Tag Archives: book

happy friday

It’s been one of those leisurely weeks where curling up and watching youtube videos sounds like a good idea (btw, I LOLed at this video til I cried. Poor girl. Burning Hair off Curling Iron) , including those mornings you’re up for 3 hours but are still in bed half dreaming, half checking the phone and making lists in your head.

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Just finished this book and cried my lashes off. It’s my new favorite piece of fiction.

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I love my little animals! They come in sheets (Muji store, NYC) and you put them together yourself. Ahh, I love little finger projects.

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need a picture holder? 2 stray slabs of wood = ta da!

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Take-out and plenty of iced green teas

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Cooked a glorious dinner! Whole grain spaghetti, chicken parm (for him), balsamic tomatoes and roasted brussel sprouts (400 degree oven, roast brussel sprouts, tomatoes, garlic olive oil, sea salt, chili flakes, rosemary sprig for 45 minutes)

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See that little wooden mannequin below the painting? People were coming over and I found it hurriedly hidden in a drawer just before they came. Someone doesn’t like little mannequin person. But don’t be ashamed woodman..

Almost done redecorating the guest bathroom and one wood project — will post photos soon.

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past

Do you ever look at something you wrote a while back and feel embarrassed and delete it right away? I just went through all my posts here and deleted almost half. It just made me feel uncomfortable. Sometimes I go through my pictures and delete. I go through facebook and delete. When I was in high school I burned all my journals from age five on. I don’t know if that’s a form of self suppression or only normal to cringe a bit? I believe I am very head-on with my past. I deal with it, I work on it, I allow whatever feelings to come up.. but maybe it is still a habit for me to attempt to bury my pasts?

I think a part of me is too afraid to share my writings in a book because later on I won’t be able to erase it..

masculine and feminine

tamaradean01

Some of my favorite bits from Knowing Woman by Irene Claremont de Castillejo. Great book… I love books about the masculine and feminine energies. Does anyone have any other recommendations?

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Psychological thinking has seeped through into ordinary life and it is so easy to explain a situation by some psychological slogan — yet the inner meaning may lie in a different place.

Perhaps man’s need is to be trusted even more than to be understood. He needs to be believed in, and his work, whether she understands it or not, to be given full value. But he needs her also to express herself. Herself. It is her own deepest self that he must know, not her opinions which she has picked up from parents, schools and the daily press, but her deepest self. How many women can give him that?

He throws light on the jumble of words hovering beneath the surface of her mind so that she can choose the ones she wants, separates light onto the colors of the rainbow for her selections, enables her to see the parts of which her whole is made, to discriminate between this and that. In a word, he enables her to focus.

Our need is to keep the balance between masculine focused consciousness and feminine diffuse awareness — or if you prefer, between the creative spirit which uses man as its vehicle and the life force which uses woman. Both of these forces are equally ruthless.

A woman’s tears accompany her deepest truth.

It is through his anima that a man receives his inspirations. She is the fountain from which he drinks. She holds the treasures in her lap and offers them when he is ready to receive her gifts. But, having received them, it is his masculine, discriminating mind which gives form to the elusive riches she offers. She is the femme inspiratrice. 

Woman needs to give. She cannot help herself. Life pours through her and she has no choice but to pass it on, or let it stagnate until it becomes an abscess in her breast. This flow of life is not intended only for her children, but also for her mate. But many a man is too proud to accept her giving, confusing it with the mother’s milk he has outgrown, unaware that it is the water of life she offers him.

It is man’s greatest task, not to learn to love, but to learn how to create the conditions in which love can alight upon us and can remain with us.

 

when i first met him

Another artist I found while in Ojai :)

Storypeople by Brian Andreas (www.storypeople.com)

“When I first met him, I knew in a moment I would have to spend the next few days re-arranging my mind so there’d be room for him to stay.”

 

So sweet!! Leaves me fuzzy..

 

knowing woman

Found a book from one of the coolest bookstores ever, Bart’s Books (Ojai, CA).

Knowing Woman by Irene Claremont de Castillejo

“A woman today lives in perpetual conflict. She cannot slay the dragon of the unconscious without severing her own essential contact with it; without in fact destroying her feminine strength and becoming a mere pseudo-man. Her task is a peculiarly difficult one. She needs the focused consciousness her animus alone can give her, yet she must not forsake her woman’s role of mediator to man. Through a woman, man finds his soul. Through man, woman finds the animus who can express the soul she has never lost. Her burning need is to trust her own diffuse awareness, to know what she knows and to learn to speak of it, for until it is expressed she does not wholly know it.”

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Ojai

My first time in Ojai and it’s becoming one of my favorite places. It’s a quaint little valley town 1.5 hours northwest of LA. It’s supposedly another “energy vortex” center like Sedona (Arizona).

Lots of biking, being in nature, taking naps, browsing thrift stores, lounging around the house and swimming… such perfect days!

Bart’s Books – outdoor bookstore!


the Krishnamurti Library – the house he lived in


amazing stone ring I found

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monster

“Who hasn’t ever wondered: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?”

-Clarice Lispector Hour of the Star – PS: beautiful novel…

 

beast

“A woman is a beast. She is as lovely as she is repulsive. She is one part demon and one part goddess, one part slave and one part muse, one part child and one part mother. These contradictions are what make a woman so intoxicating.” -Unknown

 

Still am working on first draft of novel but conceived a new idea for another book.. will be sultry and full of erotic drawings.. Lewd. That’s a fun word.

Hmm.. I’m curious to know what you think is the sexiest part of a woman. The dive at the waist, a little peek of the wet inner mouth, the way her hair curls around her ear… ?

Mallorca, Spain

The key to the house. I love keys like this! I wish all of mine were like this.

- Mallorca, Spain; 18:30

Went to the beach today and realized something… in amidst to my love affair of the beaches in South America, having been to a few beaches in Europe now, I much prefer the latter… people leave you alone more or less. In most of South America, you’re lucky if you can walk in silence for two minutes (the annoying Ssss, ssss, I do not miss).

Catching up on my reading and have finished Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go which is a definite must-read. The story gave me a strange, heavy feeling; full and empty at the same time. It’s really good. Started John Steinbeck’s To A God Unknown and am hooked already. The way he writes is so… swift. I never get bored or start drifting off the page (I experience this habitually with other books and have to force myself to stay on the page) as he just carries the story so well. I read the Introduction in the beginning and found it interesting. This book was the hardest he had labored and took him 5 years to write. I can’t imagine writing 5 days a week (which is what he did) for 5 years and receiving one rejection after another; he had to rewrite the book many times. He never considered himself one of the greats. I suppose all writers experience insecurity and fury, no matter how good they are..

The laboring is what makes one great, I guess. But then, that scares me.

 

Thread by thread

“You’re really just an ongoing set of events: boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, one after the other. The awareness is keeping up with those events, seeing your life unfolding as it is, not your ideas of it, not your pictures of it. See what I mean?” -Charlotte Joko Beck

charcoal pencils

oil and acrylic

You are near me, sitting next to me, the threads of your shirt brushing against my thigh. Thread by thread, they touch me and one by one I am farther away, confronted by added silence, our unspoken words stinging my awaiting ears. I wish to pull away from you forever, this uncertainty more painful than the sure decision of a wound but this knot that holds me to you carries the fabric of my being, my joy, my desire. Unbeknownst to even yourself, your ties are tangling, your curbed discontentment growing, pulling you away in a million directions but mine and I cannot continue holding on.

…your threads tugging on my beating heart.
(excerpt from my book.)