You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.
—Jack London via Jen Jen and Kev
Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another.
We all know that one of our greatest pleasures in life is sitting around a table and sharing great food and conversation with our loved ones. Sharing a meal creates deep connection and a sense of community...
Men and women are, ironically, starved by the over-consumption of popular culture .. They try to find satisfaction in utterly unsatisfying entertainment. In their core, they know there is more to life.
In our increasingly stressful, self-centred, Instagram world, one of the best and quickest antidotes to alleviate stress – is saying Thank-You to someone. Expressing gratitude not only makes the recipient feel good, it makes us feel good too.
Be grateful for what you’ve got, not what you’ve not.
Here’s a post from December 2013:
There are many things that make us human. Compassion, grace, love. The ability to forgive. Another I hadn’t really given much thought to, until I read this article, is gratitude. As the author says, Thanksgiving in America lends itself to taking stock of the good in our lives. Other countries and cultures reflect at different times of the year – whether that’s Christmas or New Year. The point is, ultimately gratitude is a powerful force for good. It’s how friendships are maintained and love blossoms, because gratitude is an act of selflessness. It’s an emotion we then feel compelled to pay forward and society at large benefits.
I was struck by the simplicity of this notion, but also the complexity of how gratitude, or a lack thereof, is reflected in modern society. We live in a screen age where everyone is constantly on the go. Gratitude is often an after-thought, if a thought at all. For a lot of people, the stronger emotion is a sense of entitlement. That someone else must help them because they’re so busy. Others see good deeds imparted on them as a burden, favors they are now obligated to pay back.
But if we all just took a moment to slow down and recognize what we’re grateful for and who we’re grateful too, we can understand that being grateful is integral to the fabric of our society. It keeps us in tune with each other. It makes us better people and the world a kinder place.
Be Grateful, Be Good
As you know, there are only so many hours in a day ... I've always been haunted by that line from "Time" by Pink Floyd.
And then one day you findSomething has to give
Ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run
You missed the starting gun
A Question of Character
An indicator that “character” is no longer valued much, and why that matters.
Located in Sydney's leafy inner-city suburb of Redfern, Three Williams spans an impressive 285 square meters and sits just below street level. The architecturally designed venue boasts a minimalistic, yet sophisticated warehouse feel; with leather bench seating, raw wood and exposed original brickwork.
Toby Iaccarino and Glen Bowditch - The Three Williams of Redfern. This transformed storage space is serving up share plates, house-made sodas and a sunny outlook. “None of the owners are named William,” explains co-owner Glen Bowditch, previously a manager at The Grounds and a founding employee of Sonoma.
Sam Dresser, via Aeon
Practising the Greek
virtues of wisdom and courage is one thing. But being cheerful the American way
borders on psychosis.The kindness and compassion of strangers
Been yonks since we had a feel-good tale.
We are moving into a “soulless future” as art, literature, and religion recede from the public square — or so frets via Camille Paglia
The book’s first epigraph is from Blaise Pascal’s “Pensées:” “there was once in man a true happiness of which there now remain to him only the mark and empty trace, which he in vain tries to fill from all his surroundings.” Nothing in nature, Pascal continues, has been acceptable in replacing the absence of God, resulting in a curious paradox: “And since man has lost the true good, everything can appear equally good to him, even his own destruction.”
This melancholy lamentation first arrives in “Agricola: A Song for Planting.” “I’ve looked with hope on stony ground,” the narrator says. “I’ve scythed the grain at autumn’s blush. / But now, the earth is cold; the browned / And fallen husks of last year crush // Beneath my booted step.” He finishes the poem: “What pretty lie did I speak when / I cast my efforts to sustain / Each growth? Each year forgives my sin, / But remnants of each loss remain.”
The highest point of the book from a stylistic and narrative standpoint is his series, “The Stations of the Cross,” one of the finest Catholic sequences of recent memory and worthy fodder for Lenten contemplation.
In “Jesus is Condemned,” the narrator is praying during Lent. “I tried to think for half an hour / About the face of earthly power / That would condemn a god to die.” He hears and thinks of the “hum of homeward motors, / A candidate’s rank appeal to voters.” He then concludes: “For we sit kind, when comfort’s here, / But draw our weapons with our fear / Should we one pleasure be denied.” Wilson’s poetry often forces readers to engage in some spiritual reflection and self-assessment, as in “Jesus Falls a Third Time”: “How many times must he absolve me / Till I grasp who’s saved by his fall?”
“The Hanging God” is the story of a falling world, and the work of a poet who cares enough to document the descent. Taken together, Wilson’s poetry might be best encapsulated with a few lines from “Some Permanent Things:” “It is just such a hope or its despair / That we find in our oldest poetry, / Such that we see a poem such as this one / Serves more to state than solve our mortal plight.”
… The poetry of James Matthew Wilson, a storyteller of spiritual anxiety - Angelus News - Multimedia Catholic News
The Hanging God: Virtuosity and verse at the service of the imaginative vision
The Hanging God: Virtuosity and verse at the service of the imaginative vision
Sustainable House Day at Narara Ecovillage
Central Coast Newspapers (press release) -
Narara Ecovillage has announced that a new Sustainable House Day event will take place at the ...
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Power to the people: the home owners with $3.65 electricity bills
The Sydney Morning Herald
And Narara, on the NSW Central Coast, is showing how a community can run a multimillion-dollar ...
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According to Andrej, soulful characters like Chris Currie are rare as they are able to read the Christian call in the mystery of death, of the cross, of illness, the mystery of those who are despised and discarded ...In a world that increasingly pushes us to gauge success and worth by what we own or who we know, he reminded us that authentic love, friendship and community are what we really need
Currie welcomes e-mails from families interested in moving to Hyattsville, but his ultimate goal is to have "other people capture a vision of shared living centered around faith and good works and implement it in their communities."
He insists that having families live in isolation is not the Catholic way. "We’ve accepted the nuclear family model, which is a Protestant idea" tied into the individualism of the Enlightenment. Currie argues that we are made for communion, which implies not only the immediate community of family, but also parish life. If families are the cells of the organism we call "society," then the parishes are the organs, and an organism without healthy organs soon dies.
I Couldn’t Say ‘My Mother’ Without Crying
Losing a family member at a young age has lasting impacts, well into adulthood. There’s no quick fix for childhood grief.
