Jean-Sebastien is alive with rock balancing. He and his mates are decorating the whole campus with sculptures. He has become one of our rock balancing senseis here at the Institute and it’s very cool to see what he is learning from the practice. Today, just before our module started, he was sitting with me in the centre of the circle and he asked if here was something to knowing which kinds of edges would sit together, and as he took his mind off the task of balancing, in the act of asking the questions, the rocks he …
Two good friends of mine, Roq Gareau who works for the Canadian Border Services Agency and Orlando Pioche who works for the Indian Health Service in Shiprock, NM. Men doing serious work who work together as deep friends. From Wendel Berry: Good work finds the way between pride and despair. It graces with health. It heals with grace. It preserves the given so that it remains a gift. By it, we lose loneliness: we clasp the hands of those who go before us, and the hands of those who come after us; we enter the little circle of each other’s …
One of my favourite lines of poetry ever written is contained in this surreal poem from Frederico Garcia Lorca. I remember reading the final stanza for the first time maybe ten years ago and it shook me. Intermission Those eyes of mine from 1910 saw no dead man buried, no ashen fairs of mourners at dawn, no heart quivering in its corner like a sea horse. Those eyes of mine from 1910 saw only the pale wall where the girls tinkled, the snout of the bull, the poisonous mushroom, and the incomprehensible moon that illuminated dried lemon rinds under …
Photo by aikijuanma Here is a lovely story of youth adding beauty to the world by setting up a poetry stand and giving away instantly crafted poems to anyone who asked for them. A few months ago as I was walking in Government Street in Victoria I met a woman standing beneath a tree outside Munro’s Books. The tree had small pieces of paper attached to them and when I looked closer I saw that they were poems, hanging on a “poet tree.” The poet turned out to be Yvonne Blomer and she asked me if she could read me …
Photo by Vik Nanda Some things popping up and absorbing my attention this week. Mushrooms + human hair = oil spill cleanup Customizing big flying spaces. What will the future archeologists say? The economics and ecologics of such endeavours stagger me. Wow. Ashley dreams of flying,by putting all that space on the OUTSIDE. An old friend from Peterborough, Andy Quan, comes back on my radar with a new book of poems edited by another old friend, John Barton, with whom I was a associate editor of ARC magazine in the early 1990s. I love the web. Good media (page 1, …