katerina, friday

I know it's not that simple, tit for tap, but I don't want to give any more of my touch to language. I just want language to generate more touch.

– T Fleischmann, Time is the thing a body moves through

Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Wintering is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximizing scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.

Katherine May

Rituals are sophisticated ancient intelligence about the body. Kneeling, folding hands in prayer, and breaking bread; liturgies of grieving, gathering, and celebration—such actions create visceral containers of time and posture. They are like physical corollaries to poetry—condensed, economical gestures that carry inordinate meaning and import. Rituals tether emotion in flesh and blood and bone and help release it. They embody memory in communal time.

Tippett, Krista. Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living (p. 58). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

I am my bones backpack. My body carries my skeleton in a prolix, sumptuous order. I am my own archeologist. My own archeological site. My own womb, my own tomb.

if i had to have a savory breakfast * crying * i would have

• eggs in a glass with parmesan and chives on top
• turkish eggs
• one-pan eggs and peppers
• breakfast burrito?

breakfast like a queen
lunch like a princess
supper like a pauper

I could recognize him by touch, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death at the end of the world.

The Skin
Ursula K. Le Guin

“All around us is the skin,
helping keep our bodies in.”

I’ve known that poem sixty years.
There’s more to it than first appears.

If we were skinless, like a cloud,
would we not mingle with the crowd?

Would not our little bodies be
more boundless even than the sea,

and gaseous as the atmosphere?
Would we be there as well as here?

Would I be you, and you be me,
and both of us mere entropy?

The two it takes to tango need
to be discrete, not just discreet.

The skin, however, does have holes
for letting in and out our souls,

our food, and such necessities.
It is designed to serve and please.

It washes well, but with the years
gets wrinkles, little spots and smears,

and somehow doesn’t seem to fit
as seamlessly as once as it did.

But still it is my nomad’s tent,
my shelter, my integument,

the outside of myself, this thin,
seemingly superficial skin,

that hems me neatly all about,
keeping foreign bodies out,
and keeping me, a while yet, in.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Arrange your mornings so that your body, not an alarm clock, says “time to get up”.

we are mostly water our very physical composition - we have a mystical invisible i believe emotional relationship with the moon

when i say we i mean
my physical body
our collective physical bodies
the human body
and thus our thinking and thus our being and interactions

oneness and interconnectedness are FACT in my belief system they are TRUTH We are an organism a superogranism

how does the moon cycles affect our internal world and thus our external world? look at how it affects our external world - water tides

Feeling your skin on the skin of another, feeling theirs on yours - Focusing on that sensation, embodying it, and embracing that connection - is one of the truest ways to be completely present in the here and now.

Yoga is a welcoming of everything thats in and as the body in its fullness. Not repressing some things in a search for “high vibes only”. This receiving of everything makes the body and mind feel safe, and natural healing begins.

“When you’re deeply sensitive, love is ecstasy. Music is godlike. Heartache is a wide, somatic wound. Visual natural beauty is jewel-drenched, wild bliss. Tension and conflict are muscle tightening and toxic, straight down to the cells.”

— Victoria Erickson

The brain is constantly iterating on a mental model of our environment using sensory data (see: the free energy principle and predictive coding). While you’re not going to be able to pin your mental model down as a particular structure that persists, you can hold a predictive model of your own behavior based on pattern-matching from the past. And perhaps more crucially in understanding who you are: within the ever-changing dynamic system that we think of as the self, each of us seems to possess some minimal set of traits coupled with a distance function that defines them.

On one hand, I know the self is a made-up concept of the mind, that identity should be kept small, and that trying to pin myself down usually does more harm than good. On the other hand, when I sit down to write, I feel like every sentence disproves this. I feel the same way when I’m in Northern California, taking photos, or at a piano bench. These things make me feel like myself — there’s no better way of putting it. I know this can be intellectually explained by my pattern matching present experience with past memories in a way that feels comforting, but after experimenting with experiencing none of these comforts for a sizable period of time, I can definitively tell you that this explanation strikes me as wholly deficient in magnitude.

The real miracle is not to fly or walk on fire. The real miracle is to walk on the Earth, and you can perform that miracle at any time. Just bring your mind home to your body, become alive, and perform the miracle of walking on Earth.

“Breathing in, I am aware of my body. Breathing out, I am aware of my body.” I know my body is there. This brings the mind wholly back to the body. Mind and body become one reality. When your mind is with your body, you are well-established in the here and the now. You are fully alive. You can be in touch with the wonders of life that are available in yourself and around you.