Monday, May 13, 2013

Observation - Leading to collection!

Hi All - Happiest of Monday's to each of you.
This past week has been a crazy one, filled with taking in all the sights, sounds and smells of spring and getting help with some of the major jobs around our new yard in Paducah. The builder of the garden in our new home did a bang up job - springtime has been filled with flowers - daffodils peeking through the snow and blooming dogwoods and azaelas, now roses and huge double irises.  For all these and the MANY more we are very grateful, and we would have loved to just (as we should) let it all be for a year until we could see everything, BUT for the ivy.

Someone along the way had planted invasive ivy that wandered up into my magnolia tree, wrapped around one of the dogwoods,  through basement windows and threatened to just completely take over.

It had to go -- 12 hours of pulling ivy, and 8 bags of the stuff did little more. We needed help! 


And, help we got! After Nam and his crew came in - 5 truckloads of ivy gone - and a new bed of mulch we are ready for some kick-back time.

I kicked-back by taking an on-line workshop
- Venture Lab-A Crash Course on Creativity via Stanford University. This free, worldwide learning opportunity is great, and this past week was about Observation -

Our assignment (similar to my suggestion to you last week) was to take a 30 minute walk and just take it all in and then to create a mind-map that told all about all the things we had 'observed'.

Mind-mapping is quite fun, and valuable - a great way to collect and organize anything. Since my own did not seem to upload for class I'm sharing it here.

This week I encourage you to also start collecting your observations, via journals, or photographs.

For sounds heard recently on my trip through the Caribbean I  used a recording app on my iPad to record the wonderful songs being sung from several of the churches and once just the sounds of the open market places.

How are you going to start -
or continue collecting your observations?
I would love to hear about them all!


~Rose



No comments:

Post a Comment