Tag Archives: art

Going In

Embodied Poesis

Improv dance by BlissNinja /Charleen Johnston

Music by Human Experience/Kat Factor/Katya Rose

🔥Going In🔥

“When we dance, we wake up, we get down and juicy with ourselves, we have fun and forget all the heavy shit we carry around. In the dance we get real, get free, get over ourselves. Movement kicks ass. When you truly surrender to your own rhythm, you look so cool, so mysterious, so seductive— the way you deep down really want to look but don’t trust that you do.”

Gabrielle Roth, Connections: The Threads of Intuitive Wisdom

To live as an artist

Allow your judgements their own silent, undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be forced or hastened. Everything is gestation and then birthing. To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion, entirely in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one’s own understanding, and with deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born: this alone is what it means to live as an artist: in understanding as in creating. 

Rainer Maria Rilke. Letters to a Young Poet. Trans. Stephen Mitchell. NY: Modern Library, 2001, p.23-4

Bond of Breath

Photo by me/Charleen Johnston. Models Reese Miller & Drea Bleu Good-Brown
A counterBalance ...perhaps....
When the chasm beckons
And the perilous chapel 
Seeks it's reckoning 
Thru maladies and maniacal 
Mishaps
That overlap Present & Past Times
That threaten to Bind
Tight
The blind spots with tangled knots
In games of Daimonic power
Buried
In unfolding fractal flowers
Of 'Sight 
   Or
     Blind DeLight '
As the shattered Tower 
Falls
 And Offers its gift 

A suture to bridge the rift

Shall i Fly from this precipice
Or fall to my Death
As the urge to transcend
The Bond of Breath

Charleen Johnston
9-30-21

So this is for us….

… so this is for us.
This is for us who sing, write, dance, act, study, run and love
and this is for doing it even if no one will ever know
because the beauty is in the act of doing it.
Not what it can lead to.
This is for the times I lose myself while writing, singing, playing
and no one is around and they will never know
but I will forever remember
and that shines brighter than any praise or fame or glory I will ever have,
and this is for you who write or play or read or sing
by yourself with the light off and door closed
when the world is asleep and the stars are aligned
and maybe no one will ever hear it
or read your words
or know your thoughts
but it doesn’t make it less glorious.
It makes it ethereal. Mysterious.
Infinite.
For it belongs to you and whatever God or spirit you believe in
and only you can decide how much it meant
and means
and will forever mean
and other people will experience it too
through you.
Through your spirit. Through the way you talk.
Through the way you walk and love and laugh and care
and I never meant to write this long
but what I want to say is:
Don’t try to present your art by making other people read or hear or see or touch it; make them feel it. Wear your art like your heart on your sleeve and keep it alive by making people feel a little better. Feel a little lighter. Create art in order for yourself to become yourself
and let your very existence be your song, your poem, your story.
Let your very identity be your book.
Let the way people say your name sound like the sweetest melody.

So go create. Take photographs in the wood, run alone in the rain and sing your heart out high up on a mountain
where no one will ever hear
and your very existence will be the most hypnotising scar.
Make your life be your art
and you will never be forgotten.”

― Charlotte Eriksson