Devotion is a River

The strange presence of absent beings - Annie Ernaux, The Years

A quote from Edouard Glissant's, "One World in Relation" "Glissant is widely considered to be one of the most influential Ca... — Are.na

"I was born very far from where I’m supposed to be, and so, I’m on my way home, you know?" —Bob Dylan

When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back - Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

Ear Piece (1998)
by Pauline Oliveros

1) Are you listening now?
2) Are you listening to what you are now hearing?
3) Are you hearing while you listen?
4) Are you listening while you are hearing?
5) Do you remember the last sound you heard before this question?
6) What will you hear in the near future?
7) Can you hear now and also listen to your memory of an old sound?
8) What causes you to listen?
9) Do you hear yourself in your daily life?
10) Do you have healthy ears?
11) If you could hear any sound you want, what would it be?
12) Are you listening to sounds now or just hearing them?
13) What sound is most meaningful to you?

“Every day of your lives is practice in becoming the person you want to be. No instantaneous miracle is suddenly going to occur and make you brave and courageous and true.” - Audre Lorde

I love listening. It is one of the only spaces where you can be still and moved at the same time.

— Nayyirah Waheed

Don’t be afraid to suffer—take your heaviness / and give it back to the earth’s own weight / the mountains are heavy, the oceans are heavy.


— Rainer Maria Rilke, from The Poetry of Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus

Yet it may be, they went on, that there is a zone of silence in the middle of every art. The artists themselves live in it.

— from Walter Sickert: A Conversation, 1934, Woolf

‘You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.'



HENRY DAVID THOREAU

"Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world." — Miyamoto Musashi

The things of this world

exist, they are;

you can't refuse them.

To bear and not to own;

to act and not lay claim;

to do the work and let it go

is what makes it stay.

— Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way

‘Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?’

— Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

“I read a lot. I listen a lot. I think a lot. But so little remains. The books I read, their plots, their protagonists fade… Names of people, books, cities. They are already fading away. Even the titles of films I’ve seen recently...they have already faded… Everything that I see, or read, or listen to, connects, translates into moods, bits of surroundings, colors… With me, everything is mood, mood, or else...simply nothingness.” — Jonas Mekas

Giorgio Armani // "Detail is essential . . . it is often the minutia that makes the difference, not the great idea as those are rare”

In order to be born, you needed:

2 parents

4 grandparents

8 great-grandparents

16 second great-grandparents

32 third great-grandparents

64 fourth great-grandparents

128 fifth great-grandparents

256 sixth great-grandparents

512 seventh great-grandparents

1,024 eighth great-grandparents

2,048 ninth great-grandparents

For you to be born today from 12 previous generations, you needed a total sum of 4,094 ancestors over the last 400 years.

Think for a moment – How many struggles? How many battles? How many difficulties? How much sadness? How much happiness? How many love stories? How many expressions of hope for the future? – did your ancestors have to undergo for you to exist in this present moment…

A basic tenet of somatics holds true for better or worse:  we become what we practice and we’re always practicing something.

That, I think, is the power of ceremony: it marries the mundane to the sacred.

Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer

I always try to make work that activates the viewer to be a co-producer of our shared reality.

Olafur Eliasson