NOTES from WG 2013 8.27.13
Woodlanders:
A Place for Grazing, Glazing, Lazing, Hazing, Smudging, Murking, Larping, Morphing
A Protected Tiome for Hunting/Finding: the "Duff"/Tinder to ignite;
A Place/Tinme for Finding/Feeling into the PORTALS of the moment for ADJUSTING THE STORY
Chance to try out/share/practice other new stories/models Larpers (Live Action Role Playing): Duncan
Feel your way into OTHER MODELS:
A Place for Day-Dreaming
A Place for discovering, re-discovering Your Questions (your monkeys?):
They Persist AND Change,. They need your Attention and Care
Yes, yes, yes but HOW? WHAT HAPPENS that can be SEEN ?
Using materials helps; using group making to help... Making Objects.... BUT NOT so many, nor those of a certain kind that we lose intention/focus Making Opportunities: Some are more accessible You never know:
Is NOW a Time for :
Carving? Marking/Imprinting rusted objects, hammers Pine Cones old housepaint, brushes, phragmites
Maybe Soft Land Art: chalks, fabric yarn Fairy Houses: Gourds, saws, dremels, Squishing Pulpy Materials?
Gift/Making?
Using Fragments, Homeopathy: How little of something do I need: REALLY?
Try Surrealist techniques: trust disorder: Something will emerge Trust The Prepared Mind
Playing with the Organic Just Hunt-Gather-Make
The Lenape considered a found shape stone in an animal shape more important than a crafted one
Exploring the Power of The Preface/The Afterward: Forget, forego, defer, refrain from the Body of the Text.
.
What’s my form of The Needs… NOW? Monkey Mind Aware of NEEDS
What do I really know about??
In what ways am I like my grandmother?
In What Ways can I, do I Express, Validate my beliefs
How/When do I Let my heart inhabit my body See that Tree of Contemplation
How/What do I Forage?
How am I Contributing to the Presence of PLAY/Magic in the World?
ER, When and How do I PLAY?? Do I play enough??
Opposite of play is not work, it is depression Brian Sutton-Smith
Play = adventure, fantasy/imagination, animal allies, maps, paths, special places, small worlds, hunting/gathering
Be friendly towards the Wandering Mind ... Start with YOUR Wandering Mind
How am I Hunting, Testifying to OTHER WAYS/TRUTHS About:
Remembering, re-membering
Ordering/Disordering and modelling ways to work with it
"In all chaos there is cosmos, in all disorder a secret order." Carl Jung
Revealing the Hidden Harmonies… A hidden harmony is better than an apparent one Heraclitus
Hobnoring "mis-speaks, mis-types, mis-spellings: (M)other ways of seeing things Your Souil
Exploring/ Freshening metaphors/ideas:
The Nursery: where things are started;
Potluck, Jigsaw, The Loom, The Matrix, The Zone"..
As above, so below
Life is tidal, er Lunar. The same kinds of waves wash in and out. It’s nature, our nature
Time is Circular or Ceremonial, not Linear
The Crooked Road
SHARE, not just tell extraordinary experiences
Ask Questions that allow the OTHER person--- and the Other person IN YOU-- to feel competent answering
Art/Artists as Boiling stones/chips: small, irregularly shaped stones added to liquids to make them boil more smoothly mainly in distillation provide
nucleation sites so the liquid boils easily without becoming superheated. Without boiling chips, a liquid heated in a smooth container can become superheated and release vapor suddenly, sometimes violently
How am I a Faery Doctor In the Healing World
look for healing at the joints/ cracks: hospice, oncology… when people
are available "Be Kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle"
Model how to Gather Moonlight do workshops that create visual and sculptural ways of exploring illness and health.
Prefaces and Notes: more
FOUR NEEDS to Encounter/Express: (Be aware that they change!)
The Story, Feral/Danger/Vulnerability (thanks, Lia), Capability/Transformation, Awe, Joy, Wonder, Play
Sophisticated Primitivity Sophia: Searching, releasing, redeeming
the Hidden God. S/he needs our intervention
Alchemical processes help: they are a thrre-part process
Cracks/Joints We are of the tribe of the Trickster, Hermes, the Messenger and god of the highways and particularly the crossroads, where roadsJOIN; where strange people come from Other directions to meet; where marketplaces get set-up and unusual things traded and sold and stolen. Lyme disease often hits the joints, they swell; gout too. Leonard Cohen reveres the joints. He calls it the Crack:
There's a Crack in everything, That's how the light gets in
Negative Capability: ability to hold ambiguities
Haiku -the undertheme of Woodlanders: concise nature poems, brevity, technical discipline and expressive content
Plant-Thinking /Machine Thinking (ask Laurie Seeman)
Vertical Thinking (Robert Bly): It's OK to explore DOWN... you'll probably come back
Inherent Vice: tendency of material to deteriorate due to the essential instability or interaction among components.
Monkey-Mind: Buddha described the human mind as being filled with drunken monkeys, jumping around, screeching, chattering, carrying on endlessly. We all have monkey minds, Buddha said, with dozens of monkeys all clamoring for attention. Fear is an especially loud monkey, sounding the alarm incessantly, pointing out all the things we should be wary of and everything that could go wrong. It's useless to fight with the monkeys or to try to banish them from your mind because, as we all know, that which you resist persists.
Instead, Buddha said, if you will spend some time each day making things- cards, wands, handmade paper, stone casting--- you can, over time, tame the monkeys. They will grow more peaceful if you lovingly bring them into submission with a consistent practice of making.
Helping, Fixing, Serving
a speech given by Rachel Naomi Remen author of Kitchen Table Wisdom
Rachel Naomi Remen, In the Service of Life, Noetic Sciences Review, Spring 1996. This was edited from a speech given by Ms. Remen at the 1996 Temple award ceremony. Ms. Remen with her husband, won a McArthur Award for their work with Commonweal, a holistic cancer treatment facility in Bolinas California and is a professor of medicine.
See Responses to this 8.26.13 ++
What are Artists? How are they the same and different from others?
Activists-alchemists-Practitioners-Witnesses
“Art” is not separate from daily living. art is the changing patterns we choose to put on the material world. Some of those patterns carry more meaning than others to us and other people. But that changes. Dan
Embodying the sacred: making altars, special places, special objecvts which hold (discharge) meaning
References Mentioned:
Simon Sinek Start with Why
Lewis Hyde The Gift: The Erotic Life of Property and
The Trickster Makes the World
Wassily Kandinsky Concerning the Spiritual in Art
Rachel Naomi Remen: Helping, Fixing Serving
"Arts and Wellness" The Creative Center
Schwenk's work on Water and Sensitive Chaos
Janet Frederick's Stream Work, Brian Alger's work