New Home!

Hi. It's the 8th of September. You might not yet have been wondering where today's post is. After all, many of them have been rolled out only when I got in the mood of last minute panic :-) Well, not really, but you get the idea.

Guess what? My blog has found a new home: www.cyopro.com! My website still needs a few touches, but I made sure to get the blog section populated first. Everything else took...it took a while. Jah know. If I hear anyone say the word plug-in (technically, that's one word), I think I'm gonna give them "the look."

Okay. Lemme not go on about my WordPress work. I'm glad to let you know the site is up and running, and that's where my blog posts are going to be from now on. I wanted to make sure the first post on the new site made it at the start of this year eight.

Seven years at Blogspot. Wow. I think I'm already missing Blogspot a little. But, I have to let go of this thing, for the something new. :-)

Reminds me a bit of Mr. Monk and the Badge. Start watching at 3:44, but that tear-jerking clip starts at 4:50. You didn't think I'd leave here without mentioning Monk, did you? Have we met? (Also a Monk reference. Lol!)

Sigh. Thank you, so very much, for sticking around here with me.

Join me over there, won't you?



Claudia
www.cyopro.com
wwww.twitter.com/cyopro
www.facebook.com/cyopro - Yes. Facebook. It's not personal. It's a Page. :-)

Arise, shine.

Sometimes you read a piece of writing and it just sticks.  The piece of writing by Marianne Williamson I share toward the end of this post, has stuck with me ever since I first read it. Like many other great pieces, it was, for a while, incorrectly attributed to a famous person. Such is the case when the world finds it difficult to believe that profound work can come from a not-known or lesser-known human being. 

I did not have this piece in mind when I started this blog – a part of my Create Your Own Productions move – five years ago. Neither did I have in mind the fact that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr had delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech on August 28, 1963. As I thought about this anniversary piece, however, I knew it had to reiterate the foundational “Arise, shine” as Isaiah 60: 1-3 moved me in 2008. It was my kick-in-the-pants; my shot-in-the-arm; my it-has-started-hurting-bad-enough moment. And, that year, with my mother’s encouragement, “Why not create your own…?” and Usain Bolt and #TeamJamaica’s inspirational achievements in Bejing, I had to act. It took far more courage than I thought I had in me – I’d be open to public ridicule for poor writing, is what I thought – but I did it. I was on the verge of suffocating from too many words caught in my throat. I simply had to write – or suffocate.

In that moment, too, I grabbed hold of the support that was the truth of that passage:

Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the LORD is risen upon thee.

For, behold, the darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the people: but the LORD shall arise upon thee, and his glory shall be seen upon thee.

And the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising.

So, it was an elongated moment where many sources of inspiration came together. Looking back, had I not been stewing in a state of despair; feeling oh so forlorn, that gave way to seeking hope and strength and inspiration, I might not have made that one simple courageous step.

I imagine that many will look on and ask, “Sooo, ummm, where’s the fruit of your work?” Ummm, you’re reading it; make that, a piece of it. I am not about to give my résumé of pieces I’ve written; pieces I’m writing. Simply put, I feel happy – who would’ve thunk it? – that I am doing what I set out to do. Still desire to be published but, in the meantime, it is important to me to keep this date of the 8ths – 8^th; 18^th and 28^th for posting – and I have not broken that promise to myself.  And, of course, my out-of-the-public’s-eye writing goes on. 

One other piece of the fruit – and the sweeter part – is the intangible. (For, you can always print these posts. Just please remember to ask permission first. Feel free to link back to them, though.) Now and again I’ll get a comment from someone saying how much it touched/moved/inspired them; how much they appreciated it; how they experienced a lift in their spirit, and so on. Sigh. When you don’t know the difference you make… That right there is the juice and the succulence and the joy and the warmth of it that makes me feel humbled and blessed, that God would use me to do this. (And, yes, I was kinda thinking about millie mango when I wrote that. J)

Thank God – not a phrase, really – I thank God, that I am no longer suffocating. There are new media through which I write and, one of the things that keep me grounded; keep me home; keep me shielded; keep me unscathed from the cynical and the bitter and the sub-tweets and sub-posters and sub-texts, is the fact that I am honest in my writing. Some things get through, and I like that. I’d rather not have a skin so thick that the helpful criticism is kept out with the unkind. But, for the most part, I am at home and sheltered, in the honesty. Remember the bit I shared by C.S. Lewis the other day?

Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that’s the whole art and joy of words.

Yeah. So, I re-read and go, yes, that is what I wanted to say. (Except for that one time the other day when I skirted an issue for fear of being dragged into a brouhaha… But, let’s not revisit that, ok?) I honestly believe that, since people are people wherever you go, being honest from the depth of my heart on an issue will resonate with at least one other human being; will have relatability. My feelings have to be centered somewhere. And, it shows where, when I share them.

This gets its own paragraph: I don’t know why other writers write. But, one of the highlights of my writing is someone saying, “I know exactly what you mean. I can relate to that.” It is not necessarily in that order. They say it however they want, but, you know what I mean.

And, before I close this post, I thank you, all of you, who take the time to read these posts. Thank you, all of you, who take the time to comment on the content or simply to encourage me.  To those who’ve been there from the start – my mother, my youngest sis and other members of my birth family – thank you for your support. 

Continuing with the theme of shining in this anniversary month, it is my pleasure to share the following with you.  From her book, A Return to Love, this is Marianne’s piece, the excerpt popularly known as: Our Deepest Fear.  (And, no, I don’t know her like that, but I don’t think she’d mind.)

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

Let's use it all up. Arise; shine!

Claudia

www.cyopro.com

www.twitter.com/cyopro

Getting Back Up

As they say in the movies, let's cut to the chase.  Create Your Own Productions  (CYOPro) now has a channel on YouTube.  I created it today.  I've been wanting to do it for a while, having a very good idea of the kinds of videos I want to make.  Several months ago, I created a gmail account specifically with that in mind. That would be the email address to be associated with the YouTube channel.

I was checking my personal gmail account today when I skipped over to a folder to review a few of the videos I had made while on vacation.  As I did that, it came to mind that I could use today, my last free day before getting back to work tomorrow, to create the channel - and upload the videos!  

Next thing I did was go to YouTube to create the channel. I chose my user name "CYOPro" and proceeded to upload, tag, describe and categorize the video.  I had done it!  A few minutes later, as I browsed my latest creation, I clicked on the user name and checked out details of the account.  Lo and behold, the email address that got associated (not "that I had associated", mind you) with that one special user name was my personal email address!  I had been checking emails in another tab, remember?  There had been no prompt (like, you are currently signed in to your email and will be linking x email address to this account.  Do you wish to proceed?) I hadn't signed out!  Oh, the horror!  The shock.  The disappointment.  "I should have known better; I should have known better," also came to mind.  I became so forlorn.

How did I let this happen?  I had been so careful to reserve the email address and the username and now, the connection I had wanted was not there.  Of course, I absolutely did not want the CYOPro YouTube account to be linked to my personal email account.  I searched their help centre high and low for a solution - switch username to other email address; change email address associated with user name.  Nada.  Zip.  Zilch.  No, actually, they did have something to say about it - just not what I wanted to hear.  In a nutshell, it couldn't be done.  (Sounds like there was something about being able to do it if it were a legacy account - if it had been opened before early 2009.  It didn't apply to me, so, that went in one eye and not the other.)  

Remember Kipling's "If"?  "If you can make one heap of all your winnings/And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss/And lose, and start again at your beginnings/And never breathe a word about your loss..."  (Well, never mind the last verse - 'cause I'm surely breathing more than a word about my loss, here.)  The rest of it,  though, is kinda how I felt.  

So, I did the next best thing - think of a new username; cancel the newly-created channel (at least I could have done that without deleting the email account associated with it); realize that the old username would not be available (even after cancelling the channel, people! Yep. This is the new Google-dom for you!) and link the new user name to the special email account I had set up months ago.

The name of my YouTube channel: CYOProChannel

Thereafter, I uploaded my first three videos.  Using this new Blogger look, so, here I go, inserting one of these vids, glitch-free! Of course, I could have just used a link to the video, but, where's the fun in that?

Know what, though?  After I uploaded the videos and watched them, I felt a swell of gladness.  After all, this is a project I'd wanted to start for a long time (more in the channel description), and, I've done it!  I shared it on FB and Twitter.  I wondered a little about the public's response.  But, having put myself out there (#byebyecomfortzone), I had a moment of reflection.  What do I think about it?  I think...no, I know I feel good about creating this production! 

Claudia 

www.cyopro.com

www.twitter.com/cyopro