Freak Out

for a friend who posted this:

The Song and Dance for the Hot Summer:

 

Awwwww Freak Out!

Pay Your Tuition = Intuition

 72 of 83 Nobel laureates surveyed recently strongly credited intuition in their success.

If you press (only consciously) … nothing comes of it.

You must give a sort of mysterious pressure and then rest, and suddenly BING! …. the solution comes.

- Konrad Lorenz in Medicine, 1973



Golden Neurons Lura Astor assemblage detail

The One You Feed

Bill Moyers:

Why a media anyway?

 I’m going to let an old Cherokee chief answer that.

I heard this story a long time ago, growing up in Choctaw County in Oklahoma before we moved to Texas, of the tribal elder who was telling his grandson about the battle the old man was waging within himself.



He said, "It is between two wolves, my son. One is an evil wolf: anger, envy, sorrow, greed, self-pity, guilt, resentment, lies, false pride, superiority and ego. The other is the good wolf: joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.”

The boy took this in for a few minutes and then said to his father—to his grandfather, “Which wolf won?”

The old Cherokee replied simply, “The one I feed.”

 Democracy is this way. The wolf that wins is the one we feed.



(... and media provides the bait.)


Detail: Woven Music Lura Astor assemblage

Crying and Tears

No More Seedlessness


Tears Re-set the Biochemistry of the Human Body

On a social media post, one man wrote, "And sometimes no matter how strong you think you are, the stupid tears flow."

Not thinking tears are stupid, I wrote, "Tears re-set the bio-chemistry of the human body."

There was a lot of agreement - validating observations made during my years of teaching, writing, and studying the body-mind-emotion-imagination connection.

 
 

The Queen of Tears Cries You Home
When You Cannot ...

 

You call that a Tear?

 

I'm Just a Queen of Tears

 

I Cried a Song for You

 

Moon Tears


Queen of Tears: She Cries for You -  series by Lura Astor

Life's Washing Machine

 












Sometimes life's washing machine catches you in the wringer. You are wrapped centrifugally, caught further into the machine, something is broken so the wash comes out with holes and tears, the soft fabric shredded.

Suturing the outer skin with thread and needle, as a buttonhole stitch, my thoughts meander to a new path far from the newly formed lake of space. Little thread footsteps show me new ways to visit old ideas and old ways of visiting new ideas.

I don't make the shirt whole, but I make it interesting, with its own maps of where it has been. Like laugh lines on a face or bites scratched to form a scar.

Mud Puddle Healing

We each need a good mud puddle ...
to play
in  work life,
in social life, 
and in creative life.


 

Teaching

If you are going to take a class, commit.
Commit to the learning that you want.
Commit to the teacher.
Show up.
Do the work, or drop out.
Do your homework. And then more. Research. Try the stuff out in your life. Digest the information. Try it again until you can make it yours, or, discard it.

Teachers know more than they are teaching.

If you ask sharp questions the teacher will love it.
The teacher will know you're doing your homework. 
They can then toss more info your way. You both get to wake up.

Class is not for snoozing.

Kind of Kind?

Three things in human life are important:
the first is to be kind;
the second is to be kind;
and the third is to be kind.

-    C.S. Lewis 1898-1963

Spontaneous: Lura Astor assemblage

Life's Surprises and Inherent Humor

Sometimes I'll create, imagining a thing will be kitschy. It surprises me by becoming elegant.

Other times, I'll set out to create an elegant thing and laugh as it becomes kitschy.

Color Psych! Lura Astor
Put the Fizz In  Lura Astor, assemblage detail

Dancing and The Unlived Life and Creativity

bubble kids photo prise 28 avril 2012 Saint-Merri, Paris by bpixel

The following writing is from the book Sylvia Ashton-Warner Teacher 

These are her notes on teaching in New Zealand, the class known as the "infant room". The children are Maori and English.

Published by Simon and Schuster NY 1963, she is known for her work on organic teaching.

The photos are not from the book.
 
Dancing
 
 …. Plato said it was the one complete expression involving the faculties on all levels, spiritual, intellectual and physical. That’s what I think too. Not that I deliberately teach it for that reason. It just happened one bright spring morning when I was playing some Schubert to please no one but myself that a child stood up from his work and began composing a dance, then another, then another, and there it all was. And here it all still is.

Although most of the interpretations come from them, I indulge myself by providing them with a further selection of movements to use as they choose, to supplement their own movements. But I haven’t noticed much of it being used voluntarily in their interpretation of new music. The old story of imposition again.

I never use other than classical music. Not only for my own sake but because it was a classic that brought them to their feet in the first place. So far I have used Schubert, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Chopin, Brahms and Grieg. But I’m only feeling my way, since my only source of dancing knowledge is from my own dreaming.

imgfave dotcom

My aim is that a child may be able to create dancing as freely as he draws or writes autobiography or plays. But I haven’t got there yet. (By the time I wrote the book Spinster I had got there. (Lura note: Spinster was made into a film Two Loves starring Shirley MacLaine) Although we place dancing in the output period, we also use it to break any strain of work during the day.

The Unlived Life
It’s all so merciful on a teacher, this appearance of the subjects of an infant room in the creative vent. For one thing, the drive is no longer the teacher’s but the children’s own. And for another, the teacher is at last with the stream and not against it: the stream of children’s inexorable creativeness. As Dr. Jung says, psychic life is a world power that exceeds by many times all the powers of the earth; as Dr. Burrow says, the secret of our collective ills is to be traced to the suppression of creative ability; and as Erich Fromm says, destructiveness is the outcome of the unlived life.

Martha Cooper

there'll be dancing in the streets ... music, sweet music

 

 

 

As a dancer and teacher, I love how Sylvia Ashton-Warner could play classical music but received dancing lessons in her dreams!

Curiosity

Curiosity allows for conversation.

click here for quote

Sky Ablaze with Stars

During genealogy study I read: 
1833 year of the falling stars 

I look it up ...13 Nov 1833:

“From two o'clock until broad daylight, the sky being perfectly serene and cloudless, an incessant play of dazzlingly brilliant luminosities was kept up in the whole heavens."



It was so bright that a newspaper could be read on the street. 

One writer says, "For nearly four hours the sky was literally ablaze."


Mystical Wisp mixed-media by Lura Astor

purple spiders

In a swimming pool an 11 year old girl asked, "What are all those purple lines on your legs?"

Well, I thought, a map of my years on earth. Considering ...

 ... the number of leaps and landings, jumps and choreographed tumbles during 30+ years of dance/performances.

But it was hopping within one square foot of stage, over and over, while the other leg, a la seconde en l'air at waist height, then burst! a round of twirling jetes circling the stage in half backbends ...

... yes, it was that first jete out of the centripetal motion and I could feel my capillaries as the foot landed on earth and spiders of electricity crawled up my leg.

Kinda like that, these maps of our lives, etched on skin and membrane.

Kinda like that, kid.

art: The Gift lastor

It's About Time

make melonade

Ah, Sometimes We Just Gotta Play

I love the little boulder legs.

video: Improv Everywhere / #2 of Movies in Real Life series

Play

'You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.'

 - Plato

to be faster than an angry elephant

Fear is that little darkroom where negatives are developed.                - Michael Pritchard

 












- and from Rules of the Wild, Francesca Marciano:

It was as if the silence of wilderness had seeped into me and had quietened the useless noise of my fear.

The incredible thing was that the more we ran, the more we laughed. We kept holding on to each other, laughing hysterically, like children playing a game. We burst into camp panting and shaking with laughter."

"Huyu, anaweza kukimbia sana," said Lenjo to Adam and the other guys, pointing at me and shaking his head with a smile.

"Of course I can run, what did you think?" I replied jokingly, wiping the sweat from my forehead.

And suddenly I felt victorious. It was fun, after all, to be faster than an angry elephant.

 
































 Train Window: Lura Astor Art

Woman with Baby Elephant: credit unknown
Elephant Reading: credit unknown

a beautiful fix

"What a beautiful fix we are in now; peace has been declared."

- Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) after the Treaty of Amiens, 1802

Hold Hands

I honestly don't know if this is true, but the idea provokes thought.

Touch can be a healer. Touch can create empathy. 

Comedian Louis C.K. speaks with Conan *click here* on smartphones. He says it is important that young people are able to look people in the eyes and create empathy, rather than just text and be on a phone/computer. Of course google glasses and others say the phone is going away.