Inspiration

voyages of the creative variety

Almost Time

4 Days

I'm in a state of disbelief. Everything is going by so quickly, or maybe it's thursdays..."I could never get the hang of thursdays." I've been packing yesterday and today and I plan to have all my major packing finished by today so I can enjoy my last few days in town with those I love the most. 

I just thought I would share this video with you. You can see the entire series here. I love these videos. There is just something so wonderful about them. The use of typography is perfect, the way the videos are filmed and edited and the music, perfection! I really just love every little thing about it. Have a wonderful day everybody and be kind to yourselves. ♥monica  

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

Inspiration: Harry Potter

I'm so so so excited to go to the midnight showing of the final Harry Potter installation tonight. I remember when I first started reading the books. I found the Chamber of Secrets in the library in the 6th grade and when I checked it out I was told that there was a book that came before it, so the librarian found the Sorcerers Stone for me and I checked them both out and just fell in love with them. 

The Sorcerer's Stone

 I remember going to read the 3rd and then the long wait for the fourth and every time I read a book I could relate so well with the characters in their personal struggles, certainly not their literal challenges seeing as how I'm not a witch or wizard. (I guess Dumbledore forgot to mail my letter.) 

The Deathly Hallows

Have fun tonight if you're going to see the first showing and have a great weekend! As always, be kind to yourself. -monica

Brad Warner in Europe

Happy Sunday everyone out there in I-hope-people-are-reading-my-ramblings-land! I'm having a fantastic day thus far and I hope you all are as well. I have two, personally, exciting things to talk about that are totally unrelated. So, here I go. 

♥ ♥ ♥

 First, I weighed myself this morning and I weighed in at 110.8 lbs. This is a big deal for me because while I was working at a tattoo shop at the beginning of this year I slipped into a pretty rough slump of depression and a very sedentary lifestyle, which helped the pounds to creep on slowly and being in that state really only perpetuated itself. I had a freak out moment after I started running again, but I wasn't losing any weight and found myself tipping the scale at 120 lbs. Which doesn't sound so bad to the majority of people, but consider that fact that I'm only five foot tall with a smaller frame and wide hips. (My point is perspective, for someone taller it isn't a big deal, but when you're a little thing. It makes a big difference.) Running with different friends helped a lot, mostly to pull my glum ass out of my pit and make me feel more optimistic. I also had to break some bad habits that my insomnia had started, namely mindless late night snacking. I don't want to get too heavy here, no pun intended, because I like my blog to be light hearted, but I just feel better when I weigh 110 lbs and lower. I feel physically more fit and capable, my energy is better and my self-esteem is better as well, so there is more to it than just vanity. I know where I feel best and I hold myself to my own standard, rather than what mainstream culture tells me I should be and so should you. I promise if you work at it you'll be kinder to yourself than a magazine is and you'll learn to listen to your body and do what you know if right for it. It just takes patience and clarity.

Brad Warner

Second, I have become a big fan of podcasts here recently and I was trying to see if Brad Warner, one of my favorite Zen authors, had any podcasts. He doesn't have his own series, but there are plenty of his lectures, Q&A sessions and interviews available, very cool. The exciting part is that he is going to be touring Europe, while I am in London! Wow, I'm am freaking stoked! His tour schedule can be seen, just click the hyperlink. He has dates in Germany, the Netherlands, France, Belgium and one day in the UK. Needless to say I will be finding a date that I can make and hopefully I can share it with you, my dear hypothetical readers. Also, I have a friend that is currently living in the Netherlands, so hopefully I can make it to one of those dates, see her and maybe even have a place to stay at the same time. Fingers crossed! [Correction: He does have his own podcasts. I just had a hard time finding them.]
I guess that's it for today. I'm a beautifully humid day here in Georgia, with high of only 91 today, (That's not sarcasm! It's awesome when it stays below 100 in July.) so I'm going to get off my bum and do something. Take it easy and be kind to yourselves. -monica

Inspiration: Lady Gaga aka Mother Monster

I love Lady Gaga. I love everything about her. She is consistently inspiring and has brought so much hope and happiness to popular culture that has been missing in a sea of ennui and self-loathing. She has made a global message that is it ok to be yourself, even if you're a weirdo-freak-a-zoid-monster. You have a place to belong and someone to take up for you. 

weheartit

This message really resonated with me because I've never fit 100% into any mold. Growing up I got into punk rock because it supplied me with a forceful sense of self, but it came with its own limitations and as I have gotten older I have realized that we are all these incredible amalgamates of our experiences, never just one thing or one clique and in trying to limit ourselves to that we are injuring ourselves. I can't say that Lady Gaga inspired these ideas in me rather, she gave strength to a weak flame that I had nearly extinguished by trying to only be one part of myself

weheartit

Her music is well crafted and all of the interviews I have read or seen show that she is serious about her craft and knows exactly what she is doing. She is an artist, not just a pop icon or a musician. People can argue against her all they want and that is their prerogative and I'm not going to try and stop them, because it doesn't matter. I love her and so do millions of other Little Monsters.

weheartit

Thank-You Lady Gaga, for letting us all know that we aren't alone. I'm glad to have your records tucked in with my Hot Water Music, Sigur Ros, Have Heart, Bouncing Souls, Dead to Me and AFI albums. I don't have to sacrifice any part of myself for the rest any more -little monster monica