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Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

August 24, 2020 by 27 Comments

Take a moment to think about the context in which your next decision will occur: You did not pick your parents or the time and place of your birth. You didn’t choose your gender or most of your life experiences. You had no control whatsoever over your genome or the development of your brain. And now your brain is making choices on the basis of preferences and beliefs that have been hammered into it over a lifetime – by your genes, your physical development since the moment you were conceived, and the interactions you have had with other people, events, and ideas. Where is the freedom in this? Yes, you are free to do what you want even now. But where did your desires come from?

— Sam Harris, Free Will

Notes: Quote via themindmovement. Photo: Crystal Green

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Truth.

July 16, 2019 by 16 Comments

It’s the nuances of desire that hold the truth of who we are at our rawest moments.

~ Lisa Taddeo, Three Women (Simon & Schuster, July 9, 2019)

Notes:

  • And another passage by Lisa Taddeo from her new book: “I think about my mother’s sexuality and how she occasionally used it. The little things, the way she made her face up before she left the house or opened the door. To me, it always seemed a strength or a weakness, but never its own pounding heart. How wrong I was.”
  • From Amazon.com: “It thrills us and torments us. It controls our thoughts, destroys our lives, and it’s all we live for. Yet we almost never speak of it. And as a buried force in our lives, desire remains largely unexplored—until now. Over the past eight years, journalist Lisa Taddeo has driven across the country six times to embed herself with ordinary women from different regions and backgrounds. The result, Three Women, is the deepest nonfiction portrait of desire ever written and one of the most anticipated books of the year.”
  • NY Times Book Review by Toni Bentley
  • (Early Review 50 pages in: Exceptionally well written. Page turner. Raw/Emotional.)
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Dragging the fish

March 17, 2016 by 7 Comments

Michael Wong Loi Sing, Fish hat

…desire,
a huge fish I drag with me
through the wilderness:
I love its glint among the dust and stones.

~ Gregory Orr, Leaving The Asylum in The Red House. (Harper & Row, 1980.)

Notes:

  • Poem: Your Eyes Blaze Out
  • Art: Michael Wong Loi Sing, Fish hat. Painting: Acrylic on Canvas. Meditating woman placing herself in the stream of her thoughts, accepting what she has to do, glowing with colors. The fish has his eyes open, he is the watch man.
  • Related Posts: Gregory Orr

 

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Lightly child, lightly

February 19, 2015 by 4 Comments

woman-back-black-and-white

I am a prophet of the past.
And how do you see and foresee the future?
As when a man sees a woman with a beautiful body
walking before him in the street
and looks at her with desire,
but she doesn’t turn to look back,
just smooths her skirt a little,
pulls her blouse tight,
fixes the back of her hair,
then without turning toward the man’s gaze
quickens her step.
That’s what the future is like.

— Yehuda Amichai,  section 5 of “I Foretell the Days of Yore,” Open Closed Open

Notes:

  • Yehuda Amichai (1924 – 2000) was an Israeli poet. Amichai is considered by many, both in Israel and internationally, as Israel’s greatest modern poet. Find his book on Amazon: Open Closed Open
  • Poem Source: The Journey of Words. Image Source: sexykinkyfunny&curly.
  • Prior “Lightly child, lightly” Posts? Connect here.
  • 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.”
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A place to rest. Or, a tear in the cosmos, that open up something raw in us.

June 19, 2014 by 11 Comments

awe,portrait,look up
The way in which art creates desire, I guess that’s everywhere. Is there anyone who hasn’t come out of a movie or a play or a concert filled with an unnameable hunger? …To stand in front of one of [Louis Sullivan’s] buildings and look up, or in front, say, of the facade of Notre Dame, is both to have a hunger satisfied that you maybe didn’t know you had, and also to have a new hunger awakened in you. I say “unnameable,” but there’s a certain kind of balance achieved in certain works of art that feels like satiety, a place to rest, and there are others that are like a tear in the cosmos, that open up something raw in us, wonder or terror or longing. I suppose that’s why people who write about aesthetics want to distinguish between the beautiful and sublime… Beauty sends out ripples, like a pebble tossed in a pond, and the ripples as they spread seem to evoke among other things a stirring of curiosity. The aesthetic effect of a Vermeer painting is a bit like that. Some paradox of stillness and motion. Desire appeased and awakened.

~ E.O. Wilson

Notes:

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The outcome of my days

September 19, 2013 by 14 Comments

black and white

“The outcome of my days is always the same; an infinite desire for what one never gets; a void one cannot fill; an utter yearning to produce in all ways, to battle as much as possible against time that drags us along, and the distractions that throw a veil over our soul.”

~ Eugene Delacroix, “The Journal of Eugene Delacroix”

Credits: Image – Your Eyes Blazeout. Quote – The Hidden Abyss

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