Stage Anchoring Quotes

The girl anchors the stage, sucks in the male gaze, and, depending on who she is, throws her own gaze back out into the audience.

I feel to that the gap between my new life in New York and the situation at home in Africa is stretching into a gulf, as Zimbabwe spirals downwards into a violent dictatorship. My head bulges with the effort to contain both worlds. When I am back in New York, Africa immediately seems fantastical – a wildly plumaged bird, as exotic as it is unlikely. Most of us struggle in life to maintain the illusion of control, but in Africa that illusion is almost impossible to maintain. I always have the sense there that there is no equilibrium, that everything perpetually teeters on the brink of some dramatic change, that society constantly stands poised for some spasm, some tsunami in which you can do nothing but hope to bob up to the surface and not be sucked out into a dark and hungry sea. The origin of my permanent sense of unease, my general foreboding, is probably the fact that I have lived through just such change, such a sudden and violent upending of value systems. In my part of Africa, death is never far away. With more Zimbabweans dying in their early thirties now, mortality has a seat at every table. The urgent, tugging winds themselves seem to whisper the message, memento mori, you too shall die. In Africa, you do not view death from the auditorium of life, as a spectator, but from the edge of the stage, waiting only for your cue. You feel perishable, temporary, transient. You feel mortal. Maybe that is why you seem to live more vividly in Africa. The drama of life there is amplified by its constant proximity to death. That’s what infuses it with tension. It is the essence of its tragedy too. People love harder there. Love is the way that life forgets that it is terminal. Love is life’s alibi in the face of death. For me, the illusion of control is much easier to maintain in England or America. In this temperate world, I feel more secure, as if change will only happen incrementally, in manageable, finely calibrated, bite-sized portions. There is a sense of continuity threaded through it all: the anchor of history, the tangible presence of antiquity, of buildings, of institutions. You live in the expectation of reaching old age. At least you used to. But on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, those two states of mind converge. Suddenly it feels like I am back in Africa, where things can be taken away from you at random, in a single violent stroke, as quick as the whip of a snake’s head. Where tumult is raised with an abruptness that is as breathtaking as the violence itself.

Life is a great big beautiful three-ring circus. There are those on the floor making their lives among the heads of lions and hoops of fire, and those in the stands, complacent and wowed, their mouths stuffed with popcorn. I know less now than ever about life, but I do know its size. Life is enormous. Much grander than what we’ve taken for ourselves, so far. When the show is over and the tent is packed, the elephants, lions and dancing poodles are caged and mounted on trucks to caravan to the next town. The clown’s makeup has worn, and his bright, red smile has been washed down a sink. All that is left is another performance, another tent and set of lights. We rest in the knowledge: the show must go on. Somewhere, behind our stage curtain, a still, small voice asks why we haven’t yet taken up juggling. My seminars were like this. Only, instead of flipping shiny, black bowling balls or roaring chainsaws through the air, I juggled concepts. The world is intrinsically tied together. All things march through time at different intervals but move ahead in one fashion or another. Though we may never understand it, we are all part of something much larger than ourselves—something anchoring us to the spot we have mentally chosen. We sniff out the rules, through spiritual quests and the sciences. And with every new discovery, we grow more confused. Our inability to connect what seems illogical to unite and to defy logic in our understanding keeps us from enlightenment. The artists and insane tiptoe around such insights, but lack the compassion to hand-feed these concepts to a blind world. The interconnectedness of all things is not simply a pet phrase. It is a big “T” truth that the wise spend their lives attempting to grasp.

The first stage is claiming the intention: “I am Word through this intention to do whatever you wish. Word I am Word,” “I am Word through this intention to do whatever I want. Word I am Word,” and then you fill in the blank. “I am Word through my desire to know myself more.” “I am Word through my intention to believe in my abilities.” “I am Word through my intention to create the perfect job.” “Word I am Word through these intentions. Word I am Word,” is how we present it. Now once this is stated, the energy moves and we go forward in consciousness and we create with the vibration. So the first stage is the intention. The next stage is acclimation to the frequency. Once you have stated an intention and it goes forth, then you have to acclimate to it. And that means to respect it and to believe it and to honor it. You cannot set out an intention to clean your apartment and then throw a bottle of garbage on the floor and sit back and expect it to be cleaned. You have to take the actions that correspond to the intentions. But that doesn’t mean blind action. It simply means staying conscious and present as your intention is set forth: “If I move as I am moved, I will then make the choices that are in honor of the intention I have created and set forward.” That is different than acting blindly; it is different than running around acting as if you don’t truly believe it’s so. But when we say acclimate, we simply mean you have set the intention and now you have to let it settle in, and honor it, and believe it, and trust that it is coming into fruition. That is part two. The third part is reception: “I am in my reception of my intentions, reaping the benefits of that which I have called forth into being. Word I am Word through this intention. Word I am Word.” Here we have just given you a hint that you can actually call forth your intention and then set the intention to receive the benefits of it as well, which will actually anchor it in more fully in vibration if you wish to do it this way. But you can also just trust in faith, in cosmic truth, that when you set out an intention in light it is returned to the sender in fullness. Prayer is a form of intention; however, there is a difference between begging for something and stating your own worth as the receiver of an answered prayer. However, in order to do this fully you have to believe you are supported in prayer, or in your intention, or whichever way you want to describe this process for yourself given your history and your vocabulary. If you believe that there is a God who is saying no all the time, that will be your experience.

Intuitively it makes sense that difficulties that don’t strengthen the skills you will need, or the kinds of challenges you are likely to encounter in the real-world application of your learning, are not desirable. Having somebody whisper in your ear while you read the news may be essential training for a TV anchor. Being heckled by role-playing protestors while honing your campaign speech may help train up a politician. But neither of these difficulties is likely to be helpful for Rotary Club presidents or aspiring YouTube bloggers who want to improve their stage presence. A cub towboat pilot on the Mississippi might be required in training to push a string of high-riding empty barges into a lock against a strong side wind. A baseball player might practice hitting with a weight on his bat to strengthen his swing. You might teach a football player some of the principles of ballet for learning balance and movement, but you probably would not teach him the techniques for an effective golf drive or backhand tennis serve. Is there an overarching rule that determines the kinds of impediments that make learning stronger? Time and further research may yield an answer. But the kinds of difficulties we’ve just described, whose desirability is well documented, offer a large and diverse toolkit already at hand.

So when Finn sailed back down the Negro at dawn, he saw no flames and heard no roaring as the house was destroyed. Everything at first seemed to be as it had always been: the big trees by the river, the huts of the Indians, the Carters’ launch riding at anchor. Then the dog, standing beside him, threw back his head and howled. “What is it?” asked Finn. But now he, too, smelled the choking, lingering smoke. And as he sailed toward the landing stage, he saw it--the space, the nothingness, where the Carters’ house should have been. Not even an empty shell. Nothing. He had thought that the news of his father’s death was the worst thing that had happened to him, but this was worse, because he was to blame. If he had taken Maia as she had begged… He was shivering so much that it was difficult to steer the Arabella to the jetty and make her fast. There was no point in searching the ruins; it was so obvious that no one could survive such a blaze. But there was one last hope. The huts of the Indians had been spared. Perhaps they had gotten Maia out; perhaps he would find her sleeping there. He pushed open the door of the first hut and went inside…then the second and the third. They were completely empty. Even the parrot on his perch had gone, even the little dog. A broken rope in the run outside showed where the pig, terrified by the flames, had rushed back into the forest. There was no doubt now in Finn’s mind. They had let Maia burn and fled in terror and shame. What would it be like, Finn wondered, going on living and knowing that he had killed his friend? The howler monkeys had been right to laugh when he said he wasn’t going back. He had turned downriver again almost at once to fetch Maia, and he had made good time, traveling with the current--but he had come too late.

They were sitting outside the big Starbucks that anchored the western end of Pioneer Square. Lisa was drinking iced tea sweetened with half a dozen packets of sugar, Bria a flat white, Pete sprawled under the table with a dish of water. All around, people sat at café tables in the late afternoon sunlight, perched on broad steps that dropped to the well where a gout of water pulsed and plashed. Smart little yellow trams ran along one side of the square, which was bordered by office buildings and the plate-glass windows of high-end shops. A sliver of Earth jammed into this alien world, where a dozen or more Elder Cultures had lived and died out or ascended to some unfathomable stage of consciousness, leaving behind ruins and artefacts, scraps of technology, algorithms and eidolons. A perfectly ordinary scene…

Empirical logic achieved a signal triumph in the Old Testament, where survivals from the early proto-logical stage are very few and far between. With it man reached a point where his best judgments about his relation to God, his fellow men and the world, were in most respects not appreciably inferior to ours. In fundamental ethical and spiritual matters we have not progressed at all beyond the empirico-logical world of the Old Testament or the unrivalled fusion of proto-logical intuition, 64 [see Coomaraswamy, Review of Religion, 1942, p. 138, paragraph 3] empirico-logical wisdom and logical deduction which we find in the New Testament. In fact a very large section of modern religion, literature and art actually represents a pronounced retrogression when compared with the Old Testament. For example, astrology, spiritism and kindred divagations, which have become religion to tens of millions of Europeans and Americans, are only the outgrowth of proto-logical interpretation of nature, fed by empirico-logical data and covered with a spurious shell of Aristotelian logic and scientific induction. Plastic and graphic art has swung violently away from logical perspective and perceptual accuracy, and has plunged into primordial depths of conceptual drawing and intuitive imagery. While it cannot be denied that this swing from classical art to conceptual and impressionistic art has yielded some valuable results, it is also true that it represents a very extreme retrogression into the proto-logical past. Much of the poetry, drama and fiction which has been written during the past half-century is also a reversion from classical and logical standards of morality and beauty into primitive savagery or pathological abnormality. Some of it has reached such paralogical levels of sophistication that it has lost all power to furnish any standards at all to a generation which has deliberately tried to abandon its entire heritage from the past. All systematic attempts to discredit inherited sexual morality, to substitute dream-states for reflection, and to replace logical writing by jargon, are retreats into the jungle from which man emerged through long and painful millennia of disillusionment. With the same brains and affective reactions as those which our ancestors possessed two thousand years ago, increasing sophistication has not been able to teach us any sounder fundamental principles of life than were known at that time. . . . Unless we can continue along the pathway of personal morality and spiritual growth which was marked out for civilized man by the founders of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, more than two thousand years ago, our superior skill in modifying and even in transforming the material world about us can lead only to repeated disasters, each more terrible than its predecessor. (Archaeology and the Religion of Israel, 5th Ed. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 31-33.)

The very first relationship of our life is with our parents. It’s the most deeply ingrained relationship in our minds. They act as a confidant, supporter, and an anchor for a majority of our lifetime. The death of my mother felt like the death of warmth, love, and nurture. Initially, it won’t make much sense, but eventually, as you go through different emotional stages, you start making sense of what has happened and the way you want to move on.

Abnormality departed with a leisurely step. First there was the dry beach, ten days of vacuum. Then the period of the beach and the waves. Then there was Something, that heavy hand of urgent hunches. Then the four- or five-day period when Something demonstrated its frightening and profitable talent for extending. Then the novel-writing days, strangest of all, perhaps, when words from nowhere somehow reached my fingers, ignoring the dry beach altogether. And the pictures, flashing like bright telegrams. The three months of unusual phenomena were as weird in their way as the voices of the Operators. But the anchor remained solidly hooked and, except for a few days when Something seemed to be showing off what it could do in the way of telepathy and precognition if it really tried, I wandered calmly from one stage to another, undisturbed by what was happening, undisturbed by what might lie around the corner. And then abruptly, overnight, the strange equipment was put away in storage, the regular machinery was hauled onto the dry beach and connected. Reason, as I had known reason, returned.

Dyes made from coal. The tarpits in Los Angeles… ONE OF OUR ANCHOR POINTS A COLONY IN YR DAY STILL A HUB OF POWERFUL ILLUSIONS & SO THE LEGEND OF THE CENTAUR IS THE LAST POETRY OF ATLANTIS Dinosaur, pterodactyl, bat—good Lord!

It was a tale of doubt and betrayal, one familiar from so many country songs, but the reason these stories turn up so many times is that, for all our vanities, there are not so many ways to be a fool, or, as I wrote once, “Man uses words to dress up his vile instincts.” Anytime I strayed into an attractive but opaque image, Loretta pulled me back to the story. If the harmony became unsettling, she wanted a plain chord to serve as an anchor to your feelings. If I didn’t know it already, I found it was just as hard to write a song using simple tools as it was to turn the fancy tricks that I’d long since put away. So, we finished the song and I went back downtown to debut the number on my favorite stage in the world, the Ryman Auditorium, where I was opening for Bob Dylan that night.

She seemed to have it all. Humanitarian success on the world stage, contentment and love in her private life. As she lazed on the deck of the Jonikal, for once the barometer of her heart was set fair. By some curious alchemy the public sensed this transformation, that this lonely, vulnerable and rudderless vessel had at last found a comforting anchor in life, a safe harbor to run to from the perils of the deep. For a few short days she enjoyed that state of grace in a stormy existence. Then the heavens cracked open--and claimed her.

I was raised with strong values, and had spent much of my life to that point seeing my character tested. I was viciously bullied in middle school. My father died when I was a teenager. As a lawyer, I worked eighteen-hour days immersed in acrimony. As a cub reporter, I was targeted by a violent stalker. Once I became a well-known news anchor, I accepted without complaint the scrutiny that comes with that role. I’d also navigated my way through plenty of sexism from powerful men. So I suppose I was as prepared as anyone could be to spend the 2016 election being targeted by the likely Republican nominee. Yet still, the chaos Trump unleashed was of a completely different order than anything I’d encountered before—than anything any journalist has encountered at the hands of a presidential candidate in the history of modern American politics. This is the story of how I found myself on that debate stage, and how asking that question led to one of the toughest years of my life.

For some patients tapping acupressure points is a good anchor.23 I ask others to feel the weight of their body in the chair or to plant their feet on the floor. I might ask a patient who is collapsing into silence to see what happens when he sits up straight. Some patients discover their own islands of safety—they begin to “get” that they can create body sensations to counterbalance feeling out of control. This sets the stage for trauma resolution: pendulating between states of exploration and safety, between language and body, between remembering the past and feeling alive in the present.

For established firms, the opportunity to anchor a new initiative with an internal customer can amplify the delusion of leadership. It is a double-edged sword that should be handled with care. On the plus side, an internal customer creates an opportunity to jump-start scale and show activity. The risks, however, are (a) that the internal customer is taken as an unbiased signal of market demand; (b) that the business generated by the internal customer is used as a source of revenue for the venture, rather than leveraged to attract and align early stage partners; and (c) that the artificially low barriers to serve and support the internal customer mask the need to realign the firm’s own internal ecosystem in ways that serve and support external partners and customers

When my own kids are in a particularly challenging sibling stage, I remind myself: “They feel untethered and insecure. They each need more connection with me to feel anchored in this family. Okay, let’s schedule some PNP!

During this psychological transformation, the ordinary anchors of everyday life fell away for many working Americans. Family, community, tradition, and certainty were shaken apart by the economic force of the new—urban, postindustrial, and corporate—brand of capitalism. The sense of a person's self, which had previously been socially defined, moved into the interior of each individual's life and mind. Gradually, another concept of the self emerged as capitalism moved into this new stage, and sales or leisured consumption replaced the older emphasis on production and honest, hard work. This transition marked a shift toward a new type of person, one “predicated on the effectiveness of sales technique or the attractiveness of the individual salesperson. Personal magnetism replaced craftsmanship; technique replaced moral integrity.”85 The pervasive anxiety of this era led Americans to look for leadership anywhere they could find it. Three new areas promised relief. First, a new, popular psychology of personality offered to teach Americans how to transform themselves into people with “an intensely private sense of well being.” Self-pleasure and self-satisfaction now became the purpose of individual existence rather than a by-product of a well-lived life, and this ideology conveniently dovetailed with the new consumerism.86 Not surprisingly, then, a second transformative force emerged as the emerging field of advertising co-opted psychology and drafted psychologists like John B. Watson, A. A. Brill, and Sigmund Freud's brilliant nephew Edward Bernays into its well-paying service. On the advice and example of these men, copywriters began to suggest to consumers that they could transform their position in the social and business hierarchy by buying and displaying the correct products and behaviors. The new generation of ads was highly motivational.

God created the world in six days and it is difficult for us to perceive the greatness of the primary information, unless we understand a work of inner transformation or the need for a more secure future for the next generation! The immediate answer is cold and false and it has a tinge of emotional therapy. Only the inner acceptance of reality has a dose of pure truth and can generate the echo of the self that may give us a middle way in our own vision of how to avoid the evil that extends and takes over the world! Is the deceptive tranquility of the silence that conquers us, a collective passivity that reigns over the weak, frightened and cowardly people, fueled by mediocrity and the vain hope into a better future. What happens now in this world is an ancient Greek tragedy, in which we like actors that can no longer tell the stage from reality. It is like in a therapy-drama, seen as a solution for those who had traumatic experiences in their life and cannot communicate through words. It is those who choose a non-verbal language and who saw their hands in desperation, as they can no longer articulate words. They communicate like primitive people after the discovery of fire. Others are playing their role in a theater of the absurd, like some amateur actors or as mimes in a stand-up comedy show where self-deprecation is adored. Depending on each one’s perception power, different ways of expression are chosen, perhaps more superficial and well-anchored in the context of the drama we are living to the full. It is a false sense of inner security, a mere relief valve for our emotional expression and a recipe for disaster! Why is it that nothing good and fair happens in this world anymore? Is the evil perpetuating itself in shapes and patterns we are no longer capable to distinguish from the good and the right? Why are we deceiving ourselves? “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.” But who, how, why, for whom, by whom, what, and in particular when ? Lucian Ciuchita

The early network reports are preserved online, over the protests of the media conglomerates. They sue from time to time and get the reports taken down, but someone always puts them up again. We’re never going to forget how badly we were betrayed. People died in the streets while news anchors made jokes about people taking their zombie movies too seriously and showed footage they claimed depicted teenagers “horsing around” in latex and bad stage makeup.