#dailyreader

[dawoduinc]

Define A Legend (Tha Writers writers writers Black writer whom they ALL copiii) #PaulMooney #DailyReader #ThaDoctor https://www.instagram.com/p/CLdGuQxn7z_S53k2Ang2t053OuqO94ho4NHMgk0/?igshid=36empg3oydfz

[elisemizzi]

In The Purple Forest

Daily Reader #5 - Write a scene for a children’s play in which the characters and setting are strikingly different from the everyday world. Suggest props such as furnishings or set architecture that would enhance the illusion of other-worldliness.

The world is purple: everything that is not purple has hues of purple. There are other colours - greens, blues, yellows,  browns, but they all have an inherent purpleness. Other than that the world ostensibly looks a natural environment on earth - there are trees, grass, birds, ants, hills. As we walk through this world we discover a young boy playing in a tree and we focus on him. 

BOY: Oh good, you’re here, I’ve been waiting on you, Mehmet said you should have been here ages ago. What took you so long?

The boy jumps out of the tree and lands on his feet before turning around to look at the audience again.

BOY: Come on, everybody’s waiting!

We follow the boy through short of succession of trees until we see a massive, dome-type structure not too far away in the distance that looks big enough to be a castle. It sits on a high hill and about a third of the way up the hill is a high fence surrounding the castle, with only one gate. Aside from the castle’s peculiar shape, what’s more notable is that it is a very bright yellow colour, in contrast to it’s very purple surroundings.

BOY: You must be so glad to finally be here. How long was your journey? Did you come through the Great Wordgeon? I heard that the maverbeetles have moved out of there for the autumn, so it must be a lot easier now. They used to be so - 

[From somewhere] VOICE: Mikhilt! MIKHILT!

The boy stops and looks around him.

VOICE: Mikhilt! Look up!

We find another boy hanging upside down, stuck in a tree. He looks like he’s been there for a while. 

BOY: Venet! What happened?

[evakryzanek]

Jesus Calling #Jesuscalling #iamthelight #iamthelightoftheworld #dailyreader (at Brookfield, Wisconsin) https://www.instagram.com/p/Ch925uhOWYX/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[melneedsakidney]

Today I am devoted to practicing the elements of success! #IyanlaVanzant #UntilToday #DailyDevotions #BuyThisBook #DailyReader #Religion #Spirituality #Science #God #Success #DayThirty #ChangeYourThinking #ChangeYourLife (at The House of Tuff) https://www.instagram.com/p/B78yjQclMrr/?igshid=1e8xho6x12o9q

[givencontext]

Your True Home by Thich Nhat Hanh is a daily reader, but sometimes I read the same page for several days before I move on. This one is worthy of a week, at least. What can you do to strengthen your foundation of joy and happiness BEFORE focusing on your suffering? This is hard for me today waking up to more rain and a generally very depressed mood. Very tempted to go back to bed, but I’ll muddle through. #thichnhathanh #bookstagram #dailyreader #inspiration #buddhist #rainraingoaway https://www.instagram.com/p/Byz2Yw0ADQc/?igshid=njqgd6lfsh7k

[randyyukiii]

“Mulailah mengerjakan apa yang perlu, kemudian lakukan apa yang bisa dikerjakan, dan tiba-tiba saja anda akan mampu mengerjakan apa yang tidak mungkin anda kerjakan”

[robynbyrdsworld]

Thought for the day got me in the feels #alanon #dailyreader #12steps #higherpower

[wheredoigetmyprotein-blog]

My new read just came that was recommended to me by a good friend. #knowledgeispower #jljfitness #entrepreneur #reader #readmore #joinmybookclub #dailyreader

[littlekeoni]

God is Good all the time... #kingschapelkauai #thebible #dailyreader #prayfervently #helistens #waterwalker

[healthylifestyledesign]

Fighting to #overcome your resistance creates more #resistance - soooo timely 🙏 Time to Practice detachment and Allow more zen #dailyreader thx @carrielassiter for the #perpetual gift 😘

[evakryzanek]

#dailyreflection #dailyreader #theway #prayer #prayerlife #jesusteacher (at Brookfield, Wisconsin) https://www.instagram.com/p/COQasIBBsn6/?igshid=1gldbuftxnahs

[elisemizzi]

Untitled - but a beginning!

Daily Reader #3 - Begin writing a story you’ve always wanted to write but were afraid to take the plunge, for whatever reason. You can always revise or discard what you’ve written if you’re not satisfied with the results. Taking risks is important in creative writing.

I’m not sure why I had to see what I did. Before our mother left us, she raised us to believe that “Everything happens for a reason” - it was a mantra, like her own version of a religious doctrine that allowed her to keep faith and keep going. 

But that night I didn’t have to see what I did, and I don’t understand what purpose it served, and I don’t see why the fact that I jut happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time meant that I now had to end up where I am now. Alone, scared, and hoping that perhaps someone will find me. 

The truth is that I knew better than to go to Josh’s, I knew nothing good would come of it and yet I gave in to Amanda because I couldn’t argue with the fact that, yes, I had been unsociable lately and yes, there was more to life than staying home and reading like a loser. 

So off I went, and then I saw what I saw. Now I’m here, weeks later, waiting. On the positive side, the putrid stench that starting rising after about ten days is now starting to finally subside. The helicopters have gone and the screaming has stopped and the ducks are starting to make their way back again. It’s really rather peaceful. Like my mother said, everything happens for reason so there comes a point when you just have to accept your fate and let it go. 

[elisemizzi]

Feeling Ecstatic

Daily Reader #2 - Play a selection of music from your CD collection that makes you ecstatic. What thoughts are stirred by the music? Write them down without editing. Later, fashion your notes into a poem, short story or essay.

To begin with, here’s the playlist I came up with for this exercise with links to the music on Youtube - 

1) Ultra Violet (Light My Way): U2 2) God Only Knows: The Beach Boys 3) Need You Tonight: INXS 4) Where The Streets Have No Name: U2 5) Moon River: Henry Mancini 6) Ho Hey: Lennon & Maisy 7) The Lake: Aqualung 8) The Blue Danube: Johann Strauss 9) Happy Birthday Helen: Things Of Stone & Wood 10) Quelqu’un Ma Dit: Carla Bruni 11) Under The Waves: Pete Droge 12) Dancing With Myself: Nouvelle Vague

It was a fairly easy process to find these songs: I ran my eye over the current contents of my iTunes library and looked for the ones that stuck out. Some that stuck out were disregarded, because what I was particularly looking to identify were those that, according to Fred White’s definition of being ecstatic, moved me - that took me out of myself. When I went to see what the result was, I was a little surprised to see that it was the very compact twelve songs you see above.

According to Robert Jourdain in The Birth of Harmony, our appreciation of music has its roots in the chants sung by Christian monks. Styles changed throughout history and in the thirteenth century a crucial development took place by way of a group of church composers at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. They “wrote music in which voices shifted out of sync and moved independently across time for long stretches, though alternately falling back into unison in the older style.” 

In listening to my own ‘ecstatic playlist,’ I tried to observe where this came into play. Ho Hey is probably the most obvious example, but through most of the songs it was different elements outside of the lyrics that were performing that function. 

Where The Streets Have No Name is probably the most intricate and accurate example of using technique to create that feeling of ecstasy. From Wikipedia - 

According to [Bono], the song is ostensibly about "Transcendence, elevation, whatever you want to call it." Bono, who compared many of his lyrics prior to The Joshua Tree to "sketches", said that "Where the Streets Have No Name is more like the U2 of old than any of the other songs on the LP, because it's a sketch—I was just trying to sketch a location, maybe a spiritual location, maybe a romantic location. I was trying to sketch a feeling."

My own listening notes ask how much of a role does the organ at the beginning of the song play in creating the feeling of ecstasy that I get from it.

I also wondered if there was a theme across the twelve songs I selected and was not overly surprised that it seemed to be my constant struggle between dream and reality. Not necessarily in a bad way; more that it’s indicative of the time I spend both consciously and unconsciously reflecting on life and trying to better myself whether or not I’m successful. Escapism is writ large through songs like The Blue Danube and Dancing With Myself, only to be grounded with reflective songs such as Under The Waves and - one I’ve described as feeling a love/hate relationship with - The Lake. Interesting that water seems to be a common feature: it’s almost like I’ve started my own Cloudstreet playlist.

[elisemizzi]

“Making Things Easier” Is A Fool’s Game

Daily Reader #1 - If you are old enough to remember what society was like before computers or cell phones or iPods, write an essay about the changes in human nature that occurred as a result of one or more of these inventions.

One of the key proponents of technology is that it’s meant to make things easier for us humans - make us more efficient, make us more productive.

It was 2005 and I had come a long way from a small regional town in Western Australia to a much more worldly regional town in Zeeland, The Netherlands. My friends and I were riding our pushbikes home from hockey training that evening, and I was struck by how a few of them had one earphone in their ear listening to music as they rode while we were all riding along together, talking and laughing. It’s a vivid memory because I asked myself, “How can they listen to the conversation and music at once?” and this question stemmed from my belief to listen carefully to other people, and not interrupt (this is partly because I find it incredibly difficult to listen to more than one thing at once). 

MP3 players were a new thing in 2005 and were becoming popular in my new town. Meanwhile, I was rather proud of myself having been able to save up for a cheap discman to be able to take overseas with me and was a bit put out to find that discmans were no longer a thing in this new community I found myself in. As I walked around my new school, I observed groups of students walking around talking to each other with an earphone in one ear, and I couldn’t understand what the point was. Why did they need to divert attention from their friends to have music playing in one ear all the time?

Then I was living in Melbourne at the beginning of 2007 when Facebook was starting to become big in Australia. I was happily using MySpace at the time, but a colleague at the hotel I worked at was still at uni and had gotten onto Facebook, sharing it with us as we worked the late night shifts. What struck me about this at the time was that, to me and as my colleague was using it, Facebook didn’t really seem to be serving a positive purpose as it appeared to be more of a mechanism to find unpleasant people and lament over broken relationships than to actually “connect” people in the optimistic way that it telling itself to.

Neil Postman posits, in his work Technopoly: The Surrender Of Culture To Technology, that change is ecological:

“One significant change generates total change. If you remove caterpillars from a given habitat, you are not left with the same environment minus caterpillars: you have a new environment, and you have reconstituted the conditions of survival; the same is true if you add caterpillar to an environment that has had none. This is how the ecology of media works as well. A new technology does not add or subtract something. It changes everything.”

At time of writing we are now eleven years onward from 2005 and nine years onward from 2007, and we can already see the impact that MP3 players and Facebook have had since then.  MP3 players have largely morphed into a function of our mobile phones, and “cyber-bullying” is a fairly common segment for conversation on morning television. I would argue that the changes here have to do with the amplification of inherent human traits: in the first example of the MP3 players, the key trait is selfishness; and in the second it is laziness - though both have relevant crossover. I argue that the first is an act of selfishness for the fact that, were it not, the individuals would not have diverted their intention should they have been genuine in their intent to spend time with and listen to their friends. In the second, I argue laziness because maintaining relationships - regardless of what the relationship actually is - takes a lot of personal effort. Facebook offers a way to appear to be maintaining that relationship but it is more often at a superficial level. A MamaMia article by a contributor [available here] describes her experience of fourteen out of thirty confirmed attendees to a party she was hosting not showing up, leaving messages on Facebook such as,  “Sorry lovely, I won’t be able to make it. xo” Comedian Aziz Ansari succinctly illustrates the point, highlighting the traits of laziness and selfishness:

In these examples, like many in our lives now, were you not indulging in selfishness or laziness, then you would have rocked up and kept your date with your friend throwing the party or your friend Phil. 

The breakdown in the relationship structure, by making relationships more superficial and less capable of genuine growth and development, means that ultimately it becomes harder to connect with people we believe at face value to be not like ourselves. It increases the risk of the them vs us mentality, and we are perhaps seeing that already through the political landscape with a perceived rise in fundamentalism and the fact that gross human rights violations continue to occur despite our collective knowledge - which is admittedly increased via the use of technology - that something is not right.

I don’t think technology is inherently a bad thing, but I do think that our culture’s continued acceptance of options that supposedly make things easier is a fool’s game, and one that I think that ultimately cannot sustain itself.

[healthylifestyledesign]

We are all co-creators within a diverse #universe 🌀🙏💞 #loa #abraham #community #co-creation #sisterbear #tarot #dailyreader #wisdom #grateful #mamabear