Now I See

grace.

I spend a lot of time chasing grace. I find the physical manifestation of grace, grace of the body, comes far more easily to me than its less tangible partner, grace of the soul. To have a graceful soul requires the exercise of love, kindness, mercy, and forgiveness to the benefit of others. It requires an uncommon generosity that often lies just outside my grasp. I am becoming increasingly convinced that our current modern way of life discourages, if not renders completely hopeless, the exercise of grace in our day to day lives. Until, that is, I'm proven wrong, most often in the small and simple gestures of good and common people. This week I am acutely aware of the grace in those around me, and the largeness of their souls. And I am thankful.

Listen:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3f-mzWy-lT0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMF_24cQqT0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJg5Op5W7yw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rfkXbVcudc

Something Called Weather Forecasting

eruption.

Last month, the Louisiana Governor, Bobby Jindal, in a sad and pathetic attempt to find something tangibly wrong with the stimulus package lambasted congressional democrats for trying to fund “something called volcano monitoring,”. Yesterday, Mt. Redoubt, near the Kenai Penisula in Alaska did a beautiful job of explaining to the poor fool exactly what volcano monitoring is and why it's needed. Even in its remote location the eruption of Redoubt, anticipated, tracked, and foretold by the geologists at the Alaska volcano observatory, has disrupted domestic and international air traffic, both rerouting and canceling flights. Had the prevailing wind direction been different, significant amounts of ash may have disrupted the communities on the peninsula, and if it were closer to a larger population center, the threat of serious damage and loss of life from mud flows would be real. Jindal's attitude is even more distressing when taken in the context of the presumed support that he and everyone else in his state has for continued funding for the National Weather Service. Even with the economy the way it is, we can't actually afford to be ignorant or knee-jerk in our allocation of funds, because, well, shit still happens.

photograph courtesy of the USGS, 2009

http://danielcima.com/Image.asp?ImageID=10095&apid=1&gpid=1&ipid=1&AKey=dgwhcn5e&imode=PaD

A Portrait of the Artist

chameleon.

The art of self portraiture has a long and varied history. It's practice is well documented primarily as a technical tool and lesser form of realism from early Chinese history before it was revitalized by the likes of Van Gogh and Frida Kahlo. Samuel Fosso, the Cameroon-born photographer, takes it a step further. Fosso creates portraits of other, often famous, people from the context of his own self portrait. To put it another way, he takes pictures of other people by taking pictures of himself. He presents himself as Nelson Mandela, Malcom X, Angela Davis. It's uncanny. A beautiful manipulation. His art takes on renewed potency when viewed in light of the current socioeconomic situation. A lot of people, by choice or not, are scrutinizing themselves and looking for a way to be reinvented as someone altogether new. Fosso's work presents us with a tangible representation of this metamorphosis and begs the question, who might you become?

sources:

http://thedreamhunter.blogspot.com/
www.cccb.org

New York Times

Friday Night Fish Fry

dam.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, in conjunction with the Bonneville Power Administration and several other federal and state agencies announced last week that they will resume "Sea Lion removal" along the Columbia River this week. To be clear, "Sea Lion removal" is not the transportation of Sea Lions to alternative habitats without dwindling sources of food or radioactive water, its just killing Sea Lions, either with a rifle if you're a good shot, or by lethal injection (if you're not). Why, you might ask, are we killing Sea Lions? The official story is because they have migrated upriver in search of food, depleting the increasingly fragile salmon population. But really, its not how much salmon they eat, it's that they won't pay $10 a pound for it. So you see, the Sea Lions have to go.

Don't get me wrong, the decreasing salmon population is distressing, both for the salmon and as an indication of the overall health of our waterways. After constructing 25 dams on the Columbia and an additional 250 more throughout the watershed, the wild salmon population has dropped from 10 million to 300,000. The last thing the salmon should have to deal with on their long and treacherous life journey is a natural predator. Besides, this policy clearly reflects an acknowledgment of the impacts of human consumption and energy generation on natural systems while restoring balance between species and promoting biodiversity.

Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out

apathy.

This week, the Nielsen media-trackers announced that the average American now watches an all-time high of 151 hours of television a month. Five hours a day. This number is up from last year, when we only watched 145 hours of television a month. This number, of course, does not include movies, anything on-line, video phones, or the eight hours a day most of us spend in front of a computer at work. This number, as frightening as it is, does not tell us the more important piece of information, total screen time. But if you work a desk job and watch your five hours a day of tv, you're already spending more than half your day, and ultimately your life, staring into a screen. As something of an understatement, we need to consider the connections between our 25% rate of obesity nationwide, the rising occurrence of diabetes, and the estimated 10 percent of the population suffering from depression at any given moment and how much screen time we get. But more than anything, we need to get up. Stand up, walk around, do your dishes, some tai chi, taxes, whatever. Life is short, participate.


References:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/TV/02/24/us.video.nielsen/index.html?iref=newssearch
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/1926814/Depression-Statistics-in-US-Households
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/02/tv-usage-grows.html

Three Monkeys

dick.

In case you have, in these heady post-inauguration days, forgotten that Dick Cheney is still alive and evil, allow me to jog your memory. For the five years prior to becoming vice president, Dick Cheney was the CEO of Halliburton, an oil, engineering and warmongering company. During that time, while he wasn't busy establishing the geopolitical ties that would eventually result in the issuing of several open ended and profit-guaranteed federal contracts in Iraq and sundry other countries being ravaged by American foreign policy, he occupied himself violating human rights and international business law.

A dichotomy. In 2003, Cheney was quoted on NBC saying that since becoming vice president he had, "severed all my ties with the company, gotten rid of all my financial interest. I have no financial interest in Halliburton of any kind and haven't had, now, for over three years." According to Harper's Magazine, the Bush campaign paid Enron and Halliburton $15,400 for the use of corporate jets during the election recount.

And another. Cheney's office ordered an electric company to restore power to two oil pipelines one day after Hurricane Katrina. It took the administration four days to authorize sending federal troops into New Orleans.

And an aside. Cheney's Energy Task Force investigated Iraq's oil resources six months before September 11, 2001.

I could go on. I could rant and rage and curse and wail...or I could simply say, this is not a man to be forgotten. And he is still a man of power. We can't afford to turn a blind eye to Cheney and anyone that profits from his association, we can't stop listening to the cautionary voices, and we can't afford to remain silent.


The image above may be subject to copywrite.

Red Shoe Diaries

push.

Right now, between work, dance, and life, this is how I feel. Up against the wall, pushing. Pushing to meet deadlines, maintain relationships, and meet obligations. Pushing to be stronger, faster, better, legs higher, more graceful, we'd like to see that be a double, can you get a beat in there before you land? And always, always, my feet hurt. There's a unique form of exhaustion related to being a dancer. At best, it leaves you fatigued, just on the edge of truly aching through your whole body, at worst, it leaves you sore to the touch, stiff, shin-splinted, bruised and bleeding. I think that one of the driving forces in dance is the concept of "never enough". There will always be someone in the room doing it better than you, there will always be room for improvement. And in time, you learn that your body will, in fact, always give you a little more. But it means you have to push. Always.

Complacency in dance, as in most things in life, breeds inaction and mediocrity, the all too familiar dangerous and unfulfilling tenants of our modern society. Right now, I struggle to find my point of balance, that place between the push and pulls of life that allows me to manifest the things I work for.

"I get up. I walk. I fall down. Meanwhile, I keep dancing."~ Hillel