When you have the courage to shape your life from the essence of who you are, you ignite, becoming truly alive. This requires letting go of everything that is inauthentic. But how can you even know your truth unless you slow down, in your own quiet company?
Traveling from the known to the unknown requires crossing an abyss of emptiness. We first experience disorientation and confusion. Then if we are willing to cross the abyss in curious and playful wonder, we enter an expansive and untamed country that has its own rhythm. Time melts and thoughts become stories, music, poems, images, ideas. This is the intelligence of the heart, but by that I don't mean just the seat of our emotions. I mean a vast range of receptive and connective abilities, intuition, innovation, wisdom, creativity, sensitivity, the aesthetic, qualitative and meaning making. It is here that we uncover our purpose and passion. Dawna Markova
The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves by Stephen Grosz
Our greatest difficulties should be looked at as stories rather than problems. When one attempts to tell the story of one’s life truthfully, the byproduct of that examination can be a myriad of emotions; more often than not, it is sadness. But as The Examined Life shows, whatever comes out, the richness of any person’s honest story of adversity makes mere happiness pale in comparison. We all know how it is – the longer you tell yourself a lie or repeat a well-worn opinion, the harder it becomes to admit the truth, or to see the real story. Micah Toub The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves by Stephen Grosz
There's peaches on the shelf, potatoes in the bin; Supper ready, everybody come on in. Taste a little of the summer. Grandma put it all in jars. Canned Goods - Greg Brown
Our freedom is a freedom of synthesis. It is the freedom to pull ourselves together into the type of coherent whole out of the myriad different influences imposing themselves upon us from the environment, our community,and from our own bodies. Even if the raw materials from which we construct ourselves are determined, what we make of ourselves out of these materials is up to us alone. Like the power of good editing, of the creative juxtaposition of determinate elements. It can transform experience; make the ugly beautiful and the ordinary, sublime. The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus.
The ultimate equal opportunity employer, especially in times of such epidemic inequality for America’s burgeoning ranks of poor. But the economy, like the dependencies it fuels and supports, always leads to greater appetites and acts of recklessness, and each step upward on the ladder becomes more slippery and treacherous.
The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus.
Masquerade Suite - Aram Khachaturian (an Armenian composer who has lived all his life trying to create serious art music that will be for all peopl
Imany - Slow Down Take your time It will be all right If you decide to take it on the signs. Take it easy, Take it easy
As Plato expresses it in Symposium, eros can help the soul to remember beauty in its pure form and it can contribute to an understanding of truth. Its main characteristic is permanent aspiration and desire. Even when it seems to give, eros continues to be a desire to possess, but nevertheless it is different from a purely sensual love in being the love that tends towards the sublime. Eros is thus the way that leads man to divinity. Eros is the child of Resource and Poverty. Poverty sleeps with Resource and produces a child who is always in search of something but is unable to maintain those things. Like Poverty, his mother, Eros is restless and always needy of something more, and being the child of Resource, he knows what exactly he needs to fill that void. but it is in his nature to never attain it, always wretchedly reaching out for something other, always desiring...
For Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, the metaphor of eros or intimate love provides the closest analogy in human experience for a sense of the movement to transcend oneself — to reach out for a knowledge that always partially evades one’s grasp. From The Song of Songs, and throughout the Bible and its literature of commentary and meditation, this metaphor has held a more or less central place. Issues of longing and loneliness, emptiness and fullness play themselves out here. In her "The Murmuring Deep: Reflections on the Biblical Unconscious" she offers insights into the interaction between consciousness and unconsciousnessa and better understanding of the desires and motivations of the men and women whose stories form the basis of the Bible as the foundational text in our quest to understand what it means to be human.
Going To Tehran by Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett
I’m the ghost of your father, doomed for a certain period of time to walk the earth at night, while during the day I’m trapped in the fires of purgatory until I’ve done penance for my past sins. If I weren’t forbidden to tell you the secrets of purgatory, I could tell you stories that would slice through your soul, freeze your blood, Hamlet 1.5.5
“When Hamlet says the ‘time is out of joint,’ for me that’s a discovery of a kind of truth. It’s not just a bit of word play. There’s something wrong with the time. I recognized, in my own state of shock and aftermath after what happened to us, a profound sense that time had passed without me, or the change between your own personal inner state and the way the world is progressing is out of joint. For Hamlet, he’s come back to this kingdom that he no longer recognizes, and the pieces have shifted and his whole future has been taken from him. And a new one has been put into place that he doesn’t recognize. And that’s the source of profound confusion and remorse and inability to get on aboard with it, or to play along in this new reality that he doesn’t believe in or can’t accept. But he recognizes that the only way forward is to play the part that he has been cast in. It’s deeply confusing when all value has been stripped from all that is valuable.” Jonathon Young
If I weren’t forbidden to tell you the secrets of purgatory, I could tell you stories that would slice through your soul, freeze your blood, Hamlet 1.5.5
"It’s deeply confusing when all value has been stripped from all that is valuable.” Jonathon Young
You cannot expect other people to create meaning for you. You cannot wait for someone else to define your life. You make meaning by forging it with your hands. It requires sweat and commitment. Working toward the creation of meaning is the point. it is action that forges the meaning and the significance of a life. And Then, You Act: Making Art in an Unpredictable World By Anne Bogart
“God is infinitely ineffable, infinitely unknowable, and infinitely beyond thought.”
The ancient Greeks conceived of time in two radically different ways and produced two different words to distinguish one from the other: chronos and kairos. In English, we have to make do with only one word: time. This “making do” has led us to confuse these two fundamentally diverse means of experiencing time. Anne Bogart
Centro de Arte Contemporaneo - “This museum belongs to the neighbourhood,”
While some politicians set out to wage war between people, some musicians set out to make peace between people. Fatoumata Diawara is a Malian singer who believes in slowly changing things through music. Why this war today? It is war that separates...I cry when I think of all the wars in the world. All these conflicts in the world make me cry.
The End of the Chinese Dream: Why Chinese People Fear the Future. A study of ordinary Chinese people and how they perceive their lives and opportunities in modern China. Hundreds of millions of everyday people in China are beleaguered by immense social and health problems as well as personal, family, and financial anxieties—while they watch their communities and traditions being destroyed. With masses trading their plows for cubicles, and the loss of community and family ties, nearly 350 million Chinese are expected to migrate to the cities. How about you? At least on a farm you live a more stress-free lifestyle.
Christian Caryl - Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century “It was in 1979 that the twin forces of markets and religion, discounted for so long, came back with a vengeance. to study 1979 is also to study the tyranny of chance. I do think that chance and contingency play a huge role in history. I don’t think anything is preordained...you can never rely on the orthodoxy to stay in place, or know what form political or economic change is going to take when the orthodoxy seems to have exhausted itself.”
Who is at my door? "Your humble servant." What business do you have? "To greet you, O Lord." How long will you journey on? "Until you stop me." How long will you boil in the fire? "Until I am pure. This is my oath of love. For the sake of love. I gave up wealth and position." You have pleaded your case but you have no witness. "My tears are my witness; the pallor of my face is my proof.' Your witness has no credibility; your eyes are too wet to see. "By the splendor of your justice my eyes are clear and faultless." ...Where is there safety? "In service and renunciation." What is there to renounce? "The hope of salvation."...How do you benefit from this life? "By keeping true to myself." Now it is time for silence. If I told you about His true essence, you would fly from your self and be gone, and neither door nor roof could hold you back! Rumi
Wake up! You can't remember where it was. Had this dream stopped?... Once I had a little game, I liked to crawl back in my brain, I think you know the game I mean. I mean the game called "Go Insane"...Way back deep into the brain, Way back past the realm of pain, Back where there's never any rain...For seven years I dwelt in the loose palace of exile...Now I have come again to the land of the fair, and the strong and the wise...Tomorrow we enter the town of my birth, I want to be ready. The Celebration Of The Lizard, Jim Morrison
“People are afraid of themselves, of their own reality; their feelings most of all. People talk about how great love is, but that’s bullshit. Love hurts. Feelings are disturbing. People are taught that pain is evil and dangerous. How can they deal with love if they’re afraid to feel? Pain is meant to wake us up. People try to hide their pain. But they’re wrong. Pain is something to carry, like a radio. You feel your strength in the experience of pain. It’s all in how you carry it. That’s what matters. Pain is a feeling. Your feelings are a part of you. Your own reality. If you feel ashamed of them, and hide them, you’re letting society destroy your reality. You should stand up for your right to feel your pain.” Jim Morrison
Ansel Adams's plenitude and exaltation of nature
Edward Burtynsky's depletion and devaluation
Connections: Ansel Adams's plenitude and exaltation of nature vs Edward Burtynsky's depletion and devaluation. "how ideas emerge in certain time periods, then perhaps re-emerge or are reinterpreted later in a different medium.” Chris Finn
Edvard Grieg - Piano Concerto in A minor Op. 16
Siegried's Funeral March from Die Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods) by Wagner (refering to a prophesied war among various beings and gods that ultimately results in the burning, immersion in water, and renewal of the world)
