Become an Artist of your Relationship

Creativity arises out of dynamic tension. Tension between freedom and discipline, chaos and order, old and new, passion and routine, knowledge and faith. Relationships contain all of the tensions and challenges listed here. The difference between romantics and everybody else is that romantics embrace these tensions as creative challenges, while others see them as problems or threats.

When romantic moments are charged with emotion, they create positive memories that last a lifetime.

Forest Gump Yoga

Mamma always said life’s like an asana,
bend over you never know what you’re gonna get.

Yeats’ magical avocation presents a paradox to contemporary readers: how could this supremely disciplined poet, a Nobel laureate, the founder and first director of the Abbey Theatre, a senator of the Irish Free State, ever have attached himself to such transparently bogus cults? Specifically, why would this undoubted genius dismiss the “fraud theory” about Madame Blavatsky after the debunking she had received in Madras?

Vendler offers a plausible answer: “Our present discomfort in imagining Yeats at Madame Blavatsky’s arises from our feeling that there are more respectable ways of approaching the esoteric, forgetting that a concrete encounter is the only one likely to appeal to a mind peculiarly attuned to words and visual symbols.” The magnetic drawing-room seer’s “air of humor and audacious power” inflamed his imagination. No one reads the poetry of Yeats for its lucid logic; he despised rationalism. The principal source of Yeats’ power as a poet was his fabulous rhetorical gift. From the beginning he could turn an unforgettable phrase as deftly as a ballet dancer takes a leap. He devoutly believed that words were magic charms, endowed with an innate, transcendent power to raise poet and reader directly into a higher realm, just as the dancer may believe that the music lifts him soaring from the stage.

Arthur Edward Waite writes in Transcendental Magic, its Doctrine and Ritual

Behind the veil of all the hieratic and mystical allegories of ancient doctrines, behind the darkness and strange ordeals of all initiations, under the seal of all sacred writings, in the ruins of Nineveh or Thebes, on the crumbling stones of old temples and on the blackened visage of the Assyrian or Egyptian sphinx, in the monstrous or marvelous paintings which interpret to the faithful of India the inspired pages of the Vedas, in the cryptic emblems of our old books on alchemy, in the ceremonies practiced at reception by all secret societies, there are found indications of a doctrine which is everywhere the same and everywhere carefully concealed.