Saturday Poem

The fuel for this ravisher unicycle of a world,
Going faster and faster, ever more horsepower,
Is not the president of the United States anymore.
The man on the roof of the car waves his arms.
The butterfly in love lands on fresh tar, tacky goo.
I’m turning into something I wasn’t intending to be—
In agony after the awful metamorphosis
Into a suddenly human being.


—Frederick Seidel, from “Autumn Leaves”

Friday!

(Found here)

connections

“Sometimes you find that what is most personal is also what connects you most strongly with others.”

— Grace Paley

Have a beautiful weekend...

...and go see some art, it's good for the soul.

(gif found at  illhaveuknowthatiloveyou )

“Sometimes you find that what is most personal is also what connects you most strongly with others.”

— Grace Paley

Truth!

Found here.

Emily Proud

Watercolors by Emily Proud

Sleep Sound

Jamie xx: Sleep Sound on Nowness.com

(found here)

Exploring functional movement

Just added this DVD from Erwan Le Corre (founder of MovNat) and Gray Cook (founder of Functional Movement Systems and author of Movement) to my ever growing online shopping basket because of this post from Brooke Thomas.

"We’re a mess. So the question has to be why, and the simple answer is that we live in a time and a place where we no longer need to use our bodies in order to make sure we are fed, clothed, and sheltered. Instead we live in a time and a place where we earn money to buy what we need, work primarily in static positions (hey look! I’m doing it right now!), and segregate our movement only to the small portion of time we may spend exercising. This lack of natural human movement is causing a plague of chronic pain and physical dysfunction, as well as contributing hugely to the disease processes of contemporary. culture. In short: it’s a big problem."

Click here to read more...if it tickles your fancy...

Illustration by La Watson on Flickr

"It’s impossible," said pride.
"It’s risky," said experience.
"It’s pointless," said reason.
"Give it a try," whispered the heart.

--Author Unknown

(Source: pureblyss)

Everything's running down

There are some gems in this article on James Lovelock by Stephan Moss for The Guardian...

 "Everything's running down, so enjoy it while you can. It's not a gloomy thought at all. You wouldn't have energy to do things unless things were running down." He is thinking of planets as well as people. "Earth is about as old as me if you look at it in comparative terms. It doesn't have long to go. It could be as little as 100m years, though I think it's more likely to be about 500m. As things age, they become much more vulnerable to disturbance. If someone as old as me gets pneumonia, it'll probably kill me, whereas if you're young you'll shrug it off. It's the same with planets. If there was an asteroid impact as big as the one 65m years ago, it would be quite dodgy. The older a planet gets, the less capable it is of resisting such an event. Life gets more complex and more vulnerable to disturbance."

Shouldn't this news worry us? "Of course it shouldn't worry us. If we [as a species] are still around in 100m years, it would be amazing." He doubts whether anything resembling man will still be around, but even that can't dent his essential optimism. "I don't mind the thought that a hundred progeny from now I'll be unrecognisable," he says. There will, he reassures me, be a bit of us left in whatever emerges, just as the DNA of those first cells from 3bn years ago feature strongly in our own DNA.

Click here to read on...

Last week I traveled back to Winter...

...and I fell in love with a dog named Balto. 

It was MAGIC!!

Click here to see a little more about what we got up to...


(All images by Me)
 

Last week I traveled back to winter...

...and I fell in love with a dog named Balto. 

It was MAGIC!!

Click here to see a little more about what we got up to...


(All images by Me)
 

Just try to focus on colours

Virgo: This week, your days are going to fill with color, they’re going to fill with warmth and brightness. It’s going to be easy to be dazzled, it’s going to be easy to get lost in all the colors, in all this wild joyful mess. This week you can get lost this week looking for structure, looking for order, looking for sense. Trust your gut and you can feel your way through. Just try to focus on colors, try focus on feelings, try to focus on the ways the sunlight fills up your room.

-- Madame Clairevoyant

Riblje Oko

Practice

Your Yoga practice, if preformed intelligently, is a self exploration. You can learn about the way in which you inhabit your body. You can learn about muscular habits and patterns that you have laid down in your life and you can start to find out what these patterns mean for your body. You can also start to re-write the script and change the patterns that are not helpful.

YOUR BODY REPRESENTS THE LIFE YOU HAVE LIVED THUS FAR, YOUR HISTORY.

image from here

Source: cariga 

Neuroplasticity

"...It was discovered that if you stuck a pin in one area of a person's cortex and his finger twitched, if you then stuck a pin in the exact are of another person's motor cortex, his finger might not twitch but his lip would. This is proof that each person is not created equally. Your cortical maps are all different sizes depending on which part of your body you use the most and the least; the more developed parts have a larger corresponding brain regions. 

The man who discovered this was a real hero of neuroplasticity:  Michael Merzenich, a post-doctorate fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 

He found that if you're a pianist and you practice moving your fingers up and down scales, hour after hour, day and night, more neurons would grow in the motor cortex of the finger area of the brain and expand its typography. I used to have a piano teacher who slammed the lid down while I was playing if I made a mistake, which is probably why I confess to war crimes when I see a piano. if you were a flamenco dancer you'd have more real estate in your toe area of your brain. Someone who licked stamps for a living would obviously have a larger tongue terrain. Do you see where i'm going with this?

When you're building up clusters of neurons by habitually moving certain parts of the body, it's like building muscles when you pump iron. In both cases the movement gets easier and and more automatic because that area gets stronger."

-- Ruby Wax From Sane New World

Illustration by Serge Seidlitz

(Found here)

Claire Decet

Paintings, drawings, sculptures and installations  by Claire Decet

“If we were doomed to live forever, we would scarcely be aware of the beauty around us.”

— Peter Matthiessen

How I Would Paint Happiness

Something sudden, a windfall,
a meteor shower. No—
a flowering tree releasing
all its blossoms at once,
and the one standing beneath it
unexpectedly robed in bloom,
transformed into a stranger
too beautiful to touch.

—Lisel Mueller, from “Imaginary Paintings.”
Art: Guido Cadorin.

(Source: julietjardin)

The bodies that orbit you

Gemini: This week the world’s going to move in loops and repetitions. This week, the world’s going to waken memories buried deep inside of you, thoughts that you haven’t seen in a long time. This week is going to be about charting your path, and the orbit you move in, and the bodies that orbit you. This week is for dealing with the patterns and the recurring dreams and the ideas that just won’t leave you alone. Be as brave as you can. Plant flowers that will come back, year after year.

-- Madame Clairvoyant 

Source: kanaes

Do Stuff

Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.

-- Susan Sontag

Dillan Marsh