Inspiration

23 Days

Today's post isn't going to be as lighthearted as I try to keep my blog, but considering the fact that I'm not always lighthearted and this blog is to be an extension of who I am for myself and the lovely people who are also bizarre enough to want to read my thoughts. I think I'm allowed to present a fuller spectrum of myself. Today I'm supposed to be working on my summer reading that I want to have finished before I get over to London, but I can't concentrate. I've been getting sidetracked, watching Conan O'Brien's  commencement address at Dartmouth (totally blows me away!), surfing around the net looking at what I can find and I've been coming across the most amazingly inspiration stuff today. 

This page has some really wonderful street art.

A friend of mine sent me a page of street art and that is something I've loved since I was a kid. Seriously, I used to get excited when my family was stopped by a train because that meant I got to watch all of the graffiti on the cars go by. Now people are elevating it to a whole new level of intention and craft and forcing people to take it seriously. People are making the man-made world beautiful again and taking art from the gallery and museum and giving it to everyone to view. People who do this are doing it purely for the love of art and their actions are creating a new series of questions to be asked of art and what decides if something is art. I imagine I will be wrestling around a lot of these questions in the coming year and I hope that I will have something worth hearing to say about it, but that is in the future and I am here now so there is no need to wonder about the future when I have the glorious present to live in, in every moment for the rest of my life.

rolandtiangco

 I was thinking about moving to London and being nervous, excited, scared and terrified (I call that emotional multi-tasking. It's exhausting!) and it hit me and I thought to myself: You're never going to make your dreams come true if you don't put yourself out there. .....okay, der! Everyone knows that, right? Then why are people unhappy and dissatisfied? Because, they obviously aren't living what they're saying. So they keep saying it, acting like saying something is the same as living it, which is the furthest thing from the truth. That's why it's cliché, because it's repeated endlessly as hollow words. That is the sad nature of clichés, they sound so dull and obvious because they're true, but the problem is we take them for granted and then we start to ignore it, then roll our eyes when someone comments on it.
Kind of like the air around us that we're breathing. I sound like a wack-o hippie talking about noticing the air, don't I? But seriously, really think about it, what air is composed of and how our body uses it and gives some back and how so many things interact in this invisible way. It's incredible really.  That is an extremely intimate interaction with the world around us. Most of us aren't that intimate with anything else except, perhaps, a lover. (You know what I'm talking about. When you kiss someone and for a moment or two you're breathing each other's air.) It's funny when you think about things like that and speculate on the way everything is connected and then you come across ideas like quantum entanglement that go on and prove that everything was always been all mixed up and entangled, ever since the beginning, the big bang. Beauty coming from chaos. The ebb and flow of everything.

Move by Rick Mereki

Learn by Rick Mereki

Eat by Rick Mereki.

I found this series of three videos and I just fell in love with them. I've always wanted to travel, see, do, experience, to just soak up all of the nuances of the local culture. I want to walk everywhere and eat street food and buy locally made fabrics. I want bug spray to be my perfume and to live out of a book bag. I want to have to struggle with a language barrier and to understand more from the crinkles in an old woman and man's eyes than what they actually say. The world is such a huge place and to see only one small corner of it just seems like a shame. I don't want to regret not seeing the world when I'm old. I want to be like Marge and Jack Pruden (family friends that watched me grow up). Before Marge died, nearly a year ago,  I remember sitting with them in her hospice room and they told stories and one of them was about a boat they where on with a bunch of Australians and how friendly they where and how much they drank too! They where sailing on the Indian Ocean and they could see so many stars and of course they told the story better than me. They've had years and years to get good at telling stories and know how to insert the proper anecdotes to keep everything interesting. 
I hope that I'm getting better at telling stories. I am a notoriously poor story teller, but I'm crossing my fingers that it's endearing for now, while I get better at telling stories. I hope you all liked my long-winded post and that you don't think I'm some kind of whacky hippie, because I have an odd aversion to people thinking I'm a hippie. I have no problem with hippie-types, just so long as no one thinks I'm one; I guess those are my punk rock roots still lingering. Oh well. Have a wonderful weekend and be kind to yourself. ♥monica