Sunday, October 25, 2020
ANTIDOTES TO FEAR OF DEATH by Rebecca Elson
Sometimes
as an antidote
To fear of death,
I eat the stars.
Those
nights, lying on my back,
I suck them from the quenching dark
Til they are all, all inside me,
Pepper hot and sharp.
Sometimes,
instead, I stir myself
Into a universe still young,
Still warm as blood:
No
outer space, just space,
The light of all the not yet stars
Drifting like a bright mist,
And all of us, and everything
Already there
But unconstrained by form.
And
sometime it’s enough
To lie down here on earth
Beside our long ancestral bones:
To
walk across the cobble fields
Of our discarded skulls,
Each like a treasure, like a chrysalis,
Thinking: whatever left these husks
Flew off on bright wings.
The Stunning Astronomical Beadwork of Native Artist Margaret Nazon by Maria Popova
Celestial splendor bridging ancient tradition and modern science.
“I wonder that I have so long been insensible to this charm in the skies, the tints of the different stars are so delicate in their variety,” the trailblazing astronomer Maria Mitchell marveled in her journal when she first learned to notice the different hues of the stars, almost transgressively delightful to a woman who had grown up in the Quaker tradition with its customary ban on color. To the suddenly awestruck Mitchell, the stars appeared like “a collection of precious stones” or colorful beads. How she would have relished the celestial beadwork of Native artist Margaret Nazon.
More than a century after Mitchell’s contemporary Ellen Harding Baker embroidered her stunning Solar System quilt to use as an astronomy teaching tool in an era when women had almost no access to formal education in science, and a generation after the great astrophysicist Cecilia Payne, who discovered the chemical composition of the universe, embroidered her supernova, Nazon began beading celestial objects after her partner showed her photographs of the Hubble Space Telescope in 2009 — those now-iconic images that have inspired some of our greatest poets and enchanted the popular imagination like no other visual document of science.
Against the black velvet of pure spacetime, Nazon’s intricate beadwork reaches across abstraction, across incomprehensible expanses, to make galaxies, nebulae, and constellations tangible; to render the wilderness of an impartial universe domesticated and personable. Galaxies millions of lightyears away, hundreds of lightyears wide, become intimate emissaries of spacetime on her 25×25-inch beaded canvases.
A member of the First Nation of Gwich’in, Nazon grew up on the banks of the Mackenzie River in Canada’s Northwestern Territories, steeped in a crafts tradition. She started beading at age 10. The early decorative flowers that began on moccasins and clothing eventually blossomed, half a century later, into the dazzling objects of deep space, rendered using a variety of beading techniques and bead sizes to create a beguiling three-dimensional tactility.
Nazon begins beading before dawn and often works all day, taking only short breaks between sessions, beading to the sound of classical music and jazz — Billie Holiday is a favorite. Her largest work, a triptych of the Andromeda Galaxy, took her some 200 hours.
Nazon marries integrity of representation with artistic interpretation, sometimes deliberately straying from the colors captured by the Hubble toward her favorite combination: blue and yellow, colors she associates with happiness and beauty.
With no background in science and only a rudimentary understanding of the astronomy she embroiders, her work celebrates not the cerebral but the spiritual allure of the cosmos — the way it beckons to the most elemental part of us, the part that possessed Ptolemy to scribble in the margins of his notebook two millennia ago: “I know that I am mortal by nature and ephemeral, but when I trace at my pleasure the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies… I stand in the presence of Zeus himself and take my fill of ambrosia.”
Complement with the stunning celestial art of the self-taught 17th-century German astronomer and artist Maria Clara Eimmart, then revisit U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith’s ode to the Hubble Space Telescope, on which her father worked as one of NASA’s first black engineers, and this Hubble classic composed by Adrienne Rich a generation earlier.
https://www.brainpickings.org/2019/10/08/margaret-nazon-celestial-beadwork/
What It Takes to Remain Unaffected (My strength means I stand my ground regardless of who stands with me) by Vanessa Torre
I’ve never been a huge fan of
stoicism. I never finished reading Marcus Aurelius. Instead, I’m a highly
sensitive person. At times, it’s my best quality. I easily empathize with
people. Other times, it’s my Achilles heel. The words and actions of others can
tear me apart.
I’ve tried to change my
internal makeup and become less emotional. It doesn’t work that way. I can’t
just flip a switch in my head and turn the emotions off. I don’t think I’d want
to if I could.
When emotions rule our lives
and behaviors, it causes suffering. That doesn't mean emotions are bad things,
though. We need them. They make us human. Joy and pain are part of life. We
can’t have one and not the other. I don’t want to live in a world where I have
neither just to spare myself the pain part. That’s not living.
The critical point is
balancing how much we let other things control our emotions. Our emotions
determine how we react to different situations. Ultimately, that reaction
should come from within us rather than outside of us. This is what creates our
personal agency.
We’re all resilient beings.
Our success in controlling our emotions is our ability to harness our
resiliency.
What our resiliency depends
on is owning our shit. We make mistakes. We falter. We struggle. We make
decisions that are good and bad. This is common to everyone. We need to let go
of whatever anyone else does or thinks and focus solely on what is happening
within us.
For me, it involves remaining
unaffected by things that are beyond my control. That includes other people,
their emotions, and their reactions to mine.
This is where intention comes
into play. The more I live a life of good intention, the easier it is for me to
stand with my emotions and my decisions and accept them.
Focus here. Everything else
over there is merely a distraction from me honoring my sense of self. I know
right from wrong and true from false. I practice this and let it guide me. I
control the narrative of my life.
Remaining unaffected means
understanding that others may have bad intentions and letting that be their
problem, not ours. It may be an act of agression against us, but we don’t have
to own that. They do.
Recently, I had someone say a
few awful things about me. They were judgmental and harsh. I felt a flood of
feelings I never wanted. Anger. Frustration. Betrayal. Confusion. Shame. More
than anything, I felt misunderstood.
This is not my problem, but
for several hours I let it turn me into an emotional mess. What it took for me
to stop being affected by this was to understand that they are not me. I can’t
control what they say or do. The more I know myself and understand who I am,
why I do what I do, and how I feel about certain situations, the more I can
remain unaffected.
Standing on our own sometimes
means that we have to stand alone. Not everyone has to occupy that space with
us. The people that do are beautiful. The people that don’t shouldn’t matter.
The more I can own what I
have done that has brought negativity into my life, the more I can disconnect
with the actions of others. Let that be their problem It’s not mine. They do
not get to write my narrative.
At the end of the day, I ask
myself a few questions. Did I do the best I could today? Did I stay true to my
beliefs? Did I act with a pure heart?
If I can answer yes to those
questions in complete honesty, I sleep well. If any of those answers are no, I
think about if amends need to be made and how to restore even the smallest part
of myself. This keeps the ground I stand on firm. No matter how hard the wind
blows, I can’t let myself go to the wind. My place is here.
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