In the spirit of being grateful and letting go for the new year, I am looking back over the year of 2013 and choosing some of my favorite posts. It seems like many of these were written years ago not months ago but here they are.
I’m Really Blue, are You? Written to check out the colors that associate with my personality. Fun post to write.
Embrace your Inner Geek because we are all geeks in one form or another.
My Core Beliefs because I still believe in them.
The Darkness in the Mirror- I look in mirrors all the time.
Everything you do Matters- because it does.
My Next Step– Again an interpretive drawing exercise. I remember how much fun it was to do the drawings and read the interpretations. I wanted to reread it so that I could see how close it was.
Like Monkeys Building Walls- I really found that I have a really like monkeys.
Are You Truly Living- Because I think it is an important thing to know.
It was a few short weeks ago that MY COHORT and I embarked on the Jefferson Writing Project. We didn’t know where the winds would blow our thoughts but we knew that each day they would be published on our blogs.
My friend’s name is Hope and we talked at the beginning of February and she wanted to do more writing but had some writing blocks and motivational issues. I suggested a mutual writing project. She agreed and we made up some simple rules. I am not a big rules guy because who needs limits on our creativity.
I would make up writing prompts and we each would do a post that day involving the prompt. It was supposed to last for thirty days, but went a bit longer.
I went back and looked over our Facebook messages and it started on the 9th of February and ended today. Hope doesn’t like to write on Sunday! (I can blame her, but I like Sunday off too. 🙂
Coming up with the prompts was not as easy as I thought in the beginning. I know Hope so I wanted to get some good easy to write about things. Then as I got going I would just make them up in three seconds.
Or if I was cheating, I would start a post on something and use that for the prompt, or make the prompt something I wanted to write about anyway. In fact what I found, no matter what the prompt was I just wrote whatever I wanted to anyway.
I found that I learned a lot just from reading Hope’s posts, when she was fired up she would get them done way before me. I found I could read and enjoy her thoughts and not let them affect what I was writing.
After about twenty writing assignments or so, we switched it up and Hope was responsible for the prompt. That was more fun because then I could bug her to tell me what it is, rather than the other way around. I still just wrote whatever I wanted to and included the prompt in some way. Other times the prompt was the story.
It was fun to have someone else “checking up” on your work and at first the only other person who knew why you were writing about the things you were.
It is just enough motivation to get you to give a little extra effort to make sure you got your post out that day. But most importantly it was fun. Hope is a bit different, (in a good way), I know her personally and used to coach her in basketball. That was awhile ago but I enjoy seeing the young lady she has grown to become.
So I encourage anyone who is hitting a snag in their creativity or motivation to partner up or even group up and start a writing project. It was a fun way to keep things interesting and to work on being creative.
It is called the Jefferson Writing Project because, Hope and I both lived in the town of Jefferson, Maine when we were growing up, and we both graduated from Jefferson Village School, and know that Jefferson is small, has a beach, and a cattle pound. I do not know what the cattle pound is for, but it exists. She likes to take pictures there. Thanks Hope for all the fun. I will always be reading and commenting on your blog because that is how I roll.
It has long been one of my long standing beliefs that people come into your life for a reason and you merely need to allow things to play out to find out why. Sometimes they come in to stay for awhile, and some times they just pop in teach you something and then disappear on down the line.
I have been doing a super secret writing project with Hope Rose of Hope is Something You Can’t Live Without, well at least it is super, not really all that secret. I wanted to take a moment and evaluate our progress. She wanted to write and needed a little push, and I always like projects. So I devised the rules which looking at I have broken all the time, but I never liked rules anyway.
Rules of The Project
I will provide you with a prompt each day.
You will have a reasonable time to post something,using any creative medium you want, along with your writing. You can take pictures, you can draw pictures, you can paint pictures, you make macaroni pictures, or you can take them from Google, videos from youtube, whatever expresses what you feel inside. I will also complete the assignment. The commitment is for 30 days, that means until March 9.
But there must be writing that answers the prompt.
So we started this journey of very few rules and no real idea of what would come out of it. I am not sure if I expected to write like I was some sort of dancing machine or what, but it has been interesting. I have enjoyed it and I hope that Hope has as well. There are still ten days left as far as I can tell because we missed a few and I see more writing on hope’s blog then there were prompts. But I may be mistaken which one goes with which.
So here are the prompts so far and links to our answers:
One of my favorite people in the blogisphere is my friend Raimy-D(creative-guru.com). She spends her time dreaming up stuff for me and others to try to experience. I am two activities behind but I am making an effort to do this one in real-time and let the chips fall where they will. I will take a lot of positive thinking to get this done.
Automatic Writing Assignment
This activity is called automatic writing and I was intrigued because I had such a good time when I tried her automatic drawing exercise, highlighted by Raimy-D and her expert analysis of my very talented drawings.
It was liberating and fun. So automatic writing, no problem, this should spark some positive thinking.
This is how it is supposed to work
So it should work like this: 1. Think of a question you want to have answered in your life.
start writing without a conscious thought. (easier for some than others)
write until you get tired I guess or until you feel like you are done.
The idea is that the subconscious mind will answer the question that you ask. I have told Raimy-D that I am a little fearful of doing this because what if the answer isn’t something I want to hear? But bravery is the better part of valor here and I am going to do this right now, right here and you can read my ramblings.
The question: What is my next step supposed to be in life? (Play the song at the bottom when you read, it is neat.)
There were twelve swans that went to a local pond to take a swim. The water was warm but the swans didn’t know about the secret underneath the water. There were worlds that they had never seen. one at a time the swans would dive for food and while under the water they saw what was there and went to investigate each finding their own world to explore for awhile. Until there was only one swan left and he looked around and realized that he was all alone. He called for help, but no one came. He wanted to fly away but also couldn’t leave his companions without knowing their fate. He had never seen anything but food on his dives so he was unaware of the mysteries below the water. Finally he dove deep and saw out of the corner of his eye a light that he couldn’t resist. He swam as hard a he could toward the light and with all of his effort he made it and emerged into a totally new world. It was colorful, and full of beautiful trees, sparkling lakes it had a lot of green grass to walk on and beautiful puffy white clouds that the swan couldn’t wait to fly into. There was no reason he could think of that this place existed but here it was he could touch it with his feet and taste it with his tongue. It seemed real to him and in the end I guess that is all that mattered.
So there you go I am not going to read this until after Raimy-D looks at it and tells me what she thinks. The answer will be in the comments. Feel free to contribute your own interpretation of the story I am open to any and all guidance in this endeavor. I just want to learn about my next step.
I encourage you to give this a try for yourself and see what happens. I definitely encourage you to read the Creative Guru so that you can try all of this neat stuff as well.
A fantastically fabulous blogger from a magical kingdom has come up with a great idea to challenge the masses, a tug of war.
Always up for a challenge I accept wholeheartedly. The inaugural question was what came first, the chicken or the egg?
This was a softball to me, because of my rudimentary understanding of biology and evolution. The world has my excellent experience in the public education system of the 1970’s and 80’s to thank for this detailed answer.
The Chicken Wins
There are several arguments I could make. If I believed the religious teachings I heard every Sunday as a youth, God made chickens and chickens make eggs and that is the end of the story. That would make it simple, even if it makes no sense an leaves a “few” gaps.
That answer never satisfied me so I looked to education for my answer. As I understand life it worked something like this.
There was a Big Bang! (just had to get that reference in here)
The Earth and the atmosphere formed.
Life started to evolve.
Where it came from, now that is debatable but here we are, not debatable. (at least we think we are here)
Life was made up of single cell organisms who due to environmental influences started to evolve over time to become more proficient at survival.
Many forms of life evolved, why they didn’t just all turn into people or monkeys or dinosaurs, or chickens is a bit unclear to me, but what do you expect from a free education.
Now these single celled organisms multiplied through cell division. Over time cells bonded together to form multicell organisms. Some of these primitive life forms eventually evolved into chickens.
The early chickens found an evolutionary benefit to developing their young in eggs outside of their bodies, so it is clear that the Chicken definitely came first!
It had been years since I had ventured into that attic As I climbed the rickety pull down ladder my face was greeted with a musty, dusty smell and the cold air that stabbed my cheeks reminding me of the winter weather outside. As my body became fully engulfed by the cold I tried to make it a quick visit. I was looking for my copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, when something caught my eye.
It was a box. There was nothing about the box that separated it or made it seem that much different from the rest of the boxes in the attic, but the feeling I had was definitely not normal or routine. I picked it up almost subconsciously and maneuvered my way back down to the warmth of the house below with the box still closed in my hands.
There was a Christmas excitement that I was feeling as I started to pull the top of the box open to see what treasure was held inside. I am not sure if the contents glowed but there was a light that emanated from the container as I peeked inside. It could have been real light for all I know or remember because inside were memories that hadn’t been disturbed in years and they were being resurrected today.
The Book
The first thing I pulled out of the box was a book. It was a children’s book and a pretty ordinary one at that, but it brought to life, experiences that occurred long ago.
It was called Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel. The contents of the book didn’t matter as much as the words. As I flipped through each page, the voices of those who read those pages to me in my youth came back. Most of them from the grave.
I was awash in nostalgia and even the love a kid feels when someone takes the time to read a story to you. Parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and even some teachers voices rose from the page.
When I was child the best time of day was just before I went to sleep when my mother or father would read a story to us. It was a ritual that lit my imagination on fire.
I dreamed of castles, monsters and being a hero. Those images crept back into my mind as I remembered my imaginary adventures from long ago. I wondered how many kids today get to experience this now.
The Scrapbook
Anxiously I moved on, the next item was a scrapbook I had made in junior high of all of the pictures I could find with me in them. As most young people are, I suppose I was a bit self-centered at the time.
It hit me as I remembered teams I had played on or my seventh grade class picture, just how much life had changed. Not one of the kids including me in those pictures had ever heard of a cell phone or a personal computer for that part.
Yet we managed to live our lives, make friends, go places, and have fun anyway. I remembered how awkward it was to call someone’s house (from the phone attached to the wall) and have to talk to their mom to see if they were home.
Each of these pictures made me wonder how kids can manage to
pay attention at all today. They always have an electronic distraction within arm’s length.
I had a hard enough time concentrating when there was only a paddle ball to distract me. If you are not sure what that is, see the image, but the point is I was easily distracted.
I looked at the kid I was and was happy for him that he had never dreamed of Facebook. It was much more fun to talk to girls in person I think.
My Former Friend
The next item was not filled with pleasant memories. It was filled with pain and sadness. It was a homemade award that one of my best friends had given me.
It represented some joke between us. We used to work together and I thought we were very good friends. It struck me that I had not seen nor heard from this person in over five years.
Something in my heart sunk as I thought about the temporary nature of all things in life and particularly the fleeting ideas of friendship. Why weren’t we friends anymore? What had happened?
It all seems so silly now. There was this award, a joke shared long ago that now only echos in hollow silence. They say that everything happens for a reason and some day perhaps I will understand the reason friendship ends, but it won’t be today.
The Game Changer
I was out of time and had to run, but I reached in the box one more time and this time I came out with a total shock. My collectors edition of thoughts by William George Jordan! The book I think is only significant to me as my reading of it changed my life from one of a taker to one of a giver.
That book was the gateway for me into a world of wonder and wisdom. It planted the seed of an idea, that every thought you form affected your experience in life was a concept that I had never conceived of, much less ever heard of before.
I recalled how as one book turned into another that philosophies started to make sense in my mind. I remember not only feeling more positive about life but more hopeful about the fate of the world.
There were greater powers available to mankind than simply watching tiny plays acted out on a television screen. Learning is a lifelong thing and how much you want to learn is controlled only by your own personal desire and ability to put away your phone, turn off your television or computer and allow words to seep into your mind. The reward is knowledge of anything you want. Aladdin had a lamp, you have a book, each can make any wish you have come true.
The End
I closed the box and placed it in a very safe place and hurried off to my pressing appointment with work. Even though I left the room physically, my mind was still stretching back to what was inside that box.
I had recently challenged the always wonderful, beautiful, kind, considerate and very funny Purnimodo to come up with her top five American movies. Purnimodo decided to call them movies to watch when you are stranded, but many of them I would watch any time. She came up with a pretty potent list, but I have a few years on the fair blogger from Holland, and that means a little more movie expertise.
This is a rundown of my top movies with an explanation of why each one is so very awesome. I am not putting them in any particular order and I don’t think I will be able to keep it to five, because movies are awesome. (So are you, if you are still reading.) My criteria are pretty simple, I have to have seen it at least five times and still want to watch it right now. In most cases I even know the dialogue, but I’ll be quiet if we watch it together.
Good Will Hunting
This movie has it all. Robin Williams playing the sensitive shrink, who works with the tough kid from Southie, Matt Damon, and gets him to use his talents wisely. It involves friendship, romance and fulfilling your potential. Great movie any way you look at it. Best line in the movie: “Tell him I’ve gone to see about a girl.” You must have a very little heart if you don’t like this one.
There are not many films that take place inside a prison like this. Andy Dufrane falsely accused of murdering his wife spends twenty years in prison, launders money for the warden, breaks out, takes all of the money for himself. Best line in the movie, “Get busy livin’ or get busy dyin’. That’s goddamn right.” You will feel like going to live on a beach in Mexico after this one.
This is a movie that many people have never seen, but it is worth the time. On the surface it is about a golf match, but underneath it is so much more. It is about finding your own unique talent and doing the best you can with it. Letting go of the past, and living in the present moment. Starring Matt Damon, Will Smith, Charlize Theron and directed by Robert Redford, it should have been a hit, but it was a flop at the box office. Still a great movie that you should see. This movies has so many good lines it is hard to choose just one but I will choose this one: ” You got a choice… You can stop… Or you can start…” Bagger Vance says as he is guiding Rannolph Junah back into the light.
OK, this one is kind of a kid’s movie, but I still watch it every time I am feeling under the weather and need some extra rest. Who can argue it has everything, fencing, boxing, giants, revenge and true love. What can top all of that? This is a classic, with many lines and I recently threw a few around it made me realize that I haven’t watched it for so long that I might be feeling a bit under the weather, ahem today! Great lines, a million of them, “inconceivable!” , “As you wish”, “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.” I can’t believe you are still reading this and not watching this movie!
I put these two together because they are the best of the franchise. If you have never seen Rocky then you need to quickly, it is a classic about how anyone on any given day can be a champion and give a championship effort. Rocky III has Mr. T in it and is great because it came out while I was in junior high. I skipped Rocky II because it was too long and drawn out, and anything after III was either over patriotic or didn’t make sense. Although, Rocky Balboa, the last Rocky movie gave one of the best speeches ever, so I included that one here. Enjoy the fight. The world ain’t all sunshine and rainbows………..
A great story that I now know pretty much word for word. Jack Nicholson is great in this one and Tom Cruise was ok too. Star studded cast with Demi Moore, Keifer Sutherland joining Cruise and Nicholson. Full of good lines, but has the best speech and courtroom confrontation that you can imagine. Between Danial Caffey (Cruise) and Colonel Nathan Jessep (Nicholson). The moral of the movie is nobody is above the law and we should all do what we can to protect those who need it. “You don’t need a patch on your arm to live with honor.”
Fight Club is an awesome movie about……..Sorry rule number one prevents me from telling you anything further so does rule number 2. Just watch it if you have never seen it. Great movie.
There it is, my top five movies. Well really it is Seven, but who is counting, well I guess you are if you have read this far then you should definitely leave a comment and let me know how you think I did. What makes your list my friends?
This is the second article about the things that I know for certain after a few years of trying to answer the questions of life. The access to and the willingness to read and learn is the great equalizer of all people.
Books and Reading Changed My Life
I have always been a reader, but not a learner. The books that I read for much of my life were designed to entertain and tell a story but not to teach me anything in particular. I am almost ashamed to say that I lived more than forty years before I truly discovered the power of books. This is what I have learned to be true. Not everyone is born with great athletic ability, or supportive parents, or money, but once you learn the skill of reading you able to build your intellect to any level that you desire.
You Can Do Anything
If you have access to books, you have the ability to learn from the greatest thinkers that mankind has ever produced. What you want to learn, you can learn all you want to about. This means that all of the world, science, math, literature, or physics are all there for you to
delve into as deeply as you could possibly want to.
This is what happened to me, once I started to realize that books possess a whole lot of power, I had trouble reading anything for fun. I didn’t want to waste any of my reading time with something that didn’t make me think or to gain a better understanding of the world around me. I am certainly no intellectual giant, but I do realize the miles that I have crossed, and the distance I still need to navigate. What a trip.
Once You Start…….
Much like a rock rolling down a hill, once knowledge is gained, and you feel like true understanding has started to peek through the haze of your mind, you want to learn more and more as fast as you can. The great part about this is that once you stretch your brain out, to accept these new ways of thinking, and thoughts that you have aquired, it will never shrink back again. There is no turning the light of knowledge off.
This power of gaining knowledge and understanding is the factor that levels the playing field for all people. you can feel sorry for yourself because of the circumstances that you were born into, or your experiences of life, but there is absolutely nothing stopping you from learning all that you want to from the many books of the world. All of which can be accessed free of charge at your local library.
You Can Do Anything By Reading
You have the opportunity to learn about business from Andrew Carnegie, or philosophy from Nietzsche. There are no limits to what level of expertise you want to acquire. The only limit is in the amount of time and thought that you want to invest in a particular project.
If you can read, you can do anything at all and that is a fact that I know to be true.
About five years ago, I had never heard of Facebook, and I was intimidated by the new technology that was coming out on a seemingly daily basis, but learning to adapt and overcome the hurdles that life has put in front of me, I slowly integrated myself into the world of social media. I started my Facebook account in 2007 according to my timeline and it has been slowly infiltrating my daily life since. Now I have to check Facebook to see everything from the latest news, to what music to like and who I should be listening to for fashion tips. Alright I have never really cared about fashion but you get my point. Facebook has gone from something I have never heard of to the single most dominant form of media in my life today, in about five years and I am not sure if that is good or not. I do know that is has changed the way I look at the world.
At first I didn’t check it very much, but I found out that you could connect with other people you haven’t seen in a very long time, which was kind of great. Each connection you made was like a walk through your past, remembering friendships, enemies, good times, bad times, everything out there you can imagine. For me it was the older connections that really meant and still mean a lot to me, people that I knew when I was young. There was a shared experience of youth that provides a common bond between people. Reconnecting in this way is the strength of this medium for people my age, I think.
So you wanna be friends?
This is the one of the oldest questions that I remember being in kindergarten and asking this question and there is something very basic and reassuring you get from the answer. If the answer is no then you know that whomever it was is really a jerk and not someone you can rely on. Or if the answer is yes, there is a warm feeling inside that someone out there likes me. Or they really just want to creep around my page and see what I am up to. I am an optimist so I will stick to the thought that they really like me. It says, “you are ok, you are alright! You have a friend.” Even if you have a thousand friends, there is always room for one more friend or two, I mean can we really ever have too many friends? I still love reconnecting with someone after many years and seeing what they look like now, and all of that type of stuff that everybody does but doesn’t admit to. I think there is a desire in everyone to connect, to revisit those shared experiences.
Technology has Grown My Addiction
Since the cell phone companies have been so creative with their little smart phones, now there is no time of night or day that I can’t just flip on my phone to see what is happening
on Facebook. Honestly I will check it three or four times an evening, just to make sure that I don’t miss anything. It has also become my number one news source. There was an earthquake in Maine in October. I didn’t feel any vibrations, I didn’t see any damage, I only knew it happened because Facebook told me so. If there is an emergency, Facebook tells me. Traffic trouble? Facebook tells me. Nuclear explosion, Facebook tells me. Surprisingly, Facebook seems to be significantly faster than and just as accurate as the main stream media and more so if you count FoxNews as a major media source.
So here I am in my mid forties, unable to go longer than an hour without looking at Facebook on my phone because something might happen. Thank you Mark Zuckerberg for complicating my life.
Messages on Facebook are awesome, I love to get them. Somebody liked my link? Hell yes
they do! Someone commented on my post? That’s what I am talking about! When I get a message on Facebook it must be what it was like back when you got letters in the mail. Someone took the time to think of you, write it down and send it to you. That is awesome. Except when someone you work with realizes that the only communication you will consistently check is Facebook and starts sending you messages there that are totally about work stuff. What a rip-off! I think, “Wow, look at those messages! This is a great day.” Then I click on it and see what it is……….it is like someone just cancelled the Super Bowl. Even if it is really vital information that will make someone money and it should be good news, I can’t help but be significantly disappointed in getting work messages on Facebook.
Let’s Ask Facebook
So here it is 2012, I can’t imagine what kind of technology is coming next, but no matter what it is, you can bet your ass that it will involve an easier way to interact with Facebook. I am not sure if I am happy or sad about this, I will have to check Facebook and see what it tells me to feel.
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There are many times in life when you have to fight to be a man, today was not one of those days. As I was minding my own business, thinking about enjoying the warm weather and getting some work done. I was interrupted by the gentle clucking of chickens outside. The place where I am fortunate enough to work has their own chickens, that they do get their own eggs from, and so they serve a purpose. I have seen them almost daily, and my interactions with them have until today been of the most perfunctory in nature.
So this takes us to today, I hear the chickens clucking away outside, and I decided that I should go out and talk to them and see what all the clucking was about. I mean there must
have been something happening. So I approached the herd of chickens like I always did, with a friendly disposition and the intent of just saying, “Hello chickens, what is happening on this beautiful November day?”
The conversation started much as I thought it would, I milled about with the chickens and made my own fake clucking sound, thinking this would ingratiate me with the rest of the flock. Seeing no animosity, I took that as encouragement and started to duck my head and
mimic the motions the fowl were making. This turned out to be a bad idea. As one of the roosters took this action to be a threat I think.
Out of nowhere he pecked at my shoe. Which more startled me than scared me. This chicken was really mad at my shoe apparently as he continued to attack. I tried to reason with the chicken and calmly explained that I didn’t mean any harm and if he went away I might bring him some food. He didn’t buy it so I of course went into my natural defense mode, which is reminiscent of the crane technique from the movie the Karate Kid. Mr. Miyagi said when you do this right, there is no defense. He obviously had never tussled with an angry chicken before.
I hoped he would get bored and stop his attack before I had to get serious and move to the second part of my self defense training. (The fetal position) Fortunately I was able to stay
calm and stop laughing long enough to think of an acceptable exit strategy.
The irony was heavy on my mind that I was running away from an overly combatant chicken: Who was the chicken? I did learn that if a chicken does start to attack you, if you run away, they will not be able to follow you very far and they will immediately attack your friend who was taking pictures of that whole incident. So it all worked out in the end I got away with out being harmed by a chicken or doing harm to a chicken. I also haven’t laughed so hard in a long time.