SCENE Miami

01/01/2024

You’ll never move forward until you take a step away from the past

Let me give you a New Year message: Believe in yourself, because no one ever achieved anything significant without believing in himself and no one ever will! Believe in yourself powerfully, especially when there is no reason left to believe in yourself because the ultimate bottom is the best place to start a big rise!

May the New Year bring you new grace, new gladness and new glory

Any new beginning is forged from the shards of the past, not from the abandonment of the past Maybe it’s an issue of being unable or unwilling to realize that we can actually impact things sufficiently to change things, rather than seeing ourselves as being exiled to some distant side line of life where we can do nothing more than sheepishly root for a life that’s far too far away to touch

The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes Life has no remote , so wake up and change it

In this new year, may you have a deep understanding of your true value and worth, an absolute faith in your unlimited potential, peace of mind in the midst of uncertainty, the confidence to let go when you need to, acceptance to replace your resistance, gratitude to open your heart, the strength to meet your challenges, great love to replace your fear, forgiveness and compassion for those who offend you, clear sight to see your best and true path, hope to dispel obscurity, the conviction to make your dreams come true, meaningful and rewarding synchronicities, dear friends who truly know and love you, a childlike trust in the benevolence of the universe, the humility to remain teachable, the wisdom to fully embrace your life exactly as it is, the understanding that every soul has its own course to follow, the discernment to recognize your own unique inner voice of truth, and the courage to learn to be still

I feel sorry for people who maintain relationships and friendships detrimental to their mental health. Everyone is guilty of it at one time or another- but the idea is to strive to be your best; right? So, meanwhile why are so many people faking it? Security? Fear of loneliness? Fears of independence? Fears of being self ? Or just the idea that you can make someone change?

Regardless of the justifications you give & treat yourself to I hope all of you - "New Year -New Me Types" strive for self care , honest and pure friendships and relationships based of love- and not based off the fake realities of your mind. These delusions of what you hope for instead of what's there, where you and your puppet show master focus more on everyone else and less on self. To change the world you must start within. But you must first Be Honest with yourself.

My new year started a few months ago-- and it was the best choice I ever made- and I hope your recreations are progressive and successful in The New Year Let the dawn of the New Year’s first day be the beginning of a new era with an invisible Almighty’s blessings showered on everyone to be always true to their own first version

Every tomorrow is an outcome of what I do today, and the beauty of it all is that today is happening all the time On Behalf Of The Entire Team At SCENE Chicago I Wish You All A Happy New Year!!!

DL Banks Founder SCENE Chicago

12/05/2023

Please join us for an exclusive Curator’s Brunch on the Beach. Enjoy a relaxed breakfast, champagne, a tour of the fair before it opens to the public, and have the chance to speak one-on-one with the most fascinating art professionals, artists, curators, and critics visiting Miami.

SCOPE MIAMI BEACH 2023
On the beach between 8th and 10th Streets

10:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Tuesday, Dec 5 AND Thursday, Dec 7

Please contact [email protected] or [email protected] ASAP for a ticket. This event is VIP invite only.

11/13/2023

Who's Joining Us In Vegas?!?!?

Don't Miss Out, Payment Plans Are Available For Super Bowl 58 VIP Tickets & Hospitality Packages

10/10/2023

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves,

“Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?” Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.

It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone.
And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we're liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

09/04/2023

08/20/2023

The Power Of

Faith is the most unexercised muscle known to man.

Faith revels in the liberating fact that only a terribly minuscule part of life lies within the constricted confines of my reach, and that I am graciously invited out to live in a place beyond my grasp. I would say that I was without faith, but no one is truly faithless; they just have faith in the wrong things: fear and defeat. The challenge is never based on the size of the obstacle that stands before me. Rather, it is dictated by the degree of faith that rests within me. And all your Faithless doubts Will not destroy The rising spring In me. Reflect who you truly are even when people try to tempt you to reflect the wrong image of yourself. The faithful often find themselves blindsided. They don't suspect anything because they can't imagine doing something so awful themselves.

Once faith dies, the death of hope follows hard on its heels. You may have fallen down, but you can get back up again. You may have doors shut, but new doors will open for you. You may have been lied on, but the truth will come to the light. You may have been hurt, but the pain will pass. You are a survivor. You have a history of surviving. Faith is rare because fear is rampant. For faith will demand that I step into places that fear itself fears to go. In the absence of faith, our dreams will move from feasible aspirations to implausible fantasy. Easily mistaken, it is not about a love for adversity, it is about knowing a strength and a faith so great that adversity, in all its adverse manifestations, hardly even exists.

If I errantly define myself by the limiting rubrics of a limited culture, I will not even begin to understand the slightest fraction of who I am. What I need to realize is that God does not work in fractions. God never delays. Rather, it is our ‘delayed’ willingness to embrace the genius of God as held against the ignorance of our shallowness, for such a crippling posture infuses a sense of delay directly into the middle of strategic perfection. Being faithful in the smallest things is the way to gain, maintain, and demonstrate the strength needed to accomplish something great. When your only regret is if anyone thinks you regret anything that is the definition of conviction. If they do not even respect their own, they respect no one.

Truth leads to believe, which produces faith. As faith grows, all our human faculties and attributes are absorbed in the Love of the One and the quest for Truth. As presence develops in us, so does faithfulness. Everything becomes harmonized by that presence. Finally, that presence is unified in the One. The Words You Say Will Eat Away The Foundation Of Faith When Spoken To Judge Casting Away Love Just To Be Another Stain In The Curse. Love means being there and sticking it out. That's what love means. Loyalty is the quantifying basis of all emotions. Faithfulness is the cornerstone to love, hate, anger, patriotism, friendship, compassion, and self-respect. Love is the agent of universal synthesis. Love links and draws together the elements of the world.

It’s a war of visions and dreams, none of which is substantiated, in the end only the ones best published and adhered to by the most powerful will be known as the supreme truth, the rest will be trampled underfoot. And the Hand that guides us towards our soul’s purpose is the fountain of courage that already resides within us, ever whispering it’s messages of encouragement, calling us towards those destinations amongst the trail of stars that will illuminate our way back home. Guru and disciple do not meet accidentally, neither one becomes disciple by conversion only. In fact, there is always an ancient link maintained through many births nurtured and flowered with love and trust, with dedication and faithfulness, that which somehow gets revealed in this birth by meeting each other and finding that they were living in each other’s soul always.

Little things are little things; but faithfulness in little things is a very great thing. A person whom lives by faith is not bound to feel hopelessness or the agony of infinite despair. I need not adapt in certain ways. I am in fact but a visitor to this world, an ephemeral gasp within its long, tired history. By this alone I have the power not to shuffle away from the Faith, the power to break loose from these marching-shackles of ongoing cultural and political pretense. Don’t wait for miracles but believe and be so strong enough in invisible virtues like faithfulness. Reflect who you truly are even when people try to tempt you to reflect the wrong image of yourself. I always knew a good man should do no bad deeds, but it never occurred to me that a good man must do good deeds. He cannot just sit back and do nothing. He cannot just relax and let things happen around him. He must act or his faith is meaningless, mere words or thoughts.

Faith doesn't make sense. It makes Miracles.

08/16/2023

Gruntled

You don't get to choose if you get hurt in this world but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices.

True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is sufficient, for he that is so wants nothing. The greatest blessings of mankind are within us and within our reach. A wise man is content with his lot, whatever it may be, without wishing for what he has not. It is indisputable that the being whose capacities of enjoyment are low, has the greatest chance of having them fully satisfied; and a highly endowed being will always feel that any happiness which he can look for, as the world is constituted, is imperfect. But he can learn to bear its imperfections, if they are at all bearable; and they will not make him envy the being who is indeed unconscious of the imperfections, but only because he feels not at all the good which those imperfections qualify. But I do know we’re deficient in some way. We are too involved in materialistic things, and they don’t satisfy us. The loving relationships we have, the universe around us, we take these things for granted. Life's trials will test you, and shape you, but don’t let them change who you are. True friends don't come with conditions.

There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium; and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, not how it compares with other expression. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a q***r, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others. To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss. It’s the ‘everyday’ experiences we encounter along the journey to who we wanna be that will define who we are when we get there.

For me, and for many of us, our first waking thought of the day is "I didn't get enough sleep." The next one is "I don't have enough time." Whether true or not, that thought of not enough occurs to us automatically before we even think to question or examine it. We spend most of the hours and the days of our lives hearing, explaining, complaining, or worrying about what we don't have enough of... Before we even sit up in bed, before our feet touch the floor, we're already inadequate, already behind, already losing, already lacking something. And by the time we go to bed at night, our minds are racing with a litany of what we didn't get, or didn't get done, that day. We go to sleep burdened by those thoughts and wake up to that reverie of lack. This internal condition of scarcity, this mind-set of scarcity, lives at the very heart of our jealousies, our greed, our prejudice, and our arguments with life. It's okay to feel satisfied-it's not a crime. Decide to be happy under all conditions, let happiness be your habit.

There is something sustaining in the very agitation that accompanies the first shocks of trouble, just as an acute pain is often a stimulus, and produces an excitement which is transient strength. It is in the slow, changed life that follows--in the time when sorrow has become stale, and has no longer an emotive intensity that counteracts its pain--in the time when day follows day in dull unexpectant sameness, and trial is a dreary routine--it is then that despair threatens; it is then that the peremptory hunger of the soul is felt, and eye and ear are strained after some unlearned secret of our existence, which shall give to endurance the nature of satisfaction. It is not until you rhyme with a person that makes you their perfect match, it is when you are satisfied with each others peculiarities, and find jewels in their loopholes.

The key to ultimate happiness and fulfillment lies within our own transformation. The more we learn and grow and evolve as individuals, the more we will find happiness and satisfaction in relationships, work and life. There's more to a person than flesh. Judge others by the sum of their soul and you'll see that beauty is a force of light that radiates from the inside out. Those who achieve the extraordinary are usually the most ordinary because they have nothing to prove to anybody. Be Humble. Riches, prestige, everything can be lost. But the happiness in your own heart can only be dimmed. If one’s life is so unsatisfying that an unhealthy activity brings a shred of happiness, it is nigh impossible to give it up unless something that brings greater happiness can be enjoyed in its stead. Never let the things you want make you forget the things you have. Without emotional response, love is an act of self-deceiving self-satisfaction by an unsatisfied self. Words could never satisfy me, but life satisfies me.

I don't make much of a living, but I do live much of a making.

08/15/2023

True Matter

Growth is often the parent or the child of pain.

Maturity is when your world opens up and you realize that you are not the center of it. We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations. Don't you understand that we need to be childish in order to understand? Only a child sees things with perfect clarity, because it hasn't developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things that we don't expect to see. Man’s growth is held back by his surrender to other people’s expectation that he remain the person he was when they met him. Most adults are adults all over except between their ears. Don't allow others to direct your ethical resolutions, rather navigate with your own moral compass so you can see the beacon of your own conscious.

Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up. Maturity is the ability to live fully and equally in multiple contexts; most especially, the ability, despite our grief and losses, to courageously inhabit the past the present and the future all at once. You stop being a child when you realize the world isn't here to cater to your wants and needs.

Cynicism is the dark side of maturity. As you travel the journey of life, you just wish it was easy to appreciate relationships before it ends rather than worrying about when they will. We often betray our arrogance or immaturity by asserting that we will never do something bad that we are capable of doing. It’s never what stands around us. Rather, it’s always what resides within us. People's sense of self worth is pivotal to their ability to look clearly at the hurt they've caused. The more solid one's sense of self regard, the more likely that that person can feel empathy and compassion for the hurt party, and apologize from an authentic center. It takes immaturity to be hurt by the fact that someone does not trust you. The mature person searches for solutions to the problems that the immature person just complains about. Arrogance is full with perception of perfection, while maturity always has room for understanding and improvement.

Don't you understand that we need to be childish in order to understand? Only a child sees things with perfect clarity, because it hasn't developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things that we don't expect to see. I have lived a great deal among grown-ups. I have seen them intimately, close at hand. And that hasn’t much improved my opinion of them. The great measure of human maturation is the increasing understanding that we move through life in the blink of an eye; that we are not long with the privilege of having eyes to see, ears to hear, a voice with which to speak and arms to put round a loved one; that we are simply passing through. The pursuit of happiness is one of the most common symptoms of intellectual immaturity. We do not mature with age. We mature with the setbacks that we face in life. If by growing up you mean allowing the adult within me to abandon the child within me, I have no interest in such a horrid proposition. If instead you mean to let each enhance the other at the exclusion of neither, I have every interest.

If you erased your past mistakes, you could purge your regrets with them, but you’d also wipe any lessons learned and any subsequent maturity gained. Don’t regret the minefields you stepped into, just try and learn not to step into the same one twice. Finding yourself takes concentrating the Mind and freeing the Soul. Finding what is takes freeing the Mind and concentrating the Soul. Growing up is a hard business, and it is a heart business. The true indicator that I love myself is that I choose to love others above myself. If I rise above what people do to me and consistently strive to be the ‘bigger man’ despite the cost to me, I will never become what I dislike in others.

Trials don't come to take what you have, they come to supply you with what you lack.

08/11/2023

If life is the greatest gift of all then death is its most grateful recipient.

Old words are reborn with new faces. We all want to break our orbits, float like a satellite gone wild in space, run the risk of disintegration. We all want to take our lives in our own hands and hurl them out among the stars. Change is the end of something you know and the beginning of something else that you don't know. Something new that holds opportunities. That's how things are these days: everything must move aside to make room for the new, all the time. Whether you are continuing along the same path or at the beginning of something new, you can always start afresh in your mind, heart, openness and attitude. Creativity isn’t finding something new. It is rearranging what you already know into a new mold

Old formulas don’t give new solutions.Everyone has that moment I think, the moment when something so momentous happens that it rips your very being into small pieces. And then you have to stop. For a long time, you gather your pieces. And it takes such a very long time, not to fit them back together, but to assemble them in a new way, not necessarily a better way. More, a way you can live with until you know for certain that this piece should go there, and that one there. Don't keep forever on the public road, going only where others have gone. People tend to resist a change into something new and different. But after it's succeeded, they easily say that the change is a must. Every new moment holds a greater potential than the last. Explore it. Living in new shapes, reshapes our thinking.

There was rarely an obvious branching point in a person's life. People changed slowly, over time. You didn't take one step, then find yourself in a completely new location. You first took a little step off the path to avoid some rocks. For a while, you walked alongside the path, but then you wandered out a little way to step on softer soil. Then you stopped paying attention as you drifted farther and farther away. Finally, wondering why the signs on the roadway hadn't led you better. The old resists the new one. Change hurts is the reason. Nothing new or innovative is created without a stretch of the imagination. Reach your goals by reaching for the sky with some brain stretches of the imagination every day. The darkness that follows a sunset is never so dark that it can change the inevitability of a sunrise.

The depth of life is found in the breadth of living. Once you reach deeper and deeper into your reality, you approach closer and closer its surreal essence. I wonder the world desperate to find the edge of myself.Existence is an art.By expanding your views, you expand your reality. Sometimes you look around the world, to see the dazzling walls and showering fountains of it, and feel like that today is the end and beginning at the same time. That's the moment you discover something new of yourself. That's love, cause and life. Just please understand that everyone is going through a rough time as well. Even if they are hiding behind money or a simple smile. We are all continuously stumbling as we go about our lives. If we had perfect lives we'd all be perfect people. Only thing we can learn to do is endure or we will not be happy and happiness is the closest thing to perfect.

Your ideas have legs and just as they run through your head, they could be running through someone else's head and it's just a matter of who gets to the finish line first. Nothing is new under the sun so act on your ideas. You will never get to a new place by walking an old path.

It is only when the mind is free from the old that it meets everything anew, and in that there is joy.

08/07/2023

The Hypnotist

I do not think there is a woman in whom the roots of passion shoot deeper than in her.

Love isn't something to be given on a whim, or shelved when it isn't convenient. Love is gift, a promise, and a belief in another person. If you treat it as such, it will fulfill you always. To develop emotional and erotic intelligence we need to practice enlarging our inner passion at every moment. It doesn’t matter what’s going on in our world, or even how we feel about ourselves in the moment.In fact the best time to accomplishing something may be when we least feel like trying, because the hopeless part of ourselves most needs the light. Men love women who are courageous for it means they can go all the way with him in his pursuit of his good dreams and intentions. Diversity creates dimension in the world. Behind the perfection of a man's style, must lie the passion of a man's soul.

Passion is sweeter split strand by strand. Divided and re-divided like mercury then gathered up only at the last moment.Countless as the sands of the sea are human passions. Passion and drive are not the same at all. Passion pulls you toward something you cannot resist. Drive pushes you toward something you feel compelled or obligated to do. If you know nothing about yourself, you can't tell the difference. Once you gain a modicum of self-knowledge, you can express your passion. It's not about jumping through someone else's hoops. That's drive. Passion often makes a madman of the cleverest man, and renders the greatest fools clever. The real test of love is loving those who we feel are the hardest ones to love.

She imagined she could taste the storm in him, the battering winds of desperation and frustration that met her own, blow for blow. Passion in life. is life. It’s contagious. Get naked and roll around in it.People who enjoy living have it all figured out.They are passionate, driven, alive, and they are real.She did not understand the beauty he found in her, through touch upon her living secret body, almost the ecstasy of beauty. For passion alone is awake to it. And when passion is dead, or absent, then the magnificent throb of beauty is incomprehensible and even a little despicable; warm, live beauty of contact, so much deeper than the beauty of vision.

They loved each other, not driven by necessity, by the “blaze of passion” often falsely ascribed to love. They loved each other because everything around them willed it, the trees and the clouds and the sky over their heads and the earth under their feet. Perhaps their surrounding world, the strangers they met in the street, the wide expanses they saw on their walks, the rooms in which they lived or met, took more delight in their love than they themselves did. The key to flow is to pursue an activity for its own sake, not for the rewards it brings. That we may not fall short of desire, but let us give way to the unspoken passion hidden in the closet of our discretion.

You’ve no idea the restraint I’ve created. A word, which in a past life, never held special meaning for me, flows now through the blood of my veins as if to remind me it was always there. Like you, always there. You said I was not strong. So I created strength to fight against these natural feelings which keep me tied to you. I drew a line in the sand so I would not step towards your door again. I have boundaries, strength and pride. What I do not have is you. And that is the only part I wanted. You’ve no idea the restraint I’ve created. You’ve no idea the bold wall I’ve built to keep me out of your compromising arms. He tasted passion. He tasted emotion. He tasted a world he’d never imagined, one he could never not enter. It was right there in front of him, suddenly open to him. Unexpected. Exciting. Scary When a man finds this kind of woman, he will go all out for her knowing that she will not be a letdown. Fear is the passion of the enslaved.

Ultimate prosperity is one's value within. It takes a man of depth, morality, and charm to be envied yet without a sign of wealth or romance. A passion to prove such inner worth is his permission to achieve whatever he desires. Passion is different from interest. Those who are just interested in things have the “wish”, but passionate people have the “will” In the end, only God can see the heart of an individual and distinguish the difference between legalistic deadweight and the passion of holy solemnity. Like a child who saves their favorite food on the plate for last, I try to save all thoughts of you for the end of the day so I can dream with the taste of you on my tongue. Passion is wholehearted devotion; it is fervor and agony; it is temper and zeal. Passion is not a reaction to an external event. It is the left over emotions from the internal battles you have won that propels us two forward. Passion precedes prosperity.

If you follow your passion, the world will follow ours…