enriching our essence
There was this day when suddenly I felt guilty for reading. It felt like a guilty pleasure: something so idle, so static, like I was not doing anything productive or creative. After…
tags /insecurity /
posts tagged with the above term(s)view tagged posts from: any | journal | essays | notes | resources | collections | highlights | notebooks
what is there when there is nothing
When we quit careers, leave relationships or start working on ourselves, we may neglect to consider the systemic consequences of that in our lives. Plenty of those times it is most likely…
To experience the everyday sublime
To experience the everyday sublime requires that we dismantle the perceptual conditioning that insists on seeing ourselves and the world as essentially comfortable, permanent, solid, and “mine.” It means to embrace suffering and conflict rather than to shy away from them, to cultivate the embodied attention that contemplates the tragic, changing, empty, and impersonal dimensions of life, rather than succumbing to fantasies of self-glorification or self-loathing. This takes time. It is a lifelong practice.
the sublime exceeds our capacity for representation
As understood by Edmund Burke and the Romantic poets, the sublime exceeds our capacity for representation. The world is excessive: every blade of grass, every ray of sun, every falling leaf is excessive. None of these things can be adequately captured in concepts, images, or words. They overreach us, spilling beyond the boundaries of thought. Their sublimity brings the thinking, calculating mind to a stop, leaving one speechless, overwhelmed with either wonder or terror. Yet for we human animals who delight and revel in our place, who crave security, certainty, and consolation, the sublime is banished and forgotten. As a result, life is rendered opaque and flat. Each day is reduced to the repetition of familiar actions and events, which are blandly comforting but devoid of an intensity we both yearn for and fear.
2020: pursuing non-pursuing
I used to obsess about writing these every year. But this year I felt an indifference. Is it age? That I feel the choice to end and start a year overnight on…
my long, winding, challenging road to healing
In my last few posts I wrote about how I’ve become increasingly more aware of my dysregulated nervous system. Just like the analogy I have used that I don’t expect a person…