Let there be light

Let there be light. And the light was. Here it is in French: "Que la lumière soit. Et la lumière fut." Please note the subjunctive of the verb "to be."

The photo is the view outside my window. The sky is pretty much what we get every winter day here. How to get through these dark days ahead?

Join something.

I am a joiner. I belong to AARO, WICE, PAN, the AWG, the ALP, Ivy, the EPWN, Smartworking, a Meetup or two. And then there are the online groups: Facebook, Linkedin, Xing, Myspace, and now art websites such as Artmesh, among others.

And now, I am about to embark on becoming part of a new group: it sounds to me like an artists' group that Julia Cameron suggests in the book "The Artist's Way." A new friend who has just moved to Paris proposes that her like-minded friends get together once a week to focus on our creative process and to support one another. The homework is responding to the 26th Verse of the Tao te Ching which begins "The heavy is the root of the light. The still is the master of unrest." And ends with "To be restless is to lose one's self-mastery."

Fretting about the Parisian lack of sun just might be losing one's self-mastery!

Here is a glossary of abbreviations above:
AARO: Association of Americans Resident Overseas www.aaro.org
WICE: www.wice-paris.org
PAN: Paris Alumni Network www.pan-paris.org
AWG: American Women's Group in Paris www.awgparis.org
ALP: American Library in Paris: www.americanlibraryinparis.org
Ivy: artists collective www.ivyparisnews.com/
EPWN: European Professional Women's Network: www.europeanpwn.net/
Smartworking: consulting and personalized networking www.smartworking.fr

And finally, a blog that showed up when I googled "Que la lumière soit."
http://manchotfig.canalblog.com/archives/2008/10/13/10939604.html