Seth Haines's Blog, page 16

Silence: A Productivity Tool for Those Who Care About Productivity

Productivity—it’s the buzzword of the day. There are productivity apps, productivity books, and productivity podcasts. The productivity gurus shill productivity tools meant to boost your output, your throughput, your everywhere-a-put-put. Those gurus have the answers, and they’ll tell you all about them for $9.99, for a retweet, for a like on Instagram. But how often do you hear these gurus discuss the power of silence?

We live in a world of constant noise—cell phones dinging, computer popup notifications, 24-hou...

Silence: What it Teaches You About Love

Can you sit in the silence with the ones you love? When you do, what do you hear? What do you know?

View this post on Instagram

In the moments of silence that pass between us, I know what she’s thinking. That’s what twenty years of love does. It makes the silence as meaningful as any conversation.

A post shared by Seth Haines (@sethhaines) on Oct 14, 2019 at 2:51pm PDT

***Take a chance on waking up.

My next book, The Book of Waking Up: Experiencing the Divine Love that Reorders a Life is...

Silence: The Voices in my Head

At midnight, in a space of relative silence, I hear my lesser angels in my head. Amber received a text just before I turned off the lamp—an innocuous text as it were—and my noggin was a veritable spin cycle.

I was right.

Another was wrong.

What I’d say if I had the chance.

How the other would react.

I was right.

Another was wrong…

For over an hour, I turned thoughts over like stones, one after an other, always circling back to the first stone. I turned in the covers too, tossed in them like a m...

Silence

A man named Society punched the clock, left his factory, and made his way to the field. There, Society found a tree whose fruit was called silence. Society looked up at the silence, remembered the tales his grandfather spun about it. Silence was sweet, his grandfather said, and if you looked at it just right in the evening sun, you could see a reflection of your truest self in its skin. Considering his ancestor's tale, Society wondered: What is my reflection? The tree was tall, though, and a...

Observation #19: A Study in Narcissism

Researching narcissism in our modern culture, I stumbled across an article from Medical News Today entitled, “Social Media Photo Overkill May Boost Narcissism.” The article states:

A recent study reveals that an increase in narcissistic traits may be an unwanted result of sharing images, including selfies, "excessively" on social media.

The findings, which appear in The Open Psychology Journal, show that participants who posted large numbers of photos and selfies on social media developed a 25...

Observation #18: Every Building Has a Story

I slept in a guest house built in the shadow of the abandoned mill. In the morning hours, I bent my ear to the wind just so, right at the angle of nostalgia, and I heard the histories of the men and women who laid the bricks of that mill. People of another era grinding grain for the community, for themselves. I heard the humming of the the woman whose thee young’uns were waiting for pops to cross the Atlantic after having been holed up in Italy. The whistling of the man between wars who foug...

After a Long Hiatus (A New Observation)

Lake Fayetteville at first light on an overcast day. Click here for a print of this photo.

I’ve been away for a time, but I’m back with new photographic observations. This one came from Lake Fayetteville, in Fayetteville Arkansas.

I’ve imagined this shot since I first saw the old structure jutting up from the lake—a sort of cold scene from a sci-fi novel like Hugh Howey’s Wool. I was never quite sure how to pull the photo off, though. What was the best angle, the best camera, the right len...

Observation #17: The Right Light

Observation #17: Good architecture sneaks up on you, I think. The building you’ve passed 1,000 times waits for the right moment, the right light, the right balance of elements and then WHAMMO! she whops you upside the head and says ‘Pay attention!’”

*Photo taken with the Fujifilm X100S. For behind the scenes content join the inner circle.

Sign up to receive daily Observations and my Tiny Letter in your email.                

Observation #16: Monochrome Magic

St. Mary’s Catholic Church. Altus, Arkansas.

Observation #16: Sometimes the way to see the magic is to strip away the color.

*Photo taken with the Fujifilm X100S. For behind the scenes content join the inner circle.

Sign up to receive daily Observations and my Tiny Letter in your email.

               

Observation #15: Every Building Speaks

St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Altus, Arkansas.

I’m a firm believer that every building has a personality, a way of being on the land that says something. This weekend, I stopped by St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Altus, Arkansas just as the mass was ending. I listened to that building as I set up the photograph, and this is what it said: “Sometimes stone is delicate; always it is strong.”

Observation #15: Everything in the world speaks a thing.

*Photo taken with the Fujifilm X100S. For behind th...