Tagged: puttingwordstogether

18
Jan
2010

WORDS OF WISDOM

“The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life.”—Jessica Hische A type artist & graphic designer whose work I admire was featured on Humble Pied recently. It’s a website that highlights advice—one piece of advice—from one inspiring person every few days. What a neat idea! Sometimes out of all the blah blah blah that constantly passes through your receptors, it’s that one sudden striking of a clapper inside the bell of your brain that stands out and makes you sit up and pay attention. It arrests you, snaps...

03
Nov
2009

BY CHANCE, MET; BY CHOICE, FRIENDS

What if we had never met? What would your life be like? Some of you might argue that, in fact, we never HAVE met, and some of you have only met me once or twice in person, but maybe the meeting of the minds that passes for frequent contact here is enough. Maybe it counts! For all the friends I’ve never met, and the ones I’ve only met a couple of times and all the ones that used to live nearby and whom I never now see, it must count for something, right? What if you’d never come to that...

14
Oct
2009

IN ME, AN INVINCIBLE SUMMER*

Mia gave me a good dose of motivation the other day. She is trying to list three delights every day. This reminds me of the reason why the blog One Good Thing was baptized thusly. Even in the worst day, there is always at least one good thing. Most days, there are many. And too many days, we ignore them. Maybe we notice them, but we let the bad things take precedence. We push aside the things that matter for the things that also matter, and that often take priority. No matter what there will alway be both, so maybe...

24
Sep
2009

I’VE SOMETHING TO SHOW YOU, STAND HERE

Fragments, figments, shuffled bits of memory. I keep thinking about writing. But I don’t sit down and do it. Am I percolating? Or simply slothful? I miss my interactions here. I need a swift kick in the pants. KICK! You, who write, how do you begin? Have you got an outline? An agenda? A reel tape of remembrances that you can pull from your pocket like ticker tape? Where is the adrenaline and the motivation and the inspiration when you need it? Fragments and figments. I just wrote gifments. Hee! JPGments. Are those the snapshots of your mind in digital...

17
Aug
2009

ARE WE PEOPLE THAT YOU WANT TO KNOW?

Do you always remember a face? Even if you say you never remember names, I bet you remember faces. We have such an amazing ability to scan incredible amounts of faces and register them as known or unknown in the blink of a synapse. I read an interesting blog entry today by the artist James Gurney, written some time ago, that talked about this and it got me thinking. You get off a plane and as you come out into the arrivals hall, you are already scanning for the person who is meeting you. Your glance skims over dozens of...

09
Aug
2009

CREATIVITY IS THE POWER TO CONNECT THE SEEMINGLY UNCONNECTED*

How often should you post, when you blog? Should you post every day? Every couple of days, every week, once a month? I know that when some of my favorite writers are posting daily it feels like Christmas every day to me. But, sometimes it seems that if I post too often people don’t have time to read it all or that they miss things, and only see the latest. How much is too much? Does it even really matter? I suppose it is the writing urge that should steer and not the desire for validation or comments. I don’t...

05
Aug
2009

CREEP IN OUR EARS; SOFT STILLNESS, AND THE NIGHT*

Words jump like Mexican beans around the inside of my head all day; most of them dry up and lie twitching long before I have any chance to let them out, let them live, set them free. I would think that my brain must be full of the desiccated husks of thoughts that never became words, words that were never used, ideas that sprouted but alas, died on the vine. Each morning seems, however, to start fresh, a fertile ground for new, tiny germs of big ideas, polysyllabic words, sounds, fragments of song; a veritable plethora of images imprinted on...

29
Jul
2009

EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE

Are you all the time noticing things, seeing things that others maybe don’t see? There are things to notice all around you, all the time. If you keep your eyes open and just watch where you’re going, you won’t believe the things you see, sometimes. Mostly it’s little things, the little things that seem to be beneath people’s notice: the way the feathered grasses grow in wavey patterns when there’s a whole field full of them. The way the flowers burst out again when the weather has been cool for a week. The funny face that little kid you passed...

04
Jun
2009

ALL OVER THE MAP

Christina and Rée and Erin are making magic with words. They do it all the time and o! it makes me wild with envy and it makes me stutter with wonder and each word they choose is so right that I find myself holding my breath as I read all the way to the end where the explosive whoosh as my breath releases all at once in a cloud of joy. Some of my blog friends have stopped up their mouths with silence. Did you ever read Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream? That is what...

19
May
2009

WHEN IDEAS FAIL, WORDS COME IN VERY HANDY*

Maybe I have a hole in my head where all the words have leaked out. I looked down around my feet to see if they were there, but all I see is bright green new grass. Sometimes pavement. Sometimes shoes. Where have the words gone? Have they traded in their D’s for M’s and gone inching off, into the grass, greening themselves with protective coloring? Camo-worms. I know that technically I shouldn’t have used apostrophes there with D & M, but I seem to remember that sometimes apostrophes are necessary when the lack of them would cause confusion. You wouldn’t...