There is a light that never goes out

Mixpod will be update soon -- be excited!

 

Once more, the sun rises as it rose in summer; bounty, balm after violence.

http://thefloatinglibrary.com/averno/
Read. Now.

And it was all yellow

Have been toying with Plixr-o-matic. Also, finished 102 minutes of Coldplay's
Madrid stream last night, and mastering '42' by ear on piano. All is well.

Mine?

Didn't have a lovely week. In quite the foul mood right now. Questions of incompetence are nagging at the rear of my skull. What is the world and how does it work?

Just be patient and don't worry

I'll be counting up my demons, hoping everything's not lost

Just because I'm losing doesn't mean that I'm lost

"Don't stop imagining. The day that you do is the day that you die."

Youth Lagoon made some of the most beautiful music I've heard all week. Makes my heart swell and do little back flips in my chest. It's so precious, so beautiful.

Montana, July, Cannons, 17, The Hunt, Daydream

Wordsworth

To My Sister

by William Wordsworth

It is the first mild day of March:
Each minute sweeter than before
The redbreast sings from the tall larch
That stands beside our door.

There is a blessing in the air,
Which seems a sense of joy to yield
To the bare trees, and mountains bare,
And grass in the green field.

My sister! ('tis a wish of mine)
Now that our morning meal is done,
Make haste, your morning task resign;
Come forth and feel the sun.

Edward will come with you, -- and, pray,
Put on with speed your woodland dress;
And bring no book: for this one day
We 'll give to idleness.

No joyless forms shall regulate
Our living calendar:
We from to-day, my Friend, will date
The opening of the year.

Love, now an universal birth,
From heart to heart is stealing,
From earth to man, from man to earth:
--It is the hour of feeling.

One moment now may give us more
Than years of toiling reason:
Our minds shall drink at every pore
The spirit of the season.

Some silent laws our hearts will make,
Which they shall long obey:
We for the year to come may take
Our temper from to-day.

And from the blessed power that rolls
About, below, above,
We 'll frame the measure of our souls:
They shall be tuned to love.

Then come, my Sister! come, I pray,
With speed put on your woodland dress;
And bring no book: for this one day
We 'll give to idleness.

Lines Written in Early Spring

by William Wordsworth

I heard a thousand blended notes,
While in a grove I sate reclined,
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

To her fair works did Nature link
The human soul that through me ran;
And much it grieved my heart to think
What man has made of man.

Through primrose tufts, in that green bower,
The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;
And ’tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.

The birds around me hopped and played,
Their thoughts I cannot measure:—
But the least motion which they made
It seemed a thrill of pleasure.

The budding twigs spread out their fan,
To catch the breezy air;
And I must think, do all I can,
That there was pleasure there.

If this belief from heaven be sent,
If such be Nature’s holy plan,
Have I not reason to lament
What man has made of man?

The Tables Turned

By William Wordsworth

Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books;
Or surely you'll grow double:
Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks;
Why all this toil and trouble?

The sun above the mountain's head,
A freshening lustre mellow
Through all the long green fields has spread,
His first sweet evening yellow.

Books! 'tis a dull and endless strife:
Come, hear the woodland linnet,
How sweet his music! on my life,
There's more of wisdom in it.

And hark! how blithe the throstle sings!
He, too, is no mean preacher:
Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your teacher.

She has a world of ready wealth,
Our minds and hearts to bless—
Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,
Truth breathed by cheerfulness.

One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.


Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—
We murder to dissect.

Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.

Up in Flames

"Sunlight Is the Best Disinfectant."

This is beautiful. Can't get enough of it.

Freebirds fly away
They just don't stay

On and on, the silence seems to carry on, you are the one

So, Fossil Collective is following me on Twitter. No biggie?
Above, I've attached their rather eerie but enlightening music video of On and On.

We'll be glowing in the dark

YES, STREAMING CHARLIE BROWN TODAY!
Already one of my favourite Coldplay songs... has been on my mixpod for almost a month now,
I think! Very, very content.

Don't Panic

Listening to Parachutes a couple days before Mylo Xyloto hits stores. Classic.

So if you ever feel neglected
And if you think that all is lost
I'll be counting up my demons, yeah
Hoping everything's not lost

Us Against the World

Title is the new song Coldplay's streaming today on iTunes!
It's lovely and soft... but builds up later, which makes it even more powerful.
Can't wait for the album.

And if we could float away
Fly up to the surface and just start again
And lift off before trouble
Just erodes us in the rain

By the way, the 'Paradise' video is out and it's so crazy and happy, I love it so. Elephants!

Anyway, the message I'm trying to get across with this post is:
1) Listen to 'Us Against the World' on iTunes.
2) Watch the video for 'Paradise.'
3) I'm incredibly excited for October 24th.

Mylo Xyloto

 

http://www.coldplay.com/newsdetail.php?id=823&page=0

So, the much anticipated Mylo Xyloto will be out October 24th, and not only has Coldplay created a 'personal MX artwork application,' they'll also be streaming a song a day until the 24th. So, I'm very excited and have downloaded iTunes for this very purpose.

Winter's coming -- I can smell, feel and see it. And, it's lovely.

Cambodia

First off, I'm listening to Swallowed by the Sea by Coldplay as I write, so my verbose message will be rather melancholy.

Well, I went to Cambodia for six lovely and
insightful days. I watched the world go by in a land I'd pinned my thumb on as a child to visit... never did I imagine the fundamental experience the trip would encapsulate until now.

Cambodia... it's exotic, urban and traditional. I arrived at night, and it seemed dark and musty. Then, morning came, and worked its wonders like always. Suddenly, Phnom Penh lost its luridness from the night before... it became France-like, the buildings so bright and colourful, the sky crisp -- and my heart lightened. There was the usual hustle-bustle of city life. Market venders with stalls stacked with fruits, splashed with colour, lined on the road. Bright yellow mangoes, oranges the colour of the setting sun, strawberries, ripe and red, and all other sorts of vegetables. The motorbikes would roar as they sped, and the bells of bikes would ring as cyclists passed our way.

It was on our seven-hour drive to Siem Reap that Cambodia touched my heart... the grass was greener than any I'd seen before -- the hue of the blades all massed into one was the true meaning of green, nothing else compared. And the sky... it was electric blue, with whiffs of cloud dashed across it in swirls and strokes, wide, sweeping and faint but precious. The trees -- they sprouted individually in their own territorial space of green grass, and the flood had run over the land so their reflection were mirrored -- mirrored so beautifully so you could only just differentiate between sky and sea. I fell in love with the view... the palm trees that sprouted its long bladed leaves in clusters, the clouded sky, and of course, the water, as always.

I tried new things -- I let a furry, live tarantula crawl up my arm, its legs tickling the inside of my elbow. Then, I tried a portion of a fried tarantula's leg. Crispy. The village children were so precious... they smiled widely... they lived in this magical place. And they loved it. They swam in their flooded back garden, they walked around topless, some even naked. They ran barefoot in the muddy roads I didn't dare walk. The squealed, leaped, and ran after us. Their childhood was so different from mine, yet beautiful in its own way.

We left the village at sunset. The grass was dark, but not the water or the sky it emulated. Brilliantly streaked yellow-orange from the gaps between the whirls of cloud in the sky, the water held the sap of the sky in its ripples and it couldn't be touched or held with hands, but I did so with my eyes and it stays with me now, the golden sap, in my mind, when I close my eyes, and when they're open. I'll never forget.

Then of course, there was the magical Angkor Wat. Broken, worn and ancient as it is, Angkor Wat is truly a wonder of the world. It's huge, stands majestically in its venerability, a powerful dedication to the Gods that throws its still image across the water, reflected as part of the Earth. It's domes rise pointed and spiraling towards the heavens shapes like the tip of lotus flowers. Everything in the temple was irrevocably connected to nature, to Earth.

Cambodia was magic.

The Bluest Eye

Toni Morisson writes beautifull, bitterly and powerfully, but in a different way than Ayn Rand. Whereas the beauty of the ideas conveyed in The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged astounded me, the words and descriptions in The Bluest Eye were so beautifully tuned it was painful to read.

All worth it.

“Misery colored by the greens and blues in my mother's voice took away all the grief out of the words and left me with a conviction that pain was not only endurable, it was sweet.”

“Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love a free man is never safe. There is no gift for the beloved. the lover alone possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glance of the lover’s inward eyes.”

“Lonely was much better than alone”

"Dandelions. A dart of affection leaps out from her to them. But they do not look at her and do not send love back. She thinks, 'They are ugly. They are weeds.' Preoccupied with that revelation, she trips on the sidewalk crack. Anger stirs and wakes in her; it opens its mouth, and like a hot-mouthed puppy, laps up the dredges of her shame. Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth."

“She left me the way people leave a hotel room. A hotel room is a place to be when you are doing something else. Of itself it is of no consequence to one’s major scheme. A hotel room is convenient. but its convenience is limited to the time you need it while you are in that particular town on that particular business; you hope it is comfortable, but prefer, rather, that it be anonymous. It is not, after all, where you live.
When you no longer need it, you pay a little something for its use; say, “Thank you, sir,” and when your business in that town is over, you go away from that room. Does anybody regret leaving a hotel room? Does anybody, who has a home, a real home somewhere, want to stay there? Does anybody look back with affection, or even disgust, at a hotel room when they leave it? You can only love or despise whatever living was done in that room. But the room itself? But you take a souvenir. Not, oh, not, to remember the room. To remember, rather, the time and the place of your business, your adventure. What can anyone feel for a hotel room? One doesn’t any more feel for a hotel room than one expects a hotel room to feel for its occupant."

“You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question.”

“They seemed to have taken all of their smoothly cultivated ignorance, their exquisitely learned self-hatred, their elaborately designed hopelessness and sucked it all up into a fiery cone of scorn that had burned for ages in the hollows of their minds - cooled - and spilled over lips of outrage, consuming whatever was in its path.”

“Jealousy we understood and thought natural...but envy was a strange, new feeling for us. And all the time we knew that Maureen Peal was not the Enemy and not worthy of such intense hatred. The Thing to fear was the Thing that made her beautiful, and not us.”

My favourite:

"These and other inanimate things she saw and experienced. They were real to her. She knew them. They were the codes and touchstones of the world, capable of translation and possession. She owned the crack that made her stumble; she owned the clumps of dandelions whose white heads, last fall, she had blown away; whose yellow heads, this fall she peered into. And owning them made her part of the world, and the world a part of her"

"But to find out the truth about how dreams die, one should never take the word of the dreamer."

“When all us left from down home and was waiting down by the depot for the truck, it was nighttime. June bugs was shooting everywhere. They lighted up a tree leaf, and I seen a streak of green every now and again. That was the last time I seen real june bugs. These things up here ain’t june bugs. They’s something else. Folks here call them fireflies. Down home they was different. But I recollect that streak of green. I recollect it well.”

An impression of loveliness

RIP Steve Jobs

I should have posted this sooner.
Steve Jobs was a true visionary... my family has never used or encouraged Apple products, but only now have I realized how much Steve Jobs reminds me of Ayn Rand and the heroes in her books... he never let his spark go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the note quite, the not yet, and the not all, or let the hero in his soul perish, leaving frustration for the life he deserved but had never been able to reach. The world he deserved was won -- it is real, it is possible, and it affects every one of us.


Rest in peace, Steve Jobs. There's an article by Yaron Brook, president and executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, where Brook writes:

Toward the end of the novel, when heroine Dagny Taggart is reunited with several men she had thought she would never see again, she says that the meeting is like a childhood dream "when you think that some day, in heaven, you will see those great departed men whom you had not seen on earth, and you choose, from all the past centuries, the great men you would like to meet."

One of the men replies: "And if you met those great men in heaven…. There's something you'd want to hear from them. [Y]ou'd want them to look at you and to say, 'Well done.' … All right, then. Well done, Dagny!"

If there were a heaven, filled with the great men of history, I have no doubt that they would say, "Well done, Steve Jobs."

Below are my favourite Steve Jobs quotes. They mean so much.

Death is the destination we all share, no one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be because death is very likely the single best invention of life.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

No one wants to die. Even people who wanna go to heaven don't wanna die to get there.

The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it.

"All men fear death. It’s a natural fear that consumes us all. We fear death because we feel that we haven’t loved well enough or loved at all, which ultimately are one and the same."

I have work but I don't want to complete it.
My winter mood is already settling in... I love winter so dearly, I feel like a child again, which is painful in some ways, of course.

Tears stream down your face when you lose something you can't replace

Makes me want to cry.