Hawaii Here We Come

Headed to Hawai'i for the See Change & Hawai'i Community Foundation's youth-led Youth Empowerment Stories video program. So very exciting! This is where we'll stay for the first day or so until the youth join us. Mission Pictures (Arne & Shane) and Ed are coming to be part of the team. I'm starting to get fired up about it. Until now, it was all-logistics-all-the-time, and there was always something that needed to be done. We're in the calm before the storm, when there's nothing more to do until we get there and are on the ground with the youth!!!


Well, nothing more to do except work on my tan. Ha (who are we kidding!?)...

Chillin' with the Ballards

I spent a lovely Sunday chillin' with the Ballards. Or more appropriately, I ooh-ed and coo-ed over the littlest Ms. Ballard. She's my partner in crime in the picture.
We all went to All Saints Church for a lovely service and a tiny little 18th birthday reunion with Kat and Noelle (who is a priest there now).
Happy Palm Sunday!

Tuckered out

I'm a bit tuckered out. Stayed up way too late playing my first ever round of Settlers of Catan and eating Arne's homemade Earl Gray and Butter Cookie icecream. Yum.

Before that there was a party for Arne and Shane's DVD release.

And before that a week working in Hawai'i when I didn't even have time to put on my bathing suit! I had time to do lots of other fantastic stuff... including work with See Change's fabulous client, the Hawai'i Community Foundation, see a humpback whale spout and tail, visit an 800-year-old fishpond, get some yummy greens (thank you Summer and pals) at Ma'o Farms, take the secret (unpaved) back way from Hana to Kahului, see 4 rainbows or maybe more, and bond with my delightful boss, Melanie Moore Kubo. Here's the fishpond below. Oooh pretty!

Unexpected Rewards

Sometimes, the rewards in life are a little different than you may have expected. Arne's movie, Girls Rock!, has been a lesson in getting various and sundry unexpected rewards, and also about not necessarily being rewarded in the way you *did* expect.

Rewards he got: me. He says all the time that once he was doing something he loved, he was ready to get loved by me! I don't know of anybody else who started off making a movie with the goal in mind of finding the love of your life. :)

Rewards we get: Some people *do* get it. And it makes my heart swell 1) that they do, and 2) that what they get is a vision that lives somewhere between my husband, his best friend from 4th grade, about 100 little girls, and 25 passionate women (and now on-screen, too)!

Here's somebody who gets it:
My ears are bleeding: little grrrls are gonna rock ya
Rock on, Matt (the author of this post)! With feelers out like this when you write and when you live, life is going to hurt for sure, but it's also going to be well worth it.

"imagine a day when all children regardless of ethnicity or gender, are given pragmatic-yet-encouraging environments in which to grow. maybe..."

The Rose

I've been getting this great "natural spirituality" publication for a few years, The Rose, since my friend Kat worked at Emmanuel Episcopal Church where it's published. I don't quite know how to work in synchronicities and other psuedo-Jungian terms into a sentence. They feel a little like business jargon: "Don't be so siloed! We should synergize to work together". But throwing away some of the loaded language, it warms my heart to spend an evening or two a quarter pondering dreams and connections to the divine, and other things I can't quite explain.

So recently they had an article about how everything is connected. It was pretty technically advanced - Fourier transforms and the holographic content of quantum fields - but I think the gist is that we're connected in ways we can't quite comprehend (but almost can). The one twist on this is that now science is beginning to see the evidence of this connection.

Anyway, I love that I read this article just this weekend, and then this morning called a dear friend who was just going through old negatives from high school and thinking of me. In a non-local, non-temporal holographic plane (that connectedness we can't quite understand), that's basically the same thing as tapping me on the shoulder. Well, almost. :)

Tired

Sometimes sleeping makes you more tired. Why is that? You sleep and sleep and then you wake up and you're far more tired than you were when you went to sleep.

I slept far too much last night, and now I'm paying for it. Go figure! My only saving grace is that I ran for an hour yesterday. Maybe I tuckered myself out...

Anne of Green Gables

A friend of mine from way back - we may have been in choir together when we were 6 years old - put a quick note up that I happened to catch this weekend: "feeling more like a Marilla and less and less like an Anne."

It took me a moment to realize she was referring to Anne of Green Gables. And then it all came back. Many many rainy Saturdays spent watching the 6 hour mini-series with my mom, and when he was little enough not to protest, my brother.

I can't say that I've ever been a Marilla. Practical, rigid, caring in her own "I know what's best and you'll do it!" way. She was maybe a lot like my grandmother, who I adored.

I have very much been an Anne. Impractical, lost in reverie, dreaming big, frequently hot-headed. So much an Anne that for the longest time I simply hated my hair (Anne hates her hair passionately). I believed for many years that my hair was permanently on a bad hair day - even though it never really was.

The funny thing about all this, though, is that of the two, I think at this point, Marilla is a far more exciting name. In comparison, Anne is just plain vanilla.