Blogs

Use this space to post thoughts, questions or reactions from the workshop.

Eco Walk (parody of Macklemore’s Thrift Shop ft Ryan Lewis)
By Zoe Holman and Claire Johnson with special thanks to Roux

We’re gonna grab some leaves
Throw them up in the a-air
I-I-I’m searching looking for a meaning
We are eco walkers

I wrote my third memo about the ways in which our art projects connected back to the socially conscious thinking we'd been doing before going into the prison.

My last site-sit post of the semester...

Brain very busy with multiple thought trains. A dark, drizzly December afternoon. 

And when the brain-thoughts get a bit quieter, I melt into the haze, silvery-gray, ripples, drizzles, damp, subdued, non-verbal, non-analytical. Just being. Not figuring out what to say about it. observing. ducks swimming this way, each with v-shaped wake in the still water, then swimming back the other way. not seeming to have a particular purpose. 

There were seagulls today, which I haven't seen at the pond for quite a while. The Canada geese were all up eating on the grass towards the middle of campus.

The other title I thought of for this post: from Shakespeare: 

...or in the heart or in the head?

(tell me, where is fancy bred? Is this Shakespeare?)

Feeling like I think with my whole body, not just with my brain. I like to think with my whole body, not just my brain. Do I sound insane?

(Yes, Shakespeare: Merchant of Venice.)

These are ecological questions...

Then, the seagulls started a bit of screeching-- not too loud-- and one of them flew up and circled, full circle, around above the pond. I got into watching the wingbeats. A drummer I know once told me he always studies birds' wingbeats, as a lesson in grace and in rhythm. The other seagulls flew up too, and watching the rhythm of all those wingbeats at once made me feel quite stoned: another way of entering an altered state, a natural high!

Just being.

Eco Walk (parody of Macklemore’s Thrift Shop ft Ryan Lewis)

By Zoe Holman and Claire Johnson with special thanks to Roux

We’re gonna grab some leaves

Throw them up in the a-air

I-I-I’m searching looking for a meaning

We are eco walkers

Walk into the forest like what up I see some big trees

Little rabbits scampering around and I see some cool bees

Water on the leaves, man it’s so shiny

All the nature ‘round us seems so damn tiny

Walkin’ in, shoes all laced, headin’ to the wilderness

Dressed IN warm clothes, ‘cept my naked head, that’s a mess

Damn it’s so beautiful, deer standing next to me

Caught a quick glimpse of it, saw it go right by a tree

…

But shit, it’s just the way of life!

Walking in, wanderin’, cannot stop the wonderin’

Saw an old campsite someone else been bummin’ in

So why don’t we just stay the night?

I hope there are no bears in sight

We’re getting lost, falling down, can’t find my way back home

We don’t even got a map, we don’t even got a map

No for real—we’re hella lost—can we get a map out here?

So these are the lessons, we learned here:

From developing our own personal ideas

To sitting alone outside, and writing alone outside

Learned to write English good, learned to speak English good

Hello, hello, my Anne man, my teacher

Solnit, ain’t got nothin’ on our lost game, hell no

The non-human roles (green cards):

a squirrel from Elizabeth's site-sit

a baboon from the troop observed by Barbara Smuts

Max, Peter Singer's dog in "The Lives of Animals"

a Pachysandra plant in Morris Woods

a piece of Wissahickon Schist, now part of a Bryn Mawr College building

The human roles (orange cards):

Winona LaDuke

Henry David Thoreau

Peter Singer

David Bohm

Terry Tempest Williams

The blue cards looked something like this:

Each group included a red, a green, and a blue cardholder. The non-human character got to speak first.

I did not get a full record of who was in each group, but here are some of the memorable moments:

A baboon fell into the river and was in difficulties. The author in the group (Peter Singer) preferred to wax poetic than to rescue the baboon. The class member playing herself pointed out that the baboon could not appreciate poetry.

Squirrel: Elizabeth is an intruder in my house: Attack!

class member: do you not like humans?

David Bohm: intruding my house Elizabth is

Max the dog: I have worth but YOU do not get to decide what that worth is.

Thoreau: Learn to live on your own, dog. Undomesticate yourself. Then you will learn your true worth.

So I just finished reading an article about the slow food movement for my Italian culture class and I came across this: 

Se, come dice il poeta contadino Wendell Berry, “mangiare è un atto agricolo”, produrre il cibo deve essere considerato un “atto gastronomico”.

This is when Berry was talking about eating as an "agricultural act." It seems that many cultures have really embraced his views on ecological justice. 

Memo #3 Image

Borrowed from: http://whatshappeningswfl.wordpress.com/2012/04/24/an-evening-under-the-sea-april-27/

This paper explores how no true reform can come from within the prison system, or any insitution, unless we...

ABOLISH it!

Here it is! Thank you all for participating in the reconstituted poem exercise we did together. Phrases from the peom were taken from Walt Whitmans Song of Myself in his larger collection entitled Leaves of Grass. I encourage all of you to keep reading more Walt Whitman! I know two minutes definitely wasn't enough time to get to know the poems I handed out, but they are definitely worth spending some time with. Thank you to everyone for your amazing presentations as well! It was a wonderful semester and I look forward to having classes with all of you over the next for years. 

Every Atom belonging to me as good as belongs to you… and every atom of my blood formed from this oil, this air

Houses and rooms are full of perfumes the shelves are full of perfumes I breath the fragrance myself and know it and like it

I know that the hand of god is the promise of my own and the spirit of Fod is brother of my own

The smallest sprout shows there is really no death all goes onward and outward, nothing collapses

If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle they are nothing

This is the meal equally set, this is the meal for natural hunger, it is for the wicked just the same as the righteous, I will make appointments with all, I will not have a single person slighted or left away

I laugh at what you call dissolution and I know the amplitude of time