No one should accept the whole of us. We're appalling! :)

"You probably believe that when somebody tries to tell you something about yourself that is a little ticklish and a little uncomfortable, they are attacking you. They are not. They are trying to make you into a better person. And we don't tend to believe that this has a role in love.

We tend to believe that true love means accepting the whole of us. It doesn't. No one should accept the whole of us. We're appalling! You really want the whole of you accepted? No, that's not love. The full display of our characters, the full articulation of who we are, should not be something that we do in front of anyone we care about.

So what we need to do is to accept that the other person is going to want to educate us. And that it isn't a criticism. Criticism is merely the wrong word we apply to a much nobler idea, which is to try and make us into better versions of ourselves. But we tend to reject this idea very strongly."

Minute 11, 'Mating Minds — Alain de Botton on Attachment Styles and the Art of Compromise'

Duration: 15.58 mins https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLNaKCk_Pjo 

Mutual Education

 "And for the ancient Greeks, the whole notion of love is that love should be a process of mutual education. In which two people, under the auspices of love, undertake to educate one another to become better versions of themselves. And they do this not to be cruel, not as a way of bringing each other down, but because they have the sincerest best interests of the other at their heart. And therefore love is a process whereby a teacher and a pupil are constantly rotating roles. Everyone is the teacher and everyone is the pupil at certain points and has lots of things to take on board.

This is not a sign that love has been abandoned. It is the proof that love is in action."

Minute 34.39, Alain de Botton, 'On Love' (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-iUHlVazKk)

It was never success that transformed us

Though It Is Tough to Choose It

This is the path of failure. We see that our definition of success is what is not working. What is working is deep, unseen. —Joi Sharp

Even a small discontent is enough to shut us down,
convince us that the world is cold and indifferent.
Everywhere there’s evidence of this: The slush

that falls on your car seat when you open the car door.

The carrion eaters with their great black wings
that linger beside the road. You pray for sun,

and it gets darker. Someone asks
you a question, and you see your whole life
fold into one small envelope of failure.

Then one day you hit against the same
impassable wall you always hit and this time you fall
to your knees, not because you are weak,

but because at last you are ready to be opened.

Oh sweet failure, how it leads us.

Any unhappy ending is only an invitation

to crawl into the blank pages
of the next unwritten chapter.

It was never success that transformed us—

always the breaking. Not the breaking itself,
but the mystery inside pushing through us

like bindweed through pavement

making cracks in everything
we think we know, so that the world
can come streaming in.

Rosemerry Trommer

How we stand in the middle of it all, lost. How we love anyway.

Relearning

The world doesn’t want to be saved. It wants to be loved. That’s how you save it.
          -Richard Brendan

And isn’t that the way it is—
the truth that opened me yesterday
now puts me in shackles. Whatever
I knew about saving the world
must be lost. Today, the only truth
is the invitation to fall in love
with the world as it is.

Fall in love with the thorn, the sting, the loss,
the ringing in the ears after the shot.
Fall in love with all I’d rather not.
Easier when it’s metaphor. Harder
when it’s wound. Hate. Anger.
Dark snarl of contempt hurled in the face.
Harder when love feels far away.

There’s only one way then to save
the world. How we stand in the middle
of it all, lost. How we love anyway.

Rosemerry Trommer

https://ahundredfallingveils.com/2019/06/08/relearning/  

I carry her smile in my pocket all day

Of Strangers

And so it is that kindness stays with me,
the way the woman in the store smiles at me
when she can tell I might start to cry.

I carry her smile in my pocket all day,
like a coin, something I carry everywhere
with no effort, but sometimes forget, and then,

when my fingers again find the ridged edges,
when I feel the weight of the coin in my palm,
I am struck by how something so small

carries value, carries meaning. All day
the smile stays with me. All day, I touch
it again and again, feel how its weight

tips some invisible scale, how I remember
again to say hello to fate and fall in love.

Rosemerry Trommer

Oh yes. Smiles actually save lives - http://whiletheworldisgoingplaces.blogspot.com/2013/06/i-am-walking-to-bridge.html

Only if Love Should Pierce You

Only if Love Should Pierce You

Do not forget that you live in the midst of the animals,
horses, cats, sewer rats
brown as Solomon's woman, terrible
camp with colours flying,

do not forget the dog with harmonies of the unreal
in tongue and tail, nor the green lizard, the blackbird,
the nightingale, viper, drone. Or you are pleased to think
that you live among pure men and virtuous
women who do not touch
the howl of the frog in love, green
as the greenest branch of the blood.

Birds watch you from trees, and the leaves
are aware that the Mind is dead
forever, its remnant savours of burnt
cartilage, rotten plastic; do not forget
to be animal, fit and sinuous,
torrid in violence, wanting everything here
on earth, before the final cry

when the body is cadence of shrivelled memories
and the spirit hastens to the eternal end;

remember that you can be the being of being
only if love should pierce you deep inside.

Salvatore Quasimodo, translated by Jack Bevan

The strange commerce of love

"As she got older, she was discovering the strange commerce of love: Whatever she gave to others (affection, understanding, kindness) she got to keep for herself too. And whatever she withheld (all of the previous things plus peace of mind and communication), she actually ended up losing instead of keeping.

She wondered if love was the only transaction where such an inversion of the fundamentals was possible."

Philip John, 'Labyrinths'

https://www.facebook.com/Labyrinths.PhilipJohn/photos/a.1456617284574306/2039936179575744/?type=3&theater

Was there magic, and did you stop for it?

"At the end of a day, I tend to ask myself, did you contribute something beautiful to the world? Just a little beauty. And, did you live strongly and quietly today? Was there magic, and did you stop for it? Did you attend?"

http://transactionswithbeauty.com/home/snow

Falling more deeply in love with the world...

On the Winter Solstice

...On this longest night, it’s so clear—
the truest reason to write at all is to fall
more deeply in love with the world,

with its trees and its drizzle
and its stubborn shine and its
relentless hunger and its corners
that will never ever see the growing light.

Fall in love with the octopus that can detach
an arm on purpose and then grow it back again.

Fall in love with the elusive lynx
and the crooked forest and the frazzle ice
tinkling in the San Miguel River.

Fall in love even with this profoundly flawed
species that, despite all its faults,
is still capable of falling more deeply,
more wildly in love.

Rosemerry Trommer

And the darkness is not complete

Indeed. "Though much is taken, much abides."  And there's more to admire in men than to despise. My faith has been tested, but remains. :) Wishing you all a great holiday season and fresh beginnings. Thank you for all your kind words. It's been a tough year but it has carved me deeper to receive even more of the world's kindness. As always, I am overwhelmed with gratitude. 

Solstice

These are dark times. Rumors of war
rise like smoke in the east. Drought
widens its misery. In the west, glittering towers
collapse in a pillar of ash and dust. Peace,
a small white bird, flies off in the clouds.
And this is the shortest day of the year.

Still, in almost every window,
a single candle burns,
there are tiny white lights
on evergreens and pines,
and the darkness is not complete.

Barbara Crooker

If you wanted to be yourself all the time, get an aquarium full of fish

The Virtue of Discomfort

In the beginning of a relationship, she said, both people were happy to be a little uncomfortable. It was a voluntary suffering. She said the Latin root for the word passion was ‘passio’ which meant ‘to suffer’. It made sense, she said. You were so passionate about someone you were willing to make sacrifices. You watched a high brow film and ate salad afterward not because you liked it so much but because your partner liked it a lot and you wanted to see the world through their eyes and you knew they would do the same for you. So at this stage of your love, passion triumphed over authenticity and you didn’t mind it at all. The discomfort made you feel alive.

Then time passed and the desire to be uncomfortable for the other diminished. It was time for frankness, for complete ‘authenticity’. Society made you believe this was the ‘real’ stage of the relationship. Now it was a win-win, you could ‘settle down’ and build an honest, comfortable life together. But, she said, this is where her heart always sank. She hated comfort. And marriage, to her, was really a way of legitimizing comfort and indifference with the carrot of stability, of security.

So here’s the thing, she said. Once you had a relationship that was not so comfortable but very passionate. And now you had a relationship that was very comfortable but devoid of passion and curiosity. Which was better?

After a pause, she said she would choose passion, even if it meant a little discomfort. In other words, she wanted to suffer for her partner and she wanted her partner to want to suffer for her.

She wanted them both to give up a little of their ‘authenticity’ to change for the other. Otherwise what was the point of love?

If you wanted to be yourself all the time, get an aquarium full of fish, she said. Why be with a human being?

Being your true self all the time, being ‘authentic’ was for her not a virtue in relationships but a kind of selfishness.

Philip John, Labyrinths

 

Down Hysterica Passio! The Stirring of the Beast Beneath

I used to write down interesting things I read, in notebooks, pre-internet days. I have 5 of them, I think I started in 1982, while I was at school - shy child whose only interactions were with people in books. I copied down this passage at age 21. I did not know then how true it is!

Later on in life I learned the hard way about the need to be angry at the right time, to use rightful anger to initiate positive action, make things better, ensure self-preservation, safeguard one's self-respect. I was surprised to hear myself tell someone recently - you don't have to show anger or be destroyed by it, you can use it as fuel to do amazing things. I wish I had that wisdom earlier, but better late than never. :)

"We all have something within ourselves to batter down, and we get our power from this fighting. I have never 'produced' a play in verse without showing the actors that the passion of the verse comes from the fact that the speakers are holding down violence, or madness - 'down Hysterica Passio'.

All depends on the completeness of the holding down, on the stirring of the beast underneath. Without this conflict we have no passion, only sentiment and thought."

W.B.Yeats, in a letter to Dorothy Wellesley. From 'Yeats: The Man and the Masks', by Richard Ellmann

Notebook 5, 12 June 1989

Related post, on the importance of discovering one's rage: https://whilethereisstilltime.blogspot.com/2010/08/enkidu.html

Picture: Angry Samurai mask, from here.

Now I am becoming my own tree

“In my youth I believed in somewhere else
I put faith in travel

now I am becoming my own tree.” 

W. S Merwin

http://transactionswithbeauty.com/home/variations  

But sometimes restriction creates more freedom

This gave me goose pimples.

How Did Hokusai Create The Great Wave?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEubj3c2How

I had used the image in here: http://whilethereisstilltime.blogspot.com/2018/11/it-matters-that-you-care.html

It matters that you care

"The great Katsushika Hokusai was an artist, a Japanese one but ironically least like a typical Japanese artist.  Japan's best known woodblock print, his Great Wave, is also typically un-Japanese. "

Hokusai Says

Hokusai says look carefully.
He says pay attention, notice.
He says keep looking, stay curious.
He says there is no end to seeing

He says look forward to getting old.

He says keep changing,
you just get more who you really are.
He says get stuck, accept it, repeat
yourself as long as it is interesting.

He says keep doing what you love.
He says keep praying.

He says every one of us is a child,
every one of us is ancient
every one of us has a body.
He says every one of us is frightened.
He says every one of us has to find
a way to live with fear.

He says everything is alive --
shells, buildings, people, fish,
mountains, trees, wood is alive.
Water is alive.
Everything has its own life.
Everything lives inside us.

He says live with the world inside you.
He says it doesn't matter if you draw,
or write books. It doesn't matter
if you saw wood, or catch fish.

It doesn't matter if you sit at home
and stare at the ants on your veranda
or the shadows of the trees
and grasses in your garden.

It matters that you care.
It matters that you feel.
It matters that you notice.
It matters that life lives through you.

Contentment is life living through you.
Joy is life living through you.
Satisfaction and strength
is life living through you.

He says don't be afraid.
Don't be afraid.
Love, feel, let life take you by the hand.
Let life live through you.

Roger Keyes

Listen to this poem here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1joKzx7-M_k