Beautifully Broken Issue #26: Connection & Disconnection

IDEAS, ART & WISDOM TO REPAIR OUR BEAUTIFUL WORLD

Sep 16, 2024

Happy Saturday (or in this case Tuesday as I'm running late this week)! Welcome to Beautifully Broken Issue 26: Connection & Disconnection

IDEAS: Connection & Disconnection

If we connect to the internet and virtual life, what are we disconnecting from in order for that to take place? Everyday life perhaps, which is perhaps filled with pain, fear, complication. We seek to disconnect and distract ourselves by connecting to a virtual life that is becoming increasingly filled with the same pain, fear and complication as normal life, except it's delivered in a way that is stimulating and addictive. Where we sought escape and relief, we find only more of the same suffering.

If everyday life is filled with pain, fear and complication can we then say that this is normal, natural? That we just have to learn to accept it? If this were the case, then why do we need to escape to something else?

There's a feeling deep within us that the suffering of everyday life is not how life should be. We long for freedom, liberation. How to realise these feelings? The answer to that question is, I believe, our life work. Each of us must build the world we feel inside.

Each person can remake their world so that it reflects the freedom that we feel within. How fulfilling. With meaning like that, the inevitable suffering of material existence is nothing.

Find what is beautiful about yourself and manifest it. A poem, a photograph, a painting, a charitable cause, an event to help others.

Now we have something to run towards instead of away from.

Now we connect instead of seeking disconnection.

HEADLINE FICTION #11: Vertigo Strikes, A Scorched Angel's Warm Coat

Here's a new format for short fiction that I've invented. It's a 70-word story in three panels with a pattern of 7-16-47 words, where the first 7 words form a headline style title, the 16 serve to fill out the headline information a little more and the final 47 contain the meat of the story and resolution. I think I'll call it "headline fiction". These micro stories of mine are based on dreams (and nightmares!).

ART TO MEDITATE UPON

Oriental Poppies by Georgie O'Keefe (1928)

Regarded as a mother of American Modernism, Georgia O'Keeffe is known for her paintings of flowers and landscapes. O’Keeffe’s painted subjects, motifs, and forms changed with the influence of European Modernism. Although many connected her depictions of iris flower with vulva, she rejected such Freudian interpretations. However, this did not preclude other feminist artists to refer to her as their influence, and even Judy Chicago dedicated a place to her in her Dinner Party piece. Apart from flowers, Georgia O'Keeffe also painted a variety of subjects such as skulls, fruit, and a dead rabbit in her famous still life paintings.

Meditation: Small spaces such as flowers provide a world as vast as the one we experience to small lifeforms like insects. Our world that we imagine as being vast is also an illusion of scale. Measured against the vastness of the world or even the universe itself we are reduced to the tiniest of fragments, less than a grain of sand in terms of size and importance and yet, at the same time, because we are part of the greater environment, we carry it within us and only have to look within to feel ourselves as the universe, the container of all that expands around us. Love and the mind allow us to move within these two perspectives - infinitely vast within, infinitely small on the outside.

WISDOM OF OTHERS

Excerpt from The Essential Rumi (translated by Coleman Barks)

Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī, or simply Rumi, was a 13th-century poet, Hanafi faqih, Islamic scholar, Maturidi theologian, and Sufi mystic originally from Greater Khorasan in Greater Iran. Rumi's works were written mostly in Persian, but occasionally he also used Turkish, Arabic and Greek in his verse.

TENDING TWO SHOPS

Don’t run around this world

looking for a hole to hide in.

There are wild beasts in every cave!

If you live with mice, the cat claws will find you.

The only real rest comes when you’re alone with God.

Live in the nowhere that you came from, even though you have an address here.

That’s why you see things in two ways. Sometimes you look at a person and see a cynical snake.

Someone else sees a joyful lover, and you’re both right!

Everyone is half and half, like the black and white ox.

Joseph looked ugly to his brothers, and most handsome to his father.

You have eyes that see from that nowhere, and eyes that judge distances, how high and how low.

You own two shops, and you run back and forth.

Try to close the one that’s a fearful trap, getting always smaller. Checkmate, this way. Checkmate that.

Keep open the shop where you’re not selling fishhooks anymore. You are the free-swimming fish.

Think that you’re gliding out from the face of a cliff like an eagle.

Think you’re walking like a tiger walks by himself in the forest.

You’re most handsome when you’re after food.

Spend less time with nightingales and peacocks.

One is just a voice, the other just a color.

PHOTO HAIKU

Pink clouds touching gold,
what's happening to my life?
Pink. Touching. Clouds. Gold.

Photo: Sunset, Moondah Beach, Mount Eliza

Ideas To Live By In The Coming Week

As soon as you enter your house, turn your digital devices into silent mode and place them somewhere out of sight.
Turn away from suffering and towards the life you've always wanted to live.
Build a life with meaning, creativity and service to others.

Peace Now,

Morgan,

14th September, 2024

Beautifully Broken