Joy in the Ordinary

In all the little things...

image from Action for Happiness

{卷珠帘}

卷珠帘 {'Raise the pearl curtain'}, a beautiful traditional Chinese style song by young talented singer songwriter 霍尊 Huo Zun (also goes by Henry Huo) who came to fame on a Chinese singing talent contest a couple of years ago. The lyrics are written in old Chinese prose and describes a woman wistfully thinking of the person she loves as she sits by a window on a moonlit night.


I'm really loving the 古風 'gǔ fēng' ('style of the antiquity') and 中國風 'Zhōngguó fēng' ('Chinoiserie') art and music that can be found everywhere now by Chinese artists and musicians. Maybe it's just me getting older and that urge to look at your roots, but I'm rediscovering a great interest in all these traditional Chinese arts, the music, the dances, the clothing, the history and the folklore. Especially the 古風 aspect, which describes a style that conjures a Middle Kingdom of a time long ago, of myths and legends, when gods and spirits roamed, warlords clashed, heroes fought, and everything was that little bit more epic...

A dance to The Unforgiven

Resurrected my ancient iPod touch this morning and was happily running through old playlists when the opening strings of the The Unforgiven as played by Apocalyptica came on. Aah I still get shivers from it.

I actually first heard this version on the inaugural Eurovision dance contest back in 2007 when the winning couple from Finland danced a Paso Doble to it. Their interpretation of the music and the beautifully balletic flow of their Paso were just magical. I loved the dance and the music.

(sidenote: what did we do before we could find everything on Youtube?!)

*Sigh*...isn't that just gorgeous?

I can't quite remember if it was from this that I looked up Apocalyptica or if it was after seeing the clip of Kseniya Simonova the sand artist's story telling, that moved the audience and judges on Ukraine's Got Talent to tears, which used music from Apocalyptica as well. I don't know what it is but I just love it when classical instruments are used to produce that rock/metal sound, I feel it adds a whole other level of awesome!

Things to give up if you want to be happy...

I love this, words to remember and a state of mind to strive for...

15 Things to Give Up If You Want to Be Happy

1. Give up your need to always be right

When given the choice between being right and being kind, choose kind. - Wayne Dyer

2. Give up your need for control

By letting it go, it all gets done. The world is won by those who let it go. When you try and try, the world is beyond winning. - Lau Tzu

3. Give up on blaming others

A man can fail many times, but he isn't a failure until he begins to blame somebody else - John Burroughs

4. Give up your self-defeating self-talk

The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. - Eckhart Tolle

5. Give up your limiting beliefs

A belief is not an idea held by the mind; it is an idea that holds the mind. - Elly Roselle

6. Give up complaining

You can complain because roses have thorns, or you can rejoice because thorns have roses. - Alphonse Karr

7. Give up the luxury of criticism

Spend so much time improving yourself that you have no time left to criticise others. - Christian D Larson

8. Give up your need to impress others

Don't try to impress others. Let them have the fun of impressing you. - James R Fisher Jr

9.Give up your resistance to change

Follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be. - Joseph Campbell

10. Give up labels

The highest form of ignorance is when you reject something you don't know anything about. - Wayne Dyer

11. Give up your fears

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. - Franklin Delano Roosevelt

12. Give up your excuses

99% of failures come from people who have the habit of making excuses. - George Washington Carver

13. Give up the past

Forget the mistakes of the past and press on to the greater achievements of the future. - Christian D Larsen

14. Give up attachment

The wise individual doesn't get too attached to any of life's pleasures, knowing that wonderful science is hard a t work proving it's bad for him. - Bill Vaughan

15. Give up living your life to other people's expectations

The world is a mirror and reflects back your expectations. What you get is what you see. You create your own reality. - Denis Waitley

Original article by World Observer Online

Original Image via Pinterest

Chess set of tiny planters

Even though I'm not really a chess player, I love ornate chess sets. Especially ones with a special theme where the pieces have original designs.

So I saw this and immediately fell in love. A chess set of tiny planters that you can customise with your own choice of herbs and cute succulents? I want one! A 3D-printed set that XYZWorkshop created for a design competition.

If you are in possession of a 3D printer, the printing pattern is even available for download, for free, on MyMiniFactory.

via MyModernMet

Cookie Wisdom

As a kid, Cookie Monster was always my favourite one from Sesame Street because he had funny eyes and was such a messy eater XD

[Image from artisticstateofmind]

A beautifully expressive short ballet

I keep saying this, but I just love discovering a new piece of artwork or music and artist or singer through randomly clicking on a link somewhere. Today this video of Sergei Polunin dancing to Andrew Hozier's 'Take me to church' was trending and I clicked to see why.


Wowee! I had heard of Polunin before, I think probably from coverage for when he unexpectedly left the Royal Ballet, but I hadn't seen his work. On just this performance in the video - I think he really is incredible. The power in his leaps and turning jumps is just awesome, and I love that you can see his emotions through his movements and in his body, particularly his face and his hands, as he interprets the music.

I love dance and ballet in particular. I love the discipline and the form - the training gives ballet dancers that elegance and poise and those very particular shapes and extended lines that are really pleasing to look at. The thing is though, I'm not actually so keen on classical ballets. Yes, they're very pretty, but maybe they're too pretty. I always feel they're dancing with masks on because they can't show their effort on their faces. And it can't be messy - it has to be very neat, and precise. I feel that, dance, at its simplest, is expression. Expression is messy; it's visceral and spontaneous. So I love this way of ballet dancing. The movements are not completely tidy, in fact I feel they're quite unrestrained, in that he's not censoring himself - he's not just aiming for a picture perfect pose but to actually describe a feeling.  Yet, you can still see that he is technically brilliant because he can execute those difficult, powerful moves and look absolutely exquisite as he hits those lines.  And it feels very raw and emotive because he's showing effort and emotion on his face. What an astounding dancer. All the more impressive because I know a little of how difficult it is!

Assassin's Creed

All right, a little fan-girl geeking out coming up. You have been warned.

I'd always known of the Assassin's Creed games, but had never played them or really known about them in depth.

And then a couple of years ago I came across this really cool video of parkour/free-running inspired by the Assassin's Creed game style.



I loved it! But still I didn't attempt to get the game itself at the time. There was no particular reason; I guess I've just never been a massive action game player.

And then last year I played the most recent Devil May Cry, DMC, and really liked it. My little sister and I started working our way backwards through that franchise over the summer and it got me playing games again (we played quite a bit of video games growing up - Pacman, Super Mario, Bomberman, Sonic, my favourite Ecco the Dolphin ^_^...)

Anyway, so Assassin's Creed Unity was launched just at the end of last year and the guys who did the original parkour video did another one with 4 people, to tie in with the new game's multi-player co-op capability.


Talking about how cool it was with my other sister's boyfriend over Christmas, he said he had Assassin's Creed Black Flag on his Xbox and let me have a go on it. I have to say I didn't get into it so much on first play because I found the gaming style quite complicated, the controls confused me somewhat. But I was on board now, and after finding Assassin's Creed II on special offer on Steam over New Year's (=D) I gave it another shot. And I'm really glad I did as I was very impressed with the whole world and back story that they've built up for it - warring factions, Templars and conspiracy theories, sci-fi crossed with historical drama! The intrigue! The sense of adventure! I'm a really clumsy assassin though; I keep walking into walls and falling off rooftops (unintentionally)... and my brain's inability to realise that it's not really me climbing up those high places is a bit of a problem (I'm scared of heights) but it's definitely a great game. I really like how detailed the locations and historical information are, it's almost like going on a virtual tour of the time periods the games are set in - currently I'm still rampaging through Renaissance Italy.

I also can't stop re-playing the cinematic trailer for Assassin's Creed Unity because I love the song - Lorde's smokey cover of 'Everybody wants to rule the world' - and the action is so brilliantly choreographed to every beat. Very neat.


Word is that the next one is to be set in Victorian England. That'll be interesting. But the one I really hope they develop is the short side game China Chronicles that they've already released. Not only would the backgrounds and graphics plus the martial arts influences that'd be in there be so awesome, the main selling point for me is that the assassin in that story is a woman!

The Drowned Man

Way, way back in January, one of my friends treated me to an evening out to see immersive theatre company Punchdrunk and the National Theatre's most recent offering, The Drowned Man. It was like nothing I'd ever seen before. Seriously. It was mind-blowingly awesome. I loved it so much I couldn't stop recommending it and took my sister and her boyfriend, and my youngest sister all to see it to make sure they didn't miss it. My youngest sister liked it so much we went back to see it again, just a few weeks before it finished its run. If it hadn't wrapped, I suspect we might have gone again. Yes it really was that good, and no, that is by far not the most times people have been.



The Drowned Man is set in a 1960s Hollywood film studio, Temple Pictures. Inside the studio where stars and starlets chase their dreams, two lovers struggle to make ends meet. Tragedy strikes when infidelity, scheming and betrayal drive them apart, leading one of them into ever increasing delusion and paranoia until eventually it ends in a horrific death. Strangely, a similar story unfolds in parallel outside the gates of the studio among the people of the town. Even more mysteriously, something happened to Temple Studios itself, which we are told was shut down overnight for an unknown reason...

Do you know Punchdrunk? They made their name through pioneering large scale immersive theatre where audience members are free to roam and interact with the sets, the story and the characters.

I'd been to an open air promenade play before (based on Lords and Ladies, the Discworld book by Sir Terry Pratchett) which was staged in a park and where the audience followed the actors around the various scenes as the story unfolded. But we were still only watching in the background. Punchdrunk's productions are truly immersive. They convert huge disused buildings into unbelievably detailed sets and you are allowed to go wherever you want as the actors enact the story around you. There's no right or wrong way to go about it, you choose what you want to do and see. Though, 'seeing' doesn't describe the complete sensation, it's more 'experiencing'. You don't just watch as a passive audience, you have to work for it by choosing what to do. Very often you have to chase after the characters (up and down stairs, through narrow corridors, across forests and deserts...) as they go about their business. You can stand right next to the actors in a fight, sit at their desks, eavesdrop on intimate conversations, read a note they've read, look through cabinets, walk into their homes, riffle through their belongings... the amazing sets, the sounds, the smells, the music, the lighting, and the actors, all catapult you into the world that the story creates. It is as if you are watching from inside the story, beside the characters. It's like a live-action computer game. There are some rules though - all audience members have to wear a mask, talking is not allowed, and you are encouraged to explore on your own. A lot of it is practically in the dark, with only strategic lighting to guide you through the huge maze of rooms and sets. The more you search, the more secrets you uncover. And if you are very brave (and very lucky), you might find yourself rewarded with a special interaction.

For The Drowned Man, four floors of an old postal sorting warehouse was converted into Temple Studios and its town. The scale and detail of the sets were just incredible. To give you an idea of the sheer size, it played host to around 40 cast and 600 audience members at full capacity, with lots of space still left over. There was a working cinema inside. Yes really! You could have gotten lost in there. Each show ran for three hours but that was still not enough to see everything. You could easily have spent it just exploring the sets and rummaging through the details. And if you decided to follow the characters, there were multiple story lines happening simultaneously all over the four floors and it was impossible to follow everything. My friend and I missed a whole floor on the first visit and even after seeing it three times I hadn't followed every character.

The story itself is inspired by Woyzeck, a fractured, unfinished play by George Buchner, about a soldier who is driven crazy by his lover's affair and ends up killing her. It also draws on ideas from other works including short story The Sandman, and novels The Day of the Locust and Something Wicked This Way Comes. To quote Punchdrunk's own description, Temple Studios is a place where '...celluloid fantasy clings to desperate realism and certainty dissolves into a hallucinatory world' as we '..[follow] its protagonists along the precipice between illusion and reality.'

For me, it very much gave a sense of the dark underbelly of the Hollywood dream - voyeurism, exploitation, obsession and corruption. I loved the air of menace that ran through the whole story, the allusions to the malevolent and the supernatural that played with the mind and made everyone very jumpy. I loved how, as the audience, we wandered around this world in eerie white masks as if we were ghosts - we could see the characters but they couldn't see us (or could they...?). The freedom to roam everywhere and be so close to everything completely blurred the fourth wall and, in a crazily beautiful way, brought full circle the very idea of fantasy/reality that was being played out.

I also loved that each person's experience was completely unique to them - only I saw everything the way that I saw it, even though we were all watching the same thing. And because of the story-within-a-story, multiple layered nature of the game that we were playing, we could all be seeing a different layer of the story depending on how deeply we were looking for hidden clues and trying to unravel the secrets. Oh how things clicked into place when reading spoilers afterwards.

I can't wait to see more of Punchdrunk's work. I'd first become aware of them a few years ago when they turned railway arches at Waterloo station into the setting of an immersive play for the launch of a sci-fi horror game for one of the big consoles (found out too late, didn't see it T_T). Their Sleep No More, which has located the story of Macbeth inside a 1930s hotel, is currently running in New York. Will they bring that back over to the UK? Or will their next production be something completely new? I wait with bated breath! Here is Punchdrunk's founder, the genius that is Felix Barrett, to tell you a bit more:


PS. All the scenes you see in the trailers are from the actual sets that were on location.

Measure

"If your parents ever measured you as a child, they had you stand against a wall, and made a little pencil mark on the wall to show your growth.
They did not measure you against your brother, or the neighbor’s kids, or kids on tv.

When you measure your growth, make sure to only measure your today self by your past self. If you compare your relationships, your success, or your anything against anyone else, you are not being fair to you.

Everyone has a different path, a different pace, and different challenges to face along the way."

~Doe Zantamata | writer, photographer

...the audience still sleeps

Sunrise on the beach, Rhodes, Greece | 2008

“When you do something noble and beautiful and nobody noticed, do not be sad. For the sun every morning is a beautiful spectacle and yet most of the audience still sleeps.”

~ John Lennon

Little President Man

Have you met Robby Novak, aka Kid President?


He is adorable and I'm a huge fan. His videos are so funny and uplifting. This incredible little boy living with his own illness inspires a lot of happiness.


You can't help smiling and he has the most infectious laugh.


Only 10 and he's met the President at the White House and been invited to the United Nations!

Visit to a lavender farm

Went to visit some friends who live in Hertfordshire over the weekend. They took us to a lavender field in Hitchin which is part of a working farm. Hitchin used to be one of two major lavender growing areas in the country.

It was really sunny in the morning when we arrived and as we came off the road into their car park we could see this purple hill in the distance. It was so pretty!

My friends had been a couple of months before and were disappointed because the lavender had not yet bloomed. This made up for it I think.

The rows of lavender stretched out over the low hill and even though the sun did then decide to play hide and seek behind huge clouds, it was just wonderful.

There weren't too many people around just yet so it was perfect for photos.

There were so many bees buzzing all around, with butterflies and ladybugs...

The farm harvests the lavender to make essential oil and lavender products for sale in the 17th century barn. There's a cafe and an outside area to sit and enjoy the view. You can also take home plug plants of lots of varieties of lavender. I was very tempted to buy some to join my pink Little Lottie lavender, but seriously, there's no room left on my balcony...

We each picked a bag-full of the lovely purple stuff and the rain didn't start until we were safely indoors again. So now all I have to do is decide what to do with all that lavender once it has dried. There's no such thing as too many lavender sachets, right?

Fairy tales are more than true...

Dragon slayer by Katja Kaikkonen on deviantART

“Fairy Tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”

~Neil Gaiman, paraphrasing G. K. Chesterton

Amor Mio by Lee Hyori feat. Park Jiyong

I am so in love with this song. Not only is Lee Hyori unbelievably beautiful, this song really showcases her voice. And Park Jiyong, who duets with her on this, can really sing. My word! He hits really high notes on it. Plus he plays the piano for the piece, which is always a bonus for me =D

The lyrics are as beautiful as the melody. It's about losing the one you love, so it's a sad one. It's so powerful and delicate at the same time.

This is a live version, with English subtitles.


Sigh.... and swoon.

Weekend DIY - Herbal Boutonnieres

I think the summer wedding season is about to go into full swing now... I should know! One of my best friends is getting married at the end of July. The excitement is building =D

On that note, for those thinking of doing some DIY for a wedding, here's a simple to follow step by step from Once Wed for making lovely boutonieres using fragrant herbs that you might be growing in your own garden.

via Once Wed

Weekend DIY - Tea Storage Jars

Do you ever walk into a specialist tea shop and hanker after the neat rows of pretty jars for your  own kitchen? *Me! Me!* Well, I don't suppose many of us would really need to have so many varieties of tea on selection, but cute storage ideas are always good!

Let Amanda of Wit & Whistle show you how easily you can upcycle glass jars into storage for your favourite herbal teas (or anything else you fancy putting in them) with a simple coat of chalk paint.

via Wit & Whistle

Weekend DIY - Lace Sleeve Tank Top

This is such a cute way of making a simple tank top pretty and a bit more dressed up. I love the floaty lace sleeves. Follow ...love Maegan's easy instructions for making your own lace sleeve tank top.

via Pinterest

In picture - so small a beautiful thing

'In picture' is back (yay). This month's theme is going to be ~small but fierce.

F1160008 by kori song on Flickr

We travel, some of us forever...

Wherever the wind blows, by ilovedoodle

“We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.”

~ Anais Nin