“Genius is focus,” a precept I first heard from the Abraham Tapes, helps me understand the accomplishments of people I admire. They practice daily. The effect of any one day’s practice may be practically negligible, but the effect of a year’s daily practice will be profound.

Daily practice creates a space in which new ideas can birth.

Sometimes, when I don’t practice a skill for a while, I forget that I have it. I take great comfort in remembering that I actually do, once I get back to practicing again.

Each day I aim to sing a forty-five minute set of vocal warmups. I copied the vocal warmup CD into my computer so I can scan my email while practicing, and I have another copy in my car, so I can sing them while driving, probably a droll vision when I am stopped at a traffic light.

On a good day, I also play an hour of guitar, walk an hour, make visual art and/or write, and work at my business as artist/entrepreneur.

I absolutely love those moments when I notice the effects of repetition piling up. Today was one of those days. After nine months of working steadily at producing my jazz and blues CD, What Living’s All About, I am ready to send it off to press!

Jeff Gere blends talents as painter, puppeteer, and mime, into performances which have electrified Hawaii and mainland audiences of every age for twenty years. Jeff’s animated physical energy, wide range of voices, morphing elastic face and clear characterizations make his shows unforgettable events. Jeff becomes his stories!

Jeff is the Honolulu Parks Department’s Drama Specialist. He directs the Talk Story Festival, Hawaii’s biggest storytelling celebration. He creates/hosts Talk Story Radio, a weekly Pacific storytelling show. Born on Halloween, Jeff has three ‘Haunted Hawaii’ CDs of true supernatural tales. Recent tours include Arizona, Hong Kong, Vancouver and Turkey.

Jeff’s repertoire is voluminous. His Arabian Nights Series ran 18 months in Honolulu’s Chinatown. He creates shadow puppet shows. Jeff tells to thousands of Oahu park kids each summer. Commissions include interpreting Egyptian mythology, and becoming Van Gogh’s Ghost. His ‘Art Off the Wall” Series interpreted The Contemporary Museum exhibits for three years.

My mother, Verna Lebow Norman, has sculpted prolifically, beginning in her mid-teens in the 1930’s. Mostly, she has worked in clay, but, in the ‘40’s and ‘50’s, she carved wood often as well. Her mid-century modern pieces intrigue me especially, even after having known them almost all of my life.

The Moongazer

The Devil

The Boddhisattva

The Cat

These are paintings I made a year ago in Tracy Dove’s studio. They relate everything I know about feeling good:

Breathe deeply and let it all go

Focus on compassionate love

Connect to your Divine Spirit

Move in escstatic communion with nature

Have we learned anything from Hurricane Katrina?

Consider this, from an article by Laurie Becklund in the California Monthly, a UC Berkeley alumni magazine, in the December 2005 issue.

Two thirds of California’s fresh water, and most of Southen California’s drinking supply, flows through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, a network of sixty islands and peninsulas six times larger than New Orleans that is protected by 1,100 miles of fragile levees, originally built with shovels in the nineteenth century, and not significantly improved since then.

UC Berkeley professor of geo engineering Ray Seed says that instead of raising money to fix the problem, politicians have periodically funded studies, despite reports of $100 million in damage caused by levee failures in June 2004 after routine maintenance budgets were slashed.

A major quake in the Bay Area could cause salt water to pour into the delta, effectively destroying the fresh water supply for Southern California, other than emergency supplies from the Colorado River. Not even good levee maintenance would prevent this; an emergency trench through the center of California is Seed’s most likely solution.

In terms of the national budget, Seed hopes that the debate over Katrina will create a swing back to funding civil engineers. Or as he ironically puts it, “Mechanical engineers get paid to make weapons; civil engineers get paid to make targets.”

Sunset at Chain of Craters Road, Hawaii Volcanoes National Park

Straight from the heart of the earth, lava streams up as the beginning of islands and continents. It smells like fireworks: sulphur. Lava is rock being river, cascading into the sea. In Hawaii, lava symbolizes the goddess Pele, passionate sculptress and dancer. Some say she lives in Halema’uma’u crater on the Big Island of Hawaii. Those who know her well bring gifts of gin and ohelo berries, which they toss into the steaming caldera with prayers of respect.

If you dare to walk in the dark over dangerously uneven lava shelves with a flashlight, and you have sturdy shoes that you are willing to sacrifice (because sometimes the heat of the lava river coursing ten feet under the trail can cook the glue holding your shoes together), take a seaside walk after sunset at the bottom of Chain of Craters Road in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park to some place you decide to stand in the dark and watch neon bright streams of lava flow down the mountain and into the sea.

You will not be alone, but, rather, on a pilgrimage with thousands of others, almost any night you go. Not everyone wants to walk all the way to the edge of the cliffs, because sometimes the lava cliffs break off into the sea. But some people always do.

Moonrise over the ocean at Chain of Craters Road. Note lava on the left.

Update on monocrops for sustainability:

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0329-32.htm

Just because vegetable crops are a superior source of fuel oil to petroleum does not mean we should use poisonous biotech crops to fill this need.

At my booth at the Hilo Bridal Fair in 2003.

In 1988, on Maui, I opened a home business coordinating custom weddings for tourists. Before I sold the company in 1999, it (that is, a bunch of employees and I) had put together about 3000 of them. Before you award me a medal for courage, I should say that more than half of them involved only a couple, a minister, maybe a photographer, and a beach at sunset.

I preside at the wedding of Kevin Schlueter and Sandi Yang.

Even after I sold the company and moved to Hawaii Island, I put together another half dozen weddings, which I enjoyed all the more because they were few and far between. Producing twenty or more weddings per month is not exactly a recipe for optimal physical and mental well-being.

I made this bouquet from flowers growing in my botanical garden near Hilo.

The joy that kept me doing it so long was the volume of creative output—I made thousands of bouquets, sang thousands of songs (some to accompany hula dancers), brainstormed with clients to create unique ceremonies, rewrote and redesigned my ads, website and brochures yearly, designed outdoor wedding equipment to withstand the Maui winds, designed the overall look of the more elaborate weddings, and constantly researched new locations, performers, costumes, equipment, floral resources, and ideas to make my weddings fabulous.

Reception set-up on the porch of my garden home near Hilo

It worked. When Good Morning America presented a week on weddings in March 1994, they filmed one of our weddings. When Nancy Davis, an editor at Modern Bride magazine, published a coffee table book, she included four exotic weddings we produced. When wedding consumer advocates Alan and Denise Field created a book on destination weddings, they recommended my company.

I sing at a wedding near Kalani Honua Oceanside Retreat

What closed that chapter was my muse. Even though my creative output was prodigious, it wasn’t about my unique voice as an artist, writer and musician. Managing an office full of employees, client files, inventory, office and wedding equipment, communication systems and monetary decisions required over forty hours per week of intensely focussed attention, on top of which the creative wedding projects that gave me joy took another twenty to forty hours per week. I certainly did not want to give up the part of the business that gave me joy. There simply was no time to make another book, song, film, or performance. Sometimes there was hardly time to eat and sleep! So, when I sold A Wedding Made in Paradise, it was with a profound sense of relief.

Surrounded by tropical flowers and trees, a couple weds in my garden.

Nonetheless, I am looking forward to presiding and singing at the wedding of my website godparents Kim Cooper and Richard Schave in June 2006.

Why I Blog

I like to write, take and edit photographs and post stuff online.
Anything done daily gets done better and better.
I like the spontaneity of blogging. I do it when I like, about whatever I like.
My voice, not often available in corporate media, is available online.
I want to help raise political awareness; it’s going to take a lot of us participating vigorously to save democracy in the USA.
I want to recognize publicly the works and celebrations people are creating to promote sustainability, peace and social justice.
I’d like more people to know about my artist friends and their works.
I’m hoping to contribute to the physical health of my readers with recipes and health-related information.
I love the way my blogposts are finding their way around the ‘net.
I’m amazed at how many people are visiting my website. Today (March 28) the counter says nearly 28,000 readers have visited since the new site went up on January 15.