consolations
(2014) by David Whyte
intro’d here via maria.. from consolations.. on courage crisis .. https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/11/16/david-whyte-consolations-courage-crisis/
Walking the pilgrim edge between the two, holding them together, is the hardest place to stay, to breathe of both and make a world of both and to be active in their exchange: aware of our need to be needed, our wish to be seen, our constant need for help and succor, but inhabiting a world of luminosity and intensity, subject to the wind and the weather, surrounded by the music of existence, able to be found by the living world and with a wild self-forgetful ability to respond to its call when needed; a rehearsal in fact for the act of dying, a place where inside and outside can reverse and flow with no fixed form.
Whyte’s Consolations remains one of the most beautiful and consolatory books I’ve ever encountered, the kind with which each repeated encounter is always new and always regenerative. (I recently had the honor of composing the introduction to the new English edition of this quiet, deeply resonant gem.)
consolations on hold at library – thanks library
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notes/quotes:
2
alone
alone ness..
the body is inhabited in a different way when we are alone than when we are with others.. alone, we live in our bodies as a question rather than a statement
curiosity over decision making .. maté trump law.. et al
the permeability of being alone asks us to re imagine ourselves, to become impatient w ourselves, to tire of the same old story and then slowly hour by hour.. to start to tell the story in a diff way as other parallel ears, ones we were previously unaware of, begin to listen to us more carefully in the silence.. for a solitary life to flourish, even if it is only for few precious hours, aloneness asks us to make a friend of silence, and just as importantly.. to inhabit that silence in our own particular way, to find our very own way into our own particular and even virtuoso way of being alone
silence.. self-talk as data.. quiet enough to see
3
to inhabit silence in our aloneness is to stop telling the story altogether.. aloneness always leads to rawness and vulnerability, to a fearful simplicity, to not recognizing and to not knowing, to the wish to find any company other than that not knowing, unknown self,..
one of the elemental dynamics of self compassion is to understand our deep reluctance to be left to ourselves
to be alone is not necessarily to be absent form the company of others, the radical step is to let ourselves alone, to cease the berating voice that is constantly trying to interpret and force the story from too small and too complicated a perspective. even in company a sense of imminent aloneness is a quality that can be cultivated..
4
to feel alone in the presence of others is also to understand the singularity of human existence whilst experiencing the deep physical current that binds us to others.. whether we want that binding or no.. aloneness can measure togetherness even thru a sense of distance
5
at the beginning of the 21st cent.. to feel alone or want to be alone is deeply unfashionable: to admit to feeling alone is to reject and betray others, as if they are not good company, and do not have entertaining, interesting lives of their own to distract us, and to actually seek to be alone is a radical act; to want to be alone is to refuse a certain kind of conversational hospitality and to turn to another door, and another kind of welcome, not necessarily defined by human vocabulary
hospitality – constant hospitality law
no words ness
monet to see law: ‘to see we must forget the name of the thing we are looking at.’
Claude Monet
it may be that time away from a work, an idea of ourselves, or a committed partner is the very essence of appreciation for the other.. to be able to let them alone as we let ourselves lone, to live something that feels like a choice again, to find ourselves lone as a looked for achievement, not a state to which we have been condemned
off script.. beyond finite set of choices et al
7
ambition
ambition ness
ambition is a word that lacks any real ambition, ambition is frozen desire, the current of a vocational life immobilized and over concretized to set unforgiving goals… ambition abstracts us from the underlying elemental nature of the creative convo while providing us the cover of a target that has become false thru over description, overfamiliarity or too much understanding
the ease of having an ambitions is that it can be explained to others; the very disease of ambition is that it can be so easily explained to others.. what is worthy of a life’s dedication does not want to be known by us in ways that diminish its actual sense of presence.. everything true to itself has its own secret language and an internal intentionality w a secret surprising flow, even to the person who supposedly puts it all in motion
idio-jargon et al
8
we may direct the beam of ambition to illuminate a certain corner of the future world but ultimately it can reveal to us only those dreams with which we have already become familiar
9
no matter the self conceited importance of our labors we are all compost for worlds we cannot yet imagine..
ambition takes willpower and constant applications of energy to stay on a perceived bearing; but a serious vocational calling demands a constant attention to the unknown gravitational field that surrounds us and from which we recharge ourselves.. as if breathing from the atmosphere of possibility itself..
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anger
anger ness
anger is the deepest form of compassion, for another/world/self/life/body/family/ideals.. all vulnerable and all, possibility about to be hurt.. stripped of physical imprisonment and violent reaction, anger is the purest form of care.. the internal living flame of anger always illuminates what we belong to, what we with to protect and what we are willing to hazard ourselves for.. what we usually call anger is only what is left of its essence when we are overwhelmed by its accompanying vulnerability, when it reaches the lost surface of ur mind or our body’s incapacity to hold it, or when ti touches the limit of our understanding..
what we name as anger is actually only the incoherent physical incapacity to sustain this deep form of care in our outer daily life; the unwillingness to be large enough and generous enough to hold what we love helplessly in our bodies/mind with the clarity and breadth of our whole being
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what we have named as anger on the surface is the violent outer response to our own inner powerlessness, a powerlessness connected to such a profound sense of rawness and care that it can find no proper outer body or identity or voice, or way of life to hold it..
wow
what we call anger is often simply the unwillingness to live the full measure of our fears or of our not knowing, in the face of our love for a wife, in the depth of our caring for a son, in our wanting the best, in the face of simply being alive and loving those w whom we live
our anger breaks to the surface most often thru our feeling there is something profoundly wrong with this powerlessness and vulnerability; anger too often finds its voice strangely, thru our incoherence and thru our inability to speak, but anger in its pure state is the measure of the way we are implicated in the world and made vulnerable thru love in all its specifics: a daughter, a house a family, ..
anger turns to violence and violent speech when the mind refuses to countenance the vulnerability of the body in its love for all these outer things – we are often abused or have been abused by those who love us but have no vehicle to carry its understanding, or who have no outer emblems of their inner care or even their own wanting to be wanted.. lacking any outer vehicle for the expression of this inner rawness they are simply overwhelmed by the elemental nature of love’s vulnerability. in their helplessness they turn their violence on the very people who are the outer representation of this inner lack of control
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but anger truly felt at its center is the essential living flame of being fully alive and fully here; it si a quality to be followed to its source,.. to be prized/tended.. and an invitation to finding a way to bring that source fully into the world thru making the mind clearer and more generous, the heart more compassionate and the body larger and strong enough to hold it..
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what we call anger on the surface only serves to define its true underlying quality by being a complete but absolute mirror – opposite of its true internal essence..
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beauty
beauty is the harvest of presence, the evanescent moment of seeing or hearing on the outside what already lives far inside us; the eyes the ears, or the imagination suddenly become a bridge between the here ad the there , between then and now, between the inside and the outside; beauty is the conversation between what we think is happening outside in the world and what is just about to occur far inside us
beauty is an achieved state of both deep attention and self forgetting; the self forgetting of seeing, hearing, smelling or touching that erases our separation, our distance, our fear of the other..
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beginning
beginning is difficult, and our procrastination is a fine ever present measure of our reluctance in taking that first close in, courageous step to reclaiming our happiness.. perhaps, because taking a new step always leads to a kind of radical internal simplification, where, suddenly very large parts of us, parts of us we have kept gainfully employed for years, parts of us still rehearsing the old complicated story, are suddenly out of a job.
a downsizing where the parts of us too afraid to participate or having nothing now to offer, are let go. with all of the accompanying death like trauma, and where the very last fight occurs, a rear guard disbelief that this new, less complicated self, and this very simple step, is all that is needed for the new possibilities ahead.. .. we so often prefer the story to be more elaborate, our identities clouded by fear, the horizon safely in the distance the essay longer than it needs to be and the answer safely in the realm of impossibility.
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besieged
besieged is how most people feel most of the time: by events, by people, by all the necessities of providing, parenting or participating and.. to feel crowded, set upon.. blocked by circumstance..
if the world will not go away then the great discipline seems to be the ability to make an id that can live in the midst of everything w/o feeling beset.. being besieged asks us to begin the day not w a to do list but a not to do list, a moment outside the time bound world in which it can be reordered and reprioritized.. i n this space of undoing and silence we create a foundation from which to re imagine our day and ourselves.. beginning the daily convo from a pov of freedom and being untethered allows us to re see ourselves, to reenter the world as if for the first time..
2 convers as infra.. self-talk as data
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besieged as we are, little wonder that men and women alternate between the dream of a place apart, untouched by the world and then wanting to be wanted again in that aloneness..
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creating a state of aloneness in the besieged everyday may be one of the bravest things individual men and women can do for themselves..
seeing people and places and perplexities not as enemies.. but as.. participants in the drama, .. being seen/recognized/wanted by the world and having a place in which to receive everyone and everything, if infinitely preferable to its opposite
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confession
to confess is to free oneself, not only by admitting a sin or an omission but to profess a deeper allegiance, a greater dedication to something beyond the mere threat of immediate punishment or the desolation of being shunned.. to confess is to declare oneself ready for a more courageous road, one in which a previously defended id might not only be shorn away, but be seen to be irrelevant, a distraction, a working delusion that kept us busy over the years and held us unaccountable to the real question
freedom from deception may be the goal but no confession is w/o consequences. our fears about the result of confessing are well grounded; the old id the secret was protecting almost never survives the revelation . we begin the new life in isolation; perhaps indeed shunned by those we have wronged or even by those unable to understand our need to tell.. confession implicitly calls for carrying on the journey newly alone unaccompanied by the familiar company we have kept until now
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deathbed confessions happen to frequently because in the light of our immanent demise and disappearance, preserving the old fearful id that kept the secret is seen to be absurd almost laughable, we are suddenly not the thing we have been defending all along
in the shadow of our disappearance we come to understand that the preservation of our name and our id have taken enormous effort and willpower to sustain for mere temp and provisional sense of personhood..
fittingness.. cummings art\ist law
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to confess is to integrate the offending w the offended, inside and out.. two previously irreconcilable worlds..
unoffendable ness
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courage
french – coeur, or heart
courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation w life
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to be courageous is to stay close to the way we are made
camus use to tell himself quietly to live to the point of tears..
courage is what love looks like when tested by the simple everyday necessities of being alive.
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the first courageous step may be firmly into complete bewilderment and a fine stat of not knowing
no enemy line to throw ourselves at, no medal to be earned (talking about parenting).. no glamor in the outward show, deserving of no medal, but on the inside, a heartfelt, robustly vulnerable and courageous realigning of one life w another
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on the inside we come to know who and what and how we love and what we can do to deepen that love; only form the outside and only by looking back, does it look like courage
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crisis
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denial
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despair
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the antidote to despair i snot to be found in the brave attempt to cheer ourselves up w happy abstracts, but in paying profound and courageous attention to the body and the breath, independent of our imprisoning thoughts and stories, even strangely, in paying attention to despair itself, and the way w hold it, and which we realize, was never ours to own and to hold in the first place.. to see and experience despair fully in our body is to begin to see it as a necessary , seasonal visitation, and the first step in letting it have its own life, neither holding it nor moving it on before its time..
we take first steps out of despair by taking on its full weight and coming fully to ground in our wish not to be here. we let our bodies/world breathe again… in that place, strangely, despair cannot do anything but change into something else.. as it was meant to from the beginning
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destiny
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disappointment
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disappointment is a friend to transformation, a call to both accuracy and generosity in the assessment of our self and others, a test of sincerity and a catalyst of resilience
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forgiveness
to approach forgiveness is to close in on the nature of the hurt itself, the only remedy being, as we approach its raw center, to reimagine our relation to it
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we allow ourselves to be gifted by a story larger than the story that first hurt us and left us bereft
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friendship
all friendships of any length are based on a continued, mutual forgiveness..
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no matter the medicinal virtues of being a true friend or sustaining a long close relationship w another, the ultimate touchstone of friendship is not as improvement, neither of the other nor of the self, the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another.. to have walked w them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone
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genius
genius is something we already possess.. from latin genius loci.. the spirit of a place.. the conversation of element that makes a place incarnate, fully itself.. a unique confluence.. existing nowhere else on earth.. human genius lies in the geography of the body and its conversation w the world
embodiement.. rheingold (mom) art law.. 2 convers as infra
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to live one’s genius is to dwell easily at the crossing point where all the elements of our life and our inheritance join and make a meeting..
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to live out our genius is to live out the convo between our particular inherited body and the body of the world form which we seem to have been made.. genius is not a fixed platform where we can arrive solely thru accomplishment.. it has its own hard won language and its attempts to order the un-orderable .. it intuits a particular future for itself but is made in convo w all other futures..
genius is not a fixed internal commodity to be exploited and brought to the surface but a convo to be followed, deepened, understood and celebrated..
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giving
giving is a difficult and almost contemplative art form that has to be practiced to be done well..
yeah.. i don’t know.. i think if you have to contemplate and practice it.. it’s giving by numbers/measures/accounts.. ie: gift ness
giving is an essence of existence, and a test of our character; it asks deep question about our relationship to others, to ourselves and strangely, to time itself.. to geve well, appropriately and often..
i don’t think it’s an essence.. if it has to be practiced/contemplated/appropriate.. et al
to give generously but appropriately and then, most difficult of all, and as the full apotheosis of the art, w feeling, in the moment and spontaneously, has always been recognized as one of the greatest of human qualities
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giving is not done easily, giving is difficult; giving well is in fact a discipline that must be practiced and observed over years to be done property
ugh
the art often involves giving the wrong thing to the wrong person at the wrong time and learning how to do the opposite thru time and trial, it means getting beyond the boundaries of ur own needs, it means understanding another and another’s life, it acknowledges implicitly that we ourselves must be recipients of things we cannot often id or even find ourselves
yeah.. i think giving is more about letting go when people ask for something.. otherwise it sounds more like work.. (as solving other people’s problems).. and that whole waster realm.. of how we get to where there’s not enough for ie: 8b people..
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giving means paying attention and creating imaginative contact w the one to whom we are giving, it is a form of attention itself, a way of acknowledging and giving thanks for lives other than our own. the first step in giving may be to create a budget, to make a list or to browse a storefront but the essential deed is done thru the door of contemplation: of the person, the charity, the cause, finding the essence of the need, the person or the relationship..
started out good.. 2nd sentence throw it right back into the realm of commodity/inhumane ness (any form of measuring/accounting)
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to give is to make an imaginative journey and put oneself in the body, the mind and the anticipation of another.. a step of coming to meet, of saying i see you..
if it were only that
little wonder then that the holiday giving that is none of these, that is *automatic, **chore-based, walking round the ***mall based, exhaust us, debilitates us
like *your list **your budget/discipline/proper-ness ***your storefront browse..
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gratitude
gratitude is not a passive response to something we have been given, gratitude arises form paying attention, form being awake in the presence of everything that lives w/in and w/o us
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to intuit inner lives beneath the surface lives, to inhabit many worlds at once in this world, to be a someone amongst all other someones, and therefore to make a convo w/o saying word, is to deepen our sense of presence and therefore our natural sense of thankfulness that everything happens both w us and w/o us, that we are participants and witness all at once
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ground
to come to ground is to find a home in circumstances and in the very physical body we inhabit in the midst of those circumstances.. to find the support and foundation that has been beneath our feet all along
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haunted
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we cease to be afraid when we give away what was never our sin the first place and begin to be present to our own lives just as we find them, even in facing what we have banished from our thoughts and made homeless, even when we do not know the way forward ourselves. when we make a friend of what we previously could not face, what once haunted us now becomes an invisible, parallel ally, a beckoning hand to our future..
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heartbreak
heartbreak is an indication of our sincerity..
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help
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it may be that the ability to know the necessity for help; to knowhow tot look for that help and then most importantly, how to ask for it, is one of the primary transformative dynamics that allows u to emancipate ourselves into each new epoch of our lives
this is more resonating that giving to others or working for others.. but i think we can go deeper and not focus on the help needed.. and instead focus on daily curiosity – am thinking that will give us the utmost courage/energy to not even waiver on asking for help (can’t not).. and it will detox us from all the things we currently think we need help for today.. that are actually irrelevant distractions
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hiding
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what is precious inside us does not care to be known by the mind in ways that diminish its presence
hiding is an act of freedom from the misunderstanding of others, esp in the enclosing world of oppressive secret govt and private entities, attempting to name/anticipate us.. to leave us w no place to hide and grow in ways unmanaged by a creeping necessity for absolute naming/tracking/control..
hiding is a bid for independence, from others, from mistaken ideas we have about ourselves, from an oppressive and mistaken wish to keep us completely safe, completely ministered to, and therefore completely managed..
indeed.. huge..
hiding is created, necessary and beautifully subversive of outside interference and control.. hiding leaves life to itself, to become more of itself. hiding is the radical independence necessary for our emergence (into the light of a *proper human future)
which he’d quite referring to life as *proper and appropriate et al
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honesty
the fear of loss, in one form or another, is the motivator behind all conscious and unconscious dishonesties.. honesty lines in understanding our close/necessary relationship w not wanting to hear the truth..
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honesty i snot the revealing of some foundational truth that gives us power over life or another or even the self, but a robust incarnation into the unknown unfolding vulnerability of existence, where we acknowledge how powerless we feel, how little we actually know, how afraid we are of not knowing ..
honesty is not found in revealing the truth, but in understanding how deeply afraid of it we are.. honesty allows us to live w not knowing.. honesty is the outer diagnostic of our ability to come to ground in reality.. where there is no realistic choice between gain or loss
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istanbul
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joy
joy is the act of giving ourselves away before we need to or are asked to
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loneliness
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loneliness is the place from which we pay real attention to voices other than our own; being alone allows us to find the healing power in the other
human beings are made to belong. loneliness is a single malt taste of the very essentiality that makes conscious belonging possible.. the doorway is closer than we think i am aloe; therefore i belong
brown belonging law et al
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longing
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it is as if we are put into relationship w an enormous distance inside us leading back to some unknown origin w its own secret timing indifferent to our wills, and gifted at the same time w an intimate sense of proximity, to a lover/future/transformation/life/sky/ground..
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maturity
143
memory
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memory is the living link to personal freedom
?
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naming
naming love too early is a beautiful but harrowing human difficulty.. most of our heart break comes from attempting to name who or what we love and the way we love, too early in the vulnerable journey of discovery
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we name mostly in order to control but what is worth loving does not want to be held w/in the bounds of too narrow a calling.. in may ways love has already named us before we can even begin to speak back to it.. an invitation to the most difficult art of all, to love w/o naming at all..
labels et al
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nostalgia
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nostalgia is not an immersion in the past, nostalgia is the first annunciation that the past as we know it is coming to an end
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pain
pain is a form of alertness and particularity; pain is away in
in deep pain we have energy only for what we can do wholeheartedly.. pain teaches us a fine economy, in movement, in the heart’s affections, in what we ask of ourselves/others
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pain’s beautiful humiliations make us naturally humble and force us to put aside the guise of pretense.. in real pain we have no other choice but to learn to ask for help and on a daily basis.. pain tells us we belong and cannot live forever alone or in isolation.. pain makes us understand reciprocation.. in real pain we often have nothing to give back other than our own gratitude.. pain can be an intro to real friendship..
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experiencing real pain ourselves, our moral superiority comes to an end.. we find understanding/compassion as to why others may find it hard to fully participate
real pain is never far from real laughter.. at ourself or for another watching that self.. laughter at the predicament or the physical absurdity that has become a daily experience.. pain makes drama of an everyday life w our body and our presence firmly caught on stage and in the spotlight, we are visible to others in away over which we have no choice, limping here or leaning there..
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pain is appreciation.. for most of all the simple possibility and gift of a p;in free life.. other do not know the gift in simply being healthy.. of being unconsciously free to move or walk or run.. pain is a lonely road, no one can know the measure of our particular agonies.. but thru pain we have the possibility.. of coming to know others as we have, with so much difficulty, come to know ourselves..
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parallels
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pilgrim
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procrastination
procrastination is not always what it seems. to see procrastination as undesirable, esp in the initial stages of an endeavor is to say.. that a woman feeling her first birth pangs should simply get on with it; that a bud should be broken open to reveal the full glory of the flower.. what looks from the outside like our delay; our lack of commitment; even our laziness may have more to do w a slow, necessary ripening thru time .. to hate our procrastinating tendencies is in some way to hate our relationship w time itself.. the way it works its own way .. in its own time
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procrastination enables us to understand the true measure of our reluctance.. to learn what we are afraid of in the endeavor itself
procrastination does not stop a project form coming to fruition, what stops us is giving up on an original idea because we have not go to the heart of the reason we are delaying.. nor let the true form of our reluctance instruct us in the way ahead.. to procrastinate is to be involved w larger entities than our own ideas..
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regret
regret is a short, evocative and achingly beautiful word;.. an elegy to lost possibilities even it its brief annunciation, it is also a rarity and almost never heard except where the speaker insists that they have none, that they are brave and forward looking and could not possibly imagine their life in any other way than the way it is.. to admit regret is to lose control not only of a difficult past but of the very story we tell about our present
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to regret fully is to appreciate how high the stakes are in even the average human life
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rest
rest is the convo between what we love to do and how we love to be
to rest is to give up on the already exhausted will as the prime motivator of endeavor, w its endless outward need to reward itself thru established goals.. to rest is to give up on worrying and fretting and the sense that here is something wrong w the world unless we are there to put it right; to rest is to fall back literally or figuratively form outer targets and shift the goal not to an inner static bull’s eye, an imagined state of perfect stillness, but to an inner state of natural *exchange
*perhaps dance.. the word exchange unsettles me because it makes me think of tit for tat ness.. and the keeping track of things
the template of natural *exchange is the breath, the autonomic giving and receiving that forms the basis and the **measure of life itself.
*dance
autonomic: involuntary or unconscious; relating to the autonomic nervous system.
**being (or something.. other than any form of measuring/accounting))
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we are rested when we are a living exchange between what lies inside and what lies outside, when we are an intriguing convo between the potential that lies in our imagination and the possibilities for making that internal image real in the world
we are rested when we let things alone and let ourselves alone, to do what we do best, breathe as the body intended us to breathe walk as we were meant walk.. live w the rhythm of a house and a home..
when we give/take in an easy foundational way we are a closest to the authentic self, and closest to that self when we are most rested..
have/need ness
to rest is not self indulgent, to rest is to prep to give the best of ourselves, and to perhaps, most importantly, arrive at a place where we are able to understand what we have already been given
bread – enough ness and the possibility to get back/to an undisturbed ecosystem
in the first state of rest is the sense of stopping, of giving up on what we have been doing or how we have been being..
let go of the things you have to cling to .. ness
in the second, is the sense of slowly coming home, the physical journey into the body’s uncoerced and unbullied self, as if trying to remember the way or even the destination itself
supposed to’s.. of school/work
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in the third state is a sense of healing and self forgiveness and of arrival.
in the fourth state.. deep in the primal exchange of the breath, is the give and the take.. and the ability to delight in both
the fifth sated is a sense of absolute readiness and presence.. a sense of being the meeting itself between inner and outer, and that receiving and responding occur in one spontaneous movement
fromm spontaneous law et al
a deep experience of rest is the template of perfection in the human imagination, a perspective from which we are able to perceive the outer specific forms of our work and our relationships whilst being nourished by the shared foundational give of the breath itself.. from this perspective we can be rested while putting together an elaborate meal for an arriving crowd, whilst climbing the highest mountain or sitting at home surrounded thy the chaos of a living gamily..
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rested we are ready for the world but not held hostage by it, rested we care again for the right things/people/way..
art (by day/light) and sleep (by night/dark) as re\set.. to fittingness
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robustness
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rome
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run away
we are perhaps most fully incarnated as humans, when part of us does not want to be here, or doesn’t know how to be here.. presence is only fully understood and realized thru fully understanding our reluctance to show up
rather.. i was thinking more along the lines of hari present in society law.. and rishnamurti measure law.. and cope\ing ness.. et al
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self-knowledge
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shadow
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shadow makes a presence of absence
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shyness
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silence
real silence puts any present understanding to shame; orphans us form certainty; leads us beyond the well known and accepted reality and confronts us w the unknown and previously unacceptable convo about to break in upon our lives
silence does not end skepticism but makes it irrelevant..
in silence, essence speaks to us of essence itself..
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we begin to join the convo thru the portal of a present unknowing, robust vulnerability, revealing in the way we listen, a different ear, a more perceptive eye, an imagination refusing to come too early to a conclusion, and belonging to a different person than the one who first entered the quiet
to become deeply silent is not to become still, but to become tidal and seasonal, a coming and going that has its own inimitable, essential character, a story not fully told
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solace
221
touch
225
unconditional
unconditional love is not fully possible.. the hope for, or the declaration of a purely spiritual, unconditional love is more often a coded desire for immunity and safety, an attempt to forgo the trials of vulnerability, powerlessness and the exquisite pain to which we apprentice ourselves in a relationship, a marriage,
hmm.. i’m thinking if it’s not unconditional.. it’s not full love
pearson unconditional law et al
the hope for unconditional love is the hope for a diff life than the one we have been given
perhaps it is the one we’ve been given.. but very different than the one we crafted/manufactured/now-inhabit.. et al
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unrequited
(not returned or rewarded)
unrequited love may be the form that love mostly takes; for what affection is ever returned over time in the same measure or quality w which it is given?
and how would you measure anyway.. we have to let go of any form of measuring/accounting
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the great discipline seems to be to give up wanting to control the manner in which we are requited, and to forgo the natural disappointment that flows form expecting and exact and measured reciprocation..
to see love as the ultimate letting go and thru the doorway of that affection, make the most difficult sacrifice of all, giving away the very thing we want to hold forever..
let go of the things you have to cling to
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vulnerability
in refusing our vulnerability we refuse the help needed at every turn of our existence and immobilize the essential, tidal and conversational foundations of our id
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withdrawal
withdrawal can be the very best way of stepping forward and done well, a beautiful freeing at of mercy and as an art form, underestimated in this time of constant action and engagement.. so much of what we are involved with , in even the highest cause, becomes involvement at the busy periphery..
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we stick to the wrong thing quite often, not because it will come to fruition by further effort, but because we cannot let go of the way we have decided to tell the story and we become further enmeshed even by trying to make sense of what entraps us, when what is needed is a simple, clean breaking away
the it is me ness
to remove ourselves entirely and absolutely, abruptly and at times un compromisingly is often the real and radically courageous break for freedom.. we make ourselves available for the simple purification of seeing ourselves and our world more elementally and therefore more clearly again..
not yet scrambled ness
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we with draw not to disappear, but to find another ground from which to see..
see with heart et al
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work
work among all its abstracts, is actually intimacy, the place where the self meets the world.. human need to be needed/seen.. to give something.. to come alive thru our contribution to the visible world.. to find something rewarding
i think art can be these things (sans rewards).. but work for us is too tied to earning a living.. and doing things for other people.. solving other people’s problems.. i don’t think the world needs/wants/craves.. people that are spending their days doing/being that.. i think the world needs is he energy of 8b alive people.. 8b people living in their fittingness
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work is the inside made into the outside
again.. i’d call that art.. which doesn’t desire/need the ‘profit, recognition, wealth’ listed as by product of work
__________
from David Whyte‘s consolations:
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be you. 