performing arts, anything that uses human bodies for expression or for self-improvement
This post is part of a series exploring how we humans interact with time. So far we’ve figured out that our latest iteration of strategies for dealing with time, Clock Time, is starting to wear down a lot of us post-moderns into frazzles. The whole purpose of Clock Time is to enable us to get more and more things done. The Achievement Junkies among us are having a field day. The rest of us are finding that if we are…
I have some most excellent, scientifically correct news: We humans are a lot more than big old naked brains riding around in vehicles that are kind of like animated meatballs with feet. I have to admit that is a bit of a relief. (I like albondigas in their place, but life, it seems to me, is more than a tapas bar.) All during my growing-up years, I was dragged kicking and screaming into the prevalent paradigms that told me that my…
Another IPS (Inner Peace Symptom): a tendency to notice what you are noticing and to ask why you’re noticing it. [Sometimes you notice things that call to your heart and your heart responds by dancing. The best move then is to go do more of that dance….] Have you noticed the latest trend (especially after the pandemic lockdown) toward hugging trees, galaxy-gazing, mooning over wilderness landscapes and generally dissing our man-made constructs and urban follies? Going-Outside-with-the-capital-O has become the new…
It is heartening for me to see the world-wide burgeoning of another sort of rebellion against the very real effects of the post-modern aftermath of our narcissistic phase of dominion and domination over nature, where we humans felt entitled to willy-nilly pave over the world and dump our stuff all over the place to make yet another ugly. They call it “guerilla gardening” and it continues to expand all over the globe.
For weeks now I’ve been hung up on the saga of the resurgence of Pinball — that American-made quintessential mix of skill, chance, and enticingly challenging distraction in a glassed-in box that swept up the world and wrapped it up in the epitome of American “cool” and then nearly got killed off by the advent and rise of the now-ubiquitous video game. The pinball industry lay there gasping at the end of the 20th century. The death watch began around…
I am reading a book by a man I admire greatly, Edward Espe Brown. He was the first head cook at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center back in the 1960’s and later founded Greens Restaurant in San Francisco. His earliest book, THE TASSAJARA BREAD BOOK is a classic. More than one dear friend remembers their well-thumbed, flour-coated and oil-stained go-to copy of the book and the loveliness that flowed from their hands and the kitchens of their youth.
For the past few months, the Light of My Life and I have been showing up at the early Saturday-morning Upcountry Farmer’s Market fairly frequently. It has been some years since either of us visited the market.
A while back I was involved in an infuriating (to me) conflict that seemed to be made up of a lot of little niggly nothings that got blown up into bigness. It stopped me in my tracks and got me riled up…badly.
One of the best bits of advice I’ve come across is in Sam Bennett’s book GET IT DONE: From Procrastination to Creative Genius in 15 Minutes a Day: “Be busy like a trapeze artist flying through the air or like a stuntwoman – just cleanly move through each task with great clarity, concentration, and grace.”
This poem was one of the earliest signs that I had decided to live after my husband Fred died. It came a couple of years after his death in 1997. The poem was inspired by a picture done by photographer Randy Jay Braun, a friend who made a career of making remarkable portraits of hula dancers, particularly those who lived on Maui. I have a poster of it still hanging in my bedroom.
