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Posts tagged ‘Art’

Jul 25

Happiness and Thank You: A Blog Post

Lorsque paraît la beauté..

Image by ImAges ImprObables via Flickr

It’s easy to write when your sad, angry and full of hope, but harder for me to write when I am happy.  My high school teacher Marie Tollstrup used to say that if you look at most poetry and literature, it has traces of negative emotion with a happy ending merely to showcase the writer’s whimsy, yet today I feel obligated to note the love surrounding her and I, amongst our dear friends, family from abroad and in general.  Each day in the past week has been full of positive emotion, brimming with future possibility, and the reality that our time has finally come. This December will make it 5 years when I fell in love so deeply and truly with someone who I had known all my life that it still feels unreal that I am with someone so beautiful inside and out.  But I digress.  These past few days have made me realize how truly blessed and lucky I am to have the people I do in my life.  Looking at my past posts, I have spent an inordinate amount of time whining about the ones that truly do not matter, ignoring the ones that come around me at a drop of a hat, and I cannot help be thankful for being just good enough to have them in my life.  I do not know what I did to deserve them but dammit, I am going to make damn sure I keep them!

 

Thank you, thank you, and thank you.  I wish I was more eloquent but I cannot stop smiling, while soaking in these beautiful days and events with amazing friends and family.  THANK YOU!

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Jul 4

Energy: A Blog Post

Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...

Image via CrunchBase

I remember writing few months back where all my energy, ideas and focus melded into one need to get the story done.  I was smiling and truly enjoying the process, just living the dream of being a writer, knowing that what was being laid down was pretty good and I could do this.  I want that moment back, those blissful hours when it seemed becoming a writer full time was not a fantasy, that I was good enough dammit!  Yet lately, I seem to have found people who either don’t think much of my writing or dismiss it.  Worse, still I have others who manage to always feel bad about blogging or posting on Facebook even when I am supremely careful of not blogging names and keeping my status updates to a minimum.  I feel stifled and trapped into being a certain type of personality on social media as if I have to apologize for being open about my thoughts and feelings.  Sure, I have said too much sometimes and called out others when it was not my business to, and to that I can only apologize and call it a learning process, yet I feel trapped with the label of someone who talks too much.  It’s soul and creativity killing to know that my words are scrutinized to be either dismissed or confirm my status as a big mouth.

I want my words to have the energy they did when I wrote freely and got them out of being in my body, bottled up for so long.  That’s where I want to get to.  Let’s hope that the ones who are judging me know that they are killing me softly.

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Jul 3

Half Way: A Blog Post

New Year Sunrise

Image by joka2000 via Flickr

Yesterday, marked the halfway point for 2011.  I was surprised to see that reminder from the Change Anything blog (changeanything.com) a book that I am currently reading, not because I had not followed through on my New Years resolution.com but mainly because I had stayed the course.  I lost weight, I started reading again, planned and took a few trips and wrote some.  I did not just have one resolution but many and I am sticking to them not because I wanted to because I needed to.  In the past few years, I have begun to feel less like myself and more a social being trying to please others and you know what, it fucking sucks!  I much rather be in the days when I was true to my vision and focus and did what I pleased but then I realized that was not ideal either as I often did events that made much less money than I expected.  I never did find the balance of running a successful promotion company and label, and a personal life.  But few years back, I felt like I had sold myself out just to be successful but even writing that does not feel true.  The reality is that I always managed to get to the halfway but somewhere, somehow, I get derailed before getting to the end, and that is what worries me.  Losing focus.  My dream is to be the person I have always imagined myself to be, and at 39, I don’t have much time before I am defined by the years behind me.

So here’s to being halfway there, sticking to my guns and being the person I have always imagined myself to be.  Wish me luck.

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Jun 30

Image: A Blog Post

Love of Beauty, Ralph Waldo Emerson

Image by Glenn Franco Simmons via Flickr

mage by Matthew Stillman
Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Mess up your hair. If you are wearing makeup – smudge it. If you have a pair of pants that dont really fit you – put them on. Put on a top that doesn’t go with those pants. Go to your sock drawer. Pull out two socks that don’t match. Different lengths, materials, colors, elasticity.

Now two shoes. You know the drill.

Need to add more? Ties? Hair clips? Stick your gut out? I trust you to go further.

Take a picture.

Get ready to post it online.

Are you feeling dread? Excitement? Is this not the image you have of yourself? Write about the fear or the thrill that this raises in you? Who do you need to look good for and what story does it tell about you? Or why don’t you care?

(Author: Matthew Stillman)

So the last prompt is here and its about your image and although it focused on the visual, I realize my dread is more for the lack of future prompts.  The image in my head for myself is ugly in terms of lack of focus and the emptiness of desire for being better.  Physically. I have finally come to terms that while I used to nerd in High school, I have grown up and not the dark, skinny ugly kid anymore.  A particular images comes to mind when I write this.  I was in Junior high and 2 kids were mocking each other and then suddenly one of them says atleast your not him! (point to me).  That moment was one of the only times where I truly felt ugly but the reason was more than physical, it was the realization that the first time anyone in that class had even acknowledged me even thought we had been together for year!  Wow, it took my ugliness to be mocked for me to get any attention, a life lesson that stayed with me a while and made me think I could never get with anyone remotely good looking.  That is the power of bad words, to inflict pain well after the mocking is done.  That’s what my image has come down to, being in that room being repeatedly made aware of how ugly I am.

 

Today, that image has faded away not because it’s not true, but because I no longer give it the power it had on me before.  The image is now that of someone committed, someone who knows what he wants, and someone who will achieve more than what those idiots were going on about in that small room.

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Jun 29

10 Year Text/Tweet: A Blog Post

10 Year Text by Tia Singh
Speak what you think now in hard words, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Imagine your future self, ie, you 10 years from now. If he/she were to send you a tweet or text message, 1) what would it say and 2) how would that transform your life or change something you’re doing, thinking, believing or saying today?

 

This was an interesting and as the next to last prompt for this writing challenge, a very interesting one at that. I had to actually close my eyes and see myself 10 years from now  (not fat, hair graying but not balding), and for a moment nothing because I was too involved in the now.  I wanted to respond right away without thinking (getting the prompt over and done with) and then it hit me, really hit me, that this challenge was more than just finishing a task, it was to learn, grow and be the person I have always wanted to be.   Instead, some of the prompts became little writing games rather than me finally admitting to myself that the only way I can move on in life is ACT rather than THINK

so the future will simply be? “Write Much?”

 

Overcoming Uncertainty by Sean Ogle
Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Write down a major life goal you have yet to achieve or even begin to take action on. For each goal, write down three uncertainties (read: fears) you have relating to each goal. Break it down further, and write down three reasons for each uncertainty. When you have three reasons for your fear, you’ll be able to start processing the change because you know where the fear stems from. Now you’ll be able to make a smaller changes that push you towards your larger goal. So begins the process of “trusting yourself.”

Due to the writing challenge as well as things finally settling down for me emotionally and mentally, I can say that I am operating on all cylinders in all the areas I wish to improve on.  I would say that I need to keep it going, no matter how minute the progress.

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Jun 27

Personal Recipe to Being Alive: A Blog Post

For everything you have missed you have gained...

Image by Chapendra via Flickr

Personal Recipe by Harley Schreiber
I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering and unsteady. I wish it to be sound and sweet, and not to need diet and bleeding. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Think about the type of person you’d NEVER want to be 5 years from now. Write out your own personal recipe to prevent this from happening and commit to following it. “Thought is the seed of action.”

(Author: Harley Schreiber)

I NEVER want to be in the same position of wanting and desiring that I was in last year (stroke, cancer, loss of creativity(.  I do not want to stuck in a rut, and worse I do not want to be making the same mistakes and excuses of today.  I see now that whenever I open myself to new challenges (running nowadays), something comes alive in me and I see control in my life.  It’s when I let life happen to me that I stagnate, lost and wondering what happened to the old me.  I see now that I have to keep moving, learning, growing, traveling meeting, and donating (more than just money, but my vision and ideas for music, culture and charity).

Alive-est by Sam Davidson
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. If we follow the truth, it will bring us out safe at last. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

When did you feel most alive recently? Where were you? What did you smell? What sights and sounds did you experience? Capture that moment on paper and recall that feeling. Then, when it’s time to create something, read your own words to reclaim a sense of being to motivate you to complete a task at hand.

(Author: Sam Davidson)

Last week, I did something I never thought possible: I ran 3 miles without stopping and under 40 minutes.  Not athletic by any means but I saw concrete results by doing the Insanity work out and although I did not complete it, I got results I never thought possible and now it has turned me on to working out harder and longer and considered doing a mini marathon.  I felt alive, in control, amazed I was doing something I had not done since being in the junior high track team (I was terrible, managed to come last in every long distance race).  I now see that if I break down each day, task, idea, thought, desire to just that one thing, I can get it done.

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