Well, this wasn't exactly a slow week, especially at work, but the good news is that I'm making great progress through The Sun (the real benefit of this is how it consistently opens my heart), journaled 4 out of 5 mornings, didn't work through lunch once, got to meditation group on Wednesday (looking forward to yoga this week), and I think we ate everything (or at least a portion of each thing) in our Bugtussle basket!
I ordered all my books (used) for school last weekend and it's been fun going through the mail each evening to see what's arrived. Most of it! One of my classes is on archetypes and the other is on symbols, so the bulk of the books are by Jung. I've made space for them on one of my bookcases, which has involved finding a good home for some other books. I'm thoroughly enjoying this gathering phase and reading a book that was on the suggested reading list: The Courage to Create by Rollo May, first published in 1975. I was drawn in right from the preface (and was delighted to see that it had been written in the land of Squam Art Workshops: Holderness, NH). Here are some quotations (his italics) that have really resonated with me:
"Suppose the apprehension of beauty is itself a way to truth? Suppose that 'elegance' - as the word is used by physicists to describe their discoveries - is a key to ultimate reality? Suppose Joyce is right that the artist creates 'the uncreated conscience of the race'?" p. 7
"We shall often be faced with despair, as indeed every sensitive person has been during the last several decades in this country. Hence Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and Camus and Sartre have proclaimed that courage is not the absence of despair; it is, rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair." p. 12
"I propose a new form of courage of the body: the use of the body not for the development of musclemen, but for the cultivation of sensitivity. This will mean the development of the capacity to listen with the body." p. 15
"It is a seeming contradiction that we must be fully committed, but we must also be aware at the same time that we might possibly be wrong." p. 20
"Then we know the meaning of the statement attributed to Leibnitz: 'I would walk twenty miles to listen to my worst enemy if I could learn something.'" p. 21
"Some new vision is triggered in us by our contact with the painting; something unique is born in us. This is why appreciation of the music or painting or other works of the creative person is also a creative act on our part." p. 22
"When I use the word rebel for the artist, I do not refer to revolutionary or to such things as taking over the dean's office; that is a different matter. Artists are generally soft-spoken persons who are concerned with their inner visions and images. But that is precisely what makes them feared by any coercive society. For they are the bearers of the human being's age-old capacity to be insurgent. They love to immerse themselves in chaos in order to put it into form, just as God created form out of chaos in Genesis. Forever unsatisfied with the mundane, the apathetic, the conventional, they always push on to newer worlds." p. 32
"'Creativity,' to rephrase our definition, 'is the encounter of the intensely conscious human being with his or her world.'" p. 54
As you can see, there's something amazing on pretty much every page! And it's been such a friendly feeling to find my good buddy James Joyce mentioned so often. I must admit, I'm feeling pulled back to the Wake. Even my title for the photo above ("alight aloft"), which felt like a reference to something, I realized echos the last mysterious fragment line of the book:
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