The Conflicted Love Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller

How an intense, unclassifiable relationship shaped the history of modern thought.

Brain Pickings| (getpocket.com)

  • Maria Popova

“I had seen the Universe,” the revolutionary education reformer and entrepreneur Elizabeth Peabody recalled of first meeting the adolescent Margaret Fuller (May 23, 1810–July 19, 1850), who had already mastered Latin, French, Italian, Greek, and pure mathematics, and was reading two or three lectures in philosophy every morning just for mental discipline. “I am determined on distinction,” Fuller wrote to her former teacher at fifteen. By thirty, this fierce determination would establish her as the most erudite woman in America.

In Fuller’s twenty-fifth year, she met the person with whom she would form her most intense lifelong bond and who would in turn come to consider her his greatest influence: Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803–April 27, 1882). “She bound in the belt of her sympathy and friendship all whom I know and love,” he would write upon her tragic and untimely death. “Her heart, which few knew, was as great as her mind, which all knew.” Occupying a significant portion of Figuring, from which this essay is adapted, Emerson and Fuller’s bond would challenge conventional relationship categories and shape the foundational philosophical, political, and aesthetic ideas and ideals of contemporary culture.

Immersed in the intellectual atmosphere of liberal New England, Fuller had long yearned to know the man revered as the country’s most daring intellect. But it was Emerson who made the first overture to the young woman whose reputation had rippled to Concord. He asked Elizabeth Peabody for a formal introduction. In early 1835, Peabody arranged for her young friend to visit Emerson in his home.

At first jarred by Fuller’s freely expressed strong opinions and lack of deference, Emerson was eventually won over — quite possibly by a poem she had recently written and published in a Boston newspaper, under the near-anonymous byline “F,” elegizing the death of Emerson’s beloved younger brother; or possibly by her countercultural proclamation that “all the marriages she knew were a mutual degradation,” which Waldo — as the Sage of Concord was known to his intimates — later reported to Peabody. He affirmed her admiration for Fuller’s intellect, writing that “she has the quickest apprehension.” Within two years, Fuller would become the first woman to attend Emerson’s all-male Transcendental Club — an occasional gathering of like-minded liberals, in which even Peabody was not included, despite the fact that she had coined the term Transcendentalism to define the philosophical current sweeping New England.

But Margaret and Waldo’s initial meeting of minds soon became a contact point magnetized by something beyond the intellect — something she hoped, at least for a while, would propel each toward the “fulness of being” she held up as the ultimate aim of existence, something that would prompt him to shudder in the pages of his journal: “There is no terror like that of being known.”

One of Arthur Rackham’s 1926 illustrations for Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

In 1839, having used her meager earnings as a teacher and writer to put her younger brothers through Harvard — an institution closed to women — Fuller founded a groundbreaking series of “Conversations” for women, which would seed the ideas harvested by the feminist movement of the twentieth century. Held at Elizabeth Peabody’s house in Boston on the mornings of Emerson’s successful Wednesday evening lectures, so that commuters could attend both in a single trip, these conversational salons explored subjects ranging from education to ethics, with session titles like “Influence,” “Mistakes,” “Creeds,” “The Ideal,” and “Persons Who Never Awake to Life in This World.”

After the staggering success of the first gathering, when a small group of Transcendentalists set out to do in print what Fuller was doing in conversation, Emerson proposed her for the editorship of a new periodical, promising her a share of the proceeds large enough to alleviate her ongoing financial struggles. Fuller accepted. They called this unexampled journal The Dial — the title that cofounder Bronson Alcott had given to his daily log of sayings by his two young daughters, Anna and Louisa May. Nothing like it had existed before — it was America’s first truly independent magazine, unaffiliated with any university or church, devoted not to a religious ideology or a single genre of literature, but to a kaleidoscope of intellectual and creative curiosity: philosophy, poetry, art, science, law, criticism. A century and a half before the TED conference claimed “ideas worth spreading” as a motto, Emerson envisioned The Dial as precisely that — a publication “so broad & great in its survey that it should lead the opinion of this generation on every great interest,” a sort of manual on “the whole Art of Living.” Fuller aimed even higher. On the prospectus printed on the back of the inaugural issue, published on July 4, 1840 — just after her thirtieth birthday — she vowed to aim “not at leading public opinion, but at stimulating each man to judge for himself, and to think more deeply and more nobly, by letting him see how some minds are kept alive by a peculiar self-trust.”

Art by Ofra Amit from A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader.

In the course of their professional collaboration, Margaret and Waldo’s relationship swelled with complexity that strained the boundaries of friendship, of soul kinship, even of intellectual infatuation.

Waldo, sorrowing in an intellectually unriveting marriage, bonded with Margaret in a way that he would with no one else — not even his wife and children. “Most of the persons whom I see in my own house I see across a gulf,” he anguished in his own journal. “I cannot go to them nor they come to me.” He and Margaret found themselves on one side of an invisible wall, the rest of the world on the other. But neither knew what to make of this uncommon bond that didn’t conform to any existing template. The richest relationships are often those that don’t fit neatly into the preconceived slots we have made for the archetypes we imagine would populate our lives — the friend, the lover, the parent, the sibling, the mentor, the muse. We meet people who belong to no single slot, who figure into multiple categories at different times and in different magnitudes. We then must either stretch ourselves to create new slots shaped after these singular relationships, enduring the growing pains of self-expansion, or petrify.

Margaret Fuller experienced friendship and romance much as she did male and female — in a nonbinary way. A century before Virginia Woolf subverted the millennia-old cultural rhetoric of gender with her assertion that “in each of us two powers preside, one male, one female,” making her case for the androgynous mind as the best possible mind, “resonant and porous… naturally creative, incandescent and undivided,” Fuller denounced the dualism of gender and insisted that “there is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.” The boundary, she argued far ahead of Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir in her groundbreaking Woman in the Nineteenth Century, is indeed porous, so that a kind of ongoing transmutation takes place: “Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid” as male and female “are perpetually passing into one another.” Fuller was highly discriminating about her intimate relationships, but once she admitted another into the innermost chambers of her being, she demanded of them nothing less than everything — having tasted Goethe’s notion of “the All,” why salivate over mere fragments of feeling?

But this boundless and all-consuming emotional intensity eventually repelled its objects — a parade of brilliant and beautiful men and women, none of whom could fully understand it, much less reciprocate it. Hers was a diamagnetic being, endowed with nonbinary magnetism yet repelling by both poles. Falling back on his trustiest faculty, Waldo tried to reason his way out of the emotional disorientation of his complex relationship with Margaret:

I would that I could, I know afar off that I cannot, give the lights and shades, the hopes and outlooks that come to me in these strange, cold-warm, attractive-repelling conversations with Margaret, whom I always admire, most revere when I nearest see, and sometimes love, — yet whom I freeze, and who freezes me to silence, when we seem to promise to come nearest.

Illustration by Margaret C. Cook for a rare 1913 edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.

To hold space for complexity, to resist the violence of containing and classifying what transcends familiar labels, takes patience and a certain kind of moral courage, which Waldo seemed unable — or unwilling — to conjure up. “O divine mermaid or fisher of men, to whom all gods have given the witch-hazel-wand… I am yours & yours shall be,” he told Margaret in a letter in the early autumn of 1840. But the following day, he lashed out in his journal, writing at Margaret what he wouldn’t write to her:

You would have me love you. What shall I love? Your body? The supposition disgusts you. What you have thought & said?… I see no possibility of loving any thing but what now is, & is becoming; your courage, your enterprize, your budding affection, your opening thought, your prayer, I can love, — but what else?

This false notion of the body as the testing ground for intimacy has long warped our understanding of what constitutes a romantic relationship. The measure of intimacy is not the quotient of friction between skin and skin, but something else entirely — something of the love and trust, the joy and ease that flow between two people as they inhabit that private world walled off from everything and everyone else.

Perhaps Waldo did recognize that he and Margaret had an undeniable intimate partnership, and it was this very recognition that made him bristle at the sense of being coerced into coupledom. He was, after all, the poet laureate of self-reliance, who believed that for the independent man “the Universe is his bride.” And yet, although he experienced himself as an individual, he had somehow conceded to the union of marriage and wedded a human bride — one who had grown to depend on him for her emotional well-being, which Waldo now experienced as a dead weight. He called it a “Mezentian marriage” — a grim allusion to the Roman myth of the cruel King Mezentius, known for tying men face-to-face with corpses and leaving them to die. He raged in his journal:

Marriage is not ideal but empirical. It is not the plan or prospect of the soul, this fast union of one to one; the soul is alone… It is itself the universe & must realize its progress in ten thousand beloved forms & not in one.

Margaret, too, tried to figure the form of their relationship. She wrote to Waldo with unprecedented candor, accusing him of being unclear in his feelings for her and commanding him to clarify where he stood, with an awareness that she might be yearning for more from him than he could ever give her:

We are to be much to one another. How often have I left you despairing and forlorn. How often have I said, this light will never understand my fire; this clear eye will never discern the law by which I am filling my circle; this simple force will never interpret my need to manifold being.

Acknowledging the agitation that bedeviled them both as they tried to make sense of their relationship, she promised that “this darting motion, this restless flame shall yet be attempered and subdued.” She sensed between them an infinite possibility, but “the sense of the infinite exhausts and exalts; it cannot therefore possess me wholly.” The paradox, of course, is that there is always something irresistibly vitalizing about our irresolvable passions, about that which we can never fully possess nor can fully possess us — some potent antidote to the wearying monotony of our settled possessions. “People wish to be settled,” Emerson would write in one of his most famous essays, published just a few months later, “[but] only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.” For now, he painted the dark contours of this recognition in his journal: “Between narrow walls we walk: insanity on one side, & fat dulness on the other.” Margaret, sensing the bipolar pull of his desires, demanded that he choose a pole:

Did not you ask for a “foe” in your friend? Did not you ask for a “large and formidable nature”? But a beautiful foe, I am not yet, to you. Shall I ever be? I know not.

And yet she told Waldo that with him alone she felt “so at home” that she couldn’t imagine finding another love as quenching: “I know not how again to wander and grope, seeking my place in another Soul.”

Art by Salvador Dalí from a rare 1975 edition of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

But Emerson was not looking to be “at home” in anyone other than himself. Already feeling his independent nature stifled by his marriage, he could not — would not — let himself be trapped in a second relationship, his soul cemented and Mezented with a second weight of expectations. After nearly a month of stupefied silence, he finally responded to Margaret in a lengthy and conflicted letter:

My dear Margaret,

I have your frank & noble & affecting letter, and yet I think I could wish it unwritten. I ought never to have suffered you to lead me into any conversation or writing on our relation, a topic from which with all my persons my Genius ever sternly warns me away. I was content & happy to meet on a human footing a woman of sense & sentiment with whom one could exchange reasonable words & go away assured that wherever she went there was light & force & honour. That is to me a solid good; it gives value to thought & the day; it redeems society from that foggy & misty aspect it wears so often seen from our retirements; it is the foundation of everlasting friendship. Touch it not — speak not of it — and this most welcome natural alliance becomes from month to month, — & the slower & with the more intervals the better, — our air & diet. A robust & total understanding grows up resembling nothing so much as the relation of brothers who are intimate & perfect friends without having ever spoken of the fact. But tell me that I am cold or unkind, and in my most flowing state I become a cake of ice. I feel the crystals shoot & drops solidify. It may do for others but it is not for me to bring the relation to speech… Ask me what I think of you & me, — & I am put to confusion.

Four days earlier, he had entreated her: “Give me a look through your telescope or you one through mine; — an all explaining look.” Now he argues that they can neither be fully explained to the other, nor fully seen — they are as constitutionally different as if they “had been born & bred in different nations.” Inverting Margaret’s accusation of his withholding, he points out her own opacity:

You say you understand me wholly. You cannot communicate yourself to me. I hear the words sometimes but remain a stranger to your state of mind.

Yet we are all the time a little nearer. I honor you for a brave & beneficent woman and mark with gladness your steadfast good will to me. I see not how we can bear each other anything else than good will.

Illustration by Margaret C. Cook for a rare 1913 edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.

This undulating emotional confusion runs through the entire letter as Waldo struggles to reconcile his seemingly irreconcilable desires — not to lose his uncommon and electrifying bond with Margaret, but not to be trapped in bondage. He tells her that a “vast & beautiful Power” has brought them into each other’s lives and likens them to two stars shining together in a single constellation. He urges her to let things be as they have been, to savor their uncommon connection without demanding more:

Let us live as we have always done, only ever better, I hope, & richer. Speak to me of every thing but myself & I will endeavor to make an intelligible reply. Allow me to serve you & you will do me a kindness; come & see me… let me visit you and I shall be cheered as ever by the spectacle of so much genius & character as you have always the gift to draw around you.

We suffer by wanting different things often at odds with one another, but we suffer even more by wanting to want different things.

In their early correspondence, Waldo had articulated to Margaret a sentiment about the problem of translation in poetry, which now seemed to perfectly capture the problem of translating their interior worlds to each other:

We are armed all over with these subtle antagonisms which as soon as we meet begin to play, and translate all poetry into such stale prose!… All association must be compromise.

A decade later, the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer would limn this central paradox of intimacy in the philosophical allegory of the porcupine dilemma: In the cold of winter, a covenant of porcupines huddle together seeking warmth. As they draw close, they begin wounding each other with their quills. Warmed but maimed, they instinctually draw apart, only to find themselves shivering and longing for the heat of other bodies again. Eventually, they discover that unwounding warmth lies in the right span of space — close enough to share in a greater collective temperature, but not so close as to inflict the pricks of proximity.

How Margaret and Waldo negotiated that elusive optimal distance, how she finally found unreserved love elsewhere when she was least expecting it, and how her rich and enduring intellectual bond with Emerson shaped both of their bodies of work and the entire history of American letters, unfolds throughout the rest of Figuring.

For more excerpts from it, see Fuller on what makes a great leader, Emily Dickinson’s electric love letters to her own unclassifiable beloved, Rachel Carson’s timely advice to the next generations, Nobel-winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli on science, spirituality, and our search for meaning, the story of how the forgotten sculptor Harriet Hosmer paved the way for women in art, Herman Melville’s passionate and heartbreaking love letters to his neighbor and literary hero Nathaniel Hawthorne, and a stunning astrophysical reading of the Auden poem that became the book’s epigraph.

This article was originally published on June 5, 2019, by Brain Pickings, and is republished here with permission.

Jacob and the angel: Wrestling to reconcile body and spirit

by Kittredge Cherry | Oct 20, 2019 (qspirit.net)

When Jacob wrestled with the angel in the Bible, they embodied the struggle between sexuality and spirituality. Artists have created many homoerotic images of the scene over the centuries.

The story of Jacob wrestling (Genesis 32:24-31) will be read at many churches worldwide this Sunday as the alternate lectionary reading for Oct. 20, 2019.

Many have interpreted the story as a struggle between material and spiritual needs, but it is especially powerful for queer people who are trying to reconcile their sexuality and their faith. Jacob refused to give up the fight until he forced a blessing out of God. Like Jacob, LGBTQ people can also win God’s blessing by continuing to wrestle with our faith, regardless of those who condemn as sinners.

The story in Genesis begins when Jacob, ancestor and namesake of the Israelites, is alone one night.  A mysterious stranger comes to him. Scripture refers to the stranger as a man, God, and an angel (Hosea 12:4). He wrestles with Jacob until dawn. Then the angel wants to leave, but Jacob insists, “I will not let you go, unless you bless me.”

The angel gives him a new name and identity as Israel, which can be translated as “one who has prevailed with God.” Jacob asks to know the angel’s name, but he just gives a blessing and leaves. Alone again, Jacob marvels, “I have seen God face to face and lived.”

Jacob is honored in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. For Christians, some see the pre-incarnate Christ himself as the mysterious stranger who wrestled with Jacob.

A notable nude and rather homoerotic “Jacob and the Angel” was sculpted by Hendrik Andersen (1872-1940), lover of famed British-American novelist Henry James.

The story raises intriguing questions. What was the nature of the “wrestling” that went on all night long? Whether or not there was an erotic interaction, the friendly conclusion affirms that God wants to relate to human beings as equals. God rewards those who challenge God.
___
Related link:
Wrestling with God” at the Queering the Church Blog is a queer reflection on Jacob and the angel.

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Top image credit:
“Jacob Wrestling with the Angel” by Leon Bonnat (1876) Wikimedia Commons

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This post is part of the LGBTQ Saints series by Kittredge Cherry. Traditional and alternative saints, people in the Bible, LGBT and queer martyrs, authors, theologians, religious leaders, artists, deities and other figures of special interest to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people and our allies are covered.

Copyright © Kittredge Cherry. All rights reserved.
Qspirit.net presents the Jesus in Love Blog on LGBTQ spirituality.

Kittredge Cherry

Kittredge Cherry

Founder at Q SpiritKittredge Cherry is a lesbian Christian author who writes regularly about LGBTQ spirituality.She holds degrees in religion, journalism and art history.She was ordained by Metropolitan Community Churches and served as its national ecumenical officer, advocating for LGBTQ rights at the National Council of Churches and World Council of Churches.

Coming Through

By Heather C. Williams, H.W., M.

December 27, 1987

Coming through!

I AM coming through!

The dark night of misperceived relationships
Is dissolving before my eyes as I see
The true shape of Loving Unconditionally.

Talk to me about financial acceptance,
Rewards and percentages.
I can afford to receive
Now that I can give what I treasure.

I actively perceive my greatest good.
I actively let go of the package it uses to attract my attention. Adversity that once energized my longing for a Higher Vision is now seen as a sense testimony to Translate.

I AM coming through!

Together like family members clustered around the gene pool,
My thoughts congregate with precision timing creating everything
I call my world.
Predictable, most of it.
Occasionally I am awakened by an unexpected face, sound, color… A potential new world,
Whereupon my highest and deepest joy comes splashing through.

I AM coming through!

Throw off the heavy robes of belief in lack and limitation.
Burn the bags of “not-good-enough-yet” stuff.
Celebrate the arrival of the parade of “Self-Directed-Individuals” all around.
Speak of it quietly amidst wet morning kisses with your lover.
We are parenting a New Self!
This is the greatest hour.
Let yourself be embraced by Unconditional Love.

I AM coming through and I AM loving myself exactly as I AM!

Werewolves Of London

Nina Album – Excitable Boy 1978 Warren Zevon – Vocals, Piano Waddy Wachtel – Guitar, Producer Mick Fleetwood – Drums John McVie – Bass Written by Warren Zevon, Waddy Wachtel, Leroy P. Marinell Video by Nina

Werewolves Of London Warren Zevon

I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand
Walking through the streets of SoHo in the rain
He was looking for a place called Lee Ho Fook’s
Gonna get a big dish of beef chow meinAaoooooo
Werewolves of London
AaooooooAaoooooo
Werewolves of London
AaooooooYou hear him howling around your kitchen door
You better not let him in
Little old lady got mutilated late last night
Werewolves of London againAaoooooo
Werewolves of London
AaooooooAaoooooo
Werewolves of London
AaooooooHe’s the hairy-handed gent who ran amuck in Kent
Lately he’s been overheard in Mayfair
You better stay away from him
He’ll rip your lungs out, Jim
I’d like to meet his tailorAaoooooo
Werewolves of London
AaooooooAaoooooo
Werewolves of…

Source: LyricFind

(Submitted by Gwyllm Llwydd.)

The Washington Post’s Mensa Invitational

The Washington Post’s Mensa Invitational 

once again invited readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition.Here  are the  winners:

1.  CASHtration (n.): The act of buying a house,  which renders the subject financially impotent …for an indefinite period of time.

2. Ignoranus:  A person who’s both stupid and an asshole.

3. Intaxicaton:  Euphoria at  getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize  it was your money to start with.

4. ReinTarnation:  Coming back to  life as a hillbilly.

5. ‘BOZONE’ (n.):  The substance  surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately,  shows little sign of ever breaking down in the near future.

6. Foreploy:  Any  misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid 

7. Giraffiti: Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.

8. Sar-chasm:  The enormous GULF  between the author of sarcastic wit …and the person who doesn’t get it.

9. Inoculatte:  To take coffee intravenously when one is running  late.

10.  Osteopornosis: A degenerate disease.  (This one got extra credit!)

11. ‘Karma’geddon:  It’s like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it’s kinda like, a real serious bummer, huh?

12. Decafalon  (n):The  grueling event of getting through the day consuming  only things that are good for you.

13. ‘Glibido’:  All talk and no action.

14. DOPEler  Effect: The  tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they are fired at you rapidly.

15. Arachnoleptic  Fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after you’ve accidentally walked through a spider web.

16. Beelzebug  (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito, that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast  out.

17. Caterpallor (n.):  The color you turn after finding half a worm in the fruit you’re eating.

+++The WashingtonPost has also  published the winning submissions to its yearly  contest, in which readers are asked to supply  alternate meanings for common words.

And the  winners are:

1. Coffee, n.  The person upon whom one coughs.

2. Flabbergasted,  adj. Appalled by discovering how much weight one has gained. 

3.  Abdicate, v. To give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.

4. Esplanade, v.  To attempt an explanation while drunk.

5. Willy-nilly, adj.  Impotent. 

6.  Negligent, adj. Absent mindedly answering  the door when wearing only a  nightgown.

7. Lymph, v.  To walk with a  lisp.  (I think this one might imply that “lymphatic” would be to dance with an obsessive lisp??)

8. Gargoyle, n.  Olive-flavored mouthwash.

9. Flatulence, n.  Emergency vehicle that picks up someone who has been run over  by a steamroller.

10. BALDERdash,  n. A rapidly receding hairline.

11. TES Ticle, n.  A humorous question on an exam.

12. RECtitude, n.  The formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists. 

13. Pokemon, n. A Rastafarian proctologist. 

14. Oyster, n. A person who sprinkles his  conversation with Yiddishisms. 

15. Frisbeetarianism, n. The belief that, after death, the soul flies up onto the roof …and gets stuck there.

16. Circumvent, n. An opening in the front of  boxer shorts worn by Jewish  men.

(Courtesy of William P. Chiles)

If You Master This Listening Technique, You’ll Hear What People Don’t Say Out Loud

Learning to “hear offers” like an improviser can turn obstacles into opportunities.

Inc.|

  • Cathy Salit (getpocket.com)

Photo from Getty Images.

Most of the leaders I work with as a coach and trainer already know they need to be better listeners — they’ve read the articles about the central role listening plays in building teams, managing change, achieving strategic buy-in, etc. They’ve seen the research that correlates effective listening with a broad range of leadership attributes and business success, and they’ve taken Lee Iacocca’s famous frustration to heart.

So how can you turn listening from a shortcoming to a superpower?

Let’s start with what listening is not (though in my experience this covers much of what passes for listening in business). Listening is not transactional; listening is not passive; listening is not waiting your turn to talk.

Superpower listening is different — it’s active, it’s curious, it’s creative, and it’s collaborative. And most importantly, it’s a performance.

And performing as a listener has everything to do with improvisation. If you’ve ever seen improv comedy, you’ve experienced the kind of magic that takes place as people perform what looks and sounds like a very funny, well-rehearsed script. But there is no script. No rehearsal. No plan.

Improvisers can create theater without a script for one reason: They are awesome listeners. Improvisers perform listening in a very particular way. They listen to build with others. They listen to create with others. They listen to collaborate with others. Improvisers are open and willing to say yes to their co-performers, follow them anywhere, and co-create with everything they are given. I call this act of listening hearing offers.

And in every conversation, you’re presented with all kinds of offers. Even if the opposite appears to be the case. A colleague ignoring your question is an offer. Your team getting the research that you asked for done early is an offer. A client saying he’s not interested in whatever you have to sell is an offer. A laugh at your joke is an offer. Your boss not looking up at you when you come into her office is an offer. All of this — the good, the bad, and the to-be-determined — they’re all offers that you can create with, if you hear them.

But most of us ignore many of the offers that are right there in front of us, for countless reasons. Maybe you’re afraid you don’t know what to say, or you don’t really understand, so you just soldier on even as the conversation crumbles. Or you disagree, and put all your energy into arguing. Or you get attached to the locomotive of your agenda and can’t get off that train. Or you’re worried you’ll sound stupid, say the wrong thing, or just plain run out of time.

All of the above have probably been true for everyone, at least some of the time. But armed with the improviser’s superpowers of performing as a listener (by hearing offers and building with them), you can overcome the multitude of obstacles and turn listening into an act of co-creation with other people.

Try these exercises to warm up your listening superpowers:

1. Pick an upcoming meeting or a one-on-one conversation and experiment with making listening your first priority. Don’t listen for anything. Instead, notice how many offers come your way (remember, they’re not always positive). Pause longer than you normally would before you respond, and when you do, pick an offer, acknowledge that you heard it, and then build on it.

2. Take special notice of body language offers. How someone sits, their facial expressions, their walk, what they’re looking at, and more. Listen, see, and respond to those offers.

3. Perform curiosity: Do you have a friend or colleague you disagree with about something? Have a conversation in which (for once) you don’t try to convince them that they’re wrong, but instead find out everything you can about how they see the topic or issue.

4. Ask a colleague or friend to tell you a story about him or herself that you’ve never heard. Sit back, and listen.

This article was originally published on June 5, 2017, by Inc., and is republished here with permission.

Your Horoscopes — Week Of October 29, 2019 (theonion.com)

Scorpio | Oct. 23 to Nov. 21

Everyone wants to live forever, but in your case, it would just mean more time being chased by an angry swarm of bees.

Sagittarius | Nov. 22 to Dec. 21

Your extremely trying week will not be improved by your decision to deal with all problems by leaning on the horn.

Capricorn | Dec. 22 to Jan. 19

Nobody likes a know-it-all, but then, you probably knew that already, you smug jerk.

Aquarius | Jan. 20 to Feb. 18

You should have more folding chairs around. If wrestlers come over and can’t find one, they’ll use something else.

Pisces | Feb. 19 to March 20

Success is often difficult to define, though for you, it pretty much boils down to filling that cup with clean urine.

Aries | March 21 to April 19

The throbbing inside your skull will finally come to a stop this week, signaling the end of the trematode’s gestation period.

Taurus | April 20 to May 20

The stars foresee a second job promotion in the days to come, though they should probably be telling Dave about it instead of you.

Gemini | May 21 to June 20

You’ll soon possess the courage of 10 men, and the sexually transmitted diseases of about 50.

Cancer | June 21 to July 22

The hounds of hell will be at your door this week, clawing furiously to be let out and use the bathroom.

Leo | July 23 to Aug. 22

Despite the offer of a brand-new car, an all-expenses-paid trip to Greece, and a four-piece living room set, you’ll once again go for the box with the question mark on it.

Virgo | Aug. 23 to Sept. 22

You’ll die a little bit on the inside this week, and a whole heck of a lot on the outside.

Libra | Sept. 23 to Oct. 22

It’ll be a nuisance wearing the Nielsen box on your head all week, but at least you’ll find out that your viewership goes up when you’re fighting or having sex.

Legendary Cellist Pablo Casals, at Age 93, on Creative Vitality and How Working with Love Prolongs Your Life

“The man who works and is never bored is never old.”

Brain Pickings|

  • Maria Popova (getpocket.com)

Long before there was Yo-Yo Ma, there was Spanish Catalan cellist and conductor Pablo Casals (December 29, 1876–October 22, 1973), regarded by many as the greatest cellist of all time. The recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the U.N. Peace Medal for his unflinching dedication to justice and his lifelong stance against oppression and dictatorship, Casals was as much an extraordinary artist as he was an extraordinary human being — a generous and kind man of uncommon compassion and goodness of heart, a passionate spirit in love with life, and an unflinching idealist.

And yet, like many exceptional people, he cultivated his character through an early brush with suffering. In his late teenage years, already a celebrated prodigy, he underwent an anguishing spiritual crisis of the kind Tolstoy faced in his later years and came close to suicide. But with the loving support of his mother, he regained his center and went on to become a man of great talent, great accomplishment, and great vitality.

To mark his ninetieth birthday, Casals began a collaboration with photojournalist Albert E. Kahn that would eventually become the 1970 autobiography-of-sorts Joys and Sorrows (public library) — one of the most magnificent perspectives of the creative life ever committed to words.

Straight from the opening, Casals cracks open the essence of his extraordinary character and the source of his exuberant life-energy with a beautiful case for how purposeful work is the true fountain of youth:

On my last birthday I was ninety-three years old. That is not young, of course. In fact, it is older than ninety. But age is a relative matter. If you continue to work and to absorb the beauty in the world about you, you find that age does not necessarily mean getting old. At least, not in the ordinary sense. I feel many things more intensely than ever before, and for me life grows more fascinating.

Recounting being at once delighted and unsurprised by an article in the London Sunday Times about an orchestra in the Caucasus composed of musicians older than a hundred, he considers the spring of their vitality:

In spite of their age, those musicians have not lost their zest for life. How does one explain this? I do not think the answer lies simply in their physical constitutions or in something unique about the climate in which they live. It has to do with their attitude toward life; and I believe that their ability to work is due in no small measure to the fact that they do work. Work helps prevent one from getting old. I, for one, cannot dream of retiring. Not now or ever. Retire? The word is alien and the idea inconceivable to me. I don’t believe in retirement for anyone in my type of work, not while the spirit remains. My work is my life. I cannot think of one without the other. To “retire” means to me to begin to die. The man who works and is never bored is never old. Work and interest in worthwhile things are the best remedy for age. Each day I am reborn. Each day I must begin again.

For the past eighty years I have started each day in the same manner.

With great elegance, he contrasts the dullness of mindless routine with the exhilaration of mindful ritual — something many great artists engineer into their days. In a sentiment Henry Miller would come to echo only two years later in his own memorable meditation on the secret of remaining forever young, Casals writes of his daily practice:

It is not a mechanical routine but something essential to my daily life. I go to the piano, and I play two preludes and fugues of Bach. I cannot think of doing otherwise. It is a sort of benediction on the house. But that is not its only meaning for me. It is a rediscovery of the world of which I have the joy of being a part. It fills me with awareness of the wonder of life, with a feeling of the incredible marvel of being a human being. The music is never the same for me, never. Each day is something new, fantastic, unbelievable. That is Bach, like nature, a miracle!

Casals, indeed, finds great vitalization in bearing witness to nature’s mastery of the self-renewal so essential for the human spirit over the long run:

I do not think a day passes in my life in which I fail to look with fresh amazement at the miracle of nature. It is there on every side. It can be simply a shadow on a mountainside, or a spider’s web gleaming with dew, or sunlight on the leaves of a tree. I have always especially loved the sea. Whenever possible, I have lived by the sea… It has long been a custom of mine to walk along the beach each morning before I start to work. True, my walks are shorter than they used to be, but that does not lessen the wonder of the sea. How mysterious and beautiful is the sea! how infinitely variable! It is never the same, never, not from one moment to the next, always in the process of change, always becoming something different and new.

In the same way, Casals argues, we renew ourselves through purposeful work. But he adds an admonition about the complacency of talent, echoing Jack Kerouac’s fantastic distinction between talent and genius. Casals offers aspiring artists of all stripes a word of advice on humility and hard work as the surest path to self-actualization:

I see no particular merit in the fact that I was an artist at the age of eleven. I was born with an ability, with music in me, that is all. No special credit was due me. The only credit we can claim is for the use we make of the talent we are given. That is why I urge young musicians: “Don’t be vain because you happen to have talent. You are not responsible for that; it was not of your doing. What you do with your talent is what matters. You must cherish this gift. Do not demean or waste what you have been given. Work — work constantly and nourish it.”

Of course the gift to be cherished most of all is that of life itself. One’s work should be a salute to life.

Hence Ray Bradbury’s famous proclamation that he never worked a day in his life — further testament to the magic made possible by discerning your vocation.

Casals lived and worked for another four years, dying eight weeks before his ninety-seventh birthday. Joys and Sorrows remains an invigorating read — a rare glimpse into the source of this creative and spiritual vitality of unparalleled proportions.

This article was originally published on December 3, 2014, by Brain Pickings, and is republished here with permission.