Friday, December 27, 2013

You Are The Fairest Fair of All

To This Day Poem
Shane Koyczan Canadian Spoken Word Artist


"Dozens of collaborators from around the world helped to bring this piece to life. Learn more about them and the project at To This Day Project"

"The quote here is taken from the incredibly passionate written word performance by poet Shane Koyczan. Take a couple minutes this morning to watch and listen to one of the most powerful accounts of bullying you may ever hear and feel." -The BULLY Project


Shane Koyczan "To This Day": "Help this message have a far reaching and long lasting effect in confronting bullying. Please share generously."

Tuesday, December 24, 2013

Dear Santa Big Time Rush To Stop Bullying

The BULLY Project

Tony "The Anti-Jared" Posnanski Health/Wellness Website ("1After reading her son's letter over the weekend, Suffern shared it online with friends, including Tony Posnanski's Facebook page, where he features stories of inspiration, weight loss and life advice.")

Big Time Rush (BTR)
Instagram (@therealcarlospena)

CNN iReport

YouTube

*"2According to statistics reported by ABC News, nearly 30 percent of students are either bullies or victims of bullying, and 160,000 kids stay home from school every day because of fear of bullying…"

*Bully-proofing your kids




Wednesday, December 18, 2013

The Second Flood

Monday, December 16, 2013 POSTED AT: 3 Quarks Daily

A UNIVERSE FROM NOTHING? OR: DESPERATELY SEEKING TRANSCENDENCE IN A MATERIALIST WORLD

by Fausto Ribeiro

Let us imagine for a moment the following story: a man is sitting at the edge of a cliff, marveling at the
immensity below and all of its beauty – a resplendent lake, enormous mountains, a vast field covered with trees, maybe a small village with a few lovely houses whose chimneys release a white, innocent smoke. There is a notebook on the man's lap; in it, with a worn-out pencil, he registers in the form of poetry his impressions about that which he has the good fortune of witnessing. A beautiful woman then approaches from a nearby trail and sees him; upon realizing what this stranger is doing, she is immediately overcome with a great emotion, an expectation so ravishing that her hands start to tremble slightly: here is a man who writes poems about nature's enchantment, about it's mesmerizing beauty! Instantly the woman conceives in her mind a whole image of who this man is, of his values, of his rich inner universe. She passionately contemplates, above all, the possibility of a real connection between the two of them. Nervous, she walks slowly in his direction and touches him gently on the shoulder, in the hope of initiating a conversation that would confirm her expectations. When he turns to face her, however, she suffers a shocking disappointment: the man is ugly; his features clearly violate the universal principles of beauty neurologists affirm exist.

Automatically, in a snap, before any words are said, the whole mental edifice built by the woman crumbles, and while flushing awkwardly, she pronounces a few random sentences about the amazing view, about the lake, about the low probability of rain for that afternoon. The man answers with some other banalities, courteous but tense in light of the unexpected encounter with a woman so much more beautiful than him, so out of his usual reach. A brief silence imposes itself, and the woman glances furtively at the man's notebook. She reflects for a few seconds. When the silence becomes unbearably uncomfortable, she – already taking a few steps backwards – mumbles as a goodbye a prefab phrase about how nice it was to have met him, to which he responds politely, struggling in vain not to show how disappointed he is with the abrupt end of a conversation that had already provoked in him, so soon, the beginnings of an embarrassing arousal.

The woman then walks away in quick steps, unconscious that her brain is already working to set up the mechanism of defense that will prevent her from making the unfortunate meeting the object of any posterior rumination. In a few minutes, maybe a few hours, she will have forgotten about the man's existence. Nevertheless, the ruins of the hope that had illuminated those brief moments before she saw the man's face will remain dammed up in the grey area between her conscious and her unconscious self, being yet one more grain of sand in the mountain of repressed anguish to which, throughout her life, she will give many different names and prescribe many tentative solutions.

The man, on the other hand, will immediately lose the inspiration to continue his poem; confused, he will go back to his cabin. He will dine a microwave-heated lasagna (one of the pretty houses he had seen from the top of the cliff was in fact a small unity of a supermarket chain), he will drink a few glasses of wine; later, he will half-heartedly work on the revision of the poems written that day, finding them to be silly. He will then go to his bedroom and, with the aid of digital entertainment, practice the loneliest of sports while thinking about the woman. Afterwards, he will take a tranquilizer and sleep alone in a king-size bed. In between the "uneasy dreams" that will certainly follow, he shall notice that to his anguish – present for so long he hardly remembers its beginning – he has never wanted to give any names, nor has he prescribed for it any form of active solutions.

--

For many centuries it has been understood that a rather different story deserved to be told. In it, the man too would have been blessed with good looks by what we now call darwinian evolution, and the more favorable unfolding of the fortuitous encounter would be filled with the kind of instances and emotions that encompass all that is sublime and, at times, tragic about the "human spirit". The manner in which these ecstatic feelings took place, as well as the degree of earnestness and innocence in the language employed and the actions performed, were arguably one of the indicators of the literary period in question.

However, at some point in the late 19th century, a conclusion was reached that perhaps this story had ceased to be entirely worthy of our attention: the horror and the irrationality which permeated human lives were now so absolute that literature would no longer be allowed to focus indulgingly elsewhere. Later, during the 20th century, such realization reached a paroxysm: how could one possibly write about idyllic love amidst the absurdity of a war machine? Hence the 1930 words by Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade:

The survivor

Impossible to compose a poem at this stage of human evolution.
Impossible to write a poem – a single line, even – of real poetry.
The last troubadour died in 1914.
He had a name that no one remembers anymore.

There are terribly complicated machines for the simplest necessities.
If you want to smoke a cigar, press a button.
Jackets button themselves up by electricity.
Love is made through wireless telegraphy.
No need for a stomach in order to digest.

A wise man declared to The Newspaper that there is still
a long time before we reach a reasonable level of
culture. But fortunately, by then I'll be dead.

Men haven't improved
and kill each other like bugs.
The heroic bugs are reborn.
Uninhabitable, the world is more and more inhabited.
And if the eyes relearned to weep it would be a second flood.
(I suspect I've written a poem.)

And so the disturbing literature of the 20th century was made by these sparse survivors. Now, in the drowsy dawn of the 21st, it seems to wane at the shadow of the ubiquitous giants of cynicism and irony – resources once invaluable to writers, but now swallowed by crushing mass entertainment and digital stupor. If a lyricism that fancies itself as liberating seeks, in desperation, to resort to such tools in order to fulfill its mission, such naiveté can only be looked upon with bitter and sympathetic pity.

Lets go back, then, to the story of the clumsy and failed encounter. Could it possibly hold, in all of its pathetic unhappiness, a meaning capable of granting a few more fading breaths to 21st century literature – to allow the ball of the western canon to keep on rolling, however penitently? Could the horror of the war of machines (which, even as it suffocated art, allowed it to subsist under an excruciating bondage) be replaced by the depressive realism which inevitably takes hold of us as we realize, thanks to neo-darwinism and neurology, that our animality is, finally, not only inescapable, but in fact the very defining trait of our existence? How should we react to the discovery that it is not just theocentricism, but also humanism that is a chimera based on blind faith – the discovery that it is not only god, but perhaps even the transcendence of the human spirit that may be dead? And what should we say about the fact that even that old story – the one told so many times, in which there was an agreement of desires between the man and the woman – was nothing but the description of a chance meeting between two animals of the same species, whose biological compatibility allowed their brains to release neurotransmitters that caused well-being, satisfaction, and ultimately sexual ecstasy, thus generating a state of mind which humans (primates endowed with admirable linguistic skills) chose to call "happiness" or even "love"? Should these two stories, in light of it all, continue to be told, or has literature finally become a superfluous enterprise? Can humans, in the end, remain silent in the face of that which presents itself to us – even if only by a mere illusion of our fallible animal brains – as metaphysical, sublime, or terrible?

To these questions, the glistening lakes and snowy peaks observed by the man in our story are indifferent. Illuminated as they are by a cosmos which, scientists tell us now, may have sprung up from nothing at all, they follow their steady and purposeless path in utter silence. Nevertheless, hopeful fools are compelled by their cursedly quixotic souls to glimpse at the possibility of a second flood and, like Sisyphus, to suffer ridiculously through the brief infinity of their individual lives. They then pour desperate sentences in word processors, much like their ancestors knelt on hard church benches, begging for an elusive, quiet, and perhaps unreachable mercy.

The above literary piece is open to individual interpretation for such is the beauty of all art, music, literature, and individuality! Below is my analysis:

I found this to be a very captivating piece of intellectual stimulation at its’ best! It was as though the Author suckled grammatically correct words from an ancient old Mother dictionary, another seemingly lost art now a days. As a Reader, I became entangled in a web of content that was magnificently interwoven. I was thrust from blissful sceneries into what appeared to be a short abridged edited version about The Phantom of the Opera, when quickly I plummeted into the concept of ‘war of machines’ and what is regarded as mans primal instinct. Here I was most enthralled with the Poet whom in 1930 could know that perhaps modern technology may be the down fall of all humanity. Then interlinking the finally thread in this web of concepts; Fausto Ribeiro concluded, perhaps metaphorically; emphasizing the second flood. This was a banquet of soulful words and to you the Author, I thank you because my mind was famished. ~ndpthepoetress


"1Fausto Ribeiro was born in Brazil in 1982. He obtained his law degree from the University of São Paulo with a dissertation about the UN’s (lack of) reaction to the genocide in Rwanda. He joined the Brazilian Foreign Service in 2007 and has since served in Brasilia, Amman, Geneva, and currently in Nouakchott, Mauritania."

*Thank you for Permission to Repost this at BindingInk.org that was given by Fausto Ribeiro ('Current Guest Columnist at 3 Quarks Daily')

"ABOUT 3 QUARKS DAILY: Six days a week (Tuesday through Sunday) the editors of 3 Quarks present ten to twelve interesting items from around the web each day, in the areas of science, design, literature, current affairs, art, and anything else we deem inherently fascinating." Rss feed

Saturday, December 14, 2013

Hug Yourself

Have you {{Hugged}} yourself today?
"You must love yourself before you love another. By accepting yourself and fully being what you are, your simple presence can make others happy. You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love & affection." ~Buddha"


#FightFatTalk with me & Special K

Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Christmas Spirit in Flight at WestJet


"This is unreal. I may have teared up a little bit.
Wait until you see what Airlines did for a flight. Seriously the coolest idea ever." 96.7 KISSFM

Monday, December 09, 2013

Christmas Thru Artistic Sands Of Time

Wikia "Joe Castillo was a sand artist act from Season 7 of America's Got Talent. He finished the competition in 5th place."

Grable Group "Joe Castillo is the best selling author, artist, storyteller and finalist from America’s Got Talent who has developed a new way of telling stories with his hands in the sand. SandStory is a unique way of storytelling that uses sand art, a light table and music as a medium. He has been seen live in all 7 continents, over 43 countries, and into 35 different languages."

Visit:
Joe Castillo
Joe Castillo YouTube Account
Joe Castillo Facebook Page

Sunday, December 08, 2013

Because You Are Special K


...join together to silence negativity and shout for positivity.

Shhhhut down fat talk at Facebook.com/SpecialKUS
Join the conversation at: #FightFatTalk
Follow us on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/SpecialKUS

Words are powerful. Let’s make sure they're positive. #FightFatTalk

Saturday, December 07, 2013

Be More Than a Bystander


I don't know what shocked me more, this video or the derogative stereotypical unwarranted negative comments and the amount of people who 'liked' such senseless verbal bashing at Vodio posting of this video. Even if the first comment was intended as a joke, words can be verbal weapons and words hurt. If one must make a defamatory joke at the expense of another individual or culture, than it is not a joke.


Be More Than a Bystander

Friday, December 06, 2013

In Honor of Nelson Mandela 1918-2013

"Nelson Mandela, long time champion of the anti-apartheid movement and former president of South Africa, died today at the age of 95. He will be remembered for his unrelenting pursuit of racial equality and lifelong struggle against segregation and poverty, as well for his passionate belief in humanity. But he has also been known for his ability to motivate millions with his words. From his testimony given during the trials leading up to his imprisonment to the speech he gave upon his release 27 years later, and the countless addresses and speeches given thereafter, Mandela provided us with no dearth of inspiring thoughts..." (The wisdom of Nelson Mandela: quotes from the most inspiring leader of the 20th century By Roberto A. Ferdman and Ritchie King)

"Nelson Mandela achieved more than could be expected of any man. His own struggle inspired others to believe in the promise of a better world, and the rightness of reconciliation. Through his fierce dignity and unbending will to sacrifice his own freedom for the freedom of others, he transformed South Africa — and moved the entire world. His journey from a prisoner to a President embodied the promise that human beings — and countries — can change for the better. His commitment to transfer power and reconcile with those who jailed him set an example that all humanity should aspire to, whether in the life of nations or our own personal lives." Presidential Proclamation -- Death of Nelson Mandela

President Obama has ordered US Flags to Half Staff now until Sunset, December 9 in Honor of Nelson Mandela. www.halfstaff.org

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