“One can never ask anyone to change a feeling.”

— Susan Sontag

feel things

The first person who saw your face was delighted by you. Isn’t that something? You managed to bring joy only by breathing.
Your mother will occasionally peek through the cracks of your door when you are sleeping, even now, to make sure that she can see the movements of your chest.
The boy who kissed you in the park last night isn’t in love with you, he won’t even stay, but he meant every second of those minutes.
You’ll walk a city street that your feet have never touched before and you’ll be terrified of getting lost and that feeling is what’ll help you find the way home.
You’ll give your money to a homeless man and he will hold your hand firmly between his and he will say ‘thank you so, so much’ and isn’t that something?
There’s a piece of music that makes your heart feel like it’s bleeding. Listen to it. Listen to it again.
When was the last time you paused to stare at night time?
Did you know that there is at least one person in your life who will jump in front of a hail of bullets for you, without your asking.
Your entire body is made of nerves. Feel things.
Take walks in places you’ve never been.
Take photographs of people not everyone considers beautiful. Find loveliness in them.
Let go of the things that are killing you from the inside out.
One day you’re going to be part of the sky, you’re going to be that beautiful and that necessary but not today. Not today.
--Azra

(Source: thirlie)

Bert's Lost Paperclips

Sunday Tune

'like pearls slipping of a string'

'After all,' Anne had said to Marilla once, 'I believe the nicest and sweetest days are not those on which anything very splendid or wonderful or exciting happens but just those that bring simple little pleasures, following one another softly, like pearls slipping off a string.'

L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Avonlea

( Photo of pearls forming in the shell from the American Museum of Natural History.)

whole universes, which I can never exhaust

"Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful for me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust."

-- Italo Calvino

replace reading with moving and book with move.

About reasons to be a mover

"I think that one of the reasons I got involved in dance
is to finish my movement development.
Because I have a hunger to find,
and to finish,
and to explore,
to do essentially what babies do when they begin to move.
A hunger to find out more of what movement is or can be.
I think it provides a service to keep the search alive
in a culture,
which has engineered an environment which requires physical and sensorial suppression to exist in.
Most of the people who study dance aren’t ambitious to be dancers, in fact.
Or aren’t serious about that ambition.
I think they’re trying to complete physicality
that gets messed up by sitting for 12 years in school, or longer.
Essentially, urban civilization has cut off from movement and sensorial development which would occur in a natural environment.
I mean the sense of smell is leaving.
The sense of sight is rigidly controlled by readings,
by television,
by school,
by signage,
by words everywhere in the city.
In fact there are many kinds of of control or implicit visual message
about how to interact with the city.
Here there is more neon than nuance.
Food is advertised rather than hunted for.
Entertainment becomes divorced from ingenuity.
I’m not complaining because it is about 15,000 years too late to change direction.
I have found the cities very interesting places,
but when I return to the country I am struck by the difference in what is required by the senses.
It is appalling how we disuse the body.
Dance remind us about that.
Dance explores some of the physical possibilities.
Dance refocuses our focusing mind on very basic existence,
and time, space, gravity, open up to creativity.
This seems to me a reminder of nature, of our natures,
and as such it provides a service to us in our physical doldrums.
It is a wakeup call to deadened urbanites,
a stimulus, to work-habituated bodies,
a promise to developing children …
Even those country folk who cope with their natural environment
use their bodiies more and more often
fall into a routine and mold their bodies into tools
from which creativity has departed
dance will remind them of their feet, their spines, their reach
I think its good for us"

About reasons to be a mover. Steve Paxton. from Emilio Rosales

blurrrr//ffffound

"Just don’t give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there is love and inspiration, I don’t think you can go wrong."

-- Ella Fitzgerald

(image of Ella Fitzgerald at the Downbeat Club, 1949.)

Splittings

1.
My body opens over San Francisco like the day –
light raining down      each pore crying the change of light
I am not with her     I have been waking off and on
all night to that pain     not simply absence but
the presence of the past      destructive
to living here and now      Yet if I could instruct
myself, if we could learn to learn from pain
even as it grasps us      if the mind, the mind that lives
in this body could refuse      to let itself be crushed
in that grasp     it would loosen      Pain would have to stand
off from me and listen     its dark breath still on me
but the mind could begin to speak to pain
and pain would have to answer:
We are older now
we have met before     these are my hands before your eyes
my figure blotting out      all that is not mine
I am the pain of division      creator of divisions
it is I who blot your lover from you
and not the time-zones or the miles
It is not separation calls me forth      but I
who am separation      And remember
I have no existence      apart from you

2.
I believe I am choosing something now
not to suffer uselessly     yet still to feel
Does the infant memorize the body of the mother
and create her in absence?   
or simply cry primordial loneliness?    
does the bed of the stream
once diverted      mourning       remember the wetness?
But we, we live so much in these
configurations of the past      I choose
to separate her     from my past we have not shared
I choose not to suffer uselessly
to detect primordial pain as it stalks toward me
flashing its bleak torch in my eyes     blotting out
her particular being     the details of her love
I will not be divided      from her or from myself
by myths of separation
while her mind and body in Manhattan are more with me
than the smell of eucalyptus coolly burning      on these hills

3.
The world tells me I am its creature
I am raked by eyes     brushed by hands
I want to crawl into her for refuge     lay my head
in the space     between her breast and shoulder
abnegating power for love
as women have done      or hiding
from power in her love     like a man
I refuse these givens      the splitting
between love and action      I am choosing
not to suffer uselessly      and not to use her
I choose to love      this time      for once
with all my intelligence.

-- Adrienne Rich

Marc Johns

Stop minimizing and discounting your feelings. You have every right to feel the way you do. Your feelings may not always be logical, but they are always valid. Because if you feel something, then you feel it and it’s real to you. It’s not something you can ignore or wish away. It’s there, gnawing at you, tugging at your core, and in order to find peace, you have to give yourself permission to feel whatever it is you feel. You have to let go of what you’ve been told you “should” or “shouldn’t” feel. You have to drown out the voices of people who try to shame you into silence. You have to listen to the sound of your own breathing and honor the truth inside you. Because despite what you may believe, you don’t need anyone’s validation or approval to feel what you feel. Your feelings are inherently right and true. They’re important and they matter — you matter — and it is more than okay to feel what you feel. Don’t let anyone, including yourself, convince you otherwise.

-- Daniell Koepke

(image source: thedeathofcool, via awelltraveledwoman)

(found here)

"Each one of us has lived through some devastation, some loneliness, some weather superstorm or spiritual superstorm, when we look at each other we must say, I understand. I understand how you feel because I have been there myself. We must support each other and empathize with each other because each of us is more alike than we are unalike. "

--Maya Angelou

Dialog

Dialog, 1977 by Rudolf Bonvie

I feel, therefore I am.

In the middle of the 17th century, Spinoza took on Descartes and lost.

According to Descartes' famous dualist theory, human beings were composed of physical bodies and immaterial minds. Spinoza disagreed. In ''The Ethics,'' his masterwork, published after his death in 1677, he argued that body and mind are not two separate entities but one continuous substance.

As for Descartes' view of the mind as a reasoning machine, Spinoza thought that was dead wrong. Reason, he insisted, is shot through with emotion. More radical still, he claimed that thoughts and feelings are not primarily reactions to external events but first and foremost about the body. In fact, he suggested, the mind exists purely for the body's sake, to ensure its survival.

For his beliefs, Spinoza was vilified and -- for extended periods -- ignored. Descartes, on the other hand, was immortalized as a visionary. His rationalist doctrine shaped the course of modern philosophy and became part of the cultural bedrock....

Read the full article by Emily Eakin in The New York Times.

Kiki Smith, Coming Forth, 2008

Feel it.

Quote from From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. by E.L. Konigsburg.

Pina

(Found here)