Tales

“ If you are a dreamer, come in. If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, a hoper, a prayer, a magic-bean-buyer. If you’re a pretender, come sit by my fire, for we have some flax-golden tales to spin. Come in! Come in! ”

-- Shel Silverstein

Darn

"... I darn and am looking for holes in people’s clothes and the stories that accompany them; repairing these holes and returning the mended garments. It is a way to briefly make contact with strangers. I am interested in the spaces the body occupies, the tenderness of touch and the ways in which we go about day to day life."

Celia Pym, Hope's sweater, 1951. 

Quote and images from Celia Pym found via Selvedge 

Optimism and Despair

"If novelists know anything it’s that individual citizens are internally plural: they have within them the full range of behavioral possibilities. They are like complex musical scores from which certain melodies can be teased out and others ignored or suppressed, depending, at least in part, on who is doing the conducting."

-- Zadie Smith
 A talk given in Berlin on November 10 on receiving the 2016 Welt Literature Prize.

getting to know me

One of the clearest lessons from contemporary neuroscience is that our sense of ourselves is anchored in a vital connection with our bodies. We do not truly know ourselves unless we can feel and interpret our physical sensations; we need to register and act on these sensations to navigate safely through life. While numbing (or compensatory sensation seeking) may make life tolerable, the price you pay is that you lose awareness of what is going on inside your body and, with that, the sense of being fully sensually alive.

--Bessel Van Der Kolk from The Body Keeps The Score

the snowbed

Jan Von Holleben's The Snowbed is one of the best books on my shelf.

"I find and I know that painting from nature is meaningless for me. I'd rather create paintings from memories, as visions of a landscape - I now mostly observe the bodily movement of mountains, water, trees and flowers. They are all reminiscent of similar movements in the human body of similar stirrings of joy and pain in the plants. Painting alone is not enough for me, I know that one can create qualities with colors - in the summer you feel an automnal tree deep inside, with your essence and your heart, it is this wistfulness that I want to paint." 

-- Egon Schiele in a letter to Franz Hauer, August 1913

New Mexico landscape by Michael A. Muller

Otto Kunzli – Arbeit Fur Die Hand – 1979-80

Francesco Viscuso

Ruth Thorne Thomsen, dot lady, 1983

Martin Puryear, untitled, 1977

Kansuke Yamamoto

Ana Mendieta

seeds

I don’t know what’s coming. I do know that, whatever it is, some of it will be terrible, but some of it will be miraculous, that term we reserve for the utterly unanticipated, the seeds we didn’t know the soil held. And I know that we don’t know what we do does. As Shane Bauer points out, the doing is the crucial thing.  

Rebecca Solnit, “The Arc of Justice and the Long Run”

sophie tottie

sophie tottie

Take a walk. Make something.

rules for self-care

1. MOVE. Take a walk. Be in nature. Commune with Mother Earth. She has seen it all, and she's still here supporting us. 

2. MAKE SOMETHING. A sandwich, a scarf, a sculpture, a song. Something small. Just remind yourself of your capable hands and self. It can help you keep the forward momentum. 


people, we need to take care of ourselves and our loved ones, bake cakes and look at the moon, all while remaining outraged, active and committed to moving society in the direction of freedom for all.

ink

Wild harvested Inks from the Toronto Ink Company

'i teach self-care'

"I teach self-care. I create environments for people to investigate themselves. I give them permission to touch their wounds, their blindness and numbness. I believe that deep self-knowledge is the path to healing and repairing the places where we've turned our backs on ourselves, where we were ignorant of our own body biases within our tissues and therefore our heart and soul. I help people find where they have unknowingly been at battle in their bodies. I teach this across fractured party lines. I teach people to empower themselves through body sensing and body-relating practices. And I believe that embodied self knowledge fosters compassion, understanding and better inter-relating to other humans. I want to know my neighbor, even if we disagree. I am prepared to do my part in repairing this country. I chose to not be at war with my own body a long time ago.

To my movement educator friends, let's continue to hold space for people of all ages and stages, let's honor them by hosting environments where they can find ease and peace. May we unify inside ourselves in order transform the anxiety and fear within society."

-- Jill Miller of Yoga Tune-Up

Ina Chadwick Wilde, from “The World Traveler.”

joan mitchell

Joan Mitchell, Pastels

on repeat

carfully tended

My desire
is always the same; 
wherever life deposits me:
I want to stick my toe
& soon my whole body
into the water.
I want to shake out a fat broom
& sweep dried leaves
bruised blossoms
dead insects
& dust.
I want to grow
something.
It seems impossible that desire
can sometimes transform into devotion;
but this has happened.
And that is how I've survived:
how the hole
I carefully tended
in the garden of my heart
grew a heart
to fill it

-Alice Walker

i art rachel

♡ my new shop selling hand made objects to spread love and cause mischief with ♡

iArtRachelShop

 

what makes us human

I could post these all day! You can check out the film in full on youtube (all 3 hours!) but I recommend going to see a version on the big screen. It's incredible and you can see it for free. The sheer indivisible weight of experience in the stories told by people from across the world have left me feeling connected and inspired to do more in my little corner of this planet. It's also interspersed with some breathtaking landscapes to remind us, If we've forgotten, about the importance of the land. And, in my interpretation, how much peoples freedom is tied to it.
Oohhh and the movement! Movement most definitely matters.

it all matters

It all matters. That someone turns out the lamp, picks up the windblown wrapper, says hello to the invalid, pays at the unattended lot, listens to the repeated tale, folds the abandoned laundry, plays the game fairly, tells the story honestly, acknowledges help, gives credit, says good night, resists temptation, wipes the counter, waits at the yellow, makes the bed, tips the maid, remembers the illness, congratulates the victor, accepts the consequences, takes a stand, steps up, offers a hand, goes first, goes last, chooses the small portion, teaches the child, tends to the dying, comforts the grieving, removes the splinter, wipes the tear, directs the lost, touches the lonely, is the whole thing. What is most beautiful is least acknowledged. What is worth dying for is barely noticed.

-- Laura McBride, We Are Called to Rise

after winter must come spring

Giovanni Salani - Battito d'ali

anna bu kliewer

constance stuart larrabee

jj

several planes

"To talk to Le Guin is to encounter alternatives. At her house, the writer is present, but so is Le Guin the mother of three, the faculty wife: the woman writing fantasy in tandem with her daily life. I asked her recently about a particularly violent story that she wrote in her early thirties, in two days, while organizing a fifth-birthday party for her elder daughter. “It’s funny how you can live on several planes, isn’t it?” she said."

- Julie Phillips' profile of Ursula K. Le Guin:

sarah scampton

images found here