Zainab Salbi: Women, wartime and the dream of peace | Video on TED.com
TED Talks In war we often see only the frontline stories of soldiers and combat. AT TEDGlobal 2010, Zainab Salbi tells powerful “backline” stories of women who keep everyday life going during conflicts, and calls for women to have a place at the negotiating table once fighting is over.
Darkness Into Light
don’t be bitter my friend
you’ll regret it soon
hold to your togetherness
or surely you’ll scatter
don’t walk away gloomy
from this garden
you’ll end up like an owl
dwelling on old ruins
face the war and
be a warrior like a lion
or you’ll end up like a pet
tucked away in a stable
once you conquer
your selfish self
all of your darkness
will change into light
“Don’t Be Bitter My Friend” ~ Rumi
Slavoj Žižek – What Is Love?
“What is love?” Slavoj Žižek asks in the documentary The Examined Life.“Love is not idealization. A true Lover knows that if you really love a woman or a man, that you do not idealize him or her. Loves means that you accept a person, with all its failures, stupidities, ugly points and nonetheless the person is absolute for you, everything that makes life worth living, that you see perfection in imperfection itself. And that is how we should learn to love the world.”
Furthermore Zizek adds:
“We should not forget that we humans are a part of the living earth. We should not forget that we are not abstract engineers or theorists who just exploit the nature. But we are a part of nature, that nature is part of our unfathomable, impenetrable background.”
Slavoj Žižek is one of my favorite modern day philosophers. For one, because when I hear him speak, it’s quite reminiscent of the thought process that takes place in my own mind, his choppy way of explaining his thoughts but also because I admire his way of bringing us closer to the earth, closer to the good, the bad and ugly parts of the world, that we are not separate from nature. The below clip is a part of my growing admiration, as he says that “Love Is Evil” when referring the imbalance that comes from biased loving of a certain portion, a certain person, a certain self, in this world. Rather than, as he states in The Examined Life, loving all facets of our world. He’s on to something here.
Backward Life – Disnormalizing The Standard Of Movement
I’ve come to realize that I live my life in a backward notion, yes, “notion” which is not to imply that I am looking back, nor that I am rotating patterns of the past but it is a factual product of my life is that I am evolving through a series of consequential events and emotions that are conventionally sensed at opposite ends of one’s life.Having no pertinence on the certainties of tragedy, trials or great feats. It is my belief that if should one exist long enough, it is an absolute that one will cycle through each of these aspects, as indubitably as we will not escape the verity of death.
Perhaps realization is the first step toward transformation.
