Foghorn Lullaby

 

What is your sound?

What is the one sound which above all others, causes you to slowly unravel like a tightly wound film reel spooling out onto the floor?

If you could record just one sound for a child that you love, what would it be?

If you could choose a single sound to rock you to sleep, what would you choose?

Sounds are free. They wind their way through the corridors of our stone fortresses and float out of barred windows. They echo through locked spaces and come and go, nonchalantly circumventing all our defences.

I’ve always loved to be high up in the city and hear the street sounds rising into the room, making fun of my carefully constructed little secure space.  Shaking me out of my complacency and celebrating the messiness and glory of life all around.

Now that I live at the three lighthouses, my open window lets the constant, massive sound of the sea rush in on the damp salt breeze.

And right now, as I write, the foghorn is sounding its woody, resonant note across miles of sea. It’s a huge sound and enormously comforting.

We can’t ever cut ourselves off. Even when we think that we are completely separate, sounds can come in to us.  And remind us, painfully and joyfully, that we are not alone.

 

Creative relaxation online

four – making sounds

Global Soundscapes is making a map of how the earth sounds.

You can click on the map to hear both natural and made sounds recorded around the world.

You can filter sounds to just listen to “sounds that make me happy” or – should you wish – “sounds that stress me out”.

You can download an app and record the sounds of your own environment to contribute to the project, which aims to use the sounds to learn about the health of the planet.

Links –

All the info is at

https://www.globalsoundscapes.org

or search for global soundscapes /soundscape ecology

more info

You’ve got to like a site with four buttons on the homepage labelled watch explore record  and fun.

It’s worth a thought – the sounds of the place where you live are something other people value and want to hear. Maybe we should take out the headphones for a moment and listen to where we are…

Grace and peace to you.

 

 

Touchstones and starlight

Do you pick up a stone now and then and carry it in your pocket?

Smooth stones are very soothing. Put on your winter coat and plunge a hand in the pocket amidst city street clamour or meeting hopping frenzy.

A smooth pebble, picked up in calm and emptiness, on a beach two seasons and a hundred miles away, can become a touchstone.

A touchstone – a thing whose fine quality can help us judge the quality or genuineness of others.

For me, the “other” thing that I need to test the genuineness of is usually myself. That cool touch can momentarily remind me of who I’d like to be, the person I am at my calmest and best.   It can make my self seeking or triviality seem very transient.

Maybe its the simplicity and beauty of that shape. Or because pebbles are also the oldest things most of us are ever likely to hold.

This one is 150 million years old. What an incredible thing I am holding. How amazing. I imagine the only reason it isn’t in a glass case on velvet is that on the beach, it was one amongst 180 billion.

You are one amongst 7 billion people on earth. That doesn’t make you any less precious. Or amazing.

Grace and peace to you.

 

Creative relaxation online

three- explore distant galaxies

Galaxy Zoo is a project which asks you to help to classify galaxies according to shape – spiral, round  – and features so that astronomers can understand more about how they formed, and ultimately about the story of the universe.

It uses data from a number of telescopes, including the Hubble, so that some of the galaxies surveyed have included the furthest we’ve yet seen – which means they are billions of years old.

No specialist knowledge needed.

Just looking at the photos is amazing.

Links

http://www.galaxyzoo.org

http://www.zooniverse.org

Or search for “galaxy zoo”

More info

Galaxy Zoo data has proved to be accurate and  astronomers have been able to rely on it to focus precious observation hours on the galaxies which best fit their research.

Lots more like this at the parent site Zooniverse, a creative science project  where everyone can get involved in research online.

 

 

Jumping In

Remember those really annoying fridge poetry magnets that prevented you from ever effectively cleaning the fridge door? They got into children’s mouths, hoovers, dogs and if you were clumsy, the hummus. 

But when they were new, we had a set and the most unlikely people wrote poetry in our kitchen. Some of the poems blew us away. Some of them made absolutely no sense (even to the people who wrote them). Some of them were strange and wonderful.

Somehow, when they came across them for the first time,  the invitation of the magnets made people jump in. 

We took to jotting them in a book which then got lost behind the cookery books, and found again when we moved house.  By then, a lot of those friends had moved on, moved out, fallen out or in one case emigrated. 

Reading through the poems when I should have been sorting our endless gubbidge, I was struck again by the people who might otherwise have thought poetry pretentious, or felt self conscious, or just opened the fridge and got the milk out, and who had left traces of creativity behind for us because of those damn magnets. 

I packed the book.

Creative relaxation online

Two – write and record some poetry

I’ve been using the If poetry app for a while. It has some nice wandering line drawings and a gentle feel which is designed, I suspect, for children but which makes it rather a relaxing space. It has a modest but pleasingly random selection of poems. 

There’s a function which allows you to have poems read to you (by a number of well known voices) and another which allows you to compose and record your own poems.  These can then be sent via email. 

The If app is only available for the i-s and is a paid app. Currently the other drawback is that until they publish the update, you can’t record on IOS 7, so they’ve reduced the price to 69p… so, you might prefer:

The Poetry App from the Josephine Hart foundation. I personally don’t dig the Sherlock Holmes Study look, but I can see how it might feel cosy. Also it’s free, exceptionally easy to start using, and works on iPad, android and iPhone.

 You can have a large range of poems read to you, again by a constellation of voices. 

You can compose, record and email your own poems in a lovely font and they appear as fat, rather pompously satisfying, leather bound books in your library.

You can then try clicking on strange victorian cameos floating in a night sky to explore poetry by author.  Each poem is then reached via a Phineas Fogg style balloon. Mad. But within ten minutes I found a fantastic Philip Larkin poem Id never seen and wrote a poem about what it’s like here right now at the three lighthouses.  It’s below. 

Give it a try. Jump in. 

Grace and peace to you. 

Wild Spray

Wild spray, outside my window
Blusters and gesticulates in the dark
Fingerprinting the glass with salt
Tracing a message for the morning

Fifteen things and creative relaxation

I love to play Candy Crush. My brain just goes into slow motion and I find it really relaxing.

I stop thinking about my shoddy parenting choices.  I also stop thinking of my unanswered emails, which are the e- equivalent of an ironing pile where the youngest child grew out of the things crushed at the bottom six months ago.

In other words, it stops my querulously anxious brain from ceaselessly berating me for my failings and I zone out for a bit.

The thing is, if I spend  20 minutes playing candy crush at bedtime the government won’t topple.  So I’ve been doing it quite a lot, or alternatively visiting thereifixedit or undertaking random web browsing of the follow a link from a link from a link from a Facebook post variety.

And what I’ve noticed is this: it’s all a bit unsatisfying.  I suppose because its ultimately unproductive and uncreative and frequently unenlightening. Though fun at the time…

In a month when Ethical Consumer is focussing on “how ethical is your online life?” and looking at the global impact of our net use, I’m also suspecting that laughing at other people’s bad repairs violates my “everyone on the Internet is an actual person” creed.

Other parts of cheezburger definitely do, though I don’t think the cats care if we laugh at them. But some insecure and uncertain teenage girl who was trying to take a selfie that made her feel beautiful and worthwhile definitely cares.

Also, I’m getting a bit jaded with fifteen things. Everything important to us can’t be reduced to fifteen things surely?

Fifteen superfoods will sadly not boost my skin’s elasticity, which I suspect is a lost cause. Might justify me pigging out on avocado but that’s it. Fifteen mistakes we all make just might help a bit though I guarantee I’m going to make them all again, and fifteen people you won’t believe exist helps noone. (Its true. They don’t exist.)

So I’ve started to look for relaxation-time-things to do online which are more creative, productive and add to the sum of human happiness not misery. Number one is below.

I can’t guarantee there will be fifteen.

Grace and peace to you.

 

One – Help tag the nation’s oil paintings

Become a Your Paintings tagger and spend the odd ten minutes relaxation tagging paintings so others can find and enjoy them.

Its strangely soothing and you get to enjoy a wonderfully random selection of paintings, or conversely focus on a collection you like.

Suggestions from the good old Oxf.Eng.Dic. to help. No specialist knowledge needed.

Links

http://www.thepcf.org.uk/what_we_do/223

http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings

Or look up “your paintings tagger”

http://www.ethicalconsumer.org

 

More info:

The PCF, a small charity dedicated to making all the UK’s nationally owned art accessible to all of us, has created an ambitious project with help from the BBC to put all the nation’s 210,000 oil paintings online. In order for folk to be able to search effectively, tags by subject matter (not just artist and title) are essential, and unfortunately this data just doesn’t exist. Everyone can help.  Each painting needs tagging by 5 taggers to ensure a useful variety of tags.  They need you!