Article: Breathing is Meaning

In an analysis of the physical components necessary for sound production – power source, oscillator, resonator – breath occupies the most active place in human vocal production: it is the energy impulse that excites the vibration in the vocal folds and the resulting resonance in the body – starting, continuing, and stopping it. Because of the living and therefore infinitely changeable quality of the particular actions and structures that are responsible for this sound vibration, the way in which the human body breathes impacts the voice a great deal, much as the hands of a good pianist and a beginner create different sounds with the same instrument. Breathing, then, makes an essential difference in quality of vocal production. By quality I refer not only to timbre, but to the entire range of use of the voice.

Voice is an action. It has no location in the body except when it is in action, sounding. The essential physical structures – diaphragm, intercostal, abdominal and back muscles; larynx; articulators; body form and cavities – are in themselves virtually mute until with a particular use of the breath and vocal folds they all inter-relate as power source, oscillator, and resonator to create sound. It is for optimal functioning of the breath energy, as power source, that I have searched.

From Riley Dog

Happy New Year.

We are poised on the edge of the millennium – ruin behind us, no map before us, the taste of fear sharp on our tongues.

Yet we will leap.

The exercise of imagining is an act of creation.

The act of creation is an exercise of will.

All this is political. And possible.

Bread. A Clean Sky. Active peace. A woman’s voice singing somewhere, melody drifting like smoke from the cookfires. The army disbanded, the harvest abundant. The wound healed, the child wanted, the prisoner freed, the body’s integrity honored, the lover returned. The magical skill that reads marks into meaning. The labor equal, fair, and valued. Delight in the challenge for consensus to solve problems. No hand raised in any gesture but greeting. Secure interiors – of heart, home, land, – so firm as to make secure borders irrelevant at last. And everywhere laughter, care, celebration, dancing, contentment. A humble, early paradise, in the now.

We will make it real, make it our own, make policy, history, peace, make it available, make mischief, a difference, love, the connection, the miracle, ready.

Believe it.

We are the women who will transform the world.

From: A Woman’s Creed Written by Robin Morgan, in collaboration with Perdita Huston, Sunetra Puri, Mahnaz Afkhami, Diane Faulkner, Corrine Kumar, Simla Wali, and Paola Melchiori, at the 1994 Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO) Global Strategies Meeting.

Entropy Gradient Reversals – Faster Horses!

Sigh

Consulting. Man, what a racket. Why didn’t I figure this out years ago? But I almost feel unclean for doing it. I almost feel guilty. Not for taking their money. That’s just manifest destiny. No, sometimes I feel terrible because I think maybe I really am helping these clueless fuckers to rape the rest of us. Giving them some empty-headed motivational excuse to weld all that avarice into an effective weapon that will make us all salivate for spiffier software or snappier net connections or the latest breakfast cereal breakthrough.

But what have I done, really? Tell them that people are confused and lonely, stranded in their lives, burned out and breaking under the strain of an insane commercial culture run utterly amok? This is news?
It’s what I don’t tell them that let’s me sleep at night. Which is that even terminal confusion is a thousand times better than spiritual enslavement, and that I am beginning to see people — some people anyway — waking up from the long bad Night of the Undead Advertisers. No matter how slick the shtick, they wouldn’t buy any of this crap if their lives depended on it, which of course they do not.

The Seven Points of Mind Training

This website contains a database of commentaries on the Seven Points of Mind Training. The core practice involves taking on others’ sorrow and pain and sending them your joy; not as a masochistic practice but with the aim of getting away from the self-centeredness and self-seeking that cause us so much pain. These practices were brought to Tibet in the eleventh century by the Indian Buddhist teacher Atisha.

The Seven Points consist of 57 proverbs divided by subject into seven sections. This site contains commentaries by five teachers. Access commentaries by clicking on the name of one of the sections, then clicking on the initial of the teacher to the left of the proverb. You can compare the commentary of another teacher on the same proverb by clicking on his or her initial at the top of the commentary.

William son of Mungo and Catherine Anne (Munro) Dand

My mother’s family online. This photo is my maternal maternal great grandmother and great grandfather,