ON EMITTING YOUR OWN FREQUENCY

 ‘Everything changes when you start to emit your own frequency rather than absorbing the frequencies around you, when you start imprinting your intent on the universe rather than receiving an imprint from existence.’ 

- Barbara Marciniak

ON BEING FAT

ON BEARING SORROW

"All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them."

- Karen Blixen

ON MAKING A FOOL OF YOURSELF

ON YOUR LIFE CHOICES

I'm talking about these people who've ended up in one life instead of another and they are just so disappointed...They've done what's expected of them. They want to do something different but it's impossible now, there's a mortgage, kids, whatever, they're trapped. Dan's like that...

But I don't think he even realizes it...High functioning sleepwalkers, essentially. 

People like him think work is supposed to be drudgery punctuated by very occasional moments of happiness, but when I say happiness, I mostly mean distraction. 

Say you go into the break room...and a couple of people you like are there, say someone's telling a funny story, you laugh a little, you feel included...you go back to your desk with an afterglow, but then by four of five o'clock the day's just turned back into another day, and you go on like that, looking forward to five o'clock and then the weekend, and then your two to three weeks of paid vacation time, day in day out, and that's what happens to your life.

That's what passes for a life...That's what passes for happiness for most people. Guys like Dan, they're like sleepwalkers...and nothing ever jolts them awake.

- From Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

ON WHY WE TELL STORIES

"Part of..suffering is that [you] can't articulate it. Pain is resistant to language; it can reduce us to a stage before language - to the confusion and anguish, the cries we had before we had words. Karen Blixen said, 'All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.' But what if a person can't tell a story about his sorrows? Experience has taught me that there are stories that we never found a way to voice, because no one helped us to find the words. When we cannot find a way of telling our story, our story tells us - we dream these stories, we develop symptoms we don't understand... 

"We will probably never know what's the point, but we can find meaning, and ourselves, through speaking and listening. We are born into a world of feelings and words; we become who we are by sharing our stories. We need others to help s make sense of ourselves. From our first words to our last, we're story-tellers, but we can't be story-tellers alone - we need someone to listen." 

- Stephen Grosz

ON MATURITY

“The things you learn in maturity aren’t simple things such as acquiring information and skills. You learn not to engage in self-destructive behavior. You learn not to burn up energy in anxiety. You discover how to manage your tensions. You learn that self-pity and resentment are among the most toxic of drugs. You find that the world loves talent but pays off on character.

“You come to understand that most people are neither for you nor against you; they are thinking about themselves. You learn that no matter how hard you try to please, some people in this world are not going to love you, a lesson that is at first troubling and then really quite relaxing.”

- Civic Leader John Gardner

HAPPY THANKSGIVING...AND THOUGHTS

I wish you nothing but good thoughts this time of year, and came across this quote. It sets off sparks, don't you think?

Stay strong. Reach far. Rise above the fray.

Happy Thanksgiving!

ON REVOLUTION

"Revolutions have two phases: first comes a struggle for freedom, then a struggle for power. The first makes the human spirit soar and brings out the best in people. The second unleashes the worst: envy, intrigue, greed, suspicion and the urge for revenge."

- Adam Michik, Historian

VIKTOR FRANKL ON THE SEARCH FOR MEANING

"Being human always points, and is directed, to something or someone, other than oneself -- be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself -- by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love -- the more human he is."

ON SELF-TRANSFORMATION

THE ALMOND OF EVIL

Roxana Bashyrova/Shutterstock

No one has anything bad to say about the almond. It's high in protein, vitamins, and the fats that are good for you.  I probably have some in my mouth right now. Almonds are good = eat almonds. Unfortunately, as someone who lives in California, almonds also happen to be sucking my state dry of water, and this at a time when California is in drought. 

I've always appreciated people who can see life on a grander scale, people who can plan and execute a seven book series*, people who can read the patterns in the earth. I suffer from nutrition myopia where food is concerned, that is to say, I cannot see beyond eating based on my own health. And that's pretty much it. 

However, I remember coming across an article from 2012 (don't ask) featuring James Beard Award-winning Chef Dan Barber, owner of the Blue Hill Restaurant in New York, and a resident locavore. If you are looking for someone able to see food on a grander scale, he may be one to follow. 

Now, here's Barber in own words. Note, he's not a punch-puller:

"I'd like some to explain the phenomenon of the self-righteous vegetarian to me. I'm not here to say I don't eat vegetables—I do, a lot of them—but, from a soil perspective, they're actually more costly than a cow grazing on grass. Vegetables deplete soil. They're extractive. If soil has a bank account, vegetables make the largest withdrawals. So without animal manure, where are you going to get your soil fertility for all those vegetables in an organic system? You are, by some measures, forcing crops into a kind of imbalance. 

Butchering and eating animals may not be called kindness, but eating soy burgers that rely on pesticides and fertilizers precipitates destruction too. You don't have to eat meat, but you should have the good judgment to relinquish the high horse. There is no such thing as guilt-free eating.  

What's the definition of a healthy diet, the kind you can actually feel a little smug about? There isn't one answer, of course, because it depends on where you live and what time of year it is. 

Good diets, like great cuisines, are filled with diversity—grains, vegetables and a smattering of meat (not big 12-ounce sirloins, but utilizing every part of the animal). The proportions vary depending on the region and the climate. But modern agriculture separates animals and vegetables and grains; we've broken apart the system, which means we've broken the nutrient cycle. So now you need to import your nutrients in cheap chemical form rather than using manure. We've allowed dinner to become less diverse, less nutritious and a lot less flavorful." 

"True sustainability is about more than just deciding to cook with local ingredients or not allowing your child to have corn syrup. It's about cuisine that's evolved out of what the land is telling you it wants to grow. As one farmer said to me, Food systems don't last; cuisine does."

From the Wall Street Journal.

*Cheers to you, Game of Thrones author George RR Martin, and please don't die before completing the series.

GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ: THE PROCESS

During an informal survey in one of my English classes, the professor moved down a line of students, asking each person the same question: What is your favorite book? 

The answers that came, with few exceptions, were identical: One Hundred Years of Solitude.

So, when I read Marquez's obituary in the Economist, detailing how that book came into being, I thought I would share:

"In July 1965 Garbriel Garcia Marquez - Gabo to all who revered him later - decided to lock himself away in a house on Calle de La Loma in Mexico City. He ordered his wife to sell the car and get credit from the butcher. For 15 months, using only his index fingers, he typed for six hours a day in a room he called "The Cave of the Mafia." He survived on a diet of good Scotch and constant cigarettes. At five in the afternoon he would emerge in to the fading light with his eyes wide, as though he had discoursed with the dead... 

"'One Hundred Years of Solitude,' the fruit of his self-imprisonment, sold 50m copies in more than 30 languages... 

"Writing was difficult; the words came as painfully as kidney stones. Nonetheless, there was nothing else he had wanted to do in life. He burned 'to write so I would not die.'"

ON THE SOUL AND THE MIND

Interesting. Do you believe this?

BODY THOUGHTS

It's Friday, and I have a subscription to US Weekly. It was a gift. From a friend. 

Because I kept reading her copies. Oh well, secret's out. You won't see a copy of James Joyce's Ulysses hanging around in my bathroom. Of course, you won't see US Weekly either, because that's gross. 

Most of it is exactly what you would expect, but sometimes, in the The Body Issue of all things, certain celebrities have some interesting things to say. 

"I really love myself. I'm comfortable in my own skin."
- Charlize Theron

"My Grandmother wore daisy dukes until she was 70! She loved her legs. And my mom wore plunging necklines. They were good examples for me."
- Jessica Alba

"I'm pretty healthy so I think that helps a lot. I've been that way for a long time - 20 solid years of eating vegetarian, vegan and taking care of myself."
- Jared Leto

I know. It's right there, on the tip of your tongue - if I looked like that, I'd love and take care of myself too. Thanks, genetics!

But what about just caring deeply about yourself? And then drawing nourishment from the well of love you have for yourself? How would you behave? 

Differently or the same?

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS

THE NEW 10 COMMANDMENTS 

1 Laugh.
2 Read.
3 Say please.
4 Floss.
5 Doubt.
6 Exercise.
7 Learn.
8 Don't hate.
9 Cut the bullshit.
10 Chill. 

- @TheTweetOfGod

SHAME V. GUILT

"Shame is: I am a bad person. 

Guilt is: I did a bad thing."

This comes from the interview with Brene Brown that I showed earlier, about two weeks ago. Just scroll down a bit. Alright, there it is. 

There were a number of good quotes that came out of that interview. I took notes. This particular quote came from the interviewer summing up Brown's previous work on shame, a book that I have never read and, to be honest, probably never will. 

Even so, the topic of shame fascinates me. Here's Webster's definition:

"A feeling of guilt, regret, or sadness that you have because you know you have done something wrong." 

That makes sense. If you are a serial stabber, then you should feel shame, because serial stabbing is wrong. But...what about all those other times? When you're not doing anything clearly in the wrong, but the shame is there. When that happens, shame becomes your own personal mental albatross. It can inhibit you, it can make you feel awful, but it serves no purpose. It is this predicament that interests me. Because why? Why does this happen?

Let's go back to the stabbing example. I don't stab, but I do feel shame. Like a rational person, I decided to make a list, a personal "shame hall of fame," a "shame highlights" reel, to see if there was a pattern. Maybe I did something in a previous life? This could potentially have been really interesting, but it wasn't. There was no pattern. Shame just...happened. For little things. Things so immaterial they were hard for me to recall afterwards. This was a frustrating realization. When I say frustrating, I mean $#%* frustrating. 

There are probably a mountain of studies that have been done on the topic of shame, none of which I have read. I just have my one theory, which stems from that quote, above. That quote suggests that shame is the result of a mental habit. When there is an instance where guilt is the appropriate response, you interpret guilt as shame. Does that make a difference? It does to me. Hearing that quote felt a bit like the release of a bird out of an internal cage, because in many ways, guilt is a lot easier of a burden to bear. Guilt doesn't make you a worse person. 

I don't know why habits form. But once they form, then it's just a matter of breaking that habit.* I'm not When you feel shame, rebrand that as guilt. See where that takes you. 

* I'm not saying this is easy, by the way. I would just rather feel guilt than shame. Shame is God awful. 

ON PERFECTION

"I think perfection is ugly. Somewhere in the things humans make, I want to see scars, failure, disorder, distortion."
- Yohji Yamamoto

ON FAME

"Jared Leto said that fame doesn’t change you, it changes everyone around you. While I’m not the centre of attention here (and fuck, the times I have, it’s never been fun), I do become aware of the people around me and their transparency. They fail to hide it. I’ve experienced being a target of the tabloids, finding moments I thought I was in safe hands splattered all over the internet, being pushed and shoved, or watching others get pushed and shoved by paparazzi just to get what they think they’re entitled to."

- James Lowe (boyfriend of singer Lorde)

ON DOUBT

Source

Do you believe in the existence of an internal compass? It's the closest thing to a writer's spirituality - you have to have faith that it exists, without any physical proof. You just have to believe, because without it, you have no guide, no point of reference, just options. There are too many options, or none. To make a choice, you have to believe sometimes, that you know what you're doing, you have to trust in your creative instincts, and set aside the doubt.