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Taking a hands-on break from the digital

I spend so much time in front of a computer, writing and designing, or on the smartphone where I read every interesting book and I can get in ebook format. Online activities take up a lot of time as well, whether it’s searching for information and images for work projects or keeping up with the twitter verse. But I notice all that media overload sometimes hinders a deeper thought process. At some point even signal can become noise, if there’s a constant stream. I have to ask myself, is my mind ever quiet and what are the consequences of filling it constantly with some form of digital noise?

The struggle is to find a way to clip the right noise at the right times to keep the brilliant signals sounding out. That’s where a hands-on kind of break helped today. I took moleskin and sat on the bed. A pen in my hand felt really strange, so unlike a keyboard, and yet words and thoughts poured from some unseen place inside me. The signal was clear. To feel paper, to listen to the wind in the trees outside the window, to breathe quiet, energized me to expand my personal reach.

When I see dogs, I imagine them doing stupid things

Fluffy cream-coated dog riding in the back seat of a Jetta, shakes his ears and sticks his head out the window. Wind flies under him and lifts his ears like wings. They ride higher that his eyes. He comes off the seat, tongue flapping in the breeze, bonks his head on the roof, then roles back into the cushions with a laugh.

The individual spark from draft through version 20

I’m an intuitive writer. When working on a creative project, I begin with a seed idea and then it grows from there. Sometimes it starts with a voice in my head, sometimes with an image clearer than a photograph, sometimes with a vague notion of an action I’d like to explore. But what I find is that the first draft can be a wildly different story than version twenty. Somewhere in the revisions, I’ve nearly swapped out all scenes with new ones.

This reminds me of the idea that the human body regenerates about every 15 years or so. Tissues seem to do this at varying rates, but your current body is probably about 15 years old. So if the human body switches out cells over time while the individual spark of consciousness remains the same, then what spark travels across my story versions? What remained constant, or did anything? Why did I cut out or rewrite sections? Am I discovering something about myself in this process? Maybe what I once thought mattered no longer does, and yet, I’ve grown through the process.

I still think in terms of “I,” even though I’m not the same person I was a decade ago, and in a similar way, the story somehow keeps its individuality though it has changed.

Green Tea Andante

Random. I was walking back from the office kitchen with a cup of hot water, ready to drop in my green tea at my desk and noticed how the water was rippling on the surface. No matter what I did, I just couldn’t calm the surface unless I stopped and remained motionless. Then I started to wonder, was there some way that I could tap the cup while walking to cancel out the vibrations? Or maybe sing to it.

Question of the day:
Where Would You Go If You Could Roll Back the Universe?

I would like to believe that life, more than anything, is about brain and heart, impressing my imagination and raising the adrenaline levels, pumping endorphins around my system, like coffee, only much, much hotter, because it pushes me beyond jitters.

If I could roll back my life, my universe, I would want to burn away the dust, the flack, the crap moldering my vision so that I could clearly see the road ahead. I want to see my light waves breaking free of my own gravity, where my own limitations fall behind, where I finally step beyond failures to realize dreams.

And What If My Sun Broke Free Of Its Gravity?

The sun is gravity embodied, or the closest object to a black hole I’m ever going to encounter. I mean, that ball of fire out there bends space and time around it, sucks it in like air into a lung the size of a thousand earths. I only want to get so close, close enough to ride its breath on exhale, light racing at light speed, the place where time stops and I become free to see myself smile.