A tree of birdhouses...

The way the branches form patterns, and that blue sky, and those birdhouses are incredible ~ from a master dollhouse maker's studio surely, the detail alone worth admiring. Photos from a walk an hour ago. (If you can't see it, go here: http://img38.echo.cx/img38/8194/birdhousesbc7og.jpg)

Red Breast...

Sky Tangos...

The birth of stars amidst colliding galaxies with their deathly black holes fascinates me...

Collisions of galaxies in the young universe caused prodigious star production even while the black holes at their centres increased exponentially.

Matter suctioned by the dense gravity of black holes flew at massive speeds inwards as gases were blasted to the outer fringes creating the luminescent edges of the merging galaxies.

The light pouring out of such ancient crucibles of creation and destruction creating the very memories we see emblazoned in the night sky through our telescopes.

In such collisions, a thousand more solar masses of stars formed each year than in our slower star-creating counterparts in the modern galaxies we exist in.

But when I look at simulations of colliding galaxies, I see only tangos and hot passion, sangrias and lust, sex and creating babies, the madness of merging amidst looming black holes and bright bursting stardust across the heavenly skies, an explosive terrain of love...

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The photo is an active link back to the article at Space.com, for those of you who want to explore more...

A sweaty butterfly...

I've been languishing since I've found myself, once again, on the temp office work circuit. Which is work in a strange office, then stress a lot in the days between, work a bit in another strange office, stress more, you get the routine. I don't want to buy my monthly gym pass. I can't seem to make it to the park where jogging is free. Dance is too far away, mostly everything takes about 2 or more hours of transit for about 2 hours of dance, and again I don't want to spend the money. So lapse into lax muscles and the only cardio is considering my job prospects. O so lazy...

There is much mention of exercise in Blogland these days. Must be the Spring...

My contribution to the Blogosphere Gym is cheap: a $5.00 skipping rope. Yesterday I set a timer for half an hour and skipped on a board thrown on the scrub called grass out back. I stopped constantly to retie my hair or catch my breath or because I can't manage the simple mechanics of turning a rope over my head and under my feet. Perhaps in that half hour I skipped for 20 minutes. Which is what I wanted to do. Then I did yoga for another 15 minutes, focussing on the spine and abdominals. I finished my 'work out' by walking around the house with two 5 lb weights stretching my arms way back and up and down like a sweaty butterfly for at least another 20 minutes.

Not much you must agree, but net result: today my calf muscles ache, and across my chest. It feels good. And not only was it *free* I didn't even have to brush my hair or wash my face or change from house clothes into jogging attire, just put on some running shoes...

Skipping is a great exercise and under-rated. I wonder why?

Stained Glass light...

As far as stained glass goes, the pattern is not sublime. I bought this glass in 1982 at a small stained glass store on Queen Street in Toronto, back before it became an upscale fashionista district, when there were cafes and used book stores galore. I lived in a condo in a renovated Victorian house near the Art Gallery. All my windows looked out onto brick walls or a parking lot. I missed the sky and wanted to hide the impenetrability of brick, the way I felt cemented in.

My father was dying, my life changing irrevocably; I was in a wild and passionate relationship with an intellectual poet. I surrounded myself with stained glass, some pieces more sublime than others.

After my father died, I bought a house with huge windows and privacy a few blocks away. I could see the sun and the moon in the sky. The stained glass went into the attic for almost two decades.

I moved it with me to Vancouver, finding it bringing back a time I had forgotten, and hung it myself with my power drill.

During the day the windows are open. In the evening I shut them and enjoy the deep and glistening colour. When I sleep I draw the curtains.

In this digital photograph of the stained glass casement windows this morning it looks as if the sun is, is... there is such brilliant light, it seems to be pushing the glass open, the curtains open, drawing the viewer out to its brightness, a whiteness into which the landscape has collapsed, the dark blue lace that I have hung as netting to keep out flies and bees in the Summer becomes a mere few stitches of a design over the whiteness of the sun's field, even the window frame is being submerged in light, a light almost blinding to the occupant within...

What intrigues me is that I was working on a cross-cultural study of light in many different fields when my father died, a piece of work I never completed; it was based on stunning dreams of light...

Can you describe this photograph? It is one of the ones with a light that seems almost visionary. Be poetic...

It is impossible for me to believe that I am entirely my body, that everything that I am is contained here in the cafe in which I sit, looking out the floor to ceiling full wall of windows at the rain gently pooling drop by drop into puddles or wetting the street with a sheen only rainwater can give. The world revolves around me, the musac with its forgettable music and chatter, the scrape of chairs of people arriving or leaving, the muted tones of conversation, someone who has a cold blowing their nose, the sounds of food being eaten off plates, knives and forks scraping, the clacking of a dishwasher being stacked in the back, tables being cleared and wiped, and all types of people who are quietly sitting except for one table of loud laughers. My feet are cold. The street is busy with trucks and cars and pedestrians. Umbrellas float everywhere like dark flowers

How can everything I am be contained here in this remote and anonymous spot? Located here in this curve of space and time, at this edge of the universe, that that's it, that's all there is?

Because most of what we are seems to transcend our bodies, it is not hard to imagine what travels with us, our memories, feelings, passions and desires will travel beyond our bodies into a deathless realm beyond our deaths.

One day perhaps we will understand how energy manifest into matter and how it unmanifests, the secret of life and death.

Perhaps we are runners passing the baton ~ our written thoughts, inventions, works of art, labour, children ~ just keeping the links of civilization alive even as we each appear and disappear, a living force for awhile, and then gone.

Fragments towards a Meditation on the Body...

MP3 of this post at Sound Click: "Fragments Towards a Meditation on the Body...", which I'm not sure about, but it's there now...

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On our blogs we post, barely editing, always planning to come back at some future point to edit, only the posts fly by like days...

Anyway, I just put this montage together, the writing moves over small line drawings of dancers I did maybe a year ago...the words shaping themselves are nothing conclusive or that I would want to rest my weight on, barely touching the surface of this subject, the body, but leaning into the writing coming soon on the body where all bodies are created...

This is just a miniscule meditation on what tells me I am alive. A sort of Descartian I Am, or even Buddhist recognition of the. most. basic.

The ground of being, the body, where I begin...