The Spirit Was Gone

air balloon

The words in themselves already have some rounded fanstasy, if we breath to the "aaair ballooon" and its song as it navigates...when I found myself underneath sunrise in between the earth...I felt again a child-like surprise, an excitement almost forgotten! This was one very special morning almost two years ago!

El Ultimo Hielero

Un docu hermoso:

EL ULTIMO HIELERO

Kazuo Ohno

"I would love to offer you even something as tiny as a grain of sand. If only I could succeed in doing that, then I might fulfill my longing to share a part of my life with you. Isn't it worth risking one's life to offer something as microscopic as that tiny single grain of sand chosen from amongst countless millions?  Take great care at all times. Even the most infinitesimal detail of the slightest gesture you make should be executed with loving care.
It's never too late to start. "

Ken Price

PRIMITIVE- LYNX, une femme hors du temps

This film is beautiful and inspiring. 

A reminder of our primitive selves, something that lies dormant in most of us. 

Art and the Body

Art and the Body
essay by Lee Ufan (excerpt)

"The body mediates between the inside and the outside, and can arouse us to the possibility of a more open situation. There is mutual cooperation between consciousness and the body, but they are not identical. The body is more strongly connected to the greater world than consciousness. The body is part of the outside world. 

Therefore, human beings can know the outside world and experience transcendence by taking advantage of the existence of the body and the role it plays. This is the reason that I am so concerned about the body. 

In order to join the body and consciousness at a high level, I highlight this ambiguity and always do my best to act physically. I make art by performing repeated actions with the body, thus bringing about transformations and changes in my ideas and increasing the depth and expansiveness of the work. My personal capacity may be only 10, but it is magnified to 20 or 30 by the operation of the body in relation to the outside world. It is only through the existence of my body that I can make a work of art that transcends my self. As more externality is incorporated, transparency fades, the unknown appears, and the work becomes richer in content and allusion. 

The body and consciousness are sometimes in conflict and sometimes in accord. This leads to divergence in the process of making. The work takes on otherness as externality penetrates it via the body. An even more important aspect of employing the body is the fact that art-making is a site of encounter with externality. Experience is contact with the outside world, through which one can sense infinity. Making art is truly living, and touching infinity, through physical action." 

.

time spiral….and suddenly a new year…

The transition from 2013 to 2014 brought a whole questioning of how I handle time, pace…what's my pace, how is my emotional time interacting with practical time and social time and the oniric time in relation to "palpable" time…would it ever/never be palpable. 

Balance

  "Kazuo's fundamental, or what I would call intuitive, approach to live performance doesn't entail that he simply steps out onto the stage and starts improvising on the spur of the moment. There's a lot more to it than that; it's not simply a matter of anything goes." He doesn't discard an entire life's experiences, or all the knowledge and craft involved in the making of a performance. On one level he remains very conscious of where he is and what he is doing. And yet he attains a level of consciousness that allows him to forget the self. This spontaneous approach frees him from certain strictures-such as a rigid choreography-and, what's more, enables him to flow with all that surges forth from his interior life. 

   Kazuo's dance gives birth to a fluid sequence of spontaneous images; it's as though he's carried on wave after wave of subjective impulses. Prominent among the many landscapes and moods evoked are those he discovers in the recesses of his subconscious memory through his writings. While he's perfectly aware of the fact of that he's onstage, and of the ensuing in-built limitations of a performance's framework, he nonetheless freely interacts with the universe he creates. His creative output exemplifies a working method in which cognitive control is closely allied with an intuitive process. i've often been struck by the fact that it's only when mind and body freely interact that Kazuo truly dances. His dance becomes lifeless as soon as he's caught up in thinking about how to move or is dictated to by habit. "

Excerpt from -kazuo ohno's world, from without and within-

Kazuo Ohno

"Debería existir una pintura totalmente libre de la dependencia de la figura -el objeto- que, como la música, no ilustra nada, no cuenta una historia y no lanza un mito. Esa pintura se contenta con evocar los reinos incomunicables del espíritu, donde el sueño se convierte en pensamiento, donde el trazo se convierte en existencia. "

Michel Seuphor

"from the chest"

agreeing with and quoting Chandralekha

“My work is about linking inner and outer spaces. We live in the body without understanding its vital parts and points and without the knowledge of how to bridge the inner-outer divide.”

A Subtle Understanding of Waking Perception

This book has been the work and effort of many friends and myself for a a couple of years and finally we have reached the end product to be shared!!!!
It is a sort of diary of two months spent around Kerala in South India.
I wanted to understand and experience nature through intuition, healing and perception.. and let that be the guidance for creation.
The book includes paintings, personal notes, a preface by Dr. Robert Svoboda (http://www.drsvoboda.com/), an essay by sociologist Roland Playle, an interview with naturalist and botanist Anand Gopinath and it has been beautifully designed by Maru Calva (http://marucalva.com/) and printed thanks to the support of Antonio Arevalo at ARGO.
Translation was made by Clara Marin and a lot of advice, help and support from Fede Schott (http://hi-lo-fi.com/, http://federicoschott.com/)
Some books that were influencing my thoughts at the time of creation were:
-Metamorphosis of Plants, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
-The Secret Teachings of Plants, Stephen Harrod Buhner
-Hinduism and Ecology, Ranchor Prime
-The Only World We've Got, Paul Shepard

At the moment the book can be bought through me, or at Spoonbill and Sugartown books in Brooklyn, NY.
Thank you for your support!

there is no movement without rhythm

Africa has been calling from the depths for many years, I feel the call coming very close to the surface. African rhythms awake my body like no other sound, and movement unravels by itself. I hope soon to set my bare foot on African soil...and I trust that where and how to begin the exploration of this vast continent will reveal itself, just like dance.

Time Loop

After a few months of cyber silence, I return through the same route I left... Rumi.
I have just returned from a very interesting workshop -Moving Arts Lab- at a beautiful place -Earthdance-
Movement and nature opened me up and I had many feelings bubbling inside, on the day I was meant to depart and enter the city I asked Rumi for a poem for this state of mind.



NOT A DAY ON ANY CALENDAR
- Rumi -

Spring, and everything outside is growing,
even the tall cypress tree.
We must not leave this place.
Around the lip of the cup we share, these words,

My Life Is Not Mine

If someone were to play music, it would have to be very sweet.
We're drinking wine, but not through lips.
We're sleeping it off, but not in bed.
Rub the cup across your forehead.
This day is outside living and dying.

Give up wanting what other people have.
That way you're saf.
"Where, where can I be safe?" you ask.

This is not a day for asking questions,
not a day on any calendar.
This day is conscious of itself.
This day is a lover, bread, and gentleness,
more manifest than saying can say.

Thoughts take form with words,
but this daylight is beyond and before
thinking and imagining. Those two,
they are so thirsty, but this gives smoothness
to water. Their mouths are dry, and they are tired.

The rest of this poem is too blurry
for them to read.

Rumi-BIRDWINGS

Your grief for what you've lost lifts a mirror
up to where you're bravely working.

Expecting the worst, you look, and instead,
here's the joyful face you've been wanting to see.

Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.
If it were always a fist or always stretched open,
you would be paralyzed.

Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding,
the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated
as birdwings. 

Yogi Wisdom

"The rhythm of life 

is when you 

experience your

own body, mind

and soul. "

yogi tea 

sunset

Chandralekha-sharira

Chandralekha was an acclaimed bharata natyam dancer in India in the 1950s and early 1960s, Chandralekha left the dance world for two decades before emerging as an acclaimed new choreographer in 1984. Based in Madras until her death in 2007, she was dedicated to reinvigorating traditional forms with contemporary energy. This is a fraction of Sharira, her last piece, with dancer and writer Tishani Doshi. 

SUFI

The Sufic way of thinking is particularly appropriate in a world of mass communication, when every effort is directed toward making people believe certain things; that they should as a consequence do certain things that their manipulator a want them to do.
The Sufis often start from a nonreligious point of view. The answer, they say, is within the mind of mankind. It has to be liberated, so that by self-knowledge the intuition becomes the guide to human fulfillment. The other way, the way of training suppresses and stills the intuition. Humanity is turned into a conditioned animal by non-Sufi systems, while being told that it is free and creative, has a choice of thought and action.
The Sufi is an individual who believes that by practicing alternate detachment and identification with life, he becomes free. He is a mystic because he believes that he can become attuned to the purpose of all life. He is a practical man because he believes that this process must take place within normal society. And he must serve humanity because he is part of it.
The exercises of the Sufis have been developed through the interaction of two things, intuition and the changing aspects of human life. Different methods will suggest themselves intuitively in different societies and at various times. This is not inconsistent, because real intuition is itself always consistent.
The Sufi life can be lived at any time, in any place. It does not require withdrawal from the world, or organized movements, or dogma. It is coterminous with existence of humanity. It cannot, therefore, accurately be termed an Eastern system. It has profoundly influenced both the East and the very bases of the Western civilization in which many of us live- the mixture of Christian, Jewish, Moslem, and Near Eastern or Mediterranean heritage commonly called "Western."
Mankind, according to the Sufis, is infinitely perfectable. The perfection comes about through attunement with the whole of existence. Physical and spiritual life meet, but only when there is a complete balance between them. Systems which teach withdrawal from the world are regarded as unbalanced.

Expert from "The Sufis" by Idries Shah

Insomnia

I'm in a warm bed, inside the outside cold of Istanbul.
Something is not cozy inside me, and it might be the uncertainty
unclear of what doubts down on me... I project towards the security of the first sun rays
A breakfast with citrus, almonds and warm milk with honey,
and a few hours later a plate full of olives.
If the morning goes as expected,
the night will turn familiar.

MARLEY-2012 Documentary

The true meaning and power of art is to transform the soul and unite people in love. It does not matter in which form it comes, it could be Buddhist chanting or Reggae; as long as the carrier of the message stays true to heart and always non-violent. This documentary was revealing and beautiful, surely the whole world has heard the songs and here are the true reasons why it has touched us all.

40 years ago

"The visual values of the landscape have been traditionally the domain of those concerned with the arts. Yet, art, ecology, and industry as they exist today are for the most part abstracted from the physical realities of specific landscapes or sites. How we view the world has been in the past conditioned by painting and writing. Today, movies, photography, and television condition our perceptions and social behaviour. The ecologist tends to see the landscape in terms of the past, while most industrialists don't see anything at all. The artist must come out of the isolation of galleries and museums and provide a concrete consciousness for the present as it really exists, and not simply present abstractions or utopias...We should begin to develop an art education based on relationships to specific sites. How we see things and places is not a secondary concern, but primary."
Robert Smithson

Miguel Vicuña: Cantante Indígena del Ecuador

Rumi-QUIETNESS

Inside this new love, die
Your way begins on the other side.
Become the sky.
Take an axe to the prison wall.
Escape.
Walk out like someone suddenly born into color.
Do it now.
You're covered with thick cloud.
Slide out the side. Die,
and be quiet. Quietness is the surest sign
that you've died.
Your old life was a frantic running from silence.

The speechless full moon
comes out now.

Sayulita

Tantric paintings - visual metaphysics

"They are things of beauty, "a joy forever," and thus very much capable, we may believe, to become supports of cosmic visions. They would also have been, when most abstract, the starting point of aniconic meditations. Some include a dot, a bindu, which, in Tantric metaphysics and cosmology, is the symbol of the undifferentiated absolute, both holding within itself the whole cosmos and transcending it: to concentrate on this focal point is to "see the world in a grain of sand" and to transcend it, to open, that is, one's soul both to the plenitude and the absolute pure void -shunya- of the supreme deity, invisibly present in such abstract symbols, to be reached and experienced through and by transcending them."
André Padoux

*

lands
without the slightest sound
In the spirit

Franck André Jamme

Artists anonymous from Rajasthan, India

Çavusin

Barcelona

Book Presentation

For summery and purchase:
http://libros.malaletra.com/colecciones/hilo/183-ttatimus.html

Extracts from - Seed to Seed, The Secret Life of Plants - Nicholas Harberd

"And a question forms in my mind. An unexpected question. Is the whole of the cell alive, or is only a part of it?

This is a question I haven't previously considered. A simple question of such obvious importance that I can't imagine why I've never thought of it before. What is alive and what is not? Where is the boundary between life and absence of it?"

+  +  +

"And now a further image arises in my mind. Of a petal detaching from a rose. The petal falls to the ground. Descends, twirls through air to earth. Then begins to decay. Crimson fades into brown. The petal shrivels and twists. Dark veins, a sepia background. The process of disintegration. The cells breaking down into molecules from which they're constructed. Those molecules leaching into the water of the soil. Further disordering of the molecules into their constituent atoms and ions.

Finally the petal disappears. And although it seems as if it had never existed, those once-incorporated ions, atoms, and molecules are now distributed in the earth and air. Then we move on a few years. To a time when a few of these same atoms have once again become part of a living thing. Of a grass stem picked by a child so she can suck in its sweetness. Atoms, once of the petal, then returned to earth, then of the grass, are now of the child. "

Garden of Eden of 1600's-Convent paintings, Malinalco, Mexico

 

may

lately

I have not carried my camera around in the last months, I do not feel like documenting, or commenting or saying.... I dont post, I dont write. This is all a very good sign! I'll come back...but for now I am just getting some fresh air!

uprooted

quelites

days go by in monochrome

desk

transplanting roots

new little garden