“Emotions drive the threesome of attention, meaning, and memory.” In essence, that just about sums up what we know about learning: attending to information, constructing meaning, and lodging it in our memory. Brain researchers have shown that emotions are critical to patterning, which is the way that information is organized in the brain, how we are able to retrieve that information. Emotions assist in both evaluating and integrating information and experiences.
However, as we know, not all emotions facilitate learning. Stress, frustration, anger, fear – all can overwhelm the brain with hormones and thought patterns that totally shut down one’s ability to learn. When major emotional flooding occurs it is true that one literally cannot think straight.”
- Eric Jensen
Teaching with the Brain in Mind
“I can remember the frustration of not being able to talk. I knew what I wanted to say, but I could not get the words out, so I would just scream.”
- Temple Grandin
“Generalised [sic] anger and frustration is something that gets you in the studio, and gets you to work – though it’s not necessarily evident in anything that’s finished”.
- Bruce Nauman
I woke at 5:25 a.m. today. I tried to lie there and to drift off. I heard sounds of fluid spurting out.
The cat had wanted attention, more than anything else, so we have been attempting to extinguish such displays.
Uhm, perhaps this morning, she really did need to be let out. I have yet to find the cat pee, or the source of the noise.
It did get me dashing out of bed, thank you cat, for that, I think.
I let her outside. I was treated to cardinal serenades back upstairs in my room by the opened window as I ran through my morning routine, an hour or two early. I am productive so far! I wonder if this level of alert and function will last!? I think that might be nice. I will appreciate it, even if I end up not being able to sustain it today.
I updated Goodreads. I have been bringing bag after bag full of books home from the library. Some look and feel good. Some I quickly realize that I should have listened to my nose wrinkling brain, and let them there. Normally, to stretch my tastes, I MUST complete reading a book even if I dislike it. I cannot recall why I do this. I thought some of it was due to the Goodreads challenges. I can’t let me count a thing as having been read, if I haven’t read it cover to cover. I also do not like wasting of time. I think that I might have a very funny-odd way of deciding waste. I made a neat satisfying done pile to return to the library today.
I am thinking that I might go back to my new community garden plot–YES! I got one this year! I am only able to weed a few minutes at a time. I am really glad that the ground appears to have been well worked and it is pretty easy to get the weeds out. I am not sure if I will grow food or a witchy garden. Perhaps some combination of both. The plants and flowers that I have a wish for, work well as pollinators and for bringing the creatures that make things mesh and eat the ‘pests’. Speaking of eating. The cat has created a mural of evisceration on the walk in front of the door.
Chores now, running through the head. When did the kitchen here become Hell? My insides are horridly unhappy over this. The heart DID love cooking. Everything involved with it now, allergies, disorders of my household, and simply screaming, and not physically being able to clean it make it a mountain.
Inside, I think…make sun tea and lemonade in the new half gallon jars. Make mayonnaise, it is the base of many simple things. Outside, I suddenly decide that the feeling in the house and perhaps the literal clutter, requires a clearning. I begin by lighting the candle and smudging my room. I have tea. A smile of satisfaction and on, to music, Imogen Heap, and her train for home. I think of that train of addiction and how it just keeps on going without you. I think in a broader usage –important concept of generalization here, it reminds me that when I think that I get off of the train and check out of life, I’m going to roil along like being stuck in an undertow or roaring forward on that train.
“Do what you feel, just how you like…”–Imogen Heap
I NEVER talk around my images. Now, since I said NEVER, I can now break the rules. I forgot to say YET. Today I am going to post two images. I reaaaaaaaaaaaaally dislike it when people writing try to grovel and apologize and to smear their defects of character all over while appearing to be larger than the defects. Sharing the shit right out seems to be more direct and honest for me, though I would question the wishes of a reader to read a journal-like sharing of someone’s cleaning of their side of the street. Caring about it at all, causes me to laugh at myself as it causes the I’m sorries and the trying to slide things in sideways that I claim to detest. Isn’t that funny (or not depending on perspective and amount if ingested tea)?
So, here we go. My one camera, that I am ever so grateful for, it was GIVEN to me, simply handed over!!! This camera has a few broken bits, it has a few things that caused it to be viewed as a bit strange and it stopped being made. It has all sorts of bells and whistles. I used it like point and shoot. Some people see the images that I get from the camera and they appear to wish to speak technically about focal whatsits and depth of water, I mean field and f-something, no not a tornado. I don’t know about those. The motor on the lens that I choose to use most often is broken, so I do that myself. I see things that I like and I do my thing.
The camera fix-it guru says…hmm this is the third time I’ve had to fix the white something or other–I can’t recall, wait! balance maybe?!?! Anyway, either I am bumping buttons or…something perhaps unpleasant. He just has me bring it back to ‘fix’ it. He is also learning the ‘errors’ in the camera that I like, and not fixing those to frustrate me. For some reason the camera turns reds into fuchsia! It’s a BITCH! Sometimes, the Sigma raw is OK, but when put into the Sigma software so that I can get the images off of the camera and open them–which involves converting from raw to jpeg, THE REDS AND SHIFTED TO FUCHSIA!! There are many many times that I do NOT alter my images. Thus, the Lilac Project that I am doing hasn’t many posts because they are NOT the RIGHT COLOR!!!!
I simply cannot post crap. I CAN post imperfections and remembering many admonishments about certain works and sacred items having a bit of imperfection left within them or worked in on purpose, I rather like to do that myself. But. IF lilacs are a soft lilac shade and the camera turns them fuschia, not even color temperature and saturation will EVER allow me to get it right. Right and Wrong can be dreadfully and utterly amazing for me, or a living Hell. (important to note, my other camera doesn’t exactly get the shade either and recalling the red tulip experience, I believe all cameras can have a red, yellow, blue issue) I don’t know enough about it to know if that is valid or just a nice way to get around telling me that I screwed up. Ok, so here is the original image.
And this is what I did to it, the colors are better or more true to the bush, and then I simply played with it.
Does anyone know why the fuschia? I am frustrated. I might require Help. (or a hosing off)
“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”
–Friedrich Nietzsche
“To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.”
–e. e. cummings
“There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else. You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that. Again, you have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you’ve been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw – but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realize that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you were transported. Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of – something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat’s side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it – tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest – if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself – you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say ‘Here at last is the thing I was made for.’ We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.”
- C. S. Lewis
“Solar
On a gray day, when the sun
has been abducted, and it’s chill
end-of-the-world weather,
I must be the sun.
I must be the one
to encourage the young
sidetracked physicist
working his father’s cash register
to come up with a law of nature
that says brain waves can change
the dismal sky. I must be the one
to remind the ginger plant
not to rest on the reputation
of its pungent roots, but to unveil
those buttery tendrils from the other world.
When the sky is an iron lid
I must be the one to simmer
in the piquant juices of possibility,
though the ingredients are unknown
and the day begins with a yawn.
I must issue forth a warmth
without discrimination, and any guarantee
it will come back to me.
On a dark day I must be willing
to keep my disposition light,
I have to be at the very least
one stray intact ray
of local energy, one small
but critical fraction
of illumination. Even on a day
that doesn’t look gray
but still lacks comfort or sense,
I have to be the sun,
I have to shine as if
sorry life itself depended on it.
I have to make all the difference.”
– Thomas Centolella Views from along the Middle Way
"The point is to understand everything, to realize everything, every impossibility, every stone wall; not to reconcile yourself to a single one of the impossibilities and stone walls if the thought of reconciliation sickens you; to arrive by way of the strictest logical syllogisms at the most repulsive conclusions on the eternal theme of how you are somehow to blame for the stone wall itself, even though once again it is abundantly clear that you are not to blame at all, and in consequence of all this to sink voluptuously into inertia, silently and impotently gnashing your teeth and reflecting that there isn't even anybody for you to be angry with, that an object for your anger can't even be found, and perhaps never will be, that this is all a fake, a conjuring trick, a piece of sharp practice, and there is nothing there but a morass, nobody knows what, nobody knows who, but in spite of all the mysteries and illusions, you ache with it all, and the more mysterious it is, the more you ache."
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky Notes From The Underground
Yes! Yes! Yes! Thank you Whiskey River
Thank you!
