life path
‘Wintering is a season in the cold. It is a fallow period in life when you’re cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider. Perhaps it results from an illness; perhaps from a life event such as a bereavement or the birth of a child; perhaps it comes from a period of humiliation or
... See more‘We like to imagine that it's possible for life to be one eternal summer, and that we have uniquely failed to achieve that for ourselves, We dream of an equatorial habitat, forever close to the sun; an endless, unvarying high season. But life's not like that. Emotionally, we're prone to stifling summers and low, dark winters, to sudden drops in
... See moreDoing those deeply unfashionable things - slowing down, letting your spare time expand, getting enough sleep, resting - are radical acts these days, but they are essential. This is a crossroads we all know, a moment when you need to shed a skin. If you do, you'll expose all those painful nerve endings, and feel so raw that you'll need to take care
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This was a liminal moment in the calendar: a time between two worlds, and between two phases of the year, when worshippers were just about to cross a boundary but hadn't yet done so. Samhain was a way of marking that ambiguous moment when you didn't know who you were about to become, or what the future would hold. It was a celebration of limbo.
Our
... See moreHalloween is no longer a time for remembrance, but it still reveals our need to enter liminal spaces: those moments when we're standing on the breach of fear and delight, and those times when we wish that the veil between the living and the dead would lift for a while. But most of all, it hints at the winter to come, opening the door to the dark
... See moreI didn't feel that the two should be in conflict - achieving your potential, and not being completely miserable. Happiness is the greatest skill we'll ever learn; it is not a part of ourselves that should be hived off into a dark corner, the shameful territory of the wilfully naive.
Happiness is our potential, the product of a mind that's allowed to
... See more“...I was a liberal arts major at university, where my research focused on the Japanese language. Specifically, I’m interested in how people communicate. While pursuing my research, I became curious about the use of language in print media. I was especially fascinated by the effectiveness of particular expressions and sentence structures. Ideally,
... See moreThe protagonist is Ushiyama Yoshiko, a BA liberal arts graduate. We meet her immediately as she is interviewing for a permanent position in ‘the factory’ to a middle manager named Goto.
She speaks very eloquently in this interview about the interest she has in language used in print media due to the research on communication in Japanese that she conducted during her degree, and states how she would like to use that experience in this career.
She also relates this to a lifelong relationship to the factory and its products, saying how she has seen advertisements as a child that drew her to working for the technologically advanced and ethical company. This demonstrates to the interviewer that Yoshiko has conducted her own research about the company, as well as presenting an emotional argument for her desire to work there, and flattering the company and thus interviewer as she does so.
We haven’t known Yoshiko long enough to understand yet whether these claims are genuine, but we understand her to be intelligent enough to go about her interview in such a way regardless, using multiple persuasive tactics in a relatively short space of time. She is also able to pull this spiel from the top of her head, without any further prompting, so we understand that she has prepared well, irrespective of her actual interests or whether the factory really does have ‘famously high standards, both technologically and ethically speaking’.
As we so often find in ancient folklore, the Cailleach offers us a cyclical metaphor for life, one in which the energies of spring can arrive again and again, nurtured by the deep retreat of winter. We are no longer accustomed to thinking in this way. We are instead in the habit of imagining our lives to be linear; a long march from birth to death
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