Eldora. It’s a gorgeous, sunny Sunday morning. The valley is a canvas of color splatters. The aspen are gold, a final rush before collapsing into winter’s muted palette of silver, white and gray. White has already announced itself, with patches of its cold white scattered about the entire valley in the form of snow. Josh and Bill report that Friday night it snowed vigorously up here, with half a foot or so on the ground yesterday morning.
Yesterday Connie and I met with Carola regarding the Dreamways website. (Carola got into Denver from Brazil Wednesday. Turns out that the time difference between Colorado and Porto is only three hours.) She has made all the changes I requested at the beginning of the week. She made a few more as we talked yesterday, and has a couple more to do. And – the site is ready to go online! This is stupendously exciting for me.
The Dreamways website is a reality! What a journey it has been! When the problems with diacritical marks and apostrophes/quotation marks arose 2 weeks ago, I did feel quite dispirited. But these problems were fixed – such a relief!
However, Word files dumped into Moveable Type lose all “decoration”, such as bolding, italics, underlines and fonts. Also tabs / spaces to indent paragraphs can’t be used. Turns out that paragraph indentations simply cannot be done. (This seems very bizarre to me, but such is the reality.) And – there is not ability to do different fonts.
I was faced with dumping each of my Word journal files into Moveable Type work files and then inserting bolding, italics, underlines, as well as returns between paragraphs. Since I have a lot of text with no graphics (at this point), it immediately became clear that it is important to do what I can with the tools available to create visual diversity.
I decided that I would bold a word or phrase in each paragraph to Mitch each such group of sentences. Connected-in-topic paragraphs I didn’t CR between, but paragraphs that initiated new topics I preceded by an empty line.
The prospect of going through all of those files yet again daunted me. Last weekend I mulled this over. I realized that it didn’t matter how much work this involved for me: if I wanted the journal on the website and in a workable visual presentation, I simply had to do it. So, I spent fifteen or so hours last week getting the project done. I finished yesterday morning.
While with Carola Saturday, I uploaded (downloaded?) all of the Journal files up to Sept. of this year into the website. What a feeling of accomplishment!
With Carola there, I was able to do lots of exploring with Mov. Type and the website. This way of learning is much easier for me, face-to-face with a guide person, rather than by phone or e-mail.
Connie affirmed that she would get some content into her Dream Blog yesterday and call Carola so that Carola could do what is necessary to get the website up.
My level of excitement re Dreamways is very high, with the website now real. It no longer feels like something “out there” and “down the road”, that might not happen. It now is (vitually!) tangible. All the work put into it is paying off in having a wonderful site!
It surprises me, how invigorating the reality of the website is for me. I am truly excited. As I was telling Connie, it feels like the site is a space of Home, a place of purchase from which I can go out into the world to say and do what is significant to me.
I am seeing Don Quixote, the caballero andante, the Dreamful Hidalgo, fearlessly (and naively…) setting out on his journeys, unflagging and unflinching. Who’s to say what is a windmill and what a real Dragon? Perhaps he ultimately was no one’s fool. Or everyone’s fool, like M.L. King, Gandhi and Rolihlala. I hope to live a life being a fool of that ilk.
Friday D and I recorded Shooting Blanks at UCCS. The “call-in” featured me as Armīns / Meeny. The recording session went VERY well. It seemed like both D and I had the biggest energies yet for the dialogue. I felt perfectly at ease „being“ Meeny. The half hour flew by! I am increasingly loving doing the show.
This radio project is such a wonderful testing ground for Doing Big. It dawned on me that at ISAMI there is no Big Bad Critical Dragon to keep me small. I can safely experiment as much as I dare.
Taking on Armīns / Meeny was intimidating at first. I was uncertain as to who he might be, scared to have him be my father. Frightened to be my father. But that is exactly who he must be, I realized: my father. The Fear of „channeling“ him was yet another iteration of silencing myself when confronted by him. As I’ve now „been“ him, in practice and on the air, I realize that, in addition to gaining Voice, I’m also feeling greater compassion for him. As I mindfully talk his words, I can feel and understand what he might be feeling and thinking.