Bridges, Mushrooms, and Phone Calls from Old Friends
Dancing Ghost in the Magic Forest
“You only need to know the direction, not the destination. The direction is enough to make the next choice.”
- James Clear
While I was riding through the nature preserve last week in the rain I noticed a tree fallen over a creek that had oyster mushroom blooms and wondered how I live in a place where it’s rare to find edibles on a bike ride from your house but I did find those bolettes that time and haven’t seen them since and I guess I did find oysters growing on a dead birch off the Greenbelt behind campus where I work sometimes from the sixth floor of a building in a nice little space with a glimpse of the hills and Boise River that I ride along to get to work and so I’m glad about the mushrooms and hope to share some with you someday because the Stropharia spawn didn’t likely because of lack of nutrition and ignorance on my part but on Tuesday I got to be part of a panel with other artists which was super cool.
See, my friend Megan and I were talking on the phone and she had an idea to create a dance work to a poem like how dance is often done to music but use the poem like the music and narrative so she did that and choreographed a dance that Natsumi performed and Elizabeth created an amazing dress for and they recorded the dance to the different moods and locations of the poem I found and then Megan very cinematically edited it and so the dance-poem video is an art installation called “Then and Back” and there’s artwork too that Megan selected for the exhibition called “Figural: Bodies in Print” and it’s at the Janet Turner Print Museum on the Chico State campus in Northern California and on their website so even more than finding mushrooms along a creek on a bicycle I feel so fortunate to be part of something so beautiful.
These things too recently inspired me:
The Singing Bridge. While we were in Bentonville we got to experience Craig Colorusso’s sound art installation on a bridge in the rain with birds and creek sounds and no one around and I don’t know anything more except it’s beautiful.
4 Keys to Telling Stories Everyone Will Love, from Cave Paintings to Star Wars | Joe Lazauskas. As a person who gets to work with story and narrative in my hobbies and day job, I really appreciate how Joe breaks down story into four essential elements.
Tumbling Towards a Wall. I’ve been listening a lot to this ambient album by Ulla that mixes recordings of city and nature throughout. Great music to work and write to.
Inside the Extraordinary Experiment to Save the Stradivarius Sound. The mayor of Cremona in Italy actually asked the 70,000 residents to avoid the area of town near the music hall so they could record a Stradivarius. More interesting was to learn about the climate shift that happened in the late 1600’s which many attribute to creating a slowed growth rate in the spruce trees used in the making of these violins.
How the Food We Eat Affects Our Brain: Learn About the “MIND Diet”. Of course we know coffee is good and bad for us and that Lion’s Mane mushrooms are neurogenic so stimulate regrowth of nerve (and likely brain) cells but what foods other than water should we consume to keep our brains healthy?