thetchuth

From April 30, Mark Nepo, the Book of Awakening

“In exploring place, identity and privilege through cocoons, Kathy Pick provides a meditative platform on which to consider oneself. She asks, how can one address and express these relationships to others? “ Excerpt from the Curator Jisgang Nika Collison.

Historian and essayist Pamela Haag - melancholy marriages, 'Marriage adds to your life, and it also takes things away. Constancy kills joy; joy kills security; security kills desire; desire kills stability; stability kills lust. Something gives; some part of you recedes. It's something you can live without, or it's not. Maybe it's hard to know before the marriage which part of the self is expendable, and which is part of your spirit." Home, marriage, and motherhood have forever been the pursuit of many women, but also the place where women cease to feel like women. Marta Meana (prominent researcher) challenges that women's sexuality is dependent on relational connectedness - love, commitment, and security. Women may be just as turned on as men by the novel, the illicit, the raw, the anonymous, but the arousal value of these may not be important enough to women to trade in things they value more." Women choose good relationships over sexual pleasure. Women's sexual drive needs to be stoked more intensely and more imaginatively first and foremost by her - not only by her partner. Dalma Heyn, psychotherapist and author, on "erotic silence." An unexpected, inarticulate deadening of pleasure and vitality after they tie the knot. A woman's sexuality depends on her authenticity and self-nurturance, yet marriage and motherhood demand a level of selflessness that is at odds with the inherent selfishness of desire. Being responsible for others makes it harder for women to focus on their own needs, to feel spontaneous, sexually expressive, and carefree. Finding at home the kind of self-absorption that is essential to erotic pleasure proves a challenge. The burdens of caretaking are a powerful anti-aphrodisiac. When a woman struggles to stay connected to herself, an affair is a venue for self-reclamation. Like the heroes of ancient mythology, she leaves home to find herself. "Whereas before the affairs these women exeprienced their bodies as fragmented, their voices muted, some vital organ or aspect of their personality missing, during the affair and after it they became changed. They let go of those muffled feelings and entered a clear reality, one filled with color and vibrancy, in which they felt alive and awake and strong and focused." Connection, intensity, aliveness. 1. Institutionalization of relationships - a passage from freedom and independence to commitment and responsibility. 2. Overfamiliarity when intimacy and closeness replace individuality and mystery. 3. Desexualization of roles of mother, wife, house manager Female sexual desire requires a balance between comfort and freedom, security and risk, intimacy and individuality.

I have found her writing style to be almost unbearable, so why do authors that I love (Ken Liu, SA Chakraborty) keep commending her work?

Cherry blossom season :)

"... there’s a reason motherhood as a story is so infrequently told... if you knew that your mother’s journey was, intrinsically, a hero’s journey — if that was in any way an established narrative in our culture — you’d have to accept that this memory of womb-like safety, this foundation upon which so much of our identity is built, was often just an illusion. You’d have to realize that while you were blissed out on your mother’s lap, one of those epic battles, the kind that envelops heroes as they fight their way out of a ring of fire, was raging just above your head. No one wants to believe that in the moments you felt the most peaceful, the woman cradling you so softly was shielding you from a sword that she herself was holding. Every mother you know is in this fight with herself. The sword that hangs over her is a sword of exhaustion, of frustration, of patience run dry, a sword of indignation at how little she feels like a human when she so often has to look and behave like an animal. Mostly, it is the sword of rage: the rage and shock of how completely she must annihilate herself to keep her child alive. Ultimately, the hope of impossible delight almost always wins out over the impossible torment. I know this because here I am, alive, writing this, and here you are, alive, reading it, which means our mothers did what heroes do: They kept us all alive to tell our own tales one day. And what I can tell you is that so much of the heroism of motherhood is the ability to swallow the sword. To swallow the pain and frustration and keep everything inside. No one wants to think that their mother, that all-forgiving source of limitless unconditional love, occasionally, in a fit of rage or boredom, met her limits. And yet, of course she did. .... No one wants to know that as she rocked you and sang you the tenth lullaby of the night, she was fantasizing about putting you down, walking out the door, and never coming back. A mother’s heroic journey is not about how she leaves but about how she stays."

If you share everything publicly, you erode the soil of the sacred personal from which your many seeds of truth and beauty sprout and grow. Though it may not be in style, having a private life creates a cradle of intimacy, a sanctuary for pure healing, growing, being. Your life is not performance art. It is the sacredness of the soul.

Cherry blossom season in Seattle

forest fairy :)

NYC and Met Karl Lagerfield exhibit