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About Me
My name is Thom Waymouth and this is my blog. I am 31 years old. I consider wherever I am to be my home.
I am a dancer, a hat manipulator, a Sphere player, a poi and staff spinner, a juggler, an acro-balancer, a chess, poker and other strategy game enthusiast, a knife thrower, a singer, and a poet.
I teach flow arts, ( poi, staff, sphere, hoop), as a meditation and show people that they can do anything.
I love cooking, eating delectable foods especially sushi, climbing trees, reading, singing in the shower, playing guitar, making art with my friends, crocheting, pushing my boundaries, and learning new things.
I cultivate playfulness in myself and others!
I also am one of the producers of an extraordinary fusion festival ~ FlowStorm -
I relish meeting intriguing new people, especially you!
Blogs I follow:
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More Delectable art made for some of my nearest and dearest…
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Day 3 ~ Tutorial Tuesday ~ Wesley Thoricatha teaches us some sweet meteor technique!
Booya! -
My friend Fiona and I make beautiful art from acorns tiny seashells and berries…
Today was so rich! My extremely fabulous friend Fiona and I created a golden spiral out of golden spirals and surrounded it with all kinds of other natural treasures we found to make some truly delectable art… Go us!
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Flow365: Day 1
This is my new blog. One video a day for a year. An exercise in cultivating presence and bliss in the moment… I hope you’ll tag along…
Whew! This is going to be challenging! My first day and the video camera my awesome friend Tarapin gave me went all squirrely. Thanx to my dear friend Jody I borrowed another but then experience technical difficulties on the internet end.
Finally Victory Woohoo!
This is Flow365. A video every day for a year. A mergence of east and west. A video meditation to cultivate presence and bliss. I hope you enjoy it ~
Thanx to my superb friend Tori Watson for the hilarious animation at the end. -
Where have all the rubbish bins gone?? At Honolulu’s Eat The Street (a food truck rally), they’ve swapped out trash cans for little composting/recycling tents placed strategically around the fair grounds :D Rather brilliant, if you ask me. I love seeing people take these steps towards restoring our balance and relationship with nature and learning how to reduce/manage/recycle our own waste is a great place to start. I totally appreciate how Eat The Street is forcing their fair goers to at least place a little more thought into their rubbish.. and I hope *fingers-crossed* to see more of these compost tents showing up at other events around town. Then maybe.. just maybe we -Hawaii- will finally catch up to the top notch recycling systems I’ve already seen implemented in countless other countries.
Hey.. I have I hopes :)
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"We’re gonna live like we are telling the best story in the whole world… Are you ready?"
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Object Manipulation Can Save the Earth
I wrote this in November 2009
How is it that we humans sit firmly entrenched in the pilot seat of the spaceship we call Earth? We have reached a state of existence unseen before now, where many of us lack the need to invest energy towards survival. What happened in the past to bring us to the level of evolutionary competence that we currently enjoy?
Let us briefly explore human evolution. What series of circumstances led us to grow from a species of chimp-like apes into a race of upright astronaut philosophers with aspirations to godhood? We lacked superior brains at the start. For quite a while our ancestors “broke bread” with the ancestors of today’s chimpanzees. The brains of us and them were relatively the same size. What seems to have substantially accelerated it was a drastic change to the body: our adoption of a permanently upright posture. We are the only primates who do this. The remainder of our primate kin are all ingrained knuckle-draggers.
Why did this happen? What benefit did this change afford us that we sacrificed our low center, our speed and our agility? The answer is: freedom of hand movement. We have specialized finger dexterity which gives us the ability to use tools, (manipulate objects), with focused precision. In addition we are the only primates besides gibbons, (the acrobatically gifted swingin’ kings of the jungle canopy), who have adapted shoulders for pivoting our arms up past our heads, (Represent Poi Swinga’s!). When we started walking only on two legs, we started making tools. Once we started making tools we then strove to make better and better tools. The advancement of our tools improved at an arc parallel with the remarkable growth of our brains. The maps/programs in our brains that control the aptitude with which we manipulate the different shapes, weights, sizes, textures, etc.. of our environment became broader and more specialized. This specialization was usually directly related to the activities we do the most.
At first we must have specialized in things directly related to our survival; weapon making, fire construction, hide-skinning, etc.. Even so, the earliest known cave paintings date to over 32,000 years ago, so it is clear that we have been anatomically driven towards Play for a long long time. In the rich countries of the world today, survival rarely comes into the picture. Our specialized object use has diversified and we partake in all kinds of activities from scuba diving and driving a car, to miniature model building and computer programming. I think that perhaps we should be wary of over-specializing in certain areas while leaving other valuable simplistic skills to be forgotten in their incubation chambers. I believe it is important to get back to the basics. The brain and the body were made for each other. If as a species we were to institute cultural rituals that encouraged all to consciously cultivate every part of their bodies we would be setting up future generations for evolutionary progress. Some of these already exist, for instance; martial arts. Although because of the media and many people’s inclination to violence, they fail to be completely ideal. On the other hand, in their raw forms, dance and object manipulation are, in my opinion, perfect. Our environment is home to a myriad of different shape families of matter. If you become adroit in your manipulation of your body and any matter you may encounter then you are, in effect, becoming better at life in general. This type of play when done ritually will make you better at whatever it is you do.
One of our greatest boons as a species is our amazing brain plasticity. Those who use chopsticks frequently have a more intricate brain map in regards to that tool, which allows them to manipulate those two little sticks with a competence unmatched by those who rarely use them. It has been proven now that humans can learn new skills at any age, (shedding some inspiring light on outdated thinking like “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”) People who go blind later in life often use a cane to get around safely. At first, (because of their lack of experience with this object), they stumble into things and the cane may even seem to be more of a hindrance than a help. If they give up then and there, they make this a truth, but if they continue to use it, many find that their perception changes. The fact that they are sensing shapes and vibrations through their arm and their hand fades from their consciousness and their sensory awareness extends literally to the tip of the cane! Their perceptual experience becomes located at the tip of a “lifeless” object! What this means is that with continued play or practice, we as humans have the ability to become one with an object as far as our brain maps are concerned.
If you look at the brain space used to control different parts of your body, hands require the biggest plot of brain reality in humans. This is because they are the most used parts of our body. Perhaps if a significant number of us were to start using primarily our feet for most activities, over the course of many generations, we would evolve to have four intricately adept limbs. I have personally noticed a speedy translation of aptitude from one object to another. I sphere-played a lot with the elbow stall and then found that I was almost instantly able to balance my cane in that spot as well. Soon after, I really started to incorporate elbow powered motions into my hat play in pleasing ways. Now, (after playing with the elbows in many different ways with different objects), I feel that I have a higher level of general control with them. Perhaps the area of my brain which controls them has increased in size ( I hope to get hooked up to a fancy brain machine in the near future and get to the bottom of this! ;)
Beyond our ability to learn new skills lies our ability to condense that information. As a professional chess player I noticed one skill that was the most influential in separating good players from great players. This was namely the ability to see the bigger picture. To visualize the greater scope of the board with the speed of instant recognition. This skill also translates to being able to visualize longer and longer strings of moves with that same speed, ( As a result most Grandmaster can typically see over 10 moves into the future in any given position whereas your average player may see 3 moves in advance.) I see this basically as space conservation of your brain reality and you can achieve it as a side effect of continually pushing your mental imagery further and further. This skill is not exclusive to the mental realm. Ask any object manipulators, spinners, and jugglers about the way their skills blossomed and I am certain you will hear similar stories. In Sphereplay, (contact juggling), for instance, when you first learn the roll over the top of the hand; At first you will drop, (learning from failure), it is a little shaky, and it most often takes the effort of conscious thought and focused energy. Then eventually you come to a day when you realize that you can do it without consciously thinking about it. It has become an inveterate ability which requires only a tiny modicum of invested energy.
…To go further down the rabbit hole, one must then visualize the next “logical” step and then once they have solidified the “muscle memory” of that step, they can unite the two moves into one fluid motion with double the ascetic scope,(and so on). The true innovators will have a wider scope of what they perceive to be the next “logical” step and will hone the ability to quickly prune away dead branches, (stagnant variations), in an expeditious manner.
This world is a place with rules that are parasites to our perceptions. Rules that continue to redefine themselves. Those of us who’s beliefs are rigid are begging the parasites of our mind’s to eat us. “The world is flat.”, “Children should be seen and not heard.”, “That race of person is a lesser being.”… These are all statements that, at one point in time, a plethora of people believed to be true. When the shrouds of perception and judgment have been lifted, the properties of whatever we encounter become clear. We humans are the honey bees of this planet. Each fleck of pollen has a different shape, color, and texture. It is up to us to turn that pollen into honey. This broken broom handle I found in the dumpster is smooth on one end and pointy on the other ~~ my tomatoes have flourished since I supported them with it. Object manipulation is adaptation to the properties of matter, (physical matter or subject matter). It nourishes in us the ability to see the inherent ascetic beauty and practical strengths of things. By strengthening your ability to manipulate matter in different forms you elevate the future usefulness of whatever you encounter, be it living or inert. When the methods of it are applied to problem solving and creative thinking we witness innovation. When the methods of it are applied to the way we treat people, our relationships become mutually uplifting.
Some want exclusivity. They want you to be content to watch things happen rather than experience the vibrations and epiphanies of doing them yourself. I believe that those of us who settle for comfort, convenient truths, and selfish passing pleasures are the dodo birds of today. Those of us who continue to climb the thought ladder and push ourselves further into the vast universe our imaginations are trendsetting interplanetary explorers blazing the evolutionary trails! So my friends, let’s get back to the simple truths. Let each of us abolish our personal cages of perception and open ourselves to unbiased acceptance and creative communion. Together we can produce so much beauty the sun itself will be blinded by the brightness of it. Grab the favorite toy of your passion be it poi, a ukulele, or an idea you had for a great quiche and play! My favorite toy is a sphere which we call the Earth and matter manipulation can save it!~
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Spinners Occupy Chicago
My first foray into the I Movie preview maker. Silliness Galore, woohoo!
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The coolest prop I have ever been given. A beautiful dream come true thanx to Dai Zaobab. Wow! I am floored!
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This made my day! Haha!
FIRST WEEKLY VIDEO:
HOW TO COOK BEEF STROGANOFF AND FIGHT OFF A NINJA
made with Josh Greenfield and Casey Donahue.
* Special thanks to the legendary Vic Armstrong for teaching me how to make stuff like this without getting killed!
If you like this video, please consider sharing it
tolkienshield
