windthread

the beginning of the book lays the groundwork for Allen's thoughts about Feeling at Home.  So he begins talking about Emotions and Feelings.

"Neurologist Antonio Demasio suggests that the simplist animals are best thought of as having reflexes, rather than emotions,  but that animals with only a small and rudimentary brain, such as fruit flies or sea slugs, show evidence of having emotions.  What these very simple animals might not have are feelings:  an ability to internally experience emotions.

The fear we feel when confronted with danger,  the anger at encountering an obstacle, the joy of gaining a valued object, the sadness at loosing one, the disgust after consuming or viewing something unpalatable, and the surprise that stops us in our tracks when something unexpected happens….these are just some of the major emotions that make behavioral flexibility possible.  For us, conscious humans,  these emotions are not simply acted upon, but experienced and remembered and contextualized as   feelings.

Today there is not doubt in modern cognitive science that emotions are "real" and universal  psychological, neurobiological, and psychophysiological phenomena,  and that while culture is seen as providing the context in which emotions are expressed,  culture is not their ultimate source.

[Psychologist Paul Ekman]  identifies the following as being basic emotions:  amusement, anger, awe, contempt, contentment, disgust, embarrassment, excitement, fear, guilt, interest, pride in accomplishment, relief, sadness, satisfaction, sensory pleasure and shame."

I can't rewrite the whole book here,  but the above quotes along with so much more preface Allen's thoughts about  "feeling at home".  What IS it, to feel at home.

so many things have risen up for me,  one that i have to admit that the most constant thread or story line of my dream life is the effort to "feel at home".    And the second today… how all the months, years, really,  in the Old Cowboy's Final Time,  how they were predicated upon his thinking he wanted to die in his own home.  Verbalizing this over and over and over.  But when the time to die came,  home became unclear.  Home often would blur into the ranch in Colorado.  And as he processed his final days  of life,  neither place was Home.  He did not feel at Home.  He felt adrift.  

I am so loving * this book but/and my guess is that it will help me formulate and understand things so far unarticulated  (in myself)  about "feeling at home".  What that means for me.   *and i note that …….Love is not mentioned……

 

From yesterday,  that i couldn't access,  so found the originals…

 

 

Double click.   Emotions/Feelings

 

Upon seeing this article,  these photographs in that old Natural History publication,  i instantly related to this monkey….i   "was at home" with her….i "knew" her.  So much so,  i cut one of the photographs out and framed it and it has been with me ever since, more than 20 years,  i see myself in her.  So, i see this in some way as a self portrait.

 

and i have had this photograph,  or a copy of it,  for even longer.  What it meant to me,  when i left a nice two story frame home in a nice neighborhood in a nice college town to live in a 1972 Ford Econoline Van.  Swearing i would never own a home ever ever again.  

and then jumping ahead,  home to me being a Place to keep our "stuff"

 

our stuff,  being things that help us live.  Here,  Tay's art now also with Chinche's death pouch that Mo sent.

 

and this small Cloth of Holy that Nancy Krampf sent accompanying the seeds.  I doubt that she knew but she did "know" that the stone on it is a Petoskey stone,  from the northern shores of my birth state, Michigan,  from those north shores where i would go to "feel at home" in those early times,  before i left home.

so,  i am Full of thoughts about Home.  Maybe a place where you can define your own particular and peculiar sense of things…of Resting…away from demands and expectations of others…

 

and the sense of love i feel when looking at this blurry print out.  Diorama.  Always Diorama.  Like i saw in that glass case in the Museum of Natural History in Detroit when i was maybe 4 years old.  Diorama.  and i somehow held it inside me as symbol of home and recreated it over and over and over and probably will once again.  So i need to know about this,  this "feeling at home".