Sources of inspiration...

Best-selling author Elizabeth Gilbert once gave a talk on the concept and history of "the muse." It was pretty eye-opening for me, and while it didn't inspire me to paint a masterpiece or churn out the Great American Novel, it did make me examine things from a new perspective. Which I suppose is a type of inspiration.

Today's blog examines a couple different sources of inspiration. The first is poverty. The San Francisco Chronicle reported on the partnership between Tim Jahnigen, his wife Lisa Tarver and Sting to create One World Futbol after Jahnigen was dismayed by a CNN report on the children of Darfur who played soccer with anything but a real ball since those quickly went flat. One World Futbol produces soccer balls made out of the same stuff as Crocs. For each $39.50 ball sold, another goes to a child in need around the world. The couple's goal is to give out 1 million balls in the next three years.

The other theme is the wisdom of others. London's Daily Mail posted a story on its 10 most inspirational speeches. It, of course, skews heavily toward British politicians, but it does reference the great speeches from Mahatma Ghandi, Dr. Martin Luther King, and Winston Churchill. You will have to Google for the full text, but the story gives a nice abstract of each one. On a less world-beating note, each year colleges and universities bring in famous, infamous and everyday speakers in one last effort to propel their graduates to greatness. My own university's graduation speaker was more embittering than emboldening, but other schools do better. Harvard, for example. The following link is one speech that manages to be both entertaining and energizing.

(Photo courtesy of The Daily Mail)

Win one for the Gipper!

I'm probably about to induce the revocation of my sports fan card, but I have no idea who the Gipper is. However, he has been invoked more times than is probably known as coaches exhort their players to try their hardest.

Today's blog is about inspirational moments in sports. I apologize here for the lack of clever transitions in today's post, but the amount of rain I'm currently getting makes me want to curl up in the fetal position and rock back and forth, muttering to myself. It does not make me want to channel Steinbeck or Hemingway. At least not Hemingway's writing talent.

Cornell's men's basketball team made a fabulous run in this year's barely controlled chaos known as the NCAA Tournament. A friend of mine is responsible for generating media coverage for the team, so I'm fairly certain he's responsible for getting this little nugget out into the Interwebs. Remember Jason McElwain, the autistic teenager who played just four minutes in the very last game of his high school career and knocked down six threes on the way to 20 points? Well, it turns out he bonded with Cornell's head coach Steve Donahue, who has an autistic son. According to ABC, McElwain served as an advisor and source of inspiration for the Big Red throughout their tourney run.

Tonic provides a list of the top 10 most inspirational coaching moments on film and in real life. Ethan Zohn's column touches on everything from Jim Valvano's touching "Don't ever give up" speech at the ESPY's to Jim Belushi's rousing rant in Animal House. Zohn even managed to find Knute Rockne's famous "Inside 'em and outside 'em" speech (which may or may include the Gipper reference - the rain is making my Internet too slow to load a video).

Finally, this last item appeared in the Boston Globe this morning after I heard about it on the radio on the commute in. The Carroll Center for the Blind in Newton, Mass., and the Perkins School for the Blind held the first known fencing competition among the blind yesterday. Coach Cesar Morales champions fencing for the blind students as a way to help them develop skills they'll need in every day life. Fencing aids the students in orientation, balance and navigation. Fencing has been taught at the Carroll Center since it opened in 1954 as the first civilian residential rehab center for the newly blind.

(Photo courtesy of The Boston Globe)

We should all be like Mylyn...

Ever since I got a normal, 9-5 job, I've had Netflix. I wanted to catch up on all the TV I missed while working 80-hour weeks. Consequently my queue is constantly, like, 27 titles long. My current rotation is Eureka, NCIS and JAG.

Don't judge.

Anyway, one of the current plot lines on JAG is a character becoming an amputee after stepping on a land mine. The season I'm on is set in 2002, so obviously, they're factoring in the war in Afghanistan. The show tried to be honest but sympathetic to the Navy, and this storyline is no different. While the writers picked the most good-humored character to have this happen to, it did explore the ramifications on his career, on his marriage and with his friends. I think sometimes televised war numbs you a little. It's good to be reminded those who are injured are people, not statistics.

The Journal Gazette - Times Courier out of Illinois had a story on an Iraq war veteran's (and double amputee) new home, built by dozens of volunteers from "Homes for our Troops" and "StormHawk Construction." National Guard Sgt. Cameron Crouch suffered his injuries after falling from a roof in Iraq onto marble floors. Presumably, he was in one of Saddam Hussein's palaces. Crouch fell 70 feet and required 25 surgeries. Later this year he is set to marry his fiancee Christy.

Risks for injury do not just occur on the battlefield. EJ Poplawski was competing in the 10th annual US Telemark Extreme Freeskiing Championships when his last descent over a cliff broke one of his skis, according to the Ski Channel. He subsequently hit a tree and shattered his knee. Poplawski didn't get to the hospital quickly enough to save his lower leg. But that didn't stop him from continuing to ski and race. He recently competed in the Winter X Games and tours the country as a motivational speaker.

This next little girl should motivate all of us. One night, three year-old Mylyn Beakley, herself an amputee, saw Haitian children on TV who had also lost legs, and ran into her bedroom. The little girl retrieved a prosthetic leg she had grown out of and told her mother she wanted "to give it to Haiti." The hug she gives one of the staffers at the 1:10 mark in the NBC video is precious.

(Photo courtesy of The Journal Gazette - Times Courier)

Alternative medicine...

There's so much debate swirling on the national and state levels about health care. Should it be universal or is that one step down the slippery slope of socialism? What programs are "valuable enough" to survive massive budget cuts?

Since starting in my current field, I've become aware of so many programs available to patients beyond the usual check ups and eye exams. Medicine's pendulum has swung from superstition to hard science, but now it seems to have settled or is approaching settling somewhere in the middle. Not that I want to go back to leeches and animal sacrifice, but I do see the value in treating the spirit as well as the body.

The New York Times profiled an art therapy program called Project Moving On, run by the Brooklyn Bureau of Community Service, for mentally ill patients. People with chronic mental illness are either referred by the Brooklyn Mental Health Court or by physicians and hospitals gather daily to draw, paint, sew, and crochet. The skills needed for these tasks - beyond talent - help people focus and deal with the issues that come with their illnesses.

In my hospital system we use both art therapy and animal-assisted therapy in our treatment programs. In our case, the animals help people with emotional issues, but Frankie Two-Paws has made an impact on people with physical challenges. The disabled cavalier spaniel has limited usage of his back legs after being rescued from a puppy mill, according to The Beacon News. He now races around in his doggie wheelchair at the Rush-Copley Medical Center, inspiring the physical therapy patients there.

The New Haven Register reported on a local artist who volunteers at Yale-New Haven Hospital painting watercolors on demand for patients in the outpatient oncology unit. Dennis Gentle, an 80-something Renaissance man, visits with the patients as they receive treatment and paints scenes as per their requests. He does have a list of things he won't paint, but patients and their families treasure these little works of art. Some people use the scenes he creates as their own happy places, places to go to during the draining treatment.

(Photo courtesy of The Beacon News)

Sources of inspiration...

I get inspired by both the oddest and most mundane things. And usually one will inspire an idea of the opposite extreme. For example, watching an HGTV episode on redoing an Arts & Crafts house inspired me to replicate some typical stained glass designs from the period in cookies. Or a puzzle I picked up on a sort-of whim gave me the idea to completely do over a bathroom in my future home with a San Francisco theme (yeah, I know, but I have no idea what to tell you). Or a passing remark or random observation while out on a walk develops into my latest children's story. 

For artist Bill Guffey, his inspiration is Google. More specifically, Google Street View. The Christian Science Monitor reports Guffey is based out of rural Kentucky but frequently paints scenes from London, Paris and all other fancy cosmopolitan cities. He does it by typing in random locations in Google Maps and using the Street Views that come up as the scene. He recently finished a series on all 50 states. The photo for today's post comes from his blog. It's a scene from Burkesville, Ky. 

Some people find inspiration in popular media - books, music and movies. For me these usually provide a form of comfort or escapism, but whatever floats your boat. Bleacherreport.com has a story on a movie character come to life - Ricky "Bobby" James. If you draw inspiration from "Talladega Nights," I'd worry about you, but Ricky James is definitely someone worth looking up to. The 20 year-old car racer is a paraplegic after breaking the T7 bone in his spine at 16. He has since competed in all sorts of competitions I wouldn't try as a person with full use of her extremities and has won the 2008 West Coast Pro Truck Championship. 

So keep a weather eye out. Maybe the smallest thing you notice today will send you off in a completely different direction. Happens to me all the time...that explains a lot actually. ; )

Mish-mash Monday...

I had a really good weekend, highlighted by a spontaneous trip to Newport, R.I. on Saturday - the first truly gorgeous day we've had in recently memory. My weekend was a little of this - the Cliff Walk, shopping - and a little of that - errands, puzzle-doing - and today's blog follows in that vein. 

Within the last year or so, I've become a little obsessed with Arts & Crafts architecture. This should be a surprise to no one, considering the name of the style. : ) But I came across a blog post on wired.com about Frank Lloyd Wright legos. He's not generally my style, but I loved Legos as a kid and thought it was pretty cool to have Lego sets that let you build actual architectural gems like the Getty Museum, etc. 

The current crisis in Iran has overshadowed another attempted political revolution that made news months ago after the cyclone that devastated Burma/Myanmar exposed just how badly the people there were suffering under a dictator. Protests led by Buddhist monks and nuns and populated by ordinary citizens were brutally crushed. According to Google News, some of the opposition members fled and had been looking for asylum until the tiny island of Palau took them in and promised to keep them safe.

The last story for today is about an inspirational three year-old. Olivia Curcuru had an accident not that far from her home and was paralyzed from the upper abdomen down. But she has not let that stop her. Like any three year-old, Olivia plays games with her mom and participates in sports. She competed in her first triathlon one month after coming home from rehabilitation, according to The Explorer News out of Tucson, Ariz. 

(Photo courtesy of The Explorer News)

Right in my wheelhouse...

Looking at the three stories I found today, the theme would only be apparent to me. Yes, all three are good news, and yes, I did find them all the same way. But a theory of communication I learned in college that is coming back to me now quite randomly and only vaguely holds that stories in the news grab people's attention more quickly and for longer when people have a tie to or stake in them. 

Last night I was at a meeting at the MSPCA about a certain breed of dogs which I have mentioned a lot on here, so I won't do it again. : ) I want a dog terribly, so this story in the LA Times about the two dogs which stopped traffic on a NY expressway yesterday caught my attention almost immediately. It seems the mama got hit by a car, and her son made sure to stay between her as she lay on the ground with a broken leg and anything that came nearby - human or car. Mama is recovering nicely, and the son has been taken home.

The inspirational story I found in Florence, Ala.'s Times Daily about a cancer center nurse who contracted breast cancer and proceeded to beat it grabbed my attention since my father and uncle are both recovering from cancer, and I just found out a friend's boyfriend's mother has been diagnosed with it. Jamie White started her career as an ER nurse but moved to oncology after having a baby. Her grandfather went through his cancer treatments at her center and recovered before she herself was diagnosed. White went through her treatment at her own center and became an inspiration to the other patients by encouraging the nurses to share her story with them. 

My last homegrown tale comes from msnbc.com. President Obama has made a firmer commitment to rescuing the Chesapeake Bay with his latest executive order. Citing the Clean Water Act, he put the Environmental Protection Agency in charge of restoration efforts. The Bay is in very poor health and is in danger of becoming unable to support not only the wildlife who call it home, but the watermen who make their living off the estuary. Obama's order will send funding and oversight to the cleanup efforts at the watershed and hopefully will put pressure on the surrounding states to do more.

(Photo credit: www.usc.edu)

The sources and means of inspiration...

Every day in news articles I see the words "inspire" and "inspiration" used in myriad contexts. This is, well, inspiring (sorry) to me because it reminds me there are many different ways people can draw inspiration, from experiencing a different culture to seeing someone help an elderly person across a street. 

The ways you get inspired are different as well. For me personally when a creative inspiration strikes, it's usually like a lightning flash - the whole idea at once. Looking at recipes makes me wonder how I can tweak them to my specific tastes (and usually results in an continual trips to the kitchen), and inspiration for my writing usually comes over time as ideas and themes germinate. Each occurrence of inspiration brings its own excitement. 

Opening my Yahoo! this morning, the top story was how President Obama has inspired hope and positivity in the nation according to an AP poll. This story is a little more political than I like to be on this blog; in America, there seem to be fewer ways to head for unhappy thoughts than get into a political debate. But I liked the thought our citizens were a little more positive than they used to be, despite the economy.

WBNG News in Binghamton, N.Y. has a feature on its website about a triple-amputee patient who lost both legs and his right arm in a collision with a train and who travels around the country to inspire and give hope to recent amputees that life does go on. 

And monstersandcritics.com has a story about Queen Rania of Jordan finding inspiration for a speech in the philanthropy of a poor Jordanian girl who worked with her mother to turn homemade jam into a source of pride and income for a disadvantaged and poverty-stricken school. 

Photo credit: arttoheartweb.com