SCENE Louisville (2025)

14/08/2023

No Mic Needed

It is better to experience temporary discomfort to achieve the dream, than permanent comfort without any fulfillment.

On our chosen pathway it is necessary to constantly evaluate, analyze, and make changes along the way in order to achieve success. Achievement doesn't come from what we do, but from who we are. Our worldly power results from our personal power. Our caI ireer is an extension of our personality. People who profoundly achieve aren't necessarily people who do so much, they're people around whom things get done. Mahatma Gandhi and JFK were great examples of this. Their great achievements lay in all the energy they stirred in other people, the invisible forces they unleashed around them. By touching their own depths, they touched the depths within others. That kind of charisma, the power to affect what happens on the earth, from an invisible realm within is the natural right and function of the son of god. New frontiers are internal ones, the real stretch is always within us. Instead of expanding our ability or willingness to go out and get anything, we expand our ability to receive what is already here for us. Personal power emanates from someone who takes life seriously. The universe takes us as seriously as we take it. There is no greater seriousness than the full appreciation of the power and importance of love. Miracles flow from the recognition that love is the purpose of our career.

A person may learn things all their life, but never gain knowledge of truth. You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand. I have known many who led their fighters to titles, and some who took them right to the end of the rainbow. I have found, however, that destiny controls the passes to these places, and I keep telling myself, trying to believe it, that it is not important, really, how far you go but how you make the trip. The world isn’t waiting for you. It doesn’t even know that you're alive. But it needs you, and it won’t know about you until and unless you get yourself out there. Our success as a civilization should not be evaluated purely on the basis of our achievements, but also take into account who we have become in the process.

Quit beating yourself up, beat your goals up instead. Without a degree of risk, there is little chance for the enormous mixture of relief and achievement that follows in its steps. It is the leap that goes on to support even greater attempts at the seemingly impossible challenges that the world often uses to sort the men from the boys, and of course, the women from the girls. For the case that one thinks he has plateaued in life, God has already set yet another peak for him to reach: and a much more challenging peak than his own, one that which is to serve others. A willing soul will keenly go the length, breadth and depth to fulfill the dream.

Achievement requires a strong will, failure, a stubborn won't. With all the global warming going around nowadays, it would only take the stubbornness of a mule and the patience of a sitting duck to achieve what no man has ever done before – namely melt the ice in a wax figure’s beaten heart that was chopped off and hidden 50 meters under the polar ice caps in Alaska, to protect it from feeling. There is, however, hope for any person who wants to remain an individual. He can assert himself and refuse to conform. He'll be on his own, that's true, but while he will not have the security enjoyed by those who do conform, there will be no limits to what he may achieve. Those who improve with age embrace the power of personal growth and personal achievement and begin to replace youth with wisdom, innocence with understanding, and lack of purpose with self-actualization.

If you don’t take control of your career development, it’s highly unlikely that anyone else will. The difference between successful and unsuccessful people isn’t really about resources that were available to them when they started out, Instead its their resourcefulness or personal initiative that makes the difference. Every great leader once fell down from a tall ladder. You don't become a star until you get the scar. Take that risk now. Master The Three Keys to Success and you can achieve anything in life. Work and Life are not separate spheres. They are integratedmoments in life that happen throughout the day. The idea that “work” competes with “life” ignores that “life” is actually the intersection and interaction of four major domains: work, home, community, and the private self. Our life is an odd mixture of different moments of action and inaction, work and rest.

A positive attitude leads to a positive action, which then yields a positive result. That’s how the cycle always goes. Nothing seems to be too difficult for people blessed with positive mindsets. Reading is the multiplier of success. Reading instantly gives you access to a treasure trove of wisdom and experience laid out by those who have gone before you, especially those who have already walked the road you’re walking on right now. Stop thinking of the past, and stop worrying about the future. Just win the day. Achieve the goals you set for every single day, and you’ll rebuild your life in a few short years. Material poverty doesn’t cause murder, r**e or terror.Mental poverty does. It’s our decisions, not our conditions, that ultimately shape the quality of our lives. Our perceptions of reality are only a relationship to what is actually out there. Perceptions are influenced by context, by previous life experience, and by our tendency to seek out evidence to confirm our expectations. This drive to confirm/conform, as argued by social physiologists, results in what is known as self fulfilling prophecy. Many of us have allowed well-meaning parents,teachers, religious
leaders and peers to tell us that there is something fundamentally wrong with us if we don’t believe as they do. Simply put, we have forgotten how to think for ourselves.Only once you believe that success is possible,then success becomes possible.

There is no one who is happier than the person who is able to control his or her life. Who does what he /she thinks its right. Who pleases himself before everyone. Who doesn't suffer from what people will say syndrome. When you have time . Find a way to please yourself. Then you will be happiest person alive. Difficulties & Challenges become our strength when we focus on the goal. Even the greatest fool can accomplish a task if it were after his or her heart. But the intelligent ones are those who can convert every work into one that suits their taste.

If you want to live an exceptional life, you must move beyond probability into the realm of possibility.

10/08/2023

The Consternation Of Life

A man that flies from his fear may find that he has only taken a short cut to meet it.

We pass through this world but once. Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within. Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom. Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts… perhaps the fear of a loss of power.

There is a stubbornness about me that never can bear to be frightened at the will of others. My courage always rises at every attempt to intimidate me. Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less. I’m intimidated by the fear of being average. I believe that words are strong, that they can overwhelm what we fear when fear seems more awful than life is good. There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure. The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls.

There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create. Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life. People tend to be generous when sharing their nonsense, fear, and ignorance. And while they seem quite eager to feed you their negativity, please remember that sometimes the diet we need to be on is a spiritual and emotional one. Be cautious with what you feed your mind and soul. Fuel yourself with positivity and let that fuel propel you into positive action.

I must say a word or three about fear. It is life’s only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unnerving ease. It begins in your mind, always … so you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don’t, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you. Anything that’s human is mention-able, and anything that is mention-able can be more manageable. When we can talk about our feelings, they become less overwhelming, less upsetting, and less scary. The people we trust with that important talk can help us know that we are not alone.

Nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own egos. That is the way we all see …each other in life. Vanity, fear, desire, competition– all such distortions within our own egos– condition our vision of those in relation to us. Add to those distortions to our own egos the corresponding distortions in the egos of others, and you see how cloudy the glass must become through which we look at each other. That’s how it is in all living relationships except when there is that rare case of two people who love intensely enough to burn through all those layers of opacity and see each other’s naked hearts.

Fear isn’t so difficult to understand. After all, weren’t we all frightened as children? Nothing has changed since Little Red Riding Hood faced the big bad wolf. What frightens us today is exactly the same sort of thing that frightened us yesterday. It’s just a different wolf. This fright complex is rooted in every individual. We are all the pieces of what we remember. We hold in ourselves the hopes and fears of those who love us. As long as there is love and memory, there is no true loss. The human race is a monotonous affair. Most people spend the greatest part of their time working in order to live, and what little freedom remains so fills them with fear that they seek out any and every means to be rid of it. And one has to understand that braveness is not the absence of fear but rather the strength to keep on going forward despite the fear.

Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others.

08/08/2023

If there is one word in the universe capable of softening hearts, it is this: Mom.

A queen could leave her throne. But a mother never leaves her son. My mother, was a physically small woman, yet she was the biggest person I’ve ever known. She had total focus, an attribute that deeply impressed me. She taught me by example that how we live impacts how we die. She lived a life of courage, beauty, and integrity; she died in the same manner. For if the nature of the story is such that my mother left me with deficits and scars, I can know that the nature of God is such that He will leave me as a result of my mother blessings and health. Your mom is your world, she can understand everything even what you can’t tell she can see it, My mother was like sand. The kind that warms you on a beach when you come shivering out of the cold water. The kind that clings to your body, leaving its impression on your skin to remind you where you’ve been and where you’ve come from. The kind you keep finding in your shoes and your pockets long after you’ve left the beach. She was also like the sand that archaeologists dig through. Layers and layers of sand that have kept dinosaur bones together for millions of years. And as hot and dusty and plain as that sand might be, those archaeologists are grateful for it, because without it to keep the bones in place, everything would scatter. Everything would fall apart.

The only love that I really believe in is a mother’s love for her children. I grew up watching my mom handle any and every obstacle life put in her way. As a seemingly single parent she went through the s**t I’m sure kept her up crying at night but she still got up every morning and did an amazing job raising us. I could never be weak. I learned from the best. My beautiful mom has always been there for me through every crisis, heartache and through all the good and more importantly bad times in my life. It takes a year to learn how to talk and a lifetime to learn what to say.My mother raised me to not hold grudges so I rather forgive and let my heart be at peace. I am proud of many things in my life but nothing ever beats being a good son to my beloved mother. Moms come in all shapes and sizes. There is no formula for the perfect mom. But there is one thing they all have in common and that is the deep love they carry for our sons & daughters. Being a mother is not about ‘birthing a child into the world.’ Rather, it is about repeatedly ‘birthing into the child’ a steady sense of their inestimable worth, a prized understanding of their authentic self, a conviction that the impossible is largely the stuff of myth, and an utterly unwavering belief that cold actions of men never represent the warm heart of God. It is the relentless act of birthing these things into the innermost soul of a thirsty child that makes a woman a mother.

No one is ever quite ready; everyone is always caught off guard. Parenthood chooses you. And you open your eyes, look at what you've got, say "Oh, my gosh," and recognize that of all the balls there ever were, this is the one you should not drop. It's not a question of choice. Thank you, Mom, for the way you managed yourself during the childish, mean, selfish, insensitive, irresponsible, unreasonable, hateful moments I put you through. From your example I learned to be patient, positive, kind, selfless, sympathetic, reliable, sensible, and loving. You have my endless appreciation. I cannot imagine how much I must’ve suffered in my previous lives to be fortunate enough to have parents like you in this life. Parents expect only two things from their children, obedience in their childhood and respect in their adulthood. One of the strongest loves I’ve ever witnessed is the love a mother has for her child.

I can pinpoint that as the single happiest moment of my life, because I realized then that Mom would always have my back. It made me feel like a giant. I raced back down the concrete ramp, faster than I ever had before, so fast I should have fallen, but I didn't fall, because Mom was in the world. If you know your mom is a great killer, and you think of your mom as a great killer, and you know she would kill for you, not just metaphorically, but really end lives for you, without hesitation, you don't want to make her sad and worried because how can you repay her for all the things she's willing to do? You can't. When she was frustrated with us Mom used to say, ‘You weren’t born in a barn!’ But the way I sometimes acted often made me wonder if I’d been born in a barn that collapsed long before I had ever gotten out of it. To be a Mom means to have your heart walking around outside your body, forever.

Whosoever does not believe in the existence of a sixth sense has clearly not regarded their own mother. How it is they know all they know about you, even those secrets you locked away so tightly in the most hidden compartments of your heart, remains one of the great mysteries of the world. And they don't just know they know instantly. When a mother elevates her communication, she naturally elevates the outcomes of her child's life since a mother's words become her child's universe of possibilities. Mom means miracles of a magical life. It is not that you give birth to a child that matters most. Rather, it is what you birth into them. For many, Mother's Day is a day about Showing Appreciation to your mom. But for some its also a day of remembrance of that unconditional love that they had with them all these years but have lost now. Every mother is an artist, for the bared canvas of a newborn’s soul begs for the artist’s touch. And because this is so, a parent must prepare the palette with the utmost care, choose the brushes with poised caution, and mindfully attend to every brushstroke regardless of how slight. And such caution is utterly imperative for the emerging rendering will be both a legacy borne of the parent, and a life lived by the child. Conscience is less an inner voice than the memory of a mother's glance.

To describe my mother would be to write about a hurricane in its perfect power. Or the climbing, falling colors of a rainbow. One of a mother’s greatest gifts is to teach her child that to grow is not to timidly sit on some safe shore at water’s edge and clumsily grab whatever happens to float by. Rather, it is to deliberately step into waters both calm and turbulent in order to wrestle great things to shore. And that lesson can be best taught by a mother who stands before her child dripping wet. To all the mothers out there especially my amazing mom Happy mothers day. May the Lord give you more years to live and enough strength to face the daily challenges. May he blesses you. May he keep you, until you see your children succeed in life. Thanks for all the love and for making sure we grow up right. I have felt God’s love through you. Everyday to me is a Happy Mothers Day , because there is no day were you stopped being a mother to me. My mother is a never ending song in my heart of comfort, happiness, and being. I may sometimes forget the words but I always remember the tune. I love my mom.

There is only one mother in this world who is the best one; the one that every kid has got.

05/08/2023

Our Pulse

I can see no better reason for being alive.

There's nothing more intimate in life than simply being understood. And understanding someone else. Most people are slow to champion love because they fear the transformation it brings into their lives. And make no mistake about it: love does take over and transform the schemes and operations of our egos in a very mighty way. In every friendship hearts grow and entwine themselves together, so that the two hearts seem to make only one heart with only a common thought. That is why separation is so painful; it is not so much two hearts separating, but our one being torn asunder. Real intimacy is a sacred experience. It never exposes its secret trust and belonging to the voyeuristic eye of a neon culture. Real intimacy is of the soul, and the soul is never reserved. This is our skin. This is not your skin, yet we are still under it. I wonder if this is how people always get close: They heal each other's wounds; they repair the broken skin. Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone and finding that that's ok with them. They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.

In a healthy relationship, vulnerability is wonderful. It leads to increased intimacy and closer bonds. When a healthy person realizes that he or she hurt you, they feel remorse and they make amends. It’s safe to be honest. In an abusive system, vulnerability is dangerous. It’s considered a weakness, which acts as an invitation for more mistreatment. Abusive people feel a surge of power when they discover a weakness. They exploit it, using it to gain more power. Crying or complaining confirms that they’ve poked you in the right spot. I celebrate it, and relish the electricity of it, with every fiber of my being. See, don't just look. Your partner is so much more than their appearance. It's how kind their heart is, how lovely they smile, how much they care and have compassion, how generous and giving they are which becomes much more attractive. Depending on the situation, sometimes you can know a person better in ten minutes as we have than someone you have crossed paths with all your life.

I have dreams about you. It's been a while since I could remember any of my dreams, and still, this one has left me with such strong impression. Even now, when I am fully awake, your face, mind and body flashes before my eyes. It's a face I can totally relate to, as if it wasn't any more yours than it is mine. Terrifying thing, you know? I can't say I've felt that sort of intimacy with anyone. For a moment you knew all my secrets, without me even having to tell them. For a moment I even knew them myself. While I was looking into your eyes, I suddenly started to realize things about myself that were unspoken for years, like fragments of my inner life that were deeply repressed. It’s hard to distinguish if they were buried inside because dealing with them was such a dirty work, or if leaving them unnamed meant that it was not possible to define them precisely enough, so they would keep their true meaning. Perhaps, all this life that I've known so far was in fact no more but a dream about living. The only thing that has kept me in touch with reality was you and my daughters.

I am more of an illusionist that a deceiver, but it all comes from being in fact, a very private person. Even if it was true that you knew me better than anyone, I’d never not admit it. I’d rather dig my own heart out, with a rotten spoon, than not admitting it. I may let people in my own little world occasionally as I have you, but I would never let them not be aware of it. I don’t mind throwing my intimacy in front of others, especially when I care. The more I care, the less you give away, and this is something for you to understand, and grant me your eternal love forgiveness. I didn't play my tricks on you in order to deceive you, but rather to save myself, and maybe even deceive myself as well. I certainly don’t deserve your pity. Especially not now that I am awake. To feel aroused is to feel alive. Having great s*x is like taking in huge lungfuls of fresh air, essential to your body, essential to your health, and essential to your life. This is what intimacy does to us over time.

My skin will never work like that again, so aware of you, my person that I'm unsure where she ends and I begin. Never again. Never again will my skin be a thing that can so perfectly communicate; in losing my skin to the fire, I also lost the opportunity to make it disappear with any other person but you. No relationship can truly grow if you go on holding back. If you remain clever and go on safeguarding and protecting yourself, only personalities meet, and the essential centers remain alone. Then only your mask is related, not you. Whenever such a thing happens, there are four persons in the relationship, not two. Two false persons go on meeting, and the two real persons remain worlds apart. It's like the old question, "Do you lock your house to keep people out, or to protect what's inside?" Should a person act modestly and dress modestly in order to prevent intrusion from the outside, undesirable things from happening, or to preserve and maintain what is inside: the delicate and sensitive ability to have and maintain an intimate relationship. Friendship is a creative and subversive force. It claims that intimacy is the secret law of life and universe.

Just because lips have met twice doesn't mean hearts have not joined. And just because two bodies are drawn to each other doesn't mean two people are not right for each other. A physical relationship does not always equal love. Successful relationships like ours are those relationships were conflicts are successfully resolved and in fact peoples intimacy, closeness, and love are enhanced through the resolution of conflicts. I have always become closer to you, my kids and to my friends when we have conflicts and work through them successfully because conflicts will always arise. They are an opportunity for intimacy, self-knowledge, and a greater connection. Two people making love are like one drowned person resuscitating the other. But love doesn’t control, and I suppose that’s why it’s the ultimate risk. In the end, we have to hope the person we’re giving our heart to won’t break it, and be willing to forgive them when they do, even as they will forgive us. Real love stories don’t have dictators, they have participants. Love is an ever-changing, complicated, choose-your-own adventure narrative that offers the world but guarantees nothing. When you climb a mountain or sail an ocean, you’re rewarded for staying in control. Perhaps that’s another reason true intimacy is so frightening. It’s the one thing we all want, and must give up control to get.

We know each other as much as they knew themselves, and our intimacy, rather like too many suitcases, was a matter of perpetual concern; together they moved slowly, clumsily, effecting lugubrious compromises, attending to delicate shifts of mood, repairing breaches. As individuals they didn't easily take offense; but together they managed not to offend each other in surprising, unexpected ways. There are people one knows and people one doesn't. One shouldn't cheapen the former by feigning intimacy with the latter. Intimacy is not purely physical. It's the act of connecting with someone so deeply, you feel like you can see into their soul. Sound crazy? It may well be, but it is precisely in relationships of intimacy that your craziness (and mine) will be hardest to conceal. You can’t find intimacy you can’t find home when you’re always hiding behind masks. Intimacy requires a certain level of vulnerability. It requires a certain level of you exposing your fragmented, contradictory self to someone else. You running the risk of having your core self rejected and hurt and misunderstood. When an individual trusts another sufficiently to expose the truest self the deepest fears, the hidden desires a powerful intimacy is born. It's in giving yourself that you possess yourself. Dare to be different. Represent your maker well and you will forever abide in the beautiful embrace of his loving arms.

There is no lie in sensuality. It’s the ultimate truth.

09/07/2023

At What Cost

Winning isn’t everything, but wanting to win is.

There is nothing in this life that can destroy you but yourself. Bad things happen to everyone, but when they do, you can’t just fall apart and die. You have to fight back. If you don’t, you’re the one who loses in the end. But if you do keep going and fight back, you win. To be heroic is to be courageous enough to die for something; to be inspirational is to be crazy enough to live a little. If you want to find the real competition, just look in the mirror. After awhile you’ll see your rivals scrambling for second place.

Never do a single thing in the anticipation to prove something to someone who has hurt you. If someone has hurt or offended you (whoever that person may be), never perform anything or strive for anything in your life with the mind of proving something to that someone/ to those people. May nothing that you do be done with any thought of them in mind. There is nothing that needs to be proven. Who you are tomorrow begins with what you do today.

When you win, you don’t examine it very much, except to congratulate yourself. You easily, and wrongly, assume it has something to do with your rare qualities as a person. But winning only measures how hard you’ve worked and how physically talented you are; it doesn’t particularly define you beyond those characteristics. Losing on the other hand, really does say something about who you are. Among other things it measures are: do you blame others, or do you own the loss? Do you analyze your failure, or just complain about bad luck? If you’re willing to examine failure, and to look not just at your outward physical performance, but your internal workings, too, losing can be valuable. How you behave in those moments can perhaps be more self-defining than winning could ever be. Sometimes losing shows you for who you really are. Opportunity doesn’t make appointments, you have to be ready when it arrives.

Perfection of effort is not required, by the way. It is the consistency of attempting to work these tools that brings the progress. It’s like anything else. If I want to tone muscle, lifting a ten-pound weight a few times every day will move me toward my goal much quicker than hoisting a fifty-pound barbell once a week. Yes, it really is true: “Slow and steady wins the race.” Just try a little, every day. You’ll see. You are not an option, a choice or a soft place to land after a long battle. You were meant to be the one. If you can wrap yourself around the idea that you are something incredible, then you will stop excusing behavior that r**es your very soul. You were never meant to teach someone to believe in you. You were meant to be believed.

I’ve wanted to win at everything, every day, since I was a kid. And time doesn’t change a person, it just helps you get a handle on who you are. Even at age 50 something, I still hate losing–I’m just more gracious about it. I’m also aware that setbacks have an upside; they fuel new dreams. You were born a winner, a warrior, one who defied the odds by surviving the most gruesome battle of them all – the race to the egg. And now that you are a giant, why do you even doubt victory against smaller numbers and wider margins? The only walls that exist are those you have placed in your mind. And whatever obstacles you conceive, exist only because you have forgotten what you have already achieved. Winning is a state of mind that embraces everything you do.

Not all dreamers are winners, but all winners are dreamers. Your dream is the key to your future.

SCENE Louisville

14/08/2023

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