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24/02/2015

Worth reading today.

Best-selling author and neurologist Oliver Sacks has been diagnosed with terminal liver cancer.

Sacks, 81, penned an eloquent op-ed in The New York Times on Thursday, expressing how he plans to spend the last months of his life: deepening friendships, saying goodbye, writing, and traveling.

“I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude,” he wrote. “I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an in*******se with the world, the special in*******se of writers and readers.” He concluded: “Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”

11/12/2013
Notre Histoire

The big picture - in two minutes. Pretty genius.

12/11/2013
What is Wrong With Our Culture [Alan Watts]

Turn it all off. And watch this.

Thought-provoking 5 minutes on the state of the world from the late, great Alan Watts, a man far ahead of his time. Speech: Alan Watts - What is Wrong With O...

12/11/2013
Existential Bummer

Existential Bummer

"Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes b...

05/11/2013

WINTER: I'm already over it, and it hasn't even begun.

04/11/2013

It was a beautiful wknd for a hike.

31/10/2013
17 Playful Doodles that Incorporate Everyday Objects

Simple brilliance. Hidden in plain site. Really is amazing how some people see the world with such effortless precision. A perfect example of how the profound can be made universal through art.

Javier Pérez aka cintascotch, is an artist and illustrator from Guayaquil, Ecuador. A few times a week, Pérez shares a new doodle with his 20,000 Instagram followers. Each doodle incorporate...

30/10/2013

Chitown. You are gorgeous.

30/10/2013
The woman who saved a man with an SS tattoo

Powerful stuff - take one minute to read something here that could seriously change the way you think about the ripple effect of hate.

In 1996, a black teenager protected a white man from an angry mob who thought he supported the racist Klu Klux Klan. The young woman's bravery is still inspiring people today.

24/10/2013
Shepherdstown Pedal and Paddle in Shepherdstown West Virginia on Our Terrain

Looking good, Eddie. Folks, if you're into biking/kayaking and the beauty of WV's eastern edge, then look no further than this gem of a shop in Shepherdstown:
Shepherdstown Pedal & Paddle. Great business - great story.

Bikes, boats, rentals, repairs and group rides in Shepherdstown West Virginia.

22/10/2013
I Forgot My Phone

Enough (not) said...

Written by Charlene deGuzman & Miles Crawford Directed by Miles Crawford Starring Charlene deGuzman With (in order of appearance) Jacob Womack Nick Luciano A...

18/10/2013

Timeline Photos

10/10/2013

If there was ever a time I wanted to stand up from my chair, push back from my table, and walk into a picture. It is now.

07/10/2013
The Scarecrow

Three minutes of incredible truth.

Watch "The Scarecrow," the companion film for Chipotle's new app-based game. Then download the free app at www.scarecrowgame.com and join the quest for whole...

26/09/2013
Trader Joe's Ex-President To Turn Expired Food Into Cheap Meals : NPR

Finally.

In the United States, 40 percent of the food produced annually goes to waste. Doug Rauch, former president of Trader Joe's, wants to do something about it. He's opening a restaurant that will transform produce past its sell date into healthful take-out food.

12/08/2013

Chances are these days that most of us know someone who struggles with substance abuse and has likely deferred years of their life to sustain an addiction, and the wasted years that come with it. Maybe this person has even been in and out of jail, and/or is simply struggling to put any semblance of a life together. Even amid the myriad support services, rehabs, and treatment facilities nationwide, the recovery process is often arduous and daunting. Enter the Delancey Street Foundation.

Delancey Street is one of the most innovative, inviting, and rewarding treatment programs you will find in this country. They have multiple facilities around the nation, and if you want to change your life, you'll get in. If you, or someone you care about, have an ounce of strength left to turn your life around, and a way to get there, please check this organization out: http://www.delanceystreetfoundation.org/

09/08/2013

Human beings like to freeze the moment, probably to give it definition, purpose. We like to ask ourselves, "What was the greatest __________ you ever did? Was that the best moment of your life? Were you at your best, then?" We do this all the time. We freeze moments. Sure, it ends up being like a photo album in the brain, perhaps - but memories, even the memory of greatness, of something unforgettable, bend and stretch at the seams, and eventually become distorted in time. What was perhaps the greatest moment in your life, may not maintain its perfection years later, when you look back on it. And what wasn't necessarily a defining moment may gradually become one as the years stack up, and your mind fills in the gaps with additional details.

Recently, I watched a journalist ask a young athlete if the goal he scored to win the game was the most important goal he's ever scored. The athlete didn't even hesitate with his answer: "I suppose it was the most important goal I've scored in my life up to this point." The journalist asked him what he meant. He responded: "It was a great goal for me and the team, but I'll probably score a goal or two next week, and those will be more important than this one. Especially if we win." The journalist didn't quite seem to get it, or he did get it, and decided that it was too heady for local TV, so he changed the topic and focused on the upcoming week and the team. But I was captivated. Here was a highlight that should have topped Sportscenter's Ten Best Plays that night. And it wasn't even a play - it was an idea, a concept, a conviction.

This kid was touching on a notion that gets its fair share of delivery in sports, though probably not enough: "You're as good as your last performance." And as sports often transcends life, there is limitless value in this statement to folks walking around on the street, at jobs, at home with the family, or taking a moment with themselves, to think about life. There's a follow-up notion to this, as well, though it has a little more bite - but again, its impact is no less relevant: "If you're not working to get better, you're getting steadily worse."

Again, both of these concepts have roots in sports - at least that's where I've come across them, and heard them uttered the most. Probably because in sports, we're taught not to dwell on the past, even if it was astounding, because you've got a game to play, and a reason to be great right now. But these two statements transition to life quite effectively. The question is, of course: How willing are we to receive them?

I know what that young athlete would have probably said if the journalist hadn't taken the opportunity to segue in a more universal direction. He would have described how the moment was great for its immediate value and the positive effects it created: the comradery, the victory, the excitement, the optimism, the accomplishment. But his next goal was every bit as important because of what it stood for: he was still performing at a high level, still competing, still finding the upper hand, still overcoming challenges, still pushing to be the best he could be, and still relevant. Each score after that held the same distinction - and will throughout his career. It was a pretty amazing thing for a young athlete to say on television. I wish the journalist would have let him elaborate. He chose to move away from it, probably sensing that the kid might be heading into territory that was too uncomfortable for everyday folks to digest - or be confronted with.

Hopefully I wasn't the only one watching.

08/08/2013
Conveying the Passage of Time through Photography

Wonderfully creative. One of the better photographic innovations I've seen since tilt shift or stitch. Just gorgeous. Take a look:

Fong Qi Wei is an artist and photographer that "strives to make images which touches both the feeling part and the thinking part of your mind." He wants to get your attention (the feeling pa...

02/08/2013
Watching planet Earth from West Virginia

Pretty amazing little operation going on right in Shepherdstown - who knew? Well done, SkyTruth - keep up the good work.

Skytruth, a small non-profit in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, is transforming the environmental movement with satellites. The Fold’s Zoeann Murphy zooms in for a look.

01/08/2013

A question:

Is greatness defined by the moment or rather the perpetuation, the sustainment of such moments—the longevity of such beauty? Is something great if it fails over time, crumbles inevitably? Was it great while it lasted? Is it great in increments, or does the fact that it couldn’t last, discredit its greatness? Was Rome great? Is America great? Depends on who you ask. Are the details that comprise greatness beautiful for what they represent, exclusively, or subject to the failures that inevitably ensue, and the picture such failures inevitably paint?

A notion:

There’s a handful of things you were meant to do in your life—truly meant for—as it relates to your genetics, your instincts, your natural talents, your disposition, your desires—where everything comes together and makes sense, and you know you were meant for this. Even if it completely contradicts with what you’ve decided is the life you want, you still know, deep down, that this is the true you—you at your best—as close to perfect as you could ever be. In a world of endless distractions, limited windows, and colossal deterrents, the likelihood of discovering such a line in life, or accepting yourself amid such a discovery, is rare. But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t, or shouldn’t, happen—regardless of where it takes you, or what you become.

A fact:

Time doesn’t wait for us to catch up, and neither will most people. What we ultimately decide to do with ourselves is less a matter of grand announcements and more a matter of private responsibility. After a while, we no longer define our processes, though our processes will most certainly define us.

29/07/2013

Shepherdstown - Aug 17th - a must-attend event: Shepherdstown DogFest. This is an all-things-dogs festival with tons to do downtown for you, your friends, your family, and especially - your dogs! The DogDay 5K starts off the festivities with a challenge course run through Shepherd University campus at 10 a.m., and then the rest of the day, including Sunday, is jam-packed with a steady list of dog-friendly and dog-themed events and activities: Dog Show, hot dog eating contest, parade, live band, kid-friendly contests, educational seminars, and a whole lot more.

Share this post! And pencil it in to your own schedule. It's going to be the start of a lovely annual weekend in Shepherdstown.

26/07/2013
Chuck Feeney: The Billionaire Who Is Trying To Go Broke

A great read - the word hero gets thrown around aimlessly today. Chuck Feeney is a hero.

"Chuck Feeney is the James Bond of philanthropy. Over the last 30 years, he’s crisscrossed the globe conducting a clandestine operation to give away a $7.5 billion fortune derived from hawking cognac, perfume and ci******es in his empire of duty-free shops. His foundation, the Atlantic Philanthropies, has funneled $6.2 billion into education, science, health care, aging and civil rights in the U.S., Australia, Vietnam, Bermuda, South Africa and Ireland. Few living people have given away more, and no one at his wealth level has ever given their fortune away so completely during their lifetime. The remaining $1.3 billion will be spent by 2016, and the foundation will be shuttered in 2020. While the business world’s titans obsess over piling up as many riches as possible, Feeney is working double time to die broke."

Chuck Feeney has earned $7.5 billion, but he's not on The Forbes 400. Instead, the Duty Free Shoppers founder has secretly given it away as fast as he's made it. All he personally has left is $2 million-- and credit for inspiring the modern philanthropy movement

26/07/2013

Science has helped to reveal that our planet, though seemingly isolated, sits within a realm of specifics—beginning with the circumstances relevant to its conception on up to its present position just outside the dust in one of the Milky Way’s giant spirals. We are truly an amazing development in the universe, but not an impossibility, and frankly, not even a rarity in comparison to the scope of that realm in which we reside. A human's own sense of existence on this exotic rock is a testament to the nature of humankind's compulsion to seek, to understand, to know—but not a license for ownership of anything but a temporary time and place.

All of our hopes, dreams, contemplations, endeavors—it will all have come and gone in a few million years. The Earth is around four billion years old. Man is around eight million—Thinking Man, Philosophical Man, Industrial Man, Consuming Man, Imperialist Man—much less time than that. For all its worth—the metaphor, the meaning that is attributed to our existence—it will have emerged, evolved, and passed in a fragile, flickering glimpse within the course of cosmic history. If humanity’s climax isn’t the annihilation of itself through war or consumption, or a combination of the two, then even the future species that may have finally discovered a way to avoid such calamity will only have prolonged their eventual demise.

The galaxy appears to be expanding ever away from itself, so even a most advanced species would labor to plant just a seed of itself on another, similar planet—requiring a technological cooperation and global collectivity that simply seems beyond our current ability to gainfully pursue. The Milky Way is set to collide with a much larger galaxy in the distant future, either before or after our own life-giving sun bloats to profane proportions, swallows half of the solar system, and slowly recedes to collapse in on itself, ultimately exploding outward at a distance of millions of light years. The cosmos knows nothing of such madness; it is merely an infinite theater of collisions and space, destruction and creation, evolution and annihilation.

At our most accomplished, most evolved, we will have come and gone in less than nine million years—a span unnoticed in the universe for its immeasurable briefness. Such a notion cannot be disputed, cannot be juxtaposed, cannot be generalized. It merely floats in time, like us, quite possibly for reasons that will never be revealed.

11/07/2013
Doctors Should Start Advocating Dietary Options to Treat Heart Disease

At a time when we’re set to expand medical coverage, Americans need to take a sober look at what conventional medical care really offers—a lot of pharmaceutical treatment for a lot of dietary diseases. We should all be aware that taking these medicines may do more to enrich the pharmaceutical companies than to eradicate disease.

A must-read:

It’s time to start advocating diet changes for heart patients—not just medication, says Dr. Daniela Drake.

02/07/2013

When you think about it, we spend almost all of our lives trying to figure it out. As an infant, we try to figure out what in the hell is going on. What are we? Where are we? What is this? Who is that? We figure out how to walk, talk, comprehend, learn.

As adolescents, we struggle to figure out who we are in this world—why some of it makes sense and some of it doesn't. We desperately seek to express a definition of ourselves that will not only tell the world who it is they're dealing with, but secretly give us some extra time to wrap our minds around this giant concept we barely understand.

As young adults, we enter an entirely new landscape of "figuring it out." We now have to not only "act" like we sort of know something, we have to actually DO something that suggests as much. And this reality only builds in strength and scope. As we exit our twenties, we're supposed to know pretty much what we want out of life and how we want to apply it to the next fifty years.

In our thirties, we're supposed to figure out how to be married (for real), how to be parents, how to be professionals, how to be homeowners, how to save money, how to think about the future, how to accept hardship and adversity, even sadness, but also triumph and success.

In middle-age, we have to figure out aching joints and tired bodies, wear-and-tear, long-term health and finances, career stability, life reflection, the passage of time, what it all means, who we are now as opposed to then, who we have around us, what lies ahead, and what we need to leave behind.

Our sixties and seventies bring about a new shift—we're now "seniors"—aka "old" by societal standards. And whereas we know that age is just a number, the number still represents a profound passage of life and time. We wonder if we did all that we were supposed to, or could have done. We contemplate do-overs, or perhaps second, maybe third chapters. We try to figure out what it means to live this long, as so many haven't. We look at the many generations before us, now gone, and the many after us—and the repetition of it all. We have satisfaction, and regret. We have great joys, and great sorrows. Our vigor might be less, but our hopes are still pure, and our fears concern us more than we'd care to admit.

Our eighties and beyond are not spent trying to figure out very much—but rather, accept. We simply have to accept that we've made it this far, and what will be will be. We're not useless by any means—just a little slower, a little more cautious. The world around us is now moving at a speed we don't really recognize, though we once did. Most of what we know and remember is stored safe in the vault inside of our hearts and minds. The value of life now is measured in relationships and memories, and moments close on the horizon. We accept that not everything is meant to be challenged, conquered....figured out. Life is life. We will come and go. What we do while we're here will impact a certain amount of people, perhaps even perpetuate something greater. Who we are and who we were will depend on how much we figured out along the way. And in the end, we figure out that life is unique to every single person who lives it—we're all in it together, and then in a blink, we're gone. We tell those who care to listen: "You don't have to figure out everything. But figure out something. Life is too short to spend undecided."

18/06/2013

A perfect mid-June evening beckons even the most distracted of us out for an amble.

17/06/2013

And yet here we sit
On this incalculable speck of a rock
Like a nit afloat within the sands of the Sahara
Hovering on a single thread of unslaughtered harmony
Planets crash into planets somewhere in the abyss
A cosmic butchery eons in the making
(Where upon we’ve somehow escaped the menu)
Creation, destruction, on a scale unfettered by human conception
And yet here we sit
Wrapped in fabrics
Aglow in the luxury of our humanness
In a place so preposterously privileged
As to be a dream
Splashing fancy fluids down our throats in the fading heat of a perfect autumn sundown
Stars explode on the other side of the ether
Bombs explode on the other side of the planet
Dreams explode on the other side of the room
Where day turns to night, summer to winter, hope to regret
We hold our cheeks soft to the skin of this rock, and wait for permission to breathe
Far enough from the maelstrom to elude disaster
Close enough to live on borrowed time

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