Writerquake: a space in the blogosphere for two years

Today is Writerquake's SECOND BLOGOVERSARY! I wondered what would come to me to post for this occasion, as my thoughts have been scattered lately and I am feeling physically wired and mentally spacey. I am just not grounded and haven't been for some weeks now. What has helped me to cope with this sense of unease is the Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver. The nightly escape into the coverage of events from the day has kept me going and I will go through Olympics withdrawal when it winds down this weekend. Maybe that will be what finally gets me back into a yoga and meditation practice.....

I thought that since it's my blogoversary I should be able to post something just for me, something that makes me feel good, and I figured that you wouldn't find fault with my selfishness. This, my favorite advertisement shown during the Olympics, is what I wanted desperately to post in celebration of Year Number Two at Writerquake. Not only wanted to, but needed to have here. And once it was embedded into the post I realized why I love the ad so much. Aside from it being such an obvious ad-age winner, aside from the very fine song by Lou Reed (and I do not care if his song might actually be about heroin, as discussed in comments at youtube, because it is perfect in context with the ad's intent and artistic impression), I love the ad because it reminds me of all of you.  It reminds me that, although my blogging friends are scattered on all parts of this beautiful planet, we are not so far apart or so different from one another and that the differences that do exist are wondrous. It reminds me of how much you have come to mean to me in these past two years. Then I realized that this post isn't just for me after all; it is for us.

In watching the ad here I forgave myself for being so ungrounded lately. In fact, my communication with many of you has led me to a self-forgiveness that I had not attained before joining the blogosphere. Reading your posts, viewing your expressions of art, having comments from you after my own posts have all gone into a kind of soul-bank for me, a place of honesty where I've found freedom to be myself again in ways I had allowed to be suppressed during the last decade.

So, thank you for looking at the squiggly ugly things crawling away when we turned over the rocks they were hiding under. Thank you for showing me your parts of the world that help me to dream beyond mine. Thank you for soaring in the blogosphere with me, especially today!

Perfect Day - lyrics (portion) 

Oh it's such a perfect day,
I'm glad I spent it with you.
Oh such a perfect day,
You just keep me hanging on,
You just keep me hanging on.


I discovered something amazing in working on this post, something that highlights the synchronicity of pieces of my life, when I am open to seeing them........
NASA's Earth Observatory website features an article with photos taken from the space station of various cities at night. What serendipity to read that they exist as a result of a device constructed by astronaut, Don Pettit, who is a native son of my town Silverton, Oregon! We absolutely love the guy here. Although he resides with his family elsewhere he returned to be the Grand Marshal in our annual festival parade after his first trip aboard the space station. He is a focal point in a mural painted on one of the downtown buildings (Silverton is a "mural art" town and I promise to feature some of the murals here in the future.)

This is an excerpt from the article linked in the above paragraph:

In late 2002 and early 2003, astronaut Don Pettit, part of International Space Station Expedition 6, spent some time accumulating spare parts from around the space station, and constructed a device called a barn-door tracker. A barn-door tracker is a camera mount commonly used by astronomers and photographers on the ground to capture images of stars and planets in the night sky. The camera is mounted on a hinged platform that can be moved very slowly and precisely (by turning a knob). On the ground, the device allows photographers to compensate for the rotation of the Earth relative to the stars. In space, it allows astronauts to compensate for the movement of the Space Station relative to the Earth below. The careful coordination keeps the targeted city in the same position in the camera’s field of view during the long exposure, even though both the station and Earth’s surface are moving.

Pettit’s tracker and nighttime photography techniques produced hundreds of images of cities from around the world that had estimated resolutions (level of detail) of about 60 meters. Since then, a few other crew members have been able to successfully master night photography techniques. . .

Recently, Don Pettit assembled a sequence of several of the most striking images of city lights at night into an animated “world tour” [high-resolution (126 MB MPEG), web-resolution (39 MB QuickTime)] of cities at night (script). This video, produced entirely by Pettit, takes you on a quick trip comparing cities from different regions, all viewed from the International Space Station. . .

The video is SPECTACULAR!
What a world we live in. What a world we are.........

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