Fear Not




Fear Nothing

 

Dad and Mom

无言的恩爱。

To be or not to be

So near yet so far. 

Some barriers are there to protect you;
Some are there to block you from success.

When will I have the courage to march towards those barriers?

Favoraite things

Julie Andrew
Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens
Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens
Brown paper packages tied up with strings
These are a few of my favorite things

Cream colored ponies and crisp apple streudels
Doorbells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles
Wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings
These are a few of my favorite things

Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes
Snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes
Silver white winters that melt into springs
These are a few of my favorite things

When the dog bites
When the bee stings
When I'm feeling sad
I simply remember my favorite things
And then I don't feel so bad.

Enduring Love

Enduring love: a work in progress
www.theage.com.au


ISABELLA Rossellini plucks thoughtfully at the soft folding of her neck skin, which hasn’t been landscaped into cling-wrap tautness. There hasn’t been any tinkering with her eyes and mouth either; their creases reveal decades of generous smiles and still-sexy pouts. It is a face that, in the forthcoming film Late Bloomers, speaks truthfully of love and life.

While it is a relief to see a famous woman so comfortable with time’s work — born in 1952, she’s beautiful not despite her age but partly because of it — it is also reassuring to see the warts-and-all intimate relationship at the film’s heart. Rossellini and an equally aged William Hurt play this central couple with authenticity — wear, tear, joy and tenderness.

Older people in love: well, they’re usually invisible in popular culture. As for young people in love, they get a pretty fraught deal, too, widely represented as impossibly perfect beauties having endlessly hot sex with other faultless, fatless peers. It’s a lot to live up to.

Representations of real love — with deep feeling and commitment — are hard to find. We all know desire sells things and love has been co-opted as a retail tool but the different ages of love — from the first blushes of awkward youth through to the easy elegance of a loving relationship that has endured many decades — get twisted or ignored. Perhaps because they are ‘‘ordinary loves’’ (to misquote singer Sade), full of emotional nuance and imperfections, they get trampled in a giddy rush of manufactured ‘‘passion’’ peddled by slick advertising, celebrity cultism, TV soaps and the pornography-drenched internet.

While the lightweight new-release film Ages of Love falters in exploring how love matures as we age, it has its moment of truth when a nicely weathered Robert De Niro and a now-mellowed Monica Bellucci are on screen: they tenderly accept one another’s shortcomings of character as they embark gently on love.

True human love is very different from romance, writes Jungian analyst Robert Johnson in We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love. Romance, he says, has supplanted religion as something we expect to give us meaning; through it, we expect a partner to provide continual ecstasy and intensity. That is not possible and as we become wearied by the cycles and dead ends of romance, we begin to wonder if real love exists. ‘‘Romance is not a love that is directed at another human being,’’ he writes. ‘‘The passion of romance is always directed at our own projections.’’ Human love, by stark contrast, is a willingness to share simple, unromantic life, ‘‘not to eternally demand a cosmic drama, an entertainment, or an extraordinary intensity in everything’’.

Poet Alicia Sometimes, once partial to such cosmic dramas, says most portrayals of relationships show the swooning beginnings of impassioned love or the tempestuous, hurtful ends of it but never the easygoing middle bits. ‘‘You hardly ever see films where they are happy and not much else,’’ she says. Daily, garden-variety happiness, amid the familiar proceedings of life with her two children and husband Steve Grimwade, director of the Melbourne Writers Festival, is where she has found contentment. She might never pack a dishwasher in the approved manner and he might never get his clothes into the laundry basket but this younger couple know  they are there for each other, special and interested.

As a teenager, Sometimes thrived on the idea intimate relationships should burst with earth-shattering dramas. Meeting Grimwade in 1997 at a poetry event was different. ‘‘It was not a feeling of, ‘This love is so immense it’s going to kill me,’ or ‘I can’t breathe.’ This was so calm and I think that was what was different. Every other relationship I’d had was over-the-top, stomach-crampy, I must-get-a-T-shirt-made-of-them.’’

Grimwade impressed with kindness, calmness, humour. ‘‘It doesn’t sound like the makings of true love but ...’’ They married in 2005.

In a new book, The Curious History of Love, French sociologist Jean-Claude Kaufmann says there are many forms of love but his historical research reveals that somewhere along the line, intimate love between couples was hijacked to become a commodity. ‘‘It is tragic because the ‘calculating individual’ model has become so powerful that it is now encroaching upon the private realm,’’ he writes.

‘‘Our choice of conjugal partner, in particular, is increasingly influenced by a consumerist logic [comparing products in order to find out which is best] and that makes commitment very problematic.’’

The paradox, he writes, is that the more this cold cynicism envelops our culture, the more we seek happiness. Genuine lovingness (not hyped ‘‘romance’’) offers this solace and could be ‘‘truly revolutionary’’ for society.

Writers and poets perhaps talk about love with such perceptiveness because expressing its delicate rhythms, using both intuition and careful analysis, has always been their consuming topic. When writers Robert Dessaix and Peter Timms met almost 30 years ago, both had recently emerged from passionate affairs. Drama was not something either of them sought when they encountered each other through an ad Dessaix had placed in a magazine. Contrary to the fabrications of romance, with all its heightened passions and fantasies of perfection, what these two people hoped for was something more earthed.

‘‘In our popular culture — the culture of New Idea and Woman’s Day and Hello — there’s only one kind of falling in love and it’s the same as falling in lust,’’ Dessaix says. ‘‘In real life, for a lot of people, they are not totally separate things but they are rather different things. And I think that you fall in love with someone that you feel you might like to spend most of every day for the rest of your life with differently from the way you fall in love in the sense of being seized with passion and a desire to copulate.’’

Timms says that when he met Dessaix, there was no grand passion; rather, he found the writer interesting, clever and wonderful to converse with and there was a natural attraction. ‘‘It was an alternative for me, something reliable and steady and intellectually stimulating that looked like it was going to last. Then I found that the love grew gradually, after we moved in together, over a period of years.’’

Dessaix, too, surpasses romantic fantasy, observing that living with a partner is, for us all, mostly made of drudgery. Cooking, cleaning, shopping, sitting in a recliner watching TV, walking the dog or weeding. ‘‘For a love relationship to work, you have to have something that transforms that ... and makes it beautiful. If you don’t you are left with just vacuuming and ironing and then everything goes sour and you start to think, ‘If only I could have a weekend with Brad Pitt, I’d feel invigorated.’  What you really need is some kind of shared internal life that redeems all those things.’’

Dessaix describes this shared internal life as a ‘‘secret kingdom’’ with its own history, stories and loves in life. ‘‘After 30 years, I quite often say to Peter, ‘Do you think ...’ and he’ll say, ‘No, I don’t.’  I don’t even have to mention what the topic is.’’  

That said, both  men  say their personalities and opinions have remained  quite distinct, even as some of their interests have crossed over. Mutual values, though, are important to them and were part of the attraction.

The shared internal life allows us,  Johnson says, to affirm ‘‘the person who is actually there, rather than the ideal we like him or her to be’’. This love causes us to value the person as a total, individual self, with imperfections as well as admirable qualities.

For Dessaix and Timms, this richness comes from careful, conscious communication and employing healthy humour. ‘‘If I am feeling something is going wrong,’’ Dessaix says, ‘‘I will say, ‘I don’t think you should have said that.’  I said that last night but I have the language to say why and Peter has the language to defend himself (quite unreasonably, of course!) and to explain why he said what he said.’’ This is perhaps why they have never had a serious argument or dispute that has left ‘‘either of us feeling bitter or damaged’’.

Dessaix says beauty is of the essence — that ‘‘love’’ means finding someone deeply beautiful to you. ‘‘Life is terribly, terribly short, as I now know, in my 60s, with my 30s feeling like the week before last. You shouldn’t be spending any of those years in a miserable relationship.’’

Timms agrees. ‘‘You won’t find another person beautiful unless you find all sorts of other things beautiful. You have to be able to appreciate the beauty of the landscape or music or whatever it might be — you’ve got to be able to experience the beauty of existence, if that’s not too exalted-sounding. We are talking about love being between two people but it has to be expansive as well.’’

Further along the spectrum of enduring love is romance writer Valerie Parv. With 26 years  between her and her husband, Paul (‘‘not that we ever really noticed it’’), they had been together for 38 years before he died in 2008. For this woman, who has written 70 books (50 of them in the romance genre) and clocked up 29million sales, romance is not a fantasy in real life.

‘‘I got so frustrated being told you couldn’t have a romantic relationship like we do in novels that I wrote a [non-fiction] book called I’ll Have What She’s Having. I wanted to say it can be like this, it depends on how much work you are prepared to put into it. Paul and I always used to work at our romance and people used to say, ‘Oh, you sound like newlyweds.’

‘‘I don’t know if they thought it was something I’d put on just to look good professionally but it was exactly how we were, privately and publicly. I am convinced the secretes that you do have to work at it.’’

The essence of her relationship was about retaining the great appeal of their early times together. ‘‘What is a romantic relationship?’’ she asks. ‘‘There are certainly psychologists who say that it’s chemical and that it will wear off and you will settle into this boring, everyday existence. That wasn’t our experience. Perhaps because of what I do, we were more aware of it. This ‘queen of romance’ thing has to be good for something! A lot of it came down to doing the things that you do when you first get together, which is you consider each other, you care about each other, you don’t belittle each other, you don’t try to score points. They are things that sneak in.’’

Like Sometimes, Dessaix and Timms, Parv is wary of high drama in a relationship — interesting for a romance novelist. ‘‘The whole media focus [is] on drama — let’s face it, that’s what sells papers, magazines and online services — but that isn’t the whole of life. The quiet times are as valuable, even more so than the dramas. Drama in fiction — you can resolve it and everyone goes away happy. In real life it’s far more destructive.’’

Her words are so sensible, it is no surprise to discover she has done a counselling diploma in recent years and might one day practise. She would enjoy reading Robert Johnson, too, because he insists an intimate relationship is inseparable from friendship and commitment.

 ‘‘We can learn that the essence of love is not to use the other to make us happy but to serve and affirm the one we love,’’ he writes. ‘‘And we can discover, to our surprise, that what we have needed more than anything was not so much to be loved, as to love.’’

良友

知己，
是不是在你看不清时，当你的眼晴？
是不是在你没法保护自己时， 挡在你前面？

我想，
不管做了什么， 也可能方法用错了，
目的终究是不想再让自己受伤害。
这是我对知己的信任。

当不能了解时， 就要学会谅解， 这就是信任。

Rojak 3

"For you, a thousand times over."
Then I turned and ran.
It was only a smile, nothing more.
It didn't make everything all right.
It didn't make anything all right.
Only a smile. A tiny thing.
A leaf in the woods,
shaking in the wake of a startled bird's fight.
But, I'll take it. With open arms.
Because when spring comes,
it melts the snow one flake at a time,
and maybe I just witnessed the first flake melting . 

Kathina 2011, Warburton.
You can burn everything with patience. 

My treasure :)
得来不易，所以格外珍惜， 乃人之常情。

Sweet memories :)
亿童年。

谢了

才想拥有，朋友就带它们漂洋过海来了， 真的谢了。 

Anchor

Mindy Gledhill
© 2010 Blue Morph Music (BMI)

When all the world is spinning ‘round
Like a red balloon way up in the clouds
And my feet will not stay on the ground
You anchor me back down

I am nearly world renowned
As a restless soul who always skips town
But I look for you to come around
And anchor me back down

There are those who think that I’m strange
They would box me up and tell me to change
But you hold me close and softly say
That you wouldn’t have me any other way

When people pin me as a clown
You behave as though I’m wearing a crown
When I’m lost I feel so very found
When you anchor me back down

Chorus

When all the world is spinning ‘round
Like a red balloon way up in the clouds
And my feet will not stay on the ground
You anchor me back down

Viber

For iphone or andriod phone users, you may enjoy free international calls and text messages to other Viber users using 3G or Wi-Fi.

It works like Skype with the differences that you don't have to purchase any credit nor to have any account. Your phone number is your ID.

For more information, please visit their website:
http://www.viber.com/

Enjoy.

Humour

Me:   Why don't you add some sugar in your coffee?
Ruth:  Because I'm sweet enough.
Me: ... .... !!

Me: Well, since our microwave is dead what should I use to melt the agarose gel?
Jocelyn: I use my palm to heat it but you need to be HOT.
Me: ... ... !!!

活着

Work for a Cause – NOT for Applause. 
Live life to Express – NOT to Impress. 
Don’t strive to make your Presence noticed. 
Just make your ABSENCE felt.


~ Chong Kheng ~ 

Nike Spirit

Sometimes we may have a thousand excuses to not do something, 
but for that ONE reason, that ONE necessity, that ONE need, 
we have to do it, we just have to do it, 
no compromise, no bullshit, just do it.


~ Desmond ~ 

Self-check 13

Almost forget the fact that I may be 'soft' and 'gentle' but I am not weak.  

新欢

< It's not easy to be me > 
Superman- Five for Fighting 
I can't stand to fly
I'm not that naive
I'm just out to find
The better part of me

I'm more than a bird, I'm more than a plane
More than some pretty face beside a train
It's not easy to be me

Wish that I could cry
Fall upon my knees
Find a way to lie
About a home I'll never see

It may sound absurd, but don't be naive
Even Heroes have the right to bleed
I may be disturbed, but won't you concede
Even Heroes have the right to dream
It's not easy to be me
[ Lyrics from: http://www.lyricsmode.com/lyrics/d/david_gray/its_not_easy_to_be_me.html ]
Up, up and away, away from me
Well it's all right, You can all sleep sound tonight
I'm not crazy, or anything,

I can't stand to fly
I'm not that naive
Men weren't meant to ride
With clouds between their knees

I'm only a man in a silly red sheet
Digging for kryptonite on this one way street
Only a man in a funny red sheet
Looking for special things inside of me
Inside of me... inside of me...
wu... hoo... hoo...
It's not easy to be me.

Puppha Vagga (Flowers)

As a bee without harming the flower,

its colour or scent, flies away, 

collecting only the honey, 

even so should ones live their lives.

Dhp Puppha Vagga v49

One: Live a simple life

Two: Be green and be kind

Three: Leaving no trace behind. 

Solitude

独处乐. 

Do not easily draw by negative energy of others.
Remember to be self-sufficient and be a good friend of yourself.
After all, you walk your own path. No one can live your life for you.

Boundary

NSW Coastline 2011

看到这画面时，有两个感想：

１。站得高真的能望得远。呵呵。
２。天空，大海，沙滩和草地被界线清楚地一一隔开，让人一目了然。生命里的人事与物，如果也能这么清楚地一一规类就好了, 就简单多了。

人为，环境或品种？

有点奇怪。Sydney 2011. 

不知道为甚么会长成这样。 是人为？环境？还是品种？ 

Leading nowhere ...

有时侯，不选择也是一种选择；是更需要勇气的选择。
前路模糊时，不防沉着不做任何选择，如果可以的话。

Wollongong, Sydney 2011.

我说

There are three kinds of things:
1. Things that we enjoy doing
2. Things that we can do well
3. Things that we have to do but may not be skillful at

To do thing in category 3 would be a big challenge for us. At this time, what we have to think of is how to do it well but not whether we can do it or not.

不起眼的，放在对的地方，效果还是挺不错的。　

弄假成真

可爱吧。　就不知道好吃没有。　呵呵。

难关

关关难关， 关关过。
抬头挺胸， 脚踏实地，
加油了。

放弃了，就浪费了一个突破自己的机会了。
机会难逢呢！ 呵呵。

难关重重，岂能阻我去路？呵呵。
Bus loop, Monash. 

梦想

A: ".... but I have no dream...."

Some survive because of their dreams.
Some just haven't found their dreams.
Some live in others' dreams.
Some do not need a dream to keep them alive.
Some already live in their dreams but never realized.

So it's alright for not having a dream as long as you live a happy life NOW, I guess. 

Monash Clayton, Vic. 

听你说

郁可唯&林凡
我挺开心你为努力生活。
和你们分享要的每一秒钟。
如果难过你的肩膀最辽阔。
你帮我带走乌云满布的天空。
如果生活少了有你陪我。
我整天开着手机也感到失落。 
因为我们都最想看到彼此灿烂的笑容。
* 我懂星座却没有人想我，
真的喜欢一个人安静的自由。
我做的梦我坚持做到最后。
就算我爬到云端也继续做梦。
我唱的歌只希望能快乐。
其它我也不想要想的太多。
因为我们都最想，拥有自己最真的感动。
听你说，听你说。
我们同时拥有一个真心的朋友。
要日出日落，因为有梦，所以更认真生活。
听你说，听你说。
我们真实拥有一片美好的的天空。
不能常联络却更紧握我们交换的美梦。
只想听你说。


p/s: Thanks, LS :) 

有无限

因为生命有限，所以希望自己不为小事抓狂; 不为没有答案的事钻牛角尖;
不执着于不能改变的事实。

因为心容量有限，所以希望自己不记伤心的事；不记欺我之人；
不把自己放大再放大。

因为爱无限，所以我要爱人人。

因为人的潜能无限，所以我要有自信且对事事乐观。

运气好时，连上大号也能遇上令人窝心的事。呵。

从心出发

洗脑

察觉最近都是电脑在替我记人事物，电脑资讯在主宰我的思考和帮我做判断。

明明觉得那餐馆还不赖，可reviews 说不好，竟怀疑起舌头了。
明明知道研讨会日期，可还要去 google calendar 确认。
出门没智能手机就没安全感。

结论是我最近背叛了自己, 相信电脑多过相信自己了。

是时候洗我脑了。

神圣的图书馆会不会也有被电脑淘汰的一天?

Simply Graceful

THE AUSTRALIAN BALLET 2012 SEASON PREVIEW

Ready to celebrate its 50th anniversary year, the Australian Ballet reveals its stunning program for 2012.  My acknowledgement to the hard work of the dancers.  "Embracing the past and future" 

用心

今天，特意对周围用点心， 发现了这些小事情.
高兴的是 small little things can still make my day !!

Thanks, Xenia :) 

 I think I know who did this !! :) 

That's why I try to avoid coffee :) 

Quote that keeps my heart pumping. 

Kate's little corner.  Do you have yours? 

春天来了

因为知道春天终会来， 所以这个冬天对我来说不太冷。

Spring is on its way. 春天来了。 

大地回春。 

天气转暖，骑脚车一族开始出动啦。 

摄氏十度，小伙子不用外套，还喝冷饮，高境界。 

Dana Reward

Media sells sensation but not reality.
Reality needs to be seen and felt with our own heart and through our own experience.
But often, our hearts cheat too. We see and hear only what we want to. 

有型的Adele

Sometimes it lasts in love, but sometimes it hurts instead. 

Regrets and mistakes, they are memory made. 

大小无

把不满的情绪压下，大事化小， 小事化无的感觉很棒。
因为这样， 很快可以回归正常频率， 经松， 快乐的心情也接从而来。 
不要把精力花在不对的地方，要记住了。 
Life's too short to be taken seriously ... 

Hi Bye

If you don't appreciate Hi Bye friends, then be mindful try not to be one either.
Lee Yean, look into their eyes and give them a warm smile when people say 'hi' to you. 

My neighbour

简. 

不需要很大。
不需要很华丽。
简单，舒服就好。

这样的家，住久了，气质会不会好一点? 呵呵

Viva la Vida

决定了。
现在， 我的第一偶像是 Cold Play 的主音， Christopher Anthony John "Chris" Martin. 
原来， 他的另一半是 Gwyneth Paltrow. 
才男配佳女， 我服啦 ！ 呵呵。 

Happier

Being happy is not so difficult.
But what really difficult is being more happy than other people.
Because we always assume that others are more happy than we are.
Are you trying to be happy or happier than others?

Go back to where you came from

It is now the most watched documentary in Australia.

http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/tv-and-radio/go-back-a-ratings-winner-for-sbs-20110622-1ged3.html 

To watch it online. 

http://www.sbs.com.au/shows/goback/episodes/page/i/1/h/Episodes/ 

Happy watching. 

The cast of  "Go back to where you came from".

请多保重

偷拍. 

被发现啦. 

在Jungle Trekking时, 看到了这温馨的一幕.

十分钟里, 俩人并没有交谈. 就那样静静的坐着. 

一切尽在不言中. 

亲爱的朋友们, 请多保重. 让我们一起慢慢变老.

老来互相调侃， 当然也互相勉励.

我可是会活的很老的.呵呵. 

魔术师

乍看一下， 很像魔术师， 就抛下朋友， 跟了上去。
拍完照后， 把他跟丢了， 还蛮失落的。
事后回想， 会失落是因为那一顺间， 我把他当成了我生命里的魔术师，
可以把我不喜欢的都变走的魔术师。

再见他的话， 会对他说：" Hey mate, so... Harry is your friend ?"  呵呵。

Dhammacakka Day Gift

HS, thanks and I owe you once. 

Eighth core value: Reflection

  

Long long time ago, in a monastery, all the monks practice meditation every evening.  There is a kitten in the monastery always kacau the monks when they are meditating.  So the old Abbot tied this kitten on the pillar every time before they go to meditate.  After long long time, the Abbot passed away but the kitten is still being tied on the pillar every time they meditate until it grows old and dies. Then the monks buy another kitten and tied it on the pillar every time they want to meditate. They practise this for a long long time. Until there is a sutra and catatan on the benefits of tying a kitten on the pillar while meditating.  The moral of the story is we cannot follow tradition merely without asking why. We cannot follow things blindly but must understand why we do that.  E.g. why we must bounce three times when paying respect? Why we must offer fruit, flower and water to the Triple Gems so on and so forth.  The Buddha never taught us to do all these. The Buddha only shared with us the essential things that will lead us to the Nibbana which are the Four-Noble truths and Noble Eight-fold path.  This is because the Buddha knew that human mind is very easy to create ideology.  The way we do Puja is a cultural thing or a way of paying respect.  Once ideology is being created, human mind will cling on it and believe that it is the truth.  Clinging creates attachments.  Attachments are afflictions.  It is this affliction which keeps us in the Samsara and makes us not able to be freed.

We can do reflection in a truthful way to achieve liberation from affliction. Affliction refers to attachment due to greed, hatred and delusions.  We have to reflect every day: Do I have greedy thought today? Do I act greedily today? Do I say something which will lead to greedy action? Do I have any hatred thought? Do I get angry today? Why do I get angry? What are the objects and subjects that make me feel angry? Do I have frivolous thought, action and speech today?  We must reflect sincerely and truthfully. Or else it will become justification but not reflection.

One can study Buddhism very well, like an Abhidhammist.  But still there are Abhidhammists who are depressed. So, knowledge has to be coupled with reflection then only it is called as LEARNING.

Learning is not simply adding on information.  Learning only happen when a person reflects and finally realizes the truth then only a person can be transformed. A teacher cannot transform us. A teacher can only inform. Inform us the knowledge. We have to always reflect and walk the path on our own. The Buddha didn't save Angulimala. It was Angulimala did the reflection on the Buddha's word. Then he realized that was true and finally transformed himself to a better person. 

Adding more knowledge is like adding more water to a fountain.  But it is not like lighting a lamp which will dispel the darkness. Only wisdom can dispel darkness.

Footnote: 

Eight core values

·        Compassion: The passion to the community. Be passion in helping and supporting each other. 

·        Courage: Able to cope with adversities and having the courage to go on.

·        Respect

·        Integrity

·        Service

·        Faith

·        Learning

·        Reflection