Those who know don’t talk.
Those who talk don’t know.
Close your mouth,
block off your senses,
blunt your sharpness,
untie your knots,
soften your glare,
settle your dust.
This is the primal identity.
Be like the Tao.
It can’t be approached or withdrawn from,
benefited or harmed,
honored or brought into disgrace.
It gives itself up continually.
That is why it endures.
The Daily Tao
See the full image here: walmart1.jpg
A friend sent me a link to a page on the Walmart website; a product page for the movie “Planet of the Apes”. Why he sent it to me had to do with the “Similar Items” to the right of the product. The “Similar Items” include “Introducing Dorothy Dandridge” and “Martin Luther King: I Have A Dream/MLK Assassination”.
I sit back and listen to my favorite ladies whisper and sing - Nora, Sarah, Joss, Natasha, Nina, Billie and Ella…
We all want love. We all make art about love. And it eludes us as we seek it, like mercury in your hand.
Love is and isn’t the beginning and the end of all things. Love inside your core, your heart, that’s special, private and real. Love as the pull of desire, external and needy, is commonplace, is desperation and running from being alone.
I had a vision.
Me, floating towards a great darkness, a calming sea of deep indigo night.
I am smiling, peaceful, brimming with happiness.
I reach the center of this emptiness and sit, cross legged, on the air.
I close my eyes, grin wide and hold out my hands, moving them gracefully, while arcs of light dance between them and reach up into my mind, and into my heart. Finally, the light bursts and spills out in patterns and designs unnamable but glorious, a million miles tall and wide and deep.
I have become the splendor of light. channelling promise and potential, love and hope, faith and belief.
Is this eternity?
I hope so.
Peace,
Melissa
What do I really want my life to be like?
My life should be an artful fantasy, a work epic, a love story of the world and of the man I choose to marry and have kids with. I want to marry someone I can build a life with, not someone I sorta see every night. Someone who is not judgemental of my past, who would actually care less and who celebrates me as who I am now. Someone who understands the journey is not always simple, or even humane.
“He’ll often drop in. Only you mustn’t press him. He’s wild, you know. Not like a tame lion.”
Tumnus
The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe
The holidays were quiet and gentle this year. A much-needed break and time alone to reflect, dream, wish, and sleep.
I’m sending my holiday greetings and wishes out to everyone.
For all you new video iPod users, this a good video to download and show off on your new gear.
Peace and much love…Melissa
Winter 2005 interview with Copious Magazine:
Q: Tell us about your artistic aesthetic.
I am a visualist, VJ, filmmaker, photographer, writer and painter. Every piece starts with the impetus to create a visual representation of something that I am currently obsessed with. How does color move? What happens when light intersects with smoke and sound waves? How are we destroying and healing ourselves with images? Which images move products and which images move the soul? I am engaged in the samsara of the visual artist - the continuous cycle of creation and destruction of my visual world. I try to create anew daily, and in that creation, add to the continuing growth of beauty in this world. As a photographer, I’m drawn to capture excitement in motion - the moment of the high note, the high kick, the leap, the sudden smile, as if each is a joyful break in the clouds where the sun spill through. I started with a black and white Polaroid camera as a child and each time I grasp a new tool, I am that child again, playing with a new tool to make things pretty, make things new.
She who is centered in the Tao
can go where she wishes, without danger.
She perceives the universal harmony,
even amid great pain,
because she has found peace in her heart.
Music or the smell of good cooking
may make people stop and enjoy.
But words that point to the Tao
seem monotonous and without flavor.
When you look for it, there is nothing to see.
When you listen for it, there is nothing to hear.
When you use it, it is inexhaustible.
- The Daily Tao
I’ve felt as if I’ve been in orbit for a few years now. Re-entry has been particularly rough. So many mistakes and lessons learned, and re-learned, and lots of bruises on my ego. Ego is a jewel and a mill stone, all at once. Like everything is - both light and dark. The meat of life is in the gray, complicated texture of living in balance.
Smokifantastic
She’s a seer, healer, artist and performer. And a very dear friend.
Her site was finally launched this week. Please click here to enjoy the unique world of Smokifantastic.
:) melissa
Do you want to improve the world?
I don’t think it can be done.
The world is sacred.
It can’t be improved.
If you tamper with it, you’ll ruin it.
If you treat it like an object, you’ll lose it.
There is a time for being ahead,
a time for being behind;
a time for being in motion,
a time for being at rest;
a time for being vigorous,
a time for being exhausted;
a time for being safe,
a time for being in danger.
The Master sees things as they are,
without trying to control them.
She lets them go their own way,
and resides at the center of the circle.
- The Daily Tao
When a filmmaker raises the questions, sometimes we also fall into wanting to answer them. The answers are in the conversations, interviews, and the process. We strive to decode and construct narratives despite the bias of each interviewee. We must be disciplined, yet relaxed, in the flow of information we are using to sculpt a story. We are there only to channel and guide the story, we are not the story. Our journey is story making, thought construction, layering of the literal and the symbolic to universal truths.
What is a good man but a bad man’s teacher?
What is a bad man but a good man’s job?
If you don’t understand this, you will get lost,
however intelligent you are.
It is the great secret.
- Excerpt from The Daily Tao
Community - I didn’t understand. Connectedness - the invisible strings that hold us loosely together. Responsibility - where does mine start? Trust - learning not to ask so many questions.
I’ve been to the dark side of me, deeply, intensely, an all consuming affair with myself. My dream from the first days in Israel was a warning or a premonition. Not of hurting anyone external, but a pivotal battle with my fears, my ego.
