Wednesday, January 7, 2015

Sensitive Stew

And then my ex gave me this book for Christmas. It's a collection of interviews with Joni Mitchell, and she says “Sensitivity is a good thing in that you notice a lot of details, especially in nature. One of the bad things about it is that you tend to tread [in place] because sensitivity lacks clarity. You’ll get a problem you don’t know the answer to and you’ll go over and over it, spin your wheels, tread it to death. However, by treading over and over and over, there is a deepening process so in that way you do come to, hopefully, occasionally, some hidden truths, because … sensitivity is the setting sun, it’s the gateway to the look-within place, it’s the deepening place. It’s what depression is for. It’s to drive you in to face yourself and correct yourself… if you take a medicine and you don’t get to the ‘why,’ you’re gonna remain an asshole on drugs. You’re never gonna get to the bottom or the turning point or the revelation… You can’t be deep without sensitivity… even though I’m ultra-sensitive, it doesn’t mean that I’m just always wounded and bleeding but that I’m perceiving things that other people might not.”

So that’s a slightly different perspective. The going over and over it, spinning your wheels, treading it to death … while one way to think of it is that you are deepening the ruts of habit — getting nowhere except entrenching them so that you get more of the same in your life — another possibility is that it’s how you eventually come to an understanding, a revelation, a turning point.

I often understand, yet there is no turning point.


You can listen to some of the interviews online! I never knew that. They were broadcast on CBC in 1973 and 1979:

http://www.cbc.ca/books/2014/09/joni-mitchell-in-her-own-words.html