out of focus colors

as we close in on the summer holiday, i'm feeling a bit fuzzy to say the least. it's been a long haul, these past months. it's really hard when a job you dearly love turns sour, but it so often happens in a time of growth and disruption. i love both growth, disruption and also change, but it's been a bit ridiculous of late. when the wrong people are brought in and the good people leave and the company culture changes radically, it creates change that's not good or productive. i'm ready for a holiday. and happily, we are getting on a plane next week. it also helped that i went to an intimate and utterly blissful yin yoga class today. my mind quieted down and i saw a veritable rainbow of colors during some of the long poses. it centered me and put me, at least momentarily, in touch with my body. this color thing is really interesting. i've had flashes of synesthesia over the years, but it's really started to show itself in new ways during my recent bodywork sessions. i need to learn what the colors mean, even if it's only what they mean for me...i saw everything from rich, bright, vibrant red - it's never just one uniform color, there are nuances - to salmon to yellow and orange to green and teal to the most velvety indigo. my sense of it is that it's when i'm in touch with emotions, or more like touching them, as i wouldn't say i could articulate them. i've read some pieces about colors associated with the chakras and perhaps there's also something of that in it, when one or another is activated, but it feels more connected to some kind of emotional bedrock inside me. one which i've been probably out of touch with for far too long. if i ever was in touch with it. but i have hope, with the appearance of all these colors when i'm doing bodywork or yoga, that i can get in touch, maybe also at other times. maybe it's just a reminder that i need to live a more colorful life. but first...vacation.

back to the mat

i returned to the yoga mat this evening after too long an absence. one thing or another got in the way all summer long and i am reluctant to admit that i hadn’t been at all in over two months. i have been noticing the twinges of the nerve damage brought on by my back problems returning to my left leg of late, so i knew i had to get back into the studio. i chose a restorative class to ease my out-of-shape muscles back into it. the instructor was a lovely little wisp of a thing in a black leotard and big cozy hand-knitted sweater. in her soothing voice, she told us that we would need at least four blankets and two bolsters. i always feel a bit greedy taking three blankets for these classes...one for the mat, one as a pillow and one to cover up with at the end during savasana…so four felt a bit decadent. by the end, we had actually all used six, which felt like the height of luxury. they are heavy, cream-colored cotton blankets that can be folded into all sorts of supports and which provide the perfect weight to ground you during savasana.

under the guidance of the instructor’s melodic, calm voice, for an hour and a half, i reconnected with my body, mentally investigating all of the tensions and twinges and sore spots. i melted into the mat, synesthetic colors – rich, mahogany brown with flecks of light blue and then pink and magenta swirled before my closed eyes. i felt a kind of hum of alignment with the earth’s energy, radiating into me from the solid floor beneath my mat. it felt rich and energizing and right. the nerves in my left leg protested at times, but they were also grateful for the attention and the time i gave them after so many weeks of neglect.

i live in my head so much of the time and so often take my body for granted. and i suppose that i will again, but it felt good to choose to be in my body and with my body for a concentrated hour and a half. i think i’ll go do it again tomorrow night.

practicing :: a beginning

i went to a restorative yoga class today. my very first one. the physiotherapist cleared me last friday to begin yoga, which i've not really tried before, but which feels like the right thing to build up my weakened core muscles. he told me to take it easy in the beginning, hence the restorative class. it was super low key, lots of stretching and breathing and holding positions for what at times seemed interminable stretches of time. i discovered that my muscles are super stiff and quite sore after half a year of back pain and living in fear of new back pain. i had an inkling of that fact last week when i got a massage and it made me feel downright ill (nauseated and light-headed) for about four hours afterwards. it was better tonight with the yoga class. holding the various poses gave my muscles time to pass through the stiffness and pain and open up, softening and somehow filling with light, even tho' the room was dark and warm and quiet. or maybe because it was. it felt centering to be there, to be beginning a practice, to be taking the first step on what i hope is a new path.

the instructor talked about the full moon and how in it the sun has exposed the shadow side of moon. she said that our practice this evening, in sync with the full moon, could very well expose our own shadows, clearing them out, shedding light upon them.

lying there in the dark, stretching my stiff, too-long-unused muscles, breathing, listening to the music and the gentle guidance of the instructor, colors flitted across my closed eyelids...deep dark purples, peaches, rich glowing green, rosy pink and warm amber. i hated to open my eyes when it was all over, so soothing were my own personal northern lights. and i realized afterwards that yesterday i had painted something a bit like what i saw.

on wednesday, my new practice will continue with chandra hot yoga.

a magical color show of the mind

this photo of kusama's gleaming lights of the souls that's at louisiana museum of modern art is the closest i could get to an experience i had last evening. i had an MRI scan of my back. that meant lying very still for half an hour, listening to dire straits. then, the tech came in and said he'd like to do a second scan higher up, after seeing the nerve issues in my knee, which took another 20 minutes or so. it seems that i very likely have a herniated disc and maybe even two, tho' i won't know for sure until i see the doctor on monday. but, enough about that.

the MRI called forth my weak synesthesia - and during the whole thing, where the magnets did their rotational thing, i saw before my closed eyes, the most amazing color show. it was a wide range of color, from deep, dark purple to rich teal to bright orange with sunflower yellow edges and an amazing salmony peachy color, like a summer sunset. the whole range of color notes, from deep bass to clear, tinkling, dancing high notes. i did wonder if the dire straits was actually what was triggering the color show before my eyes, but when the cd ran out for the last five minutes and the colors continued, i knew it was the machine. it made what might have been a nerve wracking experience, full of strange noises and being uncomfortable and having to be still while being in pain, into a pleasant, relaxing and almost magical one.

i found myself wishing i could take a photo of what i saw there on the inside of my eyelids, but alas, i could not. i may get out watercolors and try to duplicate it, but somehow, it seems like something that i should just preserve in memory - just a little conversation between my brain, my central nervous system and me.

synesthetic moments and the future of the past

i'm fascinated by the notion of synesthesia. probably because i first learned about it in a russian context. i think it was in nabokov's speak, memory, that i first encountered the condition. as wiki puts it: it's a neurological condition in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. for many people, this means that they see numbers or letters as colors or hear sounds as colors. it's something you are just born with and which isn't that understood. you can't make yourself have it and many people don't realize they have it until they realize that others don't see or hear colors in the same way.

i have a mild case of it - often getting an impression of a color from music and definitely getting strong color flashes from various emotions. this one must be more common, or there wouldn't be phrases like, i saw red for angry moments. i see color less in anger and more in moments of deep love and happiness and contentment - and they are generally warm blue-greens (probably why i painted my blue room blue), tho' i also see deep, rich purples and sometimes yellow and orange.

anyway, synesthesia continues to fascinate and when i came across this performance of russian composer scriabin's attempt at composing a synesthetic symphony, i had to share it.

russian composer scriabin's prometheus: poem of fire
an unfinished, unrealized synaesthetic work (he meant for it to be performed in the himilayas).
performed instead in a concert hall at yale.
i love how anna gowboy, the scriabin scholar behind the project, put it:
 "tonight is the future of the past."

a version of it was also done at the university of iowa sometime in the 70s.
but lasers have come a long way since then.

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fantastic images by edward burtynsky. 

check especially his shipbreaking photos from bangladesh.

thanks bill, for the link!

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do you know where your antipode is?

coffee after 4 p.m.

maybe it was too much coffee, but i am feeling that feeling that comes over me every so often. the feeling that i can't sleep because it would be a waste of time. there's so much to do and create. so many thoughts to get down on paper. so much knitting to be learned. so much beauty to be created. so many memories to be preserved. so much life to be embraced. there's no time for sleeping.

the world is full of inspiration. the crocus are already in bloom. the air is filled with the very texture of spring. it awakens feelings of invincibility--i can clean, i can organize, i can make things, i can cook, i can paint, i can write, i can knit (ok, that was going a little too far). i don't need sleep. to sleep would be to waste this feeling, to lose my grasp on it. the feeling has a strong green color--a spring green--i note this because i'm working on strengthening and broadening the band of my synesthesia.

a note about synesthesia (tho' you can go read the wiki link yourself)...dictionary.com defines it as: a sensation produced in one modality when a stimulus is applied to another modality, as when the hearing of a certain sound induces the visualization of a certain color. my experience of it most often comes with smells--i get a strong visual of a color with certain smells. but it can also be more abstract--a feeling can give a strong sensation of color for me. i'm working on tuning into those moments, as i think it happens more often than i realize, but because it's second nature to me, i'm not always conscious of it.

they say it runs in families. i think my sister has the number version of it--where she sees something in certain number combinations (2s and 7s anyone?).

anyway. it's an interesting notion. and it seems to be keeping me up this evening....

creativity happening

i know. i'm obsessed with whether or not i'm creating something at the moment. but it's because it's of concern to me. after three very dry years of not creating anything crafty (i created plenty of work stuff), i am feeling a deep and abiding need to create something--painting, writing, knitting, felting, even cooking, whatever it is...so forgive me if i'm obsessed.

at last, i feel i have acquired enough of the necessary supplies...pretty papers (i know, i'm obsessed with those as well), embellishments (including, but not limited to ribbons, brads, little eyelet thingies, felt, flowers, rub-ons, alphabets and stickers), stamping supplies, paints, canvases, brushes, gesso (that's cool stuff!!), pastels, chalks (i have yet to acquire those, but i've had them in my hand several times)....you get the picture.

i have sought inspiration. (the internet is HUGE, by the way, and totally chock full of inspiration). i have a good idea of what i like (authenticity) and what i don't (sentimentality and bits that are too straight and squarey). i have spent an inordinate amount of time looking at things and not enough time MAKING things.

but now, i have begun. i have an old (but nearly brand new) moleskine journal that i began to use two years ago at a meeting in singapore. i took notes in about 4-5 pages and then abandoned it. not sure why. i have gessoed over the first two pages...it feels cathartic to blot out those notes. they weren't relevant anymore anyway...and then i used some of my new pastels. i mixed a gorgeous blue-green over the gesso, which made an almost canvas-like pattern, thanks to the brush i used with the gesso. my fingers got stained blue-green, from smooshing the pastels around, which i love, because in my synesthetic moments, it's always blue-greens i see. and purples (but i digress..and will elaborate further in another post). i don't know yet what i'll write in it, but what feels good is to cover those old, now meaningless words. to watch the ink blur underneath the gesso and to blot it out with the pastels. very cathartic.