Welcome to 2012! So fresh and new and full of possibilities.
None of us can know what lies ahead. We plan. We work toward our goals. Yet we know there will be surprises along the way. There’s an element of mystery and grace for which we cannot neatly account.
And so we wonder.
This liminal space, between what has been and what will be, is a place where storytellers and artists play.
So let’s ease into the new year with two short stories, a song, and a curious form of art.
Mr. Moses (a true story)
Artist Marian SkottMyhre shares a memory from her childhood in this very brief story brought to us by Gratefulness.org.
Two Travelers and a Farmer (a folktale)
Retired professor D.L. Ashliman gathers folktales from all cultures and puts them on the web for everyone to enjoy. Here’s a very short American folktale for us as we travel into the new year.
Satchmo
Louis Armstrong was born in 1901 in the poorest section of New Orleans. He began to work at the age of seven.
On New Year’s Eve 1913, he celebrated at the stroke of midnight by firing a pistol into the air. The result? Confinement for two years in a reform school called the Colored Waif’s Home. Where he learned to play the coronet.
As of New Year’s Eve 2012, there were almost 1.5 million hits for one of Satchmo’s YouTube videos. Which one? You guessed it. And here it is.
Visual Mashup (more than the sum of its parts)
The image on this post is a visual mashup. What’s more, its a visual mashup of 1,000 individual visual mashups!
Here’s a closeup and the story behind this breathtaking Big Heart of Art.
Imagine! All the contributing artists share their gifts with us freely under a Creative Commons license. Such generosity!
Life as mashup
You might say this post is a mashup of sorts. And so is life. Elements present themselves. We integrate them in our own unique way.
My nephew Chris is an artist. He told me that at it’s heart, art is about seeing.
If life is more than the sum of its parts, how we see matters. And how we express our unique selves in our moment-by-moment choices is our way of creating our life. We may even find that the dark, hard parts have their place in the whole mashup.
Your turn
Did these artists prompt thoughts you’d like to share with us? Please leave a comment. And I’d sure appreciate you passing this post on to others.
May 2012 be a lively mashup for us all!
Image by qthomasbower at Flickr
