Words, Words, Words October 16, 2009

Thinking of throwing my hat in the ring for NaNoWriMo again this year. In 2008 I made it to just under 46,000 before my tendonitis got so bad that I had to accept defeat. This year the problem is that I haven’t thought of anything interesting to write about.

DETAILS.

But, while I try to drum up some inspiration, here are a few things I’ve heard recently that have made me stop long enough to scribble them down.

“Stock your mind, stock your mind. You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace.” – Frank McCourt

“Where one burns books, one will, in the end, burn people.” – Heinrich Heine

“The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think. – Glaser & Way

“We don’t grow into creativity… we get educated out of it.” – Ken Robinson

“A good book is the purest essence of a human soul.” – Thomas Carlyle

I’m sensing a theme…

Update on my sister July 6, 2009

It’s been over a month since Kell’s car accident, and every Saturday since her operation I’ve promised myself, “this will be Correspondence Saturday! Today I’ll sit down and respond to the many phone calls, emails, texts, and Facebook messages.’ And then each Saturday comes to an end and I haven’t written a single word of thanks.

Part of it is that I feel like I used all my words up during her two-week hospital stay. Koodo says my airtime for that two weeks was over 800 minutes (with per-second billing), and over 1000 text messages were sent and received. It’s just one indication of what I think is the greater ‘problem’: there are just so many of you!

My gosh, there has been such an outpouring of love and support, it would take forever to thank you enough. So, I’m humbled to know that it’s okay that I’ve been a bit incommunicado lately.

Kelly is doing… well. I hesitate to say that simply because she still has a long journey ahead, but at the same time, she WILL make a full recovery, which is more than any of us had expected during the first few hours when we didn’t even know if she was alive or not.

I look at the footage of her being airlifted, I see the car, and I think how is my sister sill alive? It’s nothing short of a miracle in my mind.

Not sure how I managed to drive to the hospital, but I do remember calling a couple friends asking them to get people praying. As I found out later, Kell made it onto the church prayer list, as well as several Canada-wide prayer chains.

I believe so strongly in the power of prayer; I’ve seen people healed in profound ways as a result of prayer before, and I am honoured to know that so many people went to Him on Kell’s behalf… and on my own behalf, too, I know.

So many of you have asked me what you could do. Well, you did exactly what you needed to do. Gandhi puts it beautifully:

Prayer is not an old woman’s idle amusement. Properly understood and applied, it is the most potent instrument of action.

Yes, prayer is a powerful instrument of action. Prayer is the act of worshipping and appealing to the only Being who has any control in a situation that seems so out of control. I believe that as humans we have been given free will, and with that comes choice. I also believe that God honours our choices–which results in a lot of bad, but also a lot of good.

So, when we choose to pray to Him, He honours that choice and that prayer. Whether He says yes or no is up to His perfect wisdom and discernment regarding a world that once was perfect and will again be perfect but for now is not perfect. Nonetheless, I attribute much of my sister’s healing to the prayers that you chose to pray for her, and I am so grateful to those of you who said ‘yes’ to a call to powerful action.

You’re the best!

Let’s talk. Let’s ta-a-a-alk. Let’s talk. November 25, 2008

As a group, we realized–just as the organizers had hoped–that much of what impeded true progress in the field was that we were using different terminology to mean the same thing, and in many cases, we were using a single word (such as ‘timing’) to mean very different things, and following very different elementary assumptions.

…

The idea behind such a gathering is that if the people who are world experts in the topic–often contentiously holding opposite views–can come to some sort of an agreement about certain aspects of the problem, science can move forward more quickly.

I was reading my morning dose of This is Your Brain on Music, and these passages in particular caught my attention.

What would happen if people holding different views actually engaged in dialogue, rather than holding at arms length those whom we have labeled “the other”? And what if–gasp!–we actually tried to solve some problems together?

Y’know, I’m just thinking, the potential rewards are huge!