Category: Inspiration

Posted on

Create!

Kurt Vonnegut

(Tom: Golly gee gosh I love this advice! It is so good I am sharing it again. If you get a fraction as much from it as I got your day will be immeasurably enhanced.

Take joy in some creation today!)

The point is not to Win, but to do, to experience, to become.

With thanks to Vera Risdon and Kurt Vonnegut.

In 2006 a high school English teacher asked students to write a famous author and ask for advice. Kurt Vonnegut was the only one to respond – and his response is magnificent:

“Dear Xavier High School, and Ms. Lockwood, and Messrs Perin, McFeely, Batten, Maurer and Congiusta:

I thank you for your friendly letters. You sure know how to cheer up a really old geezer (84) in his sunset years. I don’t make public appearances any more because I now resemble nothing so much as an iguana.

What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.

Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives. Draw a funny or nice picture of Ms. Lockwood, and give it to her. Dance home after school, and sing in the shower and on and on. Make a face in your mashed potatoes. Pretend you’re Count Dracula.

Here’s an assignment for tonight, and I hope Ms. Lockwood will flunk you if you don’t do it: Write a six line poem, about anything, but rhymed. No fair tennis without a net. Make it as good as you possibly can. But don’t tell anybody what you’re doing. Don’t show it or recite it to anybody, not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever, or Ms. Lockwood. OK?

Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them into widely separated trash recepticals. You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what’s inside you, and you have made your soul grow.

God bless you all!

Kurt Vonnegut”

Posted on

On Art

Magic is always there. Sometimes it just takes an artist to find it and show the rest of us where to look.― Amy Neftzger

Posted on

A Poem from William Wordsworth

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come.

Posted on

Human Rights Video #2: Don’t Discriminate

One of my principle concerns with the current scene is the rapidly escalating speed with which human rights are being trampled. The lack of peace in certain regions is proof positive that these principles are actually valid and needed, more than ever.

This trend needs to be reversed. The entrance point is educating people that they do have rights. Hence this post and the request you share these posts so more people are aware of and insist upon their rights so that we can live in a peaceful society.

Watch the video and if you think so too, please share it!

Do you know it is a fundamental right of yours to have your own opinion? You would not think so from the way some people (including the government) try to belittle you for disagreeing with them but it is.

Posted on

Human Rights Video #1: Born Free and Equal

One of my principle concerns with the current scene is the rapidly escalating speed with which human rights are being trampled. The lack of peace in certain regions is proof positive that these principles are actually valid and needed, more than ever.

This trend needs to be reversed. The entrance point is educating people that they do have rights. Hence this post and the request you share these posts so more people are aware of and insist upon their rights so that we can live in a peaceful society.

Watch the video and if you think so too, please share it!

Do you know it is a fundamental right of yours to have your own opinion? You would not think so from the way some people (including the government) try to belittle you for disagreeing with them but it is.

Posted on

Two Paths

Two Paths

It does take courage, independence, a level of curiosity and logical thinking for most people to follow the path less travelled.

Posted on

Why Climb Mt Everest?

Mt Everest

People ask me, “What is the use of climbing Mount Everest?” and my answer must at once be, “It is of no use. There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever. Oh, we may learn a little about the behaviour of the human body at high altitudes, and possibly medical men may turn our observation to some account for the purposes of aviation. But otherwise nothing will come of it. We shall not bring back a single bit of gold or silver, not a gem, nor any coal or iron…”

If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won’t see why we go. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to live. That is what life means and what life is for. – George Mallory