Autumn Updates :: Winter Garden Healing Arts
In this newsletter:
Anniversary Special — Buy One Gift One Free
Poems by Kamau Brathwaite
I hope you are having a peaceful autumn (or second summer, as the case may be). For those of you new to my practice, I send these newsletters out on a roughly seasonal basis, with news about my practice, some literary or artistic offering, and, occasionally, a nice offer. Spoiler alert: this one includes a nice offer... read on for details!
My summer was mostly low key here around town. I was glad to have an opportunity in August to assist with a four day Visceral Manipulation training in Los Angeles. I will be back down in February to assist the next level in the series. Teaching assistant work has been a good way to reinforce my own skill, and to challenge myself to be more specific and sensitive with my technique, more accurate and helpful with my explanations.
Anniversary Special — Buy One Gift One Free
This month marks one year since I made the move to Oakland from Los Angeles. I'm grateful for the warm welcome I've received, and have enjoyed getting to know many new people over the past year. To mark the occasion, I am celebrating with an anniversary offer. From now until the end of October, I am offering a free gift treatment for every regular session purchased. The only catch is that you have to gift it. So treat yourself to your own session, and you will receive a certificate that a friend or loved one can redeem for their own session. Or, if you can't make it in yourself, you can gift them both, and be twice as nice.
Visit this page to purchase a half-priced gift certificate for any two Bay Area sessions. This certificate can be used for your own session, and forwarded along to be used for your gifted session.
If you are currently seeing me on a sliding scale arrangement, please reply to this email and I will give you a discount code to use when buying your gift certificate.
The above photo is from a few months ago near the Dimond District in Oakland.
Poems by Kamau Brathwaite
This month's literary offering comes from the Barbadian poet, theorist, and scholar Kamau Brathwaite, from his 2010 collection Elegguas. The selections I've chosen are from a series of vignettes entitled mesongs, which largely treat themes of grief and remembrance. These are poems that invoke, that celebrate, that dance with and through the memory of lost friends, loves, comrades. Poems that inhabit the fleeting threshold between worlds of living and dead, that investigate the act of remembrance itself. Brathwaite seeks out this crossroads, and returns to it again and again, haunting his dead across the page as they haunt him across the veil, with language that is permeable, too, to the effects of decay, of slippage, of uncertainty, of human frailty. Language that is experimental, yet unashamed to embrace small comforts: a familiar gesture, an alliteration or rhyme. Syntactical flourishes that catch one off guard with their elegant simplicity. Yet Brathwaite is all too aware that this embrace is itself uncertain — that what seems solid and knowable one moment may be nothing more than a wavering echo the next.
Brathwaite also designed his own typography, a peculiar set of pixelated fonts he called Sycorax, which were used in many of his published works, including Elegguas. I am using a stock font below, as I don't have access to Brathwaite's fonts, but I encourage folks to seek out his books (as well as his recitations) for the full effect of his wide ranging creativity.
III
The dancer dance to death
but we only know the dancing
the strings the joints the places
to be oiled the rust after the last
performance are denied to us
we only know the dancing
VI
Even your letters
though they
attempting to be living
shatter the glass
the spent fragments
mirror the cracked colossus
the attempted life
even your letters
the sent silver
the brittle breaking present
glimpses & glimmers your love
the constellations
VII
There are no murmurs in the mind
talk. like the poles. is fixed
a voice made visible
and a thousand situations spin
into the complexity of simpleness
there is no movement in the fire
a silence glows like music in the lyre
XVIII
To burn to blaze to lose the sense of time
to flower like the flame into simplicity
to be the moment when the razor hurts
the carnival balloons big til they burst
XXII
Day at Devizes (2)
How green the air is
wrapped in wind shawls
how moth the cool is
how infant the sky is
blue egg along white wall
how cool the height is
how star the breeze is
twinkled with wood bird calls
how born the spring is
XXIII
for Barbara on The Backs at Cambridge before i meet her
Stranger who reeds
goldenly her gold book
under her gold hair
in weaving the web
of the day's equil-
ibrium's complete-
ly involved in the still
of her sitting's x-
citement
you feel her balance(d)
against you
whose moving away
is like falling through
sitting the sitter x-
pected was there
XXIV
for Barbara at Devizes
And suddenly you was talking trees
fall black with birds behind the hill
and green as grass fly off
into the sun o blinding girl
the whole cathedral crash at your back
With care,
Wilson