Horrifying October

Partly the reason I love October, is that in most places, fall makes dramatic changes. It makes me feel like getting busy. This is probably a squirrel-like urge to sock away food for the winter. I still enjoy fall in Hawaii, even though there isn't much evidence of change. It's making me think about getting ready to paint holiday windows in the San Francisco Bay area again.

Of course, as as artist, I find that it's also fun to mess up people's windows during this time of year - as I did here for a "Fright Shop" in Hawaii. It's so much fun for me to just draw big, improvising along as I see what happens in front of me. 

I enjoy the images and themes of Halloween; the magic and the unexplained happenings. I love the idea that it is, for one night, socially acceptable to assume and act out as another persona - even if it is just for a costume party or an evening of dancing.

But strangely enough, I really cannot watch horror films. I'm just too impressionable. Horrifying images make it into my dreams and haunt me in ways that aren't at all fun or even have a purpose. Movies are intentionally designed to get an emotional reaction from movie goers; in a horror film this is overkill. 

This doesn't make much sense to me, because I do enjoy taking chances and being adventurous. It seems like a strange purpose to look for horror on purpose, when so much real challenge is available in the world.

But extremes are entertaining to some people.
If you enjoy horror, what is it about the experience that you enjoy?

Recluse

There are many reasons why a person ends up being alone. Some of them are negative, and some are positive, and some are accidental, and some of these choices happened "accidentally on purpose."

Sometimes you make choices to do what you think you want to do, and only later find out that you've inadvertently chosen to do it all by yourself after you're entirely committed. If you think about how long it takes to get exactly what you want, how long people work to set themselves up for retirement - it's a long haul. Most people don't know what they're going to do with themselves when they retire because they never had a chance to do what they loved to do - or they're not able to reinvent themselves.

Sometimes it is just that we cannot "sell" to others our desire to have things the way we want. There has to exist someone else who wants share that situation with us, and that is sometimes a tall order if our dreams are unique. Or sometimes, we end up alone because there is something we do that is not socially acceptable to others who would usually want to hang out with us - too much "baggage."

I am overwhelmed with how many of my peers have become alcoholic as they age - probably somewhat because "it doesn't matter now." Some people go through a process of "giving up" (sometimes necessary) without ever coming out on the other side of it to understand what they positively do want. Some just decide not to bother learning anything new and get along with what they have. For them, it's just too much trouble to feel like you don't know what you're doing. This is one example of circumstantial isolation. If you don't change with the times, you get left behind. And possibly disillusioned about what you believe is not possible now.

Relationships teach you about yourself. (At least, that is how they have always worked for me.) In a way, it's expending less effort to be alone. All those character defects that are irritating to someone else don't matter when you're alone. Nobody else is there to accept the consequence except you. If you're OK with what you do, you can have things be any way you want. Of course, some older folks get very "set in their ways." But think of the advantages, you don't have to explain or apologize about the way you are, how you work, why you do what do. There is nobody to answer to. Being alone is both an advantage, and a disadvantage.


Someone asked an old woman past 100 what is the best part of being old - and she said, "No peer pressure."

Lightly skipped over by most is underestimating the power of a significant booby prize that is the strangest feature of being lucky enough to get old. Watching those twenty, thirty, forty year friendships dissolve or suddenly disappear is not for sissies.

I don't know what your experience with death and the process of grieving is, but in my peer group - people do not want to hang around someone who is grieving. Oh, after someone dies, people will gather to console one another and commemorate, but then, they go away. They don't call, they don't make contact again for another...three months or so. Then it's only a light check-in.

Somehow the person who is grieving is supposed to "get over it" or "deal with it." Most of your friends will get tired of hearing about how you feel when you miss someone who has died. This distaste perhaps reminds them of how they have trouble thinking about their own death. Maybe it's just too close to how unpleasant it would be to be the one who is left after best friends and lovers are gone - as you are now. It's as if grief is a state of social quarantine.

There isn't much social support either for accepting each person's unique process of going through their own grief. Instead of recognizing that grief is a special time of self-knowledge, if the process of grieving goes on "too long," it is labeled "depression."

It's not depression, it's grieving - but this is the cloak that society wraps it in. This mistaken label for grieving as "depression," is yet another very good reason for circumstantial isolation. 

In A Fight

In brain science and in hand-to-hand combat, the person who has the ability to calm themselves while under the threat of fighting has the upper hand. A person who can calm themselves can use an incidental strategic advantage collected by their slower upper brain as well as their faster reactions of their reptile survival brain. 

A friend of mine was once in a bad situation where a group of thugs were threatening to roll him and rob him. He looked around, figured it would be easier to defend himself if he were in a small space where one person at a time was going to come at him. So he backed in between two parked cars against a dead end wall and proceeded to wait. The thugs taunted each other to go in after him; but eventually one of them said, "Look at him - he's too calm. He's got a gun. Let's go."

Defending oneself in real fight is a whole different matter too, but again - calm observation and questioning one's own assumptions can pay off...

At 24 years old, I was once walking uphill on a one-way switchback to the little Mesa to a party in a remote place in Bolinas near the beach at night. As I walked, I began to suspect that someone was behind me, matching my footsteps. Was it in order to sneak up on me for some nefarious purpose? I shuffled my feet. The person behind me matched my footsteps again. The houses I was passing had occupants who were on vacation, or gone to bed and locked their doors... So I decided my advantage was that he did not know that I suspected what might be going on.

At fifteen paces, I turned around, still walking backwards and started blabbing to him in an over-friendly way in the dark silence. "Oh, hi! Were you at the beach like I just was? I didn't notice you there. Did you get that shirt at the freebox? I love the Freebox... I'm going to a party; are you going there too? "

He stopped, somewhat shocked...not answering me. Which indicated to me that he might have the nefarious intentions I imagined. Now I knew how he was dressed. But there we were...walking along, twenty feet apart. So I kept blabbing to him and decided to choose my battle ground to conduct a little test. I wanted to control where I was going to allow him to get closer to me to see what he might do when we came to a steep switchback.

When I reached my chosen spot, at that point I said, "Oh shit! Forgot something at the beach, gotta go back..." Sure enough, he ran the last ten feet uphill across the street towards me and pushed me down. But because I was smart to think ahead, I was on the ground parallel to the outside edge of the road; next to me was a steep drop off. I had a significant advantage of familiarity with the terrain.

While I was on the ground as he was coming close to me, I realized that my legs were a whole lot longer than his arms. I remember thinking, "Some part of me must have been planning this." As he loomed over me, still saying nothing, I crouched in a fetal position, saying, "Oh, you're going to help me up." He still said nothing. As he bent over me, all I had to do was extend my legs and plant them in his crotch to toss him over the steep edge of the road. I got up and ran. When I breathlessly arrived at the party, I explained what had happened. The guys in the part all went out looking for this attacker. But there was enough time to for him to disappear.

Later in the daytime, I went back to the scene of the crime. I saw that what I had done to evade the attack was an even better plan than I imagined. Where he'd landed off the side of the road, there were many poison oak bushes...

Manifesto

I'll put what I mean in the positive,
leaving behind passé routines and shortened regrets.
Who, how and what I love shows my genius.
Coincidence-control is my delight.
I count on timing to take my talents for the ride they deserve 
Around a cycle of return, they're crying, "Me! Me now!"
Humility dazzles wealth.
  
I'll help with respect, merging with your bonding language  
to inspire, laugh & free you -  
because I am so often connected,
helped, awed and laughed. 
 
May my ruthless emotions be artful & tactful;
allowing others to misunderstand,
accepting who they are now,
releasing the curse and blessing
of glimpsing what is not yet born in everyone.
 
I'm always learning what "appropriate" means,
expanding connections & meaning-making.
My complaints are fodder.
I will design a way though artfully
dancing around my own resistance & fears,
forgiving myself again, in gratitude
as I learn what I can do, and
how I can do what I know.

Where's the Music?

 Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
        Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
    While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
        And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;
    Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
        Among the river sallows, borne aloft
            Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
    And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
        Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
        The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
           And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

(The last stanza of Keats's "To Autumn." when he was dying of TB.)

When I read a poem, I wonder..."where is the music to this?" For me, unless a poem has a tune and is sung, it's not complete. When I hear poets read their poems, or rappers rap their lines, I think, "that person really wants to express themselves and they haven't learned to sing yet."

 I love it when poetry is lyrical or when poetry is an expression of meaning that has additional images or experiences in context with it. But by itself, usually poetry just doesn't do much for me. Part of the reason I don't really get into poetry is probably because there's no music attached, or I'm not connecting with the emotional content that's being expressed.


Words and grammar structure meaning - and poetry is where words become free of their structure. Poetry is how you can rub words together and they can become something original that hasn't been meant before. But unless you're skillful, the reader won't know what you're really saying and will read things into what you wrote that you didn't mean. Understanding is constructed by the person who is experiencing it. Their assumptions and perceptions trump your intent as an artist.

Sometimes poetic words will be so delicious on the page that I can actually imagine them complete without a tune attached. But usually that is when I can imagine images that go with the words instead of a tune, as I can do with this stanza from Keats. The poetry that goes beyond this "lack"of no music will evokes its own images that completely affect me. If a poem doesn't "do it for me," then usually it just doesn't contain enough of what it's hinting at. It's not "juicy enough." Hints are OK, I guess, for those people who like them, but I'm after experiences, or the hints of experiences that I have yet to embody.

Oddly enough, this is also the reason I listen to mostly instrumental music. It's also the reason I carefully select the films and video content to which I expose myself. If I listen to music with lyrics without selecting the content of it, (the radio, for instance) I am often so disappointed with how much drivel is out there. It's that I'm so affected by any art that I must be deliberate. When there is a song with words worth listening to, I never get tired of hearing it and may even take the time to learn to play and sing it. But frankly, most of what my culture imagines is valuable to say in a song or violent movies are ...not what I want to program into my psyche by repeating it. We humans seem to be preoccupied with the sounds of our own self-indulgences - we're verbal and like to blab - even when we don't have anything to say.

Being an artist, how can you tell if what you have to say is going to be considered notable by others unless you say it? Any expression seems to find it's audience. It's always interesting how "great" works of art continue to grow in meaning as the culture changes. People continue to find new meanings in "timeless" artistic vision. What is most personal becomes the most universal, as it is artfully expressed.

What do you think?

Relationship Stages

 

Personal Relationship Stages
 

 

 

 

An interesting view, that relationships have stages. Regarding the few intimate relationships I've had, would say the stages are:

• 1. Who is this person? What might we do together as a team?
  
  
• 2. Wow, this is wonderful. I'll do anything for her/him.
  
  
• 3. Wait a minute. Is what I'm doing to demonstrate love working how it's intended? Maybe this needs a bit of investigation and adjustment so the demonstrations I contribute to create love in the relationship goes where there are intended. In return, what I allow them to do for me also constructively floats my boat.
  
  
• 4. Trades, offerings and tacit agreements evolve and are enjoyed or endured.
  
  
• 5. A way to update these agreements becomes necessary. Whether agreements are made tacitly, verbally, as trades or as "standing" agreements - is everyone on the same page about what the agreement is? Who does what for whom and who gets to wait for their desires/needs to be met, and how long do they wait? Does the "waitee" ever get what it is they want/need? Can agreements-customs be changed or updated as various member's needs change? For instance, if one of the members of the relationship gets injured and needs care to heal from the other(s), can the relationship be flexible enough to provide that care and later re-establish independence after healing without breaking apart?
  
  
• 6. Over time, everyone's challenges, shortcomings, strengths and/or style or preferences become familiar. Can each member accept the person's intent to do their best in bettering their character flaws, or accept these flaws? How to support and/or encourage improvement of personal character development and learning? How does each member "help" one another? Do the agreements that have evolved merely adjust and compensate for shortcomings? Or is there a recognition of a process that improvement is also evolving? Can personal change be accommodated? The answers to these questions makes or breaks the relationship.
  
  
• 7. If a "break" is happening, character flaws are assigned the role of punishment. It would be so nicer for ME if the person improved - they must not love me enough to improve themselves and make it easier on both of us. Mountain out of molehill sensitivity develops, noting the most minuscule expression of these character flaws in spite of ongoing improvement. The relationship must end; the pressure of having someone so invested in your shortcomings or successes is too pressurized.
  
  
• 7. a. From my own experience, the way out of this is to re-prioritize the constant recognition of the objectionable behavior(s.) Make a specific time to express objections all at once, (without defense is best) instead of constantly having uncontrolled emotional reactions come up all the time. Meanwhile, constructively rebuild the relationship based on enjoyable, bonded experiences so the enjoyment of being together is renewed.
  
  
• 7. b. Of course, if you work this out, you can start new projects together. If you don't navigate this stage very well, the two of you part ways, with various clean-up work ahead. Or you get so damaged that making further agreements are impaired,  but you keep going anyway.
  
  
• 8. I've heard after twenty years together, the partners change places in what their shortcomings have become. The shortcomings and complaints each used to have about the other swings in the opposite direction...sort of hilarious!
  
  
• 9. But by now, there's been some track record of getting past difficult times and hopefully, communication skills have increased well enough to continue indefinitely. Unless significant lifestyle changes intervene that make a liaison no longer possible for various practical reasons... But some relationships can spend time apart and get back together ongoing.
  

Why Teach?

One of my standard questions I like to ask strangers that is designed to tell me something about a person is, "Did you have especially interesting or memorable teachers during your school years?"  What is really sad is when the person cannot think of a single teacher during all their schooling who stood out as memorable or interesting! Those who have had no stand-out teacher in all their years of being a student makes me feel exceptionally lucky. These teachers below are only some of the highlights...

There was that Spanish teacher who put up with me sleeping in her class in first period in middle school who did not mind that she had to repeat her question to me once she woke me up. She began by teaching the class songs, which had my heart right off. It was also OK with her if you came up with a different way to say the same thing on a language test, which isn't allowed these days.

Then there was the middle school art teacher who, after teaching me how to enter art contests and win them, sat me down and said, "You could be a great artist, if you wanted to do that. Not just a popular artist, not just a famous artist, but a great artist." With his help, I won $4000. in art contest awards  - a tidy sum in 1968!

There was the high school history teacher who, by assigning me an event in the Civil War era and then having me research that one event in multiple history books  - he taught me about point of view, bias, inflationary language, how a conqueror changes history documentation, how persuasive language works in newscasting, advertising, etc. etc. I'd have to say that was the most useful class of any I ever had, with the exception of learning how to read.

Then there was the college professor scholar from Taiwan who, after giving me credit for a class he was teaching in the I Ching, decided he would see how I was at learning Chinese - just for fun - in the three weeks left of the quarter we had left. He strung together the broken apart elements of very complex Mandarin characters by telling a story about how the history of the meaning of the parts of that character were related. It was only later that I realized he had been teaching me at a breakneck pace of 100 characters a week - and he made it completely easy to remember! (Of course, I've forgotten all of it forty years later.) It was one of the regrets of my life that the temptation of a full college scholarship I had received made me unable to travel back to Taiwan with him to teach English and complete my studies of Chinese. When I met him I observed that he seemed to change himself around to reach specific students, who were so self-involved that they never realized what a shape-shifter he was or the apparent inconsistency of how he presented himself. In one afternoon, he presented himself as a joking fool, an authority, a political refugee, a data mine, or a friendly, grandfatherly, absent-minded professor. At that time I was about to choose a particular affectation of how to present myself, being afraid that it was some form of character dishonesty to present myself inconsistently. When I told him what I'd observed in his shape-shifting ways that afternoon, he replied, "It must be that you have this characteristic in yourself, which I believe is the rapport of good teaching."

A Chinese saying: "The best compliment to an excellent teacher is to teach another." Have taught upwards of 3000 people how to juggle three items when I used to have a business making juggling balls. I still teach people to juggle. The way someone learns and unlearns says quite a bit about who they are. So I teach people to juggle partly in order to get to know someone. Sometimes I'll use the process of learning an unfamiliar skill such as juggling to draw parallels in learning another skill - Alexander Technique - which is part of the way I make a living. Alexander Technique is a subject I teach for the love of it, and because of the value I've gotten from it. A flexible attitude of continual learning can be a form of enlightenment.  I never tire of giving people that first lesson in Alexander Technique - because even though it's a skill akin to the devotion of learning a musical instrument, I keep wondering if someone in that first lesson could get the whole thing, in a flash of epiphany.

Another reason I teach is the same reason I love to listen to improvisational music - I love to be around discovery when it's happening.

As has been mentioned, I also teach in order to know my subject better. Using my sharpened and sensitive observation skill has got to be another one of the biggest thrills for me - especially when I can making someone aware of something about themselves they never noticed previously that turns out to be extremely useful for them. Some of learning is uncovering what the person senses they already know innately, but have somehow forgotten and have become dulled to sensing from habitual repetition. Learning to unlearn what is unnecessary has the most delightful effectiveness - and it's so elegant.


It doesn't matter to me whether I'm the teacher or the learner, but sometimes it's easier to play the part of the learner. I once put a relationship back together that was on it's way to falling apart by choosing the most enjoyable and conflict-free situation as a "standing date." It was being the learner and my partner being the teacher at a skill we could do daily.

But the most enjoyable part of teaching - for me - is to simplify the subject, to not merely repeat the way I was taught. I LOVE to innovate ways to communicate the subject so that my students can learn it faster, easier and more thoroughly than I did.

Being Santa

When I was a teen, my boyfriend's family in San Diego had adopted a Mexican family from Tijuana to be the recipient of their donations. I was the first person who could translate between the two families and got to hear an interesting story.

It all started when the San Diego family had bought a used car and wanted to fix it up and sell it to make a little money. They found this shop over teh border where eleven kids were running around. The mechanic did an excellent job on the car, and later an excellent job redoing the interior - the reconditioning was perfect. After realizing the poverty level of the Mexican family, the family from San Diego decided to buy another car and this time give all the money they made on the sale of the car after it was fixed to the mechanic and his family.

They did this multiple times.

It took the sale of four cars for the mechanic and his family to figure out what was going on. Each time the San Diego family came with another car and some money, the mechanic assumed that as a customer, they wanted an even BETTER and more expensive job fixing up the car they had brought. ...While the family from San Diego just wanted to give the Mexican family some money that represented their true efforts from the sale of the cars on the other side of the border.



Hope that you're in a position to make someone's life better this Holiday season!

Going Muraling

Always Loved

We are not the roles we assume. Roles are like jobs that can be replaced. People are not their roles of being a spouse, lover... Although the world assumes this is true and react accordingly.

Once I open myself to being intimate with someone else and grow to love them, from that point on it doesn't matter what they do next. I will always love them wherever they go. They must work hard to injure and destroy that love of mine - unintentional injury doesn't count.

If enough time has gone by, that can't be done completely - unless they intentionally and willfully work pointedly to do so. Even then, the time we spent when we were in harmony is always mine should I choose to keep it for myself. In time, I may find someone else to craft an alliance with that is more appropriate to needs, but that second person is not a "replacement" for the first. If we part, nobody can ever hold the same connection we shared because it was and is still unique. With each connection, (believing that great relationships are made and not found) I have been indissolubly changed by my experience of intimacy with them. In knowing them. It is as if I grow appendages that are uniquely shaped just for their connection of holding hands with me.

At least, that's my experience so far.

In Another Life...

What I Almost Became...


Perhaps in another life, (one I got very close to choosing,) I would have been a translator. Being born in California, the only living language that I could learn was my local dialect of Spanish. Mostly from a brilliant teacher in middle school, I learned enough to fluently play the translator between two families who had become friends without knowing each other's language. Then a full scholarship took me away from the border town where I was raised. Without use, I forgot most of what I had learned. Now after not using what I knew for decades, I know enough to tell what someone is talking about, but I no longer know what they are saying about it!

I had stumbled on the I Ching one day in the library when I was twelve while looking for "magic books." Here was the first completely foreign universe of completely dissimilar symbolism that I could not grasp, although I could read the words. So I began to collect different translations of the I Ching and compare them as I used the book for an oracle. The ability of the I Ching to give the same reply to similar questions, even when asked years apart, this completely fascinated me. How did this synchronicity Jung talked about really work? I am still fascinated with this question. In my documentation of my experiences with the I Ching, I now have a sort of catalog of my questions about what to do with my life, what choices to make and why make them. Using the I Ching has helped me gain the benefit of being able to compensate for time of arrival of possibly related information. 

My lifelong interest in the I Ching was partly fueled by a college professor I had when I attended U.S International Uni. He was a scholar from mainland China who's affiliated institution bestowed a degree on the head of my school merely for hiring him!  Because I already knew the content of the class in the I Ching he was offering (and because I could already handle a brush as an artist,) this professor taught me Chinese for seven weeks while giving me a guaranteed "A" in his I Ching course. 

Of course I had a private teacher and no classmates to compare myself against, but it was only later that I learned we had gone at a breakneck speed of a little more than 100 characters a week. He made it simple for me, after learning about my ability to memorize song lyrics. Essentially, he showed me about how different "character families" were related to each other symbolically. He did this by taking a very complex character that had many brush strokes, and teaching it to me backwards, one stroke at a time, using a story to link the meanings together. We did probably five of these "character families" each day and they were somewhat related to a larger story. When I think back about it, this was inspired teaching.

Probably the one decision in my life that I regret was to keep my college scholarship to go to art school instead of taking advantage of an opportunity offered by this professor, Dr. Dun Fong Lee. This professor, (who I'd spent quite a bit a time with socially,) offered to set me up teaching English and to continue our lessons in Chinese - as he was returning to Taiwan when I was getting ready to transfer my credits at that school to art college. Leaving my boyfriend was unthinkable, (it didn't occur to me that perhaps he could accompany me!) there was no way to stay in touch from so far away in that era except for letters that took forever to arrive - and I was an orphan who had no parents to remain interested in what happened to me. So there were many reasons to not go. Still, I wish differently. I did attempt to contact him a few years later, once I had taken advantage of my art school scholarship, but I could not find him. Perhaps he had died, because his was in his late sixties when I had turned eighteen.

But my interest in languages remained. It was another stumble during college that took me into a book about the Wharf-Sapir theory. Here was another book I couldn't understand, even though I could read the words. It suddenly made me realize that there were worlds of cultures out there containing different thinking styles that possibly could not be conveyed in English...

Later in college I designed an independent study class in "communication" to explore how many ways meaning could be conveyed. It took me from animal training, (inter-species communication) through symbolism and body language via gestalt therapy experiments and the examination of how adapting built habitual routines and contexts, into artificial intelligence, toward learning a bit of the Hopi language, back into polling surfers who were encountering dolphins to evaluate the surfers on their proprietary sense of owning their surf spot.

Eventually I finally buckled down and spent the ten thousands hours plus in learning to write in my own language. The experience of traveling to Europe encouraged me to start a "travel journal," ...and the rest you can read right here.

 

Hunch or Prejudice?

What is the difference between an intuitive hunch and a prejudice? This is one of my virtual questions that I enjoy asking.

It's curious to me how each and every perceptual attitude that someone can adopt seems to have alternate ways of describing it. These descriptions, definitions and interpretations seem to color how the subject and person is defined to express another bias or prejudice. Some can get quite...colorful, with pointed accusations.

For instance, students often stop themselves from asking a question of a teacher out of respect for that teacher. But from the teacher's point of view,, "why don't my students ask ANY question?" In my culture, you can have rapport or you can have respect, but not both.

Another instance, it's obvious from my posting here that I enjoy to take the time to offer the benefit of my observations to other people. I've taken the time to learn to write to do this, which has been an effort for me because my talking style isn't easily translated into the forms of writing.  But now others are coming to recognize my investment of being able to write. Whenever there is recognition of "talent" or ability, people inevitably wonder why you do such a thing. They assign a motive to your actions - sometimes these motives are not what you would answer if they had asked you. In some cases, they react as if the person who has invested value in an opinion must be a proselytizer or a salesperson.

But sometimes, people complaint that I am being "too" helpful. They seem to not appreciate my motives or my open-mindedness because I don't communicate that very well.

If I come up with creative thinking ideas on their behalf without warning them or getting their permission to do so, they react strangely. They're slightly intimidated. They don't know why I can do it or why I would do such a thing for them. Perhaps they assign nefarious motives to what I'm doing or why I'm doing it. I've been accused of "co-dependence," but I just don't have the vested interests and addictions to go along with the profile. Demonstrating my ability to think has also often gotten me defined me as "analytical," as if I am an inflexible one-trick pony.  Am of the opinion that everyone has multiple talents, often undeveloped.

I've learned to actively refuse to defend myself and instead invite participation. But sometimes it just doesn't work. People misread my communicating as being upset. They don't dare to confront or engage, fearing they might offend.

Would love to open a conversation to suggestions on how to better this state of affairs, because I think this same issue affects many, many interactions with many people. Perhaps I just need to joke about it more often.

Anyone have any suggestions or explorations...stories? Probably not. Somehow, the way that I write doesn't invite comments. Not sure what to do about that.

Sculptural

In honor of deva spirits and witches everywhere, I made a witchy nymph. 

What you don't see in this picture is how I had to splint and graft two pieces of the stick into one to get the witchy nymph to have arms as well as legs. 

While I was doing so, I was thinking about how many of us wounded healers there are, partially broken... How many there are who have had to go from being broken to making themselves whole again. This journey seems to be necessary to make compassionate teachers with some real answers for those who find themselves in dire straights.

Haywired

It is a fact that no matter how much "better" your sensory judgment gets,  you are always going to be using your senses in a 'relative' way.  'Absolute fact' doesn't exist. It's not how people are wired. We're made so that we get used to being whatever we have learned, so what is new can get our attention. So whenever a significant change is made, it will always feel "strange" and "abnormal."  

After recovering from over-doing and needing to adapt to terrible or extraordinary circumstances of life that nearly everyone encounters, it is pretty amazing how it's still possible to uncover your original subtle sensitivity. Eventually with the right sort of attention, you can get your bearings and learn to do things easier as you used to be able to do it when you were innocently younger. As this is happening, the changes that register as "significant" get more subtle, but they are still changes with those same "weird" sensations of newness. 

I believe that sensory appreciation is far and away more important priority as a principle than most Alexander teachers give it. Most give it lesser billing as a sort of "special effects" in relation to the other "more important" principles - but I think motor sensory amnesia has center stage as the one of the three most important concepts of Alexander Technique. Sensory appreciation is the principle that needs to be introduced first. 

It's important because students need to know from the beginning how to recognize that something new has happened. most people disregard happenings that are "unclassified flukes" because they don't fit preconceptions - they're not anywhere near the radar of expectations. If students don't understand what a discovery looks like, how are they going to know they are making one when it happens?

As far as humor goes - more teachers should use it!

Seven Minute Drawing

The illusion of depth works best if you can blur your view, simulating the ability to stand back from the image.