Pulling threads
Notes and news from the present moment, on its swift way to becoming past.
Sky Mandala Silks
I have selected a handful of photographs from the vast collection of images collected in #skyproject, and reflected the sky back upon itself. As images of the sky in their random gorgeousness are mirrored, kaleidoscopic, soft-edged artworks in pattern emerge: SKY MANDALAS.
Turning Corners
When the sky mirrors itself…New developments in #skyproject, last yoga classes of the year, and an eye to future offerings…
Milkweed Birdbreast
…All those seeds, ready to be borne on the wind, ready to be born as new green and flowering plants just a few months hence…
For the Time Being
Time, oh time … I am a time-being, a being in a complex relationship with time. Who among us is not?
I grieve the speed of time flying … except in October.
art for peace
I am delighted to announce that these unusual art objects were selected for display in the Art for Peace Exhibit at the Textile Museum the weekend of September 24–25, 12pm–7pm.
a fresh start
I was reading yesterday in the I Ching, hexagram 32. Hêng, or “Duration.” This hexagram is made of two trigrams: The Gentle / Wind, below, and The Arousing / Thunder, above. How fascinating that two such dynamic natural forces, combined, could yield an association with union and constancy! But in this iconography, the explanation goes:
Thinking about Ritual
Thinking about ritual — and THREE ways to practice together in the coming weeks…
Turn the Year Retreat
A Winter Solstice Mini-Retreat
8:30–9 :30 a.m. December 27–31, 2021
As each calendar year ends, on the heels of Winter Solstice, I make a point to mark the transition with intention. There is something so delicious about retreats at this time of year. I find a sense of newness emerges by paying attention to how the natural world changes with the season, and dropping into resonance with that. There is an inward quality to the season of winter, and an outward quality to our holiday celebrations. With tempering and balance, this can be a rich time of rest, and if we are lucky, a deeply generative quality can be found in these dark, cold days.
Inspire / Respire
inspire … to fill (someone) with the urge or ability to do or feel something, especially to do something creative;
respire … to recover hope, courage, or strength after a time of difficulty.
Familiar Ground
It was so wet, and varied, as it is there in November. Such dynamic skies! The rain and wind and mist, the drama — things I know, deeply, but after such a long time away, my embodied perspective has shifted. I saw anew the scale of hills and mountains, and the hovering, dawn-coloured light that hugs the horizon’s mist for most of each day. Cedar and salt. A northern, maritime, rainforest place.
Notes on Blues
Picasso: Painting the Blue Period, at the Art Gallery of Ontario.
When I was about the same age Picasso was when he made these works, the Blue Period was my favourite. I was not alone — while Picasso could not sell them when they were new, they eventually became hugely popular. There is much to appreciate in the exhibit, yet as I view the work now, I do not have the same love for this Blue Period that I once did.
Giving the Monkey a Job
As I sustain a meditation practice over many years, I notice that there are similar mind-states that show up in day-to-day life. A formal, silent and still practice has helped me get better at noticing subtle shifts in states of mind, but those states of mind are not attached only to sitting meditation.
Poiesis
The practices I have been gathering and that I share when teaching, are things I experience as methods of “homecoming” — coming to rest in being, whole. “Creative” or not, I believe we all, by the fact of living, are in the process of bringing forth what has not before been expressed what has not yet been realized. This is poeisis.
A Living Being, Feeling the Sun
I am working on a book that follows the lives of several families in the early 1900s, in a very rugged and remote part of the west coast. I have been reading widely many writers from that time period, to understand more deeply how that literature depicted it’s own time, to get a feel for how people understood the historical moment from within it. One of the writer’s I have come to read in this quest is Willa Cather, and her story of an orphaned settler boy. She writes this 10-year-old character with great tenderness, and through him, in two brief passages, Cather delivers a profound teaching that sounds like buddhist or yog philosophy to me.
Welcome Summer Retreat
When we sit together, we practice resting into our experience.
We practice sharing, and we practice listening.
In these ways, may we become skillful.
July 5–9, 2021
8:00–8:30 a.m.
Pearls of Wisdom
Working with the reflex to DO rather than BE when faced with suffering, remembering: it is skillful to bear witness, without jumping into distracting action; to listen, without dissociation, or minimizing, or denial; to return to presence when facing pain.
Context and Action
I practice what I teach, taking care and discernment with media consumption — yet I am caught in emotion with this week's news. Centered as it is around grave violence against the earth and indigenous peoples in the province where I grew up, it hits very close to home. We must hold our remembering, even if forgetting seems like it would be easier.