Bless this brave patriot!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNBlxdk9wPA&feature=share

'Hey Jude" live in Red Square, Moscow

I found this wonderful YouTube video Christmas Night while delightfully "altered". It got me teary-eyed seeing how deeply moved people in the audience were. Plus this is one of my very favorite Beatles songs of all time, perhaps eclipsed only by 'I Am The Walrus'. Enjoy! John

favorite "Concept Cars"

Since childhood I have loved seeing futuristic concept cars, and the anticipation as to whether they would enter production. I love sleek aerodynamic forms and covered wheel wells for better air flow.....plus I think they just look cool. Here are some favorite GM concept car images.

A poem I wrote in my early 30s that I keep framed and hanging in my livingroom as a reminder to think and feel expansively vs. fearfully.

DICTUM

Live a Big Life.
Stretch the skin of each new day
then fill it with the flesh of your dreams.

Find the frozen stone of your fear
and chip it into sparks
to illumine the wonders that you can do.

Tell a Big Truth so bright
that the light of it flies out from your mouth
into the dark places
beneath every stone
behind every building
inside every mind.

Let your words and deeds be trusted things
that others can hold and treasure
as perennial measures of honor.

And every time you do the right thing
a stain will fade from the hearts of your children
their grandparents
and you.

Ask a Big Question.
Never lose the cool hunger of your youthful eyes…
learn of the mysteries
inside a lover,
a seed,
even you.

Use your Fear to taste the dark sweetness
reserved for heroes
so that when Death does come
you will have really BEEN,
you will have truly SEEN.
And as you leave that frail human shell,
it a faded chrysalis,
feel the quiver of your new, unseen wings.
　
　
John Starnes
　

Welcome to Starnesland

I've been blessed since early childhood with an active mind, and with age and experience have learned to make it a habit to generally feel happy and hopeful vs. pessimistic and depressed as in my teens and early twenties. As a result, I have many interests and avocations and points of inquiry that that do much to make life feel like a remarkable gift, not a burden.

The astonishing Hubble Telescope makes clear that not only do we live our daily lives at work, with traffic, people dealings, cleaning house and countless "mundane" tasks in the outer edge of the spiral Milky Way Galaxy, it is just one of MANY MANY billions of other galaxies. For me, knowing how incredibly tiny I am in all of that is not scary but liberating and makes me feel very privileged to have been born. Look at the wonder we exist in the midst of!

For years my highschool friend Michael Valdez has advised me to share my way of life on line in someway, even a video cam recording the evolution of my trippy Gay Trailer Trash on Acid livingroom project, now almost a decade old. My Denver friend Michael Mowry was here recently and gave me a true life epiphany by telling me about Blogspot...and this Blog is my second....I will soon start a third one about Old Roses and some modern roses. I am sure I do not have enough room in my mind for a fourth blog, plus I am always behind on weeding and housework. Other folks want me to write e-books, some feel I could sell more of my altered Star Trek paintings with a website, and some say they feel that some folks might find my approach to, and experience of, life, maybe interesting or useful. I just know I am having a blast with this and am thankful to both Michael's for their long term encouragement.

That photo that the European Mars Express Orbiter took of that ice glacier miles across makes clear that Mars is NO where near dry as we humans have thought. I have toyed since I was ten with fantasies of terraforming Mars into a second garden planet, and now have many ideas about making that a reality. I wish I could live at least another 200 years and help to terraform Mars!

I feel that I have in essence been "tripping" since 1998 when I was blessed to buy my "Old Man House" here in south Tampa by borrowing the equity in my 829 square foot house on Willow Street in Denver. Plus in my forties I was advised by a number of older folks to RELISH my then upcoming fifties, like author/rosarian Bill Grant, and recently passed away rosarian legend Miriam Wilkins who said they'd LOVE to be in their fifties again. I've long heard that as we get older we feel stronger and more free to be who we really are, and at 56 I agree.

I know I am going to enjoy creating and maintaining this blog, and I hope others find Starnesland a cool place to check out now and then.

John Starnes