Yoko Ono, yes...

Most people that know me know that I love to try new things, some I am not bad at, some I am terrible at and others....well lets just say those experiences are ones that you should keep to yourself.

Experiential learning is the name of the game when it come to me...the thrill of not knowing what is going to happen next, the pride you have when you master something you have never been able to do, or even just the feeling of knowing you have done something you wanted to, ticking it off the list shall we say. Ah if we only had time to just do............

Recently I have had the opportunity to take on a new sport.....mostly by necessity for a race I signed up for with a great team of friends, cross country skiing, not the classical variety but skate skiing. Some people were advising me that its a very difficult thing to do and that its really really hard....well so far I have found that it is.....BUT that's what I love...... we shall see what category this new experience fits into!

That brings me to the title of this blog, and the name of our team that is entered into this great race, Team Yoko Ono......

You see Yoko Ono no matter what you think about her and how responsible she was for breaking up the Beatles, she was willing to try and do just about anything! Take her singing...some say she was being artistic...personally I think that should have been one of the experiences she should have chosen not to share....and what about her “protests”? The “bed in” John and Yoko stayed under the covers for days on end at hotels in Amsterdam, Holland, and Montreal, Canada in 1969 to promote their campaign for world harmony and the end of the Vietnam war.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeDocgPpGd4

This was obviously a much more serious topic to tackle but in essence its really was another experience, although I think a few of us could honestly say that staying in bed for days at end would be a welcome experience!

And then there is her poetry, some rather strange but some touching....

CLEANING PIECE III

Try to say nothing negative about anybody.
a) for three days
b) for forty-five days
c) for three months

See what happens to your life.

And her art.....there is a story of how John Lennon and Yoko Ono met, the story goes that he visited a preview of an exhibition of Ono's at a gallery in London on November 9, 1966. Lennon's first personal encounter with Ono involved her passing him a card that read simply "Breathe". However, the Ono work which Lennon saw at the gallery show that awakened him to her was "Ceiling Painting," described as follows: "The viewer is invited to climb a white ladder, where at the top a magnifying glass, attached by a chain, hangs from a frame on the ceiling. The viewer uses the reading glass to discover a block letter "instruction" beneath the framed sheet of glass – it says "Y E S." 

Another display was a white board with nails in it with a sign inviting visitors to hammer a nail into its surface. Since the show was not beginning until the following day, Ono refused to allow Lennon to hammer in a nail. The gallery owner whisked her away, saying, "Don't you know who that is? He's a millionaire!" Upon returning to John, she said he could hammer in a nail for five shillings. Lennon replied, "I'll give you an imaginary five shillings if you let me hammer in an imaginary nail". And the rest is history!

Now don't get me wrong, I can honestly say I have never really been a big fan of Yoko Ono and I am not trying to draw any relationship between my choices and her's. What I have always appreciated about what she does is her ability to put her fears aside and do what she wants to do, to experience what she wants to experience. Whether she is good at it or not.........

Fear drive us away from trying new things, fear or what other might think, fear of not being the best, fear of failure, they all keep us from experiences....and experiences are what make us who we are. They give us a perspective about the world that we might not have had before.

Experiences open us to ourselves and our fears, once we have seen our fears we know what we are facing, only then can we overcome them.

Like Yoko Ono said:

All my concerts had no sounds in them; they were completely silent. People had to make up their own music in their minds!
Yoko Ono

What?

Well, actually.....never mind............Go Team Yoko Ono!

Till next time...............