Me through January's eyes

The image above is a snap I took a few days ago of a very familiar vista here in Ottawa. The sky that night over Mooney’s Bay was beautifully grim. Until this morning, that sky had wrapped around me like a heavy blanket. The moon is waning and a few very well placed words have set me straight.

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” -Albert Einstein

While watching the “news”, Jon Stewart had as his guest American astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson (a.k.a. the absolute living emperor of the coolest nerds. All that intelligence is super hot!). Mr. deGrasse Tyson quoted Einstein while explaining his passion for challenging the boundaries of knowledge through creativity. While it is comforting when men of extraordinary intelligence acknowledge the rightful place of creativity I wish I saw it more in the habits of the people who run this place. For now, I will settle to fold it more significantly into my quotidian life.

I need to come back inside a while. Do a little creating without strings. The kind that grabs my wrist and drags me running. Blissfully.

And I don’t even like running!

Off and running...

heARTbeatgal

thirty parts

I am cold today. And a little blue. But, that is how it is meant to be this time of year. So I won’t fight today. The moon is pulling on me. It will pass as it always does.

In the meantime, I am meditating on the images I have been blessed with thus far. I am inspired. I worry about doing justice to the enthusiasm of my collaborators, and to the vision in my head. Much more than that, I am hugely thankful for the impact this little journey is having on my life.

Thank you collaborators.

…and keep’em coming. The more the better!

heARTbeatgal

What more could a girl need?

More. A lot more.

Tell your friends, or better yet, snap photos of one of their parts and send it to us at collaboartive@gmail.com. Please. The vision is forming and we are going to need lots of images.

The anonymity is proving challenging so I have decided to have a sexy man manage the inbox for us so I can keep my distance from the identities. Thank you sexy man

Keep’em coming…

My thanks.

heARTbeatgal

It has been thirty days since I started down the path that lead us, for better or for worse, to “Rainbow Sunshine Magic” (the title of CollaboARTive piece number one).

I have always felt a special connection to the number thirty. A little research proves that I am not alone in this affection. It is after all the atomic number of zinc. Also, the age Jesus and his crew hit their stride, as well as, the height of Noah’s Ark in cubits. Most intriguingly though, I discovered today, that by adding up some of the subsets of its divisors (e.g. 5, 10 and 15=30) makes thirty a semi-perfect number! Mathematically speaking, I have no idea what this means of course. I was required to repeat grade eleven math three times before I got it right. Right enough anyhow. Damn you fractions!

So, with its promise of semi-perfection, and the satisfaction of my time well spent these past thirty days, I feel compelled to commit myself, us, to another thirty days.

my hand

This time around, after the deeply personal experience of reaching out to those nearest and dearest, I am suggesting a slightly different approach.

An anonymous collaboration.

Below is the address and password to a Gmail account I have created for us.

collaboartive@gmail.com

Password: thirtydays

To date, it has but one lonely message from me that links us all (ANY and EVERYONE!) to a Dropbox folder.

In the folder, there is one sad and lonely image. My hope is that for the next thirty days, collaborators will fill, anonymously, abundantly, the email inbox and Dropbox folder.

I am asking collaborators to send images of a body part. An anonymous photo of one body part.

In the meantime, I will indulge in a little meditation on the theme of touch that has haunted me for at least six months now. More on that to come.

Ok, here we go again.

Touch me.

heARTbeatgal