"This Is Water" David Foster Wallace

Four years ago today, David Foster Wallace, one of the most wonderful writers ever, took his own life.  This  commencement address was given by him at Kenyon College in 2005.  
I am forever still trying to exercise some CONTROL over what I think.

Jeff D. Before and After

"You're not Jeff, I'm Jeff"

Patience

Patience – Using time, pressure and patience, the universe gradually changes caterpillars into butterflies, sand into pearls, and coal into diamonds. You’re being worked on too, so hang in there. Just because something isn’t happening for you right now, doesn’t mean it will never happen.
Photo of PensiveMonkey at Angkor Wat, Cambodia by Keith Stretchko

Returning to the Source

Empty yourself of everything.
Let the mind become still.
The ten thousand things rise and fall
while the Self watches their return.
They grow and flourish and then
return to the source.
Returning to the source is stillness,
which is the way of nature.

~ Lao Tsu ~
Tao Te Ching

ElasticTime

"Le temps dont nous disposons chaque jour est élastique; les passions que nous ressentons le dilatent, celles que nous inspirons le rétrécissent et l'habitude le remplit."

"The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions that we feel expand it, those that we inspire contract it; and habit fills up what remains."
--À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (Within a Budding Grove), 1919, by Marcel Proust

Tin Hat "2 little whos"

From the new Tin Hat Album  "the rain is a handsome animal",  a magnificent new 17-movement song-cycle based on the poetry of e. e. cummings.  Charming.


e e cummings – “2 little whos”

2 little whos
(he and she)
under are this
wonderful tree

smiling stand
(all realms of where
and when beyond)
now and here

(far from a grown
-up i&you-
ful world of known)
who and who

(2 little ams
and over them this
aflame with dreams
incredible is)

This poem is a sweet description of how two people feel when they are in love.  Two people, lying under a wonderful tree, are talking of their dreams and aspirations.  As they smile and rise together, they must leave the realms of “beyond” and return to “now and here.”  However, because they are still young and because they have each other, they hold onto these incredible dreams as they go through life.

Know Who You Really Are

...Human nature, if one looks deeply at its source, is only conditioned social and cultural behavior passed down through generations. We are not alien spirits on this planet seeded here from another realm, we are more like apples who grow from the apple tree, we grew out of planet Earth. According to science, if you roll the clock back to the big bang, all matter in the known Universe can be condensed down to the size of a tip of a pen, so to think we are divided individual beings, is only a illusion the ego creates. You are no more different and divided from other life forms, then a wave is different and divided from the ocean or the leaves that are from a tree. The whole point of spiritual "methods" such as meditation, is to root you back into the Present Moment, which IS the only place One will ever BE. But the tools and "methods" should not be worshiped no more then the meal you just ate to sustain your energy. Giving power to "methods" only transfers your presence away from what You already posses within. So to put off your Awakening to some far off divine event, such as years of meditation or the day You reach your death-bed, is only escaping the work that needs to be done Today, and that is to Know who You Really ARE, beyond the "image" we only "pretend" to BE...
Art by: Robby Donaghey

You Are The Universe Experiencing Itself

How important are you?   You are here to enable the divine purpose of the universe to unfold. 
Be what and who you want to be. This is YOUR life to create.  And whatever you create is perfect. 

Rachid Taha "Barra Barra (Everybody Out)" رشيد طه - بره بره

Rachid Taha - Everybody Out!
رشيد طه - بره بره
Barra Barra
Movie Scenes from BlackHawk Down

"Barra (بره)" means "outside" and therefore "barra barra" means "get out" or "everybody out". This song is about all the problems there are in Algeria, and the reality that you have to get out of the country to escape those things.
Of course Rachid Taha like most of the biggest Rai singers has in fact fled Algeria and currently lives in France.



Everybody out! There's sadness, rage and treachery
Everybody out! Corruption and jealousy, no longer can anyone be trusted
Everybody out! Thirst, the people are forsaken
Everybody out! There's no honor, just oppression and slavery
Everybody out! Thankfulness is gone and ugliness is everywhere
Everybody out! The stars have gone out and the sun has gone black
Everybody out! There's no more goodness, happiness or prosperity
Everybody out! There's no more trees and the birds have stopped singing
Everybody out! There's no day or night, only darkness
Everybody out! Hell has taken over, there's no beauty left
Everybody out! The time has passed, there is no honor
Everybody out! There's corruption and war and the blood is running
Everybody out! Only the walls are left standing
Everybody out! There's fear and so everyone is silent

رشيد طه - برا برا

بره بره... الحزن والبغض والزوارة
بره بره... الفسد والحسد ما بقى أمانة
بره بره العطش والناس منحوسين
بره بره... لا حرمة ظلم وعبودية
بره بره... الشكر دان والقبح ران
بره بره... النجوم طفت ظلمت الشمس
بره بره... مابقي خير لا سعاده ولا زهار
بره بره... مابقت شجرة سكتوا لطيور
بره بره... مابقي ليل ولنهار لضلمه
بره بره... الجهنم نما ما بقي الزين
بره بره... كتر الزمان مابقت حرمه
بره بره... الفسد والحرب والدم يسيل
بره بره... الحيطان الحيطان واقفين
بره بره... الخوف فالناس ساكتين

The Cure For Insommnia

..."So there is always this blank side of experience. What I'm suggesting is that the blank side of experience has the same relationship to the conscious side as the off principle of vibration has to the on principle. There's a fundamental division. The Chinese call them the yang, the positive side, and the yin, the negative side. This corresponds to the idea of one and zero. All numbers can be made of one and zero as in the binary system of numbers which is used for computers.

And so it's all made up of off and on, and conscious and unconscious. But the unconscious is the part of experience which is doing consciousness, just as the trough manifests the wave, the space manifests the solid, the background manifests the figure. And so all that side of life which you call unconscious, unknown, impenetrable, is unconscious, unknown, impenetrable because it's really you. In other words, the deepest you is the nothing side, is the side which you don't know.

So, don't be afraid of nothing. I could say, 'There's nothing in nothing to be afraid of.' But people in our culture are terrified of nothing. They're terrified of death; they are uneasy about sleep, because they think it's a waste of time. They have a lurking fear in the back of their minds that the universe is eventually going to run down and end in nothing, and it will all be forgotten, buried and dead. But this is a completely unreasonable fear, because it is just precisely this nothing which is always the source of something. 

Think once again of the image of clarity, crystal clear.
Nothing is what brings something into focus. This nothing, symbolized by the crystal, is your own eyeball, your own consciousness." ~Alan Watts...
Art by: Justin Bonnet

Rutger Hauer "Tears in Rain"

Tears In Rain is the final monologue of the Replicant Roy Batty in the movie Blade Runner. It has been described as "perhaps the most moving death soliloquy in cinematic history". The final form of the speech was improvised by Rutger Hauer.

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain............Time to die".

David Bowie "Cracked Actor"

My fav bowie song forever

Crack baby Crack, show me you're real.
Smack baby Smack, with all that you feel.
Suck baby Suck, yeah, give me your head,
Before you start professin' that you're knocking me dead.

Nothing is as it Seems

Nothing is what it seems. Not a single thought, conception, or experience, high or low, is anything but a modification of dreams, a kind of hallucination, the conjunction of wave patterns in vibratory frequencies, typically appearing very elusive to perception in the denser realms of the ordinary senses, where thought-energy rigidifies momentarily into seemingly solid objects. Nevertheless, there are no enduringly solid objects. This so-called world is a phenomenon of luminous interweaving energetic interactions — a radiant play of light.

It is always an event in Consciousness, in the vastness of which everything that appears is simply a modification. However, when we attach, or cling to, or fixate on any of these endlessly arising objects or conditions or their effects, exclusive of their Source, then we make those objects, states, or conditions “real” by the process of identification and differentiation — we grant them substantiality apart from ourselves, and thus create our own suffering as a result.

By Grace, when that perceptual presumption of duality is recognized as the activity of separation itself and thereby begins to be undermined, these billion upon billion appearances once more become non-binding, fluid, and transparent. The whole adventure they imply – in whatever realm, heaven and earth or hell and high water — is recognized as an expression of the dream, having no defining or ultimate significance, but only as the play of Mystery — the Unknown — Itself.

We do not know what any of this is! We cannot actually differentiate ourselves from a single thing, any more than wetness can separate itself from water. There is no definitive explanation for any of it, nor is there really any need for one, except to the mind of dilemma. This is not a matter of belief or speculation. It can be directly verified when one stops and simply contemplates the mystery of one’s own appearance here, the awareness that we Are, but that “What” is aware is unknowable, since it can never be an object to itself. It just is. Is.

What we know of dreams can serve to illuminate our “position” in the so-called waking state. In either, we are in exactly the same situation – we appear to create our environment in both conditions, as well as our sense of being an independent “I”, but we have no idea how this is happening, except that we Are. Everything else is subject to interpretation, but the simple fact of Awareness is our irreducible inheritance.

By allowing attention to rest in this Awareness of pure being itself, rather than on the objects and events that appear and disappear in the absorbing play of thought-energy, something quite interesting is revealed. Clearly the dream is a creation, a product of our own consciousness — who makes this dream but us? And yet we don’t know what we Are, except that we Are. Our experience here is free from thought and movement, with no judgment or measure of inside/outside – utterly clear and transparent, like space. There is no separation between the experiencer, the experiencing, and the experience.

On the other hand, though dreaming arises in our own consciousness and dissolves “there” just the same, can we even call it “our own”? When we awaken, we realize the dream has no concrete substantiality, except what we might attribute to it in our conditioned and conditional knowing. This activity is itself a kind of humorous pretense that most take quite seriously, nevertheless. So serious, in fact, that when differing dreamings clash, further confusions, contentions, and even wars follow. Who would imagine that world conflicts originate in dreaming?

Just so, this waking realm can be seen as not a place or world, but as an indefinite dimension that is not fixed like any object, but fluidly manifesting as a play of infinite possibility. Then, our limited points of view can begin to be submitted to a conscious process in which we unfold in a truly heart-felt relationship to the wonder of this mystery, without the terrible burden of knowing or identification, or even any humorless concern about the implications of the dream world itself. Paradoxically, we can begin to become responsible for our separative tendencies, which are the real creators of every circumstance of the dream, and the source of our suffering and chronic sense of alienation.

This true responsibility is relative to the force of our own activity, which creates the drama in the same way as if we were to complain about a pain in our arm, only to discover that we have been pinching ourselves in our sleep. The dream itself does not have to be accepted or rejected in terms of any of its content. It resists definition. Where do we dream? Where is a “place”? It is our own habitual activity which is separating, contracting, seeking, suffering, imagining, and calling all of this into form and giving it a kind of reality. When this is seen, felt, and welcomed without recoil, without grasping or turning away, then our inherent freedom “resumes” as the ordinary and natural state of being.

~Bob O'Hearn~
"As We Think"

Life is but an Empty Dream?

Camp 4 Collective -- Carston Oliver -- Nate Balli [Edit] from Camp 4 Collective on Vimeo.

“A Psalm of Life”

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream! -
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each tomorrow
Find us farther than today.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world’s broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of life,
Be not dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead
Act, - act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o’erhead!

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time.

Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us then be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.

---Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Jimmy Chin "Yosemite Climbing Culture"

"the dirtbag shower is always on Cold"

a CAMP 4 COLLECTIVE production for NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
Directed: Renan Ozturk and Jimmy Chin
Produced by: Jimmy Chin
Edited by: Renan Ozturk
Cinematography by: Renan Ozturk, Mikey Schaefer, Tim Kemple and Jimmy Chin
Description:
A behind the scenes adventure with photographer Jimmy Chin as he attempts to do justice to the cutting edge of climbing today in Yosemite for a National Geographic cover story.
Music:
Green Button Music
"As The Clock Turns"
"The Museum"
GreenButtonMusic.com
Random Rab
"K'Khana" (Featuring Rigzin)
"The Alienist"
MySpace.com/RandomRabMusic

Killian Martin "A Skate Escalation"

Wow. Skateboard as Art/Dance


Directed/Filmed/Edited: http://www.BrettNovak.com

Music: Patrick Watson - "Tracy's Waters"

This Is YourSelf

..."You cannot control your thoughts, and you cannot control your feelings, because there is no controller. You are your thoughts and your feelings, and they are running along, running along, running along. Just sit and watch them. There they go. You are still breathing, aren't you? Still growing your hair; still seeing and hearing. Are you doing that? Is breathing something that you DO? Do you see? Do you organize the operations of your eyes, and know exactly how to work those rods and cones in the retina? Do you DO that? It happens, and it is a happening. Your breathing is happening. Your thinking is happening. Your feeling is happening. Your hearing, your seeing, the clouds are happening across the sky. The sky is happening blue; the sun is happening shining. There it is: all this happening.

May I introduce you? This is yourself. This is a vision of who you really are, and the way you really function. You function by happening, that is to say, by spontaneous occurrence. This is not a state of affairs that you should realize. I cannot possibly preach about it to you, because the minute you start thinking 'I should understand that,' the stupid notion that 'I' should bring it about arises again, when there is no 'you' to bring it about. That is why I am not preaching. You can only preach to egos. All I can do is talk about WHAT IS. It amuses me to talk about what is because it is wonderful. I love it, and therefore I like to talk about IT. If I get paid for it, it is because sensible people get paid for doing what they enjoy doing. My whole approach is not to convert you, not to make you over, not to improve you, but for you to discover that if you really knew the way you were, things would be sane. However, you cannot do that. You cannot make that discovery because you are in your own way so long as you think 'I' am 'I,' so long as that hallucination blocks it. The hallucination disappears only in the realization of its own futility, when at last you see that you cannot make yourself over." ~Alan Watts...
Art by: Shawn Hocking

Snowboarding on Bachelor's Northwest Side

Julia Snowboarding Sparks Lake, a black diamond run on the Northwest side of Mt. Bachelor in April 2008 on a Bluebird Day.

Songs are "Nessaja" by European techno band Scooter, and "Elevation" by U2.

When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer

I Am Not I

I am not I. 
I am this one, 
walking beside me whom I do not see, 
whom at times I manage to visit, 
and whom at other times I forget; 
who remains calm and silent while I talk, 
and forgives, gently, when I hate, 
who walks where I am not, 
who will remain standing when I die.

Yo no soy yo
Soy este
que va a mi lado sin yo verlo; 
que, a veces, voy a ver, 
y que, a veces, olvido. 
El que calla, sereno, cuando hablo, 
el que perdona, dulce, cuando odio, 
el que pasea por donde no estoy, 
el que quedará en pié cuando yo muera.

~ Juan Ramón Jiménez ~

Elephant Taxi

Going for a ride at Patera Elephant Farm near Chiang Mai, Thailand in March 2011

If you can't see my Smile.......

If you can't see my Smile today, I must be upside down :-)
----photo at Perhentian Island, Malaysia, August 2011 by Julia

The Purpose of Words

The purpose of fish traps is to catch fish. When the fish are caught, the traps are forgotten. The purpose of rabbit snares is to catch rabbits. When the rabbits are caught, the snares are forgotten. The purpose of words is to convey ideas. When the ideas are grasped, the words are forgotten. Where is the man who has forgotten all words. He is the one I would like to speak with.

~ Chuang Tzu ~



Photo from Ankgor Watt, Cambodia by Keith   April 2011

My Life Philosophy

"Live as if you where to die tomorrow; Learn as if you were to live forever."
-----Gandhi

photo from our Kalalau Trail hike on the Napali Coast in Kauai, Hawaii by Julia

Terence McKenna "Reclaim Your Mind"

Terence McKenna - Reclaim your mind from Olivier Ferland on Vimeo.

Kill your Televisiou

Green Lakes Hike

Let Hailey be your guide to the Green Lakes and Fall Creek.....the most popular hike near Bend, Oregon.  Music is "Pump Me Up" by Edwin Yearwood and Krosfyah.

Shooting Stars

Mind you, sometimes the angels smoke, hiding it with their sleeves, and when the archangel comes, they throw the cigarettes away: that’s when you get shooting stars. – V. Nabokov

A Night at Bhodi's in Cambodia

A typical night at Bhodi's Place in Kampot, Cambodia.  A balmy, black night, millions of stars, chill and happy backpackers,  a warm salt river with phosphorescent algae, Khmer blues music, strong drinks and the sweet smell of reefers.

Alan Watts "The Way of Waking Up"

"So then, here's the drama. My metaphysics, let me be perfectly frank with you, are that there is the central Self, you could call it God you could call it anything you like. And its all of us. Its playing all the parts of all beings whatsoever everywhere and anywhere.

And its playing the game of hide and seek with itself. It gets lost, it gets involved in the farthest out adventures but in the end it always wakes up, and comes back to itself. And when you're ready to wake up, you're gonna wake up. And if you're not ready your gonna stay pretending that you're poor little me."


with background music by Kitaro- "Endless Water" and "Tree" from his album "Ki"

Elephant Wash

Julia washing her elephant at Patera Elephant Farm near Chiang Mai, Thailand in April 2011.

Sea Lion on New Zealand Beach

Julia playing with Sea Lion on a New Zealand Beach near Dundedin.

Chiang Mai Busker

Blind Busker in Chiang Mai's Chinatown in March.

Riding the Bull

 Julia "Riding the Bull" on the Lower Deschutes River last week.

Learning to Fly Pt. II

The Wind could carry me on the last part of my Journey, 
if I become light enough,

by letting go of the few things I am still clinging to.....that still believe in Gravity. — photo at Crater Lake National Park by Julia.

Melancholy

Mantis Parable

A short film by Josh Staub that he created entirely by himself during his spare time (he works at Disney).

Mauna Kea Time Lapse

The White Mountain from charles on Vimeo.


I am made of stars

The Known Universe

I feel so small

The Tallest Man on Earth "The Gardener"

He may not be tall but he's got a BIG voice and writes wonderful songs.  Kristian Matsson  is a singer-songwriter from Dalarna, Sweden.  Recorded at the legendary Music Inn on West 4th Street in Greenwich Village.

Mountain Biking in Bend, Oregon

AllRide Edit of Whoops Trail in Bend, Or from Kirt Voreis on Vimeo.

Imagining the 10th Dimension

Boggle Your Mind
Watch Imagining the ten dimensions in Educational  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

Kill Your Television Pt. II

Johnny Cash "God's gonna Cut You Down"

Jack Kerouac's 30 tips for prose and life

 Belief and Technique for Modern Prose----by Jack Kerouac

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You’re a Genius all the time
30s. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

Thom Yorke "The Clock"

time is running out
for us
but you just move the hands upon the clock

you throw coins in the wishing well
with gold
you just move your hands upon the clock

it comes to you begging you to stop
wake up
and you just move your hands upon the clock
throw coins in wishing wells
for us
you make believe that you are still in charge

Rammstein Live at Rock am Ring 2010

The best show band in the world. When others pray, I listen to Rammstein.

Tracks:

Rammlied @ 0:00
Ich tu dir veh @ 04:34
Sonne @ 11:38
Heifisch @ 16:40
Ich Will @ 24:46

Placebo "Twenty Years"

They just keep getting better. Placebo live at Angkor Watt in Cambodia.

I dreamed I was a Butterfly

I dreamed I was a butterfly, flitting around in the sky; Then I awoke. Now I wonder: Am I a man who dreamt of being a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming that I am a man?
~ Chuang Tzu ~

Rainbows

"The existence of the rainbow depends on the conical photoreceptors in your eyes; to animals without cones, the rainbow does not exist. So you don’t just look at a rainbow, you create it. This is pretty amazing, especially considering that all the beautiful colors you see represent less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum.”

— We Originated in the Belly of a Star, NASA Lunar Science Institute, 2012.

Paul Simon --Graceland

"The Mississippi River is shining like a National Guitar"

Red Hot Chlil Peppers "By the Way" and "Scar Tissue"

This is one of the best concerts I've EVER seen....playing at Slane Castle brings out the best in every band

Skier buried in Avalanche

This is Intense.

The guy in the video was the first one to drop from their group and while not a guide, he had a lot of Utah and AK backcountry experience. He had a Black Diamond Avalung on, but as you can tell from the video while he's talking as he's dropping in, it wasn't in his mouth to start. He tried to shove it in the instant of starting to get sucked down, but it didn't stay in fully during his ragdoll descent. It was just off to the corner of his mouth he said, and he definitely got some snow / ice in his mouth still.
So as he drops in you can also see the sluff to the skier's right immediately start building....and that's actually the chute that was the intended route down. For whatever reason - well pure, unadulterated powder will do it to you - he didn't go make some strong "skier cuts" into the upper pack to do one final snow check as instructed by the main guide who was doing the "tail gunner" work.
Instead he just sent it. And it didn't take more than a few turns out on this big shoulder above this cliff band to break loose.
This was a decent sized avalanche. 1,500 feet the dude fell in a little over 20 seconds. The crown was about 1 - 1.5m. The chute that he got sucked through to the skier's right was flanked on either side by cliff bands that were about 30m tall. He luckily didn't break any bones and obviously didn't hit anything on the run out.
He was only buried for 4 and a half minutes which is incredibly short. I cannot stress these next sentences enough; that in and of itself to be unburied in ONLY 4:28 is miraculous if you have any understanding of being caught in an avalanche and what it takes to be found. It could literally be some kind of "world record" just on how good the guide and supporting cast of other skiers was in getting to him. It also shows why you should ALWAYS be going with people trained in avalanche rescue / first aid....as well as why you'd want to be going with a guided heli operation. Sure this was terrifying for him, but he would've probably been dead if not for going with a guide.
He also got very lucky to be honest. In the time that he's buried, you can hear his breathing already accelerate. The ruffling noise back and forth is his chest rising and falling and the noise that his jacket makes. The intermittent whimpering noise you hear is him trying to swallow and get some air since the avalung wasn't fully in his mouth and instead just to the corner of his mouth. Still sends chills up the back of my neck. Oh...the luck? They located him so fast because his right glove came off just before he came completley to rest and there was an excellent visual of course.
And then the digging out is utterly amazing. I don't think that you could've paid a Hollywood crew to stage something better. The fact that he could've been facing any 360 direction and yet he's looking right up into the sun-filled blue sky with that first full scoop away of the shovel is borderline spiritual.
This is simply a very sobering and unbelievable video. However, you should take away from this video all the positive things that you can learn from it. Yes there are risks to the backcountry - but with proper gear, training, and guide(s) with avalanche and EMT training - you can greatly lower your chances of getting caught in an avalanche in the first place.....and coming back alive if you ever were to get caught in a slide.

Rihanna AOL Session 2010

AOL Sessions = Amazing live performances

Open the Door to the Whirlwind

"Very few beings really seek knowledge in this world. On the contrary, most people try to wring from the unknown the answers they have already shaped in their own minds—justifications, confirmations, forms of consolation without which they can’t go on. To really ask is to open the door to the whirlwind. The answer may annihilate the question and the questioner." -Anne Rice

Damien Rice "The Blower's Daughter"

Haunting

Pixies "Debaser"

The lyrics are based on a surrealist film by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí called Un chien andalou. The film notoriously opens with a scene in which a woman's eye is slit by a razor, which is referenced in the song lyric "Slicin' up eyeballs/I want you to know."

got me a movie
i want you to know
slicing up eyeballs
i want you to know
girlie so groovy
i want you to know
don't know about you
but i am un chien andalusia
wanna grow
up to be
be a debaser, debaser

got me a movie
ha ha ha ho
slicing up eyeballs
ha ha ha ho
girlie so groovie
ha ha ha ho
don't know about you
but i am un chien andalusia

Pixies "This Monkey's Gone to Heaven"

There was a guy
An under water guy who controlled the sea
Got killed by ten million pounds of sludge
From New York and New Jersey

This monkey's gone to Heaven
This monkey's gone to Heaven
This monkey's gone to Heaven
This monkey's gone to Heaven

The creature in the sky
Got sucked in a hole
Now there's a hole in the sky

And the ground's not cold
And if the ground's not cold
Everything is gonna burn
We'll all take turns, I'll get mine too


This monkey's gone to Heaven
This monkey's gone to Heaven
This monkey's gone to Heaven
This monkey's gone to Heaven

If Man is five, if Man is five, if Man is five
Then the Devil is six, then the Devil is six
The Devil is six, the Devil is six and if the Devil is six
Then God is seven , then God is seven

This monkey's gone to Heaven

Sophia Loran "Boy on a Dolphin"

I love beautiful women. This 1958 movie was Sophia Loren's English language debut.

Howlin' Wolf "How Many More Years"

Wow, that is some Sweet harmonica.  It's time to HOWL!

Modest Mouse "Missed the Boat"

while we're on the subject, could we change the subject now?
i was knocking on your ear's door, but you were always out
looking towards the future, we were begging for the past
well we know we had the good things but those never seemed to last
oh please just last
everyone's unhappy, everyone's ashamed
well we all just got caught looking at somebody else's page
well nothing ever went quite exactly as we planned
our ideas held no water but we used them like a dam

oh and we carried it all so well
as if we got a new position
oh and i'll laugh all the way to hell
saying "yes this is a fine promotion"
oh and i'll laugh all the way to hell

of course everyone goes crazy over such and such and such
we made ourselves a pillar, we just used it as a crutch
we were certainly uncertain at least i'm pretty sure i am
well we didn't need the water, but we just built that good goddamn


oh and i know this of myself
i assume as much for other people
oh and i know this of myself
we've listened to more of life's end gong than the sound of life's sweet bells
was it ever worth it was there all that much to gain
well we knew we'd missed the boat and we'd already missed the plane
we didn't read the invite we just danced at our own wake
all our favorites were playing so we could shake shake shake shake shake
tiny curtains opened and we heard the tiny clap of little hands
a tiny man would tell a little joke and get a tiny laugh from all them folks
and drifting around on bubbles and thinking it was us that carried them
when we finally got it figured out that we had truly missed the boat

oh and we carried it off so well
as if we got a new position
oh and we own all the tools ourselves
without the skills to make a show with
oh what useless tools ourselves

JOAN MİRO

Miro's colors sound like a sad cello tune.

The Beatles - All You Need Is Love

Beatles - All You Need Is Love from SimDo on Vimeo.

:-)

Annie Flore Batchiellilys "Diboty"

I really enjoy everything she sings. Wish I could find an outlet to purchase one of her CDs.  Can only find her songs on YouTube.

Billy Collins "Hunger"

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds "Dig Lazarus, Dig"

Dig yourself)
(Laz'rus dig yourself)
(Laz'rus dig yourself)
(Laz'rus dig yourself)
(Back in that hole.)

Larry made his nest high up in the autumn branches
Built from nothing but high hopes and thin air
He collected up some baby blasted mothers who took their chances
And for a while they lived quite happily up there

He came from New York city man, but he couldn't take the pace
He thought it was like dog eat dog world
Then he went to San Francisco, spent a year in outer space
With a sweet little San Fransiscan girl.

I can hear my mother wailing and a whole lot of scraping of chairs

I don't know what it is but there's definitely something going on upstairs

(Dig yourself)
(Laz'rus dig yourself)
(Laz'rus dig yourself)
(Laz'rus dig yourself)
(I want you to dig) (Back in that hole.)

(I want you to dig)

(I want you to dig)
Yeh, New York City he had to get out of there and San Francisco well,
I don't know and then to LA where he spent about a day
he thought even the pale sky stars were smart enough to keep well away from LA

Meanwhile Larry made up names for the ladies
Like miss Boo and miss Quick
He stockpiled weapons and took potshots in the air
He feasted on their lovely bodies like a lunatic
And wrapped himself up in their soft yellow hair

I can hear chants and incantations and some guy is mentioning me in his prayers.
Well, I don't know what it is but there's definitely something going on upstairs

(Dig yourself)
(Laz'rus dig yourself)
(Laz'rus dig yourself)
(Laz'rus dig yourself)
(I want you to dig) (Back in that hole.)

(I want you to dig)

(I want you to dig) Well New York City man, San Francisco, LA, I don't know
But Larry grew increasingly neurotic and obscene
I mean he, he never asked to be raised from the tomb
I mean no one ever actually asked him to forsake his dreams
Anyway to cut a long story short, fate finally found him
Mirrors became his torturers, cameras snapped him at every chance
The women all went back to their homes and their husbands with secret smiles in the corner of their mouthes
He ended up like so many of them do, back on the streets of New York City
In a soup queue, a dope fiend, a slave, then prison, then the madhouse, then the grave
Ah poor Larry.

But what do we really know of the dead And who actually cares?

Well, I don't know what it is but there's definitely something going on upstairs.

(Dig yourself)
(Laz'rus dig yourself)
(Laz'rus dig yourself)
(Laz'rus dig yourself)
(I want you to dig)
Back in that hole Dig yourself

Pachebal's Canon in D----Korean Hiphop Style

Wonderful juxtaposition

Velvet Revolver "Mr. Brownstone"

Mark Twain and Satan

"Fame is a vapor.  The only certainty is oblivion."  Surreal video from a 1984 children's show.

Muddy Waters "Mannish Boy"

Mr. McKinley Morganfield, aka  MUDDY WATERS......aka  "The Father of the Blues"

Don Kelley Band "Ghostrider"

Guitar Wizard JD Simo and the Don Kelley Band at Robert's Western World in Nashville.  Go see this band now.....they are amazing and JD is beyond...............

Patti Smith "Because the Night"

My fav version of this Bruce Springsteen/Patti Smith song.


Take me now baby here as I am
Pull me close, try and understand
Desire is hunger is the fire I breathe
Love is a banquet on which we feed

Come on now try and understand
The way I feel when I'm in your hands
Take my hand come undercover
They can't hurt you now,
Can't hurt you now, can't hurt you now
Because the night belongs to lovers
Because the night belongs to lust
Because the night belongs to lovers
Because the night belongs to us

Have I doubt when I'm alone
Love is a ring, the telephone
Love is an angel disguised as lust
Here in our bed until the morning comes
Come on now try and understand
The way I feel under your command
Take my hand as the sun descends
They can't touch you now,
Can't touch you now, can't touch you now
Because the night belongs to lovers ...

With love we sleep
With doubt the vicious circle
Turn and burns
Without you I cannot live
Forgive, the yearning burning
I believe it's time, too real to feel
So touch me now, touch me now, touch me now
Because the night belongs to lovers ...

Because tonight there are two lovers
If we believe in the night we trust
Because tonight there are two lovers ...

David Bowie "Rebel Rebel"

One of the catchiest riffs ever.

Garbage "I Think I'm Paranoid"

Bend me
Break me
Any way you need me
As long as I want you baby it's alright

Ukulollo "Ravel's Bolero"

The amazingly versatile, romantic, fashionable yet rebellious ukulele.  What a great video concept and fantastic editing.

Staring at the Sun

Watching Venus cross the Sun for the Last Time in My Life.

Richard & LInda Thompson "Walking on a Wire"

One of my favorite songs ever....the guitar solo at the end is amazing....you can feel the anger & the pain.


I hand you my ball and chain
You just hand me that same old refrain
I'm walking on a wire, I'm walking on a wire
And I'm falling

I wish I could please you tonight
But my medicine just won't come right
I'm walking on a wire, I'm walking on a wire
And I'm falling

Too many steps to take
Too many spells to break
Too many nights awake
And no one else
This grindstone's wearing me
Your claws are tearing me
Don't use me endlessly
It's too long, too long to myself

Where's the justice and where's the sense?
When all the pain is on my side of the fence
I'm walking on a wire, I'm walking on a wire
And I'm falling


Too many steps to take
Too many spells to break
Too many nights awake
And no one else
This grindstone's wearing me
Your claws are tearing me
Don't use me endlessly
It's too long, it's too long to myself

It scares you when you don't know
Whichever way the wind might blow
I'm walking on a wire, I'm walking on a wire
And I'm falling
I'm walking on a wire, I'm walking on a wire
And I'm falling
I'm walking on a wire, I'm walking on a wire
And I'm falling

Richard Thompson "Shoot Out The Lights"

Richard Thompson sings "Shoot Out the Lights" with Elvis Costello and the Imposters on Spectacle, December 2009

Tai Wun On

by Greg Hildebrandt

The JZ Band

Ted Brainard on lead guitar & vocals (my old guitar teacher), David Z on vocals and rhythm guitar, and Joe Leonardi on bass. At Parilla Grill in Bend, OR.

Avett Brothers "Laundry Room"

Don't push me out,
just a little longer
Stall your mother,
disregard ur fathers words.

Close the laundry door,
tiptoe across the floor
Keep your clothes on,
I got all that I can take
Teach me how to use
the love that people say you made

Stop your parents car
i just thought you'd ignore
We can wish upon it
but we wont share the wish we made
But i cant keep no secrets,
I wish that you would always stay
Last night i dreamt the whole night long
I woke with a head full of songs
i spent the whole day
I wrote em down but its a shame
Tonight i'll burn the lyrics,
cause every chorus was your name


Break this tired old routine,
and this time dont make me leave

I am a breathing time machine,
i'll take you on for a ride

Prekestolen (Pulpit Rock)

Watching this video makes my feet tingle .

Theresa Andersson "Blue Skies"

Theresa Andersson from New Orleans....go see her live NOW!

Theresa Andersson & Tommy Emmanuel "Borderline"

A Madonna cover by two incredible artists.

Given to Fly

1st song: Contact - Violence

2nd: Diz Organ & Sackcloth Fashion - Under Man

no green/blue screen in this video

ⓒMatchstick Productions


Soaring, skimming, what a rush.

The ONLY Reason

My Travel Philosophy

Paper Moon

“It’s a Barnum and Bailey world,

 just as phony as it can be,

 But it wouldn’t be make-believe 

 if you believed in me.”

Amanda Palmer "Ukulele Anthem"

Amanda fucking Palmer......I want to buy you an ice cream and walk together through Central Park strumming our ukes.

The Praying Hypnomantist

Looook into my eyyes..you are getting verrrry sleeeepy

The Vaccines

The Vaccines performing If You Wanna, Nørgaard & Wreckin' Bar live on Jools' Annual Hootenanny 31st December 2011.

Vatican Soap

           Official Vatican Soap 

Jack White "Sixteen Saltines" & "Freedom at 21"

I want to walk a mile in Jack White's shoes......Ooooooooooooooo, I got the 'wanna be Jack White' blues.

Carly Simon "You're So Vain"

One of my fav songs back in the 70s.  Live at Martha's Vineyard.

The Mystery of It All

Yuri Cortez/AFP/Getty Images

Mountains Rise, Mountains Fall; Change is Constant.
Great Article by Adam Frank:


The only constant is change. It's the most basic fact of human existence. Nothing lasts, nothing stays the same.

We feel it with each breath. From birth to the unknown moment of our passing, we ride a river of change. And yet, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, we exhaust ourselves in an endless search for solidity. We hunger for something that lasts, some idea or principle that rises above time and change. We hunger for certainty. That is a big problem.

It might even be THE problem.


Religions are often built around this heartache for certainty. In the face of sickness, loss and grief, a thousand dogmas with a thousand names have risen. Many profess that if only the faithful hold fast to the "rules," the "precepts" or the "doctrine" then certainty can be obtained.

Fate and future can be fixed through promises of freedom from immediate suffering, divine favor or everlasting salvation. Scriptures are transformed into unwavering blueprints for an unchanging order. These documents must live beyond question lest the certainty they provide crumble. When human spiritual endeavor devolves into these white-knuckle forms of clinging they become monuments to the fear of change and uncertainty.

It would be symmetrical if I could point to science as the pure antidote to the rigid rejection of uncertainty. Science, in the purest forms of its expression as a practice, holds to no doctrine other than that the world might be known. In the ceaseless pursuit of its own questioning path, science asks us to allow for ceaseless change in our ideas, beliefs and opinions. It's this aspect of science that I value more than any other.

But science does not exist alone as practice. It's also a constellation of ideas that exist within culture and those ideas can gain value, in and of themselves, without connection to actual practice. In this way science becomes something more and less. For some people the idea of Science offers a trumped up certainty that yields its own false defense against the rootlessness that roots of our existence.

My co-blogger Marcelo Gleiser put it beautifully two weeks ago when he wrote, "what is pompous is to think that we can know all the answers. Or that it's the job of science to find them." When science as an idea is used to push away the tremulous reality of our lived existential uncertainty then it, too, is degraded. It becomes just another imaginary fixed point in a life without fixed points.

Of course it doesn't have to be this way. The world's history of spiritual endeavor contains many beautiful descriptions of authentic encounters with uncertainty. Ironically these often serve as gateways to the most compassionate experience of what can be called sacred in human life.

Buddhism's First Noble Truth, which focuses specifically on the reality of change and suffering, serves as one example. In the Christian tradition works like the "Cloud of Unknowing," a 14th century paean to the importance of experience over doctrine or dogma, serves as another. Dig around in most of the world's great religious traditions and you find people finding their sense of grace by embracing uncertainty rather than trying to bury it in codified dogmas.

For science, embracing uncertainty means more than claiming "we don't know now, but we will know in the future". It means embracing the fuzzy boundaries of the very process of asking questions. It means embracing the frontiers of what explanations, for all their power, can do. It means understanding that a life of deepest inquiry requires all kinds of vehicles: from poetry to particle accelerators; from quiet reveries to abstract analysis.

Though I am an atheist, some of the wisest people I have met are those whose spiritual lives (some explicitly religious, some not) have forced them to continually confront uncertainty. This daily act has made them patient and forgiving, generous and inclusive. Likewise, the atheists I have met who most embody the ideals of free inquiry seem to best understand the limitations of every perspective, including their own. They encounter the ever shifting ground of their lives with humor, good will and compassion.

In the end, embracing uncertainty is to embrace a quality I have written about many times before: mystery. These lives we live, surrounded by beauty and horror, profound knowledge and pitiful ignorance, are a mystery to us all. To push that truth away with false certainty, falsely derived from either religion or reason, is to miss our most perfect truth.

We are, after all, just "such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep."

You can keep up with more of what Adam Frank is thinking on Facebook and Twitter. His new book is About Time: Cosmology and Culture at the Twilight of the Big Bang.

Burnt Norton

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened.......

by T.S. Eliot

Florence, Italy

La Bellissima

Firenze città mia
lasciarla dolore

50 Inspiring Travel Quotes

1. “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” – Mark Twain
2. “The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” – St. Augustine
3. “There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.” – Robert Louis Stevenson
4. “The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.” – Samuel Johnson
5. “All the pathos and irony of leaving one’s youth behind is thus implicit in every joyous moment of travel: one knows that the first joy can never be recovered, and the wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.” – Paul Fussell
6. “Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.” – Jack Kerouac
7. “He who does not travel does not know the value of men.” – Moorish proverb
8. “People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.” – Dagobert D. Runes
9. “A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.” – John Steinbeck
10. “No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.” – Lin Yutang
11. “Your true traveler finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty-his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.” – Aldous Huxley
12. “All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.” – Samuel Johnson
13. “For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” – Robert Louis Stevenson
14. “Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things – air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky – all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.” – Cesare Pavese 15. “One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” – Henry Miller
16. ″A traveler without observation is a bird without wings.” – Moslih Eddin Saadi
17. “When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in.” – D. H. Lawrence
18. “To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.” – Freya Stark
19. “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” – Mark Twain
20. “Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.” – Miriam Beard
21. “All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.” – Martin Buber
22. “We live in a wonderful world that is full of beauty, charm and adventure. There is no end to the adventures we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open.” – Jawaharial Nehru
23. “Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going.” – Paul Theroux 24. “To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.” – Bill Bryson
25. “Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
26. “Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by.” – Robert Frost
27. “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” – Lao Tzu
28. “There is no moment of delight in any pilgrimage like the beginning of it.” – Charles Dudley Warner
29. “A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.” – Lao Tzu
30. “If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay at home.” – James Michener
31. “The journey not the arrival matters.” – T. S. Eliot
32. “A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles.” – Tim Cahill
33. “I have found out that there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.” – Mark Twain
34. “Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quiestest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.” – Pat Conroy
35. “Not all those who wander are lost.” – J. R. R. Tolkien
36. “Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.” – Benjamin Disraeli
37. “Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.” – Maya Angelou
38. “Too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversation.” – Elizabeth Drew 39. “Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe”……Anatole France
40. “Travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind.” – Seneca
41. “What you’ve done becomes the judge of what you’re going to do – especially in other people’s minds. When you’re traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.” – William Least Heat Moon
42. “I soon realized that no journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the world around us, it goes an equal distance into the world within.” – Lillian Smith
43. “To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.” – Aldous Huxley
44. “Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art.” – Freya Stark
45. “The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.” – Rudyard Kipling
46. “Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.” – Paul Theroux
47. “The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.” – G. K. Chesterton
48. “When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.” – Clifton Fadiman
49. “A wise traveler never despises his own country.” – Carlo Goldoni
50. “Adventure is a path. Real adventure – self-determined, self-motivated, often risky – forces you to have firsthand encounters with the world. The world the way it is, not the way you imagine it. Your body will collide with the earth and you will bear witness. In this way you will be compelled to grapple with the limitless kindness and bottomless cruelty of humankind – and perhaps realize that you yourself are capable of both. This will change you. Nothing will ever again be black-and-white.” – Mark Jenkins
51. “One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” – Henry Miller
52. “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” – Lao Tzu

A Question

Illustration by Milton Glaser. Words by Bob Dylan.