Beauty Mountain

Eoin Finn is a yogi and surfer who’s blissology project encourages a commitment to six aspect for 30 days; yoga, meditation, food awareness, nature appreciation, gratitude and a wild card that changes each week.
I actually found him through his awesome free Blissology yoga podcasts on iTunes. The podcasts offer up a variety of yoga classes, from short & sweet, to a full-on 90 minute, even a great pranamaya breathing session.
Here area few nugget of wisodon from Eoin’s Happiness Map:
You are about to become all you are thinking.
Listen to the intelligence of the body.
Close your eyes often and Feel the vibrations of life.
Feedback from your body will tell you whether you are being present or not.
Celebrate the Animal and the Angel in you.  Love is the Ultimate Renewable Resource.

don’t it? This one is written all over her face :)

Books, films and music have always held the very best magic for me. The first song I ever remember hearing on the radio was Let It Be, late at night on my brother’s old black box. Any one of my family can attest that I was completely obsessed with the movie The Three Lives of Thomasina. I was enchanted by the funeral procession the children held for the cat, Thomasina, though the wee Scottish village, and the beautiful “witch” who resurrected her. I must have seen it dozens of times, at a time when you couldn’t just go out & buy a movie, you had to wait for it to come to the theater or tv. When I was around 10 I read Jane Eyre, and I still feel cold and bereft at the thought of Jane’s friend at the orphanage dying in her arms. And don’t get me started on Grimm’s Fairy Tales. I was (and am) fascinated with them, the real, dark ones, not the Disney-fied versions. They are probably where many of my ideas of right and wrong (and more than a few nightmares) originated.

One of the unexpected bonuses of having a child is that you get to witness all the great books, movies and music with them. When I was just pregnant with my girl, F & I started to read Harry Potter out loud, even nicknaming her Hermoine. Since then I have caught my daughter’s looks of a sort of kindly disdain as I have wept deeply, and with amazing regularity at, for example, House at Pooh Corner, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron , The Secret Garden…..

I’ve stayed away from pop music since I was a kid. My Ipod is a boomer mix of alt-rock-country-indie-folk-afro-cuban-world :) music. But I am loving the morning blend H & I listen to on the way to school, performed by some righteous women. So, at her age I was listening to These Boots Are Made For Walking,Love Child, Lay Down (Candles In The Rain), We get our groove on, loud, then I leave her with the daily reminder to “shine your light, girl”.
(to listen, hit the pop-out player button)

http://www.musiclist.us/mc/mp3player_new.swf

Wish-listing this print by beauchamping who quotes Kerouac in his shop’s announcement, “”the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’ ~ Kerouac”. All prints are created using a xylene transfer process. It’s like a screenprint, but without the screen, and the artwork is hand-transferred inch by inch over a long hour.

The way of love is not a subtle argument.
The door there is devastation.
Birds make great sky-circles of their freedom.
How do they learn it?
They fall, and falling, they’re given wings. Rumi

Guillermo Del Toro makes the most beautifully morbid monsters. This video from a recent New Yorker article shows the exquisite sketchbooks where his creatures originate. I loved (and was horrified by) Pan’s Labyrinth.
(From wikipedia), In 2009, in an interview with Charlie Rose, del Toro described his Roman Catholic upbringing as excessively “morbid,” saying “I mercifully lapsed as a Catholic, I say, but as Buñuel used to say, “I’m an atheist, thank God.” Though insisting he’s spiritually “not with Buñuel” and that “once a Catholic, always a Catholic, in a way,” he followed by saying, “I believe in man. I believe in mankind, as the worst and the best that has happened to this world.”

Do you know the poetry of Joy Harjo? Her words make me want to climb inside and live for a while, however difficult.

She had some horses.

She had horses who were bodies of sand.
She had horses who were maps drawn of blood.
She had horses who were skins of ocean water.
She had horses who were the blue air of the sky.
She had horses who were fur and teeth.
She had horses who were clay and would break.
She had horses who were splintered red cliff.

Isn’t she gorgeous? Elizabeth “Bunny” Johns is one of the five women I profiled for WNC Magazine recently. Check out the article that this post came from in theSeptember issue of the excellent WNC Magazine,The River Maidens, Ride the waves with WNC’s leading female kayakers featuring just five of the many river goddesses of the region. Like the Naiades of ancient Greece, fresh water spirits who presided over the rivers and streams, western North Carolina has its own version of river goddesses. You might spy these fresh water mermaids by the plastic form attached to their torsos, helmets and padded armor worn across their chests, or see them floating and playing in the waves of some of the country’s best whitewater.

Bunny Johns is something of the grande dame of paddling in WNC. Originally from Atlanta, GA, she was part of the early Bryson City paddling community, first coming to the area as a camp counselor at Camp Merrie-Woode in Sapphire, NC, a valid outdoor camp for girls, in the early 1960s. In fact, that was her introduction to paddling. She taught swimming at camp, and her students, in turn, taught her to paddle the lake in a canoe. She quickly turned her attention to canoeing, graduating from paddling lakes to whitewater, at that time section 3 of the Chattooga River. Eventually, as she became part of the early community of Nantahala Outdoor Center she took the plunge and moved full-time to Bryson City, working as a manager in the kayak school. “At that time, the philosophy was, everybody did everything; clean rooms, kayak and raft guide, cook. After I burned the trout the got me out of the kitchen.” As a group of serious paddlers, she began racing Open Boat Canoeing at the national level. In 1981, she and Mike Hipsher earned the Gold Medal in “a perfect run” at the 1981 Wildwater Championships at Bala, Wales. She became president (after serving as VP for years) of NOC from 1991-2000. She was on the Olympic Committee, working to bring the Summer Olymics to Atlanta in 1996, even serving as an Olympic official. Bunny has PhD in Plant Physiology from NC State University, and worked as a Research Associate at NCSU while obtaining the degree. Today she runs BunRab Enterprises, primarily working with Duke Energy to rebalance its use of resources. “I do what you need me to do, that I can do,” she says. She also serves on the boards of The Rotary Club of Bryson City (as president), WCQS, West Care Health System and Harris Regional Hospital, and MedWest Health System. She also works with the Little Tennessee Land Trust, helping to conserve the landscape of the upper Little Tennessee and Hiwassee River valleys by protecting private lands from inappropriate development.

“Paddling takes me to wonderful places, beautiful places. It demands that I be totally there. It’s a most fascinating thing for an active mind. To allow me to just focus on the river, how can I play in this moment?”

Favorite river and why?

I don’t have a favorite river, but if I had to choose… I’d choose two. The Chattooga and the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. The Chattooga because it is protected, a beautiful place where you can see ospreys dive.

Favorite moment on the river.

So many! I think it was running Overflow Creek on the Chattooga with several buddies, who talked me into running the waterfall. I thought I could never do that, but found that, yes, I can.

Favorite music

Classical. Specifically the William Tell or the 1812 Overtures.

Food

Indian. I make it at least once a week

Restaurant

Thirteen Moons Restaurant at Nantahala Village

Any hobbies?

Civic involvement, hiking with my dog, and, well, I still paddle.

Insider’s tip to WNC

It’s only for serious hikers, but Bypass Gorge on the Tuckasegee River

Hero

Ramon Eaton, who was vice-president of the American Red Cross when I was in college. I met his daughter when I was a counselor at Camp Merrie-Woode. He taught me so much of lasting value. From the great experience he brought to everything he did with the American Red Cross. But mainly he was just my good friend.

Philosophy

Service above self.

Future Plans, Big Dreams

I want to stay local. To do what I can within my community to be of service. Spend time with my dog. Take advantage of work opportunities that come up. Continue to be part of the Boards of the health organizations that to provide health services that are needed by the community.