We need guidance. The outcome of our soul is dependent on the love and support of the people around us. However, many of us yearn for mentorship and guidance, but our environments lack adequate heroes. We need writers, artists, and craftsman to provide the light of our possibilities. Through these people we develop the faith to develop persistence in a psuedo connected world. Our suffering connects us to the people around us. Through persistence we grow to understand the importance of guidance, ancestors, and joy. Anais Nin On Persistence found throughout A Woman Speaks: The Lectures, Seminars and Interviews of Anais Nin, speaks on the importance of continuing on the path towards joy saying:
I wept because I could not believe anymore and I love to believe. I can still love passionately without believing. That means I love humanly. But my faith seems naive, at least today. Maybe tomorrow I can believe again. One must be thrust out of a finished cycle in life, and that leap is the most difficult to make-to part with one’s faith, one’s love, when one would prefer to renew the faith and recreate the passion.
Over and over again I sail towards joy, which is never in the room with me, but always near me, across the way, like those rooms full of gayety one sees from the street, or the gayety in the street one sees from a window. Will I ever reach joy? It hides behind the turning merry-go-round of the traveling circus. As soon as I approach it, it is no longer joy. Joy is a foam, an illumination.
I am poorer and hungrier for the want of it. When I am in the dance, joy is outside in the elusive garden. When I am in the garden, I hear it exploding from the house. What joy? Have I not possessed it? I want the joy of simple colors, street organs, ribbons, flags, not a joy that takes my breath away and throws me into space alone where no one else can breathe with me, not the joy that comes from a lonely drunkenness. There are so many joys, but I have only known the ones that come like a miracle, touching everything with light.
We lose faith in the world being magical enough to create synchronicities that help us reach our higher selves. Only seeing the oppressive reality causes the image we project on the future to become bleaker and bleaker. Unfortunately, and fortunately, only we can save ourselves from the despair of ceasing to reach our highest potential. We must create under gruesome conditions in order to escape hell. A new relationship to ourselves must be developed, for we are forced to declare we will not collapse, we will gain a new strength, and a new faith that reflects our possibilities.
In order to survive the tribulations required to become our higher selves we must be honest about our conditions. We must be honest that life is difficult, but the creative–every artist, musicians, painter, and craftsman–makes the attempt to alchemize his pain into the art. We want success, to be free, to articulate the prayer our heart needs, and live a life where our work, and our spirit, is valued. Speaking on the necessity of confronting your anger, and her relationship to self-publishing her masterpiece in response to publishers saying she was an inadequate writer–Anais Nin On Persistence says:
Confront all the angry thoughts, feelings, the jealousies and condemnations, to find their cause, seek the root of such feelings and then operate on that. Need of security and reassurance can cause criminal acts. When human pain has struck me fiercely, when anger has corroded me, I rise, I always rise after the crucifixion, and I am in terror of my ascensions. THE FISSURE IN REALITY. The divine departure. I fall. I fall into darkness after the collusion with pain, and after pain the divine departure.
The relationship to handcraft is a beautiful one. You are related bodily to a solid block of metal letters, to the weight of the trays, to the adroitness of spacing, to the tempo and temper of the machine. You acquire some of the weight and solidity of the metal, the strength and power of the machine. Each triumph is a conquest by the body, fingers, muscles. You live with your hands, in acts of physical deftness.
You pit your faculties against concrete problems. The victories are concrete, definable, touchable. A page of perfect printing. You can touch the page you wrote. We exult in what we master and discover. Instead of using one’s energy in a void, against frustrations, in anger against publishers, I use it on the press, type, paper, a source of energy. Solving problems, technical, mechanical problems. Which can be solved.
What would happen if we surrendered to the strangeness of life? If we ceased to fight agaisnt the unpredictability, anxiety, and doubt, and committed ourselves to living deeply within the present moment. One has to learn to become what we wish to be, and let go of our attachment knowing its coming. We have no control; we may have influence, but when we relinquish control the blessings are realized.
We have a tendency to want things we already have, and releasing control puts us in rhythm with the strangeness of the universe. Only when we drop all preoccupations, and open ourselves up to the truth can we be our own salvation. As we peer behind the falsehoods that create unnecessary suffering we discover the reality that leads to peace. Without a source of nourishment, without mentors, and without love we are bound to fall into despair, and quit. However, the world depends on our self-discovery, and the culture depends on our attempt to become. Salvation is found in the work that builds perseverance and faith–Anais Nin speaks on courage, and recounts the hard-earned triumph of her handcrafted masterpiece saying:
I could be healed by the sheer courage of continuing to live. I could heal myself.
Anais Nin On Persistence speaks with warmth and urgency on those themes which have always been closest to her: relationships, creativity, the struggle for wholeness, the unveiling of woman, the artist as magician, women reconstructing the world, moving from the dream outward, and experiencing our lives to the fullest possible extent. Continue reading Anais Nin on the importance of shaping your destiny.
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