tongue and groove

Cooper

I love this story.  Once a week for a year, two Seattle filmmakers put a small customized digital camera around the neck of their cat, Cooper.  It was programmed to take a photo every 2 minutes (or 200-400 photos a day).  They were amazed at the results...

"If my cat can take photos prettier than what we've taken, what is art? It asks a lot about the intention behind art and how it's interpreted," Michael Cross said.

The story is here.  And Cooper's Flickr set is (featuring some of his 'best' photos) is here.

adulthood

Seems like the older I get, the only thing I figure out is how much I still don't know.  Or maybe more appropriately, how much I continually forget.  Even so, I wanted to mark H's 18th birthday on the 2nd in a special way, so I wrote a poem for him about a few of the things I think it means to be an adult.  It's here.  Comments welcome if you'd like to add what being an adult means to you.  ;)

December Views

I meant to post here over or around Thanksgiving--I really did.  There's just been a lot going on--all year--and this blog has taken a backseat to other things.  But over Thanksgiving weekend I started thinking about returning to blogging...about finding a way to ease back in.  And Darlene gave me the perfect route, December Views.

I greatly enjoyed participating in the first December Views last year on my Vox blog.  Here are those posts with a January 1, 2008 post thrown in for good measure.  I sometimes miss my Vox blog and have at times thought about posting there again.  I think December Views might be a good time to start Vox'ing again.  I know that some of you get frustrated when I switch blogs, but I've always said I blog first and foremost for myself...as a sanity measure.  Maybe that's why I haven't been feeling very sane this year...very little blogging.  ;) 

So this isn't a "I'm dropping this blog and moving again" post--it's just a "Vox feels like a good fit for this project" post.  I like having more than one blog and keeping my options open.  ;)  The only downside in this moment is that my brother's family asked to borrow my camera for their Thanksgiving vacation.  Right now I have my sister-in-law's little Casio, so my picture-taking might not ramp up for a few days until I get my camera back. 

If you want to join the December Views project, you can jump in at any time.  Just drop Darlene an email at orangedaisies at gmail dot com and put "December Views" in the subject line. 

And in January I'm going to join Jamie's "12 Secrets of Highly Creative Women" book blogging group.  The first prompt goes up on my birthday, January 9.  That seemed like a good omen.  ;)  Details are here.  If you'd like to participate, email Jamie at openthedoor dot ca.

2008 has been a hard year for me.  I won't go into every reason why that is.  I'll simply say this:  Now that the election is over, I'm ready to start focusing some energy on my creative self again.  The election wasn't part of 'the hard stuff'...it just provided me with a necessary distraction and some intellectual stimulation to get me through some off times.

Here's wishing all of you a wonderful December.  My Vox blog, The Land of Moo, is here.  December Views posts will be there.  I may (or may not) occasionally post on other subjects here.  I'll have to wait and see how the month unfolds.  ;)

Once upon a time...

Prepare to have your heart melted...  :)



Once upon a time... from Capucha on Vimeo.

equilibrium

I was shocked when I went to my poetry blog this morning to see that I'd written very little there the past few months.  It dawned on me yesterday that the past few months have really been about finding my equilibrium again, about recalibrating my energies and priorities.  Going from 0 to 60 as a parent.  Stepping away from a toxic workplace, casting off what had come to weigh me down. 

H. has been in school for a little over a month now.  We've had two trips to my hometown in that time (formy  step-niece's beach wedding and my Dad's 80th birthday party).  Imagine waiting 13 years to have H. meet and spend time with my family.  Imagine the joy I feel when after all that time I find that he loves it there--that he enjoys spending time with my family, with his new (to him) cousins.  Driving through the redwood forest last Sunday--thinking that exact thought--tears welled up in my eyes.

I've stopped beating myself up for falling behind in everything...reading blogs, commenting, updating my Flickr stream, writing poetry, posting here.  I spend the majority of my time online at Twitter these days.  We live in such a teensy space, the three of us--almost like being squeezed into a dollhouse.  Yet it somehow works.  Our dining room table's been stored in the garage and in its place we've transformed half of our kitchen into a combo office/studio space.  I've been able to fit Twitter into the small (time) spaces.

But now I think I'm ready to return a bit.  To focus a bit more on my internal life.  Every day brings new surprises and a reminder (since we have him for only his senior year) that every day truly does count. 

Yesterday I was reading this review about Keri Smith's new book, How to Be an Explorer of the World:  Portable Life Museum.  I loved the suggestion to write a poem using book titles, so this morning I did just that using a shelf of non-fiction titles.  It's here.

Do yourself a favor...read this and listen to the interview with Anna Deveare Smith.  I could listen to Ann Richards discovering her chi all day long.  :)

Maira Kalman

an interview with Maira Kalman

her New York Times blog, The Principles of Uncertainty

The Principles of Uncertainty book

And her TED talk...

who does she think she is?

Website here.

this i believe...redux.

I just stumbled upon something I wrote a few months ago.  I rarely go back and read stuff I've written, but often when I do, I have no recollection of writing it.  I don't mean that in a 'she's losing her memory' sort of way.  I mean that sometimes when I write, it can be sort of a pure process...like I set my head down for a few moments and just let it flow.  You'd think I'd do it more often just for the pleasure of that experience.  :)  Anyway, this is recycled from May 9th of this year...(but the collage is new)... 

i believe in poetry rest stops.  i believe in taking showers by candlelight and losing myself in the zen of baseball.  i believe in the right to be wrong.  i believe in letting go of the need to be known in my pursuit of the knowing of me.  i believe thrift stores could more accurately be called treasure shops.  i believe in 'make-a-tions'...in the ability to see a vacation in even the narrowest travel window.  i believe there's a powerful lesson in beach glass...that no matter how ordinary we were starting out, being buffeted by life carves each of us into a unique find.  i believe in postcards...especially old ones with stranger's handwriting.  i believe in sacred thoughts and hope-bombs and wishful dreaming.  i believe wisdom is the most valuable currency.  i believe the love of a good dog can cure most ills.  i believe "amelie" is one of the best films ever.  i believe in making a spectacle of one's self.  i believe a splash of color is always a good thing.

letting go of "NO!"...or why selfish gets a bad rap...

A couple of days ago, Pamela Slim tweeted a link (at Twitter she's @pamslim) to a free 3-card reading.  Judging by the follow-up tweets I saw, it appeared that several of us did readings and that for some of us, they were eerily accurate.  The first card was the "problem," the second was "the way through" and the third card was "choose the gift."  My third card was "flow - tao; synchronicity; being lucky and in tune with the unfolding process."  There was a line in that third card of the reading that really jumped out at me...about "using your situation as a form of control to stop yourself."

Yesterday on Twitter, @andreamercado tweeted a link to a guest post by Clay Collins at Zen Habits.  Clay's post is called "8 Great Anti-Hacks to Fundamentally Change Your Life."   This, for me, was the money quote in Clay's post because it piggy-backed on the line from the previous day's reading:  "...it’s not quitting things and being flaky that will make you productive, it’s the aggressive elimination of everything that doesn’t make you come alive.

My mother and I have had a running gag for decades, ever since The Big Chill because it's a William Hurt line in that film:  "I'm not into that completion thing."  I'm sure dozens of my friends over the years have considered me "flaky."  I've moved dozens of times and have had more jobs than I can remember.  It's probably stating the obvious to say that I grow bored easily.  I don't think of myself as a quitter.  If you queried my past employers, I suspect the recurring motifs would be dedicated and conscientious.  I'm the polar opposite of a slacker when it comes to work.  I typically do the workload of two or three people and for typically less than I should be getting paid to do the work of one.  My problem is that I say "yes" to things when my intuition is screaming "NO!" 

Now, you might think that's a tactic borne of low self-esteem.  It's true that I can be very self-deprecating, and when I got sober I tried to learn some humility (because I honestly don't think I possessed any until that time).  But when people have suggested that I might not love myself, it hasn't rung true--and this week I had an AHA! moment as to why I think that is.  I love myself, but what I'm really bad at is giving love to myself.  And I'm not sure I can articulate well why those two feel different to me.  All I can say is that I genuinely like who I am as a person, but I'm not good at honoring who that person is.

And until I saw that line in that card reading, it had never occurred to me that refraining from saying NO! could be a form of (self) control.  I've been keeping my NO! bottled up...and I think it's time to unleash it.  Which leads me to Clay's line about the "aggressive elimination of everything that doesn’t make you come alive."  Maybe it was all the years I was taught by strict, humor-less nuns...or the guilt-laced theology they tried to drill into us (it didn't take with me)...or my sad childhood...or...whatever...  But somewhere along the way, I adopted the belief that honoring myself was selfish.  It's okay for you to honor yourself, and I'll be one of your biggest cheerleaders.  But if I do it, it's selfish.  This week I started really thinking about that word:  selfish.  And it occurred to me that by adding a hyphen to it, I could reframe how I think of it:  self-ish.  Self-like.  If I genuinely like myself, then I will honor myself by being more self-like.

I need to let go of saying NO!, but not in the way we normally think of letting go.  I don't need to eliminate the NO! from my life--I need to release it, because those fake yeses make me feel the opposite of alive.  Being selfless is noble...but being self-less is not.

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Right after I wrote this post, I went back to Pam's blog because I saw her newest post was about vision boards, and who doesn't love a vision board?  (I know many of you are devotees and create them regularly.)  I did have to laugh when I watched her video and saw she used a picture of a fountain to represent flow (the third card of my reading.  I love the idea of a fountain representing flow.)  But what really got me was further down in her post where she linked to a post she'd written for Martha Beck's blog:  "How just saying NO can change your life." 

I think a vision board is in my immediate future...and I think the word NO is gonna figure prominently.  ;)

what would you do with YOUR 37 days?

As I mentioned in an earlier post, on July 27th, Patti began marking 37 days until her book's publication on September 2nd.  As part of that process, she's asked 37 Days readers to count with her by thinking about how we would spend our time if we only had 37 days left to live.  Send your submission to her via email at pattidigh (at) gmail (dot) com.  It can be a blog post or essay or photograph or video or poem...or whatever strikes your fancy.  (I do believe there's a 370-word limit on writing submissions though.)  Full details are here.

Mine is at Moojo Cafe here.