BP4_HistoryPin.com

I am continuing this post from my post at HistoryPin.com. Here, I began a story that this picture recalls about visiting my grand parents on Long Island, NY, when I was a child.

con't... "The backyard gardens were a particular joy in the summer; as was the long days spent on Jones Beach and coming back to their house for a home cooked dinner of fresh picked vegetables, especially tomatoes and zucchini. The house always smelled of dill, no matter what else was cooking.

At the beach, it was funny to see my grandmother getting her almost ankle length house dress wet, wading in the waves while clutching her big floppy straw hat, keeping it from blowing away and balancing herself so not to plop down into the swirling froth. Warmer more joyful times are not in my memory. I built upon those memories all of my life by going back to those beaches as often as I could. Now that I live in Chicago, the Atlantic Ocean and those salty beaches are what I miss most."

HistoryPin.com is an amazing web2.o tool that hopes to build a world history, one story and picture at a time. In partnership with Google maps, one can post a picture, a date as far back as far back as 1840, and write a story joining them. Connecting story and place are nothing less than sacred according to Joe Lambert, Director of the Center for Digital Storytelling in Berkeley CA., where they have been doing the work of connecting up people and their stories with places since 1993. He claims that this work is a healing ministry for our culture and planet; "If we had to sum up our learning, it would be that we see storywork, and our work in particular, as only valuable when it is owned as a technology of healing by a local population. It is part of any number of useful recovery technologies in the face of the particular impact of globalized consumer capitalism on our identities, on our connections to each other, on the way we make our communities cohere, and our societies healthy. We need help. We either return to the sacred wisdom of place and make our world a whole, or it appears we will perish, on-by-one in a series of new fangled illnesses, or in one vast collective disaster of an over-heated planet."

So, I started to heal my own little bit of sacred space by using this web 2.0 tool History Pin; check it out and reclaim and share some of your history and identity too.

Lambert, J., Digital storytelling, capturing lives, creating community,
Berkeley, CA., Digital Diner Press, 2009, pg. xvi