On friendship

"Friendship is a mirror to presence and a testament to forgiveness. Friendship not only helps us see ourselves through another’s eyes, but can be sustained over the years only with someone who has repeatedly forgiven us for our trespasses as we must find it in ourselves to forgive them in turn. A friend knows our difficulties and shadows and remains in sight, a companion to our vulnerabilities more than our triumphs, when we are under the strange illusion we do not need them. An undercurrent of real friendship is a blessing exactly because its elemental form is rediscovered again and again through understanding and mercy. All friendships of any length are based on a continued, mutual forgiveness. Without tolerance and mercy all friendships die."

[...]

"In the course of the years a close friendship will always reveal the shadow in the other as much as ourselves, to remain friends we must know the other and their difficulties and even their sins and encourage the best in them, not through critique but through addressing the better part of them, the leading creative edge of their incarnation, thus subtly discouraging what makes them smaller, less generous, less of themselves."

[...]

"The dynamic of friendship is almost always underestimated as a constant force in human life: a diminishing circle of friends is the first terrible diagnostic of a life in deep trouble: of overwork, of too much emphasis on a professional identity, of forgetting who will be there when our armored personalities run into the inevitable natural disasters and vulnerabilities found in even the most average existence."

[...]

"But no matter the medicinal virtues of being a true friend or sustaining a long close relationship with another, the ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self, the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone."

David Whyte

Here

“Marriage is not a house or even a tent…”

“I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other,”
Rainer Maria Rilke

HABITATION

Marriage is not
a house or even a tent
it is before that, and colder:
the edge of the forest, the edge

of the desert

the unpainted stairs

at the back where we squat

outside, eating popcorn
the edge of the receding glacier
where painfully and with wonder

at having survived even

this far
we are learning to make fire
Margaret Atwood

Amizade, intimidade, casamento...

"Our paradoxical longing for intimacy and independence is a diamagnetic force — it pulls us toward togetherness and simultaneously repels us from it with a mighty magnet that, if unskillfully handled, can rupture a relationship and break a heart. Under this unforgiving magnetism, it becomes an act of superhuman strength and self-transcendence to give space to the other when all one wants is closeness. And yet this difficult act may be the very thing — perhaps the only thing — that saves the relationship over and over."
Maria Popova, Brain Pickings

A marriage ought to be based on a friendship; not primarily just on physical attraction...

... Well... first and foremost... because the physical attraction is going to go away, sooner or later.

 
Mary Wollstonecraft - Her Life and Key Ideas

Sobre Mary Wollstonecraft

Mais coisas:
The Love Letters Of Mary Wollstonecraft To Gilbert Imlay

Letters to a Young Poet: aqui e aqui

Maria Popova:
The Difficult Art of Giving Space in Love: Rilke on Freedom, Togetherness, and the Secret to a Good Marriage

The Original Marriage of Equals: The Love Letters of Feminism Founding Mother Mary Wollstonecraft and Political Philosopher William Godwin


"I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other. For, if it lies in the nature of indifference and of the crowd to recognize no solitude, then love and friendship are there for the purpose of continually providing the opportunity for solitude. And only those are the true sharings which rhythmically interrupt periods of deep isolation."
Rainer Maria Rilke

On Love

“An honorable human relationship — that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word ‘love’ — is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other,”
Adrienne Rich [by Brain Pickings]

The Universe in Verse - 2018 - The science of the Earth / Holy stardust!!

The Universe in Verse 2018: full show from Maria Popova on Vimeo.

"Celebrating science through poetry with an element of protest to remind us just how vital the truth and beauty are to human life, to civic life, to our flourishing as individuals, as a community and as a species."


Links:

Maria Mitchell (1818-1889) - astrónoma
Rachel Carson (1907-1964) - bióloga marinha. Mais aqui.
Maya Angelou - poetisa e bióloga
Denise Levertov (1923-1997) - poetisa
Natalie Batalha (1966) - astrónoma
James Gleick (1954) - autor de ciência
Terrance Hayes (1971) - poeta
Marie Howe (1950) - poetisa
Amy M. Homes (1961) - poetisa
Jane Hirshfield (1953) - poetisa
Kelli Anderson - designer
Robin Wall Kimmerer (1953) - botânica


Poems:

A Brave and Startling Truth
Sojourns in the Parallel World
World Below the Brine
Renascence
The Fish in the Stone
Cutting Greens
The Singularity
The Explorers
Optimism

a life worth living

"People should be doing everything they can to be as kind as possible and to enjoy each other’s company. Any art, any anything, that helps us do that is worth having. But if it doesn’t, it isn’t. "
Adam Phillips, by Maria Popova, aqui

To share, share, share

"In conversation things can be metabolized and digested through somebody else — I say something to you and you can give it back to me in different forms — whereas you’ll notice that your own mind is very often extremely repetitive. It is very difficult to surprise oneself in one’s own mind. The vocabulary of one’s self-criticism is so impoverished and clichéd. We are at our most stupid in our self-hatred."

Adam Phillips quoted by Maria Popova, in The Poetics of The Psyche

Bounadries

"One thing you discover in psychoanalytic treatment is the limits of what you can change about yourself or your life. We are children for a very long time. [..] The point is that it’s an experiment in what your life might be like if you speak freely to another person—speak and allow that person to show you the ways in which you stop yourself thinking and speaking freely. I don’t mean by that that it doesn’t change symptoms. I know by my own experience that it does. But I think the most interesting thing about it is its unpredictability. If you buy a fridge, there are certain things you will be guaranteed. If you buy a psychoanalysis, you won’t be. It’s a real risk, and that also is the point of it. Patients come because they are suffering from something. They want that suffering to be alleviated. Ideally, in the process of doing the analysis, they might find their suffering is alleviated or modified, but also they might discover there are more important things than to alleviate one’s suffering." Aqui

lingerings...

"It’s not as though when I read I’m gathering information, or indeed can remember much of what I read. I know the books that grip me, as everybody does, but their effect is indiscernible. I don’t quite know what it is… There are powerful unconscious evocative effects in reading books that one loves. There’s something about these books that we want to go on thinking about, that matters to us. They’re not just fetishes that we use to fill gaps. They are like recurring dreams we can’t help thinking about." Adam Phillips, citado por Maria Popova, em Brain Pickings

Wisdom and the monstrosity of people’s ignorance

"Isn’t it better, he wonders in another stroke of psychological genius, to illustrate the monstrosity of people’s ignorance by way of the ignorance of imaginary others? He hoped that by seeing the absurdity of the lunar people’s belief that the Moon is the center of the universe, the inhabitants of Earth would have the insight and integrity to question their own conviction of centrality. Three hundred fifty years later, when fifteen prominent poets are asked to contribute a “statement on poetics” for an influential anthology, Denise Levertov—the only woman of the fifteen—would state that poetry’s highest task is “to awaken sleepers by other means than shock.” This must have been what Kepler aimed to do with The Dream—his serenade to the poetics of science, aimed at awakening. In December 1629, Kepler funded the printing of his Dream manuscript out of his already shallow pocket and set the type by hand himself. The first six pages took him four months, and then his money ran out. He left his family at their temporary home in Sagan and, already in precarious health, traveled to Leipzig, where he borrowed fifty florins—a substantial amount, about as much as a skilled craftsperson made in a year. He then put on his warmest brown stockings, belted a pistol and a powder flask into his tattered black woolen cloak, and made his way to Nuremberg, where he bought a famished mare as bony as himself. The two fragile creatures rode a hundred kilometers through the autumn rain to the Bavarian courts in Regensburg, where Kepler would seek permission to sell some Austrian bonds to repay his debt and finish printing The Dream. Days after he arrived and settled into an acquaintance’s house, now named after him, Kepler came down with an acute illness. Used to frequent attacks of fever and bodily ailments, he paid little mind. Bloodletting was performed to attempt alleviating the symptoms, but he began slipping in and out of consciousness. Pastors were called in. At noon on November 15, 1630, Johannes Kepler died, six weeks shy of his fifty-ninth birthday. Three days later, as his body was lowered into a grave in the Lutheran churchyard of St. Peter’s Gate, a pastor proclaimed: “Blessed are they who hear and preserve the word of God.” The Thirty Years’ War, waged unblessed and unblessing on the alleged word of God, would soon swallow the cemetery and erase any trace of Kepler’s bones. The night after the funeral, a full moon passed through Earth’s shadow in a lunar eclipse governed by eternal forces deaf to human words—fundamental truths of nature, which Kepler had spoken in the native tongue of the universe: mathematics. Three hundred thirty-nine years later, his Dream would come true as the first human foot stepped onto the Moon, leaping humankind via a trajectory calculated by his laws."
Figuring, Maria Popova

The body keeps the score / Memórias de Território

"Self-regulation depends on having a friendly relationship with your body. Without it you have to rely on external regulation — from medication, drugs like alcohol, constant reassurance, or compulsive compliance with the wishes of others."

"The body keeps the score: If the memory of trauma is encoded in the viscera, in heartbreaking and gut-wrenching emotions, in autoimmune disorders and skeletal/muscular problems, and if mind/brain/visceral communication is the royal road to emotion regulation, this demands a radical shift in our therapeutic assumptions."

"The natural state of mammals is to be somewhat on guard. However, in order to feel emotionally close to another human being, our defensive system must temporarily shut down. In order to play, mate, and nurture our young, the brain needs to turn off its natural vigilance. Many traumatized individuals are too hypervigilant to enjoy the ordinary pleasures that life has to offer, while others are too numb to absorb new experiences — or to be alert to signs of real danger."

"Such posttraumatic reactions make it difficult for survivors to connect with other people, since closeness often triggers the sense of danger."

"Traumatized people are often afraid of feeling. It is not so much the perpetrators (who, hopefully, are no longer around to hurt them) but their own physical sensations that now are the enemy. Apprehension about being hijacked by uncomfortable sensations keeps the body frozen and the mind shut. Even though the trauma is a thing of the past, the emotional brain keeps generating sensations that make the sufferer feel scared and helpless. It’s not surprising that so many trauma survivors are compulsive eaters and drinkers, fear making love, and avoid many social activities: Their sensory world is largely off limits."

Mais aqui.

"… He had nightmares. And so the story's about… I knew about nightmares because I've always been a part time scientist and I worked in a sleep lab and I studied the electrophysiology of nightmares. And so I heard his nightmares and gave him a drug to make his nightmares go away.

He comes back a week later and I, triumphantly, as doctors do, expected him to be profusely grateful for the wonderful drugs I gave him. And I said: So how did the drugs work? How did my drugs work? And he said: I did not take your drugs, because I realized that I need to have my nightmares because I need to be a living memorial to my friends who died in Vietnam. And that statement […] was the opening of my career, because I was so astounded because he was a person who was just like his father, got stuck on love. And we barely think about love as being an antecedent of trauma. This is something that we see pervasively throughout peoples lives. If the people who you love as a little kid (and we are all programmed to love our parents) hurt you, this whole relationship to our parents, who we love, who hurt us becomes extremely complex. And it becomes very hard to move away.

And so, as time went on, and we learned more and more by biology, people started talking more and more about trauma as a fear reaction. And indeed, the fear sensors in the brain do get changed and do get activated. But what we tend to leave out is that, as human beings, we are a connected species. As we all are interacting with each other and that love is actually the glue that keeps our lives together. And that life without love has no meaning. And that love is also a very important part of traumatic stress. And it gets very messed up in traumatic stress.

So you get to love people who do terrible things to you. You get to hate people who are very nice to you. And you get sexually excited about things that hurt you. And you get numbed out to things that are pleasurable. And all of these things get very messed up.

And many of these dimensions are being left out of our over simplistic stupid diagnostic system that we basically built up to firm up our relationship with the drug companies. […] And we forgot about human beings."

Bessel Van der Kolk

A conferência aqui.



EMDR, aqui

On the move with Oliver Sacks

 

 

Oliver Sacks in Greenwich Village in 1961, on his new BMW R60 (Photograph: Douglas White)

“I have been able to see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts”
Oliver Sacks

cynicism

"But destruction alone, without construction to follow it, is hapless and lazy. Construction is far more difficult, because it requires the capacity to imagine something new and better, and the willingness to exert ourselves toward building it, even at the risk of failure. But that is also far more satisfying in the end."
Mais, aqui.

OKCupid - Love Is Not Algorithmic

"Online-dating platforms can tell us a lot about potential partners, but people are not made of steady data points, and love is not just about matching interests. There is no higher praise these days than being data-driven. A person who is data-driven is free of bias, and cuts through arguments with a sword of truth. No longer do we need to fumble through life. The answers will come. We will know how to respond, just what to do. We will let the data tell us!" [...] "Axioms work well in the realm of pure numbers and physics, but they are often superficially applied to biology, and especially so when applied to the social sciences.

Exactly the point we assume the data of a system to be both consistent and complete. This is when axiomatic logic at its most naïve and dangerous."

Aqui 

Do ódio de estimação!
“To be universally liked is to be relatively ignored.”
"Having haters somehow induces everyone else to want you more. People not liking you somehow brings you more attention entirely on its own. [...] be yourself and be brave about it."
e mais aqui 

What data can't do — aqui
"To enter a relationship is not to compliment your “likes,” but to undergo a confrontation to identity, to enter a process" [Alain Badiou]

"In a world rife with consumerism, where online dating promises risk-free romance and love is all too often seen only as a variant of desire and hedonism, Alain Badiou believes that love is under threat. Taking to heart Rimbaud’s famous line “love needs reinventing,” In Praise of Love is the celebrated French philosopher’s passionate treatise in defense of love.

For Badiou, love is an existential project, a constantly unfolding quest for truth. This quest begins with the chance encounter, an event that forever changes two individuals, challenging them “to see the world from the point of view of two rather than one.” This, Badiou believes, is love’s most essential transforming power." daqui

Alain Badiou diz que, segundo Jacques Lacan: "Love, as a suplement, to the lack of sexual connection can only come to be, by chance. So we have an opposition between sexual searcher and the chance of love. So, the sexual belongs to the order of being — of Nature—, and love belongs to the order of the event."
"It is love that comes aboard being in the encounter." [J. Lacan]

Receita para um herói

Mais, aqui

Storytelling

"The storyteller takes what he tells from experience — his own or that reported by others. And he in turn makes it the experience of those who are listening to his tale. The novelist has isolated himself. The birthplace of the novel is the solitary individual, who is no longer able to express himself by giving examples of his most important concerns, is himself uncounseled, and cannot counsel others. To write a novel means to carry the incommensurable to extremes in the representation of human life. In the midst of life’s fullness, and through the representation of this fullness, the novel gives evidence of the profound perplexity of the living."
Aqui

HYMN TO LIFE

Surely, a friend loves a friend the way
That I love you, enigmatic life —
Whether I rejoiced or wept with you,
Whether you gave me joy or pain.
I love you with all your harms;
And if you must destroy me,
I wrest myself from your arms,
As a friend tears himself away from a friend’s breast.
I embrace you with all my strength!
Let all your flames ignite me,
Let me in the ardor of the struggle
Probe your enigma ever deeper.
To live and think millennia!
Enclose me now in both your arms:
If you have no more joy to give me —
Well then—there still remains your pain.

Lou Andreas-Salomé 
... mais aqui