Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.
~ Carl Jung
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Love and Power
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Friendship
There are all kinds of friends - childhood friends, college friends, work friends, intellectual friends, friends of happenstance or neighborhood - but there is also a transcendent kind of friend, the friend of spirit.
Spirit friends reverberate at your own frequency - a sympathetic vibration. Any time together goes by far too quickly, and it seems as though the most important interactions are going on at a level that can never really be articulated. What is created between you is paradoxical - a new and always-changing thing that nonetheless somehow vectors the eternal.
It's stunning to me the way that existential effects can overtake any discernible cause. I've wondered sometimes if that might have been the kind of thing that the "communion of saints" or the Buddhist "transmission" were trying to describe - that resonating recognition of spirit-friendship. Have you experienced that?
A spirit-friend reconnects you, atunes you. It's not mystical as in a meditation, because there is content. Details matter. When you see the face of a spirit-friend, hear the voice, catch the cadences - your heart is glad. That heart-gladness beams me on.
I tend to shy away from socializing very much. I'm in many ways a very private sort of person. Also, as my hubby's ex-wife expressed it, I have a tendency to "try too hard" when I do get out and about. If it's a social situation where I feel uncomfortable or nervous, it can be painful.
This week was nothing like that. After darkness, joy.
This week's rhythms and syncopations wrenched me out of myself. I had been feeling so numb, so utterly sad - and then, from everywhere, gifts! I feel healed, and grateful. It's like a sweet angel observed me, just watching me think I'd pull a rabbit out of my hat. When I pulled a rhino instead, he turned to the cosmos audience and said, "Now here's something we hope you'll really like" and sent some friends to lift me up.
Yeah, that's it. My guardian angel is a form of Rocky the Squirrel... and I'm a deluded moose. I like it.
Spirit friends reverberate at your own frequency - a sympathetic vibration. Any time together goes by far too quickly, and it seems as though the most important interactions are going on at a level that can never really be articulated. What is created between you is paradoxical - a new and always-changing thing that nonetheless somehow vectors the eternal.
It's stunning to me the way that existential effects can overtake any discernible cause. I've wondered sometimes if that might have been the kind of thing that the "communion of saints" or the Buddhist "transmission" were trying to describe - that resonating recognition of spirit-friendship. Have you experienced that?
A spirit-friend reconnects you, atunes you. It's not mystical as in a meditation, because there is content. Details matter. When you see the face of a spirit-friend, hear the voice, catch the cadences - your heart is glad. That heart-gladness beams me on.
I tend to shy away from socializing very much. I'm in many ways a very private sort of person. Also, as my hubby's ex-wife expressed it, I have a tendency to "try too hard" when I do get out and about. If it's a social situation where I feel uncomfortable or nervous, it can be painful.
This week was nothing like that. After darkness, joy.
No one is as capable of gratitude as one who has emerged from the kingdom of night. ~Elie Wiesel
This week's rhythms and syncopations wrenched me out of myself. I had been feeling so numb, so utterly sad - and then, from everywhere, gifts! I feel healed, and grateful. It's like a sweet angel observed me, just watching me think I'd pull a rabbit out of my hat. When I pulled a rhino instead, he turned to the cosmos audience and said, "Now here's something we hope you'll really like" and sent some friends to lift me up.
Yeah, that's it. My guardian angel is a form of Rocky the Squirrel... and I'm a deluded moose. I like it.
Gratitude is a vaccine, an antitoxin, and an antiseptic. ~ John Henry Jowett
Sunday, March 22, 2009
No Beams
Sometimes there's nothing that can beam me on. Today is one of those days.
Oh, there's no earth-shattering catastrophe. I'm just too sad to beam.
I'm floating right along that teetering edge of despair. I can't explain why in any sort of convincing way, even to myself. In some ways, I'm just irrational.
I try to bolster all sorts of positive things inside, but it's not working. My happy place has slid away from me. I can't write. I can't sing. I can't seem to distract myself with any of the things I would normally enjoy. I can't even cry.
It happens to everyone, sometime.
So this blog is all about sharing things of joy, things that make me beam on and on and on, but I feel alienated, joyless, incapable of beaming.
Maybe it's a good time to ask others: What beams you on - especially when you're overwhelmingly sad for no good reason?
Oh, there's no earth-shattering catastrophe. I'm just too sad to beam.
For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. The very sun and moon seem taken from us. Outside, the day may be blue and gold, but the light that creeps down through the thickly-muffled glass of the small iron-barred window beneath which one sits is grey and niggard. It is always twilight in one's cell, as it is always twilight in one's heart. And in the sphere of thought, no less than in the sphere of time, motion is no more. ~ Oscar Wilde
I'm floating right along that teetering edge of despair. I can't explain why in any sort of convincing way, even to myself. In some ways, I'm just irrational.
I try to bolster all sorts of positive things inside, but it's not working. My happy place has slid away from me. I can't write. I can't sing. I can't seem to distract myself with any of the things I would normally enjoy. I can't even cry.
It happens to everyone, sometime.
So this blog is all about sharing things of joy, things that make me beam on and on and on, but I feel alienated, joyless, incapable of beaming.
Maybe it's a good time to ask others: What beams you on - especially when you're overwhelmingly sad for no good reason?
Saturday, March 7, 2009
Performing a Flamboyant Set
It really beams me on to get in touch with my inner flamboyant performer.
An impromptu performance in the living room started out as an attempt to explain something that had amused me that day. Hubby thought it was very fun and said he much preferred this to the "whiny" set (you know, Tori Amos, Kate Bush, etc.).
What exactly is a flamboyant set? Take a look-see.
So, imagine how challenging it might be to perform these - and to convey the full effect of each - without costumes. In some cases, he had never seen that expression on my face before, much less seen me slap my hip.
The humor of it all is layers deep and years long.
An impromptu performance in the living room started out as an attempt to explain something that had amused me that day. Hubby thought it was very fun and said he much preferred this to the "whiny" set (you know, Tori Amos, Kate Bush, etc.).
What exactly is a flamboyant set? Take a look-see.
- Money, Money - Cabaret
- Time Warp (the Little Nell part) and Sweet Transvestite - Rocky Horror Picture Show
- Buenos Aires - Evita
- Rainbow High - Evita
- Dance: Ten; Looks: Three - A Chorus Line
- The Meaning of Life - Monty Python
- Turn Back, O Man - Godspell
- All for the Best - Godspell
So, imagine how challenging it might be to perform these - and to convey the full effect of each - without costumes. In some cases, he had never seen that expression on my face before, much less seen me slap my hip.
The humor of it all is layers deep and years long.
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