Conceptual Proposal for “Dear Mother Nature” Hudson Valley Artists 2012 curated by Linda Weintraub Samuel Dorsky Museum, SUNY, New Paltz

There had to be a spot that contained magic, power, a place of such presence that all your senses start tingling, where you feel high, as if suddenly the volume has been turned up, inside you, outside you, everywhere.

-Mickey Hart

Curator, Linda Weintraub, of the 2012 Hudson Valley Artists exhibition at the Dorsky Museum, SUNY, New Paltz, invited artists to send a gift, to Dear Mother Nature expressing their relationship to and feelings about nature. My gift, an idea from 2010 sketched out in my notebook, is an earth healing treatment that utilizes techniques from Jin Shin Jyutsu, an ancient healing art developed to balance the body’s invisible energy system. JSJ uses the right and left polarity of hands on the body, to “jumper-cable” and direct energy flows into distinct pathways to unify and integrate the body.

The Main Central Vertical Flow in JSJ begins in the spine at the coccyx and moves up through the solar plexus, heart, throat, middle of eyebrows, to the crown. Using the Hudson River as a metaphor for the human spine, my earth healing treatment acupunctures the land in 12 separate locations, along the east and west sides of the river, aligning and balancing across these energy centers.

Coccyx = Stony Point/Peekskill

Solar Plexus = Newburgh/Beacon

Heart = New Paltz/Poughkeepsie

Throat = Kingston/Rhinebeck

Middle Eye= Catskill/Hudson

Crown = Albany/Troy

Drawing on the principle of batteries, copper rods wrapped with iron wire will be inserted into corresponding earth “chakras” representing the spine along the river.

The invisible network generated by human-made energy channels co-creates not only metaphor, but an actual physical and etheric connection to the planet.