Sparks from the Fire

Just got an iPad for my birthday.  Amazing toy, tool, whatever…  Watchfire Music is developing an app for the iPad, iPod and iPhone that will blow some minds and bring further inspiration to the masses, so I thought I ought to own one.

I had heard that it was an unnecessary toy – a sort of in-betweener somewhere between the iPhone and the computer, a toy for rich kids, but I’ve had it for a week and excuse me if I now write an ad for Apple.  This thing is fabulous.  Try to wrestle it from me and you’ve got a fight on your hands.

The Missus got a Kindle about four months ago.  She just about sleeps with it under her pillow.  She won’t leave home without it.  She’s a big reader on the train she rides to Boston every weekend and swears by it.

I downloaded the free Kindle app for my iPad.  Now we can share some of the books we read.  I dropped my book I was halfway through reading the other night getting off the plane.  Never knew it until last night when I settled down to read for an hour or so.  Couldn’t find the book.  So I downloaded it in literally 15 seconds into my iPad and got cozy. (more…)

I’m deeply inside a great novel at the moment – the kind that when you read it, sometimes you lose track of which reality is real, yours or the novel’s.  I spent long hours this past weekend deep into the drama of this book that I remember reading back in the 7^th grade and loving.  I’m loving the re-read even more now.

Anyone looking for a little Inspiration during these times of recession and budgetary restrictions would do themselves a favor by picking up this charming and most well-written story and diving into it.

A Tree Grows In Brooklyn is a novel by Betty Smith first published in 1943. It relates the coming-of-age story of its main character, Francie Nolan, and her Austrian/Irish-American family in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York City. The novel is set in the first and second decades of the 20th century. The book was an immense success, a nationwide best-seller that was distributed to servicemen overseas. It was also adapted into a popular motion picture, the first feature film directed by Elia Kazan.

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Hold on to your Inspirational hats! I lost mine over Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin’s Inspirational classic, Three Cups of Tea, which I just finished reading. Published by Penguin Books, this little gem produces a guaranteed 10 inspired tears per chapter and gets you connected up to the world along the way. I won’t tell you the plot or what it’s about; suffice it to say, ‘Just read it!’

This man, Greg Mortenson, is as close to a modern day saint as they come and I’m a better man for the chance of getting to know him. He goes to the top of my donation list – if there was ever a charity where you could count on the giving getting to the right getter, baby, this is the one. (more…)

The short and incomplete history of a seeker

I am a seeker. “What do you seek?” you may ask. Perhaps first let’s get on the same page with what it means to seek. Webster’s Deluxe Unabridged Dictionary says, to ‘seek’ is, “to search, to pursue, to explore, to try to learn or discover.”

What do I seek? I seek truth. Again, our dictionary says that truth is “the real or true state of things.” So by definition a seeker is an ‘explorer’ of the ‘real or true state of things’.

Many people seek through their religion. I do too, but I’ve learned in life to grab it any way I can from any place it comes – as long as at its center there is truth.

When asked how he could possibly break through and smash the traditions of music with his historic and monumental work The Rite Of Spring, Igor Stravinsky said that in order to break the barriers of music, one has to first have studied and know all of music to begin with.

And so, as a seeker of truth in music, I listen to the likes of Bach, Mozart, Tshaikovsky, Copeland, Gershwin, Lennon and McCartney, Dylan, James Taylor, Paul Simon, and Stravinsky among many others. As a seeker of truth in life, I listen to the Bible, Confucious, The Koran, The Dead Sea Scrolls, Krishnamurti, The I Ching, and Lao Tsu.

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