The wisdom of no escape.

There is a story of a woman running away from tigers. She runs and runs and the tigers are getting closer and closer. When she comes to the edge of a cliff, she sees some vines there, so she climbs down and holds on to the vines. Looking down, she sees that there are tigers below her as well. She then notices that a mouse is gnawing away at the vine to which she is clinging. She also sees a beautiful little bunch of strawberries close to her, growing out of a clump of grass. She looks up and she looks down. She looks at the mouse. Then she just takes a strawberry, puts it in her mouth, and enjoys it thoroughly. Tigers above, tigers below. This is actually the predicament that we are always in, in terms of our birth and death. Each moment is just what it is. It might be the only moment of our life; it might be the only strawberry we’ll ever eat. We could get depressed about it, or we could finally appreciate it and delight in the preciousness of every single moment of our life.
– Pema Chödrön, The Wisdom of No Escape.

Work and Play.

The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

IF- Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you

    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

    But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;

    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

    And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

    And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

    To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

    If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it.

This week.. Some thoughts.

Since the beginning of this year something has been coming up over and over again.

I started this blog back in 2005, at the time it was just a space to save poetry bits which I liked, hence the name “Al gravitar Rodando” which means At the gravitating turning  (you can read the poem over here, though I warn you it’s more than a bit confusing 🙂 ) .

At the time this title seemed perfectly because of the pure confussion and madness going around my life at the time, I wasn’t a jeweler back then, I was stuck in an office job and the blog was kind of a little creative outlet of mine.

Little did I know back then life would take such a spin, I kept writing on an off.. even personal things of my day to day, I look back and I see my transition into a jeweler, how my business began, when I moved to Guatemala, etc.

Why did I stopped writing?

This is perhaphs one of the silliest things you will read today… I met someone who said ” oh .. I liked what you wrote about bla..bla bla..” … to which I was a bit surprised someone in my same city had even read my blog.. then I discovered that everytime I post something it goes into my subscribers inbox.

Woah!

I know… big deal, huh? That’s kind of what you want isn’t it? to be read, found and followed…

Well it did the complete opposite…

I was extremely shy about posting random ramblings and it just kind of stopped, I didn’t want to be Spam.

I also went into a social media rage.. where I got sick of Facebook, discovered instagram (not many words, bingo!) and then  few things started happening.

First I went to a workshop where they asked us to write during the duration of it (2 weeks) our thoughts .. I followed the “Morning pages” routine which asks to write 750 words every morning, this is about 3 pages.

So I do enjoy writing, apparently I am only shy to be read..

Time went by and I got told by a person I truly admired that I have to start writing NOW. This because we do forget details, processes and thoughts.. so it’s important to keep track, I guess that it is also nice to share, how many nights have I spent reading other people..

I get back home and a close friend says, you should write on the plane back home, write everything that comes through your head…

This week was the closing point.

I was sitting down having coffee with my friends and it seems as if everyone had decided to bring this topic up.. they told me the exact same thing..” You have to write, there is a lot going on.. do it!”

We spoke about people understanding you are not a “writer”, if there are mistakes it’s understandable, there is no more pressure than the one you give yourself, really it’s not a big deal and finally this is the only way to improve your writing as well, simply by doing so.

Funnier still is I go out on a date and also have the person sitting in front of me saying ” You should share more, your costumers might be interested in who is behind the work and these stories”

Since last Thursday I’ve been thinking about it and well I do believe in signs… so here goes, it’s pure stubborness, also the ever present insecurity that hunts me sometimes, but here is to another go this time I want to share things that interest me, battling between having a personal or business blog it’s a bit difficult..

But I reckon bits of things I run along the way are more interesting than just posting pieces of my jewelry.. for this I do an almost daily post in my business Instagram.

So to begin I leave you with this ramble, there will probably be a lot of that, I don’t think I have changed in that sense one bit.

Good night and I leave you with a song!

 

 

 

Three things.

In all, there were three things:
the certainty one is always beginning
the certainty one must go further
and the certainty that one will be interrupted before finishing.
From the interruptions, to make a new path,
from falling, a dance step,
from fear, a ladder
from dream, a bridge, from search…the encounter.

On coincidences and Deja vú

I take comfort in the fact that there are two human moments that seem to be doled out equally and democratically within the human condition—and that there is no satisfying ultimate explanation for either. One is coincidence, the other is déja vu. It doesn’t matter if you’re Queen Elizabeth, one of the thirty-three miners rescued in Chile, a South Korean housewife or a migrant herder in Zimbabwe—in the span of 365 days you will pretty much have two déja vus as well as one coincidence that makes you stop and say, “Wow, that was a coincidence.”

The thing about coincidence is that when you imagine the umpteen trillions of coincidences that can happen at any given moment, the fact is, that in practice, coincidences almost never do occur. Coincidences are actually so rare that when they do occur they are, in fact memorable. This suggests to me that the universe is designed to ward off coincidence whenever possible—the universe hates coincidence—I don’t know why—it just seems to be true. So when a coincidence happens, that coincidence had to work awfully hard to escape the system. There’s a message there. What is it? Look. Look harder. Mathematicians perhaps have a theorem for this, and if they do, it might, by default be a theorem for something larger than what they think it is.

What’s both eerie and interesting to me about déja vus is that they occur almost like metronomes throughout our lives, about one every six months, a poetic timekeeping device that, at the very least, reminds us we are alive. I can safely assume that my thirteen year old niece, Stephen Hawking and someone working in a Beijing luggage-making factory each experience two déja vus a year. Not one. Not three. Two.

The underlying biodynamics of déja vus is probably ascribable to some sort of tingling neurons in a certain part of the brain, yet this doesn’t tell us why they exist. They seem to me to be a signal from larger point of view that wants to remind us that our lives are distinct, that they have meaning, and that they occur throughout a span of time. We are important, and what makes us valuable to the universe is our sentience and our curse and blessing of perpetual self-awareness.

Douglas Coupland.

Caught in time.

This is a really spontaneous piece that I am quite fond of..

I was talking to a friend of mine over coffee about “making” and how some times pieces can take months to make sense and become real or the complete opossite.

I’ve lost plenty of hours of sleep thinking if what I did had any sense at all and then working to see how I could make it clearer. In all truth I believe in being honest and making from your gut and heart, the only thing I am certain of is of the comunion between your subconcient and hands.

All my questions are not answered yet and maybe there is no answer to them at all..but I live for the explosive beautiful moments of making, concentration, losing track of time, of truly not thinking at all and just moving your hands,when there is that rush to finish and then holding a finished piece, your idea in a tangible form for the first time.

As for this piece, she simply invites you to look closer.

Happy 2016!

Robert Ebendorf

Robert  Ebendorf is known internationally for his use of unusual materials such as found objects, industrial products, and paper in his work, and his willingness to share his techniques and ideas with students.

He is credited with helping to shape the craft movement since the 1960’s.

I recently found  a transcript of an interview with Robert Ebendorf on 2004 for the American Art, Smithsonian Institution it  is a very inspiring read, to understand his thoughts, you can find it here.

 

You can see more of his work over here