Yoghurt Practice
Balanced on the blades of my shoulders, with my kneecaps seeking to level with my ears, it occurred to me that in spite of my years and gray beard, I remain highly suggestible.
In my youth, I was sought out by missionaries, magicians and pathological liars because I was such a manifest mark. My credulity knew no bounds. People had merely to say, “I think you should do this,” and I was out the door, doing that and telling people all about it. I said, “Wow…” a lot in those days. A pitiful thing.
Lately, I’ve been going to yoghurt practice twice a week. I don’t go because of job stress: job stress is the only thing that holds civilization together, in my opinion. If I didn’t have job stress to keep me steady, my shoes would be off in a flash and I’d be out moonstomping with the coyotes and the hoot owls. No, I go to practice because if I don’t, my tendons turn into beef jerky and I begin to move like the Tin Man of Oz after a spring rain.
Heidi, my yoghurt teacher, has the Inflection. She says, press down on the palms of your hands and lift your legs off of the ground….and I will do this and tie myself into imponderable knots. Remarkable gift. I don’t think I credit anything she says about physiology or spirituality, but this seems to have no bearing on my willingness to do whatever she says. I’m very glad she’s not in politics. (Though we’d probably be much better off if she were.)
Suggestibility is very important in little a art. One needs to be able to connect the dots and put the little l line where it belongs. Of course, the argument needs to be properly framed.
Tom Hull recently said something about how we who follow the path of curve folding tend to rely on tools and/or templates (too true) and then gives an interesting example of how one can estimate a circle, using a cone. Being highly suggestible, I’ve done something similar here with a simple masu. Using the octagon you get from a frog base, you make a crease that shows where the big R radius of the inner square is. You then use that mark to visualize a little box and make a circle arc going from one bottom corner to the other, touching the top of the box at its midpoint. As you go around the masu, making these curves, the sides of the masu become cylindrical. The more accurate your circle arcs become, the more manifest the cylinder. Masu with Groin Vault Crease Pattern Try it out.
And if you’re still looking for fun, you might try this one, which has a pendentive dome for a bottom and squinch edges. Pendentive Masu Crease Pattern (Pendentive is Latin for hangy-down-thing and squinch is just fun to say.) Same principle and it will support many times its own weight in beer. I got the idea from Heidi explaining about alternatively compressing and stretching the lower spine. You have to think about something when you have your kneecaps by your ears for two minutes. It’s not like you can sing to pass the time.
