art

sunday morning with freud

In a tiny grove with flowers everywhere, young girls of days gone by sit looking in their mirrors.

They say: “Sometimes we think that we have grown old. That our hair is white and our eyes no longer clear as the new moon … but it is not true! Our mirrors are bewitched with winter, and they lie! It is the mirrors that make our hair like snow and wrinkle our young faces! But wicked winter can bewitch our mirrors only, not ourselves … Forever we are unchanged.” ~Wang Chang-ling*

Freud noted that suffering comes from three directions: the feebleness of our bodies, the superior power of nature, and more painful to us than that of any other, our relations with others. He also wrote, “In the last analysis, all suffering is nothing else than sensation; it only exists in so far as we feel it, and we feel it in consequence of certain ways in which our organism is regulated.” The few who possess the ability to experience pleasure through special dispositions and gifts do not have “an impenetrable amour against the arrows of future.”**

*Trans Anonymous. The Jade Flute by various authors. The Project Gutenberg eBook of the Jade Flute

** source: Peter Gray, ed., The Freud Reader  (New York, 1998)

looking back

“Do not observe yourself too much. Do not draw too hasty conclusions from what happens to you; let it simply happen to you. Otherwise you will too easily look with reproach (that is, morally) upon your past, which naturally has its share in all that you are now meeting.”*

“… every action has an equal and opposite reaction. This simple concept is fundamental. You can extend it to our lives, our actions and their consequences.

“So when we do something we should always expect a reaction even when we think no one has seen us?

“When we are part of a complex whole; if you move one thing, you affect everything else. And somewhere, without knowing it was you, someone is affect by your action and reacts, striking when you least expect it.”*

*cited in Trans. M D Herter Norton, Letters to a Young Poet. Rainer Maria Rilke

**unknown source

rain drops

Hidden among the roots

of grass I hear

a cuckoo ~ Otsuin*

Today my memory invites me to that time…the time my grandparents invited me to go with them to visit family. Sitting in Great Aunt Ida’s living room with her siblings and their spouses listening to shared stories of unknown family and friends, a adolescent’s sudden insight, “that is what being old is….sharing stores of those who died in one’s yesterdays.”

Today as a great grandmother, I find myself wandering through recalled memories with yearnings to visit past times colored by gratitude and secret desires to resolve moments of disconnect.  

Seeking moments of my mom and dad, sisters and brothers, friends, extended family, and teachers and imagining us all sitting together around a table of trust, the trust that evaporates caution, sharing yesterday’s stories of being.

*cited in Y Hoffmann, Japanese Death Poems

an early morning with Etty

“…Woke up in the middle of the night. And suddenly remembered my important dream. A few minutes of intense effort to bring it back. Gluttonous. Greedy. Had the feeling that the dream was part of my personality, that I had the right to hang on to it, that I must not let it escape me, that I had to be certain of it if I am to be a rounded and whole person.*

Cee’s Photo Challenges: FOTD

*Trans, Arno Pomerans. An Interrupted Life. Lester & Oren Dennys Limited. 1983. pg.58