LibriVox Marguerite Duras on Immortality, Life & the Art of Seeing, Illustrated by Maria Popova “The art of seeing has to be learned.” “ Fiction is a lie, and good fiction is the truth inside the lie, ” Stephen King proclaimed , and a beacon of this conviction is The Lover ( public library ) — a short and stirring 1984 autobiographical novel by Marguerite Duras , with a cover as iconic as the book itself, designed by the inimitable Louise Fili . For this latest installment in the Brain Pickings artist series , designer and artist Kerri Augenstein has illustrated some of my marginalia from this masterpiece, including a poetic meditation on the recently explored question of immortality , in the style of her magnificent Dumb Dots Figure Studies series. It’s while it’s being lived that life is immortal, while it’s still alive. The art of seeing has to be learned. Both pieces are available on Etsy as limited-edition 5.5″ x 9.5″ prints in Kerri’s Etsy shop . Donating = Loving Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes hundreds of hours each month.
Iron Level Upkeep For Runners As a runner, you need to be informed of your unique iron needs. An iron deficiency is one of those nasty conditions that can disguise itself as being overtrained or under-rested. A drop in performance, an onslaught of fatigue, runners watch as their running takes a nose-dive and there seems to be no ‘logical’ reason as to why. Getting a blood panel as soon as you notice a dramatic change in your running is typically one of the first suggestions from a coach, with iron levels being one of those red flags to watch out for, particularly for females. “For someone going through these types of situations, the first thing I would ask is about their sleep, nutrition, iron, etc.,” says Kelly McDonald, assistant coach at Cal Poly. For competitors asking their bodies to perform at one hundred percent, even a ten percent drop in how one feels is a lot — call it the athlete’s magnification glass to the layman’s perception of tired. RELATED: Exhausted? What is ‘normal’? How to Get Iron-Heavy Blood
Tesla Overrated, Debunked 1903: Thomas Edison stages his highly publicized electrocution of an elephant in order to demonstrate the dangers of alternating current, which, if it posed any immediate danger at all, was to Edison's own direct current. Edison had established direct current at the standard for electricity distribution and was living large off the patent royalties, royalties he was in no mood to lose when George Westinghouse and Nicola Tesla showed up with alternating current. Edison's aggressive campaign to discredit the new current took the macabre form of a series of animal electrocutions using AC (a killing process he referred to snidely as getting "Westinghoused"). Click to expand...
HAARP Debunked and Explained NRL Scientists Produce Densest Artificial Ionospheric Plasma Clouds Using HAARP U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) research physicists and engineers from the Plasma Physics Division, working at the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) transmitter facility, Gakona, Alaska, successfully produced a sustained high density plasma cloud in Earth's upper atmosphere. "Previous artificial plasma density clouds have lifetimes of only ten minutes or less," said Paul Bernhardt, Ph.D., NRL Space Use and Plasma Section. "This higher density plasma 'ball' was sustained over one hour by the HAARP transmissions and was extinguished only after termination of the HAARP radio beam." Artificial Ionospheric Plasma Clouds Sequence of images of the glow plasma discharge produced with transmissions at the third electron gyro harmonic using the HAARP HF transmitter, Gakona, Alaska. Click to expand...
Messages From The Light Part 7 Life is Impossible (BBC Documentary) The Hard-Core Mindfulness Yogis of Vermont - Evolving Human A few weeks ago, I had a rather remarkable week in Burlington, Vermont. There’s a 6-month, in-depth residential Mindfulness training program going on there. It’s hard to know exactly what to call it. In Burlington, they refer to it as ‘The Monastery’. The program is divided into two three-month segments – three months of very intensive retreat practice (10-12 hours a day of formal practice, at the level you’d see in a Zen monastery), followed by three months of mindfulness teacher training and teaching mindfulness to teens in the city of Burlington. The teacher leading this program is 37 year old Soryu Forall (an article about Soryu), who started a company called The Center for Mindful Learning (CML), which specializes in Mindfulness training in a classroom environment. So I was picked up at the Burlington airport in a car with 3 of the 10 full-time retreat residents. On one of the joint meeting occasions, I was chatting with a long-time member of the Quaker community.
How Inviting the Unknown Helps Us Know Life More Richly by Maria Popova “The unknown was my encyclopedia. The unnamed was my science and progress.” “Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves,” Rilke famously urged. In an entry from April of 1945 found in The Diary of Anais Nin, Vol. 4: 1944-1947 (public library) — which also gave us Nin on the meaning of life, why emotional excess is essential to creativity, and how our objects define us — the beloved diarist and reconstructionist considers the vital importance of allowing for not-knowing in order to truly know the world in its fullest dimension, of using the unknown as a gateway to deeper presence and greater awareness: It is possible I never learned the names of birds in order to discover the bird of peace, the bird of paradise, the bird of the soul, the bird of desire. Five years later, in the fifth volume of her diaries, Nin would revisit and evolve this sentiment in her famous words on embracing the unfamiliar, writing: Share on Tumblr
Life Lessons From Remarkable Women Lately I have been reflecting upon all that I need to accomplish and am responsible for in my day-to-day life. Juggling two kids, running a small nonprofit, and finishing writing a book had me feeling a bit overwhelmed and frazzled these past few months. Many days I feel like I am split in far too many directions, with inadequate time to accomplish even a little bit of what I have to do, much less any time left over to recharge. Fortunately, I can draw from the wisdom and strength of a community of women leaders. Joan Roshi Halifax, author and abbot of the Upaya Zen Center: “You could say that every bird has two wings: one of those wings is the wing of contemplation, and the other wing is the wing of action. "I deeply value the time in my day when I meditate, and when I take a backward step and go into deep solitude at my hermitage in the mountains. Anna Deveare Smith, actor, playwright, and professor: “I do believe in body, mind, and spirit.
If the Web Preceded Print: The New Golden Age of Book Design and Creativity on Paper by Maria Popova “This is an important and wonderful time to be a writer, a storyteller, a designer, a reader.” “The mind, the brain, the top of the tingling spine, is, or should be, the only instrument used upon a book,” Nabokov wrote in his treatise on what makes a good reader. That’s precisely what the fine folks of Gestalten — who have a knack for pictorial magic, visual storytelling, and art as sensemaking — explore in Fully Booked — Ink on Paper: Design and Concepts for New Publications (public library). In the introduction, which begins on the book’s very cover, Andrew Losowsky presents an irreverent and brilliant in its perspective-shifting quality reversal of media history: Let me state this for the record: The internet is not dead. He concludes by peeling away at the essence of what this irreverent satire — like all great truth-telling satire — bespeaks: Everything in this book is a physical expression of print storytelling, gloriously non-digital and proud of the fact.
The Secret Museum: Van Gogh’s Never-Before-Seen Sketchbooks by Maria Popova A bittersweet record of artistic genius and unlived dreams. Given my soft spot for the sketchbooks of famous artists and private notebooks of great creators, I was delighted to discover that, unbeknownst to most, Vincent van Gogh kept one. At Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum, Oldfield finds the artist’s seven surviving sketchbooks, only four with their original cover, meticulously stored in the prints and drawings archive. Van Gogh had been all set for a deeply religious life but, aged 26, he transferred his religious zeal to art. The first sketchbook Leafing through countless pages of his sketchbooks, Oldfield reflects on this record of the artist’s creative journey and the bittersweet memento the sketchbook provides: The first sketchbook has a royal blue, marbled inside cover and an empty pocket at the back. ‘View of the Sea at Scheveningen’ by Vincent van Gogh, 1882 Curiously, the two paintings once hung in the Amsterdam museum but were stolen in 2002. Donating = Loving
Explaining Socialism To A Republican I was talking recently with a new friend who I’m just getting to know. She tends to be somewhat conservative, while I lean more toward the progressive side. When our conversation drifted to politics, somehow the dreaded word “socialism” came up. My friend seemed totally shocked when I said “All socialism isn’t bad”. She became very serious and replied “So you want to take money away from the rich and give to the poor?” I smiled and said “No, not at all. “Well it is, isn’t it?” I explained to her that I rather liked something called Democratic Socialism, just as Senator Bernie Sanders, talk show host Thom Hartman, and many other people do. Democracy is a form of government in which all citizens take part. Socialism is where we all put our resources together and work for the common good of us all and not just for our own benefit. Of course when people hear that term, “Share the wealth” they start screaming, “OMG you want to rob from the rich and give it all to the poor!”