Have a LOVELY weekend!

(Found here)

Have a lovely weekend!

James Turrell

If you don't use your creative energy it ends up using you.

 James Turrell lithographs

Found here

Yoga to go: The keys to a rewarding home practice

Newsflash!!!
WORKSHOP ALERT

Where? Triyoga Chelsea 
When? 31/01/2014
Time? 19:30 - 21:30
Price? £25

So if you are interested in nurturing or developing a home practice or if you find your self at a loose end, or not knowing where to take a new pet, human or otherwise I really must recommend you come along and say hi and get your stretch on...click HERE for tickets.

And here is the blah blah...

Do you love your yoga practice at the studio but your home practice never quite meets your expectation?

Our bodies represent the life we have lived thus far; a map of our personal history. The physical aspects of Yoga provide a useful tool to view the way we move. For this practice to be of use, it makes sense to tailor it to your life and body. That’s where rolling out the mat at home comes in.

Going to class is brilliant, of course, but translating that to a home practice can be tricky.  In this workshop you are invited to make clear choices about which feelings in your body you pay attention to - building your self-knowledge, intuition and self-trust that, if used intelligently, will help you direct a practice that fits within the boundaries of where you are, what you're feeling, and what you're needing.

Join Rachel in starting and/or nurturing your home practice, to get the most out of your body in the safest possible way. Prepare to:

     

·         Focus the mind for the moment-to-moment noticing and decision-making that takes place during asana practice

·         Create templates for your own safe sequencing

·         Get rid of the myths and inspire yourself to help make things a little easier when removing the obstacles to practising at home

teacher bio:

Rachel’s teaching springs from the very precise Iyengar system, but is also greatly influenced by the study of functional movement, the work of Vanda Scaravelli and her current teacher Anna Ashby.  Classes combine an appreciation for alignment with a real love of movement, while including more restorative practices where appropriate.  Rachel’s training includes the Karuna Yoga Teacher Training Diploma (RYS 500 hours, 2007-  09) and the Restorative Yoga (36 hours, 2011) taught by Anna Ashby and Chris Swain.

www.rachel-and-yoga.com


(image found at goldlionaz)

"As you begin to realize that every different type of music, everybody's individual music, has its own rhythm, life, language and heritage, you realize how life changes, and you learn how to be more open and adaptive to what is around us. "

--Yo-Yo Ma

Rhythm and Soul

Northern Soul

Langston Hughes: The First Book Of Rhythms

Found here.
To read the complete The First Book of Rhythms see this Flickr set.

“Organize yourself & bring rhythm to your life: Because you have things to do, habits to break, dreams to achieve, peace to discover and one life to live”

― V.V. Rao

FOLI

There Is No movement Without Rhythm

The Strongest Woman in the World

By Yumi Sakugawa
 (via therumpus)

I love the rhythm of Yumi Sakugawa's comic strips. Read more on her blog.

Katie Paterson

‘Fossil Necklace is a string of worlds, with each bead modestly representing a major event in the evolution of life through a vast expanse of geological time. From the mono-cellular origins of life on earth to the shifting of the continents, the extinction of the Cretaceous period triggered by a falling meteorite, to the first flowering of flowers, it charts the development of our species and affirms our intimate connection to the evolution of those alongside us. Each fossil has been individually selected from all corners of the globe, and then carved into spherical beads in a secondary process of excavation.’

--Guy Haywood, Kettle’s Yard.

Katie Paterson's Fossil Necklace is one of the most beautiful things i've seen in a while. 
It is currently on show at The Welcome Collection (London) as part of the Foreign Bodies Common Ground exhibition.

from kettlesyard

“Queen of Monmartre”

La Goulue - She was the first major star of the Moulin Rouge and credited with creating the can-can. She’s also immortalized in many Toulouse-Lautrec paintings.
(Found here)

“The art of yoga is creative, rhythmic in practice and individualistic in nature."

-- BKS Iyengar (The Art of Yoga)

Although there is rhythm to this practice, there is no formula. Tailor practice to your body and don't let the attention become dull.

Source ellenbee via therumpus

“If you repeat a single word over and over again, it becomes nonsensical. The same applies to body parts—repetition disassociates them from their real function. They may create an interesting shape, but they have no actual use.”

J. Mae Barizo on artist Alvin Booth’s newest exhibition, Come to Your Senses.

(From theparisreview )

Become the rhythm of your breath.

Folk Dance (1928) | Cyril Edward Power linocut from iswasandwillbe

"This is a week for being careful, for being intentional, for keeping your ear to the rhythms of the ground you walk on, and the rhythms of your tender beating heart."

-- Madame Clairevoyant

Andy Goldsworthy

Ice sculptures

(from here, here and here)

Irish Dance

Coco Rocha on JIG from Coco Rocha on Vimeo.

Red Hot Rhythm's 'Rhythm Junkies' - Teaser Trailer 2: The Irish

I used to do this. Yep.
It's still my favorite kind of folk dance, especially the tap. Dancing those rhythms is like laying your heart beat on the floor.

(image source: awesomeartists)

Prayer does not use up artificial energy, doesn't burn up any fossil fuel, doesn't pollute. Neither does song, neither does love, neither does the dance. 

 --Margaret Mead

Eadweard Muybridge 
The zoopraxiscope - a couple waltzing

"I am rooted, but I flow."

--Virginia Woolf

Rhythm (from Greek ῥυθμός, rhythmos, "any regular recurring motion, symmetry") generally means a "movement marked by the regulated succession of strong and weak elements, or of opposite or different conditions." This general meaning of regular recurrence or pattern in time can apply to a wide variety of cyclical natural phenomena having a periodicity or frequency of anything from microseconds to millions of years.

In the performance arts rhythm is the timing of events on a human scale; of musical sounds and silences, of the steps of a dance, or the meter of spoken language and poetry.

(text from here. image source: Rhythm)

Chalcopyrite on Calcite

Rock Crystal

But hers through which the crystal tears gave light,
Shone like the moon in water seen by night.

-- Shakespear
Venus and Adonis 1.491. D iii, 1. 16, 17.

(photo credit: Noé Sendas)

Sunday Tune

Sunday Tune

Miso

Miso

PHANTASIA FOR ELVIRA SHATAYEV

(leader of a women’s climbing team, all of whom died in a storm on Lenin Peak, August 1974. Later, Shatayev’s husband found and burned the bodies.)



The cold felt cold until our blood
grew colder      then the wind
died down and we slept

If in this sleep I speak
it’s with a voice no longer personal
(I want to say      with voices)
When the wind tore      our breath from us at last
we had no need of words
For months      for years      each one of us
had felt her own yes      growing in her
slowly forming      as she stood at windows      waited
for trains      mended her rucksack      combed her hair
What we were to learn      was simply      what we had
up here      as out of all words      that yes      gathered
to meet a No of no degrees
the black hole      sucking the world in

I feel you climbing toward me
your cleated bootsoles leaving      their geometric bite
colossally embossed      on microscopic crystals
as when I trailed you in the Caucasus
Now I am further
ahead      than either of us dreamed      anyone would be
I have become
the white snow packed like asphalt by the wind
the women I love      lightly flung      against the mountain
that blue sky
our frozen eyes unribboned      through the storm
we could have stitched that blueness      together      like a quilt

You come (I know this)      with your love      your loss
strapped to your body      with your tape-recorder      camera
ice pick      against advisement
to give us burial in the snow      and in your mind
While my body lies out here
flashing like a prism      into your eyes
how could you sleep      You climbed here for yourself
we climbed for ourselves

When you have buried us      told your story
ours does not end      we stream
into the unfinished      the unbegun
the possible
Every cell’s core of heat      pulsed out of us
into the thin air      of the universe
the armature of rock beneath these snows
this mountain      which has taken     the imprint of our minds
through changes elemental and minute
as those we underwent
to bring each other here
choosing ourselves      each other      and this life
whose every breath      and grasp      and further foothold
is somewhere      still enacted      and continuing

In the diary I wrote:  
Now we are ready
and each of us knows it      I have never loved
like this      I have never seen
my own forces so taken up and shared
and given back
After the long training      the early sieges
we are moving almost effortlessly in our love

In the diary as the wind      began to tear
all the tents over us      I wrote:
We know now we have always been in danger
down in our separateness
and now up here together      but till now
we had not touched our strength

In the diary torn from my fingers I had written:
What does love mean
what does it mean      ”to survive”
A cable blue fire ropes our bodies
burning together in the snow      We will not live
to settle for less      We have dreamed of this
all of our lives

-- Adrienne Rich (1974)

Hello Friday

Enjoy your weekend.
Retreat into spaces that are safe and warm, remind yourself that you are brilliant and you deserve a weekend off . Read your favorite stories. Eat well. See your friends.

(image found here)

Friday!

At first you may only be able to progress this far by Joseph Staples / Office Supplies Incorporated

Splittings

1.
My body opens over San Francisco like the day –
light raining down      each pore crying the change of light
I am not with her     I have been waking off and on
all night to that pain     not simply absence but
the presence of the past      destructive
to living here and now      Yet if I could instruct
myself, if we could learn to learn from pain
even as it grasps us      if the mind, the mind that lives
in this body could refuse      to let itself be crushed
in that grasp     it would loosen      Pain would have to stand
off from me and listen     its dark breath still on me
but the mind could begin to speak to pain
and pain would have to answer:
We are older now
we have met before     these are my hands before your eyes
my figure blotting out      all that is not mine
I am the pain of division      creator of divisions
it is I who blot your lover from you
and not the time-zones or the miles
It is not separation calls me forth      but I
who am separation      And remember
I have no existence      apart from you

2.
I believe I am choosing something now
not to suffer uselessly     yet still to feel
Does the infant memorize the body of the mother
and create her in absence?   
or simply cry primordial loneliness?    
does the bed of the stream
once diverted      mourning       remember the wetness?
But we, we live so much in these
configurations of the past      I choose
to separate her     from my past we have not shared
I choose not to suffer uselessly
to detect primordial pain as it stalks toward me
flashing its bleak torch in my eyes     blotting out
her particular being     the details of her love
I will not be divided      from her or from myself
by myths of separation
while her mind and body in Manhattan are more with me
than the smell of eucalyptus coolly burning      on these hills

3.
The world tells me I am its creature
I am raked by eyes     brushed by hands
I want to crawl into her for refuge     lay my head
in the space     between her breast and shoulder
abnegating power for love
as women have done      or hiding
from power in her love     like a man
I refuse these givens      the splitting
between love and action      I am choosing
not to suffer uselessly      and not to use her
I choose to love      this time      for once
with all my intelligence.

-- Adrienne Rich

Mar Seck

This album has accompanied me on my travels around London this week. Mar Secks voice is so delicate. Beautiful.

Marc Johns

(Found here)

(found via crop-marks)

Stop minimizing and discounting your feelings. You have every right to feel the way you do. Your feelings may not always be logical, but they are always valid. Because if you feel something, then you feel it and it’s real to you. It’s not something you can ignore or wish away. It’s there, gnawing at you, tugging at your core, and in order to find peace, you have to give yourself permission to feel whatever it is you feel. You have to let go of what you’ve been told you “should” or “shouldn’t” feel. You have to drown out the voices of people who try to shame you into silence. You have to listen to the sound of your own breathing and honor the truth inside you. Because despite what you may believe, you don’t need anyone’s validation or approval to feel what you feel. Your feelings are inherently right and true. They’re important and they matter — you matter — and it is more than okay to feel what you feel. Don’t let anyone, including yourself, convince you otherwise.

-- Daniell Koepke

(image source: thedeathofcool, via awelltraveledwoman)