pandemic grief and sadness
One of the biggest cognitive dissonances I’ve had in this pandemic is seeing almost everyone I know – including the most intelligent and the most socially responsible – throw away all covid…
tags /courage /
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daring to be ugly
I was quite vain when I was younger due to a low self-esteem which led to a high level of insecurity. That insecurity made me feel ugly and that I was never…
representation matters
Yesterday I watched a video interview with Kristen Kish, whom I discovered via Iron Chef. Apparently her mentor put her up to compete in Top Chef – she was reluctant to, but…
We have spent a lifetime developing responses to pain and difficulty
We have spent a lifetime developing responses to pain and difficulty. Changing these old habits is like trying to reverse the momentum of a boulder tumbling down a mountainside. It requires great effort, skill, patience, perseverance, and no small amount of courage. —Lama Shenpen
on writing as me
what it means to write as oneself, to write so deeply into yourself that people can feel your bones just by reading your words
nature of the wasteland
And what is the nature of the wasteland? It is a land where everybody is living an inauthentic life, doing as other people do, doing as you’re told, with no courage for your own life. That is the wasteland. And that is what T. S. Eliot meant in his poem The Waste Land.
It’s easier to stay home
It’s easier to stay home, stay in the womb, not take the journey.
a sociological stagnation of inauthentic lives
This is exactly T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land that you are describing, a sociological stagnation of inauthentic lives and living that has settled upon us, and that evokes nothing of our spiritual life, our potentialities, or even our physical courage—until, of course, it gets us into one of its inhuman wars.
They’ve moved out of the society that would have protected them
They’ve moved out of the society that would have protected them, and into the dark forest, into the world of fire, of original experience. Original experience has not been interpreted for you, and so you’ve got to work out your life for yourself. Either you can take it or you can’t. You don’t have to go far off the interpreted path to find yourself in very difficult situations. The courage to face the trials and to bring a whole new body of possibilities into the field of interpreted experience for other people to experience—that is the hero’s deed.
I have seen simple people become significant and creative in their own spheres
I have seen simple people become significant and creative in their own spheres, as they have developed more trust of the processes going on within themselves, and have dared to feel their own feelings, live by values which they discover within, and express themselves in their own unique ways.