Sometimes I Go About Pitying Myself
Sometimes I go about pitying myself,
and all the time
I am being carried on great winds across the sky.
Chippewa music
adapted from a translation by Frances Densmore
You Can Trust Even Your Extravagant Desires
You can trust your wants; even when their gratification seems farthest off, the uneasiness they occasion is still the best guide of your life, and will lead you to issues entirely beyond your present powers of reckoning.
From a speech called Reflex Action And Theism by William James
Man’s chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities, – his pre-eminence over them simply and solely in the number and in the fantastic and unnecessary character of his wants, physical, moral, aesthetic, and intellectual. Had his whole life not been a quest for the superfluous, he would never have established himself as inexpugnably as he has done in the necessary. And from the consciousness of this he should draw the lesson that his wants are to be trusted; that even when their gratification seems farthest off, the uneasiness they occasion is still the best guide of his life, and will lead him to issues entirely beyond his present powers of reckoning. Prune down his extravagance, sober him, and you undo him.
Give clear signals
A Ritual To Read To Each Other
If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.
For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.
And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail,
but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.
And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider–
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.
For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give–yes or no, or maybe–
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
William Stafford
There are many good people doing many good things. You are safe. You are loved. You are not alone.
The Soweto Gospel Choir singing Pride by U2
Lyrics
One man come in the name of love
One man come and go
One come he to justify
One man to overthrow
In the name of love
What more in the name of love
In the name of love
What more in the name of love
One man caught on a barbed wire fence
One man he resist
One man washed on an empty beach.
One man betrayed with a kiss
In the name of love
What more in the name of love
In the name of love
What more in the name of love
(nobody like you…)
Early morning, April 4
Shot rings out in the Memphis sky
Free at last, they took your life
They could not take your pride
In the name of love
What more in the name of love
In the name of love
What more in the name of love
In the name of love
What more in the name of love…
Determine to participate as fully as possible in the life around you.
Time is what one must find in order to Develop interest and curiosity to enjoy life for its own sake. The other equally important resource is the ability to control psychic energy. Instead of waiting for an external stimulus or challenge to grab our attention, we must learn to concentrate it more or less at will.
The only way to take over the ownership of life is by learning to direct psychic energy in line with our own intentions.
…it is not what happens to a person that determines the quality of life, but what a person makes happen.
Other things being equal, a life filled with complex flow activities is more worth living than one spent consuming passive entertainment.
Only if attention is to a certain extent free of personal goals and ambitions doe we have a chance of apprehending reality on its own terms.
– Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi