We have a culture of criticism in which critics, professional and self-appointed, measure their merit by how intelligently they can eviscerate an idea, a work of art, or, increasingly and alarmingly, a person. We seem to have forgotten how to acquire what Bertrand Russell called, just a year before Suzuki’s essays were published, “a high degree of intellectual culture without emotional atrophy” in his magnificent meditation on why construction is more difficult yet more rewarding than destruction.

The more you suffer the deeper grows your character, and with the deepening of your character you read the more penetratingly into the secrets of life. All great artists, all great religious leaders, and all great social reformers have come out of the intensest struggles which they fought bravely, quite frequently in tears and with bleeding hearts.

We are too ego-centered. The ego-shell in which we live is the hardest thing to outgrow…

For anyone who has ever experienced the soul-squeezing sense of not-enoughness — and in a consumerist culture, most of us have, for the task of consumerism is to rob us of our sense of having enough and sell it back to us at the price of the product, over and over.

hmmmm beijo bom

“An honorable human relationship … in which two people have the right to use the word ‘love,’” the poet Adrienne Rich memorably wrote, “is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.” But too often, we mistake for love feelings rooted in the pleasant untruths of delusion — about ourselves, or the other, or the possibility that exists between the two. Anyone who has ever been vitalized by the electricity of infatuation has also burned with disappointment as the fantasy of the idealized beloved has crumbled into the reality of a living and therefore flawed person. And yet one of the great paradoxes of the human heart is that we go on falling in love — or in what we think is love, or hope might be love — anyway.

Nearly two centuries before the French philosopher Alain Badiou examined the delicate psychoemotional machinery of why we fall and stay in love, his compatriot Stendhal set out to outline the dark side of life’s most radiant experience in his “crystallization” theory of the seven stages of infatuation and disillusionment. But infatuation, argues Alain de Botton in a portion of The Course of Love (public library), isn’t a maladaptive mutation of our love-faculty — rather, it is an essential feature of it.

Every stage in life is processed by individual consciousness, and the degree to which we are self-aware, and have some understanding of our deeper needs and conflicts, may have a powerful effect, not only on how we respond to events, but on the events themselves.

o Sol não pode morar perto da Lua

(...)
– Anda brincar comigo – pediu-lhe o principezinho. - Estou triste...
– Não posso ir brincar contigo – disse a raposa. – Ainda ninguém me cativou...

(...)
– «Cativar» quer dizer o quê? – Perguntou o principezinho?
– É a única coisa que toda a gente se esqueceu – disse a raposa. - Quer dizer criar laços…
– «Criar Laços»?

- Sim, laços – disse a raposa. - Ora vê: por enquanto, tu não és para mim senão um rapazinho perfeitamente igual a cem mil outros rapazinhos. E eu não preciso de ti. E tu também não precisas de mim. Por enquanto, eu não sou para ti senão uma raposa igual a cem mil outras raposas. Mas, se tu me cativares, passamos a precisar um do outro. Passas a ser único no mundo para mim. E eu também passo a ser única no mundo para ti...

- Só compreendemos o que cativamos – disse a raposa. – Os homens deixaram de ter tempo para compreender o que quer que seja. Compram as coisas já prontas nas lojas. Contudo não há nenhuma loja onde possa comprar-se amizade e, portanto, os homens deixaram de ter amigos. Se queres um amigo, cativa-me…


- E tenho de fazer o quê? - Perguntou o principezinho.
- Tens de ter muita paciência – respondeu a raposa. - Primeiro, sentas-te longe de mim…assim…na relva. Eu olho para ti pelo canto do olho e tu não me dizes nada. As palavras são uma fonte de mal-entendidos. Mas podes sentar-te cada dia um bocadinho mais perto...
O principezinho voltou no dia seguinte.


(...)
Foi assim que o principezinho cativou a raposa. Mas quando chegou a hora da despedida:
- Ai! - Exclamou a raposa – ai que me vou pôr a chorar...
– A culpa é tua – disse o principezinho.- Eu não te desejava mal nenhum, mas tu quiseste que eu te cativasse…
- Pois quis - disse a raposa.
- Mas agora vais-te pôr a chorar! - Disse o principezinho.
- Pois vou – disse a raposa.
- Então não ganhaste nada com isso!
– Ai isso é que ganhei! - Disse a raposa. - Por causa da cor do trigo... – E em seguida acrescentou:

-Anda, vai ver as rosas outra vez. Vais compreender que a tua é única no mundo. Quando vieres ter comigo, dou-te um presente de despedida: conto-te um segredo.

na luta

From the topless starlets of 1960s to Gaspar Noé’s pornographic entry this year, there has always been plenty of flesh at Cannes – on screen and off. 

Knee socks

The crossroads of should and must

Must is different. Must is who we are, what we believe, and what we do when we are alone with our truest, most authentic self. It’s that which calls to us most deeply. It’s our convictions, our passions, our deepest held urges and desires – unavoidable, undeniable, and inexplicable. Unlike Should, Must doesn’t accept compromises.

Must is when we stop conforming to other people’s ideals and start connecting to our own – and this allows us to cultivate our full potential as individuals. To choose Must is to say yes to hard work and constant effort, to say yes to a journey without a road map or guarantees, and in so doing, to say yes to what Joseph Campbell called “the experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonance within our innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”

Choosing Must is the greatest thing we can do with our lives."

One evening I was walking along a path, the city was on one side and the fjord below. I felt tired and ill. I stopped and looked out over the fjord—the sun was setting, and the clouds turning blood red. I sensed a scream passing through nature; it seemed to me that I heard the scream. I painted this picture, painted the clouds as actual blood. The color shrieked. This became The Scream.

 Edvard Munch, Nice 22 January 1892

Coverup conspiracy?

On April 8, fortuitous Jupiter in Leo, your seventh house of one-on-one relationships, turns direct (forward), ending a four-month slowdown in love. Since December 8, 2014, the planet of expansion has been doing backstrokes in this harmony-oriented zone of your chart, pausing progress, but also helping you check in: Is your love life headed in the right direction? With optimistic Jupiter here until August 11, you’re in the midst of one of your luckiest or most expansive love cycles in 12 years—it is really helping you discover new, life-affirming perspectives on love. 

You could even meet someone wildly different from your usual type...and why not? Since Jupiter rules travel, you could stumble across your future spouse while hiking the calanques of Cassis, fighting climate change in the Maldives or, perhaps even looking for the lost city of Atlantis. Keep an open mind, because you never know who will be a match—and it's likely to NOT be your usual type (if you actually have one, Aquarius!). What matters most is the essence of the connection, not the package it comes in. 

Love is balm for the soul

Healthy grounding of my idealistic notions of relationships.

Few of us ever live in the present.
We are forever anticipating what is to come or remembering what has gone.

Louis l'Amour

Bliss

There's a conclusion to my illusion
I assure you this

There is a light to all this darkness, I will tell you this
There's redemption in you asking them just why it is

Some answers are better left unspoken when you know you ain't getting anyYounger, younger, younger
Are you?