saturday poem

Outwitted

He drew a circle that shut me out--

Heretic, a rebel, a thing to flout.

But Love and I had the wit to win:

We drew a circle that took him in!

 

 

--Edwin Markham

friday cartoon

circles - community dance project from Taylor F. on Vimeo.

see the moon?

On the far side of the moon there is a crater called Niepce, named after Joseph Niécephore Niépce, inventor of heliography and the oldest surviving photograph. It is a worn crater formation, ‘with rim features that have been softened and rounded by subsequent deposits of ejecta’.[7] It is a careful, patient activity, to observe the features of the moon: one must follow the border of the sun’s illumination, the thin region between darkness and light where the shadows are longest — the shadow terminator, this place is called. In Niepce, it has been observed, there is a small crater shaped like a teardrop, likely created by a low-angle impact.

Tell me again, I ask the stations — tell me again how nothing is as it seems. Show me how fine a thing it is to spend one’s time securing moments of illumination for safe-keeping. Convince me — I want to believe — that every twinkling trace, every glance of light is an inscription, a burnishing, a tiny percussion in the surface of time: a still life, memento mori, to its passage. Take me there.

 Section of the essay See the moon? The Celestial and the Circular in Photography by  Emily LaBarge. Read the essay in full over at The Photographers Gallery blog 

( J.W. Draper, The Moon, 1840. Image: London Stereoscopic Company/Getty Images)

the quilting circles of gees bend

The Quiltmakers of Gee's Bend - PBS Feature from Glass World Films on Vimeo.

The Quilts of Gee's Bend
soulful beauty.

balance

Mechanischer Körperfächer (body fan 2) - rebecca horn

"the fan suits my body -- i carry it and i balance it on my shoulders so that head and shoulders constitute the central axis of the two semi-circles -- starting position -- the two semi-circles of the fan close over my head -- when i move my body's balance, the two semi-circles change their horizontal starting position and begin to turn -- one semicircle turns in fron of my body, the other one behind it, so that my body becomes the fixed axis for the semicircles -- when the rotation is slow,  just sections of my body can be seen by turn -- when the two semicircles rotate fast, they close in a transparent circle."

  -- Rebecca Horn

via flash art n. 46-47, june 1974

if you walked in a circle...

Where we are with movement is where we were with nutrition 40 years ago. We say, “Just move more!” if a whale in captivity were to just swim more, it would make the flopped fin worse. Moving more might bring about even more of the forces that brought about the disease of mechanotransduction- in this case the flopped fin. It might make things worse.

At the end of the day swimming more wasn’t really the problem. If you walked in a circle everyday, you would notice that your body became shaped to that.
Then you walk fast in that circle, it will highlight those diseases even faster.
When we say we need to move well or differently, often we say [in this example], “Walk in the circle in the other direction.” You would offset some of the adaptations with that correction, but it’s still treating the symptom.

Corrective exercise is spot-treating these nutrient deficits by creating something novel instead of pulling back and asking what is the actual problem here? What are my actual movement requirements and how can I actually meet those instead of taking the vitamin or pill equivalent?

-- Katy Bowman for Liberated Body

Hans Coper

'Practicing a craft with ambiguous reference to function one has to occasionally face absurdity. More than anything, like a demented piano tuner, one is trying to approximate a phantom pitch. One is apt to take refuge in principles which crumble'

-- Hans Coper

talking circles

found here

circles of life

Everything
Turns,
Rotates,
Spins,
Circles,
Loops,
Pulsates,
Resonates,
And
Repeats.

Circles
Of life,
Born from
Pulses
Of light,
Vibrate
To
Breathe,
While
Spiraling
Outwards
For
Infinity
Through
The lens
Of time,
And into
A sea
Of stars
And
Lucid
Dreams.

-- Suzy Kassem

sunday tune

Saturday Poem

Found on the streets of New York City

meditation

One of the first yoga teachers I had gave me a lovely tip for meditation. It stuck with me and is something I've used on a regular basis ever since so I thought I would share.

Put on one of your favorite tunes then simply sit and listen to it fully, without distraction. See if you can focus your attention on the centre of every single note.

I've been told this works just as well if you are playing the instrument yourself. I wouldn't trust it with my shakey rendition of chopsticks on the piano though...

This is what I used today.

I trust my work. It's a collaboration with the material, and when it's viewed, it's a collaboration with the world. 

-- Kiki Smith

Recommended Read

Road Warrior

After fifty years, Gloria Steinem is still at the forefront of the feminist cause.

By Jane Kramer  || Click the title to read.

 “I’m an entrepreneur of social change,” Steinem says. “I talk. I write. I tell stories. I want to do justice to the women I meet.”  

(Photograph by Inez and Vinoodh for The New Yorker)

TRUST

“This flyer, a pre–Riot Grrrl ‘manifesto’ that was later re-purposed for the mini-zine Riot Grrrl, is the first image in the book. Kathleen told me she made it in 1989, when she was volunteering at Safeplace, Olympia’s long-lived domestic-violence shelter and advocacy organization. Designed so that it could be folded up into a small rectangle with the word trust on top, this flyer was both a secret invitation and a public announcement, much like Riot Grrrl itself.”

Archivist Lisa Darms reflects on her favorites from the Riot Grrrl Collection.

Lead with love.

Low ego, high impact.

Move at the speed of trust.

--Black Lives Matter.

Sunday Tune

Saturday Poem

The world doesn’t just invent itself:
it needs some coaching, a poke,
to remind it that invention
has always been necessary.

 

And there are more subtle necessities,
like jellyfish and unicorns.
Things the earth could not
think up on its own and so
thought us up.

 

— From “The Joke,” a poem in Fancy Clapping by Mark D. Dunn, reviewed at The Rumpus by Jim Zukowski.

Source: therumpus.net

Friday Cartoon

"Young women you are going to be older women one day. Don't worry about it....each decade adds character!"

joint health

Movement at a joint requires the bones to rotate, spin, roll and slide smoothly and safely around other bones, tendons, ligaments, joint capsules, muscles, cartilage and most importantly nerves.  As we age, many of these “obstacles” to safe movement become rougher and larger through injury and normal degenerative aging processes. Performing a full range of motion movement at a joint without bumping or grinding any of these obstacles might require a very subtle and precise movement. The more accurate the movement, the less bumping and grinding. The less precise the movement, the more wear and tear on the joints, causing irritation to nerves, inflammation, microtrauma, stress, loss of energy, etc.

So how do we train precise joint movement? One simple way is by paying very close attention to what is happening in the joint during movement and using that feedback to improve the quality of the motion. This necessarily requires doing simple movements very slowly and mindfully. 
You should be curious about the following questions  Is there any pain with the movement? Is there even the slightest discomfort? Is the movement arc smooth or ratcheted? Do you need to speed up and use momentum to skip over an uncomfortable part of the movement? Is the movement smooth and easy or labored and filled with tension? Are you moving with the effortless quality of a great athlete, a dancer or a little child? What would it feel like to move perfectly? Do you feel tension in non moving parts of your body such as your face, jaw or hands? Can you do the movement incredibly slowly? As fast as possible? 

You can apply these question to any type of movement or school of movement when it comes to thinking about how you move and what you want those movements to look and feel like in the future.

clay bodies

Vessels like these have been found across the globe dating back millenia. Clay is easily shaped and decorated, allowing people to convey information about cultural identity, society and beliefs through design.

Fired clay pots sometimes absorb traces of their contents, which scientific analysis can sometimes identify helping to tell us more about life and death through history.

For me it is the trans-formative firing process that makes ceramics unique as an art form. You make work and then give it to the fire and hope that during its metamorphis something beyond your expectations emerges. It's a natural process and I like to think of it like the body aging. No two human bodies grow the same and no two pots emerge the same.

Placing something you have labored over into a kiln, relinquishing control over its final aesthetics, takes a certain mind set, patience and a certain amount of faith.

Kiki Smith

getting shorter with age

"So, “everyone” gets shorter with age and this phenomenon is usually chalked up to compression over time. It is said that your height decreases because either the discs between your vertebrae have flattened out or, your bone density decreases with age, creating weak bones that can no longer stay upright so they curl forward. This seems to be the general understanding of why we get shorter as we get older. However, things are not always as they appear.

What I’m about to explain here is how someone can measure as shorter without any change in their mass — only in how their mass is oriented. I’ve failed, many times, to get this point across to large crowds of clinicians and they always end up looking at me like I’m insane. How can someone possibly be shorter if some body part hasn’t changed in length?

Let me show you...."

Katy Bowman making sense of shrinking. Head over to her blog to read the rest.

family means love and complete whole.

When the night feels my song, 
I'll be home, I'll be home. 

--Bedouin Soundclash - When The Night Feels My Song

Happy birthday Jofish. xx

live with your hands unfolded

Son: What are your dreams for me?
Dad: My dream is for you to beable to live out your dreams. I like this old proverb that talks about when children are born they come out with their fists closed because that's where they keep all their gifts. As you grow your hands learn to unfold because you are learning to release your gifts to the world. So, for the rest of your life I want to see you live with your hands unfolded.

Getting On, Getting Around

Getting On, Getting Around - An insight into mobility & ageing from Close-Up Research on Vimeo.

Woman with Bird in Her Hair
by Betye Saar, 2010

Aging

Aging is happening and you can’t stop it. You can, however, change your perspective toward it and embrace it with  energy, grace and style.

Sunday Tune

saturday poem

Sleep doesn't divide into halves

The days aren’t discarded or collected, they are bees
that burned with sweetness or maddened
the sting: the struggle continues,
the journeys go and come between honey and pain.
No, the net of years doesn’t unweave: there is no net.
They don’t fall drop by drop from a river: there is no river.
Sleep doesn’t divide life into halves,
or action, or silence, or honor:
life is like a stone, a single motion,
a lonesome bonfire reflected on the leaves,
an arrow, only one, slow or swift, a metal
that climbs or descends burning in your bones.

-- Pablo Neruda (via aconversationoncool)

Friday Cartoon

body road map

Viewing ancestral-health data through modern eyes can skew our conclusions with what to do with this information. Because we come from a movement-free culture, our relationship to moving tends to boil down to exercise. Only, exercise science, like nutritive science, has attempted to isolate the variables it perceives as most beneficial to the human. Despite the fact that we now know the quality of food varies with its freshness, the way it was fed and or grown, and even the way it was treated (or not), food is still most often evaluated by caloric quantity and percentage of fat, sugar and protein. This, despite the fact that these are not the most important variables when it comes to eating for health, they are still our culturally-selected variables.

In this same way, human movement has been reduced to variables that those evaluating science-data have determined to be most influential in health. Things like heart rate, or intensity of exercise and for how many minutes. The amount of pounds or kilograms to be lifted and the number of times before resting. The length of resting before repeating the loads again. Like nutritive science, exercise science has come a long way in the last 30 years, but also like nutrition, our relationship with exercise is deeply-tinged, culturally speaking with variables that have little to do with actual, sustainable health

-- Katy Bowman on deciphering modern 'optimal human movement' maps. 

found here

soles

I draw in the lines of your foot. I paint in the lines of your mouth. I make watercolors in your hand. I sew images in your ear. I draw a map in your navel…

I was very impressed by the Carte du Tendre [Map of Tenderness] invented by a woman writer of 17th century France, Mlle de Scudery. For some time, I conceived of gardens of “tendre” which mix writing and photography with real spaces: the path of reconciliation, the tree of shame, the herbs of confidences, the turtle of longevity, the spider of scandal, the route of chance, the maple of dispute, the copse of indiscretion, the timber trees of hope, the oak of kisses, the poppies of confession, the rabbit of fortune, the branches of forgetfulness, the junction of uncertainties, the forest of hesitations, the lake of temptation, the plains of fatigue, the lime tree of rest, the mountain of assiduousness, the passageway of pain, the intersection of ambition, the ramble of emotion, the slope of forgetfulness, the mound of despair…

Annette Messager, quoted in an interview with Bernard Marcade in BOMB, Issue 26, Winter 1989.

In the interview, she calls herself 'a trainer of paper spiders'. I like that.

(images found here)

skatepal

Journey to the Middle East with the inspirational SkatePal team.

Over the past two years SkatePal, a Scotland-based charity, has built three parks across Palestine to help nurture a local skate community by teaching young kids the joy of skateboarding. Photographer and filmmaker Sirus F Gahan traveled to Gaza with fellow skaters and volunteers Luke Murphy, Martin O’Grady, Harry Gerrard and Sam Dearden to document SkatePal’s admirable work.

(via Nowness)

recommended read

this journey is very good indeed...

“It is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters in the end.”

― Ursula K. Le Guin

Earth to Earth

Earth to Earth - the beginning... from Adam Buick on Vimeo.

Journey Jar

Journey Jar by Adam Buick

 a walk from st. davids head to porthgain.

 2013 Coloured stoneware with porcelain path inlayed. ht 38cm

There’s nothing more appealing than the feel of the crafter’s hand. Every morning when I drink my tea from a cup made by a friend, its two handles resting on porcelain hips, I am comforted. The slight chip in the lip that I’ve contributed reminds me to slow down when I handle what’s precious.

--  Dominique Browning

sunday tune

saturday poem

To flee from memory
Had we the Wings
Many would fly
Inured to slower things
Birds with surprise
Would scan the cowering Van
Of men escaping
From the mind of man

 

Emily Dickinson

friday cartoon

"Our bodies physically store our memories. We are the history of our lives, so to be in touch with one’s body is to have access to those memories.”

Janine Antoni

changing skin

These beautiful and delicate sculptures, made of paper and glue, were made by French artist, Mathilde Roussel. Meant to emulate human skin, these folded sculptures serve as a metaphor for everyday human change:

"We imperceptibly change everyday as if we were changing skin. The Mues sculptures make visible this metamorphosis through imprints of a body at the specific time. They are clothing of empty skin that we fold and keep to put on a new one. This skin becomes the trace of the time passing and the memory of an anterior life."

See more on Mathildes website