donutszenmom.com

Yes, a new template. Wanted more flexibility with the categories. This blog was originally started to keep up with my yoga practice notes. Along with a little personal stuff. And then I added some separate pages for poetry projects.

Lately, though, I’ve had some work/technology/learning topics I’ve been thinking about, and I’ve been debating whether to start a whole new blog, or try to have one, more flexible site.

So, if you want yoga (which is 99.999% of the current posts), you can use the Ashtanga yoga category to select those posts. Technology and Poetry have their own categories, so you can sort that way, too.

This is nice. Everything is all fresh and shiny. Unlike my house, which I’ve neglected in favor of playing on my computer all morning.

excavating a space within or beyond,
a space into which to pass

and, even closer, the dead figure,
the pure simultaneity of

the immediacy and directness with which surface is given to vision

there is a slippage in this imperative
through which the visual and the bodily
form a single continuum

gathers up all the strands of separate parts
retreats away in successive waves
back into the distance

the loss of a single viewpoint

the very image of what could be called the moment
lifted up within, cancelled,
at the same time deposits its mark on the surface,
like the x that cancels, in a great hiss of negation

pleasure of leaving a mark

the mastery of resemblance is progressive

the fabulously detailed and nuanced animals
bifurcated from within,
point in opposite directions simultaneously,
both downward
and upward,
the internal contradiction of the world
a perfect fit

projected out

this is the trace, the instigator,
the pure movement

preceded by multiplicity
which underlies the ground of possibility

indivisibility of presence

allows the outside
to invade its inside

the field to which he or she is present
only as a displaced term

separation of self
from itself

connects

then

1

1. name / a) Becoming light. b) Suspension and habit describe the contours of the human body.
2. third eye / a) One who measures fate a half inch in diameter and over three miles long. b) One who makes predictions I can’t understand.
3. throat / One who shapes a kind of postscript.
4. crescent moon / Master of all things, nearly swamping in the end. The Lord of all things broken up and of all things gathered in folds.
5. hair / The creator of vaguely topographic configurations.
6. ashes / One who is difficult to distinguish from the central core. One introduced as a narrow band along the edge of creation.
7. skin / One who is a pier extending into the sea.
8. serpent / The soul of all beings — animals and insects spread out across the maps, sometimes clustering, sometimes appearing to head out into the unknown.
9. spray / One who is a simple text.

2

10. the pure self / One who is landscape with rain. What we see remains.
11. the supreme guide / One who reverses the rhythms of this earthly life.
12. multiplicity / One who is beyond the map’s edges, suggesting released or liberated souls.
13. humor / a) One who evokes the human body. b) Indestructible.
14. snake / a) One who bestows erect stances and animated gestures. b) One whose explicit bodily references are lost to more abstract arrangements. c) One who is an imaginary grid of raking light and long-handled nets. d) One who could, theoretically, go on and on.
15. ink / One who directly witnesses the recollections of ordinary people.
16. animal / One who transgresses every boundary.
17. body / One of self-portraits, cast-off clothes, endless pictures and continuous projections.

3

18. One who alone is the definition of rotting apricots and apples.
19. One who leads to ruin in unpredictable, disintegrating flux.
20. One who intercepts the view of the outside world.
21. One who possesses a body fragmented and eventually eclipsed.
22. One with the great freedom of the burning ground.
23. One resting in uncertainty.
24. The Bird with One Wing amongst the illimitable field.

4

25. One who when observed without any intention will unfold.
26. Anything that could be used to draw or write about human or animal forms.
27. One who fuses spirit and matter. And bestows momentary contact between.
28. One who is chains, tires, satellite dishes, radio towers, batteries and, at the outer edges, birds of this and that.
29. a) One who eagerly seeks after the mysterious incommensurability of the apparent. b) The source of love, but it’s not what you think. c) The source of all doors.
30. The inexhaustible trying to keep up.
31. One who can fly with one wing. It is desire that binds.
32. One who generates a heat-producing and luminous body.
33. Breath.
34. One who offers resistance to, and is resisted by, other bodies.
35. One who is one-sensed.
36. One who pursues spiral feet and delicate hair. b) One who has the ability to assemble whoever is there, with whatever is available.

5

37. He who manifests a bright line of pointed flames.
38. One who causes happiness to everyone by the beauty of a hand, a sleeve, a toppled candle, a breakfast dish.
39. a) A slightly opened window, a way to enter discreetly. b) A burst of light, along with a ringing tone. c) A boat’s hull level with the horizon.
40. The Question, responded to with vagueness or parried with counter-questions.
41. A draft strewn with changes, corrections and interruptions.
42. One who is expanding and quickening and necessarily inadequate.
43. The Creator of generalized contours and blurry edges.
44. The Producer of thin, almost transparent washes and wiry graphism.
45. a) One who posits the picture as a whole. b) The nest of tactile.

6

46. One who cannot be rooted in the sense of touch, emotionality, or mood.
47. a) The preeminent criterion of reality. b) One who is visually clear yet always mysterious.
48. One from whose navel the wish not to know emanates.
49. The Lord of Failures — hideous and inescapable.
50. a) One who is the agent of all actions. None remember what they are, but all remember the outline, the image. b) The Creator of a pattern of thick black lines suggesting the outlines of many small adjoining stones.
51. The Great Thinker: blurred and delayed.
52. One who created no literal answer to the question of location.
53. One who is exceedingly huge in size.
54. One who introduces fragments of sky or landscape into otherwise coherent terrain.
55. One who, in grasping the significance of form, is the link between far-flung elements.

7

56. One who is beyond the pencil-on-paper storyboard.
57. One who plunges into the vagaries of slight variation.
58. a) One who is always in a state of bliss. b) One who has a complexion that appears to move into the distance too slowly, as if space has been compressed.
59. One whose eyes situate physical beings amid the events of one direction that diminishes too quickly.
60. Creator of trying to catch up with the endless flow of contingencies.
61. One who is going from no place to no place amid the swarm of irreducible particulars to which no system is adequate.
62. There are three words in this name: Man of Sorrow.
63. Purity suggesting a void at the root of things.
64. The embodiment of moment to moment through all the twists and turns of provocative detail.

8

65. ambiguous / Beyond the maps’ edges.
66. bird / Halo of grease.
67. sweat / Life.
68. woman bathing / Sheer, unadorned matter.
69. ashes in water / Something unfolding over time.
70. moon / Lord of the cows and pigs.
71. eyes / He who gulps water and stares straight ahead.
72. destruction / Remnant of collapsed systems.
73. tree / a) The consort of navigation. b) The Lord of carried upward to heaven. c) One who is suspended in a steplike, rising formation. d) One for whom microorganisms predominate to mesmerizing effect. e) A touch of the master’s hand.
74. tears / Layered, embossed and consumed by those who name or describe him.

A boat,
a floor inscription:

formlessness itself

Blue water sliver moon
constitutes one of many self-tests

Whispery dream, a canoe on the banks of a placid waterway,
perhaps sadder than intended

A considered statement, perhaps not.

Poppy field, rice field

an awful lot of hush

something was there

without time – without body –
without place

lines overlap the open interiors of the loops

As they curve broadly toward the edges,
they visibly waver and shift
– a sensitivity
and continuous flow

– put a name on it, please –

ragged assemblage,
tattered battle flag,
scavenged cape.

Perhaps more to the point, it looks like
(working with the invisible)
a disembodied material, opening
to a range of new chromatic
and atmospheric possibilities,
a traditional corporeality – a tendency,

the wow and flutter of an intentional choice
or limitations in unfamiliar territory
create woozy effects of countless
blurry-looking lines that have been woven together
in what seems like numerous threadlike strands of differentiated color
but is in fact
a monochrome field

The result is dense with a perfectly smooth
factureless trompe l’oeil
always present in the mind

(perforation marks)

These punctures afford glimpses
of light shows, tree branches,
and the wall behind – composition
even in a moment of self-obliteration
manipulated by two people
(tenderhook) (self-portrait)

The affinities, the sense of
parallel purpose discovered by comparison
is one rather abrupt turn,
is exactly what the title says,
several rows one might almost take
as quirky abstraction, but once acknowledged
won’t go away.

More explicit is the night chant way,
a diagram oblique and freighted as its title,
painted onto a large black square in vivid reds,
yellows and purples – appearing as tally marks, Xs,
and various scratchings here and there
until historical flowers and coded “storms”
fall apart completely,
the margins of everyday life
nearly invisible,
uprooted
in the versions
of our statements

the way one picks up a shell on the beach
– Helene Cixous

Because the landscape simply is beautiful,
because it exists at all.

When I started, the pieces were not joined in any permanent manner.
The only possible means was in relation to the material.

We had to lean, conceived as weight
and held up with what was underneath.
We had to walk and map and roll.

In a sense, it was “rigging,” but I have always thought of it as hands,
as extension. There is no prescribed way to go about it,
between knowing and materials and openings
and using only the necessary tools.

In this instance, one of the predictions is a tendency to overturn.
But you could not enter into them.
You could not go through them.

The discrete object dissolves into what is experienced in time.
This occurs in circles flush to the ground
and involves anticipation and reflection
and viewing edges.

The form reopens so there are many ways of entering into.
At this point it is different due to mass and processes
in any given point of understanding.

I did not want to find a way of holding in place,
which is alienating, distancing
and excessive in terms of context.

Nor does it help to add on a syntax in contradiction of sense.
Any use is a misuse entitled terminal,
which you can enter into
and look up at the sky.

In effect, it is continuous and explicit:
the situation has become.

I am interested in how people connect via media, and how that might affect organizations in the future.

Sure, the amount of information that is being produced and shared is staggering, and yes, “keeping up” is like trying to drink from a fire hose. Some people want to think this surge in connecting via technology is a fad, and some just want to turn the whole thing off. It’s just too much NOISE!

As an instructional designer & educational technologist, my plan has been to participate and witness and ride the wave for a while to see how it all works — I can’t really expect to know how to work with this surplus of information and the myriad modes for tapping into it in any coherent “big picture” way (read: in a way that is clearly advantageous to my organization) until I’ve gotten familiar with some of the possibilities: thus I blog and text and podcast and get my RSS feeds of info. And this morning I set up a Twitter account (twitter.com/wjin). Cody and Jenna were there already.

There is corporate curiosity about these toys, no doubt. But I see the skeptical looks, too. Corporate workers are, for one thing, much too busy to play with toys. I’m not sure how to get past that reality. I do recognize that folks are inundated with tasks-at-hand (particularly middle managers). The information-influx already has them pulling out their hair. Most workers are at war with their email in-boxes and the cognitive dissonance of multi-tasking. Are they really going to take the time to learn about new technologies and to set up their own networking system?

Telling people that they’ll be better off for learning and incorporating technical solutions and online networks is like telling people they should eat their vegetables. Not well-received. Tell them it’s fun! doesn’t do the trick either. They’re too busy to have fun. I am tempted to go with the scare tactics: what’s gonna happen when EVERYONE else is connected and YOU’RE NOT?!? But that’s not going to work, either. And who am I to mess with the workings of evolution?

I play with technology because I get a kick out of it, and there are opportunities in my job to apply what I learn when I play on the weekends. Yes, on the weekends. My job does not include time for technical experimentation. I do, however, find that there is recognition (and rewards!) for the experimentation I conduct on my own time. Which rocks, because it’s something I want to do anyhow. So here I am on Sunday, accessing information about the future of technology and human capital management and generational differences in the workplace. I read what the best thinkers are writing, and communicate with people who are thinking about the same things. This begs the question, though: am I working on the weekend? If I am interested in the discussion, is it work or entertainment?

Clay Shirky recently shared some really interesting thoughts about cognitive surplus and the consumption of media. I link to both the text version of the talk, and a videocast.

Really cool stuff, and well worth reading/listening to. And it’s good for you. And it’s fun! And if you don’t, you’ll turn into a dinosaur.

I have to work on my proselytizing.