I think of rivers, of tides. Forests and water gushing out. Rain and lightening. Rocks and shadows. All of these are in me. 

-- Haruki Murakami

Why We Are Digging Up Old Bones

The remains of Cervantes have been discovered. Art history sleuth Silvani Vicenti thinks he has identified the remains of the woman we know as the Mona Lisa. The Archbishop of Canterbury has just conducted the funeral of Richard III in Leicester Cathedral. On Front Row the sociologist Tiffany Jenkins explains our fascination with bones of cultural and historic significance. Listen here. 

phosphate of calcium

What reconciles me to my own death more the anything else is the image of a place: a place where your bones and mine are buried, thrown, uncovered, together. They are strewn there pell-mell. One of your ribs leans against my skull. A metacarpal of my left hand lies inside your pelvis. (Against my broken ribs your breast like a flower). The hundred bones of our feet are scattered like gravel. it is strange that this image of our proximity, concerning as it does mere phosphate of calcium, should bestow a sense of peace. Yet is does. With you I could imagine a place where to be phosphate of calcium is enough. 

--John Berger
and our faces, my heart, as brief as photos

found via giphy

Sunday Tune

Sunday Tune

Saturday Cartoon

Saturday Poem

Once

On a summer trip to Norway, I jumped in to the Arctic sea.
I did it because everyone else was doing it (yup) with what looked like ease...
And, as I have mentioned before, I've been swimming since I was a tiny...one of the only things my parents were adamant me and my brothers stuck with...so I figured I'd be strong enough.
The cold was such a shock to the system I had to be pulled back out, gasping and numb.
When I swim in the ocean now, I step into the water slowly and with great care and although I rarely think about that time in Norway, it always feels as though I'm absentmindedly touching a scar.

Once

As a kid, I ran down a hill so fast I couldn't stop myself.
Momentum took over and I lost all ability to command my legs.
My body just kept propelling itself forward.
I still vividly remember the feeling bubbling in the pit of my stomach as I lost control.
I tumbled straight into a bush and a pile of rocks broke my fall leaving a permanent scar on my right knee.
I remember not wanting to leave the shelter of the bush, I was boiling with embarrassment.
It was some time before I let myself loose control like that again.
And it took an even longer time to learn that mistakes aren't good or bad, they're just mistakes.
And you clean them up.
And you go on.

Mathematics

demonstrate

Photo of NYC protest, ca. 1920s. Via all things amazing.

“Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy; it is absolutely essential to it.”

― Howard Zinn

Once

When learning how to dance with a partner my teacher told me
 '"The highest technique is to have no technique. Your movement should be the result of his movement and his the result of yours."
It took me a long time to understand what that meant.

 I've since found out he borrowed that quote!

 "The highest technique is to have no technique. My technique is a result of your technique. My movement is a result of your movement." -- Bruce Lee

  (thanks again for sharing the video David!)

Frida

Frida marching for workers rights, at a rally protesting C.I.A. involvement in Guatemala and on a communist rally.

Once

On a family trip to Ireland I fell in love with Irish Dance.
On my return home my mum found a local class for me to attend.
I was besotted for years.
It's still my favorite kind of folk dance, especially the tap.
Dancing those rhythms is like laying your heart beat on the floor.

p.s. THIS is brilliant.

Once Upon a Time

"Unlike what most people think, storytelling does not begin with inventing, it begins with listening" 

- John Berger

Brilliant article about John Berger and his work here

Sunday Tune

Saturday Cartoon

Remembering Jordan Davis

A Much-Needed Film About Life, Death, Guns And Race

Bread AND Roses.

Sunday Tune

Saturday Poem

Once

I got up early in the morning
to take pictures of this huge momolith
in the middle of the australian outbck.
It took me a whole day
to walk around Ayers Rock.
On my trip
I never met anybody,
but ever since I'd left the motel in the morning
I was joined by a dog
running ahead of me.
It was blazingly hot,
and except for a stubborn German like me,
nobody in his right mind would have gone on such a march.
Thanks to my local guide
I found a few amazing hidden places.
Only when, to top it all,
I decided to climb the mountain,
my canine companion backed out.
He waited for me at the foot of the steep climb
and welcomed me when I came back down,
wagging his tail.


Wim Wenders. from his book "Once"

Found here

The miracle is this…
The more we share
The more
We have

Leonard Nimoy,
A Lifetime Of Love: Poems On The Passages Of Life

Recommended Read

This is a slightly premature recommendation because I haven't finished reading it yet, mostly because I keep getting side-tracked looking up all the wondrous thins Chris references BUT I'm really enjoying it so far.I am really enjoying this.

If you want a much more nuanced argument for giving it a go then take a listen to this Liberated Body podcast.

Denali

Blindly

Documenting scenes from a painting workshop with visually impaired participants, Żmijewski’s video Blindly asks what it means to imagine and represent without relying on the sense of sight.

Artur Żmijewski, Blindly 2010

Video, colour and sound, 18min 41sec

Image courtesy of the artist and Foksal Gallery Foundation

Agnes Martin

Artists are intuitive. They wait for inspiration. That's what art is about, the intuitive, not the intellectual. Art about ideas stimulates ideas, but art that comes from inspiration stimulates feelings of happiness, innocence and beauty.

--Agnes Martin

I've just been to see her exhibition at the Tate. It's glorious, go!

I don’t think there is much separation in all the things we do. How we do one thing is how we do anything.

-- Lauren Spencer King

From apieceapart.com

La Passeggiata

Language: Italian
Etymology: Derived from passeggiara: to take steps, pass through

Meaning: To take passeggiata is to master the art of the evening stroll. It means to walk aimlessly and enjoy the simple pleasure of being outdoors and socialising in the lingering summer sun.
The ideal time to take passeggiata is between late afternoon and dusk as a break between sitting down and finishing dinner.

How about organising a moving meeting place like this through summer rather than indoor happy-hour drinks? You get to hangout, gossip and move all in one...I like mine without shoes...

Photos by @MyNameIsJessamyn/Instagram
found here.

Essential

"Deciding what is essential in our lives isn't about paring back our belongings and forgoing our beloved but unnecessary frivolities: Instead of determining how little we can live with, it's about working out what we simply can't live without."

-- Kinfolk Magazine/The Essential Issue.

--Arnold Schwarzenegger

Sunday Tune

Sunday Tune

Saturday Cartoon

Saturday Poem

Let children walk with nature,
let them see the beautiful blendings.
communions of death and life,
their joyous inseparable unity,
as taught in woods and meadows,
plains and mountains and streams.
And they will learn that death is stingless.
And as beautiful as life.

-- John Muir, Walk With Nature

Inga Kerber

all work by Inga Kerber

the whole of nature

A human being is part of the whole… He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

-- Albert Einstein, 1950

Peter Doig

Love the way Peter Doig places his figures in environments, like long bodies.

the long body

The long body is a Native American term which refers to the individual body plus the life support systems around it. It is a much bigger conception of the human body than we have in western culture, and considers the body continuous with the larger environment.
The perception of our bodies as isolated units is dangerous because it doesn’t take into consideration that organisms live in context. We co-evolve with our habitats over many millions of years.
We think we have nervous systems to regulate our bodies- and we do- however the nervous system has other functions- for humans in particular -  it's purpose is to learn habitat and our social environment too.

-- Frank Forencich over at Liberated Body

Recommended Read

Body Intelligence Meditation by Ged Sumner
 This is the sentence that attracted me to this book “Biology is just another subject taught in school, but when you take away our beliefs, all we are is our biology.”

Ged Sumners book was driven into being by the idea that the more conventional forms of meditation can be seen to encourage an escape or "rise above" the body and a desire to stop thoughts, which he considers anti-body and something that lends itself to dissociation from the body....something I would agree holds a gem of truth...

This vivid and well thought through book includes a good number of meditations that show you how to tune into the subtle states that lie within the body. I really enjoyed the clearly guided visualisations that help create an easy and deeply felt connection with the physical body.

If you are interested in exploring the universe that is your body in a very simple and deeply felt way then I highly recommend this book (or the audio downloads). It's a brilliant tool to add too your embodied thinking box.

Bert's Lost Paperclips

feel everything

(Found here)

Mel Bochner

Mel Bochner

The Backwards Brain Bicycle

"...Be very careful about how you interpret things, because you are looking at the world with a certain bias, whether you think you are or not. "
Absolutely brilliant experiment so show how fixed the brain becomes...

the long body

The long body is a Native American term which refers to the individual body plus the life support systems around it. It is a much bigger conception of the human body than we have in western culture, and considers the body continuous with the larger environment.
The perception of our bodies as isolated units is dangerous because it doesn’t take into consideration that organisms live in context. We co-evolve with our habitats over many millions of years.
We think we have nervous systems to regulate our bodies- and we do- however the nervous system has other functions- for humans in particular -  it's purpose is to learn habitat and our social environment too.

-- Frank Forencich over at Liberated Body

(found here)

Sunday Tune

Saturday Cartoon

In conjunction with an exhibition of her drawings, modern dance legend Trisha Brown improvises movements across a large piece of paper placed on the Medtronic Gallery floor. Part of Trisha Brown: So That the Audience Does Not Know Whether I Have Stopped Dancing. http://www.walkerart.org/calendar/200...

think it through

Movement visualization has been used by many elite athletes, dancers and musicians to improve performance for a long time.  Science has been interested in the effects of visualization on physical performance since the 1920s.  Although there have been conflicting results, research has left no doubt that imagery can improve physical performance.  Here is a brief summary of some interesting results.

Numerous experiments have shown that people can increase their physical skills by imagining themselves practicing the skill.  For example, in one experiment two groups of people were taught a series of notes on the piano.  Neither group had ever played before.  One group practiced playing the notes for five days, two hours a day.  The second group simply imagined playing the notes for the same amount of time.  At the end of the experiment, the imagining group had improved almost as much as the practicing group.  In fact, they had completely caught up after two hours of hands on practice.  Further, their brains showed objective changes in the neurons that control the skills.  How is this possible?

-- Todd Hargrove
Click here to read on....

"While walking, the body and the mind can work together, so that thinking becomes almost a physical, rhythmic act."

-- Rebecca Solnit

Physical Thinking

"We are all experts in 'physical thinking', we all have a body right, and we all know what that body feels like in the real world..."

--Wayne McGregor A choreographer's creative process in real time

Image by Katrien de Blauwer

Thought

"Thinking has, many a time, made me sad, darling; but doing never did in all my life...my precept is, 'Do something, my sister, do good if you can; but at any rate, do something.""

--Elizabeth Gaskell North and South