elizabeth gilbert

[Elizabeth’s ted might have been the first ted i ever watched?? at least among the many i swam in that weekend in 2009/2010? i first found ted. much like the weekend i first found soulbiographies. hard to come up for air, remember to eat, et al.]

Your elusive creative genius

Elizabeth Gilbert muses on the impossible things we expect from artists and geniuses — and shares the radical idea that, instead of the rare person “being” a genius, all of us “have” a genius. It’s a funny, personal and surprisingly moving talk.

The author of ‘Eat, Pray, Love,’ Elizabeth Gilbert has thought long and hard about some large topics. Her latest fascination: genius, and how we ruin it.

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we included her graceful description of dealing with genius in many places.. ie: slide 27 in i’m possible.

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[but i personally, didn’t take in the beauty of eat pray love until some 3+ yrs later. perhaps timing is everything. esp when/as you learn to take everything you encounter as a clue and every person as a teacher.]

If you could clear out all that space in your mind, you’d have a doorway, and you know what the universe would do, .. rush in, ..everything else will take care of itself.

simply strategy – let’s try it. right now. right here. a people experiment.

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find/follow Elizabeth:

Elizabeth M. Gilbert (born July 18, 1969) is an American author, essayist, short story writer, biographer, novelist and memoirist. She is best known for her 2006 memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, which as of December 2010 has spent 199 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list, and was also made into a film by the same name in 2010.

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maybe my life hasn’t been so chaotic.. it’s just he world that is.. and the only real trap is getting attached to any of it.. ruin is a gift.. the road to transformation.. we must always be ready for endless waves of transformation (51 min into eat pray love)

let go

Tis’ better to live your own life imperfectly than to imitate someone else’s perfectly.

I’ve come to believe that there exists in the universe something I call “The Physics of The Quest”- a force of nature governed by laws as real as the laws gravity or momentum. And the rule of Quest Physics maybe goes like this:

If you are brave enough to leave behind everything familiar and comforting and set out on a truth-seeking journey, and if you are truly willing to regard everything that happens to you on that journey as a clue, and if you accept everyone you meet along the way as a teacher, and if you are prepared – most of all -to face (and forgive) some very difficult realities about yourself….then truth will not be withheld from you.

Or so I’ve come to believe.

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ted 2014:

the only thing your sub-conscious is capable of feeling is the absolute value of how far you have been flung from yourself

find your way back home again – home – whatever in this world you love more than you love yourself..

home – the thing you have to do no matter the consequence…

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nov 2014 on balance:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/13/elizabeth-gilbert-life-you-want_n_6148472.html

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may 2018

via John fb share:

I love the advice of Elizabeth Gilbert to choose curiosity over fear and her efforts to find a less macho way of framing creativity, but I would love to explore why she is so averse to passion as a way of framing what can help us to choose curiosity over fear – in fact I was just writing a piece on how the passion of the explorer is much more consistent with the feminine archetype rather than the masculine archetype

https://onbeing.org/programs/elizabeth-gilbert-choosing-curiosity-over-fear-may2018/

And all of that is a very strange way to see creativity and, I would say, a very new way. And by “new,” I mean post-Enlightenment, the last couple hundred years, and very Western — and, I would also say, very macho, in a way, very male, [laughs] because it comes with this grandiosity that’s on the individual, and this pressure to be great and to be a genius. And it’s strange.

genius ness

Oh, I love curiosity — our friend. I think curiosity is our friend that teaches us how to become ourselves. And it’s a very gentle friend, and a very forgiving friend, and a very constant one. Passion is not so constant, not so gentle, not so forgiving, and sometimes, not so available. And so, when we live in a world that has come to fetishize passion above all, there’s a great deal of pressure around that. And I think if you don’t happen to have a passion that’s very clear, or if you have lost your passion, or if you’re in a change of life where your passions are shifting, or you’re not certain, and somebody says, “Well, it’s easy to solve your life. Just follow your passion,” [laughs] I do think that they have harmed you, because it just makes people feel more excluded and more exiled and, sometimes, like a failure.

yes.. passion seems more bound to commitment.. blocking bravery to change your mind.. everyday.. curiosity more spontaneous

And it’s a little bit like — gosh, I mean, even the word, “passion,” has this sort of sexual connotation that you’re — I’m much more interested in intimacy [laughs] and in growing a relationship, than everything has to be setting your head on fire. And curiosity is an impulse that just taps you on the shoulder very lightly, and invites you to turn your head a quarter of an inch and look a little closer at something that has intrigued you. And it may not set your head on fire; it may not change your life; it may not change the world; *it may not even line up with previous things that you’ve done or been interested in. It may seem very random and make no sense. And I think the reason people end up not following their curiosity is because they’re waiting for a bigger sign, and your curiosities, sometimes, are so mild and so strange [laughs] and so, almost, nothing — it’s a little trail of breadcrumbs that you can overlook if you’re looking up at the mountaintop, waiting for Moses to come down and give you a sign from God.

*the it is me

I think a definition of an interesting person is an interested person. I’ve never met an interesting person who’s not also an interested person.

And you say, “I want to live in a society filled with people who are curious and concerned about each other rather than afraid of each other.” So taking this virtue of investigation, of that gentle friend of curiosity, as something that we can live by would be good for us collectively, right?

imagine cure ios city

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convo w maria on figuring – feb 2019 – livestream [https://vimeo.com/315749076]

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