“Live in the sunshine
Swim in the sea
Drink the wild air.”-Ralph Waldo Emerson
The sumptuous fullness of August is a womb of comfort. Every morsel of forest and of lakes and of mountains and of oceans have come into fruition. The sky is big and bountiful. Rains have come.
There is sweetness in this ripe completion.
We have only to absorb it all.
“The ship is safest when it is in port, but that’s not what ships were built for.”
-Paulo Coelho
“And the ship plays on those sonorous harps, the shrouds and masts of ships”.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“A great ship asks deep waters.”
-George Herbert
Know that you sail the seas of life
as the master of your own ship.– Jonathan Lockwood Huie
“On a ship, knowing when to be silent is just as important as knowing when to speak.”
-J. Z. Colby
Oh yes, a luxuriant cleansing forest bath. A total immersion into the very soul and heart of the experience of being in and with the forest. A pleasing, rejuvenating, captivating, engaging absorption of Life and of communion.
There is a Japanese practice called shinrin-yoku that in translation means “forest bathing”. In this practice participants are asked to fully engage with nature using all five senses. The only mission is to be with the forest in a mindful and focused way with your sight, taste, hearing, touch and smell.
Not only is the experience pleasing and stress reducing there are other reported health benefits.
From the article “This Japanese Practice Could Transform Your Day” by Nicole Frehsee (Huffington Post):
“A study conducted across 24 forests in Japan found that when people strolled in a wooded area, their levels of the stress hormone cortisol plummeted almost 16 percent more than when they walked in an urban environment. And the effects were quickly apparent: Subjects’ blood pressure showed improvement after about 15 minutes of the practice. But one of the biggest benefits may come from breathing in chemicals called phytoncides, emitted by trees and plants. Women who logged two to four hours in a forest on two consecutive days saw a nearly 40 percent surge in the activity of cancer-fighting white blood cells, according to one study. “Phytoncide exposure reduces stress hormones, indirectly increasing the immune system’s ability to kill tumor cells,” says Tokyo-based researcher Qing Li, MD, PhD, who has studied shinrin-yoku. Even if you don’t live near a forest, studies suggest that just looking at green space — say, the trees outside your office window — helps reduce muscle tension and blood pressure.”
Find your forest and go inside, your senses alert and your mind open. Focus on the experience itself. Feel it. Absorb it. Enjoy the cleanse and the rejuvenation from your forest bath.
“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.”
-William Blake
“What if you wake up some day, and you’re 65 or 75, and you never got your memoir or novel written; or you didn’t go swimming in warm pools and oceans all those years because your thighs were jiggly and you had a nice big comfortable tummy; or you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life, of imagination and radical silliness and staring off into space like when you were a kid? It’s going to break your heart. Don’t let this happen.”
-Anne Lamott
“And love is smiling through all things.”
-Terrence Malick, The Tree of Life
“It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men’s hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of air that emanation from old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit.”
-Robert Louis Stevenson
“There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it.”
-Martin Luther
This article from The Lewicki Agency’s website (http://thelewickiagency.com/uppercase-art-and-lowercase-art/) has the words to help explain the muse and the need for expression that I have passion for. I love bringing those expressions to fruition here on Sweet Breathing’s blog/website. It is purely personal. It may never be read or seen. It’s simply what I have in my be-ing that day as I connect inside and outside with the world – especially nature’s world.
My expressions in photography and words are not Art (although the quotes that I often pair with my offerings from the masters that speak to me about these wonders often are). My photos and words are certainly not “Fine” nor the “Uppercase Art” this article discusses. But they are indeed “lowercase art” in the very way this article describes.
This blog truly is an honest and raw dialogue, in pictures and words, about my world, my life, and my experience – my constant thread to wonder. It IS freeing, creative and often does (as the author writes) “reveal another dimension of my understanding.”
lowercase art.
Yes, it explains it pretty well. Thanks Andrea.
from Andrea Lewicki:
“There’s a difference between Art and what I call ‘lowercase art.’
Both are forms of creative expression.
Both are dialogues about our world, our lives, our experience.
Uppercase Art is fine art. It’s created in awareness of a particular domain of expression.
Uppercase Art has lineage.
The most important distinction of Uppercase Art is that its dialogue includes an external audience. Uppercase Art has a life outside the artist.
Lowercase art is created more in the insulated awareness of an individual’s life. It has a certain wild individuality. Lowercase art is an internal dialogue, within the artist. It’s personal, deeply individual. You invent the rules, the traditions, the standards.
You create and take apart and recreate all within the privacy of your own experience.
Both Uppercase Art and lowercase art are about creating meaning. Both can be inventive and radically new. In both Uppercase Art and lowercase art, you learn to improvise through obstacles, solve the unique problems that arise from your inventions, and reveal another dimension of your understanding.
But lowercase art is primarily for you. It’s your creative playground. What starts in lowercase art sometimes ends in Uppercase Art, but it doesn’t have to. Lowercase art can be messy and incomplete and still make perfect sense to you.
When you create lowercase art, you create your own creative shorthand.
Lowercase art is liberating, an activity of pure freedom, safe from external judgement.
It’s yours. It’s where you can be most freely you. There’s courage and connection here.
Lowercase art is good for your overall wellbeing.”
“Inspiration isn’t delivered on a silver platter to an idle or distracted muse. Inspiration is received by open eyes, open mind, & open heart.”
-Andrea Lewicki
“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”
-Albert Einstein
“You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you’ll discover will be wonderful. What you’ll discover is yourself.”
-Alan Alda
“The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless, and hot. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much color. Often at night there is lightning, but it quivers all alone.”
Natalie Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting
Ah Mountains! Providing peace, sustenance, beauty and strength.
They bring a felt sense for me that is very powerful and deeply comforting. I am embraced and absorbed by them. Completely.
The mountains truly and always are a balm for the soul and provide a cleansing for the spirit. I do so love living amongst these sentinels of abiding serenity and power.
“We are now in the mountains and they are in us, kindling enthusiasm, making every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell of us.”
-John Muir
“Keep close to Nature’s heart…and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.”
-John Muir
“The mountains were his masters. They rimmed in life. They were the cup of reality, beyond growth, beyond struggle and death. They were his absolute unity in the midst of eternal change.”
-Thomas Wolfe
“The greatest gift of life on the mountain is time. Time to think or not think, read or not read, scribble or not scribble — to sleep and cook and walk in the woods, to sit and stare at the shapes of the hills. I produce nothing but words; I consume nothing but food, a little propane, a little firewood. By being utterly useless in the calculations of the culture at large I become useful, at last, to myself.”
-Philip Connors
“The mountains are calling and I must go.”
-John Muir
“Mountains seem to answer an increasing imaginative need in the West. More and more people are discovering a desire for them, and a powerful solace in them. At bottom, mountains, like all wildernesses, challenge our complacent conviction – so easy to lapse into – that the world has been made for humans by humans. Most of us exist for most of the time in worlds which are humanly arranged, themed and controlled. One forgets that there are environments which do not respond to the flick of a switch or the twist of a dial, and which have their own rhythms and orders of existence. Mountains correct this amnesia. By speaking of greater forces than we can possibly invoke, and by confronting us with greater spans of time than we can possibly envisage, mountains refute our excessive trust in the man-made. They pose profound questions about our durability and the importance of our schemes. They induce, I suppose, a modesty in us.”
-Robert Macfarlane
“Mountains are not Stadiums where I satisfy my ambition to achieve, they are the cathedrals where I practice my religion.”
-Anatoli Boukreev
“Emerald slopes became so tall they touched the clouds, and showers painted diamond waterfalls that sluiced down cliff sides.”
-Victoria Kahler
“The mountain has left me feeling renewed, more content and positive than I’ve been for weeks, as if something has been given back after a long absence, as if my eyes have opened once again. For this time at least, I’ve let myself be rooted in the unshakable sanity of the senses, spared my mind the burden of too much thinking, turned myself outward to experience the world and inward to savor the pleasures it has given me.”
-Richard Nelson
