found here

stones and stars

"On his first day, Mr. Piailug took stones from the garden and made a map of the stars on the ground, Mr. Thompson said. Slowly, he learned to pay attention to ocean currents and read the weather from the color of the light at dawn."

Laura Parker, "A Hawaiian Canoe Crosses the Ocean, Guided by Sun and Stars."

sunday tune

saturday poem

Home

no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well

your neighbors running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body
you only leave home
when home won’t let you stay.

no one leaves home unless home chases you
fire under feet
hot blood in your belly
it’s not something you ever thought of doing
until the blade burnt threats into
your neck
and even then you carried the anthem under
your breath
only tearing up your passport in an airport toilets
sobbing as each mouthful of paper
made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back.

you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
no one wants to be beaten
pitied

no one chooses refugee camps
or strip searches where your
body is left aching
or prison,
because prison is safer
than a city of fire
and one prison guard
in the night
is better than a truckload
of men who look like your father
no one could take it
no one could stomach it
no one skin would be tough enough

the
go home blacks
refugees
dirty immigrants
asylum seekers
sucking our country dry
niggers with their hands out
they smell strange
savage
messed up their country and now they want
to mess ours up
how do the words
the dirty looks
roll off your backs
maybe because the blow is softer
than a limb torn off

or the words are more tender
than fourteen men between
your legs
or the insults are easier
to swallow
than rubble
than bone
than your child body
in pieces.
i want to go home,
but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home told you
to quicken your legs
leave your clothes behind
crawl through the desert
wade through the oceans
drown
save
be hunger
beg
forget pride
your survival is more important

no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying-
leave,
run away from me now
i dont know what i’ve become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here

-- Warsan Shire

friday cartoon

far

"Leaving home and loving home don't have to be at odds with one another. Despite what our grandmothers' rib-cracking hugs lead us to believe, our families never intended to keep us-only to   make and teach us, and to love us enough to let us go...

...our secure base is our people, not a location. Those relationships can stand firm among the zigzagging, sling-shotting trajectory of our nomadic lives."

-- Kelsey Snell (for Kinfolk Magazine)

martha graham

feel things

The first person who saw your face was delighted by you. Isn’t that something? You managed to bring joy only by breathing.
Your mother will occasionally peek through the cracks of your door when you are sleeping, even now, to make sure that she can see the movements of your chest.
The boy who kissed you in the park last night isn’t in love with you, he won’t even stay, but he meant every second of those minutes.
You’ll walk a city street that your feet have never touched before and you’ll be terrified of getting lost and that feeling is what’ll help you find the way home.
You’ll give your money to a homeless man and he will hold your hand firmly between his and he will say ‘thank you so, so much’ and isn’t that something?
There’s a piece of music that makes your heart feel like it’s bleeding. Listen to it. Listen to it again.
When was the last time you paused to stare at night time?
Did you know that there is at least one person in your life who will jump in front of a hail of bullets for you, without your asking.
Your entire body is made of nerves. Feel things.
Take walks in places you’ve never been.
Take photographs of people not everyone considers beautiful. Find loveliness in them.
Let go of the things that are killing you from the inside out.
One day you’re going to be part of the sky, you’re going to be that beautiful and that necessary but not today. Not today.
--Azra

(Source: thirlie)

Zashiki-warashi

All images belong to Carolina Silva and you find more here and here.  

Carolina writes about these watercolours on here website...

'The appearance of this spirit is that of a 5 or 6 year child. Zashiki-warashi can be found in well-maintained and preferably large old houses. It is said that once a zashiki-warashi inhabits a house, it brings the residence great fortune; on the other hand, should a zashiki-warashi depart, the domain soon falls into a steep decline. As the zashiki-warashi is child-like in nature, it is prone to playing harmless pranks and occasionally causing mischief.'

Sarah and Joshua

♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡

lean on me

Photographs by Bertil Nilsson for Kinfolk Magazine

family

"A family is a network of people who care for each other. 

You can be born into one or build your own. It can contain hundreds or two. Real family values have nothing to do with where we live or how we know each other -  they're about how we treat each other. "

-- Nathan Williams and Georgia Frances King
Kinfolk, The Family Issue

sunday tune

saturday poem

Outwitted

He drew a circle that shut me out--

Heretic, a rebel, a thing to flout.

But Love and I had the wit to win:

We drew a circle that took him in!

 

 

--Edwin Markham

friday cartoon

circles - community dance project from Taylor F. on Vimeo.

see the moon?

On the far side of the moon there is a crater called Niepce, named after Joseph Niécephore Niépce, inventor of heliography and the oldest surviving photograph. It is a worn crater formation, ‘with rim features that have been softened and rounded by subsequent deposits of ejecta’.[7] It is a careful, patient activity, to observe the features of the moon: one must follow the border of the sun’s illumination, the thin region between darkness and light where the shadows are longest — the shadow terminator, this place is called. In Niepce, it has been observed, there is a small crater shaped like a teardrop, likely created by a low-angle impact.

Tell me again, I ask the stations — tell me again how nothing is as it seems. Show me how fine a thing it is to spend one’s time securing moments of illumination for safe-keeping. Convince me — I want to believe — that every twinkling trace, every glance of light is an inscription, a burnishing, a tiny percussion in the surface of time: a still life, memento mori, to its passage. Take me there.

 Section of the essay See the moon? The Celestial and the Circular in Photography by  Emily LaBarge. Read the essay in full over at The Photographers Gallery blog 

( J.W. Draper, The Moon, 1840. Image: London Stereoscopic Company/Getty Images)

the quilting circles of gees bend

The Quiltmakers of Gee's Bend - PBS Feature from Glass World Films on Vimeo.

The Quilts of Gee's Bend
soulful beauty.

balance

Mechanischer Körperfächer (body fan 2) - rebecca horn

"the fan suits my body -- i carry it and i balance it on my shoulders so that head and shoulders constitute the central axis of the two semi-circles -- starting position -- the two semi-circles of the fan close over my head -- when i move my body's balance, the two semi-circles change their horizontal starting position and begin to turn -- one semicircle turns in fron of my body, the other one behind it, so that my body becomes the fixed axis for the semicircles -- when the rotation is slow,  just sections of my body can be seen by turn -- when the two semicircles rotate fast, they close in a transparent circle."

  -- Rebecca Horn

via flash art n. 46-47, june 1974

if you walked in a circle...

Where we are with movement is where we were with nutrition 40 years ago. We say, “Just move more!” if a whale in captivity were to just swim more, it would make the flopped fin worse. Moving more might bring about even more of the forces that brought about the disease of mechanotransduction- in this case the flopped fin. It might make things worse.

At the end of the day swimming more wasn’t really the problem. If you walked in a circle everyday, you would notice that your body became shaped to that.
Then you walk fast in that circle, it will highlight those diseases even faster.
When we say we need to move well or differently, often we say [in this example], “Walk in the circle in the other direction.” You would offset some of the adaptations with that correction, but it’s still treating the symptom.

Corrective exercise is spot-treating these nutrient deficits by creating something novel instead of pulling back and asking what is the actual problem here? What are my actual movement requirements and how can I actually meet those instead of taking the vitamin or pill equivalent?

-- Katy Bowman for Liberated Body

Hans Coper

'Practicing a craft with ambiguous reference to function one has to occasionally face absurdity. More than anything, like a demented piano tuner, one is trying to approximate a phantom pitch. One is apt to take refuge in principles which crumble'

-- Hans Coper

talking circles

found here

circles of life

Everything
Turns,
Rotates,
Spins,
Circles,
Loops,
Pulsates,
Resonates,
And
Repeats.

Circles
Of life,
Born from
Pulses
Of light,
Vibrate
To
Breathe,
While
Spiraling
Outwards
For
Infinity
Through
The lens
Of time,
And into
A sea
Of stars
And
Lucid
Dreams.

-- Suzy Kassem

sunday tune

Saturday Poem

Found on the streets of New York City

meditation

One of the first yoga teachers I had gave me a lovely tip for meditation. It stuck with me and is something I've used on a regular basis ever since so I thought I would share.

Put on one of your favorite tunes then simply sit and listen to it fully, without distraction. See if you can focus your attention on the centre of every single note.

I've been told this works just as well if you are playing the instrument yourself. I wouldn't trust it with my shakey rendition of chopsticks on the piano though...

This is what I used today.

I trust my work. It's a collaboration with the material, and when it's viewed, it's a collaboration with the world. 

-- Kiki Smith

Recommended Read

Road Warrior

After fifty years, Gloria Steinem is still at the forefront of the feminist cause.

By Jane Kramer  || Click the title to read.

 “I’m an entrepreneur of social change,” Steinem says. “I talk. I write. I tell stories. I want to do justice to the women I meet.”  

(Photograph by Inez and Vinoodh for The New Yorker)

TRUST

“This flyer, a pre–Riot Grrrl ‘manifesto’ that was later re-purposed for the mini-zine Riot Grrrl, is the first image in the book. Kathleen told me she made it in 1989, when she was volunteering at Safeplace, Olympia’s long-lived domestic-violence shelter and advocacy organization. Designed so that it could be folded up into a small rectangle with the word trust on top, this flyer was both a secret invitation and a public announcement, much like Riot Grrrl itself.”

Archivist Lisa Darms reflects on her favorites from the Riot Grrrl Collection.