Firstindigo&Lifestyle

21-century art

Category: lifestyle

  • Natural world, meditation and climate change

    Natural world, meditation and climate change

    Meditation as a practice implies self-awareness. Finding about inner strength, intuition, thought processes and wishes. Otherwise, putting things in the background while finding the inner focus to clarify and perform. All these aspects create the assurance of different levels of balance. One might believe that meditation is a pure focus, while the contrary is in fact true.

    Mindfulness as a concept, a reality of nourishing the mind and soul by turning into more quiet time. Quieting one’s mind in order to listen to inner atmosphere of feelings and emotions. Why not to discover the universe that is within us? Replacing negative thoughts with appreciation of ourselves, of others and the world.

    Breathing

    It is not only about tuning into balancing acts, but also inspiration and self discovery. We are full of emotions and feelings, which are positive and not at all negative; and even some of the negative ones may turn into new energy and offer insight. Meditation implies a pause, opening a pathway to our inner thoughts.

    A truthful path includes maintaining a certain level of anxiety and uncertainty when it comes to specific problems like climate change. If we sit back and relax, wash away our mind with calm waters of emptiness, we won’t have the energy required to fight the problem. Where our attention is needed, where frustration isn’t supposed to be solved by simply relying on our positive energy.

    Collage: Firstindigo&Lifestyle @polyvore-designs

    For the overachieving among us, stretching beyond our everyday selves is not the biggest question. Finding treasures in the more simplified notions of our inner powers might be. Not all progress is necessarily meaningful. But finding answers in more everyday actions, in nature, in the natural world, and in those encounters with others.

    Sometimes there is time to learn compassion for ourselves, in order to better listen and pay attention to the natural world. Compassion is the key turned into caring on a deeper level about anything important. In meditation this manifests in being attentive to breathing, keeping the mind and body aware of the breathing. Step by step this awareness opens up into something deeper, reaching outside the limitations of us as humans.

    Our consciousness can open up to thoughts where breathing becomes part of the universal rhythm of breathing together with this planet. The natural world requires our attention to the actual concept of breathing. We are all living, palpable things. Over consumption, unnecessary interruption of the natural course of life, creates chaos over rhythm of breathing in all living things. Planetary destruction is emblematic of bodies that have moved away from their breathing.


    Meditation can be motivational, it can energize us to think more deeply about ourselves and others. This planetary home of ours calls for our attention into our breathing. Meditation is about becoming aware of how the parts can fit into the whole, and how that whole can mend the individual parts.

    Between East and West

    French philosopher Luce Irigaray’s literary work “Between East and West: From Singularity to Community”, investigates Eastern practices and philosophy from the point of view of the body, in which breathing has a central role. After herself practicing yoga and meditation, her research implies a personal awakening that has manifested through practice of the conscious breathing. Following ancient Eastern practices of breathing and yoga, Irigaray argues that both humans (women and men alike), nature, and the natural world including the spiritual life, are part of a bigger plan of discovering our being in here.

    In this writing Irigaray examines the Western tradition through ancient Eastern disciplines. It is the meditation that teaches us to breathe. Yogic traditions, according to Irigaray can offer us a meaningful way to reconnect our human and planetary pasts with its futures.

    In Jewish Kabbalah, which also is an ancient tradition, there is a lot of thought put into spirituality and our collective well being. We should gain more compassion for one another, and understand that ultimately we are all creatures essentially bound up with other creatures. All levels of the creation and the preservation of the planet is a common goal for us being here.

    From this perspective, our meditative approach can lead to a child-like approach when it comes to life; the wonder that locks our inner core into things beautiful and wondrous. When we grow up, we tend to forget how things in nature put a smile on our face, how literally everything that grows out there can feel exciting and worth exploring. Nature’s mysterious part is also something that can open to one who will pause, sit back and absorb its presence. Listen to a birdsong, look at the trees behind the brick wall in the midst of urban life. We can imagine going back to nature anytime. Meditation is one key to acknowledging that this is possible.

    The Natural world can lead us to believe in higher beings, in something more universal than our mundane lives. Species and subspecies come from somewhere, the universal energy and movement can lift us to have faith in the worlds that are often invisible.

    Sparkles and a vessel as a thought introduced in Kabbalah. Our divine task to help ‘creation’, to correct errors in nature. To make the world a better place for all living things. There is something divine in the sun with the radiance that it wakes us up to each new day. The universe that keeps repeating the same mantra of coming back fresh every single day. We haven’t been able to stop the sun from rising, even with all our destructive human behavior. Even when sun stays in the clouds.

    Climate change

    It is more and more discussed how climate change can bring disturbance to our lives and shake our balance. The World Health Organization published a study about how climate change can have an impact on our overall health.


    “The principal reason for the global increase in temperatures is a century and a half of industrialization, with the burning of ever-greater quantities of oil, gasoline, and coal; the cutting of forests; and use of certain farming methods.” (https://www.who.int/heli/risks/climate/climatechange/en/)

    Global warming will certainly have consequences where our health may be at risk. In terms of changes in our ecosystems and as catastrophic weather phenomena, climate change can create new emergencies.

    When we meditate, we can learn to appreciate each new day. And think how we can better meet the challenges. Climate Change is adding another layer that intensifies patterns and experiences that are abnormal, when the future holds more extreme rainfall, floods, tropical cyclones, droughts and heat waves, in addition to the increase in the frequency of calimas and atmospheric dust. (https://www.una-climateandoceans.org/448491047)

    One of the nature’s emergencies is called calima. The calima is caused by a storm or change in weather impacting the Saharan Air Layer. Climate change will cause more of the phenomena. The hot, dry and dust filled system is located above the Sahara desert. It meets the more humid and colder system that linger over the Atlantic Ocean.


    Reference:
    Luce Irigaray (2002): Between East and West. From Singularity to Community.
    Translated by Stephen Pluhácek. Columbia University Press.

  • Future perspectives in verses

    Future perspectives in verses

    Climate Change brings to mind emissions, which require solutions, such as futures with bikes and more car free highways. The planet Earth is calling us to bring nature to the negotiation table. These are the verses for the new year. 

    "Nature's rhythm is different from the pace of the contemporary society."

    What we don’t seem to realize is that nature is in fact offering space without asking us to limit our dreams. Two years into the pandemic has changed our everyday perspectives; we have voluntarily moved our lives more outdoors. We suddenly pay attention to dear little details that we see in nature, and think about the future livelihood and living on this planet.

    Nature’s rhythm is different from the pace of the contemporary society. This is also something that this pandemic has taught us oh so well. Did we ever imagine that we would be capable to pause, and start dreaming of a different future? Some of us did dream, at least.

    Looking at the birds in winter, as they descend to a freezing environment. 
    "Looking at the birds in winter, as they descend to a freezing environment."

    Let’s take birds in the winter as an example. What is it in their circumstances, the birds in suburban environments, that is causing us to pause and consider if the animals have enough food.

    Cars, parking lots, people going shopping in their vehicles, trains, commercial projects surrounding geese habitat. What is so special about these animals living next to human habitation, geese in our urban and suburban parks. They make us think changes in season, and how the big birds used to migrate someplace warmer.

    Humans are responsible for destroying wilderness, wetlands, populations, to name a few. With geese, as their extinction was more evident due to destruction of the species natural habitat – the birds were brought into urban areas where they had never been living before. The natural migration cycle stopped and the geese stayed in their new settings. Humans have since then found that the birds’ new existence is perhaps too close, birds taking over parks and parking lots. 

    "We can be thankful that they still have some wilderness to roam and be birds."

    A question of food for geese is a problematic one, since feeding and making them accustomed to vacate human habitat eventually means that nature’s own cycle is being interrupted. Not because geese themselves were opting for these new environments. We can be thankful that they still have some wilderness to roam and be birds. 

    "Future perspectives do imply stricter and more compassionate approaches, when it comes to ever busy air and street spaces."
    Biking is an old fashioned green new deal. It also goes together with the nature’s rhythm. The pace is one of wondrous.
    "Biking is an old fashioned green new deal. It also goes together with the nature's rhythm. The pace is one of wondrous."

    To participate in a green new deal, cutting back emissions is of course not just an act of love for many of us who like to travel and seek far away adventures. Yet, future perspectives do imply stricter and more compassionate approaches, when it comes to ever busy air and street spaces. Cutting down greenhouse gas emissions is easily a foreign language concept or theory that stay away from the realities of modern individuals, who can count cars in the garage. Everybody needs their own car just to get around. How to explain this in simple terms, how to change this pattern? 

    "The awakening is bringing nature closer to our communication, forming new communities."
    Stone River by Andy Goldsworthy outside the Stanford University Cantor Center for Visual Arts.

    Futures hold promises for the world in the form of awakenings. Climate coalitions and awakenings for earthy subjects are thankfully becoming one kind of new normal. 

    "World, in which constant profit is a standard, and where sustainability and co-creation are like dialects of foreign languages."

    When it comes to art, fundraising is meeting with auction house practices to make equity and ethical planetary standards meet in the productions. How much sustainability can we create with these methodologies, is yet to be discovered – not just in the form of capital, but as acts of recycling, repurposing, and meeting circular economy standards.

    World, in which constant profit is a standard, and where sustainability and co-creation are like dialects of foreign languages. Co-creation implies a communal aspect of creating together. As such it is somewhat strange to Western notions, which rather highlight the success of ego-driven selves.

    At its best, the awakening is bringing nature closer to our communication, forming new communities. Community and art can meet in various ways. The art works that take over public spaces are a great example.

    Outside the Stanford University’s Cantor Center for Visual Arts is a Stone River, a large wall created of sand stones. A sculptural serpentine project created by artist Andy Goldsworthy (2002), is blending with its campus environment, growing naturally in the landscape of trees and meadow, bringing joy for people working and visiting the campus and the Art Center. These stones are remnants of campus buildings. The stones had fallen during two earthquakes that hit the bay area in 1906 and 1989.

    Stone River is composed of rumble that was left behind after two earthquakes.

    The Stone River was inaugurated in 2002 at the campus. Goldsworthy found out that the campus had remnants of historic earthquakes that shook the area, in 1906 and 1989 respectively, forming stone rumble that had fallen off the buildings. He instantly gained a feeling that stones could organically return back to earth, forming a flow which almost seemed that it had archeological origins. As if the stones had been there for a long long time.

    Goldsworthy is referencing rural Scotland, where there is archeological presence of people layering stones, layer after layer like this.

    In Stone River, the stacked stones in the sculpture, set in a nearly 3 1/2-foot trough dug in the earth, rise from a 4-foot wide base to an almost impossibly precise undulating line. “I call it a river, but it’s not a river,” Goldsworthy said. The sculpture is “about the flow. There’s a sense of movement in the material, through the individual stones, so you just see this line.” –Barbara Palmer, Stanford Report

  • Shakespeare and Earth Day

    Shakespeare and Earth Day

    Earth Day and Shakespeare’s Birthday both take place in April, a month known for its showers and blossoms. The poetry month of April resonates with the nature’s big events, and surely that of playwright and poet William Shakespeare’s imagination. Earth Day is celebrated on the 22nd, and Shakespeare gets his day on the 23rd.

    Earth Day wishes to bring us back to thinking of hope in the days of chaos, and optimism for our futures during crisis. Each of us has a voice in creating our ideas for, what the future might hold, and what kind of world would we rather imagine. Perhaps a look back in the history will show us, how not to live in the future. From the point of view of conservation, Shakespeare’s times weren’t necessarily better than our more recent past.

    “The Shakespearean Forest” is a book written by Anne Barton (Cambridge University Press, 2017). The book handles woodland in early modern drama. “The Shakespearean Forest” puts the playwright’s work within a historical, social and literary world of forests. It also questions, how the forests might have been staged in the early theater. Forests as surroundings were also “stages” for leisure hunting, and preparation for warfare. 

    Shakespeare’s birthplace, the town of Stratford-upon-Avon, was surrounded by the Forest of Arden. This forest was already in decline in his time. It is believed that during his lifetime, trees were more of a commodity, used as timber for building houses and ships, and functioning as fuel for cooking and heating. 

    To see nature in a positive light in Shakespeare’s work is not hard though. Nature acts as a metaphor in his writings numerous times. One of the greatest is from “King Henry“: “Let heaven kiss earth! now let not Nature’s hand Keep the wild flood-confin’d! let order die! And let this world no longer be a stage To feed contention in a lingering act.” (Henry IV, Part 2).

    There are so many beautiful and accurate comparisons between seasons and our life cycles, seeing weather as a backdrop for actions, and setting its moods for our own. Not to mention how romantic sentiments are created within nature. Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 98” is an appraisal for the month of April, a song of Spring. 

    From you have I been absent in the spring,
    When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim,
    Hath put a spirit of youth in everything,
    That heavy Saturn laughed and leaped with him.
    Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell
    Of different flowers in odour and in hue,
    Could make me any summer’s story tell,
    Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew:
    Nor did I wonder at the lily’s white,
    Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose;
    They were but sweet, but figures of delight
    Drawn after you, – you pattern of all those.
        Yet seem’d it winter still, and, you away,
        As with your shadow I with these did play.

    meadow @Firstindigo&Lifestyle
    meadow @Firstindigo&Lifestyle

    The Folger Shakespeare Library,  in Washington D.C., opened in 1932 being an independent research library devoted to advanced study of the Renaissance and the early modern period in the Western hemisphere. It is a world-class research center with an outstanding collection of editions of Shakespeare’s plays. The Library has one of the world’s finest collections of 15th- through 18th-century rare books and manuscripts from Great Britain and Europe.