snowdrops > Recent Status Updates

“Fantasy:
Someday, when I have a solid month to devote to my house, I’ll get it totally cleaned and decluttered. I don’t see the point in starting until I know I can finish.
Reality:
Housekeeping doesn’t end. Ever.”

Omg! lol why does no one ever tells this! Always this expectation that someday everything will be neat and clean and in its place. Such a shame that we are not taught these habits like brushing teeth!

"So warped are our sensitivities that we have to learn to honor nature, to honor our own bodies. We have to reconnect with the primal wisdom that assures us that we are loved, that life is our birthright, that we need not prove ourselves or justify our existence." (Marion Woodman)

"The child learns that its own little body is its home on this earth, that it has respected boundaries, that its feelings and needs are recognized.

Instead of using the child to mirror her, the conscious mother mirrors the essence of the child—its delight, its anger, its imagination, its growth. Rather than concentrating on the product she is creating, she delights in her child's process." (Marion Woodman)

"Unconscious mothering can be transformed into conscious mothering when the feminine container is strong enough to open to archetypal energy and allow the love to pour through, at the same time recognizing human limitations. A mother who genuinely loves her baby, who honors her body through which the gift was given, who celebrates her sexuality, creates a container for her child." (Marion Woodman)

"Knowledge has entertained me and it has shaped me and it has failed me.Something in me still starves.In what is probably the most serious inquiry of my life,I have begun to look past reason,past the provable,in other directions.Now I think there is only one subject worth my attention and tht is the precognition of the spiritual side of the world and,within this recognition,the condition of my own spiritual state."

"In this universe we are given two gifts: the ability to love, and the ability to ask questions. Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us."

“Were they seed eaters? Were they meat eaters? Not the point. They were dreamers, and imaginers, and declarers; they lived looking and looking and looking, seeing the apparent and beyond the apparent, wondering, allowing for uncertainty, also grace, easygoing here, ferociously unmovable there; they were thoughtful.”

“Forebears, models, spirits whose influence and teachings I am now inseparable from, and forever grateful for. I go nowhere, I arrive nowhere, without them. With them I live my life, with them I enter the event, I mold the meditation, I keep if I can some essence of the hour, even as it slips away.”

"For it is precisely how I feel, who have inherited not measurable wealth but, as we all do who care for it, that immeasurable fund of thoughts and ideas, from writers and thinkers long gone into the ground—and, inseparable from those wisdoms because demanded by them, the responsibility to live thoughtfully and intelligently. To enjoy, to question—never to assume, or trample."

"An appreciation of the basic feminine attitude of acceptance of and
harmony with nature is absolutely essential. In this sense the Feminine is submissive to nature and unable to alter or change the course of natural events. But it is just this apparent submissiveness and helplessness, this complete acceptance of what is, that has not been respected by the masculine spirit in our culture." (Robert M. Stein)

This reality—that women have largely identified with these roles and that men have generally remained on a similar primitive level, relating to women only as maternal or erotic archetypes— has contributed much to the sterility of modern marriages. (Robert M. Stein)

While the maternal capacity and the need to evoke erotic desires in the male through her physical charm and beauty are certainly instinctual dominants in women, to be forced to identify with these roles prevents a woman from developing her individuality. (Robert M. Stein)

This is my new obsession - all kinds of hacks and organization stuff. Let’s see how long it lasts.

This book was much needed at this time. I had Covid in April 2021, and since then i've been trying to get back to the previous state of health. But having constant issues with fatigue, sleep and physical activity, even breathlessness. Did not think all this was so related and the main difference between rest and low level activities was an eye opener. Even this RSV infection seems to be as much draining as Covid.

"We all have our states of fullness and of emptiness, but we overflow at different points. One overflows through the sensual outlets, another through his heart, another through his head, and another perchance only through the higher part of his head, or his poetic faculty. It depends on where each is tight and open. We can, perchance, then direct our nutriment to those organs we specially use."

"We are surrounded by a rich and fertile mystery. May we not probe it, pry into it, employ ourselves about it, a little? To devote your life to the discovery of the divinity in nature or to the eating of oysters, would they not be attended with very different results?"

"He is a wise man and experienced who has taken many views; to whom stones and plants and animals and a myriad objects have each suggested something, contributed something."

"What else is there to be improved? Who knows what opportunities he may neglect? It is not in vain that the mind turns aside this way or that: follow its leading; apply it whither it inclines to go. Probe the universe in a myriad points. Be avaricious of these impulses. You must try a thousand themes before you find the right one, as nature makes a thousand acorns to get one oak."

"It is wise to write on many subjects, to try many themes, that so you may find the right and inspiring one. Be greedy of occasions to express your thought. Improve the opportunity to draw analogies. There are innumerable avenues to a perception of the truth. Improve the suggestion of each object however humble, however slight and transient the provocation." (cont.)

"Walk often in drizzly weather, for then the small weeds (especially if they stand on bare ground), covered with rain-drops like beads, appear more beautiful than ever,—the hypericums, for instance. They are equally beautiful when covered with dew, fresh and adorned, almost spirited away, in a robe of dewdrops."

"Give me the obscure life, the cottage of the poor and humble, the
workdays of the world, the barren fields, the smallest share of all things but
poetic perception. Give me but the eyes to see the things which you possess."

"Here I am thirty-four years old, and yet my life is almost wholly unexpanded. There is such an interval between my ideal and the actual in many instances that I may say I am unborn. There is the instinct for society, but no society. Life is not long enough for one success. Methinks my seasons revolve more slowly than those of nature; I am differently timed. I am contented."

"The newspapers tell us of news not to be named even with that in its own kind which an observing man can pick up in a solitary walk, as if it gained some importance and dignity by its publicness. Do we need to be advertised each day that such is still the routine of life?"

"We do not commonly live our life out and full; we do not fill all our
pores with our blood; we do not inspire and expire fully and entirely
enough, so that the wave, the comber, of each inspiration shall break upon
our extremest shores, rolling till it meets the sand which bounds us, and the sound of the surf come back to us."

A truly good book is something as wildly natural and primitive, mysterious and marvellous, ambrosial and fertile, as a fungus or a lichen. Suppose the
muskrat or beaver were to turn his views to literature, what fresh views of
nature would he present! The fault of our books and other deeds is that they are too humane,.something speaking in some measure to the
condition of muskrats and skunk-cabbage as well as of men.

"In literature it is only the wild that attracts us. Dullness is only another
name for tameness. It is the untamed, uncivilized, free, and wild thinking in
Hamlet, in the Iliad, and in all the scriptures and mythologies that delights
us,—not learned in the schools, not refined and polished by art."

"It is as sweet a mystery to me as ever, what this world is."

Suffering is merely that high, intense clarity of thought and emotion which forces you to recognize things as they are. But this does not mean acceptance, resignation. When you see things as they are in the mirror of truth, which is intelligence, then there is a joy, an ecstasy; in that there is no duality, no sense of loss, no division.

If my experiences and remembrances of the past are becoming hindrances in the present through their reaction,then I cannot comprehend or live fully, intensely, in the present.
You react to the past because the present has lost its significance, or because you want to avoid the present;so you go back to the past and live in that emotional thrill, in that reaction of surging memory,because the present has little value.