Spring Updates :: Winter Garden Healing Arts
In this newsletter:
Spring greetings & recent history
Discount offer
Report Back: Palestine Legal Benefit
New 45 minute option and revised on-site pricing
Poems by Patrick Pritchett
Spring greetings to you all. It has been a few months since my last note, so I wanted to say hello and check in with a few updates.
I had a busy start to the year, traveling to Chicago to celebrate my mother's birthday, then down to Los Angeles to assist a Visceral Manipulation training (VM2 with Dee Ahern, PT). I had a birthday of my own, followed immediately by another VM training, this one here in San Francisco: Manual Approach to the Brain I, with Kenneth Lossing, DO. This was my first time in the new Brain curriculum, despite some overlap with other courses I've taken. I thought the material was excellent, and I have had opportunities to incorporate some of the techniques already. The Barral Institute tapped me at the last minute to help with filming and facilitating the course—another couple of firsts for me.
I haven't talked about music much in this space, but it actually consumes most of my creative time. I was recently interviewed about an album I released last year, and I thought I'd share the interview with you all. We got into some of my thinking around how music relates to embodiment and healing—always fruitful topics for the newsletter. Read the interview here. I also have a new project coming out shortly, an album of solo soprano saxophone improvisations recorded in Oakland this past winter.
Discount Offer
As the old song says, Spring can really hang you up the most. Whether or not that's true for you, springtime is a great time to tend to the body and allow the earth's cycle of growth to harmonize with your own. Here's a discount code you can use for 10% off any normally priced session between now and the end of April: BLOOM. Treat yourself, and please forward this email to a friend.
Schedule your next session here.
Report Back: Palestine Legal Benefit
In my last newsletter, I announced a benefit for the US-based organization Palestine Legal. While it hasn't been a particularly lucrative year with all these other commitments, I was able to set aside $135 to support their work providing legal support to organizers and affected communities who stand for justice in Palestine. And look! I got a neat postcard from them.
At this point, I am not running another benefit, but I do want to continue to support folks who have a hard time investing in their own self-care in such difficult times. I can apply the value of any donation you make toward Palestine Legal, UNRWA, or Medical Aid for Palestinians, up to the full amount of one full-priced session. Just send me a note with your donation receipt when you make your appointment. I'm setting a soft deadline of the end of April for this offer, but I think we all know that the need will extend far beyond that. Don't be shy about asking again, or sharing this with your community. If you'd like to pay via credit card when you book, send me a note in advance, and I can give you a discount code to use when scheduling.
New 45 minute option and revised on-site pricing
In other logistical odds & ends, I have added a 45 minute option to the menu for in-office appointments. This is intended for return visits only, and is especially encouraged for folks trying to commit to more regular care, but who need a cheaper and/or quicker option. (Note that sliding scale work is also available. Please ask!).
I also revised my on-site pricing for work around San Francisco. Appointments in the city are now a bit more reasonably priced. This is in recognition of the fact that I no longer have an SF office, and I think I priced home visits a bit high initially anyway.
This photo is from a couple months ago at Oyster Bay Regional Shoreline in San Leandro. Pentax LX shooting Ilford HP5 Plus, for the photo nerds.
Poems by Patrick Pritchett
This season's literary offering comes from an anthology I found at the thrift store recently, though it was published in 2012 by Ahsahta Press out of Boise—a press which sadly no longer exists. The volume is called The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral, edited by Joshua Corey and CG Waldrep. It's an expansive and lovely anthology, highlighting a mode of writing that resonates for me. Readers of this newsletter may recall selections by Kamau Brathwaite and Melanie Noel—both poets who also happen to feature in Arcadia.
For this month, I opened at random to the entry for Patrick Pritchett, whose work I have not read before. I found his poems to have a pleasantly meditative ambiguity, with an openness that offers multiple avenues of entry and exit. The fact that some of it reads as almost a manifesto does not diminish the impression, but rather asks that we adapt our expectation of what a manifesto can or should do. It is a situated writing that recognizes both the desperate need for escape, and also the impossibility of arriving unencumbered. Pritchett examines the necessary and inevitable recourse to language in our understanding of the world; its inextricable relationship with forms both evolving and in various states of breakage and decay. Nothing is whole except in relation. Nothing is absent that can be thought. Anything that can be thought can be inflected. Every inflection is a complex truth.
Have a look and let me know what you think.
Forms Of Disappearance
1.
The branch outside the window hangs
in paleolithic winter light.
No lack there
instead a small burning
by which we touch a thing
learning to live with
the shape of desecration.
2.
Or as the given must be made real, over and over again.
Reading it out of dinosaur brain
the fuels to find a form to hold any-
thing slips into foam.
Ur-channel surfing.
3.
The crease of day is stone is sun is grass and gone.
Watergush to entrance. Equals disappearance.
Come down to ground, hold what little space
is given. Sole node and feeling for the limit, grain & seizure.
Ach. Ache. Strophe wanna go downtown.
4.
Reservation for the portrait of what occurs.
The theory of the body hinging on the theory of space.
The center of coal set to motion and quivering as at a great depth.
Who would stand beside and attend to the house of capital and love.
As a song turns in the narrow pivot and tries to break the heart and does.
5.
Growth of the world demands appearance of the word.
Surplus value = mark the disappearance of it.
And say to the end of the street is where what stirs is the smallness of our going.
Houses, cars. Tornadic flame across a field.
Things without recourse to thingness.
The pronouns supplying the most basic requirements for location.
Even the custom of dwelling dwindles.
Thrum of sunset.
Spiked dirt.
Twenty-First Century Ecology
Tree is the word. Green name spreading in the sun & all shining.
We leaf. The sole burning of a line of light along crest of hill and then.
Trough of smoke called daylight. You are standing in a room
that is the sign for wood. Curve of voice above and arch of grass.
The field is what extends the hand.
To come to the edge is here and anywhere. And to crease is to go on
falling. Can the harvest hold its absence? Or the granary of birds
the wind?
Excess seizes form.
In the realm of the road a stream.
The sun is a mouth of blue.
With care,
Wilson