Hot Masthead, Cool Makeover

Check out this hot, cool new look! This boomin’ corner of cyberspace just got a glamour treatment by Pop Art Diva! Thanks, Terri, for this fabulous and colorful transformation for Hottie/Cool. She’s becoming quite a blog babe!

I had a neat experience recently with Kayla, the teenager and budding author I mentor. Kayla had brought her protagonist into a unique setting in her novel, just in passing. Until we started brainstorming, Kayla didn’t realize this unusual place had a real purpose and potential for furthering her story in a most hilarious way. We had a discussion about the right and left brain—how our creative right brains often give us a bits of information or ideas. Then it’s up to our left brains and analytical skills to figure out what we’re supposed to do with them.

That’s how Mini Me—Joyce at Three—got to be prominent on this blog and in my new masthead. When I discovered this photo in an album some years ago, I knew instantly that it was "the" picture of my inner child. The round, Jester motif picture frame was pure synchronicity—something I found in a unique shop on a business trip to Minneapolis. It took a long time before I realized that Joyce Jr. belonged in it.

Everyone should have a picture of his or her inner child where s/he can see it often. Mini You is the source of your inspiration, playfulness, and the beginnings of your lifelong process of learning by trial and error. Little You lived out loud and was full of wonder! This aspect of ourselves is what makes cool later living possible. If your childhood was troublesome and lacking in this aspect, let Big You nurture Little You and remember the wise words of novelist Tom Robbins: “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.”

It took many things adding up cumulatively before I realized: my intuition to have Mini Me in my blog masthead represents an important aspect of blowing up the old Old. Stomp your foot and refuse to be a fuddy duddy!

Then there is the fact that we are called “baby” boomers. That surge of post-war fertility that we were born of packs a lot of symbolic whammy. We are a generation that is fertile with imagination and creativity. Our population swell is swellest of all as our collective wisdom permeates the general population all at once. In the same way, our sheer numbers, as children, changed how society coped with most everything from child rearing to education and housing.

This year at Winter Solstice, the Magical Child was the theme of our Solsisters celebration. I shared this photo, and everyone caught the concept instantly and planned to go home and find the picture of her Inner Child. I invited everyone to bring it to next year’s celebration.

Young me and Older Me have a constant intuitive dialogue that Terri has captured as an electric, psychic bond joining past and present. There is that well-known addage--heavy, but at one level highly truthful, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Remembering the best of our childhood past is no condemnation—why the TV show Happy Days was so popular. Or if we’re condemned to laughter, joy, wide-eyed curiosity, and high energy from here on out, give me a life sentence.