On Redreaming

I just finished a book by Adriana Trigiani called Milk Glass Moon. It is the sort of page turner of a book that reminds me of a Hallmark movie.  Completely engaging, yet not especially edgy.  I’m not going to shout to everyone that it is a must read, but I enjoyed it.  The reason I mention it is that there was a concept in there that has kind of stuck in my head today.  That is the idea of redreaming.  This is presented as what you do when you reach your dreams.  You don’t stop and think you have arrived, you must redream.  Dream another one.

What I’ve been thinking about this is that sometimes when you don’t reach your dream you need to stop and redream as well.  I tend to be a rather nonspecific dreamer.  I have vague ideas of what I want to do or be, but seldom allow myself to be very specific about it.  Then I am distracted pretty easily, leaving me with only a sort of wisp of a dream.  Academically I know that if you wish to reach your dreams you must know what they are.  The Law of Attraction works best if you can be specific about what you are attracting.  Yet in practice, I seem to avoid actually forming a picture of my dream.  Being specific about my dreams, forming an idea of exactly what I want is a lot of work.  It means I have to make it happen.  So I just go with the flow.

For the past couple of years this is what I did in my work.  I went along with what was offered, and did as I was asked to the best of my ability.  I knew what I was doing wasn’t really what I would ever dream of doing, but I felt that if I did these things they would eventually lead to something I could feel passionate about.  It was kind of like paying my karmic dues, I guess.  I left what I was passionate about to go do something I only felt okay about, believing that in time I would return to my passion but on a different level.

It didn’t work out like that.  Without spending a lot of time on details, suffice to say that I returned to my original passion but different.  Way different, and it has been extremely difficult.  I’ve often been grouchy about it, have felt completely powerless and overly cynical.  I quit doing almost everything that nurtures me.  No exercise to speak of, not drinking enough water or eating right or even sleeping enough.  Sounds self-destructive, doesn’t it?  It has been, I now realize.

One thing that has brought me joy in the past months is photography.  I’ve learned to see things in different ways, and have grown more and more confident about myself in this realm.  I’m no competition for Ansel or Dorothea, mind, but I am happy when I’m behind the camera or playing with the shots I’ve taken, and that’s enough for me.  It is a start towards redreaming my life.  Seeing things differently on the physical plane may just create the habit of seeing other things in a new way.  I’m open to that idea, and plan to start some redreaming.  Only this time, I will practice being a little more specific.

Seeing through different eyes.

This year I took on the challenge of taking a photo a day.  It sounded fun enough, no big deal, as I usually have my camera with me.  It is turning out to be such an interesting experiment already, after only 24 days.  First of all, there is the actually remembering to take a shot every day.  I read in the challenge a suggestion that you make sure to take a shot every morning, just so you’ll have something to fall back on if nothing fantastic comes up later in the day.  That is an excellent piece of advice.  At least three times I’ve gotten close to bedtime and had to punt.  One night I took a shot of my gas fire.  Boring.  My hand.  The neighbor’s Christmas lights when I was deathly ill (That one turned out fine.).  So there is that.

There are two other things that are happening that I’m so enjoying, however.  One is that I’m beginning to see things in a different way.  Through different eyes, if you will.`For example, yesterday I was walking through the Farmer’s Market with a friend and spotted the vignette above.  The strong vertical symetry of the sugar cane, with the leafy greens and round turnips and pumpkins behind.  And the red bucket.  As we were walking I casually said, “Oh, there’s a good shot.”  I snapped it and we kept on going with barely a pause in the conversation.  As she shopped for greens I shopped for photos.  Generally I don’t shop for food and shoot photos at the same time.  I have to do one thing and then the other, it seems.  My shopping bag gets too heavy and unwieldy to try to do both.  Not that I’d put the camera down and shop without it, but I’m just saying.

The other thing that is happening is that I’m interacting differently with people.  I’ll ask if they will be my photo of the day, and so far they always want to be.  They pose, laugh, seem to feel special.  Other times people teach me things about my camera or about taking photos and I’m learning to be a better photographer technically as well.  I learned a long time ago that to be a good photographer who gets the great shots of people one must be bold, which isn’t my strongest thing.  This photo challenge is helping me grow in that area.  I like it.  A lot!

Voice Thread

I have a new thing to try.  This week Kevin Hodgson challenged the Day in a Sentence community to post our sentences on Voice Thread.  I am a novice at this site, so felt a little intimidated, but appreciated the challenge.  I went out and bought a set of headphones with a mic (the headphones don’t fit me at all.  I think my head is too big.  But ni modo, I bought them at Circuit City so too bad for me.  The mic works, so whatever.)  Anyway, I posted my sentence on Kevin’s voicethread, and then decided to make my own.  So, if I can figure out the embedment here is my first Voice Thread:

Exotic Jerky

Let’s see if it worked…okay it works as a link.  That’ll do for this time.  I’ve spent far too long on this.  Next time I’ll try actually embedding it here.  I hope you enjoy it.  So poetic.

This odd Twitter thing has happened…

I participate in Twitter. I am a Tweeter. (Not a twit.  What is the language for this?!) Every so often I get an announcement via email that someone is following me on Twitter. I always go check to see who it is, see if I know them, and so forth. Usually when they have thousands of followers, I block them unless they seem really interesting. I just don’t want to get spam from someone’s business. If they seem like a regular person, I will often click to follow them as well, at least until I decide I’m not interested, or until I see them post twelve tweets in a row, hogging up the whole page. Repeated episodes of that will make me quit following them, as well.

Just before Christmas I got notice of a follower who was obviously a youngish mother and wife who lived in my town. I was puzzled by who she might be, and how she might have found me. (How do people find you anyway? I never seem to find anyone myself, I just follow people who follow me. I’m such a groupie.) Anyway, I clicked to follow her, thinking she must be someone I know and I’d figure it out eventually. Ever since, I’ve read her tweets and learned of her injured rib from coughing, her excitement at getting a new house to rent, her frequent updates on what she’d cleaned in the past hour or so and news about her children and husband (Dear Son – DS, Dear Daughter – DD  and Dear Husband – DH).

Yesterday, I noticed a tweet that seemed to be about her spouse, so I clicked over to his site to see if it included any identifying features, thinking maybe I could figure out who they were or how I know them. Imagine my surprise when I found a conversation about my son. They were waiting for him to show up for something, and were being pretty disparaging about him. I was puzzled, and at first thought it must be a coincidence. Except he has a pretty uncommon name. So I called him and asked if he knew about whatever event they were discussing. He knew immediately who and what I was talking about.

He felt badly that they were feeling so negatively about him, and went to talk to the man, his friend. (My son is direct, if nothing else. In a good way.) Apparently they got things straightened out between them. I thought nothing more about it until this morning when I saw this tweet: “A MOM of one of DH’s aquaintances is spying on me on Twitter. How weird.”

So now.  At first it made me mad. Like, what’s weird is you having a private conversation in a public forum and calling it spying when someone reads it. Hello, it’s Twitter! But now, I’ve cooled down (No, I didn’t post that thought! Although I was tempted.) and am thinking more about the whole phenomenon of Twitter. I mean, I comment to people specifically, and I post tweets, but often I just read what other people write. That is what Twitter is about, and I learn interesting things from people’s links, blog posts and just their updates. But upon further reflection, I think I have been remiss in not greeting people when they first begin to follow me. Does that mean I spy? In the case of this young woman, I guess I didn’t respond to any of her tweets because they do tend to be pretty personal, and I feel sort of like a voyeur, even though she chose to follow me, not the reverse.

I think I have to rethink this whole thing about having interactions/relationships/friendships in cyberspace. I regularly comment on people’s blogs and photos on Flick’r and ask people to be my friend on Facebook (that was a little hard!) and make @ responses to tweets on Twitter. Even though I know the people I meet there are real people, it is sometimes hard to ascribe to them the same level of realness that I would to someone I know in the physical face to face world. Sort of like a cyber-sitcom. This requires a shift of thinking.  Maybe change the way I do things in Twitter. Like say hello to new followers.  I’m pretty okay with the rest of the cyber stuff I do. I wonder if any of you readers have any ideas about this?

A Photo a Day

Keeps me interested and sane.  Well, I think it will.  I recently learned of a Flick’r group called 365/2009, in which participants agree to take a photo everyday of the year.  Evidently they will be posting them at that group site on Flick’r.  I love the idea of doing this, but not so much the daily posting.  I already post photos in another group on Fridays and really enjoy doing that, seeing everyone’s photos and commenting on them.  It’s kind of like the photos are blog posts and we all get commenting practice with them.  I will just post mine to a set on my own Flick’r page and probably skip the big group posting.

Anyway, I am excited about deciding what the photo of the day will be each day.  It’s like a different way of looking at the day.  Since this is only January 4, I can give you my examples so far without killing you with boredom.  Let’s see, here is January 1:

I took it at the annual Polar Bear Swim, which was so much fun to observe, that it was the focus of my day.  I took lots of photos of this event.

January 2 I hadn’t decided yet to do this photo a day thing, and didn’t take a single shot that day.  So I included this one which is typical even though it didn’t happen exactly on January 2:

The funny thing is, these Mackers are both playing games on the Webkinz site.  They look so involved.

On January 3 I went to the Farmer’s Market and decided that my friend Bobbi’s coffee cart would be my photo of the day.  I like this one a lot.  I think we should all walk around every day with red umbrellas over our heads.  The red does wonders for the complexion:

Today is a friend’s birthday.  Trea is 33 today and likes lots of celebration of her special day, so I decided she’d be the photo of the day.  We met for breakfast and I took this stunner:

She thought a sexy pose in front of her bowl of menudo was a good idea.  I won’t argue, I think she looks pretty cool.

Okay, I promise not to do this every week.  But I do want to say how excited I am about taking on this project.  It’s like mandatory careful looking at the day.  It will be fun to see what shape it takes over the next months.  I’ll let you know how it goes.

Thanks for checking in.  Take care of yourself.

A new year has begun.

Ahhh.  Another new year has begun.  Another chance to get it right.  (I know, every day presents such a chance, but I’m just saying.  It’s a new year.)  The last year brought so many lessons, some of them harder than I expected.  In a way I think I went into hibernation this past year, just dealing with stuff.  But I also found a community of friends online and that’s been really fun.  After reading Sue Waters’ blog post about building a Personal Learning Network , I realize that this year I began to build one without knowing it. (Her post is here: http://suewaters.wikispaces.com/)  Now that I do know it, I intend to flesh it out with the parts that are missing.  So that’s one thing.

Another thing I want to do this year is guarantee myself more time offline.  I have to figure out how to balance time online with activity in real life.  If I don’t I might just become a lump in a chair, and that is way less than appealing. So the gym figures in here, somehow, but getting out and taking pictures is also part of it.  Last year I began taking more photos.  I used to take most of my photos when I traveled, barely any where I live.  Ever since Bonnie organized the Photofridays group on Flick’r I’ve been conscious of getting out and taking photos each week so I have something new to post.  My goal with photography has been to find the story in a shot, and I think that occasionally I have been successful in that area.  And I’ve been taking some great photos of my town. So that is something else I’m going to continue to play with this year because it is immensely delightful to me.

Then the other day I was thinking of the multiple levels of a person (me, of course): physical, mental, emotional and spiritual, and I realize that in the past year or two I have neglected my spirituality.  Not completely, but more than is optimal.  Which has undoubtedly augmented the difficulty of the hard parts.  I have known about the Law of Attraction for a long time now, since I first went to hear Abraham about five or six years ago (way before The Secret), but have not been a very conscious creator in the past couple of years.  So, there’s that too.

This year I commit to no resolutions, just intentions.  It’s all about balance this year for me.  I wish you a joyful, balanced year.  With lots of love and laughter.