Just 3 hours to go before NaNoWriMo officially begins. At the stroke of midnight I magically transform into a novelist. Have I prepared for the month-long writing challenge? Have I thought of great story ideas? Have I outlined a plot? Did I come up with great character names maybe? Other than names for hedgehogs that is? OF COURSE NOT!!! What I DID do is I spent the better part of the day stumbling.
"Stumbling?" You might ask. Yes, I stumbled on dozens and dozens of sites, thanks to a really neat service called Stumble Upon, a site I just recently discovered. You can sign up for free, you fill a short form describing some of your interests, you download and install a toolbar and you're good to go. Unfortunately the toolbar only works with the Firefox web browser but if you don't have Firefox already, it's well worth the download. That's what I had to do and it took just a few minutes. Once you've installed the thing, you can discover a whole new world of sites, information, photos and videos that you may not have found otherwise. You view randomly selected sites that you rate with one click (thumbs up, thumbs down). You hit a button and you're on the the next site. The more sites you rate, the better the application can "learn" what specifically interests you and the better recommendations it makes to suit your tastes. I'm hooked. I'd say the only downside was that all that clicking to get to the next goody made me feel like a lab rat or a gambling addict.
What does any of this have to do with the odd couple showcased up there? Everything actually. I found this picture thanks to 'Stumble Upon'. And yes, what you're seeing is indeed a giraffe licking a squirrel. Kinky, I know. It was from one of the rated called
The animal photo archive. Of course I couldn't resist showing it here. It needs a caption though so don't be shy to submit your musings. Get creative! Get silly! Get strange! Just send something my way because very soon, I'll be unable to put more than two words together for anything else than this 50, 000 word novel I'm supposed to invent and write within a month. Should be interesting. Interesting and bad no doubt, but that's part of the fun. If you want to get some idea of just how bad it can get, just visit my other blog, fifty thousand words: the shameful blog of shlock o' block prose which I've set up specifically for that purpose. And Shelly: 10-4. I'll do my best to keep adverbs to a minimum, that's a promise.
October 31, 2007
The odd couple
October 30, 2007
Planet Earth as seen by...
The site of the day award goes to: A Photo a Day from Planet Earth. Everybody and anybody is invited to submit photos from around the world. So who knows? Tomorrow's pic could be yours, or even mine... you just never know...
Pics from A Photo a Day from Planet Earth
(from top to bottom):
Street scene, Vientiane, Laos: taken by MJ Klein.
Meenakshi Temple, Madurai, India: taken by Claude.
Bicycle, Pisa, Italy: taken by Bryan
October 29, 2007
A very lucky find
I'll bet you anything it never occured to you that someday you'd see a porcupine and say "AAAaaaaaaaaawwwwwwww he's so adorable!!!". Well I never thought I would anyway. I'm glad I found this little guy because I can use all the solace I can get tonight... it's just been a crappy weekend and a crappy day. I'm trying to make decisions about my life when I have no business trying to get ahead of myself. My mandate right now, as prescribed by health professionals is to just "be" (and take a lot of pills, but that's a different story). So: I am. What am I? I dunno. Right now I'm googoo-gaga over this little critter over here. According to the native Indian Medicine Cards, Porcupine represents innocence. And... yep, I can sure see that with this little puppy over here. He's so cute I want to give him a name and adopt him. And suckle him. Or then again, maybe not that last one.
According to the medicine cards, Porcupine carries a very powerful medicine which is the power of faith and trust. The power of faith gives you the ability and the drive to move mountains, affording you the resources to accomplish just about any goal. Trust gives you the courage to trust in the Great Spirit, or the Higher Power, or God, or Buddha, or Jesus, or The Universe, or whatever you want to call it - knowing that there is a divine plan, or a greater purpose, or a field of infinite possibilities for us all. When you're more trusting, you also encourage a willigness in others to trust more, which in turn allows you and others to be more open and eager to share love, joy and friendship. Porcupine reminds us that it's important to connect with your inner child by remembering to let go of adult concerns like fear, worry, greed and suffering, and becoming a playful and fun-loving creature again. Porcupine gives you the personal power to appreciates each new day as an opportunity to rediscover the world and let your imagination roam free. "By honoring Porcupine, you honour the playfulness of spirit that lets everyone win". That all sounds pretty good to me - and if you've stopped by here today, then you should consider yourself lucky too.
Photo by Mike Finley
Simple Gestures Of Solace
Adapted from a DailyOm article,
Offering Comfort
Sometimes it's difficult to see someone you love hurting, struggling, or in pain. You might feel like you need to do something to ease their troubles. It's important to be sensitive to what our loved ones truly want in these moment when they're asking for help, otherwise, we might very well get carried away and say or do more than is really needed. The greatest comfort and support sometimes come from just allowing ourselves to let go and simply exist in the present moment with the other person.
It might be helpful to think of the gestures of kindness that were the most healing to you when you were upset. Was it gentle words such as “I care about you,” or the soothing presence of someone holding you and not expecting anything in return that you found most consoling? When you're able to recall these times it becomes easier for you to keep in mind that giving advice or saying more than is necessary isn't always reassuring and that "less is more". What is truly comforting is having someone who's just there for us, and isn't trying to fix us or our problems. When you feel the urge to offer advice or repair a situation, you can take a few deep breaths, let the impulse pass, and bring your attention back to the present moment. You don't have to do anything more than that to be a good friend.
Warning: this post may make you dizzy
I think I'll always remember the very first time I saw Op Art. I was very young, and my classmates and I were on a daytrip at the museum of contemporary art. Everything looked different and surprising to me. Up until then, I'd mostly enjoyed the renaissance masters with their perfect technique and virtuosity and most of all, the realism they were able to convey. Mind you, I couldn't have put it in those words back then, but that's what it all boiled down to. On that day I found, large surfaces of garrish screaming colour, geometric patterns, objects and junk stuck on canvases and then... what's this? It looks three dimensional! And the next one seemed to move! This is art too?
And then they gathered us all around and showed us three smaller paintings hung on a wall and instructed us to stare at each one for a while and then look away at the opposing white wall, and lo and behold! An after-image! That's when they taught us about complimentary colours and that notion literally made a strong impression on me, my retinas never forgot the experience and the excitement of that day. There are many reasons why people develop certain passions, and many of them are obsucre. I went into design because I was always fascinated with colour and that day, I learned that one could literally perfom magic with the right shapes and combinations of colour, or abstraction thereof.
I've put together a little collection of Op Art pieces for your viewing pleasure. However, I'm not joking about the warning up there. One of the sites where I found some truly freaky optical illusions, Akiyoshi's illusion pages, contains this eplicit Warning: This page contains some works of "anomalous motion illusion", which might make sensitive observers dizzy or sick. Should you feel dizzy, you had better leave this page immediately. Therefore, scroll down at your own risk and enjoy the magic!
Op Art by Akiyoshi Kitaoka, Bridget Riley & Friedrich A. Lohmueller
October 28, 2007
Crazy people like me
Crazy people like me
A short story by Smiler
She'd slept in until 10:20 that morning when the phone rang. It was a nurse from the outpatient clinic Tara had contacted calling her back to give her an appointment. Tara, nervous and easily upset these days was having difficulty expressing herself, and finding herself tongue-tied, started crying on the phone. The nurse grew very concerned "Unfortunately we can only take you next week, but in the meantime I strongly suggest you get yourself to the ER as soon as possible. You need to get help." she urged her.
Her family doctor and her closest friends and relatives had also insisted she go check herself into the ER, but Tara was terrified of going there. She was concerned they'd keep her indefinitely. She was even more scared of the serious nut cases she was likely going to encounter and be forced to spend several hours with before getting to see a doctor. But then again, she couldn't go on like this. She'd been crying day and night for nearly two weeks now, and the thoughts plaguing her were likely to drive her to desperate measures. Since no outpatient clinic could give her an appointment any sooner, and since she'd been trying to see a good doctor for several months now, she finally made up her mind. She would go to the ER. As much as she hated to admit it, this was now what could be considered an emergency situation. .jpg)
Tara felt very much alone with no one there to accompany her to that truly scary place. She tidied up her apartment, cleaned the dishes, put her papers in order on her desk. She didn't want to come back to a messy place after the impending ordeal. She took a shower and brushed her hair for the first time in days. She wanted to look at the very least somewhat presentable. She didn't put on any makeup, since she couldn't stop crying anyway, though she did think of putting on some cologne. Appearances might not count for much in a place like that, but if I'm going to see a doctor, I should show him that I can still take care of myself she mused.
There was a rainstrorm raging by the time Tara called a taxi. As she was making her way out the front door, she was juggling with a garbage bag, the recycling bin, her purse, an umbrella and the housekeys when the phone rang. It was her boyfriend calling from overseas. They hadn't spoken for a couple of days and she told him where she was headed to. "Don't go!" he said, "What if they decide to keep you there?" This annoyed her greatly and she raised her voice: "I have to go! I have no choice at this point! I'm a danger to myself and I can't cope anymore!" This was absolutely true. She managed to take the trash, recycling, and all her personal effects down the stairs, while still holding the phone to her ear without a glitch. Her boyfriend, having recanted, was now in the middle of telling her how much he missed her as she was getting into the taxicab, when she inadvertently pressed on the keypad. This caused the line to cut off suddenly. Damn! This is just great, he can only call me once a day and now he'll think I've hung up on him! She was already very upset about going to the ER, and now this too. Tara was inconsolable. She started crying and sobbing even harder.
Between her sobs, she managed to tell the taxi driver the name of the hospital she was going to. It was the only such hospital in the city. Of course all the taxi drivers know exactly who it's for: she thought, crazy people like me. She felt deeply ashamed, and as she looked out the window at the grey day and pouring rain, she was glad for the rainstorm. It seemed especially fitting on that day, at that moment. The taxi driver was very talkative and seemingly concerned about Tara. He tried to convince her that a "beautiful girl" like her didn't need to go to a place like that. "All you need is to think happy thoughts, look at yourself in the mirror, see how beautiful you are, such beautiful eyes, such beautiful lips, how can such a beautiful girl like you cry so much? Even with all the tears, you are still beautiful. I take you for coffee, we talk and you will feel better, you will see" he persisted in a heavily accented and broken English.
She knew the man had good intentions, but what was meant to be an uplifting sermon only made Tara feel even more alienated. She carried her beauty indifferently. She knew it was a double edged sword, and not knowing how to wield it, she pretended it did not exist. And since when has beauty or money or power or any of those external trappings equated with happiness? That beauty the cab driver was talking about as though it was meant to solve all her problems, had instead been the source of much trouble in her life, had all too often attracted the wrong kind of people. Or maybe they were the right people who were attracted to me for the wrong reasons. She surmised.
The car entered the hospital grounds. It had been several years since Tara had been there last. She was surprised to see how green and pretty everything looked. Trees everywhere, nicely groomed grass, flowerbeds, the two story buildings all set a good distance away from each other, almost like a university campus, almost pleasant-looking even. But she wasn't reassured. They only make it look that way to get our defenses down. The taxi driver dropped her off at the emergency pavillion with one last plea "You don't belong here" he said "I will bring you anywhere you want, you are too beautiful for this place". The tears started flowing more insistently now. She wished he hadn't kept bringing up her looks that way, as though it were the solution to all her problems, it was insulting. She didn't appreciate being objectified this way. What they see is an illusion, they can't possibly see all this pain and ugliness I carry inside.
The security guard at the entrance searched Tara's handbag and promply took her mobile phone away. She'd managed to stop sobbing for a minute or two as she had made her way in, but at that moment she broke down again. "But all my phone numbers and contacts are on there, what if I need to reach people to tell them I'm here?" she wailed. Am I making a Paris Hilton of myself? she wondered as she was pleading with the guard. Maybe but I don't really care. There is no such thing as dignity in a place like this. She was panicked at the thought that they might keep her there and she would have no way of reaching anyone to tell them where she was, or how to get inside her apartment to feed her cat. 
She was still crying when she signed in, and she continued to do so while they made her wait in the admissions room. This room was furnished with a dozen padded office chairs, most of which were occupied. Tara didn't dare look around - she felt humiliated and she was afraid of seeing "real crazies" - the kind that talk to themselves with drool running down their chin. She was sobbing and sniffling so much that she went through an entire pack of Kleenex tissues within ten minutes. When she did look up briefly, she saw a young woman sitting in front of her. She seemed normal. Clean. Calm. Tara wondered what she was doing there. Visiting someone maybe? She quickly looked down again. Another administrator called Tara into an office where she searched her bag again and took away her Tylenol and contraceptive pills. She informed her that it would be a while before she'd be seen, as they only had one psychiatrist on duty that day. A nurse would see her in a while to make an initial assesment. Tara asked about her mobile "Could I have it back just to call a few people? I need to let them know I'm okay" She was told there was a payphone which had been put in the waiting lounge for just that purpose and which could be used free of charge.
The waiting lounge wasn't so much a lounge as a couple of intersecting hallways with some chairs along the walls. There weren't a lot of patients waiting, maybe half a dozen at most, but Tara knew that didn't necessarily have any correlation with how long she would actually have to wait. Tara sat herself on the chair closest to the telephone to make some calls. She could hear someone talking loudly in the adjoining corridor but she couldn't actually see him from where she was sitting. She didn't know if it was an orderly or a patient, and if the latter, she wasn't entirely sure if he was talking to himself or if he had an interlocutor, since he spoke in a seemingly endless monologue. His voice was so loud that it was impossible to tune him out. After she had finished making her phone calls, Tara listened more attentively for a few minutes, and realized he was giving an oration about the dangers of cocaine addiction. She had not yet seen who was talking, yet Tara learned that this man had had a roommate who had held down a respectable position until he had developed a cocaine habit, accumulated enormous debt, fell into despair and finally lost his title and his job. Apparently the roommate had deteriorated into a state of decrepitude and was now living in the streets. Tara desperately wanted to block out this onslaught - the sound of the man's voice was driving her to distraction and the saying "a little bit of knowlege is a dangerous thing" came to mind when she realized he wasn't about to shut up anytime soon.
She eventually got a peek at The Orator when he walked past her. He looked to be in his late forties or early fifties, though he might have been younger. He had short graying hair and a short beard - which looked like a growth that had gone unshaven for a good while. He was wearing pants which must have been black jeans at one point. They were evidently too large, held together with a belt, and he'd cut them off a few inches bellow the knee. One of the pant legs was a bit longer than the other and had an uneven zig-zag cutting pattern. He had on black Doc Martens shoes which had been spray-painted fluorescent orange, though a good portion of the paint had rubbed off or been scratched and chipped. His huge belly was spilling over—yet still contained—in the ochre-yellow t-shirt tucked into his pants. He was not at all as Tara would have imagined him to be, but at least she had no doubt now as to whether he was a patient or a member of the hospital staff. 
The Orator kept pacing the corridors and finding people to assail with his knowledge as new patients came into the waiting lounge, but every time he approached Tara, she made sure to turn away and kept herself busy one way or another in order to avoid him. At first she did this by making a few more phone calls, and when she was finished with those, she moved down a couple of chairs away from the phone and attempted to read a magazine. A stooped and unkempt old man shuffled past her and plopped his skinny frame in the chair Tara had previously occupied. He tried to use the phone, and after attemting to punch in his numbers a few times, he mumbled to himself unintelligibly. After a while Tara realized he was in fact talking to her:"does it work?" she was able to make out finally. "Of course it works, I just used it!" she replied tersely. Then she had a better look at him and her heart sank. He had well over a dozen or so stitches above his left eye, apparently quite fresh. And she saw now that he was attempting to punch in the numbers with his entire fist. Oh Gawd. Heaven have mercy on me. She offered to dial the number and handed him the receiver, but as he was talking on the phone, Tara quickly realized with dismay that he was talking about his stools and describing them in great detail. His most recent visit to the toilet had apparently been his fist in several days and was an event worth writing home about, as it were.
She decided to seek out another spot. She found a counter at the end of the corridor. It was on a windowed wall and overlooked the grounds outside. She sat on one of the chairs with her back to the room and pulled out her journal. She wrote down impressions of the place, and made notes about some of the nonsense The Orator was spewing at that moment. He was presently lecturing about the wonders of cardboard as a construction material. Tara found it hard to ignore him completely because everything he talked about was vaguely interesting and bore some elements of truth, but he somehow managed to make it all sound grotesque as well. Presently he was saying he had put together his very own "designer furniture" and that he had built his kitchen cabinets all out of... cardboard. "Cardboard can even be used as a weapon! Take martial arts for example..." then he segued into this next topic, talking about it's various branches, techniques, history and myths: "Did you know they once had only white belts, which the novices wore through their entire training period, and only once the belts had turned black from sweat and blood were the students deemed worthy of being considered as masters?" Even though it was a misconception, he did manage to make his argument sound convincing and Tara wondered for a moment where this man got all his information.
The old man once again made his appearance, this time holding a TV remote in his hand. He shuffled himself into a chair behind Tara and proceeded to point the remote at the television that hung on the opposite corner. When he landed on a decades-old rerun of a soap opera, he proceeded to raise the volume to what seemed to be the absolute limit. The sound was deafening now but Tara, insisting on keeping her interractions to an absolute minimum, kept on writing in her journal. After a few minutes an orderly appeared and gently asked the old man to turn the volume down. The old man did as he was asked and then immeditately proceeded to turn it up even louder. Again, the orderly calmly asked him to lower the volume "You know, not everybody wants to listen to your soap opera Mr So and So!" she said. Apparently he was a regular. Tara was not very surprised.
She had brought a good book to read and no sooner had she cracked it open that The Orator approached her and declared: "Tell me what you are reading and I will tell you who you are!" At which she burried her nose even deeper into the book and waved him away. She'd managed to read a few chapters when the nurse called her in for the initial evaluation. After Tara had poured her heart out with the ensuing sniffles and tears, the nurse said: "If you don't take medication, you won't receive coverage, simple as that". Tara did not like pills. Tara had resisted taking pills for several years, but at that point, she was willing to swallow any pills they were going to give her, since she realized that if she needed to be in a place like this with all these crazy people to begin with, then surely she must be crazy too. The nurse sent Tara back to the waiting lounge, informing her that it would be a few hours longer before the doctor called her in.
She continued reading while awaiting the psychiatrist. The Orator was still going strong, but Tara had grown accustomed to his voice by now and was able to more or less ignore him. The old man had fallen asleep in his chair. Eventually, the psychiatrist called Tara into his office. He seemed young and alert and willing to listen, empathetic even. Not like a drug addict and without any visible tics or strange facial expressions, unlike many of the psychiatrists Tara had seen before. She explained her situation to him, detailed her medical history and related the incredible stresses she'd been put under at work. The more she talked the more she cried and the more she became agitated and the more worried the psychiatrist seemed. "I strongly suggest you stay here overnight, I am concerned you may be a risk to yourself". Tara shook her head. "Can you force me to stay if I don't want to?" she asked. "I can't force you but I highly recommend it. I think it would be foolish to go back to your house to spend the night alone." 
But there were no beds available he added, and they'd have to keep her in the emergency ward. That was the final straw. Tara imagined an entire evening, night and morning spent in the presence of The Orator and the sad old man and God only knows who else and she got even more upset now. She begged the doctor to let her go, she promised and solemnly swore that she would not do herself any harm. "I'll start doing better as soon as I leave this place, I assure you! I get anxious and upset when I have to go to hospitals, and this place in particular just terrifies me. Just PLEASE just give me a note that I can send to my insurance company so I can pay my rent and rest easy for a little while". She was able to stop crying long enough to make herself heard. The doctor gave Tara a prescription for all kinds of pills, along with the note she needed. I'll take the fucking pills if it means I never have to set foot in this place again" she thought to herself. Her personal effects were returned to her and she was buzzed out of the waiting lounge. She walked out of the pavillion to a beautiful sunny day, savoring her freedom.
Colour photographs: LSD photographers
October 27, 2007
Freathers and Swirls
My friend Naomi, upon seeing the lollipop painting by Justin Clayton I'd posted yesterday wrote me a note saying "that reminds me of something I did some years back!" Of course I wanted to have a look and she sent me this wonderful series of paintings/drawings called "Feathery Swirls". I thought they were so great that I wanted to post them as soon as possible. I asked her where the inspiration came from and she had this to say:
"The drawings started in 1998 and then I moved into the paintings around 2000, and I completed one series of twelve of paintings, in the Spring of 2003....
[...] It started with just kind of doodling, the way I do... with pen and ink. And as things evolved, I felt the need to begin to use some color... So, first I would draw the freehand drawing and then I began using these wonderful color pencils—Prismacolor, made by Berol... Each drawing became a further extension of some original idea that kept growing and changing. And then, I came up with this idea of taking 12 different colors, [...] and using them in each drawing—doing a series of twelve drawings with THOSE particular colors, and by moving one color from the top to the bottom as I moved from one drawing to the next—that changed the entire look of each feathery drawing. Very exciting. To me these all have a Southwest feeling to them, a Native American look, in a way... The thing about the way I work is that it comes from an intuitive place... I don't know why or where they come from... Later... years later sometimes, I might have an inkling of the origins... What I do know is these come from something deep deep inside me. They are completely organic. It's one of the things I love about expressing myself this way... in truth, there are no words, just the art pieces themselves"
"Feathery Swirls" by Naomi Caryl
My Life: The Soundtrack
It's the If your life was a movie what would the soundtrack be meme:
1. Open your music library
2. Put it on shuffle
3. Press play
4. For every question, type the song that's playing
5. Press the "next" button only once for each question
(don't cheat!)
Click on the links to view the videos!
1. Opening Credits: Mr. Brightside - The Killers
2. Waking Up: The Introduction - 2nd Shift
3. First Day in High School: Exchange - Massive Attack
4. Falling in love: The Songs That We Sing -
Charlotte Gainsbourg
5. Party Song: I Guess That's Why They Call It The Blues -
Elton John
6. Fight Song: Here We Go Again - Ray Charles
7. Breakup song: On the Bound - Fiona Apple
8. Prom: Violin Concertos 3, 5 - Mozart
9. Life's OK:Cocoon - Jack Johnson
10. Mental Breakdown: Little fluffy clouds - The Orb
11. Driving: Scherzo, Allegro Molto - Amadeus Quartet
12. Flashback: Lovesick - Lisa Germano
13. Getting Back Together: You Know I'm No Good -
Amy Winehouse
14. Wedding: Tchaikovsky, Rococo Variations, op. 33 -
Moderato quasi adante
15. Birth of Child: Don't Tell Me - Madonna
16. Final Battle: Vivaldi, A.: Concerto In Mi Minore
N. 4, Rv550 - Vivaldi
17. Death Scene: Que Dolor - DJ Kicks: Kruder & Dorfmeister
18. Funeral Song: Flipside - Everything But The Girl
19. Closing Credits: The Wind - Cat Stevens
Jewel in the sky
The Great Carina Nebula
A jewel of the southern sky, the Great Carina Nebula, aka NGC 3372, spans over 300 light-years, one of our galaxy's largest star forming regions. The Carina Nebula is home to young, extremely massive stars, including the still enigmatic variable Eta Carinae, a star with well over 100 times the mass of the Sun. Eta Carinae is the bright star left of the central dark notch in this field and just below the dusty Keyhole Nebula (NGC 3324).
Credit & Copyright: Robert Gendler and Stephane Guisard
October 26, 2007
Weekly Recap
For those of you who are new to this blog, or if you haven't had the opportunity to keep up this week, I'm continually reorganizing the contents and adding categories in hopes of enabling navigation through the site (suggestions welcome!). Most of the content is timeless so don't be shy to traipse around, goodies abound! I always LOVE knowing who's been visiting - feel free to leave your comments or just say hello. Here's a summary of some of the recent features you'll find:
Fresh Paintings Posted Daily: While I was searching for an original and fresh image of a teacup I came across artist/blogger Justin Clayton's work (see above). I discovered he's part of a growing network of "Daily Painters" so I went investigating a little bit further to find out how artists are making art more accessible and more affordable to the general public these days.
Looking for a good quirk: every self-respecting writer has to cultivate at least one quirky habit in order to be taken seriously. Some writers take that advice way too far and develop habits that end up being life-threatening, but since I've more or less sworn off mind-altering substances, I had to find something more tame... 
Smiler's list: I felt intimidated to come up with my book list up until now because I thought my selection wasn't "literary" enough. After all, I'll go from I Ching and Jung to Michael Crichton on any given day and haven't even begun the "Pulitzer Project" or "Read the Nobels" projects yet. But a fellow blogger who was looking for some inspiration asked me to share, so I went about bearing some of the contents of my humble library.
NaNoWriMo? What's THAT?: How could I resist signing up for a challenge that is described as follows: "The goal is to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that's a good thing." It's free, there are no obligations whatsoever, and the start date is November 1st so there's still plenty of time to sign up!
On forward thinking: You may not agree with some of his ideas but it cannot be denied Schopenhauer influenced so many great thinkers after him such as Carl Jung for example. Schopenhauer did say "reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for oneself" which begs the question: did that apply to his own writings too?
Love is Just a Four Letter Word: A walk down memory lane with a video of Joan Baez singing Bob Dylan's "Love is Just a Four Letter Word". Filmed at Joan Baez's home and featuring Earl Scruggs.
Painting: Justin Clayton (click image to enlarge)
"The Champagne of Comics"
Just found this on a site called Married To The Sea: "The Champagne of Comics", a daily online comic written by Drew and Natalie. With over 200 older comics in their archive you're bound to find something in there that'll tickle your funny bone.
October 25, 2007
Quote of the day
"The task of the novelist is not to narrate great events but to make small ones interesting." ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Suffering of the World
Photo: Cindy Ellen Russel / Honolulu Star Bulletin
Fresh Paintings Posted Daily
"I call most of my work “portraits”. Typically, a portrait is a likeness of a person but I like to broaden the definition to include many subjects. After all, I feel the subjects I paint have a personality of their own. Whether it is a row of palm trees or a single orange, they all exude a character."
Justin Clayton paints. Every day. Small postcard-size canvases mostly, which he then posts on his blog, dailypaintings.com. I found Justin the way I find most things nowadays: completely by chance. I was searching for an original image of a teacup and came across this. Looking through his blog, his work seemed fresh and I liked his range; from landscapes and portraits to fruit and candy, one senses that Justin looks at everything as though it were new to him every time, and his brushtrokes make his canvases come alive.
Justin studied painting at Los Angeles Academy of Figurative Arts and California Art Institute in southern California, and his Daily Paintings have been featured in USA Today, Food & Wine magazine and Domino Magazine, among others. He started this project on January 1, 2006 as the result of a New Year's resolution to paint on a daily basis, and he's managed to turn it into a moneymaking proposition: anyone can subscribe to receive a daily painting by email and viewers can then bid for the paintings via eBay. But Justin is not alone. He's part of a growing group of artist/bloggers who somehow found each other on the internet and formed The Daily Painters Guild in early 2006. All of them paint every day. Some finish a canvas every day, as Justin does—in 3 hours or less—and some take longer to complete their work, but many of them agree that artist Duane Keiser is the Father of Daily Painting. Keiser has also been credited in USA Today and the New York Times with starting the internationally recognized “A Painting a Day” movement in 2004.
Artist/bloggers such as Clayton and Keiser are radically changing the art world by using the internet to sell their work at more affordable prices directly to collectors. Dealers and galleries, who can command 50 percent in commissions or more no longer have exclusive control in defining who is emerging or successful, and more artists/entrepreneurs can now make a living from their craft, which means more art is being produced and more consumers can have easy access to quality art, sometimes for as little as $100 a pop. It's worth looking into.
Paintings: "Sunny side up", "Jam on bread",
"Girl with book" by Justin Clayton.
October 24, 2007
"Hello, my name is not Fritz."
That's right, his name isn't really Fritz, I just thought it was a funny blog name because of the Fritz the Cat cartoons, and my guy has more than a passing resemblance to his cartoon namesake. He tends to respond to "puppy" or "Izzy", or his actual "real" name sometimes, if and when he feels like it, which is not very often. He's more interested in catching flies or chasing after squirrels. I think cats have nine lives precisely because they're so damn curious, which inevitably gets them in trouble (click here to see cats clowning around). I suspect my Fritz likes to go trolling the alleyway because he's got a girlfriend back there, if not several (he is after all, a very handsome boy). 
But then again, I shouldn't discriminate - for all I know he's more into the males of the species. I wonder what he's looking at so intently now?
Pic by Smiler
A: "Being myself"
"In order to do what really matters to you, you have to,
first of all, know what really matters to you."
~ Dr. Edward Hallowell: Psychiatrist
Photo: Mamoru Kobayakawa
Styling: Smiler
October 23, 2007
Looking for a good quirk
I read somewhere that every self-respecting writer has to cultivate at least one quirky habit in order to be taken seriously; like wearing only yellow from head to toe, developing a fake lisp, walking a pet lobster on a leash, etc. I know it was meant to be tongue-in-cheek, and I also know that some writers take that advice way too far and develop habits that end up being life-threatening, like mixing hard drugs and booze "because it makes them write better". In my case, since I've more or less sworn off mind-altering substances (if you don't count pharmaceuticals), I had to find something more tame. But what?
As I went to make myself my usual cuppa tea to think about it... BINGO! It hit me. Tea! That's my quirky thing! I have so many kinds on display in the kitchen that it always suprises my friends and guest when they come here. I prefer drinking tea instead of coffee 
because coffee tends to upset my tummy. Not only do I prefer drinking tea, but if I'm going to drink tea, it should be Earl Grey tea. I like Earl Grey so much that I always keep at least three or four different varieties on hand; there's Twinnings loose leaf for the regular weekday cuppa (very slight bergamot flavour, almost savoury, doesn't call attention to itself). There's Taylors of Harrogate for afternoons or weekends (very pronounced bergamot aroma, almost perfume-like), then Kusmi Tea for the occasional exotic taste (much smokier and dry than the others, brings to mind samovars and opulent, Turkish-style decor).
This weekend I also got some Mighty Leaf Organic Earl Grey tea, which is what I'm having right now. "Organic Earl Grey is made of rich organically grown black tea leaves and golden buds with a twist of citrusy organic bergamot. Mighty Leaf perfects the classic tea with an elegant, balanced and full flavored cup. Earl Grey himself would be proud." Doesn't that 
sound just luscious? Someone got paid good money to write that, no doubt. Just the tea pouches are so pretty that they look like something that should be kept and cherished. I'm not kidding. They look like silk that's been handstiched. They are indeed handcrafted, as it turns out. Says so right here on their website, which I've discovered just now. These tea bags look so special that, as I was letting my tea steep a few minutes ago, I was trying to think up some way of reusing these wonderful pouches, because it doesn't seem right to just toss them away. It's quite an indulgence for a regular Tuesday morning.
But then again, on this Tuesday morning I've decided to truly consider myself "A Writer", which in a way is a very special occasion. I don't think I've ever done that with quite as much resolve before. Writing isn't new to me, but calling myself a writer always seemed... presumptuous somehow. I'm supposed to be visual. I'm not supposed to be interested in all this grey stuff on the page. So I'm not sure how the new self-appointed title will change anything, but I guess we'll just have to see how it plays out. Maybe the fact that I signed up for the NaNoWriMo challenge has influenced me somewhat. I decided that it would really help me with this business of writing a novel in thirty day, if I officially considered myself a "real" writer for the duration of the challenge, which goes from November 1st till the 30th. I also decided to start wearing my new title a bit early just to get accustomed to it, like breaking in new shoes, the difference being nobody can actually SEE that I'm a writer, whereas with new shoes they'd actually SEE me limping miserably down the street. No idea how all of that'll pan out, if I'll make it to the end, what kind of story I'll come up with and if it'll be fit to show at all or not, and what shape I'll be in one way or the other, but it's the journey that counts. 
I have to start indulging in my special writerly quirky habit as of today to get into the proper mindset, which involves drinking at least one cuppa—if not two or five—of fancy Earl Grey tea with milk and sugar—ALWAYS with milk and sugar—every single day. It's something I've been doing for a few years now anyway, so that doesn't change anything much, other than the fact that this habit is now explained by the fact that I'm *a writer*. Before it was just something people kind of scratched their head about "You only drink tea, and only Earl Grey tea? AND you bring your own teabags??" Now they'll be like, "Don't mind her and the tea thing, she's *a writer*". "Oh right, that makes sense" kinda thing.
Maybe I should come up with a rigid schedule or some kind of Earl Grey tea ceremony to make the whole thing more special and ritualistic. I'll have to think about that one. Because otherwise, you can't say that having a marked preference of Earl Grey tea is a particularly eccentric or different or quirky habit, unless you live in North America as I do, where everyone seems to pride themselves on their coffee addiction 
and you're lucky if you get that godawful Red Rose crap they serve you in some of the "better" restaurants. I've already decided my next Greyian indulgence will be to order my next batch from Mariage Frères in Paris. And if that doesn't make me seem quirky enough, I'll just have to get a pet lobster.
Painting: Justin Clayton
On intuition
"Intuitive intelligence is more accurate and precise than anything that exists in the realm of rational thought. Intuition is not a thought; it is the nonlocal cosmic field of information that whispers to you in the silence between your thoughts. So when you listen to the inner intelligence of your body, which is the ultimate and supreme genuis, you are eavesdropping on the universe and accessing information that most people don't normally access."
~ Deepak Chopra, Power Freedom and Grace: Living from the Source of Lasting Happiness
Fractal art: Holly Bishop
NaNoWriMo, NaNoWriMo, Go Smiler Go!
It's done. I've signed up to participate in the National Novel Writing Month challenge. I hesitated and hem'd and hah'd and can I really write a novel in 30 days? And should I really attempt it? Finally, with all the encouraging comments I've gotten, it would've seemed silly NOT to sign up at this point. It can't possibly go wrong with all that wondeful support you've all shown! The beauty of this challenge is if you don't want to or can't finish for some reason, you don't have to! And if you're turning out crap, nobody will take offense, because that's what's expected anyway! I know I'm deluding myself on that point, because I'm just not capable of turning in something that is outright bad. I'd like to at the very least churn out half decent crap that could be reworked into something which stands a chance of being published. That would be something to be proud of, wouldn't it? Seems like an attainable goal, right? Right. Not putting pressure on myself at all, right? Right.
October 22, 2007
Smiler's list
Q: what do YOU do when you're not writing?
A: What else? Read of course!
I've been wanting to put together a book list for some time, and had more or less promised one to The Individual Voice, but then... I felt intimidated to share said list. I thought my selection wasn't "literary" enough and might seem... trite. There's that, and then there's the fact that I have very poor short-to-medium term memory. This means, simply put, that it was difficult to remeber what I've already read and several titles are therefore missing from the "already read" category. As you'll no-doubt notice, my "current reads" list is relatively long compared to my "already read" list. This is because I like to have several books going at the same time and also because it's much easier to speed through a besteller than it is say, through the Confessions of Saint Augustine. As for having multiple books going at all time, that habit seems to run in the family. You could say it came with the programming. Here's the list* in no particular order:
Books I'm reading:
• I Ching or Book of Changes, Brian Browne Walker**
• Confessions of Saint Augustine
• The Dhammapada
• Lord Tennyson, Selected Poems
• Oscar Wilde, Selected Poems
• Touched with Fire, Kay Redfield Jamison
• The Essential Rumi
• Meditations from the Mat, Rolf Gates**
• When She Was Bad, Patricia Pearson
• My Life, Golda Meir
• The Portable Jung (edited by Joseph Campbell)
• Le procès, Franz Kafka
Books I've read this year:
• The Birth of Venus, Sarah Dunant
• Tears of the Giraffe, Alexander McCall Smith
• Lost Between Houses, David Gilmour
• On Beauty, Zadie Smith
• Running with Scissors, Augusten Burroughs
• Dry, Augusten Burroughs
• Catherine la grande, Henri Troyat
• The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran**
• Ensemble, c'est tout, Anna Gavalda
• The Moon and Sixpence, Somerset Maugham
• Eat, Pray Love, Elizabeth Gilbert
• The Red Tent, Anita Diamant
• Smart Women Finish Rich, David Bach
• Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden
• Front Row: Anna Wintour, Jerry Oppenheimer
• Codependent No More, Melody Beattie
• The Road Less Traveled, Scott M. Peck
• On Writing, Stephen King
• State of Fear, Michael Crichton
• Digital Fortress, Dan Brown
• Deception Point, Dan Brown
• Shopaholic Ties the Knot, Sophie Kinsella
• The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell
• Power Freedom and Grace, Deepak Chopra
• On the Suffering of the World, Schopenhauer
Books I want to read this year:***
• Memories, Dreams, Reflections, C. G. Jung
• I am Charlotte Simmons, Tom Wolfe
• Sputnik Sweetheart, Haruki Murakami
• The Red Pony, John Steinbeck
• The Power of Full Engagement, Jim Loehr and Tony Scwartz
• People of the Lie, M. Scott Peck
• Blink, Malcolm Gladwell
• The Trial, Franz Kafka
• The Castle, Franz Kafka
• Caravan of Dreams, Idries Shah
• Mister God, this is Anna, Fynn**
• Women who Run with the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph.D.
• The Tender Bar, J.R. Moehringer
• Beware Wet Paint, Alan Fletcher
• The art of looking sideways, Alan Fletcher
• Morality for Beautiful Girls, Alexander McCall Smith
• The Right to Write, Julia Cameron
• The Blind Assasin, Margaret Atwood**
• The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri
• The Philosophy of Schopenhauer, Bryan Magee
• The Renaissance Soul, Margaret Lobenstine
• How To Think Like Leonardo Da Vinci, Michael J. Gelb
• Blindness, Jose Saramago
• Start The Pulitzer Project & the Read the Nobels challenge****
* Books appearing in orange link to reviews and commentaries.
** Books I've read at least once already, or reference books.
*** This list grows exponentially over time and I always end up reading about a third of what I intended to begin with.
**** The Pulitzer project presently stands at 84 books. As for Read the Nobels, there are currently 104 Laureates in the fiction category, many of which have written several books.
Photo: © Tracey Emin, Monument Valley
Tate Museum
NaNoWriMo? What's THAT?
I'm thinking of signing up to this writing challenge. The goal is to write a novel in 30 days. A 175-page or 50,000 word novel in one month. It's about quantity, not quality, and just getting the word count is all that's required. As they put it: "Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that's a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down." I like the idea because I like a challenge, and it will, once and for all, dispel this notion I have that I'm not "capable" of writing a whole novel. I'm thinking once the ice is broken, maybe I'll be able to sit down and actually write a "real" novel, which... would help me dispell that other notion that I'm not a writer. Something like that. And besides, quantity has never been a problem for me, so I think I can handle this challenge. To read more about NaNoWriMo click here. Anybody else out there game to give it a shot? I could sure use the support!
La citation du jour
"La majorité n'a pas le droit d'imposer sa connerie à la minorité." ~ Georges Wolinski
"The majority shouldn't have the right to impose it's stupidity on the minority." ~ Georges Wolinski
Here kitty kitty!
Don't you just love kitty cats? Well I do anyway. Aren't these just adorable kittens? Don't you just wanna hold'em and cudle'em? No? You must be a dog person. No troubles. Dogs are cool too. I'm posting these two pics now because they were contenders for my Schopenhauer post, but the drawing won out in the end. Which one would you have picked? Why?
October 21, 2007
On forward thinking in the 19th century
"A quick test of the assertion that enjoyment outweighs pain in this world, or that they are at any rate balanced, would be to compare the feelings of an animal engaged in eating another with those of the animal being eaten". ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Suffering of the World
"He was the first to speak of the suffering of the world, which visibly and glaringly surrounds us, and of confusion, passion, evil—all those things which the [other philosophers] hardly seemed to notice and always tried to resolve into all-embracing harmony and comprehensiblility. Here at last was a philosopher who had the courage to see that all was not for the best in the fundaments of the universe." ~ C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
I just recently became interested in Schopenhauer after I picked up his essay entitled "On the Suffering of the World" at the bookstore. There are many things to say about Schopenhauer; his philosphy, his views on the importance of art, self-awareness, morality and so much more... but the fact is I'm not familiar with his body of work yet, so I thougth I'd just present a few excerpts and quotes as an introduction to this great thinker who influenced so many after him. I'll be reading The Philosophy of Schopenhauer by Bryan Magee next.
"Just as a stream flows smoothly on as long as it encounters no obstruction, so the nature of man and animal is such that we never really notice or become conscious of what is agreeable to our will; if we are to notice something, our will has to have been thwarted, has to have experienced a shock of some kind. On the other hand, all that opposes, frustrates and resists our will, that is to say all that is unpleasant and painful, impresses itself upon us instantly, directly and with great clarity. Just as we are conscious not of the healthiness of our whole body but only of the little place where the shoe pinches, so we think not of the totality of our successful activities but of some insignificant trifle or other which continues to vex us." ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Suffering of the World
"There is only one healing force, and that is nature; in pills and ointments there is none. At most they can give the healing force of nature a hint about where there is something for it to do." ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, Neue Paralipomena
"Every child is in a way a genius; and every genius is in a way a child." ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung
"There is only one inborn erroneous notion ... that we exist in order to be happy ... So long as we persist in this inborn error ... the world seems to us full of contradictions. For at every step, in great things and small, we are bound to experience that the world and life are certainly not arranged for the purpose of maintaining a happy existence...hence the countenances of almost all elderly persons wear the expression of ... disappointment." ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Road to Salvation
"Schopenhauer is often said to be the first, or indeed the only, modern Western philosopher of any note to attempt any integration of his work with Eastern ways of thinking. That he was the first is surely true, but the claim that he was influenced by Indian thought needs some qualification. There is a remarkable correspondence, at least in broad terms, between some of the central Schopenhauerian doctrines and Buddhism: notably in the views that empirical existence is suffering, that suffering originates in desires, and that salvation can be attained by the extinction of desires. These three 'truths of the Buddha' are mirrored closely in the essential structure of the doctrine of the will." ~ Christopher Janaway, Self and World in Schopenhauer's Philosophy
Drawing: "Head and Forepart of a Tiger" John Macallan Swan (1847-1910), Drawing on paper, support: 222 x 346 mm, on paper, unique, Tate Collection
October 20, 2007
Love is Just a Four Letter Word
This one goes out to you mama, I miss our daily exchanges...
hope you come back to blogdom sooooooooooon!
Click here if you can't see the video clip above. You'll find the lyrics below if you want to sing along!
Love Is Just A Four Letter Word
Performed by: Earl Scruggs & Joan Baez
Songwriter: Bob Dylan
Seems like only yesterday
I left my mind behind
Down in the Gypsy Café
With a friend of a friend of mine
She sat with a baby heavy on her knee
Yet spoke of life most free from slavery
With eyes that showed no trace of misery
A phrase in connection first with she I heard
That love is just a four-letter word
Outside a rambling store-front window
Cats meowed 'til the break of day
Me, I kept my mouth shut,
To you I had no words to say
My experience was limited and underfed
You were talking while I hid
To the one who was the father of your kid
You probably didn't think I did, but I heard
You say that love is just a four-letter word
I said goodbye unnoticed
Pushed towards things in my own games
Drifting in and out of lifetimes
Unmentionable by name
After searching for my double, looking for
Complete evaporation to the core
Though I tried and failed at finding any door
I must have thought that there was nothing more absurd
Than that love is just a four-letter word
Though I never knew just what you meant
When you were speaking to your man
I could only think in terms of me
And now I understand
After waking enough times to think I see
The Holy Kiss that's supposed to last eternity
Blow up in smoke, its destiny
Falls on strangers, travels free
Yes, I know now, traps are only set by me
And I do not really need to be assured
That love is just a four-letter word
Strange it is to be beside you, many years the tables turned
You'd probably not believe me if told you all I've learned
And it is very very weird, indeed
To hear words like "forever" plead
so ships run through my mind I cannot cheat
it's like looking in a teacher's face complete
I can say nothing to you but repeat what I heard
That love is just a four-letter word.
October 19, 2007
Weekly Recap
For those of you who are new to this blog, or if you haven't had the opportunity to keep up this week, I'm continually reorganizing the contents and adding categories in hopes of enabling navigation through the site (suggestions welcome!). Most of the content is timeless so don't be shy to traipse around, goodies abound! I always LOVE knowing who's been visiting, so feel free to leave your comments or just say hello. Without further ado, here's the summary of just a few of the features I've posted this week:
Renaissance Revisited: Are you a Renaissance Man or Woman? What does that term mean to you? We're all creative in one way or another, and anything can be considered as art if it's done from the heart. Includes a short review of Sarah Dunant's excellent book The Birth of Venus.
Making her papa proud: Anoushka Shankar, daughter of the legendary sitar player Ravi Shankar, was the youngest person ever nominated in her category for a Grammy. Her latest release, Breathing Under Water blends classical Indian music with smooth electronic backgrounds and I can't stop listening to it. Guests include Norah Jones (half sister to Anoushka), Sting and of course Ravi Shankar.
Trippin' Out': a look at some seriously mind-blowing images and debunking a myth about LSD (no you won't be considered crazy if you've ever taken it, and no you won't be considered a square if you haven't).
And now for something completely retarded:
Borat in a canary yellow spandex unitard singing a love song?
You gotta see it to believe it.
Train Nº69: All aboard! A fictional story about a train ride from New York City to Montreal. There are a few surprises along the way, but our protagonist ends up getting more of an adventure than she bargained for.
It's a bird... it's a plane... no wait! It's... Hindustan Superman?: Featuring Superman (he sings and he dances!) and Michael Jackson doing an Indian version of "Thriller", shiny red leather and all. It's so bad, it's good.
Are you KIDDING me???: When I heard about a "hot new trend" which involves stylists shopping for the under 18 year-old crowd, I got really pissed off, so I decided to write about it.
And I use the opportunity to rant about Paris Hilton. Yet again.
... And last but not least, to view my ever-expanding collection of fractal art, select "fractal art" by category. Happy browsing and don't be shy to leave a comment!
Fractal Art: Vivian Wood (click image to enlarge)
On Paradox
"The most exquisite paradox ... as soon as you give it all up, you can have it all. As long as you want power, you can't have it. The minute you don't want power, you'll have more than you ever dreamed possible." ~ Ram Dass 
Paradox
"...once again we face a paradox, for it appears that softening your heart and gently tending its wounds will protect you from evil. Building a fortress and defending yourself behind it will only make you more vulnerable. Healing your own heart is the single most powerful thing you can do to change the world. Your own transformation will enable you to withdraw so completely from evil that you contribute to it by not one word, one thought, or one breath. This healing process is like recovering your soul.
~ Deepak Chopra
"He moves, and He moves not.
He is far, and He is near.
He is within all, and He is outside all."
~ from the Isa Upanishad
"The heart has its own reasons...
The ways of the soul are filled with paradox."
~ Thomas Moore
“Paradoxically though it may seem,
it is none the less true
that life imitates art far more
than art imitates life”
~ Oscar Wilde
Sand Crop Circles: Andres Amador
October 18, 2007
Last one for the day
Just because it's beautiful...
The Elephant's Trunk in IC 1396
Like an illustration in a galactic Just So Story, the Elephant's Trunk Nebula winds through the emission nebula and young star cluster complex IC 1396, in the high and far off constellation of Cepheus. Click here for more details.
Source: NASA
Credit & Copyright: Brian Lula
Quote of the day
"We must not forget that only a very few people are artists in life; the art of life is most distinguished and the rarest of all the arts."
—C. G. Jung
Photos by Smiler
October 17, 2007
Renaissance Revisited
For many of us, getting in touch with our creativity can be a lifelong challenge. Others seemingly find their calling from the cradle, effortlessly bounding from one feat to the next. When we’re aware that we have the gift of creativity (and having that awareness is half the battle), then there’s the whole matter of "[becoming] open enough to follow the meanderings of the spirit". For some of us this process happens smoothly, as a serpent sheds it’s skin, while others have to be taken there kicking and screaming.
If you are, like myself, the kind of artist who’se created a career out of something which reasonably resembles your vocation, yet can't be defined as art because of the usual concerns of sales, profits, bosses clients etc, the lines become blurry and confused. Can something that is artistic but doesn't come from the heart be called art? Can something be just a little bit artistic, or just a little bit creative? We may try to justify our choices, but the soul always knows. It is never fooled, and it finds it's own mechanisms to bring you back to the convoluted path that is "being an artist."
Those few lucky souls who are given a clear mandate can focus all their energies on their artistic endeavour and become accomplished in their craft. But what happens when life has given a person so many gifts that it’s not a question of discovering a talent, but rather finding which one needs the most attention? What then? I posed the question to Eve, a fellow blogger recently, and her excellent (and very Jungian) response was: "Let them find you as they wish. This is the renaissance sort of person, not as rare as we like to think nowadays." I found her answer excellent. But the question begs to be asked, just what is a Renaissance man or woman? 
"In the Renaissance period (roughly 14th-17th century), a woman of good breeding was expected to marry well, be loyal to her husband and produce male heirs. A Renaissance Man, on the other hand, had to be well-educated, have cultural grace, be a gentleman and have a good understanding of the arts and sciences. He was also expected to show refinement and courage and be of noble birth. Many women did not fit the mold of what was considered to be a "Renaissance Woman." as they were considered to have too many interests that were considered to be limited to men. Ironically, these same women would nowadays perfectly fit our definition of what a modern "Renaissance Woman" is in our day and age." *
In her excellent book "The Birth of Venus", Sarah Dunant vividly recreates Renaissance Florence in the Medici era, as experienced by Alessandra Cecchi, the fifteen year old daughter of a prosperous cloth merchant. Alessandra, a willful and spirited girl with a talent for drawing, is captivated by an artist her father has brought to their palazzo to decorate the family chapel. Her independent spirit displeases her family, since Alessandra is expected to marry shortly after the onset of her first period. But Allessandra prefers to immerse herself in the art of the great masters of her time, such as Botticelli and Leonardo da Vinci, at the same time as the monk Savonarola preaches hell and damnation and threatens to destroy all "profane" art.
Alessandra was born in an era that could not accomodate her strong character, and the solution her family finds for her to keep her independence was typical of the times. Perhaps she would have been better off in the 21st century. But what is a Modern Renaissance Woman then? According to Renaissance Women Network, "A renaissance woman is someone who sets her own agenda for personal achievement. [...] She understands that she has been created for such a time as this and embraces her destiny as a challenge and not a curse, no matter what her personal circumstances. She is a winner not a whiner, a leader not a follower, a victor, not a victim. She wants to change the paradigm of the feminist movement that has served to marginalize and ridicule women who do not follow their collective agenda." My definition of the Renaissance Woman? It's best summed up by the following book title: The Renaissance Soul: Life Design for People with Too Many Passions to Pick Just One.
Fractal art: Jock Cooper (2007)
The Birth of Venus, Botticelli (around 1482)
Lady with an Ermine, Leonardo da Vinci (1485)
Quote of the day
"The lovely thing about being me
is that I'm so damn good at it."
—Michele Agnew
(a very fun blog I highly recommend)
Making her papa proud
"Most people are musicians simply because they play a certain instrument; when they play that instrument, the music appears. But Ravi - to me, he is the music; it just happens to be that he plays the Sitar. And it's like that with Anoushka. She has that quality - She is the music." —George Harrison - 1997
Breathing Under Water
Anoushka Shankar and Karsh Kale
Imagine living in a world where psychedelic raves follow classical recitals and rock and roll dives become Bollywood hangouts. A world where West Coast yogis immerse themselves in Eastern culture and where the New York underground draws inspiration from the New Delhi club scene. This is the world of Anoushka Shankar. Breathing Under Water is Anoushka's fifth and latest release. Working in close collaboration with Karsh Kale, an Indian-American percussionist with a penchant for club music, the album blends classical Indian music with smooth electronic backgrounds. As the daughter of the legendary Ravi Shankar, Anoushka may have inherited some of her father’s talent, but she's also somewhat of a prodigy and an innovator in her own right. She started studying sitar with her father when she was nine years old and made her recording debut at 13. Her 2001 album, Live at Carnegie Hall, brought Anoushka onto the global spotlight, with a Grammy nomination which made her the youngest person ever nominated in her category. With her restrained, mature musical style and her youthful good looks, she's introduced the sitar to an entire new generation and brought this classical Indian instrument into the 21st century. 
With Breathing Under Water, Kale and Shankar have negotiated a musical middle ground where their respective sensibilities can influence each other. On the disc’s second track, “Slither,” Kale stirs together a pulsing electronic background over which Shankar’s sitar carves out elegant, buzzing melodies, which produce the effect of "a classical Indian raga speeding on a modern jetliner". The album also features some special collaborations with guest musicians, including Sting and Shankar’s half-sister, Norah Jones. Jones appears on the beautiful “Easy,” in which she sings as effortlessly as a classic torch singer. Last but not least, the album culminates with the collaboration of papa Ravi Shankar, who performs with Anoushka in a lush, multilayered duet on the two-part “Oceanic". This brings the album to a close on a touching note and helps reinforce one of the disc’s major themes: that innovation grows from tradition."I am waiting for the time when I will be called Anoushka's father. Anoushka has indeed a rare talent. There is something spiritual in the way she plays. She feels the music and gives in to it."
—Ravi Shankar in an interview to Maya Bahir, Yedioth (Israel)
"I'm pushing the envelope on a personal level and trying to see how far I can go," Anoushka says. "On the one hand it means so much to me explore the Indian Classical music my father taught me, and on the other hand I am so deeply excited to be discovering my own creative voice, and I hope to be able to explore and express it to my full potential. I really hope to create that balance, because that is who I am. And at the end of the day," she concludes, "you've got to be making music because you love it, and because it's honest."
Motivational Quote of the Day
"As I grow older, I pay less attention to what people say. I just watch what they do." —Andrew Carnegie: Scottish industrialist, philanthropist. Founder, Carnegie Steel co.
Painting: Judy Somerville
On Compassion
Adapted from a DailyOm article,
In The Presence Of Difficulty
Compassion is the ability to see the deep connectedness between ourselves and others. True compassion recognizes that all the boundaries we perceive between ourselves and others are an illusion. When we first begin to practice compassion, this very deep level of understanding may elude us, but if we start where we are, we will eventually feel our way toward it. We move closer to it every time we see past our own concerns to accommodate others. As with any skill, our compassion grows most in the presence of difficulty.
We can practice small acts of compassion every day, when our loved ones are short-tempered or another driver cuts us off in traffic. We can extend our forgiveness by trying to understand their point of view; we know how it is to feel stressed out or irritable. The practice of compassion becomes more difficult when we find ourselves unable to understand the actions of the person who offends us. These are the situations that ask us to look more deeply into ourselves, into parts of our psyches that we may want to deny, parts that we have repressed because society has labeled them bad or wrong. For example, acts of violence are often well beyond anything we ourselves have perpetuated, so when we are on the receiving end of such acts, we are often at a loss. This is where the real potential for growth begins, because we are called to shine a light inside ourselves and take responsibility for what we have disowned. It is at this juncture that we have the opportunity to transform from within.
"You can lead a horse to water, but a pencil must be lead."
Not sure exactly how these two ended up here today.
A bout of nostalgia perhaps? ;-)
Trippin' out
The first image is trippy, and it could well be a representation of what our brains look like on psychotropic drugs, such as LSD for example. You don't need to be high to see that - if you stare at the image long enough, and you happen to be a little bit sleep deprived when you do this, you'll know exactly what I mean. It's another great example of fractal art, which seems like a tricky medium to master, requiring complex formulas, calculations, parameters and special software, along with an artistic eye of course. I have no doubt that it must have taken the artist many hours of tweaking to get to the final result.
The second image on the other hand, now that's REALLY mindblowing stuff. It may not look like much if you don't know what you're looking at, but I can tell you that THAT image took ten BILLION years to create. This from NASA: "The galaxy on the left, I Zwicky 18, was once thought to be one of the youngest galaxies on record. Its bright stars indicated an age of "only" 500 million years. The galaxy was intriguing because it looked like galaxies forming in the very early universe, but also mysterious since it is so nearby—only 59 million light years away—and surrounded by galaxies that are significantly older. Recent images of I Zwicky 18 by the Hubble Space Telescope have helped resolve the mystery, discovering a population of old faint stars intermixed with the bright star population. Therefore I Zwicky 18 is now thought to be just as old as its neighbors, roughly 10 billion years old."
All this talk about mindblowing trips brings me to and urban legend I just found, which claims that if someone has taken LSD more than seven times, he or she is automatically deemed legally insane (in the U.S.).
True of False?
LSD (Lysergic acid diethylamide) is a powerful psychedelic drug that alters brain function, resulting in temporary changes in perception, mood, consciousness and behavior. Because it can cause such radical changes in cognition, the belief is that long-term use of this drug must inevitably result in permanent damage to the mind. The common belief is that a specified number of LSD uses causes a determination of legal insanity. The rumor itself is surprisingly common, but there is little agreement on how many drug trips make up the magic number, which varies between two and ten uses, with seven trips as the most common. Another twist on the theory is that it is not the number of times a person uses LSD, but the spacing of the trips which is the determining factor.
False. No specific number of LSD trips renders a user insane. "Legally insane" can serve as a linguistic shorthand for a defendant in a criminal matter who has been deemed mentally incompetent to stand trial but "insanity" is not a psychiatric term. Individuals can be subject to "involuntary civil commitment", such incarcerations require their subjects to have diagnosable mental disorders and pose imminent threats to themselves or others, or to be incapable of caring for their own basic personal needs. Determinations on whether or not to commit are based on subjects' current behavior and thinking, not merely on their past activities, such as drug use.
This is where I breathe a big sigh of relief. I'll have one or two related stories to tell. Eventually.
"Urban legend" text adapted from snopes.com
Fractal art: Ingvar Kullberg
Photo credit: NASA, ESA, and A. Aloisi (ESA & STScI)
October 16, 2007
Motivational Quote of the Day
"Be where you are. That's an important part of living a centered life. When your life is in balance, your access to the optimal emotional state is easy and effortless."
—Nick Hall: Internationally recognized psychoneuroimmunologist and author.
Fractal art: Pavel Tisnovsky
Inner Truth
I-Ching Hexagram 61:
Chung Fu - Inner Truth
The I Ching teaches a simple but effective method of influencing difficult people and arduous situations. It advises us first to lay aside our prejudices—our feelings of being wounded, angry, or in the right —and second to seek to understand the positions of others and the lesson that the Sage is teaching us with the situation. Even when another is truly out of line, it is only by accepting this and remaining balanced that you make it possible for positive change to occur. Gentleness and understanding create in others an unconscious willingness to be led.
The superior person avoids the use of anger and force in trying times, knowing that they only prolong the conflict. It is far wiser to accept that each experience we have is necessary for us to learn something about ourselves and about the higher laws of life. The greatest openings come when we meet difficulty with acceptance, gentleness, and a desire to understand the lesson underneath.
Adapted from Brian Browne Walker's version.
Aparigraha
The mark of a moderate woman is freedom
from her own ideas. —Lao Tzu
"Aparigraha, or nonpossessiveness and nonhoarding, is the fifth of the yamas—or moral restraints—on the eight-limb path of Yoga*. Aparigraha is about letting go. The Yoga Sutras advise us not to waste any energy holding on to that which is not really ours in the first place. Aparigraha can apply to our own thinking. Attachment to our thoughts is as wasteful as our attachment to political ideology, to relationships, or to our piles of stuff. Aparigraha is also about letting go of our most cherished pain-producing beliefs. It is about the end of all attachment: letting go of our fears, letting go of our desires, becoming free.
Aparigraha advises us to travel light while on the spiritual path. We must let go of the old to make room for the new; we must grieve our dead and then let go in order to love the living. Much of the work we do with aparigraha concerns the obvious; a closet full of old clothes which needs emptying to accomodate other things, new colleagues at work replacing our old friends and workmates. As difficult as these passings are, they have the advantage of being directly in front of us. All that is required is yet another level of surrender, a leap of faith.
More difficult is the aspect of aparigraha that concerns worn-out beliefs. Many of the basic assumptions that guide our daily choices are unconscious, unseen. We have all been progammed, sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally, to an extend that most of us are only vaguely aware of. Of equal power are our own beliefs, carried over from previous periods in our lives, previous life situations. Collectivelly, the old thoughts and ideas create an energy that robs us of the moment. Aparigraha invites us to walk away from yesterday's outdated beliefs. Just as we take boxes of our old clothing to the Salvation Army, we can begin shedding our old ideas. We can begin to trust our perceptions of the truth in the moment. There is a power in this process, an unfettering of the mind and the spirit. We can begin to wear our beliefs like a loose garment. We can experience the lightness that comes from the freedom from our own ideas."
—Adapted from "Reflections from the Mat: Daily Reflections on the Path of Yoga" by Rolf Gates.
* The Eight-Limb Path of Yoga includes to following:
1. Yamas (the five moral restraints)
2. Niyamas (the five observances)
3. Asana (postures)
4. Pranayama (mindful breathing)
5. Pratyahara (turning inward)
6. Dharana (concentration)
7. Dhyana (meditation)
8. Samadhi (union of the self with object of meditation)
And now for something completely retarded.
Borat singing a love song... need I say more?
Click here if you can't view the clip above.
"The only way to deal with an unfree world...
...is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion."
"Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future."
"Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others."
"You cannot create experience. You must undergo it."
"But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill oneself."
"La liberté, seule valeur impérissable de l'histoire."
—Albert Camus
October 15, 2007
Train Nº69
Train Nº69
A short story by Smiler
She had originally planned to return to Montreal the previous day via train Nº71. But then there'd been that last minute brunch invitation with a consultant who also happened to be a VIP, so this is how she'd ended up on the Monday train instead, train Nº69. She'd had to rush from her friend Sam's place in Brooklyn to make it on time. She'd lucked out and gotten an especially friendly cab driver. His cab was neither clean nor especially comfortable, but she quickly learned he was a philosopher and a Muslim and their conversation made her forget that she was trying to beat the clock. When they arrived, she realized she'd gotten to Penn station early and she gave the driver a big fat tip, saying "thank you, you're a very nice man, best of luck to you".
Tara sat on the train gathering her thoughts while the last of the passengers made their way to their seats. It seemed to her an incredible coincidence for her to be travelling on Amtrak train Nº69. She was prone to giving lots of importance to small details like that, and other than the obvious sexual connotation, the numbers had special significance to her. She thought it was a sign and wondered what kind of surprises were awaiting on this trip.
She heard children's voices and leaned over to see what they looked like. They were at the other end of the car, two pretty little girls with dark hair, dressed in pinks and reds, apparently traveling with their mother. The smaller one couldn't have been more than four or five, and when she noticed Tara looking at her she gave her a sweet smile and put her hand up to her as if in tentative wave, fingers making a scratching motion. "I'd love to take pictures of that girl later, I wonder if her mother will let me".
A few minutes later, a conductor made his way up the aisle. She didn't take notice of him until he turned around to make his way back, walking towards her. She recognized him instantly. "PETE, is that YOU?!?" His face lit up and he beamed his radiant smile. "Taaarrraaaaaa", he thundered, and then he stood there staring at her, grinning wide and blinking a little. He was wearing his work clothes, looking spiffy in his blue suit and cap, almost like a soldier in uniform. Pete had always been an imposting man, but now she noticed he'd developed a visible paunch. They hadn't seen each other for a good number of years. Tara couldn't remember just how long it had been. A few seconds went by and still neither of them had said anything. Pete looked amazed and happy to see her so unexpectedly. Tara, while pleasantly surprised, wasn't quite so shocked. Too many coincidences happening lately.
Finally Pete broke the silence
-"S'great to see you Tara, you look great as always - you headed back home then?".
-"Yep", she said "I see you're still working the train".
-"Yup! It's a good stable job" Pete replied. "Listen, I gotta go get some paperwork in order right now, but... I'm sure we'll be runnin' into each other during the trip. There'll be plenty of time to catch up.".
-"Where are your HQ's?" she asked. This ellicited an even larger grin from Pete, if that was even possible.
-"I'm in the dining cart, don't be shy, come over for a visit" he said and took his leave.
The train started to roll. Since she had both seats to herself and a good ten hour ride ahead of her, she decided to get comfortable and spread her things out. She always travelled with piles of things, like a gypsy; books, two apples, a stack of magazines, juice, water, packets of nuts, several notebooks, her iPod, a camera. She liked to keep busy, or at least, occupy her mind. She chatted with her neighbouring travel companions - two young French business students who didn't speak a word of English and were travelling through North America for the first time. She was tired from all the excitement of her trip. New York had been, as New York always was, filled with action and interesting encounters. She'd barely slept during her week there. Sam had taken her to so many cocktail parties in Manhattan, and there'd been all these consultants to meet, and then again with Sam, they'd taken so many photos, and there'd been that lovely meal at Bar Tabac and then endless conversations, many of which had turned into heated debates. Tara had known Sam for a good decade. It had been a platonic relationship since the beginning, but with their personalities, they tended to clash often. She remembered now that Sam had invited her on board his 90 ft schooner. While the idea sounded lovely, she wondered if it was wise to accept the invitation. "Aren't the elements likely to react to our presence and start clashing? And mightn't there be great big storms and thunder and lightning once we hit ocean waters?". I'd much prefer smooth sailing..." she'd thought to herself when he'd mentioned it. Presently, she stretched out her legs across the seats and as the train rumbled on, she put on soothing electronic music and fell asleep almost instantly.
She woke up an hour later. She was hungry and thirsty. She remembered Pete, and decided to go join him in the dining cart. Again, Pete smiled as soon as she made her apparition. She noticed he was wearing a baseball cap as he liked to do, instead of the required conductor's hat. They started chatting, catching up on old times:
-"So how long's it been? Five years?"
-"Nah nah, it's gotta be more than that, I've been sober for six".
-"Is that so? That's amazing Pete, I'm so happy for you"
-"Yeeeaaahhh, it was that or... well nuthin' basically. Had'ta quit drinkin' or lose evertything. I got a home now and my two daughters livin' with me."
-"Pete! That's really great! I was wondering what happened to you, if you were doing okay and everything."
-"Doin' great!" he growled merrily. "I finally woke up and saw the light!"
Pete had gone through a major spiritual awakening in the past seven years. He was evidently proud to be able to tell Tara about it, since she'd been one of his major influences to motivate him to stop drinking. Tara remembered now, the times she'd turned him away when he'd showed up at her doorstep late at night "Go back to the pub and your friends, you're too drunk Pete". They'd stopped seeing each other after the last time he'd showed up, so drunk he could barely make it up her stairs.
-"Really? How did I do that? It's not like I pressured you to stop drinking or anything" she asked.
-"Nah nah, it's hard to explain, it was just... conversations we had in the past. We talked about so much stuff and it made me think, you know? About my priorities in life. If I hadn't met you Tara, then who knows? Maybe I'd be an even bigger drunk now."
She made a worried face, then smiled.
-"You know what the crazy thing is? I was shocked to see you on board today cuz, I shit you not, I was jus' mentioning you to my partner Jim over here."
Jim was sitting in the next booth. He was also wearing his uniform. He too had removed the jacket and hat. He was wearing eyeglasses and proudly displayed a perfectly bald head. Jim smiled and nodded:
-"Yep, he sure did talk about you, just a week ago as a matter of fact, said he probably wouldn't have done it if he hadn't met you."
They sat accross from each other and chatted. She told Pete about her latest projects and ideas. "I always knew you'd be going places" he said. He recounted some anecdotes about passengers he'd spent some time talking with. In his line of work, he got to meet all kinds of interesting characters. She noticed as they were talking, that people came up to their table and engaged in conversation with him, and then stood there and continued talking after he'd given them an answer, as if they didn't want to leave his presence. He had that kind of charisma. Along with a calming presence. "A calming presence is good to have in one's life" she thought to herself.
The little girl in the pigtails and red pants made an appearance, along with her bigger sister and mother. They took a seat at the table just behind Tara and the girls started fooling around, shoving each other, shouting and laughing. Their mother looked tired and weary, but she was looking at her girls and smiling, once in a while asking them to pipe down in a low voice. Tara had brought her camera with her to the dining car, and presently she turned to the other woman and smiled "do you mind if I take pictures of your girls? It's just for my own collection". The woman looked uncertain. "Here, let me show you the kind of portraits I take" Tara walked over to her booth and sat next to the woman. "These are lovely pictures you take" the woman said, with an obvious foreign accent "if you want to photograph my girls, it's okay." she added. The girls hammed it up for the camera while Tara clicked away in rapid sequence. She wasn't after a perfect shot. She just wanted to grasp their energy on a still image somehow. Then the girls started whinning, and Tara knew the moment had passed. Thank you so much, Noor is it? and you too girls, you did a great job!" and with one last wink at Peter, she stepped out of the dining car.
As she walked back to her wagon, she noticed the train had filled up considerably during the stopovers. When she regained her seat, she found she now had an older gentleman as a traveling companion. They started making pleasant conversation. Heinrich was a retired vet and spoke English, Spanish, German and French fluently. He'd been born in Germany, but his parents had moved to Argentina before the war, he said. Tara loved animals, and so they spoke about horses and dogs for a while. He seemed to be a compassionate and caring man, Tara noted. She couldn't help but have a slight apprehension about German men of Heinrich's generation, it was imbeded in her genes, or maybe it was all that WWII footage she'd been shown in school as a child. Now she felt guilty for even entertaining the thought, but she wondered if Heinrich mightn't have had a more sinister past. She pushed the thought away. Such a nice man! And besides, she didn't want to entertain the thought that she was possibly in the company of a former Nazi. Heinrich was traveling with his wife Nonnie, who was sitting just behind them. Tara offered Nonnie to swap seats so they could sit together, but she smiled and said she was just fine. One or two stops later, the seat next to Nonnie was vacated and Heinrich joined his wife again. Tara was a bit sad to see him go. She'd found him to be a very interesting individual, even her overractive imagination allowed her to see that. The two cute as buttons French business students were still sitting on the other side of the alleyway, and Tara enjoyed stealing glances at them. "Dirty old woman!" She berated herself, though she looked to be no more than twenty five, if that, especially wearing her yoga clothes as she was today. The hours rolled by with the scenery. Mostly shrubs and fields and the occasional trees.
And then, train Nº69 came to a full stop. They were at a the border crossing, someone said, so it might take a while. The scenery outside was depressing. The sky was muted and gray and it had started to rain. There was a layer of fog outside, and when she looked out the right window, past the French students, the view, even though it was plain enough, filled her with fear and dread. It was the combination of the weather, and then the barbed wire on top of the fence and then those blocky buildings, like bunkhouses - again, those reels of footage she'd seen as a child came back to haunt her, only this time the scenery was real. She started to imagine the worst.
They waited half an hour, forty five minutes, seventy five minutes, and still, no sign of departure. They were being detained at the border."How much longer?" the passengers asked. There was no way to tell. The air grew stale as the border patrol agents tersely questioned and searched each and every passenger. Those who looked foreign or who had an accent were brought to another section of the train for further questioning. It had been a long weekend. There were more passengers than usual. It was taking much longer than normal. The snack cart was off limits, and everyone started complaining of thirst after a while. The smokers on the train asked if they could get out to have a cigarette and were told to stay put. They'd been waiting close to two hours now and it didn't seem like anyone was leaving anytime soon. Tara was growing more and more anxious, in the grip of that irrational fear that they were somehow in great danger."This could go on indefinitely. I wish Pete was here to reassure us at least." One of the little girls started to cry. She wanted to get off the train. Her mother was trying as best she could to soothe her.
One passenger who was sitting close to Tara said "we're all going to get trombosis if they force us to just stay seated like this. And I should know 'cause I'm a nurse". This broke the tension for a moment and gave Tara and Heinrich the vet a good chuckle. But Tara could feel the tension rising. She could well imagine what traveling on a train in Europe must have been like at the onset of WWII. Stuck at a border crossing in no-man's land, nobody giving the passengers information, no food, no water, not knowing what could possibly happen next... those looming bunkers outside - are those meant for us? How terrifying that must have been.
Everyone was growing restless and impatient. Tara decided she needed to stay calm and set an example "All it takes is one person to make a difference." she told herself. She loaned one of her magazines to a fellow passenger who was complaining loudly now. She considered starting an impromptu yoga class, but she realized there wasn't enough room and most people didn't look like they were wanting to do yoga besides. Although she didn't want to make a display of herself, she also needed to DO something. She didn't want to let the mounting anxiety get the better of her. After deliberating a little, she got over her reservations, stepped out into the aisle and started doing some yoga postures - a series of sun salutations. She needed to keep moving and she needed to stay calm. Some passengers looked on curiously, but nobody seemed to mind. Progressively, as she followed the now familar routine, she started to enjoy herself and get over the irrationional fear that they'd entered the twilight zone, or that history was about to repeat itself.
A woman from customs suddenly stepped into the wagon. She was wearing her uniform, blue slacks that were a little bit on the short side and fit too tightly on her generous frame, and a blue shirt, also tight fitting. She had frizzy hair. She could have been pretty, but her facial expression and the energy she emanated were too unplesant for that. Tara noticed all this with distaste "she should try smiling once in a while" she thought to herself. Then the customs agent opened her mouth and shouted: EVERYONE MUST REGAIN THEIR SEATS"
Tara didn't like customs agents very much. This one returned the favour. She turned to Tara brusquely and snapped: "YOU need to regain your seat, you're causing us trouble.""WHAT?!?!? NOT ALLOWED TO DO YOGA?!? How ridiculous is THAT exactly???" Tara cried, confused and very agitated now. To her horror, all the anxiety she'd been trying so hard to hold back burst forth now. She started shaking and blabbering. She called the customs woman a fascist. Then, upset that she'd said it once, she said it again. And then, as thought she'd suddenly developed a case of Tourettes, she couldn't stop herself from talking and calling the woman names. She knew she shouldn't but she simply couldn't stop. Nearly every sentence uttered in rapid hiccuping staccato was punctuated with that word. "I have. a medical. condition. You fascist. I'm prone. to saying. things. that'll get me. in trouble. Cow. This. condition. gets worse. if I'm. prevented. from doing. my yoga. It calms me. it's been. recommended. to me. by my. doctor. You fascist. Now you've gotten. me so. upset. I don't. know what. I'm saying. Anymore. Fascist pig" The customs officer just shrugged and said "I have nothing to do with it, I'm just the messenger. The train conductors said you were blocking the passage and they couldn't circulate, so they sent me. Tara knew this was a blatant lie. Pete would never have sent a litte toy soldier like that. He would have come himself and asked nicely, with a smile.
The other passengers came to Tara's defence "Let her do her yoga! She wasn't disturbing anyone, why should she NOT be allowed to do her yoga?? " Tara appreciated their show of support, but she was embarrassed now. She hadn't meant to cause so much fuss and lose her cool like that. Of course she'd wanted to assert her freedom, but she'd tried to do it in the most calm way she knew how. And now she'd made a mess of it. She knew she could get in big trouble for all the things she'd said. She clambered back in her seat, and put on some music while flicking through a magazine. The customs agent was standing next to her, trying to justify herself to the other passengers, she tried to speak to Tara also, but Tara ignored her and said "I'm not well, I need to calm down. Please leave me alone now." The customs woman left. There'd be no psychiatric ward for Tara's little performance today.
Eventually Pete appeared, bringing water for everyone, along with some news. Something to do with the fact that certain passengers hadn't brought papers and had suspicious stories that needed verification. "We'll be on our way soon" he told everyone. Again, he beamed at Tara before returning to his duties. After a while, Train Nº69 was on it's way to Montreal again. It had been a very long day. and they still had a couple of hours of traveling ahead of them, but the worst of it was over. When they finally arrived to destination, Tara bumped into Pete again at the taxi stand. He'd scribbled his mobile number on a piece of paper and presently handed it to her telling her she should call him "anytime". "Yeah sure, I'll call you sometime, so we can chat some more, it was really great seeing you again Pete.That night, the only thing Tara looked forward to, more than anything, was to just hang out with her cat. Alone.
Photos by Smiler
Z is for... fugly.
Apparently they've managed to make a dress that looks like the mask of Zorro. Must be all the rage on "The Bold And The Beautiful". The only inconvenience is that the wearer has to walk around with her arms stuck out by her sides at all times to show the full effect. Must get tiresome after a while. Ah, the joys of being a fashion victim...
It's a bird... it's a plane... no wait! It's... Hindustan Superman?
I found this truly godawful video as I was doing research on the word Hindustan*. It made me laugh so much I just had to share it here. Ladies and gents... I present to you Hindustan Superman!!! No joke. He dances and he sings too! Don't they have enough deities over there to take care of the thugs and miscreants? Why would someone want to get the guy wearing tights involved? It's so bad it's good, but if Superman isn't your thing, there's also an Indian Michael Jackson doing "Thriller" in Hindi. The guy's wearing shiny red leather and everyting. Sheesh.
Call me old fashioned but I tend to prefer classical dance and costume, as seen here, with Medha Hari dancing the
Bharatanatyam. Now that's more like it.
* A term refering to Hindu culture.
Automated artwork
I stumbled on the above images as I was looking for some Gustave Courbet paintings because I wanted to mention a Courbet retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris (October 13th - January 20th). The retrospective is called "La chaîr de l'être" (The flesh of being), and it would have absolutely made sense for me to post one of his most famous—and most scandalous—paintings The Origin of the World (L'Origine du monde), depicting a close-up of a woman's sex. Sure, it would have made for shock value, but then again, I'm not after shock value. And besides, a small version of the painting can be seen a couple of times in the first grid (click on the images to enlarge).
The grids come from Google Grid which "is a web-based application that uses images from Google Images to generate a large gridded montage of images based on your search terms. This graphic tool, can be used to create desktop pictures or even posters". What a terrific concept, and I would have loved playing around with it, but unfortunately, the application is no longer in operation. Still, there's all kinds of goodies to be found there.
October 14, 2007
Are you KIDDING me???
For some reason, the following bit of news from Splendora Style Forecast has me really enraged:
"Here's a hot new trend we heard about from our New York friend Patty N., a chic fashion professional who is also the mother of two gorgeous girls. Patty turned us on to Little Bird Style, personal shoppers/stylists for the under 18 set. She was a bit skeptical when she first heard about this service but after realizing that she'd rather spend quality time with her daughters (that does not involve them trashing store dressing rooms), she parted with $250 for the clothes and a small shopper fee. She was delighted when her girls, Mara and Lily, returned from their exciting excursion with fabulous new outfits.
"I know what I'm getting my New York mom-friends for the holidays." [says the reporter]
Conspicuous consumerism is defined thus: "Conspicuous consumption is a term used to describe the lavish spending on goods and services that are acquired mainly for the purpose of displaying income or wealth. In the mind of a conspicuous consumer, such display 
serves as a means of attaining or maintaining social status. A very similar but more colloquial term is "keeping up with the Joneses"." (much more on Wikipedia)
However, I believe the problem with America in this day and age is that there's not enough consumerism, wouldn't you agree? We really need to encourage young girls to shop from the earliest age because the solution for paying off that war deficit MUST be "creating more shopaholics". Doesn't that sound like a fabulous idea? Now that we have all those wonderful role models for staggering displays of nouveau richness in the form of Paris Hilton and her ilk, we just need to give the kiddies the proper tools and guidance so they'll develop all the required skills to overspend, because they're not quite demanding enough as it is. But if we train them properly, we'll be sure that as they grow up, they'll have their priorities straight and focus all their energies on SPENDING. That way, when voting time comes around, they'll be even more likely to vote for the candidate who promises the most tax cuts, if they bother voting at all, which is doubtful because it might cut into their shopping or hanging out with friends and keeping up with the Joneses time. Do I sound pissed? You bet'cha I'm pissed. It's not that I'm an anti-consumerist, but really, can we please leave the kiddies out of this 'till they're old enough to make informed decisions?
Love, War & Sex (how very French)
Amours, guerres et sexualité
(Love, War & Sex)
Location : Hôtel national des Invalides - Paris, 129 rue de Grenelle
Dates : Septembre 22nd - Decembre 31st 2007
Here's an event only the French (and possibly the Dutch) could have concocted. This goal of this exhibit is to explain how intimate relationships between men and women (both military and civilians) were affected by WWI & II. The presentation focuses on the most intimate types of relationships, i.e romantic and sexual. The exhibit showcases various objects, posters, photographs, private correspondence & journals, news items as well as audio and film archives. In all, more than 480 works are on display. You'll have to go to Paris before December 31st to see it, and if you do, please be sure to send me a postcard, or at the very least, foward your impressions to me. 
Amours, guerres et sexualité
Lieu : Hôtel national des Invalides - Paris, 129 rue de Grenelle
Dates : du 22 Septembre au 31 Décembre 2007
S'aimer en temps de conflits... Comprendre comment et en quoi les Deux Guerres mondiales ont affecté les relations entre les hommes et les femmes, civils et militaires, au niveau le plus intime, celui du rapport amoureux et de la sexualité. Objets, affiches officielles, photographies, correspondances privées, journaux intimes, presse, archives filmiques et sonores... plus de 480 oeuvres sont présentées.
October 13, 2007
Weekly Recap
For those of you who are new to this blog, or if you haven't had the opportunity to keep up this week, I can tell you that there's been lots of activity here at Smiler, with Love ; there's a new tagline, I've added more categories and relabeled all the posts to allow for easier navigation (you can also use the search button and type in keywords), and last but not least I've been posting like a fiend over the past week and you'll find both longer pieces to sink your teeth into as well as short features for a quick glance. Here's a summary of some of the features you'll find as you scroll down:
Global Warbling: Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" is a good documentary with very good intentions. But I was disturbed by the one-sided message and the fact that it's now become required viewing in many classroms, so I went digging around to see what the detractors were saying...
Do you have a Chorus of Fish Singing in Antarctica?: If you're familiar with Little Britain, then you already know the hilariously annoying Mr Mann. If you're not, then click on this link to discover what you've been missing.
Summer of '74: an autobiographical short story about... you got it, The summer of 1974. I was five years old and just discovering the world and we were living with a group of Iranian students who were looking forward to the Shah's demise. Many years later, I had the good fortune to meet Farah Pahlavi, the Shah's widow, who agreed to meet me in her home.
The Cube: it's an imagination game, and more. You can read about it here then decide if you're ready to play.
Riposa in Pace: a short story about a jogger who finds solace while running among the dearly departed.
On Synchronicity: find out where the word and concept of synchronicity came from, how it's linked to the I Ching, an ancient Chinese divination system, and how Carl Jung was involved in any of this.
... you'll also find much, more more.
Happy browsing and don't be shy to leave a comment!
Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest
2007 Winner: Crowded street/Yvonne Mous
Click to enlarge image.
Fractal Art
The Mandelbrot set is a set of points in the complex plane that forms a fractal. A fractal is generally "a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be subdivided in parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole". I don't quite understand what that means, but it makes for pretty images.
October 12, 2007
Global Warbling
"An Inconvenient Truth offers a passionate and inspirational look at one man's fervent crusade to halt global warming's deadly progress in its tracks by exposing the myths and misconceptions that surround it."
While it's true that talking about this documentary isn't exactly breaking news, I saw it on television today and found it so disturbing that I had to do a piece about it. But before I knock it, let me just say that I think it’s fantastic that this movie was made because it has reached a public far and wide and has encouraged people in every socio-economic to pay attention and start making better choices. Now while I hardly doubt that former Vice President Al Gore had very noble intentions with this movie and it's a necessary message to get out there, I wouldn't suggest to someone to watch it while in the midst of an existential crisis (as I happen to be). While I support the environmental cause and do my part in conserving energy, reducing carbon monoxide (not owning a car helps), reusing, recycling, becoming a better informed consumer, buying environmentally friendly products and so on, my major criticism is that the film presents a completely one-sided view and knocks the viewer over the head with staggering statistics, scary images, and descriptions of worst-case scenarios that supposedly await us in the coming decades. While it’s imperative to keep pushing to get everyone—industries, government and individuals alike—to pay attention and find solutions and hopefully prevent all the major catastrophes that many are predicting, I think Gore went too far on the doomsday angle of this story. It's clear Gore and his team based themselves on volumes of extensive scientific research to prove their point. But you don't have to be a scientist to know that statistics and numbers can be manipulated in many ways to support whatever theory needs validating, and also that the ACTUAL (convenient or inconvenient) truth is very rarely quite so black and white.
In the spirit of airing several viewpoints on the issue, here are a few interesting items I found:
The Great Global Warming Swindle
This documentary, broadcast on Channel 4 in the UK on March 8, 2007, brought together skeptical scientists who disagree with the consensus regarding human-caused global warming. Among other claims, the film states that Gore has misrepresented the data in An Inconvenient Truth, and that the actual relationship between carbon dioxide and the temperature is the other way round (that is, rise in temperature preceded an increase in carbon dioxide in the ice core samples). The film claims that the consensus on climate change is the product of "a multibillion-dollar worldwide industry: created by fanatically anti-industrial environmentalists; supported by scientists peddling scare stories to chase funding; and propped up by complicit politicians and the media". (Wikipedia)
Some news items :
"'An Inconvenient Truth': Al Gore's Fight Against Global Warming" (The New York Times, May 22, 2006)
"Global Warming's Real Inconvenient Truth" (washingtonpost.com, July 5, 2006)
"So how did An Inconvenient Truth become required classroom viewing?" (National Post, May 19, 2007)
When you can't make sense out of it, may as well laugh about it, right? :
"Prior to being released, the film was parodied in the South Park episode "Manbearpig". Gore laughed off this sensationalized depiction of him, saying "Their comic sensibility is aimed at a different demographic than the one I inhabit, but I still find a lot of what they do hilarious." "
Unscripted and Unlined.
SIR RICHARD BRANSON: ... and I said "You know Pamela, Rick Salomon will only use you for his own selfish reasons. You should let me use you in our next advertising campaign instead. You could be like a virgin all over again."
PAMELA ANDERSON: Yeahhhh. Like, totally. He totally said that.
RICHARD: Well you know what she did? She BIT my hand! I've no idea why she did that, but I'll forgive her, because she's got enormous... what's the word I'm looking for?
PAMMY: I like, totally did. Just had to sink my teeth into him. Have you seen my teeth? Aren't they white? Aren't they sharp? Aren't they just perfect?
RICHARD: I think it wouldn't be completely out of place to say people are probably not looking at Pamela's teeth at the moment.
PAM: I don't know what you're talking about Richard. What do you mean?
RICHARD: I'm looking away, I'm looking away, I'm looking away. But isn't it the stangest thing, I've completely lost my train of thought...
Photo: infdaily.com
Motivational Quote of the Day
"You are here to enable the divine purpose of the universe
to unfold. That is how important you are!"
—Eckhart Tolle: Contemporary spiritual teacher and writer.
Photo: NGC 6164: A Bipolar Emission Nebula
Credit & Copyright: Gemini Obs., AURA, NSF
Do you have a Chorus of Fish Singing in Antarctica?
In our last episode of Little Britain, we found Mr Mann, shopping for a painting of a Dissapointed Horse. He leaves the shop with a painting of a Displeased Owl to put next to the painting of an Inovenienced Badger he already has at home.
A fellow fan of Little Britain wrote: "The inconvenienced badger found the displeased owl rather vexatious, actually. Couldn't get along. Mr. Mann should be returning one or the other in just about a week or so - he can't decide which, for the moment."
I'm betting he'll return both. With that extra cash burning in his pocket, he'll be going to the record shop where he'll be asking for an album featuring a Chorus of Fish Singing in Antarctica. The shopkeeper will actually FIND a Chorus of Fish Singing in Antarctica, and Mr. Mann will ask: "are they singing in Swahili?".
The shopkeeper will ask for Mar'gret's help. A Chorus of Fish Singing in Antarctica in Swahili will be found in the pile to the left. "But does the album feature a photograph of the fish wearing tuxedos?". Wouldn't you know it, yes it does. "Are fhe fish also wearing red bow ties?" Mr. Mann will add. "Must they really be red?" The shopkeeper will ask. "I'm afraid so" will be Mr Mann's reply. "These fish are wearing grey bowties unfortunately", the shopkeeper will answer, despondent. "Ah, that's most unfortunate" Mr. Mann will say.
"But I do have an album featuring an A Capella Group of Guinea Pigs Reciting Passages of the Bhagavad Gita. In Sweedish." the shopkeeper will say. "Are they wearing black tutu's?" Mr. Mann will ask. "Because I'll only buy it if they're wearing black tutu's on the album cover. "As a matter of fact, the guinea pigs are indeed wearing black tutu's!", the shopkeeper will say victoriously. "All right then, I'll take it".
And Mr Mann will go home to listen to the A Capella Group of Guinea Pigs Reciting Passages of the Bhagavad Gita. In Sweedish.
Until next time folks.
Summer of '74
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For the past few days, I've been trying to remember the specific set of circumstances that led to my living with a group of Iranian students when my daughter was five years old - an eviction from yet another slum, that much is certain. But which one? And how did I meet Darius (1,2 and 3) and Noor and the gorgeous Shahnaz? Maybe writing about them will bring back the memory? —Riverlee To see Riverlee's full story click here .
I remember things very differently:
It was the summer of '74. As far as the roommates go, I remember very little, other than one of the women was very pretty, and that they came from a place called Iran. The house was Victorian, grey stone, imposing. The kitchen was in a semi-basement. Yellow as a colour scheme comes to mind, as in mustard yellow tiles or a bright yellow kithen table. Maybe both. I don't remember the food in great detail, other than it was very good. There was a television propped on a shelf up on the wall. From my angle, it seemed to touch the ceiling. This really fascinated me. Obviously I hadn't seen a whole lot of televisions at that point. Probably because we couldn't afford to have one.
There was something forbidden—therefore very alluring—about the living-room. Had I been told it was off limits? A strange blackish shiny beast lurked in the corner - a second, much larger tv set. Lots of papers strewn all over the large desk in front of the window. One day, feeling very brave, I marched right into that room and was about to climb onto the huge black couch when I saw it, barely six inches from me. My eyes almost popped out of my head. The thing was truly scary. It was very green and it looked like a cross between an alien and a dangerous piece of machinery with lots of weird moving parts. I pictured it spontaneously expanding into an enormous hulking thing, filling up the entire living room, breaking through the walls and ceiling, shattering the windows, wrecking the furniture, then going on a rampage, Godzilla-style. "Mommyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy a monster a monster a monster eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeekkkkk". I screeched, quite certain the entire household was in grave danger. When mommy arrived to rescue me, the thing promptly skipped away. It can do that? How fascinating! it's just a big grasshoper, she said. To her maybe. To me it was the stuff that nightmares are made of.
Then the mono came. From where, I've not the slightest clue. I went from firecracker to limp bunny in two days. My spleen was so huge, it made a bump on the left side of my belly. I was overtaken by sleep many times a day, usually when I was in the middle of something interesting. I slept in a double bed down the hall from the kitchen. My mom and I shared the bed at night and with the fever, I was tossing around "Like a fish jumping out of the water." My poor mother spent her nights worrying about me either landing on her face or rupturing my spleen in a belly flop. The spleen situation was a major concern. My mom had to watch out for me constantly to make sure I didn't bump into things. Death by spleen rupture was seemingly a constant threat. One day, feeling a bit more energetic, I scurried away and joined a game of skipping rope outside. Within seconds, my mom showed up screaming "Stooooooop!!!". After that, I stayed indoors and played with a Slinky instead. It went from being a fascinating wonder-toy ("It's Slinky, it's Slinky, it's fun for a girl and a boy") to a boring piece of crap in no time. It was like that for a good part of the summer. Time just seemed to have come to a full stop.
Eventually I got better. I discovered the neighborhood kids. There was this pudgy boy, maybe eight years old living next door. Because he was "the older boy" he spoke with great authority. He had a sort of skateboard his dad had put together. Just a piece of wood with wheels screwed on. He liked to impress us smaller kids with his boarding skills. I wanted to try it but he kept saying "no, you're too small". Then he left it out one day, just leaning up against the wall. I didn't waste any time. I set it down with care and sat myself on the wood plank, both feet planted firmly on the sidewalk. Did I mention we were living on one of the steepest streets in the city? The second I took my feet off the ground I knew I was in big trouble. I tried to stop the thing, stomped my feet down, and promptly landed on my face. I cried and cried of course. My mom ran out with one of the other women in the house. I was scraped up a little, and we there was blood everywhere which was coming from my mouth. I was lucky all my teeth didn't fall out, but it sure felt weird having wobbly teeth for a while. Not long after that, I was trying out the "good as new" secondhand bike my mom had gotten for my birthday. It had the training wheels on and everything, but I needed lots of prompting just to put my feet on the pedals. No wonder.
"There were many Iranian students in Montreal at that time. All of them gearing up for the great day when they would overturn the Shah's regime and bring peace, joy, happiness and prosperity to their people. They disagreed as to the particulars of what constituted peace, joy etc...but, by golly, they knew that was what awaited Iran." —Riverlee
A good thirty years—and seemingly a lifetime—later, I met Farah Pahlavi in her home in Potomac, near Washington, D.C. I was there on assignment with a photographer. I'd never had to concern myself with matters of protocol before, much less been required to call anyone "Your Majesty" so I was quite anxious about our visit. Her private secretary met us at the door, a slender man of uncertain age, bearing a thin mustache, as I recall. He informed us the Empress was getting ready and would be with us shortly. We waited a long time. I grew concerned that the photo session might not go as planned. When she came to meet us in the large formal living room, she was most gracious but also seemed anxious. I detected a deep melancholy there as well.
She had the natural reserve of someone who'd been groomed to be a queen, but I didn't want official portraits. I wanted something spontaneous and fresh. There were some very beautiful and interesting art pieces surrounding us so I asked her about them. They were all by contemporary Iranian artists and as she was talking, her face opened up and she came alive, chatty even. We talked about Iranian culture, Iranian customs, the Iran she knew and missed from her husband's days, the difficulties of their years of exile, when many countries turned them away fearing repercussions from Khomeini and his followers. She mentioned her daughter, Leila, whom she was still grieving (she'd reportedly died of a barbiturate overdose in 2001). We spoke at length about her late husband, the Shah if Iran. About how they came to meet, the sort of husband and father he was, his policies, his illness, the growing unrest of his opponents. And then she said: "People didn't appreciate what he was trying to do for Iran and it's citizens. They criticized him harshly, but since Khomeini took over in 1979, everybody ended up losing everything in the end. Everybody lost."
Photos: Official State portrait of Empress Farah of Iran, taken during the visit of American president Richard Nixon to Iran on May 30, 1972.
Bahman Jalali / Image Of Imagination fanoosphoto.com
October 11, 2007
"Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted."
-"I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a good book."
-"A child of five would
understand this. Send someone
to fetch a child of five."
-"Outside of a dog, a book is
a man's best friend. Inside
of a dog it's too dark to read."
-"To write an autobiography of Groucho Marx would be as asinine as to read an autobiography of Groucho Marx."
-"From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down, I convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend on reading it."
-"A likely story — and probably true."
—Groucho Marx
October 10, 2007
185+ books, now that's a project!
I just looked into The Pulitzer Project. Many of you are familiar with it, but for those who aren't, the goal of the exercise is to read all 81 books that won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Then again, if you're interested in a more international sampling, you might want to look into Read the Nobels. The challenge: to read books authored by Nobel Laureates in Literature. The Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to 104 persons since 1901, and with many of the authors having written several books (and in some cases, as with Doris Lessing, entire bookshelves), there in no specification as to how many books should be read.
There are few rules to accomplish either of the projects, if any. You can read the books in whatever order you like. If you've already read some of them before, you can cross them off the list. You can write a book review, or not. There is no obligation to check in with anyone. And best of all, there's no time limit. Thank goodness for that last one, because if a person decided to combine both projects AND read all the books ever writen by every Nobel Laureate, that might take a lifetime to accomplish. Especially should this person unwisely decide to add anything else to their reading list, as I would. Whatever the case may be, just keep in mind you need to keep adding on the new books from year to year as they get awarded. So many books, so many other things to do. Like eat. And write. And pee. Oh, and work too. But it's all about the journey, right?
What does your cube look like?
I've just played an amazing game called THE CUBE and now I'm hooked. You may or may not have heard of it. I just learned how to play it from this book. The introduction reads: "The Cube is an imagination game—and more. In the summer of 1991, playing it was suddenly the rage in the coffeehouses of Eastern Europe. Where has it come from? No one knows. Some think the Cube may be an ancient Sufi teaching riddle. Lost for centuries, it reappears in times and places where the soul most needs to know itself. Now, it is here." Then, this: "The warning on page 17 of this book protects the power of The Cube—like a genie in a bottle. If you open it at the right time, you will receive rich gifts of insight and surprise. But open it too soon, and the power flies away."
I bought the book but you don't have to because I have to say that I liked and agree with the Queen of Monkeys's review:
Great game, but you don't need the book
I learned of the cube from a friend, who helped me through the exercise. I have done it for myself and for friends multiple times since. "Knowing the secret" (which frankly I think is a ridiculous way of putting it) only ruins it for you if you believe it does. Don't limit yourself, you can play this game again and again. As you change, your answers may change too, giving you new insight into yourself and your path. I do think it is a much more organic experience to do the cube person to person, rather than using the book. Just like reading Tarot is better without referring to the manual. I wish you peace and harmony on your journey.
All the same, I thought this quote (p.88) was safe enough to share:
Like everything you do
playing The Cube
has already changed you
by giving you a new view
of yourself.
Scientists know
that the observer
alters the experiment.
And alchemists know
that working with certain images
stirs the very depths of life.
By setting synchronistic
forces in motion,
The Cube can work
in quite mysterious ways.
If you'd like to have more details to play the game, just post a comment or email me.
Value Your Own Wisdom
Adapted from a DailyOm article, from October 10, 2007
The Truths Within
Throughout our lives, we encounter individuals who presume to know what's best for us. But the insights they offer can't compare with the powers of awareness and discernment that already exist within us. From birth, we're blessed with wisdom that can't be learned or unlearned. It exists whether or not we acknowledge it because it's a gift given to us by a loving universe before we chose to experience existence on the earthly plane. Yet for all its permanence, it is vital that we value and honor this incredible element of the self. When we don't use our inborn wisdom, we begin to doubt our personal truths. When we recognize the power of our heart's wisdom, we discover how intensely beautiful and useful self-trust can be .
Inner wisdom isn't subject to the influences of the outside world, which means that it will never demand that we surrender our free will or act in opposition to our values. We're amply qualified to determine our own fate, and our inner wisdom is the source of our discernment and ability to identify blessings in disguise. When we're unsure of who to trust, how to respond or what we require, our inner wisdom knows where we're going and where we're coming from. Taking this into account isn't a product of experience but rather part of our connection to the universal mind.
Aurora, Stars, Meteor, Lake, Alaska
Credit & Copyright: Bud Kuenzli
"Riposa in Pace"
A short story by Smiler
It was morning. She wrote. she wrote some more. And then again. She edited. And then she edited again. And then she contacted a couple of friends to see if one of them would go run with her. They were busy with other things. Fair enough. She went by herself and ran for eighty minutes. She couldn't have run that long if someone else had come along.
The mountain was about twenty minutes from her apartment, uphill from begining to end. Because she was feeling tired and weary that day, she didn't make a goal of it to actually get to the mountain. She figured running towards it was a good enough job for the day.
When the hills were too steep, she walked. She got up top, to Beaver Lake. She ran along the grassy knolls that surround it. She found it pretty there. Not gorgeous. Nice. Nice enough. There was hardly anyone at that hour, and it was cold besides. There was a very happy dog running around with a friendly looking old man stood there [sic] looking at him and smiling, and she played with him a little. The dog that is—she just smiled and said hello to the old man, since he didn't look like he was about to start hopping around like an idiot the way she was doing with his dog. The dog played along. The old man smiled back at her and said That dog certainly is full of life. Yes, he certainly was.
She found an old tree she liked, and she leaned on it to unwind her legs and do a few yoga stretches. It wasn't a big tree. It had obviously been beaten up by the elements. There were lots of branches missing. And still, there were tender fresh new leaves all over it. It's misshapened, poor thing. But we understand each other she thought to herself. She pushed against it, and she imagined it pushing back againt her too, and she was quite sure she felt they were exchanging energy. Something like that.
She was inspired to do a handstand. But she needed more support and her present companion wasn't up to the task. She found a great big oak tree with a very large trunk. It was a good tree. A strong tree. She knew it could support her fumbling attempts at doing a handstand unflinchingly, and not let her down. It didn't. She felt happy as she looked at the world upside down, even if for just a short while. A great change of perspective indeed. Good to get the blood flowing to the brain when you use it as darn much as I do, she thought. Her arms were strong and they held her up just fine, but she'd need more practice to stay up there for longer bouts. I'll just keep practicing she said to no one in particular.
She felt a special connection to trees somehow. That's what her name meant: tree. But it was a foreign and strange sounding name, so kids would to tease her about it relentlessly. She didn't mind now. Tree hugger indeed she thought, smiling to herself.
She decided to continue her run through the cemetery. Grand Maman Margot was burried here, though she wasn't sure where exactly. Mère-Grand, she called her in French sometimes. She felt her presence still. She liked to honour her memory whenever she got a chance. Margot is short for Marguerite, which means Daisy in English, so she'd been buying daisies every week. Granny flowers. She sometimes made sure to let the florist know that they were actually meant for her grandmother. They didn't need to know she's passed away long ago, did they? And besides, she figured they'd understand even if they did know. Florists must hear all kinds strange stories.
There was a beautiful cemetery near the ocean in Bronte, Australia, where she'd jogged while visiting there. She'd had qualms about disrespecting the dead, but those were appeased when she saw several runners running on the path by the tombstoes when she'd gone on her initial walk to take in the sights. After that experience, she felt quite sure the departed enjoyed getting visitors - even if only the occasional joggers. So on this day, running on the montain, she though it might bring her some measure of peace and comfort to go running though Mount-Royal cemetery, where her beloved Gand-Maman Marguerite was burried. She had fond memories of going to visit her after class at Victoria School, playing cards with her, eating Pringles chips. How old was I then? Seven or eight maybe? she wondered. Granny always wore a dress. Always seemed well put together. Was always kind and gentle with her grand-daughter. Or at least that's how she liked to remember her. When she got Margot her daisies, she always make sure to put them in Mère-Grand's painted ceramic pitcher, imported from Italy, way back when.
From a distance, when she started nearing the cemetery, she saw a bunch of multicoloured stickers with bad typography stuck haphazardly all over the entrance gates. She hesitate to go in. This was not her idea of a peaceful run in a lovely setting. She reached the entrance gates: "on strike" the stickers read. The cemetery itself was filthy. There were plastic bags and newspapers strewn all over the place. It saddened her to see how very little respect we have for the dead. "But then again, we have so very little respect for the living nowadays, why should we be bothered once they've gone to another place? Why bover? Right?". She joked to herself to push away the indignation she felt.
She continued running along nonetheless. Don't let it bover you kiddo, She thought to herself. Grand Maman is here. She'll be glad that you've dropped by for a visit. She had good upbeat music playing on her iPod. She focused on that. She noticed a huge section with tombstones that were especially glitzy. Black granite no doubt, all done up with golden lettering. Cyrillic. A russian section. She hadn't realized the russians had taken over such a big section of the cemetery that way. She hadn't realized there was such a big russian population in Montreal to begin with. Are they mostly living or mostly dead? she couldn't help but ask herself. That thought makes her chuckle for some reason. She had a morbid sense of humour, that's for sure.
As she continued running and gazing at the tombstones, she wondered just how "beloved" some of those dearly departed husbands and wives had been while they were still living. Does the size and quality of the tombstones have anything to do with the love and appreciation the bodies burried beneath them had received while they were alive? or with the legacy they've left behind for that matter? She wondered. Of course not. Sometimes... diametrically opposed, I would suspect,
Was Mozart's carcass not just tossed into a communal ditch? One of the greatest composers that ever lived. All those treasures he's left behind; 600 compositions... with works widely acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, concertante, chamber, piano, operatic, and choral music... Considered among the most enduringly popular of European composers... Many of his works part of the standard concert repertoire... Considered to be one of the greatest composers of classical music. etc, etc... "He was not buried in a "mass grave" for paupers but in a regular communal [unmarked] grave according to the 1784 laws in Austria." She'd read somewhere. That was so terribly reassuring. Terrible, mostly. Once we've used up the bodies, we just toss them aside. Oh Wolfgang... the injustice of it. They should be ashamed of themselves. Still, she continued running to the beats of the electronic music blaring into her skull. The Crystal Method. A running track done for Nike. Purchased on iTunes. It was a good one. Not great. Good. It prompted her along, helped her push further on, and that was all that was required at that moment.
As she started making her way out of the cemetery, she saw some words chiseled into granite steps. She backtracked to have a closer look. "Riposa in Pace" it said . Keep that one in mind, She thought, That's quite beautiful. Italian I think. I might want to use that somewhere. "Riposa in Pace". Am I allowed to rest in peace while I'm still living? She was tempted to ask aloud. Tempted to scream actually. But she didn't. She just continued running along.
She kept running. She was tired now. Very tired. Depleted. Thirsty. But she needed to make her way back home. Needed to feed herself. One option was to take some of the cash she always carried "in case of emegency" and take a bus or taxi ride home. But that was out of the question today. May as well make the end of the run a pleasant one she decided. I'm fine. I have enough energy to carry me home. She pushed on. It was all downhill from there anyway, easy enough. She took the large winding path down the mountain, down Pine Avenue. She liked Pine avenue. She always asked taxi drivers to take that route to bring her home when she finished late at the office. It was so stately. There was a nice view of the city on the left, and the mountain to the right.
She saw a few other joggers running towards her. Everybody had their music on. Some of them nodded and smiled back at her. Mostly they didn't take notice. Focused on their own run. That's fine, I do that too a lot of the time. They're in the zone It occured to her: "how many of those runners feel as badly as I do right now? And how many people must think we've got it all together because we LOOK like we've got it together? Because we LOOK like we know exactly where we're going. This time. Today, I actually do, but not always. Right now, I'm making my back to my apartment. Simple enough."
It felt colder outside. She pressed on. The Crystal Method mix was getting more and more upbeat now. She was tempted to start sprinting, but there was a good fifteen, twenty minutes to go still, so she increased the speed a little, but she made sure to pace herself. She went down Dr. Penfield. Ran past the dog park. She made a mental note to go have a walk there with her camera sometime. Just hang out with the dogs for a while.
She continued running. She started sprinting in short spurts. Getting hungry. Getting thirsty. Made her way down Sherbrooke. She loved Sherbrooke street. Perfect to run along with those extra wide sidewalks like the ones in New York City she tought. She started feeling... the loneliness crashing in again, here in this most familiar setting, so close to home. How many times have I walked here... alone? How many taxis and buses have I ridden in... alone? And that car door I slammed... was it just a year ago now? Ugh. Was better to just slam that door and walk away in the pouring rain. He wasn't worth the trouble. Lonely or not.
She was nearing that pretty little parc now, close to Dawson College. The same college where that shooting had occured the previous year. But that's not what she remembered it by. She remember her days as a student there. And all the doors that opened up for her before she'd even graduated. Now still even.
She made her way down Elm street. So pretty. So British. She decided to end her run there. She wanted to go pick up a few things at the local grocery store. She didn't want to go inside sweaty and short of breath. Wouldn't do to show up in that state. We are in Westmount after all. Elm... She saw a triplex up for sale. The brick was... not a very nice colour. Too dark. But otherwise it looked like a very good building from the outside. Solid. Respectable. I'd just paint the brick white and it would look great, if only I could afford it, she thought to herself.
She was getting close to De Maisonneuve now, right by the grocery store. She decided... give yourself a hundred meters, then go for your last sprint. That's what she liked to do. Always keep a little for that last push. That was the fun part. When she could finally let her legs do what they did best, pound hard against the pavement, launch her forward, propel her into the air. It was almost like flying. Almost. Only not.
Someday... I too will fly. But for now... I must stay grounded. I will rest in peace while I'm still among the living. Riposa in Pace.
What do these things have in common?
1. Banana popsicles
2. Nijinski
3. Leila the siamese cat
4. Fats Waller
5. A girl named Celeste
6. A miniature tool kit
7. Earthworms
8. A bird with a broken wing
9. Vietnamese food
10. A Cornell Capa poster
11. An airplane
12. Russian dolls
13. Hindu deities
14. Big, ugly eyeglasses
15. An empty swimming pool
Answer: They're all elements to include in a short story. Wanna try your hand at it? It can be just a few lines or several chapters. Don't be shy to send me the results!
October 9, 2007
Now presenting: Lulu!
The big one, the Great Dane? that's Asia. The little one that Asia is about to swallow in one single bite? That's Lulu. But no worries. They're just on one of their play dates. Apparently Asia likes to take Lulu into her mouth and throw her up in the air. Apparently Lulu doesn't mind this. That's a dog's life for you. Lulu lives in Tel-Aviv with my dad. I believe she's around 16 months old. My dad hadn't had a pet in many many years. "It's too much trouble" he'd say to me whenever I suggested it. "If you're going to live alone, you should have a pet" I persisted. And then, life intervened. To make a long story short, my dad had a roommate for a while and the roommate brought Lulu along, and then the roommate left and also left Lulu behind. And then Lulu being the adorable sprite that she is just stole his heart, so he kept her.
Lulu's a miniature Pinscher. I always imagined he'd get more of a Lassie-type dog you know? The Lassie over here on the right I mean: a kind dog, somewhat on the frumpy side? But no. It was meant to be Lulu. Seems she's quite the little clown and a very friendly critter. Sometimes overly friendly, even. When she sees someone sitting on a park bench, she jumps right into their lap without asking permission. Not everyone likes that, because not everyone likes dogs, but those who do like dogs get a good laugh out of it. 
I'm sure my father would get a kick out of this blog entry. But dear old dad is as close to a ludite as I've ever known. He keeps promising he'll learn how to use "the computer", but it's been years now, and still no email exchange. So instead, our ritual is we speak on the phone once a week. Usually Sundays. They tend to be long conversations.
Partly we have long conversations because of the ludite thing (and attending lack of regular emailing), partly we have long conversations because a good portion of the time we talk about Lulu. You'd think talking about a dog for half an hour every week would be boring, but just hearing all the tenderness, love and joy in my father's voice when he talks about that little creature—who keeps getting into some kind of (inoffensive enough) trouble all the time—makes for fun conversations, and honestly I wouldn't care if he described the texture of her poop to me at that point. (yuck, I know). Sometimes I talk to him about Fritz, and how adorable Fritz is and Fritz's latest exploits. Because I'm convinced Fritz is one of the smartest and kookiest cats that ever lived, of course. It's like talking about our kids, only not. I don't think we should ever put those two "kids" together though. My dad tells me the one thing that Lulu hates the most in the world is... cats. And wouldn't you know it, the one thing Fritz despises more than being thrown into a tub-full of water is... dogs. I guess Lulu and Fritz won't be having play-dates anytime soon.
Photos of Lulu & Asia: Yair
Photo of Lassie ©Robert Bourges 2007