Hi-Def

Friday, Christmas Eve, brought surprise. Santa Baby came home early from work. Rather than pulling up to the garage below as is typical, he pulled up to the front door. I opened the door and said, "Just what are you up to?!" He started hauling all of his gear - laptop, coffee mug, project book, etc. - from the front seat and said, "I stopped and bought us a new TV."

The TV wasn't an entire surprise. He'd been talking about getting a new one soon, and our old one had been exhibiting death signs for a few weeks. As he walked in the door he handed me a stack of DVD's that he'd rented. "We saw this already..." I said as I looked at the titles. He tapped the top of the cover, it read Blu-Ray. I looked at him with a knowing grin and said, "Ohhhh... you are a bad man." He knows when I say this that he has done something very, very good.

He proceeded to bring in the box containing a new Blu-Ray disc player. Then he hauled in the enormous box containing our new LCD High-def TV. Tech-head Genius Man that he is, he had everything hooked up and running in short order. He popped in the disc that we had seen before, on our regular old TV and regular old DVD player.

Let me interrupt here to say that Steve's been doing research on this stuff for over a month now. He's expounded the virtues and pitfalls of every kind of TV out there to the point where my internal eyes would begin to roll back in my head as soon as I heard him say, "Here's an interesting review..." I mean, just buy a damned TV already and have done with it! I couldn't see what the big deal was. A TV is a TV, right? Wrong. So wrong. I'm finding it difficult to type while my head is hung in shame.

Where was I... "He popped in the disc that we had seen before, on our regular old TV and regular old DVD player." Right. Thank you. Wow, I mean, WOW what a difference! The cliffs were so defined I felt like I could jump off of them; the streams were so clear and crisp I wanted to dip my toes in them; I could swear I felt the high grass of the savanna tickling my knees. I could read the credits at the end (I may be weird, but I do that) instead of squinting at fuzzy letters that make as much sense to me as reading Swahili.

I'm convinced. I'm hooked. High definition is the only way to go.

It got me thinking. Of course. How much of our lives go buy in a blur, unnoticed and shrugged off. What if we took the time, and took the steps, to see things more clearly?

It's completely apropos that I've decided to participate in a writing challenge all next month (January 2011).

I have committed to participating in the National Month of Small Stones (read about it at A River of Stones, here). This will be a real challenge for me. Rather than my usual lengthy missives, I will be reigning in my writing muses and only writing a tiny nugget to capture what I've observed. The key is being open and aware, and noting the moment when it comes. So, the challenge isn't just about writing, it's about observing and really living a moment. It's about letting the moment strike you with clarity, and then writing a very short description of it.

What is a small stone? It's like seeing the very fine, high-def hairs on the monkey rather than the entire monkey and the tree and the sky. Instead of a long diffusive blog describing everything I observed about the monkey and its movements and how it made me feel, you'd get to read something like this:

Fine hair trembles in the breeze.
We feel the same wind.
We are connected.

So, Black Ink Pad is going high-def for the month of January.