The idea for this challenge came on quite suddenly, but I think it might be helpful, or interesting, or a lot of fun, for people to think about and write about these topics.  Click on the badge to add it to your widget page — sorry about the size — you’ll have to resize it yourself.  My inner cultural grammarian is telling me to write please before every topic.  Consider it done.  Please remember that the beliefs you hold may not be the same as the person next to you, (figuratively,) and please, keep denigration and condemnation out of your answers.  Here goes:

• Day 1:  Are you a spiritual person?
• Day 2:  If you are a spiritual person, why?  If you aren’t, why not?
• Day 3:  Is your spirituality private, or public?
• Day 4:  Name three ways you represent your faith in your daily life.
• Day 5:  Talk about your first spiritual experience.
• Day 6:  If your spirituality has changed, please explain why.  If not, do you think it could ever change?
• Day 7:  Are you interested in other world religions?  Which ones?
• Day 8:  Name and describe your favorite spiritual place.
• Day 9:  What has been your toughest spiritual conflict?  If you don’t have one, write about what would be a conflict for you, in the practice of your own faith.
• Day 10:  Can you resolve the conflict?   How?
• Day 11:   Who is your favorite spiritual author, besides the author of your book of faith, (Bible, Torah, Q’uran, etc.)?
• Day 12: Describe any public medium by which your faith is broadcast.  How does the word, whatever it may be, get out?
• Day 13:  Do you participate in organized religious services?  Which ones?  Describe one, please.
• Day 14:  Do any major dictates of your religion feel wrong to you?  What do you do about the one with which you disagree the most?
• Day 15:  If you had to live in a culture which represents a different faith from your own, which would it be?   (Assume for the purposes of this topic that no spiritual prejudice exists.  Don’t worry about what others would think of your faith.  Simply tell of the culture you would choose.)
• Day 16:  Do you write about your spirituality?  Where?  If not, would you consider it?
• Day 17:  Are your children being brought up in an organized religion?  If you have no children, think about what you’d do if you did.
• Day 18:  Do you and your significant other share opinions about faith and spirit?
• Day 19:  Briefly write about someone you know personally whose sense of faith or spirituality is different from yours.
• Day 20:  What is your favorite spiritual rite or ritual?
• Day 21:  Does your faith require a public act or profession of faith?  What is it?  If not, can you think of one that would work with your own type of spirituality?
• Day 22:  Do you have holidays, or holy days?  Which is the most important to you?  If not, please create one.
• Day 23:  Do you know the story of the beginning of the faith you follow?
• Day 24:  Name three things in the world today that impact your own spiritual community or spiritual practices.
• Day 25:  Are you a leader in spiritual endeavors?  Which ones?
• Day 26:  What day of the week is your day of worship?  Do you have one?  Why?  Why not?
• Day 27:  Write a letter to someone who does not share your faith, and explain the reasons you would or wouldn’t consider converting to theirs.  (For this topic, please don’t feel like you have to delve deeply into the other’s religion or faith.  Just the highlights will do.)  Remember, you aren’t trying to convince them; you are responding to their effort to convince you.
• Day 28:  Does your blog reflect your spirituality?  If you don’t have a blog, would it if you did?
• Day 29:  Name the person in your life who has had the greatest influence on your spiritual beliefs.  If there is no one, name a person in the public eye that you’d like to question about your faith.
• Day 30:  Has your sense of your own spirituality been changed by participating in this challenge?  Please explain.

Thank you for participating in this challenge.  Please include a link to this website in your posts.  Something like, “This challenge comes from Judith.”  Feel free to comment on each daily post that uses a topic, and/or include your own responses. Almost all of the topics are way too long for a post title, so go ahead to paraphrase, or simply refer to the day of the topic you are considering.

Finally, this is a 30-Day Challenge, but it does not need to follow the days of any month.  In fact, a space of days or weeks between topics is just fine, as is answering all of them in one day, but if you can do that, you may be the next spiritual leader of a world religion, or else you don’t feel drawn to answer, except for in the most basic terms.  And that is fine too.  Thanks for participating.

• You are comfortable doing nothing. For long stretches of time.
• You live in the present moment because you know that is where imagination will look for you.
• You meander rather than stride calisthenically; you notice the form and colors of leaves, the shape of clouds, the curve of a hill.
• Your writing (and your life) surprises you.
• You converse about your characters as if they were fully alive.

Is imagination present in your life?  Do you slow down enough, often enough, to let it speak to you?

Blessings!

Chris

[From Nancy - earlier, JudithB reviewed a different book by Judy Reeves.  Click here to see that post.]

But for most of us the space between ‘dreaming on things to come’ and ‘it is too late, it is all over,’ is too tiny to enter.

The goal then, is to lengthen that space.  Here are some specific things that help me do that:

• Identify what my priorities are
• Figure out what I’m willing to give up to make them happen
• Ask for help and support
• Do it

Identify my priorities – this is where writing out goals in January and September help me.  I list everything I think I might want to do.  I look for patterns where I’ve written the same thing several different ways as that is a often a sign something is important to me.  I look for repeat goals that I’m not getting done and consider whether to drop the goal or finally get it going.  Finally I pick several to start with and adjust my goals as needed because either my priority did not bring satisfaction, the timing was better for a different goal, or I accomplished it and did not wish to pursue it further.

Blogging by Amy recently had a good article that setting goals is not enough; we also need to set sacrifices.  If we don’t it deliberately, it will happen by default.  Which leads to the next point. . .

Give up something - to meet my goals, I usually have to give up something to have the time.  If I cannot, then I have to live with not accomplishing my goals.  And some years, that is my reality.  Then I try to give up the goal(s) without whining.  To blog, I’ve given up my personal journals and a fair amount of my reading time.  In exchange for my photography, I no longer needlepoint.  I love my reading and I love my needlepoint, but I’ve done plenty of both and want my public writings and photography to be a priority at this time.

Ask for help and support - this one is hard.  I am blessed to have a husband who does his share of work around the house.  We’re paying to get the lawn mowed this year and in exchange, he’s taken over cooking and grocery shopping for me.  When I asked him to do this, I pointed out that I could not be out wandering on the weekends, plus do laundry, bills, and cleaning AND the cooking too.  He agreed and took this from me.  My house cleaning is spotty and he is fine with that too.

Do it - it is so easy to come home from work and just vegetate.  But I have to sit and write my blog posts.  I have to take my walks during lunch to get those pictures.  If I want other objects of attention for my camera, I have to get out of the house and go take them whether the local botanical gardens or going up to West Virginia for a long weekend.  Doing something, even if only a short while a few nights each week, is much better than doing nothing.  Momentum is a great help also; once I get going it’s easier to keep going.

I recently read an interview with the author, Darlene Foster.  In it, she said that she wrote for two hours a day, including marketing and research.  She sets attainable goals such as completing one chapter a month.  Even with her modest goals, she’s published two children’s books already!  I was in awe of her accomplishments.  I might not be able to write for two hours every night, but I bet I could do a chapter a month.

So put together a plan and start acting on it.  Adjust it if needed.  If you fail, get up and try again.  If you succeed, enjoy your accomplishments.  Keep with it.

As for me, I started consistently keeping my blog in early 2011.  I now have almost 400 entries to my blog.  I took over 10,000 photographs last year, in addition to all the earlier ones that I either took or scanned.  It took discipline last year to sit and write those blog entries and to take pictures every day.  But I look back now at the accomplishments of a year – ONE YEAR – and I think, wow!  Look at what I did.

But if I didn’t show up, it never would happened.

There is an unattributed quote in the photography world that says,

F8 and be there.

Its meaning is that you will miss 100% of the shots you aren’t ready to take.  F8 is an average camera setting that reliably produces good results when there is no time to think or react.

So the next time you think of skipping your blog, taking a break from a challenge, or giving your hobby a rest, remember this – you will miss 100% of the things you do not do.

[Parts of this were originally posted on Living The Seasons on November 15, 2011.]

Posted on January 16, 2012

By now you will have recognised realised that I am besotted by words in the English language.  I like the way they look, the way they sound and their meanings.  I can spend whole days following the etymology of words.

Imagine my delight then some years ago to be presented with a copy of “The Professor and the Madman” the story of the compiling of the Oxford English Dictionary and the two men who were so intimately involved in it.

“The Professor and the Madman masterfully researched and eloquently written, is an extraordinary tale of madness, genius, and the incredible obsessions of two remarkable men that led to the making of the “Oxford English Dictionary”–and literary history.” From the book description on Amazon.

Have you discovered this book yet?  It was written and researched by Simon Winchester and  published in 1999.

We are told that compiling the OED  was one of the most ambitious projects ever undertaken.   As definitions and quotations were collected, Professor James Murray leading the overseeing committee discovered that Dr W C Minor had submitted more than 10,000 words and their quotations.  The committee insisted honoring him at which time the truth came to light.

That truth – Dr Minor, an American Civil War veteran, was  an inmate at Broadmoor, an asylum for the criminally insane.

Dr Minor had served in the Union army as an  assistant surgeon and held the rank of lieutenant. He spent about six months attending to civil war casualties at hospitals in New England before being sent to the front line in May 1864. It appears that following time in the battlefield his mental illness resurfaced.  Because of this he had to leave the army and was sent by his family to convalesce in London.  He settled in a particularly poor part of London (Lambeth) where he supported himself by painting watercolours and playing the flute.  But his mental illness was never under control and while living there he shot and killed a brewery worker who was on his way to work, thinking that the worker was out to seek revenge for an earlier incident while Minor was in the US Army.

Minor gave himself up to the police and was sentenced to be confined in the newly opened Broadmoor Asylum ‘Until Her Majesty’s Pleasure Be Known’

While detained in Broadmoor where he had two cells, a manservant, a large collection of books, and, incredibly, regular visits from Eliza Merrett, the widow of the man he had murdered, Minor heard of the   ‘Appeal for volunteer readers’ sent out by James Murray, in which Murray asked interested members of the reading public to scour published literature for quotations to illustrate the use of English words. Minor, described by the Broadmoor administrators as particularly learned set to work assembling lists of quotations and by the mid-1880s was sending hundreds, and later thousands, of quotations on slips of paper  to Murray and his team at the “famous scriptorium at 79 Banbury Road, Oxford.”

The letters were  signed ‘W. C. Minor, Crowthorne, Berkshire’, and until he called upon Minor,  Murray had no idea that his most assiduous correspondent was an American murderer and an inmate at one of Britain’s most secure and infamous lunatic asylums.

The two men became firm friends united by the complexity of the English language.  Despite this friendship and the benefits of his involvement in the dictionary Minor’s illness became more acute and in 1902, he amputated his own penis in the belief it might curb his troublesome sexual appetite. Following this and prompted by Murray, the  Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, allowed Minor’s release and deportation in 1910.

Minor was farewelled by Murray and his wife and sailed back to New York where on arrival there, he was immediately committed to  St Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, DC. He deteriorated steadily, was moved to the Retreat for the Elderly Insane in Hartford, Connecticut and in 1920 died of a respiratory infection

We know very little of his life after returning to the United States but his legacy as a volunteer reader can be found among the pages of the twenty-volume Oxford English Dictionary. Professor James Murray said of him at the time that “so enormous have been Dr. Minor’s contributions … that we could easily illustrate the last four centuries from his quotations alone” (The Professor and the madman p160).