Elizaveta Ephemeris

is this you?

“There is probably no better or more reliable measure of whether a woman has spent time in ugly duckling status at some point or all throughout her life than her inability to digest a sincere compliment. Although it could be a matter of modesty, or could be attributed to shyness- although too many serious wounds are carelessly written off as "nothing but shyness"- more often a compliment is stuttered around about because it sets up an automatic and unpleasant dialogue in the woman's mind. 

If you say how lovely she is, or how beautiful her art is, or compliment anything else her soul took part in, inspired, or suffused, something in her mind says she is undeserving and you, the complimentor, are an idiot for thinking such a thing to begin with. Rather than understand that the beauty of her soul shines through when she is being herself, the woman changes the subject and effectively snatches nourishment away from the soul-self, which thrives on being acknowledged." 

"I must admit, I sometimes find it useful in my practice to delineate the various typologies of personality as cats and hens and ducks and swans and so forth. If warranted, I might ask my client to assume for a moment that she is a swan who does not realzie it. Assume also for a moment that she has been brought up by or is currently surrounded by ducks. 

There is nothing wrong with ducks, I assure them, or with swans. But ducks are ducks and swans are swans. Sometimes to make the point I have to move to other animal metaphors. I like to use mice. What if you were raised by the mice people? But what if you're, say, a swan. Swans and mice hate each other's food for the most part. They each think the other smells funny. They are not interested in spending time together, and if they did, one would be constantly harassing the other. 

But what if you, being a swan, had to pretend you were a mouse? What if you had to pretend to be gray and furry and tiny? What you had no long snaky tail to carry in the air on tail-carrying day? What if wherever you went you tried to walk like a mouse, but you waddled instead? What if you tried to talk like a mouse, but insteade out came a honk every time? Wouldn't you be the most miserable creature in the world? 

The answer is an inequivocal yes. So why, if this is all so and too true, do women keep trying to bend and fold themselves into shapes that are not theirs? I must say, from years of clinical observation of this problem, that most of the time it is not because of deep-seated masochism or a malignant dedication to self-destruction or anything of that nature. More often it is because the woman simply doesn't know any better. She is unmothered.” 
― Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run with the Wolves

 

I have always loved Clarissa Pinkola Estes and her writing. Her book 'Women Who Run with the Wolves' was a revelation to me - because it also taught me a lot not just about myself, but people around me.

It is true that accepting a compliment can be a difficult thing. The saddest part is that oftentimes it's those of us who crave to be recognized or appreciated the most - the most wounded ones - are also, by default, the ones who are unable to accept it.

I have often wondered if that is one of the reasons why so many brilliant artists go off the rails upon achieving the recognition they have worked so hard for. 

If your internal sense of worth is broken and wounded, the external recognition may assuage the symptoms, but does not truly address the cause. What's more, it may just create more discomfort, because the more one is told how wonderful he/she is, the more anxiety of being 'found out' sets in. It creates a kind of pressure to be perfect that can drive you to heights of achievement, but also into the depths of addiction or isolation.

The danger of insecurity is this then, precisely: it can be a driving force behind your success. Some of the most successful people in the world were driven by insecurity or desire to prove themselves. But like anything, taken to an extreme, it becomes a crippling device: the more you achieve, the more you are afraid, internally, that you are really a fraud - that at a drop of a hat, the castles you have built will come crashing down, and everyone will see the 'emperor with no clothes'.

What's more, if you encounter defeat or failure - and Life offers plenty of those, too - you will count them as proof. 

In fact, we all live our lives accumulating external proof to our internal selves.  

To find out what that default internal setting is for yourself or others around you, watch where these following words are said - or thought:

                  "I knew it. I knew it would happen/come to this/end like this/come to pass."

If it is said after something great happened, then you know what your internal setting is. You believed that something good would pass. You knew you had internal strength to pull this off. You had a sort of faith in the process and the world. You also believed on some level you were worth it.

If you are one of those people, then I will also take a chance and surmise that you are, indeed, one of those people able to take a compliment without discomfort. For these is a huge difference because humility and self worth.

If, however, you have found yourself saying the above words over and over again after a disappointment or failure - in the recent years or months - believe me - there is some work to be done. A tuning of your internal instrument. Maybe you need to consider changing the strings... Ask yourself: when someone tells you something nice about yourself, do you light up? Does it make you smile, or do you brush it aside? 

I know it because I have been both of those people. I have also been with both of those people. And we all have both kinds  in our families or close circles.

(to be continued)

my favorite word

Adventure

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from Adventurous)

An adventure is an activity that comprises risky, dangerous or uncertain experiences. The term is more popularly used in reference to physical activities that have some potential for danger, such as skydiving, mountain climbing, and extreme sports. The term is broad enough to refer to any enterprise that is potentially fraught with risk, such as a business venture or a major life undertaking. An adventurer is a person who bases their lifestyle or their fortunes on adventurous acts.

Adventurous experiences create psychological and physiological arousal, which can be interpreted as negative (e.g. fear) or positive (e.g. flow), and which can become a detriment as per the Yerkes-Dodson law. For some people, adventure becomes a major pursuit in and of itself.

Adventurous activities are typically undertaken for the purposes of recreation or excitement, such as multi-sport adventure racing or a traveler's adventure tourism. However, an adventurous activity can lead to gains in knowledge, such as in the case of the numerous pioneers who have explored and charted the Earth and, in recent times, traveled into space and to the Moon. As a more modern example, adventure education makes use of challenging experiences for learning.

Moreover, adventure can be describing an unusual experience or participating in exciting undertakings. An adventure action can be involving risky undertaking or an action without concerning outcome. In addition, taking an adventure can be illustrating taking the chance or to adventure an opinion.

The English word adventure has its roots in the Latin word adventurus which means "about to happen", arrive. Oxford Dictionary of English, 2nd Ed, 2003, ISBN 0-19-8613474

l'orizzonte
 

letter 8

I am locking myself in, mostly, for the rest of the week to listen and finish songs. It's going to be a lot of lyric writing, so I have to be very careful about not 'externalizing' myself too much.. the taste of language, the words, all have to be coming from a place of silence and geniune feeling..a kind of connected solitude, if you will. But reading Rilke or poetry around this time is good for me.. it amplifies my emotions and further separates from the rational and mundane, so that even simple things can take on a heightened quality.

Letter Eight
Borgeby gard, Fladie, Sweden
August 12, 1904

I want to talk to you again for a little while, dear Mr. Kappus, although there is almost nothing I can say that will help you, and I can hardly find one useful word. You have had many sadnesses, large ones, which passed. And you say that even this passing was difficult and upsetting for you. But please, ask yourself whether these large sadnesses haven't rather gone right through you. Perhaps many things inside you have been transformed; perhaps somewhere, deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad. The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of. If only it were possible for us to see farther than our knowledge reaches, and even a little beyond the outworks of our presentiment, perhaps we would bear our sadnesses with greater trust than we have in our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy embarrassment, everything in us withdraws, a silence arises, and the new experience, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it all and says nothing.

It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing. That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, - is already in our bloodstream. And we don't know what it was.

We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can't say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens. And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate; and later on, when it "happens" (that is, steps forth out of us to other people), we will feel related and close to it in our innermost being.

And that is necessary. It is necessary - and toward this point our development will move, little by little - that nothing alien happen to us, but only what has long been our own. People have already had to rethink so many concepts of motion; and they ill also gradually come to realize that what we call fate does not come into us from the outside, but emerges from us. It is only because so many people have not absorbed and transformed their fates while they were living in them that they have not realized what was emerging from them; it was so alien to them that they have not realized what was emerging from them; it was so alien to them that, in their confusion and fear, they thought it must have entered them at the very moment they became aware of it, for they swore they had never before found anything like that inside them.

Just as people for a long time had a wrong idea about the sun's motion, they are even now wrong about the motion of what is to come.

The future stands still, dear Mr. Kappus, but we move in infinite space.

(Rainer Maria Rilke)

rainy day poem II

these water-words are made of rain;

elsewhere, of snow and ice your scent.

Our hurt is real but never meant

within confines of love's domain.

 

Beoynd a million crumbling walls

until the planets meet again 

I may discover your abode

between the drops of morning rain

 

As if I was an astronaut,

I'll navigate the secret path;

I'll be a sparkling fish in flight

A hawk, a dolphin or a kite.

 

I sing to you because I know:

Truth lives within my heart's delight

The fear of living falls away

I feel the moment ebb and flow

 

These water-words are made of rain

I breathe them in - then let them go

They paint my window, speak my name

I wait. Until we meet again.

 

 

 

 

 

well I finally finished - or at least wrote more of it - the poem I started when it rained last. One simply can't write rain poems or songs when it's all sunshine outside.

 

I missed Neil Gaiman's appearance at the Royce Hall last night, which is sad. But I made a new friend - actually, two - and gave an impromptu concert. Then, as they walked me to the car, we ended up singing Monty Python songs, which, of course, was a moment to cherish *almost* as much as going to hear Neil Gaiman read. Actually, I have watched videos of him reading his work. A most excellent example of how silences are even more important than words - when telling a story or, mind you, singing a song. There is something to the thought that because so much of today's music is relentlessly enslaved to a beat of some sort, that it ends up losing some of its.. soul? Humanity? What is the word I am looking for?

 

We, as humans are physical, finite, and even our hearts beat at various rates at all times. I sometimes think that because by nature one is attracted to the opposite of oneself, we crave infinity, perfection, a beat that goes on and on and on. A reality we can control: cue in video games. A world that is alienly perfect, and a body that can fly through the air between huge trunks of exotic trees: Avatar. Pandora.

 

But can you truly love perfection? You can aspire to it, wish to possess it, admire it. But love?

 

I have to be careful in that sense, because I always seek to be better, make my music that much more perfect. Before I release it to the world. Mind you, there is nothing inherently wrong with perfection that comes from practice: the effortlessness. No, what I mean is: dressing up your truth to the point where it becomes unrecognizable, because you are afraid that otherwise you are not enough.. Not pefect.

 

I am coming to realize that I will be spending more time in the UK in the coming months. The rain doesn't bother me at all. If anything, I really think I will write my best songs there yet. Rain makes me go within, and it's then that I gain my best insights and stop looking outwards.