samsara

the cycle of birth, growth, decline, death... the vastness yet intricacy of humanity, nature, this life, and all the thousands upon thousands of connections. we are one.

(nyc)

faith...

professor: you are a christian, aren't you son.

student: yes sir.
professor: so you believe in God?
student: absolutely sir.
professor: is God good?
student: sure.
professor: is God all powerful?
student: yes.
professor: well, my brother died of cancer even though he prayed to God to heal him. most of us would attempt to help others who are ill. but God didn't. so how is this God good then? hmm?
(student sits in silence)
professor: you can't answer, can you? let's start again young fella. is God good?
student: yes.
professor: is satan good?
student: no.
professor: where does satan come from?
student: ... from... God...
professor: that's right son. tell me son, is there evil in this world?
student: yes.
professor: evil is everywhere, isn't it? and God did make everything, correct?
student: yes.
professor: so who created evil?
(student does not answer)
professor: is there sickness? immorality? hatred? ugliness? all these terrible things exist in the world, don't they?
student: yes sir.
professor: so who created them?
(student has no answer)
professor: science says that you have five senses you use to identify and observe the world around you. tell me son, have you ever seen God?
student: no sir.
professor: tell us, have you ever heard your God?
student: no sir.
professor: have you ever felt your God, smelled your God, tasted your God? have you ever had any sensory perception of God for that matter?
student: no sir, i'm afraid i haven't.
professor: yet you still believe in Him?
student: yes.
professor: according to empirical, testable, demonstrable protocol, science says your God doesn't exist. what do you say to that, son?
student: nothing. i have only my faith.
professor: yes, faith. and that is the problem science has.

student: professor, is there such a thing as heat?
professor: yes.
student: and is there such a thing as cold?
professor: yes, of course.
student: no sir, there isn't.
(the lecture theater becomes very quiet with this turn of events)
student: sir, you can have lots of heat, even more heat, superheat, mega heat, white heat, a little heat or no heat. but we don't have anything called cold. we can hit 458 degrees below zero which is no heat, but  we can't go any further after that. there is no such thing as cold. cold is only a word we use to describe the absence of heat. we cannot measure cold. heat is energy. cold is not the opposite of heat, sir, just the absence of it.
(there is a pin-drop silence in the lecture hall)
student: what about darkness, professor? is there such a thing as darkness?
professor: yes. what is night if there isn't darkness?
student: you're wrong again, sir. darkness is the absence of something. you can have low light, normal light, bright light, flashing light. but if you have no light constantly, you have nothing and it is called darkness, isn't it? in reality, darkness is not. if it is, well, you would be able to make the darkness darker, wouldn't you?
professor: so what is the point you are making, young man?
student: sir, my point is that your philosophical premise is flawed.
professor: flawed? can you explain how?
student: sir, you are working on the premise of duality. you argue there is life and then there is death, a good God and a bad God. you are viewing the concept of God as something finite, something we can measure. sir, science can't even explain a simple thought. it uses electricity and magnetism, but has never seen, much less fully understood either one. to view death as the opposite of life is to be ignorant of the fact that death cannot exist as a substantive thing. death is not the opposite of life, just the absence of how we understand it. now tell me professor, do you teach your students that they are evolved from a monkey?
professor: if you are referring to the natural evolutionary process, yes, of course i do.
student: have you ever observed evolution with your own eyes, sir?
(the professor shakes his head with a smile, beginning to realize where the argument is going)
student: since no one has ever observed the process of evolution at work and cannot even prove that this process is an on-going endeavor, are you not teaching your opinion sir? are you not a scientist, but a preacher?
(the class is now in an uproar)
student: is there anyone in this class who has ever seen the professor's brain?
(the class now breaks out in laughter)
student: is there anyone here who has ever heard the professor's brain, felt it, touched it or smelled it? no one appears to have done so. so, according the established rules of empirical, testable, demonstrable protocol, science says that you have no brain sir. with all due respect sir, how do we then trust your lectures, sir?
(the room is silent. the professor stares at the student, his face unfathomable)
professor: i guess you'll have to take them on faith, son.
student: that is it sir... exactly! the link between man and God is faith. that is all that keeps things alive and moving.

by the way, the student was einstein.

(nyc)

one and the same

i think the biggest fallacy of all religions is this notion that you and i are separate entities than this Supreme Being we call God. not only does He reside within us, but we are born of Him and by Him, and in fact, ARE Him.

in our moments of creativity, in our moments of unconditionality, in our moments of freedom and joy, we are not separate. we embody the exact components of the God in all of us at that time.

actually, we are God all the time, it's just that we fail to recognize it. why would anyone make their highest creations any less than the fullest of who they are?

He exists through us.

stop avoiding your beauty. be amazing, just the way that you were originally designed.

(nyc)

happy new year world!

work hard
play harder
love hardest

give and forgive
be present
love is my only religion

allow all
choose happiness
walk in blessing

be magnificent
be glorious
be BEAUTIFUL

one love:
JUST BREATHE......

thank you 2011

it's been a beautiful, ever-changing, ever-expanding journey...

ONE LOVE.

xoxo youri

(washington dc)

newton's 3rd, part ii

newton's third law of motion states that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. in my interpretation, i understood this to mean that all things are one, and that one force cannot exist without its counterbalance, i.e. light cannot exist without dark. the yin and yang of life.

the more i thought of it though, i realized that there can be further extrapolations from newton's law. remember the children's playground taunt, "i'm rubber, you're glue, whatever i say bounces off me and sticks to you"? it's what you would use when someone called you stupid or something mean. it's not quite the same, but the general idea of this rhyme holds a lot of truth.

whatever you give is what you receive.

the interesting thing about newton's law is that it happens in the same moment. as i push down on the keys of this keyboard, they are equally pushing back at me. as i give love in this moment to x/y/z, i am also receiving love unto myself. this is the key - all too often, we look for answers outside ourselves, rather than realizing our own power. we are already complete and whole, we don't need someone or something else on the outside to confirm or affirm our beauty. our souls did not come with parts missing or broken bits. what comes from the outside can help our wholenesses to grow and to expand our comprehensions, but we are, and always have been, fully capable of giving and receiving love in equal capacity of our own volition. in that same way, we must also be careful of own power to hate or hurt others. in effect, we are hating or hurting our own selves because the source is one and the same.

another thought i was pondering last night was this: according to the physics of this law, as i am asking for something, the answer is already existing. by my mere bringing forth of the request, i am also giving birth to its counterbalance. so that means i never have to worry, because everything that i want is always created in fullness. so why aren't the answers always instant or why do the answers sometimes stink?

i think that's why we need to not lose faith, be careful and be specific in our requests, and to not pollute our vibrations with negative thoughts. it slows things down and mutates the answer. we cannot expect a good positive outcome when we spew out negativity and darkness to begin with, or mix that in somewhere in the process. and we must recognize that we are constantly asking for things, even if we don't realize it. many times they are not even conscious thoughts, but in our conditioned emotional responses, which is why it is so important to be positive. it is a muscle to be trained like any other. we must make our requests in good faith and hold steady for the good outcome.

because this is not just gibberish, but an actual proven physical law of the universe, as put forth by isaac newton, one of the most revered scientists of all time.

(nyc)

newton's third law of motion

in my previous posts earlier this year, i wrote about how physics and newton's first law and second law of motions apply to real life. here's my take on #3:

for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction.

for some reason, this whole concept fascinated me when i first learned about it in high school. my physics teacher explained that if we were pushing up against a wall, the wall was equally pushing back at us. it made for a funny image in my head that totally captivated me for some unknown reason and has stuck with me for all these years.

i think it must have been because it's something that we all inherently understand, even as little kids. for example, if you hit someone on the playground, they're going to hit you right back!

but on a bigger picture scale, newton's concept is interesting because it implies that nothing can exist without its equal and opposite force. there can be no light without dark. there can be no joy without pain. there can be no laughter without tears. it is only through the co-existence of pairs that these life forces can even exist in the first place. yet how often do we only cherish and pursue one-half of that equation? we always only want the "good" stuff, but the reality is that we have to accept the wholeness. because ultimately, it is all one and the same.

and therein newton's third law of motion, is proof yet again of life's simplest philosophy ---
be. here. now.

just breathe.

"the deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain. is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter's oven?" - kalil gibran

next up, calculus.

(nyc)

cosmic sequence

from terence malick's "tree of life"

(watch it full screen...)

how can one watch this and not feel... something...

(nyc)

specificity

today i had another stunt choreography rehearsal for a role that i'll be filming soon. i never realized exactly how very specific all these movements have to be. it's been an eye-opening, bruise-inducing experience for me so far, but i'm loving all of it. i'm learning so much about intention, being specific and being centered within my body and my emotions, and it's making me realize - it's just like the writing and editing work that i do, only this is all physical. and then i realized - actually, it's just like all of life, period.

sometimes, you just need to experience things in a different way to illuminate your spirit.

learning.

(nyc)

immense

i just feel immense right now.
my heart feels swollen with love, with pride, with beauty
with gratitude.


this this this!! is what it's all about
creation in the highest.

(times square)

a sister's eulogy for steve jobs

I grew up as an only child, with a single mother. Because we were poor and because I knew my father had emigrated from Syria, I imagined he looked like Omar Sharif. I hoped he would be rich and kind and would come into our lives (and our not yet furnished apartment) and help us. Later, after I’d met my father, I tried to believe he’d changed his number and left no forwarding address because he was an idealistic revolutionary, plotting a new world for the Arab people.

Even as a feminist, my whole life I’d been waiting for a man to love, who could love me. For decades, I’d thought that man would be my father. When I was 25, I met that man and he was my brother.

By then, I lived in New York, where I was trying to write my first novel. I had a job at a small magazine in an office the size of a closet, with three other aspiring writers. When one day a lawyer called me — me, the middle-class girl from California who hassled the boss to buy us health insurance — and said his client was rich and famous and was my long-lost brother, the young editors went wild. This was 1985 and we worked at a cutting-edge literary magazine, but I’d fallen into the plot of a Dickens novel and really, we all loved those best. The lawyer refused to tell me my brother’s name and my colleagues started a betting pool. The leading candidate: John Travolta. I secretly hoped for a literary descendant of Henry James — someone more talented than I, someone brilliant without even trying.

When I met Steve, he was a guy my age in jeans, Arab- or Jewish-looking and handsomer than Omar Sharif.

We took a long walk — something, it happened, that we both liked to do. I don’t remember much of what we said that first day, only that he felt like someone I’d pick to be a friend. He explained that he worked in computers.

I didn’t know much about computers. I still worked on a manual Olivetti typewriter.

I told Steve I’d recently considered my first purchase of a computer: something called the Cromemco.

Steve told me it was a good thing I’d waited. He said he was making something that was going to be insanely beautiful.

I want to tell you a few things I learned from Steve, during three distinct periods, over the 27 years I knew him. They’re not periods of years, but of states of being. His full life. His illness. His dying.

Steve worked at what he loved. He worked really hard. Every day.

That’s incredibly simple, but true.

He was the opposite of absent-minded.

He was never embarrassed about working hard, even if the results were failures. If someone as smart as Steve wasn’t ashamed to admit trying, maybe I didn’t have to be.

When he got kicked out of Apple, things were painful. He told me about a dinner at which 500 Silicon Valley leaders met the then-sitting president. Steve hadn’t been invited.

He was hurt but he still went to work at Next. Every single day.

Novelty was not Steve’s highest value. Beauty was.

For an innovator, Steve was remarkably loyal. If he loved a shirt, he’d order 10 or 100 of them. In the Palo Alto house, there are probably enough black cotton turtlenecks for everyone in this church.

He didn’t favor trends or gimmicks. He liked people his own age.

His philosophy of aesthetics reminds me of a quote that went something like this: “Fashion is what seems beautiful now but looks ugly later; art can be ugly at first but it becomes beautiful later.”

Steve always aspired to make beautiful later.

He was willing to be misunderstood.

Uninvited to the ball, he drove the third or fourth iteration of his same black sports car to Next, where he and his team were quietly inventing the platform on which Tim Berners-Lee would write the program for the World Wide Web.

Steve was like a girl in the amount of time he spent talking about love. Love was his supreme virtue, his god of gods. He tracked and worried about the romantic lives of the people working with him.

Whenever he saw a man he thought a woman might find dashing, he called out, “Hey are you single? Do you wanna come to dinner with my sister?”

I remember when he phoned the day he met Laurene. “There’s this beautiful woman and she’s really smart and she has this dog and I’m going to marry her.”

When Reed was born, he began gushing and never stopped. He was a physical dad, with each of his children. He fretted over Lisa’s boyfriends and Erin’s travel and skirt lengths and Eve’s safety around the horses she adored.

None of us who attended Reed’s graduation party will ever forget the scene of Reed and Steve slow dancing.

His abiding love for Laurene sustained him. He believed that love happened all the time, everywhere. In that most important way, Steve was never ironic, never cynical, never pessimistic. I try to learn from that, still.

Steve had been successful at a young age, and he felt that had isolated him. Most of the choices he made from the time I knew him were designed to dissolve the walls around him. A middle-class boy from Los Altos, he fell in love with a middle-class girl from New Jersey. It was important to both of them to raise Lisa, Reed, Erin and Eve as grounded, normal children. Their house didn’t intimidate with art or polish; in fact, for many of the first years I knew Steve and Lo together, dinner was served on the grass, and sometimes consisted of just one vegetable. Lots of that one vegetable. But one. Broccoli. In season. Simply prepared. With the just the right, recently snipped, herb.

Even as a young millionaire, Steve always picked me up at the airport. He’d be standing there in his jeans.

When a family member called him at work, his secretary Linetta answered, “Your dad’s in a meeting. Would you like me to interrupt him?”

When Reed insisted on dressing up as a witch every Halloween, Steve, Laurene, Erin and Eve all went wiccan.

They once embarked on a kitchen remodel; it took years. They cooked on a hotplate in the garage. The Pixar building, under construction during the same period, finished in half the time. And that was it for the Palo Alto house. The bathrooms stayed old. But — and this was a crucial distinction — it had been a great house to start with; Steve saw to that.

This is not to say that he didn’t enjoy his success: he enjoyed his success a lot, just minus a few zeros. He told me how much he loved going to the Palo Alto bike store and gleefully realizing he could afford to buy the best bike there.

And he did.

Steve was humble. Steve liked to keep learning.

Once, he told me if he’d grown up differently, he might have become a mathematician. He spoke reverently about colleges and loved walking around the Stanford campus. In the last year of his life, he studied a book of paintings by Mark Rothko, an artist he hadn’t known about before, thinking of what could inspire people on the walls of a future Apple campus.

Steve cultivated whimsy. What other C.E.O. knows the history of English and Chinese tea roses and has a favorite David Austin rose?

He had surprises tucked in all his pockets. I’ll venture that Laurene will discover treats — songs he loved, a poem he cut out and put in a drawer — even after 20 years of an exceptionally close marriage. I spoke to him every other day or so, but when I opened The New York Times and saw a feature on the company’s patents, I was still surprised and delighted to see a sketch for a perfect staircase.

With his four children, with his wife, with all of us, Steve had a lot of fun.

He treasured happiness.

Then, Steve became ill and we watched his life compress into a smaller circle. Once, he’d loved walking through Paris. He’d discovered a small handmade soba shop in Kyoto. He downhill skied gracefully. He cross-country skied clumsily. No more.

Eventually, even ordinary pleasures, like a good peach, no longer appealed to him.

Yet, what amazed me, and what I learned from his illness, was how much was still left after so much had been taken away.

I remember my brother learning to walk again, with a chair. After his liver transplant, once a day he would get up on legs that seemed too thin to bear him, arms pitched to the chair back. He’d push that chair down the Memphis hospital corridor towards the nursing station and then he’d sit down on the chair, rest, turn around and walk back again. He counted his steps and, each day, pressed a little farther.

Laurene got down on her knees and looked into his eyes.

“You can do this, Steve,” she said. His eyes widened. His lips pressed into each other.

He tried. He always, always tried, and always with love at the core of that effort. He was an intensely emotional man.

I realized during that terrifying time that Steve was not enduring the pain for himself. He set destinations: his son Reed’s graduation from high school, his daughter Erin’s trip to Kyoto, the launching of a boat he was building on which he planned to take his family around the world and where he hoped he and Laurene would someday retire.

Even ill, his taste, his discrimination and his judgment held. He went through 67 nurses before finding kindred spirits and then he completely trusted the three who stayed with him to the end. Tracy. Arturo. Elham.

One time when Steve had contracted a tenacious pneumonia his doctor forbid everything — even ice. We were in a standard I.C.U. unit. Steve, who generally disliked cutting in line or dropping his own name, confessed that this once, he’d like to be treated a little specially.

I told him: Steve, this is special treatment.

He leaned over to me, and said: “I want it to be a little more special.”

Intubated, when he couldn’t talk, he asked for a notepad. He sketched devices to hold an iPad in a hospital bed. He designed new fluid monitors and x-ray equipment. He redrew that not-quite-special-enough hospital unit. And every time his wife walked into the room, I watched his smile remake itself on his face.

For the really big, big things, you have to trust me, he wrote on his sketchpad. He looked up. You have to.

By that, he meant that we should disobey the doctors and give him a piece of ice.

None of us knows for certain how long we’ll be here. On Steve’s better days, even in the last year, he embarked upon projects and elicited promises from his friends at Apple to finish them. Some boat builders in the Netherlands have a gorgeous stainless steel hull ready to be covered with the finishing wood. His three daughters remain unmarried, his two youngest still girls, and he’d wanted to walk them down the aisle as he’d walked me the day of my wedding.

We all — in the end — die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories.

I suppose it’s not quite accurate to call the death of someone who lived with cancer for years unexpected, but Steve’s death was unexpected for us.

What I learned from my brother’s death was that character is essential: What he was, was how he died.

Tuesday morning, he called me to ask me to hurry up to Palo Alto. His tone was affectionate, dear, loving, but like someone whose luggage was already strapped onto the vehicle, who was already on the beginning of his journey, even as he was sorry, truly deeply sorry, to be leaving us.

He started his farewell and I stopped him. I said, “Wait. I’m coming. I’m in a taxi to the airport. I’ll be there.”

“I’m telling you now because I’m afraid you won’t make it on time, honey.”

When I arrived, he and his Laurene were joking together like partners who’d lived and worked together every day of their lives. He looked into his children’s eyes as if he couldn’t unlock his gaze.

Until about 2 in the afternoon, his wife could rouse him, to talk to his friends from Apple.

Then, after awhile, it was clear that he would no longer wake to us.

His breathing changed. It became severe, deliberate, purposeful. I could feel him counting his steps again, pushing farther than before.

This is what I learned: he was working at this, too. Death didn’t happen to Steve, he achieved it.

He told me, when he was saying goodbye and telling me he was sorry, so sorry we wouldn’t be able to be old together as we’d always planned, that he was going to a better place.

Dr. Fischer gave him a 50/50 chance of making it through the night.

He made it through the night, Laurene next to him on the bed sometimes jerked up when there was a longer pause between his breaths. She and I looked at each other, then he would heave a deep breath and begin again.

This had to be done. Even now, he had a stern, still handsome profile, the profile of an absolutist, a romantic. His breath indicated an arduous journey, some steep path, altitude.

He seemed to be climbing.

But with that will, that work ethic, that strength, there was also sweet Steve’s capacity for wonderment, the artist’s belief in the ideal, the still more beautiful later.

Steve’s final words, hours earlier, were monosyllables, repeated three times.

Before embarking, he’d looked at his sister Patty, then for a long time at his children, then at his life’s partner, Laurene, and then over their shoulders past them.

Steve’s final words were:

OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.

Mona Simpson is a novelist and a professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. She delivered this eulogy for her brother, Steve Jobs, on Oct. 16 at his memorial service at the Memorial Church of Stanford University.

(nyc)

the spaces in between

earlier this year, i arrived into the virgin air terminal at SFO and noticed an art installation hanging above my head:

the artist's name is janet echelman, and when i looked her up, i found that she had started doing these voluminous, huge, billowing installations all over the world:

what i noticed about her art is the way it draws your attention to previously empty air, and the way that the netting newly defines space. before she put up her creation, no one noticed the emptiness. it was just where the sky was, or where the ceiling was. but then she puts something up, and suddenly there are things that you couldn't see before, come to life - the air, the wind, the sheer space. and all it took was a mere visual to make us sit up and notice. but it's not as if all that was not there before, we just didn't pay attention.

aren't there so many things in life that work in this exact same way?

pay attention - be present - there are so many things you're missing just b/c the visual is not there. but it still exists, in a very real way.

(nyc)

"i love you because all the loves in the world are like different rivers flowing into the same lake, where they meet and are transformed into a single love that becomes rain and blesses the earth." - paulo coelho, the aleph

how can time exist when my 4am here is your 4pm somewhere else in the world, at the same moment? and how can separation exist when there is both no space and all the space between us? there is no difference between you and me, no difference between now and tomorrow.

love is. vibration.

(nyc)

suspended.

it's a funny thing to me, whenever i'm on a plane. i feel like i'm in a moment of suspended animation, neither here nor there, literally hovering in the air between a past and future. airplane rides always make me feel vulnerable for some reason. i'm in this place of transition, in territory that is simultaneously familiar yet unfamiliar. i know airports, i even know specific airports very well. i know the intimate cocoon of my seat, the same way that i always curl up, and my routine of swaddling up with my scarf, socks and hot tea. yet every time, it's a new adventure. who will i meet? who will sit next to me? what new things will i see and learn? travel has a way of knocking you off your feet. nothing is home, so you become extra aware, your sensitivity becomes heightened, and in that temporary space of hours and time zones, i find out new things about myself, about others, about the world. i love it. it's why i like traveling so much, why i love airports. all these people are rushing to and from one place to another, but for a moment, we are all intersecting and crossing paths and in transition. it's quite a remarkable thing.
sometimes it feels good to just come home. but what is home? where is it? i've been traveling for so long now, that i don't even know. even when i come home to manhattan, and it is home, it always takes me a few days to adjust back to the energy flow here. i always feel displaced both going and coming.
i've learned to become comfortable with that place of in-between. i treasure it actually. it's all life really is, ultimately. we never are truly in that one place that we think that we are. we are not our pasts, nor are we quite yet our futures.
that only leaves the now. eternally in that place of neither here nor there, but exactly right at home, in this very moment.
it's all i have.
just breathe.

thank you

today is just a simple thank you post. so many wonderful and amazing things, events, places and people have been entering my life in just this past week alone. my gut said be here, i am, and it was totally right.

loving los angeles.

(DTLA)

old korea + new korea

the human body - the human soul - is capable of amazing creations when you demand the best of its abilities.

inspiration in motion:

(nyc)

diary

i asked God for a full life, not realizing that it also meant that it would not be easy.

there is truth to the statement that ignorance is bliss. some people just float through life, choosing to avoid the darknesses. there's nothing wrong with that.

but it's not full, and it's not complete.

i realized, this past week, that were it not for the darkest pits, i would not know how bright life could be.

i'm blessed because i receive what i ask for, in unimaginable magnitudes. both sides.

in one week, i felt the whole range. 

i felt small, raw, shredded, bleeding, alone.

i felt peaceful, connected, rewarded, loved.

and then it starts again.

every day.

new.

and i choose for it to be full.

(nyc)

el amor despues

el amor despues
del amor tal vez
se parezca a este rayo del sol
y ahora que busque
y ahora que encontre
el perfume que lleva al dolor
en la esencia de las almas
en la ausencia del dolor
ahora se que ya no puedo
vivir sin tu amor

(washington dc)

what's a flashmob?

this is what my brazilian friend asks me.

this, my friend, is a flashmob:

para voce, para o amor - eu sou a menina de azul ;D

(nyc)

one love

(nyc)