~:: Another Pony, and a Challenge ::~

Two things today, and I’m a little shakey with trepidation, trying this.

First, I show you island horse.  And daffodils.   Then I talk about found design.  Then a giveaway.  Except not exactly a free one.  It’s a challenge (this is the trepidation part, because I don’t know if any of you will want to play) .

Discussion: Found Design

But I realize that I have actually written a short piece on this idea before.  So if you have time, I’d like you to nip over to Me for just a second and check out the bit about the shower window. Where I discover a rather Santa Fe bit of steam.  (Gee, Gin – prophetic?)  And then, if you will, take a sec to look at this piece of my good friend Donna‘s, where she finds things in the floor.  (Are you really going to do that much work?  It’s about CREATIVITY. ) Then I am showing you some more examples:

Inspiration can come from anywhere.  The coolest bird design I ever saw was a crack in a sidewalk.  These particular things are poor, beat-up tag ends of soap (relics of my rather uneven sense of economy).  This first one is the same on the other side, and suddenly, I saw in it this beautiful design for a Christmas dove – or any bird with wings folded.  All of this soap looks to me like old, antique ivory.  And now I’m trying to think how to get this effect with Sculpy.  But it was the shape of the wing that caught me.

Do you see the hen?  I’m not a line person.  I can draw a little, but lines don’t come leaping out of my hands.  Sometimes shapes do, and I recognize them after they’ve formed themselves.  So I borrow line and deliberate shape from the world around me.  I couldn’t believe this dirty old bit of soap showed me a shape that I immediately loved.

And this side works for me, too – the little head, the hopeful tip of the head, the little head wattle thing.  Do you see it?  Anyway, that’s my creative tip of the day.  No, wait.  There’s more coming:

I used to assign my English students a cold-eyed description paper.  Choose an object in your house; write down a totally just-the-facts-ma’am description of it.  No mention of function or color or any emotional value.  When they brought the things in, I read each one out loud, and chose one or two kids to stand at the board to draw exactly what I was reading.

Three inches high with a quarter inch indentation on the left side . . .

As the scribes drew, the author could see just how well they had coldly described the object, and the grade depended on whether we could tell, from that description, what the thing was supposed to be.

I wanted my students to SEE the thing.  See past the function.  See what was actually there.  Awake.  Realize.  Notice.  And that’s how you find design in unlikely places.  TA-DA!!!!

The not really Giveaway:

The prize: one of the felt easter eggs. Now, I’m pretty sure you’ll not get it by Easter, because I’m going to give this a couple of days, here.  And I’m still working out some shaping quirks.  But you’ll get one of these if you win.

The eligibility:

This is the hard part.  A couple of weeks ago, I taught one of my b-i-l’s university classes, working with this assignment – which happened to pique my interest a bit.

To win the Easter egg, I ask you to write a tiny story, no more than 500 words.  And this is the assignment: write about one of the defining, pivotal moments in your life – that moment between who you had been, and who you realized you really are, or are going to be.  When you found out that you LOVED blue cheese dressing, or when you made the choice that led to a career you’d never even considered before.  Or when you realized that you could SEE.  Or when you found out that you were a natural Sax player.  Or decided to move to Australia.  Or NOT move to Australia.  Or that you might be a Taurus, but you REALLY AREN’T.  Or when you took a look at your house and decided that, with all its faults, it’s PERFECT.   A point of meaning, discovery – something quiet.  Or loud or whatever.

I’m not sure how I want to do this.  If these were photographs (which they kind of are), I’d make a Flickr group.  But I think I’ll do this: you can leave your story in a comment, or email it to me.  And I will collect them all and put them in a post.  If you want to keep it private, I will not publish it.  I will not award the egg to the best writer or the most amazing story – I think I’ll just make it random, because this isn’t about how well you write, or how significant your quiet moments are.  It’s just a creative challenge.  That’s all.  It might be the first time you ever tried to put something like this into words.  So it’s not a writing contest.  Just a try-your-hand-at-it with the incentive of several hours of my slave labor in your behalf.

So – anybody up to it?  It’ SPRING!!  Get WILD!!

Here is my own example of what I mean:

I think I always assumed that I would have children.  It came with the package: grow up, get married, live in a house, have a yard, have some kids. Not sure, though, that I’d ever actually thought it through.  I hated babysitting.  Loved the money, tolerated the kids. The kids were safe with me, and fed.  But not nurtured.  I’m not sure, after I’d most emphatically been a kid myself, how I grew up to see children as  nothing but foreign – and fairly boring – objects.

How could I have thought I’d be fit to be a mother of children?  Like I say, not sure I ever really thought it through.

But I got married, and we moved into the house we built as a mutual investment.  By the time we were shingling the roof, we were married, ready to live together and make a family.  And about a year later, I became pregnant.

I had great plans for pregnancy: stay fit and take it like a woman.  The first time I got up early to run the mile around the neighborhood, I overbalancing on one of the planks we’d been using across the not-yet-front-yard, and pretty much destroying my ankle. Nine long months later, forty pounds heavier, I was slogging myself through record snow, trying to get contractions going. I was so ready not to be pregnant anymore.

Finally, water broken, I was ordered into the hospital. Contractions started and, after a couple of hours of hard pushing, I not only broke every blood vessel in my face, but in the whites of my eyes.  Before we’d left the house that evening, I stood in the den and said out loud, “Good-by old life.”  But even then, I had no idea.

They finally put the swaddled little Gin in my arms.  I remember looking down on her and feeling a sudden, overwhelming rush of nothing but fear.  The only thing I had in my mind was this:  “What in heaven’s name have I done?”  I had no idea what to do with her.  I didn’t even know what she was.  That first night, they put her in a warmer, and I watched her through the plastic wall of it, afraid even to touch.  I thought I needed hospital permission.  I wish I had known better.

There maybe wasn’t an exact moment.  But over those next few days, my life was transformed. Maybe it happened after Mom left and it was just Gin and me.  But at some point, the swaddled bundle became my Ginna, and I was actually, totally, thoroughly in love for the first time in my life.

It was a love affair that would last a life-time, an eternity.  And it grew to include three other little ones.  Big ones now.  Next to whom my life itself is nothing but a resource.  And because of whom my life took on its meaning.

A leap of faith.

A ton of work.

And in the end—love.

Stories will be accepted through next Friday night, April the 23rd. (this is a change)