Category: Inspiration

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 read in 2022. What were 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 – READ September 2022
  4. Fleishman is in Trouble – Taffy Brodesser-Akner – READ August 2022
  5. Deacon King Kong – James McBride – READ June 2022
  6. Kafka by the Shore – Haruki Murakami –READ December 2022
  7. The Sentence – Louise Erdrich – READ December 2022

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. Nice White Ladies – Jessie Daniels – READ October 2022
  6. Broken Open – Elizabeth Lesser – READ November 2022
  7. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches – Audre Lorde – READ December 2022

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 2018-2021

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. The 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
  21. The Girl on the Train – Paul Hawkins
  22. The Secret Life of Bees – Sue Monk Kidd
  23. Crazy Rich Asians, China Rich Girlfriend & Rich People Problems – Kevin Kwan
  24. Indian Killer – Sherman Alexie
  25. Men without Women – Haruki Murakami
  26. Dune – Frank Herbert
  27. Daisy Jones & the Six: A Novel – Taylor Jenkins Reid
  28. Snow Crash – Neil Stephenson
  29. Slaughterhouse 5 – Kurt Vonnegut
  30. The Bell Jar– Sylvia Plath
  31. Evvie Drake Starts Over – Linda Holmes
  32. Klara and the Sun – Kazuo Ishiguro

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
  22. Flow – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
  23. The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
  24. Hillbilly Elegy – J.D. Vance
  25. The Everything Store – Brad Stone
  26. Gang Leader for the Day – Sudhir Venkatesh
  27. Night – Elie Wiesel
  28. White Rage – Carol Anderson
  29. Funny in Farsi – Firoozeh Dumas

Music for Inspiration – 2021

In the midst of COVID, I started leaning on music to find inspiration, release, escape and enjoyment. My focus leaned towards albums. I am fascinated by the storytelling component of a full album. I’ve focused on exploring mostly LPs (Long play records – usually 8 songs or more) with some EPs (extended play records – usually 4-6 songs). Some come as recommendations, some are stuck in my head when I wake up, and other times I explore an artist I’ve recently discovered or haven’t listed to in a number of years.

This is year 2 of exploring albums and different artists. 2020 full list is available here. See this post for my top 10 albums of 2020. New albums released in 2021 are noted.

  • Saturday, Jan 2: Madvillain, Madlib, MF DOOM – Madvillainy
  • Sunday, Jan 3: SAULT – Untitled (Rise)
  • Monday, Jan 4: FKJ – French Kiwi Juice
  • Tuesday, Jan 5: BERWYN – DEMOTAPE/VEGA
  • Wednesday, Jan 6: Amber Mark – 3:33am
  • Thursday, Jan 7: Nbdy – Admissions
  • Friday, Jan 8: SAMA’ – SAMA’ – BBC RADIO 1 ESSENTIAL MIX – 2019.07.06 (set)
  • Monday, Jan 11: Sublime – Sublime
  • Tuesday, Jan 12: Jim Bryson, The Weakerthans – The Falcon Lake Incident
  • Wednesday, Jan 13: Michael Franks – The Art of Tea
  • Thursday, Jan 14: Isaac Hayes – Hot Buttered Soul
  • Friday, Jan 15: Dolly Parton – Coat of Many Colors
  • Tuesday, Jan 19: Brian McKnight – Anytime
  • Wednesday, Jan 20: Cristoph – On the Inside
  • Thursday, Jan 21: Gogol Bordello – Gypsy Punks: Underdog World Strikes
  • Friday, Jan 22: 112 – Part III
  • Monday, Jan 25: Kelsey Lu – Blood
  • Tuesday, Jan 26: Dwson – Impulsiv
  • Wednesday, Jan 27: Yves Tumor – Heaven To A Tortured Mind
  • Thursday, Jan 28: Maxwell – Now
  • Friday, Jan 29: Jack Johnson – In Between Dreams
  • Monday, Feb 1: Weezer – OK Human [2021]
  • Tuesday, Feb 2: Santino Le Saint – Rage of Angels
  • Wednesday, Feb 3: Madlib – Sounds Ancestors [2021]
  • Thursday, Feb 4: Flume – Flume: Deluxe Edition
  • Friday, Feb 5: Moon Boots – First Landing
  • Monday, Feb 8: SG Lewis – Dawn
  • Tuesday, Feb 9: Foo Fighters – Medicine at Midnight [2021]
  • Wednesday, Feb 10: islandman – Kaybola (Deluxe Vesion)
  • Thursday, Feb 11: Against All Logic – 2017-2019
  • Friday, Feb. 12: Bonobo – Late Night Tales: Bonobo
  • Tuesday, Feb 16: Black Coffee – Subconsciously [2021]
  • Wednesday, Feb 17: Tank – Savage
  • Thursday, Feb 18: Sam Shure – Laconia
  • Friday, Feb 19: Keith Jarrett – Budapest Concert (Live)
  • Monday, Feb 22: Bob Moses – Desire
  • Tuesday, Feb 23: U-Roy – Dread in A Babylon
  • Wednesday, Feb 24: Arlo Parks – Collapsed in Sunbeams
  • Thursday, Feb 25: Bicep – Isles [2021]
  • Friday, Feb. 26: Hoody – Alpine Grooves, Vol 7 (Kristallhutte)
  • Monday, March 1: Idris Elba – Murdah Loves John
  • Tuesday, March 2: Phoebe Bridger – Punisher
  • Wednesday, March 3: Meg Myers – Sorry
  • Thursday, March 4: Crossfade – Crossfade
  • Friday, March 5: Bunny Wailer – Blackheart Man
  • Monday, March 8: Kings of Leon – When you see yourself [2021]
  • Tuesday, March 9: U2 – The Joshua Tree
  • Wednesday, March 10: Gregoire Maret, Roman Collins, Bill Frisell – Americana