From wonder into wonder existence opens. Lao Tzu

The reverb10 prompt asks what “you have done to cultivate wonder this year.”  I am going to give this a shot, but am feeling distinctly unwonderful.

I also am confused by exactly how I’m supposed to get to interact with the other folks doing Reverb10, which is what drew me in. I don’t see an RSS feed of the blogs or aggregator. I think twitter is the main meeting place, but I haven’t been terribly involved with twitter lately—it kind of lost it’s shine (maybe I need to decrease the number of tweets I get from classroom 2.0). I’m giving it another try because of this. I’ve put some twitter functionality into the blog, though I’m not sure it is the right one.

Ok, I went away for an hour—had dinner that my lovely J cooked because I’m still in the big dislocated ankle boot  and tweaked the widgets in my blog.  I think maybe I’m closer to twitter integration now. I also added  feedjit, but I don’t like the advertisements on it. I’m learning more in the last 24 hours about crossing the streams of social networking than I have in the last 6 months or more.

Already reverb10 seems to be making the net less anonymous—which is good. I think folks behave better when they aren’t skulking about in secret.

Anyway— what have I/we done to cultivate wonder this year—that’s pretty easy honestly and I have to say it is much like @libismorgan. Just look at that face:

Being her mom is really cool. She’s a brave, inquisitive, kind and magical Bean.  I’m going to have to mention Disney World again—seriously going there with her and seeing her complete belief in all the princesses and pixies, in Mickey and Minnie—well it was a wonder to see one little body contain that much joy and excitement. Every day she’s excited by some project or other. Today we took her dolls and we’re making a “stop motion” movie with them dancing and being judged by some other dolls. And if I remember to participate with her—instead of giving in to being tired, or hurt/peeved  by something that happened at work, or just too much of a grown up—then I get to feel a bit of that too.

I also try to use my camera to make myself see things differently. And to look at things I might not look at otherwise.  Learning how to take pictures is new for me. And learning how to do new things, like making twitter work with my blog, or taking pictures or how to do server admin on a Mac (I’m not a Mac person) –all those things give me a sense of wonder. New knowledge, that feeling of—“wow I didn’t know it worked that way, and now I do and look what it can do!” keeps me from plodding through my days.

Finally I guess is music. I have loved music since forever. I love to sing (even better I love to hear the Bean sing) and I hope to get back to playing various instruments. I meant to relearn ukelele this summer (I used to play with my Dad) but ran out of time. But the best thing is finding new (or new to me music) I’m lucky I have great friends like Kai and Jill who send me things like The Plague Monkeys and The Family Crest. My friend Tanya told me about Florence and the Machine.  I found Antony and the Johnsons and Meaghan Smith by just wandering around youtube or amazon or blogs. I just give things a try.

Also—and if you go a few entries back to How about some Halloween—well it takes a couple of months to get all that set up. And yes we dress up every year and we hang out outside on the steps with a huge skull full of candy and talk to about 100 kids every year. It’s our anniversary—and hey you get to dress up, be spooky and hand out candy to kids with your family, what could be better! We love to watch folks look around and find all our spooky surprises. 

The Bean, Music and Halloween. Oh, and lolcats. Can those count?