Moonshadow

'Did it take long to find me?' I asked the faithful light.
'Did it take long to find me?  And, are you gonna stay tonight?'

Thank you.
And, to the other little lights as well.


Is this part of what he (and Campbell) had mentioned?  That we are creating our own mythology?
Either way, I'll choose to appreciate the times when, after sending my request into the earth, the universe meets me in a way that I can recognize.

Today, my favorite lyrics are from "Moonshadow" by Cat Stevens.  It just occurred to me today that maybe 老子 would have also been amused.

The Human Achievement

I'm listening to Viktor Frankl's Man's Search For Meaning on Audible.
It's the background and description of his school of thought in psychiatry called "logotherapy".

I like the way he describes the "human achievement" as that which a person may produce from a given "predicament".

Turning predicament into a human achievement is the manner in which all people are necessarily artists.  Like any art, it can be practiced, stylized, and honed into a truly respectable craft.

In everything, the uniquely human potential is to paint that layer of perception, interpretation, and chosen response upon the canvas of situation with which we are presented.

It is the art of acknowledging and working with what we cannot change to produce, create, or accept what we can.  We may or may not consider it to be successful, but it is this layer of perception and response that would not arise in any other way, and thus, in its uniqueness, is a human achievement.

I am reminded of the quote at the beginning of Steinbeck's Cannery Row.
And Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Pitzeem and the Mare

I brought a copy of "The Night Abraham Called to the Stars" by Robert Bly with me.
The other night, realizing I was parched for poetry, I turned to it and asked for water. I'd glanced across this poem before, but now have eyes to see:

Pitzeem and the Mare

Let's tell the other story about Pitzeem and his horse.
When the One He Loved moved to the mountains,
He bought a mare and a saddle and started out.

He rode all day with fire coming out of his ears,
And all night. When the reins fell, the mare knew it right
Away. She turned and headed straight for the barn.

No one had told Pitzeem, but his horse had left
a new foal back in the stable. She thought of nothing
All day but his sweet face with its long nose.

Pitzeem! Pitzeem! How much time you've lost!
He put the mountain between the mare's ears again.
He slapped his own face; he was a good lover.

And every night he fell asleep once more. Friends,
Our desire to reach our true wife is great,
But the mare's love for her child is also great. Please

Understand this. The journey was a three-day trip,
But it took Pitzeem thirty years. You and I have been
Riding for years, but we're still only a day from home.


( and another poem, just the last 2 stanzas:)

The Country Roads

...
In my early poems I praised so many lost things.
The way the crickets' cries in October carried
Them into the night sky felt right to me.

Every way of knowing is blessed by bootleggers.
Because the government does not allow delight
To be sold, you have to find it on the country roads.

Sesame Street

I haven't been paying attention to sesame street in a long time, but I think these more recent clips are great. (videos on Youku, one of the Chinese Youtube sites)

This one is unexpectedly hilarious: G club

And this one is just a good reminder:Will.i.ams Song, 'What I am'

Flowers

"One of the things you have to do with a flower," he said, "is let it grow, it's own way. You have to give the flower what it needs to grow.

projective geometry

The words my thesis advisor used to describe projective geometry seem increasingly applicable to contemplations of the world(s) I inhabit.

"When you think about it, they're really all the same point"
- Joe Roberts

"I hope

the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams."

- Red
The Shawshank Redemption






I think I just remembered something.

Magic and Machines

verbalized statements about reality

From Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig:


"He became aware that the doctrinal differences among Hinduism and Buddhism and Taoism are not anywhere near as important as doctrinal differences among Christianity and Islam and Judaism. Holy wards are not fought over them because verbalized statements about reality are never presumed to be reality itself.

In all of the Oriental religions great value is placed on the Sanskrit doctrine of Tat tvam asi, "Thou art that" which asserts that everything you think you are and everything you perceive are undivided. To realize fully this lack of division is to become enlightened."

(I'm not sure how historically accurate this statement is, but I like the part about reality and words. Words create worlds.)

Grade school wisdom

A while ago, I was walking through an elementary school, reading the bubble-letter slogans promoting good character and personality and attitude and really appreciating the messages in them, now that I understood what it meant. I was once tall as a doorknob running through elementary school hallways, and though I knew the vocabulary, the posters and banners went way over my head.

I reflected that it seemed odd for such strong messages delivered to kids who are not able yet to understand them. But I guess they're all good thought-seeds to plant.

In middle school, there was a poster near the office that I remember passing frequently. It's the only one I remember. It said something along the lines of

People will not remember you for the clothes you wore, the ... or the ... [ insert other things of concern to middle schoolers ], but they will always remember the way you made them feel.

It seemed obvious, but it stayed in my head anyway.

As I move farther through life, I start wishing both that I had been able to understand such attitude slogans at a younger age, and wishing that the people I meet could have been similarly exposed.

Obstacle course

He traced a short line segment on the table with his finger.

"Our parents get us from here, to here. They teach us the basics."

He he traveled the short distance with another finger, then indicated the vast tabletop fanning beyond the endpoint of the line.

"After that, we're on our own. And," he said, peppering the table with jabs like a minefield from another finger, "it's all an obstacle course from there."

The expanse of the tabletop stretched arbitrarily in all directions.

"We got to make our own way through the obstacle course. There are all these obstacles out there, but there are things you can do to make it easier on yourself.

Some we can go over,
some we choose,
some just come at us,
some we can go around,
some we avoid,
some ... are just there.


Some people use intuition,
[some use impulse,]
some have a plan..."

I looked at the empty table covered in an imagined landscape of boulders ... some to choose, some to avoid, some are most easily approachable in a certain order. I imagined trying to steer or coast on the thin path of my life as it wound through the terrain.

Refrigerator wisdom (part 3)

another significant set of words on the refrigerator of a friend, it's about time I finally got around to posting them. I've been meaning to since at least last July, and now is certainly a good time.

"

... we must suffer, suffer into truth. We cannot sleep, and drop by drop at the heart the pain of pain remembered comes again, and we resist, but ripeness comes as well.

"
-Aeschylus
Agammemnon



(I also feel like this may have been referenced in I Have Tasted Air Above the Clouds)

past Trying?

This hums in me a sympathetic resonance for something I used to want to say.



[...]

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.


EAST COKER
(No. 2 of 'Four Quartets')

T.S. Eliot

Oracle at 112 5th Ave

I was walking with a friend in New York City when this vertically-scrolling column caught my eye.

Enjoy yourself because you can't change anything else

The sign was speaking to me. And it was relentless.

Aspiring for love is stupid

Even your family can betray you

Extreme self-consciousness leads to corruption

Fear is the greatest incapacitor

I'm glad that my friend was there too, because he began reading aloud from the display. Otherwise, it would have been easy to think that I was seeing some kind of hallucinatory prophetic vision.

Freedon is a luxury not a necessity

Giving true reign to emotion is an honest way to live

Keep your life in flux

Hiding your motives is despicable

I kept semi-expecting the quotes to begin repeating themselves, but they never did. They only began sounding perhaps more political. I kept reading and hearing the words in the rising voice of my friend.

It is man's fate to outsmart himself

Is Liberation dangerous? Only when overdue!

Let it explode. Run with it. Don't control or manipulate

Grassroots agitation is the only hope

It is sometimes better to die than to continue

I considered that it might be good practice to read these things out loud from time to time.


As with everything of course, add salt to taste.




(* We asked some people emerging from the building what sort of building it was. They replied, Barnes & Noble)

mantra

My brother reminded me that this mantra, often delivered by a housemate, really does work. Try it. Play with the enunciation.

" You know, ... I AM pretty awesome..."

The Importance of Faith in a Sadhana

- totally taken from This Post on An Aspiring Yogi in the West-- because I liked it. --

The Shiva-Samhita (3.16, 18 -19)


Success comes to a person of faith and self-confidence, but there is no success for others. Hence practice hard.

The first sign of success is confidence that [one's efforts] will bear fruit. The second is being firm in that faith; the third is worship of the guru;

The fourth is equanimity (samata-bhava); the fifth control over the senses; the sixth is moderate eating; there is no seventh.

heard a prophecy today.

"You will set yourself apart from the majority, and thereby make yourself more useful to the majority, by your (study of the Chinese language)."

I met a nice couple at Lili's today over a discussion of the fantastic avocado melt I ordered. We chatted about my studies and my desire to learn Chinese in Taiwan, and that's when the man said that.

He actually did say the part in parentheses,
but I like to think I could fill that part in with many of things that I try to do and be.

Even though I know that variety and versatility are important (and for there to be variety, there must be deviation) and therefore it is vital that I pursue those things that interest and are within the abilities the particular person that I am ... his words encourage me to keep growing in the ways that seem best to me, and to grow with confidence.



Funny isn't it?

For as difficult as it can feel,

it is often the ways that we are different from others that make us more useful and more appreciable.



Go be yourself. It is very important.

I Have Tasted Air Above the Clouds - some quotes

This is not the way it's supposed to be, but this is the way it was.



Sybil

Apollo comes upon me too quickly -

I can't breathe

[...]

and now I am screaming, but it is his moan [...] I am saying his words, and the men are nodding, because I am a prophetess now.


I keep thinking of the fish ... and how they reached for the sea with their triangle mouths... If I were a fish, my gills would be pushing against the air.

I am screaming,
I am screaming like a fish in a net.


After the first time, I feel nothing,
and under the nothing, there is dirt.


I am a prophetess, and a priestess of Apollo - and men sail for hundreds of miles... to see - me !






Although it has broken me -- broken me and remade me -- part of me is not shattered. I protected my brother and Atta.

I Have Tasted Air Above the Clouds - Writer/Director's Note

I Have Tasted Air Above the Clouds is a thesis project written and directed by Mic Parker, showing this weekend.

I'm not going to try to explain what I thought of the production here, but the following are worth quoting:

The blurb description from the website:

"She was the most famous prophetess of the ancient world. A word from the Cumaean Sibyl averted war, exposed traitors, razed cities to the ground. One of the most powerful women ever and one of the most powerless. This modern adaptation of Virgils Sixth Book of the Aeneid tells the story like you've never heard it before, incorporating music, dance and the enduring strength of one of history's unsung heroines."


And what I assume to be the Director's note from the back of the program:

"This show is a gift. Like many of the gifts we select for one another, it might not quite be your color. Further, I won't be at all surprised if the fit isn't universal. And since we wrapped it ourselves, you might sometimes see my fingerprints, or those of my cast or crew, in the tape. I fear that this gift is a little to early for some and, much worse, a little too late for others.

However, like any true gift, this show has its origins in a very real love and admiration. Love, first, for the Cumaean Sibyl, a minor character in Virgil's Aeneid who has been virtually ignored by generations of otherwise very intelligent scholars, artists and playwrights. As Aeneas' guide through the underworld, the Sibyl is a small but fital part of the legend of the last prince of fallen Troy. Without her courage and indomitable spirit, Aeneas undoubtedly would have died at the mouth of Hades. He never would have founded Rome and we would say instead that, "all roads lead to Carthage." Ah, the horror.

This show is a gift, then, for a mythical character whose story I felt needed desperately to be told. But it is also a gift for the very real women who are, even today, living in isolation, terror and constantly thwarted hope. You see, Sybils still exist: one out of every two women in America will, at some point in their lives, be abused by their partners. Sibuls still exist: there were 72,032 reported cases of domestic abuse or rape against women last year. So what is truly a myth is that we no longer need to fight this problem. Though the Sibyl's story is a tragic one, no more stories need be tragic.

So, this is a gift to my beautiful mother and sisters. To my kind and compassionate friends, coworkers and acquaintances, new or old. This show is a gift for you, if you need it. If you are the victim of domestic abuse, please know that you are not alone and that the situation is not hopeless. If you are in danger, or you know someone who is, please call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-8000-799-7233 (SAFE)."

Beloved

I have been thinking of that "Anything dead coming back to life hurts" quote a lot recently ..

..
mostly I think, because I don't hurt ..?