A neo-renaissance, eco-epicurean savors, curates and shares slices from the surf's edge on the inspiration, imagination, the art of living, the living of art - and anything that screams Life.
M. Scott Peck: The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace Just started, but compelled by the model of moving from pseudo-community (where everyone is fake nice) to a true community where no one is trying to change anyone else; and collaboration truly flourishes.
Michael Scott: The Alchemyst: The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel Just checked out of library. Adore fantasy, fairy tales, and myth. And when the jacket said that Michael Scott was an authority on mythology and folklore, I was hooked. Plus I still have designs on writing my own mythic tale down soon.
Steven Johnson: Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation Really intrigued by the title. Fabulously diverse in examples. If you ever felt like a square in round world, this book will make you sing for joy because that's what life is about--growing, moving, evolving.... The book is much stronger for being in Science section and not restricted to business innovation alone.
"If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living." - Joseph Campbell
PILGRIMAGE - the inclination toward a willingness to live in perpetual discovery taken in form of an outer, worldly path or journey towards that which is simultaneously inherently Pathess and without distance; to move in unknown mystery and allow grace to unfold; sense of 'play' invoking gamer lingo -'sandbox' - for MMORPG which are "non-linear and open-ended" (hmmm, life on earth is THE ultimate massively multiplayer role-playing game but we often stick to the linear cause-effect closed-off 1.0 version); focused on active movement and engagement and experimenting and direct experience in and with the world as meditation over sitting still in concentration in a cave in Siberia; epiphanies; following the path with heart (i.e. "Before you embark on any path ask the question: Does this path have a heart? If the answer is no, you will know it, and then you must choose another path. The trouble is nobody asks the question." - The Teachings of Don Juan, by Carlos Castenada)
We have all known grace - sometimes it shows up as: serendipity, exhilarating adventure, synchroncity, coincidence, miracles, 'magic', breath-taking moments, sweeping moments of unexplicable love and compassion, simple joy, 'flow', time stands still moments, blessed moments, instants where you are buoyed and transported by beauty or nature or simply sublime extraordinariness of the ordinary. (Above two paragraphs I wrote in a private email outlining an idea sent 4/13/2006)
The first time I walk into the used bookstore called after the blue cypress, I interrupt the clerk listening to a monologue by a customer eruditely citing Ulysses and Lolita in the same paragraph if she has any of the Memory of Fire series by Eduardo Galeano. I'd already browsed the history section to no avail. She searches her computer, stares at the cover art before saying: "I think I saw that one in the fiction section."
"Fiction?!"
"Fiction."
“Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is.” ― Joseph Campbell
"Stop being such a cheapskate in your business dealings and your personal life. Give, give, give to others; make sure deals are win-win for both sides. Again, it's not the amount of money involved, it's maintaining--all day long--a truly generous, creative, flowing state of mind that wants to see everybody prosper. Ben Franklin was perhaps the greatest statesman, scientist, and businessperson in America's history--and his response to competition was to invite all his competitors to join a new society called a Chamber of Commerce, dedicated to finding ways to work together to expand markets, and make everybody involved richer."
Clue: From Memory of Fire: Volume 3: Century of the Wind by Eduardo Galeano a compilation of vignettes from the history of the Americas written in present tense:
The roundup is on for the wounded and hiding strikers. They are hunted like rabbits, with broadsides from a moving train, and in the stations like netted fish. One hundred and twenty are captured in Aracataca in a single night. The soldiers awaken the priest and grab the key to the cemetery. Trembling in his underwear, the priest listens to the shootings begin.
Not far away, a little boy bawls in his crib.
The years will pass and this child will reveal to the world the secrets of a region so attacked by a plague of forgetfulness that it lost the names of things. He will discover documents that tell how the workers were shot in the plaza, and how Big Mamma is the owner of lives and haciendas and of the rain that has fallen and will fall, and how between rain and rain Remedios the Beautiful goes to heaven, and in the air passes a little old plucked angel who is falling into the henhouse. (187 and 464)
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Complete quote via the Joseph Campbell Foundation: "If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are -- if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.
* * *
Now, I came to this idea of bliss because in Sanskrit, which is the great spiritual language of the world, there are three terms that represent the brink, the jumping-off place to the ocean of transcendence: sat-chit-ananda. The word "Sat" means being. "Chit" means consciousness. "Ananda" means bliss or rapture. I thought, "I don't know whether my consciousness is proper consciousness or not; I don't know whether what I know of my being is my proper being or not; but I do know where my rapture is. So let me hang on to rapture, and that will bring me both my consciousness and my being." I think it worked." - Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, pp. 113, 120
"Whenever a mind is simple and receives divine wisdom, old things pass away,--means, teachers, texts, temples fall; it lives now, and absorbs past and future into the present hour." - Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance
Sharing a short and sweet excerpt as I'm running out the door. Finished this week, Rocket Boys--now on my short list of favorite books. It's a first person account of a group of high school kids inspired by Sputnik to learn rocket science on their own in a small mining town.
This passage below takes place Thanksgiving weekend 1959 in Coalwood, West Virginia. (Yes, it's a true story.)
And happy gratefulness to all of you today. (Bonus, I'm launching--nope, not a rocket--a pop-up art project Penny for your Charms that urges you to also walk on water. Hope you can join in over the next month as it unfolds.)
I used up almost all of my [propellant material] zinc dust loading the Auk XXIII. Getting more was a problem. The BMCA [the boys' rocket club] treasury was bare. Still, I wasn't terribly worried about it. I just had this belief that whenever I needed anything to build my rockets, somehow it was going to be there, provided by the Lord or whatever foolish angels had taken on the BCMA as a project. O'Dell said he'd think about a way to get us some money.
. . . I was tense as I began the coundown. Although Quentin was confident, I was a little afraid of the big rocket. I took a deep breath and turned the firing switch on the professional-looking console Billy and Sherman had built.
. . . There was no sign of our rocket at all. It had simply vanished. Quentin rang up and reported the same result downrange. A towering funnel of smoke gradually drifted over us. Auk XXIII was up there somewhere. What if it came down on the crowd or on us? What if it went uprange and landed in Coalwood again?
"I see it!" Billy yelped. Good old sharp-eyed Billy!
"Where?"
"There!"
It was just a dot, but it grew, and it was downrange, although veering toward Rocket Mountain. It hit the top of a big tree, which shivered from the impact, as if to let us know it had caught our rocket. Picking up our shovels, we ran down the slack, the crowd cheering us as we went past.
"Forty-two seconds," Roy Lee cried breathlessly as we ran.
"Seven thousand fifty-six feet," both Quentin and I called out at about the same moment, both of us capable now of working out the calculation in our heads. It was our highest rocket yet, but it wasn't what my nozzle design had predicted. "What happened?" I worried as we pounded down the slack. "According to the equations, it should have gone three thousand feet higher."
"Don't know," Quentin puffed. "Have to look at the rocket."
Billy led us up the mountain, weaving through the trees and bursting through a line of thick rhododendron into a green glade beneath a ridge. Auk XXVIII was buried there, up to its fins in soft, wet loam. O'Dell looked around and held up his hand. "Stop, boys," he ordered. "Don't trample this place!"
We pulled up short. "Why?"
He dropped to his knees beside a big oak and dug carefully with his shovel, pulling up a gnarly root. "You know what this is?"
When we all shrugged, he smiled. "Money."
"Not another crazy scheme," Roy Lee groaned.
"No, this one's for real. It's ginseng. This glade's full of it. I've never seen so much!"
"What the hell is ginseng?" Roy Lee asked.
"Indian medicine. People over in Japan and places like that think it cures everything."
"How much is it worth?"
"Well," he said as he dug up another root. "I don't think we're going to have to worry about zinc-dust money for a while."
I had vaguely heard of the stuff being dug around the county, but had never actually seen any of it before. I looked at the dirty ginseng specimen O'Dell handed me, thinking of God and whatever angels He had assigned to BCMA. "The Lord preserves the simple," was Mom's response when I mentioned this to her.
Fear and the creative process is and isn't spoken about much. Here's a snippet from a e-letter I wrote a musically-inclined friend today. What the heck, I'll publish it.
oh, it's john cage's 100th birthday today (um if he were alive i suppose or wherever he is in time-space)
julie lazar spoke at SFMoMa yesterday with tons of slides since she and Cage collaborated on a visual composition (rolywholyover circus) that traveled to five museums
anyhow, julie said she moved to NYC when she was 17 to become a dancer. she worked in ticket booth at lincoln center for day job and happened to get some tickets to see a john cage performance
she said, "I didn't like what I saw or heard but i decided then and there to dedicate my life to artists that help us [didn't catch precisely how she worded it: shattered our illusions? expanded our vision? etc]... My idea of what life was was blown open."
isn't that amazing?!
she didn't like it, but it didn't matter--it was how it jolted her out of her expectations that mattered
i often WORRY (needlessly) that i will be judged, shunned, exiled, crucified or something worse for doing precisely that--jostling/shattering people's expectations [rather than bending over backwards meeting expectations].... and yet that's why it moved her...
- e
What I'm deeply interested in can be deemed quixotic, as in Don Quixote--who tended to be scorned and mocked for his chivalry. (If you doubt this, look up dictionary definitions for quixotic, such as: "foolishly impractical especially in the pursuit of ideals.") However, I did read a paragraph recently that called to me: "Don Quixote holds a good-hearted vision of the world as a noble place, and so strong is this vision that by the end of the novel, it has in some mysterious way transformed his material surroundings." Exactly.
Brian Clark in an interview with Andrea Phillips says, ""Artistically, I like to believe that we have the opportunity to create a sense of wonder about the world around us, to wake people up from the plodding through life with a little moment that can start to open the doors of perception and unlock a sense of power to remake the world the way you want it to be. For at least the last decade, much of my work at least incorporates elements of this ideal of "reality hacking".... "
I recently reading a moving part (the rest of the book isn't as personal albeit it's great too and I highly recommend it if you're interested in the subject, yet the personal story is why I resonated with this section) in A Creator's Guide to Transmedia Storytelling by Andrea Phillips about how she found herself suddenly unemployed in December 2007.
"And as much as I was desperate to do paying work, I was equally hungry to do fulfilling work. Perplex City had been three years of incredible creative collaboration with an exceptional team, and it was gone, gone, gone. I was lonely and unproductive. I was terrified that my career as a creator had ground to a halt and would never move forward again. I was waiting for a break. Waiting for an offer. Waiting for someone to notice me and tell me what to do next. And waiting, and waiting, and waiting.
And then I started talking to my old friend and fellow Cloudmaker Jay Bushman. He had recently launched a Twitter adaptation of a Herman Melville story called The Good Captain. Every day for three months, The Good Captain spun out a few short sentences of the tale of a drifting spaceship and the robot mutiny that had led to the ship's dire situation.
I found myself profoundly jealous of Bushman's ability to create and promote something so interesting when it wasn't his job and he had no funding. What did he have that I didn't?
The answer, of course, was nothing at all. Nothing but the sheer drive to create, that is.
This ignited the spark in me that had been missing: the passion to just make something with whatever resources I had on hand. Since I was so dead broke, those resources amounted to my brain, my fingers to type with, the computer I already owned, and the Internet connection I was already paying for.
[Andrea explains some projects she created using free resources like Twitter, Google Calendar (for time travel, of course) and a Wiki fiction experiment.]
. . . A curious correlation arose. the more indie stuff I made, the more paying work I got, too, and on an amazing array of projects. Why? There are a lot of people who talk about transmedia. It turns out that there are precious few who are actually tring to make something with what they have right now.
. . . And it's nothing special about me: you can do it, too. Just prove that you have the ambition to create, no matter what your situation. That puts you at a decided advantage.
So my biggest, most important lesson is this: you can't wait for permission or funding or a contract or a job. Once you get this--and I mean really, really get this--you and your career will be transformed. You will be liberated. Don't hang around hoping that somebody specifically asks you to make something. Find something to get excited about, and then, as the Nike ads go, Just Do It." - Andrea Phillips, A Creator's Guide to Transmedia Storytelling
I too find fear disguises itself as "waiting for not right now" as somehow some other point might be the right time, right opportunity, right job, right place, right teammates, right funding, right attitude--yada yada. I recall opening a book this past spring where an interviewer asked Bob Dylan for the secret to his success. He replied, "I was doing what I could with what I had where I was."
I'm reposting an oldie but goodie today that evokes Independence, at least in my mind. It was originally written on June 28, 2005--nearly seven years ago today.
I'm back in San Jose, CA at least for the moment, where this was once written. Barefoot Coffee Roasters is no longer as edgy and independent as it once was, and there's no longer a chalkboard in their bathroom. The Beatles reference, "All you need is love," turned out to be prophetic (you'd have to read several posts to follow the connections). And how the rest of the story unfolded will wait for a future post.
Jun 28, 2005
When's the Last Time You Tried to Pay the Rent with Love?
There is only one success - to be able to spend the rest of your life in your own way. - Christopher Morley
Two weeks ago I'm sitting at a stool writing my bio at Barefoot Coffee Roasters (a fantastic organic coffeehouse in Santa Clara, CA). I'm supposed to come up with a witty list of bullet points per request to sum up my education, work and adventures. I get up to go to the bathroom mainly to stretch from the hours spent in front of the laptop. I'd been staring at the screen stumped as to how to succinctly articulate that rollercoaster adventure that spanned the years 2001-2004.
The bottom half of the bathroom wall is entirely wrapped in chalkboard. And there's a plastic tub with colored chalk to tempt our expressive side. Someone else has written in baby blue:
All You Need is Love - John Lennon
A dissenter responds in pink pastel:
Yes, thank you. We've all heard the song. When's the last time you tried to pay the rent with love?
That my friends pretty much sums up the core question in my life today. I use it as an open-ended question to dwelve into rather than an abrupt and cynical that's-just-the-way-it-is-folks statement.
I know, I know I said I'd come clean with my story. That's not entirely possible in the attention-deficit blogosphere. Only a sneak peek fits here. It doesn't help that I'm not entirely motivated to speak about the past. The beauty and freedom of blogging is writing about the here and now in the here and now.
Yet I thought you should know that although this here blog is often listed in the business blog category, I personally know almost nothing about conventional quote success unquote. I've only been a millionaire on paper. Heck, haven't we all been millionaires on paper, in our imaginations? If you resonate with Chris Morley's definition, well, then perhaps I can be more helpful.
Think of me as a fellow patient in the same hospital who, having been admitted a little earlier, could give some advice. - C.S. Lewis
In many ways, my story isn't unique. I've met so many folks that have gone through a near-bankruptcy, the dot-com crash, business betrayal, and divorce. It matters little if it was all in a span of a year or three or ten.
From there, each of us goes down our own pathway. I think what's important is not so much the turning points themselves, but the aftermath. How we learn, digest, integrate, rebuild in that in-between time to use the lessons and wake-up calls fruitfully. Along with my father's death at seventeen and more recently witnessing the tsunami, the avalanche of events circa 2001-2002 have been among the turning points of my life.
In hindsight I was fortunate enough to have so much go so wrong in short order that I couldn't pretend that I knew anything about anything. The Buddha has said: Forgo everything you have thought significant until now. (Uh, easier said than done.) I was stripped of everything I thought significant and I was stripped of being a know-it-all. I was hungry for answers, and this time simply stark questions remained. That in itself was a remarkable turning point: Evelyn didn't know.
Ask and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: for everyone that asketh receiveth, and he that seeketh findeth, and to them that knock it shall be opened. - Jesus, The Sermon on the Mount
(Note: that I can even quote Jesus inpublic forgodsakes shows the great strides I've made. This would have been unthinkable - what would they think!? - just two years ago.)
Let's switch to another story... Don Listwin was No. 2 at Cisco when he left to become CEO of Openwave in September 2000. (Talk about bad timing. Uh, strike that, it did allow Listwin to cash out all his Cisco stock options.)
Yet the Internet bubble had already begun to burst, and [Don] Listwin says the four years he spent as CEO turned out to be the hardest of his life. "I had to lay off half my 2,500 employees. I got divorced. And my mom died." Listwin says....
He was at the hospital, near Vancouver, where his mom had died less than an hour earlier. His father and sister had just arrived, and the mourning process had begun in earnest. Just as a nurse came into the room and asked if the family would like to donate Grace Listwin's corneas, Listwin's mobile phone rang. It was Openwave's CFO, reporting in that they had missed their numbers for the quarter. "Thanks for telling me, but at the moment that's just going to have to take a back seat." - "When the Dream Changes", Paul B. Carroll, Worthwhile Magazine, July/August 2005
I'd been the first employee of a golden-boy-founded Internet start-up. That same September 2000 that Listwin joined Openwave we tried to get a second round of funding. I can only picture the men gathered around the board room as our iconic venture capitalist yelled and stomped when he uncovered that said golden boy, now chairman of the board, was merely working part-time. Everything quickly unraveled.
Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. - Steve Jobs
Listwin walked away from Openwave and now devotes his life to fighting cancer at his non-profit. (Listwin's mission is focused on the crux of the cancer problem because "money is being made from treatment, not from detection.") I only use Listwin as a counterpoint to myself. It really doesn't matter: you can be a multi-millionaire in a velvet-lined prison cell of your own making or you can be a nomadic gypsy tossed from port to port, freedom and security is totally independent of your bank account.
Money isn't evil. It is nothing. - Anonymous
As catchwords that pull me forward, authenticity, purpose and integrity were the drivers that fueled my personal quest. These catchwords guided me quite well for the last few years. They fueled my curiousity. The funny thing was I practically ended up right where I'd started, or at least it looks that way externally.
We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.- T.S. Eliot
I watched many of my compatriots (especially women) leave behind technology and business to heal the world and escape to be 'more authentic': from joining non-profit ventures to becoming Reiki masters to listening deeply as a personal coach. It would require a book-length post to chronicle my journey - so I'll cut to the chase. I got to the point where I realized I didn't need to go anywhere to be myself. I didn't need to go anywhere to heal. Trust me, there's a whole lot of healing needed right here within business.
The old catchphrases have lost their mystery. Ever since the tsunami, I have new catchphrases: open-heartedness, selflessness, and grace. These catchwords are proverbial carrots at the end of the stick - pretty distant but compelling. Yet, they are on the very same authenticity continuum that I embarked in 2002.
Ultimately authenticity is interwined with fearlessness. You can read Steve Job's 2005 Stanford commencement speech. It's remarkably inspiring. Four days later, one can easily be back to reading the weekly status report and glumly punching the clock. I know this. Verywell. Your fear, your doubt, your resistance, your homeostatis andyour obstacles aren't specifically addressed in Job's speech, are they?
Inspiration doesn't pay the bills. We dismiss millionaires like Jobs and Listwin. Yeah, right, what do they know about fear and failure, we mumble. Fine, then (although they're ultimately flesh and bones - andspirit - too).
I grew up in an immigrant family, so 'Do what you love and the money will follow' was hardly my parent's life-long advice. To top it off, they were so overprotective and fearful of outsiders that riding my bicycle around the block, going over to a friend's home, having a boyfriend, and certainly the school trip to D.C. were strictly forbidden.
In a parallel universe I would have been an English lit and philosophy major, but even a journalism degree was too risky. In my first semester as a copy editor of the university paper, I quickly saw that seniors were having a tough time securing ill-paying reporting jobs. Needless to say, I graduated with a BSEE. (Actually, I love the art of computers too, but in my heart of hearts it's not my first love.)
Recently, at a journalism conference an Indian-Japanese comedian is introduced thusly, "Like all good Indians and all good Japanese, he became an engineer." This is so true it hurts like a Dilbert cartoon. His humorous quips as Andy Groves' demo boy eventually paved the way to his new career. The Indian journalists foremost question to him: "What did your parents say?" I'm scratching the surface, but this is the firm foundation I then laid my own heap of fears upon.
"So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time," is plain as day in Jobs' pep talk. He continues:
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. - Steve Jobs
In 2002-2003, I bounced around the Bay Area sleeping on friend's couches (no floors, so I am one up on Jobs ;-)) and there were days I could barely afford peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for dinner. After one consulting engagement in Europe (after a long dry spell, and expenses were only reimbursed later), I wandered alone through Italian cobblestone streets teeming with cafes and shops hoping I could find something to eat with the change in my pocket. It amounted to less than a euro. Although I went hungry that one day, I gorged myself on the morning flight back to the U.S. on business class.
But as I've said before, the summer of 2002 was priceless. All the money I'd hoarded during my lucrative engineering days had never granted me a lasting sense of peace and joy and freedom. With nowhere further to fall, I gleaned what intuition actually was and followed it; I experienced the expansiveness of impersonal unconditional love - a love that emanates from the universe; and I was experimented with what freedom without strings attached might look like. It was that indescribable love that I trusted. It was an imperfect often halting trust, but it got me by. In an about face to the controlled will and rationality that had shaped my life, I simply trusted that it would (ok, how's might even) all work out OK.
You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life. - Steve Jobs
What motivates me now? You will think me absurd for saying this in the same breath as the word business - and perhaps you've already surmised it: Yup, I am definitely hinting about enlightenment as the endpoint on the authenticity continuum.
We could regard enlightenment as the complete experience of fearlessness. – Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Shambhala Sun, March 2005
Enlightenment: that's my carrot catchword these days. Althoughenlightenment feels nebulous. It's more concrete when I translate it and contemplate opening my heart and living in grace.
As I write, I feel more absurd. The concept sounds absurd. Enlightenment? Hello, it's 2005. I work for a living. And I am attempting enlightenment in the most (or one of the most) materialistic regions in the most materialistic country while employed in a materialisitic profession. What gall!
According to Buddhist teachings, the buddha-nature is present in every living being, and thenatural state of one's mind, when it's not misconstrued by the power of negative thoughts, is perfection. - Matthieu Ricard
They say Matthieu Ricard, the son of a French intellectual, "gave up a promising career as a scientist to study Tibetan Buddhism." Uh, what exactly is this promise behind a promising career, anyway? Does it have any relations in the family of happiness?
At a 2003 conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin who oversaw the experiments there, described his follow-up studies. Davidson, who had spent time in Asia studying meditation when he was younger, flashed a PowerPoint slide of a bell curve rising like a red mountain out of a flat landscape. It was a graph, he explained, charting 150 people's normal brain states. For the great majority, that state was a mix of left prefrontal cortex (positive emotion) and right prefrontal cortex (negative emotion) activity. But there was one tiny "data point" at the chart's far edge, a solitary pilgrim walking away from the looming red peak of statistical normalcy. That point was Matthieu Ricard,scanned during his compassion meditation. His reading was entirely off the curve in the area of positive emotion -- the most extreme result ever recorded. - "Scanning the Monk",Marc Ian Barasch, Utne Reader, March/April 2005
For extreme results of happiness and compassion, I'd go back immediately and wipe the tad-less-than-positive absurd from my vocabulary.
The eighty-four adepts, or mahasiddhas, who lived in India in the second to twelfth centuries found it necessary do spiritual practice in conjunction with their worldly activities. For instance, King Indrabhuti ruled a large kingdom and was surrounded by great luxury. Yet he received mahamudra [Buddhist] instructions, practiced them while ruling his Kingdom, and achieved the supreme accomplishment of mahamudra - enlightenment in one lifetime. Other mahasiddhas were cobblers, arrow makers, sweepers, and even practitioners of such humble occupations as grinding sesame seeds...There was for them no contradiction between the work that they had to do and the practice of mahamudra; no conflict came up between Dharma [application of Buddha's teaching] practice and worldly activities. - Essentials of Mahamudra: Looking Directly at the Mind, by Khenchen Thranga Rinpoche
What motivates me? Today, Mother Theresa's words spur me too: "Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person." And I continue to ask myself: When's the last time you tried to pay the rent with love?
Love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whoever loves much, performs much, and can accomplish much, and that which is done in love is well done. - Vincent van Gogh
Now ask yourself: When's the last time you tried to paid the rent with love?
At first I didn't connect a friend's email subject line:
row row row your boat gently down the stream
with the "truck art" I saw last night when I went for a walk.
I mulled over that "last great unknown" phrase. So I memorized the line "last great unknown," Wyoming, Powell and resolved to look up the website when I came back home from my walk. I already knew of Powell since I've run many of the canyons* (Lodore, Westwater, Desolation, Gray, Cataract--alas not Grand Canyon) that he would explore in his expedition.
As I walked I also became less perturbed and more curious about the sensations of the flight-or-fight stress response that were threatening to debilitate my entire being (releasing cortisol, adrendaline and what-not). Logically, there wasn't a reason. I wasn't being chased by a woolly mammoth. My mind, as was its habit, was simply freaking out in wanting to know for certain what was next (even a lie would suffice to pacify it). It wasn't getting any clear signal that could serve as any reference point--and that was its issue. I don't know if the feeling is what what we commonly call 'fear' is as this physiological response felt even more primal and fundamental than emotion.
My fears weren't quelled, but there was the insight that it wasn't going to get what it wanted. And somehow there was relief in this answer answer: Actually, there is no last great unknown. It's just the next great unknown, and the next. The only drama in all this is fabrifactured when (and if) I think life and I are two separate entities at cross-purposes.
I do not think humanity has even touched the surface of what is possible when we don't rush around looking for surety of shore, when we don't hole up in cozy lakes... but allow the current of the mighty river its due. When I remember that the Unknown is also You and I, is Us, is All, then the 'have to know' rift disappears.
"Hello, my name is John Wesley Powell. It is the 24th of May 1869, and the good people of Green River City have turned out to see us start. Today we begin our expedition into the last great unknown within the continental United States. I am proud to say that I am a self-driven, self-taught man of action, and am determined to conquer these unmapped, uncharted rivers and canyons, knowing that if I should fail, sure death awaits me and my crew. The nine men making the expedition along with me are prepared to embark on what I believe will be a 10-month journey throughout lands into which no one has ventured. It is my future goal to ultimately be able to guide Americans safely into the West. I seek knowledge of, and want to explore, what many believe cannot be done. Native Americans have told me that to enter the canyon is to disobey the gods and should not be done.
I have chosen a different path than that of my father, but believe that my calling lies in the depths of the canyon walls, or perhaps rushes through the rivers’ water. I see many people here today at Expedition Island in Wyoming that I shall later invite to join me on this adventurous expedition through writings I intend to note in my journal. As our expedition into the American West is about to begin, and final preparation is quickly coming to an end, I would like to take a moment to write down how I came to be here today."
I also found it inspiring that Powell feels as if he is following a 'calling' or nudge that's bigger than his parental conditioning or any sense of self-preservation--and he is going to follow it--come what may.
Also this diary passage resonates with me because Powell ventures forth with an ensemble, and as I've come to realize that atriums are more my style than freelancing solo in a coffee shop, reading that really struck a chord. In fact, I just landed today in Silicon Valley on a scouting mission because I want to be engaged in an expedition with a shared purpose again (and that takes place face-to-face, not just virtual teams).
I noted too that Powell decides to keep a diary in order to share his journey widely. This one feels far more courageous than tumbling down thick Western rivers in petite wooden boats, but I've seen that, for me, it is important not slip into hiding, and keep on sharing, out loud--especially in these exciting times.
Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream, merrily merrily merrily merrily life is but a dream.
* I lived in Salt Lake City and my ex-husband was an investor in Adventure River Expeditions (three things I love) in southern Utah (it's been acquired, so not A.R.E. now).
p.s. If you're in the Bay Area, I'll be here thorugh June 1. I'm investigating an accelerator idea, and some other quixotry. It's too much to go into in one blog post, but you can check out my bookmarks under Education and Innovation to connect the dots and get a sense. If you tend to work best with a group of peers and partners, drop me a line.
Image Credits: U-Haul, John Wesley Powell's expedition 1869 photos from their own expedition photographer ("Powell's Grand Ambition" covers the difficulty of the Grand Canyon portion of the journey); Swimming Cities of Switchback Seas is a sculptural floating city assembled by Swoon and crew.
The ruins of the once center of the cosmopolitan world Byzantium Empire are underground in Istanbul.
Paradoxically, antique and precious things aren't the only thing underground.
Often new and too edgy things reside underground.
Although, I'm tiring of hiding underground.
Perhaps it is the function of artists, shamans and culture-makers to be culturally dystonic: To be too edgy--not by force or contrivance but simply because you are going with the dynamic of life (go ahead and rock the boat, surf the edges).
Heck, it's a dragon year in the Chinese zodiac. It's a year of adventure. No time to be tentative and timid like Ms. Chihuro in Spirited Away. She was having none of it, sulking in the backseat as they drove to their new home. Her parents said a new school could be an adventure (ya right?). Little could she foresee her dread of the unknown would be tested by far more intimidating tests than any grade school.
Switching cartoons for a minute. I know it's been ages since you watched Avatar: The Last Airbender, if you've ever have.
There's a particular scene where one character does something so uncharacteristic, they faint immediately after, and in the next scene are bedridden with fever. A second character offers them support and wisdom in this dialogue (changed two words so I don't spoil the story for you):
You should know this is not a natural sickness. But that shouldn't stop you from enjoying tea.
What's happening?
Your critical decision. What you did beneath that lake, it was in such conflict with your image of yourself, that you are now at war within your own mind and body.
What's that mean?
You are going through a metamorphosis, my friend. It will not be a pleasant experience. But when you come out of it, you will be the beautiful person you were always meant to be.
Pretty much nails how I've been feeling. That sort of fever, but not quite a fever. An intense battle of my own self-images (self-mirages) clasping and collapsing.
I learned a new word last week in Shamans Through Time. "Among the Sedang Moi, a person may even drink his own urine, in the hope that this act will so depreciate him in the sight of his divine sponsors that they will take back the power they had been given." An individual who feels called to be a shaman may commit suicide as an act of refusal. It's so anathema to my self-concept, even if it is ultimately "positive" (well, maybe "whole") it wrecks how I have fixated myself.
ego-dystonic /ego-dys·ton·ic/ (e´go-dis-ton´ik) denoting aspects of a person's thoughts, impulses, and behavior that are felt to be repugnant, distressing, unacceptable, or inconsistent with the self-conception.
For a person who prides themselves on their cocky persona being compassionate might be repugnant, so ego dystonia looks unique to each. Ultimately no fixed image is going to do the river of you/us/I any justice.
Later, in the 1956 essay, George Devereux states, "shamanism is often also culture dystonic." The arts are dystonic. Who we really are is dystonic.
Recently, I read Tara Mohr contend that actually there are two flavors of fear, first is akin to worry about an imagined future fate. The second kind:
"This is the word used in the Old Testament whenever people encounter something sacred. When Moses meets the burning bush, he feels “yirah.” Yirah is described as a kind of trembling awe we feel when we are in the presence of the sacred. It is also described as “the fear that comes over us when we are inhabiting a larger space than we are used to.” - Tara Mohr
The fear that comes over us when we inhabit spaciousness, when we are the sacred.
The Evolution of Culture and The Evolution of Creativity chapters in British-Israeli physicist David Deutsch book, The Beginning of Infinity, asserts that shame and taboo are the primary tools used to keep individuals and society comfortable (or confined, depending on perception) in our conclusions and self-conceptions. In other words, tools to avoid the fever of dystonia, resist evolution, hem life.
Deutsch shares:
"Therefore no society could remain static solely by suppressing new ideas once the have been created.
That is why the enforcement of the status quo is only ever a secondary method of preventing change -- a mopping-up operation. The primary method is always -- and can only be -- to disable the source of new ideas, namely human creativity. So static societies always have traditions of bringing up children in ways that disable their creativity and critical faculties. That ensures that most of the new ideas that would have been capable of changing the society are never thought of in the first place.
How is this done? The details are variable and not relevant here, but the sort of thing that happens is that people growing up in such a society acquire a set of values for judging themselves and everyone else which amounts to ridding themselves of distinctive attributes and seeking only conformity with the society's constitutive memes. They not only enact those memes: they see themselves as existing only in order to enact them. So, not only do such societies enforce qualities such as obedience, piety and devotion to duty, their members' sense of their own selves is invested in the same standards. People know no others. So they feel pride and shame, and form their aspirations and opinions, by the criterion of how thoroughly they subordinate themselves to the society's memes." - David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity
Culture is a funny thing. In the West, they view dragon as adversary to be slayed, and in the East, dragons are harbingers of fortune and magic.
The dragon? It has no way of knowing, really, which culture you hail from. It just rides life.
Your humble wood dragon, Evelyn
Bonus: Self as a verb instead of self as an image is beautifully explained by Adyashanti in a January 18, 2012 webcast (available for sale) titled, "The Whole Notion of Self." (Scroll through titles on the right sidebar on the Radio Archives page.)
p.s. Yes, this is a very much an explaining post. Setting up context for what in near-future may look like up-ending memes and conceptions that have been handed down as gospel. In the end it's an experiential process of discovery that I really can't tell you about, and why I'm moving more toward exploring posts.
p.p.s. The young girl in the film was modeled after a real girl. If you've never seen Spirited Away it's a real treat for the imagination. It's been voice-overed in English by Pixar/Disney, and it is the top revenue film in Japan of all time.
“Publishing a volume of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo,” said author Don Marquis, speaking from experience. Something you’re considering, Leo, may seem to fit that description, too. It’s a project or action or gift that you’d feel good about offering, but you also wonder whether it will generate the same buzz as that rose petal floating down into the Grand Canyon. Here’s what I think: To the degree that you shed your attachment to making an impact, you will make the exact impact that matters most. Give yourself without any expectations.” - Rob Brezsny
I'm not a Leo per se, yet that truly spoke to me. And poetry is more than lyrics and lines, more fathomless in category as W.B. Yeats says, “What can be explained is not poetry.”
My last post here was back in October. Once I was locked out from updating (I hadn't paid my monthly fees), it didn't take long to see that I could appreciate a respite.
Recently, I picked up the Avatar: The Last Airbender cartoon series on DVD at the local library (no spoilers, I'm only 2/3 through). It begins in an alternate world with its own cosmology. This world is divided into four elements, with their attendant lands and kings. They are in the midst of a hundred-year war instigated by the Fire Nation wiping out many of the people and cultures in their world, including the Air Nomads and their temple.
A small tribe of Water people are deciding whether or not to banish a new-comer: a twelve-year-old named Aang whom might just be the Avatar (by balancing the four elements within himself, the Avatar can restore balance outside, ending the war). The debate ensues around whether he is too reckless to be among their serious warriors.
This is the dialogue that spoke to me, and I might just make it my mantra (internally) going forward:
Kitara: Don't you see? Aang's brought us something we haven't had in a long time. Fun. Sokka: Fun? We can't fight Firebenders with fun! Aang, the Avatar (smiling earnestly): You should try it sometime.
I can see some of you rolling your eyes at this point. Does it seem like fun = frivolous, or is it fun = harmonizing the imbalances in the world while having fun in the process? Fun = inventing and inspiring joyous ways of living?
This is where the line in the opening of the post: "It’s a project or action or gift that you’d feel good about offering, but you also wonder whether it will generate the same buzz as that rose petal floating down into the Grand Canyon" resounds. This blog, Crossroads Dispatches, celebrates it's 8th anniversary on February 6th. It's time for a shift that's closer to my gift: Less explaining, more exploring. To that end, I'm focusing on experiments in imagination and improvisation and fun; starting off easy and going into the more far-fetched and revolutionary as we go. That doesn't mean explaining shall never occur, but yeah, I'm aiming for exploratory, adventurous, experiential.
A glimpse of EXPLAINING:
"Today, the sci-fi novels of the sixties feel like artifacts from a distant age. "One way you can describe the collapse of the idea of the future is the collapse of science fiction," Thiel said. "Now it's either about technology that doesn't work or about technology that's used in bad ways. The anthology of the top twenty-five sci-fi stories of 1970 was, like, "Me and my friend the robot went for a walk on the moon,' and in 2008 it was, like, 'The galaxy is run by a fundamentalist Islamic confedereracy, and there are people who are hunting planets and killing them for fun."
[Peter] Thiel's venture-capital firm, Founders Fund, has an online manifesto about the future that begins with a complaint: "We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters." He believes that this failure of imagination explains many of the country's problems--from the collapse in manufacturing to wage stagnation to the swelling of the financial sector. As he puts it, "You have dizzying change where there's no progress."" - "No Death, No Taxes," The New Yorker, November 28, 2011
I don't relegate the dynamic of unfolding change to technology alone. I am more interested in questioning and stretching the horizons of the possible. Sometimes that is a simple shift of perception that affects identity, culture, and society.
Here's a glimpse of EXPLORING:
Speaking of sugared petals, here's an exercise:
imagine you are host to a 101-course meal (I believe Senia gave me this seed idea originally in NYC 2006 after an adventure in the Whitney Museum).
Spring roll, raisin, red pepper, Mung bean, tomato preserve, pancake and mini pancake, maple syrup, kombucha, polenta rounds with basil and tomato, red Russian kale, thistle flower coffee, guava juice, blackberry, jalapeno, red currant, Morbier cheese, fennel seed were among the 100 bites of art offered.
Now imagine like the boys in Peter Pan that you too can be fed by the energy of envisioned food.
Or as Robert Irwin puts it, “It’s strange. With food, for instance, people seem able to understand what’s involved: you savor the taste rather than just feed the body. But people have a hard time understanding that it should be the same way with visual experience.” Actually, I'd omit visual and broaden to "the same way with experience."
So now what might you serve that nourishes the senses, spirit and soul as well?
I'd have sugared rose petals.
And pinecone, an hourglass, peanut butter on a sterling silver spoon, a jar of royal blue moist tempura paint, match tea powder (unsteeped), a haiku printed on cloth, confetti, a pincushion stuck with pins with colorful threads through them, cottonball, typewriter ribbon, swim goggles, leaf, lit tealight candle, shower curtain ring, Pocky (Japanese snack), an ice cube... and on and on.
What would you serve?
p.s. Essence of exploration: The venue above, the West Bank Social Center’s tagline is 'UNPREDICTABLE THINGS ARE HAPPENING.'
"Awestruck, she watched the animal trainers, the acrobats, the jugglers, and clowns. And then the lights dimmed and a spotlight shot upward and a lone woman climbed up a rope to a metal bar suspended far above the floor. Later Olga would learn that this wondrous sport was called "trapeze." But before she knew the word she knew her destiny. "That's for me!" she promised herself.
. . . Most circus performers come from circus families or have trained as gymnasts. Olga had neither circus connections nor gymnastics' training. She didn't even know where the nearest circus school was located. She had no allies. Her parents were conservative and practical. Her sisters, her grandmother, her friends were all walls she had to scale on her way to the trapeze. Even the friend who had recklessly lowered her onto a stranger's balcony in the middle of the night wouldn't help her run away to the circus.
"The Census says that 5.9 million Americans ages 25 to 34 are living with their parents, an increase of 25 percent over from before the recession. Men are now twice as likely as young women to live with their parents.
. . . Only 55.3 percent of young adults 16 to 29 were employed, according to the Census, down from 67.3 percent in 2000 and again a post-World War II low. - "Editorial: Generation Needs More than a New Name," Willoughby, Ohio News-Herald, September 24, 2011
*****
You read this and it seems so... dim. According to some.
According to who?
Is it?
*****
"Young eagles have no instinctual fear when they emerge from the nest. They learn to avoid dangerous predators such as the wolf and fox, so Kazak hunters must climb to the nest and capture the juvenile eagle before it learns to fly -- when it is fearless. The Kazaks call the fledging a 'balapan', which they compare to a celestial raptor Hangaard (Khan Garuda). Living with an eagle may seem impractical - the raptor must be fed a marmot or a rabbit every other day and when it is cold in winter the nomads will sometimes feed it from their own flocks. The visible benefits of owning an eagle may not seem to tally with the cost, but what binds the Kazak to the eagle is something more than utility, it is what anthropologists call 'deep play.' The Kazaks say that the eagle 'chases away darkness from a man's heart.'"-- Hamid Sardar
*****
I had lost all sense of deep play when I lived in New York City.
I tried to make it--according to other people's terms.
Students praised for performance and ability tend to want to continue receiving those kudos, and won't risk threaten their reputation as a smart cookie or as a success. "The mastery-oriented children are really hell-bent on learning something" have been praised on process and effort, and they go for it for the pure privilege of growing. They'll look foolish. So what. Kids that were praised for performance tend to want to confirm their greatness, and kids praised for process seek activities that expand their abilities. (see also Little Bets, by Peter Sims)
Why, glory be, you are so successful!="All this implied that when students were valued for their intelligence, failures would be taken more personally, even as being disgraceful."
Whoa, look at you, you are learning!="Tend to view failures and setbacks as opportunies for growth. They have a desire to constantly challenge and stretch themselves."
*****
"Uranus thus confronts the Saturnian part of us that wishes to hold on, to maintain the status quo, to resist change in favor of security, tradition, and the established order.
The rebel-trickster side of the Prometheus archetype can thus come from within or without, and in the latter case a person can feel constantly subject to problematic changes that require one to reorient one's life. Whether these changes are precipitated by other people, by new psychological or physical conditions, or by external circumstances, their role is to open one's life to something new. If one is identified excessively with the past, if one tries to hold on to structures that are outmoded, then one will experience Uranus as a disruptive force that at times can be quite uncomfortable. But the potential is always there for one to integrate the archetype, and for one to contact one’s own capacity for freedom and excitement, for openness to the unexpected and the new.
When any planet is in major aspect to Uranus, that second planetary archetype tends to be liberated into expression, often in sudden, unusual, or unexpected ways. The second archetype is given an exciting, creative or innovative stimulation, and can be a source of both freedom and unanticipated change." - "An Introduction to Archetypal Astrological Analysis," Richard Tarnas, Ph.D.
*****
"Come to the edge" he said, "We can't, we are afraid" they said...
"Come to the edge" "We can't, we will fall" "Come to the edge" and they came and he pushed them and they flew. - Guillaume Appollinaire
"After years of rampant consumerism and easy credit, such nascent initiatives speak to the new mood in Greece, where imposed austerity has caused people to come together — not only to protest en masse, but also to help one another." - "Battered by Economic Crisis, Greeks Turn to Barter Networks," NY Times, October 1, 2011
*****
". . . . Unlike most runaways, who are impelled by impulse, Olga postponed her departure for months. She would need at least a little money, and, not being a thief, would have to earn it. And she needed an act.
. . . For a few days she tried juggling with stones and fruit, but having no one to teach her, quit in frustration. She thought of animal acts. . . Her father refused to buy her a dog so Olga went to Ishim and befriended a tiny shaggy mongrel she spotted at a refuse dump. It followed her home, where she washed it and named it "Lassie," after a dog she had seen in a movie.
Her father said, "You can't take care of yourself! How are you going to care for a dog?"
But Olga proved a good master and proceeded to train Lassie with a determined patience she rarely accorded humans. In no time Lassie was standing and playing dead. Olga would make her climb the stairs one at a time. If Lassie failed to stop on a step until given permission to continue, Olga would make her start all over. By the end of the month she had an act." -- Dreams of the Solo Trapeze: Offstage with the Cirque du Soleil, by Mark Schreiber
*****
"“I felt liberated, I felt free for the first time,” Mr. Mavridis said in a recent interview at a cafe in this port city in central Greece. “I instinctively reached into my pocket, but there was no need to.”
Mr. Mavridis is a co-founder of a growing network here in Volos that uses a so-called Local Alternative Unit, or TEM in Greek, to exchange goods and services — language classes, baby-sitting, computer support, home-cooked meals — and to receive discounts at some local businesses."
. . . For Ms. Houpis, the network has a psychological dimension. “The most exciting thing you feel when you start is this sense of contribution,” she said. “You have much more than your bank account says. You have your mind and your hands.”- "Battered by Economic Crisis, Greeks Turn to Barter Networks," NY Times, October 1, 2011
*****
"Now all [Olga] she needed was a train ticket to Tyumen, her first stop on the road to Moscow. She had no money of her own and certainly couldn't approach her parents. There weren't many jobs available for a young girl, and she was still attending school. She and her friends had brought lollipops from gypsies in Ishim, but none of the townspeople sold them. So one day Olga asked a gypsy woman how they were made and went in to business for herself, stealing sugar from her parents' kitchen. The first batch was awful, but the second was good enough to sell to her friends. Her father kept asking where all the sugar was going. To this day he doesn't know it financed her escape, the first yellow brick in her long road." - Dreams of the Solo Trapeze: Offstage with the Cirque du Soleil, by Mark Schreiber
*****
Exactly one year ago today I was living in NYC.
I'm not sure if I were there today I would be part of the Occupy Wall Street protest.
mid-14th century (implied in protestation) "solemn declaration," from Latin protestari "declare publicly, testify, protest," from pro- "forth, before" + testari "testify," from testis "witness" (see testament).
my public declaration
I can certainly identify with many of the frustrations of the protesters. I was broke, I was running out of options: tried and tired all the grant proposal crayon inside the line forms, tried potential investors (long story, 'twas a media venture), tried X and Y and Z's and Kickstarter and plain hustle. Gave up. Try the government. Trudged to the food stamp office, uh-huh so they'd alert my landlord, and that would send them red flags (I was month-to-month, not on a lease) -- so there goes that. I'd never felt so powerless. So I left NYC before rent was due up again. I did not Make It in America. Near penniless with just enough for airfare, I moved in with family across the country.
(btw, I'm only able to share this aloud now since I've shifted into
a growth mindset...
even if the USA is predominantly a fixed mindset...
it's
a #
not me
although one can fixate on poor too)
So yeah, I can certainly identify.... and yet....
I am not 1%. I am not 99%.
I am the 100%--and I don't see that message conveyed much.
Except I just did when I read this. There are instances... for instance, that one woman.. you'll recognize her when you get to that point in the story below (and this again is an excerpt of a longer piece) conveys the I am the 100%:
"We stood there for a while, and when it started to rain, we got under an umbrella with an older, white couple who looked to be in their mid-sixties or so. Then they walked up to a police officer, spoke to him, and he motioned for them to approach the ranking officer in front who was standing with a bullhorn. We then saw this couple walk out of the netted area and leave.
At this point, Rebecca and I walked up to the same ranking officer and politely requested to leave. We were told no and to get back in the crowd. We overheard two officers holding the netting asking each other what they were going to do with all these people. They obviously had no idea what the leadership’s strategy was, if any. We then went under the umbrella of a group of young women who were in their teens and twenties and were talking to a detective (or someone with the NYPD who was wearing an overcoat). He asked us some very leading questions: “Are you all together?”, “So no one told you to disperse?”, “Did you know you would end up here?” We said we had no idea what was happening. Then he told us to talk to the same ranking officer with the bullhorn. This time when we approached, the cops gave him a signal and he motioned for us to all pass through. Just like that.
As we were leaving, I asked one of the women what she had said to the officers before we came over and why they had let us go. She said she had struck up a conversation with an officer and told him he was “beautiful” and a “beautiful person” and that the “love and good vibes” she had sent his way seemed to have an impact on him."
Alas, in the next sentence the writer belittles
the magic and power of the 100%...
the compassion of unconditional love and remarks in response
to the truthfulness of that woman, she adds: "Oh, I’m sure."
It's so easy to be jaded.
Dig deeper. Be still. Feel the undercurrent.
Be sure of love. It's there's 100%.
*****
Olga calmly told her parents she was running away to circus school one day in August.
"Let her go," he told his wife, whose tearful pleading was no more effective than his own threats. "She'll be back tomorrow."
. . . . She was fourteen years old.
Olga Sidorova became a trapeze artist with Cirque du Soleil for many years.
Today, she teaches master classes at the aerial dance studio and school she founded in Sydney, Dancing in the Air.
*****
There were too many roads, too many versions. There were too many roads, no one path--
And at the end?
16. List the implications of "crossroads."
Answer: a story that will have a moral.
Give a counter-example.
17. The self ended and the world began. They were of equal size, commensurate, one mirrored the other.
"The millet fileds were generous and the harvest was good. The hard work of collecting and transporting grain from the farm to the roof of the houses where it waited to be put into the granaries was over. Now, in the fallow season, the villagers turned their attention to spiritual matters, to initiation. The dry season would be painfully idle if there was nothing else to do. One afternoon I was sitting outside with my sister when a town crier came running to my father's house. In a Dagara village, the town crier is considered an envoy of the spirit. He does not greet people or otherwise behave normally, for he is possessed by the message he has been commissioned to convey. He appears very agitated while doing so because he is responding to what the spirits have told him to do.
Out of breath, he stopped in front of us, mumbled something, and drew a cross on the mud wall of the women's quarter. He said nothing, but instead sang a bizarre song. As he was about to go away, I stopped him.
"Wait a minute. What's all this about?"
"What? You don't know? Well, a child who lives in this house will become a man--if he lives that long. . ."
This answer transfixed me, I sat down. I had imagined that Baor was scheduled for the middle of the dry season.
Seeing my perplexity, my sister tried to clarify things for me. "You cannot be told about it until the day before. If you know ahead of time, something is wrong."
"So my initiation begins tomorrow--and I am not the least prepared for it."
Now is the dry season. The millet harvest was good. The season of initiation for my eternal boy. Not just in the Northern Hemisphere. Or in the tribe of the Dagura of Africa. Here in the imaginal hemisphere, too.
Typically, I wouldn't be thinking what I was doing or who I was being ten years ago although the recent attention to 9/11 had that effect. Plus, the photographer Brooke Shaden wrote an open letter to her future self in ten years time.
"I’d like to see the world, but not in the way that most people say they want to. I want to go places and sit in every open field I can find in each unique country and hear the wind talk to me." - Brooke Shaden, "34-Year-Old Me"
Ten years ago... ten years ago. I read both Of Water and the Spirit: Ritual, Magic, and Initiation in the Life of an African Shaman as well asHidden Journey: A Spiritual Awakening by Andrew Harvey in the same time frame in the winter ten years ago while I lived in Salt Lake City and was still a computer engineer (unemployed) and still married (separated). Both books influenced my life by upending what I thought I knew about how the world works. Yet my life was already being upended as our startup closed up shop January 2001, I found looking for work as a former dot-com CTO daunting (the "new economy" was now a pariah in traditional IT circles) and my husband asked for a divorce.
I was more willing to listen to alternative answers than I'd been ever before. (The open-ended question I threw out was, "What is my purpose?"--pretty standard, yet almost any question will do....)
"So it comes to pass that, when we pursue an inquiry beyond a certain depth, we step out of the field of psychological categories and enter the sphere of the ultimate mysteries of life. The floorboards of the soul, to which we try to penetrate, fan open and reveal the starry firmament." -Bruno Schulz
Okay, I'm willing to listen. Maybe consensual reality maybe wasn't a fixed reality or reality, after all.
"To a Dagura man or woman, the material is just the spiritual taking on form." - Malidoma Some
It also shook up my belief that everyone has pretty much the same universal world-view.
In a letter to a friend, Gustav Mahler reveals this about the composition of his Third Symphony, "I tell you in, at certain places in the score, a quite uncanny feeling takes possession of me, and I feel as if I had not created this myself." I would read things like this in 2001, and it'd sound romantic and soothing to hear--although, then, truthfully, I had no clue what Mahler meant.
So reading Of Water and the Spirit was like standing at the edge of a lake--the first body of water I'd ever set eyes on. Although no book is going to be an experiential dive, and until I at least dipped a toe, I would not know wetness. The book did, however, entice me to care about exploring and experimenting with wetness.
So, a few days ago in a Google+ exchange, someone was sharing how they were upset by a brand-new violent, pornographic game (or book?) and another person replied: "Words are wind." And added, that it doesn't matter what the content is as it's only make-believe.
"The world of the Dagara also does not distinguish between reality and imagination. To us, there is a close connection between thought and reality. To imagine something, to closely focus one's thoughts upon it, has the potential to bring something into being." - Malidoma Patrice Some
If I fully believed that words are 'merely' wind, I wouldn't be writing now nor ever. Although paradoxically, words are wind. It's only that many underestimate the power of Air.
In fact, there is a good deal the dismissive tone of the comment, "Words are wind" stirred a fire within me. Noting my anger I connected it with something a mentor of mine said recently, Stifled passion, sooner or later, ends up bursting out as anger. All which has catalyzed me to wholeheartedly commit to accomplishing a few "word as wind" projects with optional interactive elements that I've had on hold (for several reasons with "no money" among the excuses).
“Words that merely come from other words are hard and aggressive. Such words are also lonely, and a great part of the melancholy in the world today is due to the fact that man has made words lonely by separating them from silence.” - Max Picard via Dennis Lewis, "Some Impressions on Words, Voice, Listening, and Silence"
"As in the case of "Star Trek," Westerners look to the future as a place of hope, a better world where every person has dignity and value, where wealth is not unequally distributed, where the wonders of technology make miracles possible. If people in the West could embrace some of the more positive values of the indigenous world, perhaps that might even provide them with a "shortcut" to their own future." - Malidoma Patrice Some
"I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia." - C. S. Lewis
I didn't read The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe (2nd in The Chronicles of Narnia) as a child. In fact, I first cracked open the series only a few years ago. I did savor fairy tales and classic myth from globe spanning cultures such as Greek to Sumerian to Japanese to Navajo. (Sweet surprise! The book devas generously are gifting away all the Kindle versions of one of my childhood faves--Andrew Lang's The Green Fairy Book plus other colors of the prism.)
I'd read in many sources that it's worthwhile to recall childhood instincts and inclinations to reclaim natural, innate talent and delight as a potential livelihood. The most recent example I'd come across is real-world game designer (and motivational speaker) Jane McGonigal's story shared briefly in this excerpt:
". . . Jane’s first year in the real world [after college]—editing at a dot-com in New York, ruling out law school and publishing—left her feeling a little lost. One day [her sister] Kelly asked her, “As a child, what did you do that you loved?”
“Making up games and giving motivational speeches,” Jane answered. “But that’s not a career! Who does that?” - Elle magazine's article on Jane McGonigal
So it would seem that I applied the same logic, my conclusion should be read (and write) fairy tale and modern myth. (I'd probably lean toward the stylized parables that appeal to young and old, male and female, like The Alchemist.)
You'd think that's the logic if early innate inclinations are any clue.
Immersed (yet thoroughly trapped indoors as an eight-year-old), I imagined realms where I would saunter in adventures with elfs, unicorns, and undines well beyond the fortress walls of the concrete block house in our Miami suburb.
Even as a child, I wanted to live out an enchanting fairy tale in real life--no mere vicarious thrill would sate me.
Perhaps the closest that rings true (for me) is real-life mythic life and real-time writing of it. Yet to be honest, that feels like I am putting my very life, soul, heart, spirit, plus everything sacred and profane on the line. (Have you ever noticed how easy it is to scramble sacred and scared?) I tremble as if I'm staring down a dragon. Why so? I happened to read this recently, and it resonates:
"If you didn't know human nature, you might suppose that a single activity like painting, mountaineering, or writing could be treated separately, but the whole person is affected because the whole person is being expressed. (This is why it's said that you get to know yourself on the mountain or in front of the lank canvas.) Even if you pick a very narrow skill, like running a marathon or cooking, your whole sense of self shifts when you succeed with passion as opposed to failing or backing off.
The willingness to reach inside every part of yourself opens the door to total understanding. You place your entire identity on the line, not just an isolated part. This may sound daunting, but actually it's the most natural way to approach any situation.When you hold some part of yourself in reserve you deny it exposure to life; you repress its energy and keep it from understanding what it needs to know." - Deepak Chopra, The Book of Secrets (longer and worthwhile excerpt online)
The pilgrimage shall in the mists of perceived time slay all identity. In the meantime, gumption and courage might have to do.
"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius— and a lot of courage—to move in the opposite direction." - E. F. Schumacher
"I'm working on this because it's the most challenging, riskiest, scariest thing I can think of to do among my livelihood options. Plus, if I live through it intact, it will take me to my edge while using my gifts."
"Creativity is like breathing – pointers may help, but we do the process ourselves. Creative clusters, where we gather as peers to develop our strength, are best regarded as tribal gatherings, where creative beings raise, celebrate, and actualize the creative power which runs through us all." - Julia Cameron, A Guide for Starting Creative Clusters
p.s.I am more partial to the first book The Magician's Nephewbetter than the more popular 2nd in The Chronicle of Narnia series, partially because it tells of the creation myth and authoring of the world of Narnia and of another world. All photos from the movie version, as well as movie stills from http://kingsandqueensofnarnia.tumblr.com.
"If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living." - Joseph Campbell
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