MonkeyMindMakers

Woodlanders:

A Place for Grazing, Glazing, Lazing, Hazing, Smudging, Murking, Larping, Morphing

A Protected Tiome for Hunting/Finding: the "Duff"/Tinder to ignite;

A Place/Tinme for Finding/Feeling into the PORTALS of the moment for ADJUSTING THE STORY

Chance to try out/share/practice other new stories/models Larpers (Live Action Role Playing): Duncan

Feel your way into OTHER MODELS:

A Place for Day-Dreaming

What are the Rules? Not quite the right term… Are there rules in a dream?

Moving as in dreams… morphing remember how the "Card Workshop" went

A Place for discovering, re-discovering Your Questions (your monkeys?):

They Persist AND Change,. They need your Attention and Care

Most teachers waste their time by asking questions which are intended to discover what

a pupil does not know, whereas the true art of questioning has for its purpose to discover

what the pupil knows or is capable of knowing. Einstein

Yes, yes, yes but HOW? WHAT HAPPENS that can be SEEN ?

Using materials helps; using group making to help... Making Objects.... BUT NOT so many, nor those of a certain kind that we lose intention/focus Making Opportunities: Some are more accessible You never know:

Is NOW a Time for :

Carving? Marking/Imprinting rusted objects, hammers Pine Cones old housepaint, brushes, phragmites

Maybe make Pocket Art: smalls: those cards, sticks, use shards, Make an Accordian Book, and another

Maybe Soft Land Art: chalks, fabric yarn Fairy Houses: Gourds, saws, dremels, Squishing Pulpy Materials?

Gift/Making?

Using Fragments, Homeopathy: How little of something do I need: REALLY?

Try Surrealist techniques: trust disorder: Something will emerge Trust The Prepared Mind

Playing with the Organic Just Hunt-Gather-Make

The Lenape considered a found shape stone in an animal shape more important than a crafted one

Exploring the Power of The Preface/The Afterward: Forget, forego, defer, refrain from the Body of the Text.

The QUESTIONS : WHY? Bly: "the time of savagery" Monkey Mind is Powerful!

What are my talents, skills, themes About my predatory/parasitic nature. My Monkeys

What is MY Redacted history, my archetypal biography, My Truths, Matrix, Master Narrative

What's my updated Elevator Speech, My deathbed message Will I call for “more light?

What’s my form of The Needs… NOW? Monkey Mind Aware of NEEDS

What do I really know about??

In what ways am I like my grandmother?

In What Ways can I, do I Express, Validate my beliefs

How/When do I Let my heart inhabit my body See that Tree of Contemplation

How/What do I Forage?

How am I Contributing to the Presence of PLAY/Magic in the World?

ER, When and How do I PLAY?? Do I play enough??

Opposite of play is not work, it is depression Brian Sutton-Smith

Play = adventure, fantasy/imagination, animal allies, maps, paths, special places, small worlds, hunting/gathering

Be friendly towards the Wandering Mind ... Start with YOUR Wandering Mind

How am I Hunting, Testifying to OTHER WAYS/TRUTHS About:

Remembering, re-membering

Ordering/Disordering and modelling ways to work with it

"In all chaos there is cosmos, in all disorder a secret order." Carl Jung

Revealing the Hidden Harmonies… A hidden harmony is better than an apparent one Heraclitus

Hobnoring "mis-speaks, mis-types, mis-spellings: (M)other ways of seeing things Your Souil

Exploring/ Freshening metaphors/ideas:

The Nursery: where things are started;

Potluck, Jigsaw, The Loom, The Matrix, The Zone"..

As above, so below

Life is tidal, er Lunar. The same kinds of waves wash in and out. It’s nature, our nature

Time is Circular or Ceremonial, not Linear

The Crooked Road

What are the effects of my Work? How are you helping to make meaning? Tenrecs Twigs

How am I a Teacher/a Wisdom Carrier?: invitations to the extraordinary… and BACK

SHARE, not just tell extraordinary experiences

Ask Questions that allow the OTHER person--- and the Other person IN YOU-- to feel competent answering

How am I a Community Builder?: “Placemaking” building “meaning” Nuevo Durango

Doing Radical Gifting Making Festivals?? MakeAltars! Using Shadow media: postcards,

Art/Artists as Boiling stones/chips: small, irregularly shaped stones added to liquids to make them boil more smoothly mainly in distillation provide

nucleation sites so the liquid boils easily without becoming superheated. Without boiling chips, a liquid heated in a smooth container can become superheated and release vapor suddenly, sometimes violently

How am I a Change Agent? a Trickster? working in/on joints, cracks

How am I a Faery Doctor In the Healing World

look for healing at the joints/ cracks: hospice, oncology… when people

are available "Be Kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle"

Model how to Gather Moonlight do workshops that create visual and sculptural ways of exploring illness and health.

Prefaces and Notes: more

FOUR NEEDS to Encounter/Express: (Be aware that they change!)

The Story, Feral/Danger/Vulnerability (thanks, Lia), Capability/Transformation, Awe, Joy, Wonder, Play
Sophisticated Primitivity Sophia: Searching, releasing, redeeming the Hidden God. S/he needs our intervention

Alchemical processes help: they are a thrre-part process

Cracks/Joints We are of the tribe of the Trickster, Hermes, the Messenger and god of the highways and particularly the crossroads, where roadsJOIN; where strange people come from Other directions to meet; where marketplaces get set-up and unusual things traded and sold and stolen. Lyme disease often hits the joints, they swell; gout too. Leonard Cohen reveres the joints. He calls it the Crack:

There's a Crack in everything, That's how the light gets in

Negative Capability: ability to hold ambiguities

Haiku -the undertheme of Woodlanders: concise nature poems, brevity, technical discipline and expressive content

Plant-Thinking /Machine Thinking (ask Laurie Seeman)

Vertical Thinking (Robert Bly): It's OK to explore DOWN... you'll probably come back

Inherent Vice: tendency of material to deteriorate due to the essential instability or interaction among components.

Monkey-Mind: Buddha described the human mind as being filled with drunken monkeys, jumping around, screeching, chattering, carrying on endlessly. We all have monkey minds, Buddha said, with dozens of monkeys all clamoring for attention. Fear is an especially loud monkey, sounding the alarm incessantly, pointing out all the things we should be wary of and everything that could go wrong. It's useless to fight with the monkeys or to try to banish them from your mind because, as we all know, that which you resist persists.

Instead, Buddha said, if you will spend some time each day making things- cards, wands, handmade paper, stone casting--- you can, over time, tame the monkeys. They will grow more peaceful if you lovingly bring them into submission with a consistent practice of making.

Helping, Fixing, Serving

a speech given by Rachel Naomi Remen author of Kitchen Table Wisdom

Serving is different from helping. Helping is based on inequality; it is not a relationship between equals. When you help you use your own strength to help those of lesser strength. If I'm attentive to what's going on inside of me when I'm helping, I find that I'm always helping someone who's not as strong as I am, who is needier than I am. People feel this inequality. When we help we may inadvertently take away from people more than we could ever give them; we may diminish their self-esteem, their sense of worth, integrity and wholeness. When I help I am very aware of my own strength. But we don't serve with our strength, we serve with ourselves. We draw from all of our experiences. Our limitations serve, our wounds serve, even our darkness can serve. The wholeness in us serves the darkness in others and the wholeness in life.

Helping incurs debt. When you help someone they owe you one. But serving, like healing, is mutual. There is no debt. I am as served as the person I am serving. When I help I have a feeling of satisfaction. When I serve I have a feeling of gratitude. These are very different things.

Serving is also different from fixing. When I fix a person I perceive them as broken, and their brokenness requires me to act. When I fix I do not see the wholeness in the other person or trust the integrity of the life in them. When I serve I see and trust that wholeness. It is what I am responding to and collaborating with.

There is a distance between ourselves and whatever or whomever we are fixing. Fixing is a form of judgement. All judgement creates distance, a disconnection, an experience of difference. In fixing there is an inequality of expertise that can easily become a moral distance. We cannot serve at a distance. We can only serve that to which we are profoundly connected, that which we are willing to touch. This is Mother Teresa's basic message. We serve life not because it is broken but because it is holy.

If helping is an experience of strength, fixing is an experience of mastery and expertise. Service, on the other hand, is an experience of mystery, surrender and awe. A fixer has the illusion of being casual. A server knows that he or she is being used and has a willingness to be used in the service of something greater, something essentially unknown. Fixing and helping are very personal; they are very particular, concrete and specific. We fix and help many different things in our lifetimes, but when we serve we are always serving the same thing. Everyone who has ever served through the history of time serves the same thing. We are servers of the wholeness and mystery of life.

The bottom line, of course, is that we can fix without serving. And we can help without serving. And we can serve without fixing or helping. I think I would go so far as to say that fixing and helping may often be the work of the ego, and service the work of the soul. They may look similar if you're watching from the outside, but the inner experience is different. The outcome is often different, too.

Our service serves us as well as others. That which uses us strengthens us. Over time we burn out. Service is renewing. When we serve, our work itself will sustain us. Service rests on the basic premise that the nature of life is sacred, that life is sacred, that life is a holy mystery which has an unknown purpose. When we serve, we know that we belong to life and to that purpose. Fundamentally, helping, fixing, and service are ways of seeing life. When you help you see life as weak, when you fix, you see life as broken. When you serve, you see life as whole. For the perspective of service, we are all connected: All suffering is like my suffering and all joy is like my joy. The impulse to serve emerges naturally and inevitably from this way of seeing.

Lastly, fixing and helping are the basis of curing, but not of healing. In 40 years of chronic illness I have been helped by many people and fixed by a great many others who did not recognize my wholeness. All that fixing and helping left me wounded in some important and fundamental ways. Only service heals.

Rachel Naomi Remen, In the Service of Life, Noetic Sciences Review, Spring 1996. This was edited from a speech given by Ms. Remen at the 1996 Temple award ceremony. Ms. Remen with her husband, won a McArthur Award for their work with Commonweal, a holistic cancer treatment facility in Bolinas California and is a professor of medicine.

See Responses to this 8.26.13 ++

What are Artists? How are they the same and different from others?

Activists-alchemists-Practitioners-Witnesses

Arts is the struggle we all go through to make and re-make order about hunting, finding, making, re-making, giving away and starting again. Everybody is an artmaker: some make beauty, some make provocation, some make security; some make trouble.

“Art” is not separate from daily living. art is the changing patterns we choose to put on the material world. Some of those patterns carry more meaning than others to us and other people. But that changes. Dan

What Else is/happens/Emerges if Art-making is separated from the Marketplace??

Making as Contemplation Contemplative? The Tree As you begin to create, you will discover you can trust your inner intuitive process and express your heart-centered perspective in a safe, supportive environment. of discovering, adjusting and sharing our spiritual/artistic journeys.

Making as an Alchemical process… Technical (world) -- Intuitive (ego) Spiritual (Self)

Makers as Magicians/Shapeshifters first, then, technicians Creating SURPRISE! Delight, Awe How do you?

The importance of "Loose Parts": No plans or instructions. It's a political exercise in trusting

Embodying the sacred: making altars, special places, special objecvts which hold (discharge) meaning

References Mentioned:

Simon Sinek Start with Why

Lewis Hyde The Gift: The Erotic Life of Property and

The Trickster Makes the World

Wassily Kandinsky Concerning the Spiritual in Art

Rachel Naomi Remen: Helping, Fixing Serving

Child & Nature Network

"Arts and Wellness" The Creative Center
Schwenk's work on Water and Sensitive Chaos

Janet Frederick's Stream Work, Brian Alger's work