Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible without surrender be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story. Desiderata of Happiness by Max Ehrmann
Thanks for consenting. Tell me, what's your name? Call me the one who fell out of the frame.
Thank you. Now, what's your job? What do you do? Let's say I stay a while, then travel through.
Quite interesting. Do they pay you well? In tears and smiles, as far as I can tell.
Ok. Where is your current dwelling place? Lost in the margins of the human race.
What are your interests, hobbies, recreations? I get involved in many situations.
What are your goals in life, your great ambitions? Simply to walk - whatever the conditions.
Have you a secret longing or desire? To tread on water, then to walk through fire.
If you were asked advice, what would it be? Don't honour princes, but respect a tree.
What book has influenced you that you've read? The book of birth, the living and the dead.
What is your favourite food, your favourite drink? The food of love, and lemon juice, I think.
What is your sexual orientation? Straight, but I might bend under interrogation.
What keeps you going, day after tragic day? My hearts keeps beating. That's all I can say.
And what will happen when your life is gone? It's a narrative which I'm still working on.
Is there a last bon mot you would impart? Of living I've not yet mastered the art.
All we have are hints and glimpses, something seen fleetingly as in peripheral vision, a shadowy shape beyond the drape, the voice that whispers behind the grill, the merest murmur of Elysian melody, a prickling of the skin which might be but a draft from an open window. But it is the window opening on eternity, seen now darkly, but then face to face. Bonnie Thurston
My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope that I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.
At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is so to speak his name written in us... like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely... I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere. Thomas Merton
Concha Buika - VolverasNo disparen al pianista Those lies were not that false, neither that truthful your favorite truths, those silences were not that quiet, no, some moments were not that bad
Silvan Zingg - a tribute to Pinetop's Boogie Woogie- composed by Clarence "Pinetop" Smith - Nobody knows you when you down and out. In my pocket not one penny and my friends I haven't any. But If I ever get on my feet again, then I'll meet my long lost friend.
Felicity Don portraits of the people of the Vancouver Downtown Eastside at the Interurban Gallery.
How mind works. To connect events into sequences, to discover dependencies behind them, to invent logic is an evolutionary advantage that mind brings to human being. Mind ties everything into one huge story, where everything makes sense and directed to you and for you. Your mind believes that everything, every and each signal is perceivesd from the world is a message for you and all you need is just figure out the underlying meaning, to decrypt the message. The whole universe is just one huge novel where you are the central character, and everything rotates around you and for you. Every mind does the same; what differs is only the scale: how far it goes; and it goes as far as you allow it to go. Review, Analysis, critique
Gertrude Harris's Looking Forward- Hope in Shadows. You need not leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. You need not even wait, just learn to become quiet, and still, and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice; it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.- Franz Kafka
There is nothing more profound, more mysterious, more pregnant, more insidious, more dazzling than a window lighted by a single candle. In that black or luminous square life lives, life dreams, life suffers.
Across the ocean of roofs I can see a middle-aged woman, her face already lined, who is forever bending over something and who never goes out. Out of her face, her dress, and her gestures I have made up this woman's story, or rather legend, and sometimes I tell it to myself and weep.
And I go to bed proud to have lived and to have suffered in some one besides myself. Perhaps you will say "Are you sure that your story is the really one?" But what does it matter what reality is outside myself, so long as it has helped me to live, to feel that I am, and what I am? Charles Baudelaire
"I've come to listen to people's heartaches and take away tears," says an old boatman as he rows among the gray waters and white salt islands of Urmia (the third-largest saltwater lake in the world). As people whisper their sorrows, he collects each person's tears in vials, later to pour them into the sea. A contemporary Odysseus or Gulliver, his travels reveal a world woven from both dream and nightmare, where the inhabitants are grievously oppressed by the weight of ancient custom and tradition and the collective always conquers the individual . A portrait of a land where there are enough tears to fill up the seas and where all dreams must be buried underground, The White Meadows works as both a veiled political critique of contemporary Iran and a timeless, unforgettable fable in the tradition of Swift or Kafka. Our anthropological curiosity is immediately aroused by the strange communities and their often brutal customs. But this same curiosity goes quickly from piqued to peaked as we grasp that there are going to be no easy answers. Rather, we are faced with an allegory that refuses to operate within conventional expectations of realism, and a metaphor that stores a wealth of hidden meanings under a stark white surface.
Brian Harri call-to-action for individuals and communities to reclaim control of local food systems and to think carefully about the ethics of food consumption decisions that are made everyday.
What are the must-have ingredients for a robust local food system? What would it take for our region’s food economy to really get humming, to change the way we grow, process, distribute and serve our local bounty?
Genuine radical hospitality begins on the inside of who we are and radiates to those we know and to those we don't know. Practicing radical hospitality begins with making space for other people - within our hearts and within our lives. In their book, Radical Hospitality, Benedict's Way of Love, co-authors Father Dan Homan and Lonni Collins Pratt describe radical hospitality as a willingness to to stretch our sometimes narrow lives and listening to others without judgment. Extending ourselves for the sake of others invites us to grow - to experience those who are different from us and perhaps learn to see new perspectives through the lens of another person. Hospitality ultimately asks us to step beyond our self-centeredness and see a larger world that extends beyond our comfort zones.
When we are visited by someone genuinely other than ourselves, we are tempted to reduce him or her to the status of an object (the imperialism of the ego). In their very otherness, in their very strangeness, they summon us to a deeper wareness.
Christians have difficulty in building peace because they are reluctant to stand with the peoples of the world who are oppressed and impoverished by empire. As an empire declines it defines itself increasingly by what it is against, rather than what it is for, creating a great need for enemies. It loses sight of its founding vision. Mary Jo Leddy
During the Carolingian Empire under Constantine, The church, through Christian conquest, lost its early experience of spiritual understanding of paradise here and now and Jesus as a living presence in a vibrant world through art, ritual and devotional practices. Love for the earth calls for a theology of redemptive beauty that includes addressing the moral injury experienced by those directly involved in killing in war and the economic disparity in the body by attending to the needs of the poor. It calls for lifting up beauty by reclaiming the practice of penance, a ritual of forgiveness for the damaging spiritual consequences of killing those who bear the image of God. Rita Nakashima Brock - Saving Paradise
For the sake of easy conversation we all submit to lowest level of thinking; which is dualistic. It leads us to easy rights and wrongs, good and bad. It's the way we deal with pretty much everything. Liberals and conservatives, black and white, gay and straight. It makes for convienant, easy conversation. It doesn't really help you touch reality. I've looked at the patterns of my life and when I surrender to that simplistic, either-or, all or nothing thinking, it's made me make my worse mistakes. It's allowed me to hurt people unnecessarily without even knowing I was hurting someone. It has allowed me to not be compassionate; to not be patient, to not be merciful, to not understand situations, to read them wrong. The dualistic mind operates by reading everything by what I like and by what I prefer. It reads everything egocentric. You don’t even realize you are egocentric, you just think you are defending some great truth; you’re usually not. You are defending what you are comfortable with and you call that objective truth. Richard Rhor
A Room in the City is a self-revelatory journey into a world of darkness and light, a place of blatant lies and transcendent truths. Photographer Gabor Gasztonyi presents a Vancouver with deep roots in an otherwise forgotten past, and an East End populated by people seeking shelter, safety, and love in extreme social conditions.
Gasztonyi’s arresting images urge us to look longer, harder, and deeper at a city often deemed one of the "world’s best places to live." His unflinching eye insists that we more closely examine a culture where the chasm between have and have-not grows ever deeper, to consider how we are both implicated and removed from the lives of our neighbours. The black-and-white images, and Gasztonyi's diary entries, forcefully and unforgettably capture the desperation-and the unexpected glints of dignity and joy-of lives ravaged by poverty, drugs, mental illness and social dislocation.
Sadness can be healthy. It’s a complex emotion that causes us to rethink our own system and how we relate to the world. Major life stressors, such as the loss of a job, divorce or the death of a loved one, result in normal bereavement, which plays a part in healing. The sadness helps them by promoting a reprocessing of how they're going to carry forward. Do we want to live in a world that tolerates the full range of human emotions or do we want to use the scientific know-how we have at our disposal to reduce that range of emotion? The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder by Allan V. Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield
Feelings of gratitude don’t easily crack the daily to-do list, which is why we should feel especially thankful for Thanksgiving. Even the side-dish option of cranberry sauce requires such inspired co-operation of humans and nature for these brilliant berries to achieve life in an acidic bog that we should fall to our knees in wonder that agriculture manages such miracles. Thanksgiving is a time when we at least resolve to make the effort and aim at a higher purpose. But one of the most gratifying parts of Thanksgiving is the power it possesses to resolve many of the thankless tensions we bring to the table. John Allemang
When I was a boy of fourteen or fifteen, and my soul was overflowing with numberless longings, with pure thoughts and with that infinite hope that is the most precious jewel of youth, when I deemed myself a poet, when my imagination was full of those pleasing tales of the classic world. I used to dream then of a happy, independent life, like that of the bird, which is born to sing, and receives its food from God. I used to dream of that tranquil life of the poet, which glows with a soft light from generation to generation.
So mused the poet Becquer in the golden days of his youth, when his veins were swelling with health, when his heart was fired with ambition, and in his ears was ringing the joyous invitation of his muse.
He knew nothing of the cold, prosaic world of selfish interests. The time had not yet come when, in bitterness of spirit, and wrapping his mantle about him against the chill wind of indifference, he should say: "To-day my sole ambition is to be a supernumerary in the vast human comedy, and when my silent role is ended, to withdraw behind the scenes, neither hissed nor applauded, making my exit unnoticed."
By some strange mystery, however, it had been decreed by fate that he should only meet with disappointment in every object of his love.
As I was present at its birth, and as since its birth I have lived its feverish and impassioned life, El Contemporáneo is not for me a common newspaper like the rest, but its columns are yourselves, my friends, my companions in hope or disappointment, in failure or triumph, in joy or bitterness. The first impression that I feel upon receiving it, then, is one of joy, like that experienced upon opening a letter on whose envelope we recognize a dear familiar handwriting, or when in a foreign land we grasp the hand of a compatriot and hear our native tongue again. The peculiar odor of the damp paper and the printer's ink, that characteristic odor which seems to strike the olfactory memory, a strange and keen memory that unquestionably exists, and it brings back to me a portion of my former life,-that restlessness, that activity, that feverish productiveness of journalism. I recall the constant pounding and creaking of the presses that multiply by thousands the words that we have just written, and that have come all palpitating from our pens. I recall the strain of the last hours of publication, when night is almost over and copy scarce. I recall, in short, those times when day has surprised us correcting an article or writing a last notice when we paid not the slightest attention to the poetic beauties of the dawn. In Madrid, and for us in particular, the sun neither rises nor sets: we put out or light the lights, and that is the only reason we notice it.
At last he opens the sheet. The news of the clubs or the Cortes absorbs him until the failing light of the setting sun warns him that, though he has read but the first columns, it is time to go. "The shadows of the mountains fall rapidly, and spread over the plain. The moon begins to appear in the east like a silver circle gleaming through the sky, and the avenue of poplars is wrapped in the uncertain dusk of twilight... The monastery bell, the only one that still hangs in its ruined Byzantine tower, begins to call to prayers, and one near and one afar, some with sharp metallic notes, and some with solemn, muffled tones, the other bells of the hillside towns reply... It seems like a harmony that falls from heaven and rises at the same time from the earth, becomes confounded, and floats in space, intermingling with the fading sounds of the dying day and the first sighs of the newborn night.
"And now all is silenced,- Madrid, political interests, ardent struggles, human miseries, passions, disappointments, desires, all is hushed in that divine music. My soul is now as serene as deep and silent water. A faith in something greater, in a future though unknown destiny, beyond this life, a faith in eternity,-in short, an all-absorbing larger aspiration, overwhelms that petty faith which we might term personal, that faith in the morrow, that sort of goad that spurs on irresolute minds, and that is so needful if one must struggle and exist and accomplish something in this world."
Day is ending, birds are wending, back to the shelter of each little nest they love. Nightshades falling, lovers calling What makes the World go round; Nothing but love When whippoorwills call and evening is nigh, I hurry to my Blue Heaven. I turn to the right, a little white light Will lead you to my Blue Heaven. A a smiling face, a fireplace, a cosy room. A little nest that nestles where roses bloom. Just Molly and me and baby makes three. We're happy in my Blue Heaven. Gene Austin
There will be days When you get down, and you've got to find ways to keep your feet on the ground. Oh but honey, please remember even when I'm feelin blue that I will never ever quit loving you. Jill Barber
With somehow a detached curiosity about the world that roves from place to place and detail to detail,sort of critter, similar to an artist's or novelist’s curiosity except that it would be difficult to say what the medium is. William Gibson's Zero History
I found the path to myself through my camera. It led me around the world and home again.My most evocative photographs were right at my own doorstep, reflections of the autumn foliage in my outdoor pool, which looked like Monet paintings. Courtney Milne
Would your life be different if you experienced a moment of beauty, wonder and inspiration every day? What if you started each new day with a new perspective about your world? What might change in your life, your work, your family, the planet? Are you looking for a deeper connection, more creativity, more passion, meaning, and purpose - every day of your life? Seeing With New Eyes is about learning to see our world in different ways. The World of Courtney Milne
Pink Martini - Ninna Nanna (Splendor In The Grass)
