Went to a Josh Groban concert. He sang "You Are Loved" right in front of me and I almost feinted. Then he sang this song that I had never heard before and now cannot stop listening to.
8/30/11
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
A Higher Window
Went to a Josh Groban concert. He sang "You Are Loved" right in front of me and I almost feinted. Then he sang this song that I had never heard before and now cannot stop listening to.
Friday, August 19, 2011
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Summarize
"Art has the potential to summarize things...
It passes to the next generation knowledge: feeling.
It's part of who we are."
Isabel Allende
It passes to the next generation knowledge: feeling.
It's part of who we are."
Isabel Allende
I don't understand myself and my gifting's well, but what I do understand is that I am not detail oriented in my knowledge. I like general biology but even that got a bit too detailed with name and clade memorization, molecular biology was too detailed in it's protein and order of event listings, music gets too detailed when the theory behind it gets discussed, paining gets too detailed when the different brushes, strokes, and mediums come into play. Yet still I love biology and art. I love the big picture: I've always been big picture oriented and I've always felt as though that makes me an unintelligent person because of that fact: college is about delving into the details professionally. But I learned something about myself when Isabel said that. I found a real value in who I am: I went from someone unintelligent and ungifted to someone with a valuable skill set that helps communicate knowledge and who we are through feeling.
8/14/11
8/14/11
Passion
On an airplane I watched a show called "The Artists Toolbox" on a digiplayer. This is what I gleaned after maticulous playbacks.
"I think truth and passion interest me so much because when I talk to people, I find that everybody has passion, but not everyone can talk about that passion in a way that's truthful or they don't have the courage to paint it or write it."
"I think truth and passion interest me so much because when I talk to people, I find that everybody has passion, but not everyone can talk about that passion in a way that's truthful or they don't have the courage to paint it or write it."
-John Jacobsen
"I have not noticed that. I think that people who are really passionate are always very explicit about it. And when that passion is lukewarm you can live with it and not express it but otherwise people are really out there. If people really care for something than they act upon it."
-Isabel Allende
This makes me question my life, and question why I do what I do. How many times have I gone to start a story or an art piece and not been able to finish it because I don't know how? I feel as though the topics and truths of those pieces are things that I am passionate about, but if that was true than I would act upon it. It makes me observe the things that I act upon and realize that I am passionate about those things. I can learn about my heart through my actions.
8/13/11
Miss Independant
Whenever I've gone to make a major decision, I've always asked the opinions of others. I've counted this tactic as wisdom and felt that it's important to look at a situation from all angles, including angles that I alone cannot always see. But recently I've been faced with the truth that I am the only person that can determine what I want and what is best for me. It may not always be easy to differentiate between what I want and what I need, what I feel and what should be done, but it is feasible. I was reading, "Reaching Out" by Henri Nouwen and these are a series of quotes that led me to this conclusion:
Often we go to good men and women with our problems in the secret hope that they will take our burden away from us and free us from our loneliness. Frequently the temporary relief they offer only leads to a stronger recurrence of the same pains when we are again by ourselves. But sometimes we meet and hear that exceptional person who says: "Do not run, but be quiet and silent. Listen attentively to your own struggle. The answer to your question is hidden in your own heart."
...The real spiritual guide is the one who, instead of advising us what to do or to whom to go, offers us a chance to stay alone and take the risk of entering into our own experience. He makes us see that ouring little bits of water on our dry land does not help, but that we will find a living well if we reach deep enough under the surface of our complaints.
...Sometimes one wonders if the fact that so many people ask support, advice and counsel from so many other people is not, in large part, due to their having lost contact with their innermost self. They ask: Should I go to school or look for a job, should I become a doctor or a lawyer, should I marry or remain single, should I leave my position or stay where I am, should I go into the military or refuse to go to war, should oben my superior or follow my own inclination, should I live a poor life or gain more money for the costly education of my children? There are not enough counselors in the world to help with all these hard questions, and sometimes one feels as if one half of the world is asking advise of the other half while both sides are sitting in the same darkness.
Maybe the most important advice to all searching people is the advice that Rainer Maria Rilke gave to the young man who asked him if h should become a poet. Rilke says:
You ask whether your verses are good. You ask me. You have asked others before. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are disturbed when certain editors reject your efforts. Now...I beg you to give up all that. You are looking outward and that avove all you should not do now. Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody. There is only one single way. Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you to write; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest laces of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write. This above all-ask yourself in teh stillest hour of your night: must I write? Delve into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be affirmitive, if you may meet this earnest questin with a strong and simple "I must," then build your life according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it.
...Unless our questions, problems and concerns are tested and matured in solitude, it is not realistic to expect ansers that are really our own.
This mindset is what has led me to make decisions on my own. I continually have the urge to find confirmation in the reassuring word of a friend, but I realise that I am the only who can answer my own questions. So when I feel insecure in a decision regarding myself and feel the urge to seek out a second opinion I have been firmly squashing that desire and doing what I think is best, or what I want. It's been liberating and confidence building. It's shaping in me an independence founded on a confidence and trust in myself. It's why I decided to change my major back to nursing without the guidance of others. Because only I could look into myself and decide what I want.
8/11/10
Often we go to good men and women with our problems in the secret hope that they will take our burden away from us and free us from our loneliness. Frequently the temporary relief they offer only leads to a stronger recurrence of the same pains when we are again by ourselves. But sometimes we meet and hear that exceptional person who says: "Do not run, but be quiet and silent. Listen attentively to your own struggle. The answer to your question is hidden in your own heart."
...The real spiritual guide is the one who, instead of advising us what to do or to whom to go, offers us a chance to stay alone and take the risk of entering into our own experience. He makes us see that ouring little bits of water on our dry land does not help, but that we will find a living well if we reach deep enough under the surface of our complaints.
...Sometimes one wonders if the fact that so many people ask support, advice and counsel from so many other people is not, in large part, due to their having lost contact with their innermost self. They ask: Should I go to school or look for a job, should I become a doctor or a lawyer, should I marry or remain single, should I leave my position or stay where I am, should I go into the military or refuse to go to war, should oben my superior or follow my own inclination, should I live a poor life or gain more money for the costly education of my children? There are not enough counselors in the world to help with all these hard questions, and sometimes one feels as if one half of the world is asking advise of the other half while both sides are sitting in the same darkness.
Maybe the most important advice to all searching people is the advice that Rainer Maria Rilke gave to the young man who asked him if h should become a poet. Rilke says:
You ask whether your verses are good. You ask me. You have asked others before. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are disturbed when certain editors reject your efforts. Now...I beg you to give up all that. You are looking outward and that avove all you should not do now. Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody. There is only one single way. Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you to write; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest laces of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write. This above all-ask yourself in teh stillest hour of your night: must I write? Delve into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be affirmitive, if you may meet this earnest questin with a strong and simple "I must," then build your life according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it.
...Unless our questions, problems and concerns are tested and matured in solitude, it is not realistic to expect ansers that are really our own.
This mindset is what has led me to make decisions on my own. I continually have the urge to find confirmation in the reassuring word of a friend, but I realise that I am the only who can answer my own questions. So when I feel insecure in a decision regarding myself and feel the urge to seek out a second opinion I have been firmly squashing that desire and doing what I think is best, or what I want. It's been liberating and confidence building. It's shaping in me an independence founded on a confidence and trust in myself. It's why I decided to change my major back to nursing without the guidance of others. Because only I could look into myself and decide what I want.
8/11/10
Thinker
While road tripping back to Alaska, my friend pointed out the universal truth that there are many things that people may love, but they are not good at. If I remember correctly, he brought up loving photography, but not being good at taking pictures. I could identify with him there because I'm the same way way. I can look through Grace Adam's 365 for hours and simply soak in the message, but I could not take a picture like one of hers if someone handed me the best camera in the world. But I can imagine a picture that I would like to capture and that I would like to see. While watching the latest episode of my favorite show, "So You Think You Can Dance," it hit me: I can stretch all I want but I'm not going to be able to make my legs do the splits in the air like those women. What I can do is watch enough dance that it seeps into my nerves and my brain waves until every song and every occurrence in life becomes a dance in my mind. I love dance, but I am not good at it. But I can imagine. One of my great loves in life is communication, and I pride myself in being able to communicate a thought well on most occasions. Dance is a form of communication and though I can't dance, choreography has been running through my brain all day. I am a writer, and an imaginer, and a choreographer by nature.
It's been a running thought and theme in my life currently that there are thinkers and doers in this world, and I am a doer. When it comes to college, chemistry and math, the things that explain the world around us and that to understand them means the power to manipulate that world, do not align with my thought processes. I cannot understand them. I cannot work in a lab and follow along with the why's of what we do. But I can dig my hands into soil and sweat and ache with the strain of hard work and precision. That's what I've always been better at. When it comes to brains I'm a doer. When it comes to beauty, I am shocked and delighted to find that I am a thinker.
8/10/11
It's been a running thought and theme in my life currently that there are thinkers and doers in this world, and I am a doer. When it comes to college, chemistry and math, the things that explain the world around us and that to understand them means the power to manipulate that world, do not align with my thought processes. I cannot understand them. I cannot work in a lab and follow along with the why's of what we do. But I can dig my hands into soil and sweat and ache with the strain of hard work and precision. That's what I've always been better at. When it comes to brains I'm a doer. When it comes to beauty, I am shocked and delighted to find that I am a thinker.
8/10/11
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