How’d you do that?

I’ve been thinking about professional networking. Used to be, networking was about individual personal relationships. Established in-person and cultivated carefully. In fact, just yesterday, I heard a conversation about one of these people who are talented at schmoozing: “Anyone’d be envious of his Rolodex.”

(Seriously? Rolodex?)

Anyhow, the point was that over the course of a decades-long career, this fellow has cultivated many good business relationships. Probably hundreds.

Contrast that with my weekend experience with Twitter. I have no idea how to “apply” microblogging in a professional context (yet), which is what Twitter is, but I wanted to check it out. Mostly it is reminiscent of a very busy chat, with all kinds of random haiku-like thoughts winging over the wire. There are ways to filter for people in your own network, etc. But the most interesting thing, at least so far, has been looking at other people’s networks. The numbers of people that individuals are linked to are quite impressive: hundreds, thousands, and in some cases tens of thousands.

I signed up on Sunday. Filled out my profile, including my blog URL. Did other things all day. Went to bed. Woke up and looked, as is not unusual, at my blog stats. Huh? 300 more hits than usual overnight? Wow.

Okay, I’m sure lots of traditionalists would listen to that and say, “Yeah, but what does that have to do with the Rolodex full of business colleagues I’ve cultivated for decades?”

Meaning, they don’t see the value of these fast networking options.

The main reason people network is to hear about how other people are solving the same problems they face. The number one question a professional (compensation manager, software developer, technical instructor, manufacturer, etc., etc., etc.) wants to ask another professional is: “How’d you do that?”

People can get trained in fundamentals (definitions, concepts, design), but once that basic education is squared away, the next level of learning involves acquiring some situational expertise — learning about different situations, adding in variables that have implications on the system, and just basically looking at as many possible permutations as possible. The rationale being that if you have knowledge of all the things that can happen, you’ll be able to solve for them. You’ll have a clue.

To be professionally adept, you need an encyclopedic understanding of all the things that can happen in your work environment. Back in the day, you got that on your own, one experience at a time. Maybe you found some case studies, if you were of an academic bent. Or you made a point to meet up and chat pretty routinely with someone, or a few someone’s, from your Rolodex. You scratched their backs, they scratched yours, etc. Martinis and cigars all around.

Are those in-person, individual relationships good to have? No doubt. Are they “better” than the ability to access thousands of stories/cases/people via technology? I don’t know. If your point is discovery of effective practices in specific contexts, how does it not measure up? In fact, how does it not exceed your wildest dreams?

Kolob

I am working from home. People at the office are creating dramas and chaos, and I’m hearing all about it from different people’s perspectives, phone call by phone call. Crap. Why does this happen?

I am annoyed, I have a ton of things to do, and I need to calm down.

So here’s a picture of the huecho wall in Kolob canyon. What you can’t really see clearly is how the wall leans in toward you. A LOT. So when you are climbing, it’s like you are falling over backwards the whole time.

Okay, all better.

Bend it like backwards

Patrick talks about how practicing primary informs the intermediate backbends. Yup, I’m there. Did some experimenting recently to see if the long haul of primary really is a prereq, and keep coming up with yes. So be it.

This morning’s practice was lovely. First one without the little space heater since last fall. Yes, I am a wimp. I live in the desert where it’s warm(er than everywhere else), and still I use a space heater. Not today, though, and the silence was quite nice.

On the Matthew Sweeney wall dropback front, I am able to make my first contact with the wall at calf level. So now what? One last foot to the floor? Ah, my climbing career makes me shake my head at how easy that seems… a foot, a mere foot. What did I learn in climbing, though? Oh yeah: you can generate a shocking amount of force in a very short fall.

So now it’s a mind game.

Fine. I’ll just wait it out. Eventually my mind will get tired. That’s my secret strategy.

Courthouse Rock

The image on the header of this blog was taken on the saddle of Courthouse Rock in Tonopah, which is about 75 miles west of Phoenix. I was about 600 or 700 feet up on the climb, but 1100 feet from the very bottom of the formation: you climb up about 400 or 500 feet on scree before you get to the bottom of the climb.

The whole thing is surrounded by hundreds of miles of wilderness. One of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been.

The climb itself is quite easy, but the whole thing takes a full day. Start early in the morning, finish after sundown. You carry your water, which means you don’t bring much. Desert climbing always has a “how much water should I bring and how much weight can I save before I risk compromising my performance (and wits) by toying with dehydration” factor built in. I don’t think I’ve ever been so thirsty as I was after this climb. Need to check the photos for dates, but it was summer, and I know the temperatures were well over 100.

I was looking for a new header photo this morning and ran into dozens of climbing pictures on my hard drive. Will start posting some. They’re just amazing to look at — not the people so much as the landscapes…

Re:work

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.

5. reincarnation cycle

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

4. Sahasranama

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.

3. Installation 1

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

2. Songbirds

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

1. the way one picks up a shell on the beach

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.