Cacao Trees for Three Millenia

Natural laws. Diurnal follows nocturnal. Inbreath, outbreath. The world works: in it's clashing, it fits together. It's trustworthy. We rely on it's smooth operation. What rises falls. What is alive dies. Boiling water turns to steam. Nice, this regularity.

Without the natural laws, I couldn't rest.

Have you noticed how clean the microscopic world is? Blood platelets hang together like little solar systems of planets, each with space. Fierce dust mites look tidy.

The four forces, electromagnetic, the atom-binding strong force, the radioactive-controlling weak force, and gravity dependably weave our universe.

Or the four humors before them, but never mind.

It's a relief. The regularity of process. Eating chocolate, as I am, produces sweet heaven on my tongue. It always does. Chocolate can be trusted.

Perhaps you are like creativity,
dangerous.

I don't think about anyone else.

I'd better come back in,
where stars sparkle behind my eyelids.

At the deepest level, there is no chaos. It's troubling. An insane waring bloodbath is a neat and tidy microscopic world of platelets suspended in solution. Or the decay. Molecule by molecule. Lovely chemistry, that's all. Electron microscopes are revealers of the secrets of matter, I tell you.

Love wherever it happens is the most extraordinary of all.

Earth's Nightside

We are moved by our stories, their involving narratives with plots, characters, themes, structures mimicking us in our real lives but grander than us, more dangerous, the stakes higher, but I, oh, what can I say, and ought I to apologize, I find this image of the dark side of the earth taken by a passing spacecraft with our cities shining like stars more moving than I can find words for. All of the stories are here. I ache for this world; my heart beats for this sun-rimmed beauty - I am thick with love for this world of ours. Doesn't everything in you reach for what is within this image - us, in our nighttimes, on our rolling planet.

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"On Nov. 13th, Europe's Rosetta spacecraft flew past Earth, swooping a mere 5300 km above the southern hemisphere....Rosetta also took some spectacular pictures of Earth's nightside, capturing city lights and possibly some auroras, too: annotated image. Inside one of those dots of light, a team of Italian astronomers (Giovanni Sostero, Ernesto Guido, Luca Donato and Virgilio Gonano) were looking back at Rosetta. Here is the view through their 18-inch telescope; Rosetta is the dim streak of light cutting through the starry background. Bon Voyage, Rosetta!" SpaceWeather.com

Some thoughts on injury during dance...

If we try to exceed ourselves too much we injure ourselves. It's important to excel beyond oneself, to lose one'self' in the ecstasy of the dance, but safely. There is a hubris to an injury - an overdoing. If the ego tries to stretch with the expanding/dissolving self it's called ego-inflation and perhaps the emotional corollary of physical injury. The muscles stretch but at a point they have to 'let go,' 'relax,' even in intense, highly aerobic movement, otherwise there'll be damage: a pulled or stretched or torn muscle or tendon, a broken bone, a dislocation; harmony is lost. I find most of my injuries occur when I am working in an area of unacknowledged emotional tumult. Then I push myself and overdo it when perhaps I should be tenderly reaching in with self-compassion and loving-kindness. I forget limits, my fragility. And remembering to be humble towards what I can and cannot do.

Self-care, how important this is.

Most of my thankfully minor injuries take about six months to heal fully. Often I overdo and re-injure. In the high octane of the dance it is easy to forget that a part of your body needs constant TLC.

TLC, for myself.

Ah, should we not all do that more often, and not just when we're injured?

________________
An expansion on something I'd written in the feedback for the 5Rhythms dance workshop I attended last August.

Dance

On the edge of a great cloud bank
wet, each pore
fire suffused, open,
bones like wind
sunlight of the Summer, free
asking where the words went
when they rained, drenching the heart
the beat of the circle, writing on drums
words flashing in air, lightning.
It's electricity
not gravity
that connects us.
Blue paints the tops of the clouds,
lit.
Waves across the world.


August 26, 2007

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Written at the 5Rhythms workshop Taeji and Shara held at Dovercourt House - towards the end of the 2-day event, we were each given paper and pen and asked to write something that would be sent to us a few months later: received in the mail from Taeji today.

November Sun

leaves, fire colours
reds and oranges
the fallen sun

a street carpet
of fragmented light

sodden endless rain

paper garden bags,
of collected leaves,
raked and packed

my heart, enfolded
withdrawn

an economy of words

no fixing it, either - if it's
not there in the first sweep
it'll never be

I was on a pathway
that disappeared
before I arrived

the large wood-wet oak
a shiny canopy of leaves
held by powerful branches
bright yellow lanterns
slivers of sun

scattering¹


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On November 8th, browsing radio stations I came across Don Jackson in his nightly spot, "Lovers and Other Strangers," and found him presenting a marvelous Autumn show composed of November-inspired poetry and music, that, hmnn, has obviously been inspiring...

¹While I couldn't work it into the poem, I was also playing with an origin of the universe metaphor with a reference to the point of the "last scattering" when, in the diffuse plasma of ionized atoms, particles and anti-particles annihilated each other for the last time, leaving about a billion photons for every particle of matter, thus making the universe transparent. I wanted this reference to echo the emotional underlayer of the poem where fragmented light leads to a naked transparency of the heart, a clarity.

Setting up a small studio...

On the weekend my son and brother moved about half my storage space out. A solid pine queen-sized bedframe in pieces, a dismantled swinging couch for a backyard, an old stereo system with speakers that still works, a workout bench in its box, a functional old laser printer with an unwrapped toner, things no longer needed or there isn't room for. They cleared enough space for me to set up a small painting area so that I can work right away if I have the gumption. Once the remaining dozen or so boxes are unpacked, there will be no excuse anymore: it's heated; there's a tiny window for ventilation; next door is the laundry room with a big sink for washing brushes (I use water-based oils, so clean-up is easy); the lighting's nothing, but there are clamp lamps and full spectrum bulbs...

I paint on the floor, whenever I can summon the courage to let it go, or when I manage a zen-like state. It's always a risk. It's the most nerve-wracking thing I do.

Once the canvas is dry, I can move it upstairs where there is light in excess and work on an easel.

Some of my best paintings have been done when it's almost dark and I can barely see what I'm doing. It's not about the amount of light but the state of mind.

I'll try to take a photo later and add it to this post.

Later: Ok, so 4. And so what if they're a bit silly. You get the picture.





My doggy wondering.



Fun wall shot. Oh, whateva, then.



What's still to do. Sort of Arrgghhhh....

And, anyway, what part of the brain is remembering...

Why am I trying to remember Plato? It was a dark green hardcover book. I took to reading outside of my course lists, rising every morning at 5am and reading for about 2 hours before getting ready to make the long trek to the university for my courses or teaching assignment. When I finished the Oxford Annotated Bible, I began Plato, naturally (and after him, well, Aristotle, who I found tedious, with his categorizations and namings). In the Fall of that year I read Plato cover to cover, and hardly remember it except of the wonder of worlds opening out. Though subsequently I felt I had the "Plato layer" somewhere in my psyche and would have some dim general idea whenever I came across a reference, or when reading Neo-Platonists.

The cave, and the chained, and the muted light, this I remember. Or the city of perfect people all with their perfect roles. The split of the soul into two halves each forever seeking each other. Transmigration of souls. Pure forms. And Socrates and the hemlock, oh yes. Plato really is two men anyhow, not one. He never was one man. Any philosopher would laugh at me.

This morning carrying a large chocolate-dipped apple that I was given for answering three silly Insurance Company questions (what might insurance be good for? is there a difference between an agent and a broker? oh ho ho my) and getting my picture taken I saw it, I'd never noticed before, down by the vault. Whoever uses it? The way the morning light rested on each of the horizontal lines. It looked like an industrial strength plastic flooring until closer and realizing it was marble. Light shone ethereally down those stairs, surely a representation of pure forms. Why do we have to find representations of what we're thinking about? Is that called pathetic fallacy? Walking by walls of marble tile and on floors of marble, it could almost be a cave. Not quite, but if you thought of the tremendous industry, hauling it all from the earth, cutting and polishing it, cementing it in...

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Writers read everything, and readers of writers read everything, and I was doing a graduate degree in English Literature and was tired of references to basic works I hadn't read and so embarked on a wide-ranging and varied reading project... that went on for 10 years at almost a book a day - totally different to Fine Arts, which I also did a degree in, where mostly what you had to know was Art History, at least back then. I'm sure it didn't begin with Plato... so why is He popping up? And on marble staircases of all places.