upcoming book (Th 3/14/24) Society, Information Technology, and the Global University Sept 2008 blog posts video
*Topic: upcoming book (Th 3/14/24) Society, Information Technology, and the Global University
Time: Mar 14, 2024 07:00 AM Pacific Time (US and Canada)
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us04web.zoom.us/j/
Meeting ID: 754 6339 0423
Passcode: 07uK32
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Hair: Harbin as Assemblage, Ashram, Envisioning Anew, and Its Milieu
Harbin is a very virtual place – and I think this has to do with its culture or 'assemblage' in a Foucauldian sense – and this assemblage is both beautiful, unique and a discourse. In many ways, Harbin could have inspired "Hair: The Tribal Love-Rock Musical," except that Harbin is in northern California ~ Hair Poster.
{Eastern} Spirituality at Harbin
Harbin is also an ashram, in a sense. People come to Harbin in a similar way to that which they might spend time in an ashram in India, but this Harbin emerged in the 1970s in northern California with a lot of experimentation and innovation, and was created by a wide variety of hippies. Many of these folks went to India in the 60s and 70s and had spiritual teachers, from the East and West, but mostly with Eastern spiritual names. And around 2005, Harbin built its Temple, a very beautiful structure that harbinizes - harmonizes with and reflects a oneness - with a Harbin 'vision.'
At Harbin, some people are very sincere in their engagement with Indian spiritual traditions, through service, devotion, meditation or self-study, for example. Harbin, while supportive and receptive to these practices, is its own assemblage, with its own practices, which I see as embracing and innovating with some of these spiritual practices. The 1960s and 1970s also drew a lot on an amazingly widespread array of spiritual practices from the East, although Hinduism and India did feature prominently. And a fair number of people at Harbin - residents and guests - have and use spiritual names, for a variety of reasons.
Now, in 2008, people at Harbin are still engaging far-reaching spiritual language, but in a slightly less-widespread way as in the 1970s, I think.
I've seen some beautiful yoga asana (postures) done on the sun deck in the past few days. I think this is a result of the wide-spread growth of yoga beginning in the 1960s and 1970s.
And all of these practices bring practitioners at Harbin closer to a kind of oneness.
Envisioning the Possible
Harbin also shows people a whole new range of possibilities. Coming from outside – the SF Bay Area or northern California - it sort of 'resets' what you might think is possible to the possible again. Harbin is very cool this way. So, if one's been away from Harbin for a while, it reminds you that creative possibilities exist. And if you're completely new to Harbin, it can be very mind-expanding. In a sense, Harbin opens the possibility to envision things anew.
Harbin's Milieu
A day at Harbin tends to take on a life of its own in remarkable ways. People's 'flow' emerges in relation to Harbin's milieu. (Harbin may minimize cell phone use and wireless internet access to shape this possibility.)
- Colin said...
Interesting, Scott.
Obviously all the work would go into specifying and elaborating what care of self might be in this context.
One rather quick thought is this. Care of self for Foucault is expressed in the figure of Socrates, Socrates as a midwife of self-care, a teacher of self-care, and a philosophical provocation to self-care.
So in an open virtual world self-care might take the form of practical engagements between a wise lover of self-care and a beginning student of self-care. Indeed a virtual hot spring, while interesting, would be a rather desolate place were it not a site for some sort of interaction and engagement. I wonder if that resonates with your experience at Harbin? Why travel all the distance to Harbin when you have a hot bath tub and salts in the other room? It must have something to do with, among other things, the social milieu of the place and the forms of self-care that are socially established and extended there. Perhaps?
I have such an enormous baggage of reservations about Socrates from my reactions against a certain philosophical establishment that it's hard for me to know what to think of this. But when I can find the courage to read Foucault as trying to rescue Socrates from a certain interpretation of him that has been leveraged by contemporary professionalized philosophy then this all seems easier.
By the way, on open source the thing to cite is certainly not the preliminary study we did at Berkeley last year but rather Chris Kelt's Two Bits.- September 22, 2008 at 10:37 PM
Your Data Is Diminishing Your Freedom
By David MarchesePhoto illustration by Bráulio Amado
It’s no secret — even if it hasn’t yet been clearly or widely articulated — that our lives and our data are increasingly intertwined, almost indistinguishable. To be able to function in modern society is to submit to demands for ID numbers, for financial information, for filling out digital fields and drop-down boxes with our demographic details. Such submission, in all senses of the word, can push our lives in very particular and often troubling directions. It’s only recently, though, that I’ve seen someone try to work through the deeper implications of what happens when our data — and the formats it’s required to fit — become an inextricable part of our existence, like a new limb or organ to which we must adapt. ‘‘I don’t want to claim we are only data and nothing but data,’’ says Colin Koopman, chairman of the philosophy department at the University of Oregon and the author of ‘‘How We Became Our Data.’’ ‘‘My claim is you are your data, too.’’ Which at the very least means we should be thinking about this transformation beyond the most obvious data-security concerns. ‘‘We’re strikingly lackadaisical,’’ says Koopman, who is working on a follow-up book, tentatively titled ‘‘Data Equals,’’ ‘‘about how much attention we give to: What are these data showing? What assumptions are built into configuring data in a given way? What inequalities are baked into these data systems? We need to be doing more work on this.’’
Can you explain more what it means to say that we have become our data? Because a natural reaction to that might be, well, no, I’m my mind, I’m my body, I’m not numbers in a database — even if I understand that those numbers in that database have real bearing on my life. The claim that we are data can also be taken as a claim that we live our lives through our data in addition to living our lives through our bodies, through our minds, through whatever else. I like to take a historical perspective on this. If you wind the clock back a couple hundred years or go to certain communities, the pushback wouldn’t be, ‘‘I’m my body,’’ the pushback would be, ‘‘I’m my soul.’’ We have these evolving perceptions of our self. I don’t want to deny anybody that, yeah, you are your soul. My claim is that your data has become something that is increasingly inescapable and certainly inescapable in the sense of being obligatory for your average person living out their life. There’s so much of our lives that are woven through or made possible by various data points that we accumulate around ourselves — and that’s interesting and concerning. It now becomes possible to say: ‘‘These data points are essential to who I am. I need to tend to them, and I feel overwhelmed by them. I feel like it’s being manipulated beyond my control.’’ A lot of people have that relationship to their credit score, for example. It’s both very important to them and very mysterious.
When it comes to something like our credit scores, I think most of us can understand on a basic level that, yes, it’s weird and troubling that we don’t have clear ideas about how our personal data is used to generate those scores, and that unease is made worse by the fact that those scores then limit what we can and can’t do. But what does the use of our data in that way in the first place suggest, in the biggest possible sense, about our place in society? The informational sides of ourselves clarify that we are vulnerable. Vulnerable in the sense of being exposed to big, impersonal systems or systemic fluctuations. To draw a parallel: I may have this sense that if I go jogging and take my vitamins and eat healthy, my body’s going to be good. But then there’s this pandemic, and we realize that we’re actually supervulnerable. The control that I have over my body? That’s actually not my control. That was
So with respect to data, we see that structure set up in a way where people have a cleaner view of that vulnerability. We’re in this position of, I’m taking my best guess how to optimize my credit score or, if I own a small business, how to optimize my search-engine ranking. We’re simultaneously loading more and more of our lives into these systems and feeling that we have little to no control or understanding of how these systems work. It creates a big democratic deficit. It undermines our sense of our own ability to engage democratically in some of the basic terms through which we’re living with others in society. A lot of that is not an effect of the technologies themselves. A lot of it is the ways in which our culture tends to want to think of technology, especially information technology, as this glistening, exciting thing, and its importance is premised on its being beyond your comprehension. But I think there’s a lot we can come to terms with concerning, say, a database into which we’ve been loaded. I can be involved in a debate about whether a database should store data on a person’s race. That’s a question we can see ourselves democratically engaging in.
But it’s almost impossible to function in the world without participating in these data systems that we’re told are mandatory. It’s not as if we can just opt out. So what’s the way forward? There’s two basic paths that I see. One is what I’ll call the liberties or freedoms or rights path. Which is a concern with, How are these data systems proscribing my freedoms? It’s something we ought to be attentive to, but it’s easy to lose sight of another question that I take to be as important. This is the question of equality and the implications of these data systems’ being obligatory. Any time something is obligatory, that becomes a terrain for potential inequality. We see this in the case of racial inequality a hundred years ago, where you get profound impacts through things like redlining. Some people were systematically locked out because of these data systems. You see that happening in domain after domain. You get these data systems that load people in, but it’s clear there wasn’t sufficient care taken for the unequal effects of this datafication.
But what do we do about it? We need to realize there’s debate to be had about what equality means and what equality requires. The good news, to the extent that there is, about the evolution of democracy over the 20th century is you get the extension of this basic commitment to equality to more and more domains. Data is one more space where we need that attention to and cultivation of equality. We’ve lost sight of that. We’re still in this wild west, highly unregulated terrain where inequality is just piling up.
I’m still not quite seeing what the alternative is. I mean, we live in an interconnected world of billions of people. So isn’t it necessarily the case that there have to be collection and flows and formatting of personal information that we’re not going to be fully aware of or understand? How could the world operate otherwise? What we need is not strikingly new: Industrialized liberal democracies have a decent track record at putting in place policies, regulations and laws that guide the development and use of highly specialized technologies. Think of all the F.D.A. regulations around the development and delivery of pharmaceuticals. I don’t see anything about data technology that breaks the model of administrative state governance. The problem is basically a tractable one. I also think this is why it’s important to understand that there are two basic components to a data system. There’s the algorithm, and there are the formats, or what computer scientists call the data structures. The algorithms feel pretty intractable. People could go and learn about them or teach themselves to code, but you don’t even have to go to that level of expertise to get inside formatting. There are examples that are pretty clear: You’re signing into some new social-media account or website, and you’ve got to put in personal information about yourself, and there’s a gender drop-down. Does this drop-down say male-female, or does it have a wider range of categories? There’s a lot to think about with respect to a gender drop-down. Should there be some regulations or guidance around use of gender data in K-12 education? Might those regulations look different in higher education? Might they look different in medical settings? That basic regulatory approach is a valuable one, but we’ve run up against the wall of unbridled data acquisition by these huge corporations. They’ve set up this model of, You don’t understand what we do, but trust us that you need us, and we’re going to vacuum up all your data in the process. These companies have really evaded regulation for a while.
Where do you see the most significant personal-data inequalities playing out right now? In the literature on algorithmic bias, there’s a host of examples:
These cases are clear-cut, but the problem is they’re all one-offs. The challenge that we need to meet is how do we develop a broader regulatory framework around this? How do we get a more principled approach so that we’re not playing whack-a-mole with issues of algorithmic bias? The way the mole gets whacked now is that whatever company developed a problematic system just kind of turns it off and then apologizes — taking cues from Mark Zuckerberg and all the infinite ways he’s mucked things up and then All the talk about this now tends to focus on ‘‘algorithmic fairness.’’ The spirit is there, but a focus on algorithms is too narrow, and a focus on fairness is also too narrow. You also have to consider what I would call openness of opportunity.Which means what in this context? To try to illustrate this: You can have a procedurally fair system that does not take into account different opportunities that differently situated individuals coming into the system might have. Think about a mortgage-lending algorithm. Or another example is a court. Different people come in differently situated with different opportunities by virtue of social location, background, history. If you have a system that’s procedurally fair in the sense of, We’re not going to make any of the existing inequalities any worse, that’s not enough. A fuller approach would be reparative with respect to the ongoing reproduction of historical inequalities. Those would be systems that would take into account ways in which people are differently situated and what we can do to create a more equal playing field while maintaining procedural fairness.
but it’s not getting at those deeper problems. I think a lot of this focus on algorithms is coming out of think tanks and research institutes that are funded by or started up by some of these Big Tech corporations. Imagine if the leading research in environmental regulation or energy policy were coming out of think tanks funded by Big Oil? People ought to be like, shouldn’t we be skeptical? It ought to be scandalous. That’s kind of a long, winding answer. But that’s what you get when you talk to a philosophy professor!Opening illustration: Source photograph from Colin Koopman.
This interview has been edited and condensed from two conversations.
David Marchese is a staff writer for the magazine and writes the Talk column. He recently interviewed Emma Chamberlain about leaving YouTube, Walter Mosley about a dumber America and Cal Newport about a new way to work.
More From the Talk Column
David Marchese, a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, interviews celebrities and newsmakers.
Patric Gagne: In her buzzy new memoir about her sociopathy, the author wants to correct some misunderstandings about sociopaths.
Marilynne Robinson: The celebrated writer discusses human freedom, immortality and why she considers President Biden a gift of God.
Charan Ranganath: The neuroscientist and author of the illuminating new book “Why We Remember” explains how to make precious moments last.
John Malkovich: The actor has played a million different parts during his decades-long career, but somehow they’re all defined by the John Malkovich style.
Andreas Malm: The climate activist established himself as a leading thinker of climate radicalism with his book “How to Blow Up a Pipeline.” Here is why he advocates political violence.
Eddie Izzard: The comedian, who has carved out a parallel path as a character actor in TV, cinematic and theatrical dramas, plans to keep running in Britain’s general elections until she makes it into Parliament.
Related Content
Editors’ Picks
ADVERTISEMENT
Site Index
Site Information Navigation
- NYTCo
- Contact Us
- Accessibility
- Work with us
- Advertise
- T Brand Studio
- Your Ad Choices
- Privacy Policy
- Terms of Service
- Terms of Sale
- Site Map
- Canada
- International
- Help
- Subscriptions
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Bird of Paradise: Relaxation Response, Music, 'Flow' in a City
While Harbin also gives rise to "flow: the psychology of optimal experience" experiences in the aggregate, than almost any place I know, Harbin's pools, beauty, easy sense of time and freeing, as well as communal sociality, aren't readily available in a city. So dancing-in-mind, while creating sound patterns - practicing, especially when this information-technology-for-
How might I or we learn how to develop this in a virtual University? And how would a virtual Harbin help facilitate this (for example, building on an extraordinary performance, audio or video recording, of Mozart's "Magic Flute," and also making it interactive in innovative, ongoing ways)?
What is the anthropology of this? And of practicing a musical instrument to elicit far-reaching flow experiences? And vis-a-vis brain research?
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Web: Avatar Agency, A Talking Richard Rorty Bot?
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Harmony: Choral Music, Care of the Self and Harbin
The tenors this late afternoon stood in front of the rest of the chorus singing Brahms' "Gypsy Songs" {Zigeunerlieder}. Tears welled up in me as I heard, for the first time, different sections sing together so exquisitely and finely. As a tenor for the first time {I have sung base-baritone in the past}, I have stood only in the back, and been moved by different sections singing together, but not like standing in front. What voices and singing can do!
I'd like to bring these singing processes together with eliciting loving bliss to create a new form. As I envision this new form, it's a kind of chamber music, choral music, contact improvisation & {HAI} exploration, but I haven't yet seen how this might actually work.
!!!
Here's my reply to Colin:
Colin:
Thanks for your insightful comments on this blog for the September 3, 2008 entry: "Thistle: Foucault's Care of the Self and Harbin Hot Springs." I think that askesis (as training, a development on Foucault's reading of it, already a salutary interpretation) and pedagogy {defined by a fairly well defined set of goals vis-a-vis enjoyment at Harbin} vis-a-vis Foucault is a potentially fruitful way to instantiate it. What language or thinking might best engage Foucault vis-a-vis this? From which of Foucault's texts did aymon's "What is practice?" and "What is a decisive moment" (17 September 2008 labinar with Paul) come from, or were extrapolated from?
Concerning the virtual, here's a brief response of one key, philosophical articulation with Foucault vis-a-vis Deleuze that I'd like to think through:
http://scott-macleod.blogspot.
Vis-a-vis your reading of Foucault and my actual-virtual ethnographic Harbin project, is Socrates responding to an ethos / context in Athens where Socrates' "care of the self" orientations emerge in response to a specific tradition / context / ethos / assemblage (how would an ethnography of Socrates' world read?)? The actual Harbin may be a result of Ishvara and, somehow, "Harbin vis-a-vis the 60 and 70s," thinking since 1972 as well as every other hippie that's come through Harbin's gate, somehow in the aggregate. How might Foucault "parse" this, (or I parse this vis-a-vis Foucault) as he was writing in the context of the intellectual liberations of the 60s and 70s, as well? How might I rigorously and interestingly tease out a Harbin ethos vis-a-vis the 60s and 70s, represented as actual and virtual Harbin, in relation to Foucault? I haven't thought of Harbin as a midwife heretofore.
Harbin's sociality is unique, emerging from the '60s and 70s, in a beautiful, remote valley, where personal freedom is a key part of the ethos, to a significant degree.
I do want to make the relaxation response in a bathtub at home, or anywhere, while visiting virtual Harbin actual (and even Mozartian, somehow), but it will only complement the touch, sociality and proximity aspects of actual Harbin. And travel itself, for me, elicits a kind of bliss, too, different from walking to one's (hypothetically) beautiful bath-room in one's home. And since Ishvara - the founder, who is still around - bought the Harbin property in 1972, Harbin's history has shaped its remarkable milieu, and as a geographically delimited field-site, its history is unique to Harbin as place - one can feel and know it as culture (in a historical sense) pretty directly, if one thinks about it, especially while on property. I think Harbin offers an unique assemblage of 'flow: the psychology of optimal experience' experiences (Csikszentmihalyi), in the aggregate, which I'd like to instantiate virtually, in terms of 'care of the self,' and perhaps vis-a-vis Deleuze.
I was impressed with Chris's writing, when I read "Two Bits'" introduction, and also that readers might edit the text in a variety of ways. To make virtual Harbin editable or not, is another question, vis-a-vis creating virtual Harbin as ethnography, and as a comparable and comparative field site. How to create, complement and add to the beauty that is already at Harbin as place and ethos, which I can see, metaphorically, as a kind of improvisational opera, occurring 'in' Harbin visitors and residents.
So, I'm wondering, vis-a-vis Foucault and Paul, how I might engage the many practices of Harbin - going to the pools {and related 'relaxation response'}, relaxing on the sun deck - with friends or alone, the potential for intimacy, the nakedness, the Watsu {water shiatsu} and waterdance, the unconditional dances, the coming into the moment - the 'present' - and letting things go, the 150-180 residents as key parts of this assemblage with their own unique 'wisdom' and as friends, the films in the theater, the milieu of nature and clean air, the food in the restaurant and market, the musical events, the hippie ('New Age') thinking in liberating and positive senses, the hippie, bohemian ethos, the cleanliness vis-a-vis the pools, the simplicity, the possibility to camp and live outside - as aspects of a specific Harbin assemblage of 'care of the self,' that I might read as askesis and pedagogy, {and/or 'practice' and 'decisive moments' a la aymon}.
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Hive: Harbin, Honey, Warm Water and Culture
If archiving Harbin is partly about understanding how communication works in an arc hive of counterculture, how will I engage this in a virtual world?
A virtual world made with OpenSim Virtual World software (which can be developed independently of having a connection to the Internet; Harbin doesn't have wi-fi for guests) / Second Life - is a kind of archive.
Harbin is an arc(h)-hive ~ making honey. Such metaphors and characterization of communication and language open ways to understand Harbin as an unique social constellation~assemblage.
How is Harbin an archive for a kind of 'living wisdom' of the 1960s and 1970s, that is "Living the Future" {a 1996 pamphlet that Harbin residents wrote and published}? The present and potential for intimacy are central to this experience. Some Harbin residents have thought of Harbin as an ark, too. Harbin has been experimental in a wide variety of ways.
I think part of the honey that's produced has to do with the relaxation response in the pools - a kind of oneness - and in the pool area, as well as the nudity that many people find beneficial. As I see it, this and Harbin emerge from the 1960s and 1970s. And when a kind of Harbin 'Omega-brain' {vis-a-vis the harmonizing effects of omega-3 fatty acids, e.g. 1000 mg flaxseed oil, 3-4 times a day ~ a term I coined just now} - the Harbin experience {as I understand it} is generated - life is sweet.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Melis: Harbin, Culture, Virtuality and Foucault
Metaphorically, how does Harbin Hot Springs produce the "honey" {which may include the relaxation response and qualities of free sociality and creativity there} that it does, - in other words, how does this milieu {assemblage, apparatus?} give rise to the Harbin experience, which is varied and individual - a certain kind of neurophysiology - as part of a concept of mind, or subjectivity?
There are 'interesting minds' there that 'process code' remarkably and multifaceted, in countercultural, hippie and New Age ways, as well. How does this work?
Also, how do the serendipity and synchronicity I see and experience at Harbin work? I don't know the academic literature on anthropology or philosophy of serendipity and synchronicity - aspects of humanness - nor of the 'present?' Thoughts? In what way might Michel Foucault address some of these questions? Also, how would Foucault approach questions of the experience of the 'present' - the now - in terms of history? Perhaps it's the opposite of stultitia and is, instead, an example of what remarkable practices, and 'decisive moments' of 'care of the self' give rise to. How might I examine all of this in Foucauldian terms? In general, these are all questions about how unique 'cultural phenomena,' subjectively experienced, work. Culture can be both very ephemeral, yet very real, through communication and language.
I'm also interested in documenting Harbin - it's a remarkable, unique, social constellation {an instantiation of 'care of the self'?}, both as ethnography and as a virtual world, and both in the present, and since 1972, through observation, talking and writing. In doing so, I'd like to explore how one might generalize ways of being, thinking processes as well as experiences {flow: the psychology of optimal experience' experiences, in the aggregate}, and then generate these in new form, ~ virtually.
In the context of a virtual world, which we might all edit and develop, people, in their creativity, might create new {Harbin-related} experiences (Harbin is experimental, and, as an assemblage, instantiates creative possibility; it's 'real,' and remarkable, when I think about it}. So, in documenting {archiving} it - what a folklorist might do - I'd like to understand it, to open the possibility to instantiate it in new ways, through a kind of generalization process, expressed virtually, that one might experience (might affect subjectivity, in Foucauldian terms).
These are current questions I'm interested in.
2 comments:
- Anonymous said...
Hello Scott - your blog entry came to my attention in a google alert just as I was about to post something about Harbin culture too. It's far too long since I've visited though so I am happy to hear that the air and water there are much the same. My own blog is new too, and I'd be delighted if you'd browse there and leave a comment if you feel so inspired. Ahh, the thought of heading north to Harbin as you were yesterday. I enjoyed Dandelion Seeds also. Here's a link to my posting today: http://www.aquapoetics.com/
2008/10/my-first-visit.html. - October 4, 2008 at 2:35 PM
- Scott MacLeod: said...
Hi Sulis,
Just saw this. Thanks for your comments!
I'll continue to look at your blog through google reader.
Scott- January 11, 2009 at 3:31 PM
Main | Water: the key ingredient in aquatic bodywork »
October 04, 2008
My first visit to Harbin Hot Springs
A single woman camping alone in a clothing-optional community - sure it breaks boundaries! Yet there, amongst apparent strangers, I felt safer and more accepted, acknowledged, recognized than ever before. For the first 24 hours, I wandered around cautiously waiting for the signs of threat, the warnings to retreat - they never came. Meanwhile, something extraordinary was happening to my guarded English heart. I was approaching my fortieth year and ready for something new.
What follows here is an edited and ecstatic extract from my journals after my first visit to Harbin to train in Watsu back in September 1998. It was a significant step in my water quest - one I'd like to share with you to begin this blog about aquatic bodywork and it's essential medium, water. In the ten years since then, there has been much water under the bridge of my life but the memory of magic still remains. The venue itself has become more popular and perhaps more business-like but healing spirits are still it's guardians.
I was there (at the School of Shiatsu and Massage founded at Harbin Hot Springs) to learn an unusual form of water therapy invented on site more than two decades previously by poet turned bodyworker, Harold Dull. Although Watsu (water-based shiatsu) is an effective therapy for physical, mental and emotional pain, this practice appeared to me to be a kind of cultural phenomenon. The ‘water family’ it spawned seemed to be tapping into our species' oceanic origins.
The watery medium and the warmth are a crucial part of this transcendence. Somehow the boundaries between individuals and between people and the immediate environment or larger universe are removed, at least temporarily. Water as cleanser, supporter, protector, eases the transition from separation to connection. In this place I fell in love with all types of people instantly and innocently. For the most part, the sense of safety was validated.
How is it achieved? You learn to hold another, or are held, suspended in spring-fed pools shaded with fig by day, lit by stars at night. Matching breath to breath you follow the free-flowing patterns of movement that arise spontaneously in liquid bodies. And after a while, if you let go of doing, remain present and aware, something magical happens. Perhaps it is this magic that evaporates out of the water and suffuses the air of that place. Perhaps the water itself hold the memory of all that joy.
Stepping out on to land, people are ready to play, eat well, dance, laugh, be creative, be themselves. There is no need to act the purist, radical or fanatic here because ordinary human activities seem somehow washed clean of prejudice. Originating in the primal soup, nurtured in the watery womb, made mostly of liquid substance ourselves, the aquatic experience can be a kind of homecoming. I returned for a 3-month sabbatical the following year and immersed myself in learning aquatic bodywork.
It's been too many years now since I was there; I plan to remedy that soon and write an update here. I'd love to gather here the first experiences of others who went on to train in aquatic bodywork after visiting Harbin Hot Springs. You can write a comment directly below or email me.
Click here for a poem written after that first encounter.
For a fascinating blog including reflections on Harbin counter culture by Scott Macleod, click here.
Image: Warm pool celebration at Harbin.
Posted by Sara Firman (Sulis) on October 04, 2008 in An aquatic practice | Permalink ShareThis
|
* * *
genetics
https://www.desiderata.com/
upcoming book (Th 3/14/24) Society, Info Tech, and the Global University Sept 2008 blog posts video
Virtual #WUaSFieldSites #WUaSresearch
— Scott_GK_MacLeod_WUaS_worlduniversityandschool.org (@scottmacleod) March 14, 2024
"upcoming book (Th 3/14/24) "#SocInfoTechAndGlobalUniv" Sept 2008 blog posts' video" -https://t.co/D30Jp3K7hG - https://t.co/3wp7xi7ZLe re WUaS creation of virtual STEAM #FieldSites in eg #RealisticVirtualHarbin esp- https://t.co/q9ZlK6Hg0A ~ pic.twitter.com/nmg6VWTJRj
upcoming book (Th 3/14/24) "Society, Info Tech, & the Global University" Sept 2008 blog posts' video -https://t.co/D30Jp3KF7e - Sept 2008 blog posts - https://t.co/3wp7xi8xAM - re WUaS creation of virtual STEAM #FieldSites in a #RealisticVirtualEarth esp https://t.co/q9ZlK6HNQ8 ~
— Scott_GK_MacLeod_WUaS_worlduniversityandschool.org (@scottmacleod) March 14, 2024
upcoming book (Th 3/14/24) "Society, Info Tech, & the Global University" Sept 2008 blog posts' video -https://t.co/XKHlv7gEjr - Sept 2008 blog posts - https://t.co/YsZ7dB47Wu - re WUaS creation of virtual STEAM #FieldSites in a #RealisticVirtualEarth esp https://t.co/kGrxCJEI6R ~
— HarbinBook (@HarbinBook) March 14, 2024
*
*
https://species.wikimedia.org/wiki/Viola_incisa
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q4483395
*
.jpg/1600px-Viola_arborescens_(plant).jpg)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Viola_species
https://species.wikimedia.org/wiki/Viola_%28L.%29
...
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.