I have known Ciak as a brand for some time now and have always wanted to own a Ciak sketch book, notebook or journal. I have just bought a bright yellow CIAK (pronounced as "Chack") large (21cmx15cm) sketch book. And I have to say I am more than pleased to have made this purchase.
All Ciak products are handmade in Florence, Italy. Its covers, which come in a wide multitude of bright coloured choices, are made from smooth and soft Italian bonded water-resistant leather, thereby ensuring that it is firm but yet flexible. I prefer this texture to even the Moleskine line of notebooks.
A distintive feature of this product is its patented horizontal elastic band, whose major advantage is that I can securely fastened a pen to the sides of the notebook without fear of loss or damage. As for my preferred choice of pen is the fountain pen, and I am pleased to say that its 140 pages of permanently bound, plain ivory coloured paper is extremely friendly fountain pen ink.
I highly recommend this product to any individual who enjoys having a trusty and colourful sketching / writing companion to document all the sights and sounds of his journey through life.
P.S. Please check out my recommendation on Ciak Products at ThisNext by clicking on the link as stated in the following:
“When you consistently open as love, you begin to look like love.”
Whatever you pay attention to, right now, you begin to look like.
Whatever you have spent time attending to in the past, you already look like.
What would a videotape show if you had been recorded for the last eight hours? Would your face be long or glowing? Would your chest be sunken or beaming? Would you move like a nervous robot or an ebullient lover?
Suppose you sit at a computer all day, staring into the screen, pushing around words and numbers. Day after day, your body and mind resonate with cyberspace. You can easily begin to look like the dry domain to which you have been attending: functional, logical, insensate. Your shoulders can become hunched, your head tight, your body vacant. Feeling into a computer day after day can de-vitalize you.
Or, suppose your lover leaves you, and you spend the day mulling over the break-up, feeling hurt, depressed, and afraid. Your chest caves in, your breath becomes shallow, your face waxes pallid. You begin to look like the domain of dark and sagging emotional energy to which you have been attending. Feeling into gloomy sentiments, your entire demeanor is endarkened.
Imagine that you’ve just won a million dollars. Your eyes widen, your face flushes, you dance and scream and whoop, hugging everyone around you. You look like the domain of abundant energy to which you now attend, thanks to your million-dollar moment. Feeling into the huge flow of money invigorates you.
Where you put your attention defines how you look and feel. For instance, you could attend to your genital need. You could go to a party and put your attention on potential sexual partners. Eventually, if all you did was place your attention on sex, you would begin to look and feel like a genital with arms and legs. And if you go to a singles bar, you may indeed see a number of walking, talking genitals.
On the other hand, right now, you can feel into the deepest love in your heart. You can remember someone you truly love, or you can simply feel directly into your deep heart, attending to its openness, compassion, and care. You can do this through the day. Even when something upsets you, you can choose to put your attention on your heart, and feel into the domain of love.
Feel the beating of your heart now. Relax your body and soften your breath so you can feel your deep heart beating and pulsing outward to your hands and feet and head. Imagine opening your chest so your heart was exposed to the world without protection, glistening, alive, tender. Imagine offering your beating heart as a gift to all, like offering a vibrant, delicate flower to your lover.
Opening your heart to all, feel your offering as love. What does love feel like? How does love show? As you feel your beating heart and open outward to all, what would a videotape of you reveal?
When you consistently open as love, you begin to look like love. Your face shines. Your eyes sparkle. Your body moves with grace, opening as the tide of love swelling from your deep heart to all—through the day, at work, during sex. Your voice carries the fullness of love rather than the stress of genital need or the exasperation of emotional betrayal. Since every part of you takes on the characteristic of what you feel, if you feel as love you show as love.
You can attend only to your worried thoughts and troubled emotions, and therefore appear as a twisted and fearful character. Or, even when you are worried or troubled, you can feel open as an offering of love.
Through this practice of feeling open, history evaporates as it occurs. Openness prevails. Love appears as you.
P.S. The above prose was taken from Chapter 8 of David Deida’s work entitled “Blue Truth”.
To lift your eyes to heaven, When all men’s eyes are on the ground, is not easy. To worship at the feet of angels, when all men worship only fame and riches, is not easy. But the most difficult of all is to think the thoughts of angels, and to do as angels do.
As the son inherits the land of his father, so have we inherited a Holy Land from our Fathers. This land is not a field to be ploughed, but a place within us where we may build our Holy Temple; that which we have inherited from our Fathers, and their Fathers, Fathers.
The Holy Temple can be built only with the ancient Communions, those, which are spoken, those which are thought and those which are lived. The Communions are a bridge between man and the Angels, and like a bridge, can be built only with patience, yet, even as the bridge over the river is fashioned stone by stone, as they are found by the water’s edge.
And just as the roots of the tree sink into the earth and are nourished, and the branches of the tree raise their arms to the heaven, so is man like the trunk of the tree, with his roots deep in the breasts of his Earthly Mother and his soul ascending to the bright stars of his Heavenly Father, and this is the sacred Tree of Life which stands in the Sea of Eternity.
To lift your eyes to heaven, When all men’s eyes are on the ground, is not easy. To worship at the feet of angels, when all men worship only fame and riches, is not easy. But the most difficult of all is to think the thoughts of angels, and to do as angels do.
A sudden gust of wind hit me that instant and made my eyes burn. I stared towards the area in question. There was absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. “I can’t see a thing”, I said. “You just felt it”, he replied. “What? The wind?”. “Not just the wind”, he said. “It may seem to be wind to you, because wind is all you know”.
P.S. This is a follow-up on my previous Random Thoughts post marked "Columbus' Clippers". I asked previously, "how many times in our lives did we not see something simply because we did not believe that it was possible?" This time, I am asking "how many times in our lives did we not see something simply because we did not know?" Spiritually speaking, I think they are more or less the same question.
When the layman on the streets says: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it"; The lawyer will say: "Insofar as manifestations of functional deficiencies are agreed by any and all concerned parties to be imperceivable, and are so stipulated, it is incumbent upon said heretofore mentioned parties to exercise the deferment of otherwise pertinent maintenance procedures".
Do you suppose they celebrate death days on the other side? Will the day we give up the ghost be a day of celebration in heaven, or are we just another log on the fires of hell? The only extraordinary thing about birth, it seems to me, is that we are no longer dead, which we presume to be an inferior predicament. How fiercely we struggle to avoid death. How the death of our loved ones pains us. How desperately we hold on, hold on for dear life.
Cold, Barren, Bleak ... Winter is the kindest season. The heart will not melt in winter. Chilled by the cold, we are spared the guilt, the sorrow, the messy emotion of life. Winter is solace for the lonely. It's cold touch soothes the tettered heart. The sad tales are best told in winter.
The premise demonstrated in this article is that we can only perceive what we believe is possible. In other words, our eyes cannot perceive what we don’t believe is possible even if it is just right there in front of us.
According to Dr. Candace Pert in “What the Bleep Do We Know?”, when Columbus first reached the Caribbean Islands, she narrated that the Native American Indians on the islands just couldn't understand from where Columbus and his crew came. When Columbus pointed at his clippers, or ships at that day and age, which were some distance off the coastline, the Natives could nothing but the endless Atlantic Ocean. This was even though these vessels were just sitting on the horizon in plain sight. This was because clippers as a concept were just beyond the Natives' comprehension and imagination. As a result, the clippers were "invisible" to the Native American Indians since their minds cannot even begin to construct the concept of seafaring vessels capable of crossing vast stretches of ocean.
The Sharman, on the other hand, noticed unusual ripples or wave forms, which were generated by the clippers docked offshore, hitting the shorelines since Columbus' arrival. He was determined to find out what caused them. And for several days, he stood by the coast staring out into the ocean, squinting his eyes to try seeing exactly what he was not seeining. Finally, the shapes of clippers materialized and he was at that instant able to see the clippers. Thereafter, as soon as he told his fellow Indians, they too could immediately begin to see the clippers simply because they believed the Sharman.
P.S. How many times in our lives did we not see something simply because we did not believe that it was possible?
If you
Acknowledge that there is a single source of all that “is” or may ever “be”; that every life event, without exception, is part of “The One”;
Trust in the process of life as it is shown to you, divine timing with no accidents;
Believe that each and every experience drawn to you, without exception, is your opportunity to demonstrate your mastery of Life;
Believe that your life mirrors your quest to know yourself in all ways, knowing your extremes to find your balance; and
Believe that your life essence is eternal and that your body may enjoy the same experiences of eternalness,
Then
How can you, at the same time, judge an event, choice or actions, of yourself or another, as right or wrong, good or bad, or anything other than an expression of “The One”?
In other words,
If You
Believe that your life is eternal;
Believe that your life mirrors your quest to know yourself;
Believe in the Divine Order and Divine Timing;
Believe that each experience masterfully drawn to you is an “Opportunity” to demonstrate mastery;
Trust in the process of life as it unfolds unto you; and
Acknowledge that there is a single source of all that is “The One”,
Then
How can you, at the same time, judge an event or see it as something other than “The One”.
Therefore,
If
You question or do not believe in the essence of even one of these statements,
Then
You have just defined your next step in your path towards balance and mastery.
It was May 27th in 1992 at 4pm in the afternoon, a mortar shell dropped in the middle of a long queue who were then waiting patiently for bread in front of one of the last functional bakeries in the market place. 22 people were killed instantaneously on the spot. Vedran Smailovic looked out of his window to find remnants of flesh, blood, bone, and rubble splattered over the area. It was at that moment where he knew he had had enough.
Smailovic, who was 37 at that time, was the principal cellist of the Sarajevo Opera and was also widely recognised as an extraordinarily talented cello player too. Till 1992, he was occupied with his involvements in the Sarajevo Opera, the Sarajevo Philharmonic Orchestra, the Symphony Orchestra RTV Sarajevo, and the National Theatre of Sarajevo, as well as playing the festival circuit and working in recording studios.
Smailovic felt infuriated by what was happening around him but helpless to do anything to stop it. He was neither a politician nor a soldier, but just a musician. But did that mean he would just stand by and watch people die, while fearing for his own life all this time? In the long, dark night that followed the bread queue massacre, Smailovic thought long and deep. With the dawn of a new day, he had made up his mind that he would do something, and that something would be what he knew best, and that was to make music.
So every evening after that, for the next consecutive 22 days at exactly 4pm in the afternoon, Smailovic would walk to the middle of the street where the massacre had occurred. He would be dressed formally in his black coattails as if for a performance. There in the middle of the street, he would sit on a battered camp stool placed in the crater created by the mortar shell, with his cello in his hand, playing music. All around him, mortar shells would fall and bullets would fly. Yet he would play on regardless.
For 22 days, one day each for the people who were killed in the bread queue, Smailovic played his cello in the same spot at the ruined Sarajevo market place. He played to ruined homes, smouldering fires, as well as the terrified people hiding in basements. He played for human dignity that was the first casualty in war. But most importantly, he played for life, for peace, and for the possibility of hope that will exist even in the darkest of nights.
As his story began to filter into the press, he became a symbol for peace in Bosnia. An English composer, David Wilde, was so moved and inspired by the story that he wrote a composition for unaccompanied cello, simply called “The Cellist of Sarajevo”.
World renowned cellist Yo Yo Ma played this piece at the International Cello Festival held in Manchester, England, in 1994. When he finished playing the piece, Yo Yo Ma remained bent over his cello and his bow remained resting on the strings. No one in the hall moved, not a sound was made for a long time. Finally still in silence, Yo Yo Ma slowly straightened in his chair, looked out across the audience, and stretched out his hand toward them. All eyes followed as he beckoned someone to come forward to the stage. He was none other than Vedran Smailovic, the Cellist of Sarajevo himself. He rose from his seat and walked down the aisle as Yo Yo Ma came off the stage and headed up the aisle to meet him. With arms flung wide, they met each other in a passionate embrace. The audience then exploded into a chaotic and emotional frenzy of applause and cheering.
More recently, a young Canadian novelist, Steven Galloway, was also similarly inspired so much so that he wrote a poignant short novel in the same setting as the actual incident itself and whose title was also called “The Cellist of Sarajevo”.
So what does “The Cellist of Sarajevo” really stand for? It is the name of a bestselling book. And it is also the name of soul stirring cello composition. But most importantly, it is the name of life, of peace, and of the possibility that hope will exist even in the darkest of nights.
