It’s the Circle of Life
And it moves us all
Through despair and hope
Through faith and love
Till we find our place
On the path unwinding
In the Circle
The Circle of Life
I took a workshop a few years ago about finding your life’s purpose. It was an appeal to my Feely side and it turned out to be much more beneficial than I dreamed it could be. The end result of the day-long seminar was to create a personal mission statement. It was supposed to be short enough and easy enough to remember if you were being held at gunpoint and asked to recite it. After going through several worksheets to help identify verbs and values that should be included in the statement, I eventually derived this statement:
My life’s purpose is to illuminate, celebrate and participate in the circle of life with friends, family and the Universe.
I like it. The verbs really resonate with me and what I find valuable, useful and important in life- both at work and not. It also was important to me to recognized the Circle of Life as I know it is constantly moving and must be a part of how we live in this world.
Parts of the circle of life are easy for celebration and participation. Birthday parties. Graduation. Weddings. First bike ride. All kinds of things. And, some parts are harder.
Yesterday, I had to participate in one of the hard parts of the circle of life as I said good-bye to my dog, Haleakala. From a post I wrote back during my Project 365:
Back in March 1999, this skinny scared dog showed up in our yard upon returning from a trip to Hawaii. We named her Haleakala and on April 22, 1999 (Earth Day) she came inside the house for the first time. So, we declared Earth Day as her unofficial birth day. She got some treats from a vendor at yesterday’s Earth Fest. She loves them!!!
Saying good-bye to her was one of the hardest things I ever have had to do. She was diagnosed with cancer three months ago and the decline started shortly after that. It is a gift that we can prevent suffering and pain but it is a hard gift to give.
But, I want to celebrate her life and what she gave to me.
I went through my Flickr account and pulled together a slideshow of good, bad and ugly photos of her over the past 4 years or so. You can see what a pretty girl she is.
The Circle of Life keeps moving and so will I as I keep illuminating, celebrating and participating.
I know that I have already blogged about how BIG the internet is. But, in many ways, it does feel small. For example….
Earlier this month, I was sitting in a webinar learning about new functionality for a system used at my school. It was quickly getting over my head so, of course, I went to Tweetdeck to see if anybody was tweeting about the same webinar. I found one person who mentioned he was watching the same session. Okay. One other person. Fine.
Later that same day, I was dealing with a technical issue with a plug-in for our WordPress Multiuser system and started working via email one-on-one with the developer of the plug-in. He was very helpful and we got the issue resolved relatively quickly. (it was one of those issues where it finally started working with settings that made no sense but neither of us wanted to take the time to figure out why it broke or why is was working with those settings – sometimes you just have to take the victory and run).
After working with him, I decided to check on Twitter and see if he was there. One search query later, I found his Twitter page and in his tweet history was the ONE TWEET about the earlier webinar. He was the one person I found also watching the same presentation.
I have a ukulele now. And I take piano lessons. Add in the drum set in the basement and the guitar in the closet and there are a lot of musical opportunities in the house these days. Right now, the uke is the winner…it sits out by my desk and I pick it up about every day. Can’t say I practice any of the rest of the instruments that much.
Of course, I am only playing the one song I know right now (I’m Yours by Jason Mraz) but the more I play it, the easier it gets. Practice makes perfect.
All of this leads up to something that I have been thinking about for a while but never got down to writing about it until now. We went to hear Steve Martin play his banjo this weekend at the lovely Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. Yes, the home of the Grand Ole Opry! It was my first show there and I hope it won’t be my last as it was a great performance space. Wonderful acoustics, fun pews (not TOO hard) and a top-notch show to boot. Steve Martin was a pro with the banjo and his band was phenomenal.
Add in the fact that his opening act was the multi-talented John McEuen of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and that he had guest vocals from Dan Tyminski and Rhonda Vincent as well as closed the show with Earle Scruggs playing Foggy Mountain Breakdown and you get the gist that it was a truly wonderful night of music.
But, what I have been thinking about was how easy they all made it look. McEuen went from guitar to banjo to fiddle without even taking a breath it seemed. If I put down the uke and sit at the piano, I have to fidget and think and get all set up to get going. It is amazing how at ease he seemed with all of the instruments and just being on stage. And, I know it comes from practice.
To take it from music to techy – I can sit down at a Mac and then move to a PC and then to an iPhone with the same ease. I have been told many times during training “you make it seem so easy”. And, that is my goal – to make it seem easy but to also really just make it easy. But, there does take some practice. Some time with the “instrument” whether it is an operating system or a software application or a new peripheral. You have to spend some time with it and learn how to work it, where things are and so on. Then, moving between all of these things gets to be much smoother. And, just like how a guitar player can probably pick up a uke and make some decent noises – the more tech you play with the easier it is to pick up something new just because of all of the practice you did before.
I guess I am at that age where many of the famous people who were influential on my growing-up are starting to die. I noticed that several of my recent posts have been about recent deaths. Yesterday, we lost Mary Travers (the Mary of Peter, Paul and Mary). While Michael Jackson certainly was a huge part of my adolescence, the trio of PPM were also very much in the mix as I listened to a lot of their music when I was young and then continued the love affair with many hours sitting around a campfire singing their songs with other campers, then as a counselor and finally now, continuing the tradition each year with my annual campout with friends from those summer camp days.
All of this death has me thinking about how we pay tribute to these celebrities who are so influential for whatever reason: crushes, aspirations of similar stardom, talents that create art that speaks so deeply to us and so on. It is interesting to note how those tributes have changed over the years and with the technologies available to those who feel need to “tributize” someone.
After Michael Jackson died, it was almost immediately that the tributes started pouring in via blogs, YouTube, twitter, Facebook, MySpace and more. There were mashups, postings of clips from interviews, artwork and more.
Patrick Swayze’s death probably prompted the same reaction. I was not as affected by his death as others around me were but that is probably another blog post on another blog.
I did a quick search on Mary Travers this morning on blogs, YouTube and Twitter. While there were a few podcasts and audio tributes last night, I didn’t find as much as I would have thought. And that makes sense. Mary’s audience is older and her work is not so much in the digital realm. I have one CD and the rest of her music I have on LP album and cassette. That adds a hurdle to making an online tribute so it cannot happen so “immediately” as Michael Jackson or even John Hughes, as I posted earlier.
I only wonder how the technology will change how we memorialize people, both famous and not, in the future. I think the feely part of the equation will always be there…we have a human need to eulogize, share grief and express admiration for someone’s life and how it touched ours. But, how we do it is certainly changing. It is easier, faster and much more public.
Thinking about my own tribute rituals, I recalled when John Lennon was shot. I was a freshman at Virginia Tech. My roommate and I got all of our albums together and played them all night while other girls on our hall came by. Slowly, a little shrine developed with his photo, candles, a flower or two and just a bunch of folks sitting in the yellow candlelight listening to Lennon sing us to sleep. Last night, I played two Peter, Paul and Mary albums on my turntable and then put their jackets in my LP album frames as my tribute. I guess that will her shrine for now. For Michael Jackson, I blogged about his influence and found plenty of videos to embed. That also makes sense, because part of MJ’s art was so visual that you need the video to appreciate it, share it and pay tribute to this talents. I dont’ think you need video with Mary Travers as much.
But, just because I think this song is beautiful (a tribute to John Denver as he wrote it), here is one Mary Travers song to share.
I am so saddened to lose on of my truly major icons yesterday. I am not sure icon is the right word but hero is not right either. I didn’t want to be Michael Jackson but I did want to marry him at one point. When I was about 12. Then, after reading the biography of the Jackson 5 that I got in the Scholastic Book Club, I did the math on his birthdate and realized that he, being well over 3 years older than me, was WAY too old for me to marry and it would never work out. I recall being a big heartbroken over that fact at the time.
But, I stayed a fan through Jackson 5 and then well into his heyday of the 80s/90s. Thinking over definitive moments, it had to be this one. I still remember watching the Motown Special on live television with my siblings. When he broke out the moonwalk for the first time…on my.
First, we screamed: O no, he didn’t (or something like that) Second, we all got up and started trying to do it ourselves. Badly. Really, really badly!
His dancing has always intrigued me. He floats in space rather than just dance on a stage. Magical. There are so many strong performances and videos, but I think the dancing in Smooth Criminal has always stuck with me.
As his legal battles went on and his musicality waned, I remained a fan but did wonder what the extremely hard life of being in show business since the age of 3 had done to his mind and body.
Rest in Peace Michael. You are the King of Pop and that will never change.
I was at an ed tech conference this past week. At lunch, they had “edutainment” speakers, which is a great idea since everybody is usually eating and so on so a “serious” speaker is often not the best idea.
The speakers were the producers and original composers of Schoolhouse Rock. When they took the stage, I was happy. When, they started singing some of the old tunes, well, I suddenly was shot back to Saturday morning sitting in my pajamas, eating Capt’n Crunch and watching some Sid and Marty Krofft show (probably Land of the Lost) as well as learning about multiplication tables, the parts of speech and how the government works.
I mean, I can totally still recite the Preamble to the United State Constitution but only if I can sing it to the Schoolhouse Rock tune!
I then returned to school and started sharing my excitement with other colleagues. They didn’t know the show!! Never heard of Schoolhouse Rock. That struck me as pretty odd but I guess there is just a small segment of the population who was at the “right” age for this to become as ingrained as it is for my and my siblings.
Oh well, I totally loved it. Enjoy the original song from that series.
