“At around age six, perhaps, I was standing by myself in our front yard waiting for supper, just at that hour in a late summer day when the sun is already below the horizon and the risen full moon in the visible sky stops being chalky and begins to take on light. There comes the moment, and I saw it ten, when the moon goes from flat to round. For the first time it met my eyes as a globe. The word ‘moon’ came into my mouth as though fed to me out of a silver spoon. Held in my mouth the moon became a word. It had the roundness of a Concord grape Grandpa took off his vine and gave me to suck out of its skin and swallow whole, in Ohio.”
–Eudora Welty, One Writer’s Beginnings
memory
Morning Trip (208)
“The Heart Remembers Everything It Loved
Everything remembers something. The rock, its fiery bed,
cooling and fissuring into cracked pieces, the rub
of watery fingers along its edge.
The cloud remembers being elephant, camel, giraffe,
remembers being a veil over the face of the sun,
gathering itself together for the fall.
The turtle remembers the sea, sliding over and under
its belly, remembers legs like wings, escaping down
the sand under the beaks of savage birds.
The tree remembers the story of each ring, the years
of drought, the floods, the way things came
walking slowly towards it long ago.
And the skin remembers its scars, and the bone aches
where it was broken. The feet remember the dance,
and the arms remember lifting up the child.
The heart remembers everything it loved and gave away,
everything it lost and found again, and everyone
it loved, the heart cannot forget.”
– Joyce Sutphen
Morning Trip (122)
“…It’s like a villanelle, this inclination of going back to events in our past, the way the villanelle’s form refuses to move forward in linear development, circling instead at those familiar moments of emotion. Only the rereading counts Nabokov said. So the strange form of that belfry, turning onto itself again and again, felt familiar to me. For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives, the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue. We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell….”
–Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero p. 136
Morning Trip (121)
“Anna pulls her face back from an orange lily, aware of its pollen and of the hovering bee. Its ancestors must have done the same, shimmering down a stem of chicory some day in 1561, here or beside the church in the distance. She has noticed the gardien cycle past to unlock its doors. There must have always been a bee here to hear Catholic music and witness a verger’s arrival. The past is always carried into the present by small things. So a lily is bent with the weight of its permanence. Richard the Lion-heart may have stepped up to this same flower on his journey to a Crusade and inhaled the same presence Anna does before he rode south into the Luberon.”
–Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero p.77
Transgender Day of Remembrance
Posting this for T.
Image and information is from the Human Rights Campaign, click for more information.
Laughing, Smiling, and Running Through that Field…
Can you see me now!?!?
And Then…Give Me Water
Rumination on Rumination ;)
“The tricky thing about rumination is that it feels like it’s helpful, but there’s no action taken, and you don’t move forward to some sort of solution.”
-Carla Grayson
“Why Ruminating is Unhealthy and How to Stop
By Margarita Tartakovsky, M.S.
Associate Editor
Why Ruminating is Unhealthy and How to StopRuminating is like a record that’s stuck and keeps repeating the same lyrics. It’s replaying an argument with a friend in your mind. It’s retracing past mistakes.
When people ruminate, they over-think or obsess about situations or life events, such as work or relationships.
Research has shown that rumination is associated with a variety of negative consequences, including depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, binge-drinking and binge-eating.
Why does rumination lead to such harmful results?
For some people, drinking or binge-eating becomes a way to cope with life and drown out their ruminations, according to Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, Ph.D, a psychologist and professor at Yale University.
Not surprisingly, ruminating conjures up more negative thoughts. It becomes a cycle.
Nolen-Hoeksema’s research has found that “when people ruminate while they are in depressed mood, they remember more negative things that happened to them in the past, they interpret situations in their current lives more negatively, and they are more hopeless about the future.”
Rumination also becomes the fast track to feeling helpless. Specifically, it paralyzes your problem-solving skills. You become so preoccupied with the problem that you’re unable to push past the cycle of negative thoughts.
It can even turn people away. “When people ruminate for an extended time, their family members and friends become frustrated and may pull away their support,” Nolen-Hoeksema said.
Why People Ruminate
Some ruminators may simply have more stress in their lives which preoccupies them, Nolen-Hoeksema noted. For others, it may be an issue of cognition. “Some people prone to ruminate have basic problems pushing things out of consciousness once they get there,” she said.
Women seem to ruminate more than men, said Nolen-Hoeksema, who’s also author of Women Who Think Too Much: How to Break Free of Overthinking and Reclaim Your Life. Why? Part of the reason is that women tend to be more concerned about their relationships.
As Nolen-Hoeksema observed, “interpersonal relationships are great fuel for rumination,” and ambiguities abound in relationships. “You can never really know what people think of you or whether they will be faithful and true.”
How To Reduce Rumination
According to Nolen-Hoeksema, there are essentially two steps to stop or minimize rumination.
1. Engage in activities that foster positive thoughts. “You need to engage in activities that can fill your mind with other thoughts, preferably positive thoughts,” she said.
That could be anything from a favorite physical activity to a hobby to meditation to prayer. “The main thing is to get your mind off your ruminations for a time so they die out and don’t have a grip on your mind,” she advised.
2. Problem-solve. People who ruminate not only replay situations in their head, they also focus on abstract questions, such as, “Why do these things happen to me?” and “What’s wrong with me that I can’t cope?” Nolen-Hoeksema said.
Even if they consider solving the situation, they conclude that “there is nothing they can do about it.”
Instead, when you can think clearly, “identify at least one concrete thing you could do to overcome the problem(s) you are ruminating about.” For instance, if you’re uneasy about a situation at work, commit to calling a close friend so you can brainstorm solutions.
Positive Self-Reflection
Nolen-Hoeksema has also studied the opposite of rumination: adaptive self-reflection. When people practice adaptive self-reflection, they focus on the concrete parts of a situation and the improvements they can make.
For instance, a person may wonder, “What exactly did my boss say to me that upset me so much yesterday?” and then come up with, “I could ask my boss to talk with me about how I could get a better performance evaluation,” Nolen-Hoeksema said.
Do you tend to ruminate?
What has helped to reduce your ruminating ways?”
Elisa's Spot 