An Onomastician at Work

A trip to Australia is always good for stirring up a little thinking differently for someone from the northern hemisphere.  Wonderful that birds sing (and sometimes schreech!) in new ways; that plants have unpredictable blooms (though roses seem to be roses); and that my sense of season is mildly challenged as I fly home in clothes a little too warm for Sydney.

A while ago, Aase Beaulieu put the term onomastics on Facebook.  I didn’t know what it was and needed to look it up.  One of its definitions is:

“the science or study of the origins and forms of words especially as used in a specialized field”.

I seem to do that a lot—I make up words—and the origin is the need to describe something specialized—because the word I need to describe something just doesn’t exist.  Lately I have been playing with different ways to convey the notion that observation when teaching the Alexander Technique is a multi-sensory event rather than a visual event.  I haven’t quite settled on a word—omniservation?  Receiving an omnisensory message?  Living in an omniverse? 

And perhaps the change in wording, or the search for wording, accomplishes something similar to traveling to a different world—for a moment, it turns an idea other way round so that you can see it anew.

The text above is from an interview with Marjorie Barstow for the Lincoln, Nebraska Oral History Project in 1980.  My theatre company was developing a play based on the oral history project and I was lucky to be able to have access to this transcript.  Reading it again was a renewal renews me as I get ready to fly to Melbour

Once a year, a small group of people and I explore the Alexander Technique at the Friday Harbor Laboratories in the San Juan Islands off the coast of the State of Washington.  Nature is one of our teachers in this simple setting.

Registration is open for this workshop.  There is just one space left in the August 23-28 part of the workshop; more spaces available in the extension.  Full information is available on the website page by clicking on the picture. Once the workshop fills, I will begin a waiting list.

National Invasive Species Awareness Week

The University of Georgia announced this “Awareness Week” on my Facebook  page today and I smiled, remembering the Odum School of Ecology invasive species potluck dinner during which I found out that kudzu can be quite tasty.  As I took a lunchtime foray outdoors to tackle my own backyard invasive species (ivy), it occurred to me that once-thought-to-be-useful thoughts/movements/behaviors that we have outgrown could be called our own invasive species.  And the process we call the Alexander Technique constructively weeds and cultivates, weeds and cultivates as we recover and discover our nature.