OUT of SERVICE

Amazing Grace movie trailer

//William Wilberforce (1759 - 1833)
Wilberforce was an English member of parliament and social reformer who was very influential in the abolition of the slave trade and eventually slavery itself in the British empire. //

//John Newton wrote the words to - Amazing Grace - one of the most beloved hymns of all time between 1760 and 1770, while working as an evangelical pastor. Son of the commander of a merchant ship, Newton was captain of a slave ship for many years, until he underwent a dramatic religious conversion while steering his vessel through a storm.
Repenting and regretting the misery he had inflicted on the thousands of human cargo he had transported across the Middle Passage for many years, he devoted his life to the Church, and wrote the lyrics to many hymns which are still popular today.
In 1780 Newton left Olney to become rector of St. Mary Woolnoth, St. Mary Woolchurch, in London. There he drew large congregations and influenced many, among them William Wilberforce. Newton continued to preach until the last year of life, although he was blind by that time. He died in London December 21, 1807.//

Roared

Last week at my painting blog I have been "roared" by Eric of Scattered Chatter and it meant:
Quote:
//Shameless says : Those people I've given this award to are encouraged to post it on their own blogs; list three things they believe are necessary for good, powerful writing; and then pass the award on to the five blogs they want to honour, who in turn pass it on to five others, etc etc. Let's send a roar through the blogosphere! The image above can be copied and pasted onto other blogs. Also, a small size of the award for sidebars can be found over at the writing circle site. //

I said to Eric that it is most mistaken to honour me with this award especially it has to do with words & writing, although I do thank him for thinking of me. The truth is words, writing & verbal skill is my weakest link, I am better at visual and tactile skill cause I was born a painter. So I can let you know that I do not write to think of writing well and I do not look for good piece of writing to read, I read to make an emotional connection and to expand my curiosity.

3 things for me making powerful writing:
1/the author risked to open his/her heart.
2/a topic that meant deep to the author.
3/writing with a passion despite of not knowing how.

Before I pass on the award I like to let known that I believe in "blogging without obligation" - a term that I learn from rubyshooz. Those 5 blogs that I pass the award are welcome to chose to respond or not, and I respect their decision.

I would like to pass on the Roar award to:

Hazel of Self vs Self .... Hazel is an artist in Australia, I have always like the direct and honest way she writes. She is definitely an artist that speaks her own voice and not just in her painting but in her writing as well.

Kelly of Dark Victorian .... I like how Kelly sometimes exposing her deeper anguish and feeling, laying them open for you to read. At times her writing is very inspirational., sometimes sweet and sometimes educational. Kelly is also talented in making fashion wear and runs another blog about that.

Eric of 8 mile love grafitti .... Eric is a poet and an exceptional one I think. His poem seems to require the utmost involvement from the reader to take a journey with him ... an out of body experience and this is what I wish to achieve with my painting one day.

Singleton of The Hippie Parade .... Singleton colorful chains of words sent peace, love & hope to every corner of the world. Both Singleton words and Eric poems are not easy for me to read and understand but they have enough power and intrigue to make me go back again and again... I just cannot explain why. Singleton is also a very talented visual artist, an exceptional colorist.

Paddy of Momentary madness ...... Paddy has since said goodbye to the blog sphere, however his impact on me is so hugh that I do not think I would forget about him. I do hope that he'll come back blogging one day and those who know him would very likely agree with me that he deserve this Roar awards even in his absence.

John Nava - an artist

JOHN NAVA
(click on picture to see his exhibit)
NEO-ICONS
paintings & Tapestries
Printed on his exhibition catalog John said:
In the wake of 9/11, not only did America come together -- the whole world stood with us. “Today,” it was repeated
everywhere, “we are all Americans.” With breathtaking arrogance, exceeded only by stunning incompetence, the
Bush/Cheney administration destroyed that unity in a matter of months.
The disastrous failures of the administration have come at a tragic cost both at home and abroad. And the
aftermath of its tactics have unfairly saddled the young people in these images with a shameful legacy. How could
their parents’ generation have gone along with a trumped-up and irrelevant “preemptive war?” How could they
have accepted a gulag of secret prisons, tacitly approved of torture, tolerated illegal domestic spying and all the rest?
How is it that at each critical juncture, the media and the Democrats were cowed into acquiescence? Could the
administration’s flag-waving and fear mongering really have been so intimidating?
In fact, during the headlong rush to war, millions of people both in America and across the world took to the streets
in opposition to the reckless hubris of the president and his men. Some of the pictures here record the language of
those protests. But their voices were glibly dismissed by the smirking ideologues in charge. Instead, they blundered
on with upside-down strategies that unified and multiplied our enemies even as they divided and alienated our
friends. They eroded American justice and devastated our nation’s moral standing in the world.
And so today our vulnerabilities have hardly diminished. A new attack would, as we saw on 9/11, bring out America’s
best, just as surely as it would fail to defeat us. On the contrary, we are defeated when the enormous tragedy of
such a crime is played on to license illegitimate war and the corruption of a free society.

John Nava
September 6, 2006

Ponder this....

A friend e-mail me this 3 weeks ago .... :
..............................................................................
Subject: Ponder this; no matter what, or how important we might think we are ..... JUST BE HAPPY

Humbling and exhilarating at the same time....
Now, THIS is really fascinating - it's rather dazzling to see it presented this way




I certainly thought this was enlightening. beyond our sun ... it's a big universe



ANTARES IS ONLY THE 15th BRIGHTEST STAR IN THE SKY
It is more than 1000 light years away.

NOW HOW BIG ARE YOU?
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TRY TO WRAP YOUR MIND AROUND THIS.....

This is a hubble telescope ultra deep field infrared view of countless "ENTIRE" galaxies billions of light-years away

Below is a close up of one of the darkest regions of the photo above....

HUMBLING, isn't it?

How big are you again?.....

AND how big are the things that upset you today?

KEEP LIFE IN PERSPECTIVE.....

DON'T SWEAT THE SMALL STUFF!

thank you for helping out

Thank you a thousand times my friends, you all have help me out regrading my last post. I did not know if it was a good idea asking your opinion & help about my painting. As it turns out all your comments have helped me to understand painting so much more, which I did not expect. It is also important for me to realise that an honest heartfelt opinion that I get from a friend is the best gift there is.

Looks like I'll not have time blogging too much for a couple of weeks and I may not be able to pay you a visit yet.

Take care you all..

Please help me to choose!

Hi everyone,
I need your help - please click here

thanks!

Here is an update to my last post " I want my e-mail"

prologue:
"Not too long ago I was self-diagnosed for having cancer and scared myself for about 3 days before my friend told me that I probably have a hernia. I confess I do analyse things too much."

I want my e-mail

I'll have to go back into battle one more time ...... today I am defeated!

"nothing"

A post of nothing....
sums up of who I am!

celebrate .... bottoms UP

afternoon songs

Woke up this afternoon went over to singleton - a soulful butterfly , at her comment section found Eric's comment - Eric is a poet - and saw Oceans mentioned. Went to Oceanshaman - with a beautiful photo of a door, and listened to his u-tube post of a hippe girl with guiter. From there led me to this girl playing santana. Saved her to my favorite u-tube and listened to this mongolian song in my farvorite that I have forgotten about. ... this afternoon I woke up feeling strange, just going to take it easy....PEACE to all!

Sharing with you below, the santana guiter & the mongolian song .... sori for a bit too MTV for the mongolian song, also it is sang in Chinese not Mongolian but still the singing resonate from miles away!

playing guitar

santana

布仁巴雅尔 - 父亲的草原母亲的河

Title: father steppe, mother river

Virus alert & fix

There is a virus going on affecting our blogs...see my painting studio for explanation & fix.

i'll be back

blogging is banned until the battle is won !!!
martial law has been declared ...

heaven

"Truth is brutality without love,
love is hypocrisy without truth."

I quote the above two sentences from Andrew, taken out of a conversation we had at the Hungtington garden. We talked about what that meant. If we could only extract the wisdom from it and apply to relationship with everyone and everything, then I said to Andrew it will indeed be:

"heaven on earth."

"Love without honesty is hypocrisy

honesty without love is brutality

....extract the wisdom from within....

eternity is now

it is

heaven on earth"

I changed the word truth into honesty as I feel it is dangerous to assert what truth is. I think it is more about being honest from within....

Mongolia my love....

I shedded tears the first time I tread on their land, the Mongolian vastness has imprinted my heart and mended an enormous dent. It raised memory of a young boy once gazing on cloud beyond his reach..... the contentment he got from such meager feat had pleased him to no end. I stepped onto the Mongolian steppe, my being then suddenly appeared. Within me the joy and sadness together merged into one happy tears. I had at last regain my childhood dream of feeling free, to gaze into nothing, and stop at nothing to reach heaven at the other end.

I love the land of Mongolia and my friend told me that it is somewhat like Montana. I have never been to Montana so I do not know, but I was in Mongolia twice and I think I have fallen in love. I love the Mongolian, their faces, their singing, their harsh and simplicity of life. When I first felt the vastness of the land, tasted the sweet clean air and looked into the deep blue sky with big white clouds playing above, I knew I was home. If I were to come back in a second life I would not mind riding on horses, sleeping in yurt and behaving like a Mongolian, whatever that meant.

Below I have posted 2 songs to celebrate and hope you'll enjoy these songs with me....they are in Mongolian so I do not know what they say..... but who need words when you are in love, no?

The 1st video below is called "Mongolian family in the steppe".

The 2nd video is dedicated to Rob and his "absent" friend as well as to all lost friends .....
It is called " Minni naiz". this is probably one of the saddest story that I have seen....and I think you do not need word to understand it.

Ariunaa - Taliin mongol ail (Mongolian family in the steppe)

Javkhlan - Minii naiz

Memories that bring sadness
are those that I want to keep....

Loves that I can no longer have are those that I do not forget.....

traces of sadness.....

remind me once I was pure
they tell me.....

I once had lived!!!

"negatively speaking....through an artist"

Life is sometimes sad, it is sometime sweet, life is sometimes sad even when it is going sweet.

The sadness that I speak of cannot be willed away nor is it an incident that you can point your magic wand, to have the sadness reversed. I have live with it for a long time, thinking it is something incomplete to be made whole with happiness -my life will be perfect once I become happy so I figured. Try getting rid of your old dog and drop it many blocks away, it can always smell its way home.

Lately, this sadness was like a siren calling from the most seductive temptress, it was hypnotic . I was mesmerized, scared and excited at the same time, I then saw a tunnel of pathway that I proceed cautiously for fear of monsters lurking around. The path was dark an unfamiliarity yet I seem to had vaguely visited many times before, may be in my dreams or were they nightmares. I went forward then hesitated, I thought of my safe haven. I really should have turn back but I could not give up this curiosity that lashed within. My life was going o.k. not spectacular but then how do you define spectacular, let just say my life has been made full with painting - my most recent haven. Painting given me a way to take my mind off the insignificance in life, it has become my life. But then as this life seems to be going well the siren seems the loudest again , my life was suddenly challenged throwing me back into this anxiety amidst calm.

As I got further down this path I could feel a draft went by me and suddenly it was as if the air was sucked out of this space where I stood. My feet was lifted off as if you were in zero gravity, the most unfamiliar feeling but when the initial shock past, I was dangling & floating. Perhaps like I was in my mothers' womb when I had no concept of what world is....in a split second I started to write, paint, laugh, cry and express like water gushing out a broken faucet. As the flow of water fill the space where only vacuum occupied a minute before I then noticed where I was, this was the void inside me that was beginning to manifest itself. It was in fact not an empty void but very full.

The same void that huanted me when I was growing up, the void that made me feel less of a person, incomplete and agonised with longing. The very thing that I was helpless about and conveniently tried to ditch, but like an old dog wagging its tail it came back home again.

The difference is.... this time I am stepping into it...to wander around, taking a stroll to play with friaries and monsters. I put down my guard entering with no judgement of myself anymore, hence when I speak from my void I care not if I am expressing a "negative" sentiment. Positively speaking there is no positive nor negative existence in this space. However, if I stumble onto sadness that is what will come out while I speak or paint. When I express myself from this space all sort of thing may come forth through no filtering of sort. Thus I could mention to you that I fear I am not a good enough person or that I think I am clumsy, mean and anti-social. This is very much the me speaking through the guilt I experience many moons ago, hidden deep within and yearn to be released. The child need to be acknowledged before a child can move on so to speak. Hence I paint or speak whatever came up to me whether it is for or against me. Perhaps at times that could be translated into being "negative" in our society...... it does not in me. I am only trying to channel the void - in whatever form it is - back into my life and my life is my art. I believe art do not distinguish between negative nor positive ... I'll leave that to the art critics.....art like life simply is ......a form of expression, and creativity comes with the freedom to express.

Does this mean my life and my art will be sad and that I only dealt into the negative experience in life? I do not think so and I certainly hope not, but that will have to be "judged" by people I come into contact with and those who will see my art. However, a word of caution... that those who judge is in fact judging themselves. I have heard other asked many times why always dealt into the negative side of life?....I sigh! In my daily life It is already hard enough trying not to judge other people, therefore within myself and my art I rather not dealt into the negativity nor positivity. In short, I do not judge if I am being "negative"... I simply "dealt".

Sometimes the sweetest part is the sadness in life, and it is up to each person to treat that as negative or positive. I prefer to call it neither, it just is. .....looking at it this way, it becomes for me an affirmation of life. I do not know if bathing in negativity is the answer, but without inviting negativity I shake hands with it when it comes, it seems to have work wonders. So far it has given me clarity in art, but the future I do not hold. The following serves only as a thought..... if one chase only the "positivity" in life one may be trying to bend the rule of nature and I am afraid it may be positively negative.......negatively speaking!

"Life is a bittersweet"

"I know I am not good at this..."

Since Wednesday until now at 12.07am almost 3 days have past and I have been trying to write something on this blog. Blank! Nothing, nothing came out.... my brain is like a desert and the wind blowing across the sand, I put out my hand and try to grip onto anything that happens to be blown my way. Only sand and dust came and even these simply slipped through the slit of my fingers, nothing, nothing I could grasp onto. I am scorching, I am dry like the desert, I only hear the wind howling, beckoning more like teasing me I guess.

I often felt like this with painting too, but then with painting I have been teased enough.... long enough for me now to gain the upper hand. I have learnt their way and know how to perform a dance to beg for rain. Well people told me stick to what I am good at, I guess I should listen to them...... but then again may be not. How do I know what I am good at, I don't do I? Good at???...good at what???.... good compare to who, compare to what. I only know I want to do something, try some writing....write despite of not knowing how.

Language is just not my thing, I was bad at composition at school many decades ago. I haven't written anything since then - not even a page of diary, except an occasional love note that I copied from lyric of songs and posed as my own to try to wow the love of my dream. (It did not work) Never thought I was born a verbal person anyway. I was a quiet child, an introspective child. My mum would suddenly jog me out of my existence and ask" Hey tim what are you so quiet about now?" I was only 9? 10? 11? how would I know how to answer this grown up question - "is it not proper to keep to yourself ?" I wonder then. I was sure sometimes they thought I was angry, I felt guilty about that. In my little mind I wish then someone could understand that I was simply enjoying myself by myself staring out the window. I was not even sure why I did that, looking at what? I just spaced out, that was me and still is. May be this is a sign of insanity manifested at a young age.

While I was growing up, I could not understand how come some people have so much to talk about. I mean some talk no000n-stop at anything and everything, I saw people listening to them so they must be interesting. I wonder, but I was sure that they are not insane, I was the one who had the problem I thought. Soon I tried to fit in; tried to be smart; jammed myself with knowledge; tried to excel at what I do; competing; comparing and always comparing fearing of being left behind. All along thinking I know who I am and where I want to get to but deep down inside I knew a void was brewing bigger and bigger by the day. In a split second, lapsed into adulthood, middle age, past that and up the hill, over the hill finally while on my way down realising that I am insane.

I have always been insane to have given up my solitude. To have stop staring out the window, to have stop daydreaming. Insane to think I know who I am and know what I am good at.....and what not good at. Old habit die hard, I still think I cannot write, still think I am not good at it. But, ...."not good at"..... compare to what? Who and what I am comparing to, I am still wondering. Suddenly it is 2.09am - two hours past midnight - I have been wondering for 2 hours and still nothing came out of this dried up desert of a brain of mind. So I guess I go and perform my rain dance and pray that when I wake up in the morning, I would have written something in my dream.

So I went to bed and drifting off into that state between sleep and dream, vaguely I heard someone appearing, I cannot make out his face but I thought I recognise his voice - I knew he was Paddy from a blog that I listen to, although the sound is faint but the voice is crisp, I thought he said //"go on and start writing...exactly like painting, I'm sure you have started with an idea of some kind to paint something and you find it turned out completely different; taken on a life of its own. I find that with writing. The best personal results are unexpected."// After that I must have dozed off completely, I am not sure if Paddy really appear in my dream but the advise is sound. May be I'll try that, I'll just go ahead to begin a writing. Lets see, here I start with putting down " Since Wednesday until now..........

"Do we really know what we do not know?"

"What we know we are not good at, is an obstacle to overcoming what we think we are not good at"

I am an artist, a painter in oil. New to blogging and fascinated by many interesting blogs in existence - many great blogs in painting and creative writing that I have come across. I am not much of a verbal person and are quite clumsy in the literate sense. Infact it takes me a long time to read through and make sense out of some of the interesting postings that I have read, and if they are in the form of a poem it is even harder. Perhaps it is because English is not my first language but then even if it was in Chinese I know I'll still fail poorly. Yet I am very much attracted to interesting ideas, thoughts, and personal experience that some blog contain, especially those have writings that seems to vibrate with emotions of life and directly communicated with my heart.

I am inspired by them, hence here attempt to ocasionally put down something in writing to make sense or nonsense out of myself.

If you would like to see my paintings please click on the link title "View my painting blog"