A clown face carved out of a pumpkin

Via Guardian and Ray Villafane/Barcroft Media

Art, Daily Art

10/31 Art: Pumpkin Carving

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Abel Tasman National Park

Daily Destination, Travel

10/31 Destination: Abel Tasman National Park, New Zealand

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31 Oct
2013

HP: 20 Things I Learned From Traveling Around the World

Clayton Cornell and The Huffington Post present an interesting list of 20 things he learned while traveling around the world:

Most places are as safe (or safer) than home.

I remember confessing to my mother recently that I had a big night out in Budapest and stumbled back to my apartment at dawn. Her reaction was: “But don’t you worry about being drunk in a foreign country?”

Ha ha, not at all mom! I’ve never felt so safe!

The only place I’ve been violently mugged was in my home city of San Francisco. Many of the people I know there have been robbed at gunpoint, and on more than one occasion there were shootings in my neighborhood.

In one incident just a block away from my apartment (Dolores Park), a man was shot five times and somehow escaped, only to collapse about 10 meters from our front door. You can still see the blood stains on the sidewalk.

Turns out we actually live in a pretty dangerous country.

In over 365 days on the road, staying mostly in dormitory-style hostels and traveling through several countries considered ‘high-risk,’ the only incident I had was an iPhone stolen out of my pocket on the metro in Medellin, Colombia. I didn’t even notice and deserved it for waiving the damn thing around in the wrong part of town. Most people think that in a place like Colombia you’ll still get kidnapped or knocked off by a motorcycle assassin, but that’s not true. According to the locals I talked to (who grew up there), things have been safer there for at least 10 years.

Caveat: This doesn’t give you a license to be stupid, and some places really warrant respect. Guatemala and Honduras, where there are major drug wars going on (and the Peace Corps recently pulled all of their volunteers), or Quito, Ecuador, where everyone I talked to had been robbed, are reasonably dangerous (I had no trouble in any of them).

In reality, based on the sort of mindless binge-drinking that happens in most travel hot spots, you’d expect travelers to get knocked off a lot more often. But if you pay attention and don’t do anything stupid, you’ll be fine.

To read more  click — here 

Via Huffington Post

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31 Oct
2013

“The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.”

~Mahatma Gandhi

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31 Oct
2013

50 greatest innovations since the wheel

The Atlantic asked a group of historians, scientists, and engineers to rank the 50 greatest innovations since the invention of the wheel. Here they are.

1. The printing press, 1430s

The printing press was nominated by 10 of our 12 panelists, five of whom ranked it in their top three. Dyson described its invention as the turning point at which “knowledge began freely replicating and quickly assumed a life of its own.”

2. Electricity, late 19th century

And then there was light—and Nos. 4, 9, 16, 24, 28, 44, 45, and most of the rest of modern life.

3. Penicillin, 1928

Accidentally discovered in 1928, though antibiotics were not widely distributed until after World War II, when they became the silver bullet for any number of formerly deadly diseases

Read on — here

Via Kottke

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31 Oct
2013

That’s when the Yoga happens.

Preface: It’s my favorite teacher’s last week in town before she moves. I loved her classes, slow, and cerebral. I always leave with an extra tidbit of knowledge (we did a class once where 45min was spent on mountain pose, and it’s significance, try holding that perfectly still for 2 minutes).
Today’s tidbit of knowledge came when we did seated forward folds with our legs spread as wide as we can. It’s difficult to keep the dog tilt in your back while folding forward, and that becomes a source of frustration.
That frustration “Is where the yoga happens.” Beautiful. It’s the point where our ego gets knocked back, and we learn our limitations, and adjust within our personal limits.
That, in itself, is the Yoga.
Moving beyond that, she notated that in Yoga, we’re practically beginners for at least 10-15 years.
Going to miss her classes, my first Yoga experience was one of her classes, it was a pleasure to take one of her last classes before she leaves town.

Via Reddit

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31 Oct
2013

The Ladder of Success?

Thomas Merton said that the way we have structured our lives, we spend our whole life climbing up the ladder of supposed success, and when we get to the top of the ladder we realize it is leaning against the wrong wall—and there is nothing at the top anyway. To get back to the place of inherent abundance, you have to let go of all of the false agendas, unreal goals, and passing self-images. It is all about letting go. The spiritual life is more about unlearning than learning, because the deepest you already knows and already enjoys (1 John 2:21).

Adapted from The Art of Letting Go: Living the Wisdom of Saint Francis

Santosha. Contentment in the now. “Sometimes good enough is excellent.”

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31 Oct
2013

“Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness.”

~James Thurber

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30 Oct
2013

Zen Breakfast

In the go-go world of modern life, a lot of people think breakfast has to be fast — a doughnut on the way out the door with a cup of coffee in the car. But the very word breakfast has a spiritual meaning.

To eat breakfast is, literally, to break one’s fast — to resume eating after having an empty stomach. Never mind that the “fast” has been enforced by sleep. Just as deliberate fasting during the waking hours can be means for spiritual renewal, so can the de facto fasting we do at night.

In Zen monasteries, monks receive their meals with a chant reminding them of five things:

1) To be grateful of the meal, no matter how simple;

2) To appreciate the effort of all, both seen and unseen, who labored to put the food on the table;

3) To reflect on their own actions, and whether those actions make them deserving of the meal;

4) To regard the food as medicine to sustain their health and ward off illness;

5) To accept the meal as a means of attaining enlightenment.

When breaking the previous nights fast, we can start our day off the same way as those monks in the monastery: By putting our minds on the plane of gratitude before filling our empty stomachs.

In this way, breakfast is indeed the most important meal of the day.

Via Zen 24/7 by Philip Toshio Sudo

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