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Mandala meditation
Once a month, I put on two hats at once and lead a Satoyama Yoga class that incorporates Drawing Meditation. Today we worked with mandalas. Before we started to draw, each of us set an intention or asked a question by writing it on the back of our sheet. The seed of my drawing reflected…
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Platitudes for Failure
My latest art project is a snarky perspective on trite phrases. What can you say to someone when they fail, fuck up, or falter? Why not use some platitudes that sound positive and supportive on the surface, but have a multitude of other meanings between the lines. “C’est la vie.”You failed and don’t want to…
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Witch’s broom
Amongst the many branches I ran through the chipper last month, I found one that I set aside. It was the perfect shape my my hand and a good length to become a handle for something. After the jichinsai, the bamboo altar was dismantled and tossed on the burn pile. Before burning, I took a…
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I made the most beautiful post box
The other day, Tod got a call from the water company. They had noticed that we had a new service at a different address and wanted to know where to send the bills and put the meter reading slips. Clearly, it was time to mount a mailbox somewhere at 555. But we don’t have a…
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AI Art & Creativity
If you’re an artist you’ve probably already played with the new generation of AI art tools: Dall-e, Craiyon, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion. They take your written description and turn it into an image. Each AI is differently trained, and even the same prompt will yield different results. For example, these three set of images were all…
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Tokyo Bay Meditation
Find calm depths even as the waves crash around you. This 12 minute guided meditation takes you on a tour of Tokyo Bay and your emotional landscape.
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Ishida Tetsuo and the Bird-Tailed Chisel
In the long-ago time when Edo was founded, there was a stone carver called Ishida Tetsuo. He came from a long line of quarrymen who lived on the Boso Peninsula, where stone was pulled from the mountains and turned into building blocks for the new capital city. He apprenticed with his father, who had left…
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Repurposing illustrations
I have a few clients who come back to me regularly(ish) for illustration and design work. I was excited yesterday to get a mail from one of them, asking if I had time right away to do some work on a short deadline for a corporate video animation. When we were discussing the details of…
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Wonder 2022
It came to me this morning, and settled solidly as the correct word after I had tried on and discarded dozens of candidates. WONDER will guide me in 2022. I considered rise, set, learn, blossom, build, act. They are all good, but none quite felt like the right next step after 2021’s ‘observe.’ Observe was…
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Everyday warmup
Follow along with our gentle, seated spinal movements to warm up your body for more yoga. This Kundalini-inspired sequence is the beginning of almost every Satoyama Yoga class.
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