#lifemoments
When was the last time you took your shoes off and felt grass beneath your feet?
For me, as a double, bi lateral amputee, feeling the grass between my toes is a beautiful but sadly very distant memory.
I guess there is a lot of merit in the saying ‘ you don’t know what you’ve got until its gone’, if I’d known I would one day be the recipient of an action of violent extremism, that as a result I would lose my legs and feet I certainly would have appreciated every single moment. I would be mindful of every thoughtless and thoughtful movement. I would have walked barefoot; in the grass, on the sand, deliberately seeking out the places and spaces where I could ‘connect’.
What this significant and permanent loss has offered me is a heightened appreciation for all that the Human body is and can do! I am in absolute awe of our body. In awe of our ability to grow and to heal, to fight illness, become supreme athletes, create new life and indeed live for over 100 years!
This appreciation for our collective wonder is present across all of my creative works, it is how I start my design process, asking two crucial questions…
‘how does this make me/you feel ?
does the work ‘touch’ or ‘speak’ to the soul of the viewer?
Introducing Grass as a physical curated element to our recent Adelaide Fringe performance, Still Alive and Kicking was intended to extend the ability for the audiences to ‘feel’. The visual sensory wrapping of high specification LED screens within The Lab, Adelaide, is an extraordinary and compelling ‘canvas’ to show original art, however coming back to the two questions I ask in my staging / curatorial brief, I wanted to add more opportunity to deeply interact with the content of the performance. Removing your shoes, revealing your feet in public is, for many, a very vulnerable action. Raw, real, bare….but importantly able to feel and take time for the ‘self’ whilst being part of a collective audience was my ambition.
Connecting to earth or ‘ground’ turns out to be more beneficial to our health than I imagined. Placing the conductive human body to the Earth's natural and subtle surface electric charge, influences the basic bioelectrical function of the body. Doing so surprisingly stabilizes the physiology, reduces inflammation, pain, and stress, improves sleep, blood flow, and lymphatic/venous return to the heart, and produces greater well-being.
So, I hope you find your space and time to connect to nature, to be conscious of the ground beneath your feet and to appreciate all that you have and all that is possible, that you are the author, the creator of your Life Moments!
xGill
Here’s more on ‘Grounding’ from Dr Arianne Missimer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ne74nsRQVTg Dr Arianne Missimer