"Yet small seeds do not doubt whether they will become trees. They trust the natural process of evolution and growth that takes them from seeds to sprouting seedlings to flowering, fruitful trees. With proper nutrients, care and love the flower of your inner lotus is sure to grow to maturity in the fertile soil of your own consciousness."
This inspires me to believe in the process, the journey, the in-the-middle-of-things madness. Trust. Faith. Belief.
Easier said than done, but I plan on showing up everyday and trying to let the seed grow as it is meant to. Naturally. Beautifully. Without fail.
For Yoga Beginners: Operation Lotus | Crazy Sexy Life
Showing posts with label ~Inspiration~. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ~Inspiration~. Show all posts
Friday, May 28, 2010
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
From Eve Ensler's "I Am An Emotional Creature"
GIRL FACT: Your left lung is smaller than your right lung to make room for your heart.
Author’s Note: These monologues are not interviews. Each monologue is a literary text inspired by traveling the world, by witnessing events, by listening to real and imagined conversations. On occasion a monologue was inspired by an article, an experience, a memory, a dream, a wish, an image, or a moment of grief of rage.
Introduction:
Dear Emotional Creature,
You know who you are. I wrote this book because I believe in you. I believe in your authenticity, your uniqueness, your intensity, your wildness. I love the way you dye your hair purple, or hike up your short skirt, or blare your music while you lip-sync every single memorized lyric. I love your restlessness and your hunger. You are one of our greatest natural resources. You possess a necessary agency and energy that if unleashed could transform, inspire, and heal the world.
I know we make you feel stupid, as if being a teenager meant you were temporarily deranged. We have become accustomed to muting you, judging you, discounting you, asking you—sometimes even forcing you—to betray what you see and know and feel.
You scare us. You remind us of what we have been forced to shut down or abandon in ourselves in order to fit in. You ask us by your being to question, to wake up, to reperceive. Sometimes I think we tell you we are protecting you when really we are protecting ourselves from our own feelings of self-betrayal and loss.
Everyone seems to have a certain way they want you to be—your mother, father, teachers, religious leaders, politicians, boyfriends, fashion gurus, celebrities, girlfriends. In researching this book I came upon a very disturbing statistic: 74 percent of you say you are under pressure to please everyone.
I have done a lot of thinking about what it means to please. To please, to embody the wish or will of somebody other than yourself. To please the fashion setters, we starve ourselves. To please boys, we push ourselves when we aren’t ready. To please the popular girls, we end up acting mean to our best friends. To please our parents, we become insane overachievers. If you are trying to please, how do you take responsibility for your own needs? How do you even know what your own needs are? What do you have to cut off in yourself in order to please others? I think the act of pleasing makes everything murky. We lose track of ourselves. We stop uttering declaratory sentences. We stop directing our lives. We wait to be rescued. We forget what we know. We make everything okay rather than real.
I have had the good fortune to travel around the world. Everywhere I meet teenage girls, circles of girls, packs of girls walking the country roads home from school, hanging out on city street corners, arm in arm, laughing, giggling, screaming. Electric girls. I see how your lives get hijacked, how your opinions and desires get denied and undone. I see too how this later comes to determine so much of our lives as adults. So many of the women I have met through The Vagina Monologues and The Good Body and V-Day are still trying to overcome what was muted or undone in them when they were young. They are struggling late into their lives to know their desires, to find their power and their way.
This book is a call to question rather than to please. To provoke, to challenge, to dare, to satisfy your own imagination and appetite. To know yourself truly. To take responsibility for who you are, to engage. This book is a call to listen to the voice inside you that might want something different, that hears, that knows, the way only you can hear and know. It’s a call to your original girl self, to your emotional creature self, to move at your speed, to walk with your step, to wear your color. It is an invitation to heed your instinct to resist war, or draw snakes, or to speak to the starts.
I hope you will see this book as something living, that you will use it to help you to identify and overcome the obstacles or pressures that prevent you from being an emotional creature. Maybe after you read these stories and monologues you will be inspired to write and share your own, or paint your bedroom wall or fight for polar bears or speak up in class or learn about sexuality or demand your rights.
When I was your age, I didn’t know how to live as an emotional creature. I felt like an alien. I still do a lot of the time. I don’t think it has much to do with the country I grew up in or the language I speak. In this book you will meet girls from everywhere. Some live in remote villages, others in huge cities or posh suburbs. Some worrying about whether they will be able to afford the latest purple UGGs, some worrying if they’ll ever get home after two years of being held as a sex slave. Some deciding whether they are able to kill a supposed enemy, some on the brink of killing themselves, some desperate for the next meal, some unable to stop starving themselves. Girls from Cairo, Kwai Yong, Sofia, Ramallah, Bukavu, Narok, Westchester, Jerusalem, Manhattan, Paris. All of them, all of you, live on the planet right now. I think whatever country or town or village you physically live in, you inhabit a similar emotional landscape. You all come from girl land. There you get born with this awakeness, this open-hearted have to eat it, taste it, know it, defy it. Then the “grown-ups” come with their rules, their directions. They teach you how to make yourselves less so everyone feels more comfortable. They teach you not to stand out. They get you to behave.
I am older now. I finally know the difference between pleasing and loving, obeying and respecting. It has taken me so many years to be okay with being different, with being this alive, this intense. I just don’t want you to have to wait that long.
Love,
Eve
Author’s Note: These monologues are not interviews. Each monologue is a literary text inspired by traveling the world, by witnessing events, by listening to real and imagined conversations. On occasion a monologue was inspired by an article, an experience, a memory, a dream, a wish, an image, or a moment of grief of rage.
Introduction:
Dear Emotional Creature,
You know who you are. I wrote this book because I believe in you. I believe in your authenticity, your uniqueness, your intensity, your wildness. I love the way you dye your hair purple, or hike up your short skirt, or blare your music while you lip-sync every single memorized lyric. I love your restlessness and your hunger. You are one of our greatest natural resources. You possess a necessary agency and energy that if unleashed could transform, inspire, and heal the world.
I know we make you feel stupid, as if being a teenager meant you were temporarily deranged. We have become accustomed to muting you, judging you, discounting you, asking you—sometimes even forcing you—to betray what you see and know and feel.
You scare us. You remind us of what we have been forced to shut down or abandon in ourselves in order to fit in. You ask us by your being to question, to wake up, to reperceive. Sometimes I think we tell you we are protecting you when really we are protecting ourselves from our own feelings of self-betrayal and loss.
Everyone seems to have a certain way they want you to be—your mother, father, teachers, religious leaders, politicians, boyfriends, fashion gurus, celebrities, girlfriends. In researching this book I came upon a very disturbing statistic: 74 percent of you say you are under pressure to please everyone.
I have done a lot of thinking about what it means to please. To please, to embody the wish or will of somebody other than yourself. To please the fashion setters, we starve ourselves. To please boys, we push ourselves when we aren’t ready. To please the popular girls, we end up acting mean to our best friends. To please our parents, we become insane overachievers. If you are trying to please, how do you take responsibility for your own needs? How do you even know what your own needs are? What do you have to cut off in yourself in order to please others? I think the act of pleasing makes everything murky. We lose track of ourselves. We stop uttering declaratory sentences. We stop directing our lives. We wait to be rescued. We forget what we know. We make everything okay rather than real.
I have had the good fortune to travel around the world. Everywhere I meet teenage girls, circles of girls, packs of girls walking the country roads home from school, hanging out on city street corners, arm in arm, laughing, giggling, screaming. Electric girls. I see how your lives get hijacked, how your opinions and desires get denied and undone. I see too how this later comes to determine so much of our lives as adults. So many of the women I have met through The Vagina Monologues and The Good Body and V-Day are still trying to overcome what was muted or undone in them when they were young. They are struggling late into their lives to know their desires, to find their power and their way.
This book is a call to question rather than to please. To provoke, to challenge, to dare, to satisfy your own imagination and appetite. To know yourself truly. To take responsibility for who you are, to engage. This book is a call to listen to the voice inside you that might want something different, that hears, that knows, the way only you can hear and know. It’s a call to your original girl self, to your emotional creature self, to move at your speed, to walk with your step, to wear your color. It is an invitation to heed your instinct to resist war, or draw snakes, or to speak to the starts.
I hope you will see this book as something living, that you will use it to help you to identify and overcome the obstacles or pressures that prevent you from being an emotional creature. Maybe after you read these stories and monologues you will be inspired to write and share your own, or paint your bedroom wall or fight for polar bears or speak up in class or learn about sexuality or demand your rights.
When I was your age, I didn’t know how to live as an emotional creature. I felt like an alien. I still do a lot of the time. I don’t think it has much to do with the country I grew up in or the language I speak. In this book you will meet girls from everywhere. Some live in remote villages, others in huge cities or posh suburbs. Some worrying about whether they will be able to afford the latest purple UGGs, some worrying if they’ll ever get home after two years of being held as a sex slave. Some deciding whether they are able to kill a supposed enemy, some on the brink of killing themselves, some desperate for the next meal, some unable to stop starving themselves. Girls from Cairo, Kwai Yong, Sofia, Ramallah, Bukavu, Narok, Westchester, Jerusalem, Manhattan, Paris. All of them, all of you, live on the planet right now. I think whatever country or town or village you physically live in, you inhabit a similar emotional landscape. You all come from girl land. There you get born with this awakeness, this open-hearted have to eat it, taste it, know it, defy it. Then the “grown-ups” come with their rules, their directions. They teach you how to make yourselves less so everyone feels more comfortable. They teach you not to stand out. They get you to behave.
I am older now. I finally know the difference between pleasing and loving, obeying and respecting. It has taken me so many years to be okay with being different, with being this alive, this intense. I just don’t want you to have to wait that long.
Love,
Eve
Saturday, December 12, 2009
"Famous" by Naomi Shihab Nye
The river is famous to the fish.
The loud voice is famous to silence,
which knew it would inherit the earth
before anybody said so.
The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds
watching him from the birdhouse.
The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.
The idea you carry close to your bosom
is famous to your bosom.
The boot is famous to the earth,
more famous than the dress shoe,
which is famous only to floors.
The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it
and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.
I want to be famous to shuffling men
who smile while crossing streets,
sticky children in grocery lines,
famous as the one who smiled back.
I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it could do.
--From Words Under the Words: Selected Poems
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Check our SARK and her beauteous way of living and loving abundantly.
(Thanks to my cousin, Liz, for turning me on to this. It turns out that today happens to be a day of reconnecting, to inspiration, to self, to others. And I am thankful for it.)
http://www.sarkjournal.com/
Sunday, December 21, 2008
Teachers inspire me.
A poem given to us at our last department meeting.
After almost two full hours of debate and complaining and whining and griping (sometimes rightfully) about anything and everything that needs to get accomplished but can't because we are only human and can only be expected to do so much, I am so grateful to have received this piece of writing.
Its simplicity and poignancy reminded me why I do this. It's not the CAPT scores or the piles of college recommendations or papers or duties or web portals or professional objectives or whatever else's. It's the students sitting in front of us. It is the faint recognition, the pieces of me I see sitting in front of me. It is the lessons I struggled so hard to learn. It is the lessons I learned the wrong way. It is the passion I had then that was stifled too early. It is the purity and innocence I see before me. And before that innocence is lost, I want to do something, say something, or not say something to help that purity become what is possible.
Even though I am tired everyday, I don't regret a second I spend with my students, for my students, because of my students. This is a life choice. This is dedication. This is for them. Because I was them, and if it weren't for a very small few, I might not have become the me I am now.
_________________________________________________________
{Untitled}in my first year, when i teach geography to seventh graders,
one little girl's voice faintly
reminds me of one of my college friends and
i almost give her an A just because she's an echo
of someone who formed a vital layer in me.
over the years I have more students who drift into
reminders of people in my past;
sometimes I recognize the resemblance immediately,
like the profile of the low appalachian ridge outside the window,
and sometimes it hits me mid-year and,
having created the borders of the connection,
i then chart the inlands,
embellish and illuminate mountains, floodplains, and
valleys with memory.
i wonder if we all listen to our students for echoes--
in the lilt of a laugh, or how one's hair parts in the middle,
like the friend we had in thenth grade
who wore mega-sweaters and leggings.
or in the turn of a phrase,
the cadence of a question,
the way a hand is slowly raised like the long neck of a dinosaur
in those long-ago science hand-outs,
that smelled like sweet cereal and purple ink.
each september it's as if we have a new chance
to fumble through the past,
to listen for echoes of ourselves that inexorably decay
as they resonate and ripple
off the earthtone and crumbly layers
of time, of characters in books, of friends and old lovers--
--and sometimes of the dead,
who we unearth for an hour or so each day;
time enough to quietly say hello,
how you doing? I'm glad you're still with me
in this young mind sitting across the canyon, across the great divide.
--Simao J. A. Drew (teaches literature and language at Liberty High School in Eldersburg, Maryland, and is a member of the adjunct faculty at Frederick Community College. At the Gifted and Talented Summer Centers sponsored by the Maryland State Department of Education, he teaches creative writing. His poems have appeared in literary magazines including Scarab and Sandstone Review.)
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Monday, September 22, 2008
Little nuggets of encouragement make all the difference.
My boss is an inspiration. She is the kind of leader I want to be, one that loves her work, that has purpose and drive, and that is constantly, lovingly involved with her staff. This person not only makes me want to be a better teacher, she makes want to be a better person.
In a post script to our first department meeting, she wrote:
"I read a poem by Marge Piercy (from Circles on the Water, 1982) this weekend that made me think of all of you."
To be of use
The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.
I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward.
who do what has to be done, again and again.
I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in the common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.
The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn,
are put in museums but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.
In a post script to our first department meeting, she wrote:
"I read a poem by Marge Piercy (from Circles on the Water, 1982) this weekend that made me think of all of you."
To be of use
The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.
I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward.
who do what has to be done, again and again.
I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in the common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.
The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn,
are put in museums but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.
Monday, September 08, 2008
Inspiration.
I am reading for me again, and the most recent was a collection of essays from director Anne Bogart: "A Director Prepares."
The last passages (as well as most of the preceding ones) rang true for me. And in a creative draught of my own making, any bit of inspiration will help. Also, it just might kick my bony ass into gear.
___________________________________________________________
A working artist is in a constant struggle with the brain's attempts to ambush their work through diversion. Do not be seduced by the buzz. In all the work with artifice, while going through the back door, keep your inner eye secretly on paradise. Stay true to a deeper pursuit.
...
Today we live within another kind of totalitarianism. Each of us is a target of the attack machinery of consumerism. A media-drenched culture aims aggressively at our psyches with a constancy that breaks and numbs the spirit. This dangerous environment offers us an opportunity: the challenge to think and to act.
Laziness and impatience are constant internal resistances and they are very personal. We are all lazy. We are all impatient. Neither are evil qualities; rather, they are issues that we learn to handle properly and act on at the right moments. We navigate them in our aim towards expression.
...
Your attitude towards resistance determines the success of your work and your future. Resistance should be cultivated. How you meet these obstacles that present themselves in the light of any endeavour determines the direction of your life and career.
Allow me to propose a few suggestions about how to handle the natural resistances that your circumstances might offer. Do not assume that you have to have some prescribed conditions to do your best work. Do not wait. Do not wait for enough time or money to accomplish what you think you have in mind. Work with what you have right now. Work with the people around you right now. Work with the architecture you see around you right now. Do not wait for what you assume is the appropriate, stress-free environment in which to generate expression. Do not wait for maturity or insight or wisdom. Do not wait till you are sure that you know what you are doing. Do not wait until you have enough technique. What you do now, what you make of your present circmstances will determine the quality and scope of your future endeavours.
And, at the same time, be patient.
The last passages (as well as most of the preceding ones) rang true for me. And in a creative draught of my own making, any bit of inspiration will help. Also, it just might kick my bony ass into gear.
___________________________________________________________
A working artist is in a constant struggle with the brain's attempts to ambush their work through diversion. Do not be seduced by the buzz. In all the work with artifice, while going through the back door, keep your inner eye secretly on paradise. Stay true to a deeper pursuit.
...
Today we live within another kind of totalitarianism. Each of us is a target of the attack machinery of consumerism. A media-drenched culture aims aggressively at our psyches with a constancy that breaks and numbs the spirit. This dangerous environment offers us an opportunity: the challenge to think and to act.
Laziness and impatience are constant internal resistances and they are very personal. We are all lazy. We are all impatient. Neither are evil qualities; rather, they are issues that we learn to handle properly and act on at the right moments. We navigate them in our aim towards expression.
...
Your attitude towards resistance determines the success of your work and your future. Resistance should be cultivated. How you meet these obstacles that present themselves in the light of any endeavour determines the direction of your life and career.
Allow me to propose a few suggestions about how to handle the natural resistances that your circumstances might offer. Do not assume that you have to have some prescribed conditions to do your best work. Do not wait. Do not wait for enough time or money to accomplish what you think you have in mind. Work with what you have right now. Work with the people around you right now. Work with the architecture you see around you right now. Do not wait for what you assume is the appropriate, stress-free environment in which to generate expression. Do not wait for maturity or insight or wisdom. Do not wait till you are sure that you know what you are doing. Do not wait until you have enough technique. What you do now, what you make of your present circmstances will determine the quality and scope of your future endeavours.
And, at the same time, be patient.
Saturday, May 03, 2008
Friday, April 18, 2008
"How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and the strong. Because someday in life you will have been all of these."
"To laugh often and much, to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others, to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived...this is to have succeeded"
"To laugh often and much, to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others, to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived...this is to have succeeded"
Thursday, July 12, 2007
India Arie--sing it sista
I am ready for love
Why are you hiding from me
I’d quickly give my freedom
To be held in your captivity
I am ready for love
All of the joy and the pain
And all the time that it takes
Just to stay in your good grace
Lately I’ve been thinking
Maybe you’re not ready for me
Maybe you think I need to learn maturity
They say watch what you ask for
Cause you might receive
But if you ask me tomorrow
I’ll say the same thing
I am ready for love
Would you please lend me your ear?
I promise I won’t complain
I just need you to acknowledge I am here
If you give me half a chance
I‘ll prove this to you
I will be patience, kind, faithful and true
To a man who loves music
A man who loves art
Respect’s the spirit world
And thinks with his heart
I am ready for love
If you’ll take me in your hands
I will learn what you teach
And do the best that I can
I am ready for love
Here with a offering of
My voice
My Eyes
My soul
My mind
Tell me what is enough
To prove I am ready for love
I am ready…
Why are you hiding from me
I’d quickly give my freedom
To be held in your captivity
I am ready for love
All of the joy and the pain
And all the time that it takes
Just to stay in your good grace
Lately I’ve been thinking
Maybe you’re not ready for me
Maybe you think I need to learn maturity
They say watch what you ask for
Cause you might receive
But if you ask me tomorrow
I’ll say the same thing
I am ready for love
Would you please lend me your ear?
I promise I won’t complain
I just need you to acknowledge I am here
If you give me half a chance
I‘ll prove this to you
I will be patience, kind, faithful and true
To a man who loves music
A man who loves art
Respect’s the spirit world
And thinks with his heart
I am ready for love
If you’ll take me in your hands
I will learn what you teach
And do the best that I can
I am ready for love
Here with a offering of
My voice
My Eyes
My soul
My mind
Tell me what is enough
To prove I am ready for love
I am ready…
Monday, January 01, 2007
Tuesday, December 13, 2005
here is my problem. i haven't written in so long i'm having a hard time separating things.... it's all mush. so until i can remove thought from muck, i'll leave you all with a quote from Barbara Kingslover's Animal Dreams:
"What keeps you going isn't some fine destination but just the road you're on, and the fact that you know how to drive. You keep your eyes open, you see this damned-to-hell world you got born into, and you ask yourself, 'What life can I live that will let me breathe in and out and love somebody or something and not run off screaming into the woods?'"
"What keeps you going isn't some fine destination but just the road you're on, and the fact that you know how to drive. You keep your eyes open, you see this damned-to-hell world you got born into, and you ask yourself, 'What life can I live that will let me breathe in and out and love somebody or something and not run off screaming into the woods?'"
Saturday, June 25, 2005
amen sista
'there is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening, that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost.' -martha graham
Friday, June 17, 2005
fresh air
a breath of fresh air. that's what this was. i sat down for 4 straight hours with a long lost friend who just popped right back into my life in a huge way.... and we talked dance. the whole time! we talked about what we've done, what we're doing, where we're going. we exchanged ideas and opinions. we played movement games. we talked improv. we talked strategies. we watched tapes of her past performances - and were brought to tears by them. we just let ourselves run around for a while in that part of us we love so much.
she helped me feel like i'm doing something good. like i'm actually making an impact on the small town, recital oriented, closed minded type studio that i'm working at. and i'm starting to believe her (though it's hard), because we have the same roots. we started there together and went off and i came back. she did not. and her outside perspective is invaluable.
"i'm so excited you're actually following through and doing something. that's exactly what this little town, connecticut needs."
i agree. i'm not going to let myself just sit complacently dreaming dreams that will never come true. i will make something happen. i will push myself to continue pushing and learning about choreography. about performance. about what works and what doesn't. about how to stretch boundaries and make connections. i will make a space for other people to explore themselves and their worlds through movement and music and words and each other.
and WE will have the time of our lives doing it.
all i can say is i am forever thankful for the people in my life who share these aspirations and who will just sit down with me for a few hours and mull about in them.
sigh......... a breath of stunning fresh air, indeed.
she helped me feel like i'm doing something good. like i'm actually making an impact on the small town, recital oriented, closed minded type studio that i'm working at. and i'm starting to believe her (though it's hard), because we have the same roots. we started there together and went off and i came back. she did not. and her outside perspective is invaluable.
"i'm so excited you're actually following through and doing something. that's exactly what this little town, connecticut needs."
i agree. i'm not going to let myself just sit complacently dreaming dreams that will never come true. i will make something happen. i will push myself to continue pushing and learning about choreography. about performance. about what works and what doesn't. about how to stretch boundaries and make connections. i will make a space for other people to explore themselves and their worlds through movement and music and words and each other.
and WE will have the time of our lives doing it.
all i can say is i am forever thankful for the people in my life who share these aspirations and who will just sit down with me for a few hours and mull about in them.
sigh......... a breath of stunning fresh air, indeed.
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