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

never leave the playground

This again from Stephen Jepson, because it's brilliant // Never Leave The Playground

I believe in the inheritance of skills and crafts—the inheritance of memory.

 Robert Graves

Egyptian jars with motifs of plants and water
Late Naqada II Date: ca. 3450–3300 BC

"For me if a beautiful memory could have a color that color would be light blue."

- Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Agnes Martin

clay memory

Something I was told this week...

You have to use your entire body weight when you are rolling out clay slabs...unless you have a press...and it is important to move the clay around as you go so that you roll it out in different directions and also turn it around at different intervals so that you roll both sides; otherwise tensions might occur in the drying or firing process leading to cracks. It's like the clay has a memory for the shape it began in and it's always trying to get back to that form. 

Like us! We need to move and be moved in all different directions to prevent tensions.

on handwork

'The use of the hands is vital for the human being, for having flexibility, dexterity. In a way the entire human being is in the hands. Our destiny is in the hands."

 I love the idea that through movement (more specifically here through working with our hands) we come into direct contact with our most human values, with the essentials that must be felt to be known... to be remembered.  I was thinking a lot yesterday about accessing memories through movement, and then about knowledge as memory, so I'm really seeing this video today through that lens.

a little more about Renate and her work here.