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žena:\zhay'na\ means woman in czech moon:\moon\ honors the power, cycles and light reflected throughout our lives |
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embrace your confusion |
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small pillar - 2"x3", burns up to 30 hours
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About This Candle In some ways, it's easy for me to dwell in the unknown; to openly admit I don't know something. I'll never forget being interviewed years ago for the Creative Services Manager position at Corbis. It was a late winter afternoon, already dark outside, and I didn't even know what a Creative Services Manager was beyond a really cool title. Partway through the interview, I ran out of mental steam. The hiring manager posed one of those complex how-would-you-handle-this scenarios using marketing terminology way over my head. I froze. Should I bullshit my way through? I looked at her, exhaled, and said "I don't know. I'd have to ask for help." I was hired on the spot.
It's a whole 'nuther story when it comes to my inner life. My handling of personal confusion runs the gamut from shaky acceptance to full-fledged freak-outs. As I write this in April 2005, I'm experiencing changes, questions and bloomings so profound I cannot even name them. I'm mystified, confused and easily disoriented, like I'm wandering the halls of a strange building with low-watt hints and whispers lighting the way.
For months I sought answers. Like any do-er I wanted to understand so I could TAKE ACTION! But no matter what I try--despite my grumbles and begging--the confusion won't budge. Something wiser than my mind is allowing my state of not-knowing to be exactly what, how and where it needs to be: quiet, gestating, unfolding, being.
So I've begun practicing acceptance of this uncertainty. Allowing confusion to be my present truth vs. a condition to override. Surrendering to what is.
"Confusion is the highest state because it comes just before knowing," wrote Suzuki. May this candle help us comfortably settle into accepting our confused open spaces, knowing they hold, at the very least, possibility. And God. —Carla Blazek, creator, zena moon |
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Our Recommended Books, Music & Movies for Embrace Your Confusion zena moon sells books, CDs and DVDs in association with Amazon.com. To order, click on the item's title or image, then add it to your Amazon shopping cart. Orders are then filled and shipped by Amazon. Send us your recommendations for this page--we may post them here.
Last updated 4/13/2005
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From Amazon.com: Sue Monk Kidd's The Mermaid Chair is the soulful tale of Jessie Sullivan, a middle-aged woman whose stifled dreams and desires take shape during an extended stay on Egret Island, where she is caring for her troubled mother, Nelle. Like Kidd's stunning debut novel, The Secret Life of Bees, her highly anticipated follow up evokes the same magical sense of whimsy and poignancy.
While Kidd places an obvious importance on the role of mysticism and legend in this tale, including the mysterious mermaid's chair at the center of the island's history, the relationships between characters is what gives this novel its true weight. Once she returns to her childhood home, Jessie is forced to confront not only her relationship with her estranged mother, but her other emotional ties as well. After decades of marriage to Hugh, her practical yet conventional husband, Jessie starts to question whether she is craving an independence she never had the chance to experience. After she meets Brother Thomas, a handsome monk who has yet to take his final vows, Jessie is forced to decide whether passion can coexist with comfort, or if the two are mutually exclusive. As her soul begins to reawaken, Jessie must also confront the circumstances of her father's death, a tragedy that continues to haunt Jessie and Nelle over thirty years later.
By boldly tackling such major themes as love, betrayal, grief, and forgiveness, The Mermaid Chair forces readers to question whether moral issues can always be interpreted in black or white. It is this ability to so gracefully present multiple sides of a story that reinforces Kidd's reputation as a well-respected modern literary voice.
2. The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less
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From Amazon.com: Like Thoreau and the band Devo, psychology professor Schwartz provides ample evidence that we are faced with far too many choices on a daily basis, providing an illusion of a multitude of options when few honestly different ones actually exist. The conclusions Schwartz draws will be familiar to anyone who has flipped through 900 eerily similar channels of cable television only to find that nothing good is on. Whether choosing a health-care plan, choosing a college class or even buying a pair of jeans, Schwartz, drawing extensively on his own work in the social sciences, shows that a bewildering array of choices floods our exhausted brains, ultimately restricting instead of freeing us. We normally assume in America that more options ("easy fit" or "relaxed fit"?) will make us happier, but Schwartz shows the opposite is true, arguing that having all these choices actually goes so far as to erode our psychological well-being. Part research summary, part introductory social sciences tutorial, part self-help guide, this book offers concrete steps on how to reduce stress in decision making. Some will find Schwartz's conclusions too obvious, and others may disagree with his points or find them too repetitive, but to the average lay reader, Schwartz's accessible style and helpful tone is likely to aid the quietly desperate.
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From Amazon.com: Like Ishiguro's previous works (The Remains of the Day; When We Were Orphans), his sixth novel is so exquisitely observed that even the most workaday objects and interactions are infused with a luminous, humming otherworldliness. The dystopian story it tells, meanwhile, gives it a different kind of electric charge. Set in late 1990s England, in a parallel universe in which humans are cloned and raised expressly to "donate" their healthy organs and thus eradicate disease from the normal population, this is an epic ethical horror story, told in devastatingly poignant miniature. By age 31, narrator (and clone) Kathy H has spent nearly 12 years as a "carer" to dozens of "donors." Knowing that her number is sure to come up soon, she recounts--in excruciating detail--the fraught, minute dramas of her happily sheltered childhood and adolescence at Hailsham, an idyllic, isolated school/orphanage where clone-students are encouraged to make art and feel special. Protected (as is the reader, at first) from the full truth about their eventual purpose in the larger world, "we [students] were always just too young to understand properly the latest piece of information. But of course we'd take it in at some level, so that before long all this stuff was there in our heads without us ever having examined it properly." This tension of knowing-without-knowing permeates all of the students' tense, sweetly innocent interactions, especially Kath's touchingly stilted love triangle with two Hailsham classmates, manipulative Ruth and kind-hearted Tommy. In savoring the subtle shades of atmosphere and innuendo in these three small, tightly bound lives, Ishiguro spins a stinging cautionary tale of science outpacing ethics.
1. Duality
Original Release Date: 1998
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From Amazon.com: Duality is at once sacred and playful. It is both dark and light, organic and refined, masculine and feminine. Dead Can Dance's Lisa Gerrard partners with Pieter Bourke, formerly of Aussie band Eden, to create this compositional dance of partnership that is classical, ancient, and thoroughly modern. Gerrard's voice is multitracked at times, conjuring a cathedral choir and the droning chants of monks. Drums and synth snake from desert to brilliant stormy sky to shaking earth and the bodies that inhabit those spaces. There are lush multiple layers of strings, bagpipe drone, and, quite literally, the laughter of children. The vocals sans "real" words and multicultural instrumentation will be familiar to Dead Can Dance listeners. Yet there is something more exclusive, more womblike about the music of Bourke and Gerrard; rather than two distinct bodies making music, like mother and in utero child sharing blood and breath, they are mutually dependent.
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From Amazon.com:
Despite making it through a difficult four-year
stretch in which the band temporarily broke up, singer Shirley Manson left her
husband, and new technologies made the sleek electro-rock sound of its first
three albums feel passé, Garbage resurfaces in rude health on
Original Release Date: 1994
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From Amazon.com: Haunting, evocative, mysterious, and magnificent, Enigma's Cross of Changes offers nine musical explorations of sound and sensation that dazzle and amaze. The songs unfold in rolling waves, each more complex and richly layered than the last, yet each fully capable of standing alone as a musically satisfying experience. The standout track on this disc is "Return to Innocence," which combines Native American chanting, Celtic harmonies, and a deceptively simple lyric to devastating effect. At once esoteric and elemental, The Cross of Changes is a fine example of the best the genre has to offer.
1. Sideways (Full Screen Edition)
(2004) ~ DVD
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From Amazon.com: With Sideways, Paul Giamatti (American Splendor, Storytelling) has become an unlikely but engaging romantic lead. Struggling novelist and wine connoisseur Miles (Giamatti) takes his best friend Jack (Thomas Haden Church, Wings) on a wine-tasting tour of California vineyards for a kind of extended bachelor party. Almost immediately, Jack's insatiable need to sow some wild oats before his marriage leads them into double-dates with a rambunctious wine pourer (Sandra Oh, Under the Tuscan Sun) and a recently divorced waitress (Virginia Madsen, The Hot Spot)--and Miles discovers a little hope that he hasn't let himself feel in a long time. Sideways is a modest but finely tuned film; with gentle compassion, it explores the failures, struggles, and lowered expectations of mid-life. Giamatti makes regret and self-loathing sympathetic, almost sweet. From the director of Election and About Schmidt.
(2000) ~ DVD
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From Amazon.com: Sexy Spaniard Victoria Abril heats up the wintry city of Reykjavík in 101 Reykjavik. Icelandic slacker Hlynur (Hilmir Snær Guðnason) lives on welfare with his mother, leading a depressed and aimless existence. His mother invites her flamenco teacher, Lola (Abril), to live with them; while his mother is away for New Year's Eve, Hlynur and Lola have a drunken fling. But upon her return, Hlynur's mother tells him that she and Lola are lesbian lovers--and it soon comes out that she and Lola are going to have a baby together. 101 Reykjavik seems to be the contemporary Icelandic version of American movies of the 1970s like Five Easy Pieces, in which antiheroic characters struggle to make sense of a world that doesn't seem to have any place for them. The movie is a bit unfocused, but its urban malaise feels genuine, if not particularly new. Abril is delightful, as always.
3. Closer
(2004) ~ DVD
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From Amazon.com: Four extremely beautiful people do extremely horrible things to one another in Closer, Mike Nichols' pungent adaptation of Patrick Marber's play that easily marks the Oscar-winning director's best work in years. Anna (Julia Roberts) is a photographer who specializes in portraits of strangers; Dan (Jude Law) is an obituary writer struggling to become a novelist; Alice (Natalie Portman) is an American stripper freshly arrived in London after a bad relationship; and Larry (Clive Owen) is a dermatologist who finds love under the most unlikely of circumstances. When their paths cross it's a dizzying supernova of emotions, as Nichols and Marber adroitly construct various scenes out of their lives that pair them again and again in various permutations of passion, heartbreak, anger, sadness, vengeance, pleading, deception, and most importantly, brutal honesty. It's only until you're more than halfway through the movie that you'll have to ask yourself exactly why you are watching such a beautifully tragic tale, as Closer is basically the ickiest, grossest, most dysfunctional parts of all your past relationships strung together into one movie. Ultimately, it falls to the four actors to draw you deeper into the story; all succeed relatively, but it's Law and Owen whose characters will cut you to the quick. Law proves that yet again he's most adept at playing charming, amoral bastards with manipulative streaks, and Owen is nothing short of brilliant as the character most turned on by the energy inherent in destructive relationships--whether he's on the giving or receiving end. | |||||||||
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