“To launch ourselves anew, we need to get out of our heads ... We need to act ... We learn who we are--in practice, not in theory--by testing reality.”
Because I Said So
The thing we always say about having or needing 'relationship experience' is a myth. New relationships don't pick up where old relationships left off. Every connection – romantic or not - is as different as the people in it. And if you have the instincts to love, be kind, be patient, be honest, and generally accept your wild, wonderful, dorky, ever-changing selves, you're going to be fine ... however things happen to unfold.
Alien Hand Syndrome
I can't stop thinking about this:
In some split-brain patients, or in others who have suffered damage to the corpus callosum, the right hemisphere seems to be actively fighting with the left hemisphere in a condition known as alien hand syndrome. In these cases, one hand, usually the left, acts of its own accord and seems to have its own agenda. The alien hand may pick up a ringing phone, but then refuse to pass the phone to the other hand or bring it up to an ear. The hand rejects choices the person has just made, for example, by putting back on the rack a shirt that the other hand has just picked out. It grabs the wrist of the other hand and tries to stop it from executing the person’s conscious plans. Sometimes, the alien hand actually reaches for the person’s own neck and tries to strangle him.
Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis
So strange. Sometimes I think we understand more about the entire universe than we do about our own physiology.
An Experience
Listen to the Liszt all the way through and then go straight into Wait for Love. It's magic magic magic magic.
Also, this is Callie (below) (obviously). She has lived in Minnesota, Colorado, Minnesota, Colorado, Japan, Minnesota, Japan, Colorado and is now in Minnesota for good. She's worldly and wise, lets me take her for long walks, and waits impatiently when I have to take a picture of something ...
That Wild, Silky Part of Ourselves
I need more Mary Oliver in my library. This poem is an all-time favorite and I like what she says (below) about the importance of the head and the heart and the art of showing up - via Braingpickings.
If Romeo and Juliet had made their appointments to meet, in the moonlight-swept orchard, in all the peril and sweetness of conspiracy, and then more often than not failed to meet — one or the other lagging, or afraid, or busy elsewhere — there would have been no romance, no passion, none of the drama for which we remember and celebrate them. Writing a poem is not so different—it is a kind of possible love affair between something like the heart (that courageous but also shy factory of emotion) and the learned skills of the conscious mind. They make appointments with each other, and keep them, and something begins to happen. Or, they make appointments with each other but are casual and often fail to keep them: count on it, nothing happens.
The part of the psyche that works in concert with consciousness and supplies a necessary part of the poem — the heart of the star as opposed to the shape of a star, let us say — exists in a mysterious, unmapped zone: not unconscious, not subconscious, but cautious. It learns quickly what sort of courtship it is going to be. Say you promise to be at your desk in the evenings, from seven to nine. It waits, it watches. If you are reliably there, it begins to show itself — soon it begins to arrive when you do. But if you are only there sometimes and are frequently late or inattentive, it will appear fleetingly, or it will not appear at all.
Why should it? It can wait. It can stay silent a lifetime. Who knows anyway what it is, that wild, silky part of ourselves without which no poem can live? But we do know this: if it is going to enter into a passionate relationship and speak what is in its own portion of your mind, the other responsible and purposeful part of you had better be a Romeo. It doesn’t matter if risk is somewhere close by — risk is always hovering somewhere. But it won’t involve itself with anything less than a perfect seriousness.
For the would-be writer of poems, this is the first and most essential thing to understand. It comes before everything, even technique.
- Mary Oliver
