RealityPivots

RAINBOW SPIRELLI PASTA SALAD,

1 lb. Tricolor Spirielli (I used Ancient Harvest Quinoa/Corn Garden Pagoda Pasta) cooked and rinsed with cold water

2 cups Smoked Chicken (optional)

1 cup Sundried Tomatoes, chopped

2 medium Carrots, shredded

1 Red Bell Pepper, chopped

3/4 cup toasted or roasted Hazelnuts, chopped

1 cup Parmesan, shredded

1 1/2 cups Balsamic Dijon Dressing=1 cup olive oil, 1/2 cup balsamic vinegar, 1/4 dijon mustard (or to taste), salt and pepper, blended until emulsified.

Toss all with dressing and serve!

My milonga on Sunday brought 3 leaders and 5 followers to Shedville. Susan brought a GREAT macaroni salad made with a pasta that contains quinoa and was perfectly al dente. Even better she consistently walked to the cross.

From Milong and po…

The next day she took a tango class from Randy and Ernie and finally had a woman’s input on her dancing. When she came for her class here on Thursday we reviewed and returned to the basics — walking. She made a real breakthrough on taking steps by moving her leg from the hips. Much smoother. We actually spent the entire class with me walking forward very slowly with enough time between each step so that she could concentrate on her movements.
I’m getting a lot out of the classes too. In this case I was paying attention to the counter rotation of my shoulders as I moved the opposite shoulder forward as I stepped forward.

My reality is definitely pivoting. Ten years living alone on the property and building sheds must have also been building good karma. It turns out that not only is Lisa a gardener but also a masseuse and she wants to practice a form of massage called Breema. I can now attest to its gentle, rocking, soothing qualities.
In addition she splits wood. She came charging out of her cabin one morning, grabbed my splitting maul and started working. Miss June in next year’s Shed Boy Calendar:

From Lisa splits wood

The garden is spruced up and happy from all the recent rain but it has been unseasonably cool.
I bought 20 double paned windows at a garage sale this weekend that I could use for the bath shed and one pole is stripped of bark and another ready to be worked on.

From Milong and po…

We had our weekly Practica last night, Tuesday, and I got my first chance in more than a month to dance with Randy. It was totally satisfying and yet matter of fact. We’ve become accustomed to the fact that we dance with complete communication and connection. One aspect that is unique for me is that she responds to my accelerations and decelerations in the moment. I can stretch out a phrase by going through it at speed and then play with the final ending in a way that emphasizes the end of one phrase and preparing to pick up the start of the next. Ah, bliss.
We had 26 people at Practica last night. The most in a long time. It was satisfying to feel that big dance space fill up more.
This Sunday I’ll host another edition of Milonga de los Bravos at Shedville.
Student Susan and I went to the First Thursday Milonga at Manresa Castle last week as part of her continuing introduction to the PT tango scene. The good news is that she enjoyed the social element; the bad news is that she forgets everything she has learned when she steps onto a dance floor for real. It was excruciating (and funny — because she has a wicked sense of humor and I could see her rolling her eyes and cringing) to see her step out and immediately lose any idea of how to respond to the lead to the cross. I’m a BIG believer in the importance of muscle memory and I’m racking my brain on how to bring that to the fore in her case and bypass her reliance on thought processes that, I assume, are blocked by stage fright.
My gardener and I went off in her pickup truck, a handy addition to Shedville, and picked up Magic Dirt from a farm in Chimacum. It is very endearing to watch her get all excited about good dirt and improvements in the garden, but it was a trial to drive her truck. I was driving because my insurance covers me as a driver and she doesn’t have the truck covered just her car. She bought the truck new in ‘89 and has the most persnickety attitude about not lugging the engine. Geez, loosen up gal, the thing is 19 years old. Mr. Mellow was strained.
In the ancient tradition of cleaning up the house before the house cleaner arrives so they don’t think you are a slob, I’ve been working steadily in the garden doing the ground breaking work, clearing weeds, to prepare for planting seeds. (Lisa’s busy until the end of June taking a full course of college classes, and working and spending time on a separate course devoted to Focusing.)
She does have time to drop some potatoes in the ground:

From Lisa.garden.shed

From Lisa.garden.shed

I’m adding a new open air shed to the garden area. I prepared by removing a dead Madrona and the Fir it was leaning against a while ago. Now I’ve put up some lumber to sketch in the design and decide on fittedness.

From Garden shed

I didn’t have anything specific in mind when I started the project but now I’m having visions of a high ceilinged space with tomato plants that aren’t ripe in time, hanging and drying out of the rain, and bunches of herbs hanging.
I’m planning a new map of Shedville so I dug out the Plat map and made some fotos to manipulate in construction of a template.

From Tibbals Lake …

Cheers.

My partner in sheds and garden is off house sitting but she sent me an email with these quotes:

Gendlin quote:

“We think we make ourselves good by not allowing the feeling of our negative ways. But that just keeps them static, the same from year to year. What is not felt, remains the same. When it is felt [from Presence], it changes….”

Tao Te Ching
Stephen Mitchell translation

36
If you want to shrink something,
you must first allow it to expand.
If you want to get rid of something,
you must first allow it to flourish.
If you want to take something,
you must first allow it to be given.
This is called the subtle perception
of the way things are.

The soft overcomes the hard.
The slow overcomes the fast.
Let your workings remain a mystery.
Just show people the results.

I am humming in happy resonance.
I wasn’t familiar with Gendlin so I read the Wikipedia entry which starts:

Eugene T. Gendlin is an American philosopher and psychotherapist who has developed ways of thinking about and working with the implicit.
…
Gendlin’s philosophy has led to the development of two practical procedures which can be used by people who know nothing about philosophy.

His Focusing procedure is “a way of teaching people to refer to their felt sense”.

Resonance:
2 a: the intensification and enriching of a musical tone by supplementary vibration;
7: a synchronous gravitational relationship of two celestial bodies (as moons) that orbit a third (as a planet) which can be expressed as a simple ratio of their orbital periods.
Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary

I see on other blogs that people use initials, generic identifiers, and other devices to hide people’s identities. The women of Port Townsend are a pushy, brazen lot. My private student Susan sent me the following comment on my last post — which is two weeks old:

Need an update on my progress. A lot has changed in the last 2 weeks!

And when I asked Lisa about writing about her as a denizen of Shedville, she only asked, “Am I going to be famous?”
When Betty MacDonald came to the area and wrote her book, The Egg and I, she embarrassed some locals. I’ll try to avoid that.
And, conveniently, I have favorable news. Susan has made continuing spectacular improvement marred only by actual dancing. She attended her first Practica last week and I placed her under Gary’s wing for a trial tanda. As I watched, he gently led her to three crosses and she missed every one. I started jumping up and down and waving my arms and yelling, “Cross, cross.” Or, so, at least, I remember.
I’ve been a cruel taskmaster since. We’ve spent weeks now with our primary exercise being to operate with no hands. It does focus the attention. She can now stay connected thusly through the cross and ochos and is close to coping with the Ocho Cortado and Molinete.
It’s been extremely interesting for me. I’ve never practiced that exercise so conscientiously. It’s incredibly effective.
Because I was chatting with a visitor from California and mentioned Tango lessons, I now have another student, though she will just have time for a few lessons before she goes back. I’m quite chuffed by these turns of events.
Part of my recent incommunicadiosity was due to growing Spring undergrowth interfering with my WiFi signal. I discovered this ridiculously easy way to make a boom antenna and it worked amazingly well.

Lisa has finished moving in and is starting to fix up her shed. The Building Dept. is considering reclassifying her domicile as a Cabin, given the domestic characteristics it is taking on.

One evening we took a walk down to the bluff.

From Gentrified su…

Last night we had dinner together (I made lentil soup) and we tangoed together for the first time since some months ago. We danced to three songs and it was very, very nice. She has got a great embrace.

Why would a woman live in a shed?
When Lisa was 11 she discovered Mother Earth News. It had been published for a year and she liked its subject matter so much she got all the back copies.
She likes camping out.
She really, really, wants to have a garden.

I’m in the position of wanting to get the garden ready enough so she can drop the seeds in the ground. I need compost.

It’s very pleasant to look out at night and see a light in the window of Lisa’s cabin.

I moved my stuff out of the Guest Shed.

From Moving out

Luckily the Old Tool Shed renovation was far enough along that I could sling up a storage shelf and squirrel things away.

From Old Tool Shed

Then Lisa started moving in. She was a tango student of mine and was showing great promise but then work and school distracted her. When she visited Shedville some months ago we talked a little about her staying in the Guest Shed. Now she’s here on the Master Gardener Residency Fellowship.
After 10 years of living out here alone it’s time for a change. This could be a an exciting new era in Shedville or it could be a plan to have someone to watch the property while I stay in Buenos Aires for a couple of years.
My private student, Susan, has been visiting Shedville twice a week for tango lessons. At our last lesson she asked how she was supposed to know were I wanted her to move. That gave me pause. Skipped an essential element didn’t you Dave?! My response yesterday was to do away with arms. Susan has focus and concentration but she relies on intelligence. After our initial introduction to close embrace and connection through forward inclination I let her find her own comfort zone as we covered walking to the cross, ochos, ocho cortado, sandwich.
Now it was time to return to connection. Her balance is a little weak.
So, we dispensed with arms, and we concentrated on ochos. I had her reduce the size of her ochos, of her pivots, to the smallest possible extent, so that she was basically walking with just the smallest amount of variation from a straight line as she walked backward. Chest to chest I moved her backward and gave the slightest of chest leads to move her from side to side. Slowly her balance improved as she reduced the Effort she was making. Slowly she felt the signals I was giving her. Finally her legs were connected to her hips and the small rocking movements were slinging her legs back to rest for the next step. Finally I could feel the pressure of my chest being transmitted through her body from chest down the side of her body to her hips and legs and placing her feet on the floor. She could feel it too. That was great.