“The only people I would care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered: those who know what beauty is, and those who know what sorrow is: nobody else interests me.”
— Oscar Wilde
Yes the only people who interest me are artists and and people who have suffered. Considering that I consider everyone to be an artist and have never met anyone who’s life has been suffering free, that does not narrow the field very much. Still tho people who have come through fire tend to fascinate me especially those who have come through it and have learned without fearing future fires when they come in turn. Fire can temper as well as burn and I would rather know people who bear their scars proudly rather than those who pass unaffected by it. Not that there is anything particularly wrong with going through life unaffected by it. Susan Sarandon’s character in Bull Durham says the world is made for people who aren’t cursed with self awareness. Perhaps that’s true. Yet I believe we make our worlds and having met many with little awareness beyond themselves. I prefer otherwise.
Blessings, G
“I am not what happened to me. I am what I choose to become.”
~ Carl Jung
The past is gone,
its footprints fade as the present
ebbs and flows along my life’s ocean.
With it goes the past hurts and triumphs
its losses and joys as well
The only use they have for me now
is as lessons that need not be learned again
It is what I encompass now that matters
and where I will take it.
Those who live in the past
reliving their glories
or remaining victim to their pain
are stagnant swamps
I would rather be the mighty ocean
flowing proudly into the future
living each day and then washing it away
with its sediment used to build anew
— G A Rosenberg
“Express yourself fearlessly. Grow and indulge shamelessly. Exist to the fullest of your potential. Those demanding you to repress your innate gifts, ask that you take the burden of their personal inadequacies, on behalf of their own insecurities. To consent to this dynamic is not an example of compassion, it is an example of dishonesty and self destruction.”
— Paul John Moscatello
What is the point of living unless we are expressing our true being? This does not mean that we disregard the feelings of others but that we realize true integrity in ourselves. The worst kind of emotional blackmail is when one person says to another “If you love me you wouldn’t act like that / think like that / believe that / do that thing” If it is a true expression of our being than they are basically telling us that there are parts of us that they cannot accept and if we truly loved them than we would be something other than who we are. If someone says that to you then it is clear that they don’t love the person you are, they love the person that they would have you be. If that’s not you then it is time to tell them as clearly and gently as possible that you won’t change even tho you do love them (if you do) and they need to either accept that or a new relationship needs to be established. Anything else is living half a life at best. The only person to change for is ourselves as we gain knowledge of who we are.
Blessings, G
The Art Gallery- 2014 page has been created and updated with the pictures from November . Please browse through and if you have an interest in purchasing any prints please contact me at rambled@mac.com or my webshops at http://wakingspirals.deviantart.com and http://www.cafepress.com/wakingspirals
Click on image to go to the 2014 Art Gallery Page:
“Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. I have only begun to learn content and peace of mind since I have resolved at all risks to do this.”
— Thomas Henry Huxley
How do I empty a cup too full
of life lived with questions?
How do I let go of disappointments
and belief in the lack of myself
when I have not been lacking
as much as my methods?
How do I give up
what I have known before
and surrender to each new moment
with openness and willingness to let go?
How do I let go of childhood falsehoods
daily stresses and concerns?
— G A Rosenberg
Thats the thing tho isn’t it? We can’t let go of something that is so shadowy as the things that clog our minds. It is only by giving them form and acknowledging what they are and how they didn’t work for us that we can even begin. The more we realize, the more we can encounter each new thing with openness. It doesn’t require letting go completely as much as the resolve to do so and not let our pasts (even the past of an hour ago) interfere with whatever we meet now.
Blessings, G
“The patterns are simple, but followed together, they make for a whole that is wiser than the sum of its parts. Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle; reinvent. Build a tangled bank.”
— Steven Johnson
For some people it’s easy to be organized and focused on one thing to the exclusion of all others. This however has never been my way. I tend to let my distractions grow into new projects of their own and then get distracted from them by what I have to work on in the first place. The different areas of my life overlap and form fractal patterns with odd synchonicities and strange convergences. Thus I think of ways of describing complex ideas using characters from old sitcoms (tho Neil Gaiman came up with the best one when he described Endora-Samantha-Tabitha as a prime example of the triple goddess in literature. Still these archetypal connections do prove useful at expanding awareness of a concept. Conversations with friends tend to evoke blog entries and blog entries connect to conversations and it all becomes a jumble that brings about dividends of understanding. Would I make faster progress and get more done with a more ordered and disciplined mind and work schedule? Quite possibly but my road would not be nearly as interesting nor as fun and I’ll take the sphegetti trail narrow or wide any day.
Blessings, G
“We wanderers, ever seeking the lonelier way, begin no day where we have ended another day; and no sunrise finds us where sunset left us. Even while the earth sleeps we travel. We are the seeds of the tenacious plant, and it is in our ripeness and our fullness of heart that we are given to the wind and are scattered.”
— Khalil Gibran, The Prophet
We travel by night
outside the form
inside the dream
and learn in new classrooms
in worlds and thoughts
that daylight would never show us.
We meet with others
friends, strangers
some we cannot understand
yet experience is the key
we continue on
knowing that it will
come in day’s travels
the knowledge we’ve gained
the toll we’ve paid
in night’s voyaging
as we find our way.
— G A Rosenberg
Click on images to see full-sized:
New Aeon Arising From the Fall of the Old by G A Rosenberg
Entombed in a Strange Construction by G A Rosenberg
Expansion of Life (Redux) by G A Rosenberg 
Naberius by G A Rosenberg 
Bathing in the Currents by G A Rosenberg 
Cosmic Spider Lwa by G A Rosenberg 
Protected by G A Rosenberg 
Inter-Dimensional Calling Card by G A Rosenberg 
Phoenix Rising (Phenex) by G A Rosenberg 
Infinite Hunger / Infinite Hope by G A Rosenberg 
Wise as Serpent, Gentle as Dove by G A Rosenberg 
Energy Flowing Over and Under by G A Rosenberg 
The Kaleidoscope Turning by G A Rosenberg 
Conquering Wolf (Marchosias) by G A Rosenberg 
Keeper of Secrets by G A Rosenberg 
New Aeon Arising From the Fall of the Old by G A Rosenberg 
