TED Talk: Sculpting Waves

Reuben Margolin is a kinetic sculptor, and his works evoke nature and the feel of meditation.


This video will only take nine minutes to watch, but you'll be amazed at how calming it is.  I wish I could stand under one of these sculptures and watch for much longer.  I can almost hear the soft movement of water and air and leaves.


Enjoy...

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The Golden Times

When I was in college, a group of close friends and I spent a weekend at a cabin in the mountains.  Before you ask -- yes, alcohol was involved, but not an inordinate amount.  There was an old jeep in the shed, and we all piled in and took a slow drive down a long country road canopied with trees.  I can still remember leaning back with the sun dappling my face through the leaves, a soft warm wind blowing, looking up at the blue sky, listening to stories being told and the answering laughter of friends.

That was one of what I like to call the “Golden Times.”   Those moments -- or if we’re lucky, longer – that somehow attain a sort of perfection.   I knew it was special, but I had no idea that over thirty years later, I would still remember exactly how it felt. 

Sometimes they’re happy accidents.  For our wedding day, barefoot on the beach, Robert and I hoped to be in some privacy with our small group of family and friends at the water’s edge at sunset.  But at the last minute our pastor said it would be too difficult for some elderly relatives to make it down the long stretch of sand. 

Robert turned to me and smiled, and said he would marry me anywhere.  So we stood on Venice Beach (not in Italy, sadly, but it’s lovely in Los Angeles, too) in full view of all the balconies of a busy hotel, and within earshot of the many people enjoying the last of the spring sunshine by biking, rollerblading, jogging or strolling on the walkway. 

What we hadn’t counted on was the respectful silence of the crowd drawn to the ceremony – and after being in our own world until we kissed and turned around, we’d had no idea that the hotel balconies had gradually filled, and the walkway was nearly choked with people who had stopped to watch.  They now raised glasses, waved, smiled broadly, and gave us a smattering of applause.

When we went to get in our car after the reception, two women stopped us enthusiastically. “You’re the bride and groom! We watched you get married!!” 

Strangers being touched by strangers.  A Golden Time.

At a Rick Springfield concert a few years ago, the man himself walked down the middle of the seats in the audience and ended up standing on my chair to finish the song, giving Robert the opportunity to play air guitar only inches away from him, and as for me… well, what would you do if you were that close and had listened to “Jessie’s Girl” about a million times? 

Golden.

Other times sparkle in my memory.  Holding Thomas as a baby.  Watching the first snow fall on Thanksgiving Day.  Reaching out to take Robert’s hand in a peaceful silence on a long drive from Idaho to Los Angeles.  Kicking chunks of ice at twilight on a frozen lake with friends, watching the irridescence skitter along as the moon rose.  Listening to Andrea Bocelli sing arias from “La Boheme” with my mother, tears glistening in her eyes and mine.

By definition, a Golden Time has an end.  It can’t be sustained.  Otherwise it becomes day-to-day life, which can be very, very good, but simply isn’t that diamond that stands out among the lesser stones.

How do we know when it’s over?  I’m afraid the answer is that most of the time, we don’t.  When is the last hug, the last kiss, the last time of making love, the last goodbye when we hang up the phone, never to hear that person’s voice again?

After 9/11, there were so many stories about husbands and wives pecking each other on the cheek in the morning, casually saying, “See you tonight,” or “Pick up some milk on your way home,” or similar banalities.  If they’d only known.

I never say goodbye to Robert without telling him I love him.  I try to leave places and people without “if onlys”…”if only I’d hugged him”, ”if only I’d told her how pretty she looked”, ”if only I’d said what he means to me…”

And now, why is this all on my mind today?

Two and a half years ago, I started on Twitter in a unique way, centered around creativity and play with a group of people that came together organically and naturally, acting out characters from a television show.  We made ourselves and lots of other people laugh, and created relationships across oceans and time zones that could never have happened otherwise.  There were misunderstandings and dramas, fallings out and comings together, and some friendships forged that I hope will never end.

My world opened up in wonderful ways, and remains open.  I still love Twitter, but I’m myself now, a writer reading other writers, enjoying the postings of artists, a few celebrities, and plenty of quirky individualists.

So today, I say goodbye, mindfully, and acknowledge that it was, indeed, a Golden Time, but it’s over.  It was one of the diamonds that stands out among the stones. 

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TED Talks: Why Videos Go Viral on YouTube

There are over 48 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute. 

Who among us hasn’t gone there to see one video, and ended up spending far longer than we thought we would, just watching people be people?

This TEDTalk is only seven-and-a-half minutes long, but in it, Kevin Allocca, YouTube’s trends manager, gets to the bottom of how we connect to each other in what has become our video community.

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Words As Little Miracles

I suppose this “writing thing” was inevitable. 

Paper and pens were my preferred toys when I was little –- for drawing, scribbling words, making large bubble letters that were strung together into nonsense sentences.  While other little girls played with dolls, I fashioned a stationery store in my bedroom, complete with a desk as a counter, a partitioned box as a cash register, and displays of supplies that I’d gathered from drawers and shelves all over the house.  When my forbearing father wanted to use a stapler, he was forced to buy it back from me for the exhorbitant sum of a nickel. 

I never cared much about the money. The real gift was getting to write out the receipt –- a piece of paper on which I’d painstakingly drawn straight lines with a ruler, and could now fill in with item, price and even some sort of tax.  I’d take the nickel with all the solemnity of a shopkeeper, and then cheerfully say, “Thank you for coming in today, sir!”

I can’t tell you how many times my sweet father bought that stapler from me. 

Those low-tech times gave me the opportunity to decide that I was going to read the dictionary from beginning to end –- and I’m aware that this puts me firmly into some sort of “club,” as I’ve heard the same thing from many other writers since.  But if I close my eyes, I can still feel the fragile pages with their gold-painted half-moons, just the size of a child’s thumb, each with a letter.

And like many others, after a stab at “begin with A, and go through Z,” it became a sort of metaphysical scattershot method of tightly shutting my eyes, opening the book, and dropping my finger onto the page.  I began to imagine that the word thus randomly chosen could inform and direct my day.  “Voyager” meant a walk around the block, “mottled” indicated I should spend time in the garden peering at leaves, “kabob” meant searching out skewers and stringing Cheerios on them for breakfast.

I think I’ve never looked up a word in a dictionary that I didn’t also learn another one.  As I scanned the columns, reading aloud, my forefinger traced a line from top to bottom of the list of words -- I was like a puppy, “What’s this?  What’s that?”   It took forever to look up a word, because “neophyte” would yield “necromancy,” “nefarious,” “negligent,” and “nemesis” on a path to the definition. 

I thought words were little miracles, really.  Sets of letters that meant something.  I was fascinated by “The Miracle Worker,” and that moment when Helen Keller realizes that letters make words, and words have meaning.

All this is not to say that I believed the best words were the most complicated or obscure.  My college Communications thesis was a “readability study” of the university’s catalogue, a book sent out to high school seniors, hoping they’d enroll.  Through in-depth counting of the types, sizes and clarity of the words used in the catalogue, I determined that you needed to be in your second year of Graduate School to properly understand it.  My professor sent the study on to the Admissions Department with a wry smile.

And my love affair with words continues today.  Dictionary.com has a “popular searches” column, a word of the day, and a new Beta program called Word Dynamo that estimates your vocabulary.  The website functions for me in the same way those delicate pages did so long ago –- you can even “Browse Dictionary” randomly -- it’s the best of technology, I think, when it mimics the real thing in spirit.

In the end, I can imagine myself in the last moments of life, trying to describe it, saying, “What’s the word I’m looking for….?”  Ah, yes…“transition…that's it...”

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The Big Green Cat Toy

“Felix! NO!”

“Rocky? Don’t even THINK in that direction…”

The annual torture has begun.  For them, and for us.

Let’s see.  We dangle pretty, shiny things at them all year long.  Say things like “What’s this? Pretty! Shiny! Come play!”

Then, we place something right in the middle of the living room, chock full of dangly, shiny things, something that smells good, like the outdoors, that sparkles…and we say…

“Don’t touch!”

I don’t know about your cats, but mine just look at me as if to say, “Are you kidding?”  And then, they casually begin to clean their fur. 

But I know what they’re thinking. 

“Sooner or later, you’re going to have to go to work…”

☆

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Please? I won't break it...♥

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To Read or to Write: That Is the Question.

It’s Saturday. Husband is at work. Yes, there’s an undecorated Christmas tree in the living room. No, I haven’t determined the quantities of ingredients to buy at Costco tomorrow to make Christmas cookies for friends and family.

But I woke with a feeling of abundance, the prospect of a day at home, cats curled around me against the cold outside.  A full day to write.  Bliss.

But first…just a peek at Twitter.  (Just to see what’s going on, mind you.)  First one blog, then another calls out to me.  Fellow writers, putting their struggles and how they overcome them into words –- beautifully, succinctly.  It’s my struggle too.

I tell myself this is research.  It is, isn’t it?

Then, a link to a new survey on authors…then to a talk on TED.  They’re talking about writing.  (I need to know what they have to say!)  I listen to one, then another.

A link from a tweet, to an exerpt from a Book-On-Tape.  My commute to work is an hour there, an hour back, and if I spend that time listening to books come alive through my car speakers, it flies by.  (I’m nearly done with “Mansfield Park,” after all.)

As a writer, I need experience.  I need to hear new voices, to learn of places I’ve never been, to explore other professions, to feel the hot wind on my face in a Sahara desert, or the biting cold of a dogsled in Alaska.  All of that is on the internet.  (All of that and more.)

On YouTube, you can take the Eurostar from Paris to London.  The countryside speeds by, and if you concentrate, you can feel the vibration, the clack-clack of the rails, as if you were there.  You can fly from Seattle to Reykjavik, and then on to London.  It’s almost as if you’re pulling your bag across the tile floors of the airport in Iceland as you change planes...

Ah, you get the picture.  Choices.

So how do I write today?  I’ll portion out my day -- half in learning, half in writing.  I’ll do my best to give each my full attention, the way I used to when I had a full-time job and a small child.  I’ll try not to wish I was doing one when I’m doing the other.

In short, focus on the now, and when I move on to the next thing, focus on that.

Focusing…Here’s hoping…  ¸¸.•*¨* ☆

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On My Bookshelf: Jack Kerouac's "On The Road"

I’m  listening now to Jack Kerouac’s “On The Road,” and although the phrasing seems foreign, it also seems brilliantly to recollect what little I remember of the late ‘50s Beat Generation-speak. To me, the language, and especially the dialogue, is as much an artifact as the speeches of Bronte’s Jane Eyre. And to both, that language was modern and true when their works were written. As a writer, I often read and listen to books as if I were wandering through a museum with the great masters.

And yet, as I listen to Kerouac, I have a memory of a day spent in my uncle’s print shop in downtown Los Angeles. I must have been about nine. I was dropped off by my mother early in the afternoon, and waited until six p.m. or so to get the ride to San Juan Capistrano for the weekend at my aunt and uncle’s house on the beach. 

With no entertainment but a set of colored pens and a very thick pad of paper, I chose not to draw, but to write. I can still see the pages in my mind, and would give much to have them to read again. But Kerouac brings back the cadence of the writing I did that day, in his “this happened, then that happened”  descriptions of his life on the road. 

I remember my running monologue of people passing by, what they were wearing, onomatopoeic references to the clunk-clunk-thwap of the printing presses in the next room, musings about the thoughts of the workers, revelations about my nine-year-old self, peppered with the self-conscious vocabulary of a child that loved to read the dictionary looking for new words with which to paint the world around her.

 I seem to recall that I filled over fifty pages of paper during that four or so hours, and that the time flew by. And I’ve read that Kerouac kept small notebooks into which he wrote his thoughts as he travelled, despite the legend of the “scroll,” the 120-foot piece of teletype paper that he supposedly filled with “On The Road” at one go.

But just the fact that a novel written in 1951 could bring my 1962 self into focus, here in 2011, reinforces my belief in the power of writing. Jack had no idea or care for the result, I imagine. He only knew he had to write it.

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Sometimes, The Detour Off the Path is the Path Itself

FREEDOM AND ATTACHMENT

Freedom and attachment spread me North and South

Into a Michaelangelo pose

The pull of the hand held, the spooned mornings

Draws seductively away

From the calm and the certainty of quiet nights alone.

The places in my heart that need

The holes in my soul that want

The corners of my life that clutch

Cry out to have you here.

While the voices of my past drone on

Holding fast to peace, hard-won

Independence that I want so much

Awareness that I hold so dear.

I love the roller-coaster ride of love

It dips and spins and tells me I’m alive

But it stops with a bump, leaves me breathless

With exhilarated memories and shaky, stunned legs.

So here I sit, laid bare

Soft silk ribbons pulling wrists to you

Ankles scarred with rope burns

Pulling downward to be grounded.

And I know I’ll buy the ticket, and I know that ropes can stretch

And that ribbons can be flimsy and can break with just a touch.

Freedom may be uncomplicated

But it bears a bitter truth:

I’m here to ride the ride

To stretch, to pull, to find the balance

Between freedom and attachment

And, with ribbons, flying, dance.

6/4/96

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When I met my husband I was in the middle of a journey that I believed I needed to take alone.  As with so many things in life, he was an unplanned event. We don’t always know what’s best for us, however.  Sometimes the detour off the path is the path itself.

Fifteen years later, I look at a man who loves me unconditionally still. He sees me in a way that I often wish I could see myself. His confidence in me is infectious. And when my speech gets a bit forceful, as it often does when I feel strongly about something, he says, smiling, with clear affection in his eyes, “I’m not scared of you…”

And although I could have taken the journey alone, I’m so grateful he’s by my side. As I wrote fifteen years ago, “I’m here to ride the ride.” He still sits next to me, sometimes with arms overhead, laughing, sometimes afraid, sometimes just peacefully looking at the view before the next drop. He's warm in the seat next to me, and, I say this with the sure knowledge that it labels me a bonafide sap…we still hold hands.

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