Summertime

I am taking a break for the rest of the summer so won't be posting for some time, but I will be back in with all manor of inspiring things i've found, heard and made come September.

In the mean time I leave you with some things that caught my attention this week... a poem, a picture and some beautiful music...

thing-searcher

‘I don’t know what you’ve got in mind,’ said Pippi, ‘but I’m not the sort to lie around. I’m a thing-searcher, you see. And that means I never have a moment to spare.’

‘What did you say you were?’ asked Annika.

‘A thing-searcher.’

‘What’s that?’ asked Tommy.

‘Someone who goes searching for things, of course! What else would it be?’ said Pippi as she swept all the flour into a little pile. ‘The whole world is full of things, which means there’s a real need for someone to go searching for them. And that’s exactly what a thing-searcher does.’

‘What kind of things?’ asked Annika.

‘Oh, all kinds,’ said Pippi. ‘Gold nuggets and ostrich feathers and dead mice and tiny little nuts and bolts and things like that.’

--Astrid Lindgren, Pippi Longstocking. Recalled to mind thanks to things magazine.

Dear Fellow Funny Shape Makers,

I am signing out for the rest of the summer. My body is telling me that I need to take a break...realign, recharge and refocus...literally from head to toe, but fear not, I won't shut down. I will be back in September full of stories, new inspirations and silly things.

In the mean time here are a few things that caught my attention this past week and on retreat this weekend...

1.  Everything is Connected by Peter Liversidge

2.Wise words...

3. Rising Mountain

4. Ido Portals Hanging challenge. This is good stuff!

5. next on my list of things to listen too...Jules Mitchell on The Science of Stretching.

6. And finally, since the sun has disappeared from this little island of late this quote from Anne Fadiman,

“It is a grave error to assume that ice cream consumption requires hot weather.”

I'm of to take a listen to the magic John Fahey makes with his guitar for the rest of the day now.
See you on the other side.
xx

Sunday Tune

Sunday Tune

Saturday Cartoon

Saturday Poem

It's like living in a light bulb, with the leaves
Like filaments and the sky a shell of thin, transparent glass
Enclosing the late heaven of a summer day, a canopy
Of incandescent blue above the dappled sunlight golden on the grass.

From 'Sally's Hair' by John Koethe.

Photo found here.

Friday!

I'm off to teach a retreat, sooooo looking forward spending a weekend moving and having fun with some sweet people.
Enjoy yours! Move a little slowly, live with your eyes open, your feet on the ground and your windows rolled down.

(gif found here ♥)

Still from Yves Klein's La Revolution Bleue,

Seizure

Roger Hiorns explains his blue crystal wonder, Seizure, created in a condemned London flat.
One of the most beautiful pieces of art I've ever seen!

(Source: The Guardian)

'well, are you gonna go for it?'

Photographs by Garry Winogrand

 1. Houston, Texas, 1977, from Women Are Better Than Men. Not Only Have They Survived, They Do Prevail, 1978–80.
2. Cheerleaders from Women Are Beautiful, Texas, c. 1970-1975.

jump from dreams

Waking up is a parachute jump from dreams.
Free of the suffocating turbulence the traveler
sinks toward the green zone of morning.
Things flare up. From the viewpoint of the quivering lark
he is aware of the huge root systems of the trees,
their swaying underground lamps. But aboveground
there's greenery - a tropical flood of it - with
lifted arms, listening
to the beat of an invisible pump. And he
sinks toward summer, is lowered
in its dazzling crater, down
through the shafts of green damp ages
trembling under the sun's turbine. Then it's checked,
This straight-down journey through the moment, and the wings spread
to the osprey's repose above rushing waters.
The Bronze Age trumpet's
outlawed note
hovers above the bottomless depths.

In the day's first hours consciousness can grasp the world
as the hand grips a sun-warmed stone.
The traveler is standing under the tree. After
the crash through death's turbulence, shall
a great light unfold above his head?

Tomas Tranströmer, translated by Robin Fulton.

landings

(Found here)

Adam Fuss

Works from My Ghost by Adam Fuss.
Daguerreotypes and unique photograms made from smoke and light.

Blue Mythologies: Reflections on a Colour

I highly recommend taking a look at this book by Carol Mavor.

Here's the back of the book blurb... 

"The sea, the sky, the veins of your hands, the earth when photographed from space—blue sometimes seems to overwhelm all the other shades of our world in its all-encompassing presence. 

The blues of Blue Mythologies include those present in the world’s religions, eggs, science, slavery, gender, sex, art, the literary past, and contemporary film. Carol Mavor’s engaging and elegiac readings in this beautifully illustrated book takes the reader from the blue of a newborn baby’s eyes to Giotto’s frescoes at Padua, and from the films of Derek Jarman and Krzysztof Kiéslowski to the islands of Venice and Aran. In each example Mavor unpicks meaning both above and below the surface of culture. In an echo of Roland Barthes’ essays in Mythologies, blue is unleashed as our most familiar and most paradoxical color. At once historical, sociological, literary, and visual, Blue Mythologies gives us a fresh and contemplative look into the traditions, tales, and connotations of those somethings blue"

‘Gravity is a part of nature. It holds the world together. We are all linked by it. We are linked to the earth. The earth is linked to the sun. When we are upright, the pull of gravity is from the waist down. You feel a pull. The earth pulls you down. If you are relaxed and if you are attentive with the body, you feel it. You let the body be sucked by the earth and this is gravity. At the same time the upper part becomes light, open, aware, relaxed.’ 

--Vanda Scaravelli

Suspended

Suspended Series by Sam Taylor-Wood

"My body is made up of saltwater and wishes, and a thousand star fish that try to mimic the constellations."

-- Megan Madgwick 

1. via seulray
2.  Gil Prates - Rio de Janeiro, 1980 via horsesatelier
3. Star Map found via seulray 

talk to her

It has been said (many times) that the most beautiful ballets are the ones that makes us forget the weight of the dancers’ bodies. With Pina Bausch, on the contrary, dance becomes a vehicle of celebration of this weight in its interaction with itself, the others’ and the environment. Her work is used beautifully in Hable con Ella by Pedro Almodóvar with that idea in mind, the dance segments in the film really reflect the musical rhythm and language of the story. I really recommend watching it and if it is of interest this essay is a good read.

shhhhhhh....

 “Sound is the mark of inefficiency.”
Gravity is king! How you move around gravity will define whether you’re an efficient – or inefficient – mover. Remind yourself of the quote above when working on your transitions, jumps and landings. Think of it as moving with a certain self-respect, with grace, elegantly, softly, efficiently – like a cat. The less sound you make, the better.

Fracoise Morellet

terrible blue infinities

"In the dark blue sky, a few yards away, the luminous half-moon looked suspiciously precise, as if it had been carefully separated from its missing half along a perforation. A nearby star, twinkling for all it was worth, resembled a flickering dot in a faulty neon sign. I reflected, not for the first time, upon the exaggerated reputation of the trite night sky, so empty of mysteries, so smug and small, in comparison with the terrible blue infinities of a blazing summer noon."

Steven Millhauser, Edwin Mullhouse.

anti gravity

The Forces With You!

One of the books my Dad wrote with my Aunty way back when.
This was always my favorite,  it explains (to kids) how forces such as gravity, friction, elasticity, and inertia and agents of force such as leverage and balance affect our lives.

The Forces With You, Tom Johnston and Sarah Pooley, 1987

Sunday Tune

Sunday Tune

Saturday Poem

Staking

The biggest (native) moth in North America lives for
two weeks. I’ve seen one spend one of its mornings
against a brick wall, preternaturally alive, folding mass
into the same amount of mass, collating. Its wings,
as you might expect, have eyes. It has no digestive
system, as such, no mouth; it thrives on its own stuff, as
acorns do. Consider, if you will, and please, you have
to, that night, clouded. The moth uses the moon, so
some contend. Everything’s dateless, but everything’s
Virginia, that is, original. A Great Horned Owl
intercepts the Cecropia Moth. These are my terms, and
these are my names.

-- Chris Hunt Griggs

Saturday Cartoon

Chasing Unicorns from Tai 'Buddha' Graham on Vimeo.


Breaking Waves With Stephanie Gilmore on Nowness.com

hands in the surf, completely transfixed by their hands!

Friday

Have a beautiful weekend listening to the silence between your thoughts.

(image found here)

Hello Friday

Found here

found here