quotlefish

[quotlefish]

Mastery in one’s career and consciousness growth simply requires that we constantly produce results beyond and out of the ordinary. Mastery is a product of consistently going beyond our limits. For most people, it starts with technical excellence in a chosen field and a commitment to that excellence. If you are willing to commit yourself to excellence, to surround yourself with things that represent this, and miracles, your life will change. (When we speak of miracles, we speak of events or experiences in the real world, which are beyond the ordinary.) It’s remarkable how much mediocrity we live with, surrounding ourselves with daily reminders that the average is the acceptable. Our world suffers from terminal normality. Take a moment to assess all of the things around you that promote your being “average.” These are the things that keep you powerless to go beyond a “limit” you arbitrarily set for yourself. The first step to mastery is the removal of everything in your environment that represents mediocrity, removing those things that are limiting. One way is to surround yourself with friends who ask more of you than you do. Didn’t some of your best teachers, coaches, parents, etc.? Another step on the path to mastery is the removal of resentment toward masters. Develop compassion for yourself so that you can be in the presence of masters and grow from the experience. Rather than comparing yourself and resenting people who have mastery, remain open and receptive; let the experience be like the planting of a seed within you that, with nourishment, will grow into your own individual mastery. You see, we are all ordinary. But a master, rather than condemning himself for his “ordinariness,” will embrace it and use it as a foundation for building the extraordinary. Rather than using it as an excuse for inactivity, he will use it as a vehicle for correcting, which is essential in the process of attaining mastery. You must be able to correct yourself without invalidating or condemning yourself, to accept results and improve upon them. Correct, don’t protect. Correction is essential to power and mastery.

---Stewart Emery

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“Cover me with soft Earth.. jasmine, lilies and myrtle; and when they grow above me.. they will breathe the fragrance of my Heart into space.”

— Kahlil Gibran

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embarrassment has good bones

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“– haunt me, then!”

— Emily Brontë, from ‘Wuthering Heights’ 

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[quotlefish]

i love the world so much. why do i often forget this

[quotlefish]

Sex isn’t what makes a relationship real; the willingness to expend effort maintaining it is. Some lovers break up with each other the first time they have a big argument; some parents do as little for their children as they can get away with; some pet owners ignore their pets whenever they become inconvenient. In all of those cases, the people are unwilling to make an effort. Having a real relationship, whether with a lover or a child or a pet, requires that you be willing to balance the other party’s wants and needs with your own.

Ted Chiang - The Lifecycle of software objects (from Exhalation)

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Touch is the sensory mode which integrates our experiences of the world and of ourselves. Even visual perceptions are fused and integrated into the haptic continuum of the self; my body remembers who I am and how I am located in the world. My body is truly the navel of my world, not in the sense of the viewing point of the central perspective, but as the very locus of reference, memory, imagination and integration. All the senses, including vision, are, in a way, extensions of the tactile sense; the senses are specialisations of skin tissue, and all sensory experiences are modes of touching, and thus related to tactility. Our contact with the world takes place at the boundary line of the self through specialised parts of our enveloping membrane. We humans, just as all animals, are extending ourselves into the world through our actions as well as material and mental constructions. As representatives of Homo sapience, our image of self does not stop at the skin, as we relate and extend ourselves in countless ways by means of mobility, technology, materials, culture and beliefs, both scientific and religious.

--- JUHANI PALLASMAA, THE EYES OF THE SKIN: ARCHITECTURE AND THE SENSES

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“You speak of energy. Energy rests upon love; and come as it will, there’s no forcing it.”

— Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy

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D.W. Winnicott

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“If one oversteps the bounds of moderation, the greatest pleasures cease to please.”

— Epictetus, Fragments

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Desire - Mary Mackey

in my dreams I hold my lovers next to me all at once and ask them what was it I desired? my hands are full of their heads like bunches of cut roses blond hair, brown hair, red, black, their eyes are pools of bewilderment staring up at me from the bouquet what was it I desired? I ask again was it your bodies? did I hope by draping your flesh over me I could escape boredom loneliness gray hairs shooting towards me from the future like thin arrows? did I think I could escape, by taking your breath into my mouth, did I think I could escape the responsibility of breathing? what did I desire in you? sex knowledge? power? love? did I expect the clouds to crack and blue moths to fly out of the stars? did I expect a voice to call to me saying “Here at last is the answer.” what I yell at them shaking my lovers what did I desire in you? their ears fall off like petals they shed their faces in a pile at my feet their bewildered eyes pucker and close centers of fallen flowers the last face floats down circling in the darkness at my feet what did I desire in you? I whisper the stems of their bodies dry in my hands

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excerpts from The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers - Bhanu Kapil Rider

 16. HOW WILL YOU / HAVE YOU PREPARE(D) FOR YOUR DEATH? Sometimes a man says something to a woman, and after that she knows she is incapable of giving birth to something. That would live. For days, I wrote about a woman whose lungs were filled with water. I made, instead, the body of the man standing at the edge of the river. Matted lashes. Flush irises. He has my eyes. The last time I saw him, I kissed his chest, through his shirt. Silk. Violet. And that was before I knew what my life would be like, without him. It was before the phone rang, and I did not reply, not even a year later, on the corner, when someone asked me if I wanted milk or sugar. Beneath ideas: the tightness in the chest at the beginning of a long sentence, the fuschia spikes of closed eyelids, dismembered kisses, arbitrary thirsts. Milk. Something sweet. Please. ~ 38. WHAT IS THE SHAPE OF YOUR BODY? The feeling of my body. I feel like the man who is making a pathway through a forest of thorns. He wants to reach a place that does not exist until he touches it with his mouth.  She has been sleeping for a long time. Brown crystals, like sugar, in the corners of her eyes. Her dreaming saliva has dried on her cheek, where it drizzled from her mouth. There are sparrows singing in the tree outside her window. People are shouting and embracing, as if they hadn’t seen each other in years. Then they remember. When they open the door, he. Has sunk his nails. Into her hip. She is pressing. Her hand against. Her eye. Smearing it. Her hand. Against the wall. They tear the man out of her body. I am thinking of the man, how he reminds me of Christ: the bloody one; the lover who is torn from his beloved; the stranger who brings the gift of awakening, but who is executed at dawn; the exhausted traveler. ~ 39. HOW WILL YOU LIVE NOW? They travel for days. Sometimes it rains abruptly. Silver flashes. The girl looks for eyes in the puddles after these sudden storms. She finds them: handfuls of monsoon frogs. Tiny. Bright green, with bronze brown flecks. She shows them to her grandfather. “Can we take them home?” No. When she is grown, she realizes that she has forgotten everything. How to live without explanations. How to travel light. How to let the earth go. How skin can see.

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from Bhanu Kapil’s The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers

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[The skin] is the oldest and the most sensitive of our organs, our first medium of communication, and our most efficient protector […] Even the transparent cornea of the eye is overlain by a layer of modified skin […] Touch is the parent of our eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. It is the sense which became differentiated into the others, a fact that seems to be recognized in the age-old evaluation of touch as ‘the mother of the senses’ - Ashley Montagu

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"The secret of progress is the speculative interest in abstract schemes of morphology"

-- Alfred North Whitehead