Swapping blogs for a day!

This is an invitation to all interested parties in the world of blogging!
Sarah, a blogger from Pakistan has hit upon a growing trend in the broader world of blogging: that of exchanging your blog with another blogger and vice verse for a day!

I thought that it sounded creative, collaborative and exciting_ so, I am helping to promote this concept. We can kick off the project with a minimum of 28 people. Each person is then paired with one other individual, to let the blog swapping begin for a twenty-four hour period!

I am discovering that people who have already done this, are discovering just how small the world of like, shared or just plain in common traits between them really are!!

To participate with this blog swapping adventure you can contact me here or, contact Sarah (the originator of this leg of the blog swapping trend) directly at this link! (I added the discussion page. Look for thisicon at the top of the page to find Sarah, the blog swapping idea originator for this group!)

Meanwhile, this quote from T.S. Elliot's poem: "In Four Quarters" is a fitting reference to this project as well_ I found it here, on the blog of another "swapper!"

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
- T.S. Elliot, Four Quarters

James Turrell

The work of James Turrell has intrigued me since I read about it in an old edition of ARTnews. I was recently glad to see he was one of the featured artists in the PBS Series, Art:21, Art in the 21st Century, part 1.

Fractured Atlas

Business
Fractured Atlas Puts 'Biz' In Show Business

by Neda Ulaby

Listen Now [18 sec] add to playlist | download

Morning Edition, March 11, 2009 · Fractured Atlas founder and Executive Director Adam Huttler never intended to create an arts service organization. As a freshly minted Sarah Lawrence graduate, Huttler moved to New York City to start his own theater company and put on plays.

"That lasted for about one show," Huttler admits. "I realized I was OK as a director but really better at the business side of things."

So Huttler transformed his company into a not-for-profit that teaches arts organizations to function better as businesses. Eight years later, Fractured Atlas boasts a $4.5 million budget and supports 7,500 arts organizations and individual artists nationwide. It helps with low-cost health insurance, fiscal sponsorship, professional development, technical assistance and liability insurance.

"We try to help [artists] be in a position to focus more exclusively on making art," Huttler explains.

Fractured Atlas' services helped the Catalyst Theater Company in Washington, D.C., obtain unemployment insurance for its part-time actors and staff. Artistic Director Scott Fortier says he plans to take advantage of Fractured Atlas' free online classes in fundraising and accounting, especially during a moment of declining donations across the arts world.

"Once you start actually acting like a business, I think that your donors are happy, your board is definitely happy. It gives us a grown-up feel," he observes.

Most Fractured Atlas members are individual artists. They can get basic memberships free or pay $75 a year for more programs and services. For example, Fractured Atlas can help documentary filmmakers get errors and omissions coverage that protects them if they are sued by their subjects — and is crucial for scoring distribution deals.

Another Fractured Atlas member, Christian Oh, helps run the DC Asian Pacific American Film Festival, which annually brings over 80 independent movies to Washington. Oh says Fractured Atlas helped his organization expand to the extent that he may not renew his membership: He says the film festival has learned how to take care of itself.

"It's almost like a parent and child," he says. "You know, we've been a child of theirs for a while and we realize that we're growing up and we need to move on."

Huttler says that means he is doing his job. The recession has not hurt Fractured Atlas' membership. In fact, Huttler says that since October, it has gained about 300 new members a month.

"Artists will keep making art, no matter what," Huttler says.

And, he adds, they might as well have health insurance while they do it.



I am in the "child" stage as my 501c3 sponsored project is something I am still learning at my own pace, how to promote, how to solicit funds and resources for, and all that comes with staring fear in the face, in order to get on with creating my first sponsored art project.

The affordable health insurance for artists part is not quite out west yet, but I am looking for it!

* To locate my fiscally sponsored project, scroll very near the bottom of the page in the link to "Timeless Rhythms." Thanks!

My Kid Could Paint That

I checked out this video from the local public library, as support for my own transitional return to self. Recently I have experienced an end to full-time, single parenting the last twenty-one years. Prior to that, I was living life instinctively and intuitively developing my artistic self; an extension of a moment of great epiphany that had happened at age seven. During childhood life really wasn't safe for me, to develop the open vulnerable nature I came into this world to express, in order to share for well-being within and in all receptive contact. Consequently, a truly light-filled innate happiness got layered over in negative conditioning. Now after many years of hard work to understand historic chaos more clearly, and to learn to take greater responsibility for my own responses to living my own life_ I more consciously recognize innate wholeness that is always within us_ we NEVER lose it. We do however, move into rigid forgetfulness!

I say all of this because watching this video personally surprised me in this way.
I thought it would be a very different kind of film, instead, I found one is confronted with the complexities of being human! Yet, I don't believe the film-maker even knew he may be asking us to notice so many things about ourselves, that for me point to the nature of being more & more consciously aware of the nature of awareness, (especially) in this world of form.

Watching this video at this moment in my own life experiences, I find a sensitivity about Marla's freedom as a child that I want to guard. Would if she could just be a child without adult agenda interdicting what is naturally developing in her; developing into what is (to be) her own turf? Wouldn't it be incredible, if everyone hungry to recapture within themselves, what is clearly capable of naturally expressing within Marla herself_ the self-discipline, the self-awareness, the self-love and respect, to let go completely and just watch with no agenda? To watch while she grows up doing what she does, and very simply let her lead this natural expression unfettered, without adult interpretation first?

If I just let go of all the adult agendas I witnessed flying around this little girl, a little girl who is growing up in the most intimate ways in front of a camera_ I can begin to touch something that is shared within each of us. That which is beyond describing! I invite you to try to stay with this consideration in the best way you may understand it.
The only thing "weird" about this consideration or what Marla Olmstead is accomplishing quite naturally, is really the lack of common unawareness in many adults.
What I am saying is that in each moment of our lives, we all have the opportunity to more consciously witness life in action. What does this even mean?
Just consider that if, watching can occur as a conscious experience in each one of us; watching closely one's own responses to what is being seen, specifically here as Marla paints, what might we each come to understand?
The experience of consciously recognizing Marla as a child within each of us, developmentally taking action instinctively_ before thought, concepts, or mental layers of any kind take over. To additionally become aware of what we internally layered adults, unconsciously make the contents within this film (for example) out to be, beyond Marla just painting. Waking up to this kind of realization about our unconscious habits within ourselves is powerful to consider. To wake up to recognize that we are Marla in our own unique ways, is powerful to consider. Is this life really that we have to lose parts of ourselves, to traverse through the journey while we are here?

If not, and we can begin to recognize that as well-meaning, never-the-less commonly unaware adults promote the contents within the film, contents that have become more and more removed from Marla simply painting, and more and more about our collective unconsciousness acting out just that_ THEN, what might happen?!
If we could begin to ease risking our recognition for the sweetness, the preciousness of childhood, and instead wake up to childhood that can be nurtured to grow more consciously, aware of its own self_ we might begin to gain in the evolution of conscious self-recognition.

Unto her own self Marla seems to me, to represent the combination of innate individual openness and balance within her immediate environment, thanks to her parents nurturing attention. (Just don't forget about Zane, cognizantly recognized as a capable individual, away from his sister's endeavors.)
In parental evenness, consciously parenting in non-attachment Marla's own instinctive lead, her own development into puberty and young adulthood_ could support the development of a very evolved human being, as she chooses. Contributing as I say, while she is still very young, it might be equally important, as choices may reflect her parents understanding_ to do their own personal work to awaken within.
I write none of what is posted in this article as judgment, interdiction or personal attack of any kind; the contents of this article are firm suggestion only.

Having said so thus far, there is no esoterism inferred that one cannot very simply access. Access in the course of personal self-inquiry and access as active exploration, the nature of unconditional love within us all. To access consciously knowing oneself more fully, to the extent one may be naturally attracted to a path of self-inquiry, as we also live honoring a parallel life in form. This is part of the personal journey I find my own self living, reflective in this transition from a path of healing past family history, to one of ongoing inquiry about waking up to the present moment as I choose how to function in the world now. As a child, I instinctively felt that trying to figure out how to live somewhere between past and future always seemed too narrow, too claustrophobic, particularly in a house riddle with complex layers of chaos. At age seven, the idea in any event, of "becoming an artist" seemed to hold the liberation I sought, in order to know myself more intimately. Capable of living a life of simple happiness for its own sake.

If the adult world were the result of early natural internal nurturing, through the support of balanced external environments (and I am not talking about unreachable potential)_ what might we continue to learn about waking up, over the course of life, about our own inherent nature consciously being in this world of form?

This is a very stirring film that has provoked within this blogger good food for thought. See this film if you are a mind, and consider with me.