For the better part of the day, I’ve watched my big tree swaying in the strong wind gusts.  A few times, I’ve thought the tree was going to fly away.  Tonight is no different.  We’ve had wind gusts as high as 35mph at various times, and a steady wind of about 14mph.  Early today…I mowed the backyard and was “rewarded” with the sting of dry grass flung back in my face (depending on the angle of the mower at that time).  While I’m not overly fond of the wind, at nearly 90F, it was definitely not a today I was going to stay indoors.

Also, for the last few days — I’ve been trying to figure out a topic for the podcast.  I’m actually at a bit of a dry point in trying to realize topics at the moment.  I could do an ABS (Another Beltane Show) considering the time of the year, but considering I’m not one to pay much attention to the ritualized aspects of the year — it just didn’t seem like the right topic.  So, I turned to my Bardic Grade material from OBOD for a hopefully topic clue and came up with the idea to touch on following one’s individual passions.

Oddly enough, this worked really well.  One of my favorite things to do is telling stories around a campfire or reading books for children in the library.  One of my loves is making new voices for individual character types while going through the stories or even going to the length of physically acting out some of the parts during the reading.  In following this particular vein, I’ve managed to utilize this to anthropomorphize concepts such as Network Firewalls, TCP/IP concepts, and the passing of Security tokens between a client machine and a server – all in a college classroom setting.  And to a very positive reaction from students in non-computer/technical fields such as nursing and history.  Not only do I manage to get the students’ attention, but I also have touched a vein in how to present information to them in a way that allows them to retain exactly what I was trying to get across. So, in a strange way, I get to follow a passion for storytelling and play-acting in a work environment that I was expecting to be dreadful within.  It may simply be a manner of applying some Awen based inspiration — but it still remains some of the best fun I have ever been paid to have.

So, in staying with the vein of this within the podcast:  have you ever thought about taking something you were passionate about, twisting it slightly to fit into a more mundane part of your everyday life, and seeing what results from it?  I have…and to quote my favorite poet – Robert Frost – “that has made all the difference.”