QUOTE FOR THE DAY

You can't use up creativity.  The more you use, the more you have.

Maya Angelou

QUOTE FOR THE DAY

There is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost.

Martha Graham

GAY MARRIAGE

I have struggled with this issue for a while, not with how I feel about it, but with how I feel about the people who are not gay yet feel so strongly about it.  I think of them as bigots and tend to judge and dislike them for that...and that makes me think because I am always interested when I find myself being judgemental.

I struggle with the concept that these "non homosexual folk" are oftentimes basing their hatred, their desire to reduce other people's rights, their belief that other human beings are somehow "less than", on their religion and my struggle then is based on the hypocrisy I see in the notion of all religions usually teaching love and then seeing this teaching being expressed as bigotry which can never ever be an expression of  love yet somehow the very religious cannot see to that point - despite all their apparent spirituality.

I am appalled by the notion that there are people out there who think that, whatever their spiritual belief is, it supersedes fundamental human rights, actual civil rights.  Rights do not need to be defined in a book about religion, they can be felt at core and anyone who pretends that they cannot tell what is right from wrong, what every being accrues to themselves merely by being without first reading the rules or definitions from whatever their spiritual mantra is, is being disingenuous and, I will go so far as to say, willfully ignorant..  I find the fact that they bully people with a different sexual inclination, from that deficient moral base, abhorrent and yes, it absolutely is bullying in my book.

I console myself by remembering that we have very recently disposed of both gender and racial discrimination (politically correctly speaking anyway - whether they are truly disposed of or not is the grist for a different mill post to this one :) ) and that bigotry based on sexual preference is probably just the new topic and will accordingly be dealt with in the same way ..... eventually.  Still, we call ourselves evolved and I have to wonder about the arrogance of that taking our treatment of our fellow members of society, no matter how different, into account.  We also like to call ourselves faithful and I am very troubled by how the definition of being faithful to some religion or other somehow incorporates discriminating against anything that is contradictory to that - do people not realize that the mantras they are so fond of spouting are man and not God made?.

Lastly, I am troubled by the fact that in my very passionate tirade about bigotry and bullying, I sense an inclination  to bigotry within myself - I am a bigot about bigots - therein lies both the irony and the trouble with being judgemental ....

MOTIVATION

Each of us has been put on Earth with the ability to do something well.  We cheat ourselves and the world if we don't use that ability as best we can.

George Allen

Quote for today

You become more divine as you become more creative.  All the religions of the world have said that God is the creator.  I don't know whether he is the creator or not, but one thing I know, the more creative you become, the more godly you become.  When your creativity comes to a climax, when your whole life becomes creative,. you live in God.  So he must be the creator because people who have been creative have been closest to him.  Love what you do.  Be meditative while you are doing it - whatsoever it is!

Osho

QUOTE FOR THE DAY

The highest prize we can expect for creative work is the joy of being creative.  Creative effort spent for any other reason than the joy of being in that light-filled space, love, god, whatever we want to call it, is lacking in integrity ...

Marianne Williamson

QUOTE FOR THE DAY

To be creative means to be in love with life.  You can be creative only if you love life enough that you want to enhance it's beauty, you want to bring a little more music to it, a little more poetry to it, a little more dance to it.


Osho

Quote for today

"We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and along these sympathetic fibers, our actions run as causes and return to us as results."
– Herman Melville

If Jason Calacanis is against Apple, who can be for it?

I read this blog post a little while ago and, bizarre as it probably is considering the subject matter, it did get me to thinking, mainly I suspect, because I dislike any form of unjustified elitism and I regard the whole Apple thingy as just such an unjustified snobbery.

My first thought is about just how expensive Apple actually is .... for everything ... even for music you buy from them nevermind their PC's, operating system and laptops.  Yet, people seem to be more than happy to pay to buy what seems to have effectively been brainwashed into them as a sort of cool form of hippie elitism.

I find this amusing actually.  Anyone who knows anything about real hippies knows that they are rather shabby and against the flow sort of characters but Apple, by it's profits, is neither of those things.  People, however, continue to buy into the comeback story of the poor orphan child which floundered two decades ago and has "miraculously" recovered.  I too find this tale touching, but not when it is to the tune of a couple of thousand dollars to get something a good few other cheaper devices can do for me - that seems to "ring" false somehow.

My husband had bought into the hype though and bought an INCREDIBLY expensive, top of the line, best of the best, Macbook Pro three years ago (he really is an elitist :))  Said "Pro" has been through 3 batteries now - two of them actually expanded with heat and have warped the casing  and one just upped and died for reasons which remain unknown.  Said Mac has now been given to the child - yes, the child - which is sort of wasteful and sad if you think about it and is most definitely not elitist or hippie-like.

I have to give it to the Apple folks though, they know how to market, o boy o boy but they do!!  I am regularly astonished at the fanaticism one evinces from a closet Apple fan by ranting about an exploding battery and about how much mental power is exerted to justify such things nevermind the energy devoted to demonizing PC's and that demon of computing, Microsoft, when said closet elitists defensively respond.

To me, this is a car type debate.  Being a woman, I just want a car that is reasonably priced, safe, reliable and not like a tapeworm ridden dependant with regards to gas - I feel the same way about computers .... clothes too believe it or not and yes, I know this makes me somewhat of a rarity.

Labels do not maketh the man and nor do the car or the any kind of machine and so this whole business of setting oneself up, backside exposed so the jeans label can be seen, or feet in the air so the colour of the sole can be seen or my favourite, and the most pertinent to this post, in the window facing outward so that the make of your laptop can be seen in any given dingy coffee shop.  I find all of those behaviors sort of tacky and purpose defeating most especially when for example Apple, holds itself up to be the very antithesis of that sort of thing.

I drove a Toyota and I loved my Dell.   I would never move from Windows to Leopard and by God, I think Office is a magnificent set of pieces of software. I have never had a Dell battery explode nor have I paid what I consider to be a small fortune for any software or music that I own (though I do indeed have an IPod).

That typed then, guess which side of the fence I fall on which brings this particular little tirade to a close :)