YouTube Covers By the Brooke. Now in MP3.
I added a link to a magical place, where you can download MP3s of virtually all my YouTube covers (and a few non-YouTubes as well). That link can be found on my MUSIC page.
Poetry In, Poetry Out
I’m beginning to think in poems.
The more that lyrics become my obsession and little God Poems before sleep become my ritual, the more my thoughts turn poetic. I sleep better because of it. I leave my thoughts alone as soon as I end one on a good line. I want to end every day that way, on a good line, and let it echo into my dreams.
I’m reading more poetry than I ever have. Is it any wonder I’ve never been particularly poetic; I used to hate poetry (unless it sounded like a song). I read philosophy and psychology books and that was about it. Made occasional exceptions for fiction books like Dune that are as much philosophy and psychology as they are fiction. Now I’m reading Emerson journals and God poems every day and suddenly I can write songs.
I may be on to something.
Send me your favorite poems.
Here’s a God Poem for you.
The Outer Affects The Inner
I’m reading an awesome interview right now (and it looks like I’m going to have to get the guy’s book
“…if you want to become someone different, just start acting like the person you want to be. It’s like that business motto – ‘fake it till you make it’ – but it works on a spiritual and ethical level as well … Even with my wardrobe, I saw how the outer affects the inner. There’s a line in the Bible that says your “garments should always be white.” I decided to take that literally, and walked around in white clothes. It affected my mood. I felt happier, lighter.”
The Inner Affects The Outer:
Right before reading the AJ Jacobs interview I was reading some posts by fellow lifestyle artist and friend of the show, Ted Heistman on his blog, ‘Free Range Organic Human‘. In one, he was discussing personality types and his recent discovery that he’s an extrovert, not an introvert as he’d previously assumed. The main point I gleaned from that post is — the mere realization (or decision) that you are (or could be) a different personality type than you had previously been type-casting yourself as, shifts your selective-focus-majigg to emphasize a whole different set of memories, attitudes, etc., and that begins almost instantly to change your behavior, your feelings toward yourself and others (and thus theirs towards you, and thus your whole experience of life). It’s like how mood swings work, but at a deeper level.
Then, in another post, Ted made this excellent point:
“I think of these personality types as ‘cognitive strategies’ that people can jump around in a bit from type to type rather than as being immutible characteristics of people.”
Right! Personality tests are generally just (mis)used to further type-cast oneself (personality ‘types’, hello) and often end up functioning as little more than ’scientific-feeling’ means of validating what are actually personal choices not to venture outside the comfort zone of our ingrained habits, thought-patterns, personal biases and so forth.
Personality assessments can be useful as aids in self-understanding and self-acceptance, but that isn’t where you’re supposed to stop. That’s a step on the path towards a truer, and ongoing, sense of clarity about who you really are and what you really want, and where the discrepancies lie between that and the current situation. Once you’ve got that going on, you know what you need to do to start aligning your actions with your true/new intentions. And once you start doing that, the really cool shit starts to happen.
On the other hand, if you’re living under the core assumption that you can’t really change who you ‘are’ (that may be true on a deep, essential level but not on the personality level) — that the ‘type’ of person you are is the type of person you must and will always be — if you believe in that kind of predestination of personality (whether you frame it in terms of nature, nurture, astrology or whatever) then you will continue to play the same role and act out the same scenarios in the same types of ‘movies’ as long as that belief is held, instead of pushing yourself, growing as an actor on the stage of Life and becoming ever more awesome. You don’t respect actors with no range; why would you settle for it in yourself? (I’m not saying you do, I’m just asking it as a general question).
You don’t have to be a ‘radical’ lifestyle experimenter to be a lifestyle experimenter (though, it technically makes you more rad if you are). Any step in the right direction is good. Any step in any direction is creative. It’s standing still that you don’t want to do. Even just ‘tinkering around’ with your thoughts and emotional states, conducting mini-experiments with your lifestyle, changing the way you dress even a little bit (even if you like the way you dress already, it is a habit), trying a different soundtrack for a change, playing with how you talk, how you walk, etc. — any one or number of those can get the ball rolling. “Gradually Daily” is a little mantra I’ve been using that’s actually very helpful. It’s just enough to remind me to do things a little bit differently, a little bit better, to make a little bit more effort to be a little bit more awesome than I was yesterday.
Remember: You are your most important project. All your other projects depend on it! Nourish the root and you nourish everything that stems from it.
That’s my little surmon for the day. I didn’t actually mean for this to be a surmon. I meant to just tell you about the cool articles I was reading, but The Televangelist that lives in my head is a sneaky opportunist with a strong grip. Once she has the mic, there’s no getting it back till she’s done.
Gyrus On Glamour
In response to my recent post about Glamour!, fellow godstar and friend of the show Gyrus had this little brilliant snippet to add to the conversation (in an email, but quoted here with permission) :
“I guess we who critique Western civilization have a tendency to react to the whole surface artifice thing, and being more “natural” ends up being associated with being plain and a bit grubby! But how many indigenous people spend ages adorning and beautifying themselves? And hey, if you want natural, check out all those birds with stupendous plumage! We really do need to rediscover that natural parading and glorifying, without getting sucked too far into the mass-media gloss that parasitizes that sort of stuff … It seems like a strange issue to get involved with as we teeter on the brink of ecological catastrophe… but oddly it seems important. Maybe it’s important to us people who’ve invested so much energy in suppressing that natural strutting about… Now’s the time when people with ideas like ours need to get noticed more!”
Stray Cat Strut MP3, Brought To You By The Brooke
Okay, I thought all this website-updating would go much faster than it is, but I should have known better. I’m getting hyper-ambitious and am probably going to completely change the theme and a bunch of other stuff. So I’m not even going to mess with creating new pages while still on the current setup. I’ve also been having hosting issues preventing me from uploading any new MP3s, or getting the flash players to work anymore, so I will probably be switching hosts too.
I’ve also been busy creating music. There’s also that.
But — I forgot I had uploaded this one MP3 before all the changes and issues started, and didn’t actually post it here. So here it is!
Stray Cat Strut (Stray Cats cover By The Brooke)
(Note: this is not a new version. It’s the YouTube version minus the NKOTB intro and minus the video).