Honor every form of love as a movement toward connection.

Honor every form of love as a movement toward connection.
Jack Kornfield

When you imagine the world, you get to set the rules.

Imaginary friends forever
Studio 360

July 26, 2018 · 4:00 PM EDT
Contributor Jessica Benko

Maxine's portraits of her imaginary friends.

Lots of kids have imaginary friends. (A young Kurt Andersen had a gaggle including Robbie Dobbie, Crackerpin, Jimmy the Cat, a poodle called Genevieve — which he pronounced in the French manner.)

Marjorie Taylor, a psychology professor at the University of Oregon, has been looking at imaginary friends and the children who invent them. “They tend to be more social, less shy, and do better on tasks which require you to take the perspective of another person in real life. We have found that they are more creative on some kinds of tasks. Other people have found that their narratives are richer.”

Taylor is exploring the idea that these children are more creative — in particular, the kids who build a paracosm, a country or place for their friends “where children think about all kinds of things like entertainment, the food, the clothes, the transportation, the money.”

Maxine, who is 8, walks us through her paracosm and the friends in it. Some are a little creepy, like Devil Man and Betchaboo, who takes the shape of a gun, but they’re not frightening to her. “They’re not the kind of people who will go and kill people. They’re not like gangsters; they’re just tricksters.” Besides, Maxine says, if imaginary friends caused trouble, “then they would be deleted. Because then you don’t exist. Sometimes when I forget about them they die, but they’re not deleted.” When you imagine the world, you get to set the rules.

Museums in a New Context

Article
A 2010 study by the American Alliance of Museums found that while people of color will make up 46% of the American population by 2033, they are on track to only represent 9% of museums’ core audiences. However, museums like the High Museum of Art in Atlanta are trying to buck this trend. Earlier this year, that institution reported that it had tripled its number of visitors of color (now comprising 45% of the museum’s total visitors) in just two years. How? By showcasing the work of under-represented artists, adjusting admission fees, diversifying its staff and volunteers, and adopting the slogan: “Here for you.”

Meanwhile, a 2015 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) report found that one of the top reasons people in the US visit arts spaces is to learn something new. The same report states that “listening to other perspectives” is a key value held by the majority of museumgoers. And in discussing how museums can create opportunities for discovery and affirmation, Roman Krznaric, founder of the Empathy Museum, said: “Developing empathy has the power to create radical social change.” However, touting art as a luxury reduces the number of seats at the table, undermining the notion that arts spaces are platforms that can host difficult conversations about issues (race, class, gender, etc.) that affect us all.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky

You know, I’m an adrenaline junkie myself. My favorite sport used to be rock climbing, because there’s not enough adrenaline otherwise. So I understand people who live on adrenaline very well. Such people are in demand in a profession as dangerous as investigative journalism. It’s clear that if they don’t find a job in this area, they’ll get their adrenaline in other areas. This is a civically beneficial path to fulfillment for people who live on adrenaline. Of course, it’s very important that these people be professionals. …

Before working in the oil industry, I worked as an apprentice at factories for munitions and explosives. This was a profession I liked because it gave me that adrenaline. Well, so what — someone has to carry out that work. [Sighs.] Yes, it was also a risk. Factories blew up from time to time. [Sighs.] Well — what can you do? What can you do? One must make sure one does all one can to prevent such things from happening. But on the other hand, you can never make sure you are completely safe.
-Mikhail Khodorkovsky

PTSD

Intensive Outpatient Program Shown to Ease Vets’ PTSD Symptoms

The Road Home Program at Rush helps military veterans and their families make healthier transitions to civilian life by offering specialized mental health care, peer-to-peer outreach, counseling and community resource navigation.

“It takes a nation, not one government agency, to build a military and go to war. Our nation shouldn’t rely on just the VA to make sure our military veterans make a healthy transition to civilian life.”

source

Rex Pickett

"Writing is not an avocation. It's a life. A writer -- not a famous one -- once told me: writers are like thieves; they're always working…”

[O]pera was not an option. But, I loved words. They had power. I wrote a poem about my high school principal titled “Mr. Pencil Head.” It got published in the school journal. The principal called me in to rebuke me for what was obviously an attempt to make him look foolish and otiose. That's when I knew I wanted to be a writer. That's when I realized I had found my creative medium for personal transformation.

http://www.advicetowriters.com/interviews/2018/2/20/rex-pickett.html

Imaginary Characters

It's true that writing is a solitary occupation, but you would be surprised at how much companionship a group of imaginary characters can offer once you get to know them.
ANNE TYLER

Courage Reborn

I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.
ANNE FRANK

Mystery

The creative process is a process of surrender, not control. Mystery is at the heart of creativity. That, and surprise. JULIA CAMERON

Thank You, Rob Reiner

America is fighting for its life. DT has injected US with the toxins of racism, misogyny, xenophobia & lies. He is obstructing justice & conspiring with an enemy to destroy Democracy. Patriots will not let America die. VOTE!!!
- Rob Reiner

Never Doubt

Margaret Mead — 'Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.'

What Box?

When people say thinking outside the box. I say: What Box?

Refusal to Despair

Anais Nin:

"It's almost like the man who goes to the bottom of the ocean and takes with him some oxygen to equalize the pressure. I'm talking about equalizing the pressure between outer actions and events which are shattering and devastating to us and then the place where we recompose and reconstruct ourselves, where we finally achieve what Jung called the second birth. The second birth we are entirely responsible for; it's a self-creation. This second birth is the one that you can make, and the discovery of that to me was always a great relief..."

From A Woman Speaks (Chapter 2: Refusal to Despair) 1982

Be a Lighthouse

Is the beam from a lighthouse affected by howling wind and rain? It remains perfectly steadfast and unaffected by the storm. Your true self is like that. Nothing can ever harm you once you are consciously aware that it is so.
Vernon Howard

The scars you share become lighthouses for other people who are headed to the same rocks you hit.
Unknown

The lighthouse does great service to humanity; yet it is the slave of those who trim the lamps.
Alice Wellington Rollins

Lighthouses are endlessly suggestive signifiers of both human isolation and our ultimate connectedness to each other.
Virginia Woolf

Lighthouses don't go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.
Anne Lamott

Masih Alinejad

Opinion
My Sister Disowned Me on State TV

Stalin would have been proud of Iran’s latest attempt to break my spirit.

By Masih Alinejad

Ms. Alinejad is the author of “The Wind in My Hair: My Fight for Freedom in Modern Iran.”

July 31, 2018

On Friday, my sister publicly disowned me on prime-time Iranian television.

I can’t say this comes out of nowhere. Over the past two decades — as a journalist critical of the regime, as an outspoken feminist and ultimately a dissident living in exile in America — the Islamic Republic has tried to intimidate me and my family, which still lives in the poor village where I was raised in northern Iran.

[...]

“I am prepared to give up my life for hijab,” my beloved sister says.

I, too, would give up my life. I’d give it up for women like her to live in freedom.

Masih Alinejad (@alinejadmasih) is the founder of My Stealthy Freedom and the author of “The Wind in My Hair: My Fight for Freedom in Modern Iran.”

Stephen King Interview

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/stephen-king-the-rolling-stone-interview-191529/

All that said, you’ve made it clear over the years that you still believe in God.
Yeah. I choose to believe in God because it makes things better. You have a meditation point, a source of strength. I don’t ask myself, “Well, does God exist or does God not exist?” I choose to believe that God exists, and therefore I can say, “God, I can’t do this by myself. Help me not to take a drink today. Help me not to take a drug today.” And that works fine for me.

Do you hope to go to heaven?
I don’t want to go to the heaven that I learned about when I was a kid. To me, it seems boring. The idea that you’re going to lounge around on a cloud all day and listen to guys play harps? I don’t want to listen to harps. I want to listen to Jerry Lee Lewis!

Do you wish you had stronger beliefs? Would that give you comfort if you had more certainty?
No, I think uncertainty is good for things. Certainty breeds complacency and complacency means that you just sit somewhere in your nice little comfortable suburban house in Michigan, looking at CNN and saying, “Oh, those poor immigrant children that are all coming across the border. But we really can’t have them here – that isn’t what God wants. Let’s send them all back to the drug cartels.” There’s a complacency to it.

How about evil? Do you believe there is such a thing?
I believe in evil, but all my life I’ve gone back and forth about whether or not there’s an outside evil, whether or not there’s a force in the world that really wants to destroy us, from the inside out, individually and collectively. Or whether it all comes from inside and that it’s all part of genetics and environment. When you find somebody like, let’s say, Ted Bundy, who tortured and killed all those women and sometimes went back and had sex with the dead bodies, I don’t think when you look at his upbringing you can say, “Oh, that’s because Mommy put a clothespin on his dick when he was four.” That behavior was hard-wired. Evil is inside us. The older I get, the less I think there’s some sort of outside devilish influence; it comes from people. And unless we’re able to address that issue, sooner or later, we’ll fucking kill ourselves.

I want to talk about writing now. Walk me through your typical day when you’re working on a book.
I wake up. I eat breakfast. I walk about three and a half miles. I come back, I go out to my little office, where I’ve got a manuscript, and the last page that I was happy with is on top. I read that, and it’s like getting on a taxiway. I’m able to go through and revise it and put myself – click – back into that world, whatever it is. I don’t spend the day writing. I’ll maybe write fresh copy for two hours, and then I’ll go back and revise some of it and print what I like and then turn it off.

Do you do that every day?
Every day, even weekends. I used to write more and I used to write faster – it’s just aging. It slows you down a little bit.

Is writing an addiction for you?
Yeah. Sure. I love it. And it’s one of the few things where I do it less now and get as much out of it. Usually with dope and booze, you do it more and get less out of it as time goes by. It’s still really good, but it’s addictive, obsessive-compulsive behavior. So I’ll write every day for maybe six months and get a draft of something – and then I make myself stop completely for 10 days or 12 days in order to let everything settle. But during that time off, I drive my wife crazy. She says, “Get out of my way, get out of the house, go do something – paint a birdhouse, anything!”

So I watch TV, I play my guitar and put in time, and then when I go to bed at night, I have all these crazy dreams, usually not very pleasant ones because whatever machinery that you have that goes into writing stories, it doesn’t want to stop. So if it’s not going on the page, it has to go somewhere, and I have these mind dreams. They’re always dreams that focus on some kind of shame or insecurity.


Like what?
The one that recurs is that I’m going to be in a play, and I get to the theater and it’s opening night and not only can I not find my costume, but I realize that I have never learned the lines.

How do you interpret that?
It’s just insecurity – fear of failure, fear of falling short.

You still fear failure after all these years of success?
Sure. I’m afraid of all kinds of things. I’m afraid of failing at whatever story I’m writing – that it won’t come up for me, or that I won’t be able to finish it.

Do you think your imagination is more active than most people’s?
I don’t know, man. It’s more trained. It hurts to imagine stuff. It can give you a headache. Probably doesn’t hurt physically, but it hurts mentally. But the more that you can do it, the more you’re able to get out of it. Everybody has that capacity, but I don’t think everyone develops it.

Saved by A Dog

I was being bullied in high school, One I came home and locked my bedroom door, he said. My dog Ranger busted through the door to to reach me.
He knew he had to save your life, I said.

The "Social Hygiene" War Against Women

his book is a brilliant study of the way social anxieties have historically congealed in state control over women’s bodies and behavior — at times with the complicity of medical authorities. It should come as no surprise, but appalls nonetheless, to learn that more than one government enforcer of the American Plan also played a key role in the notorious Tuskegee syphilis study, in which infected black men were deliberately denied treatment and left to sicken and die. Unchecked power over those who have little, Stern warns, is a peril that should keep us on high alert today.

Cynthia Gorney, a professor emerita at the School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of “Articles of Faith: A Frontline History of the Abortion Wars.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/31/books/review/scott-stern-trials-of-nina-mccall.html

Losing Earth

Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change

We knew everything we needed to know, and nothing stood in our way. Nothing — except ourselves. A tragedy in two acts.

By NATHANIEL RICH
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/climate-change-losing-earth.html

A Traitor to Your Class