A history of New York

Stunning. Absolutely stunning. I can't stop watching this animation of the development of New York, from the 16th Century to the present. It's what you'll see when you ride the elevators in the new 1 World Trade Center, to the observatory. As you rise through the storeys, New York literally rises from the swamp, and the years and decades scroll with you so that you can keep track of the growth of the city in both time and height. Imagine then reaching the top. The doors open, and you step out into... NOW.

The happiness of the pursuit

"We should concern ourselves not so much with the pursuit of happiness, but with the happiness of the pursuit."

Once upon a time, before there were podcasts, I was going to create a podcast. It was to be an exploration of "how we celebrate." I was going to travel the world, for one year, and observe and take part in celebrations, big and small, personal and public: mardi gras and backyard weddings, New Year's Eve in Times Square and a christening in Addis Ababa.

Back then I worked as a radio reporter, so I did a deal with one of the syndicates we broadcast to. I would pre-record five minutes of "celebration stories" every week, play the recording to them over the phone (yes!), and they would then broadcast them to their 30 or so radio stations around Australia.

I don't think blogs had been invented in those days, and there certainly wasn't any YouTube or social media, so the visual component of my journey was to come later, in what I hoped would be a beautiful and inspirational book.

That would have been a good book, don't you think? How we celebrate.

Anyway the journey didn't happen because a misadventure in renting with flatmates unexpectedly required all my savings (which admittedly was only enough for my flights and not much more), and the whole idea kind of sank. Maybe one day, when the kids are grown up and I'm retired...

I was reminded of this whole non-journey recently when I watched a lovely, thoughtful little comedy called "Hector and the Search for Happiness." Have you seen it?

Essentially, Hector is a psychiatrist who gets fed up listening to and failing to fix his clients' first world problems. Which is kind of a first world problem in itself, really. He can't make them happy. He can't make himself happy, either.

So Hector channels his inner Tin Tin and embarks on a global adventure to find out what makes people happy. To everyone he meets, he asks, "Are you happy? What makes you happy?"

At one point in the story, he is hooked up to a machine that colour-codes the emotions he is experiencing. Yellow for happiness, blue for sadness, and acid-green for fear ("because fear eats away at you"). Something happens (I don't want to give it away) and Hector begins experiencing all of these emotions, and more, at once, and his brain glows like a rainbow. "It's an aurora borealis of the brain!" the observing scientist says.

Hector's emotions, when experienced all together, are beautiful.

How are you, dear friend? Are you happy? What makes you happy?

Images are screen grabs from the movie, taken by me. Here's the official trailer, if you're interested. 

Wednesday link bonanza

Happy hump-day, dear friend! Here is a big bonanza of links to get you through to the end of the week, hopefully with a smile and a bit of inspiration.

* I've signed up for a tea swap. Do you want to join me?

* Get in my bed! You, and you

* This "balloons and books" baby shower looks amazing! I wish I'd thought of that.

* This quote. Inspired!

* I know Easter is over and we have probably all eaten our entire year's worth of chocolate and sugar, but I still want to try this cake sometime soon. There will be plenty of substitutes for Easter eggs!

* Yelp reviews for newborn babies. These made me laugh, even though my mother-heart was inwardly shouting "Nooooo!"

* There's gardens, and then there are house plants. But did you know you could wear greenery as jewellery? Imagine all that healthy oxygen wafting up your nose all day!

* The Joker Card is a singing birthday card that won't shut up until you destroy it or the battery goes flat. Who do you want to annoy today?

* You are perfectly imperfect

* Heading to New York? These are great tips for getting around and making the most of the city

* Recently a friend with a farm gave us bags and bags and bags of heirloom cherry tomatoes. And I salad-ed and roasted and pasta-sauced and goat-cheese-tarted my heart out, but still I ended up throwing more than half of them out before we could eat them. And THEN I saw this list: 30 things to do with ripe tomatoes. Next year, tomatoes, you are MINE

* The next birthday party I host, I want to bake a really long cake

* Calling all book-lovers and writers: book-spine poetry!

Photo is of Ralph meeting the Easter Bunny for the first time, snapped moments after he was busted stealthily lifting chocolate eggs from the Easter Bunny's basket. It's not relevant to this list, just super-cute.

The booktown

Fjærland is a tiny, ridiculously picturesque village in Norway. Resting in the shadow of a glacier, at the end of the Fjærlandsfjord, it is home to only 300 souls. That's like a third of the population of my high school.

Fjærland is also a "booktown." Almost every shop in the town sells books and, if you were to put all the bookshelves together, they would stretch for more than four kilometres. Here is a little video about it.

Fjærland - Norway's book town from Fjord Norway on Vimeo.

Bucket list! Will you come with me?

(All images are screen-grabs, taken from the video above)

Love

love has no gender

love has no race

love has no disability

love has no age

love has no religion

love has no labels

This video from Love Has No Labels has been doing the rounds of social media lately. Have you seen it? Just from watching, I feel so GOOD about the world. Like there is hope for us. Have a great weekend! Try to hug somebody.

(ps. If you can't see the video embedded below, watch it here)

Practise kindness

"When we feel love and kindness toward others, it not only makes others feel loved and cared for, but it helps us also to develop inner happiness and peace."

- Dalai Lama

Image credit: Michael Quinn (licensed under Creative Commons)

Fred & Lorraine

This love story made me cry a little bit. In a good way.

When 96-year-old Fred’s wife of 75 years, Lorraine, passed away, he sat in his front room and started to hum a tune, then he wrote down some words for her. “Oh Sweet Lorraine,” he called his song, and he said “it just fit her.”

He saw an ad for an online singer-songwriter contest and thought “why not, I’ll just send it in.” But Fred didn’t post his song online, he posted it old-school, in a manila envelope, to the studio. And he wrote a letter explaining the song, adding “I can’t sing. It would scare people HA HA.”

The studio was so touched by Fred’s story and his love for Lorraine, that they produced the song for him. Here's a little video about that process. And LOOK at Fred's face when the song starts!

(ps. There's something going on with the video I've embedded. If you can't see it just below this text, you can watch Fred's story here)

A Letter From Fred from Green Shoe Studio on Vimeo.

How I overcome creative block

How do you overcome creative block? Here is a trick that always works for me.

To start, I go for a walk while listening to music (the music can be Tracy Chapman, or Bob Dylan, or Lamb, or something classical. I don’t tend to choose anything else because for whatever reason, for me these artists/genres don't get in the WAY of other creativity - do you know what I mean? This is also the ONLY music I can stand listening to while I’m writing creatively).

Anyway, I let my walk take me to the art gallery. When I’m there, I wander around looking at the paintings and sculptures and thinking about them or not thinking about them as the mood takes me. I don’t force anything. But (and this is very important) I keep the music going. I have it turned up loud enough, inside my headphones, that the other sounds of the world and the gallery all but recede into nothing.

I don’t know what it is, something perhaps about the combination of music and art and exercise I imagine, that triggers the creative side of my brain. So far, this trick has never failed me. I always walk home creatively unblocked, and brimming with new ideas.

If I'm not close to an art gallery, I still go for a walk while listening to music, but instead I bring my camera and take photographs. I notice different things through the camera lens when I'm inside the soundtrack of my walk.

How about you? How do you combat creative block?

Image credit: photo by S Zolkin, licensed under Creative Commons 

12 nice things to do for yourself or somebody else on Wednesday

I've been painting. This is going to be a postcard, if I'm happy when it's done...

Did you know it's Random Acts of Kindness week? What a week! I love this! I actually wrote and scheduled this post on the weekend, and then only yesterday found out about RAK Week. Serendipity, my friends! So here you go: 12 nice things to do for yourself or somebody else.

1. Nurture a little love: make somebody a seed bomb

2. Get a pedicure. Give somebody else a pedicure. Give the dog or cat a pedicure (just try not to smile)

3. Make a cup of tea. Now think about how you spend your life

4. Leave a love note for a stranger

5. Buy somebody a coffee: buy one for a friend, shout the person behind you in line at your cafe, donate the cost of a coffee to a charity

6. Those lines on your face? Learn to love them. Tell your mother you love hers, too

7. Try this: go 24 hours without complaining

8. Now this: go 40 days without being mean

9. Look for poetry in unexpected places. Then share it

10. Get a house-plant. Give a house-plant

11. Invite your friends over for a proper, grown-up dinner party

12. Dress up. Go the whole shebang, even if you’re only going out to buy bananas. You'll feel good, and it will make other people smile (especially the green-grocer)

The Honourable Woman

Stop a minute. Why is the Internet not exploding with people talking about The Honourable Woman? Why did I only discover this mini-series in a roundabout, accidental way on iTunes because I happen to like Maggie Gyllenhaal as an actress and happened to notice her face in the promo picture?

Holy everything! I can't believe bloggers all over the world aren't talking our ears off about this show! So I guess I'll have to do it.

The Honourable Woman is an eight-part spy thriller. It starts off compelling but slow, and winds up completely, totally, under your skin. Gyllenhaal's character is Nessa Stein, a British-Israeli woman at the head of her family's company. The company formerly dealt in arms but now, under Nessa's leadership, builds communications networks. Her goal, pursued at great personal cost, is to create equality in communications access and opportunity for both Israelis and Palestinians.

The Honourable Woman is taut, considered, complex, clever, vulnerable and of course entertaining. And it is driven, sometimes relentlessly, by a phalanx of powerful, intelligent, broken, fully-drawn female characters.

Had enough of all the adjectives?

Maggie Gyllenhaal in this is exquisite. I couldn't look away. And have you heard of the stunning actress Lubna Azabal? The two of them together made for some of the most intelligent, brave and beautiful television I have watched in a long, long time.

The final episode (the hands, the hands, look for the hands; also, black on white and white on black, oh the symbolism) has destroyed me. I am undone.