The Meaning of It All

“The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance.” - Alan Watts

As found on Brain Pickings

What a Calling is Not

FEAR

Do Not Despise Your Inner World

"Do not despise your inner world. That is the first and most general piece of advice I would offer… Our society is very outward-looking, very taken up with the latest new object, the latest piece of gossip, the latest opportunity for self-assertion and status. But we all begin our lives as helpless babies, dependent on others for comfort, food, and survival itself. And even though we develop a degree of mastery and independence, we always remain alarmingly weak and incomplete, dependent on others and on an uncertain world for whatever we are able to achieve. As we grow, we all develop a wide range of emotions responding to this predicament: fear that bad things will happen and that we will be powerless to ward them off; love for those who help and support us; grief when a loved one is lost; hope for good things in the future; anger when someone else damages something we care about. Our emotional life maps our incompleteness: A creature without any needs would never have reasons for fear, or grief, or hope, or anger. But for that very reason we are often ashamed of our emotions, and of the relations of need and dependency bound up with them. Perhaps males, in our society, are especially likely to be ashamed of being incomplete and dependent, because a dominant image of masculinity tells them that they should be self-sufficient and dominant. So people flee from their inner world of feeling, and from articulate mastery of their own emotional experiences. The current psychological literature on the life of boys in America indicates that a large proportion of boys are quite unable to talk about how they feel and how others feel — because they have learned to be ashamed of feelings and needs, and to push them underground. But that means that they don’t know how to deal with their own emotions, or to communicate them to others. When they are frightened, they don’t know how to say it, or even to become fully aware of it. Often they turn their own fear into aggression. Often, too, this lack of a rich inner life catapults them into depression in later life. We are all going to encounter illness, loss, and aging, and we’re not well prepared for these inevitable events by a culture that directs us to think of externals only, and to measure ourselves in terms of our possessions of externals.

What is the remedy of these ills? A kind of self-love that does not shrink from the needy and incomplete parts of the self, but accepts those with interest and curiosity, and tries to develop a language with which to talk about needs and feelings. Storytelling plays a big role in the process of development. As we tell stories about the lives of others, we learn how to imagine what another creature might feel in response to various events. At the same time, we identify with the other creature and learn something about ourselves. As we grow older, we encounter more and more complex stories — in literature, film, visual art, music — that give us a richer and more subtle grasp of human emotions and of our own inner world. So my second piece of advice, closely related to the first, is: Read a lot of stories, listen to a lot of music, and think about what the stories you encounter mean for your own life and lives of those you love. In that way, you will not be alone with an empty self; you will have a newly rich life with yourself, and enhanced possibilities of real communication with others. - Martha Nussbaum"

https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/10/12/martha-nussbaum-take-my-advice/

Copley Symphony Hall

I Sing the Body Electric

Martha Graham

It's Not Where You Start

“It’s not where you start, it’s where you finish,

  Nobody starts a winner, give me a slow beginner,”

   - Song by Barbara Cook, Songwriters Dorothy Fields/Arthur Schwartz

What You Fear to Lose

The Different Pawed

 In this world of the simple and odd,

The bent and the plain, 

the unbalanced bod,

The imperfect people and differently pawed, 

some live without love... 

That's how they're flawed.

 - Berkeley Breathed

Taste All Wines

“You can only know a good wine if you have first tasted a bad one.”

― Paulo Coelho

Taking Care

If you want to take care of tomorrow, take better care of today.

~Dainin Katagiri~

Umpqua River

Knowing is Not Enough

"Principles are good and worth the effort only when they develop into deeds," - Van Gogh

"Our neurons must be used...not only to know but to transform knowledge, not only to experience but also to construct." - Santiago Ramon y Cajal

BrainPickings.org: Diseases of the Will: Neuroscience Founding Father Santiago Ramon y Cajal on the Six Psychological Flaws that Keep the Talented from Achieving Greatness

Befriending Who I Am

Meditation practice isn’t about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better, it’s about befriending who we are.

~Ani Pema Chodron~

Knowledge is Only a Rumor

Creativity embeds knowledge so that it can become practice. We move what we’re learning from our heads to our hearts through our hands. We are born makers, and creativity is the ultimate act of integration — it is how we fold our experiences into our being… The Asaro tribe of Indonesia and Papua New Guinea has a beautiful saying: “Knowledge is only a rumor until it lives in the muscle.”

–Brené Brown, from Rising Strong 

Table Etiquette / Kiss the Earth

On the 20th Century

Tonight I went to see the Cygnet Theater's production of On the 20th Century. It's an over-the-top operetta musical comedy farce with no opportunity for a cheap laugh left untouched. I haven't laughed at a show of any kind like that in a long time. My friend Nate went with me and enjoyed it as well. What a treat!

Tonight's Bonfire

Though Tuesday nights are not usually good nights for me to plan evening activities tonight I made it to the bonfire for the first time in many months and I was very glad I did. North Cove Beach on Vacation Island in Mission Bay is a lovely quiet spot during the week. Sometime after this picture, after the sun set and after the fire quieted down the wind fell away and the bay turned to glass reflecting all the lights of the city. A lovely way to spend the evening.

Book Review

Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


suc·ce·da·ne·um
ˌsəksiˈdānēəm/
noun: dated literary
a substitute, especially for a medicine or drug.
“The head was followed by a perfect desert of chin, and by a shirt-collar and neckerchief, and by a dreadnought pilot-coat, and by a pair of dreadnought pilot-trousers, whereof the waistband was so very broad and high, that it became a succedaneum for a waistcoat: being ornamented near the wearer’s breast-bone with some massive wooden buttons, like backgammon men. As the lower portions of these pantaloons became revealed, Bunsby stood confessed; his hands in their pockets, which were of vast size; and his gaze directed, not to Captain Cuttle or the ladies, but the mast-head.”

dis·com·fi·ture
disˈkəmfəˌCHər/
noun: a feeling of unease or embarrassment; awkwardness.
synonyms: embarrassment, unease, uneasiness, awkwardness, discomfort, discomposure
"Shame, disappointment, and discomfiture gnawed at his heart; a constant apprehension of being overtaken, or met—for he was groundlessly afraid even of travellers, who came towards him by the way he was going—oppressed him heavily. The returned unweakened in the day. The monotonous ringing of the bells and tramping of the horses; the monotony of his anxiety, and useless rage; the monotonous wheel of fear, regret, and passion, he kept turning round and round; made the journey like a vision, in which nothing was quite real but his own torment."

Some of Dickens most vivid language. It flows effortlessly from realism to impressionism, from muddy, gritty details to allegory and free association of universal truths and the indifference of the glory of the rising sun to the misery of our maddening lives. It's similar in theme to Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" except instead of romance the story is told through the experience of a shipping magnate whose excessive pride takes him from extreme wealth, wife, and children to bankruptcy, isolation, and near death. And like Jane Austen's novel Dickens' Dombey is redeemed by the love and forgiveness of a strong woman.

Reading Dombey and Son is like sitting down to a rich dinner; the language and detail of emotions is delicious and amazing. And Dickens never seemed to grow tired of it and rush the ending as some authors do, but kept up the pace of brilliance through each of about four endings while he wraps up all of the story lines and characters he's introduced.

"...when I thought so much of all the causes that had made me what I was, I needed to have allowed more for the causes that had made him what he was. I will try, then, to forgive him his share of blame. Let him try to forgive me mine!”

My main critique, and the reason I took so long to finish, is that most chapters detail the actions and motivations of the members of the Dombey household and almost everything happens within London. As beautiful as it's written I kept hoping the action would switch to one of the other characters who's lost at sea. He eventually finds his way back, but the details of how or his adventures doing so are not included. If Herman Melville would've been enlisted to step in and give us exploits of our boy Walter on the high seas that would have been fun indeed.

But it's a great book and worthwhile for any Dickens fan to read. I found myself newly amazed at Dickens' insights into the human heart and the motivations of women and men. In this age of the fast words found in Twitter, texts, and Facebook clickbait sinking one's teeth into a full course reading rich in all the colors of the English language is food for the soul.



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