Sign language

Where am I?

Where are we, when the longest queue in the small-town-village is the queue for the bookies, and the popular entertainment of choice is escapist superhero mystery & myth action movies?

I am thankful – I sit here in my garden, what I have right now are memories of a good holiday, a good cup of coffee in my hand, and intermittent blue skies.
Reading stuff recently made me think (surprise surprise you mutter!)…

‘Most people don’t want the truth, just constant reassurance that what they believe is true’. This struck me.

‘Ultimately the nature of mind is limitless.’ Nature has been very pervasive over the lockdown period,

‘A lot of what runs through you is fiction’ Christa Wells

The words ’fear ferments’ also resonated… (I’ve been reading Joanne Harris)

Just as an exercise during lockdownishness, I created a study I’ve called Sign Language below

Language and our cultural behaviour controls our consumption, what we eat and drink, when we work and create, or relax and holiday, it chooses what and how we love. It takes our wealth and builds monuments to its glory. Our culture is there at birth, death, & every important time between. It consumes all it can, and our culture discards what’s not needed.
Our cultural ‘Images’ breed ‘Assumptions’, which in turn create ‘Motivations’… I AM…

Over the lockdown period, I’ve been trying to practice awareness of breath, posture, stance, etc – ‘personal presence’ before ego and assumptions cloud the mind. It’s not easy and requires constant attention to ‘notice’. In her Youtube series ‘Home’ ’30 days of yoga’, Adrienne Mishler has a clever casual personal way of repeating words and phrases around the essential principals involved in yoga asanas. I found the practice went far beyond the words… 🙂

If you know me you’ll know I’m a miserable bugger! As a student of Art and Performance, with a view to creating and ‘discovering more’, I was taught to deconstruct. Deconstruction is useful, it helps us to discover the links between the ‘object’, the ‘subject’, and it’s ‘meanings’. But deconstruction can leave us with piles… piles of stuff that mean little. Stuff without value.

But we need some form of meaning, we need purpose…

In the media and our cultures at the moment, reassuring truths are not that obvious, but I sincerely hope you can find things to hold onto and cherish. There’s a lot to be thankful for despite the stormy skies.

Back again to my favourite quotes, from Wallace Stevens: ‘the interaction between things is what makes them fecund’.

‘They have no speech, they use no words; no sound is heard from them. Yet their voice goes out into all the earth…’ Psalm 19