slouchy monoprints by Renee Gouin

For Equilibrium, a Blessing

Like the joy of the sea coming home to shore,
May the relief of laughter rinse through your soul.

As the wind loves to call things to dance,
May your gravity by lightened by grace.

Like the dignity of moonlight restoring the earth,
May your thoughts incline with reverence and respect.

As water takes whatever shape it is in,
So free may you be about who you become.

As silence smiles on the other side of what's said,
May your sense of irony bring perspective.

As time remains free of all that it frames,
May your mind stay clear of all it names.

May your prayer of listening deepen enough
to hear in the depths the laughter of god.


― John O'Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings

note to self

Our ignorance is their power so take every opportunity to make the connection with those around you, listen and learn.
Connections create community.
Community helps understanding.
Understanding fuels empathy.
Empathy facilitates change.

John McCracken

family

The Family, the cosmic, transcends our realms of humanity.
Your mother
         father
         sister
         brother
         stranger
         lover
         friend
         and enemy
The birds
The bees
The flowers
The trees
All interstellar entities
Everything that lives and breathes
We are all family.

--Zoe Bedeaux from i-D Soul

Gillian Wearing

we are all one here

John Ashbery, from 'How to Continue.'

You Are Me

Barcelona-based director Gerard Montero talks about Empty, a film he made with choreographer Paloma Muñoz:

"The film explores ideas around dance and the significance we place on movement, which can't always be easily explained. In this empty space of the swimming pool we explored the poetic potential of the body’s movement and how a place can effect how we shape it.

turtles all the way down

“My goal is simple. It is complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.”
—Stephen Hawking, 1981

Stephen Hawking opens his new book with a marvelous old anecdote. A famous astronomer, after a lecture, was told by an elderly lady, who was perhaps under the influence of Hinduism, that his cosmology was all wrong. The world, she said, rests on the back of a giant tortoise. When the astronomer asked what the tortoise stands on, she replied: “You’re very clever, young man, very clever. But it’s turtles all the way down.”

Most people, Hawking writes, would find this cosmology ridiculous, but if we take the turtles as symbols of more and more fundamental laws, the tower is not so absurd. There are two ways to view it. Either a single turtle is at the bottom, standing on nothing, or it’s turtles all the way down. Both views are held by leading physicists. David Bohm and Freeman Dyson, to mention two, favor the infinite regress—wheels within wheels, boxes inside boxes, but never a final box.¹ Hawking is on the other side. He believes that physics is finally closing in on the ultimate turtle.

--  Review of A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes by Stephen W. Hawking

Riccardo Guarneri

i can hear her breathing

Everything is Connected

From Sustainable Human, check it out, brilliant stuff.

the gifts we give

this piece of writing is magnificent. very much worth a read, but be warned, it's a weepy...

“An Eskimo [Inuit] custom offers an angry person release by walking the emotion out of his or her system in a straight line across the landscape; the point at which the anger is conquered is marked with a stick, bearing witness to the strength or length of the rage.”

― Lucy R. Lippard, Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory

a record collective disobedience.

"Desire lines, also known as cow paths, pirate paths, social trails, kemonomichi (beast trails), chemins de l’âne (donkey paths), and Olifantenpad (elephant trails), can be found all over the city and all over the world, scarring pristine lawns and worming through forest undergrowth. They appear anywhere people want to walk, where no formal paths have been provided. (Sometimes they even appear despite the existence of formal paths, out of what seems to be sheer mulishness—or, perhaps, cowishness.) Some view them as evidence of pedestrians’ inability or unwillingness to do what they’re told; in the words of one academic journal, they “record collective disobedience.”

Robert Moor, 'Tracing (and Erasing) New York's Lines of Desire.' The New Yorker, 2/20/2017.


Image by Richard Long: A Line Made by Walking, 1967.

Between hitchhiking lifts, [Long] stopped in a field in Wiltshire where he walked backwards and forwards until the flattened turf caught the sunlight and became visible as a line. He photographed this work ...

(I have a copy of this on my wall...thank you natalie!)

where i am for now

What do I believe in? Imagination, gardens, science, poetry, love, and a variety of nonviolent consolations. I suspect that in the aggregate all this isn't enough, but it's where I am for now.

Teju Cole, from 'A Conversation with Aleksandar Hemon' in Known and Strange Things. (found via evencleveland)

slack jaw

Slack Jaw - Ellen Page & Emma Portner from Emma Portner on Vimeo.

John Opera

John Opera, Cyanotypes

blue is the light that got lost

"The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. Water is colorless, shallow water appears to be the color of whatever lies underneath it, but deep water is full of this scattered light, the purer the water the deeper the blue. The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue at the horizon, the blue of land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance. This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue.

For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains.

Blue is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in, for the blue world."

-- Rebecca Solnit  A Field Guide to Getting Lost

push me pull you

Anna Hepler: PUSH ME PULL YOU from Visual Arts Center of Richmond on Vimeo.

Anna Hepler

Anna Hepler, Cyanotypes

"A LETTER TO MY TEENAGE SELF" by SOLANGE KNOWLES

"there will be fear. a lot of it. there will be triumph. a lot of it. there will be constellations you want to reach for but can’t put your finger on. you will trace them like the scars on your body you got from trouble and the times of your life. you will take the long way to get to these Orions. the long way will become a theme in your life, but a journey you learn to love...."

this letter reads like song lyrics..read it in full here.

"There are two ways to slide easily through life, to believe everything or to doubt everything. Both ways will save us from thinking." 

- Alfred Korzybski

life makes shapes

"Life makes shapes. Life is a natural, evolutionary process in which series of shapes are continually forming. These shapes are part of an organizing process that embodies emotions, thoughts, and experiences into structure. This structure, in turn, orders the events of existence. Each person?s shape is his embodiment in the world. We are the body we inherit, the one that lives us, and a personal body, the one we live and shape through voluntary effort. We are citizens of two worlds, rooted in the animate, immortal and timeless. Molecules and cells organize into clusters, which further organize as layers, tubes, tunnels and pouches. These give structure to liquid life and set the stage for embodied human consciousness. Through the act of living, a personal human shape grows, one that is changed by the challenges and stresses of life."

-- Stanley Keleman

I Lie

it’s necessary to talk about trees

WHAT KIND OF TIMES ARE THESE

There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.

I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don’t be fooled
this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.

I won’t tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light —
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won’t tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it’s necessary
to talk about trees.

Adrienne Rich

picasso pots

Holding Space for Not Knowing

"In today’s episode we're talking about holding space for not knowing. Why are we- culturally- people who think we need to know things? There is an underlying assumption that we can know definitive capital T truths- and we want bedrock answers. We want to avoid the feeling of groundlessness that comes with not definitively knowing things. The trouble with that is that we look outside of ourselves for prescriptions of how to live, and we create a society where the stronger your opinion the more right you must be. We wind up without space for sourcing our own answers, or for differing viewpoints, or for the experience of evolving understandings that can shift over time and be alive in their unfolding... so let’s delight in some groundlessness today!"

Ep 32: Holding Space for Not Knowing

click above for a beautiful episode of Bliss and Grit

dreamy

“Inelegantly, and without my consent, time passed.”

― Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You

Emma Amos

love everything about these.
Painter: Emma Amos

there are only relationships

"The body is not like a machine, an assembly of various parts put together to create a greater whole, and we must stop thinking of ourselves like that.

We are organisms that evolved in complex ecosystems, with layers of interdependence. There are no units that act alone or have any sense autonomy - there are only relationships."

- Peter Blackaby 

A Pang is more conspicuous in Spring
In contrast with the things that sing
Not Birds entirely – but Minds –
And Winds – Minute Effulgencies
When what they sung for is undone
Who cares about a Blue Bird's Tune –
Why, Resurrection had to wait
Till they had moved a Stone –

Emily Dickinson, ca. 1881. Amherst College Archives & Special Collections, via The Morgan Library.

Cyril Edward Power

folk dance lino cuts by Cyril Edward Power

Folk Dance

1. Ball de bastons – Weapon dance from Spain and Portugal
2. Bluegrass Clogging
3. English Clogging - The Unthanks
4&5. Irish Step Dance
6. Georgian folk dances – Including dances Kartuli, Khorumi, Acharuli, Partsa, Kazbeguri, Khevsuruli

“Sometimes in life confusion tends to arise and only dialogue of dance seems to make sense.”

― Shah Asad Rizvi

trisha brown

“Do my movement and my thinking have an intimate connection? First of all, I don’t think my body doesn’t think.”

— Trisha Brown

As I walk through
This wicked world
Searchin' for light in the darkness of insanity.
I ask myself
Is all hope lost?
Is there only pain and hatred, and misery?
And each time I feel like this inside,
There's one thing I want to know:
What's so funny 'bout peace love & understanding? 

And as I walked on
Through troubled times
My spirit gets so downhearted sometimes
So where are the strong
And who are the trusted?
And where is the harmony?
Sweet harmony.
'Cause each time I feel it slippin' away, just makes me want to cry.
What's so funny 'bout peace love & understanding?

 Lyrics by Nick Lowe

pegge hopper

beauty comes first

"It is evident that a child will learn a piece of music more quickly where there is melody, rather than an exercise in which only technique is required. Therefore beauty comes first.  In the same way, yoga will be accepted by the body when it is done without resistance. The wave along the spine is like the melody in music. When the beautiful flow of extension is in action, this wave (felt along with the magical attraction of gravity) will help the body find the right adjustment in the performance of the various movements."

--Vanda Scaravelli