I came across the daily schedule of Benjamin Franklin a few months back. It got me thinking about the incredible amount fo work this man accomplished in his life time. I always wonder what it would be like to live back in the day when people didn’t have so much of the modern technology that seems to distract us.

Back then, it must have taken so long to make progress. Longer to get somewhere, longer to communicate, longer to write, longer to do just about everything. At the same time, Benjamin Franklin accomplished more back then, than most people today will in there lifetime. I am pretty sure as well, that you would never hear that he was bored, even without the Lakers and the Packers.

Benjamin Franklin's Daily Schedule

After seeing this and allowing it to marinate over the last six months or so, I finally had to change my life. I have a schedule for the most part, I get up, check the news, get ready for work, come home, fix dinner and get ready for the next day. I then usually watch a little TV before getting into bed and reading before I fall asleep.

So now, I am on my second week of waking up at 6 o’clock when my alarm goes off(no snooze) and going upstairs to my office to work on personal stuff for hour and half to two hours. This blog post is part of my new daily/weeekly schedule. The way I look at it, if I have an hour and a half every morning for 5 days a week, that is one full day worth of work on personal projects, learning something new and most importantly thinking.

I have scheduled 30 minutes blocks of different activities from writing, creating art, learning, thinking of ideas, personal work and free time to do something I have never done or to just think.

I believe back in the day, people had a lot more time to think. Our society has become one that with all the technology/innovation that we have to make our life easier, we have left ourselves with less time, more on the go, and we never get a chance to sit down and to think. An example I love is that we created a automated phone system to help make it easier/faster to talk to someone, but now our waits are 5 to 30 minutes to actually talk with a person when we need to solve a problem.

I have my daily schedule planned and I hope to make my world and the world around me a better place for taking the time to accomplish some of the ideas and thoughts that I have on my mind. If I can use Franklin’s schedule to learn something or create something every morning, I think I can better myself and my life.

I will see what happens…

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via ibelieveinadv

Even though I just got off a week of vacation and got no surf in, I wanted to post what I am feeling right now.

Oh, mamaa
I wanna go surfing
Oh, mamaa
I don’t care about nothing

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Only thing I can say is this is brilliantly done, enjoy

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From an interview with Timothy Verdon, Art Historian and Canon of the Cathedral of Florence.
“God is infinitely beyond human comprehension – God is God, we are creatures. And yet in everything that the Judeo-Christian tradition tells us about God, it is clear that God wants to communicate with his creatures, God wants to be known by his creatures.

The whole point of the law and the prophecy in ancient Israel was that God wanted his creatures to understand him and themselves – a creature is a reflection, to some degree, of the Creator. This will of God to make himself understood – and in that process help us understand ourselves – reaches fulfilment in Christ. Christ is the Word of God where the Scriptures are many words that come from God and are filtered through the inspired authors; Christ is the very Word that all those other words try to give partial expression to.

Minerve chassant les Vices du jardin de la Vertu

Christ assumes a form that makes him intelligible to human beings – the Word becomes flesh. And then the Gospel of John immediately adds that he dwelt among us, and we saw his glory. What Christ did while he was on earth was to reveal the identity, the personality of the Father: all of the wonderful things that he did that reveal the father – the words he spoke, the miracles, the acts of mercy – even after Christ’s Resurrection and Ascension, they continue…

What’s the relationship of all of this with art which is my specific field? The relationship is simple. When Christ took a Body – when the Word of God took a body from the humanity of Mary – it was to be seen. Christ is now invisible except in the abstract forms of the sacraments – we see water and we know that we’re being cleansed, we see bread and wine and we know that his Body and Blood are present, but we don’t really see the body and blood. But somehow the extreme simplicity of that communication that God wanted in Christ’s Incarnation is now filtered by a symbolic system of sacraments and signs. So we don’t actually see, but the art of the Church allows us to see. It extends down through the centuries, something like that privileged experience of the people of Jesus’ own time when they saw him and intuited that there was more than just a man here. Art allows us to continue to enjoy that experience…

So the ancient desire of human beings to see God, Moses on the mountain asks God to show him his face…. In Christ people really contemplated the Face of God. Christ tells us that we see him in the poor and the needy, and so on. But the works of visual art that surround these privileged moments in which [people] come into direct contact with Christ, and which usually tell stories from the life of Christ, or of Mary or of the saints, in whom we also contemplate Christ – the works of art are part of this process.

Much of what I’ve done as an art historian is to try to remind other art historians of this whole dimension that I’m describing, which usually has not been discussed. And that’s a grave omission, because the artists and the patrons were more or less conscious of all of this. They lived within this system. So the art historians should be aware of it, because if not they are going to talk about these works in a way which is misleading. Certainly the style, the economical features – all of these things are interesting and real and an important part of the history of art, but the larger framework within which these works were meant to function was something more like what I’ve been describing.

I try to call the attention of colleagues to these things, and even more, perhaps, I try to reawaken Christians to the extraordinary eloquence and beauty of this visual heritage which today ordinary believing Christians have the equipment to understand. They may not be art historians but they have keys to understanding the works of architecture and painting and sculpture that many art historians don’t have. And those keys come from their own faith, from the simple experience of life in church, the life of the sacraments.

One could add that something that Christians tend not to reflect upon and that historians of art and of sacred music and sacred architecture similarly tend not to reflect upon, is that the great work of art that Christianity has produced since its beginning is the Liturgy.

What believing Christians have been harried by the Spirit to do right from the beginning is to seek those poetic forms of expression and those physical actions and those material objects that can be called into play to express their faith. Really Jesus himself taught us to do this. At the Last Supper, he took bread, and then he said words: “This is my Body”. Jesus, who is himself the Word made flesh, in order to communicate, takes physical things that already have their own range of meanings and says words that open that implicit range of meanings to a much more specific and explicit communication.

So Jesus himself is the first teacher of how you combine things and actions and words in order to create a composite work, which is basically a work of art. At the Last Supper, he puts on an apron, he kneels down, he washes their feet. He’s continually doing things that invite reflection and then making sure that we understand what he’s doing.

What I’m saying is that you can’t really just talk about the visual art of the Church, or the music of the Church, or the Liturgy. All of this is part of a single creative impulse that flows from the experience of Christ himself, the Word who becomes flesh. A conceptual expression of God who becomes visible and tangible. The First Letter of St John says that this is what we have seen and touched and contemplated with our own eyes; it’s a total sensory and intellectual experience. The Liturgy is that. So an artist working for the church and for its Liturgy is within this millennial creative action which, in the last analysis, is a continuation in time and space of the Creation described in Genesis.”

Just came across this and thought it was executed pretty damn perfect! Check out Will Hoffman and Daniel Mercadante other works at Everynone. This is my type of copywriting—through the use of visuals

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Had to watch it a couple times…

Anything else out there like this?

Tweet

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I want to do this so bad…

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The song is “Luv (sic) pt. 2″ by Nujabes feat. Shing02

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