world wide window

Ever since watching Slumdog Millionaire my mind has been swirling with colors, especially after I bought and played the soundtrack. Greens with orange, teal with red and a beautiful rust color that isn't quite orange but too beautiful to be brown. Oh, and curry yellow. I even fixed a delicious shrimp curry for dinner last week. I think my new color inspiration can be seen in this goldfish mobile I made. I used some Heather Bailey scrapbook paper as well as some Japanese origami paper. I was wishing I could hop a plane to Mumbai and collect some fabric and paper from an Indian market. I did a search on Flickr for "Mumbai Market" and was instantly transported cyber-style to streets lined with overloaded carts carrying fruit in every color of the rainbow, storefronts painted in bright shades of aqua and green, and stacks upon stacks of gorgeous fabric. I even had the instinct to reach for my camera to capture what was clearly already captured by someone else who was actually there walking the streets. I wanted to copy and paste a lot of the photos here, but that's just plain unethical. So do a Flickr search yourself if you want to take the trip I took.

It's amazing how open the world is to us now with the internet. When I was growing up, my Grandmother took a trip to Japan. I remember how I thought Japan was as far away from here as anything possibly could be. The Japanese language was something I knew I could probably never learn, so I thought if I didn't go with my Grandma to Japan (who spoke a little Japanese and understood a little more) that I'd never visit this beautiful land of temples, tea houses and origami paper cranes. The world was SO BIG to those of us born before 1980. The only window we had was a dusty set of encyclopedias with teeny tiny pictures of all these far away places. I never did make it to Japan with my Grandma, sadly, but it doesn't seem as far away to me now... and maybe that's because I'm not 10-years old... but I know I'll go... someday.

"Oh, the places you'll go," I often find myself saying to my boys. I guess every parent wants their children to see and explore more of the world than they did. I just hope that someday it's safe to visit all the places I'd like to see. I often get the wanderlust, but then I open the newspaper or watch the news and I'm quickly satisfied with staying locked up at home with the computer screen as my window. I'd like to think that we're becoming more accepting as a civilization with things like the wonderful world wide web to show us that we're really not all that different from one another. I wish we could all see the beauty in our differences and be inspired by them rather than offended, threatened and terrified. Maybe the more time we have to look at one another the less we'll start to identify each other by color, religion and culture. I'd like to think that could happen, anyway.