vocabulary

graffiti, charlottetown - ml 2011

For a small town, there is an awful lot that goes on in Charlottetown.  A friend of mine had a couchsurfer staying with her last night, and in the space of just a few hours we all went to Pecha-Kucha style talks at the library about sustainability, and then had mad group art-making at the bi-monthly City Nights event.  The theme of the night was 'meat,' so several of us collaborated on a rather hilarious cardboard slaughterhouse, complete with blood splatters, a pasture and miniature cows.  Hopefully the resolve of the vegetarians in the group was only strengthened by the experience :)  
You can watch a short video from a previous City Nights here. 

celebrate - ml 2011

This past spring I decide to venture into the world of video, naively thinking "oh, this will be fun and relatively easy!"  Since then I've been engaged in a mighty stand-off with video-editing software, and we had reached a stalemate until a gifted filmmaker friend graciously took the time to show me the many, many ropes of Final Cut Pro. 


The experience of struggling through a new medium had me thinking a lot about vocabulary.  It seemed to be the main reason I was having trouble - because I didn't understand the terms.  Perhaps that is the essence of understanding a new concept/language/process - building a vocabulary.  For instance, when the categories/terms of body, mind, and spirit were first used, it wasn't that the actual experience was new, it was that now there was vocabulary to help us understand it.  And that new vocabulary allowed for abundant growth and change to happen in human consciousness.  I wonder if, with all the rising tides, both literal and metaphorical, that we're faced with right now, if maybe what we really need is a new way of understanding what is happening; a new vocabulary.  Just a thought...


"There is no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening. "  - Marshall McLuhan