the one, the only

Leonard Cohen Makes It Darker

At eighty-two, the troubadour has another album coming.

Like him, it is obsessed with mortality, God-infused, and funny. 

By David Remnick

Leonard Cohen at home, Los Angeles, September, 2016.

Photograph by Graeme Mitchell for The New Yorker

October 17, 2016 Issue

from the article: When I asked him if he intended his performances to reflect a kind of devotion, he hesitated before he answered.

“Does artistic dedication

begin to touch on religious devotion?” he said.

“I start with artistic dedication.

I know that if the spirit is on you it will touch on to the other

human receptors.

But I dare not begin from the other side.

It’s like pronouncing the holy name—you don’t do it.

But if you are lucky, and you are graced, and the audience is

in a particular salutary condition,

then these deeper responses will be produced.”

 

 (blessed to have been at the show in Charlottetown, P.E.I. on his 2008 tour)

by far, the most powerfully moving live performance I have ever experienced...

♥︎ thank you ray ♥︎

magnifique!

“Many of Danielle Richard’s paintings feature a vista, a clearing,

a door, or a window through which a feminine gaze appears to flee,

but what it truly seeks is to delve into its most intimate being.”

♥

even though I don't understand French, I love listening to it.

this looks like a lovely presentation in Danielle's honour...

A bit of history about the origin of the word 'empathy' in Art that doesn't seem to be commonly known: In 1873, the art historian and philosopher Robert Vischer was the first person credited with using the German term Einfühlung to explain how we  'feel into' or the 'in-feeling of' works of arts and nature. His father, Friedrich Theodor Vischer, had previously used a similar term Einfühlen in explorations of Idealism relative to architectural form.

In the late 1800s the Father of Experimental Psychology William Wundt used empathy in terms of human relationships but still from an art-based position, saying 'when empathizing with a work of art, the beholder physically imitates the object and imaginatively projects himself into the object.'

A student of Wundt's, Theodor Lipps, transfered empathy to psychology in an attempt to explain how we discover that other people have selves, though he presented many examples from the visual arts, including 'when I observe a circus performer on a hanging wire, I feel I am inside him'.

Freud got in there then with 'putting oneself in another person's position', and in 1909, a psychologist named Edward Titchener translated Einfühlung into the adjective 'empathic' which he defined as the appreciation of another person's feelings, or the process of humanizing objects,

of reading or feeling ourselves into them.

From then on it seems like the art/aesthetic origin was no longer referred to, and around 1929 it started to get confusing when philosophers began arguing that empathy was more cognitive than emotional, and ever since then the lines between empathy and sympathy have been blurred, empathy commonly referring to cognitive function and sympathy to feeling, though they are often used interchangeably in today's society (this confusion clearly illustrated especially in the comments here). It also became a political tool; it can be very politically incorrect to be non-empathetic, and to be sympathetic has its own weakness/negative connotations as well.

I would like to see the downfalls of this confusion around

the word empathy and how it is being used as a distraction illustrated more clearly and spoken of more often,

as Edwin Friedman does in the fascinating book

A Failure of Nerve, where he says that the increased popularity of empathy is largely a symptom of the 'herding/togetherness forced characteristic of an

anxious society'.

I personally align with the earlier meaning of empathy in which I see the roots being represented aesthetically

('the science of feelings') through the arts as early (and likely even earlier) as the mid-1700's when Johann Georg Sulzer said that 'art is the expression of a psychological state of man; it imitates human nature in that it expresses nature through the representation of an object.'

Going with this version of empathy and distinguishing it from sympathy by defining it simply as having loyalty, support, or favor with, ultimately paves the way for less semantic confusion and more opportunity to...

throw all of this out the window!

and just be compassionate.

that is, recognize our shared humanity.

♥

Feel life.

Be life.

Accept life.

tribal

I'm happy that Susan Cain has written a book (currently a nytimes bestseller) about the unique challenge many of us intrinsically 'Quiet' people face in our society...
(her talk on TED.com recently about the book is delightful. she makes a great comment about the irony of an introvert's job being to go out and speak to large groups about it (!) so it is inspiring how she approached it and labeled this her 'year of speaking dangerously'.)

I personally don't think of all quieter people as introverts, and thus all louder people as extroverts, but rather at our core, we all fall somewhere along a spectrum. And I feel it is beneficial to have the awareness of where we ourselves generally are on that spectrum, and to also be aware that about one-third of those among us are much more on the higher sensitivity end of the spectrum (the bulk of whom are also introverts but many are also extroverts as Elaine Aron brilliantly speaks to here). Included in my Living in Possibility quest is an individual path toward self-acceptance that leads to self-celebration (of course I don't mean this in an egoic/outward achievement sense but in an inward, Divine knowing way), at whatever volume works.

please be careful with me

I'm sensitive

and I'd like to stay that way

~Jewel

One way of getting along with it all is allowing

more space around each situation. 

these days, I try to give myself

the freedom to be

situationally:

*extroverted ~ sometimes this is necessary and I do enjoy stretching in this way on occasion.
*quiet ~ this one comes naturally, while claiming it as a rejuvenative and creative necessity does not.
*vegetarian ~ all about balance and striving toward inner and outer harmonization. as my body, as well as my understanding of its nutritional needs combined with the broader impact of our individual and collective choices evolves, so have my eating choices.
*and tribal ~ it seems the further I travel along life's highway the more I engage with the concept/cost of contending with the proverbial square peg/round hole. And I am truly blessed to feel connected with several tribes along the spectrum, though this hsp/quiet/introvert/extrovert stuff is largely unspoken. I intend to dance more with my perceived danger of speaking to this...

☀

Always remember that you are absolutely unique.

Just like everyone else.

~anthropologist Margaret Mead

☀

perky

percolation:
seeping through an opening.

does the coffee bean have something to teach us about responding expansively to adversity?

unlike a carrot that starts out strong but then wilts
or an egg that starts out soft
then becomes hardened on the inside,
when heated in boiling water,

ground coffee beans become something

useful, tasty, even beautiful...

Into the fire of Life's mysteries I dance 

With the book of my heart wide open

I may find love

I may find pain

But only an open book can be written in

And I have stories to tell

~ 'Flamenco' by Kim McElroy 

haiku II

merge with nonfiction

existence thrives on wonder

makes space for unfaced

~mh

playful

freeform haiku

emerge nonfiction

the bliss of discovering

which book will find me

~mh