Finding - and Sharing - Our Talents

As this blog pretty readily attests, I'm a pretty terrible gardener, and my judgment (some might say "common sense") is occasionally a bit lacking when it comes to decisions I make around the yard (and elsewhere...), but this comes at the expense of other abilities.

I've been involved with music for most of my life, but I've never fully explored the process of creating my own music.  I guess you could say that the muse never quite struck.  But it gave me a pretty good blow last night.

I was driving around Ithaca yesterday afternoon and had a few minutes to spare, so I stopped at Stewart Park, which sits at the southern end of Cayuga Lake.  As I drove around and down the hill approaching the park, I saw what appeared to be small blocks of ice on the lake.  But once I parked and got out of the car, it was pretty apparent that it wasn't ice - they were waves.  To have so many waves on the lake, especially this far offshore, is a pretty rare occurrence.

I happened to have my camera with me, and rather than snap a few photos, I figured that a video would capture the experience more fully.  The wind was blowing right down the throat of the lake - violently! - pushing the water toward the southern shore and churning up the water.  The video wouldn't load directly to the blog, so I've created a YouTube channel for the blog where I'll probably be posting other videos in the future. 

I decided to set my raw video of the whitecaps on Cayuga Lake to music.  The idea was to capture the constant but unsettled nature of the waves, express the nautical nature of the scene with a bit of a rolling sea shanty feel, some Morse Code, and sprinkle a few splashes on top.  I could spend hours tweaking things - and the quality of the recording is only as good as my computer's puny sound card - but I can't help but be pleased with the end result.  It leaves me with a completely different impression than the original video, with only the howling wind.

The new YouTube channel opens a lot of potential, but we'll see what develops.  For now, it's just a place to plop some videos...added music or not.  Sorry for the shaky camera - the wind had just a little to do with that!

I hope you'll take a minute (literally) to check it out.  And in the long run, I hope you'll find your own talents (like how to arrange the flowers in your garden) and find ways to share them (like telling me how to arrange the flowers in my garden).