Monthly Archives: September 2011

hen pecking

Jon Katz with his beloved donkey Simon

I had to share this post called The Rooster Syndrome by the wonderful Jon Katz.

If you don’t know about Jon, you are in for a treat.

His blog Bedlam Farm Journal is just one of the best around.

As he says, “come and see.”

 

 

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big

Brandi Rivera riding Sanne in the performance of RIDE

Earlier this week for the first time in many months, I rode the Friesian, Sanne.  He is big in every way:  big character, big heart, and big mover.

I thought about the connection with my post on chaos, and how riding Sanne demanded that I find order within the initial chaos of the ride – the feeling of trying to contain all of that movement, and having to find a way to transmit it thought my body, not blocking it, but channeling it, diving into it and finding its rhythms – opening to it.

When I read Susan Casey’s The Wave, I was blown away by her descriptions of the surfers, the ones who seek out the biggest, wildest waves.  Casey is a visceral, brassy writer, and as she  follows the wave chasers around the world, they seems way out on the farthest edge –  playing with death.  The surfers open to the wave, what other choice is there, really?

What waves are you riding?

 

 

 

 

 

the spaces between

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

photos:  Jeffrey Anderson

dancers:  Ingrid Schatz & DeAnna Pelecchia

 

 

 

I love this sequence of photographs because of what it reveals about the spaces between.  The spaces between the bodies, and more important, the spaces of transition from one movement to another.

Recently I noticed in myself a tendency to not straighten my body, not lengthen into the vertical as I moved from one task to another.  Bending forward to pick up one thing then curving into another movement were blending.  I think it is the remnants of when my girls were small.  My whole body became a forward bending arc of love, protection, readiness to hold, to embrace, to dress, to bring my body around them. I can feel it in the barn too – bending forward to wrap the horses’s legs, to pick up a brush, and somehow the spaces between becomes part of that, rather than having a fullness of their own.

So now I am paying attention to the spaces between – consciously lengthening upward and reaching my legs downward between.  It brings breath in, broadens my perspective outward for a moment before I lean into the next thing.

The word for the space between the cells is interstitial. I love that word because it captures something of the secret hiddeness of those spaces, their subtlety.

How do you feel your transitions?  How do you pay attention to the spaces between?

 

 

today, or at least the beginning

photo:  Pam White

I love reading about the shape of a person’s day. How they navigate the arc of it, the little parts, the details.  But I find myself shy to reveal those details about myself.  So here goes!

Today I got up at 6:15 and let the dogs out – Cho, the 16-year old Spanish Galgo is always the first to give us a shout.  Then a cascade of cats enter the bedroom, the ones that would keep us up all night investigating drawers, opening and closing doors, knocking over anything that isn’t attached.

I made tea – Harney’s Pu-erh for Pam, and CTC, a zesty black Assam for me.  Finished the Sunday Times magazine section.

It has been warm, so I am still swimming. This morning I noticed that I was doing that old style “figuring out”  kind of thinking.  While swimming!!!  Grinding into a thought, a situation, something troubling, usually.   Feeling that, I shifted.  First, I just looked at the ripples on the water (side stroke) and then watched the color of the water, the sky, looked at the mist lifting off the mountain (back stroke).

I could feel my mind release – it feels like “molecular thought” – a way of experiencing the mind that is more about sensing the whole and feeling in a general, indirect way around the edges of things, looking though things in a transparent way – wafting instead of piercing. Free flowing instead of gripping, manipulating, trudging, pushing.  Dissolving instead of calcifying.  Opening instead of contracting.

How do you experience your mind?  And what does your body tell you about your mind?