ripples

Have you changed through the years? Or have you deepened into who you are?

I'm not talking about contentment, or dissatisfaction with now, or what led to here. There are events that shape us, yes. But our identity is something deeper than what befalls us. Who we are carries us through.

Really I can only speak for myself, and, though my life is perhaps not where I would like it to be, I'd say I've become more deeply the person I want to be. I don't think I've ever been outside who I am, and I haven't ever undergone such radical change as to seem like a different person to myself.

This talk is about that. I recorded it in 2008, and though it was posted in this blog when it was made, I have created an updated HD version.


direct link: ripples

(I like that colour, but I have no idea why YouTube is presenting a still of this more muted talk in such vibrant colours.)


_
Drop of water: Free Super Slow Motion Water Droplet.
The opening and closing music is a few bars from the first song on F.T.G.'s Le puits.

                                          

Stone #34

On this cold, windy day the trees,
their bare branches stick brooms
sweeping clouds across the sky.

Stone #33

In the park, a man, coiled dreads, Tai Chi, a thick, slow snowfall, festive card kind, layering whitely anything upperside to the sky.

Stone #32

the milky sun shines gloss gold in the slush mud puddle in the pot hole of the street even if it doesn't in the sky

What is a pebble? A moment of attention...

So many thoughtful responses to Dave Bonta's question, "What Kind of Attention," at a discussion post at Writing Our Way Home:

So I guess probably everyone here agrees with at least one of the following three propositions: that paying attention is worthwhile in and of itself, that the writing or other artwork that comes out of such moments of attention can be compelling, and that paying attention can lead to authentic/original insights. As a writer and reader, I've long admired poets such as Mary Oliver and John Haines whose poetry seems to originate in just this kind of attention to the world (which isn't to say that I don't like other kinds of writing, too). My question for writers and artists, though, is this: is there a special kind of attention that leads to the best insights? And does it exist purely in the observational moment, or is it also something that comes from immersion in the act of creation as well? What is the precise (or even the approximate) relationship between these two periods of attention?

Each response has depth and insight, and it's worthwhile to take a look at them. This is mine:

When I wrote a dent/tweet for AROS during January (and will be resuming), I found it interesting. Each day and night is filled to the brim with sensual awarenesses, emotions, thoughts, ideas, a full range, very complex, each moment, truly!

Yet I would have driven myself crazy if I thought, 'what to focus on, what to focus on.' There's so much, even in my very quiet reclusive life of daily samenesses.

What I found was it was like my 'writing self' set 'an intention' - an aros everyday. Because every day, even if it was nearing midnight and I was scrounging for something, anything, a moment always emerged with more 'weight' - like a pebble falling out of the sky.

This pebble fell from the sky as if it were from another landscape - one where 'a moment' could be expressed in a small image, or thought, or utterance, or poem.

In this other landscape, which is part of my landscape, language predominates. The pebble is a languaged construction of the world that I inhabit, I know that. Drawings, which I sometimes did, always needed the written component. And, afterall, this is a poetry group.

So, for me, it's not so much my attention in my world as listening for the moment that is realizing itself through my perception.

And it's heavy, heavier than the other moments, it carries a weight that is already transforming itself into words, and it is not likely that I would then miss it!

If any of this makes sense!

                                          

A Page for AROS at my Blogspot Blog with its Own RSS Feed

It's taken a morning of searching, but I now have a working page for aros, A River of Stones, my mini 140 character pebbles, and an RSS feed to that page (which is a label page):

http://brendaclews.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/aros

You can find the label page for aros at the top of this page (or any page on my site, it's so cool).

Note: I was only able to find this feed, and subscribe to it in Google Reader through the orange browser feed button on your browser bar.

Also I was able to get Facebook to recognize and import the url of the feed into my Notes.


These two great articles by GXG tell you exactly how to do it:

Tranform a Blogger Label into a Page.

How to Add Label-Specific Feeds to Blogger



                                          

Anansi Hides the Moon

direct link: Anansi Hides the Moon

A painting, 'Parchment Figures: Doubles, Doppelgängers, Clones,' hanging on a wall. Sunlight moving through wind-waving branches falls through a window onto it. You can also see the shadows of the window itself. That morning I was absorbed watching the light and shadows dancing quietly over the painting and videotaped it. Then, on an evening walk I came across a light on a patio with a thick white gauzy curtain around it, and shot some footage with my iPhone video camera. Later, playing with the footage, I added the billowing curtain and its light next to the painting of doubles and shadows. Then I cut sections of a photograph of the painting out, animated them and added them to the film. Finally, pondering on what I had produced, I wrote a whimsical poem of the African trickster spider god, Anansi, and wove it in with handwritten notes.

It does have a serious theme - can you guess it?

Take a moment to look at the moon.

(An aside: the video as it shaped itself inspired the poem. I made the video and then wrote the poem over a few days, meditating on each tiny section to see what was emerging/wanting to be said. I swear Anansi, the trickster, was loose in my computer, though, since sections of the video kept inexplicably changing while I was working on the text. Eventually I had to use a video I'd made of the footage only for the trickiest text -the opening title- which had repeatedly, every time I tried to lay it on the timeline, caused bizarre things to happen to all the other tracks, like shortening them or making them speed up for small durations, but chaotically and if you fixed this, that went off. Nothing like this has ever happened when I've edited a video before. It was as if the components of the video had taken on a life of their own. I kept resorting to the earlier versions FCE saves in 'the vault' before using a 'fixed' file, the .mov file I uploaded to Vimeo a few days back. These trickster gods do keep us hopping!)

The painting, from chalk drawing to nearly finished, can be viewed here: Parchment Figures: Doubles, Doppelgängers, Clones.
Flute music a very small section of 'Bodydrama at the Nave' by ARTSomerville.
This videopoem was featured at Moving Poems.


Anansi Hides the Moon

Anansi
the spider
dropped
in from
where
African
gods and
goddesses
hang out

Anansi
hid
the moon
behind a
curtain

The sun flickered

The parchment
figures, doubles,
doppelgangers
and clones
barely
noticed

The days
were
sun bright
and the city
was electric
light
at night

Sometimes
it's
like that
_

From Parchment Figures: Doubles, Doppelgängers, Clones