Category Archives: improvisation life

Apr20

help from Mary

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Do you need a little help today?  Here it is – more help from Mary Oliver.  Do you need reminding that there is just this moment, and so taste it and swallow it whole?  Listen to this.  It is a gift from Brain Pickings, and the ever generous and brilliant Maria Popova.

THE FOURTH SIGN OF THE ZODIAC (PART 3)

I know, you never intended to be in this world.
But you’re in it all the same.

so why not get started immediately.

I mean, belonging to it.
There is so much to admire, to weep over.

And to write music or poems about.

Bless the feet that take you to and fro.
Bless the eyes and the listening ears.
Bless the tongue, the marvel of taste.
Bless touching.

You could live a hundred years, it’s happened.
Or not.
I am speaking from the fortunate platform
of many years,
none of which, I think, I ever wasted.
Do you need a prod?
Do you need a little darkness to get you going?
Let me be urgent as a knife, then,
and remind you of Keats,
so single of purpose and thinking, for a while,
he had a lifetime.

Mary Oliver

 

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Feb20

faraway

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yaddo

I am in retreat at beautiful Yaddo for a month.  Faraway from routine, from the familiar, from home, from the known.  Artists in retreat  hope to get deeply lost in the work, to find something unexpected, to come up against all that is uncomfortable and unknown and to move with that, through that.  To find treasure along the way.

It is a rare and precious thing to be nourished and supported in this way.  To have the luxury of occasional, luxurious, playful camaraderie with other artists.  To feel the deep, quiet surround of others’ practices.  Appreciation, every moment.

 

Jan22

following Gillian

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GILLIANPhoto:  Pam White

Following Gillian

From the horse’s body

 

Gillian Jagger is one of the extraordinary people I know.  I have been blessed to know her for many years now, and the depth and ferocity of her work, the expansive sky of her mind never cease to move and inspire me.

She recently sent me a link for some new videos that I share here:  Following Gillian and from the horses’s body.

Watch them when you can make some real time for them, because she is inviting you into a world that has nothing to do with clock time, with limitation, with hurry.  Let yourself be moved.