Art and Words

Candy: Last night and today I worked on some older photos in my collection. I'm working hard to redo my photography website and while collecting and processing the photos, I played with a few. I'm including them for you tonight.

The lead-off image is a panorama I took while standing inside the Pantheon in Rome last May. It's what you see when you look out between the columns. I can instantly put myself back in that plaza when I look at this photo.

This one is an artistic rendering of what was a really blurry photo of a gondolier I took from a bridge over one of the canals in Venice. I wasn't sure what would happen from that not-very-good photo, but I really like how it turned out. This one was produced from a photo taken after dark near Elbow Lake, Minnesota, in July of 2004. You'd never know it was pitch black, would you? It's really colorful, and these type of renderings have been really appealing to me lately.

Here's a piece based on a photo of the pier and cable cars at Daytona Beach, Florida. Tim and I were there between Christmas and New Year's with his basketball team, and the photo was taken from the balcony of our hotel room.

This one is one of my favorite images so far. It's a little blue elephant bank that I photographed in our attic in Hiram this spring. I love the colors that came out as I played with it in Photoshop.

I read half of Alice in Wonderland today at B&N. I haven't read that story since I was a little girl. It was really great to go back through it and rediscover some really clever truths hidden in the story.

Part of a conversation between Alice and the Cheshire Cat struck a chord with me today. I've been struggling for most of my life with what I should do as a vocation, but especially lately as I contemplate what direction to take next. Here's the conversation.

"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?" asked Alice.

"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.

"I don't much care where--," said Alice.

"Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat.

"--so long as I get somewhere," Alice added as an explanation.

"Oh, you're sure to do that," said the Cat, "if only you walk long enough."

Funny, right? Except that it's indicative of my professional path. I haven't known where I wanted to go so it didn't really matter which way I took. This fictional conversation symbolizes the frustration I have with not knowing the destination before I head out.

The flip side, though, is that it really opens the door to some adventures that I might not ever have experienced had I known the destination and taken the shortest path to it.

Because I'm working on my site, I also read a couple books on Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and Flash, but nothing was really interesting enough to include in this post. Go figure!

I'll tell you what, though. Last week I read a book by Ben Stein that was really incredible. You know Ben Stein, the guy from the TV show Who Wants to Win Ben Stein's Money?

Anyway, he's written several books, and this one is How Sucessful People Win: Using "Bunkhouse Logic" to Get What You Want in Life. It addresses the issues of making a contribution to your world and how to live a big life modeled after the way people we consider successful live.

The two basic tenets are this: you have to use your "inner mobility" and "activity" to keep yourself going. He uses the analogy of a cowboy driving a herd of cattle to market throughout the book, and talks about how to prepare for the game of life, then identifies ten rules of the game that he has learned from his observation of successful people.

Here's an excerpt that I found especially interesting.

The cowboy doesn't simply abandon his cattle 20 miles from the market and wait to see if they arrive by themselves. He herds them every inch of the way.

Similarly, your ideas, your creativity, and your energy are your charges. You cannot just abandon them to the free play of the cruel world. You must guide them and take care of them by doing for yourself. That is how you win the game.

Think enough of yourself to do for yourself. That is how you'll thrive in the world, and that's the only way.

Here are Stein's tenets:

Prepare for the game
1. Decide what you want
2. Ask for what you want
3. You can't win if you're not at the table

Rules of the game
1. Concentrate on "How To"; Forget "Why Not"
2. Notice what is, not what should be
3. Luck is catching
4. Life is a process, and the process never ends
5. Nothing happens by itself
6. The best is the enemy of the good
7. Personal relationships are golden
8. Persistence: the one indispensable ingredient
9. Make time your ally
10. "Nice guys" finish first

#6 especially hit me because it's about perfection and how that often keeps people from doing what they are good at. Stein wrote that "the compulsion to do something perfect is the exact equivalent of the compulsion never to get anything done at all" and that "perfectionism is the great crippler of young adults." Interesting.

Well, I guess that's enough for today. I hope that you have a great Wednesday and that when you encounter frustration that you can remember this: the cowboy doesn't give up or cry when he reaches the watering hole and finds that it has dried up. He simply moves on in search of another watering hole.

Here's to moving on from dried up watering holes!