May 2013
12 posts
“Never cut a tree down in the wintertime. Never make a negative decision in the...”
– Robert H. Schuller (via larmoyante)
The New Inquiry: Hard Blows
Time has indeed healed the psychic wounds of most past relationships—even the ones that involved a shared lease—but in the case of the man in New York, time only mystified what had happened between us. In truth, part of what enabled my histrionic behavior was the sense of ethereality I experienced while dialing. It was somehow momentarily affirming to let my pride dissolve, to give in to something...
Memory Myths →
As a lifelong user of human memory, you probably feel you’ve got a good idea of how it works, right? To test your understanding of memory, we compare several commonplace conceptions with insights from psychology.
April 2013
17 posts
2 tags
Its theologians have known that our soul suffers from what ancient Greek philosophers termed akrasia, a perplexing tendency to know what we should do combined with a persistent reluctance to actually do it, whether through weakness of will or absent-mindedness. We all possess wisdom that we lack the strength properly to enact in our lives. Christianity pictures the mind as a sluggish and fickle...
“Jim Jarmusch once told me Fast, Cheap, and Good… pick two. If it’s fast and...”
– Tom Waits (via ancient-serpent)
1 tag
“Maybe coming clean is the ultimate selfish act. A way to absolve yourself by...”
– Cindy Chupack (via creatingaquietmind)
2 tags
This is the archetype of the midwife who is a therapist, because every therapist is a midwife. People come to therapists at times of transition and crisis. The Hecate in us can see where they came from. We have some idea of where their choices might take them. Patients stay with us at the crossroad until they become clear which direction they will choose. The path that is most authentically them...
“If you can’t laugh together in bed, the chances are you are incompatible,...”
– Richard Francis Burton (via peryr)
2 tags
The next phase of it is that you’ve committed to raising it in some fashion. This is a maturing part of most of our lives. In making that commitment we often cut ourselves off from other possibilities in another way. It’s not a Procrustean bed in terms of, “I have to cut myself off from this in order to be on the road to Athens.” It’s much more. “For now, in terms of time and commitment, I have to...
2 tags
I’ve been interested to pick up along the way what people are saying about transitions. The cocoon is a place where the caterpillar totally dissolves; it is insolutio in the alchemical model of dissolving into the water, or the emotional side of life. Then it moves on, and from that beginning a butterfly forms in the chrysalis — that in between place that is neither caterpillar nor butterfly. I’d...
“Mythological symbols touch and exhilarate centers of life beyond the reach of...”
– Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God, Vol. IV: Creative Mythology (via ancient-serpent)
March 2013
15 posts
Good-Friday, 1613, Riding Westward
LET man’s soul be a sphere, and then, in this,
Th’ intelligence that moves, devotion is ;
And as the other spheres, by being grown
Subject to foreign motion, lose their own,
And being by others hurried every day,
Scarce in a year their natural form obey ;
Pleasure or business, so, our souls admit
For their first mover, and are whirl’d by it.
Hence is’t,...
“It is likely I will die next to a pile of things I was meaning to read.”
– Lemony Snicket (via runa-lovegood)
1 tag
Jesus Christ Superstar (1973) "Hosanna" (Stereo,... →
February 2013
9 posts
“Nothing ever goes away until it teaches us what we need to know.”
– Pema Chodron (via psychotherapy)
: The Manuscript of Beowulf (1000 AD) Can Now Be... →
penamerican:
Made around the year 1000, most likely during the reign of King Æthelred the Unready (978-1016), this manuscript committed to parchment a tale that (in some modern scholars’ opinions) had been passed down for centuries, between generations of storytellers.
In its present state, the poem,…
