KateThoughts

Spiritual Moments

I found this video posted on Ronni Bennett's site this morning. It reminded me to look around me a little differently for the various small blessings that cross my path every day. I thought you might enjoy it, too.

Hypatia: Greek Philosopher & Mathematician AND a Woman

Thanks, Cindy, for sharing these links and introducing me to Hypatia. I really hope we'll be able to see the movie.

The first video here is an overview of her life.

This one is a trailer for a new film starring Rachael Weisz as Hypatia. Makers are looking for a US sponsor for the film; I surely hope they find one!

Poertry (by K. Rhoades) from Erin

Erin, thanks for finding this. What sparked Erin to remember this was my story of a drumming experience at White Sands many years ago. I suspect that all of the women present for that spontaneous and inspired piece of creative heaven remember it clearly, as I do. This poem captures the emotions I felt then and thoughts I've had about it since.

I Walked into a Moment of Greatness

“I walked into a moment of greatness. There was a wave of pure emotion running through the air like a pulse recording the beat of souls. I stood against a wall, the house was in darkness, light on the stage.

The last act of Meistersinger had begun. I listened. All of me heard. If that straight line of terrific tensity which stretched continuously between myself and the music, growing more and more sensitive each moment, could have existed indefinitely until the line became inseparable with the state about it what would have happened?

Everything had merged there was no possibility of any retention of the separateness of a human self from the space of sound into which that sentient self had projected. An extension of feeling and a diffusion of music with it creating a condition of oneness. A passing of each into the other.

Sound, Giving, Will, Feeling, an insistent entity reached. Was there any part of me that did not respond? I was not a woman. I became merely a part of the attunement of the moment as did all the others. The strangers standing so near that I could have touched them and I think we were touching. We had dropped our little selves we were not but something greater than ourselves was breathing. What gave it the impetus to breathe? And if it could have endured, if a climax could have been reached and held for the fraction of a second - would not that instant have become infinite? Would it have been death? Or escape into a quickening of life?”

Katharine Rhoades April 1915.

Ms. Rhoades was an artist as well as a writer. I found this excerpt about her work interesting.

”The terms in which critics evaluated Rhoades' work at the 1915 exhibition place her paintings within a loosely defined expressionism, which prioritized emotion, intuition, and spirituality. Charles Caffin in the New York American insisted that Rhoades' reliance was on intuition, rather than observation: "Miss Rhoades seems to have a capacity of psychically sensing her subject" (19). Agnes Meyer, a journalist, photographer and fellow member of the Stieglitz circle reviewed Rhoades' work at the time of the 1915, commenting on the artist's individual vision:

“her whole impulse to paint seems to spring from a close communion with and a desire to impart the underlying significance of the world as she sees it . . . There seems at first to be a strange and foreign quality in her portraits but a sympathetic study reveals the fact that she has seen further or at least differently than we (Meyer 8).”

Meyer again points to Rhoades' ability to visually articulate a metaphysical consciousness and stresses her status as a seer, psychic, or medium through which highly developed states of consciousness are expressed.”

The article in which this excerpt appears was found online.

It'll do your heart good...

and here is where they tell us how it came about... Inspiring couple, great sense of humor:

Don't Worry, Be Happy... :)

Long time no see...
I've been working in the yard (- beautiful results, if I do say so myself!) and getting ready for our trip to Chicago.

Meantime, here's a little ditty you've heard before with a video you may not have seen...
enjoy
http://www.cmt.com/videos/bobby-mcferrin/89948/dont-worry-be-happy.jhtml

I'd love to embed one, but most videos are cartoons or still shots or no good. Go ahead, click thru and enjoy the link above.

Music & Art: luxury or necessity?

My friend Erin sent this to me. It is worthy of reading and remembering; hence its posting here.
Thanks Erin.

Written/delivered by Dr. Karl Paulnack, director of the Music Division of The Boston Conservatory.

"One of my parents' deepest fears, I suspect, is that society would not properly value me as a musician, that I wouldn't be appreciated. I had very good grades in high school, I was good in science and math, and they imagined that as a doctor or a research chemist or an engineer, I might be more appreciated than I would be as a musician. I still remember my mother's remark when I announced my decision to apply to music school-she said, "You're WASTING your SAT scores." On some level, I think, my parents were not sure themselves what the value of music was, what its purpose was. And they LOVED music, they listened to classical music all the time. They just weren't really clear about its function. So let me talk about that a little bit, because we live in a society that puts music in the "arts and entertainment" section of the newspaper, and serious music, the kind your kids are about to engage in, has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with entertainment, in fact it's the opposite of entertainment. Let me talk a little bit about music, and how it works. The first people to understand how music really works were the ancient Greeks. And this is going to fascinate you; the Greeks said that music and astronomy were two sides of the same coin. Astronomy was seen as the study of relationships between observable, permanent, external objects, and music was seen as the study of relationships between invisible, internal, hidden objects. Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts and souls and helping us figure out the position of things inside us. Let me give you some examples of how this works. One of the most profound musical compositions of all time is the Quartet for the End of Time written by French composer Olivier Messiaen in 1940. Messiaen was 31 years old when France entered the war against Nazi Germany. He was captured by the Germans in June of 1940, sent across Germany in a cattle car and imprisoned in a concentration camp. He was fortunate to find a sympathetic prison guard who gave him paper and a place to compose. There were three other musicians in the camp, a cellist, a violinist, and a clarinetist, and Messiaen wrote his quartet with these specific players in mind. It was performed in January 1941 for four thousand prisoners and guards in the prison camp. Today it is one of the most famous masterworks in the repertoire. Given what we have since learned about life in the concentration camps, why would anyone in his right mind waste time and energy writing or playing music? There was barely enough energy on a good day to find food and water, to avoid a beating, to stay warm, to escape torture-why would anyone bother with music? And yet-from the camps, we have poetry, we have music, we have visual art; it wasn't just this one fanatic Messiaen; many, many people created art. Why? Well, in a place where people are only focused on survival, on the bare necessities, the obvious conclusion is that art must be, somehow, essential for life. The camps were without money, without hope, without commerce, without recreation, without basic respect, but they were not without art. Art is part of survival; art is part of the human spirit, an unquenchable expression of who we are. Art is one of the ways in which we say, "I am alive, and my life has meaning." On September 12, 2001, I was a resident of Manhattan. That morning I reached a new understanding of my art and its relationship to the world. I sat down at the piano that morning at 10 AM to practice as was my daily routine; I did it by force of habit, without thinking about it. I lifted the cover on the keyboard, and opened my music, and put my hands on the keys and took my hands off the keys. And I sat there and thought, does this even matter? Isn't this completely irrelevant? Playing the piano right now, given what happened in this city yesterday, seems silly, absurd, irreverent, pointless. Why am I here? What place has a musician in this moment in time? Who needs a piano player right now? I was completely lost. And then I, along with the rest of New York, went through the journey of getting through that week. I did not play the piano that day, and in fact I contemplated briefly whether I would ever want to play the piano again. And then I observed how we got through the day. At least in my neighborhood, we didn't shoot hoops or play Scrabble. We didn't play cards to pass the time, we didn't watch TV, we didn't shop, we most certainly did not go to the mall. The first organized activity that I saw in New York, that same day, was singing. People sang. People sang around fire houses, people sang "We Shall Overcome". Lots of people sang America the Beautiful. The first organized public event that I remember was the Brahms Requiem, later that week, at Lincoln Center, with the New York Philharmonic. The first organized public expression of grief, our first communal response to that historic event, was a concert. That was the beginning of a sense that life might go on. The US Military secured the airspace, but recovery was led by the arts, and by music in particular, that very night. From these two experiences, I have come to understand that music is not part of "arts and entertainment" as the newspaper section would have us believe. It's not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from leftovers of our budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a pass time. Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we can't with our minds. Some of you may know Samuel Barber's heart wrenchingly beautiful piece, "Adagio for Strings". If you don't know it by that name, then some of you may know it as the background music which accompanied the Oliver Stone movie Platoon, a film about the Vietnam War. If you know that piece of music either way, you know it has the ability to crack your heart open like a walnut; it can make you cry over sadness you didn't know you had. Music can slip beneath our conscious reality to get at what's really going on inside us the way a good therapist does. I bet that you have never been to a wedding where there was absolutely no music. There might have been only a little music, there might have been some really bad music, but I bet you there was some music. And something very predictable happens at weddings-people get all pent up with all kinds of emotions, and then there's some musical moment where the action of the wedding stops and someone sings or plays the flute or something. And even if the music is lame, even if the quality isn't good, predictably 30 or 40 percent of the people who are going to cry at a wedding cry a couple of moments after the music starts. Why? The Greeks. Music allows us to move around those big invisible pieces of ourselves and rearrange our insides so that we can express what we feel even when we can't talk about it. Can you imagine watching Indiana Jones or Superman or Star Wars with the dialogue but no music? What is it about the music swelling up at just the right moment in ET so that all the softies in the audience start crying at exactly the same moment? I guarantee you if you showed the movie with the music stripped out, it wouldn't happen that way. The Greeks: Music is the understanding of the relationship between invisible internal objects. I'll give you one more example, the story of the most important concert of my life. I must tell you I have played a little less than a thousand concerts in my life so far. I have played in places that I thought were important. I like playing in Carnegie Hall; I enjoyed playing in Paris; it made me very happy to please the critics in St. Petersburg. I have played for people I thought were important; music critics of major newspapers, foreign heads of state. The most important concert of my entire life took place in a nursing home in Fargo, North Dakota, about 4 years ago. I was playing with a very dear friend of mine who is a violinist. We began, as we often do, with Aaron Copland's Sonata, which was written during World War II and dedicated to a young friend of Copland's, a young pilot who was shot down during the war. Now we often talk to our audiences about the pieces we are going to play rather than providing them with written program notes. But in this case, because we began the concert with this piece, we decided to talk about the piece later in the program and to just come out and play the music without explanation. Midway through the piece, an elderly man seated in a wheelchair near the front of the concert hall began to weep. This man, whom I later met, was clearly a soldier-even in his 70's, it was clear from his buzz-cut hair, square jaw and general demeanor that he had spent a good deal of his life in the military. I thought it a little bit odd that someone would be moved to tears by that particular movement of that particular piece, but it wasn't the first time I've heard crying in a concert and we went on with the concert and finished the piece. When we came out to play the next piece on the program, we decided to talk about both the first and second pieces, and we described the circumstances in which the Copland was written and mentioned its dedication to a downed pilot. The man in the front of the audience became so disturbed that he had to leave the auditorium. I honestly figured that we would not see him again, but he did come backstage afterwards, tears and all, to explain himself. What he told us was this: "During World War II, I was a pilot, and I was in an aerial combat situation where one of my team's planes was hit. I watched my friend bail out, and watched his parachute open, but the Japanese planes which had engaged us returned and machine gunned across the parachute chords so as to separate the parachute from the pilot, and I watched my friend drop away into the ocean, realizing that he was lost. I have not thought about this for many years, but during that first piece of music you played, this memory returned to me so vividly that it was as though I was reliving it. I didn't understand why this was happening, why now, but then when you came out to explain that this piece of music was written to commemorate a lost pilot, it was a little more than I could handle. How does the music do that? How did it find those feelings and those memories in me? Remember the Greeks: music is the study of invisible relationships between internal objects. This concert in Fargo was the most important work I have ever done. For me to play for this old soldier and help him connect, somehow, with Aaron Copland, and to connect their memories of their lost friends, to help him remember and mourn his friend, this is my work. This is why music matters. What follows is part of the talk I will give to this year's freshman class when I welcome them a few days from now. The responsibility I will charge your sons and daughters with is this: "If we were a medical school, and you were here as a med student practicing appendectomies, you'd take your work very seriously because you would imagine that some night at two AM someone is going to waltz into your emergency room and you're going to have to save their life. Well, my friends, someday at 8 PM someone is going to walk into your concert hall and bring you a mind that is confused, a heart that is overwhelmed, a soul that is weary. Whether they go out whole again will depend partly on how well you do your craft. You're not here to become an entertainer, and you don't have to sell yourself. The truth is you don't have anything to sell; being a musician isn't about dispensing a product, like selling used Chevies. I'm not an entertainer; I'm a lot closer to a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue worker. You're here to become a sort of therapist for the human soul, a spiritual version of a chiropractor, physical therapist, someone who works with our insides to see if they get things to line up, to see if we can come into harmony with ourselves and be healthy and happy and well. Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master music; I expect you to save the planet. If there is a future wave of wellness on this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of mutual understanding, of equality, of fairness, I don't expect it will come from a government, a military force or a corporation. I no longer even expect it to come from the religions of the world, which together seem to have brought us as much war as they have peace. If there is a future of peace for humankind, if there is to be an understanding of how these invisible, internal things should fit together, I expect it will come from the artists, because that's what we do. As in the concentration camp and the evening of 9/11, the artists are the ones who might be able to help us with our internal, invisible lives."

Just one more for today ~ another feel-good post

Today is the 15th anniversary of my wedding to Joel. Hooray for us. Here's "our song"...

I love you, baby girl.
Thanks for hanging in there and being such a great teacher.
What a trip we're on...   :)

I didn't know Judi Dench could crack me up one minute and make me cry the next.

and then there is this clip from A Little Night Music: There is a short set-up that will give extra weight to the song...

You know, it is one thing to carry strong emotion thru a play. It is another, and much more dificult thing, to get to that emotion in just a few minutes and from an interview.
Dame Judi Dench: a true master of her craft.  There are other videos  if you care to search.

How to Dance in the Rain

A beautiful story that came to me by email...(thanks Marilyn!) I don't know the author, but given its broad distribution, I think it will be fine to post it here.

“It was a busy morning, about 8:30, when an elderly gentleman in his 80s arrived at the hospital to have stitches removed from his thumb. He said he was in a hurry as he had an appointment at 9:00 am..
I took his vital signs and had him take a seat, knowing it would be over an hour before someone would to able to see him. I saw him looking at his watch and decided, since I was not busy with another patient, I would evaluate his wound. On exam, it was well healed, so I talked to one of the doctors, got the needed supplies to remove his sutures and redress his wound.

While taking care of his wound, I asked him if he had another doctor's appointment this morning, as he was in such a hurry. The gentleman told me no, that he needed to go to the nursing home to eat breakfast with his wife. I inquired as to her health.

He told me that she had been there for a while and that she was a victim of Alzheimer's Disease.
As we talked, I asked if she would be upset if he was a bit late.

He replied that she no longer knew who he was, that she had not recognized him in five years now. I was surprised, and asked him,
'And you still go every morning, even though she doesn't know who you are?'

He smiled as he patted my hand and said, 'She doesn't know me,
but I still know who she is.'
I had to hold back tears as he left, I had goose bumps on my arm, and thought,

'That is the kind of love I want in my life.

True love is neither physical, nor romantic.
True love is an acceptance of all that is, has been, will be, and will not be.

The happiest people don't necessarily have the best of everything;
they just make the best of everything they have.  
 

Life isn't about how to survive the storm, but how to dance in the rain.”

Wonderful Voice and a lesson or three

I would love to embed the video here, but that feature has been disabled. Here is the link to one of the Susan Boyle videos - we've seen her several times already!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxPZh4AnWyk 

Watch Simon's eye-rolling when he asks Susan her age. The cameras catch  audience members doing the same and many are laughing.

Susan's response? "That's just one side of me."

And her sheer delight at the reaction of the crowd, and later of the judges, seems charming, & genuine.  She was not remotely flustered by everyone's reactions: not the first laughter & derision, and not by the turnaround when those watching realized what they were seeing.

So:
You can't judge a book by it's cover.
Age is a number in someone else's mind.
Follow your dreams.
Take a chance.
Savor the moment.

Bookmark this video and watch it often.

A Model for Aging Well

Can you imagine a political figure with a 92% approval rating? AFTER she's been in office...for THIRTY-ONE years?!

Can you imagine playing hockey at 88 yrs? Why the hell not?!
Check out Hazel McCallion. What an inspiration! Enjoy!



I think I'll play this everyday.

Prayer in Old Age, attributed to a 17th Century nun

attributed to a 17th Century nun, and found in this post at TGB, by guest blogger, Chancy of Driftwood Inspiration:

"Lord, you know better than I know myself that I am getting older and will someday be old. Keep me from the fatal habit of thinking I must say something on every subject and on every occasion.

“Release me from craving to straighten out everybody's affairs. Make me thoughtful but not moody, helpful but not bossy. With my vast store of wisdom it seems a pity not to use it all, but you know, Lord, that I want a few friends at the end.

“Keep my mind from the recital of endless details - give me the wings to come to the point. Seal my lips on my aches and pains. They are increasing, and my love of rehearsing them is becoming sweeter. I dare not ask for grace enough to enjoy the tales of others' pains, but help me to endure them with patience.

“I dare not ask for improved memory, but for a growing humility and a lessening cocksureness when my memory seems to clash with the memories of others.

“Teach me the glorious lesson that occasionally I may be mistaken. Keep me reasonably sweet. I do not want to be a saint - some of them are so hard to live with - but a sour old woman is one of the crowning works of the devil.

“Give me the ability to see good things in unexpected places, and the talents in unexpected people. And give me the grace to tell them so."

Happy Inauguration Day

I thought I'd get to this sooner, but I just couldn't tear myself away from the events of the day. We even watched thru the entire parade; something many in the official viewing room did not do.
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CNN has put together this amazing collection of photos, and created a 3-D image you can explore by clicking. They've called it The Moment; the images come from thousands of photos taken by individuals at the ceremony. You won't believe it if you haven't seen it.
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Someone (a team, surely) in India created this other amazing thing. Check this out.
Sand sculpture in Puri, India and here is the link typed out, just in case...

http://news.yahoo.com/nphotos/Photo-Highlight-Indian-artist-Bhubaneswar2C-India/ss/441/im:/090120/481/de38abda9d7744ceb6d820694dcc74aa/#photoViewer=/090120/481/de38abda9d7744ceb6d820694dcc74aa
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News of Kennedy is everywhere, so I won't repeat that.
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Were you able to watch? working? playing? I'm sure they will run great excerpts from key moments. Hooray.
and our blessings on you, Mr. President, and your family, and your administration.

TED Talks: David Holt & Mountain Music

Wait until you see/hear the mouth bow...and stay tuned until the very end to see Thunderwear! Video is about 25 minutes and worth it all.  ENJOY! He's got a dobro, too, Bill.

Beautiful Fascinating Images...

Follow this link to some amazing photographic images: The Earth From Above.
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/10/earth_from_above_comes_to_nyc.html

Another Great Video - This one on Love :) - The Lion Story

This has come around to my inbox so many times that it is clearly popular. This is the best video I've seen of it and I decided to place it here to keep it archived. It is old video, and those who've documented this believe that Christian the lion has most likely passed on. How wonderful to have this kind of memory of him.

and the Good News keeps on rollin'

Tornado victims pay it forward:

and another one:

the clip above is great - a a bit more dramatic. Here's a news report that interviews all three women:

For more stories and videos about sportsmanship check out My Sportsmanship.

Who Am I?

Please go look at this video. Takes about18 minutes. This link is from a TED Talks conference - not likely the first place Ms. Taylor presented it, but certainly a great site.

Whether you vote for scientific research, prefer direct/indirect  revelations from one avatar or another, or prefer believable human testimony I think you can not remain untouched by this speech.

Here's the YouTube version:

Or go search Jill Bolte Tayor in your favorite 'engine' to see the tons of people/places who are interviewing, blogging, and otherwise sharing this amazing commentary by an amazing, awakened scientist.

Thanks to Laura for bringing it to my radar; Thanks to Kristie for resending the link and adding her own insightful comments. (I'm waiting for permission to quote her here.)
Kristie has replied with permission, so here are her thoughtful comments:

"As an energy facilitator and teacher, what I came away with after viewing this was that Jill will be another person who will be very instrumental in helping many to open to the possibilities that they too can tune into remembering more of who they are by firing up the right hemisphere.  What can be termed rapture or ascension, is just that.... shifting into higher frequencies and experiencing oneself as an energy being.  I'm glad I did not have to go through a stroke to experience it this way!  I commend Jill on getting out there and telling her story.  Once the right hemisphere is brought more on line and then balanced with the left, this seems to me then the human will be living Heaven on Earth, or living the consciousness of, "I'm in this world, but not of it."  :-)  Peace on Earth ............ahhhh  what a concept!"

And when you're done with the video, go explore TED Talks. I didn't know it existed until today.

VocationVacations

I found this site at Dragonslayer. It sounds wonderful, and I've already found the VV I'd take first:
voice-over actor!

If I decide to hire a career coach, though, it will be Laura Young at Wellspring! She's the best, and I know that from experience.

Good News from GNN

This was the lead headline on GNN for July 12th:

"Malawi Youth Builds $16 Windmill to Power Village"

If you're wondering what you might do to help your own village - the global one, perhaps - then give $16 (or multiply it by a factor of 10, 100...) to your favorite local charity or one of mine:

Kiva

Heifer

The Lincoln Co. Humane Society

Present in the moment...?

Marian Van Eyk McCain's latest post is an amazing example of writing skill, and then a lesson in being-here-now. You simply must go read it.

I encourage you to explore her sites; you can "take off" (quite literally) from the blog I've linked above. Marian is a model for me in many ways. Check out her various categories/labels.

a poem to inspire

Thanks, Laura, for linking to this wonderful poem. 

It is Olive Riley's Birthday - Number 108

Talk about Elder Blogging! Australian Elder, Olive Riley has reached a major milestone. Here's a birthday greeting from southern New Mexico, USA... 

Happy Birthday,
Kate