The salvation of this human world
The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and human responsibility. ~Vaclav Havel
Stay Close to Those Sounds
A quotation:
The sun turns a key in a lock each day
As soon as it crawls out of bed.
Light swings open a door
And the many kinds of love rush out
Onto the infinite green field.Your soul sometimes plays a note
Against the Sky’s ear that excites
The birds and planets.Stay close to any sounds
That make you glad you are alive.Everything in this world is
Helplessly reeling.An invisible wake was created
When God said to His beautiful dead lover,
“Be.”Hafiz, who will understand you
If you do not explain that last line?Well then,
I will sing it this way,
When God said to illusion,
“Be.”from The gift: poems by the great Sufi Master, by Hafiz and Daniel James Ladinsky
And some sulky lady sounds:
Americanas
Thanks to the stories on NPR this morning, I want to read this book:
Tom Piazza – Author – New Orleans, LA.
And I also want to see Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess again.
Yes, We Can Can!
My new favorite place to work and wine at night is Can Can! They have wi-fi and the industrious staff lets me linger.
Charmed, I’m Sure
I think also discovering the kind of man Oscar Wilde was, was an enormous influence [on me] as well. The fact that you could be such a towering intellect, such a lord of language and be charming and graceful, kind, good natured…
Perhaps the greatest definition I think of character and quality is people who when they’re truly great rather than making you feel that tall they make you feel that tall, that they’re greatness as it were improves you. They used to say of Oscar Wilde that when you got done from a dinner table you felt funnier and wittier and cleverer. Now a lot of Brilliant people make you feel less funny, less clever, less witty because they’re so clever, witty and funny, but he had the opposite effect. A bit like what Shakespeare said about Falstaff, not just a wit, but a cause of wit in others.
- Stephen Fry, in an interview on Big Think.
In Praise of Complexity
Illustration of Oscar Wilde by Aubrey Beardsley.
Only the shallow know themselves.
- Oscar Wilde
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the self-concept. Historically, I have been a champion of self-awareness and I believe that learning about oneself is one of the most important steps to professional and personal success. But it’s true that there is a limited return on investment from this endeavor. Is the self truly something we can intellectually possess or come to predict?
I stumbled upon this quotation from Oscar Wilde while browsing this morning. Growing up, my mother always used to call me “her little complexity,” and I was frequently cajoled for overthinking or overcomplicating. Complexity was a source of shame for me, a trait that alienated me from others. It wasn’t until the last year or so that I have learned to really value the complications in myself and others, and even to celebrate them.
Self Searching
Am I here, or am I there? Or is the true self neither this nor that, neither here nor there, but something so varied and wandering that it is only when we give the rein to its wishes and let it take its way unimpeded that we are indeed ourselves? - Virginia Woolf
In the past month, I’ve been going to a weekly seminar held by Landmark Education, the creator of the weekend-long intensive development programs such as The Landmark Forum. The program explores the concepts of who we think we are, as in, what we conceive of as our “Self;” and the role our life experiences and neurological composition have in creating this “Self.” The seminar proposes that our self-concept is actually more malleable than we believe it to be, and that our internal dialogue can actually limit us by creating a self-fulfilling feedback loop.
I am a strong believer in the edict “Know Thyself.” I also occasionally go through phases of subjecting everyone in my life to the newest personality profiling or temperament testing just for kicks. The idea that who we believe ourselves to be is changeable, or even adaptable, was hard for me to swallow initially. The more I sit with the thought, however, the more liberating it becomes. Our “self,” if there is a true “self,” may dance somewhere in between our inherent temperaments and our own self-concept, but the idea that we have just the slightest bit of power of who we are in this world is a sweet one.
Watermelon Pie for Breakfast
We stayed a night in Grover, North Carolina at a bed and breakfast called The Inn of the Patriots. In the morning, Amanda, who was dressed in wilted colonial garb, served us watermelon pies for breakfast. More on the eccentricities of our stay to follow.
leave a comment