For audio meditations, please go here
Fiona Middleton
Concentration; a mineral gathering
Monique McCrystal and Deja Redman
Harmony (with the whole)
Naoco Wowsugi
The Sound of Zeroth
Riane Tyler
Your Deepest Ocean Meditation
Lily Cox-Richard and Michael Jevon Demps, Library of Radical Returns
Dowsing Bodies
Tifani Kendrick
Breath-Centered Meditation to Connect with Creation
GM Keaton
Points of Contact: Learning to Float
Sara Smith
When humans dive, are we marine mammals?
Five considerations as we breathe.
Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo Ovalles
Meditation for Divers
Rachel Hilton
Air and Water
Brad Fox
Spectral Melt
FOREST-BODY-CHAIR at Mildred's Lane
Julia O. Bianco, Rachel Schmoker, Sara Smith
Acknowledgments of the Honorable Guest
Gina Siepel, Ainsley Steeves, Samiha Tasnim, Lotte Kliros Walworth
I Have Questions
Ruby Waldo
Untitled
FOREST-BODY-CHAIR is a project of RAY (the collaborative team of Gina Siepel and Sara Smith), using wooden chairs as an occasion to explore entwined ecological, embodied, and social questions connected to their construction and use. A three-week workshop version of FOREST-BODY-CHAIR at Mildred’s Lane in July 2021 brought together participant-fellows and guest artists for conversation and experimentation across somatic, greenwood construction, and fieldwork practices. Meditation Ocean was introduced into the session, allowing for additional associations to be made between forests and oceans, as well as contemplation of breath as an environmental process and metaphor. Participants were invited to develop meditation scripts collaboratively or on their own.
You’ve been frozen in Antarctic ice for a year
living without sunlight
eating seal meat and penguin steaks
You watched someone die from effects of darkness
saw their body dropped through a hole in the ice
Then it all defrosted
And now you’re back in familiar waters
It’s warmer
And there’s fresh food above
The sun rises in the morning and sets at night
And even the ocean has a bottom
You sink through carnelian red
xanthine orange
invisible green
into livid purple
dark diva violet
and methyl blue
finally luminous blue-black
and then black
a black that opens and swallows opens and swallows
even blacker than before
so dark it darkens darkness
From somewhere within
a ray of receptivity
ignites and begins to circle counterclockwise
a watchtower beam sweeps through fluid
internal and external
past and future
quickening until it blurs
a field of absorption
soon stabilizing
in all directions
a spreading sphere with no center
Remove the light source
and the illumination remains
soft and constant in all directions
Tune to the room tone
Amplifications internal and external
Languages of clicks and lacks
And beneath sound and light
appears something so fine and delicate
a tissue of such subtlety
so transparent
barely sensible
wavering oil against oil
a sheen just this side of nothing at all
And tending to that, fed by that
turn to the water, inside and out
past and future
dissolution and union
centered in non-place
an emergent incident
and notice the surprising coherence of the body
its receptivity and vitality
feel yourself as the ocean feels you
your mind a fishbowl clear and soft
Brad Fox
Spectral Melt