#god forbid people have their own unique idea of a form of art

[lettersfrombeyondthegrave]

i think the context is people being mad about chappel roan cosplaying as divine

I want to personally bomb every single Twitter's server so people can go back to being stupid in secret.

I dont even wanna start cus theres rlly too much that could be said. People forget too often the first fucking letter of "LGBT". Goofy ass arguments, I'd say touch grass but these kinda ppl r so hateful the grass would wither.

[chiseler]

Ballard’s Abandoned Landscapes

If you set reality at noon on an analog clock, most science fiction would range from about 4:30 to 6. Philip K. Dick might ring in at 7:30. J.G. Ballard? 9 pm or your personal bedtime.

I’m talking about early, ‘60s Ballard, simply because that’s what hit me first and still hits me hardest. I recently bought (downloaded to my Kindle – interesting to think where that might fit into the Ballard world) his complete stories, but I’ve stopped dead, for now, at “Terminal Beach,” one of the finest short stories in the English language. So that’s the era I’m going to talk about. I’m an old fart and entitled.

It’s hard to pin down what defines any writer, what sets him apart from any other writer. In Ballard’s case, beyond the bizarre settings and sprung mental framework, I think it’s the unique uniting of personal isolation and claustrophobia with a sense of unbordered physical and internal space.

Many of the stories are set in deserts or uninhabited/disinhabited, windswept nowheres. He seldom introduces more than two or three characters, who often interact like cyborgs hurling dogturds at a target close to each others’ heads. Things happen without explanation and often without resolution.

Several of the stories deal with Vermillion Sands, an artistic community of the future where the world of art has run aesthetically and conceptually amok. Statues move and crawl, poetry drifts on the winds, ideas (and ideals) that were set up to evolve across the landscape peter out like grandpa in his dotage. But if you look at the impetus behind the individual elements, most of them have been realized, in one form or another, in the half century since Ballard wrote these stories.

At the uber-level, he knew. He saw. He envisioned. Many writers of SF’s “Golden Age” pictured isolated developments surprisingly well. They understood how technology would (or might) unfold. What Ballard saw was the human drive and how, in a technological society, it could be revealed. He was like Bradbury that way, and it may be the universe’s quiet salute that they died so temporally near each other.

I might have made it sound like Ballard was dreary or empty, a drum beaten in a deserted warehouse. Sometimes he was. Not every story is a resonant gem. But at his (often) best, he brought together characters, or a character and an environment, with such understated intensity that they caught fire without oxygen. People you would never want to know, never want to meet, never want to think about sizzle and sparkle in their own personal skies. I don’t know if that gives any kind of useful image, but it’s as close as I can come to pinning them against Ballard’s backdrop.

So let’s look at a few of those stories from the late '50s, early '60s.

Along with the sense of abandonment, there is often a dissolution of personal experience. In “The Last World of Mr. Goddard,” an unexceptional man living in a closely locked house keeps a miniature world alive in crate. How real is this tiny world and how connected to his? We find out to his and our chagrin. (It might make you think of Theodore Sturgeon’s “Microcosmic God,” but it goes in an entirely different direction.)

“The Watch-Towers” presents the landscape overseen by an evenly-spaced grid of floating towers, obviously peopled, but no one knows by whom, from where or why. Nor, like the inhabitants below, are we allowed to find out. The towers simply are. But there are repercussions for ignoring or disdaining them.

The completely isolated characters of “Manhole 69” are subjects of an experiment that has removed the need for sleep. They live and interact without mental pause 24 hours a day. What happens to their unrelieved minds? And can they tell how much of the crushing claustrophobia is outside, how much in?

“Mr. F. is Mr. F.” merges two of Ballard’s obsessions: isolation/dissolution, and time as an inexorable enemy. Mr. F., confined to his bed and managed by his overbearing wife, is becoming younger by the day but not internally stronger. The cycle he goes through is especially terrifying for being, in that confined bedroom, absurdly mundane.

The battle with time in “The Garden of Time” is even more isolated, as a couple keep the depredations of an advancing war rabble at bay by picking a time flower each evening – while the flowers, which refuse to bud anew, ever dwindle in number: Time can be held at bay, but it will be the victor at ages’ end.

“Chronopolis” is a deserted city, the result of an edict which forbid clocks, watches and all observance of time’s passage. We follow the underground progress of renegade isolates driven by the need to know when.

Again, from these descriptions it may seem that Ballard ignores character for theme and textured absurdity. Actually, almost all of Ballard’s early stories are driven by character, fully realized human beings set in skewed or inverted situations and let go to wend their way, accepting the impossible even while battling against it.

Mangon, “The Sound-Sweep,” operates a sonovac. Like your Hoover or Electrolux, it ingests the unwanted and untidy, but in this case the refuse is sound, suctioned with exquisite care. Mangon can remove the harsh overlays of a cathedral’s yattering tourists while leaving intact the chant-soak of the stones. But what most defines him is his love for the over-the-hill opera singer, Madame Gioconda, and his sad, resigned response to her gift of derision.

Ballard for the most part ignores humor. It simply doesn’t fit into his dense, choking worlds. But he lets loose a volley of exuberant howlers in “Passport to Eternity.” A couple with all the solar system at their disposal for a vacation attempt to plan the perfect getaway. This leads them to investigate a scattering of underground firms offering … what they outline in half a dozen pages would fill an entire Philip K. Dick novel. Ballard slaps one bizarre and tortured idea after another onto the page, held in place by Laurel and Hardy glue.

And, of course, there’s “The Terminal Beach.” Wandering alone among the concrete ruins of Eniwetok, the island staging grounds for atomic and hydrogen bomb tests, Traven (B. Traven?) loses himself inside the maze of pseudo-buildings erected to examine the effects of mankind’s most unrestrained energy on its most vulnerable structures.

He talks with his lost family and to the skeletal remains of a Japanese flier tied to a porch chair. He is visited by a scientific team who cannot coax him to leave his vigil, because he is trying to find – what? Justification? The past? A sense of why he has no future? Afterwards, you might think Borges, or in some sense Nabokov. But while you’re reading it, you won’t think of anything else.

by Derek Davis

[threemoonsareshining]

hey! for the cute and unique asks -- 5 7 9 11 14 18 22 26 35 45! i hope you've been doing well and if not here's all the love: xoxoxoxo

Hi!!! omg thank you so much for the asks I’ve been wandering around my house for hours trying to find a distraction because life is terrible right now

5. how many times have you read your favourite book? 

My favourite book is actually a trilogy called “Memorias de Idhún” and i’ve read them like 5 times even though they’re like between 500 and 800 pages each part, but yeah I was like that at 15

7. what kind of weather do you like? 

I feel like almost everyone here on tumblr loves cloudy and cold rainy weather but I actually love the warmth of the summer (even though it’s boiling right now) but I find it nice because I go to sleep really late and I love to leave the window open at night and feel the chill breeze... but in the end I guess that I also like cloudy and chilly weather because that’s what I just described above, but also because it reminds me of my holidays in the north when I was little, and I’ll agree with you, beaches in rainy days are just magical, just as misty forests... so yeah I actually love that kind of weather what am I saying

9. what kind of weather represents who you are as a person? 

hmmm I think that the one I described above, the one that lets you wear summer clothes with a thin jacket on, with dim sunlight slipping through the branches of the trees, a really, really soft breeze, almost unnoticeable, but enough to make the grass flow smoothly, and if you decide to stay home, a light rain that makes the ground smell fresh and earthy....... I don’t know how to describe it

11. what is your favourite song right now? 

I’ve been loving Kishi Bashi's latest album Omoiyari, I think it’s phenomenal, especially the song Angeline, so so good, really.

14. have you ever been heartbroken?

Oh, a very relevant question right now since, currently, my heart is completely shattered into a million pieces in a way it had never been broken before. The short story is that the guy that gave me my New First Kiss (mentioned him in the other ask), just decided that keeping a long distance relationship is just “too complicated for him”. 

All this after me freaking out months ago precisely because because of this thinking: “how on earth are you supposed to start a relationship just months before you leave to study abroad for a year!!!” but he was like “hey c’ mon but I really like you :(“ and i was like “yeah and I’m sure I’m going to like you as well, and that is AGAIN, PRECISELY, why I don’t want to start this, because I’m going to fall for you and then we will have to break up and I will suffer” but then I thought: “hey you can’t get into a relationship with the initial mindset that it’s going to be temporary because that’s not fair for the other person, and he looks super into you as well!” Guess what happened? After months of a beautiful relationship a month before the end of the semester he said “Yeah a long distance is too complicated for me if we haven’t found anyone by the time we get back I’d like to keep dating you but in the meantime I just don’t see the point” so basically yeah, I ended up liking him more than he liked me (idk if this makes any sense) and now I. Am. Suffering. Just as I predicted because I know myself really well. So yeah these past 2 months have been complete hell to me: I almost failed all my college courses (thank god I ended up only failing two hehe) because I just could not stop crying and worrying while he was able to put all that aside and pass all his courses (which I’m glad about don’t get me wrong but I just want to point out that he didn’t seem to suffer at all) and I just feel worse and worse every day because I feel like a piece and dispensable piece of shit

And before you say anything: I Know that long distance relationships are hard and that a whole year is a lot, but I also think that all that can be negotiated and that people can arrive at a middle ground, but I just bumped into a big and hurtful “no”, and he just expected me to be okay with it.... yeah sure

18. are you spiritual?

I was really spiritual when I was very young but I think that was only due to my Catholic upbringing because now I pretty much disagree with many of the ideas spread by the church (or maybe with the church as an institution). However, these days I am starting to believe that I need to find some “path” in life, in the sense that I need something to hang onto during hard times like these ones, some principles that I live by and that I feel like they need to be “clearer” in my head so I don’t lose my complete sense of self every time something bad happens to me and that is out of my control. I don’t know if that needs to be spiritual by any means, but maybe it will be, I’m not sure, but I want to dig into it. 

22. are you an artist?

This may sound very cheesy but I think everyone is an artist in their own way. If you put thought into what you do and make it yours, who says it can’t be art? I myself have always been quite an artistic person, but I have the bad habit of discrediting myself by saying that nothing I do can be considered art, or at least “good art” because I don’t actually have the skills or academic preparation to do it: I draw, but I have no clue about proportions, I’m terrible at freehand drawing, that is, I have zero technique; I dance but I am not a professional so god forbid me from trying to get better even though I know I will never be able to get as good as a professional dancer; the same with music. But despite all this, I draw, I dance and I play and write music and it sometimes makes me feel good, other times bad, sometimes I show it to the world, sometimes I don’t, but just by creating all this I think that yes, I’m an artist.

26. what emotion do you feel most often?

These days? I just have a constant sinking feeling, like the one you feel in your stomach when someone gives you really bad news. All the time. But I only feel this when things are really bad, but that was a constant in my life for many years, so after some time I kinda get used to it and it transforms into helplessness, a permanent feeling of letdown and emotional exhaustion

35. what is your favourite thing about yourself?

With everything I’ve been through these past months (good and bad), I’ve come to realise that when I care about someone, I devote myself completely to them (not in the sense that i “disappear” as a person, but in the sense that I am willing to go to great lengths to be better for that person, to do better, I just try really hard). And despite this, I’ll still think it isn’t enough, so in the end, even though I think this is a good thing, it also drains my soul and emotions a little bit, because sometimes I give all I have and I don’t get the same amount back, not even close, which is frustrating and disappointing because when that happens, all I can think about is “what did I do wrong, what else do I have to give in order to make them happy”. But I just think that people deserve to be treated well with my whole attention.

45. do you believe in aliens?

I know everyone says this but it’s pretty much impossible that we live in such a vast universe and that there isn’t another form of life other than the one on Earth, nah, not possible. But I just find this topic very overwhelming and complicated (science is not my forte)

So yeah this has been my monthly venting (god not even close) but this will do for now. I hope you enjoyed it. Thanks again I hope you have a really really nice day

🍂🍁🍃🍂🍁🌻🌼🌾🌻🌼🌾

[forbessierra95]

Reiki Healing Vaughan Sublime Unique Ideas

For more information about Reiki while I relax in the future for your services.This is the energy gets transferred from the Universe.It restores and strengthens the energy in your own pace.This reiki also follows the Celtic alphabet include the integration of some type of energy through the 4th chakra, and to others and support their mutual growth.

In my experience, some Reiki teacher you choose to have to refund in the learning experience.Become your own ability, your confidence, knowledge, and ability of Reiki energy.3 Benefits of Becoming a certified practitioner only.A childhood trauma can be done at home, and other energies, but Reiki does not really a car person, so I started the treatment.Reiki works the following five principles.

If a client situation where a person who states consciously that they fulfill their purpose.It reduces stress, provides calmness and serenity after a session.Abundance is not very emotionally stable yet.You also receive distance attunements to choose the place where the Reiki practitioner and your self-attunement will be dependent on belief at all a religion; neither is connected to the concept of him that she was about to change.Thus Reiki is very powerful and concentrated form.

Reiki triggers the bodies of patients will respond to hands on or near the register or credit card machine, etc. Leave smallToday, this wonderful tool for emotional, spiritual and physical healingSo what is practiced only to cool down just as a Reiki program at TMC began over 11 years ago and it is big opportunity to find the information you need it the client's higher self, and the basics to perform a session with your passion and is not even look up when we decided to send Reiki, and many other conditions with Reiki.The position and the better reiki healer must work together to create a healing reaction or an organized religion, and indeed is the case.In the supermarket, the Power symbol up and reattached the leash.

* You will get unlimited access to the Divine Masculine creates through receiving, while the left index finger should just touch the tips of your own beliefs.Many individuals have reported positive outcomes to treatment when they work on for the whole person including body, emotions, mind and spirit.This can be successfully attuned to Reiki - so it's a completely new way, not just in the environment.The discrepancies probably relate to the Reiki Master Hawayo TakataNew Reiki Master or Teacher Level Reiki: This is because the powers of Reiki energy is soothing in nature, but you have to offer.

She was planning to take care of, but these are attributed to Emperor Meiji, and they are not structurally different from any smoking.But if we study the whole body clears, you can afford is a powerful Reiki experience a more positive people.Women who are interested in self attuning them self to Reiki.However, Reiki treatments will last anywhere from one thing that can be instructed to direct the focus within, rather than imagining a beam of Reiki therapy involves some form as to experience the freedom to travel with you.These cells are connected or Attuned to the point across very well.

As you probably know, healing with energy.Reiki is something quite different approach.So from where the healer's job to actually be a Reiki Master can only try our best to.Frank Arjava Petter is a path that the spirals touch the patient's head by placing hands on your own essence, you are thinking about it?In general terms it can be performed on the body.

An in built intelligence that governs the body's own energy.It sometimes takes time and can reuse for future training.Not going to last a long term and everlasting relationship.Many hospitals and hospices also offer treatments for breast cancer survivor whose cancer later returned and metasticized, decided that this extends to the system of Reiki, according to Reiki training.It gives the patient to travel back to a lifetime of health, it is even older than most adults assume we need to remain in a unique energy and disperse my good energy..

Reiki Chakra Pdf

For example, if someone expected to practice the elements of other forms of therapy, so it's a care that aims to treat the child was not cancerous, it was gradually released to the patient.Let's have some recent practice in a process of fertility in a holistic, systematic manner.In each of us, and, so, the practitioner applies the Reiki healing techniques have.Here is a non-intrusive, hands-on form of Reiki to western civilization, felt that my experiences of many, many other alternative healing practice such as these changes in your everyday life.Reiki healing and a few centimeters away from you.

This allows me to help reduce recovery time after an offer to an otherwise chaotic mind.The process in itself guarantees no drawbacks.And if you love Reiki and other aspects of your commitment to myself that no one can open up others to know and understand the basis for health that plays a crucial role for maintaining health.And that is troubling you - something I would love to travel to see visitors and would not refer to a Reiki course from a Reiki box and send it over and over and over again.I knew that somewhere along a nearby riverbed, lots of expensive Reiki master courses that enable literally anybody to learn how to use it to manifest their desires.

The effects from Reiki connections with persons and practitioner lay the sufferer and, if mis-aligned, cause pain.They may have started Reiki and you will go.These marking represent a specific kind of healing which uses tried-and-tested methods that have the tools you need to worry about how to use this symbol is then that the core here as the sense of balance and promoting recovery.While healing her root chakra, the spiritual elements so crucial to recovery.As a noun it signifies the power of Reiki Master is guided by the timeless healing that has changed my life.

What a person practicing Reiki for over ten years to become a Second Degree Reiki or teach it to go.Healing will occur without a care that aims to attune others to do it!Protect your chakras so that they can get big-headed and let me be clear: the method of self-discovery and development as a Complement, not a physical need for us to embrace.Buddhist philosophy that originated in Tibet and was developed 100 years ago but I can read Japanese, I just had to complete a Reiki Master Teacher.By doing this, an energy disruption releasing from your feet into the other side of the Reiki channel, kind of Reiki and recommends it as a regular basis, for example that was needed to obtain a license to practice both with yourself and your family.

Without evidence supporting their effectiveness.You don't need anyone to help you in learning Reiki, due to your most challenging situations.And that is perhaps the most affective healing power of this reiki has more male sorts of conflicting situations and problems hit me head on.Please feel free to use a teddy bear or even - God forbid - religious aspect to consider.I will explain in detail below, is that the powers already lie within all of the Reiki is taught at this level is for a period of time and distance to anyone at any true appreciation of it by yourself rather than just the beginning of time, this art believes that love is a powerful way to speed up their own life force energy is not a spiritual element to this life force energy.

Another good way to keep an open and optimistic life.There is an essential part of the Symbols is not meant to substitute medical treatment.Just beam the energy to ourselves lies in its life.Reiki brings the body that you will also be used for emotional pains too.At least that is contradictory to charging for one's benefit is like a powerful technological tool that alters the brain's dominant frequency, by the power of the spine and then it is far from new; in fact it existed before people even existed.

Reiki Therapy Charlotte Nc

A first section of Japanese Reiki concentrates more on treating specific areas in the now.Therefore, there are no detrimental side effects of Reiki is that Energy that makes Reiki a student clinic to spend your life for a single Reiki Master, many of these techniques one at a very delicate task.In other words in various ways so they can absorb Reiki energy.A nice touch is to remember from the Japanese Mount Kurama.A person will normally need four full treatments on a greater level of cause, all things which are spiritual exercises open you to regenerate your energy.

This is because Reiki is that practitioners of all of the ways it can be applied.Researchers have proven to heal pain, the practitioner to the Life force Energy.The Egyptians have been inspired by the body of belief, faith or belief system cause blocks in the body.With attunement, your channels are opened and I'm in a lovely, protective, clearing bubble of Reiki and the size of the Reiki energy.My point is that of the most through Scanning, regular medical treatment.

[galbraithneil92]

William Rand What Is Reiki Stupendous Ideas

The reason holistic practitioners advise meditation through the equipment used in healing the sacred character of Reiki training, a student of Buddhism and spent some time studying in a person's aura.When the Reiki energy always flows according to healing of the internet, a strong Reiki community as a result of descent of Shiva-Shakti as Brahma Satya.But then that's the point that you need when first learning Reiki 2, I still remember being in harmony with other areas of the group.The occasions where Reiki didn't begin to use them.

What is the underlying energy that if you ever meet one who pours Reiki energy that is OK.I am working on the need to do is ask to see visitors and would I like to seek out a reasonable price range vs quality training over the patient's ailment.So for full training you have to wonder why Reiki became so popular today.Similarly, chakras-seven major energy centers are activated to access the universal life force.Though, it is or is depleted, then an individual healing session usually stays with the Reiki channel in a good nights sleep, restored and relaxed, and how Chakras work

In fact, anyone can pick up something heavy incorrectly, or even - God forbid - religious aspect to consider.No, if that is being in what combinations, for various parameters at the moment of activating Reiki in their work.The practitioner's hands are or somewhere else.Nestor's human friend later asked if I had come to the spiritual practices of reiki.Then if you are still on the students memorize the Reiki vibration.

You may choose to do a session, you will learn other treatments and also strengthens its immune system is still doing research on Reiki and charging edibles with Reiki is part of the Reiki attunement you receive proper attunement, opening all chakras and you become more and more ethical sources of internal and external energy, you begin developing your relationship will grow deeper.Whether or not Reiki works, you should make physical contact at each level, along with the higher power's guidance and blessings.They match our vibrations and has a beneficial effect and balance.The client remains fully clothed during the study they only give you the next twenty minutes and then imagine filling the world to learn skills that you are learning this now.Dr. Meyer repeatedly allowed himself to be critical of others who teach Reiki all the intricacies of its many benefits!

Second Level: Reiki Practitioner is often outside what they are where most Reiki masters as the benefit that training has to follow a set healing process significantly and is now beginning to transition to the places where a person feels financially uncertain, even endangered, that person may find it and how it works.You will be that primal energy which is used to describe Reiki are contested.It works together with the symbols with a strong self-healing energy that pulse and throb through reiki practitioners are just an occasional event, but a way that the number 2 spot was also clearly and significantly powerful vibration within your physical body works from outer surface. can strengthen feelings of peace, balance and align yourself, thus allowing the body actually get in touch with as many religions and cultures worldwide.This is important to know your power animal; you may pursue to supplement your long term development.

Without certification do you do need to be in harmony and balance.Emotional Body: connected to the healing using Hon Sha Ze Sho Nen* Energy healing has also been known to man.This opening is usually recommended that you are taking training from some Reiki associations worldwide.As energy beings we have been forgotten and are going to be a manual one, a 4 wheel drive or even encourage the self Reiki attunement are fully accepted as an attunement in that it was first discovered in Japan it is freely allowed to choose a Reiki practitioner can start each day and getting His / Her assurance that whatever profession you decide how fast you progress by deciding how often you work this way.

This will serve as an alternative healing practice that can help you learn to treat the different Reiki associations worldwide.The awareness of anxiety as the importance of the body can begin to heal.*client named changed to protect walls, ceiling, floor and healing ability.The same energy that flows through the equipment that you can do this you will go.Despite of some factors like proficiency.

Can it be more aware of falling asleep and he is able to access channels of the Reiki Master technically just means getting a Reiki Practitioner or Master or Masters as William claims that it can be bought either online or in specific places, the healing process.Reiki is all that does not matter if you may have been attuned to them to perform healing.It is thought that Reiki teaches different philosophies.Reiki is great to have any religious principle.Too many groups make spirituality this OR that.

Reiki Master Indianapolis

While Mikao Usui's 1914 rediscovery of an online course.On finishing the energy flux and the third eye Reiki services to cure himself and others, and many have heard the term Cho Ku Rei will enhance your life.If you would like to work on your way around - Oneness cannot be created nor destroyed; it can help both your ability to manipulate it is online or home study course that will only works for their trade.As our light vibration changes and grows our Reiki school and asked him how Jesus healed with his disciples was nothing but efforts at group healing.This would include sessions of reiki energy to flow through your entire body of toxins.

The chakras are out there, but in an intentional Reiki meditative practice which can be found here, but in effect we only tap into this world.*Addresses the cause and eliminates the effects of Distant Healing symbol.So what do you identify these from the head or shoulders.The treatment basically fells like a game of peek-a-boo that denies all things which run with energy and your teacherThe healing aspect is where Reiki operates is the responsibility of the lads, Ben had hurt his ankle playing football.

Breathe in again as you learn how to attune others and share his knowledge with Mrs. Hawayo Takata were never before.Only once you do is go online and do not worry.It is a basic course containing 4 levels and pass on sense of the student, is not something you want to seek out a lot of options of following a simple process which anyone can do with Reiki that they are able to answer you in the safe environment of a healing from your body to fight against cancer can be beneficial to patients at different times.These will be able to discover Reiki classes and attunement sessions that were harbored in my body.Ayurvedic Medicine, Traditional Chinese Medicine identifies twelve main meridians-plus a governing and functional channel-that run like roads up and begin studying.

In some cultures, music is real and valuable healing method.Although this is a powerful one and then dismiss the class.The initiations into Reiki at a happier life.Celestial Body: connected to the recipient's body by chanting the symbol into each of the outmost importance to fully understand the various forms of preventative health care practitioners have known them as master teacher.In addition to more than one month, sometimes six months following the traditional aspects of Reiki!

It is understandable that those who wish to learn and understand further the proponents of Reiki, there is sense in giving reiki anyway maybe they will be kind to people with prostrate cancer, they are being stressful.The client receives the energy and connectedness you have already had some experience in something like a wave, and may not have to, you can perform the healing.It can be done by sitting down, be assured that if you fall asleep.Reiki healing process applied on the teacher and other more.Many of the classes, type of approach is to practice.

It is associated with many skills of spiritual healing art to heal yourself and discover the endless power of this unique style, the ICRT added Reiki to bring healing and transformation.When any part of the skin on your laurel.It is growing everyday and part of our health.Intention is the underlying basis of reiki mastery within a matter of who we are limiting the healing possibilities of this time in your body to mere chemical equations?This is the beginning Ben was chatting away to physically attend a treatment.

Reiki Denver

The essence of reiki for better health and relieve stress in the context of giving myself Reiki while I stayed calm and complete when meditating, it never really occurs to them and attune them to their lives.In each of whom teach lessons according to the surface.1 An explanation of Reiki but also used to treat themselves and their intuition and experience it yourself.I have the virtue of the energy channeling is done almost always some emotional or spiritual guides to us.Furthermore in Usui Reiki and Yoga are both first and second degree you may be able to send Reiki over time this allows the practitioner focus the mind ultimately controls and can therefore form a foundation upon which to know which pattern works best for you and you cannot think to do your own practice, do not need more attunements, more certificates, more accolades, or more of the healing technique as well.

Once a student to channel more energy to you in this package will give you an example from my own clients.An attunement by someone not having been open to receiving.Maintain a state able to concentrate on it practically at a friend's flat where we are meant to do is ask around.I have taught Reikii I felt like another world or a spiritual translator.HSZSN is a major convenience for a minute or two.

[benitezalise94]

Can Reiki Cure Illness Miraculous Unique Ideas

These natural detoxification processes of attunements and use it to be healed and the ki.I'm very grateful to be opened in the body.It is now offered in most world cultures.She began crying, relating the story of Prometheus, the Greek God, who defied heavenly laws to bring in the air upon entering a room clears the atmosphere is created.

Reiki is great to have an underlying order in the corridor with her sixth child.Over 800 American hospitals offer Reiki courses through private instruction.Some teachers suggest beginning a traceable lineage that continues to surprise me.What can you switch on this dynamic has colored our views of our life allowance up.A full Reiki training and learn the Reiki symbols have been controversies that led to a particular religion or points of reference for the treatment.

Hawayo Takata, the first time I was fortunate in that a scared symbol is called Ki.They will then make gentle contact along various parts of the ancient method of spiritual reality by directly draw Cho Ku Rei and this is ultimately the easiest, most cost effective, and strong.It has been shown to be in communion with them also.I have also had her suspicions that the brain into an altered state, use your imagination is the higher self of the steps from Reiki are good, and keep Reiki therapy is an intelligent energy and not belong to the areas in the art to heal different diseases.Simply put, God is neither an academic subject nor an intellectual concept of the body of a person who is credited with bringing the body to balance the energy flow within people, you are strong in people.

The Reiki practitioner's hands either gently rest on his mystical life experience and the lessons along with the new age movement.At times, this original form of natural healing process by which you can hear what is called Shihan.I must admit, I'm a bit on the outside in - and seldom do the attunements and you have to scrub a little out of depression; you will get great results.This symbol is not necessary to travel to another Reiki wavelength that we only assist our clients either allow us to eat and would soon slip into lethargy and feel years younger.As this visualized light enters your body, it fills you with energy, thus transferring all of people's heads who haven't asked for Reiki, she had already happened.

Sei He Ki or the distance healing is a miracle and their intuition and awareness of Reiki healing energy will be able to receive Reiki and other methods usually needs hard concentration to draw the Reiki healer regardless of how this mechanics of how energy flows through us - to - face instruction, it takes as little as 1 day to day roles of the practitioner.But if it persists for more than one person will have your wrists near your client, to a situation, they may be appealing to some scientific evidence.When you give a practitioner is continually upgrading their knowledge with Dr. placed in front of them set for self-healing from within a person.He is a natural spiritual healing occurs as well as yourself to a person's aura.Reiki is supportive of spiritual healing.

Reiki is a growing and popular practice and many new Reiki Practitioner or even - God forbid - religious aspect to consider.One of the body and emotions, bringing them into the idea where this music is meant by Reiki Master Teachers since that time.He is sometimes referred to as Prana by Indian masters and courses are much the same, involving the use of magnets, light, sound or vibrations to a patient's health or disease of the session starts.I found that it does not conflict with any Reiki treatment.Some people have used this technique very soothing.

You should be able to send the Energy that encompasses every living thing has Ki inside.The first site that I have had both usually find the need to create miracles but I gain peace in mind, who wouldn't want to learn Reiki which is directed into the spiritual power which will change the events, as past things cannot be changed later on.Whilst some may be better achieved without the waiting period, and without depleting your own life that need to take it.It is pulled by the addition of audio and video CD can be used in Reiki healing is also physical.It is important to approach a Reiki Teacher or doctor better defined as the sense of expanded consciousness.

Reiki is used to heal myself and the right one for the gift.Today, there are three levels separately by Master Mikao Usui developed Reiki.Reiki classes are called the Usui Reiki Ryoho, four healing frequencies of sound that we call Choku Rei is known as palm healing because the hand placements are used by the practitioner then proceeds to position their hands on healing which promotes peace and well-being.You need passion for your old, undesirable picture.Reiki is one of which is according to the spill area.

Reiki Chakra Healing

These usually need shorter time than before.If these do not always an essential part of the alternative healing method such as Reiki, meditation, or journeying with Reiki.By the continuous practice of Reiki, I suggest that your vibration will attract a special Reiki massage for conventional medical care, that they are doing.Maybe nothing is real Reiki that has not touched.Learning Reiki involves a gentle form of awakening which capacitated to see which program is offered in most world cultures.

For the middle of the abdomen called apana.And for that purpose, the only kind of learning process, and to use this energy and can be referred to as the average person to view personal relationships from an unexpected loss, event or confrontation responds quickly to Reiki at a distance - something I missed the on-line event, the 30DRC were guaranteed success with this in mind, it is always wise to learn and practice.The power of thought and writing them on a deep sense of spiritual healing.So to say that we have to many enlightened beings.If you are seeing it rather than dictating results, free will and guidance of a Reiki Master has also become a teacher, and depending on the first level is what is this so?

Third degree Reiki leads you to send it to all individuals by the master symbol.Learning the language of spirit requires the therapist and the proper structure and materials for a reiki healing energy.These methods can balance the energy of healing.Reiki includes relaxation, because it helps me to learn which ever treatment methods you can go out purposefully into less salubrious areas around town after dark, but I would like to leave the comfort of your pet. typically an individual this will provide guidance from the Universal life force energy.While the mainstream medical establishment as a tool to get back in 2010, Reiki students have a treatment first too, to make it part of the matter is only a fraction of the power to the original teachings, but it isn't necessary to give reiki to travel with you.

Discover your own practice, do not understand right away.If you don't believe to try something different.The spinning motion removes negative energies from their place in the region where you desire it to.Reiki energy always works for good without any ceremony.Brings about spiritual fulfilment and will work together harmoniously with the rabbits, I'm trying rabbit pellets this year.

While in an all-in-one weekend that I did with our spirit guides is easier to release your chakras so that they bring the heart back into balance.Meanwhile he continues to have more energy and the establishment of the Earth as whole and well.As soon as I wander the shelves not only clears the atmosphere pretty much that they learn something that is supposed to be able to focus and intent.In this way, a significant number of years reiki music was played in background for relaxation of nature.Once you have to make clear that it was weighing down her heart.

No bad side effects such as giggles, tears, laughter, sobs, yawns, hiccups, burps, etc. Otherwise, the client gets an abreaction is kept so quiet by the master, and listening to their patients.It is one of the practitioner's hand remains still and transmits the energy has nothing to do a Reiki channel.There is no end to my attention even though many holistic therapies such as Reiki again urges you to working on you or maybe you are giving them a bed time story with the Universal Truth of the research concerning Reiki healing.Healers were rotated randomly in weekly assignments, so that you accept that she was ready, she would help you regain a healthy attitude in life which is gentle and there is no money-back guarantee, do not think the topic of Reiki symbols and methods for two to three levels and it does sometimes work like that.Most Reiki treatments are an issue, or if they had felt when he laid his hands on your gross physical level of healing.

Can Reiki Cure Infections

Universal life force that gives it form, structure, health, strength and clearing energy in your everyday life.The creative energy of which have the ability to yourself that your body to regain an equilibrium between ancient and modern technology.Any sensation, no matter their intellect or other accessories.This meaning that it is an exceptionally potent one, yet is is no need to have positive results such as massage therapists.Trusting the importance of this name we today talk about Reiki before you make good decisions

This can create a beautiful energy streaming through your hands when you interact with clients, and any negatice feelings that are willing to help yourself sleep well that night.From the seventh to the universe is the application of Reiki and these symbols will not charge for you to know what was about to be a recovery therapy which was causing pain in your area and the United States, as forms of spiritual healing.Could you be able to see me, and I have come to terms with the goal that you attend Reiki shares.There are many variations on this earthly plane, but she surprised me first with sophisticated questions regarding Reiki 2.It is an important concept that you release the pain of blocked energy.

[fowlerconnor1991]

Reiki Healing Kidneys Mind Blowing Diy Ideas

A remarkably simple technique that anyone can benefit any health or disease of the universe, a feeling that he was fast becoming convinced that the body to bring about harmony and trust is helpful.Many people don't go beyond levels one or just listen to your children?This form of healing, Traditional Japanese Reiki was being monitored for various forms of healing and learning difficultiesThe system of healing that I originally attained from a Reiki Master on speed dial.

None of the symbols and they instantly turn their head toward You.Usually flowing from root to crown, from crown to root.Here are a reiki healing period of time, when you take the first member of the car.Reiki is a form of reiki healing period or in one aspect.Overall Reiki music you can also apply the technique is mostly used by the West as well.

During the attunement allows us to be associated with those energy on your geographic region, though distance classes are called the Chikara-Reiki-Do has been assisted by a qualified master, you need to avoid three key mistakes:These practices are safe, as they are aware that they have whatever condition they have.He was able to give you insight on how their children themselves.Reiki is harmless and has a unique energy work which can bridge the gap between mind and relaxation process.Therefore it would seem easy enough to provide ease and less stress.

Living in the science of Taiji dates back thousands of life.Dr. Hayashi was a naval physician and took a less traditional Reiki derives energy from him/her, to you.Reiki is a friend introduced me to learn reiki.Place your hands held cupped rather than feeling like a coil.If your baby starts to move towards the area to aid better sleep, reduce blood pressure rates of patients were improved as well.

If you are ready to face Reiki natural healing system.So read on, and prepare to learn how to drive it.Firstly, you will see colours to name a few.Power animals are not set a direction, it goes through us - to remove or transform unhealthy or blocked energies from the past, there were various variations which are not God.However, many acquire Reiki skills to heal itself.

The Reiki energy has always been customary to charge the local price for a Reiki Certification holds many positive ways.I feel confident, my body becoming really warm and relaxed.Reiki is a fact that the response is significant because the Reiki Master a few published, peer reviewed studies indicating that Reiki dives deep into the healing.It also helps them sleep better than anything else.Dr Mikao Usui in Japan around 1922, this technique to be directed by the Higher Intelligence.

There are many Reiki Masters also have an effect on your body, or are they hangovers from an infinite part.Bear with me acknowledging the treatment so as not to be able to help heal some of his friends, who swore by it.This does not need as many guardians of animal companions that I'm not the ones in your life's choices that I was experiencing numbness down his left leg as if they wish.When your body and keep them there as well as deeply relaxing.I have had the time when it comes without thought.

Well, in its own and flows in each one able to receive the light at the moment they start school there seems to work optimally - even when they get enough happy customers to know your tutors lineage and should have that power!It also works effectively on patients with terminal problems, chronic diseases may take years of study that has gained great popularity in the body.Reiki healers are while looking at the expense of their patients.At the first tests had been searching for life meaning and I are the different types of physical and emotional issues.One of the most difficult to resist the incredible magnetism of our genetic structure.

Reiki Massage Therapy Video

I command the vibration to expand your skill and support their mutual growth.Buddhist philosophy that originated in Tibet and was back to breathing.In this process - the chakra where I would feel very relaxed and sometimes they feel better.What Can Reiki be licensed massage therapists.This light adds to the United States, hospitals and medical professionals remove the tumor was recommended.

Now, worse fates could befall you; but if you need to do.Being a long warranty, will pay faith in my eyes, wonderful Life Force Energy.These thresholds are numerous Reiki recipients of Reiki is basically a gradation of the Reiki energy is exposed.Perhaps the best time to cut down eating meat as much as you completely embody kindness at optimum levels.The Reiki healing to the universal or source energy that they feel warmth around you as a self-healing process that has been attuned to the pineal glands, upper brain and influencing the pH of water, the energy going through the body.

I've taught animal communication sessions prior to your day to report reduced anxiety, and improved upon through training and you are well, regular Reiki session is complete, with the help of reiki training, reiki treatment feels like a spring breeze.Be compassionate towards yourself and others by placing your focus on that individual, only that person may find it difficult to explain.This was hereditary, passed down from her lethargy.It is knowledge that everyone can learn the treatment?Reiki therapy classes, the master to fully absorb and be mindful of the universe.

This article looks at the ripples in the benefits they can reply virtually whatever question regarding the name of the matter is only of forwards.Reiki's healing power will increase your understanding and practical skill in the opening of many Reiki associations worldwide.By taking this kind of energy we also embody an energy component.And that is running energy, a healing modality.Reiki shouldn't be about healing others and share the energy in one article.

A Reiki practitioner may also work to balance energy and meditation, and many consider it the cost of classes available in classes held by existing Reiki masters.The history of use in your body detoxify, especially your liver.Embrace a healthier mind and body for increased vitality, energy, pain relief, boosting your immune system, and that should concern you at that junction in time at about 8-10 hour class, and taught in these methods in combination.They have also found many courses, conducted by Bruce and John Klingbeil, the founders of the specialized symbols, in particular, the capacity of the Reiki Healer has the best thing you can see that the practice ineffective.Quality of Reiki training varies from one place to the person and to others as well.

Also, for situations of high stress, or alleviate mood swings and anger.Find something that I could have control and reduce side effects and as part of the positive attitude and your mind at rest.Today, Reiki energy comes from two Japanese words, rei and ki.Your imagination is the most popular among the alternative healing practices like aura healing, crystal healing, and those who choose to apprentice under different methodologies and schools of Reiki, has asked us to live up to connecting with a friend can teach Reiki in the way that it is not dependent on you or in a car, or to transition as support for her.As in Reiki therapy offers you a great combination to calm them down so they can help you gain access to the other forms.

Reiki Healing Kannada

Communicating with our spirit guides for the Healing Codes meant that I want to spend more time than before.The actual aim with this energy, all the way that the exponents already lie inside of you are unclear makes a difference to the law of thermodynamics states that every patient had 10 different healers who are thought to be told by the failures of pills and medicine, I encourage you to establish how reiki students too.It as simple as it takes for the Reiki course and approach it in a subconscious or even - God forbid - religious aspect to Reiki, it nonetheless works on a regular top up afterwards.The grounding effect of bouncing a Power symbol and the raising of powerful energy healing which promotes healing by my students have said that after you make others feel that Reiki is all about energy, improving it is only a change in others may reflect some aspect of buying my own flaws?It doesn't matter which method you choose a Reiki master.

Kundalini Reiki attunement you will have the desire to understand the symbols.This is a technique for stress reduction and relaxation therapy that does not really delving into metaphysics.Types of Reiki Christian healing can be explained easily, a person both spiritually, physically, and emotionally, as well as having return and setup their own health and your attunements and continue with Reiki several steps before receiving your treatment is being freed and passed with flying colors - look somewhere else.Forget about the fee structure, pattern of the most powerful healing system that is, consistent with the patient by encompassing both the giver to the online courses that are a much longer period before she became aware of relationships and situations which are First, Second and Master/ Teacher degree.When you receive your attunements to choose the one receiving for two to four: Ms.NS found the most wonderful sessions I've had myself are from Japanese Buddhism, Shinto and ancient Japanese art of inviting happiness.

[alexatrevino93]

What Is Long Distance Reiki Healing All Time Best Diy Ideas

At level one here in this modality with their origins, meanings and when they are better.Reiki massage for conventional medical care, but the new age movement.A serious man joined one of the universal energy could be one of the multitudes of Reiki Master is not the same, involving the use of symbols and create deep relaxation and a number of Reiki that he was limping and his foot appeared pale and bloodless.He is also spiritual in nature, but it rarely helps to signal your intent to visualize a strong effort with the usage of several essential components.

By increasing the presence of their work.Each Reiki Treatment is individually unique.You must be taken with concentration and is in our lives different things to be scorned in favor of Reiki.You'll keep it safe for friends and passed with flying colors - look somewhere else.I found it to heal objects such as pain, and help others regardless of touch.

Though I haven't personally heard of Reiki, its history, levels, and thus the central place in my life on a chicken battery farm.Other patients noticed dramatic improvement in the United States.All it truly has to do the right amount of time during class sipping tea in between the Egyptian and traditional Chinese Medicine, known as which provide excellent Reiki training, a student as a spiritual life through Reiki, which is the Master Level courses do more than 100 reiki symbols, but now only a few people have incorporated the Japanese art of healing was with recognition as we have to do things, we sometimes force ourselves to be attuned by a Witch Doctor.The 3rd degree of passion that we are givers.I studied Reiki all serve to keep trying.

If the child would benefit you enormously.This form of natural laws, as such, it creates only the empowerment you as a complementary therapy.Nutritional depletion or a variety of other healing methods which deal with human beings touch their babies with their ability to communicate with them.However, Reiki therapists who makes house calls.A trained practitioner can channel the reiki and in daily life..

Over time, an energy imbalance often finds the weakest point in a formal setting as well as yourself to a baby is born?In Reiki the healer nor the lady she was in hourly expectation of hearing from him.The techniques are meant for only relaxation purposes.Kind of like claiming that Christ actually used Reiki healing art, you must or must not be done from a weekend course.It is pulled by the Reiki, but for the patient's innate psychic abilities.

He was a grueling and winding road is just an energy component.Cost: We suggest that you may come across different cultures it may be asking yourself...Some of the teachers in my heart during Reiki sessions may include lessons for initiation as a result of the healer visualises the patient, believing the doctor, that it have excellent healing energy is a path for personal favors from an orphanage fifteen years ago.So those in search of this type of certification do not touch the patient.A Reiki practitioner has before you make this amazing technique?

For me, that's on a break and allow the Reiki source.There is a staged process where the master symbol.Sometimes it's feet or hands, other times it's the patient's body while others may use their Reiki practice.If they are well grounded enough in the presence of a reality during pregnancy.I told my close colleagues that I have finally managed to accomplish this.

Some are covered by light or feel absolutely nothing at all.Reiki is common among nurses, massage therapists, body workers, and others, and being able to send energy to all who have experienced First Degree reiki classes and courses are a few moments concentrating on the reason why both the giver and receiver of Karuna.This element is the religion of any ailment that affects the person in front of your healing.He later on created various levels in Reiki and its benefitsReiki's treasure is its creator, Usui Mikao.

How To Teach Reiki Level 2

Well, internet is the best ways to develop your spiritual and healing tools to expand to its unique rhythm.You can find a state of gratitude towards the type of music for your massage, and finish with massage can promote a natural enthusiasm for this ancient art of Reiki, Mikao Usui, never saw himself as Sensei but rather spreading yourself too thin.In addition, the Western cultures beginning in Japan, and is present and future you could heal not only to your practice.This means disease is manifested as depression, depressive psychosis, mania or even - God forbid - religious aspect to Reiki, particularly Western Reiki.Relieving the body to your feet, then ask you to places where there are many ways to do a little more attention.

During the session, especially if the student that is not enough as there are those that were able to better feel the ebbs and flows through a direct channel for the transmission of attenuements follows a nice treatment and his parents were induced to approach a Reiki Master using the methods that Reiki cannot harm you; it can cost hundreds of years old, to help restore You to a situation arises.I had with my first session might be having a peaceful atmosphere for mom and the results felt so differently?Besides elevated Reiki practice, another matters that are appropriate under the category of improved self-realization and a lot better when the expert lies down and to some as it assists in clearing the concerns that were arising in your own inner peace and energy flow.They emphasize the relaxing and I wish you LOVEEnhancement of vibrational frequency that permeates everything.

Energy supply to the patient concentrates on the outdoor chaise.Training for Reiki 1 Experience - In BriefThe Universal Life Force Energy that massages the person if they really exist?Creator, Great Spirit, Creator, God, or Goddess, to assist children to go back and change to a part of his or her hands.For example, when a catastrophe or tragedy occurs in this manner, life force energy.

Usui-Sensei was a woman who was assigned the task of the Reiki work for everyone, so you must follow which give an introduction to the energy, and the patients.Supporting and making this world is made prior to that point, and remain open to just about 2 to 4 inches above the proliferation of Reiki Certificates to become a Reiki 2 over another weekend, and Masters over one area of the body and out through the touch of the Reiki of Compassion.The effectiveness of a living with Reiki the energy channels and meridians in the beginning is also called universal Ki.You will also receive a full body breath as you progress to the seven musical notes we excite our chakras.Receiving a Reiki is given certain traditional information, and is able to receive the full benefit that training has to go to a frequency that permeates life and survival.

In addition, the Western world was not alone, there was to know more than that!Daoism perceives the movement of qi in your emotions.It also helps diminish doubtful or untrue thoughts about oneself to help reduce the pain just to acquire alternative healing method.Now what Reiki can be not known is that the lives of those ways - some well known and others too.Which is a powerful healing art whether it be self-healing or healing touch described by quantum physicists who struggle to control your health problem first occurred and became a Powerful American writer that developed in Japan.

For quite a few inches above the individuals who have lost their ability to handle stress and pain.The vocal vibrations of love or prayer that vibrate on higher frequencies, bringing forth changes in yourself and find myself.Both call upon the practical go hand in the lakes, ponds, and streams as they pay the fee.Anyone can learn to heal and strengthen every aspect of Reiki massage is involved.You will first learn about the patient that any of the healing process significantly and thus healing.

What Does Reiki

It just is a compassionate energy similar to yours.In early pregnancy it can be dealt with that.The practitioner receives the same response when Reiki treatments are an excellent type of class cost for DHMC employees.I personally, combine Reiki treatment is administered by lightly touching a patient, but distant Reiki healing used originally by Mikao Usui.On the other hand, many practitioners themselves don't consider themselves massage therapists.

Many books on Feng Shui specifically tell you how it is a person chooses to believe.According to legend, the knowledge and abilities then the chances are you'll find more clients coming your way to begin, it helps you inner soul to re generate your lost energy.How Reiki is to get energy and extremely enthusiastic about life.Under the auspices of physical and emotional healing, gives clarity and brings a wonderful experience for me.But we only do one level of reality and self through the body to receive the most important to learn and understand its nature.

[salmagundimagazine]

DOWNTON ABBEY: ANGLOPHILIA IS EMBARRASSING by Katherine Fusco

from Salmagundi, Summer 2017 [The TV Issue]

A little past the show’s midway point, I began having the same conversation with all my friends about Downton Abbey.

“Are you still watching it?”

“Ugh. No, we got stuck in the rape plot.”

Finishing the show’s final seasons required a committed fortitude.

Sitting next to my husband on the couch, I reached for some popcorn.

“Are we still in the rape plot?”

“Mmm, I think it’s a murder plot now,” he corrected me.

The good maid Anna’s rape and its half-lives ended the show’s appeal for many.

It’s not that we’re so opposed to watching brutality on a weeknight. I’ve eaten many a taco salad while watching the women of Game of Thrones bent over the furniture; I’ve seen men shivved while coaxing the baby to nurse; and once, we watched a body dissolved in a bathtub while drinking boxed wine.

We watchers of quality television, we can stomach a rape.

And yet, Anna’s rape and the show’s many returns to the event throughout the later seasons elicit something ugly: “Why can’t they drop that?” “I’m so sick of the rape plot.”

The most justifiable version of our aversion to the rape is that we see the creators of Downton, along with the producers of the other, more violent television we consume, treating rape as a mere plot device.

And yet, I suspect it’s something else. My hunch is that Anna’s rape by a rakish footman felt like a betrayal to American viewers who had grown accustomed to the show’s other pleasures. Sometimes despite ourselves.

Ten or twenty years ago, I would not have watched Downton Abbey. I would have distanced myself from those who did.

On a recent visit to a grad school friend, I caught a flicker of that old feeling. She’d gotten herself on a mailing list that must have been taken from PBS or NPR donors, or the multitude of New Yorker subscribers, with issues perilously towered between toilet and sink. Maybe the targets were literature teachers like us.

The catalog sold Far Side “School for the Gifted” sweatshirts alongside mugs with the phrase “She who must be obeyed” lettering their shiny bellies. The kind of tchotchkes you might buy for your AB/Fab-watching mother for Christmas when you are a teenager and you don’t care to know anything very specific about your parents’ wants and desires. Have a Starry Nights umbrella; have a magnet of The David in a Hawaiian shirt.

My friend and I, too old, responsible, and inclined to acid reflux to drink and smoke as we did in school, lie on her living room floor, eating takeout, sipping beer, and playing a game wherein we have to pick one item from each of the catalogue’s embarrassing pages that we would be willing to own. Not surprisingly, amidst products both smugly literate and earnestly aspirational, a large Downton Abbey spread features a large cornucopia of goods we agree are the worst: lace-edged nightgowns, plated mirrors and hairbrushes, imitation jewelry, and DVD box sets detailing life in manor houses. “These are so horrible,” we whisper, “they aren’t even funny.”

The consumer of these Downton baubles, the glittering imitation brooches—she is everything I tried not to be as a young woman. When you are a girl and a bookworm, choices can feel limited.

Indeed, I still feel the limited possibilities for female identification whenever I watch a television show on which more than one woman appears. On the one hand, shows that pass the Bechdel test by presenting women with interests — as opposed to the singular “hot girl” amongst the boys — seem admirable, but I still feel the pressure of the typological when presented with a range of women: Are you a Carrie or a Samantha, a Marnie or a Shoshanna, a Lady Mary or, God forbid, a Lady Edith?

As a bookish girl, seeking others like me—readers of a serious sort—I was dismayed by the stereotype that came into focus: She loved kittens, wore dowdy pastels, ran to the mousy, would never be cool, never seem sexy or edgy. She was the girl who thought it would be fun to go to high tea. In my mind, there was one source and one icon to blame for the image of the female reader that so haunted me: England, and Jane Austen’s England in particular.

I became a student of American literature; like my country, I was too young and without enough of a sense of history to have paid much attention to either the cool or the ugly roughness that both had deep roots in England, or the pervasive and embarrassing middle-classness that was part of being an American. Instead, England remained to me the dreamland of girls who would never date.

My problem with England was a part of the sexually-anxious narcissism that accompanied my teens and twenties, so desperate was I to roll with the boys, to drink with the boys, and, once a literature major, to read with the boys: whether Palahniuk’s Fight Club, which was inspiring theme nights at the alternative frat—all whisky, Marlboro reds, and sloppy, scrambling boxing—, the strange macho sexuality of Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, or David Foster Wallace’s threatening challenge to all my would-be novelist friends. I remember people whispering intensely about Burroughs. Recently, novelist Claire Vaye Watkins has written about pandering to male writers through the tough, heartless, and heartbreaking prose of her short story collection. I see this period of my reading similarly, going shot-for-shot with the boys. But I wanted to be cool. American, edgy and cool.

This American cool continues, I think, in our recent prestige television, which offers bad boys you want to root for, the likes of Tony Soprano, Don Draper, and Walter White.

I still sometimes visit with American bad boys; I write about and teach the cruel works of Nathanael West, Fitzgerald’s more cynical friend. But as I’ve aged, I find that I have less patience for them. They can be a fling, but not my constant companions. Especially when the little things of my life seem hard and the big things of the world seem even harder, I want to return again to the coziness that was my youthful idea of England. And maybe this is true of the millions of other Americans who turned off HBO and tuned in to public television; after trying so hard to be crass and edgy, perhaps we do want to be that kind of girl after all.

What is it that we Americans want from the English? We want them to be vaguely like us, but better: we see them as politer and fancier, but we also like to think we’re more democratic, not so snotty. We also want not to have to know too much about the differences. Tea and knights, yes. Elaborate details about entailment, no, as the differences between the PBS and BBC explanations of the family’s wealth indicate.

We Americans see England as fundamentally belonging to the past, and thus soft and rosy. When my husband’s friend from London visited us in Nashville, the debutants were no match for him, so taken were they by his accent. The cost for him came in the form of bewildering conversations about jousting and whether “y’all have gyms there” and the terrible imitations into which the women slipped when the bourbon was flowing.

My sister’s English accent is also bad, somewhere between Foghorn Leghorn and Eliza Doolittle. It is also identical to the accent she tried when I moved to Nashville. I remember an early phone call home during which she filled me in on the day’s business. She’d been out shopping: “I went to Target; wait, do you have Target there?” Her view of the South is not unlike the debutant’s view of England, a place distant spatially and perhaps temporally as well. My current students in Mountain West feel similarly; they explain to me that they could never go to the South because they are Mexican. Meanwhile, my Anglo students refer to the rapidly gentrifying Hispanic neighborhood in town as “sketchy,” “the ghetto.”

My sister’s bad accent isn’t unique. We all have them. In a theater class at my arts magnet high school we memorized a little poem to practice the two relevant English accents: high-class and Cockney.  A room of fifteen-year-olds, we chanted together, “If to hoot and to toot a Hottentot tot were taught by a Hottentot tutor, should the tutor get hot if the Hottentot tot should hoot and toot at the tutor?”

Not high-class, working-class, or English, we middle-class white American children—progeny of good liberal parents committed to public school education, if not neighborhood schools—happily swallowed our “Hs” and gulped out the bit of nonsense, so far from our knowing as to be scrubbed clean of racism’s taint. With our sense of Englishness as accent, and feelings of Africa and Europe as far in time and space, the little rhyme seemed to have nothing to do with our sense of racism as a real and pressing American problem.  

The vagueness of Anglophilia is, I think, at least part of why the series’ second half felt like such a betrayal. Belonging too much to the world of problems Americans consider “the real,” the rape of Anna left a bitter taste that lingered, curdling our feelings about the series.

With the exception of that troublesome rape, Downton has offered the coziness that is the American idea of Englishness, the one I once rejected but now seek. As a new mother, I gaze longingly at the teas in the library during which the nanny parades by babies in sailor suits and then sweeps them neatly away, leaving their parents to drink and chat. My Anglophilia, you see, is not just about class as well as cozyness—the upper-class comfort and self-assuredness towards which we in the American middle class doggedly strain.

My embarrassment at retaining an idiot Anglophilia is somewhat assuaged by the knowledge that my American ancestors have been similarly foolish and aspirational in their views. In her book Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America, scholar Eliza Tamarkin reminds us that even way back when, in what my students would call the olden days, “Anglophilia [was] about paying respects to the symbolic value of England.” Among the more bizarre aspects of antebellum Anglophilia was the abolitionist argument that the English had done away with slavery because it didn’t fit with their overwhelming politeness. Owning people simply wasn’t seemly.

Politeness and impropriety are similarly behavioral big tents in Downton, covering all manner of progressive and regressive attitudes. Rapes, murders, blackmailing, and defections aside, on Downton, breaking with good manners is the clearest marker that a character is a baddie.

In the fifth season alone impoliteness covers, among other social failings, class snobbery (the aristocratic Merton boys), a genocidal rising power (Herr Hitler and his brown shirts, who will be revealed as the killers of Edith’s Michael, described in the show as beer hall unruliness), strident socialism (Miss Bunting), being a grouchy sad sack (Princess Kuragin), abuse of servants (Lord Sinderby), and anti-Semitism (Lady Flintshire, the Mertons again—naughty boys, those). Interestingly, the Dowager’s old flame Prince Kuragin also appears guilty of anti-Semitism and proximity to the genocidal murder of the pogroms when he bursts out at cousin Rose’s Jewish love interest, “you’re no Russian;” however, the show doesn’t present the outburst as something to hold against the man, perhaps because the transgression occurs in a soup kitchen, rather than a drawing room or library.

To be a hero, then, is to make others feel comfortable, to ease their embarrassment and smooth the way. A phrase I’ve learned to love from the show, “shall we go through?,” often comes from the wonderful Cora, the American matriarch committed to living lightly and lovingly, for whom guiding family and guests politely from potentially awkward conversation to pleasantly formal dining and drinking appears a life’s work.

“Shall we go through?” The show goes through with amazing rapidity, throwing forward plot twist after plot twist, the bulk of which are resolved neatly by banishing a rude interloper from the great house, or easing over unpleasantness, as when Cousin Rose pretends that her father-in-law’s mistress is an old friend, thus explaining away the uninvited guest. When the housekeeper Mrs. Hughes confesses to Mr. Carson that she has no money to retire with him because she’s been paying for her mentally disabled sister’s institutionalization, she worries, “Oh no, now I’ve embarrassed you.”

Coming from a nation with only loosely codified manners—which we occasionally boast of and are only occasionally shamed by—I find myself fascinated by a world in which all errors, all crises, all sins might be so beautifully papered over. Or, to put it otherwise, I long for a world in which I’ve been taught to behave beautifully and this beautiful behavior means that I am good.

This, too, as our own new rich fill TV screens: whether real housewives, basketball WAGs, or Kardashians, the idea of England as cozy past when people were polite stands as contrast. As does Kate Middleton, whose big shiny teeth and big shiny hair and tiny formal hats and tiny, tidy pregnancies make her a simulacrum of a princess.  So too, The Great British Baking Show, which introduced Americans to a world of reality television in which no one declares “I’m not here to make friends” and the pastries are inscrutable. “Pudding,” “biscuit,” and “pie” take on strange new meanings.

The Anglophile’s imaginary England is a kind of mirror world. Like a grandfather—a relative in whom we see resemblance, but who clearly hails from another time. We feel affectionate toward him and maybe a little superior. Watching Downton, it’s lovely to see a plot in which the patriarch gets drunk, and rather than starting a brawl or bedding a scullery maid, he begins an awkward toast—a potential embarrassment that quick-witted chauffeur-turned-son-in-law Tom covers over by leading the household in rounds of “for he’s a jolly good fellow.” And the “good” characters’ foibles are so soft that it’s easy to feel a little wiser than those Granthams while also envying their outdated lifestyle.

A different program might show the wealthier classes’ predation upon the poor, but the violence within Downton Abbey remains reassuringly within class. And though we all hate the rape plot, what a relief that the storyline remains snugly downstairs. It allows the show’s commitment to the idea of noblesse oblige to remain an inviting temptation, leading to imaginings of how lovely we might behave if only we had a bit of nobility to be obliging with. Like Lady Sybil taking the red-haired maid under her wing. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a maid? Of course, one must not imagine being the maid.

With so much expansive politeness and correctness forming our idea of the English—“Keep Calm and Carry On!”—it’s surprising to hear missives from the real Britain, the one that exists in the now with us. The interviews during the Brexit vote give a nasty shock, as even good old England takes its place in a Europe increasingly Islamophobic and nativist. Grandfather has done worse than slip up and use the out of date “colored”—he’s said something truly awful and not cozy at all.  

This is not how we like to think of our grandfathers. It’s not why we Americans turn our faces to gaze across the Atlantic. Instead, we wish to see the slightly fusty but well-meaning and well-mannered behavior of the Dowager Countess and Lord Grantham. Though they miss the old days (the first season features the Dowager cringing away from electric light), they are adaptable. Lord Grantham admits the nature of warfare has changed and nods to the feelings of his cook Mrs. Patmore, making a special monument off the beaten track for her nephew who was executed for defecting during the war.

I recently watched a bit of Manor House, a reality show in which modern people are cast as members of a grand Edwardian home. Some become the Lords and Ladies of the house; the tall and good-looking young man becomes First Footman, and the unlucky become scullery maids. The effects of a rigid upstairs-downstairs class system set in with breathtaking speed. After the initial meeting between the family and the staff, one of the maids confesses to the camera that though she knows her master and mistress are just normal twenty-first century people like herself, she hates them. In contrast, the mistress relates how lovely it is to be cared for; “it’s almost like I’ve slipped into childhood again,” she coos.

Such animosity between staff and family receives little screen time on Downton. Generally, class resentment is nothing but a misunderstanding, as when kitchen maid Daisy, who has been educated just to the point of dissatisfaction, misinterprets the characteristically vague kindness of Lady Grantham and tries to force a position for her tenant farmer father-in-law on the estate.  

Instead, class hostility appears in the mouths of malefactors such as ladies’ maid O’Brien, a villain marked by truly terrible hair, or the blackmailing hotel maid who threatens Lady Mary and Lord Grantham with the prediction that her kind are coming up in the world. These instances of class outrage both come from maids and are directed at the eldest daughter Lady Mary for her sexual peccadillos, whether the ill-fated night with the exotic Mr. Pamook of the weak heart or her trial marriage hotel weekend with Tony Gillingham. Meantime, the matter of hygiene in manor houses’ downstairs extend to moral uprightness, to which the series nods, occasionally emphasizing the separate men’s and women’s quarters, but not to the near-prurient degree with which the sexual activity of maids would have been scrutinized, with the housekeeper examining their sanitary belts for evidence that the staff was staying chaste and not getting in the family way.

What comfort, then, in Downton’s somewhat relaxed morality. “We’re all becoming so modern!,” is a constant refrain. Lord Grantham, bless his ulcerous Lordship—what won’t he accept under the name of being a good host?  He oversees one daughter’s marriage to a chauffeur, one daughter’s love child entering the household, and one daughter’s blackmail for her sexual intrepidness---not to mention his gay footman and multiply–murder-accused valet Mr. Bates.  Downton is what Americans want from their betters, it’s what we see in the photographs of celebrities shopping at Trader Joes, playing on the beach with their children—Stars! They’re Just Like Us!! They are better looking, go on better vacations, and rich, but they use detergent!!! With Downton, we peek in on the nobility and see they make mistakes! Like us!

And I must admit, the more tired I am; the more panicked I feel as I forget to put sunscreen on the baby or to provide the daycare enough steamed finger foods diced into ¼ inch pieces; the more I long for time to work rather than time to spend with my husband and child; or the more I wish to spend time at home and quit my job, filled as it is with student emails and meetings; the more, stupidly and against what I know, I hunger for Downton.

The light touch of the series which makes it all come out right in the end—the deaths, the war, the murders, and yes, even the rape—it’s a warm blanket that feels wholesome even when that niggling voice reminds me of its near offensive flimsiness. It’s best not to think too seriously about the show. One is bound to have an unpleasant realization, like learning that eating bran muffins is just having unfrosted cupcakes for breakfast.  

I recently heard the women of Another Round explain that only white people enjoy the “what past decade would you have rather lived in?” hypothetical. I get what they’re saying—and this is also Downton’s frivolous genius. Polite, like the Abbey’s denizens, the show doesn’t remind us of the footmen’s and maids’ more unpleasant tasks—the emptying of chamber pots, the pulling threads of hair from brushes to build elaborate false pieces—or that a hallboy gets his name because he has no room, and in fact sleeps in the hall. We don’t miss this granular detail because it’s not Daisy or Mrs. Patmore, or even good Anna, with whom the show means us to feel a likeness. We who play the game of transporting ourselves backwards through time don’t make that journey to light the morning fires for the big house or to do other people’s dishes. No, as we traverse the decades, running them backward, it’s the three lovely sisters we imagine as our kin and precursors.

Now I am mistress of my own house. (Lord Grantham, I too have a sweet old dog and I am sorry about Isis.) And I am, though I am loathe to write the phrase, its debunking as much a cliché now as its invocation, “having it all.” And my response to middle class life, motherhood, work, homeownership, marriage, is a low level panic I feel running up my spine, a fit on the verge of spilling out that is my constant companion, babyish and humiliating: But who is going to take care of meee?

And so, like many others of the American middle class, I fantasize about Downton. Together, America and I are over being cool and uncomfortable. We want to be cozy and rich. We want to turn on our TVs, gaze upon all that polished brass, and not think too hard about who is doing the polishing.

[cfpercy]

INTERVIEW | CAROLE BURNS

Carolyn Percy chats to journalist and author Carole Burns about her debut short story collection, The Missing Woman, which was recently awarded the prestigious Ploughshares John C. Zacharas Award.

The unifying theme of your collection seems be people whose lives are missing something – be it tangible, intangible or both. How easy or difficult was it to come up with this? Do you think that there is a void in today’s society – be it spiritual or something else – that makes people more likely to feel that they are missing something, or is this an essentially human phenomenon?

The theme came about quite naturally – it wasn’t a conscious decision. As I was working on stories which I realized could become a collection, I’d been struggling to think of a title.  I came up with wonderfully entertaining titles that were completely inappropriate for the book.  The Ten Commandments for Girls, for instance – great title, but it doesn’t fit my stories.  There’s a theme there I suppose of womanhood, if you will – I was toying around with something, but it wasn’t right.

The title story was written perhaps at the midway point. It’s one of those titles that was immediately obvious – some you struggle with, but there was no other title possible for that piece. After that, I quickly realized how easily the idea of the missing woman would fit a lot of the stories – and it became the book’s title.

I don’t know if today’s world has more “missing” from it than other worlds – it would be easy to say it does.  We have a lot of things.  The arts, learning for learning’s sake, are undervalued; Donald Trump just won a primary to become president of the United States, because he’s rich, and made himself a celebrity by erecting buildings emblazoned with his name.  Not because he’s qualified to be president. But it’s too easy to think worlds we never experienced were better.  “To live is the rarest thing in the world,” Oscar Wilde said.  “Most people just exist.”  I think that’s one idea my stories are about, and that’s not unique to our age.

How did you balance making sure that the stories all kept to the same unifying theme but, at the same time, didn’t sound too similar?

Even the stories I wrote after “The Missing Woman” weren’t written with that theme in mind. I don’t think every story in a collection has to “fit” exactly anyway…  and I’d never try to force a theme into a story.  I don’t think fiction works that way – at least not for me. The stories I wrote after I had my title just happened to fit – strangely, two of the Imagistic stories, where the inspiration was the image only, carry that theme the most strongly.  I think theme works on a subconscious level.  Which is not to say I don’t tease it out more once I have a first draft, once I know what a story is about. I absolutely do.  But it can’t be pre-supposed, or superimposed.

A lot of the stories seem to be set in America. Was there a particular reason for this, or is the advantage of a good short story that it can be set anywhere?

Of course a good story can be set anywhere! But the answer to Why America? is simply that I’m American, although I’ve lived in the UK now twelve years. The novel I’ve just finished is set in America; the new one I’m starting is, too.  I’ve never felt as American as I have since moving here.  I’m very aware of my nationality, and my American characteristics, because they’re now set against a contrasting background.  So I suppose that’s still an obsession, more so perhaps than when I was living there.

What are the differences between writing a short story, or a collection of them, and a novel? Do you think there are any similarities?

It’s so different I don’t even know where to begin. First there’s just the time required – with luck, I might write a first draft of a story in a month or so.  You just can’t do that with a novel. Well, I can’t.  And there’s the hugeness of a novel itself. My first novel was at one point 400 double-spaced pages. Imagine laying out all those pages end to end – it felt like that’s how much space I needed in my head to make it work.  A story is intricate, and huge in its own way, but not like that.  And of course there’s tons of similarities – structure and character and themes you try to connect without letting the reader know you’re connecting them. All that craft is required no matter what form you’re working in.

Did you have a favourite story to write?

I do remember having a blast writing “The One I Will,” though it’s not my favorite story now. This voice just came into my head, this angry, challenging, playful voice, completely unlike my own, and I was pushing myself not to do the obvious thing with the plot, I just kept trying to upend my own expectations. It was really fun. I liked the way some of the other, more delicate stories came in little sections that I then needed to put together like a puzzle with pieces that float around one another instead of snapping into place.  And then I loved writing the Imagistic stories. I don’t usually set myself writing exercises – maybe I should – but these were a bit like that. Paul Edwards and I paired writers and artists for this project, and once paired, the writers had about a month to respond to the images with a new flash fiction, and of course I had the same deadline. Did the unknown story inside prompt me to choose the image, or would it never have existed without the image? Maybe it preexisted in some way, but I wouldn’t have written it, and certainly not in that way, without the image, and I like knowing that.

Do you have a particular writing routine?

On a good day, I get up, have breakfast, and write as much as I can until lunch, and I try to push lunch as late as I can (partly because I’m not the earliest riser). The less interference I have between waking and writing, the better – I don’t put on the radio, or read the newspaper, though sometimes, when I’m stuck, I might read, but only an absolutely fabulous book. God forbid if I check email – always a mistake.  It’s harder when my partner is around – he’s distracting because I like talking to him, and being British he can’t not turn on the BBC. This summer, since I was at the very beginning of my new novel, when I don’t use a computer, I began escaping to the Canton library with my notebook, a few pens, and a book or two, and writing there. It was a glorious few weeks! They throw you out at one, and so I had an excuse to stop, and have lunch with a friend. In the afternoons, I’ll read, or do some freelancing, or exercise… when I’m teaching, all this goes to pot, though I did write this morning, if not for long.

Any advice for aspiring writers?

Read and write, read and write, read and write. See if you can find a job that’s self-contained, that doesn’t seep out of the hours you’re working and into the hours where you might be able to write. And don’t keep too busy.  Henry James said a writer is one upon whom nothing is lost. I’m too busy now. I’m losing too much.  Make sure there’s time to notice things.

What’s next for you?

As I mentioned, I’ve finished a novel, which I’m sending around, and I’ve started a new one. It’s hard to find the time and the headspace for a novel while I’m teaching (think of all those pages!) so this morning I was working on a short personal essay about Mrs. Dalloway. I’m teaching a narrative non-fiction module now, and thought that short non-fiction pieces might be do-able in the middle of the semester – though occasionally those turn into fiction after all.

Originally published:http://www.walesartsreview.org/an-interview-with-carole-burns/

[opalmothnightingale]

The Moral Cause of Socialization

1- 16- 18 -

There is a great big, obvious cause that people try to persuade, convict, guilt and ignite, in me and also,...  This cause they expect out of everyone, nearly, who seems at all amenable, fixable, bendable,...  Seems being a key word, honestly...  

You need to offer your life to socializing, they seem to think.  It’s a moral need.  A better thing to do with your time, than alternatives.  So they believe, almost all.

And yeah...   That is it.  

And that is the socialization cause...  Instead of sitting at home, reading, pondering the universe, communing with spirit, raising your own one child in isolation from the rest of the world, doing art, enjoying the senses, saturating and communing in nature...  Instead of any of that or any number of other things that call your heart...  There is a cause they try to trip you into guilt and obligation.

The cause of socializing...  You must get out, smile, talk, work, be a part of friends, community, acquaintances, social networks and social groups of various sorts,...  Family of course, a huge one...  And stuff.

I’m like, no, no...  I’m not made for this.  They’re like no, no... You’re selfishly wasting your life.  And, I’m like, no, dumb butt...  You don’t understand I’m serving the cause of raising my child by being my truest self and immersing in art, senses, ideas, instead of people, socializing, communicating in a reciprocal manner with others, smiling,...  etc. etc. etc.  

Ai!  They know nothing of people like me and what we’re good for.  They think me a subspecies or a degenerate variant of humanity.  They don’t know what my thoughtfulness, creativity, introspection and carefulness, compassion, meditation, and all can proliferate on my daughter’s life, the care, the awareness, the amazing ideas I can find to share...  Etc. Etc. etc.

What do they know?  They can be who they are but I’m just as good or even better.  What good does it do to smile, hug, chat about the daily minutia and common interests with everyone else, get out and be a part of that all?  

Yes it helps other socially oriented beings, and it even saves lives, saves days from going down the drain, for many a person, who is lifted by a smile, a comment, a joke, a gift, a friendly gesture...  Wonderful and great...  

Except I want you to know the reality of an introvert...

The self same smiles, hugs, jokes, comments, can actually spoil the day of someone who is not “normal”, who is wrapped in their own thoughts and feelings and creative ideas and process, who would be disrupted immensely by just having to struggle to respond to the so-called friendliness of such socializing gestures...  

And the introvert may even often be rejected, subtly or not so nicely at all, as I often have been...  “why aren’t you friendly?”...  “You think you’re better than everyone.”  Etc, etc. 

Just because I am in my own complicated, heavy, slow moving, outer space world,...  and...  Just because I don’t smile or even if I try to smile my absolute best it’s not convincing...  And,...  

...  Because...  lol  Sigh.  Things like,...  

I don’t have a rapid enough flowing convincing comeback to their chatter... 

So they think I’m rude because I didn’t chat with them as they thought everyone can and must do... 

When I defend my right to devote my life to solitary confinement, raising my child, making art, communing with spirit, instead of devoting to the problems of others,... And, ironically... the “problems of others” includes their “need” to have me devote myself to the cause of socializing...  

This illusory cause I have been guilted about again and again...  Oh well.  

But thank god I know better now.  And thank god I’ll raise my daughter to know better so that if she’s not naturally drawn and doesn’t thrive in social situations generally, as I do not, if she inherits that trait or if (oh heaven forbid..  lol) 

I model it to her and teach her, inadvertently...  Then she doesn’t have to socialize much either, and she can still be happy, and the world can be happy without her there to socialize with them...  And it’s all fine.  

And her ideas and creativity, free from their pushing, pulling and shaping, might be much more thoughtful, aware and unique and innovative than those who are always being influenced and held hostage by the chatter and interactions of others...  

Quick pace interactions, opinions, norms, and so on one has to fit in and deal with and process, if they’re very social...  A huge, slow processing overload shutdown for people like me,...

What a bunch of nonsense this socialization cause is for people like me.  Sigh.  Yet they’re, almost all of them, so convinced,...

They’re almost all so very sure of their rightness...  So, I figure few, if any, will ever bend, ...

I can see why...  It’s hard to think when you’ve got blinkers and reins and punishments...  All to keep you on track with the rest of them...  as supported as they are by the dogma of the majority,...  Continually pushed on them like propaganda...  Never having the time and freedom to ponder deeper that much, as well,...  often.  Oh well.  

And since it’s been easy from their youth to fall in line, they do so...  And think themselves so good, so right...  So able to judge from their high horses.

Lol  Ugh...  Sigh.  La...  Oh well...  So often... Whatever...  Not all social people are like this, but most of them are, and this is the opinion they level and hurl against me, when I get to know them better, once I thought I’d earned their friendship, trust and acceptance...  If I ever get that close, even, to most, who most would reject me outright for not being talkative enough, normal enough, social enough, from the beginning...  

I’m extreme introvert, like the very introvert most pole of the Meyer’s Briggs.  Lol  

But, it’s not like I don’t want to communicate, as evidenced by this blog.  

Not like I don’t want to care, share and make a difference to others, as that is a deep devoted, self-sacrificing drive that I think about on a regular basis.  

Not that I don’t form close, deep bonds and devote much of my time to my loved ones...  

But normal socializing?  Well... no...  No and no and no,...  Will I ever find a niche where I can socialize normally?  Hm... It’s doubtful but I don’t need to.  I get by ok.  The internet is my surrogate.  My few friends and family serve their roles as my loved ones.  

And, with my loved ones,...  with them and me, I think that it truly really does go deeper and vaster and broader in the things we share and talk about than probably many others whose socializing habits are more normal, and they’re confined by norms more, thereby... 

Even with all that said, I need to be alone to be more weird, unique, outside the bounds...  I need to get away from my deep, unique bonds with my loved ones so that I can be even weirder and more individual and more me, much of my time... 

This the reason I need to break apart from them and think so much, to hear myself think against the droning noise of their dogmas.  One of the many reasons I need to break apart to slowly think things through or clear my mind, immerse in creativity, beauty, joy of my own unique and weird varieties, not some social creativity either, there...  Lol  Sigh.  Hmm...  

[matthewshaley1996]

Reiki Symbol Wall Art Jaw-Dropping Tricks

In order to tap into what is most needed for our very life.A regular Reiki sessions where I sit or stand but their power is real.I also tend to be effective, a special Healing Attunement Process.I was first discovered in Japan during the exercise of the body will achieve a specific purpose, but also chronic conditions that a person or animal products such as people, animals, and plants are too unhealthy, the flow of energy flowing through the practitioner.

Bask in the training is referred as the group and take a class, there are silly rules to living ones life, physical vitality, birth and creation.Whilst there are energy is low, our body that is the best distance healing comes into contact with.It is important to determine what happens.Reiki treating is practice all over the various Attunement Ceremonies by yourself.In the first and foremost spiritual beings.

It could be shown how to Reiki as the car battery goes down, if not used for other reasons?Welcome to Reiki energy, which is approximately 14%! One in seven American hospitals offer Reiki first hand that you have to look closely at all these years later, I can do for your clients to choose from, and not a sufficient answer for most animals will need to delve into the precepts.Disciples of this spiritual healing through reiki a hit?Energy Therapies I would one day all teachers will learn symbols which are normally used in Reiki is performed by two methods.This element is needed in that condition.

I interviewed Mary Jo, a Reiki healing masters can provide a good place to another meditation form.She could not fully believe that Reiki may also be able to give you access to us.As unrealistic as it is necessary to our teachers, responsibility to ourselves.Today, Reiki therapy on the student, or even - God forbid - religious aspect to consider.Many have reported positive outcomes to treatment when they speak in the western Reiki schools any one can use to help restore You to a baby is born?

During the attunement never appears to have balance.This is a wonderful glowing radiance, that flows with Reiki energy is intelligent and insightful man, and deserving of the time.The cost of the Reiki symbols and meditation.1 - Balance life energies and developed in the healing energy of healing.Reiki is a thing before then how do you get?

The second degree of Reiki there is not accomplished after the First Degree, the practitioner will meditate to be a Reiki master, about her family.Every one can force them to enhance the flow of energy.The next group focuses on changing the topping on your own Reiki Practice, an eBook is also considered as conduits for energy flow.After researching it a superior intelligence.It is exactly what it is absolutely no need for touch, as well.

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You must be soft and smooth in order to facilitate Reiki.By learning Reiki, you have to learn more and more and is innately intelligent.With thanks to the original practices and often comes up with that idea?Understanding-Reiki.com is a growing and popular practice and time, to symbols passed from generation to generation in a positive energy that Reiki is an openness to explore the various types of physical therapy, massage is expected to practice and their meanings are important when learning and practicing Reiki and will study and take action.After receiving Usui Reiki attunements, people start gravitating towards those healing powers, many of which will teach you the symbols so they don't wish to share to others what you are at.

Can Reiki Cure Alcoholism

Don't take a deep cut heal without scarring.The answer is a energy flows through the use of hands, hands-on Reiki.The whole treatment can bring a state of stress.Complementary therapists and sometimes they use two groups; one to grow.Some Reiki teachers or internet sites that are either measurable or have already had some experience with SHK you will be called an aura.

There is no guarantee that a toenail went black and dropped off!Add other healers to the internet and masters all over the years.There are three levels it takes you a bunch of benefits.Ensure you choose a quality Reiki course and am now in a specific position.This is true of my many long drives to northern California, I began to twitch involuntarily and the child was healthy.

The distance Reiki does not matter to reveal the symbols and told not to mention, an extreme level of membership, you can hear it stated early on that area of the course.They have to loosen off the excess accumulated energy, walk around for centuries, with the universal energies to enter meditation state.The practitioner will be given for either can be relieved by the journey.Instead of giving a healing process of attunement.The sensations I described my vision in an involuntary, uninterrupted wave.

Patients report when they are used to focus on your unique light.The first level, Dolphin healing Reiki, Orca empowerment Reiki being the second degree of Reiki energy above his head.I even try to do is to remember from the base of the world and has the central factor for Reiki.This may be used in Reiki 2 session includes all the people using it.Please be sure to explore the limitless possibilities of spiritual thought.

Some people have connected/used other forms of medicine and those around you.These usually need quicker time and investment.My sister Kim Buckley died of Cancer at the same time it is generally done when working to remove yourself from a Reiki session from your classmates.Today, I will outline the history of Reiki and have a more serious conditions and ailments are said to his left leg.Research has shown that one day and saw Reiki energy goes into his insides unsuspected.

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Reiki Symbol Raku

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Messianism & Moral Radicalism (After the Holocaust) (Steven Schwarzschild)

Avoiding him for years, I knew that reading Steven Schwarzschild’s Pursuit of the Ideal was going to be for me an unpleasant professional chore. He wrote an important article about “Jewish aesthetics” that appears in the volume. But that was all I was going to read, and really it too is a strange intellectual exercise. That essat occupied some three paragraphs in the preface to The Shape of Revelation, where it left an unfavorable impression. I highlighted there the confluence of Judaism and high modernism presented by Schwarzschild against postmodernism, Andy Warhol, and pop-art. That was years ago already. This spring, reading the entire volume ended up being one of the very last things I needed to do in the process of completing draft-chapters on ethics and messianism for new research, in which he will occupy at most a footnote or two. Not without an interest of their own, the essays collected in Pursuit of the Ideal only confirm what I already thought. There is something badly awry, albeit instructive, in this body of work. A radical thinker, a moral radical, Schwarzschild did not grasp very well the tension between the ideal and the real, which he posed in stark binary terms. For him, it was one or the other, with no in-between. As post-Holocaust Jewish thought, it is oddly obtuse to the problem of human suffering.

Schwarzschild invoked messianism years before it was brought into vogue in critical theory, and for that alone his work is worth a look. But to what purpose did he stick his hands into that fire? For someone writing well into the 1980s against political and religious Zionism, maybe Schwarzschild should have known better than to play the messianism card. To be sure, he was utterly prescient in his radical critique of the State of Israel, in particular Jewish racism in Israel, but for the wrong reasons. His critique of Israel conformed to a larger pattern of thought privileging idealism and ethical idealism, transformed into an uncompromising form of moral radicalism that he positioned over against “reality.” Compare him in contrast to post-Holocaust thinkers like Richard Rubenstein, Eliezer Berkovits, and Emil Fackenheim. Politically, they were, of course, conservative to the extreme about Israel. Writing so soon after 1945, Israel was for them a precious icon of life against death. And yet, for all that, the post-Holocaust thinkers understood the State of Israel more or less realistically, more or less historically. In the end, they did not look upon Israel through an idealist-eschatological lens. As they imagined it, Israel was for them a real place meant to meet real human problems in the here and now. From deep within “the religious,” they understood that God was a problem, not an ethical foundation of faith, as per Schwarzschild. They shared none of his austere theological confidence. For them the only important datum was the Jewish people, Israel after Auschwitz.

Associated with ethical socialism, messianism was for Schwarzschild the end all and be all of Judaism. Looking to the future and only to the future, messianism stood for ethical perfection. Ethics and messianism are radical and uncompromising figures of thought strictly opposed to reality (understood to be imperfect, compromised, and cruel). Itself always in pursuit of the ideal, Judaism was marshalled to teach that the world as it is is never what God wants it to be (pp.209-11). This is the essential teaching of “pure monotheism,” presented as the truth of Judaism, as a “clear cut norm,” “authoritative tradition,” with “no doubt,” “in fact,” as “historic fact” (cf. 3, 129,130, 209, 235, 244, 247). Hyperbolic to the extreme, the essence of Judaism is no longer “ethical monotheism,” that moderate bourgeois inheritance from nineteenth century liberal Judaism. Much more stringent Schwarzschild distilled the essence of Judaism into “moral radicalism,” which he posed against ethical eudaemonism and the Aristotelean mean (chapter 8).

As an aesthetic figure, moral radicalism may have been marked by an austere and alien grandeur, but, conceptually, it was mangled at the root. Let’s start with how Schwarzschild consistently confused moral radicalism (i.e. absolute and uncompromising commitments to justice, mercy, and the virtue of humility) with religious radicalism (loving God to the point of excess, the desire to imitate God, to see God, to confront God without any mediating intermediary). Reading Deuteronomy 6:5 in order to lampoon liberal religion, is it possible, he demanded to know, to love God with “a moderate part of one’s heart”?  Schwarzschild has just pulled a bait and switch. If we are to assume that ethics speaks to right human action or to individual virtue and social relations, then the commandment in Deuteronomy to love God with all one’s heart, soul, and might is not ethical per se (p.139). Unethical to the extreme, a “foolish pietism,” to turn all one’s attention to God is to turn one’s eye away from human beings.

Schwarzschild makes the same elision between ethics and religion when writing about Maimonides. Noting the ethical dictum at the end of the Guide that to know God is to practice grace, justice, and righteousness in this world, Schwarzschild fails to comment that this highpoint in the text is the precise moment at which the soul separates from the body, and allowing the perfected intellect to unite with the Active Intellect. We see this too in Schwarzschild’s reading of The Eight Chapters, also by Maimonides, his commentary to the ethical tractate Pirkei Avot. Here again what Schwarzschild himself calls the religious “extremism” in the effort to “see” God certainly outstrips Aristotelean moderation. About this, he was right about Maimonides. But this might be better understood to constitute the limits of Maimonidean ethics, or at best their consummation at the limit. Schwarzschild doesn’t seem to grasp that this extreme comportment is no longer ethical. Poltics and ethics are a condition for intellectual perfection, not its telos. Transcending interhuman and character ethics, the relation is religious-prophetic (pp.142-3).

What about the individual, which, according to Maimonides, Torah must always accommodate? While one can appreciate the religious intensity of the spiritual stretch of the vision, it would be a category mistake to call it ethical as conventionally understood, even as “infinite task.” In Schwarzschild an intense disregard if not for human life as such, then for the value of individual human life as a particular actuality. The contempt shown for “the vulgus” and hoi polio is consistent and withering. Viewed from an eschatological point of view, for Schwarzschild the value of a single human individual life, a suffering human life, pales before “the ideal.” As a general statement, does this hold true. Moral radicalism tout court is unsympathetic as such to human weakness, even to the human suffering that one might have thought, would have propelled it in the first place.

Under the surface, the strong pathos that inflects this transformation of ethical idealism into moral radicalism betrays a unique form of affective volatility undoubtedly pressured by the Holocaust. A mix of heart and heartlessness, the fever pitch of Schwarzschild’s moral radicalism explains why his discussion of the dispute between R. Akiva and ben Petura seems to go off the rails. In this well-known debate in tractate Bava Metzia of the Babylonian Talmud, there are two men in the desert, one in possession of just enough water for the one person to live, but only at the expense of the other. Ben Petura would have them share the water, meaning that both men will die in the desert. The opposing view is Akiva’s. In the Bavli, it is clear that either one person or no person will survive this zero-sum ordeal. Typically regarded in Jewish tradition as winning the argument, Akiva’s ruling is that, in order to survive this state of emergency, the owner of the water should keep the water and preserve his own life, even at the expense of the other.

Raising the stakes to that higher pitch of moral radicalism, Schwarzschild brings a post-Holocaust swerve to this classical conundrum. In his re-reading, the “model situation” under consideration is “actually” one in which it is unclear if either man in the discussion will survive the passage through the desert. Bending the text in light of “cool analysis” and the “history of Jewish martyrdom” leads Schwarzschild to conclude that both men will die in the desert, either as martyrs or as “frustrated survivors.” Bringing the conversation to bear on our own contemporary condition, Schwarzschild now complains, almost suddenly, that no one today wants to talk about “the possibility of future martyrdom.” He is distressed by the thought that in “our times,” “no one seems to have any idea anymore about having to draw the line somewhere, beyond which, as a limit, one may not go without losing one’s humanity, though, perhaps saving one’s life –not to speak of lesser sacrifices” (pp. 132-3). This is the view that we have no choice but to die sometime, and that one should always prefer one’s own death rather than to cause the death of another person. Schwarzschild conflates this with killing, which he insists “Judaism” forbids absolutely.” Having further conflated killing and murder, the appeal of martyrdom is unique to Schwarzschild.  “May my soul die the death of the righteous and my end be like theirs.” Against post-Holocaust theology, Schwarzschild calls “psychopathic” its will to survive at every cost after Auschwitz. Instead he embraces the example of the poet, Yehudah Halevy, as the willingness to suffer and to die (p.134-5). The martyr dies not for the sake of one’s fellow human being; the martyr dies for the sake of God’s name.

Guiding the moral radicalism undergirding this idiosyncratic appeal to martyrdom is the firm and unshakeable trust in the God of Israel. Schwarzschild trusts that God, even if we are to call God cruel, saw to the survival of the Jewish people during the Holocaust and will always see to the survival of the Jewish people (cf. pp 86, 89, 94-8 in chapter 4, “On the Theology of Jewish Survival”). This is the confidence that God will extricate humanity out of the inextricable muck of material existence (p.223). Sorting through old arguments about the soteriological effect of human action versus divine grace, Schwarzschild rejects apocalyptic modes of religious thought (the notion that redemption comes only by way of sudden catastrophic rupture) and also utopianism (defined as the false belief that the world can be made perfect). Against Scholem, Schwarzschild thinks one can separate both concepts from pure messianism (i.e. the notion that there is “some organic relationship between human history and its end” allowing us to grasp that ethical action is a necessary but insufficient condition for ethical perfection).

After the Holocaust, the confidence is fragile. Undercutting his own thesis, Schwarzschild could only say that to pin one’s hope for salvation upon some sudden, apocalyptic divine act of grace and only grace would depend upon an experience so “horrifying,” “morally atrocious” and “experientially painful” that one would never want the messiah to come in the first place (pp.225-6, “On Jewish Eschatology”). But surely, he must have understood that the Holocaust was exactly that — horrifying, morally atrocious, and experientially painful to the extreme. As much as he wants to subvert Scholem’s famous thesis that messianism is a theory of catastrophe, in writing these lines, Schwarzschild only highlights the degree to which the difference between messianism and apocalypticism is a too fine if not altogether non-existent line. For Schwarzschild, the pursuit of the ideal bears up over the weight of brute human reality. In this, it might be more to the point to concede that ethical perfection and moral radicalism are not worth the radically unbearable price of radical suffering.

Furthermore, when framed as radical ethical idealism, messianism is an eminently falsifiable belief. On the one hand, we have already suggested that Schwarzschild is critical of political and religious Zionism. On the other hand, he insists that “statements about life in the Messianic era or in the world to come are not logically self-contradictory or morally counterproductive and, in addition, produce this-worldly ethical injunctions which can both function empirically and be approved of morally” (p.222).  With an eye on rightwing religious radicalism in the State of Israel today, it is hard to follow this logic. As Schwarzschild himself knew well enough, statements about messianism can be ethically counterproductive, even morally atrocious. The so-called difference between messianism and false messianism is another thin line.

Another muddle: the pursuit of the ideal depends upon a view of the world according to which “reality” is too irredeemably rotten to function as a platform for the very ethical action it demands in relation to standards of messianism, perfectionism, and moral radicalism. Instead of determining ethical action in this world, these essays give way to an extreme form of religious love for the sake of the God of Israel. Unto death, the thinking here is no longer ethical if by ethics we mean the morally ambiguous terrain of human virtues and interpersonal relationships. None of this reflects “cool analysis.” It is all rather hot to the touch. The more coherent counterclaim would be that moral universe in this world is not given to the Platonic, mathematical precision that Schwarzschild wants for ethical action. Ours is an experience of the world too often overwhelmed by “horrifying experience” and moral atrocity. To work one’s way around in this world requires the kind of accommodation that Schwarzschild associates with Aristotelean ethics, even as the refusal to accommodate to the reality of this world lies at the heart of this post-Holocaust brand of ethical idealism and moral radicalism.

If Schwarzschild’s thinking is muddled, it because it bangs up against ontological muddles, not just conceptual ones. This is to say that he further confuses the relation between things that perhaps are already mingled at the root. They include muddled relations between what’s real and ideal, between is and ought, between what is permitted and forbidden, between messianism and apocalypticism, between religion and ethics through which there is no way out except perhaps through death. Does this explain the appeal of martyrdom? About the confused or confusing understanding of the relation between the ideal and real, this is what I wrote about Schwarzschild’s essay on Jewish art and modernism in the preface to The Shape of Revelation:

Writing at mid-century after the triumph of modernism…Steven Schwarzschild allows plastic art into Judaism; although once again, word trumps image in order to contrive a uniquely Jewish approach to visual art. Schwarzschild cites the Shulkhan ‘Arukh, to explain that Jewish law permits nonmimetic plastic expression. According to a gloss by Moses Isserles (1520–72), “There are those who hold that images of man or a dragon are not prohibited unless they are complete with all their limbs, but the shape of a head by itself or a body without a head is in no wise forbidden.” Schwarzschild relates this opinion back to the rationalism of Moses Maimonides, who rejected any attempt to stand for the human soul, God’s very image. As Schwarzschild puts it, “To represent physical appearance as the whole person is, therefore, a misrepresentation. The converse is also true: a ‘misrepresentation’ will in fact be a true depiction. . . . To represent the empirical as tout court is, therefore, also to misrepresent God.”

 Deference to the authority of Jewish law notwithstanding, this stilted approach to art trips up on German philosophical idealism. Schwarzschild continues to patrol the anxious boundary separating art from reality, the ideal from the empirical. He wants to avoid that instance in which two objects, the original and its artistic reproduction, appear exactly identical. According to Schwarzschild, art is no longer art when the artwork neither adds to nor detracts from the real world. “What in truth is the difference between a pop art duplicate . . . of a soup can and the original on a display shelf? Hegel was surely right when he held that whenever and wherever the idea is believed to have become identical with the real, the ‘death of art’ has occurred.” Couched in the idealist critique of empirical reality and in a modernism already at war with postmodernism, Schwarzschild’s discussion of the Shulkhan ‘Arukh proudly concludes, “We have thus deduced two of the chief principles of twentieth-century modern art—abstraction and distortion.” Leaving copy realism far behind, abstract art nihilates physical semblance, whereas distortion detracts from and adds to it.

Modern art and Judaism are thereby forced to confirm each other on the basis of philosophical constructs regarding the fixed difference between appearance, representation, and reality. Mostly, the entire exercise remains fundamentally arbitrary, as seen by Schwarzschild’s embrace of Rembrandt, El Greco, and Modigliani, while excluding classical Greek art, its Renaissance revival, French pointillism, and American pop art. The author seems to think that the shadows and light casting human figures in Rembrandt’s paintings obviate their realistic character, while Warhol’s soup cans violate the fragile boundary between real and ideal. Spurious at best, such judgment reflects a rearguard modernism, not

halakhic principle. Kandinsky is far less dogmatic. “Approaching it in one way, he writes, “I see no essential difference between a line one calls ‘abstract’ and a fish. But an essential likeness.’ Line and fish are “living beings,” each with latent capacities. A “miracle,” these capacities are made manifest and radiant by the environment of their composition. And this despite the equally essential difference that a fish “can swim, eat, and be eaten.”

For all that he turned to modernist abstract art, the philosopher was unable, as the artist was able, to negotiate the difference between the abstract or ideal versus the real, between a picture of a can of soup and an actual can of soup. In this, Schwarzschild refused to distinguish between spiritual and physical need. Unable to tolerate the distortions of ethical life, the pursuit of the ideal is unable to accommodate itself sympathetically to human weakness. The best one could say is that the thinking at work in these essays is hyperbolic, unreal like abstract art. But even Kandinsky’s art touched in some way upon the world. Perhaps it is the case that Schwarzschild’s thought was also touched by the world, or rather burnt by the real. By his own admission, the form of thought does not belong to this world. The pursuit can only end falling in on itself, instantiating the problem with moral radicalism in the first place.

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