#365Gratitude Day 235: The instruments of my inspiration

I love instrumental music, especially soundtracks.  

I often run and write to them.  I like the way they carry me away, emotionally.  They just work their way into my head and do things to me.  Lately, I've had a few stuck in my head.  You're about to get them in your head, too.  

First, there's Johan Johansson.  I am not quite sure how or when I found his album and in the Endless Pause There Came the Sound of Bees, and particularly this song, Theme, but I'm sure glad I did.

Johansson's work utterly destroys me.  Often when I listen to it I just cry.  There's something haunting, melancholy, beautiful and devastating about it.

The other day, on a whim I started watching Star Trek: The Animated Series on Netflix.  It's surprisingly good.  The very best part of it is the soundtrack.  It's spectacular!  I stumbled across a YouTube video with lots of the music from the show in it.  I particularly like the bit that starts around 7:40 and goes to 8:30.  I can't put my finger on exactly what it is about this music, but it is stirring!  I feel like I'm in an action movie about my own life listening to it.

Lastly there's this oddball soundtrack that's a disco concept album of The War of the Worlds.  Yes, I know, it sounds like a ridiculous idea.  (And strictly speaking, it's not instrumental music, at least not all of it.)  But it's amazing.  A musician named Jeff Wayne recorded it back in 1978. There's one song in particular that really, really pumps me up when I hear it, Thunder Child.

When I feel the creative urge hit, I'll put stuff like this on, and it fans a tiny spark of inspiration into a roaring flame.  I love this stuff.

#365Gratitude Day 234: A new chapter begins

Literally.

I started working on my new novel, A Little Patch of Sunshine back in September, 2014.  I hit chapter 7 back in December.  Then life just sort of hit me in the face, and it's been slow going since then.  

Until yesterday.  I started chapter 8 yesterday.  Whatever it was that had thrown me off-track for several months, I seem to have side-stepped it.

This is a big deal for me.  My writing and creativity are like a mental barometer for me.  When I'm writing, I'm happy.  That's actually kind of hard to parse.  Is it that I'm happy because I'm writing? Well, sure.  But I have to be happy in the first place to do it.  When I'm stressed out, or don't feel confident I close up.  Ironically, the best way for me to feel relaxed is to do it in the first place.  

There's this thing my brother Spacey often quotes, "We are what we repeatedly do." (Which as it turns out was first said by Aristotle.)  This resonates with me.  It's got a very taoist flavor, and in a way an age playing flavor too.  Do something.  Like it.  Do it again!  

Today I'm going to do it again.

#365Gratitude Day 233: Resource Full

Yesterday I had the good fortune to get to work from home. I'm in the middle of putting together a prototype for something at work and was spending my day tinkering with it.  I got stuck because I was trying to use log.info("thing I am testing:" +that_thing) in a controller. I checked standard out and saw...nothing. 

In the middle of the day I had an ​appointment to get my oil changed. I dragged my iPad and my unsolved problem with me to my mechanic. 

My digital library covers all sorts of needs

A little bit of digging through one of my tech books and I found a solution for my problem! Then I spent the rest of my appointment reading smut. 

Yay for resources! ​

#365Gratitude Day 232: Pause

Thursday was a busy day.  I had a meeting to go to about an hour and a half away from where I usually work. ​

My boss, who is very good to me, let me work from home that morning.  I got on my way mid-morning and found my way there. 

After twoish hours of mind-numbingly boring meetings I got back in my car and got ready to go home. 

That was when it struck me. I'm pretty fortunate.  All things being equal, life is working out pretty well for me.  

As often as crappy stuff pops up, more often than not, my day to day life is really enjoyable.  

I spent a few minutes sitting there in my sunlight warmed car, just enjoying being in no particular hurry, before I got on the road.  

#365Gratitude Day 231: On being alive

Every so often, I am once again grateful for this thing I'm sharing with you now.

It's a "song" sort of, a music piece created by the artist Dreaming in the Void, using elements of a spoken word lecture by Alan Watts, on what it means to be alive.

Every single time I listen to it, without fail, I feel bliss.  

Just last night on my way home from work, I was talking to my friend Andrea about the music.  So this morning I listened, and shared it, first with her, and now with you.

Andrea and I have a very special relationship.  We're friends, we love and care about one another, all that stuff.  

But we also are each other's spiritual sounding board.  She's the person whose spirituality most closely resembles my own.  We're both obsessed with mindfulness, eastern thought, Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism, and how they apply philosophically, to modern, western lives.

On a fairly regular basis, we also call one another on our shit.  When I fee low, I call her up, and she gently, kindly, slaps me around a bit.  I do the same for her.  It's almost eerie how things I have going on in my own life mirror hers.  We're almost always in lockstep about the things we need from one another.  Something I've just focused on will turn out to be something she needs to discuss, and vice versa.

I'm grateful that through sharing our practice with one another, both our lives improve.