I found this great word picture today on a site that has intrigued me for a while. I love how the name of this site/design firm twists my brain:
Awesome.
Along with the above visual, our working-but-not-jobbing friends offered this:
The world needs your contributions and can’t wait to see what you’ve got.
And:
“A year from now you may wish you had started today.” – Karen Lamb
Which reminded me of a few people I spent my weekend with. People who started, finished, and launched their ideas.
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I have been orbitting around the edges of Stefan’s life this past week. Nearly every car ride lately has been spent soaking in his new album nonstop—except when I’m pausing to answer amazing questions from R-kids, like, for example, what are heretics, and what do they have to do with drunks?
Seriously. You couldn’t pay money to have conversations like these. (Or maybe you could. Just buy Stefan’s album, and play it. For the conversations, or just for the music!)
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Then, there’s my new friend “Bill Olson.”
I spent some time this weekend with Bill and his stunning wife, Mary Lou. They are both at least 25 years younger than the seven or eight decades they claim to be. They are brimming with life—and laughter, and something really tender hanging in between…
Bill and Mary Lou invited me and R-kids to a personal tour of their private museum (a.k.a. basement), which is filled floor to ceiling with sculptures and photos of sculptures Bill has made over the years. One of the first was a simple, smooth box he carved as a young sailor in the South Pacific, sometime in the 1940s.
After the war, and art school, he moved on to:
floats for the Orange Bowl Parade,
trees for Disneyworld,
a life-size elephant for someone’s drug store (or was it restaurant?),
a small army of four-foot Snoboy mascots,
a random assortment of dead-on-life-like bear claws and deer antlers,
a three-inch replica of a complicated horse sculpture,
a baby bed shaped like a swan,
a carousel horse.
I could go on and on.
After watching “March of the Penguins,” he sculpted a penguin family of his own.
After visiting Mount Rushmore, he made a two-foot replica and sent a copy to the Mount Rushmore gift shop. They said it was the best replica they had ever seen.
He had ideas, and he launched them. One after another.
All while raising three daughters with Mary Lou, supporting them all with his art. His gift.
How can you not be inspired?
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Sunday I went to a book release party for my friend Becky, who just published her first book. This book was a labor of love, in every sense of that phrase. Blood, sweat, tears, soul, and way too many hours at the laptop have gone into those pages. Did I mention soul?
For Becky, and for all of us who have awaited this project, this book is a birth. A long-awaited finally. It took years and years to reach this stage. And here it is.
Launched.
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First, congratulations to these three visionary artists.
For the rest of us, who probably have some ideas of our own, this can all be very inspiring to hear. But *sigh* it can also be a little discouraging.
I mean, really: How?
When?
How?
Seriously, how?
And, maybe also: Why bother?
I have those questions myself, but I’m loving this article on that subject, by Anne Lamott.
And I think I’ll be checking out this podcast too, because sometimes I wonder: Have all the good ideas already been discovered anyway?
So, friends, here’s to your ideas. And here’s to launching them one day soon.
by julie rybarczyk
