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Posts Tagged ‘inspiration’

My office is filled with random yet interesting items. Maybe a color caught my eye, or a puzzle, or a map (or a bit of pottery, a magic wand, a decoder ring, a set of travel watercolors, or or or). All things that spark my creativity or capture an experience I want to remember.

For example: Mr Man and I had a special dinner a while back. 

Appetizer: mussels steamed with a great deal of garlic and a perfectly reasonable amount of white wine. 

Flavor: excellent. 

Bonus: an unexpected gift, the tiniest pearl I have ever seen. 

Taking a picture of it was a challenge, it’s that small.

I keep it in memory of that night. It’s worth nothing, and everything.

“But the pearls were accidents, and the finding of one was luck, a little pat on the back by God or the gods both.”

– John Steinbeck

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Some days you just need to watch a baby elephant play with a pumpkin. If today is that sort of day for you, you’re welcome!

A baby elephant stole the show at Oregon Zoo’s pumpkin-smashing event | AP News

A baby elephant at the Oregon Zoo had more tricks than treats to show when handlers gave it a small pumpkin to play with during an annual fall event where giant elephants smash half-ton pumpkins.

Freaking adorable.

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Here’s an illustrated short by Rich Wells, capturing an epiphany he had outside a tire shop.

Graham’s Tyres – Rich Wells

“I thought l’d take the words from my notebook and make something visual.

A reminder to myself that all this everyday stuff – admin, errands, school runs, park trips, waiting in lines, meal times –

it’s all a gift”

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It’s a brave act to embrace incompetence. What’s delightful is that it’s a temporary state.

— Michael Bungay Stanier

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Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.

— Ray Bradbury

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Today, Mr Man is out in the woods being woodsy, and his cell connection is weak at best. He called with a story about an adventure, full of drama and excitement, near misses and impossible tasks. 

Ninety seconds into the tale, the call cut out. Oh no, I thought, he just set up the problem, how will he triumph? What happened next? I waited by the phone in anticipation.

Another call, another 90 seconds, another cut line, another moment of drama as he hung, metaphorically speaking, between victory and defeat. It happened again, then again. 

I started answering his callbacks with “And then what happened?”

After many episodes I got the whole story, and it was a good one. Let’s just say that most of us would have found ourselves stranded in the bush waiting to become a bear’s dinner, but through creativity, deductive thinking and mechanical know how, he found a way!

And I enjoyed an excellent reminder of the power of suspense in story.

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Ok, this is amazing.

And if you wired other nearby plants and trees, would they all play in synchrony?

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Mr Man and I were out for a hike a few weeks ago when a barred owl flew across the path. I hadn’t expected to see an owl in daylight, but there it was. We watched it for a moment as it nestled into the crook of a tree, and went about our way. 

This is what it might have been like to stay.

from wildlife photographer Gamander López

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For those who have experienced the joy of being alone with nature there is really little need for me to say much more; for those who have not, no words of mine can ever describe the powerful, almost mystical knowledge of beauty and eternity that come, suddenly, and all unexpected.

— Jane Goodall

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“The autumn stars had come out, incredible in number and brilliance… the whole sky seemed to tremble, a shaking of diamond chips, a scintillation of sunlight on a black sea.”

— Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed

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