Further Adventures of Clown

Starting Fresh: It’s a cliché, but it is still true: Dream and Dream Big.

If you could be any where in the world or do anything right this minute, or be paid for anything, what would it be? What are the qualities of that experience that make it so desirable? What are the steps, starting with that idea and working backwards, to making that dream or aspects of that dream a reality?

Two years ago, “Doing single-narrator audiobooks” was on my list. As we close out this year, it has become the fiscal stream in my life of many that generates the most income, and I have just moved out of the ‘it’s just unbelievably hard and stressful!!!’ stage into the ‘well, it’s hard and stressful, but I love it’ stage.

I have also, for 10 years, yearned to return to Afghanistan. It looks as though 2013 will be the year that dream comes true. Dare to Dream.

Repurposing: The saying goes “Out with the Old, in with the New”, but sometimes we don’t need to actually get rid of something, we just need to repurpose it.

      Landfill Harmonic Landfill Harmonic

  I was moved so much by this story, these people, this effort. Let me quote Anastasia Tsioulcas from NPR:  

“There’s an amazing video floating around YouTube that has brought a ray of sunshine to a very dark week for all of us. It’s the trailer for an upcoming documentary called Landfill Harmonic, which focuses on one remarkable group in Paraguay: an orchestra that plays instruments created out of literal trash, made lovingly for them by their community. The young musicians all come from Cateura, a slum that’s built upon a landfill; the 2500 families who live there survive by separating garbage for recycling. A 2010 UNICEF report about this slum notes that more than 1500 tons of solid waste arrives each day. Illiteracy is rampant there, and Cateura’s youngest inhabitants are often the ones responsible for collecting and reselling the garbage. The water supply is very dangerously polluted; on rainy days, the town floods with contaminated water.”

Click here to see the video trailer!

              Fox mask Save that tissue paper!   ….and file folders, bangles, bits of ribbon, etc for your Manila Folder masks! Here’s a link to an earlier blog on How-To.

 

Letting Go

I hate to say this, but our lives and minutes and focus and stressors are VALUABLE RESOURCES. Use them wisely. Although there are many ways to spend these resources and many people, projects, and organizations clamoring for them, these, like all other resources, are LIMITED. Spend them where you personally will be at your best—wasting them on things where you are NOT at your best is disrespectful

* to your resources,

* to the project (somebody else has a different ‘best’ than you, and you have possibly deprived them of that opportunity by taking their moment and filling it with your ‘not my best skill or favoritest thing’)

* to some other thing where your favoritest bestest shiniest lovingest happiest self belongs instead. Be strict in your evaluation of the expenditure of these resources! If you need some guidelines, I suggested some in an earlier blog, “Biz and Art”.

Happy New YearHappy New Year, everyone.