Work: Sustaining the Arts

Exploring issues of sustainability in the arts.

–by Scott Pinkmountain

Practice

Part 3: The Ocean

Even beyond this deep level of the mine, there are convoluted passageways that seem to go on forever and ever. They’ll be hidden or inaccessible at first, but the more familiar you are with this fundamental territory, the more comfortable you become. Your eyes, so to speak, adjust to the light, your lungs and blood adjust to the pressure and depth. You are accustomed enough with the shattering beauty and profundity of the infinite-seeming object that you can afford yourself a look around for something else. You gain enough trust in yourself and that unnamable other to relax just a little bit.

If you follow any one of these passageways down, unfathomably deep, eventually it will lead to a great cavernous cistern. As you work your way out the very end of what you might still perceive of as “your” mine, you’ll find a dark cool cave containing a vast, horizon-less ocean that flickers with the reflection of some invisible sun. Continue reading

Darkly Devotions

Lyric prose meditations that play with elements from evangelical Christianity, Buddhism, yoga, reiki, Tarot and “weird voodoo shit.”

~by Cindy Clem

***

Anger Chronicles: Part 3

Opening exercise:

Say “rowboat rowboat rowboat rowboat rowboat” quickly and out loud. If you’re not messing it up, you’re trying too hard.

Today’s Passages:

From Zen teacher Charlotte Joko Beck: “Now our encounters with life, with other people, with events, are like being bumped by an empty rowboat. But we don’t experience life that way. We experience it as though there are people in that other rowboat and we’re really getting clobbered by them.”

From howstuffworks.com: “Psychologists Dr. Leon James and Dr. Diane Nahl say that one factor in road rage is our tendency to concentrate on ourselves while dismissing the communal aspect of driving.” Continue reading