of us? 

I know many of y’all grapple with similar struggles. My heart goes out especially to those in Savannah’s restaurant community who are mourning the sudden, surprising loss of Daniel Eastwood, a service industry veteran, artist, and food photographer who made every dish and drink that passed his lens look mouthwatering. He was a darling fellow, full of devotion for his husband and creative partner, Casey, and to the community of elevated palates and passionate personalities he called his family. May the glorious rainbow of his chakras shine forever upon all who loved him.   

Daniel

As another week passes, my mind roils with the injustice of how none of us get to survive the heartbreaking, ecstatic, mundane, mysterious, bizarre miracle of this life. But the conscious return to the breath helps calm that fire, as does taking comfort in the company of other tender-hearted weirdos searching for inspiration.

My practice will never be perfect, and to be honest, I’m not even trying anymore. Alignment always seems to come when I give up anyway, and after thirty minutes of squirming on the Clearing House floor, I finally surrender to the vibrational symphony of peace and healing filling the room. 

By the time Jacilyn strikes the last gentle gong, I’ve luxuriated in several unbroken minutes of a deeper sense of being, grateful even though I know the feeling will only last until some dipshit runs a red light in front of me or someone whines about wanting dinner.

I rise up energized anyway, like a kindergartener fresh from a nap, ready to do it all over again.  

It’s gonna be a bright sunshiney day ~ JLL

Basking in the glow at The Clearing House