Sunday Tune

Sunday Tune

Saturday Poem

Saturday Cartoon

Edward Ruscha

I bowed by head, and heard the sea far off
Washing its hands

-James Wright

Ed Ruscha, Color lithograph

what moves me

"My mother loved walking barefoot in the snow. And also having snowball fights with me, or building igloos. She also liked climbing trees. And she was tremendously frightened during thunderstorms. She would hide in the wardrobe behind the coats."

-From a speech held by Pina Bausch on the occasion of the Kyoto Prize award ceremony in 2007.

You can read it in full here Published by courtesy of the Inamori Foundationu ... I really recommend that you do!

Through Clouds and Water

Andy Goldsworthy, 1993

Glass Mountain

13. Everyone in the city knows about the glass mountain.

14. People who live here tell stories about it.

15. It is pointed out to visitors.

16. Touching the side of the mountain, one feels coolness.

17. Peering into the mountain, one sees sparkling blue-white depths.

 From Glass Mountain by Donald Barthelme

Stephen Jepson

"We no longer have to move to survive. We can go to our refrigerator to get food. Most of our lives are sedentary. We sit to drive, work, watch TV and movies, and play with our gadgets. By not moving, we become mentally and physically sluggish. Our creativity diminishes, and our bodies begin to die a little at a time through lack of use. Modern medicine works overtime to keep us healthy and negate the effects of inertia on the body and mind.

Puppies and kittens and children run around wildly chasing each other, tumbling, rolling, developing quick and agile movements. Children play jacks, hopscotch, jump rope, swing, slide, play running games and ballgames on their playgrounds, continually refining the speed and accuracy of hand and foot movements, stamina, and breathing - very important at any age in continuing the plasticity, growth and health of our brains as well.

Never Leave the Playground teaches the method of lifetime fitness through toys and play and games that can be played alone or with others of any age throughout our lives. By simply returning to the playground every day, your memory will improve, you will become more creative, and you will look forward to each new day with the excitement and vigor not experienced since you left the playground of your youth. It's time to go back to the playground and never leave it again."

-- Stephen Jepson // Never Leave The Playground

Fernanda Gomes

Fernanda Gomes

Found here

Calluses

“Did I say I was gathering
myself back in? Did I lie
and say these ragged, bitten
stub-fingers make me strong?
Did I pretend muscle
is marble, claim
blood-raw sin is as
glossy as a photograph?”

— From “Calluses," a poem in Instructions For Preparing Your Skin by Ariana Nadia Nash, reviewed here by Diego Báez.

from a well traveled woman

hard skin

“The optimal way for getting super-regenerating skin would be to allow our foot to interact with natural surfaces outside of the shoe over a lifetime, prompting a slow adaptation in foot skin thickness over that lifetime, giving us a much better ability to cope with the sensations caused by walking barefoot.”

– Katy Bowman, Every Woman’s Guide to Foot Pain Relief.

Want to know more about building a good skin foundation for upper body strength and barefoot living the READ THIS from Katy Bowman.

totally functional....

(found via goldlionaz)

“The study of anatomy does bring us into a much deeper understanding of ourselves if we’ll let it."

 “The thing is that anatomy is generally understood as this naming of things based on the cutting up of them. It generates a very abstract set of information and categories. I literally mean abstract meaning the levels of tissue have been drawn away from other levels of tissue. Abstraho literally means to draw away from, so we draw one thing away from another, and then we develop a mental conception of it. Every time you approach a body with an idea, and then execute that idea with a knife, you’re making up anatomy, because there is no such thing as a liver on a tray. There is no such thing as a skin unto itself, except through a process of dissection, and abstraction. Those aren’t realities. The reality is this whole flesh and blood pulsing experience that we’re all wandering around with.

Then we get our abstraction built, and then we say, “Oh, okay. There’s this muscle, rectus femoris, there this muscle adductor magnus, there’s this thing in our chest, the heart, and that’s a pump. The other one abducts and the other one adducts. We have all of these very abstract, conceptions. Then we approach with our techniques people, and we see them move, and we have that set of abstractions in our brain, and we say, “Well.” It’s like a math problem, and we add it up, and say, “Well, this should be doing that because of what they’re doing there. Then we apply our abstraction to the form, and try and make it emulate what our abstractions tell us it should be instead of taking in a given whole set of compensations and helping it to function better.

The actual functional person is always a gestalt of all the systems, and all of the hopes and dreams, and all of the life processes, and all of the trillions of cells streaming. In other words, that’s what’s happening in front of you, not, “Oh, we’re having difficulty abducting our x, y, z. Which would be cured by strengthening the a, b, c.” I don’t think we work that way.

I don’t think I’ve fallen too far from the Rolfian [Rolfing] tree in my aspirations along with you to transform culture. She was looking to cultivate a more mature human being, and I feel that I’m wanting to do the same, at least for my part. I feel that part of that maturity lies in an acceptance and learning from the body.”

-- Gil Hedley VIA Liberated Bodies

'this is me and this is my love'

“When the stories about you are not in your own words, and when those stories that you wish to tell about yourself are silenced, you cannot begin to put your own language to love. In order to see love in ourselves and in our lives we need to be able to speak it into reality. We need to be able to tell the truth about ourselves, to say ‘this is me and this is my love’ without censorship”

-- Tatenda Muranda. (Interrupt editor & HOLAAfrica member

Noa Eshkol

Eduardo Chilliada

“Boundaries are actually the main factor in space, just as the present, another boundary, is the main factor in time.”

--  Eduardo Chilliada

Socks

THIS is one of the many reasons we should invest time in our movement skills. I want to beable to put my socks on, with ease, in my 90's.

Peter Jansen

Peter Jansen (1956-2011) pioneered digital sculpting of sequential human movement in space and time. He worked with 3D CG software to create overlapping frames of movement and then had the result made into physical form via the thee dimensional printing systems of rapid prototyping technology.

Function

"As a term functional movement has started to drift in the same direction as the term core stability which started out well and then became far distant from its original meaning. People have come to understand this as a specific kind of training with specific kinds of equipment. And if you use this equipment then it’s somehow functional.

People think that standing swinging something about is functional as compared to sitting on a machine. But this is a long way from what I would consider to be functional movement.

Functional movement is the movement that you need to perform the tasks and activities that you enjoy and want to do in your daily life.

What is it you need to do in your job and for recreation? So it’s a much bigger umbrella. Instead of FM being a thing, AN exercise, it’s actually an overall concept. So what is functional for one person is not for another."

 -- Joanne Elphinston via this wonderful podcast by Ariana Yoga

Sunday Tune

Sunday Tune

Saturday Cartoon

Saturday Poem

Grandfather’s Hands

Your grandfather’s hands were brown.
Your grandmother kissed each knuckle,
Circled an island into his palm
and told him which parts they would share
and which parts they would leave alone.
She wet a finger to draw where the ocean would be
on his wrist, kissed him there,
named oceans after herself.

… Your grandparents often found themselves
in dark rooms, mapping out
each other’s bodies,
claiming whole countries
with their mouths.

-- Warsan Shire

Rewilding

George Monbiot imagines a wilder world in which humans work to restore the complex, lost natural food chains that once surrounded us. If you like this the I highly recommend getting hold of a copy of his book Feral.
There are certainly links to be made with 'rewilding' and the way we move and experience our own bodies too...time to start learning from our mistakes.

There is always hope.