This week.. Some thoughts.

Since the beginning of this year something has been coming up over and over again.

I started this blog back in 2005, at the time it was just a space to save poetry bits which I liked, hence the name “Al gravitar Rodando” which means At the gravitating turning  (you can read the poem over here, though I warn you it’s more than a bit confusing 🙂 ) .

At the time this title seemed perfectly because of the pure confussion and madness going around my life at the time, I wasn’t a jeweler back then, I was stuck in an office job and the blog was kind of a little creative outlet of mine.

Little did I know back then life would take such a spin, I kept writing on an off.. even personal things of my day to day, I look back and I see my transition into a jeweler, how my business began, when I moved to Guatemala, etc.

Why did I stopped writing?

This is perhaphs one of the silliest things you will read today… I met someone who said ” oh .. I liked what you wrote about bla..bla bla..” … to which I was a bit surprised someone in my same city had even read my blog.. then I discovered that everytime I post something it goes into my subscribers inbox.

Woah!

I know… big deal, huh? That’s kind of what you want isn’t it? to be read, found and followed…

Well it did the complete opposite…

I was extremely shy about posting random ramblings and it just kind of stopped, I didn’t want to be Spam.

I also went into a social media rage.. where I got sick of Facebook, discovered instagram (not many words, bingo!) and then  few things started happening.

First I went to a workshop where they asked us to write during the duration of it (2 weeks) our thoughts .. I followed the “Morning pages” routine which asks to write 750 words every morning, this is about 3 pages.

So I do enjoy writing, apparently I am only shy to be read..

Time went by and I got told by a person I truly admired that I have to start writing NOW. This because we do forget details, processes and thoughts.. so it’s important to keep track, I guess that it is also nice to share, how many nights have I spent reading other people..

I get back home and a close friend says, you should write on the plane back home, write everything that comes through your head…

This week was the closing point.

I was sitting down having coffee with my friends and it seems as if everyone had decided to bring this topic up.. they told me the exact same thing..” You have to write, there is a lot going on.. do it!”

We spoke about people understanding you are not a “writer”, if there are mistakes it’s understandable, there is no more pressure than the one you give yourself, really it’s not a big deal and finally this is the only way to improve your writing as well, simply by doing so.

Funnier still is I go out on a date and also have the person sitting in front of me saying ” You should share more, your costumers might be interested in who is behind the work and these stories”

Since last Thursday I’ve been thinking about it and well I do believe in signs… so here goes, it’s pure stubborness, also the ever present insecurity that hunts me sometimes, but here is to another go this time I want to share things that interest me, battling between having a personal or business blog it’s a bit difficult..

But I reckon bits of things I run along the way are more interesting than just posting pieces of my jewelry.. for this I do an almost daily post in my business Instagram.

So to begin I leave you with this ramble, there will probably be a lot of that, I don’t think I have changed in that sense one bit.

Good night and I leave you with a song!

 

 

 

Lilac Wine

Persona- Carl Jung

“The persona is a mask for the collective psyche. A mask that pretends individuality so that both the self and others believe in that identity although it is really no more than a well played role in which the collective psyche is expressed.

It is a complicated system which mediates between individual consciousness and social community.

IT is a compromise between the individual and society as to what a man is supposed to be.

A theater made to make a certain impression on others and to hide part of the nature of the individual.”

 

More on this article:

“The persona can be understood as the personality we choose over the personality with which we are born. The persona is an expression not necessarily of our true selves, but of our egos: how we wish to see ourselves and for others to see us, as opposed to who we truly and wholly are. As Jung pointed out, to have a persona is not the problem. We all need a persona, as we all need an ego. But the trouble begins when we become overidentified with the persona or ego, believing that these artificial creations totally define our identity.”

On projects and recovering my blog..

Every so often I tend to go into raging “cleaning” spurs.. only in my house, in my workshop is the opposite not a thing it’s ever tossed only moved to make room for more materials..

I have a wooden box where I keep my old notebooks, inside there are bits of papers with a phrase or sometimes just a name, always with the hopeful plan to not forget and to have time to research more on that person.

I have finished quite a few notebooks, I am a fan of pen on paper and I write in a sort of violent non linear matter. I open the notebook,write what I must and then start on another paper with no particular order.. so going back to older notebooks it is just a peek into chaos.

Through 2016 I have to start a year long project, to begin, my gut tells me to pick up the pile of papers and arrange, this way arranging my own mind, what I need to know next hides in the pile.. just waiting to be found.

I decided through the next few months to share with you part of what is written on my notebooks, characters and works that inspire me.

It is hard to share sometimes, hence my lack of blogging, but in forcing myself to re-discover my own notes,  I believe it will help to keep everything in one place and who knows, it might be interesting for someone else as well..

“Maybe we should think of memory itself as a work of art—and a work of art is never finished, only abandoned.”

THE DICTIONARY OF OBSCURE SORROWS http://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/
The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is a compendium of invented words written by John Koenig. Each original definition aims to fill a hole in the language—to give a name to emotions we all might experience but don’t yet have a word for.

Extracts from the The Keeper of Flocks by Alberto Caeiro (Fernando Pessoa)

The work of the poet Alberto Caeiro, Fernando Pessoa’s heteronymous, is a philosophy without philosophy. One that puts into question the cultural tradition that “covers” thought: philosophy, poetry, mysticism, religion. It does so by returning to nature in a way that implies an absence of meaning, concepts, knowledge structures and prejudices that distort the look of things, the experience of Nature and feel of Reality. Because it deals with an unlearning, Caeiro turns to the simple, not-thinking, almost to the absence of the word.

IX

I’m a keeper of flocks.
The flock is my thoughts
And my thoughts are all sensations.
I think with my eyes and with my ears
And with my hands and feet
And with my nose and mouth.

Thinking about a flower is seeing and smelling it
And eating a piece of fruit is knowing its meaning.

That’s why when on a hot day
I feel sad from liking it so much,
And I throw myself lengthwise on the grass
And shut my hot eyes,
And feeling my whole body lying on reality,
I know the truth and I’m happy.

X

The frightful reality of things

Is my everyday discovery.

Each thing is what it is.

How can I explain to anyone how much

I rejoice over this, and find it enough?

To be whole, it is enough to exist.

XXI

If I could take a bite of the whole world
And feel it on my palate
I’d be more happy for a minute or so…
But I don’t always want to be happy.
Sometimes you have to be
Unhappy to be natural…

Not every day is sunny.
When there’s been no rain for a while, you pray for it to come.
So I take unhappiness with happiness
Naturally, like someone who doesn’t find it strange
That there are mountains and plains
And that there are cliffs and grass…

What you need is to be natural and calm
In happiness and in unhappiness,
To feel like someone seeing,
To think like someone walking,
And when it’s time to die, remember the day dies,
And the sunset is beautiful, and the endless night is beautiful…
That’s how it is and that’s how it should be…

(3/7/1914)

XXIV

What we see of things is things.
Why would we see one thing as being another?
Why is it that seeing and hearing would deceive us
If seeing and hearing are seeing and hearing?

The main thing is knowing how to see,
To know how to see without thinking,
To know how to see when you see,
And not think when you see
Or see when you think.

But this (poor us carrying a clothed soul!),
This takes deep study,
A learning to unlearn
And sequestration in freedom from that convent
Where the poets say the stars are the eternal brothers,
And flowers are penitent nuns who only live a day,
But where stars really aren’t anything but stars,
And flowers aren’t anything but flowers,
That being why I call them stars and flowers.

(3/13/1914)

XXVI

At times, on days of perfect and exact light,
When things have all the reality they can,
I ask myself slowly
Why I even attribute
Beauty to things.

Does a flower somehow have beauty?
Somehow a fruit has beauty?
No: they have color and form
And existence only.
Beauty is the name of something that doesn’t exist
I give to things in exchange for the delight they give me.
It means nothing.
Then why do I say, “Things are beautiful”?

Yes, even I, who live only to live,
Invisible, they come to meet me,
Men’s lies in the face of things,
In the face of things that simply exist.

How difficult to be yourself and see only what you can!

(3/11/1914)

XLIV

I suddenly wake up in the night,
And my clock occupies the whole night.
I don’t sense Nature outside.
My room is a dark thing with vaguely white walls.
Outside there’s a quiet like nothing existed.
Only the clock goes on with its noise.
And this little thing of gears on top of my table
Smothers the whole existence of the earth and the sky…
I almost lose myself thinking about what this signifies,
But I come back, and I feel myself smiling in the night with the corners of my mouth,
Because the only thing my clock symbolizes or signifies
Filling the enormous night with its smallness
Is the curious sensation of the enormous night being filled
With its smallness…

(5/7/14)

Silvia Plath

 

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

Bluebird (Charles Bukowski)

There’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I’m not going
to let anybody see
you. there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pur whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he’s
in there.there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?

there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody’s asleep.
I say, I know that you’re there,
so don’t be
sad.
then I put him back,
but he’s singing a little
in there, I haven’t quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it’s nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don’t
weep, do
you?