ah ha, here's the right link to the rice crop art.
http://www.rense.com/general86/stun.htm
Friday, August 21, 2009
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Monday, June 29, 2009
Thursday, June 04, 2009
Just had to say something
Like, I'm home!!!
Hooray!
It has been, and is, a long transition back into life here in VT... But it's great to be here, and it's a great place to live!
Hooray!
It has been, and is, a long transition back into life here in VT... But it's great to be here, and it's a great place to live!
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Some more landscape and some thoughts
So I finally love it here. It took long enough! Took this long for the condos to melt from view, for the retired brits to not annoy me, i knew i felt differently when I had the thought that this must be a nice place to have a vacation home. What?! So anyway. I´ve been feeling really good lately, happy, excited, pleased with my new skills, ready to get home and put them to work. Really excited for my dad to come; we´re traveling together for two weeks at the end of the program. I feel thankful, lucky, blessed. Yeah, things are good.
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Praia da Luz (oceanic amazment and bumming about our culture)
Beach of the light. Today is grey, cool, windy. For two days last week (Tuesday and Wednesday I think) there were 30-40 MPH winds from the ESE which was really riling up the waves, and I only just realized how much the surf changed the profile of the beach. I´d been thinking that I was looking out at the beacj just at high tide, when the rocks are the part that´s most exposed and the sand is underwater, but this morning walking out the beach I realized that about half of the area that used to be sandy (maybe a half mile of beach? or less?) is now bare of sand and just rocks! I walked farther than I intended to because I was seeing this reddish color - what is that? seaweed? - and when I got there, it was about 3 or 4 feet of red bedrock newly exposed. The rocks where there used to be sand are boulders, some quite square, fallen from the cliffs above, some rounded and weathered, ranging in all sizes from an armload kind of size to a pebble. Wha-what?! It´s so different! I built two cairns that looked satisfyingly unlikely, on the edge of impossibly tall, in honor of the power of the ocean to change and shift and shape shift and remain the same... So I guess those rocks were there under the sand the whole time, and now I wonder where the sand went... Will it wash up in Maine? Is the whole beach area more shallow than it used to be? Will more sand fill up between the rocks again with the gentle surf washing it in?
Walking back to come to this cafe here, I walked through a pile of trash left in the sand by yesterday´s sunbathers. Why do people leave their discarded junk on the beach?! Are they too lazy to walk the 100 yards to the trash can? Do they not see any difference between leaving it there and putting it in the bin? I walked past it, annoyed at them, and then annoyed at myself for not picking it up, so I went back and collected it all; as long as we´re stupidly throwing our resources into coke cans, ice cream dishes, take out tins and single use ketchup packets, why not at least collect the evidence of our stupidity in one place and put it out of sight? Throw that shit AWAY, where ever that is. Sometimes I get a very visceral feeling of the proximity of the edge of the cliff that our culture is blindly racing towards. Good luck everyone, do the most you can. Isn´t it obvious that we´ve made some choices with negative impacts on the rest of life, and we need to STOP and change direction? Mid-course correction? It can´t be that hard. Anyway, thanks yall, for doing whatever it is that you do, cause I believe you´re all doing your part, and whatever it is that helps bring a little order to the mad chaos of the era we live in is most appreciated. By me and the rest of life.
Walking back to come to this cafe here, I walked through a pile of trash left in the sand by yesterday´s sunbathers. Why do people leave their discarded junk on the beach?! Are they too lazy to walk the 100 yards to the trash can? Do they not see any difference between leaving it there and putting it in the bin? I walked past it, annoyed at them, and then annoyed at myself for not picking it up, so I went back and collected it all; as long as we´re stupidly throwing our resources into coke cans, ice cream dishes, take out tins and single use ketchup packets, why not at least collect the evidence of our stupidity in one place and put it out of sight? Throw that shit AWAY, where ever that is. Sometimes I get a very visceral feeling of the proximity of the edge of the cliff that our culture is blindly racing towards. Good luck everyone, do the most you can. Isn´t it obvious that we´ve made some choices with negative impacts on the rest of life, and we need to STOP and change direction? Mid-course correction? It can´t be that hard. Anyway, thanks yall, for doing whatever it is that you do, cause I believe you´re all doing your part, and whatever it is that helps bring a little order to the mad chaos of the era we live in is most appreciated. By me and the rest of life.
Saturday, March 14, 2009
More pictures
Mini irises that grow out of really hard clay
Moonrise
Castle and wildflowers in Aljezur
Stork nest in a parking lot.
View of Luz, where I live, from the cliffs
Castle in Silves, perhaps 1000 years old, obviously rebuilt a bit since then...
some misty church on a hill in Monchique,a mountain town inland from Luz
sunrise from my porch
an almond tree stuck in a wall. Which will win ?
Here´s some more pictures from lovely sunny Portugal. I am in class almost all the time, but there´s been time to explore a little bit of the area. And bask in the perfect weather. Learning massage in this program means focusing a lot on being present and being in my body, not particularly easy for one who loves to daydream, space out, read...etc... it´s easier when I´m in the woods, but I don´t think I´ll be setting up a woods massage practice...although maybe that will be my niche! I don´t know. It´s really good to work on. Awareness. All that.
Moonrise
Castle and wildflowers in Aljezur
Stork nest in a parking lot. 
View of Luz, where I live, from the cliffs
Castle in Silves, perhaps 1000 years old, obviously rebuilt a bit since then...
some misty church on a hill in Monchique,a mountain town inland from Luz
sunrise from my porch
an almond tree stuck in a wall. Which will win ? 
Here´s some more pictures from lovely sunny Portugal. I am in class almost all the time, but there´s been time to explore a little bit of the area. And bask in the perfect weather. Learning massage in this program means focusing a lot on being present and being in my body, not particularly easy for one who loves to daydream, space out, read...etc... it´s easier when I´m in the woods, but I don´t think I´ll be setting up a woods massage practice...although maybe that will be my niche! I don´t know. It´s really good to work on. Awareness. All that.
Saturday, March 07, 2009
Hmmm, what to write?
I don´t know where to begin! Life here is totally full, class runs all day monday through friday, and the weekends are dedicated to market, laundry, homework, and this weekend exploring! I´m desperate to see some interesting birds here, especially a hoopoe, this weird big yellow bird with a crest of feathers on its head. My classmates and I rented a car this weekend, and I went out early listening for the poo-poo-poo that apparently is the sound they make, but no luck. Other birds were around, but it wasn´t the perfect morning, a bit too windy and rainy.
Classwise, we have learned almost a complete full body massage that takes an hour, and we are now learning more strokes to add into it, some deeper ones using the forearms and then soon we´ll start learning some acupressure and polarity techniques. Time to start thinking about ordering a table! I´m also learning anatomy and physiology, or relearning it in some cases, and I´m totally fascinated with how much we know about our own bodies, yet how little we understand at the same time.
Well, more sometime, hopefully with pictures!
Classwise, we have learned almost a complete full body massage that takes an hour, and we are now learning more strokes to add into it, some deeper ones using the forearms and then soon we´ll start learning some acupressure and polarity techniques. Time to start thinking about ordering a table! I´m also learning anatomy and physiology, or relearning it in some cases, and I´m totally fascinated with how much we know about our own bodies, yet how little we understand at the same time.
Well, more sometime, hopefully with pictures!
Saturday, February 07, 2009
Portugal!
Well. I can´t believe its been two weeks already. Class is going really well, about 8.5 hours of it a day, with a lot of hands on practice - at least two hours a day of sessions that we give each other. Sometimes thats great and sometimes its another student who´s really practicing and not getting it so its vaguely annoying, and hard to explain how to change it since we don´t know that much yet to give fefedback. But even if it feels weird or I have to say you´re pulling my hair five times, or your thumb is in my ear again, its still getting bodywork every day. We are learning a specific sequence that combines swedish, acyupressure, myofascial release and polarity, and probably other things too, but we dont get into the technicalities much at this point. We also learn anatomy, history of massage and theory.
Class is held in a villa about a mile from our apartment in town, which is a lovely walk once I get past the ugly modern condos. There´s lots of bird life and really cool varieties of plants and cactus and grasses. THe bird I most want to see is the Hoopoe, which lives inland from here.
The water is so beautiful and amazing, but the town has been swamped with really pasty kind of annoying northern Europeans. Only annoying in that they´re not particularly interesting to me and it creates a very british vibe, so that htere´s more pubs than portuguese restaurants. If I were travelling, I would have hit this town and said, get me on the next bus out of here. But its way less built up than say, Florida, and spectacularly beautiful once I turn my back to the development. The sea cliffs are amazing, full of changing color and texture and studded in the middle with an ancient volcano. Rocha Negra, black rock.
Classmates are fantastic, as is the quality of instruction. Theres six of us and I couldnt ask for a better group. We cover a range of body types, though not gender, all being ladies. We´re all studious students and have similar enough habits and interests that we bonded pretty quickly. I live with three others, in a three bedroom two story apartment. I have my own room, and the two who share a room were immediately giggling until midnight and then giggling again at dawn.
Borage
From class in Casa da Luz
Another rainbow with Casa da Luz in the back
Lagos, the bigger town nearby with a really cool old section inside a wall.
An old lady at market in Lagos, selling onions out of a bucket for 10 cents each.
Our dining room
Our view from the balcony
Sea cliffs
Luz, the town I live in, from the beach
Class is held in a villa about a mile from our apartment in town, which is a lovely walk once I get past the ugly modern condos. There´s lots of bird life and really cool varieties of plants and cactus and grasses. THe bird I most want to see is the Hoopoe, which lives inland from here.
The water is so beautiful and amazing, but the town has been swamped with really pasty kind of annoying northern Europeans. Only annoying in that they´re not particularly interesting to me and it creates a very british vibe, so that htere´s more pubs than portuguese restaurants. If I were travelling, I would have hit this town and said, get me on the next bus out of here. But its way less built up than say, Florida, and spectacularly beautiful once I turn my back to the development. The sea cliffs are amazing, full of changing color and texture and studded in the middle with an ancient volcano. Rocha Negra, black rock.
Classmates are fantastic, as is the quality of instruction. Theres six of us and I couldnt ask for a better group. We cover a range of body types, though not gender, all being ladies. We´re all studious students and have similar enough habits and interests that we bonded pretty quickly. I live with three others, in a three bedroom two story apartment. I have my own room, and the two who share a room were immediately giggling until midnight and then giggling again at dawn.
Borage
From class in Casa da Luz
Another rainbow with Casa da Luz in the back
Lagos, the bigger town nearby with a really cool old section inside a wall.
An old lady at market in Lagos, selling onions out of a bucket for 10 cents each.
Our dining room
Our view from the balcony
Sea cliffs
Luz, the town I live in, from the beach
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Friday, January 16, 2009
The Countdown!
I'm leaving in ONE WEEK! For the next big adventure. I'm getting ready, getting all my supplies, clothes, gear, etc.... into one big heap, and then hopefully into two backpacks! I'm excited to be heading off on a big adventure, with lots of support from my amazing friends and family. I'm looking forward to being in a completely new (ancient) place, being near the other side of the Atlantic, finding new rhythms in my day, and most of all being a student again! We'll have eight hour days, five days a week, with enough time at lunch to go home and cook... and explore the town, Luz, and the sea cliffs ... Time to get to work and get some things done here!
Saturday, January 03, 2009
Happy New Year!
New birth year, new year...
Drumming in the new year with good family, good friends, with a 7 or 8 foot SNOW WALL!
Fortress to protect from the blowin wind and minus zero weather. Brrrrrrrrrrrrrr
Good times, in deed. We are rich here!
Drumming in the new year with good family, good friends, with a 7 or 8 foot SNOW WALL!
Fortress to protect from the blowin wind and minus zero weather. Brrrrrrrrrrrrrr
Good times, in deed. We are rich here!
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