 They say, if the universe is like water and you flow with it, you’ll be led to where you need to be. This saying puts my mind at ease when I start to feel anxious about my future. It is common for humans to continuously put pressure on ourselves, even when things are going pretty well. Once we succeed at one thing, the idea that “time is running out” begins to mask our true reality, therefore, before we can enjoy the fruits of our labor, we have already delved into the next project. This habitual cycle takes us out of what it means to practice awareness (I will be making a post on this soon) and instead puts us in “float” mode. Since we are conditioned to put high expectations on ourselves at a young age, it becomes more difficult to answer this question, am I living for myself, or am I living to fulfill the need of others?
To be in “float mode” is to live turned off to your surroundings and only tuned into what you feel is best for you. I don’t want you to get “float mode” confused with focusing on yourself to improve your overall well being. This could include something as small as staying persistent in making healthier choices in your diet or as extreme as getting help to overcome an addiction. These are factors that do not include “float mode” because they are choices you have consciously made through awareness after having a conversation with yourself identifying how to improve an area of your life. Float mode is the opposite of this. Living in this mode may seem like a choice (initially it was), but after some time, when you find yourself unhappy doing something you once loved, you are floating. When you’re floating, it feels like your goal has been swept up from beneath you and no matter how hard you work to succeed, you continue to plateau.
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 The world is full of conversation, opinion, and last but not least, ideologies that influence our train of thought and shape how we think as individuals. It can be difficult to balance what we think is right with the ever changing trends our society tends to undergo, and as frustrating as this can be, it's in these moments we must be bold. What is right and what is wrong in the eyes of big brother will never fully fit into our lives. We will always have disagreements with the world, in our relationships, and with ourselves.
What we do have though, is the simplicity of nature to guide us back to our roots, out of our conformities and back into consciousness. Be aware of how you're evolving, how you think, how you judge your neighbor, how you treat yourself. Do you feel tension inside of you at the end of the day? Or are you happy with the connections you've been making lately? Do you feel as if you are losing yourself and striving to become a new "you" for the right or wrong reasons? Although facing these questions might be hard, being honest with yourself is the first step towards ditching the conformities of the ego and returning to your true self.  Earth, Air, Fire, Water.
Through each element, the power of love combines with the forces of nature, Days turn to weeks in the rat race. Treading the motions, Disconnecting unnoticed, It's times like these I look into my soul, And come face to face with my present being, It's here at las' I meet my purest self, Just to bring me home. Worry free, I feel alive, In control of heart and mind.  Sometimes I wonder.... what is this place I'm on? Outside of the words we've been taught to describe our surroundings, the interpretations we reflect off of one another, our own understandings and maps that we've been shown of our earth. If we didn't have any of these things to help us understand the world around us... how would we explain to ourselves this place we live on? I think to myself.... we used to think the earth was flat and it took us months to travel just across the sea. But here we are today and we can travel anywhere in the world within 24 hours by plane. We have found a way to take a trip that once took months to accomplish and turn it into a single day event. We are time travelers, we are learners, we are advancing. This place we are on, our earth, it's watched us grow and has been our home for thousands of years. Take it all in. Think about it. Explore your thoughts and embrace them. Sometimes I tend to suppress my deepest thoughts and theory's because I feel like we live in a world where the majority isn't ready to think so deeply yet. But that's where I hope I'm wrong.
 I stood on the corner of Haight and Ashbury, a famous cross section in San Francisco known for it’s abundance of hippies, smoke shops, and the vibrant atmosphere. Dressed in a colorful flowy tank top and blue-jean shorts, I held my backpack close to my body. I appeared as though I could fit in with the homeless crowd on this particular street. I wasn't trying to, I just happen to dress like them. Apprehensive at first, I managed to voice the words “Could you spare a few dollars,?” to the people walking by.
I felt ashamed, but curious. Facial expressions have never made me feel so many emotions before. The energy people gave off made me feel uneasy. For a moment I felt as if the role I was playing was my true reality. I felt worthless because people made me feel that way. When did humanity put all these walls up?, I thought to myself. I felt trapped in my own body. I've had conversations with homeless people many times before as well as with my peers, and it is safe to say there is an assumption that when you give a homeless person money he or she is going to spend it on drugs or alcohol.  Trends come and go. But one thing seems to remain the same, and the prices are rising just as high as the industry. Westernized-conventional medicine is the status quo in America, and is favored by almost all insurance companies. Emphasizing almost all medical finances in westernized-conventional medicine, insurance customers are left with little choice in how they want to be treated.
A third of U.S. adults are currently being treated with some form of alternative medicine, and are paying for it out-of-pocket, according to U.S News Health. Popular alternatives to westernized medicine include; chiropractic, homeopathic , and holistic healing (the list goes on). Each alternative source offers a different approach to one's overall health in relieving a variety of aspects including overall mind, body, and spiritual health. Westernized-conventional medicine is effective, but fails to offer the full-range of treatments patients are looking for. Whether or not westernized doctors agree with alternative medicine outside of their own practice, the beliefs of the patients are an important factor in overall healing and well being.
It was high noon at the Bunny Ranch. Wild horses frolicked in herds, making their way around the see-through white gates that surround the ranch. The air was warm and the feeling was calm as mountains back dropped the far landscape. Inside, red velvet covered the room from floor to ceiling, dim lights scattered throughout. Doors leading to a variety of rooms filled the halls, including the hard-to-miss ‘Pussy Powder Room’ (which purposed as the bathroom) and the boldly named ‘Hooker Booker’ ( appointment-scheduling office), positioned directly across from it.
A couple of working girls, and a very protective dog later, an exclusive view of Dennis Hof’s legal sex brothel was made clear, but in an entirely different light one might predict. Hof's reputation for his racy HBO show, Cathouse, created himself the stigma of a “pimp” in the media. But what about the side of Mr. Hof and the girls working at the ranch not mentioned by the media? Their values, their past, the details behind the scenes that are continuously shaken off and left unasked? Barefooted and wearing a black Bunny Ranch button-down polo, Hof had the set up at his dining room table while Cooper, the cameraman, dodged Hof’s 14-year-old-dog, Domino, who had six teeth pulled the day before. WHY HOMELESS VOTERS WHO DEFEND DEMOCRACY CAN'T PARTICIPATE WRITTEN BY, JOEY LOVATO & CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON VIDEO DONE BY, REIGHAN FISHER,JACKSON BARTLETT, & ASHLEE JONES Shannon Orneal knows who he wants to vote for. What Shannon doesn’t know is if he will be voting in November - and he definitely won’t be caucusing this weekend.
He hopes to have a home by November, but this Saturday, during the caucus, he will be homeless. Despite being a Navy veteran and having strong political opinions, voting is a luxury Orneal can’t afford. He, and so many of Nevada’s homeless population, face many hurdles between them and the polls. I wanted to share this personal narrative piece that I made for one of my final projects. The assignment was to produce a video that tells a personal story, so I chose to show how my biological father and I have maintained a relationship by writing letters to each other over the years while he's in prison. I relate his struggle with drug addiction to the tragedies society has faced over the past couple of decades, followed by the healing we have all gone through together.
Below is a video I've made that goes hand and hand with the blog post. Standardized tests are used throughout the United States to measure overall academic achievement of students through multiple-choice and true-false questions. According to TIME magazine, this structure of education started during the Industrial Revolution. TIME explains that during this specific era, kids were taken out of the farms and factories they worked in and put behind desks for the first time. These standardized examinations emerged as an easy way to test large numbers of students quickly. But as society advances, is the structure of the system and its emphasis on standardized testing doing more harm than good for students, especially those who tend to be right brain (creative) thinkers and learners? To standardize somebody is to cause them to conform to an average and be easily measured and compared to their peers. Why does the education system continue to condition the students of our future to be average?
In this day and age standardized testing is an inaccurate way to measure overall student intelligence full-scale. Students are frequently being diagnosed with learning disabilities such as ADD, ADHD, and test anxiety -- all newly developed epidemics that have emerged with the increase of standardized education. The current education system is out of date for today's generation and needs to develop a flexible model for students’ individualized aptitudes (natural abilities) that cater to the overall learning experience of the student and work towards achieving a promising future for all types of learners.  BY, REIGHAN FISHER
PUBLISHED IN, "THE NEVADA SAGEBRUSH," HTTP://NEVADASAGEBRUSH.COM Our culture has familiarized itself with a wide variety of popular magazines ranging from Reader’s Digest, ESPN, Cosmopolitan, People, and Vogue; all pertaining to a certain niche of people. But now our pool of interests are expanding and it is becoming easier to discover and absorb ideas from people outside of the United States through social media and the world-wide web. With easy access to outside opinion, it’s easier to drift away from biased opinion and close-to-home propaganda. Although this is true, throughout history propaganda has been used in the media to inflict a great deal of influence on our thoughts and has seeded into our beliefs overtime without being able to easily recognize it happening. Now the same concepts are being used by ISIS to entice their readers, recruit, and be heard globally. But what does this mean for us?  Journalism is a lifestyle. Everywhere I go, I see a story. The greatest journalists find stories everyday by simply observing. I enjoy walking along the asphalt pathway beside the river of downtown Reno when I’m feeling overwhelmed and find myself overthinking a project or story.
My best friend Megan and I walked down from our dorm rooms and met at our bikes just outside the building. As we unlocked our bikes we both agreed to ride along the river just through downtown. Once we reached the park area beside the river we dropped our bikes and looked for a place to sit. All of the picnic tables were occupied with families, except for one, where a homeless man was sitting. There was plenty of room for us too, so we took a seat beside him. After introducing ourselves we started chatting. His name was Robert Basham.  This is my new friend Elrayah Sadala. He is from Africa and moved here as a refuge because where he is from you are not allowed to express your religious beliefs and if you do you get executed. I found him on the steps outside of a church wrapped up in a blanket getting ready to sleep. As my group of friends and I headed back to our car I gathered up any water bottles we had and my friends gave me money to bring to him. As I approached him he immediately started drinking the water and was so thankful for that alone. I sat on the steps and listened to his story, and he never once asked me for any money. I noticed he had a cast and crutches and didn't once say anything about it. I asked him what happened and he said he was hit by a car and was actually there for a while but had to leave because he could not afford to stay. By, Reighan Fisher
Everyday I wake up. I go through my morning routine and prepare for what the day might bring. The moment I leave my house I am exposed to opinions, advertisements, and people telling me what I should believe, what club I should join, what side to be on, what's hot, what's not, and who I should aspire to be. It’s been like this for as long as I can remember. But I have it down. I have an important job, I make a difference. I fight for what's right. Across the ocean, an old friend of mine wakes up. She goes through her morning routine. She prepares for what the day might bring her. The moment she leaves her house she is exposed to the same things I am but different opinions, different views on what side to take, different clubs, different advertisements.  A REFLECTIVE MEMOIR BY, REIGHAN FISHER
As a baby my mom would bring me on car rides in effort to calm me down and help me fall asleep. The quiet music back-dropping in the car, curves of the winding road, and motion of the vehicle had a way of gently rocking me into a peaceful slumber. Once I learned to talk and take notice of the world around me, the car-rides became an adventure. I’d press my forehead against the window and make silly faces to the people who passed me. I’d always wave and smile. All races, genders and ages received an equal, sincere wave. I appreciated the human connection and daydreamed of where my newly acquainted friend might be headed. Even though this embarrassed my mom, who is much more shy than I, I appreciated her letting me wave on anyways. At night, I’d watch the moon outside the window in awe. It’s reflection illuminated the pupils of my eyes the same way fireworks reflect on a lake. The moon was my friend. I knew this because of how well it followed me around. We would play hide and seek. I was the seeker most often and this challenged me to wonder and think without boundaries. The moon would weave through the clouds and hide amongst the textures and shades of vapor. If it became lost for a while I knew not to worry, the moon would always return eventually. While I wondered where the moon went, I’d get lost in thought and ponder. I’d question the world around me and why things were the way they were. The moon's absence and returns always resulted in a new insight for me. “Mom how does the moon always know where we are going?,” I’d often ask. |
Thanks for being hereI feel my purpose is to show readers and viewers different perspectives of the world through the eyes of others. Everyday I challenge myself to think of new theories and concepts, change-up my routine and viewpoints, and allow myself to be creative both mentally and physically. I feel knowledge is power and when we choose to evolve and understand ourselves, we choose to understand our world and the people in it. Topics
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