Does it seem to you, as it does to me, that every human in the world has at least one thing in common: We, all of us, struggle. No matter who we are, struggle seems to be a fact of life. Some of us have great obstacles to overcome and some of us have more massive ambitions than others do, but, every one of us does have some sort of difficulty making it from where we are now to where…
You’ve heard it before and will almost certainly hear it again: You are the creator of the world you inhabit. You become what you think. Every motivational video and podcast producer focused on self-improvement is probably going to whack you upside the head with that one.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You’re busy, I’m busy, everybody’s busy. In fact, it seems like everybody’s drowning in busy, busy, busy. We bounce around doing this, handling that, rushing through our days, knocking off all of our bullets on that mile-long to-do list, steam-rolling through the obstacles, knocking off the challenges and so on and so forth. Rolling, rolling, rolling ‘til we drop. But, it’s good, right? Yup, yup, yup! Or…is it?
In 2001, a group of friends graduated from college and set out on a cross-country road trip to interview people who lived “lives centered around what was meaningful for them.” The boys acquired an RV, and wandered around countryside filming a documentary about their trip in which they brazenly approached all sorts of people who were doing what looked like interesting things and asked them a lot of personal questions about life-issues like, “How do you know that this thing…
Another IPS (Inner Peace Symptom): a growing awareness that all phenomena are empty and illusory and the only meaning and mana in any situation is what the people involved bring to it. [It’s a cool thing to realize that we humans are the arbiters of the meaning and mana in our own lives.] The search for meaning and mana is a very human thing. It’s been going on for centuries now. The words themselves are so nebulous that it’s hard…
I don’t know if it’s just me or if it’s an artist thing to ponder frequently on the direction you want to head. (You tend to spend a lot of time making course-corrections when you’re flying by the seat of your pants, I find.) I have been musing on this a lot lately. I think I am trying, in all my work – in my art, my poetry, my writing and even in my property management gig — to incorporate…
In my own art and poetry, I am wanting a “Polynesian aesthetic” in my work … what I hope is a “native” feeling to it. Even more than that, I’d like it to be a part of my business. This Polynesian aesthetic incorporates three things – a high level of skill, indirectness, and mo’olelo (story). What makes an object a work of art to me is a feeling that the thing is “special,” imbued with a sense of the person…
