“It is said if you take pity on a moth struggling to break free from its cocoon and make its passage out easier, the moth will be forever deformed. What seems an act of kindness ends up being cruel. The hard struggle to emerge is essential for the initial pumping of blood into its crumpled wings. I don’t know enough about moths to know if this is an urban myth, … It is because making it easier would ultimately be less loving and cripple our spiritual development.”

quoted from http://net-burst.net/guilty/rejected.htm

After I read this I remembered the green moth that I filmed two summers ago in my house in Vancouver.  She was caught in my room and was trying to make her way out.   I decided to film her because I am enchanted by the playful flight of butterflies (and moths) and her green wings were perfect for the film I had just began: Green Dream.

Slow Media Manifesto (English)

The first decade of the 21st century, the so-called ‘naughties’, has brought profound changes to the technological foundations of the media landscape. The key buzzwords are networks, the Internet and social media. In the second decade, people will not search for new technologies allowing for even easier, faster and low-priced content production. Rather, appropriate reactions to this media revolution are to be developed and integrated politically, culturally and socially. The concept “Slow”, as in “Slow Food” and not as in “Slow Down”, is a key for this. Like “Slow Food”, Slow Media are not about fast consumption but about choosing the ingredients mindfully and preparing them in a concentrated manner. Slow Media are welcoming and hospitable. They like to share.

1. Slow Media are a contribution to sustainability. Sustainability relates to the raw materials, processes and working conditions, which are the basis for media production. Exploitation and low-wage sectors as well as the unconditional commercialization of user data will not result in sustainable media. At the same time, the term refers to the sustainable consumption of Slow Media.

2. Slow media promote Monotasking. Slow Media cannot be consumed casually, but provoke the full concentration of their users. As with the production of a good meal, which demands the full attention of all senses by the cook and his guests, Slow Media can only be consumed with pleasure in focused alertness.

3. Slow Media aim at perfection. Slow Media do not necessarily represent new developments on the market. More important is the continuous improvement of reliable user interfaces that are robust, accessible and perfectly tailored to the media usage habits of the people.

4. Slow Media make quality palpable. Slow Media measure themselves in production, appearance and content against high standards of quality and stand out from their fast-paced and short-lived counterparts – by some premium interface or by an aesthetically inspiring design.

5. Slow Media advance Prosumers, i.e. people who actively define what and how they want to consume and produce. In Slow Media, the active Prosumer, inspired by his media usage to develop new ideas and take action, replaces the passive consumer. This may be shown by marginals in a book or animated discussion about a record with friends. Slow Media inspire, continuously affect the users’ thoughts and actions and are still perceptible years later.

6. Slow Media are discursive and dialogic. They long for a counterpart with whom they may come in contact. The choice of the target media is secondary. In Slow Media, listening is as important as speaking. Hence ‘Slow’ means to be mindful and approachable and to be able to regard and to question one’s own position from a different angle.

7. Slow Media are Social Media. Vibrant communities or tribes constitute around Slow Media. This, for instance, may be a living author exchanging thoughts with his readers or a community interpreting a late musician’s work. Thus Slow Media propagate diversity and respect cultural and distinctive local features.

8. Slow Media respect their users. Slow Media approach their users in a self-conscious and amicable way and have a good idea about the complexity or irony their users can handle. Slow Media neither look down on their users nor approach them in a submissive way.

9. Slow Media are distributed via recommendations not advertising: the success of Slow Media is not based on an overwhelming advertising pressure on all channels but on recommendation from friends, colleagues or family. A book given as a present five times to best friends is a good example.

10. Slow Media are timeless: Slow Media are long-lived and appear fresh even after years or decades. They do not lose their quality over time but at best get some patina that can even enhance their value.

11. Slow Media are auratic: Slow Media emanate a special aura. They generate a feeling that the particular medium belongs to just that moment of the user’s life. Despite the fact that they are produced industrially or are partially based on industrial means of production, they are suggestive of being unique and point beyond themselves.

12. Slow Media are progressive not reactionary: Slow Media rely on their technological achievements and the network society’s way of life. It is because of the acceleration of multiple areas of life, that islands of deliberate slowness are made possible and essential for survival. Slow Media are not a contradiction to the speed and simultaneousness of Twitter, Blogs or Social Networks but are an attitude and a way of making use of them.

13. Slow Media focus on quality both in production and in reception of media content: Craftsmanship in cultural studies such as source criticism, classification and evaluation of sources of information are gaining importance with the increasing availability of information.

14. Slow Media ask for confidence and take their time to be credible. Behind Slow Media are real people. And you can feel that.

Stockdorf and Bonn, Jan 2, 2010

Benedikt Köhler
Sabria David
Jörg Blumtritt

I will never forsake, betray, or deceive myself
I will always adore, forgive, and believe in myself
I will never refuse, abandon, or scorn myself
I will always amuse, delight, and redeem myself
*
The preceding oracle comes from Rob Brezny’s book, PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings.

How Our Language Determines Our Reality

by Dr.Morty Lefkoe

What I have  been contemplating resonated in a quote he used:

“As Ralph Strauch points out in his book The Reality Illusion:

Some languages are structured around quite different basic word- categories and relationships. They project very different pictures of the basic nature of reality as a result. The language of the Nootka Indians in the Pacific Northwest, for example, has only one principle word-category; it denotes happenings or events. A verbal form like “eventing” might better describe this word-category, except that such a form doesn’t sound right in English, with its emphasis on noun forms. We might think of Nootka as composed entirely of verbs, except that they take no subjects or objects as English verbs do. The Nootka, then, perceive the world as a stream of transient events, rather than as the collection of more or less permanent objects which we see. Even something which we see clearly as a physical object, like a house, the Nootka perceive of as a long-lived temporal event. The literal English translation of the Nootka concept might be something like “housing occurs;” or “it houses.”

read full post: How Our Language Determines Our Reality

Streetlove: “Creating an interaction between people and love represented by objects, words or paintings on the streets, in order to make people thing and rethink their relationships, their own situation and love itself.”

In cooperation with photographer Hanse Cora.

I’d love to see it.

posted at the Dharma Ocean Foundation

“Meditation is a way of permitting hang-ups of mind to churn themselves up. If we try to focus on our neurosis as a practice, that is an escape; and if we try to suppress it, that is also an escape. So the process is to relate with the neurosis as it is, in its true nature, the actual simplicity of it.  Then we begin to make some progress. As this process of relating to our hang-ups develops, at some point we at last begin to trust ourselves. We begin to develop some kind of faith and trust that what we have and what we are is, after all, not all that bad. It is workable, usable.” – Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche

“It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation. That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered around their solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But learning-time is always a long, secluded time ahead and far on into life, is – ; solitude, a heightened and deepened kind of aloneness for the person who loves. Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent – ?), it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances. Only in this sense, as the task of working on themselves (“to hearken and to hammer day and night”), may young people use the love that is given to them. Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must still, for a long, long time, save and gather themselves); it is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives are as yet barely large enough.”

Reiner Maria Rilke

from Letters to a Young Poet,  Letter Seven