Or not, depending on my mood
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Dylan Thomas
Today’s Saturday Stream of Consciousness prompt from Linda is ‘gen’, and what popped into my head was the last two lines from Dylan Thomas’ poem, so I’ve shared them here… 🙂
Painting is easy when you don’t know how, but very difficult when you do…
Edgar Degas
Because true belonging only happens when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world, our sense of belonging can never be greater than our level of self-acceptance’
Brene Brown
My introduction to Shakespeare came not only formally from studying Macbeth and Hamlet and The Merchant of Venice as a required part of our English curriculum at school, but also creatively from my mum’s love of traditional ballet – Prokofiev’s balletic version of Romeo and Juliet re-tells the tale so beautifully in music and dance, but ideally you have to read the original to be able to follow the story.
So one way or another I’ve always loved the challenge of reading Shakespeare’s plays, but to be properly understood I always felt they really needed to be read out aloud with proper expression and animation, breathing life into the sparkling narrative rather than just read out word for word in a meaningless monotone that inevitably leaves everyone bored to death by such a dry and dusty delivery.
And much later on I discovered Shakespeare’s sonnets, often bringing another challenge of true understanding if not read out aloud with feeling. They can sometimes be quite repetitive in their themes but are beautifully written nonetheless. I have a treasured silver bangle in the shape of a Mobius strip with the first two quatrains of Sonnet 116 engraved onto it. As the strip twists, the wording continues on to the ‘other’ side of the bangle, so it is engraved in its entirety.
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
William Shakespeare
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
This is also the sonnet that Marianne quotes in Sense and Sensibility, when she finally comes to the understanding that Willoughby could not have loved her enough if he chose to marry someone else for money after he was disinherited due to his own bad behaviour. And it is this sonnet (engraved as it is on my bangle) that immediately sprang to mind this morning for me, too, when I read the prompt word ‘bend’… 🙂
Optimism doesn’t mean that you are blind to the reality of the situation. It means that you remain motivated to seek a solution to whatever problems arise.
Dalai Lama
‘I think ageing is an extraordinary process whereby you become the person you always should have been’
David Bowie
‘Let’s face it, it’s like, you’ve either got a vagina or a voice, you don’t seem to have both, do you?’
Sharon Moore
Comment from a BBC report on women’s health in relation to female medical conditions, discussing how many women still feel dismissed or not taken seriously by health professionals…
You may break, you may shatter the vase, if you will,
But the scent of roses will hang round it still…
Thomas Moore
‘Accept – then act. Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it. Make it your friend and ally, not your enemy. This will miraculously transform your whole life. ‘
Ekhart Tolle
‘The more you know yourself, the more patience you have for what you see in others’
Erik Erikson
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