Ways To Be Well: Volume 19- January
Two yoga sessions ( one soft and one strong) and other (mainly visual) delights for this month........
THINGS I HAVE BEEN LOVING.....
This image.
My instinct is to try and write about what this image speaks to. But the reason it is so arresting as a picture ( and I have been trying to re-find it for months and months) is because its says everything without saying anything at all.
It is January in a nutshell. Have a good look and you will find yourself somewhere in that gloriously elaborate and reassuring root system.
This image has also etched itself onto my mind this month.
On a less than perfect day I swapped the beach for the bush and went on a two hour walk in the company of goanas and the occasional shirtless European. I was in the Kuringai National Park, which lies at the northern most edge of Sydney. A few years ago it was ravaged by bushfires. And everywhere were trees like this one. With all of their new growth, woven onto and around their charred interiors. Which spoke so much of resilience. And healing. And reminded me of those broken Japanese pots that get mended with gold leaf- gold joinery it is called, or ‘kinsungu’ - and are rendered all the more beautiful for their having broken.
And I have loved this podcast with the artist Mary Ramsden.
I have now guttingly missed her most recent solo exhibition but I loved listening to her speak- and I was also captivated too by this video where she shows how she speaks in shape and colour in her work. I can’t stop thinking about how a colour might need to be sadder to make the sense it needs to make. And how that the minute you think about it, you understand what she means. It has had me thinking about the language of colour, and to start to see it everywhere.
And I have loved getting back to the mat in a very earnest way, with joints that have been given reprieve by the warmth.
And so I thought I would create two sessions for you to do the same, depending on how you are feeling. January feels like a time to lay quiet foundations for the year. And those foundations begin in the body. A body that has the capacity for both strength and softness (which of course is very often, on much closer inspection, the same thing). So here is a session for each.