The way the branches form patterns, and that blue sky, and those birdhouses are incredible ~ from a master dollhouse maker's studio surely, the detail alone worth admiring. Photos from a walk an hour ago. (If you can't see it, go here: http://img38.echo.cx/img38/8194/birdhousesbc7og.jpg)

The birth of stars amidst colliding galaxies with their deathly black holes fascinates me...

Collisions of galaxies in the young universe caused prodigious star production even while the black holes at their centres increased exponentially.

Matter suctioned by the dense gravity of black holes flew at massive speeds inwards as gases were blasted to the outer fringes creating the luminescent edges of the merging galaxies.

The light pouring out of such ancient crucibles of creation and destruction creating the very memories we see emblazoned in the night sky through our telescopes.

In such collisions, a thousand more solar masses of stars formed each year than in our slower star-creating counterparts in the modern galaxies we exist in.

But when I look at simulations of colliding galaxies, I see only tangos and hot passion, sangrias and lust, sex and creating babies, the madness of merging amidst looming black holes and bright bursting stardust across the heavenly skies, an explosive terrain of love...

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The photo is an active link back to the article at Space.com, for those of you who want to explore more...

It is impossible for me to believe that I am entirely my body, that everything that I am is contained here in the cafe in which I sit, looking out the floor to ceiling full wall of windows at the rain gently pooling drop by drop into puddles or wetting the street with a sheen only rainwater can give. The world revolves around me, the musac with its forgettable music and chatter, the scrape of chairs of people arriving or leaving, the muted tones of conversation, someone who has a cold blowing their nose, the sounds of food being eaten off plates, knives and forks scraping, the clacking of a dishwasher being stacked in the back, tables being cleared and wiped, and all types of people who are quietly sitting except for one table of loud laughers. My feet are cold. The street is busy with trucks and cars and pedestrians. Umbrellas float everywhere like dark flowers

How can everything I am be contained here in this remote and anonymous spot? Located here in this curve of space and time, at this edge of the universe, that that's it, that's all there is?

Because most of what we are seems to transcend our bodies, it is not hard to imagine what travels with us, our memories, feelings, passions and desires will travel beyond our bodies into a deathless realm beyond our deaths.

One day perhaps we will understand how energy manifest into matter and how it unmanifests, the secret of life and death.

Perhaps we are runners passing the baton ~ our written thoughts, inventions, works of art, labour, children ~ just keeping the links of civilization alive even as we each appear and disappear, a living force for awhile, and then gone.

MP3 of this post at Sound Click: "Fragments Towards a Meditation on the Body...", which I'm not sure about, but it's there now...
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On our blogs we post, barely editing, always planning to come back at some future point to edit, only the posts fly by like days...

Anyway, I just put this montage together, the writing moves over small line drawings of dancers I did maybe a year ago...the words shaping themselves are nothing conclusive or that I would want to rest my weight on, barely touching the surface of this subject, the body, but leaning into the writing coming soon on the body where all bodies are created...

This is just a miniscule meditation on what tells me I am alive. A sort of Descartian I Am, or even Buddhist recognition of the. most. basic.

The ground of being, the body, where I begin...

When do you finally come to dwell in a residence so that it begins to feel like "home"? It happened today when I moved our large wooden rocking horse out of my room - the 'clothes horse' literally, where I flung my clothes to pile up - and put in a 'captain's chair' that I recovered years ago in another lifetime. Now I can take out one of the stained glass windows and look at the street and houses and foothills while I read. I know I'm not making sense, especially as I now am in the process of turning a red painted milking bench into a foot stool by stretching an upholstery fabric over a cushion and stapling it. And I can't explain this, and shall take some sort of photo shortly, but as I sit in my 'new' corner and read under the clamp lamp I clipped onto an ancient metal stand, looking at my room, which I quite like actually, in this old and rather dumpy rented house, I feel like I've finally "moved in." And I've been here, not altogether willingly, since July 1, 2003!

I came here to apply to do a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies, but they changed the program, it was the strangest thing, really, how it happened, and I didn't even end up applying to Admissions, and then got stuck here, but that's a story for another time.

Or maybe I was destined to come out here to the West Coast all along. Now the psychics I spoke to before I came said it was a very good move for me and that it would all work out wonderfully and they couldn't have been more wrong. The thing is, talking about telepathy and my theory of mind-reading, is that I had no premonition about the changes going on in the program I wanted to join and so they couldn't 'read' the problems I would encounter.

Yes, this is definitely a story I will continue at another time. Here's a photo of moi in ma corner reading, if I can't live with it, I'll try to replace it with a daylight one tomorrow...

Oh, that painting, yeah that's exactly where it's sat for months waiting, someday I'll finish it, who knows...

xo