saturday poem

-- Key Ballah From Preparing My Daughter For Rain

heart break

I am an immigrant, indefinitely so, with no future plans to one day return 'home' and yesterdays decision has left me feeling cut a drift, ashamed and heartbroken.

I love England, I do. I carry it with me, my heart is forever claimed by that mystical, damp, witty, cramped, eccentric, eruptive Isle and I don't find it hard to muster energy and emotion for my British heritage. But I don't give a flying fuck for the kind of isolationist, selfish, racist borders we will now frantically try and erect. Its painful to watch.

I know our history and our mythologies. I've read the books and listened to past witnesses. History can repeat itself and when we break with relations to Europe, we also break with our own mythology, our own history and understandings of the past. This is incredibly dangerous territory.
I can't speak to the immediate ephemeral stuff, thats what tv 'experts' and the internet is for, but i do know two things:

1. There’s no point blaming those who wished to leave; they are us too and they had their own intelligence and convictions. I understand the corruptive elements at play in both positions and can't help but wonder about the conversations long denied between us that have caused todays raw, calamitous bellow to fill the air. If you feel profoundly unwitnessed then the move to voice will almost always become desperate.

2. Now we are where we are know this; it is the fault of the likes of Farage, Boris and Cameron. Their lies are seductive. But In the name of all those you love, all those that have come before us and anyone who gives to the society and communities we all share please don’t be taken for a fool. Try and get past the statistics of this situation into the soul of what is happening. Your books matter. Your activism matters. The things that claim purchase on your heart matter. They absolutely do. They are not a whimsy. If we have been wandering in an enchantment then here is an awakening. You are absolutely needed and we need to come together to face those that would have us make decisions out of fear. Now is the time to start bearing witness to each other and stand up and fight for a fairer society.

Be the love that you want to see in this world.

saturday poem

Reflections

she saw the world from inside out, he saw it upsidedown:

she was a geophysicist.
he was a white faced clown.

They had much in common;
for example, both enjoyed the moon,

she from an interest in its rocks,
craters, and other messages;

he from an interest in its tides,
and its reflection of his own white face.

Of their children , according
to the laws of heredity,

one played a clarinet, one danced a minuet
and two were fortune tellers.

Other children came up in the garden,
dressed as lilac, broom, or apple trees.

All were unable to pass examinations,
but some wrote songs, some played,

and were able to amuse their parents,
as, aging, unable to speak to one another,

they watched the moon together,

he from an interest in its geophysics,
she for its reflection of her own white face.

-- Janet Dube  

(image from  Trio Film (1968) - Yvonne Rainer)

how to talk to your daughter

How to talk to your daughter about her body, step one: don’t talk to your daughter about her body, except to teach her how it works.

Don’t say anything if she’s lost weight. Don’t say anything if she’s gained weight.
If you think your daughter’s body looks amazing, don’t say that. Here are some things you can say instead:

“You look so healthy!” is a great one.

Or how about, “You’re looking so strong.”

“I can see how happy you are – you’re glowing.”

Better yet, compliment her on something that has nothing to do with her body.

Don’t comment on other women’s bodies either. Nope. Not a single comment, not a nice one or a mean one.

Teach her about kindness towards others, but also kindness towards yourself.

Don’t you dare talk about how much you hate your body in front of your daughter, or talk about your new diet. In fact, don’t go on a diet in front of your daughter. Buy healthy food. Cook healthy meals. But don’t say “I’m not eating carbs right now.” Your daughter should never think that carbs are evil, because shame over what you eat only leads to shame about yourself.

Encourage your daughter to run because it makes her feel less stressed. Encourage your daughter to climb mountains because there is nowhere better to explore your spirituality than the peak of the universe. Encourage your daughter to surf, or rock climb, or mountain bike because it scares her and that’s a good thing sometimes.

Help your daughter love soccer or rowing or hockey because sports make her a better leader and a more confident woman. Explain that no matter how old you get, you’ll never stop needing good teamwork. Never make her play a sport she isn’t absolutely in love with.
Prove to your daughter that women don’t need men to move their furniture.
Teach your daughter how to cook kale.

Teach your daughter how to bake chocolate cake made with six sticks of butter.
Pass on your own mom’s recipe for Christmas morning coffee cake. Pass on your love of being outside.

Maybe you and your daughter both have thick thighs or wide ribcages. It’s easy to hate these non-size zero body parts. Don’t. Tell your daughter that with her legs she can run a marathon if she wants to, and her ribcage is nothing but a carrying case for strong lungs. She can scream and she can sing and she can lift up the world, if she wants.

Remind your daughter that the best thing she can do with her body is to use it to mobilize her beautiful soul.

-  wordpress

we aren't here to make things perfect

Loretta, I love you. Not like they told you love is, and I didn't know this either - but love don't make things nice. It ruins everything. It breaks your heart. It makes things a mess. We aren't here to make things perfect. The snowflakes are perfect. The stars are perfect. Not us. Not us! We are here to ruin ourselves, and to break our hearts, and love the wrong people, and die. The storybooks are bullshit! Now I want you to come upstairs with me and get in my bed!

Ronny Cammareri, talking to Loretta Castorini in Moonstruck (1987)
(found via evencleveland)

saturday poem

friday cartoon

The Power of Empathy from Gobblynne on Vimeo.

LOVE

Rather, it is what she calls a "micro-moment of positivity resonance." She means that love is a connection, characterized by a flood of positive emotions, which you share with another person—any other person—whom you happen to connect with in the course of your day. You can experience these micro-moments with your romantic partner, child, or close friend. But you can also fall in love, however momentarily, with less likely candidates, like a stranger on the street, a colleague at work, or an attendant at a grocery store. Louis Armstrong put it best in "It's a Wonderful World" when he sang, "I see friends shaking hands, sayin 'how do you do?' / They're really sayin', 'I love you.'"

Emily Esfahani Smith, The Atlantic 1/24/2013. Full text here.

Wishing you many micro-moments of positivity resonance today.

far

"Leaving home and loving home don't have to be at odds with one another. Despite what our grandmothers' rib-cracking hugs lead us to believe, our families never intended to keep us-only to   make and teach us, and to love us enough to let us go...

...our secure base is our people, not a location. Those relationships can stand firm among the zigzagging, sling-shotting trajectory of our nomadic lives."

-- Kelsey Snell (for Kinfolk Magazine)

Lead with love.

Low ego, high impact.

Move at the speed of trust.

--Black Lives Matter.

Denali

Making Space

Making space, friends and peace with how they feel. Love this...

 "I don't know if I continue, even today, always liking myself. But what I learned to do many years ago was to forgive myself. It is very important for every human being to forgive herself or himself because if you live, you will make mistakes- it is inevitable. But once you do and you see the mistake, then you forgive yourself and say, 'Well, if I'd known better I'd have done better,' that's all. So you say to people who you think you may have injured, 'I'm sorry,' and then you say to yourself, 'I'm sorry.' If we all hold on to the mistake, we can't see our own glory in the mirror because we have the mistake between our faces and the mirror; we can't see what we're capable of being. You can ask forgiveness of others, but in the end the real forgiveness is in one's own self. I think that young men and women are so caught by the way they see themselves. Now mind you. When a larger society sees them as unattractive, as threats, as too black or too white or too poor or too fat or too thin or too sexual or too asexual, that's rough. But you can overcome that. The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself. If we don't have that we never grow, we never learn, and sure as hell we should never teach." 

— Maya Angelou

HAPPY VALENTINES DAY!

“It is not so incomprehensible as you pretend, sweet pea. Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard. It can be light as the hug we give a friend or heavy as the sacrifices we make for our children. It can be romantic, platonic, familial, fleeting, everlasting, conditional, unconditional, imbued with sorrow, stoked by sex, sullied by abuse, amplified by kindness, twisted by betrayal, deepened by time, darkened by difficulty, leavened by generosity, nourished by humor and “loaded with promises and commitments” that we may or may not want or keep.

The best thing you can possibly do with your life is to tackle the motherfucking shit out of it.”
― Cheryl Strayed

(print by Adrian Henry)

Cheryl Strayed

Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

I keep coming back to this book by Cheryl Strayed.

It is a group of letters from Strayed's advice column on The Rumpus. She writes with compassion, honesty, wisdom, humor and guts and I highly recommend it. I actually give copies to friends and if they don't like it i question our friendship...jokes...kind of ; )

Some of the bits I like to re-read every now and again...

Don't

“You give a lot of great advice about what to do. Do you have any advice of what not to do?

Don’t do what you know on a gut level to be the wrong thing to do. Don’t stay when you know you should go or go when you know you should stay. Don’t fight when you should hold steady or hold steady when you should fight. Don’t focus on the short-term fun instead of the long-term fall out. Don’t surrender all your joy for an idea you used to have about yourself that isn’t true anymore. Don’t seek joy at all costs. I know it’s hard to know what to do when you have a conflicting set of emotions and desires, but it’s not as hard as we pretend it is. Saying it’s hard is ultimately a justification to do whatever seems like the easiest thing to do—have the affair, stay at that horrible job, end a friendship over a slight, keep loving someone who treats you terribly. I don’t think there’s a single dumbass thing I’ve done in my adult life that I didn’t know was a dumbass thing to do while I was doing it. Even when I justified it to myself—as I did every damn time—the truest part of me knew I was doing the wrong thing. Always. As the years pass, I’m learning how to better trust my gut and not do the wrong thing, but every so often I get a harsh reminder that I’ve still got work to do.”

Sister Ship

"...You'll never know the life you don't choose. We'll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn't carry us. There's nothing to do but salute it from the shore."

Love details

"love is not so incomprehensible as you pretend, sweet pea. love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard. it can be light as the hug we give a friend or heavy as the sacrifices we make for our children. it can be romantic, platonic, familial, fleeting, everlasting, conditional, unconditional, imbued with sorrow, stoked by sex, sullied by abuse, amplified by kindness, twisted by betrayal, deepened by time, darkened by difficulty, leavened by generosity, nourished by humor and loaded with promises that we may or may not want to keep. the best thing you can possibly do with your life is to tackle the motherfucking shit out of love. and, honey bun, on this front, i think you have some work to do."

 

Space

"One of the basic principles of every single art form has to do not with what's there- the music, the words, the movement, the dialogue, the paint - but with what isn't.  In the visual arts it's called the 'negative space' - the blank parts around and between objects, which is, ofcourse, every bit as crucial as the objects themselves. The negative space allows us to see the non-negative space in all its glory and gloom, its colour and mystery and light. What isn't there gives what's there meaning. IMAGINE THAT. "

 

 

"It’s all about falling in love with yourself and sharing that love with someone who appreciates you, rather than looking for love to compensate for a self love deficit." 

-- Eartha Kitt

Friday!

Have a lovely one. Try not to get caught up in the things you are worrying about. Worry is a misuse of your imagination.

(gif found here)

micro-moments of positivity resonance

In her new book Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become, the psychologist Barbara Fredrickson offers a radically new conception of love ... It is not a long-lasting, continually present emotion that sustains a marriage; it is not the yearning and passion that characterizes young love; and it is not the blood-tie of kinship.

Rather, it is what she calls a "micro-moment of positivity resonance." She means that love is a connection, characterized by a flood of positive emotions, which you share with another person—any other person—whom you happen to connect with in the course of your day. You can experience these micro-moments with your romantic partner, child, or close friend. But you can also fall in love, however momentarily, with less likely candidates, like a stranger on the street, a colleague at work, or an attendant at a grocery store. Louis Armstrong put it best in "It's a Wonderful World" when he sang, "I see friends shaking hands, sayin 'how do you do?' / They're really sayin', 'I love you.'"

Emily Esfahani Smith, The Atlantic 1/24/2013. Full text here.

Wishing you many micro-moments of positivity resonance today.

'Love is a physical act and kindness is tangible.'

"I was having a Skype chat with my mother on Sunday. She was smiling from ear to ear, pleased that I was clean-shaven for the role I am currently playing. “I can see your lovely face,” she kept saying. She was also trying to share a bowl of peanuts with me by bumping it into the laptop’s monitor every few minutes. She has stage-two Alzheimer’s, you see. In that futile gesture, however, laid a thought. Love is a physical act. Kindness is tangible.

It seems to me that this is a concept that largely eludes many of us nowadays. We talk about the prudence of military action, of participating in the bombing of this faraway place or that. We use terms such as “surgical strike” and “collateral damage”. Anyone who is unsure about the wisdom of war is met with the response “fine then, let’s do nothing and let innocent people die”. But inaction is not the opposite of bombing, and indifference not the only alternative to war. Pointing to actively working to bring about peace as the alternative, in such a conversation, one is frequently met with a look or a comment that implies you live in some dreamworld where concepts like this exist.

Yet it is not so. To the thousands of people who volunteer at home and abroad, to the people marching to preserve a free and universal national health service, to the millions who care for their elderly relatives, to parents staying up with a child who has a fever, to my confused mother trying to feed her son through a Wi-Fi connection, love is a physical act and kindness tangible...."

Read the rest of this article by Alex Andreou at The Guardian 

Be Careful

"BE CAREFUL, VERY CAREFUL about organisations. Yoga cannot be organised, must not be organised. Organisations kill work. Love is everywhere, in everything, is everything. But if you confine it, enclose it in a box or in a definite place, it disappears.’

--Vanda Scaravelli