Wrote a lengthy entry this morning, and then lost it due to some silly stuff with forgetting my WordPress skills, and copy-paste protocols.  Not sure I have time to write it again, now. Ugh.

First things first. Last night was the school auction.  Good food, good company, and a genuinely nice time.  The silent auction came first, where my Adirondack Chair and my pen-mandala of Langston Hughes’ “The Dream Keeper” were both up for sale.  “The Dream Keeper” sold for $175.  That’s about half of last year’s painting price, which is unexpectedly low, but still gives me a sense of what is possible with drawing vs. painting, even though (for me) both art forms take about the same amount of time.

The Adirondack Chair sold for $100. That’s disappointing.  The thing was far more hours to build and to learn to build than it took to craft the “Dream Keepers”, really. And it was offered at a value of $475 — but a new Adirondack chair of slightly lower-quality wood can be had for $200, and plastic one for under $50. So it’s normal that it didn’t go for much money, I guess. People wanted a bargain. Tai chi today was good. I did about 30 minutes, plus or minus 5 minutes, of tai chi practice. IT felt good, and got some of the kinks out of my system. I had a longer entry, as I said, and then lost it due to copy-paste issues (and accidentally posted yesterday’s entry twice in the process).

In essence, I was really pleased with the “moving through water” efforts of today’s working-through of the forms.  The breathwork was good, too.  There was more, of course, but that’s what stands out to me.

Disrupt and Repair has an article up, on the “Evolution Aesthetic“, which I was planning on touching on today.  It’s nice read, because he’s touching on one of Greer’s key themes (for me), which is “Apocalypse Not.” I’m having an ongoing discussion with my lady about my concerns with the current trajectory of the American experience, and the ongoing decline of industrial society.   She thinks I’m being despairing; and I think I’m being realistic about the choices being made and the directions those choices are leading us culturally and economically.

But I appreciate that here’s a rather different voice, crying in the wilderness, about the kinds of directions we can take.  It’s part of the reason I appreciate the ways in which being a design teacher is giving me permission to be a Maker, as well; and part of the reason why I appreciate that my tai chi practice is in part about keeping me healthy within the context of an overall health plan with access to medical professionals.   His metaphor of becoming a weed or parasite is an apt one — while it may be uncomfortable to think of one’s identity as a weed or parasite, in truth they’re well adapted to survival even when complex systems around them are collapsing.  And it’s frequently from weeds, in ecological succession patterns, that the new order and the new system emerge.

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