living is more than breathing

Vivir va más allá de solo respirar. / Living is not only a matter of breathing, my friend.  

- Jeihhco, rapper for peace; Medellin, Colombia

five degrees

if you're five degrees off, you miss the mark.

if we're both five degrees off, we are landforms away from each other.
grand canyons. rift valleys. sahara deserts. atlantic oceans.

I'll try to better find my mark / and match it with yours.

tiny ponies

we made a tree opera in berkeley.

we painted dinosaurs in the backyard of fairlandia,
which we pasted all over cambridge.

we ran, jumped and skipped and played. and laughed.
and saw the streets of san francisco.

we drove through the length of the northern california coast between san fran and mendocino.

 we saw the man who sat who sold smoked salmon from a lazy boy nested in a trailer.
he had white powder in his life for his entire life until 40.
sugar. then coke.
then free from powder.

 we were nearly sprayed with the ashes of a grieving family on the san francisco coast.
they scattered the ashes of a loved one and we moved our eyes away in respect.

and here we are. and here you aren't.

you are absolutely tremendous, ms elsa kim. I will never forget that.

(my dear friend elsa kim, who died when her car collided with a tree. august 2013.)

what we put in

7. 
HOW YOU LIVE CHANGES YOUR BRAIN.

The brain is the most responsive organ of the body. Actually it is the organ that is most susceptible to change and regeneration of all the organs in the body. I have a friend named Gerald Edelman who was a great scholar of brain studies and he says that the analogy of the brain to a computer is pathetic. The brain is actually more like an overgrown garden that is constantly growing and throwing off seeds, regenerating and so on. And he believes that the brain is susceptible, in a way that we are not fully conscious of, to almost every experience of our life and every encounter we have. ...We tend to believe that the mind affects the body and the body affects the mind, although we do not generally believe that everything we do affects the brain. I am convinced that if someone was to yell at me from across the street my brain could be affected and my life might changed. That is why your mother always said, ‘Don’t hang out with those bad kids.’ Mama was right. Thought changes our life and our behaviour....

- Milton Glaser on Ten Things I Have Learned

The full list is here: http://revisionarts.com/2011/11/ten-things-i-have-learned-milton-glaser-part-of-aiga-talk-in-london/ 

delusions

that my hands can't reach inside your brain and stop the voices.
the irrationality.
the pain.
fear and suffering.

and the delusions.
/ delightful as they may be /

kills me.

Solidarity

Since the protests in Gezi Park began, every evening at 9:00pm the people of Istanbul show their solidarity by clinking their glasses with silverware wherever they are.

Here's a timeline of recent events in Istanbul. 

did they sing?

Or did they sing–
the humans and the monkeys and the wolves
rising their voices up
all together,
conjuring light from
the blacked out, inexhaustible moon.

Yes. We like to think that
some of them
must
have sung.

- from Caroline Harvey of Boston