Category Archives: Internet

“We Have to Project a Positive Future”

Posted on August 28, 2013 | Leave a comment

Yesterday, I felt inundated by questions and dark thoughts about why the world is the way it is. My stock answer, the one I tell myself over and over is, “It is what it is,” whatever it is. This is a dichotomy of thought on my part as I also tell myself that it is possible to change my own situation, circumstances, feelings and thoughts just by thinking positively, by not letting the shadows of what might be overtake the light of what is. I can make the shift from negative to positive. I can bring positive love and light into my life by being love and light, by sharing the good and putting less focus on the not-so-good.

I also believe that when we have questions, even those internal little niggling thoughts, answers present themselves. It’s up to us to look and listen, to be still. If we ask (even silently), we shall receive.

So, with the thoughts of yesterday still whirling around in my mind, questions about how we can possibly make the world a better, safer, lighter, more loving place bouncing and pinging, I found this video on my Facebook news feed. It’s from a site called The Master Shift.

John Lennon was not my favorite Beetle. In fact, he lost me when he slipped into what I called his “Give Peace a Chance” phase. I was young and silly and had no idea what that was all about. I’ve changed since then. I’ve grown a little in my thinking and I realize that Lennon, like so many others who were able to hone in on something real and tangible while the rest of us were in denial, while presenting an image of a hippy-dippy lifestyle that was suspect in my eyes, was looking and listening and finding answers that make sense for all of us.

This video is long by today’s standards of seven second bytes but it’s worth a look and a listen. You may have heard it all before; it may not bring instantaneous meaning to you or answer your questions, but it was there for me this morning to shine a little light on my own questions and I want to share it with you.

Lennon 02Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Just for Fun!

You make a difference

 

 

 

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Merrily Down the Garden Path

Posted on August 20, 2013 | 4 comments

Withered Rose 02

Is it just me or is the bloom off the rose of social media? Maybe I’m preaching to the choir here, but it seems to me that as the focus of Facebook and Twitter has changed from, “Look at me and all of the interesting things I’m doing!” to “Buy this!” the social aspect of connecting with friends and family has slowly been leached out of the media.

I’ve never been a big fan of Facebook. I just don’t have enough friends online or off to require a repository to keep up with them. And besides my writing, I don’t have enough interesting happenings going on in my life to require instant status updates. I have to admit, it is much easier to share photos and quick messages with family and my few far-flung friends, but if the news is big enough, we still call each other or text or send an email.

As for Twitter, for me the platform has devolved into 140 character commercials. When I first joined a little over a year ago, the art of the mini conversation–enticing people to connect with you through short bursts of witty banter–was becoming a valid art form. I liked the give and take, matching wits and quotes with like-minded people. The fun of Twitter, however, quickly faded as my posts and follows were greeted with stock replies of, “Thanks for following. Now, please check out my website/blog/author page and buy my book!” I can honestly say that throughout my Twitter adventure, not one long and involved conversation ended without a plea for a book purchase. In some cases, I bought the books; in other cases, I felt manipulated.

Now I know it’s all about the numbers. We’ve been convinced that the more likes and followers we have, the more successful we will be as authors or salespeople or entrepreneurs. (Maybe that’s really one job description: it seems impossible nowadays to be a writer without also being head of sales as well as the leader of our own one-(wo)man band/corporation/organization.) Long gone are the days of hole-ing up to write “The Great American Novel.” Now you have to be “out there” building a presence, developing a fandom with followers. And then you have to write four or five or six more books just like that while you hawk your work on Facebook and Twitter and every new platform that comes along. Forget about writing good books or building relationships or maintaining the ones you have. It’s all about the advertising. Sell, sell, sell! is the new mantra of the upwardly social.

As for me, I’m stepping off the garden path and letting the crowd pass me by. Social interaction makes me uncomfortable hence my comfort in being a cave dweller. As for the internet and life in the social matrix? There has to be a better way.

So, today I’ll leave you with this:

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, Old Time is still a-flying: And this same flower that smiles today, To-morrow will be dying. Robert Herrick (1591 – 1674)

(I wonder how many will remember this from lit class and how many will think of HBO’s Newsroom?)

 

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The Art of Being Me

Posted on July 12, 2013 | Leave a comment

I’ve been spending waaaay too much time on Pinterest lately! Is that a good thing or a bad thing? My sense of what’s okay and what’s not okay seems to be a little skewed when it comes to cruising through the pins. I find myself flipping through the Photography board and the Geek board with joyful abandon, frittering away time that could be better spent writing or editing or (gulp!) cleaning. (But that’s another story!)

My boards are beautiful and relaxing. I find it calming and inspiring to scroll through Abundant Beauty, my collection of pins that range from beautiful flowers to glorious sunrises to majestic moons. Photography has never been my thing but there is a newfound sense of joy welling up in me and I find that I have a serious urge to run out and buy a good camera. Or at least skip on over to Amazon and do a little comparison shopping.

Photography might just be the one thing that would get me out of my cave on a regular basis. Then again, one can take only so many shots of the moon rising over the ocean or dawn breaking through the palms. I’m already feeling the pull of a road trip out west and having a camera in hand might nudge that fantasy into reality. Or I can pull up Pinterest and look at mountain ranges from around the world without ever having to leave my comfy cave.

As I move through the boards and pins, admiring some, laughing at others, I find little pieces of myself scattered here and there. I’ve been told that it’s a great marketing ploy to pin photos as representations of emotional moments in my books. “Look for things that evoke the emotions you want your readers to feel.” So, I have boards for Ripple and A Solitary Life and Martin Vane Says Hello and within those boards are the thoughts and emotions I felt as I wrote and edited and worked to pull my characters into being. Each board is a peek into my soul as well as a hint of what lies between the pages. Each pin is a choice that brings to light a sliver of me.

I’ve discovered that there is an art to being me just as there is an art to being you. Your likes and dislikes don’t define you as a whole being, but I believe there is true insight into what really matters in our lives. I don’t pin every pin that makes me cry but I’m beginning to see a pattern in my pins, a true collage of what it is that inspires me and keeps me whole. There is so much beauty in the world that I will never get to see. But I can see it through the eyes of a photographer, amateur or professional, who like me, yearns to capture the moments of life that define me, inspire me, and make me who I am. There is an art to being me and I’m refining it every day.

Just for Fun!

SONY DSC

I’ll be leaving for Scotland on Monday. As you may know, I’ve been planning this trip for two years as a surprise graduation present for my oldest daughter. The Big Reveal took place a couple of weeks ago to the accompaniment of bagpipes. I guess that’s another thing that can lure me from my cave: bagpipes! (Or maybe it’s the man in the kilt. )

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Faith Restored

Posted on July 11, 2013 | Leave a comment

 

Wifi spoken here!

Wifi spoken here!

My faith in humanity was restored a little yesterday. I’m not a pessimist or especially paranoid about the future of the world, but I’ve had my share of human-related disappointments and OMG moments to wonder (more than once, I admit) if we are not indeed going to hell in a wifi enabled hand-basket.

On the rare occasions that I’m out and about in the world, I’m shocked to see so many people buried nose-deep in cell phones or plugged into some other device that effectively seals them in a (seemingly to them) private, protective bubble of solitude and estranges them from the organic interactions going on around them. Gone are the days of chatting with people in grocery store lines as they are, more often than not, chatting away with someone on a cell phone while the two year old in their buggy empties the contents of the candy rack onto the floor.

“My name is [blank] and I am a cellphoneaholic.”

My children and grandchildren–my adorable, beautiful, wonderfully talented children and grandchildren–have been hypnotized by their cell phones. They rarely look up.  Even the three year old is addicted. The first words out of his mouth on my last visit were, “Hey, Grandma,” hug and kiss, “can I hold your phone?” I was beginning to think that this is now the normal way to interact with people:  talk loudly, wave hands energetically while staring at the top of their head.

Enter my recently graduated-from-college granddaughter who arrived for a visit on her one day off from work. She’s gorgeous (seriously!), smart and very sweet. She drove two-and-a-half hours through bumper to bumper Disney-tourist traffic in Orlando, all the while keeping me updated on her progress (thank you, Siri!) for our first solo, post-grad, woman-to-woman visit. I was very excited to have her all to myself for the afternoon. And I did! I was thrilled.

We went out for lunch and talked–face to face, eye to eye. And I’m happy to say that I don’t know if the part in her hair was crooked or straight because I didn’t see the top of her head once. We talked and laughed about life and men and love, and lack, thereof; we discussed the importance of real communication in relationships both personal and at work; we discovered new things about each other that would never show up on a Google search and had a great time just being together.

Hope!

So, here’s my good news for the day: there is hope, I think, in the future of a constantly jacked-in world. It is possible to have a continuous conversation without the need to check out each and every ping or buzz of a cell phone notification. My granddaughter is living proof! She checked her phone discretely while I went to the kitchen for water. She put it away when I sat back down and engaged in meaningful conversation until she left seven hours later. I have to say, I am impressed, and happy, and content. Faith restored.

Just for Fun!

Without my Cell phone

Yikes!

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The Joy (and Power) of Being Right Here

Posted on June 26, 2013 | 2 comments

Over the past few weeks, Cave Dweller has become a fun and important part of my daily life. I appreciate those of you who stop by to visit my blog on a regular or a transitory basis, taking a moment out of your day to read and/or comment. Your comments are important to me and I’m equally happy to receive emails or messages on my Facebook page.

Yesterday, I was asked how the idea for Cave Dweller came about. I’d like to say that I was struck by a moment of divine inspiration, which feels kind of true, but actually, for quite some time, I’ve been looking for a place to share my thoughts on what has become a major theme in my writing: living alone in a social world. Cave Dweller has become that outlet for me and for what I want to say.

On June 1, 2013, my blog post at colleensayre.com put into perspective some of my thoughts about life and writing so I suppose this was a defining moment for me in moving away from writing about writing to writing about life. This feels like the kick-starter for Cave Dweller and I suppose I have my son to thank for that (among a myriad of other fine things).

What follows is an approximation of my June 1, post. (I guess I could have just inserted a link to the page–the better to get you to browse my website–but I like it here in my little cave and didn’t want to send you adventuring unnecessarily.) The layout is different from the original but the content remains the same:

Sandy Feet

My son wants to buy a boat. I got a text message from him this morning at 6:54, which means it’s 3:54 where he is. “Nevermind why I’m up . . . the bottom of Hello is cut off!” he said from 2,000 miles away. I read this as I sat drinking my nth cup of coffee and wondering what else I could do to promote my book (which was released last night) besides send a tweet every five seconds and plaster Facebook with ads and promos and the usual pleas of “please buy my book.”

Happy Dance

[BTW: I found an app called Buncee that makes posters and invitations and all kinds of cool stuff on the fly and I wanted to give it a try. I’d seen a cool .gif of a cat doing a happy dance on Bing and was intrigued by the “make your own” tagline. So, I whipped up a little picture with a book announcement (alas, I couldn’t figure out how to make the cat or to make this one dance) and posted it at about 6:52. Come “like” me on Facebook to see my Buncee.]

At 6:55, I repaired the truncated Hello (a very easy fix), thanked my son for the alert, and then read that he’d “spent the night reading about sailing certifications. Just need a boat big enough to carry the ‘Dragon’ onboard.”

My response? OMG!

Dragon

The “Dragon” is his motorcycle, his escape hatch, his get-out-of-jail-free card. It is his parachute, his springboard, and his path to sanity. But now he wants to buy a boat. I’m wondering where on earth he wants to ride that requires three vehicles to get there: the car to haul the boat, the boat to haul the bike, the bike to haul his butt all over creation so that he can feel free and untethered.

Don’t get me wrong! I love adventuring. I love my son. I love that my son loves to go adventuring. But I’m also wondering when my son will realize that he has already arrived. He’s there. He’s here! The adventure is happening all around him. Maybe he already has realized it and my worry is just a mother’s frenzy over her son’s desire for yet another dangerous toy. Or maybe it’s just that I’ve been reading about and thinking about the art of staying put and contemplating how to find my own joy.

Martha Beck (www.MarthaBeck.com) has written an interesting piece for O Magazine this month: “The Grass Ain’t Greener.” (Sorry, I couldn’t find a direct link to the article but it can be found in the “May We Help You?” section.) Beck’s focus is FOMO, Fear Of Missing Out. What it really boils down to is this: from this side of the fence (or the computer screen), it seems to me that everyone has a happier, more exciting, more extravagant life than I do. And I want what everybody else has!

The article got me thinking. Being a fear-based phenomenon, FOMO creates all kinds of problems not the least of which is the anxiety created from rushing around from here to there and back again looking for a place, your place, the place where you will feel at home—even temporarily. It seems that almost immediately after arriving at our destination, the wheels begin to turn yet again and we plot and plan how to get to an even better place with barely a glance at the spot in which we’re standing.

I had a mentor back in the ‘90s who used to insist that the only way to find true peace and happiness is to “bloom where you’re planted.” Mildred Ramsey found inspiration and courage to live an action-packed life, traveling around the country giving seminars and selling her book, The Super Supervisor, wherever she happened to be standing. Mildred could carve out her own little piece of sacred ground, till the soil, and plant her seeds in a dusty parking lot while selling books from the trunk of her car. She’s one of the few people I’ve met in my life who could be on the move, rushing in ten different directions, and still be totally centered and at home wherever she stood. (And without a hair out of place, I might add!)

Unlike Mildred, I think most of us are constantly searching for the next thing that will bring us joy or happiness or security, searching for that little piece of ourselves that’s blowing on a breeze in the far off reaches of somewhere else. There is joy and power in being right here and right now. There is something adventurous about experiencing this moment, breathing this air, in this place of all places.

Mildred Ramsey

I think the magic of life, the cure for FOMO, is finding ourselves in the now, in this blink-of-an-eye moment of life, cherishing it, and then taking that joy into the next moment—no matter where we find ourselves.

As a writer, I have to keep reminding myself that it’s okay to find my joy in the writing process rather than in the number of books I sell. I am happy at my desk with the world revolving right outside my window. I’m creating my own worlds, my own friends, my own experiences and finding pleasure in the sensation of living with one foot on the floor and the other resting on the haunch of the black lab curled up at my feet. Mind you, it took me 42 moves to get here and there were moments when I believed that the gods were playing some weird game of chess with my life, but I’m here. In this moment. Breathing this air. And I am thankful for it.

Life is what it is. And it’s ours. Here and now. Bring on the joy!

And Topher. . . Sweetie . . . don’t buy the boat! 🙂

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George Lucas Got Married and I Feel Dizzy

Posted on June 25, 2013 | Leave a comment

 

 

George lucas 01

Is George Lucas a Cave Dweller? I’ve always thought so. He seems like someone who values his privacy. Then again, if he has everything he needs at his ranch, why leave? But maybe that’s just the impression I’ve gotten from what I’ve read about him. Or maybe it’s just that I like the idea that he’s a quiet soul living a sequestered life away from the weirdness of the real world. Nevertheless, I read this morning that George Lucas got married. Good for him!

Now the dizzy part: I’ve taken to cruising through Goggle Trends lately, checking out the big top ten of what’s happening in the world. It sure beats wading through website after website. Then again . . . George Lucas was the top trending story, so I clicked to find out why.

Tread lightly through the mine field!

I use Chrome as my web browser with all popups turned off, yet I had to wade through a myriad of advertisements just to get to the story (and heaven forbid you accidentally click on an image while trying to X-out of a pop-up!). Upon arriving at the landing page, I was lambasted by more ads surrounding and clouding the seven sentences in six paragraphs that briefly identified Lucas, his bride, and a short list of attendees at his wedding. Had the story not been in large font, the better to take up space, I would never have been able to find it among the whirly-gigs vying for attention.

Shiny, whirly, shiny!

At the top of the screen, just below the banner that hosted every social icon known to man–as well as small ads for sponsors–was a camera limping along pushing letters out of the way; a video on the right showed running commercial segments for unidentifiable products; below video number one ran video number two advertising a credit card. Sandwiched between the paragraphs and the videos were other advertisements, sponsor notices, and links to other news and trending topics and related stories and more news about other people only marginally related to anything on the page.  I’m assuming there was a little profiling going on here along the lines of, “if you like this story about this guy, then you might like these stories about these people, too!” Yikes!

And people wonder why we suffer from attention deficit disorder. Even that discussion is enough to cause symptoms: AD/HD [A.D.D. OR ADHD]–the whole strings of letters–is now the acceptable term. How can anyone not be distracted from original intent if we are constantly bombarded by–Oh, look! Shiny!

A couple of years ago, I considered walking away from TV for good. I found myself turning more toward the internet for news and weather updates, where everything I needed was instantly accessible. I’m finding that’s not necessarily true anymore. If I have to click through ad after ad, wade through tons of video clips and news bytes just to get to the information I need, it defeats the purpose. My purpose anyway. I don’t want to be smacked in the face by advertisements. I realize that many people are making a lot of money on blog/news ads, but this is ridiculous. I don’t watch CNN because I hate that scroller that brings me all the news I don’t want all the time. The internet is now inundated with the same stuff presented in the same way.

Where’s a Cave Dweller to go for simple, straight-forward news? I’m still looking. And clicking, and . . . Oh, look! Shiny!

Just for Fun!

Dandelion

I love this image and it feels appropriate today.

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