"I went back to my body, it just seemed the simplest thing to do. We live in a culture where the body is a second-class citizen. We've been split off from our bodies. Ever since we went to church, the body was bad, we had to save our soul. Then we went to school and all they ever cared about was our IQ or PSAT tests. And then we got into industry and you were either a blue-collar worker or a white-collar worker. So all the time the body is being degraded. Yet, we are our bodies. Our bodies are us. This is the only life we're gonna live and we live it physically. You can't believe how good I feel, what a playful, joyful experience running is to me....So the job, see, is to find out what is a joy to you as this running is to me..."
-- Chris Shaheen

via Cold Splinters

what do you think of

...when you think of New Orleans?



_

embark

The word has been standing alone in my mind for weeks now. Embark. A command, an invitation.

Three days ago I left Santa Fe. What is beyond the horizon? Unknown splendors of New Orleans, some rock faces in Alabama. Couches in Brooklyn and the Outer Banks of North Carolina. I will return to my alma matter and the residue of four years spent in study, stress, companionship. For the first time I will make the pilgrimage to Italy, place of my ancestors. It is a whole lot of country and a whole lot of history. On the radio we hear word of tornado refugees, and of the death of an enemy who defined my generation. Advancement along the highway affects my mind, like a thread connecting information, distance, time. Last night, dark driving through east Texas, it seemed as though I could feel the past rising like vapor from the land beyond my headlights, the current between my life and lives that have come before.

sharpen your skillz

skip to 2:03 to see the magic happen

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

anybody want to take odds on how many cutting boards I'll break trying to learn this?

(via the hilarious teaandfood.com)

bodies of water

Mom sends me a video of the Lagoon filling with tsunami water, making full high/low tide cycles in minutes.

Áine and I are detoxifying our bodies -- eating clay, seed husks. Flushing it out.

In Japan they are poisoned again by what was wrought in Los Alamos.

"California has 2 nuclear power plants near fault lines, 1 in tsunami zone" - lucasgwolf

"Concentrations of Los Alamos National Laboratory legacy contaminants in the Rio Grande are almost always below safe drinking water regulated levels." - Buckman Diversion Project

This is how bodies of water and of earth connect us. The uranium is in the rocks and springs, the seawater tastes of fuel rods.

I cannot articulate this. I only know how in the afternoon the Pacific shimmers, a thick band of silver stretching into Japan's morning.

big choices

What's harder than deciding on your Halloween costume? VOTING. Oy oy oy, there's a lot of propositions on this CA ballot. Mr. Wolf saves the day again by pointing me* to theballot.org, where you can find progressive voter guides created by everybody from "mommapolitico" to the Sierra Club. If anybody knows of — or has created — sites with solid info about elections near or far, feel free to leave them in the comments.

Good luck with you civic duty.
- P

* I was procrastinating researching how to vote, when I came across L's recommendation on the ol' Facebook. Ironies of modern technology and social media.

All Hallows' Eve

....make it happy, make it spoooooky....