Always re-newing ...

The Brits talk of repairing things differently than we ... well, actually, they talk about EVERYTHING differently than we do. One of their verbiage "intriguities" that I love, is when they replace a part on a car motor for instance, they don't "replace" it, they "re-new" it. As in, "Anytime one removes the cylindre-head, one must re-new the gaskets before replacing the cylindre-head upon the motor-block."

Besides the cool "re" endings rather than our "er" spelling, "re-newing" has such a gentle, loving touch-sound to it. You're not junking an old part, you're lovingly re-creating or fondly improving the ... device? ... at hand.

And so these days, I am constantly re-newing so much ... from software to websites to even the way a professional views their business 'model' ... and my website has been getting a LOT of attention from me over the last few days.

My site is not only my personal professional presence on the web, it's also the test bed for the Haugen's Galleri brand that the wife and I share. I started it once upon a time, but it's nearly completely identified with Miriam these days. It's her home for her 'tribe', as she's discovering, built upon "mothering". Our "tribes" are so different, yet ... my experiments in web presence can be applied to bring hers along as well.

I've not completed all the changes I'm in the midst of trotting out on my Showit-based current site, yet I'm already working on the replacement for it. The 'nex-gen' sites we have will be based on WordPress. I'll be able to add a seamless connection to SmugMug galleries and online preview/sales that we will use for certain clients and events. It's a continual process, never ending.

Ah yes, re-newing my business model, web presence, and view of Life on a continual basis ...and the accompanying image is of model Kailey Glodt, one of my favorite subjects to photograph.
Neil

I can't hold back Spring ...

Or Life either. For all I love Winter, it is the ... pause ... that is most dear. The quietude. The peacefulness, actually ... the now. Yes, I love watching the storms roll in and barrel their way across the landscape from the windows, but note, it is watching the storms that I love. Observing. Seeing. The marvelous and ever-changing view neither requires nor asks any action on my part.

Especially if the weather outside is frightful, I sit inside and simply enjoy the view and the passing of time. A most delicious day is one spent by the fireplace with good music and good books and a view of the roiling storms passing through, expending their fury on the lands surrounding. A good companion or two make the passing time even more enjoyable, and these are the moments that are most wondrous for me. Comforting and satisfying to my soul.

The world and the weather simply move on by, and unless I need to repair damage to something, I am unaffected by them except for the pleasure they provide me. Add a glass of fine liquid, say fresh coffee mixed to my taste, a single-malt Scotch, or glass of Merlot and the passing of time is heavenly. And again, peaceful.

But now, Spring comes. And with it, Busy-ness. Hecticity. Action. Things need doing. So many things need doing ... there's Growth everywhere, much of which needs controlling, like the grass and the fruit trees wanting to sprout new limbs EVERYWHERE ... and so much action is required of me. I can't merely sit and watch, as to keep my lands and buildings looking well and being well I must become very active. There's so much to do.

Life is so busy. So not-peaceful. So exuberant and un-controlled and so often, un-expected. Spring flings us into the pell-mell rush of summer, with all its excesses. Its newness. Just as I get comfortable with the now it is gone, never to come again. It bounces me back and forth and forces me to venture OUT.

THERE. Where the unexpected and the new play and frolic while awaiting their favorite game, the ambush of the quietude and the peace of the pause.

I can't hold back Spring, of course, any more than I can hold back Life. Why all this rush to the future? What's wrong with ... now? Ever must I steel myself for the ongoing rush of Life when Spring comes a'calling. It's that time again ... to put away the joy and comfort of Peace, and brace myself for the brash bruising that is Spring and Summer. For another year.

For the Love of January ...

I'm noticing right now, how totally BUMMED I am that it is already February ... and it's made me think a bit. Why is it so much a downer for me? This isn't at all in jest, for this is what I do feel most sincerely, and with every fiber of my being. And so I've been pondering this for the whole month of January: why do I feel most at home and in-balance with the world around me in a month most others seem to dread?

I love the "feel" of December: I'm a total Advent junkie, hooked and NEVER looking for a "cure". I find myself only wishing December was twice as long as it is every year. Still, that doesn't say anything about January. As I thought and puzzled about my love of January, I noted to myself how odd it was because nothing happens in January, really. And I found the answer within that statement. Hercule Poirot loves to have the ever-factual and direct Captain Hastings about while he is solving crimes as Captain Hastings will always make the most obvious and seeming-less useless observation of something. Yet in that statement, some little fact pops up that stirs Poirot's famous little grey cells of brain-matter to connect other seemingly un-related dots. Voila, we learn something!

And so the understanding came from within that observation to myself that it's strange to love January (as I must do). The obvious following thought is this: nothing really happens during the month, so how could one "love" ... nothing? As with Poirot and his Hastings', right there in the obvious I found my answer. I realized that I love the peaceful-ness of January, the pause in the year, when it seems every thing "stops". Nothing's growing, we stay in-doors and hunker down of an evening by the fire with a good book, some music, a movie or so on the television/dvd player.
Me, the person who always wanted to be out and about when younger ... wants little more than a quiet evening at home, a fire, and a few loved ones close by. What a change from the "Neil" of thirty years ago!

By the end of February buds and shoots and the first bulb-flowers are appearing, and the pace gets dizzyingly faster week by week. LIFE just gets very busy, hecticity abounds, and off we go for another roller-coaster ride through the year. I watch others as they THRILL to this, the "coming-alive" of the world around us, as I've heard it described, and I note how different I am. How different I am from even what *I* used to be.

I now love the pause, the contemplative time, the inward-ness of January. I love the storms outside and the fire inside, the sense of snugging down to let the world go by. To think unfettered by the need to "do" whatever it is that needs done today. To feel, to sense, and to float in the pool of the Quiet of Now.
I do get my month of that each year, but it's never enough. And as I get older, I find I want that month to be longer.
Robert Neil Haugen,
1 February, 2010

We had a wonderful visit with Joass, Rachel, Glory, and little Gabriel on Sunday evening, and I even got to hold him for quite a while, though he was asleep the entire time we were there. He smiled in his sleep while I was holding him, and we saw this cute dimple in his left cheek when he smiled! So, they're adjusting though Gabriel isn't as cooperative as he could be, so far insisting on sleeping all day and being awake much of the night.

I've always loved little ones, the newborns and toddlers and all ... but as I get older I find them not just a joy but a necessity of life. They help ground me as more and more of my precious friends and acquaintances reach the other ends of their lives. Glory and Gabriel do more for me than they realize, nor will be able to understand for many years yet.

Thanks, little ones!

Welcome Little Gabriel!

Oh joy and rapture! Our very close friends, Joass and Rachel Lyatuu, have just had their second child, little Gabriel. He joins his big sister Glory (my beloved God-child) and all are doing well and quite excited. Unfortunately for Joass, the birth came the day before he started a new job "here" in Salem, so he felt he HAD to go to work rather than call in on his first day. He is so eager to get back to the hospital and see his wife and baby!

In moments like these, I'm reminded of what I thought and would tell people through all of "our" pregnancies ... to the question, "What do you want?" All I wanted was ten little toes and ten little fingers, appropriately placed and functioning, and two bright little eyes looking back at us. Boy, girl, long, short, thick, thin, screaming, calm ... were of no serious matter to me. Just a healthy little baby.

So MUCH of life is like that. It is SO easy to get caught up in wanting all sorts of things that really are just details, and not that important. But we all need these reminders, and it seems, quite often.

Gabriel, welcome to the world, and little one, I sincerely hope that I may play some little part in introducing you to the joys of life as you grow up within that wonderful family who welcomes you with such love and joy. You are blessed and lucky, little one!

Voice and Human Potential update!

I find ... constantly ... that the most important bit of information needed to understand a concept or complete a task, or that one really necessary step in a process on the computer, was not listed nor mentioned by those writing or giving the instructions. It can be frustrating, but then, it's just like real life, isn't it? Sometimes the lack of that one thing is simply an oversight on the part of the instructor. Sometimes it is because they do that one thing so naturally it never occurs to them that for someone else struggling to learn this ... whatever it is ... that one little self-obvious step is instead something totally hidden in the fog of confusion and darkness.

But how many of the really important lessons of life can you learning by hearing someone talk? We seem to need the pain of failure, the disappointment of hopes and dreams, before we completely internalize and live by a lesson. Though why this should be true of computer program instructions I do not understand! Ah well, maybe I've not learned that lesson yet?

In this week's voice lesson, I had another major "A-ha!" moment. We are taking me ever higher in pitch, and as a tenor, that is where I need to learn to "live" vocally. Yet I have always felt pressure build up in my head as the pitch gets well up there, and it forces me to strain against it, to force the sound somewhere. But no forcing is allowed in vocal production, as tension always causes even more strain upon the listener than the singer! So, I've been working with trying various methods of avoiding the buildup of back-pressure in the head on higher pitches.

Along the way, of course, I made the most gorsh-awful squawks and squeaks. And what seemed to work, to be the answer, worried me. We've been working so hard at getting the sound out in front, and not swallowed inside me. But what seemed to work involved letting the resonance, the vibrating pulse of the sound, stay inside the center of my head, and go right up through the center of my head to my skull. It was just so wrong from everything I've been working on with Jackie and Kevin!

So, as we worked on scales and vowels into the passagio (passage into head-voice) and head voice (that bizarre area that isn't "regular" chest voice nor falsetto where tenors and sopranos go to get high), I talked of the process and findings I'd achieved, and noted my concerns that I'd been going down the wrong road. Yet as I was singing, she was very impressed with the reduction in tension and improvement in sound quality up high. And we spent some time there.

And then, she just sort of absent-mindedly noted that while the pitch resonance needed to go up through a pipe through the center of the head clear to the top of the skull (as I'd noted it felt it was doing), the vowel resonance (where in the head or mouth of the singer the vowel "feels" to be) needed to keep coming forward in (or even out front of) the mouth.

Whoa, we gotta stop and talk here!

All along, over all these years of singing in choirs and taking lessons, EVERYONE has always said the upper parts of the voice are produced quite similar to the lower parts, and should be as unified as possible. Now I'm being told that above a certain point, the pitch sensation goes one direction and the vowel another ... at a perpendicular angle, getting farther from each other as I go up. This is ... WRONG.

Isn't it?

Jackie sat there very quietly for a moment, and just looked at me while thinking through something with her hand over her mouth. No, she said after a long minute's thought, it isn't wrong, it is correct. The sensation of pitch resonance goes right up to the top of the head for tenors and sopranos ... as the vowel comes farther and farther forward. They start out very similar in "feel" but begin to diverge somewhere on the path to higher pitches.

And it was so natural for her that she had never thought of mentioning it. In fact, neither of us could think of ever hearing or seeing anyone talk about this. Which seems bizarre, as it is one of the MOST needed bits of understanding to gain access to a beautiful and easy sound while singing those high notes!

It was amazing, as we worked at adopting the mental and then the physical applications of this realization, how quickly I could sing my high scales, repeatably, and with vastly reduced tension. And at such altitude! We've worked up to the "tenor" high Bb before, though it was produced with enough tension to sound quite strained. We went to Bb, softened and lightened the vowels and got them forward, then to B, then to C. The tenor top "C". Stable, on command, and repeatable. Not at all "pretty" yet, but then, I was up there fairly easily, and now we can work on learning how to sing pretty up there over time.

So, how much of LIFE is like that? We struggle, we fight to gain an inch of progress, we feel stupid as we just can't find a way to do or be what seems so easy for others ... and then, we find that one little thing that isn't what we'd thought it must be. Suddenly, what was such a great struggle to get even close to doing is doable with only a reasonable bit of effort and attention. Soon, it will be a natural motion, an easy step, an effortless process.

And after a short period of enjoying the new-found ability, it starts all over again. Welcome to the world!

Heavy Duty Learning

It seems that life is now ... and perhaps, forevermore? ... to have a heavy-duty learning curve. A really heavy-duty learning curve! The past week I made no wonderful new photographs, nor even spent time post-processing images on the computer. Yet it was fast, furious, and exhausting.

For the past several years I've been learning about our Brave New World in the Digital Age, but it seemed more in the theoretical of how one speeds up things than the practical details. It has seemed there were always more details to work on. Now I'm getting a much better picture of how to vastly speed up the doing of what I do, in the particulars of actually doing it. And I am so relieved.

So much of the "instruction" or help (and that is not a good word to use around me right now ;) ) seems to consist of glorious statements of what all you can accomplish with this blog reader and that newsfeeder and this gizmo and that plug-in for Photoshop and that app for face-book. And my, you can make links to all kinds of people if you twitter!

Ok, so, what do I do next? I go to the next page on the help file ... and am told of other glorious things I can do with this gizmo, NOT ONCE do they actually say here's the step-by-step process! So, when we invoke the start-up procedure, we find easy-to-follow steps in clear English, right?

Naw, couldn't be so lucky. We find ... gibberish. Truncated statements. Oddly used or phrased verbiage. Options that don't seem to do anything, or if blindly chosen, do something very different than what it seems like the verbiage suggests. And a "help" system written by the same dolt who wrote the pages about all the glorious things you ... theoretically ... could do with the gizmo. If somebody actually would ever say how!

But this week, I actually have been able to read, view, and digest several highly informative instruction sets on ... DOING ... something! The details of how to accomplish what the software is designed to do! Amazing, how this little bit of real help turns one's outlook around. Just amazing.

So we are now in the implementation stage of delightful new tools and tasks. In ways that should both streamline my work and allow me to do more to and with my images and words than I have been, and in less time. Ta-Da!