Tag: emotion

It started from the inside out. (Word!)

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samanthawall

Poetry approached me in that chaos of raw inverted power and leaned over and tapped me on the shoulder, said, “You need to learn how to listen, you need grace, you need to learn how to speak. You’re coming with me.” I did not walk off into the sunset with poetry, or hit the town with a blaze of gunfire with poetry guarding my back. Rather, the journey toward poetry worked exactly as the process of writing a poem. It started from the inside out, then turned back in to complete a movement. And then on and on in the manner of a ripple in water, a song in the air.

~ Joy Harjo, Introduction to How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems 1975-2002

Notes:

Man Deconstructed. Is it any wonder? Come on Ladies…

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olena kassian drawings rising, detail 2, 36- x 29-

Jessica Bennett, A Master’s Degree in … Masculinity?:

Michael Kimmel stood in front of a classroom in bluejeans and a blazer with a pen to a whiteboard. “What does it mean,” the 64-year-old sociology professor asked the group, most of them undergraduates, “to be a good man?”

The students looked puzzled.

“Let’s say it was said at your funeral, ‘He was a good man,’ ” Dr. Kimmel explained. “What does that mean to you?”

“Caring,” a male student in the front said.

“Putting other’s needs before yours,” another young man said.

“Honest,” a third said.

Dr. Kimmel listed each term under the heading Good Man, then turned back to the group. “Now,” he said, “tell me what it means to be a real man.”

This time, the students reacted more quickly.

“Take charge; be authoritative,” said James, a sophomore.

“Take risks,” said Amanda, a sociology graduate student.

“It means suppressing any kind of weakness,” another offered.

“I think for me being a real man meant talk like a man,” said a young man who’d grown up in Turkey. “Walk like a man. Never cry.”

Dr. Kimmel had been taking notes. “Now you’re in the wheelhouse,” he said, excitedly. He pointed to the Good Man list on the left side of the board, then to the Real Man list he’d added to the right. “Look at the disparity. I think American men are confused about what it means to be a man.”

Read full post here: A Master’s Degree in … Masculinity?

Notes: Drawing by Olena Kassian @ olenakassian.com

But your attention is focused, your vision becomes crystal clear

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YoungDeokSeo3-sculpture-face

As soon as the stressful event occurs, it triggers the release of the cascade of hypothalamic, pituitary, and adrenal hormones — the brain’s stress response. It also triggers the adrenal glands to release epinephrine, or adrenaline, and the sympathetic nerves to squirt out the adrenaline-like chemical norepinephrine all over the body: nerves that wire the heart, and gut, and skin. So, the heart is driven to beat faster, the fine hairs of your skin stand up, you sweat, you may feel nausea or the urge to defecate. But your attention is focused, your vision becomes crystal clear, a surge of power helps you run — these same chemicals released from nerves make blood flow to your muscles, preparing you to sprint.

~ Esther M. Sternberg, The Balance Within: The Science Connecting Health and Emotions

 

Notes:

As brightness, into brightness

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sun-sunrise-brightness-woman

You can learn only from
moving forward at the rate
you are moved,
as brightness, into brightness

— Sarah Manguso, Two Kinds of Decay

Credits: Photograph – Brown Dress with White Dots. Quote – Mythology of Blue

I should feel the air move against me

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portrait-feel-rest

I should feel the air move against me,
and feel the things I touched,
instead of having only to look at them.
I’m sure life is all wrong
because it has become too visual –
we can neither hear nor feel nor understand,
we can only see.
I’m sure that is entirely wrong.

— D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love. 

Credits: Portrait – Neil Donovan via eikadan. Quote/Poem – Whiskey River