Xavier Rudd

Xavier Rudd has a sweet, soulful voice that carries with it the cries, hurts, and hopes of Aboriginal Australians. The purity of the emotion oozing from the singer is clear and his multi-instrumental skill is mesmerizing; Xavier Rudd is one of those artistes to fall in love with, a  rare gem. With a knack for connecting with people on the soul level and even bringing concert goers to the point of tears.

The ancient Stoics were known for a many number of things, one of which was their inner resilience—the ability to remain calm in adversity, to find a way forward when faced with obstacles, and to create a philosophy of living that helps foster an immunity to letting external events erode their peace of mind.

The British author Aldous Huxley (1894–1963). With the publication of "The Doors of Perception" in 1954, Huxley became an early exponent of drug-induced alterations of conscious states, a position he maintained and expounded upon toward the end of his life, as he lost his own visual capacity and the psychedelic movement embraced him warmly.

Yuri Bezmenov

Subversion & its four stages. Yuri Bezmenov's four stages of ideological subversion are a model for understanding how Marxist-Leninist doctrine can be used to influence and undermine a target country or institution from within. He outlines these stages as demoralization, destabilization, crisis, and finally normalization. 

Though Malick characters move “under the similitude of a dream,” their every waking hour remains pregnant with possibility, potential, and expectation, even if it does not always seem so on the watery surfaces from which spring life both old and new. The first step is to “Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you” (Eph. 5:14). Then and only then can the young prince count himself the “merchant man” of Matt. 13:45-46 “[w]ho…found one pearl of great price” and thereafter arrived at “the desired country.”

It was ‘such a great misfortune’, he thought, to lose the capacity to be alone with oneself, to get caught up in the crowd, to surrender one’s singularity to mind-numbing conformity.

Tonight, 62,000 New Yorkers will sleep in homeless shelters, the most since the Great Depression. 14 percent of the nation's homeless population are in New York City. In recent years, homelessness in New York City has reached the highest levels since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

• 14 percent of the nation's homeless population are in New York City

• In April 2019, there were 61,782 homeless people, including 14,826 homeless families with 21,709 homeless children, sleeping each night in the New York City municipal shelter system. Families make up three-quarters of the homeless shelter population.

He shows His love not by helping avoid suffering, but by sending you suffering, by keeping you there.

All of our lives are too unique to copy the path from someone else.

“There is information that can be shared with words, but it is impossible to share the experience of clarity, when you are standing on top of that peak by yourself."

“Loving anybody and being loved by anybody is a tremendous danger, a tremendous responsibility,” James Baldwin reflected in his final interview. “An honorable human relationship — that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word ‘love’ — is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other,” Adrienne Rich wrote in her superb meditation on the dignity of love.

Geoffrey Oryema’

Spending 40 years in exile inspired the Ugandan singer-songwriter to produce an extraordinarily heartfelt protest album. Translated, it is clear from the lyrics that  Makambo is a sigh, not a shout, and a resignation that peace will remain elusive: One hears the weariness of a perplexed man who has been in exile and cut off from his motherland for 13 years.

Morning in the Riesengebirge

With his friend Kersting he had made a tour of the mountainous area near Dresden known as 'Saxon Switzerland', in the summer of 1810. Morning in the Riesengebirge, painted shortly afterwards, is another exposition of his theme of the cross on a peak. It may be seen as a sort of continuation of the Tetschen Altar. The planes of earth and sky, representing the bodily and the infinite, are bridged by the crucifix, lit by the morning sun.

How to Grow from Your Pain

It turns out that trauma in our lives, in whatever form it takes, isn’t actually the thing that makes us “stronger” in this case. All those inspirational quotes with cheesy sunsets about enduring adversity and “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” they all kind of mislead you into thinking that just enduring some form of hardship is enough to steel yourself against future hardship.

Don’t aim at success — the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run—in the long run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.

Elergy for Dunkirk

Drop Thy still dews of quietness ,Till all our strivings cease;

Take from our souls the strain and stress, And let our ordered lives confess

The beauty of Thy peace, The beauty of Thy peace

Breathe through the heats of our desire, Thy coolness and Thy balm; Let sense be dumb, let flesh retire;

Speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire, O still, small voice of calm! O still, small voice of calm!

Writing fifteen years after he made his exquisite case for breaking the trance of busyness, Hesse returns to the sandbox of selfhood — solitude: True action, good and radiant action, my friends, does not spring from activity, from busy bustling, it does not spring from industrious hammering. It grows in the solitude of the mountains, it grows on the summits where silence and danger dwell. It grows out of the suffering which you have not yet learned to suffer.

The diner was a place of refuge, absolutely, but there was no visible entrance, no way to get in or out. There was a cartoonish, ochre-coloured door at the back of the painting, leading perhaps into a grimy kitchen. But from the street, the room was sealed: an urban aquarium, a glass cell

I'm stainless
Tethered by earth and flame
Mixed with time and pain
Ingrained with higher purpose know the worth of my name

A man swinging a sword in the dark. Aimless. His hands grow weary, the sword lays on the ground more often than not. The power of every thrust comes from utter exhaustion. As if each one comes from a place of desperation. Something vicious comes close. It is invisible. It never hits the man but it always comes close. It waits til he is exhausted. It waits til the sword slips from the grip of the man.

Faith

As every night passes, my faith in the unknown increases. I can no longer die. Only to self. Transcending mind made hells is the first step toward enlightenment, towards freedom and strength that knows no boundaries and yields to no master, except for the One