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  • Cycle-of-Life Season
    • 1 Dormancy
      • Week 01: Human Worth
      • Week 02: Universality
      • Week 03: Justice
      • Week 04: Suffering
      • Week 05: Humility
      • Week 06: Avoiding Harm, or Evil
      • Week 07: Engaging the World
      • Week 08: Order
    • 2 Sowing
      • Week 09: Preferences (Desire)
      • Week 10: Autonomy
      • Week 11: Life as a Journey
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      • Week 14: Self-esteem (Self-worth begins)
      • Week 15: Self-confidence
      • Week 16: Independence (Self-competence)
    • 3 Growth
      • Week 17: Our Future
      • Week 18: Honesty
      • Week 19: Obligation in the World
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    • 4 Ripening
      • Week 24: Honoring
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      • Week 32: Citizenship
    • 5 Interlude
      • Week 33: Grounding and Well-Roundedness
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      • Week 35: Restoration
    • 6 Fulfillment
      • Week 36: Creativity
      • Week 37: Truth
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      • Week 39: Faith
      • Week 40: Rebirth
    • 7 Assessing
      • Week 41: Home and the Past
      • Week 42: Vitality
      • Week 43: Self-actualization and Integrity
      • Week 44: Connectedness
      • Week 45: Empowerment
      • Week 46: Equality
    • 8 Harvest and Celebration
      • Week 47: Flourishing
      • Week 48: Focus and Perspective
      • Week 49: Change
      • Week 50: Finding Our Niche
      • Week 51: Accepting / Surrendering
      • Week 52: Living Religiously
      • Week 53: Celebration and Remembrance
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You are here: Home / Cycle-of-Life Season / 8 Harvest and Celebration / Knowing Self

Knowing Self

M.C. Escher, Encounter

The intellectual component of finding one’s best niche in the world is self-knowledge. This includes knowledge of one’s strengths and weaknesses, along with ones interests and dislikes, and how well one might fit into a field of endeavor.

Real

True Narratives

Book narratives:

  • Elton John, Me (Henry Holt and Company, 2019): “ . . . the man’s hard-won self-knowledge is what the book’s really about.”

Imaginary

Film and Stage

  • Vanya on 42nd Street, a “marvelously realized adaptation of a play about people wondering what they’ve done with their lives”, this play about “privileged, luxuriantly introspective characters” this adaptation “reduces Chekhov’s ‘Uncle Vanya’ to its bare elements: loneliness, wasted lives, romantic hope and despair”

Music: Composers, artists, and major works

Sometimes an artist captures himself in performance, as if to say “this is who I am.”

  • Keith Jarrett, “My Song”, from the album of the same title
  • Astor Piazzolla and the New Tango Quintet, “Tango: Zero Hour” (Neuvo Tango: Hora Zero): Piazzolla called this album his finest. I will take it quite beyond that: this is the best tango album I have ever heard, by far, a masterful display of the playful-seductive rhythms and sounds of the tango.
  • Maxim Vengerov, “The Road I Travel” album
  • Dave Burrell and David Murray, “In Concert” album: tracks include Punaluu Peter; Hope Scope; Gallad for the Black Man; Intuitively; Teardrops for Jimmy
  • Dave Burrell, “Windward Passages” album: drawn from Burrell’s life, this music is an ode to a young man coming of age.
  • Laurence Dale, “Airs d’Opera” album
  • Howard Alden, “Take Your Pick” album

Pianist Dollar Brand Xahuri (Abdullah Ibrahim) has offered several albums that express his view of himself and his heritage,

  • “African Sketchbook” (1972)
  • “African Space Program” (1974)
  • “The Children of Africa” (1976)
  • “African Marketplace” (1979)
  • “Echoes from Africa” (1979)
  • “Africa – Tears and Laughter”
  • “Ekaya” (Home) (1983)
  • Good news from Africa
  • “African Piano”
  • Party time – compilation of tracks

Albums:

  • Hasaan Ibn Ali, “Retrospect in Retirement of Delay: The Solo Recordings”: “Ali was prolific in his own sweet way when he sat down at the piano, as much on his choices of standards as on his spontaneous and previously-composed material”

Poetry

The time will come / when, with elation / you will greet yourself arriving / at your own door, in your own mirror / and each will smile at the other's welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat. / You will love again the stranger who was your self. / Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart / to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored / for another, who knows you by heart. / Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes, / peel your own image from the mirror. / Sit. Feast on your life.

[Derek Walcott, “Love After Love”]

That crazed girl improvising her music.
Her poetry, dancing upon the shore,

Her soul in division from itself
Climbing, falling She knew not where,
Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship,
Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declare
A beautiful lofty thing, or a thing
Heroically lost, heroically found.

No matter what disaster occurred
She stood in desperate music wound,
Wound, wound, and she made in her triumph
Where the bales and the baskets lay
No common intelligible sound
But sang, 'O sea-starved, hungry sea.'

[William Butler Yeats, “A Crazed Girl”]

August 26, 2010

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Acknowledging Anticipation Appreciation Belonging Choosing Confidence Focus Honoring uniqueness Judgment Motivation Planning Prudence Remembrance Restraining Retreat Reverie Self-knowledge Tenacity Transcending ego Week 01: Human Worth

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