that's what friends are for

Dionne Warwick, Stevie Wonder, Luther Vandross & Whitney Houston




And I never thought I'd feel this way
And as far as I'm concerned
I'm glad I got the chance to say
That I do believe I love you
And if I should ever go away
Well, then close your eyes and try
To feel the way we do today
And then if you can remember...
Keep smiling, keep shining
Knowing you can always count on me, for sure
Well, that's what friends are for
For good times and bad times
I'll be on your side forever more
That's what friends are for
Well, you came and opened me
And now there's so much more I see
And so, by the way, I thank you
Oh and then, for the times when we're apart
Well, then close your eyes and know
These the words are coming from your heart
And then if you can remember...
Keep smiling, keep shining
Knowing you can always count on me, for sure
That's what friends are for
In good times and bad times
I'll be on your side forever more
That's what friends are for

Quando se fala de coração para coração,
a distância termina. Não há como aproximá-los,
pois estão no mesmo lugar. (Wilson Leipnitz)

harpsichord

Na semana passada o maestro Roberto de Regina esteve em
Curitiba e o recital que aqui aparece aconteceu e foi gravado
no belíssimo Solar do Rosário, pelo Professor Sergio Silva.

Keeping Potential Alive

The universe is forced to respect your boundaries. Just as no literal vision of beauty can affect a blind cave fish and no sweetness of perfume entices a snail, any aspect of life that lies outside your boundaries will not hold meaning for you.

A mind closed off to love, for example, will look out on a loveless world and be immune to any evidence of love, while an open mind will look out on that same world and find infinite expressions of love.

If our boundaries told the whole story, evolution could never break through them. This is where quantum leaps come in. Every observer creates a version of reality that is bound up in certain meanings and energies. As long as those meanings seem valid, the energies hold the picture together.

But when the observer wants to see something new, meaning collapses, energies combine in a new way, and the world takes a quantum leap. The leap occurs on the visible plane when the switch is “on,” but it was prepared in the invisible domain when the switch is “off.”

For example, our ability to read came into being when prehistoric man developed a cerebral cortex, yet no one in the prehistoric world needed to read. If evolution is as random as many geneticists argue it is, the ability to read should have disappeared a million years ago, since its usefulness for survival was zero.

But this trait survived for the creature who was emerging. Consciousness knows what is to come, and it builds into every particle of creation the potential not just for one unfolding future but for any future.

Nature doesn’t have to predict what is going to happen on every level. It just opens avenues of growth, and then a given creature – in this case us – makes the leap when the time feels right. As long as potential is alive, the future can evolve by choice.

Adapted from The Book of Secrets, by Deepak Chopra

love, love, love...

Tied in knots
Wendy Strgar

“Man is a knot into which relationships are tied.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Life is made of moments of unraveling. There are good reasons everyday that things come undone, but perhaps none so painful as the un-doing of our most intimate relationships. It is easy to understand how living with the difficult emotions of disappointment, embarrassment and the irritation and resentment associated with loving people up close, can bring out the least attractive parts of ourselves. And how in turn this most difficult emotional space can impact our ability to stay loving and present in the relationships we have chosen.
Attributing the places where life unravels to the people we are with is a natural response to dealing with the most disquieting and ugly places we hold. More often it is a reflection of the universal experience of not being good enough. The quiet doubt of self worth has a million faces and touches people from all walks of life, regardless of educational background, income level and even family history. We are all a broken somewhere and suffer the debilitating effects of not feeling worthy of love, our own or anyone else’s during some points in our life.
What we do with this experience, defines the course of our relationships with the people we love as well as our own ability to expand and grow into the people we want to become. Naked honesty about our own unraveling, the places where we cannot hold ourselves together is a terrible reason to leave the people you love and is the reason most disguised when it comes to affairs. New relationships have a shiny glow that makes you believe that the ugly parts of yourself vanish, which explains the remarkably low success rates of second and third marriages with a 90 percent fail rate.
The truth is that relationships are our best hope for learning to live with and love the weakest parts of our character. It is in the daily work of our relationships, back in the old days that meant working to stay alive like tending fields and creating food from the rawest of ingredients. Sharing real work was intimacy enough. Roles were born of necessity and human tribes known as families passed down values and wealth to the next generation. Life is different now and so our expectations of what and how marriage and pairing function have been altered into a fantasy that few can uphold.
The modern version of intimate partnerships is increasingly tied to how we feel about ourselves and our partners. Knowing that we all struggle with internal emotional unraveling while we grow and develop should make it off limits in measuring the worth of a relationship. Yet often the pain of looking at ourselves is so intense and the lure to escape it so powerful that we run, not realizing that it is in the capacity to stay and stay and stay that the ugliness retreats and transforms itself into peaceable acceptance.
I am no stranger to this process, both in my intimate and work life. I am regularly called to find the courage to lean in and feel the discomfort of my perceived failures as a wife, mother and business woman. I have tried it and know from the slides I have experienced that to retreat, to give up on the work, only makes it harder to come back to. There is really no way out when it comes to the work of the heart, there is only through.

the orchard dream

This has been one of the most beautiful films ever!
I just love to have the chance to see its bits again.