"I prefer winter and fall,  you feel the bone structure of the landscape. something waits beneath it; the whole story doesn’t show."

-- Andrew Wyeth

Sunday Tune

Sunday Tune

Saturday Poem

August was foggy,
September dry.
October grew too hot.
Napa and Sonoma grasslands,
                    brushlands,
           burned.
In November
          then
We all set back the clock
          and suddenly it rained.

—Gary Snyder.

Saturday Cartoon

Le Weekend!

gif found here

bone women

1. British Museum
2. from here 3. Artemis Gallery

Recipe: Cardamom Coffee

Cardamon Coffee
By Diana Yen, author of A Simple Feast: A Year of Stories & Recipes to Savor & Share  for Kinfolk.


Adding spices and a pinch of salt to my morning coffee pot is a habit I developed after drinking a delicious spiced Turkish coffee that accompanied a flaky baklava dessert. This recipe makes a delicious cup of joe to enjoy in the early hours, but it also serves as a lovely sip after dinner. I chose to use cardamom for its aroma and slight smokiness, but you can play around with any spice that inspires you. Ground cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, and star anise would also be wonderful.

Tools
Stovetop espresso coffee maker or French press

Ingredients
Ground coffee beans
1 cardamom pod (cracked) per cup of coffee
Salt
Milk
Sugar

Method
In an espresso coffee maker or French press, brew your coffee as usual, adding a cracked cardamom pod and pinch of salt per cup to the ground coffee before brewing. Add milk and sugar to your liking. The end result should be smooth with a floral spiced aroma.

Nice little detail!

“I am because you have been. You will be because I am.”

...I’m also thinking of Dr. Karandikar. He was Iyengar’s personal physician until he was reportedly worn down by the teacher’s constant stream of verbal abuse. Karandikar left the Ramamami Iyengar Memorial Institute to found Kabir Baug Sanstha just three kilometres away, across Pune’s Mutha river. Kabir Baug is a sprawling yoga therapy clinic and therapeutic college that serves thousands of mostly Indian clients and students every year. While Iyengar globally advanced the hypothesis of “yoga as therapy”, Karandikar seems to have quietly proven it by staying at home and using a seamless blend of ancient and modern techniques. Most injured clients who come to Kabir Baug for asana instruction receive a spinal x-ray before they even begin. This clinic is unknown to the global yoga community, I think, because Karandikar’s skill is not occluded by the projection of intuitive wizardry, but rather demystified through the medical technologies that have almost replaced divine vision. Karandikar has flown below the radar of Western fetish and orientalism, perhaps because his work is to show us that embodied insight is not the domain of a charmed few, but is democratically available to everyone.

--Matthew Remski WAWADIA

More updates and a link to help fund the book.

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

take pride in your details, practice them with gratitude...

dream studio space!

micro-moments of positivity resonance

In her new book Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become, the psychologist Barbara Fredrickson offers a radically new conception of love ... It is not a long-lasting, continually present emotion that sustains a marriage; it is not the yearning and passion that characterizes young love; and it is not the blood-tie of kinship.

Rather, it is what she calls a "micro-moment of positivity resonance." She means that love is a connection, characterized by a flood of positive emotions, which you share with another person—any other person—whom you happen to connect with in the course of your day. You can experience these micro-moments with your romantic partner, child, or close friend. But you can also fall in love, however momentarily, with less likely candidates, like a stranger on the street, a colleague at work, or an attendant at a grocery store. Louis Armstrong put it best in "It's a Wonderful World" when he sang, "I see friends shaking hands, sayin 'how do you do?' / They're really sayin', 'I love you.'"

Emily Esfahani Smith, The Atlantic 1/24/2013. Full text here.

Wishing you many micro-moments of positivity resonance today.

not fade away

via Nowness

via Nowness

le livre de la sante

Joseph Handler. Radiographies. Le Livre de la Sante. 1967. The first was made at Hopital des enfants malade (Paris) and shows the bones getting older...

As I explore the wilderness of my own body, I see that I am made of blood and bones, sunlight and water, pesticide residues and redwood humus, the fears and dreams of generations of ancestors, particles of exploded stars. 

~Anne Cushman

How to love these small differences?

"...Patricia White just got back from a hip replacement, which she insists came from her long ago days as a dancer, and not from yoga. On Wednesday mornings, she steps into the room on a cane, a striking image in a yoga studio. Who do we put at the front of the room? An older woman walking on a cane. In her class I am beginning to feel tiny openings in the hip flexors and around the collarbones that I’ve never felt before. I can follow this network of fissures and they lead me to new places where I can say yes. It’s like the life you share with your best friends. As they tell you the story of the past weekend, even though the circumstances are new so much of the telling is familiar, you’ve been hearing variations on this story for thirty years. Those small variations are at the heart of what friendship is. How to love these small differences? What Patricia is teaching me is how to get in touch with and love the small changes...."

-- Mike Hoolboom

Bloodpool by Kiki Smith

Nikos Economopoulos

Nikos Economopoulos sees natural human movement everywhere...or at least I see it in his photos...

Gordon Hewes

There are minimal health benefits to sitting (repeatedly) in a chair, and yet, as Katy Bowman describes in her new book Move Your DNA, the typical childhood is spent making chair sitting a fine art. 

“after a couple of years, sitting still in your chair would be your most-practiced skill, trumping time spent reading, writing, playing games, and physical education in school. Like a ninja of sitting, you practiced sitting still in a chair more than any other activity, with hours and hours in training, with no other learned activity even coming close in time spent practicing.”

--Katy Bowman in "Move Your DNA"

It’s time to start thinking outside the chair and practicing new positions. In her work, Katy cites physical anthropology professor Gordon W. Hewes study, World Distribution of Certain PosturalHabits. Hewes examined 100 different resting postures from all around the world.  As fate would have it, most of these positions don’t involve chairs.
Inspiration!

Alternatives to sitting in a chair. From Hewes "World Distribution of Certain Postural Habits"
Notice how nobody's at a standing desk. (Here is what Katy says about that...)


But before you get rid of all your sofas, make sure you are working within your actual joint range. Work with progressions and load your new found freedom slowly by using bolsters/blankets/cushions to help make your new floor office comfortable.

opalized bones

Opal forms in cavities within rocks. If a cavity has formed because a bone, shell or pinecone was buried in the sand or clay that later became the rock, and conditions are right for opal formation, then the opal forms a fossil replica of the original object that was buried.

-- Australian Opal Center via evencleveland

 1. Lot of four opalized clam shells, found at Bonhams.
2. Opal bone fossils 
3. Opalised jaw of Steropodon galmani

and many more here.

Claire Cunningham

The detail in Claire Cunningham's work is completely captivating. Take a break and click play to inspire yourself...

living story

"Skeletons are a sort of "living story" you are continuously writing. bone robusticity is a result not only of genetic data, but of data created via behavior. It is through your choices of movement and the cellular loads these choices create that your body becomes your autobiography."

 -- Katy Bowman: Move your DNA.

Juz Kitson

ceramic bones and other bits by Juz Kitson

'Learn your details with pride'

Whoever first said "The Devil is in the details" must not have liked details. And I doubt that he was an economic botanist. Because when it comes to edible wild plants, the miracle is in the details. It is the details that give one the power not only to identify plants, but also to select the best specimens among them...So do not shy away from the details: an don't resent Nature for being so replete with complexity. That is its glory, not its downfall. We owe our very intelligence to this miraculous complexity. It is not the burden of the naturalist to learn this complexity: it is the awesome reality. More then anything else, which of these attitudes you chose will determine your success. So learn your details with pride and experience them with gratitude. Let the details excite you - for there are enough of them to excite you for the rest of your life.

-- Samuel Thayer: Nature's Garden: A Guide to Identifying, Harvesting, and Preparing Edible Wild plants

This applies to every application of biological principle...i.e. your movement practice too!

Paper Trumpets #11: Let’s Bounce by Kevin Sampsell

Sunday Tune

For you, mum!

"I may not be your best
You know good ones don't come by the score
You've got something missing
I'll help you look, you can be sure

And if you want to be alone
Someone to share a laugh
Whatever you want me to
All you got to do is ask

Thunder don't go under the sheets
Lightning under a tree
In the rain and snow
I'll be your fireside

Come running to me
When things get out of hand
Running to me
When it's more than you can stand

I said, "I'm strong, straight
Willing to be a shelter in a storm"
Your willow, oh willow
When the sun is out

A fight with your best girl
Prettiest thing you ever saw
You know I'll listen
Try to get a message to her

And if it's money you want
Or trouble halved
Whatever you want me to
All you got to do is ask

I said, "I'm strong, straight
Willing to be a shelter in a storm"
Your willow, oh willow 

When the sun is out

Shelter in a storm
Your willow, oh willow
When the sun is out

Shelter in a storm
Your willow, oh willow
When the sun is out

Shelter in a storm
Your willow, oh willow
When the sun is out"

 

--Joan Armatrading

Sunday Tune

Saturday Poem

Barefoot and Pregnant

So many ladies love you with the innocence of a child
A child who believes in God
You keep 'em in luxury
But it's a luxury in the dark

You walk around with a smile upon your face
But there's something that you don't know
You're luck's run out
And it's a time for you to know

Everybody told me I was crazy
To try to tame such a wild one
Baby, baby, baby, baby, baby

I got myself into this thing
Like I never knew I could an' now
I gotta get away just as fast as I can
I got myself into this thing an' I'll find a way out

You gave me babies, to you that proves your love
Tie my hands with jewels
Barefoot an' pregnant you kept me
You sought to hide me from the truth

But your lady's done bought some shoes
And she's steppin' out on the town
Your lady took herself in hand
And she's spreadin' herself around, alright

I wanted your love but not at any price

You're just the hurtin' kind
Say you want me for yourself
But your deeds deny it

Everybody told me I was crazy
To try to tame such a wild one
Baby, baby, baby, baby, baby

I got myself into this thing
Like I never knew I could an' now
I gotta get away just as fast as I can
I got myself into this thing an' I'll find a way out

--Joan Armatrading and Joan Anita Barbara

Saturday Cartoon

BIG admiration for Ido Portal and his approach.