Some great sayings about inspiration and living a happy life, enjoy my friends ~ Rev Kane
Cooking and baking is both physical and mental therapy. ~ Mary Berry
It’s a holiday weekend, so I thought tonight I’d write something a little light for my Sunday night post.
My little brother turned vegan at 14 and stayed one for decades, he and his family are still vegetarian, but in a nod to being my brother, eating pizza finally ended his veganism. I’ve never been opposed to vegetarianism for anyone else, but I am very much a meat eater. However, I love food and love to cook and so I’m into good food whether or not it contains meat. My brother for a time tried to turn me on to eating tofu, it took a while but about 20 years ago I finally decided to give it a try. Luckily for me the Chinese restaurant where I first tried it, in a dish called bean curd country style, made a really tasty dish. On top of that, one of my concerns with tofu, the consistency and texture was not an issue in this dish. The tofu had an chewy consistency that was very different from the tofu I’d eaten before and quite good.
Over the years, I’ve come to enjoy tofu made in a variety of ways and of various consistencies. In what has become my favorite Chinese dish, mapo tofu I actually prefer the soft cubes of tofu, it works really well with the spicy nature of the dish. mapo tofu is tofu, with ground pork and seasonings in a spicy Sichuan sauce.
A few weeks ago I was looking for ways to use riced cauliflower and was going through some stir fry recipes substituting the riced cauliflower for actual rice when I chanced upon a tofu dish that looked quite good. Particularly when to my surprise the recipe started discussing how to texture the tofu the same way I first ate it. The process is quite simple, you drain the tofu by wrapping the block in paper towels putting the block of tofu between a cutting board and another board or books and let it drain for ten minutes. You then cube the tofu and put it on a baking sheet, I laid down aluminum foil and sprayed it with olive oil. You then bake it at 400 for about 20 minutes. You can sprinkle it with oil, garlic and ginger or whatever you’d like. You then use it in a stir fry or bake of your choosing that calls for tofu. I made it tonight in a stir fry with vegetables and a peanut sauce, it was fantastic. The sauce was quite easy as well:
1 tsp of oil
1/4 cup of soy sauce
1/4 cup of honey
1/2 tsp of garlic
2 1/2 tsp of peanut butter
All in all it was a great dinner and a happy day. ~ Rev Kane
Tonight a collection of single pane cartoons, to raise a smile and help you have a happy day my friends ~ Rev Kane
Click on the images to enlarge them
So tonight I’m writing a personal post to one person, I don’t know who you are, where you are or what you are going through. I know that in looking at my site stats today that you found my site by doing a search in Google with the following phrase, “I get little joy from life.” That phrase shook me to the core, it’s an ominous thing to be searching for on a search engine. It screams of that feeling of otherness that I have so often written about. The sentence made me feel in an instant, the way I felt at the depths of my depression, cold, black, alone.
YOU ARE NOT ALONE! This is how I sign every copy of my book of poetry Otherness. You are not alone, I’m here, I mean that whoever you are or anyone else feeling like this. Reach out, happinesskane@aol.com, comment on the blog. You are not alone. Life is hard, I won’t sugarcoat that one bit, but it’s also wonderful and amazing. I know things can feel inevitable, unalterable and void of hope, it’s a lie, it’s fear lying to you, depression lying to you, the bloody chemicals in your brain, other people or even the voices in your head. They lie, I know, I’ve been there and come through it. YOU ARE NOT ALONE! If it’s not me, reach out to someone else. We’re here for you, I’m here you.
Dear readers, friends, this person is not the only one who feels this way and it’s not always the people you think are the weakest or most fragile. The strong are often considered strong because they carry heavy loads with a smile on their face, sometimes they’re crying and bleeding inside. So friends, reach out to someone when you read this, just say hello and ask, and mean it when you ask, how are you doing? You may help someone have a happy day or even another day. ~ Rev Kane
Here are several sets of images from this years Burning Man festival, enjoy ~ Rev Kane
First off from the San Francisco Chronicle, photos by Mark Morford
A really nice gallery by Sai Mokhtari
Pictures from a drone’s eye-view
Finally a gallery from one of my favorite photographers at the event, Patrick Roddie, of course I’m probably biased because he did my portrait (below) back in 2005. Also his galleries focus on people, faces, body parts, great stuff.
Today, nothing more complicated than a bunch of really pretty pictures from nature, none of my own work today just a tour across the web, enjoy and have a happy day my friends ~ Rev Kane
Sitting in my apartment on a beautiful Sunday, did a small celebration of my birthday (which is tomorrow) by going to the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco. Checked out the Warhol exhibit which was nice, didn’t of course compare with visiting the Warhol exhibit in Pittsburgh a few years ago, but they did a good job. I especially dug the silver cloud room, basically air filled mylar pillows that a bunch of toddlers were going nuts with and having fun.
Really dug some of the exhibits at MOMA, more in my next post. I think this painting might have been my favorite.
Funny what passes for a celebration as you get older. It’s my birthday weekend and I’ve done such radical things as buy a rear wiper blade for my car, make a pizza, I did have some cake and ice cream. But I’m not so concerned with a big celebration for my 55th birthday especially being fresh off of a year of travel. Although there is a twinge of why aren’t I on a craps table trying to throw hard 10s! But that fear of missing out is small, as I wrote a few weeks ago I’m really happy right now. So after a very long and hectic week at work, a nice quiet weekend was in order.
Many of my most recent birthdays have been celebrated in Reno, as I prepared to go into Burning Man. A burner friend called me today, she was driving down highway 80 watching burners head east for the playa. We had both recently talked about being good with not attending this year, but we both admitted a twinge of desire seeing people heading for the playa today. Not quite fear of missing out, more a twinge of nostalgia, we’ve both spent many years on the playa and need a break from it, but that doesn’t mean we don’t miss our dusty playground.
The Phoenix Art Installation at Burning Man
My favorite art piece from Burning Man
An American Flag at the Temple at Burning Man
The Man Burns
Dawn at Burning Man
No great wisdom tonight, Burning Man was one of those bucket item lists in my life. I went, loved it, and went seven more times. I may go again someday. The lesson to take from this is that you should satisfy your desires. I have so many good memories from Burning Man, which is what brings that twinge of nostalgia.
Finally, and again a fuller post soon, my third book Athena’s Addict has been published, literally today, on Amazon and I’m really excited about it. A book of poetry focusing on love, madness, passion and a broken heart. I hope you’ll check it out and as always, have a happy day my friends. ~ Rev Kane
Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will ~ Martin Luther King
So tonight friends I want to talk about understanding, but I want to start with misunderstanding. In the last couple of weeks I’ve had two situations in which people have made assumptions about me that were completely unfounded and then acted on their assumptions in a way which was detrimental to me. I really find these situations to be frustrating, I don’t think there is anything as exasperating as being misunderstood. It is one of the reasons that I myself am so blunt, open and honest with people, it is the hope that I’ll be understood and not put other people into the situation I recently found myself in. Tonight I would ask you friends to slow your roll a bit, take time to listen to others and really try to understand what other people are saying, take the time to compare their actions to your conclusions so that you don’t find yourself acting on predetermined assumptions. This is a skill called empathetic listening.
So tonight to help with that hope, a piece I found on-line about empathetic listening, I hope it helps and helps you have a happy day my friends ~ Rev Kane
If one’s life is simple, contentment has to come. Simplicity is extremely important for happiness. Having few desires, feeling satisfied with what you have, is very vital: satisfaction with just enough food, clothing, and shelter to protect yourself from the elements. And finally, there is an intense delight in abandoning faulty states of mind and in cultivating helpful ones in meditation ~ Dalai Lama
Today I want to bring you some resources on happiness and simplicity. Simplicity is one of those elusive goals that can really bring us true happiness, have a happy day my friends ~ Rev Kane
Redemption is not perfection. The redeemed must realize their imperfections. ~ John Piper
Originally posted in 2017
Tonight’s post is about two things redemption and acceptance. Perhaps however from a perspective from which you’re not used to thinking about these two things. You see tonight I want to talk about redeeming and accepting ourselves. Let’s face it folks, we’re all screwed up!
Admit it, I just did in front of the entire world-wide web, life is a complicated exercise. We were born to parents who had no manual, no guidebook, perhaps some family and friendly advice by people who themselves had or were in the process of screwing up their own children. I don’t necessary lay a lot of blame on parents. Very few of them screwed up their kids on purpose. For the most part it was their lack of understanding of who they were that led to the issues they created. If you’re a parent, give yourself a break right now, take a moment of peace. I promise you at some future holiday dinner their will be a discussion, an argument, or an explosion of emotion where you are blamed for ruining some aspect of one of your children’s lives. Buck up, you chose to have kids and it comes with the territory, you blamed your parents, they’re going to, or already have, blamed you.
You know what they say, admitting you have a problem is the first step. So you’re screwed up, suck it up buttercup, we all are screwed up as well. However what happens in life is that you have a decision to make. There is a very significant fork in the road and it leads to two places. The first fork leads to self-loathing, victimhood and unhappiness. The second fork leads to acceptance, redemption and eventually happiness. YOU get to make that choice no matter how screwed up you are right now.
We all had rough childhoods, sure there’s a degree here. Some of you were born into abject poverty, or drug addicted parents. Some of you were beaten or worse. Many of us dealt with psychological abuse, where we told we were no good, useless, less than. More of you than we would like to admit grew up having to be someone you were not. Some of you suffered because you weren’t allowed to have designer clothes or backpack in Europe for a gap year. Something I had to learn at one point was the degree of insult is not able to be compared between folks.
If you were beaten down physically or psychologically it doesn’t seem to be on the same level of someone who didn’t get to go skiing in Aspen with their friends. What matters is how it was received and felt. I know for those of us who had really hard times this is a difficult concept for us to accept. But we can’t invalidate what others went through just because we perceive our pain as worse or more valid, pain is pain my friends and its severity is in the eye of the beholder.
The real issue is how we dealt with our pain. My choice was denial and self-destruction. I spent my late teens tuning out and spiraling out of control. My tools of choice were drugs and alcohol, but many of you picked isolation, violence, crime, risky sexual behaviors. Some of you were truly savants who played across the whole spectrum of self-destruction. No matter what you believe in spiritually, if you went down these paths you feel like a sinner.
Now, you can take your past, the folks and things that screwed you up, your destructive behavior and you can wallow in it, become a victim and live an unhappy life. That’s a choice my friends and I know at this point a lot of people stopped reading. How dare you blame me for what was done to me, I’m not. I’m saying that in order to find happiness, if that is what you want, that you have to take responsibility for your life. You can my friend and you can be happy, it starts with forgiveness and acceptance.
Forgiveness prevents their behavior from destroying your heart, not sure I could ever have said it better than that. To move forward you have to let go of the past and you can’t do that if you are constantly thinking about it, getting angry or sad. But how do you do that? First let me offer a resource, a really nice piece entitled, Letting Go of Past Hurts. It has some solid and straightforward advice. What I can talk about is what I have done to get where I am at this point in my life.
Right now, I want to go back to the quote I used at the top of this piece. Redemption is not perfection. The redeemed must recognize their imperfections. I would add and be ok with them. Perfection is a goal that won’t be attained it’s just a way for us to say succinctly, I want to move forward. My pain in my life was very much directed at my childhood. My relationship with my father was absolute and total shit. I grew up with a single mom who was trying her best, but little money, working full-time and raising two kids, well inevitably there were gaps. The neighborhood I grew up in was tough, I saw and experienced things I shouldn’t have, at least not at the ages I did. I got out of their as soon as I could at 18. But you bring your problems with you, as much as you want and may even be able to legitimately blame people and surroundings at the end of the day it’s in your head and heart where the real battle lies.
The anger and disappointment I carried with me is what allowed me to let myself slide into escapism and self-destruction. I hit rock bottom and made a conscious decision not to die, to do something better with my life. It was a momentous decision in my life but instant bliss did not follow. I curbed the symptoms but the underlying anger and disappointment remained undealt with for a long time. Through my late twenties and early thirties, even though I had what on the surface was a good life, I was dealing with extreme bouts of depression and wholly felt unsatisfied with myself. It took the dissolution of a relationship and nearly my mind as a result before I found a suitable outlet, my writing. It was through my writing that I found ways to express my anger, burn off the negative energy. At first what that did was level out the dips a bit, then it came to nearly eliminate them. Now, when I feel myself starting to dip I can almost always write my way out of sliding downward.
Creating the Ministry of Happiness helped as well, it provided an outlet to further explore the concept of happiness and practical ways to live happier. In many ways the culmination of that growth has been the last, absolute amazing year I’ve had. My path isn’t the only one my friends. But I think the general idea has to be the same for most of us trying to take that responsible fork in the road.
You have to admit and understand your pain and where your problems lay. Not just oh yeah I have problems, but understanding them. For me, anger at my father, difficulty being open with people (obviously that’s changed), having trouble trusting others.
You have to take responsibility for your own shit. You have to believe you are the one who is responsible for your happiness and commit to actively doing something about it.
You have to actually do something. It’s easy to think about all of this, acknowledge what has to happen then sit down on the couch and watch and episode of the Big Bang Theory. What are you actually doing to move forward.
You have to have patience. This all takes time, instantaneous bliss may exist but I’ve never seen it. This process is like yard work, you have to keep at it or it all can dissolve into chaos.
You have to forgive and accept yourself, hell ultimately you have to come to love yourself. You can dislike parts of yourself, I’m overweight, I need to lose another 20 pounds but that’s just part of me. You can dislike parts of yourself or your life but love who you are as a person, this is really important. You have to become your own best cheerleader and reduce the negative thoughts in your head.
Finally, you have to have fun. You have to enjoy life, find out what your passions are and engage in them as often as possible.
You can do this my friends and you have help. There are likely people who are around you who can help, if not, reach out, I’m here and I’m happy to help. The goal at the end of the day is for all of us to have happy days. ~ Rev Kane
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