Sunday Serenity #399

Hearted Bible fliker

I went to church with my sister this morning.  It was more for her pleasure than mine.  Though I did want to see the inside of the place so I could at least picture things she is talking about.

I don't like strange places.
I don't like crowds.
Especially crowds of strangers.
I don't like noise and flickering light and shadow.
I don't care for sermons anymore either.

The praise music was kinda nice.  Tho amplified electronic guitar was a bit loud for the small space.

But the biggest angst of all was that attached to my "divorce" from the church of my childhood in the early '90s. In spite of it being so different at Carri's church there were still many triggers of anxious memories and sad longing for that simple time when I thought an illusion was real.

Long story that doesn't belong here.  The gist is, that tho I've not given up Jesus I've given up preachers and dogma and anything smacking of Fundamentalism.

One good thing that came of attending today was the reminder of how much I love the Bible.  Still.  And always will.

Watching my sister follow along on her iPad reminded me I still hadn't loaded a Bible onto either of my Android devices.  An oversight needing to be addressed soon.

If nothing else I need it for writing scenes in my Fruits of the Spirit storyworld featuring Inny (Innocence) Workman Fairchild who, ever since waking from a coma speaks only in KJV verses.  It took those around him a long time to realize the things he said were meaningful in the context of what was happening.

The funnest scenes to write are the ones that pit Inny against Estelle who speaks only Shakespeare. Mmm, I probably need to find a complete Shakespeare to load onto my Nexus too.

So I spent the afternoon looking for a KJV ap for my Nexus.  Ended up with an Amplified Bible ap instead.  Tho I'm still going to look for a KJV.  The Amplified is a reference resource.

I chose the one I installed based on the screenshots--see all the blue?  But what I got was a lot of ugly olive green.  I'm probably going to look for a different one. One with a pleasing look and more features.

Even more than the colors I'm frustrated by the need to return to the book menu to get to the next chapter.

It would also be nice to have a search function for when I have a partial phrase or a word but can't remember any part of its address.

[This is one of the posts going up retroactively after the weeks long unintended hiatus that began the week after July 4th.  See She's Back for more detailed explanation.]

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Sunday Serenity #398

Hug More

There are scientific studies showing that those who hug daily are healthier and happier.

[This is one of the posts going up retroactively after the weeks long unintended hiatus that began the week after July 4th.  See She's Back for more detailed explanation.]

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Sunday Serenity #397

"The best and most beautiful things in life cannot be seen, nor touched, but are felt in the heart."

Helen Keller

I first encountered this at flickspire.com Finding Joy Inspiration Slide Show
There was no embed option so I took a chance and searched YouTube

[This is one of the posts going up retroactively after the weeks long unintended hiatus that began the week after July 4th.  See She's Back for more detailed explanation.]

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Sunday Serenity #396 - Sister Zen Time

Looking left at the bridge from or spot on the low stone wall

To alleviate my cabin fever and compensate a bit for my having missed the Go Forth celebration on Friday, this afternoon my sister took me over to Lake Sacajawea to walk the path for a ways and then  cross the bridge over to Zen Island* and sit and visit for over an hour.

I'd never been on Zen Island before.  It was developed on the tiny island at the north end of the lake and the bridge put in after Ed and I moved to Silicon Valley, California in 1999.  It is landscaped like Japanese gardens.  Few if any flowers but very manicured grass, hedges, small trees and green ground covering plants along curving gravel paths.

Its the very definition of serenity.

I love this lake and have many fond memories of it from toddler-hood forward.  I wish I could get over there more often.  Zen Island is at the end of the lake nearest Mom's house.  It would be easy walking distance for me now if I trusted myself to manage crossing the railroad track and four-lane Ocean Beach Highway to get to the path and to keep my eyes on the edge of the path instead of the glorious view.

Looking straight ahead (southish) from my seat on the stone wall.

*I'm not sure if Zen Island is its official name or just a local nickname.

[This is one of the posts going up retroactively after the weeks long unintended hiatus that began the week after July 4th.  See She's Back for more detailed explanation.]

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This is Longview

A slide show of iconic areas and buildings in Longview

Longview Named 'prettiest city' by Forbes

A Portland OR news station visits Longview after Forbes named it one of the prettiest cities in the country.

My cousin's son is interviewed.  It's his brother's wife who is taking me running.  Their family grew up less than a block from Lake Sacajawea.

Flying Over Longview, Kelso, Kalama WA and Raineer OR
and the Columbia and Cowlitz Rivers

This is long and a bit herky-jerky in places but worth it for some of the awesome views of our river valley.  Unless you are especially interested in planes and flying itself, skip ahead to the take off more than ten minutes in.

Driving over the Lewis and Clark Bridge from Raineer Or into Longview WA

Also known as the Longview-Raineer bridge, this is an iconic image for our town.
A swarm of memories from the 1960s to the present were triggered by watching this.

• Watching from the back seat as my Dad paid the toll in the mid sixties.  
• Being driven over it at break-neck speed at age 14 by the drunk father of the kids I'd been babysitting.  
• Driving over it for the first time myself at age 20.  
• Riding beside Ed on our Honeymoon--our motel was in Longbeach WA but the better road along the Columbia, especially in winter at night, is on the Oregon side so it is common to cross over to Oregon at Longview and back to Washington via the Astoria bridge near the mouth of the river.  Which I'm pretty sure is what we did the evening of December 2nd 1978 as I do remember the winter storm that lashed the windows of our room that night and the thrumming of the strong surf in my bones.

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Longview, Washington's Go 4th 2014

I didn't get to go to Longview's Go 4th celebration again this year so I experienced it vicariously.  Watched vids from previous years on the 4th and then those from 2014 later. I'm prepping this days later as I'm still running behind on getting my posts up.

The north end of Lake Sacajawea where the festivities are held each year is only blocks from Mom's house.  The 'party' is held nearly a mile from here in a several block swath on both sides of the narrow lake near the middle of it's length, centered on Martin's Dock and Lyon's Island.

Vendors set up days in advance and there's a timber festival with logging competitions:



and a cardboard boat regatta:

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Someday, Somewhere, Sometime

Jackie Evancho - Somewhere w/Barbra Streisand

This child has an amazing voice.  Not just strong and pure but expressive.  She brings me to tears with this song every time I listen.

Tho I admit that's at least partially due to how personal the words are to my current situation.  14 months since I watched Ed standing on the porch of our house in southern Oregon watching my sister back the van out of the driveway with me in the back seat.

If I'd known then it was going to be this long and still with no end in sight....

Longing is the only note my heart has played from that moment to this...

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Living Wholeheartedly: Brené Brown TED Talk

Brené Brown at TEDxHouston

Living Wholeheartedly

or

The Price of Invulnerability

I lost count of the ah ha! moments these twenty minutes gave me.

In a nutshell:

• We're born to be connected.
• Interpersonal disconnect defines our current culture.
• What breaks interpersonal connection aka relationship?
• Shame. Guilt. 
• Why do some weather encounters with shame and guilt while others are sunk by it?
• Those who are sunk have a deep-seated sense of unworthiness while those who weather it have a pervasive sense of worthiness.
• That sense of worthiness keeps their hearts whole and resilient.

How do the wholehearted live?

• With the courage to be imperfect.
• With compassion and kindness beginning with themselves.
• With connections rooted in authenticity--able to let go of shoulds be who they are
• Believing they are enough just as they are
• Embracing vulnerability--seeing it as the source of their beauty
• With willingness to takes risks--love with no guarantees
• Releasing need to be in control
• Practicing gratitude and joy

Those without the skills of wholeheartedness attempt to escape the pain by numbing the difficult emotions through:

• Addictions
• Perfection
• Control

BUT

You cannot numb selectively.

Attempts to numb sadness, shame, grief, anger, fear...
Will also numb love, joy, peace, gratitude, hope...

Without emotions life looses meaning and purpose.

Don't be satisfied with my synopsis tho.  Listen to her presentation.  The story she tells about the course of her research is priceless.  And there are plenty of points I didn't include.  Plus I paraphrased in places.

And she's funny.

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Soothing Gregorian Chant Mix

Masters of Chant

Gregorian Chant Jazz Mix

Gregorian Chant accents familiar songs.  

I'll just let the music speak for itself.

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One Word 365

One Word 365

One Word 365 suggests that instead of New Year's Resolutions we choose one word to make the theme of our year, to focus on daily in whatever way encourages an increase in or fulfillment of its essence.  

To further such an aim they have provided a kind of social network/support group for those who'd like to give it a try.

I'm thinking of joining and if I do I'm choosing JOY as my word.

For obvious reasons I think.  And the pun is fully intended.

JOY because it is the light at the end of the tunnel of depression which has been my struggle for decades.
JOY because it is my name and thus my sense of self, my identity, my life theme, my aspiration.
JOY because, whether having lost myself stole my joy or having lost my joy hid my self from my sight, seeking after either joy or Joy has to be the path toward reclaiming both and I've come to believe I can't have one without the other.

As you might imagine, I've been collecting 'joy' themed things for decades knickknacks, jewelry, art, quotes, songs, movies, crafts, stories, poems...

Assuming I'm about to join this challenge, I'll begin by resharing a poem I wrote about a moment of joy I experienced that happened to be captured on film:

Joy Splashed
by Joy Renee

______________________________________One
_________________________________  spring
_______________________afternoon at Seaside,
__________________Oregon, while walking
_______________barefoot upon damp sand
_____________at the edge of a rising tide,
___________dabbling my toes in timid
________wavelets and kicking liquid
_______diamonds at purple-tongued

______Tia, who distributes them freely

_____with shakes of her shaggy mane,

____I looked up to watch clouds cavorting

___over cyan canyons dodging the tickling

__fingers of shadow and light and gulls performing 

_their errant air-ballet upon the fickle breezes. With my 

gaze thus engaged, the sea embraced me round my ribs with salty 
ecstasy, lifting me for one eternal instant out of the grip of gravity.

[][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][]

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Sunday Serenity #395 Running Blind

See Joy Run

Running was once one of my passions and I thought for years that because I was so severely visually impaired now I would never run again.  But I learned that it was possible with a running partner and a safe location so in January I put it on my Bucket List.

Then in April I shared with my 2nd cousin's wife (a runner) about my running history and she offered to take me running after she finished the May half marathon she was training for.

Finally last weekend I shopped for running shoes.

Today Mary took me out to the west Longview dike to run.

Well, run-walk.  And it might have been first cousin if not sibling to jogging. I could not sustain the sprints past 30 seconds. Which is just a guess.  I just know they were short.  50-70 paces maybe.  But several of them over the nearly mile long stretch.

Baby steps.

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Inbox Flood

Inbox 14K Total

Inbox
13K Unread

Early last week my Gmail inbox reached 24.4K total and 22.2K unread. It had been 2 weeks since loosing Merlin and I was tentatively reengaging a few of the many things I'd pushed to the back burner and turned the heat off the day Merlin got sick.  That day I discovered several items requiring attention like sympathy notes, blog comments, notes from my sisters, a thank-you/keep it up note from a Joystory reader, requests to review, notifications from Net Galley, and notification the as yet to be used domain name for my intended online business page was expiring this weekend.

Realizing there were likely to be many more such prompted me to start slogging through the flood of 150-300 per day not counting the ones I've filtered to skip the in-box. Well that and the realization that I have to fix this inbox issue before I go live with any of my online business goals--self pub, copywriting, gift store and more.

The flood was created by following the suggestion of the AWAI copywriting course to collect junk mail to study by purposefully subscribing to email lists in niches that interested me.  Turned out I was drawn to a lot of niches--health and fitness, (diet and nutrition, naturopathic medicine, exercise) self-transformation, Spiritual paths, Law of Abundance, and hypnosis, meditation, and Brain Wave Entrainment mp3, self-pub, marketing, web site creation, promo and maintenance....

AWAI itself sends me 6-10 per day.

I began the AWAI copywriting course to learn how to self-promote but decided I might as well consider soliciting clients as a way to support my true passion of story and poetry.

I should have been creating filters and labels from the get go so the copywriting samples were either skipping the inbox or easily archived.  Same for the task list to keep the personal, urgent, time sensitive, blog and social media, business or commitment related separate from the many 'interesting, worth a more leisurely look sometime.'

I've been slogging away at it daily for nearly two weeks now and still haven't cut it in half from its crest.  Discouraging. Tho I should keep in mind the 150-300 per day are still rushing is as I slog.

Eventually I'll need to unsubscribe from many lists but I'm not taking the time to evaluate them individually for usefulness.  So, except for a few that have pissed me off, I've just been creating filters and labels then going down the label list and archiving everything sometimes attaching an email I need to tend to or just want to look at closer to a task.

But that is flooding my task list which I've never broke up into themed lists so that needs to be done next. Tho I'm considering whether I should set aside the inbox until I've created at least a few that separate the urgent and the action/reply required from the 'check-this-out-when-you-get-a-minute'.

Of course I didn't remain in the analytic mindset while reading these copywriting samples.  I got caught up in the freebie trap, subscribing to new lists to get the free, PDFs, video, mp3, tutorials, email lesson series, webinars, replays of teleseminars...

And I've bought a few products, most of which are more of the same.

Where has the time been coming from to read, watch, listen to all of these?

Or, more precisely, what have I given up doing while I do that?

My counselor says that I busy myself with inconsequential things as a distraction from things I'm avoiding thinking about.

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Friday Forays in Fiction: TED Talks on Words

I'm a lost in my favorite jungle today.

Words Words Words playlist at TED Talks

13 Ted Talks that explore language concepts like:

Why is 'x' the unknown?
What do our language habits reveal about us?
Is the paper dictionary dying?
Ode to Envy: How does fiction help us understand better than exposition?
What can you learn by tracking a word across centuries through 5 million books?
A plea to Non-Native English speakers to continue to honor and cherish their mother tongue.
Is texting killing language skills?
How did language transform humanity?
What makes a word 'real'?
What if Einstein had to pass the TOEFL?
Why do legal documents need to be so long and obfuscating?
What is Duolingo?
Why do we need poetry?

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CATcerto

CATcerto

Nora the Piano Cat with

the Klaipeda Chamber Orchestra

conductor/composer Mindaugas Piecaitis

Clips from  Nora the Piano Cat videos which first hit YouTube in 2007 are spliced together and accompanied by an orchestra playing a composition by Piecaitis.

What is unclear is whether the splices were created to fit an already existing piece or one composed for Nora's compositions.

Either way its amazing.

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ROW80 166th Check-In -- Round 2 2014 Wrap Up

A Round of Words in 80 Days
Round 2 2014

The writing challenge that
 knows you have a life

I haven't checked in since May 31st in the midst of Merlin's illness.  He lingered for 8 days.  One of the hardest days was Monday June 2nd when I discovered that it was likely that the morning I found him unconscious he had recently nibbled on a toxic plant.  I went into a tailspin of shame, guilt, and self-recrimination.

He crossed the Rainbow Bridge on the morning of June 4th sometime between 8:30 am, when he looked up at me when I lifted the lid off his crate, and 10:15 when I got up the final time that morning and found him stiff and cold.  

I'd been unable to lay down before 3am because around midnight when I started to I found Merlin laying in front of my feet with his head on the toe of my right shoe. His crate door was two feet away. He had not left it on his own steam since mid-morning. All day I'd lifted him out to put fresh pads in his crate and wipe him down about every three hours, helping him drink water and then cuddling him for awhile before putting him back in.

He was chilled so after I'd cleaned him and the crate up, I cuddled him inside my fleece vest with one of my raggedy T-shirts wrapped around him, telling him the stories of the special moments he'd given us until I started having hypnogogic episodes and loosening my hold on him before startling awake again.

During those eight days I'd put caring for Merlin at top priority and let everything else slide, including my early bird schedule.  Between the morning I found him unconscious and the weekend after he passed I'd fallen off nearly all of my new habit horses.

The spreadsheet I'd been featuring in check-ins for over a year would have had zeros or Ns across the board  for most of June except for MISC WORDS which began to soar the last week of May as seen in the last check-in.

But then I fell off the habit horse of updating the spreadsheet.  And partly due to that, the check-ins.

I didn't make much effort to get back on any for over a week either.  With my June 10th post, Time to Find a New Normal, I declared my intent to take a hiatus from my normal posting lineup and lower daily posting's priority several notches until I'd caught up on things that impacted physical and emotional health and personal integrity.  Since then I've been running several days behind on getting my posts up though I've been beginning the drafts nearly everyday.

One of the things I began doing the day after saying so long to our Mr Wizard was purposefully seeking out things online that were uplifting, motivational, useful, inspirational, amazing or hilarious.  These then became the subjects of my posts. 

I've done some mood elevating activities as well.  Like pulling out the box of summer clothes I'd packed away last fall.  And pampering my feet with a pedicure and new running shoes.  And then setting the date and time to go running with my cousin's son's wife who runs 5 kilometer races--Sunday June 29 at 3pm.

Several of the things I found on my mood elevating explorations online were directly related to story or writing.  I've posted two in the last two Friday Forays in Fiction and have another in the works for this Friday:

• Friday Forays in Fiction: The Dark Thread in Stories for Children
• Friday Forays in Fiction: Lighting Your Writing

One of the habit horses I fell off during the ordeal was fiction writing.  But I didn't write less only different.  And a great deal more.  Beginning that first morning while sitting still with Merlin inside my vest I tapped into a well of memories that became a gusher.  Memories of Merlin's 14 years and those entwined with them soon tangled with earlier and earlier memories many attached to insights I had to record.  

But when I found them invading posts they didn't really belong in I moved those paragraphs into my WhizFolder ap and began following the threads where they took me.  It's a bit like journaling for some stretches but more like storytelling in others and occasionally segues into poetry.

So I'm not going to fulfill either my ROW80 writing goals or the JuNoWriMo ones.  Now Camp NaNo is about to start and I've not yet set my goals or signed up and thinking about it makes me feel weary instead of enthused.  Tho if I declared my NaNo project to be memoir I could just keep letting those memories flow onto the screen.  I'm sure I exceeded 50K in June with that...whatever it was...as I was frequently exceeding 2K a day.

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Beatbox Brilliance

Beatbox brilliance: Tom Thum at TEDxSydney

I'd never heard of a beat box until a week or so ago and now, after watching several videos featuring them, I'm putting it on my wish list.  As well as that other device he used near the end where he recorded snatches of notes and beats and single words individually and then, using something like a keyboard, made a song out of them.

The beatbox, as Tom Thum plays, it sounds like a whole orchestra held in the hand.  Of course, I'm most interested in making it sound like a drum symphony.

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The Ultimate Bounce Back

After falling flat on your face...What would you do?

I'm going to watch this over and over until it starts to stick:

After the fall, get back up and keep going.

Don't even bother to dust yourself off.

Just get up and GO

She actually won anyway!!!

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Sunday Serenity #394: Drums for Worship

Stikyard Percussion

Well this settles it.

If what my mother said when I was eleven and choosing my band instrument was ever true, it's not now.

'You can't play hymns with drums.' was her reason for nixing my first (second, third, forth, fifth...) choice for a band instrument to spend the next six years with.

I only made it three years with the clarinet I settled on that day.

I have never lost my love of drums tho I've never actually played a real one.  But I've always tapped or thumped on everything in sight with my hands, fingers, feet or items I was holding.

Playing a real drum set was the second item on the Bucket List series I began last October.

Watching videos like this one intensifies my desire to hit big covered bowls and tubes with sticks.  But I never quite imagined playing drums like this:

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Pampered Feet

Pampered Feet

Blue Toenails

My sister and I went to a hair salon for pedicures Saturday evening.  She's a veteran but it was my first.

Soaked, sanded, oiled, massaged, clipped, and painted blue.  All while sitting in a recliner massaging me from neck to lumbar.

I could get used to this

Afterwards I got my hair cut as well.  Forgot to get a picture.

Ready to Rumble

Next we went shoe shopping for my running shoes in preparation for going running with my cousin's son's wife who is a half-marathon runner.  The date's been set for Sunday the 29th.

As one of the items on my Bucket list, this is a big deal to me.

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Friday Forays in Fiction: Lighting Your Writing

Use of Lighting in Casablanca to Reflect
the Pervasive Sense of Imprisonment
Public Domain

Growing Readership By "Lighting Up Your Writing" | Bestseller Labs:  'via Blog this'

This article over at Jonathan Gunson's  Bestseller Labs is fascinating.  In Gunson's introduction to the guest post by Claudette Young, he talks about how the use of shadows that look like prison bars in the 1942 movie, Casablanca, was purposeful on the part of the director to telegraph to the audience the sense of imprisonment pervasive in that town where the desperate yet hopeful gravitated in their attempts to leave the sphere of influence of the Nazi regime.


Claudette Young's guest post begins:

Anyone can write a story, but not everyone illuminates with their words. And learning to emphasize without red flags, spotlights, or extraneous punctuation is a skill worth the effort...  read on

She goes on to use examples from both screen and print.  The first third or so discusses the way each of the CSI series has it's own ambiance established by a signature lighting scheme.  As interesting as that was I was beginning to get impatient as I'd clicked on the link for the promise of 'Lighting Up Your Writing' and really wanted examples of how it's done with words that are meant to stand on their own to create the image and ambiance in the reader's mind--unlike script writing which is just a recipe for the director and stage lighting specialists to follow who inevitably interpret it with the mediums they use.

But the rest of the article does focus on the written word--stories and novels and non-fiction so it fulfilled the promise.

The article is well worth the read for any writer wanting advice on how to increase sensory detail (especially the lighting of setting) in their stories.

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