Welcome to 5 Bites Friday: my weekly article where I share the
contents of my learning from the past week in my life.
1 – what I read
God: a human history by Reza Aslan – a book of religion’s
Big History, where Aslan explore Homo Sapiens’ experiment and fascination with
the concept of God, from the beginning of times with the idea of ‘soul’ to the
maturation of God’s idea in monotheism religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
This book blew me away for its millennia long storytelling in only 170 pages,
as well as its articulate, reaching, and controversial claims.
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan – a novella set in
a small Irish town ahead of the Christmas about a man named Bill Furlong, her
wife Eileen, and their five daughters. Along with the financial hardships of
life that it beautifully captures, this novella also beckons at the case of ‘Magdalen
Laundries’ where around 30k women were incarcerated for forced labor, their
children either dying or taken away from them, which was funded by the Catholic
Church. Amidst it all, this novella is beautiful, both in its simple and
warming story as well as in its message of courage and doing the small things
that makes all the difference.
(After quite a few weeks, I see that I read two books in a
week. Fulfilling! But also because I had shut myself in for my heart was
wounded. Bitter-sweet, as life always is…)
2 – this week’s articles
Calm your inner storm @psyche – an article that intentionally
looked for in order to address my increasingly intense, and frequent, emotional
outbursts, it explains why we reach such extreme mode of ‘emotional
dysregulation’ and presents some instant and psychological cures like: do a
forward bend, breathing focus, and emotion awareness, validation, and reverse
action against them. Helpful.
Nietzsche on Walking @themarginalian – an article about the
philosophy of walking where Popova retells how Nietzsche religiously and with
strict principal went on along solitary walks as a means of creativity,
introspection, and antidote to suffering from loneliness.
How to know what you really want @psyche – building on the
theory of Rene Girard ‘mimetics’, this articles reveals how our desires and
actions might be pressured by our surrounding, both immediate and spread-out,
and shows also how to break free from these ‘socially processed’ desires to reach
our own, willed, aims for ourselves and our lives. Insightful!
Honesty as more than just truth telling @psyche – this article
explores our amorphized practice of honesty as well as our almost total neglect
of this virtue, and then states what might honesty mean and how to cultivate more
in our lives.
How to pray to a dead God @aeon – a article that explores
the history of God’s death, in words, the decay of God’s centrality in our
modern lives, and explains the spiritual and moral distress that this ‘disenchantment’
brought on the thinking men. Some presented science as an alternative, others
art, or purposeful living – the void left behind by God couldn’t filled with
such worldly constructions.
3 – what I watched
The French Dispatch (2021) – a Wes Anderson movie where he
exhausts himself, this fast-paced and uncatchable movie is about a French
magazine’s last edition as his editor in chief is dead. This movie presents
three distinct stories from the last edition of the magazine. Despite its
unique and at brilliant awe-inspiring direction, I couldn’t just flow with this
fast-moving picture.
Free Solo (2018) – a documentary about the famous solo rock
climber Alex Honnold and his gigantic achievement of free soloing California’s ‘El
Cap’, a wall every solo climber dreamed achieve, but couldn’t yet. An exhilarating
and stupefying watching experience!
First Reformed (2017) – so good that it might just be one of
my all-time favorite movies, this movie is about a Father of a tourist church ‘First
Reformed’, and his relation with a man who’s radically hopeless and guilty
about the irreversible environmental degradation that human’s have caused. His
wife pregnant with a baby that he doesn’t want to bring in this soon-to-be apocalyptic
world, this solitary and morally conflicted Father for help. The rest of this
movie is hugely impactful and thought-probing.
4 – this week’s podcasts
Danez Smith’s poem: Minnesota where sadness makes sense
@poetryunbound – a poem about the fulfilling and completing nature of sadness
and about the hollowness of a happiness that never quite questions itself.
Beautifully narrated and talked upon.
On fullness of things with Jane Hirshfield @onbeing – Tippet
converses with the poet Hirshfiled about her latest book of poem and about her Zen-perspective
on our tumultuous life as she recites some of her requested poems from her
book. Here’s one of them:
Let
them not say: we did not see it.
We saw.
Let
them not say: we did not hear it.
We heard.
Let
them not say: they did not taste it.
We ate, we trembled.
Let
them not say: it was not spoken, not written.
We spoke,
we witnessed with voices and hands.
Let
them not say: they did nothing.
We did not-enough.
Let
them say, as they must say something:
A
kerosene beauty.
It burned.
Let
them say we warmed ourselves by it,
read by its light, praised,
and it burned.
5 - this week's quote
'How big would you can dream, if you knew you couldn't fail?'