she's back on that inspiration thing again

like many out there, i was inspired by the women of 3191, quietly, mindfully depicting their lives on opposite coasts. and again like many, i longed for such a project. one which would push my photography. one which would push me to be more mindful of everyday things myself. one which i would share with someone whose photography and view of the world inspired me. and i am so happy that i have found kristina and that project. we were just discussing last evening that we found each other thru the überfabulous sandra juto's blog. and we all know she's very inspiring too - so thanks sandra, you undoubtedly don't know it, but you brought us together. and i'm so pleased with what's unfolding.  both kristina and i were traveling last week and we're sharing our travel photos all week, but first, a little glimpse of the weekend just gone by. do go check it out here.

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as you all undoubtedly have noticed, i travel quite a lot. i need the excitement. i need the pulse. i need to see new things, to experience new things. going away makes me more grateful for home as well. in short, travel is a sort of life blood to me, keeping my perspectives fresh and my eye honed. it makes me tick. i was thinking about the things that i look for when i travel. i find i'm drawn to the familiar...

starbucks only recently came to denmark and it's only in the airport, so i associate starbucks with travel (sorry bill, i love a good starbucks latte, despite what they did to the sonics). and look how relaxing it is!

but mostly, i'm drawn to the strange, the unexpected, the challenging...

and i'm a sucker for a good ruin--tho' this one--newgrange, a stone age site, was a bit reconstructed (in the 60s, can you tell?) for my taste...

there were some marvelous petroglyphs (my beloved helleristninger) there, which i am certain will be showing up soon in my art.

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i've been vicariously watching the results of rachel's latest art journaling course go up in the flickr group and have been doing a bit of art journaling along with it...as you saw last month. and i've got a couple of pages going, where i have created a lovely background and i'm totally stuck on the words. me, stuck on words, imagine that. i wonder why that happens? i'm trying not to obsess about it and just let them come in their own good time and in the meantime, enjoy making pages that will be great bases for the eventual words.

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hmm, what else inspires of late?

there's a lot of shoe and foot photography out there in the blogosphere these days and i'm finding it has made me a little obsessed with both buying new shoes and photographing them. hmm. i wonder if this particular bit of inspiration is healthy? got these in dublin (which you already know if you've been hanging out on twitter). they're super comfortable and they look pretty in the afternoon sun. 

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i find myself going back again and again to look at jude hill's marvelous spirit cloth creations. both on her blog and on flickr. her small quilted stories are so dense with layered meaning that i am just drawn to them and inspired by them. i've worked a bit farther on the first piece that has arisen from her inspiration and still don't know what it will be. i'm using it as an exercise in patience as well and just enjoying the process of watching it unfold before me and trying to listen to my inner muse when she tells me what comes next.

where are you finding inspiration these days?

short-term thinking has long-term consequences

here we are at number 600 and it seems like just yesterday that i did no. 500! that's a lotta posts written in about two and half months. i'll admit i've felt a bit lately like i haven't really had anything of substance to say. maybe it's because my mind is on x-bows and ice-class tankers and ships that run on LNG and it seems like with all the crafty stuff i usually share here, that's not really the stuff for this forum. but there's some shipping stuff on my heart and on my mind that i just have to write about today in this, my 600th post. because it feels like those round numbers shouldn't be wasted.

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last week, there was some hubbub in the news when one of the tabloids reported that the former minister of commerce, who recently stepped down from his post and from the leadership of the conservative party (of his own accord, by the way), had been on a whole lot of golf outings and hunting trips with the glittering heads of the danish business community. i'll admit that doesn't really surprise me all that much. it's called lobbying. companies do it. politicians partake. and influence is won, influence which actually goes both ways. it's how business is transacted. where's the scandal?

one of his big causes, no doubt as a result of these golf games and hunting trips, was something called "det blå danmark," which led a rather significant campaign to keep denmark among the main seafaring nations in the merchant fleet of the world. a big part of it is/was a drive to get young people to choose seafaring and shipping in general as a career. it wasn't the most effective campaign in the world, as far fewer are seeking admission to the officers' education than are needed. however, i'm not convinced that it was the wrong campaign, but more that going off to sea isn't really as appealing as a career anymore.

there are a variety of reason for this, as i see them:

1. young danish women expect their man to take part in household duties on an equal basis. if there are kids, the men are in there changing diapers. if you're out sailing half the year, it's a bit tough for this to be equal.
2. young danish men, while largely very attractive, are, to put it bluntly, afraid of the young danish women and their expectations. on other words, they're pussy whipped (to put it even more bluntly). this is bad for the officers' education (which although open to girls, is still overwhelmingly populated by boys). (clarification: this renders the boys too scared to choose this career.)
3. people can't imagine being out of touch--they expect internet, SMSing, email. not all ships have this onboard, as satellite broadband solutions are still very expensive. ships generally have email, but it's pushed to the satellite by the captain a couple of times a day. young people (and i would count myself here), can't imagine being without their twitter and facebook and blog and what have you. do we exist if we're not online these days?
4. seafaring is no longer a way to see the world. port stays are short and people are working their fannies off with loading and offloading cargo during the entire stay. there's very little time for shore leave.
5. people these days no longer feel "married" to a particular career. we try a variety of things and have different jobs in different industries. people don't go to work for one company at 20 and retire from the same company at 65. 
6. in denmark, the education to be a finished senior officer, including sailing time, takes 7 years. if people want to take a 7-year education, they become a doctor. those fiddling with this education have misunderstood their audience--people who want a long education aren't interested in being seafarers and people who are interested in being seafarers are not interested in a long education. (i'm generalizing, but it holds up pretty well.)

there needs to be a revolution in the way ships are crewed if this is going to become an appealing career choice. perhaps treating it more like the airlines do. when the ship "lands" in a port, a new crew could take over the offloading and loading, while the sailing crew gets some time off ashore--thereby getting to see a bit of the world. of course, this only works for cargo vessels, the whole offshore support vessel world is another story--and they've already made adjustments--wherein people are on shorter rotations (2 weeks on, 2 weeks off in some cases). 

there are great things about sailing as your job. if you're northern european, you're probably home for half the year and out sailing the other half. not a lot of jobs can boast of 6 months paid vacation. it's less for people from other countries (e.g. the philippines, which provides 25% of the world's seafarers)--they are generally out for 9-10 months and home only 2-3 months a year. it depends on what conditions you're culturally willing to accept and it depends on how good your unions are. northern europeans have had strong unions, so the conditions are pretty good. 

but, back to that commerce minister...i wonder what will happen now that he's gone? the young, smart, up-and-coming young lady who replaced him doesn't appear to be the golf course/hunting schmoozing type. and she' seems a bit fancy for det blå danmark, so she'll no doubt have another pet cause. but it seems to me that it's important for denmark on a geopolitical stage to be a seafaring nation. when you're pretty much entirely dependent on trade because you don't really have that many natural resources (a bit of oil in the danish sector of the north sea), having a role in international merchant shipping seems important. if there's no one in the government with the ear of the shipowners, reflagging ships to flags of convenience (marshall islands, liberia and the like) and getting those sailing personnel elsewhere (read: at lower costs) and moving ship/crewing management to places like singapore just might start to look very appealing to the bottom line. especially in these times where no stone of savings is left unturned. denmark's geopolitical position aside, what will it mean for the several thousand danes who are sailing in the merchant fleet today? and where will the danish shipowners get their experienced seagoing personnel for key positions ashore if no one goes to sea anymore?

i fear a time of short-term thinking and solutions is on the horizon and that they will have long-term consequences. i wish those good old boys would get back out on the golf course and sort this out.

thinking and hyperlinks

as we've seen already this week, my mind works very strangely. i can go from a simple teapot to early soviet film in one post. and even (more or less) explain how i got there. and because i just finished malcolm gladwell's blink, i've been pondering thought processes in general.

consider the following series of pictures:

our brains are processing stuff in the background all the time. as an example: i tried to consciously note all of the things that went through my mind as i just went downstairs to pour another cup of tea--a simple and rather automatic act. along the way, i noted that one of the pictures in the stairway was a bit crooked and thought about how they get that way all the time because they're in such a high traffic area. i flashed also for a moment on the ruin of pergamon that was IN the picture and smiled as i remembered the heat and sunshine and how i was wearing white linen and sabin a sundress that day. as i stirred my tea, i looked at the skinny laminx cloth napkin that was sitting on the countertop with a sprig of evergreen still laying on it and one of my precious resurrection fern crocheted stones. which led me to think of the set of my own stones that i sent to margie yesterday. that in turn made me think of some of the stones upstairs in a dark corner of the bookshelves and i wondered if i should have included any of them. i went up, cup of tea in hand and looked at the stones and saw a shard of ceramic with numbers on it that i found on the old base in subic and i remembered the little bottle of sea glass gathered on a beach near there in the philippines. which made me think about how the treasured and revered sea glass is really trash that some jerk has thrown into the ocean in the form of glass bottles which then break and tumble in the waves until they are smooth, pretty pieces of tumbled glass that wash up on shore and which people actually sell on etsy. which made me think of my list and how i need to just get my eyeball pillows up on etsy already.

it has taken me nearly an hour to write and gather pictures for the above (while doing laundry and lighting two fireplaces and a dozen other tasks), but the whole chain of thoughts probably took under 30 seconds in reality. because our minds are fast. they link things and make connections. i've been thinking for awhile about hyperlinks and whether they map this thought process and reflect it. and that's part of why i set all the hyperlinks above.

of course the whole concept of hyperlinks is manmade, so it no doubt reflects something of a human thought process, since it is born of it. (why am i always getting myself into chicken and egg circles?) but is it an example of that sense i get of the internet as taking on kind of life of its own--evolving us (and perhaps itself) to the next level? or is it just a topography of thought insofar as thought can at all be mapped? how many thoughts did i actually have along the way during those 30 seconds that i didn't catch hold of, that couldn't be mapped? would my topography simply have blanks, or would i be able to fill them in if i could tune in to that unconscious level?

that's some heavy pondering for a thursday and i'm definitely not done thinking about it. how about you?