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WHAT'S THE WORD? | Pam Morrison (New Zealand)
For almost as long as I can remember, I have have felt an urge for community. And accompanying this pull, for nearly the duration, there has been a hint of shame, or shyness, that it should be so. Surely this was an odd thing. A desire that one confessed to, rather than celebrated. Autonomy, self-efficacy, independence, even inter-dependence - these were healthy aspirations. But the longing for tribal connections ... you grow out of those things, don't you? Well, not me! There - it's out. The truth is that I mourn for something. Something I think we may have lost in the crazy diaspora of the last two of three centuries. I have roots in me; I know this because I feel their ache for the old soil. Locked into this weird and knowing DNA of mine there is a memory, so it seems, for living differently. Living in a smaller, more constant, more familiar and connected world of people. There is an African saying (exact origin unknown) - 'I am because we are'. Perhaps this is a universal truth. I know it each time I re-experience the joy of linking with friends to talk about our lives and share stories. I was delighted recently to learn the word homonomy. I was told it meant the desire for community. Aha. My visceral instinct was now named and tamed. I embraced the terminology and its meaning. More recently still, I've found, or not found, its source. I can't find the word in the dictionary - it's simply not there. So I wrap a blog post around it instead. (November 2009)
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ON NOT WINNING THE NOBEL PRIZE | Doris Lessing (South Africa)
We are a jaded lot, we in our threatened world. We are good for irony and even cynicism. Some words and ideas we hardly use, so worn out have they become. But we may want to restore some words that have lost their potency.
We have a treasure-house of literature, going back to the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans. It is all there, this wealth of literature, to be discovered again and again by whoever is lucky enough to come upon it. A treasure. Suppose it did not exist. How impoverished, how empty we would be.
We own a legacy of languages, poems, histories, and it is not one that will ever be exhausted. It is there, always.
We have a bequest of stories, tales from the old storytellers, some of whose names we know, but some not. The storytellers go back and back, to a clearing in the forest where a great fire burns, and the old shamans dance and sing, for our heritage of stories began in fire, magic, the spirit world. And that is where it is held, today.
Ask any modern storyteller and they will say there is always a moment when they are touched with fire, with what we like to call inspiration, and this goes back and back to the beginning of our race, to the great winds that shaped us and our world.
The storyteller is deep inside every one of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is ravaged by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise. But the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us -for good and for ill. It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.
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ENJOYING THE FULLNESS OF SUMMER | M (South Africa)
My small white heart-dog likes to lie under the study desk when I am working and clasp my bare foot in her front paws. This makes us both very happy even if it is an absurd thing to do in a heat wave.
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MOST DAYS | John Crawford (New Zealand)
I work and draw most days and walk on the beach
Hold the cat in the evenings feel her purr
It's amazing how much these small things distract and calm. . .
We have a distinct lack of birds this winter a black bird who swoops in front of the windows of the studio
and a thrush who hides in her thicket
Anne puts out apples and oats for them and I am pleased to say that yesterday
I saw several wax-eyes all together
Flipping and fighting much quivering of wings
a sort of green movable delight
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ATTRIBUTES OF THE MOTH | Marylinn Kelly (Pasadena, Los Angeles, USA)
By now, which means after more than three years of blog writing, some of my secrets have been pulled from under the couch cushions and put on the table. Among these are the revelation that I find life to be teeming, jumping with symbolism, that I willingly allow a representative portion of something to stand in for the still-to-come whole, that metaphor is my native language and very little is only what it seems.
In a short, perhaps five-minute segment of a recent podcast, there was a meditative exercise in which listeners were directed to find a spirit guide. The practitioner spoke of eagles, for the ability to fly would be required of the guide. Mine arrived. It was a moth.
It may be my most basic belief that we are here - wherever we are geographically, emotionally, physically in this moment - to be of assistance to each other. Assistance, in this case, can mean anything. Without rushing to Google, I thought of the moth, an extreme example of transformation, starting life as one form and becoming a different creature. I am not who I used to be. Teachers, awareness and opportunities continue to find me, carrying me out of dimness, discouragement, into a brighter land. Mulling and pondering - and daydreaming - are natural states, taking the measure of a situation, mostly by intuition, interpreting, perceiving, feeling. Feeling my way toward knowledge, insight, information.
When I looked into what moth brings as a totem I found: the ability to perceive with clarity, strong healing abilities, protection for traveling between darkness and the light, finding light in darkness, metamorphosis and, in common with the phoenix, rising from the ashes, in moth's case of the flames to which it is drawn. What better sidekick?
The title above is one of those, "Quick, write this down," flashes that fill the scraps I mentioned in the previous post. Attributes of the moth. Forgive me, please, if I repeat myself. Life as I have come to know it is fraught with meaning; likely it always was, but I had no skills. These, too, are days of myth and fable, truths revealed in waking, walking dreams. No wonder fiction explores parallel universes, wormholes, wrinkles in time. How else to explain being conscious of treading the ordinary path of oil changes, bill paying, medical procedures, clothes that need washing or detecting an unpleasant odor in the refrigerator and, in the same moments, seeing the story within the story, the plan behind the random event, the bigger picture.
For some of you, this will be like my talking in tongues. That may be a fair comparison. The best we can hope for is to know our own truths and to allow others to know theirs. If we share common ground, there is much to discuss. If not, I may be found in a somewhat unkempt state wearing soft clothes that feel like pajamas, pencil-callused fingers turning the pages in The Great Big Book of Moths.
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PLUMB | John Crawford (New Zealand)
The plumb bob is one of the objects I have had an ongoing fascination with
It is The Tool to establish the straight
To find just where the centre of gravity is in any given object
To create a line in space
Cy Twombly uses such a line to allow the other lines in his work to find their meaning more easily
and I wonder if he puts these straight lines in before or after the initial lines
I have only just discovered (by reading one of his catalogues) that the majority of his mark making
is done in total darkness
Such faith in one's internal energy and an acceptance that there is no such thing as a wrong mark
just one that has not yet found its right meaning and place
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
OUR PALE BLUE DOT | Carl Sagan (USA)
"From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known. . . "
Carl Sagan
For almost as long as I can remember, I have have felt an urge for community. And accompanying this pull, for nearly the duration, there has been a hint of shame, or shyness, that it should be so. Surely this was an odd thing. A desire that one confessed to, rather than celebrated. Autonomy, self-efficacy, independence, even inter-dependence - these were healthy aspirations. But the longing for tribal connections ... you grow out of those things, don't you? Well, not me! There - it's out. The truth is that I mourn for something. Something I think we may have lost in the crazy diaspora of the last two of three centuries. I have roots in me; I know this because I feel their ache for the old soil. Locked into this weird and knowing DNA of mine there is a memory, so it seems, for living differently. Living in a smaller, more constant, more familiar and connected world of people. There is an African saying (exact origin unknown) - 'I am because we are'. Perhaps this is a universal truth. I know it each time I re-experience the joy of linking with friends to talk about our lives and share stories. I was delighted recently to learn the word homonomy. I was told it meant the desire for community. Aha. My visceral instinct was now named and tamed. I embraced the terminology and its meaning. More recently still, I've found, or not found, its source. I can't find the word in the dictionary - it's simply not there. So I wrap a blog post around it instead. (November 2009)
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ON NOT WINNING THE NOBEL PRIZE | Doris Lessing (South Africa)
We are a jaded lot, we in our threatened world. We are good for irony and even cynicism. Some words and ideas we hardly use, so worn out have they become. But we may want to restore some words that have lost their potency.
We have a treasure-house of literature, going back to the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans. It is all there, this wealth of literature, to be discovered again and again by whoever is lucky enough to come upon it. A treasure. Suppose it did not exist. How impoverished, how empty we would be.
We own a legacy of languages, poems, histories, and it is not one that will ever be exhausted. It is there, always.
We have a bequest of stories, tales from the old storytellers, some of whose names we know, but some not. The storytellers go back and back, to a clearing in the forest where a great fire burns, and the old shamans dance and sing, for our heritage of stories began in fire, magic, the spirit world. And that is where it is held, today.
Ask any modern storyteller and they will say there is always a moment when they are touched with fire, with what we like to call inspiration, and this goes back and back to the beginning of our race, to the great winds that shaped us and our world.
The storyteller is deep inside every one of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is ravaged by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise. But the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us -for good and for ill. It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ENJOYING THE FULLNESS OF SUMMER | M (South Africa)
My small white heart-dog likes to lie under the study desk when I am working and clasp my bare foot in her front paws. This makes us both very happy even if it is an absurd thing to do in a heat wave.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MOST DAYS | John Crawford (New Zealand)
I work and draw most days and walk on the beach
Hold the cat in the evenings feel her purr
It's amazing how much these small things distract and calm. . .
We have a distinct lack of birds this winter a black bird who swoops in front of the windows of the studio
and a thrush who hides in her thicket
Anne puts out apples and oats for them and I am pleased to say that yesterday
I saw several wax-eyes all together
Flipping and fighting much quivering of wings
a sort of green movable delight
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ATTRIBUTES OF THE MOTH | Marylinn Kelly (Pasadena, Los Angeles, USA)
By now, which means after more than three years of blog writing, some of my secrets have been pulled from under the couch cushions and put on the table. Among these are the revelation that I find life to be teeming, jumping with symbolism, that I willingly allow a representative portion of something to stand in for the still-to-come whole, that metaphor is my native language and very little is only what it seems.
In a short, perhaps five-minute segment of a recent podcast, there was a meditative exercise in which listeners were directed to find a spirit guide. The practitioner spoke of eagles, for the ability to fly would be required of the guide. Mine arrived. It was a moth.
It may be my most basic belief that we are here - wherever we are geographically, emotionally, physically in this moment - to be of assistance to each other. Assistance, in this case, can mean anything. Without rushing to Google, I thought of the moth, an extreme example of transformation, starting life as one form and becoming a different creature. I am not who I used to be. Teachers, awareness and opportunities continue to find me, carrying me out of dimness, discouragement, into a brighter land. Mulling and pondering - and daydreaming - are natural states, taking the measure of a situation, mostly by intuition, interpreting, perceiving, feeling. Feeling my way toward knowledge, insight, information.
When I looked into what moth brings as a totem I found: the ability to perceive with clarity, strong healing abilities, protection for traveling between darkness and the light, finding light in darkness, metamorphosis and, in common with the phoenix, rising from the ashes, in moth's case of the flames to which it is drawn. What better sidekick?
The title above is one of those, "Quick, write this down," flashes that fill the scraps I mentioned in the previous post. Attributes of the moth. Forgive me, please, if I repeat myself. Life as I have come to know it is fraught with meaning; likely it always was, but I had no skills. These, too, are days of myth and fable, truths revealed in waking, walking dreams. No wonder fiction explores parallel universes, wormholes, wrinkles in time. How else to explain being conscious of treading the ordinary path of oil changes, bill paying, medical procedures, clothes that need washing or detecting an unpleasant odor in the refrigerator and, in the same moments, seeing the story within the story, the plan behind the random event, the bigger picture.
For some of you, this will be like my talking in tongues. That may be a fair comparison. The best we can hope for is to know our own truths and to allow others to know theirs. If we share common ground, there is much to discuss. If not, I may be found in a somewhat unkempt state wearing soft clothes that feel like pajamas, pencil-callused fingers turning the pages in The Great Big Book of Moths.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PLUMB | John Crawford (New Zealand)
The plumb bob is one of the objects I have had an ongoing fascination with
It is The Tool to establish the straight
To find just where the centre of gravity is in any given object
To create a line in space
Cy Twombly uses such a line to allow the other lines in his work to find their meaning more easily
and I wonder if he puts these straight lines in before or after the initial lines
I have only just discovered (by reading one of his catalogues) that the majority of his mark making
is done in total darkness
Such faith in one's internal energy and an acceptance that there is no such thing as a wrong mark
just one that has not yet found its right meaning and place
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
OUR PALE BLUE DOT | Carl Sagan (USA)
"From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known. . . "
Carl Sagan
