Essential Thoughts

Naples Winter Wine Festival

Michelle Finnegan — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 09:46:02 GMT

Thursday was the official launch of the Naples Winter Wine Festival. Each year for the past few years people from all over the world descend upon Naples in the private jets eager to join the spectacle of dinners with rare wine, celebrities and an auction full of packages and pricetags that can leave you breathless. With this year's economic woe's the event has moved forward with much less fanfare than years past. I suppose it is hard to read about someone paying $2 million for a car when everyone you know has lost their job, their home, their investment portfolio, their healthcare...etc. Two years ago, the event raised approximately $15million. Last year $14million. This year $5million.

It needs to be noted that the money may seem absurd to spend from one standpoint but ALL of it goes to children's charities and therefore from another standpoint it is that much more important in tough economic times that people are encouraged to give and spend generously. A great treat for this year is a newcomer to the scene (sort of). Peter Figge and his family are Naples locals but Mr. Figge is a botanist who also lives in CA where he has worked on other vineyards like Beringer and Grigrch hills. Now he grows his own grapes and produces 1500 bottles each year. I had the pleasure of tasting his Chardonnay and Pinot Noir as well as talking with him about his venture.

He explained everything from the origins of the business venture to the location and the soil to the gathering of the grapes - by hand. His beautifully graphic description of the art of wine had my mind moving along other poetic terms. As we spoke, I could not help but think of the poem, "Wild Grapes" by Robert Frost. I like the poem so much that many years ago, I named one of my paintings after it.

You can see the painting online at www.EssentialArt.org as a link to the Immokalee Friendship House, one of the charities benefitting from the Wine Festival, for whom I produced the webpage and TV and radio commercials when they came to me $86,000 in debt. The painting itself, is a portrait of two of my friends overlooking the Stellenbach vineyard in South Africa. We were sampling the wines as the sun set, pondering out our futures before leaving for a Zulu concert and embarking on a tour across the country. See if you can understand why I named the painting, "Wild Grapes." Do you also see young women wrestling with their weight in grapes?

What tree may not the fig be gathered from?
The grape may not be gathered from the birch?
It's all you know the grape, or know the birch.
As a girl gathered from the birch myself
Equally with my weight in grapes, one autumn,
I ought to know what tree the grape is fruit of.
I was born, I suppose, like anyone,
And grew to be a little boyish girl
My brother could not always leave at home.
But that beginning was wiped out in fear
The day I swung suspended with the grapes,
And was come after like Eurydice
And brought down safely from the upper regions;
And the life I live now's an extra life
I can waste as I please on whom I please.
So if you see me celebrate two birthdays,
And give myself out of two different ages,
One of them five years younger than I look-

One day my brother led me to a glade
Where a white birch he knew of stood alone,
Wearing a thin head-dress of pointed leaves,
And heavy on her heavy hair behind,
Against her neck, an ornament of grapes.
Grapes, I knew grapes from having seen them last year.
One bunch of them, and there began to be
Bunches all round me growing in white birches,
The way they grew round Leif the Lucky's German;
Mostly as much beyond my lifted hands, though,
As the moon used to seem when I was younger,
And only freely to be had for climbing.
My brother did the climbing; and at first
Threw me down grapes to miss and scatter
And have to hunt for in sweet fern and hardhack;
Which gave him some time to himself to eat,
But not so much, perhaps, as a boy needed.
So then, to make me wholly self-supporting,
He climbed still higher and bent the tree to earth
And put it in my hands to pick my own grapes.
"Here, take a tree-top, I'll get down another.
Hold on with all your might when I let go."
I said I had the tree. It wasn't true.
The opposite was true. The tree had me.
The minute it was left with me alone
It caught me up as if I were the fish
And it the fishpole. So I was translated
To loud cries from my brother of "Let go!
Don't you know anything, you girl? Let go!"
But I, with something of the baby grip
Acquired ancestrally in just such trees
When wilder mothers than our wildest now
Hung babies out on branches by the hands
To dry or wash or tan, I don't know which,
(You'll have to ask an evolutionist)-
I held on uncomplainingly for life.
My brother tried to make me laugh to help me.
"What are you doing up there in those grapes?
Don't be afraid. A few of them won't hurt you.
I mean, they won't pick you if you don't them."
Much danger of my picking anything!
By that time I was pretty well reduced
To a philosophy of hang-and-let-hang.
"Now you know how it feels," my brother said,
"To be a bunch of fox-grapes, as they call them,
That when it thinks it has escaped the fox
By growing where it shouldn't-on a birch,
Where a fox wouldn't think to look for it-
And if he looked and found it, couldn't reach it-
Just then come you and I to gather it.
Only you have the advantage of the grapes
In one way: you have one more stem to cling by,
And promise more resistance to the picker."

One by one I lost off my hat and shoes,
And still I clung. I let my head fall back,
And shut my eyes against the sun, my ears
Against my brother's nonsense; "Drop," he said,
"I'll catch you in my arms. It isn't far."
(Stated in lengths of him it might not be.)
"Drop or I'll shake the tree and shake you down."
Grim silence on my part as I sank lower,
My small wrists stretching till they showed the banjo strings.
"Why, if she isn't serious about it!
Hold tight awhile till I think what to do.
I'll bend the tree down and let you down by it."
I don't know much about the letting down;
But once I felt ground with my stocking feet
And the world came revolving back to me,
I know I looked long at my curled-up fingers,
Before I straightened them and brushed the bark off.
My brother said: "Don't you weigh anything?
Try to weigh something next time, so you won't
Be run off with by birch trees into space."

It wasn't my not weighing anything
So much as my not knowing anything-
My brother had been nearer right before.
I had not taken the first step in knowledge;
I had not learned to let go with the hands,
As still I have not learned to with the heart,
And have no wish to with the heart-nor need,
That I can see. The mind-is not the heart.
I may yet live, as I know others live,
To wish in vain to let go with the mind-
Of cares, at night, to sleep; but nothing tells me
That I need learn to let go with the heart.

Pictures of Super Bowl Sunday

Michelle Finnegan — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 11:10:54 GMT

It has long been said that a picture is worth 1000 words. Living in the digital age, we are all so accustomed to absorbing images in 3 second bytes that we are therefore bombarded with billions of stories each day; 1000 words per picture, 20,000 words per minute, 1,200,000 per hour, etc. We as humans can't possibly process those kind of numbers.

So, if we can't process all the images, what are we missing? If we focus too closely on the images, we also might just miss out on the bigger picture - the Miracle of life. Life, after all, is not a spectator sport and the real stories are often what is not seen.

In the case of the Super Bowl, we as Americans celebrate it as if it were an official national holiday. Restaurants close in the knowledge that people across the country will be gathered with friends and family to watch either the sports or the commercials. There is non-stop imagery once the game begins. The fireworks, the sports action, the cheerleaders, the fans, the halftime show...and those commercials. Each commercial this year paid an estimated 3 million dollars per slot. So much profit was made on commercials there was a contest that paid $1 million to the creator of the favorite commercial. The winners were two men who created the Doritos commercial.

The real show, of course, was the football action. There were lots of pictures coming through of all the players and coaches and fans and cheerleaders, but how many of us watched every play? We have to trust the officials who are trained to see things we do not - either because the camera is not focused on the action or because we do not know the rules (and therefore can't expect a penalty called for facemasking or roughing the kicker or unsportsmanlike conduct if we don't know what it looks like) or because we were intoxicated by alcohol or so passionately routing for one team that our "view" was skewed.

I agreed to watch the Super Bowl with an ex-boyfriend that I hadn't seen in a LONG time. He spoke to me in the flowery terms people in relationships use. He also made me laugh. He also spoke in the future tense, like, "we have to make arrangements to..." Believe it or not, he even used graphics and diagrams that he sketched on the paper on the table in front of us. He drew stick figures inside a big cirlce, then put a big smile on the face of one figure. "Here's my pitch. That's us. Look how happy you are."

Cute. The problem is, like the $3 million pitches on TV, I'm not buying into the hype. Next time we'll have to have more qualifies officials watch our game to make a fair ruling. Surely someone else can see what I seem to be missing or rule on penalties for unsportsmanlike conduct...if there is a next time.

Ripe to explore again

Michelle Finnegan — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 00:25:22 GMT

Today was an interesting day. At the onset, it didn't seem remarkable. I hadn't planned anything extraordinary. I walked my dog and enjoyed the fabulous weather. I went to the market and discovered a new brand of Red Tea, Chai tea and two new varieties of hot cocoa! I also discovered a new flavor of Bolthouse beverages.

After that, I comtemplated going back to get the SCUBA suit that I looked at last week. I don't dive as much as I used to, however, so it felt like an unnecessary splurge. I've been weighing the pros and cons. I really enjoyed diving and therefore it would be nice to get back into something I liked to do, but there is the cost. It would be great low-impact exercise, but my former dive buddy is not here and I can't dive by myself nor might I ever find that level of trust with another. My adventures could lead to unknown possibilities, but maybe these are dreams of the child I was and not the person I am?I remember the concepts, but do I need a refresher course to remind me of the mechanics?

I skipped going to get a new suit. I came home instead to unpack what I had, return lots of calls, organize and figure out what I can do next. What I found was the Dive Training magazine that I picked up from the SCUBA store.

Thanks to my Evelyn Wood speed reading course, it didn't take long to flip through the articles and photos before I put the magazine aside to continue my search for something to do. Online, I received a link from my cousin Kate, who had posted videos of her father, my uncle Mike who took Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldren to the moon in Apollo 11. This year is the 50th anniversary of the mission of landing those brave men on the moon. www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7R7T2qOTb4. It happened before I was born but I have seen many newsreels and heard the stories more times than I could possibly count.  Yet each time I hear them, I learn something new as seen with new perspective or heard new material allowing a much deeper appreciation and understanding.

Although my family, and by default, I am somehow involved in such history, it is surprising how little I think about it throughout the course of a day. That is meant with no disrespect to my uncle, his wife, children, my entire family really who have sacrificed so much for our country. What I mean is that when I wake up in the morning I do not think, "I'm the niece of an astronaut that was watched on TV by more people than any other event in human history at the time..." or, "I'm the cousin of..." or "I'm the daughter of..." I wake up and think, "OK, puppy, let me quickly brush my teeth before I take you for a walk." Then do my best to dress and go about completing whatever I had promised I would do before I have to get up and do it all again. I think much more about the lessons I have learned from the experience than the actual experience.

For example, I learned that lots of people have never studied or retained history. That lesson comes easily as few people know much about NASA or the name of the lunar missions or even the names of the three men on Apollo 11. Other lessons like discipline, integrity and perseverance came more subtly through years of my own trial and error in learning and the great leadership of various members of my family who were always there for me to critique and encourage. I've learned how strange people can be when they camp outside houses to take someone's picture or pretend to be your friend but only want to see if we really have moon rocks in the basement. Most importantly, perhaps, I learned that whatever endeavor any one of us embarks on whether it is learning to walk or fly, sing, paint or ride a motorcycle that we all start as beginners. It takes a long time to learn what our strengths are and then develop those strengths into skills. (We don't have to think of the movie JackAss specifically to admit we know adults who insist they can do things they have never done, without any book learning or experience ever doing it before. Know anyone who went on a ski vacation certain they could ski without ever taking a lesson? Or captained a boat? Or rode a motor cycle? Or baked a cake without instruction?) I do think of my Uncle Mike and his infinite patience with people while they just assume they can, while he methodically studies, trains and practices...not just in the past but everything he does in his life. He's a great role model.

Only when I am reminded of the actual experience directly, like seeing news clips of it or indirectly, like watching a full moon with the same awe and wonder that most people should have when they stare at the sky do I really ponder the magnitude of the accomplishment of someone I know...and then ponder my relationship to it and how it has shaped my life, for better or for worse.

That is a story for another day.

Today's story is extracted from the editorial in Dive Magazine by Alex Brylske. It's called "Getting the Picture." He says, "It's also hardly news that images tend to have a much stronger influence on us than words...for those of us in the TV generation and beyond...in generations past, people would remain spellbound for speeches or even lectures that went on for hours. Today, you're lucky if you can hold someone's attention for as long as it takes to finish a cup of coffee." He goes on to explain how divers tend to be more visual than others because there's no hearing or speaking under water. "In fact," he explains, "Vision is the defining sense for all primates. Evolutionary biologists tell us that our superb color vision was a selective advantage for our ancestors in distinguishing ripe from unripe fruit in the jungle canopy."

Alex Brylske asks us in his article to, "Look beyond the immediate image to what's really going on before you. That's the first step in learning how not merely to respond to your problems but preventing them from happening. After all a good picture will do more than make you think, it will also teach you something."

I think I’m getting the picture. I am taking the steps. I am calculating risk. I am looking and seeking not just diving in. I have checked out my equipment.

I might not be landing on the moon, but my uncle has once again inspired me to explore again, and not just in the physical realm. Having him discuss, after 50 years, how he was trained “not to feel” and admit that he was perhaps not the best PR person for the job to relate the story back to the emotional, excited audience on Earth is a HUGE break through of historic and human proportions. He was trained for every possible situation that might be encountered on the moon. He was not trained to express himself to the world with emotion. www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5hjYqOomc

50 years later, he also has grown as a human and has a great ability to communicate with great humor and eloquence. Perhaps after all these years, I have also grown in ways imperceptible to most. Perhaps my journey today means I will go back and dive. Perhaps it is just a small step toward opening myself up to the idea of finding a trustworthy dive buddy.

Perhaps I’ll have to see how I feel tomorrow. The good news is, I am ripe to explore again...and eternally thankful to everyone whohepled me get here. That sense of mutual respect is also something that is learned over years of reminding that none of us would be where we are without the help or inspiration of others. Even in the midst of making history and lunar orbit, my uncle was already aware of that. www.youtube.com/watch?v8m2SDDAXqtk

Miss Spelt

Michelle Finnegan — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 20:32:00 GMT

I awoke to chilly temperatures in Naples, FL. Having lived many years in Boston, MA, I remembered the importance of dressing in layers. My core stayed nice and warm when I went outseide into the crisp, cool air. My plants and flowers stayed under their cotton and flannel covers outside.

Despite the very cold weather, I made it to my Creative Learning Study at Trinity by the cove. We had more people in our group since last week and expect two more next week. Looks like we are growing in the right direction.

We learned about Paul's letter that he wrote while he was imprisioned and the lesson he taught about the ability to have joy in the midst of great suffering. Who among us does not know some form of suffering 0 great or small? Perhaps a loved one has a serious illness or lost their only form of paying bills or in pain from an injury or loss and feeling alone? God came to us in human form so that He would know the struggles of humanity and so we might know His mercy and compassion is great when we seek His path and try honestly to do His will.

One of my friends whom I haven't seen in several weeks has returned from MA, where the temperature was much colder. She was a nice addition to our discussion group. She also brought with her a photo we had taken of us last month during the Christmas festivities in a town called "Bethlehem." It remined me of the incredible transformation that took place in the community, building a manger, a marketplace, a traditional home and sharing the produce grown in the village garden. It also reminded me of the spelt bread that we ate that was made from seed that was planted in the garden...and how much I would like to try to grow my own.

When I came home, the the protective sheets were removed and my plants were thriving. If the sheets stayed on too long, the plants would have withered, but were they not covered at all, the cold might have killed them. So my faith, like my flowers is revealed again.

Now I am off to find spelt seed and see if I can make some bread!!

Bracing for the cold weather

Michelle Finnegan — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 05:14:00 GMT

I am so glad that I went to the Organic Fruit Club meeting on Monday night. The leader, Jon Puig, really knows his material and not only raffled off many varieties of trees to the large group of attendees, and spoke a bit about the Maringo tree and the various ways to eat the beans and leaves, but he invited guest speakers from ECHO to discuss what to do in cold weather. It could not have been a more timely discussion. I learned that I had to water two days before the cold so that the soil could be moist and there by trap heat because moist air and soil is warmer than dry air and soil. They also provided us with two web addresses to check the current weather trends at both NOAA and FAWN. If the weather dips into dangerous weather zones, the website will highlight it in yellow and you know to cover your fruit trees or fragile flowers. If you signed up to be a member of the club, they will also email you on days that you need to prepare in case you don't notice the weather trend on your own. They will also remind you of the next meeting. (Who could forget!)

I thanked Jon for inviting me after the meeting. There were lots of people who wanted to speak with him, so I kept it as brief as possible but did have one important question I needed to know about my mango tree. Will it grow? I had planted a seed from a mango that I ate and it sprouted up over a foot tall then stopped growing. That was a couple months ago and no new growth was noticeable. Jon asked me a "very important question". "Did I like the mango?" When I told him I did, he reassured me that it is typical for mangoes to take the winter off. It should start growing again by the end of next month.

I am beginning to like my mango even more!

Fellowship

Michelle Finnegan — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 00:51:26 GMT

I attended a fellowship session at my friend Kori Gowen's earlier today that I wanted to share. Kori has been very active in the Women helping Women group and just yesterday concluded a week-long event celebrating Women's Health and raising awareness for the Cancer Alliance of Naples. She had a speaker in her home today who moved me to laughter and tears as she shared her journey and transformation from an early childhood of pain into the beautiful woman that she is today on the inside and out.

The speaker's name is Jill Swanson and her book is entitled, "Simply Beautiful." The book explains simple steps we can take to look our best. It suggests simple make-up application tips as well as chosing clothing that compliments our natural shapes. There are even housekeeping strategies to keeping your closet tidy so dressing can be as simple as possible.

Most importantly, at the end of her discussion just like at the end of each chapter Jill Swanson's message is planted in the seeds of her faith. God created each us of with unique beauty that we can only work with and enhance as we grow in His will. There is no beauty on the outside until we can clean out our inside. Of course, her own spiritual leader told her there is nothing wrong with some fresh paint on the outside of the barn! So even when our inner beauty shines through, a little proper grooming never hurts.

Discovering what God has in planned for us in the future can be an exciting journey. Doing the work to stay true to our path is our job. Thankfully there are people like Jill Swanson who can help us present our best self to the world as we continue along our unique paths.

I am looking forward to her return so I can paint her finger in my Prints of Freedom portfolio, samples of which can be seen in my photos online at www.MichelleFinnegan.com or www.FineArtAmerica.com when you enter Michelle Finnegan as the artist's name. To make Jill Swanson's print personal to her, I plan to paint her finger with make-up!

Welcome

Michelle Finnegan — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 00:45:52 GMT

Welcome to my blog. Please check back soon for new entries.