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Inspire me and others

Discussion in 'Tilted Life and Sexuality' started by cynthetiq, Jul 29, 2017.

  1. cynthetiq

    cynthetiq Administrator Staff Member Donor

    Location:
    New York City
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  2. Wildmermaid

    Wildmermaid Very Tilted

    Location:
    Pacific Northwest
    We have guests tonight so there is too much noise to watch this, but I know it is going to be wonderful! I'll watch it as soon as I can get to my earbuds lol. What a wonderful thread idea @cynthetiq ! <3 * hugs you!*
     
  3. rogue49

    rogue49 Tech Kung Fu Artist Staff Member

    Location:
    Baltimore/DC
    Once you almost died, you are reminded to live.
    it's happened to me thrice already...two quick close calls...one slow escape. (no BS, I'm not exaggerating)

    What inspires me, is when I see people who are disadvantaged and they are continuing and bettering themselves despite it.
    The really heavy person in the gym.
    A guy on the train with elephantiasis on his face commuting to work every day.
    A 80 year old woman that started working out at 67 and looks awesome and trains others.
    The guy with no legs who body builds and flips over larger tires than I know I could.
    The dog that hops and plays cheerfully despite not having two front legs.

    Even myself, when my gout acts up...doesn't stop me. Get up, get out of bed, go to work...despite the pain.
    Or I can't breathe because of my allergy, I change my life. Move to where I can breathe.

    One of my favorite phrases is, "Know your limits, then break them".
    You keep going, you keep moving.
    Sure, you get angry, upset, cry, depressed, etc...then you start over, fail better, get better, bit by bit.
    Try, try again, adjust, tweak, build.

    I like to help those who help themselves, empower themselves.
    My friend with a severe stuttering problem, couldn't get a job...I got him an internship, turned it into a FT gig, now he has a career.
    Teaching ladies and kids to defend themselves.
    Helping my friend to start building her knowledge to get a better job.

    Or even something like changing their life, their location, to make things better. Not stay in place.
    You go to it. It doesn't come to you. They make it happen.

    Life, it's not for wimps.
    It's humbling. (I enjoy laughing at myself)
    For those that don't understand...oh well, doesn't matter.

    I'm inspired by those who fight the good fight.
    No matter the context.
    Dance the dance.

    They don't need my thoughts. They need my good will.

    I know in the end, we are more complicated than a star.
    And we do more in a morning than a mountain in a millennium.

    I'm inspired by those who make the most despite the limits.
    These are the same as the fish that crawled out of the sea millions of years ago to become us...
     
    Last edited: Jul 30, 2017
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  4. Wildmermaid

    Wildmermaid Very Tilted

    Location:
    Pacific Northwest
    Poetry of the best kind. Cried from this, understood it, applaud you for it. Words are not my first language.
    --- Double Post Merged, Jul 30, 2017, Original Post Date: Jul 30, 2017 ---
    Such a fresh and vibrant perspective! Love her oh my goodness her sense of self, life, and quips full of gallows humor and experiences is awe inspiring!!! <3
    --- Double Post Merged, Jul 30, 2017 ---
    This is what saved my life. Found in a bathroom of what was supposed to be a sanctuary on one of the darkest nights of my life. Not hyperbole just the icky truth. I was 16 and this poem saved me. I know it by heart and say it aloud. For many years the reference to "God" was too much so I changed that part in my head. I'm an agnostic and in a better place so I don't find religion as offensive as I once did. I'm kind of embarrassed to share this as i feel like such a cliché much of the time, but it still inspires me to this day.

    Desiderata

    Go placidly amid the noise and haste
    and remember what peace there may be in silence
    As far as possible without surrender
    be on good terms with all persons
    Speak your truth quietly and clearly
    and listen to others
    even the dull and the ignorant
    they too have their story


    Avoid loud and aggressive persons
    they are vexations to the spirit
    If you compare yourself with others
    you may become vain and bitter
    for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself


    Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans

    Keep interested in your own career, however humble
    it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time
    Exercise caution in your business affairs
    for the world is full of trickery
    But let this not blind you to what virtue there is
    many persons strive for high ideals
    and everywhere life is full of heroism


    Be yourself
    Especially, do not feign affection
    Neither be cynical about love
    for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment
    it is as perennial as the grass


    Take kindly the counsel of the years
    gracefully surrendering the things of youth
    Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune
    But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings
    Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness
    Beyond a wholesome discipline
    be gentle with yourself


    You are a child of the universe
    no less than the trees and the stars
    you have a right to be here
    And whether or not it is clear to you
    no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should


    Therefore be at peace with God
    whatever you conceive Him to be
    and whatever your labors and aspirations
    in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul


    With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams
    it is still a beautiful world
    Be cheerful
    Strive to be happy

    ~Max Ehrmann
    Jan. 3, 1927
     
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  5. rogue49

    rogue49 Tech Kung Fu Artist Staff Member

    Location:
    Baltimore/DC
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  6. Wildmermaid

    Wildmermaid Very Tilted

    Location:
    Pacific Northwest
    13428565_1126624380731783_3909305277472960411_n.jpg
    --- Double Post Merged, Aug 1, 2017, Original Post Date: Aug 1, 2017 ---
    This is one of my favorite people on the internet Boogie2988 (Stephen Jay Williams)...he's undergoing gastric bypass surgery soon, and many thousands of people will be pulling for him. <3

    View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZ1cUup0ATg
     
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  7. ralphie250

    ralphie250 Fully Erect Donor

    Location:
    At work..
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  8. Wildmermaid

    Wildmermaid Very Tilted

    Location:
    Pacific Northwest
    This was in Macjournal from 2010 so no idea what website was source...
    Clive Barker on creativity

    In 1997 I attended a lecture by Clive Barker, sponsored by the Learning Annex, at the ANA Hotel in San Francisco. His topic was creativity -- how it affects our lives, and how we can nurture the creative impulse. The following is a fairly accurate paraphrase of the lecture, with direct quotes.

    Some reasons for making art:

    Creating a place of refuge.
    "I first went to these places in my heart as a place of refuge. I was an overweight, nearsighted, soon-to-be-gay adolescent. I made the world my way. Art can also be a refuge from hostility."

    The attainment of power
    ". . . Any kind of storytelling is an attainment of power -- the power to move, scare, confuse, and fascinate your audience."

    The imparting of wisdom or knowledge
    "I have something to tell which is profound and deep and belongs to me, because it could only come from me."

    Sacred experience
    ". . . There is nothing wrong with standing up and being counted as spiritual beings, as artists."

    Creating a life story.
    "I look back at things I've written and say, 'I could not get to that place now, and I'm so glad I wrote it down.'"

    Showing off
    ". . . Like what you do. Celebrate it!"

    Some suggestions about making art.

    "Give the truth. Ask yourself, 'How do I get to be most purely myself?' The audience wants the real thing. Go and look for the real thing in yourself, however intensely unpleasant sometimes that can be. Express the things mom told you you shouldn't say - sexual urges, anger, despair."

    "Gather experience. . . Look at what you should not look at. A feeling of anxiety is the sure and certain evidence that you should do this." Barker performed a dissection at a funeral home, for the sake of understanding death at close hand.

    "Enjoy the freedom to be wrong. If you're driving a bus, you don't have that freedom." In other word, if your decisions are loaded up with family, friends, teachers and other critics you won't feel able to take a 'wrong' turn. Every move becomes freighted with responsibility.

    "Pay attention to small details - they're important. Sometimes it's the small details that make an artwork more truthful."

    "Be raw. The more slick, finished, pre-digested a thing is, the less likely it is to move you."

    Barker believes that drugs and other mind-altering substances will interfere with the creative impulse. He includes prescription drugs, and gives us an example: at his most depressed, when working on the novella Revelations, Barker tried Prozac. His mood leveled off, but he couldn't write as well. The creative impulse seemed muffled. His experience, and there was a general agreement from the audience, was that taking drugs or drinking may give you an occasional flash of insight while you're enjoying art as a passive observer (like smoking pot and watching a movie), but they won't help you create that work of art. Your energy or impulse will be sapped.
    Barker found that writing was a much more effective way to combat depression. His succinct analysis: "Prose: 1, Prozac: 0."

    "Make it easy to begin. Break off in the middle of a sentence. If you are at a difficult place, move on and start work in an easier place before you break off. Leave your space clear and have your favorite music, your tea or whatever, and your tools ready for when you come back. These are the things that get me to my desk." Barker also suggests setting a time limit for working. If it's open-ended it's harder to begin. And turn off the phone!
    "My touchstone is, 'You don't leave the desk.' I write 2,600 words a day, no matter what, good or bad. As Steven King says -'If you write five pages a day for a year, you have a novel.' If my work is not up to standard, can I be undefeated by that? I can survive the feeling that my work today is inferior, because I know I will write again tomorrow. Every day that you make something, that's what you made. It's probably not as good as you think it is at the time. It's probably not as bad as you think. It's from where you were that day. . . like a page from a journal. 'I am able to be, and my being is expressed by making this mark. Not that mark or another mark, but this mark."

    In his early twenties, the impossibility of achieving an 'abstract excellence' made Barker self-destructive. The idea of comparing his work to, say, Picasso's Guernica, seemed to defeat him from the start. He says, "An abstract perfection is a moving target. Our business is to make things. Let other people judge. There are days when you're not writing a Mozart requiem. . . when what you want is a jingle. But there is no abstract hierarchy with Mozart at the top, and the Supremes at the bottom, with Cosi fan Tutti at one end, and the Ring Cycle at the other. A jingle can be as truthful as a requiem. . . Hierarchies are antithetical to the business of making art."
    Barker took some time to discuss the relative quality of 'success' for a creative person, depending on one's goal. He remembered a quote, "The three T's are most important to success: Taste, Talent, Tenacity. You need a minimum of two of these to make it."

    -- Li Gardiner
     
  9. cynthetiq

    cynthetiq Administrator Staff Member Donor

    Location:
    New York City
    The Desdirata hung on my wall next to my bed for most of my youth. It has a special place in my in my heart.
     
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  10. cynthetiq

    cynthetiq Administrator Staff Member Donor

    Location:
    New York City
    WILL POWER
    THERE is no chance, no destiny, no fate,
    Can circumvent, or hinder, or control
    The firm resolve of a determined soul.
    Gifts count for nothing ; will alone is great ;
    All things give way before it soon or late,
    What obstacle can stay the mighty force
    Of the sea-seeking river in its course,
    Or cause the ascending orb of day to wait ?
    Each well-born soul must win what it deserves.
    Let the fool prate of Luck. The fortunate
    Is he whose earnest purpose never swerves
    Whose slightest action or inaction serves
    The one great aim.
    Why, even death stands still
    And waits an hour, sometimes, for such a will.

    —ELLA WHEELER WILCOX.

    Success 1.1 (Dec. 1897): 12.

    Courtesy of John M. Freiermuth.

    Will Power - An Ella Wheeler Wilcox Poem
     
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  11. cynthetiq

    cynthetiq Administrator Staff Member Donor

    Location:
    New York City
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  12. Wildmermaid

    Wildmermaid Very Tilted

    Location:
    Pacific Northwest
    • Like Like x 1
  13. cynthetiq

    cynthetiq Administrator Staff Member Donor

    Location:
    New York City
  14. Wildmermaid

    Wildmermaid Very Tilted

    Location:
    Pacific Northwest
  15. Wildmermaid

    Wildmermaid Very Tilted

    Location:
    Pacific Northwest
    She's been one of my inspirations for the last 10 years (at least). She has a saucy perspective, unique viewpoint of the world, and combines the playful and erotic. I aspire to be more like her, and count her as a role model. I don't agree with every judgement (especially porn and selfies) she makes in this article, but respect her reasons behind her assertions nonetheless.
    Ellen von Unwerth: ‘Let’s photograph girls enjoying life’
     
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  16. redux

    redux Very Tilted

    Location:
    Foggy Bottom
    I was talking about this earlier tonight with a cousin who is visiting DC. The last time I saw her was 20 years ago when we had a family reunion at the Holocaust Museum in DC at the opening of an exhibit on the Kovno Ghetto.

    My mother's family is from Kovno, Lithuania, most of whom immigrated to the US at the turn of the 20th century. But some remained and were part of a large Jewish population (30-40,000) in Kovno before WW II. When Germany invaded Lithuania (after the Russians), the Jews in and around the city were rounded up and restricted to what was called the Kovno Ghetto. It was a step above a concentration cape and a cousin (who I did not know but was living in Michigan at the time of the reunion) had lived in the Kovno Ghetto, was active in the underground, survived the Kovno Ghetto and concentration camp. Of the 30-40,00 Jews in Kovno, only about 500 survived the German occupation. She was asked to speak at the opening of the exhibit.

    Being local in DC, I helped organize the family reunion. Relatives from across the US, Canada, England, France, and Israel attended

    A rabbi who also attended spoke about it in an interview in 1999:

    GW: My father’s side of the family came from a suburb of Kovno, which was called Wolpa. There is a theory, a tradition rather, that the family came originally from Italy where the name was V-O-L-P-E, which means fox in Italian. When the family migrated to northern Europe the Rabbi Gerald Isaac Wolpe Mss. 1035-231 2 V became W because that was the V sound. One of the interesting theories is that the family actually descended from a convert. A soldier in the Napoleonic Army, who retreated from Russia as did so many of the French soldiers, and we know that many of them were shielded by Jewish families who hated the Russians. Many French soldiers were sheltered by Jews. The story was it was in different parts of the family; they had no connection with one another—that’s why I assume there is some truth to it. He fell in love with a Jewish woman, became a ger, and married her and the name descended that way. We just had a reunion of the Wolpe family where four hundred people came from all over the world. It’s quite extensive, with one underlying theme that seems to run through the entire family—many famous musicians and composers. There seems to be that strain in the family, a great rabbinic tradition....

    DR: Just to go back a bit, tell me a little more about the family in Wolpa near Kovno. Am I saying it right?

    GW: Yes.

    DR: You said there was a great rabbinic tradition?

    GW: Yes, there were rabbis. There is a lineal descendant from Vilna Gaon. Of course, everybody is a descendent from Vilna Gaon, but we’re descended from his brother’s side of the family. There was a famous family in South Africa called the Schlesinger family—quite wealthy—they were cousins, a very large family in South Africa, and many of them have migrated of course. South African Jewry is disappearing. So there was that rabbinic tradition. What else? I

    ’ll tell you one very quick story that might help you in giving you a background because I think it’s so poignant. At this family reunion—it was held at the Holocaust Museum. The reason it was held at the Holocaust Museum is that they had an exhibit there on Kovno and they wanted our family to represent the families that were destroyed in the Holocaust. The guest of honor was a cousin of mine who had gone through the entire Shoah, in a Kovno ghetto and in a concentration camp. She’s an amazing lady. She’s in her seventies and she gave a speech. Now we all knew her story, but it was absolutely heart-rending. She said that, at the end, the Germans took the surviving Jews and took them out to the North Sea and threw them into the sea, so that the oncoming Russians would not find any of them to testify against the Germans and the Lithuanians, who had cooperated with them. But a British gunboat came by and saw these people in the water and started pulling them out of the water. As they pulled her out of the water—she was holding onto her sister—her sister fell from her grasp and drowned on the last day. How horrible that was.

    Then she said the following, which I have never forgotten, she said, “And I had to decide how to get revenge on these people”—very soft spoken, and we were chilled. She said, “I decided there was only one way to get revenge on what they had done to me and that was to become a Hebrew teacher. Every time I taught a Jewish child, that was my revenge against the Nazis.” It was so vivid. It was so powerful, and that’s what she did. For forty years here, she has been a Hebrew teacher.

    I got to meet cousins. There’s a world famous composer, Stefan Wolpe, who has been written up in The New York Times. The inventor of clinical behaviorism was a cousin, Dr. Joseph Wolpe, who is very well known. There have been some rather famous people in the family in many different areas, but mainly music. Music seems to have been found everywhere. Larry Adler, who is a famous musician, his mother was a Wolpe. Even Al Jolson was supposed to have had Wolpe blood in him. I don’t always boast about that, but that’s okay. It’s a very interesting family. The people whom I met are very interesting people. There is a cousin who is the head of the department of English at the American University, and a well-known poetess, Myra Sklarew. So, you know, it’s eclectic in many different areas....

    http://fedora.library.cofc.edu:8080/fedora/objects/lcdl:11848/datastreams/PDF1/content
     
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  17. MeltedMetalGlob

    MeltedMetalGlob Resident Loser Donor

    Location:
    Who cares, really?
    Interesting articles on this website- a few in particular involve some well-known Hollywood celebrities (Morgan Freeman, Keanu Reeves and Hong Kong star Chow Yun Fat to name a few) and their use of their own wealth to make a positive difference:
    Inspirational

    (I could have sworn I saw this on @rogue49 's FB page, but when I went back to doublecheck I could no longer find it. Trying to give credit where it's due, but I apologize if I was mistaken.)
     
  18. ralphie250

    ralphie250 Fully Erect Donor

    Location:
    At work..
    reminds me of the pitcher for the angels (I think it was the angles) he only had one hand

    Jim Abbott - Wikipedia
     
  19. MeltedMetalGlob

    MeltedMetalGlob Resident Loser Donor

    Location:
    Who cares, really?
    I found this inspiring, not mention particularly moving:
    [​IMG]

    (and yes, I could have posted this in the coronavirus thread, but it's nice to resurrect these old threads, no?) :)
     
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  20. cynthetiq

    cynthetiq Administrator Staff Member Donor

    Location:
    New York City
    Buddah would tell his soldiers about the dash. He was giving me advice one day explaining to me that I needed to stop the bullshit I was doing and get on with life and live the life I'm supposed to live.

    He earned his dash and stamped the end in 2020. :(



    THE DASH
    the poem by Linda Ellis

    I read of a man who stood to speak at the funeral of a friend. He referred to the dates on the tombstone from the beginning… to the end.

    He noted that first came the date of birth and spoke of the following date with tears, but he said what mattered most of all was the dash between those years.

    For that dash represents all the time they spent alive on earth and now only those who loved them know what that little line is worth.

    For it matters not, how much we own, the cars… the house… the cash. What matters is how we live and love and how we spend our dash.

    So think about this long and hard; are there things you’d like to change? For you never know how much time is left that still can be rearranged.

    To be less quick to anger and show appreciation more and love the people in our lives like we’ve never loved before.

    If we treat each other with respect and more often wear a smile… remembering that this special dash might only last a little while.

    So when your eulogy is being read, with your life’s actions to rehash, would you be proud of the things they say about how you lived your dash?
     
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