I have found a new photo service with glorious photos–you know, good enough to print and frame– and they are freely available. The only restriction is that you can’t go off and use them to make your own site. Don’t believe me? Well, here are some samples.
The world is a beautiful place–on balance much more beautiful than we should expect, since as a rule, natural beauty has no advantage in it. The Alps don’t gain by their beauty, neither do the Azores or the Milky Way. And we don’t gain by finding them beautiful either.
Some might argue that certain kinds of of biological beauty confer a fitness advantage, but even that is problematic. For more, see Beauty Will Lead Us Home.
In this blog, I try to capture beauty in as many ways as I can. I have posts about science, posts with original poetry, and posts with some original music, all in the hope that they will strike a chord for some.
I have never written fiction before. But I have always wanted to try. So I am going to jump out of the airplane–and see where the story takes me. The difference is, this will be a kind of performance art, because I will be improvising the story in front of you, my audience. I have three episodes so far. When I began I had no plot, no script, no mental sketch as I sat down to write. No idea where the story would go or what it would be about. No parachute. My husband says, you don’t do that unless the plane is on the ground. So maybe I have a small parachute.
I follow the same rules for each episode. I may have a vague idea of where I want to go, but there is always a turn that is unexpected, even to me.
I am having fun, but this is early days yet. I haven’t written myself into a corner or created a ridiculous contradiction or worse, grown predictable and boring.
Tune in periodically to catch up on episodes. Let me know what you think in the comments. I will list the episodes and their permalinks here so you can find them. Wish me luck!
Episode 1 https://wordpress.com/block-editor/post/anngauger.blog/386
Episode 2 https://wordpress.com/block-editor/post/anngauger.blog/570
Episode 3 https://wordpress.com/block-editor/post/anngauger.blog/583
Episode 4 https://anngauger.blog/2019/12/18/4-room/(opens in a new tab)
Episode 5 https://wordpress.com/block-editor/post/anngauger.blog/1121
Why is the world a beautiful place and why does it touch me?
When I was 16, my parents gave me a horse. I was a fairly typical teenager— alienated, self-absorbed, and without a way to ground my understanding of the world. I had received a certain worldview from my parents, but it was incomplete and unsatisfying to me. I think my parents hoped that the horse would liberate me from my existential crisis. Some sort of animal therapy, perhaps. And it did, but not in the way they thought.
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Making Note of the Moments 