Today's Reading:

From: Black Futures

Far Beyond the Stars

By Octavia Butler scholar, Dr. Ayana Jamieson. 

The Octavia E Butler collection of literary manuscripts housed at the Huntington library is a vast archive comprising more than 8000 individually cataloged items that span Butler’s four decade long career. Octavia kept everything from grade school report cards, personal journals, letters, brochures, notes, drafts, unpublished writing, grocery lists to photographs, library calls slips and much more.

She kept drafts and photocopies of letters she wrote. Her imperative to deliberately and consciously shape her own legacy was driven by the facts of her life and identity, a nexus where black experience, womanism and history intersected. Her collection reminds us what we have, what we've lost what can be gained by leaving behind self curated libraries.

Today's Reading:

How to be an Artist by Jerry Saltz

"Imagination is more Important than Knowledge" - Einstein 

The imagination is endless and always there. It's a lens, a tool that enlarges life, the animates your own Cambrian Ocean of the past, present and potential future forms. It adds to what Samuel Taylor Coolidge called "gorgeous nonsense", making unreal things real, and real things unreal. 

Pledge allegiance to it; live up to it; honor, listen and take pleasure in it; let it be your magic lantern and flying carpet. 

Your imagination extends your mind to the world around you at pressurize, composes, decomposes, and connect thoughts. It's inseparable from you and will be with you on the day you die. “The imagination is not a state” said William Blake. It is the human existence itself. 

Creativity is what you do with your imagination. Write down your fights are fancy, your moments of wonder and fear your dreams and illusions of grandeur. Then put them to work. Make the imagination your compass star.

Today's Reading:

Most of us have lived two lives. Most of us have two lives the life we live, and the live life within us between the two stands resistance. 

Have you ever brought home a treadmill and let it gather dust in the attic? Ever quit a diet a course of yoga and meditation practice? Have you ever bailed out on a call to embark upon a spiritual practice, dedicate yourself to a humanitarian calling, commit your life to the service of others? Have you ever wanted to be a mother, a doctor, an advocate for the weak and helpless; to run for office, crusade for the planet, campaign for world, peace, or to preserve the environment? Late at night, have you ever experienced a vision of the person you might become the work you could accomplish the realize being you were meant to be? Are you a writer who doesn't write, a painter who doesn't paint, an entrepreneur who never starts a venture? Then you know what resistance is.

Love and Resistance:

Resistance is directly proportional to love if you're feeling massive resistance, the good news is, it means there's tremendous love there too. If you didn't love the project that is terrifying you, you wouldn't feel anything. The opposite of love isn't hate; it's indifference the more resistance, you experience, the more important your unmanifested art/project/enterprise is to you – and the more gratification you will feel when you finally do it.