Saturday, March 31, 2012

Prepare for the future

Our club president and I  attended a Rotary dinner in Ukiah, CA last night to welcome the Group Study Exchange team from Burgunady and Champagne, France.  Today we joined more than 300 other Rotarians and attended the District Conference to prepare for the next Rotary year starting July 1.  It's also a preparation for the Future Vision program which will start in July, 2013.

It was a festive night and a fruitful day today with the five different sessions.

Friday, March 30, 2012

Best wishes

Busy with newsletters and seminars.
Have a great weekend. Best wishes to everyone.

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Live the questions now



It rained all day yesterday and part of the night last night. Today, sunny and warm, 
I walked to the river,  The water was flood brown. The fishermen told me there were no bites. 

The sidewalks and streets seemed so bright and clean. It looked like the rain washed all the dirt away. It seemed that some trees were missing but none were missing.
When do you remove the scaffolding? Do you have to cast all the doubts? Is there a place for uncertainty?
“...have patience with everything  unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Do not search for the answers, which could not be given you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is,to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually,without even noticing it, live your way  into the answer.”- Rainer Maria Rilke in Letters to a Young Poet

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Restoration

Oopppssss.









The happy balance. 














                   
                                                            After a fall, how do you restore your life?

Monday, March 26, 2012

Persistence


From the books I’m reading.
“Many mathematicians, most famously the French genius Henri Poincare,have testified to the value of leaving a partially solved problem alone for a while and letting the unconscious work behind the scenes.
“Nash ‘wasted’ summer, with his enforced break from his research, proved unexpectedly fruitful, allowing some vague hunches from the spring to crystallize and mature. That October, he started to experience a virtual storm of ideas. Among them was the brilliant insight into human behavior: the Nash’s equilibrium.”-from A Beautiful Mind
“The reality of the creative process is that it often requires persistence, the ability to stare at a problem until it makes sense. It’s forcing oneself to pay attention, to write all night and then fix those words in the morning.It’s sticking with a poem until it’s perfect; refusing to quit on a math question; working until the cut of a dress is just right. The answer won’t arrive suddenly, in a flash of insight. Instead, it will be revealed slowly, gradually emerging after great effort.”-from Imagine, How Creativity Works
Jonah Lehrer was interviewed at NPR for his book, Imagine, March 21, 2012. 
Walking, putting one foot in front of the other, is persistence.

Saturday, March 24, 2012

A star and an outcast


Reading A Beautiful Mind 

“After a year or so, after he had acquired a reputation for being a genius, he began to hold court in Skibo Hall, the student center. Like the fairground magician with his swords, he would sit in a chair and challenge other students to throw problems at him to solve. A lot of students came to him with their homework. He was a star-but an outcast also.”-from the -A Beautiful Mind,the life of mathematical genius and Nobel prize winner, by Sylvia Nasar.
Have a nice weekend.
 
(photo: our granddaughter, K, celebrated her tenth birthday horseback riding with family and friends)

Friday, March 23, 2012

Daydream,food for thought


“The point is that, it’s not enough to just daydream. Letting your mind drift off is the easy part. The hard part is maintaining enough awareness so that even when you start to daydream  you can interrupt yourself and notice a creative thought.”-quoted from Imagine, How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer.


“That sketch (his mother’s face) taught me something interesting about the mind. We are always looking, but we never really see.When you draw an object, the mind becomes deeply, intensely attentive. And it’s that act of attention that allows you to really grasp something, to become fully conscious of it. That’s what I learned from my mother’s face, that drawing is really a kind of thinking.”-quoted in Imagine by Jonah Lehrer

Thursday, March 22, 2012

The Wall of Prayers


Last September Cheri and I visited  the Shrine of Blessed Mary, Mother of Jesus, in Ephesus, during our pilgrimage to the holy sites. 


 The pilgrims wrote prayers on a piece paper and attached them to the wall called the Wall of Prayers.
Yesterday I bought 3 books from our city library’s book sale: The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway and the Beautiful Mind by  Sylvia Nasar. I started reading the Beautiful Mind last night. "This is the story of John Nash, Jr....a story about the mystery of the human mind, in three acts: genius, madness, and reawakening."

I borrowed from the library-Imagine, How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer.

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Leaving and returning in the rain and sunshine

Driving to Oregon last Friday to celebrate our friend's 75th birthday, we left in the rain and sunshine greeted us in our arrival in Newberg. On Tuesday we left Oregon in the rain and arrived in Napa with the sunshine.








Rain droplets add a certain dimension, a texture, like sparkling wine in the birthday celebration.

Thursday, March 15, 2012

Can you count the birds?


 We walked on the beach in Bodega Bay and the birds got a surprise.

How many birds? Settling or flying away. 



What do you do when it rains every day?
I’ll be away for a few days and visiting Oregon.
What will we be doing in Oregon?
Cheri and  will be helping our best friend celebrate his 75th birthday. Wine tasting in the Willamette Valley, lots of fine Pinot Noir and Pinot Gris. Walking along the dormant nut orchards. Story telling. Photography. Reading before going to bed. 
Abstinence from the cyberspace, no blogs.

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

"If I could put time in the bottle"

It's had been raining since yesterday.  I didn't walk to the river. I felt so heavy.

Last week while walkng through the tiny town of Cayucos in the central coast we saw this aquarium on the front yard of a bed & breakfast house.








It was a sunny day and everyone played in the water. Well, almost everyone.
(the elephant seal were at 3 miles north of San Simeon.)

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

In paradise


If you live in paradise will you ask for more?

Will you call someone?



                                                                                             Or invite others?





"The heart has its reason, whereof reason knows nothing." by Pascal ( quoted in A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L'Engle)












Monday, March 12, 2012

A word or a thousand words




A picture is worth a word or a thousand words, a thought or a thousand thoughts, a story or a thousand stories, through one eye or a thousand pairs of eyes.
Indefatigable, that’s the word. Indispensable is the other. I want to be defined by those twin words. 
That country, that city. I want to go there and find my place, my fortune.

The old man, the wise man, says: “One lives and survives only if one has the ability to swallow and digest bitter and unpalatable things.”-The Wandering Falcon by Jamil Ahmad.

Saturday, March 10, 2012

Real or fiction


There are days I want to sit at the corner of the garden, close my eyes and reflect on what ‘s happening around me and beyond. 





I think of what things to do when I open my eyes. 

Should I walk to the village? Pick some fresh herbs and cook  a simple dinner?


How about going to the pier and fish?












Or feel the ocean breeze? Climb a mountain?




All things are real or just plain fiction nevertheless real in your mind.

Friday, March 9, 2012

A weekend wish

Just idling today.

Wish everyone a wonderful weekend.

Thursday, March 8, 2012

Tidbits of things


We walked around the places we visited during the last 4-5 days and looked at tidbits of things ordinary and interesting.





I tried to capture the stories expressed by the stilled frames. What did I see or did not see?
There were pillows on the bench in the sidewalk.Could you be seduced by colorful cupcakes?
Welcome, it says. What about a sleeping cat? Does it mean it's time to relax and enjoy the idleness of the afternoon next to the sea? And if you were a butterfly, what then?

We took our friend to the airport yesterday.