Face First Into Advent

How shopping for a new rug made me think about staying weird.

I was shopping for a rug last week. A simple errand. Except I was the only person pressing my face into the merchandise.

We have a lot of sensory neurodivergence in our home, so picking a rug isn’t a hand-test situation. I needed to know how it felt on an 11-year-old’s cheek. A forehead. A full face. It smelled like dust and wool and something strangely comforting.

Shop one, I pretended to tie my shoe. Shop two, I acted like I dropped something. By shop four, I was just down on the floor, face-first, no shame left in my body. Before kids, I would’ve picked a rug based on vibe. Before understanding our family’s sensory world, I would’ve trusted my hand.

But now I know better.

You cannot understand an experience until your whole nervous system meets it. You cannot know a thing from a safe distance. You have to get close enough for it to touch you back.

And as strange as it sounds, that is the kind of life and work I want to lean toward this coming year.

Not digital. Not disembodied. Not clever or optimized or curated into submission. Work and a way of being that puts its face in the rug. Insists on being felt, not just observed. Risks embarrassment for the sake of becoming real.

This is the part of Advent I can’t shake.

Honest Advent by Scott Erickson

Incarnation isn’t theoretical. It’s tactile. The holy does not stay distant. It takes on a nervous system. It moves toward us into the dust, the cold, the animal breath.

And somehow, all the work that has ever moved me from the world itself, to performance art, to the strangest branded activations crafted with heart, lives in that same neighborhood.

I still think about Arcade Fire’s Chrome experiment, typing in your childhood address and watching the browser guide you home like a ghost.

Or strangers lying together under Olafur Eliasson’s artificial sun.

Or Marina Abramović sitting across from a stranger until something ancient softened.

Or the Teddy Perkins episode of Atlanta that felt like a fever dream.

Or Sleep No More, and a masked actor pulling you into a dark room, whispering a secret only you were meant to hear.

Even Patagonia’s Worn Wear tour felt sacramental, your beat-up jacket mended in front of you, your own memories stitched back into your hands.

Everyone has their version of pressing their face into a rug. That moment you stop performing normal and start honoring what the moment actually requires.

Shopping for our rug last week was a reminder that, like Advent and the incarnation, I want to head toward the weird. Toward the tactile. Toward the embodied work that reminds us we still have bodies. Toward anything that feels strange and alive enough to leave a mark, not just earn a click.

Because the work that moves people usually begins with someone willing to look a little ridiculous in public. Someone willing to get close enough to feel the difference. Someone willing to literally incarnate what everyone else keeps at arm’s length.

And maybe this isn’t just about making things.

Maybe it’s about becoming the kind of person who’s willing to press their face into the rug. Someone willing to meet the world with their whole nervous system, not just their ideas. Someone unafraid of the holy, the tactile, the almost-ridiculous places where meaning hides.

Maybe that is the invitation of Advent to move closer, to feel more, to become a little stranger and a lot more human. A way of being that is less curated and more incarnate. Less theory, more touch. Less polish, more presence.

A way of moving through the world that’s alive.