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Rubies In Crystal

Does language hover between my nerve endings and the world, or is language my skin itself?

Sheath of feeling. Words groping to touch air.

AROS (A River of Stones) for Nov 1

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November 01, 2012

I sit before a large painting I am ready to trash to fret about my feelings towards it. Soon I am slapping paint all over the canvas.

___

aros

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Exercise Set for Lungs and Bloodstream; Yoga set for the Kidneys.

August 30, 2011

Because I'm working through some personal challenges, and chose a very difficult meditation to do every day (that I'll post that another time) to aid me in my quest, I realized I needed to first do a yoga set to prepare myself.

On my shelf of Kundalini Yoga sets and texts, I found an old manual from circa (!) 1983, when Yogi Bhajan was still teaching what I like to call 'Kundalini Boot Camp.' (By the 2000s, the sets were much more subtle and heart-centred.)

These sets are hard work, and yet they work in the ways claimed. I began the manual's sets a few days ago, so am posting what I did today, and will continue as I go.

Today I began with a difficult lung cleansing, holding the breath and pumping the spine back and forth while the arms and hands are locked on the knees. I was sweating by the end of it!

I followed that with the set for the kidneys included below. While I do the meditations and exercises, like the Exercise Set for the Lungs and Bloodstream, for 11 mi…

You cannot travel the path until you have become the path itself...

September 12, 2005

The Buddha says: “You cannot travel the path until you have become the path itself.” The path is uncertain. Uncertainty is the guiding force. Nothing can be projected, counted on, leaned against. Home isn't the stable habitat one returns to again and again, the familiar space that holds one’s transformations through the years, remaining more-or-less the same: every day cleaning the same kitchen, washing the dishes, some with light scratches and chips, mopping the taupe tile floor, its tiny cracks, polishing the picture window that look out on the same view, except the trees have grown taller with the passing years. Home for those without a home is what you carry with you, your essence, your inner alter, your ability to love and be stable amidst change. This is what she is about to discover. How to enact continuity without a home, when home is someone else's space, filled with the accoutrements of another's living: when one borrows the necessities for living: a bed, a chair…

Basquiat at the AGO: An Untitled Portrait

February 13, 2015

Basquiat at the AGO: An Untitled Portrait

When asked about his frequent use of "carbon" (tar, asbestos), Basquiat shot back, "How black do you think I have to be?"1 Basquiat, quintessential black artist, brilliant rebel whose astronomical rise in the international art market in his 20s, was dead of a heroin over-dose by age 27. During his short lifetime, he produced thousands of paintings and drawings. Driven, talented, full of paradoxes, aware and vulnerable, Basquiat, wild child of his times, is the focus of a blockbuster show, 'Now's the Time,' currently on at the AGO, where over 80 of his paintings and drawings are on display until May 10, 2015.

His blackness, like everything in his life and oeuvre, is entangled with paradoxes. While he would give us each bars of black soap (Black Soap, 1981) so that when we washed we would become blacker, he moved in an almost exclusively white world. Phoebe Hoban, who knew Basquiat and wrote a vivid biography of hi…

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Brenda Clews: BRENDA CLEWS is a poet, painter, dancer, video-maker, mother, friend, muse, mystery-maker, a lover, a solitary, believer in divine sybaritism. 'While we all have an instinctual sense of what 'art' is, it's from a 'Weltanschauung' that is itself art because it is part of the process of conscious life in a world that is a work of art.

Our universe's creativity is beyond our wildest imaginings.'

Brenda was born in Zimbabwe in the then small mining town of Chinhoyi. When she was two her father, D. Richard Clews, who was a geologist, moved her and her mother to Kafue National Park in Zambia, then the largest game park in Africa, as he joined a mining team looking for copper, and where her two brothers were born.

She cites her early years spent in the jungle, barefoot, living in a compound of mud huts, with many wild animals and the wonderful Ndembu people for her deep resonance with the beauty, strangeness and brilliance of the tribal mind and the natural world.

After the time in the jungle came a year in Lusaka, the capital of Zambia, and then her father took the family to England where he obtained a doctorate in Geochemistry and accepted a position in Canada. Brenda has lived in Canada since then.

Brenda has a full-length collection of poetry, Tidal Fury, with Guernica Editions, 2016. She has a forthcoming novella, Fugue in Green, with Quattro Books, 2017. LyricalMyrical Press published her chapbook, the luminist poems, in 2013. She hosts Poetry & Music Salons in Toronto.

She has edited university textbooks and creative writing, taught writing, written articles for newspapers, taught Kundalini Yoga, done temporary office work, and dog sitting, while maintaining a reclusive lifestyle of writing and painting. She raised two wonderful children as a single mother. She has a degree in Fine Arts and abandoned a PhD in English Lit many years ago.

Brenda has had solo art shows at York University (2000), Q Space (2013) and Urban Gallery (2014), and been in a number of group art shows including 'Birthtales' (1992) at A Space, 'Birth2' (2004) at Ayer Lofts in the US, '5 By 5' (2013) at The Gladstone Hotel, Yellow House Gallery (2014), SuperWonder Gallery (2016) and Arcadia Gallery (2016). Her artwork has appeared in 'Addiction to Perfection' and as two journal covers and in a poster for ‘ARM Magazine.’

Her poetry has been published in print journals, like 'Tessera,' and 'ARM Journal,' and on-line at sites, including 'Qarrtsiluni,' 'Mothers Movement Online,' and 'The Browsing Corner' (she is not good at submitting her work). She presented papers yearly at conferences at York University and OISE on the maternal body from 2001-2006. Her video poetry has been featured at 'CrossBridge' (an international multidisciplinary journal), and 'Moving Poems ('best poetry videos on the web').

She is a multi-media artist whose approach to a topic may include poetry, painting, theory, dance, recordings, and video. Brenda's oeuvre focuses on the plethora, the multiple callings, the obsessive muse, the prism rather than the spotlight, or on multiple spotlights. She writes, "Where else do you flee? How do you combine yourself?"