Category Archives: moving, breathing, feeling

Sep17

Pimp My Ride

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This is a photo of my beautiful stallion Capprichio at Dressage at Devon in 2004.  He is ridden by Sabine Schut-Kery and dancing with Ana Ayromlou.  Today he is is almost 20 years old, and our riding is cooked down, basic.  A little trot, a little canter, long companionable walks across the beautiful, grassy meadows.

If I put on music when I am riding him, I can feel him fill up, his neck arches, he starts to prance and blow, remembering all his chops – the passage, piaffe, the pirouettes and rears.  I love that feeling – all that wildness and energy coming up under me.   But dancing isn’t good for his ligaments or his joints, so we let that wave pass, and go back to being our companionable selves.  In my heart and mind though, he is always dressed to kill, and we are dancing together, full throttle.  Even just standing together gazing at the landscape, our six legs on the ground.

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Sep14

tethers

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This web made me think about points of connection – how many places in the world I anchor myself- and how many points of contact are needed to create balance.  About attachment and home.  One of my goals is to be like this web – to live lightly and effortlessly in the world. And when I went back to shoot the web a week later, it was gone – no trace – nothing remaining.

I am also thinking about the digital traces we are all leaving, and the digital tethers that connect us in known and unknown ways.  What remains of all that digital mapping when we are gone? What is digital impermanence?

Tell me your thoughts.

 

Sep13

what remains

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I recently wrote about the Skin Horse from the Velveteen Rabbit, and the idea of the body aging, becoming real and the heart opening to become a part of everything.

What remains of this web is becoming a part of the sky, dissolving into the vastness beyond the careful weaving of the absent spider.  The web also reminds me of what happens when we push against something – the price of resistance.

 

 

Sep12

improvisation dharma

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Pam White has a series of horse paintings she calls “Spirit Horses.”  To me they capture the dharma of the improvisation life.  Each stroke, each shape feels like it came directly from the painter’s body, from listening to what the horses demand.

Initially this might seem like a strange contradiction.  What does the seeming chaos of improvisation have to do with dharma’s “divinely instituted natural order of things.” (Wikipedia)

When I am improvising, whether it is in the kitchen making lasagna or in the field with the Mustang Nelson, or in the dance studio following my body’s voice, I am attuning to an order that comes from the heart, the body and the moment.  The improvisation life is one where we are fluid, flexible, adaptable.  I cannot live an improvisational life if I start the day with the lists – the dust of mundane details that can settle over every creative impulse in a moment.  Begin on the yoga mat, the meditation cushion, in the field with a dog, a horse, a lover.  Let yourself be moved.