These Pictures with Words of the Depth of Sitting in My Room In Riverside California & My SKIN is Not a Protective Function IT’S a CONNECTIVE TISSUE "WITH-TO THIS WORLD HERE-NOW!!!
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One of the Practices for "working with " WTF in both senses(What the Fuck/What’s the Feeling) they kinda of Interpentrate-Interrelate & Arise In This Human Being…
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Yes, we are in sync.
I went walking last night under the Full Moon (or as some say, Fool Moon) into the Circle of Trees where we did a tiny ceremony offering ashes of a friend to Earth. Moon was hidden the whole time behind thick clouds. But just as we rose to walk to the ocean, the Moon emerged and shone on our hair the way it shines on water. When we got to the bluff-edge and looked down, the silky dark sea swirled up against the cliffs and back out…without the Moon, again behind clouds. But moonlight illuminated sky and clouds and water and sand, and we tossed in the last of our friend’s ashes with a good sense of completion and gratitude.
Walking back was harder. So deeply fatigued. But as we walked through the field a heron cried out and stars were suddenly visible above mountain-ranges of clouds. Somehow this gave us strength. An owl swooped silently ahead of us above the trees: live oak, black walnut, chokecherry, sand willow…on our way home.
We make the path by walking. (Machado)
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“To not rest is really being violent towards your body, to align yourself with a system that says your body doesn’t belong to you, keep working, you are simply a tool for our production…”
Tricia Hersey who sees Capitalims’s “grind culture” as a form of white supremacy.
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I am Reading this Book:
Some pieces within that I Find Interesting:
Sometimes we blur the distinction between art and life;
sometimes we try to clarify it. We don’t stand on one leg.
We stand on both. — John Cage
It takes two to know one. — Gregory Bateson
I am interested in what happens to people who
find the whole of life so rewarding that they are
able to move through it with the same kind of
delight in which a child moves through a game. — Margaret Mead
The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me,
he complains of my gab and my loitering. I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. — Walt Whitman
The general and president Ulysses S. Grant was not the sort of person we would expect to find in an exploration of art, improvisation, and philosophy. But as he was dying of throat cancer in 1885, he spoke of the relationship between consciousness and his diminishing body functions. He said, “The fact is, I think I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun. A verb is anything that signifies to be; to do; or to suffer. I signify all three.” He came to see his body and mind as more of a process than a thing. Grant’s was a view of death, a time of obvious transition, but the rest of day-to-day life is like this too; we’re simply not as conscious of it. R. Buckminster Fuller, riffing on Grant’s statement, said, “I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process — an integral function of Universe.”
Nachmanovitch, Stephen. The Art of Is (p. 26). New World Library. Kindle Edition.
“Stephen Nachmanovitch beautifully reveals a world of communication and co-creation that is both new and ancient. To play in this realm of improvisation is to recognize the tenderness with which interdependence knows aloneness, and the way silence defines sound. The stories he tells show us that the complexity and simplicity of life itself exist in our interrelationships. These findings are laid out in this book with grace, humor, and careful articulation. Nachmanovitch makes it clear that the art of being human now is acutely tied into an improvisational way of being: making sense of ourselves, each other, and the natural world in ways that find new offerings within old patterns. It is to feel anew.”
— Nora Bateson, filmmaker, International Bateson Institute
“ The Art of Is gives us a precious philosophical prescription for engaging the creative opportunities of our life as the greatest work of art.”
— Alex Grey, artist
A philosophical meditation on living, living fully, living in the present. To the author, an improvisation is a co-creation that arises out of listening and mutual attentiveness, out of a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity. It is a product of the nervous system, bigger than the brain and bigger than the body; it is a once-in-a-lifetime encounter, unprecedented and unrepeatable. Drawing from the wisdom of the ages, The Art of Is not only gives the reader an inside view of the states of mind that give rise to improvisation, it is also a celebration of the power of the human spirit that, when exercised with love, immense patience, and discipline, is an antidote to hate.
– “Yo-Yo Ma, multiaward winning violinist and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient”
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Beautiful, thank you, Michael. I especially love the quote reminding us that we are not categories or things, but happenings, processes, becomings…verbs!
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Yes, thanks, Michael. I have read a lot of Nachmanovitch’s Free Play. I really enjoy his writing… and still have a lot to learn from it. I especially love the titles of his books. Bravo!
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When Thinking calms down,even a little bit,sound wakes up.-W.A Mathieu
And…Vibrations Begin to Flow In,Through & All Around One’s Incarnation with the World’s Incarnation…Grooving!!!
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The core of artistic power is the place between people, where engagement occurs. This mutuality, “dotted everywhere,” can be found in the most surprising places.
Nachmanovitch, Stephen. The Art of Is (pp. 220-221). New World Library. Kindle Edition.
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Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union,
a deeper communion.
T.S. Eilot,“East Coker” in The Four Quartets
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On The Art of Is
This book could be subtitled the book of Michael (though don’t wish to patronize you). Improvisational living, jazz 
and zen 
references; the language of the body 
… I started reading this one earlier in the week and hear your voice throughout. Thank you for this “referral.” You have frequently found interesting cats that find that grooviness within that page of written smoothiness. His words remind me of Nora Bateson so its no surprise that Gregory was his mentor. He says at one point “I am not I writer, I am writing” (in reference to his improvisational inspiration). This phrase takes me back to a repeated phrase or mantra I speak internally to my choir … “I am not a writer, I am written.” Much in the same manner as the author, my writing writes me and I like to think that, just as any improvisation takes a village, my words carry the spirit of the kin that kindle the fires … you feel me, I feel you from afar. Though we cannot directly connect (and never enough when we do by other means), know that I carry thine spirit into my days, into my children, etc. etc. Keep the fires burning dear Stumpy! 
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“my words carry the spirit of the kin that kindle the fires…”
May it be so for all of us, not writers, but writing/written…
Good to hear your spirit. Good to feel you and Michael
“from afar”, yet somehow, here and now. 
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