Hope, neuroscientists say, resides in the orbitofrontal cortex, one of the most confounding parts of the human brain, which somehow directs our decision-making and expectation and memory and emotional behaviors and our hedonic experiences — which is to say, what devastates us and what makes our life worth living. It is located just above our eyes: it dictates how we see the world. I wonder if this is why, to envision a hoped — for beyond or to focus better on a hopeful wish or a prayer, we close our eyes, or look up.
Notes: Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. Quote Source: Thank you Beth @ via Alive on All Channels.
I turned to literature like a maniac. I mean, I was – I just was reading, you know, five hours a day and memorizing all these things and convinced that nothing mattered but being a great poet, and, yeah, that’s what filled the void for 20 years. I mean, I – well, it never did it, but it certainly – I certainly tried to make it fill that void. […]
I have this hunger in me that is endless, and I think everyone probably has it. Maybe they find different ways of dealing with it, whether it’s booze or excessive exercise or excessive art or whatever. I tried to answer it with poetry for years and hit a wall with that. And finally, I decided, or rather – I didn’t decide. That’s not right. I discovered that the only answer to that hunger was God. Answer is wrong, I guess. The only solution to me was to live toward God without an answer. […]
GROSS: So – but what was your understanding of God then?
WIMAN: Well, I probably did have an understanding of God as a person in the sky, you know, or a vision of God as simply the answer to all questions, and also just a being a, like a father figure. And I suffered a real loss of that concept at some point, and to what I have now, which is God is really not an object at all, but a verb.
(GROSS: Why turn to religion and not, say, for instance, philosophy? What did religion – what did faith give you that you felt nothing else could?) […]
Oh, a living God. I mean, as philosophy, there’s nothing that loves you back. I mean, I am moved by my deepest settled belief is in the unity of existence, that there is some fundamental unity in all things. And we are part of that. And in our deepest experiences of joy or of love or suffering, there is a sense sometimes that reality is looking back at us. And it can happen to people who are not religious at all. It happens to poets all the time. They can have an experience in nature in which they’re not blending with nature. It’s as if there’s some kind of reciprocal seeing. And I think that is God. And that’s the leap that I made in my life. I think a lot of people don’t make that leap and perhaps don’t feel the need to make that leap.
Notes: Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
I am making a home inside myself. A shelter of kindness where everything is forgiven, everything allowed—a quiet patch of sunlight to stretch out without hurry, where all that has been banished and buried is welcomed, spoken, listened to—released.
A fiercely friendly place I can claim as my very own.
I am throwing arms open to the whole of myself—especially the fearful, fault-finding, falling apart, unfinished parts, knowing every seed and weed, every drop of rain, has made the soil richer.
I will light a candle, pour a hot cup of tea, gather around the warmth of my own blazing fire. I will howl if I want to, knowing this flame can burn through any perceived problem, any prescribed perfectionism, any lying limitation, every heavy thing.
I am making a home inside myself where grace blooms in grand and glorious abundance, a shelter of kindness that grows all the truest things.
I whisper hallelujah to the friendly sky. Watch now as I burst into blossom.
Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
Nothing to be done, he thinks, nothing at all. Short-term memory loss is an inevitable part of growing old, and if it’s not forgetting to zip your zipper, it’s marching off to search the house for your reading glasses while you’re holding the glasses in your hand, or going downstairs to accomplish two small tasks, to retrieve a book from the living room and to pour yourself a glass of juice in the kitchen, and then returning to the second floor with the book but not the juice, or the juice but not the book, or else neither one because some third thing has distracted you on the ground floor and you’ve gone back upstairs empty-handed, having forgotten why you went down there in the first place. It’s not that he didn’t do those kinds of things when he was young, or forget the name of this actress or that writer or blank out the name of the secretary of commerce, but the older you become, the more often these things happen to you, and if they begin to happen so often that you barely know where you are anymore and can no longer keep track of yourself in the present, you’re gone, still alive but gone. They used to call it senility. Now the term is dementia, but one way or the other, Baumgartner knows that even if he winds up there in the end, he still has a long way to go. He can still think, and because he can think, he can still write, and while it takes a little longer for him to finish his sentences now, the results are more or less the same. Good.
NY Time Book Review by Fiona Maazel, November 6, 2023: “Paul Auster Walks the Long Valley of Grief in a New Novel. In ‘Baumgartner,’ a professor contends with mortality and the haunting memory of his wife.”
Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
A great many people (not you) do now seem to think that the mere state of being worried is in itself meritorious. I don’t think it is. We must, if it so happens, give our lives for others: but even while we’re doing it, I think we’re meant to enjoy…our friends, our food, our sleep, our jokes, and the birds song and the frosty sunrise.
As about the distant, so about the future. It is very dark: but there’s usually light enough for the next step or so.
Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
