Category: Blog

The Invitation – Oriah Mountain Dreamer

It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living.
I want to know what you ache for and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.

It doesn’t interest me how old you are.
I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love for your dream for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn’t interest me what “planets are squaring your moon.”
I want to know if you have touched the centre of your own sorrow if you have been opened by life’s betrayals or have become shrivelled and closed
from fear of further pain.
I want to know if you can sit with pain mine or your own without moving to “hide it” or “fade it” or “fix it.”

I want to know if you can be with joy mine or your own if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful to “be realistic” to “remember the limitations of being human.”

It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me is true.
I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself.
If you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul.

I want to know if you can be faithful and therefore be trustworthy.
I want to know if you can see beauty even when it is not pretty every day.
And if you can source your own life from God’s presence.

I want to know if you can live with failure yours and mine and still stand at the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, “Yes!”

It doesn’t interest me to know where you live or how much money you have.
I want to know if you can get up after the night of grief and despair weary and bruised to the bone and do what needs to be done to feed the children.

It doesn’t interest me who you know or how you came to be here.
I want to know if you will stand in the centre of the fire with me and not shrink back.

It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom you have studied.
I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away.

I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.

2022 Reading List

Here are the books I am planning to read in 2022. Additional titles will be added. What are you excited to read this year?

FICTION

  1. The Sellout – Paul Beatty – READ April 2022
  2. Must Love Otters – Eliza Gordon – READ April 2022
  3. Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
  4. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values – Robert M. Pirsig
  5. Fleishman is in Trouble – Taffy Brodesser-Akner
  6. Ready Player One – Ernest Cline
  7. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
  8. Good Omens: The nice & accurate prophecies of Anges Nutter, Witch – Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman
  9. Lamb – Christopher Moore
  10. Walkaway – Cory Doctorow
  11. Play it as it Lays – Joan Didion

NON-FICTION

  1. The 4-Hour Work Week – Tim Ferriss – READ January 2022
  2. Tiny Beautiful Things– Cheryl Strand – READ May 2022
  3. Awakening: Conversations with the Masters – Anthony de Mello – READ MAY 2022
  4. Untamed – Glennon Doyle – READ May 2022
  5. I Feel Bad About my Neck – and other thoughts on being a women – Nora Ephron
  6. Your Voice in My Head: A Memoir – Emma Forest
  7. Recapture the Rapture: Rethinking God, Sex, and Death in a World That’s Lost Its Mind – Jamie Wheal
  8. Ayurveda: The Science of Self Healing: A Practical Guide – Vasant Lad
  9. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches – Audre Lorde
  10. The Hindu-Yogi Science of Breath – Yogi Ramacharaka
  11. In the Land of Men: A Memoir – Adrienne Miller
  12. Between the World and Me – Ta-Nehisi Coates
  13. Golden Gates: The Housing Crisis and a Reckoning for the American Dream – Conor Dougherty
  14. The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business – Charles Duhigg
  15. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness – Michelle Anderson
  16. Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle – Emily Nagoski
  17. Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future – Peter Thiel
  18. We Do This ‘Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (Abolitionist Papers) – Mariame Kaba
  19. High Performance Habits: How Extraordinary People Become That Way – Brendon Burchard
  20. Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion – Jia Tolentino
  21. Sex at Dawn – Christopher Ryan, Cacilda Jetha
  22. Flow – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
  23. Invisible women: data bias in a world designed for men – Caroline Criado Perez
  24. Personal next: what can we learn from elite athletes navigating career transition – Melinda Harrison
  25. Tribes – Seth Godin
  26. Small is Beautiful – E.F. Schumacher
  27. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World – Cal Newport
  28. Broken Open – Elizabeth Lesser
  29. The Biology of Belief – Bruce Lipton

How I Became a Madman (Prologue) by Kahlil Gibran

You ask me how I became a madman. It happened thus: One day, long before many gods were born, I woke from a deep sleep and found all my masks were stolen,—the seven masks I have fashioned and worn in seven lives,—I ran maskless through the crowded streets shouting, “Thieves, thieves, the cursed thieves.”

Men and women laughed at me and some ran to their houses in fear of me.

And when I reached the marketplace, a youth standing on a house-top cried, “He is a madman.” I looked up to behold him; the sun kissed my own naked face for the first time. For the first time the sun kissed my own naked face and my soul was inflamed with love for the sun, and I wanted my masks no more. And as if in a trance I cried, “Blessed, blessed are the thieves who stole my masks.”

Thus I became a madman.

And I have found both freedom and safety in my madness; the freedom of loneliness and the safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us.

But let me not be too proud of my safety. Even a Thief in a jail is safe from another thief.

The Madman: His Parables and Poems. by Kahlil Gibran

Some of my Favourite Reads of 2020-2021

Reading is my preferred way of consuming stories and media.
Here’s a list of some favourite reads (in no particular order) of the past 2 years

FICTION

  1. 1Q84 – Haruki Murakami *my favourite read of 2020
  2. Where the Crawdads Sing – Delia Owens
  3. My Sister, the Serial Killer: A Novel – Oyinkan Braithwaite
  4. Alchemist – Paulo Coelho
  5. Conversations with Friends: A Novel – Sally Rooney
  6. The Night Circus – Erin Morgenstern
  7. White Teeth – Zadie Smith
  8. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
  9. A Visit from the Goon Squad – Jennifer Egan
  10. The Big Sleep (Philip Marlowe series Book 1) – Raymond Chandler
  11. Less (Pulitzer Prize) – Andrew Sean Greer
  12. The Sympathizer (Pulitzer Prize)- Viet Thanh Nguyen
  13. Homegoing – Yaa Gyasi
  14. Crazy Rich Asians – Kevin Kwan
  15. Where’d You Go, Bernadette – Maria Semple
  16. Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe – Benjamin Alire Sáenz
  17. Beautiful You – Chuck Palaniuk
  18. Parable of the Sower – Octavia E. Butler
  19. The Rosie Project – Graeme Simsion
  20. The Martian – Andy Weir

Non-Fiction

  1. Bad Feminist: Essays – Roxane Gay
  2. White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide – Carol Anderson
  3. Dear Girls – Ali Wong
  4. Born to Run – Christopher McDougall
  5. Open: An Autobiography – Andre Agassi
  6. Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup – John Carreyrou
  7. The Last Girl – Nadia Murad
  8. The Girl Who Smiled Beads – Clemantine Wamariya
  9. Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law – Haben Girma
  10. My Horizontal Life – Chelsea Handler
  11. Awareness – Anthony de Mello
  12. The Divided Mind: The Epidemic of Mindbody Disorders – John E. Sarno
  13. The Body Keeps the Score – Bessel van der Kolk 
  14. Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison – Piper Kerman
  15. Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself – Melody Beattie
  16. Everybody lies – Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
  17. The Art of Asking – Amanda Palmer
  18. The War of Art – Steven Pressfield
  19. Being Mortal – Atul Gawande
  20. Modern Romance – Aziz Ansari
  21. Bossy Pants – Tina Fey

Play the Role

If you want to be loved,
Darling, just play the role.

Remember, I decide your value.
You are only here for how I need you, nothing else.
Your comfort… not my concern, I’m sure you’ll figure it out.

How naïve are you?
Oh perfect… you don’t listen to your boundaries.
Use and abuse?
Of course you won’t pushback.

You keep telling me you want to be loved,
But then you push back and tell me I’m doing it wrong.
Don’t you get how this works.
You don’t get a say in how you want to be loved.
Your pleasure isn’t my concerned.

Now you want to hold power and be in control.
I’ll make you pay.
I’ll use those feelings, that care, compassion, and empathy to destroy you.

Did you forget?
My feelings are your responsibility.
Your job is to take care of me first.
How dare you push back and think yourself worth is even close to mine

How dare you make me uncomfortable.

You do not get to be the comfortable one.
Show me how much you actually love me.
How dare you enjoy anything that diminishes me.
You will be punished if this makes me look bad.

How dare you enjoy something at my expense.
How dare you challenge me. You are not equal.
Take it, take all the abuse, more, you deserve it.

I’m so sorry.
You should have just listened.
You don’t know better.
You’ll do better next time.

If you want to be loved,
Darling, just play the role.

I Love you but…

I miss you and don’t want to not have you in my life.
You want me how you want me.
Not how I want me.

How do I keep me when I try to exist with you?
Can I have you in my life and still live my best life?
Are you taking up space or empowering me to grown?
You want to be what I need, but in action (practice), cannot be who I need.

I love you but…
I love you, but the time is wrong.
I love you, but I’m struggling to let go.

I love you, but I love me more.



You Could be Loved

Learning and defining how you want to be loved
1. Come to terms that it is possible to be loved – you are lovable and you can be loved.
2. Value yourself enough to know that you deserved to be loved – exactly how you want and need to be loved.
3. Spend the time needed to figure out what being loved truly means to you- how do want to be loved?
4. Advocate for what you need and teach others how you want to be loved – learn to not stay in relationships where you are not getting the love you need and are asking for.

  • Keukenhof, NLD 2018
    Keukenhof, NLD 2018
  • Philadelphia, USA 2018
    Philadelphia, USA 2018
  • Toronto, CAN 2020
    Toronto, CAN 2020
  • Los Angeles, USA 2017
    Los Angeles, USA 2017
  • Los Angeles, USA 2020
    Los Angeles, USA 2020
  • Toronto, CAN 2020
    Toronto, CAN 2020
How do we expect to be loved if we haven’t spent time figuring it out for ourselves?

How do I want to be loved?
I want to feel safe, fearless, courageous, inspired, curious, playful, secure, valued, worthy, enough, strong and brave.
I want to be loved for who I am.

Maybe this time it will be different

The harder he pushes, the worse he fucks.
That aggression, so relentless,
Yet that thrust, so limited, so underwhelming.
The talk, the insistence, the pressure,
I give in, my brain convinces me it’s just easier this way.

All for….
Disappointment, emptiness, sadness.
One minute of ecstasy?
Was that what that was supposed to be?
Unclear, as I left my body the moment my brain gave in.

I lay there now, tossed aside.
Needs unmet,
Needs not communicated, not heard.
Resentful.
Angry at myself.

I let it happen again.
I did not respect my boundaries.
This weakness, to fall back into behaviours that don’t serve me.
For what?
To believe that this is my only value.

I know better,
I deserve better,
Yet I struggle to believe that this is not my only worth.

Storytelling

What if the world is here solely for me.
What if that was the approach I took… ‘The world is mine!’
Where the world is as amazing as I want it to be.
It is created for me.
To challenge, execute, inspire and to share.

What is it that finally makes us feel that we’re valuable enough and worth it
That we deserve to share our story?

If I cannot find value within, then it is unreasonable to expect others to find any value either.
Then once I figure out my value, how do I let go of ego, and forgive my younger self?

“Never be a prisoner of your past. It was just a lesson, not a life sentence.”

I love and embrace that what I know today may be completely wrong tomorrow
… and guess what?
That it is ok and I should not be ashamed that I may have come from a less informed place.

You can’t give people what they want, but you can give them something else.
You can give them understanding.

Amanda Palmer