To thine own self be true

Information. Affirmation. Connection. Passion (for someone or something). Things or Money.

I think, though, there is something much larger, significant, and meaningful that is desired, too. Everyone wants to be understood, loved, and appreciated (sometimes these latter two take the form of admiration) by one person or as many as possible (e.g., politicians, entertainers).

Where many folks are weak is on understanding, loving, and appreciating at least one other person. A definite limit and limitation.

In our world today, the givers often do not often receive their due or fair share by way of reciprocation. But one’s own limits (e.g., “I only want this kind of love or to be loved this way”) often lead to permanent or recurring disappointments and unfulfillment. Be that as it may, there is nothing more unsatisfying or even destructive than giving and giving while getting little or nothing back.

On the other side of the coin, takers are often so limited as to be incapable of understanding, loving, or appreciating anyone else. If self is the main focus, no deep or meaningful relationship can or ever will be.

Whatever people look for is always tempered by limits and limitations in self and others. Only so much is possible based on those factors.

Limits and limitations determine the amount of one’s freedom in whatever context you can imagine and in relationships. Interesting to think that a relationship, with whatever limits and limitations on both sides, can actually enhance one’s freedom in so many ways. And that the freedom that two may experience within their closeness and sharings can enhance the other person and the couple as a unit as well. Idealism or idealistic thinking perhaps, but true, nonetheless. The freedom of one within two, the freeing of the other, and the simultananeous freedom of both at the same time. Mutual pleasure, enhancement, and connection. Many levels, potentially, thereof.

Some of the aspects mentioned at first in this entry are so mundane and banal, they mostly function at a very limited level–information, things or money. Affirmation and connection can generally be achieved through family, friends, or workmates. Passion is largely an individual matter. It can be as conventional or unconventional as the individual him/herself. Passion, though, can satisfy at some deeper, missing-pieces or talent level, as in creative expression or communication of spirit or soul. In that, there is a self-actualization or transcendence worthy of following one’s own bliss.

But always, I think, one comes back to the closest relationship in one’s life–the one that leads to connected experience and consciousness–a higher, multitudinous state than mere individual consciousness with all the subjective limits and limitations that that implies. A state of joy, ecstasy, passion, inner depth, peace, harmony, and great contentment.

The only, of course, being change–such as what we see happening with blinding speed and a lack of common sense in our time. Much that is caring is no longer the “business” of governments, busy with their various entitlements and entrenched political self-interests. That and the frenzy that is advertising and the vested interests of e-media corporations.

So what’s an individual to do? Staying clear and focused is number 1 with whatever priorities and dreams one has. With all the other social distractions going on, it remains important and necessary (for survival and success) to stay true to oneself–which is, incidentally, what I have been writing about the past 5 years. It is important, certainly, though, to know oneself and to deal with whatever missing personal pieces first–to answer the most vital question (Who am I?) first. From there, one can then go on to live each day fully and satisfyingly according to whatever dreams, goals, and values. In a real sense, it is important always to stick with what one knows, believes, desires, and chooses. In that, there is real strength and resilience for dealing with whatever changes or crises may arise.

So, ironically, the only constant is also being true to one’s self and living ‘outward’ from that centre. The rest can and will stay be as irrational and crazy as it chooses or decides to be with minimal impact on the autonomous thinking and feeling individual. Individual consciousness can, then, be lived and maintained with a minimum of anxiety and distractions from what the many others are choosing or dwelling on.

In the end, one’s “ownlife”–as Orwell called it in 1984–is basic and completely necessary. It is the one life the individual is living and responsible for. No one else. That is the only constant that truly matters in the short and long run.

“Ownlife”, Ellerslie Heights style near the lake

“Walls windows trees, waves coming through
You be in me and I’ll be in you
Together in eternity
Some kind of ecstasy got a hold on me”

–Bruce Cockburn, “Wondering Where the Lions Are”

“The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.”

“The goal of the journey is to discover yourself as consciousness.”–Joseph Campbell, (All Campbell quotes quoted on this blog are from Reflections on the Art of Living: A Joseph Campbell Companion)

The comet lit up the sky for weeks and months, changing the lives of many. A very intense bright light from somewhere else. In many ways it was the dead greats who could have told you more about it, why and how it moved the way it did. The lovers too, who lived in and for one another. They knew something about the heat and light it gave off in cold winter sky where all was otherwise frost and frigidness.

The comet glowed and was most itself beyond language, beyond time, beyond music, beyond convention, beyond mere limits and limitations of all kinds. It was free and shone like a bright spirit ablaze, filling, nay flooding a room with its veritable light and love-giving radiance.

In the end, all one could say for sure was that it was very large and unlike anything one had ever known or been remotely close to before.

And so it blazed that July on many heads-down days while others worked and chased money and forgot their own vital incandescences. Finally, it was just a brilliant reminder of what might be possible if one broke free or chose a life in stars or dream. This comet, this great glowing spirit which simply was what it was, and nothing else.

“Being distracted reduces our empathy for others and blunts responses in the brain. So it’s possible that being distracted may also reduce our own happiness.”–Sylvia Morelli, TIME July 8-15, 2013

……………

So if kids and other e-media users want to be happy (likely based on getting along with or connecting with others) and more mentally sharper/aware, then they need to become less distracted. Hmmmm, what are the major distracting devices in our society today? How do those devices make people more self-focused and self-centered with less contact with real people, Nature, and their immediate surroundings? If individuals lose touch with others, nature, and their immediate surroundings, how does that affect their physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual connectedness? How does that affect the way they see and view others? How does that affect their relationships, school work, or responsibility in the working world? How does that affect their fitness for long-term relationships or commitment as well as fitness for raising a family? If they feel nothing for others, who will do the demanding hospital and health care work and child care? If they feel no empathy, how will they respond to the pain and suffering of others? Will sympathy bite the dust because the condition of empathy is diminished? How chaotic and unstandardized will education become? How much more can the world become uncaring with all this e-media distraction?

It’s all there in Morelli’s quote–what we have become or shall become. It’s a pretty dark, depressing sort of scenario thanks to how much a society has sold its young, its individuals, and consumers to the great god of e-technology. Wireless Is The Word, baby! Get with the program and dumb-dumb wa–a-y down. Forget all about Nature, beauty, mind, spirit, and soul. That’s just old crap that no one really needs, eh?

we are very fortunate to have what might be termed scarce or rare moments of being with another person, someone else. In those precious moments, connection, obviously, but moreover light, warmth, gentleness, tenderness, touch, kindness, deep empathy, trust, maximal closeness and intimacy with no holding back. Loving freely and accepting the love of another. It is a special moment when all fears, doubts, and imagined priorities cease to exist and there are only the two people together and as close as they allow themselves and one another to be. In this place, there is no reason, no “mind-forg’d manacles”, only the language and expression of love and living for and inside one another. Naturally, freely and deeply. We should, all of us, be that lucky.

In your ongoing quest for permanence, you think the picture is not moving, but look again at the clouds overhead almost touching the skyscrapers and then some, the ripples beginning across the bay below as a boat appears at an angle on the left, changing all; everything changing yet again, never stopping, just when you thought that a moment would last.

He had unlimited imagination and was aware of the myriad possibilities in and of life. Occasionally others would try to get to know him and made the effort, spending time with him in passing. Occasionally, too, those from his past would look him up and try to reconnect to what they imagined he was. But exteriors are hard to penetrate at the best of times and very few got through to catch even a vague sense of what he was all about. Meantime, he lived freely and happily, most responsible to himself and the blisses of moments that constituted as much reality as he had ever needed or desired.

about as limited as they come. residing mostly in her imagination, believing in the superficials of her life. Her main mode was fear, fear of embarrassment and fear of what ‘others might think’–avoiding imagined embarrassment was the main motivational factor in her limited life. She prided herself on being free, but she wasn’t really; didn’t do a significant thing beyond her superficially busy, self-important working life. Basically, she was a mouse afraid of giving or risking deeply. Above all, she was just a fake, a phony; only interested in being the centre of attention and renowned for her ‘fun’ persona. That was her limited raison d’etre in a nutshell.

Poetry and song lyrics are ways of getting to emotions more than prose which is concerned more with ideas even when it’s talking about feelings.

Personally, I found song lyrics easier to write than poetry per se. The rhyme goes with the territory, so as long as you keep landing on the next end-line rhyme you’ll be ok. But most song lyrics have to do with feelings and relationships except if you’re ’60s Dylan. Contemporary song lyrics are good for expressing discombobulation; Paul Simon’s last 4 albums flow in that direction successfully, subtly, and deeply.

I had played instinctively with poetry in university (there are some good, memorable lines only) and then left it alone till I was doing books with Glen in the early ’80s. Well, he was quite the teacher (as you recall) and he, unexpectedly taught me how to write free verse via a workshop he did for Glenn Martin. That totally demystified free verse at a time when pattern-thinking had become second nature in my editing, writing, and teaching. And the more you write, the better you get at it, as much as: the more you read and notice, the more your sensibility expands, and your writing then changes and grows.

Since December’s publication, I have fallen silent; there isn’t much that I feel inclined to poeticize at this point. The prose of the blog is more naturally akin to my mind and thinking these daze. I’m more interested in ideas and patterns all over again. It wouldn’t surprise me if I didn’t write another poem ever.

That said, I, like you, come from a different time of different views about poetry. The latter include everybody from Shakespeare to Keats to Dickinson to Whitman to Yeats to Eliot to Frost to Dylan and Cohen. With Dylan getting the Nobel and Cohen passing, I feel that old era is really gone for the majority of poetry fans. But I sure am glad that my understandings and appreciations of poetry run as deep as they do; they reflect a lifelong interest in language and its possibilities in shorter forms/genres.

Of fiction, I will say that most of our lives are fiction or fictional, largely imagined, given the nature of daily dreaming, fantasy, and imagining. It has its place and can be very moving and provides narratives to steer our lives and values by. Nonfiction in terms of true stories is often interesting. I’ve enjoyed Kon-Tiki, Poitier’s life story, etc. It helps you to know these people and experiences better. But most of nf I read is either criticism, commentary, or journalism. The world of ideas which help focus one as one tries to make sense of the modern world.

Of late, ‘real (physical) life’ and spiritual process call more, dealing with what’s on in a given day more within the spheres of home, family, Nature, music, viewing, and whatever projects engage/arise. But although I’ve downsized my book collection, I have not let go of the best of the best. Those will be forever touchstones and connections with The Important as long as I can engage with those material reservoirs of greatness, uniqueness, and approaches that are core and vitally necessary.