my youngest son, "Thing 3," uttered "Grass Oil" to describe what i once made for dinner. what is the Grass Oil blog? my observations about life from my cheap seats where everyone looks like ants. i'm funny, candid and i try to be nice, with some snark for flavor. Grass Oil: simple. random. elegant. there it is. ps – "Things" is a moniker to keep my kids off search engines.
It is getting harder and harder to write these posts; not because I am unable to tackle the content (or at least sneak up on it) but because things are getting pretty ramped up around here at the Grass Oil compound.
I love this quote and it makes me think of some of my favorite people who are artists, illustrators, bloggers, photographers, designers and writers.
Welcome to Day 29 of “30 Days of Jung,” my series, wherein (soon, I will start repeating myself, like now) I take a famous quote of Carl G. Jung‘s and try to make sense or refute or invert or disembowel it or where I turn into a heaping pile of mush because of it in 1,000 words or less.
If you don’t know who Jung is, he formulated the theories of introverted and extroverted personalities, the stages of individuation, the basis of the “Meyers-Briggs” personality (INFJ / ESFJ, etc.) tests. He’s a “father” of modern-day psychoanalysis. In short, he’s a badass. But he’s dead, so he can’t be with us today.
Here is today’s:
“The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves. ”
We all need time to wind down. Playing is a necessity for not only our bodies but also our minds, yet many of us think that the way to do anything if we don’t first succeed is to try harder not smarter. Sometimes that “smarter” means taking a break.
I know that when I’m overwhelmed with something that if I put on music or try coming at it from an entirely different angle, I can achieve better and smarter results … how do I know? Because I can be heard saying, “I don’t know where that idea came from… but it works!”
Remember “SHOW YOUR WORK!” in math? Ugh. My kids hate that. I do too. Why can’t we just have the right answer and be done with it?! One of my kids has a friend who arrived at the correct answer to a problem but in an entirely different way and even though his answer was the correct one, his instructor DID NOT award him the points for his answer because he didn’t do the formula she taught.
Bullshit. Sometimes this stuff just comes to us… we can’t explain the “inspiration” it just happens.
One of my favorite aspects of the creation of a human or carbon-based life form is that we grow when we rest. Our muscles regenerate and get bigger NOT when we work them, but when we rest them. My oldest son has grown one inch in two months this summer. I expect that he’s got some more to do and he’s sleeping like a dog.
This is a fantastic fact: our brains work and settle and rewire when we dream or are tinkering on something else… Paul McCartney wrote “Yesterday” when he was dreaming:
“I woke up with a lovely tune in my head. I thought, ‘That’s great, I wonder what that is?’ There was an upright piano next to me, to the right of the bed by the window. I got out of bed, sat at the piano, found G, found F sharp minor 7th — and that leads you through then to B to E minor, and finally back to E. It all leads forward logically. I liked the melody a lot, but because I’d dreamed it, I couldn’t believe I’d written it. I thought, ‘No, I’ve never written anything like this before.’ But I had the tune, which was the most magic thing!”
Little kids. They play all the time and they solve problems when they play.
Lots of things were invented by “mistake” or through play or dreaming. It’s when our minds are relaxed and not pommeled with “NO! THAT’S NOT IT!” that they come up with their genius:
Poor Don Music. He just needed Carl Jung to help him out and take a break or just write another song.
I know that about myself, some of my best writing comes when it’s not forced; and some of my best humor comes when I’m not trying to be funny.
My husband was looking over some resumes for hires on his staff and we were saying how so many of them are so different from others, that despite the “rules” of resume writing, there seem to be some deviations and then I started laughing and he looked at me and asked what I was laughing at, did he have something coming out of his nose or something and I said, “No, it’s not that; it’s that I would love to see a resume from say… George W. Bush or Barack H. Obama (just being fair with the middle initial treatment, y’all…) and then I thought this:
And it dawned on me… DO THEY? DO THOSE SEARCH ENGINES LOOK FOR THOSE WORDS? of course they do…
But that fun spawned when we were playing, laughing and imagining…
That’s the point. The playing is a total requirement for innovation. Playing is a requirement for banter, which can turn into debate, which can turn into an argument which can turn into fisticuffs which can turn into
I know this post is a little off the wall and slightly more irreverent than my others, but that’s the point.
Welcome to Day 28 of “30 Days of Jung,” my series, wherein (soon, I will start repeating myself, like now) I take a famous quote of Carl G. Jung‘s and try to make sense or refute or invert or disembowel it or where I turn into a heaping pile of mush because of it in 1,000 words or less.
If you don’t know who Jung is, he formulated the theories of introverted and extroverted personalities, the stages of individuation, the basis of the “Meyers-Briggs” personality (INFJ / ESFJ, etc.) tests. He’s a “father” of modern-day psychoanalysis. In short, he’s a badass. But he’s dead, so he can’t be with us today.
Here is today’s:
“The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.”
I tried to find a word for the tagging in this post’s headline that was one word for “open minded” and so I plugged in its opposite, “bias” and then I found its antonym, “impartial” which was fine, but the problem with using that word for me is that it’s already a negative; it’s canceling out its initial meaning, so I won’t use it.
My husband came up with “free” but I can’t use that in a headline; it’s too out of context. Too… free.
I’m sitting here on my deck in the wake of last night’s ruling in the Trayvon Martin case in Florida. I’m not a current-events writer; I don’t see the need to get my undies in a bunch that way, there are always apolitical reasons to get my undies in a bunch… so today’s post will maintain that neutrality.
What I will briefly mention though is something completely banal and unexciting: gun laws.
I do not begrudge anyone for owning a gun, so long as it is legally carried, permitted and all that. I have issues regarding the type of guns that are somehow necessary when we’ve already established our freedom from England, but I don’t bother going into that.
I have friends who hunt. I was listening to a book on CD on our way home, Here If You Need Me by Kate Braestrup. It’s the personal memoir of a Maine widow whose husband, a Maine State Trooper, was killed while on his way to a call and her fulfillment of his retirement plans to become a minister. She became an ordained minister and chaplain for the Maine Parks and Forest agency. In her book, she talks about the men and women she works with and how they are mostly hunters and how she honors their lifestyle with new eyes because the way they eat, the way they kill deer is humane and cruelty-free in that the deer are free-range, organic, they are not born and raised for slaughter and for processing and pumped full of hormones and medicine; they eat what we provide, leave for them; they run and leap and mate and sleep in nature. When a deer hunter kills, s/he makes use of all of the animal, nothing (or not much) goes to waste and that the natural environmental fauna partakes in the ecological remnants and their circle of life continues with the intervention of man’s skill and weaponry. I emphasized the men and women she works with because I am fully aware that there are people who waste the animals, who kill not with reverence and restraint but with avarice and gluttony. Those are people I am not denying exist, but they are not people I’m going to talk about.
It put everything I’d thought about hunting on its head.
I ate some venison this week. My cousin is a hunter and he gave to us some of his venison as a gesture of gratitude for our hospitality earlier this summer while he was traveling. He killed the deer with a bow and arrow.
My kids were reluctant, “BAMBI?!” they grimaced and groaned.
“Yes, Bambi. Or his dad. Or his mother, cousin, distant relative from New York because I don’t know where Bambi was born, but I think it was California near the Disney studios… but yes, and it’s called ‘venison.’ You will try it because this is one animal that wasn’t raised for slaughter and we will honor it…” I said, smiling wildly and hoping they heard me.
They looked at me like I had three heads.
My cousin gave us the best part, the tenderloin, and on the way home from that trip when he presented it to us with a warm and sincere smile, we all listened to the Kate Braestrup story in the car.
Two days later, I prepared it in a way that I’d never prepared a meat before: with a quiet intention, gratitude for the deer. My knife slices were deliberate and kind. I felt an unusual sensation: a connection, if you will, to the animal. My husband partially softened strip bacon and I wrapped it around each tenderloin medallion, used a toothpick to hold it all together and they were grilled on our Weber out back. I served a salad I make frequently of spinach, red onion, tomatoes, avocado, strawberries, bleu cheese and balsamic vinaigrette.
The food was presented to the children. I have to say that they seemed to eat it differently, with an awareness, a softness I’d not expected.
My eldest had heard about this very recipe that my cousin had prepared for us all a few summers ago and didn’t tell us it was venison until after we’d taken our bites. I didn’t feel betrayed then, because I endeavor to be open-minded and I was his guest and I’d never refuse something that someone so clearly worked hard to prepare and share with us.
We can all go to a butcher, select some NY Strips, put them in some marinade and grill ’em, but what a hunter does, what my cousin did is so different: they set up for a couple hours ahead of the trip, they wait, they take their shot and sometimes they fail, sometimes they don’t on their first shot. Then they have to prepare their kill for transport. It’s hard work; it’s not for the meek and fancy. I honor my cousin and anyone who does this for hobby or sport with the honorable intention of expressing their gratitude and appreciation for the animal they kill.
This is the kind of gun control I can get behind. This lifestyle, of the hunter, is likely not for me. I prefer several degrees of separation between myself and my food, but maybe I should could revisit that mentality; that if I choose to eat an animal, that I shouldcould will consider and express my sincere gratitude for the life it gave for me to live mine.
This isn’t about activism to me; this won’t make me watch “Food Inc” or “Forks Over Knives” any more readily than I would watch “Bowling for Columbine” or “An Inconvenient Truth.” I can’t easily tolerate such parity, but I allow it in others; I would never deign to tell someone else how to live.
I have a strong interest in physical health and mindful eating and exercise. I just do. I have seen what its opposite, mindlessness, does: blown-out tendons, my own calves when I ran too far in new shoes, aching muscles when I lift too much, vitamin deficiency, narrow-mindedness and judgement; then there’s another side of that coin: obesity, health risks, depression, structural breakdown and arthritis pain due to inactivity. There is no RIGHT WAY for anyone, but there has to be SOME WAY for all of us.
Expecting tomorrow to take care of itself and hoping that tomorrow will allow us that 45-minute slice of time to change clothes, lace up, get the water bottle, get the iPod (or whatever it takes, I have lots of gear like that, I love gear), turn on the treadmill or make sure the kids know where I will be and what route I’m taking … all that, takes preparation, but not a lifetime.
All I know is that health is paramount. I see what neglecting health does to all of us. If you’re on the fence about whether or not to go for a walk today or a run or a skate or a stretch: don’t be. Start today.
So yeah, there is no one-size fits all. I don’t tell anyone how to live their lives; I just hope that by doing my best to live mine in a way that works for me that I’ll maybe be inspiring to someone else; and I am always looking out for inspiration from someone else. This yoga retreat coming up is going to rock my world… in so many ways… I know it. I’m a little afraid too. But I do know this: I have my intuition to help me.
Right now, a gentle breeze is passing over my face and I’m listening to Patty Griffin singing “Burgundy Shoes” and she’s at the part (2:00) where she’s echoing herself, “sun … sun … sun … sun …” I can’t help but be inspired by the fact that every moment is a moment to recognize and celebrate our individuality and our commonality.
Ooofda. When I compiled these quotes almost a month ago, I saw this one, this big, huge, chunky one and I thought, “aw, hell.”
Welcome to Day 26 of “30 Days of Jung,” my series, wherein (soon, I will start repeating myself, like now) I take a famous quote of Carl G. Jung‘s and try to make sense or refute or invert or disembowel it or where I turn into a heaping pile of mush because of it in 1,000 words or less.
If you don’t know who Jung is, he formulated the theories of introverted and extroverted personalities, the stages of individuation, the basis of the “Meyers-Briggs” personality (INFJ / ESFJ, etc.) tests. He’s the “father” of modern-day psychoanalysis. In short, he’s a badass. But he’s dead, so he can’t be with us today.
Here is today’s:
“The acceptance of oneself is the essence of the whole moral problem and the epitome of a whole outlook on life. That I feed the hungry, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy in the name of Christ — all these are undoubtedly great virtues. What I do unto the least of my brethren, that I do unto Christ. But what if I should discover that the least among them all, the poorest of all the beggars, the most impudent of all the offenders, the very enemy himself — that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness — that I myself am the enemy who must be loved — what then? As a rule, the Christian’s attitude is then reversed; there is no longer any question of love or long-suffering; we say to the brother within us “Raca,” and condemn and rage against ourselves. We hide it from the world; we refuse to admit ever having met this ‘least among the lowly’ in ourselves.”
Yesterday, I rephrased his quote. Today, I’m going to blow it off altogether and try to get to the nut of it.
Amazingly, it threads a lot of what we’ve talked about this week. Well, since I began this, really. It is so rich, really. There are many fantastic elements for me.
Once I get past all the hyperbole and comparisons, to me, the essence of this quote is in the first sentence and the final clause: “we refuse to admit ever having met this ‘least among the lowly’ in ourselves.” (I added the single quotes in the original and the excerpt for context and emphasis.)
When he says “whole outlook on life” I think he’s meaning Whole-whole as in entire-self, self-aware, self-actualized.
He’s talking about self-love. He’s talking about deep self-love and more likely, craven, feral self-loathing. I’ve seen that self-loathing in people I used to know; it makes their eyes as black as pitch and their voices thunderous and coarse and nothing is safe.
The timing of this is interesting. Preparing this post, I was trying to figure out my approach and then I happened up on the YouTube video of Dustin Hoffman talking about the making of “Tootsie” and a revelation he had while in make-up before the production went underway. Go ahead, watch it if you haven’t seen it already.
Here:
Now someone pick my face up out of the toilet from barfing too much and get me a washcloth to wipe off my mouth.
I read some of the comments on the video and one struck me most (paraphrasing): when women say this about each other, we get crickets. When a man says, it, we get applause.
Here’s me:
When an academy-award winning, classicly trained, stage, film, audio, musical ACTOR says it, up go my flags. Is this an anniversary for “Tootsie” or something? Has Hoffman, whom I respect greatly, not gotten enough love lately? (Don’t worry, I’ll get to Jung in a sec, like now, like I have been….) Hoffman IS showing us that darker, ‘least among the lowly’ in all of us; he described it in the retrospective and I dare say it that he’s doing it again IN THAT VIDEO. I’ll be a jerk and say it. I’m calling him out a little. The pauses and chokes were just … so nice. Couldn’t get the tears to roll though… he blew it on that one… he should’ve thought of puppies dying.
I grew up with An Act-ress! She could man-i-pulllll-ate like a pack of wild dogs (a seemingly weak metaphor, but not really if you know what I’m talking about); I’d see her coming and I’d drop the steak, drop the toy, drop the candy…
It was folly trying to predict one moment from the next. In a comedic way, it was like living with Doug Henning, that weird 80s magician with the buck teeth and the long hair. As I aged, I really had no clue about anything she was involved in regarding my safety and operated at a DefCon 2 (code orange) at all times. I was locked and loaded, just not trained on my sight yet. After a while I eventually gave up trying to understand or trying to believe.
Those were moments of the ‘least among the lowly’ in my life. I refer to Hoffman because I’ve come to the conclusion that I’d like to believe him, and I might NOW rather than how he states it was then. Maybe he’s more evolved and I should be less least lowly; if what he’s saying is true, about his reactions and sadnesses and cutting out people (not just women — this is gender neutral to me) based on appearances, then it’s more than the OTHER people he’s talking about but not talking about. He’s NOT talking about his least lowly self, his arrogance, his perception that he was better than they were. His disconnection…. with this video clip, I believe we’re just getting to the proverbial tip of the iceberg in human relations. It’s not how OTHER people look/behave/say/do, it’s what’s WE, the receivers of that information, that intangible sensory data, do with the data.
Again, with emphasis, chins up: It’s not just because Hoffman didn’t notice women who were what he found to be considered beneath his view, it’s because Hoffman didn’t stop there. It’s not about women, it’s not about men and it’s not about OTHERS. It’s about us. The least among the lowly of us all — that arrogance, that belittling, that other stuff that prevents us all from self-love and thus from loving others. It’s not what he failed to see in others, it’s what he failed to see in himself which prevented him from seeing others.
Wayne, I’m not done yet, so I sense you right now…
Jung uses “Raca” as a self-admonition and self-reproach. Raca is Aramaic for “worthless” and “vain” and “empty.” It’s a derivation of “to spit.”
Pretty heavy stuff. What else can generate a sense of raca in others, than a sense of raca for ourselves? Jung is ALL OVER this concept — you can’t give what you don’t have.
How many among us can easily refer to ourselves as raca without daring to consider it about another person — we’d have to be really pushed very hard to say that about someone else. Personally, I have found myself saying raca about myself regardless of how much I do for others. How much I volunteer my time, how much I do for my family, how much I do for my community and for others.
Why, just the other day in therapy I was talking about my feelings of worthlessness which are based on fears of scarcity and lashing verbal threats of poverty that I endured as a child (please don’t shriek discuss dire matters of finance in front of your young children). And it was just yesterday I felt like I was “a suckhole” (my word, get your own) on my family because I do not earn income and I spend our assets on things (clothes, food, gas, entertainment). That despite all I have done in my life, all I have accomplished, all I have contributed and all I have yet to contribute and to serve, that I feel worthless, like a suckhole, like raca. That raca builds on itself.
Jung asserts that the reversal of the Christian attitude is a “rule” — that we say raca and condemn our darker selves from the world; we hide our suffering and our needs and refuse to admit — not even reject, but to repel! — that ‘brother’ in ourselves. That feels a lot like self-rejection to me.
I don’t know what to do with that, really. Is he suggesting that we are in denial of our self-condemnation or that we are silently suffering? “That which we resist, persists” – CGJ. If we hide our darker side and we act as if we don’t possess it…
Gah, I wish he weren’t dead.
I know that every one of us possesses a darker side and I know that I don’t repel mine, but I don’t like it; I try to work with it, soften it. But there is part of us that is pure animal, irrational, primitive and horrific. How do you tame that? Somehow most of us manage every day. In our American, civilized society we have laws, rights, rules, liberties, codes and mandates. They help a ton! Do they repress us? I don’t know. Could we be like The Wild Things without the rules? Even when King Max arrived, they bent to his laws. Is it our nature to need boundaries and guidelines? I think so. But I know that’s not real; if that little boy Max really went to an island with those creatures he’d be toast.
My session ended well, we talked about how my feelings of being a suckhole are steeped deeply in concerns dumped on me by my parents and their irrationality and their lack of control of their adult situations. That’s not my issue to carry anymore. I am trying actively to shed it; it’s a matter of getting my emotions to sync up with my intellect and it takes some time and some practice. Maybe I’ll spend money irrationally on something one of these days… 😉
— that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness — that I myself am the enemy who must be loved —
…Stand in need of the alms of my own kindness.
Sigh.
Jeezus, yes. Hell yes. Arms outstretched, palms up, wide open, face up, tears streaming, vulnerable, waiting… for ourselves to be kind to ourselves. Yes, Jung is talking about a very deep part of ourselves that we at times seem unwilling to face or change. How wonderful would it be for us to release feelings of raca. How wonderful and how amazing we could be. How wonderful and amazing we already are.
This was almost 1800 words; this was a long quote and I don’t think I’m nearly done with it yet. I’ll let you guys take it from here…
Thank you.
ps —
when i saw that quote a while ago, i was struck by its size; it’s so much longer than all the others. but its length belies is intention which is quite simple but so hard to accomplish: love yourself too.
Hmm. And to think that yesterday I was complaining that Jung didn’t mention “love” in any of the 30 quotes that came up to write about because, well… he hadn’t. And I wouldn’t go so far as to say that this time he’s talking about LOVE in the sense of commitment, the bond, the relationship, the vulnerability of LOVE, but …
Welcome to Day 25 of “30 Days of Jung,” my series, wherein (soon, I will start repeating myself, like now) I take a famous quote of Carl G. Jung‘s and try to make sense or refute or invert or disembowel it or where I turn into a heaping pile of mush because of it in 1,000 words or less.
If you don’t know who Jung is, he formulated the theories of introverted and extroverted personalities, the stages of individuation, the basis of the “Meyers-Briggs” personality (INFJ / ESFJ, etc.) tests. He’s the “father” of modern-day psychoanalysis. In short, he’s a badass. But he’s dead, so he can’t be with us today.
Here is today’s:
“Where love rules, there is no will to power, and where power predominates, love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.”
Ok. ‘Will to power.’ Meaning there is no drive, no deliberation as in “thy will be done” -will? Or … please, bear with me as I’m a word freak:
well? which will will it be?
I’m going out on another limb here and I’m gonna say this: it doesn’t matter. I’m going to try to break this down in a way that I can handle:
“When love rules, no one needs to execute power over another. When power rules, love (as aforementioned) can not survive. They are mutually exclusive.”
And this applies to platonic love too.
Ok. I can move forward now.
This is very true. I’ve seen abusive relationships — they’re all about power and domination and control; it’s never about “love” or not having needs met or unreasonable demands.
Sometimes the control is not overt: sometimes it’s a matter of trust which becomes corroded over time. For example, say a couple is married, they have a couple kids. One spouse has serial affairs on the marriage (not just on the other spouse, because I believe these affairs are violations of the family). One of the spouses clearly thinks s/he has domination over the other, why else would s/he stray? The abused partner ends up wondering what s/he has done wrong to create this climate of infidelity? Surely it must be his/her fault because no reasonable person would stay faithful to such a cretin. And so now we introduce other germs into the petri dishfunction.
As a child, I couldn’t fix my mom. I felt it was my fault. She never asked me to fix her, but the directive was there and I failed miserably. I felt it was my fault or that I was the reason for her condition. It’s taken me oh… 37 years to figure out that I wasn’t the cause, or the cure, and another eight years to actually believe it without rage.
I couldn’t care less if someone is feeling “unloved” or “disconnected” from their marriage partner. Grow the hell up and learn to talk about it. Own your stuff. I have said this time and again: if you’re gonna stray, get a divorce first. But that’s too expensive. Then DON’T STRAY.
I digress. Love does this to me.
If you have love, you don’t want to hurt the other person because when they hurt, you hurt. And I don’t suggest not hurting because you’re pain averse about yourself, but because you’re pain averse for the other person. It’s not codependence, it’s maturity and compassion that suggests that “not hurting the other person” is the way to go.
You don’t need to control the other person with betrayal, control, lies or abuse. There is no need for those games because love and trust fill the voids and give voice and confidence to the wounded — we have to learn to talk to each other again.
Texting doesn’t count.
Facebook doesn’t count.
YouTube doesn’t count.
Email doesn’t count.
Voicemail doesn’t count.
A phone call is a start.
A face-to-face is the best.
There is no shame in feeling wounded. There is no shame in needing comfort or expressing vulnerability. There is no shame in saying, “I feel left out and I don’t know what to do…”
There is shame in taking off, cheating, lying, continuing, hurting and not stopping and acting as if everything is all hunky-dory. There is shame in blaming your inability to keep your relationship (friendship, brother/sister, cousin…) solvent on the other partner. As for the legal stuff: good lord, last time I checked two consenting adults make a marriage. Or a common law marriage, or a dedication to one another.
TALK ABOUT IT, PEOPLE.
Jung is right. He is dead and he is right. This might be the easiest quote to have whateverized. I don’t feel like a lump of mush, I feel like shouting from the rooftops,
“Love is love: vulnerable, real, allowing, soft, kind, forgiving, bumbling, bashful, infinite and tender. Control is abuse, constriction, restriction, domination, fearful, paranoid, hurtful, finite and mean!”
The two simply can not ever be confused.
The moment you have to ask, “When she tells me I look like crap in that shirt and asks me why I always look like I ate out of a toilet” you know it’s not love she’s conveying to you.
The moment you have to wonder if, “When he tells me the house looks like crap and the food I make reminds him of a garbage can” it’s not love.
The times when you might wonder where s/he’s been, why s/he doesn’t come home, why s/he doesn’t return a call (keeping in mind that you’re being reasonable in your needs), “will this ever get better?” it’s time to look at things and possibly yourself.
It’s OK to feel disappointment in a relationship, it’s OK to have needs and wonder what’s going on from time to time… but you also have to wonder if your needs are excessive, if your interests aren’t mutual, if your intensity isn’t matched. Could YOU be controlling? I dunno. I’ve caught myself a couple times being the wicked witch of the east, “and she’s worse than the other one…” and that’s on me. My husband is a very reasonable man. I have become reasonable. But I’ve never been possessive and that to me equates with control.
I’ve always had a sort of odd detachment in my relationships, taking it from the standpoint that autonomy is really the only thing I can always rely upon. That doesn’t mean that I’m not a good partner or a vested wife; I am absolutely. It’s just that my outlook has always been (likely due to my relationship with my mother) to not really count on other people too much. To not make a habit of it… sure it’s nice to have a buddy who can help you change a tire in the rain, but chances are… it’s best to learn how to do it yourself too.
There is no control in love. There is no forcing. There are no demands.
In love, there is freedom and security.
In love, there is delight and mirth.
In love, there is discovery and wonder.
In love there is GROWTH.
All this goes for “self love” too! Don’t think for a minute that it requires two people to have value in yourself — in self-love there is no control or domination or power. You have to let yourself, as you would a friend or a lover: fall down, make mistakes, act lost, act goofy, need more, need less, be unpredictable, be sad, be loud, be quiet, be creative, be dry, be happy … just be. Really… just BE.
I wrote a phrase on Facebook the other day, I woke up with it: “Those who belittle will always be little.”
Thank you.
ps – five more days to go. how fast it’s all gone by!!! thank you for sticking it out with me guys!!! what to do next? do you have any requests? i’m game!
Grass Oil by Molly Field 