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Dark Matter
by
What a strange thing to consider imagining a world into being with nothing but words, intention, and desire. It’s a troubling paradox—I have total control, but only to the extent I have control over myself. My emotions. My inner storm. The
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Sometimes artists find a way to place their creative-thesis into their work in plain site. Love it!
“Everyone should get at least one good look at the eyes of a man who finds himself rising toward what he wants to pull down to himself.”
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“By learning to stay, we become very familiar with this place, and gradually, gradually, it loses its threat. Instead of scratching, we stay present. We’re no longer invested in constantly trying to move away from insecurity. We think that facing our demons is reliving some traumatic event or discovering for sure that we’re worthless. But, in fact, it is just abiding with the uneasy, disquieting sensation of nowhere-to-run and finding that—guess what?—we don’t die; we don’t collapse. In fact, we feel profound relief and freedom.”
― Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears
― Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears
“Life’s energy is never static. It is as shifting, fluid, changing as the weather. Sometimes we like how we’re feeling, sometimes we don’t. Then we like it again. Then we don’t. Happy and sad, comfortable and uncomfortable alternate continually. This is how it is for everyone. But behind our views and opinions, our hopes and fears about what’s happening, the dynamic energy of life is always here, unchanged by our reactions of like and dislike.”
― Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears
― Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears
“I’m just afraid of having a tombstone that says HERE LIES A PROMISING OLD MAN.”
― Infinite Jest
― Infinite Jest
“If right now our emotional reaction to seeing a certain person or hearing certain news is to fly into a rage or to get despondent or something equally extreme, it’s because we have been cultivating that particular habit for a very long time. But as my teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche used to say, we can approach our lives as an experiment. In the next moment, in the next hour, we could choose to stop, to slow down, to be still for a few seconds. We could experiment with interrupting the usual chain reaction, and not spin off in the usual way. We don’t need to blame someone else, and we don’t need to blame ourselves. When we’re in a tight spot, we can experiment with not strengthening the aggression habit and see what happens.”
― Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears
― Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears
Shawn’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Shawn’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
373 books
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292 friends
2,069 books
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40 friends
212 books
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25 friends
2,749 books
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298 friends
559 books
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64 friends
585 books
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349 friends
2,179 books
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66 friends
956 books
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70 friends
More friends…
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