Northern Exposure- Ed's gift to Ruth Ann

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uJx_Mg5HWk&feature=related (3 Min.s)

Here's another short clip from Northern Exposure. You may remember Ed (played by Darren Burrows), who worked in the shop with Ruth Anne( played by Peg Phillips) and longed to be a film maker. I loved both of these characters. I loved Ed for his simple tactless honesty and creativity. He was a soft spoken character that made me want to move closer to the TV to hear every word he was saying. Ruth Anne was a similar character in that way, but every now and then, she would surprise the audience in a elderly wise woman way. In this clip, Ed gives Ruth Anne a tiny piece of land, in view of the mountain for her birthday. His intention is to give her this spot for her grave. It's a humorous clip with a tender feel to it.

Enjoy!
Josie

Northern Exposure - We are here for each other.

Chris on the Radio:
Link is 1 min. and 59 sec.
Enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uF0VEq7N904


Today I picked a clip from Northern Exposure, a show that I wish was still running. I always loved what Chris had to say on the local radio station in the fictional town of Cicely Alaska. It was actually filmed in Rosalyn Washington and I had the good fortune to visit the town during that time. It was like walking into the twilight zone when I walked by the side of the building that the moose walks by in the opening of the show. Of course, we took photos and did the tourist thing with a flare.

When I walked in front of the radio window where the character of Chris did his show, I stopped...looked in and saw the set up...just like the show. What was missing? Well, Chris, played by John Corbett wasn't there. He made the KBHR station come alive with his presence. He read from many of the great thinkers and shared musings on the nature of life. He always gave me something to think about. I miss shows like that. There are a few for me, but this was one of my favorites. I think this clip, which is only 1 min. and 59 sec.s says it all for today.

We are all here for each other.
Have a fearless day,
Josie

Have a Little Faith...and fearless car singing!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UkKTlzyLhQ

Today, I chose an image of "reaching out" through the cyber world. This can be challenging due to the fact that we can not see the other person's face, reactions, body language... but have you ever received an email and read it with your own spin on what you think it sounds like? My guess is yes, we all have done this if we are at all trying to communicate through email.

Cell phones and email have replaced the actual visit from a friend. It is a substitute for chatting and a poor one at that, but we continue to reach out without seeing the other person's eyes...which I believe tell the whole story.
I believe, like Rhonda and Marta taught me, assume innocence first. I have read an email this week and I am trying to assume innocence...and it is a challenge...without having that person in front of me to really look at while she is talking. Yes, I am a visual processor...imagine that!
I am also becoming aware of how I might sound in an email and have been really aware of what I write and how. I never intend to hurt another and I am working at believing that other people intend the same.
When my heart hurts, it is difficult to hear a raised voice or a raised email. So, what then?

What I know now is to practice breathing. I imagine the other person in warm light... the light of peace... the light of what I choose to call God...the light of kindness and wholeness. I do not choose the path of judgment for today...and tomorrow...well, that is left to be seen and I hope I make the same decision. The link is short and it is a song by John Hiatt that I have loved for years. I remember sitting in my car in Springfield Mo., about to go home and this song came on...well, I just started singing like nobody's business...you know.... the woman in the car rocking out to her song...LOL! ....I get kinda the same reaction when I hear RESPECT...I mean the singing wildly in the car thing... not anything about feelings like Have a Little Faith

Pardon my "...'s", that's when I take a breath.
Anyhow, Please enjoy!

Josie

Lyda Phillips- a guest appearance by one of my favorite people!

Today I am sharing a testimony of sorts by one of my favorite writers. Lyda Phillips has recently gone out of her comfort zone and here is what she has to say about that.
Welcome! Lyda Phillips...applause.
Lyda- I changed the color but oddly, your writing changed into many colors despite my efforts to make it just one. LOL

The past year has been intense. I launched my son into college and put my house on the market, while living away from my husband, working full-time and still trying to keep up my writing. I have managed to keep picking at various novels-in-progress, but at my last literary brunch with my writing partner here in D.C. we confessed to each other (she's been going through the same kind of pressure--colicky baby, returning to work, husband diagnosed with liver disease) that we have just been sort of squinting and straining and flinging words onto the page that make some kind of vague sense and move the novels marginally forward without any real organic growth or creative essence.

So along about the time I got the boy off the college, I went down to Hardy, Arkansas, for the annual reunion at the camp where I spent my summers from age 10 to 18. I rented a little car and sped up to the Ozarks through the Arkansas Delta with a Memphis hip-hop radio station blasting out the windows, and I thought, "Yanno, this is the first time I have really felt like myself in a loooonnnngggg time."

It really does so often happen that you get what you need. Those sweet, short two days were just the plunge into a watery, emotional, natural world that I craved coming out of the desert I'd been crossing. An oasis centered at Josie's house, where I have always felt nurtured and nourished despite continually catching myself before I speak to her collection of mannequins. Whatever. It was just what I needed. The company of women, the friends (I almost typed fiends) of my childhood, a return to a place and a community where I felt stronger, bolder, more competent and more accepted than any other time in my life.

Josie gave me her blog address, and when I got home I found that she blogged about connecting, or reconnecting with our creativity. Once again, just what I needed, when I needed it. I tried Josie's left brain/right brain exercise with the names of colors in typeface of a different color than the word (wow, that's hard to describe succinctly, another limitation of language). I had such trouble doing that exercise that I realized I was brain-locked. I had been so focused on just getting through these transitions, day by day, that I had completely locked myself in my left brain--even to the point of spending inordinate amounts of time at work playing msn.games. I'm afraid I still have a lot more left-brain days ahead before I can get myself into the next stage of my life (freelancing part-time in Nashville and writing much more). I feel like one of those sci-fi movie images of emerging through a shining silver membrane.

So practically the next day after the color/word exercise, I got a forwarded e-mail from a dear friend in California. This was written to her by William Kennedy, one of her co-workers at the Equal Justice Society, after he had undergone brain surgery.

"I had an incredible experience in the few weeks after my surgery in which you played an important role. The tumor that was removed from my brain was the size of a mandarin orange according to my doctor. It grew from the mid line of the brain into the left hemisphere. To the extent that there was damage it was to the left hemisphere, the rational, linear part of the brain and residence of the ego and identity. Consequently, I retreated to the right hemisphere where the first thing that struck me was the silence from brain chatter. My experience of the right hemisphere was that people are not visualized or understood based upon their accomplishments or time and place of meeting, but instead are felt as part of a whole based upon their unique energy. IN this hemisphere all people are connected as 'one'. Each is a part though barely distinct from the whole. So, I saw you there, Eva. You and Kimberly along with other people with whom I have worked. It was strange and awe inspiring to experience people in their awesome fullness without filters."

So a few nights later, inspired by Josie's fearlessness and William Kennedy's poignant testimony to the power of stopping the left-brain chatter, I turned off the computer, turned off the TV, opened the windows on a late afternoon of pouring rain, turned on Bluesville on the XM radio, burrowed in my desk for an ancient box of Crapas. I had intended to continue drawing maps of an imaginary world I'm creating for one of my novels-in-progress, a middle-grade sci-fi novel. Instead, I picked up something I had been doing more than a year ago during boring meetings at work. Then I had drawn little pictures of my dogs. The humidity made the paper slightly damp and curly but that hardly mattered. This time I found myself starting with the fluffy tail I usually start with when I do the drawings of my dog Cid. But it turned into a little horse. And I looked upon the little horse and found it good. I colored it chestnut. I gave it a little grass and a fleck of sky. The little horse was pleasing to me, calming, curative. And I sat back, admired the horse, listened to the rain and the blues, and realized that I was more perfectly happy than I had been in a long time.

A couple of days later I was revising a chapter of one of my other novels-in-progress and for the first time in months, the words flowed from the creative well, unforced, unfiltered, taking an idea that had come to me in one of those moments when you're not trying, and letting it out onto the page. And for the first time in months, when I leaned back and looked up, hours had passed and I had been unaware of time or place. I had been in my book's world, in my character's head, again. Finally.

I am so grateful for this strange and wonderful chain of events, and meetings, and places, and people that helped me begin to push through that silvery fluid curtain into my new life.
Lyda Phillips: http://writerworking.blogspot.com