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1 week ago | 
medium.com | Paddy Murphy
A week’s worth of science, strangeness, and stubborn optimismRifles for ballotsAfter forty years of bullets, booby traps, and back-alley communiqués, the PKK has decided politics might be worth a punt. At their 12th Party Congress , which sounds like either a Marxist reunion or a very tense wedding, they agreed to hang up the Kalashnikovs and try voting instead.
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1 week ago | 
medium.com | Paddy Murphy
From personality tests to mystical fire: a reckoning with the question of selfThe wound that speaksWho am I? Just three wee words, isn’t it? Small enough to write on a napkin but heavy enough to crack a cathedral asunder. It is not a question that comes gently. It arrives as a rupture, as a fever, as a voice heard at the edge of sleep when the ego slips its leash and the old truths rise like smoke. Children ask it before they learn to shoulder guilt and shame.
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1 week ago | 
medium.com | Paddy Murphy
When the performance ends, real gratitude begins, and it has nothing to do with journals or influencer wisdomThe velvet tyranny of good vibesThere exists among the devout and the dopamine-addled a curious rite, a modern sacrament in softbound leather: the gratitude journal. Scrawled each morning like holy writ in a sun-drenched kitchen smelling faintly of burnt oats and existential dread. Three things you’re thankful for. Daily. Without fail. And shame on you if you should dare to hesitate.
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1 week ago | 
medium.com | Paddy Murphy
Mystics, madmen, and the forgotten history of those who claimed to translate heavenWhen angels speak in the Bible, people collapse. Stone trembles. Smoke billows. Voices shake the ground like thunder wrapped in trumpet blasts. The divine does not whisper. It ruptures. So what happens when someone claims to hear it, and write it down? For centuries, prophets, mystics, and madmen have insisted that they’ve glimpsed, heard, or translated a language not meant for human tongues. A resonance behind the veil.
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2 weeks ago | 
medium.com | Paddy Murphy
From mushrooms to a HIV vaccination, lead to gold and some new music too, here’s the best stories from the last week…Magic mushrooms vs parkinson’sJeff Deming, a Parkinson’s patient and part-time lumber wizard, swears a few grams of scientifically supervised psilocybin gave him his life back, or at least enough of it to handle power tools again.
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2 weeks ago | 
medium.com | Paddy Murphy
The best short stories inspire and stir the imagination. Fascinate Me Fiction is a home for great sci-fi, mystery, historical, fantasy and speculative fiction short stories that tantalize, horrify, mystify and otherwise make you think. New writers welcome. Follow publicationTo the mother, and the murder behindThe boy was born in the hard light of the western sky, in a shack stitched together by sun-baked slats and the stubbornness of poor folk who didn’t know better than to stay put.
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2 weeks ago | 
medium.com | Paddy Murphy
The real lesson is buried under the rubble of who you thought you wereThey’ll tell you that wisdom comes with age. That it descends gently, like snowfall on the brow of the elderly, as if grey hairs are antennae for divine signals. But that’s nonsense, isn’t it? If age brought wisdom, your racist uncle would be the Dalai Lama by now. It doesn’t grow, it stripsWisdom is no heirloom passed down through the bloodline of chronology. It’s a ruination. It’s the carcass of falsehoods laid bare by affliction.
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2 weeks ago | 
medium.com | Paddy Murphy |Ben Ulansey
A community for readers, writers, poets, satirists, creatives, and thinkers of thoughtsFollow publicationMaking the case for stubborn, ridiculous optimismI shouldn’t be hopeful. Indeed, I could make the case that maybe none of us should be. Not with the way things are. Not when the word “algorithm” has replaced God in half the conversations I see now, as if divinity were just a series of predictive text suggestions.
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2 weeks ago | 
medium.com | Paddy Murphy
The girl who sang where silence grewThe path beyond reckoningIn the time before bells rang over the boglands, when the wind still whispered the whereabouts of the old gods and trees kept their own counsel, there lived a girl named Aoife who loved a man with the weight of a stone sinking into black water. His name was Fionnán, and he bore no glamor nor prophecy, save for the strange quietness behind his eyes that made beasts not flee from him.
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3 weeks ago | 
medium.com | Paddy Murphy
Let’s have a look at some good things that happened this weekMexi-goI bloody love Mexico. Always have, or at least since I was a kid. I think I can trace back my grá for the place since the 19994 World Cup when Ireland played Mexico and they had a mad lad in goal who took their penalties and free kicks. A short goalkeeper with an attitude who always wore colorful, crazy shirts…I mean, brother from another mother territory.
