What a world, what a life... I’m in love!

Tonight, I’ve been catching up with my friends’ Flickr uploads. I particularly enjoyed reading the narrative a friend wrote for one of her photographs. It goes something almost exactly like this:

She said, “Oh, I fall in love at least twenty-eight times a day!”
He said, “No you don’t.”
She said, “Don’t you ever catch a stranger’s eye and your heart skips a beat, or hear someone laugh and it’s the most beautiful sound you’ve ever heard?”
He said, “That’s not love.”
... and then, “I’m making sure I never fall in love again.”

She had a feeling things weren’t going to go the way she’d hoped.

Click here to see the dramatically beautiful image that goes with those words.  Thank you, dear heart, dear friend, Tracie. Your words made me smile today.

♪♫ “I've got the world on a string...” ♪♫

Yes, of course things don’t always go the way we might hope, or imagine... but that doesn’t mean we won’t keep falling in love. I won’t. I’m not sure about “twenty-eight times a day,” but I certainly fall in love on a regular basis.

I fall in love with beauty, animate and inanimate. I fall in love, easily, with a smile. Falling in love with the expression on a stranger’s face, a look that speaks to me of joy. I find myself falling in love, more and more often, with easy, unthinking laughter.

I’m in love, always, with those moments when the comfort of friends wraps me in its effortless solace. And I fall in love, over and over again with the silent beauty, the solitude, the gentle stepping tranquility of meditative drawing.

These are the things that make my heart skip a beat. This is what makes living in this absurd, fabulous, nonsensical, achingly wonderful life so extraordinary.  

This love is what makes me want to sing about my love affair with life...

Without the voice of the divine Lena Horne, I express my love affair with life in the written word, but – best of all – by drawing out what’s captured the attention of my heart. Playing with pen and paper, watching the lines as they appear. Curious to see what form they may take each time.

This week, my pens played to the tune of the weekly Zentangle challenge game (#23) of another Diva, the unutterably sexy Laura Harms. [G’day, girlfriend!] She gave me a string for my pen-song (which I copied by hand, from the screen of my laptop).

And I give her this playful tile in exchange.
A pen-song, this time, that sang of my love affair with the whimsical.

“The Yellow Brick Road”
(Click image to embiggen)

Embrace the uncertain, welcome the unexpected...
but most of all,

Never stop falling in love... with LIFE!

---

zFlick - installation and use

This week, the Zentangle blog (in this article) wrote about a neat, free utility designed for searching through all the many images and photographs on Flickr.  This is an absolutely wonderful tool for browsing Zentangle and ZIA* on Flickr.  You can search for specific tangle examples, tangly themes, ZIA done with different methods and materials, and more.

I installed zFlick straight away on my laptop, and have been having lots of fun with it ever since.  So I decided to put together a couple of very short videos to show people how easy it is to install and to use. 

Note: if you have a slow connection, or the video keeps stopping instead of playing smoothly all the way through – just press the pause button and wait until the faint red progress bar§ has filled all the way to the right hand side before watching the video.  This is a useful tip whenever you are watching YouTube (or other online video content).  If the video quality is fuzzy on the blog page - click on the video screen where the YouTube logo appears to watch the video on YouTube, where it may be a little clearer.

First, a brief video showing the installation of zFlick   

And now, a video demonstrating it in use

Here are some fun searches to try, once you have zFlick up and running

• zentangle watercolor (and 'zentangle watercolour' – since it can be spelled both ways!)
• zentangle alphabet
• zentangle bookmark
• zentangle ixorus
• zentangle artoo
• zentangle calligraphy
• zentangle christmas
• zentangle quilt
• zentangle mandala
• zentangle ensemble
• zentangle kit (of course!)

Go, install, search, and find all that tangly deliciousness, just waiting for you on Flickr.

Have fun everyone — I certainly have!

Notes
Wallpaper photograph in the video, © Kit Murdoch, 2010.
Videos show installation and use on a PC, using Windows 7. [A desktop-how-to video by Kit.]
* ZIA = Zentangle inspired art (pron. rhymes with 'mia' in Abba's Mamma Mia). 
§ the red progress bar's position is indicated with a yellow arrow in the image below (if you wait until it has filled all the way to the right, the video will play all the way through smoothly)