Crossroads Dispatches

Before I die I want to ______

Before I die I want to.... that was the question sitting there blank on the blackboard. The answer not to be engraved in stone, a fixed and unmoving testament. Just chalk--so it's okay to morph it, play it by ear and adjust to the rhythm of life. I was intrigued by Candy Chang's interactive art projects, as I flipped through the magazine:

"Through a series of large-scale projects that combine installation art with social activism, Chang has encouraged people to engage with public spaces to let their voices be heard. In 2008, while living in New York, she invited Brooklyn residents to anonymously reveal their rental costs on sticky notes posted on a local storefront—helping them determine the fair market value of their apartments. In 2011 she constructed a blackboard over an abandoned house in her current city of New Orleans, stenciling it with the phrase BEFORE I DIE I WANT TO.... Passersby wrote in answers like "go to school," "feed an elephant," and "understand," in chalk. Chang says the project served as a reminder of "what matters to people as individuals and as a community." - Oprah Magazine, "How Candy Changs Public Art Projects Are Changing Communities Everywhere," September 2011

Somehow that story reminded me of at least two things (plus a few interactive art projects I'd been musing around). Before I die, I want to get back to New Orleans to culminate a creative project I started there. Preferably way way before I die, like more like next month. October 2011.

Before I die, I want to be real. In the interest of saving face (clients and potential employers Google our names and hold our vulnerabities and voice against us as I've been told by HR folks...) I've not been sharing much of myself over the last three years. Screw it, I can't pretend and I can't live that way (i.e. meekly, in hiding). Plus, context is everything, and since this site is 100% coming from my lens, my voice, it helps to have a glimpse where I'm coming from and going to.

This is a question I got in my inbox a few months ago from a reader:

Question: So I'm curious if you've jumped off the Silicon Valley treadmill permanently or just recharging the batteries before taking another shot at it?

I jumped off in late 2004, ever since the surviving the tsunami, I've never again been attracted to that world, but I also try not to be repelled by it either. I was set up to start a firm with some friends, the four of us were going to do a consulting and coaching practice around social media for business when we all came back from holidays, etc. to kick off Jan 2005. Not.

Obviously too much coincidence to just happen to be in Thailand, just happen to be on the beach, when such an unmistakable wake-up call knocks on one's door. I don't exactly go to Thailand every day, or any of the other nations hit [by the Indian Ocean disaster on December 24, 2004].

The peace came because having witnessed the enormity of that disaster and its aftermath (I returned a year later in Dec 2005 for nine weeks), I immersed myself in a monastic life for the next 16 months. My main thing has been enlightenment/self-realization/whatever-name-you-give-it since that time, everything else is a backdrop. Luckily, I didn't leave Bay Area right away as that is where I found my teacher, Adyashanti.

Speaking of Before I Die, I Want to.... this oldie blog post came up as something to share. Especially for those of you who have only been reading for a couple of years. Wow, and Geshe Michael Roach shows up in it pretty prominently in this post after I rustle it up and skim it. I only just re-read my favorite chapter (on the Economics of Limitlessness) and promptly wrote to his office two months ago. I want him to come speak in New Orleans. Why? A hunch.

"Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over." -- F. Scott Fitzgerald

August 11, 2005

If Not on the Day I Die, Then Not Today

There's a practice called "Death Meditation" in Tibetan monasteries. The idea you get in your mind when you hear that phrase is probably lying down on a cold piece of sidewalk somewhere  and trying to imagine a lot of tubes up your nose, relatives crying at your side, and heart monitors going off with a beeping sound. But this is not the point at all. To put it simply, you just wake up in the morning and stay there in bed, lying down, without opening your eyes. And you say to yourself: "I'm going to die tonight. What would be the best thing to do with the rest of my time?" via Geshe Michael Roach, The Diamond Cutter

Which is eerily similar to this quote I referenced the other day from Steve Jobs:

For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself:  "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.  - Steve Jobs, 2005 Stanford commencement speech

I suppose you might get the urge to to try skydiving that day, or maybe go sing in a karaoke bar, or get the most expensive tickets to a Broadway play (assuming there's a matinee). The Death Meditation practice has to be done on a regular basis, over an extended period of time - and that's when it has its strongest effect. One result you'll find comes pretty quickly is that you streamline your life: You cut out the things that you own or do that slow you down...

If you were really going to die tonight, would you sit and read through the whole Sunday paper, or most of the magazines you subscribe to? Would you really surf around the TV looking desperately for anything of even minor interest? Would you still go out and spend an hour or two at lunch or dinner, gossiping about the other managers. Decide then: If not on the day I die, then not now either. Because, frankly, it may really be today. - Geshe Michael Roach, The Diamond Cutter

I read these words last night.

I did the Death Meditation this morning. I did not have an intense desire to beam myself to the Parthenon in Greece (I'm an ancient civilization junkie) or bask in the glow of the Taj Mahal at dawn. I'd no desire to bungie-jump into a canyon, or race a car at top speed across the glistening salt flats. You'll say this is only because I've already done many exotic or biochemical fueled adventures. Yes. Run Boston Marathon, check. Run fifty-milers weaving through mountain ridges, below glaciers, facing oceans and fjords, check. Run intense white water, check. Run off to Prague, Hong Kong, Venice, Bangkok, Oaxaca, Tokyo, Auckland, check. Run through matchbox villages, hidden serene canyons, fern chocked valleys, check. Yes - and no. With all I've done there was still...well, more I wanted.

Or was it less?

There was a practical  part of me well aware that I have to wrap up my presentation for the BlogBusinessSummit by tomorrow. Can I make the presentation memorable so that if it was the last thing I did it would be worthwhile? So many folks whip together a few bullet points with little feeling for what they are leaving behind. And then there are presentations that seep into you like Julie Leung's on the social masks we wear (you had to be there because the visuals and Julie's presence are inextricable; but here's the audio).

There's a few things I won't get to by tonight. Beginning the book that won't go away or this new blog I'm working on launching. That's ok. But could write a poem. Better yet revise that poem I'm working on. Get the class blog up and share the poem (for my fellow Taos Summer Writers Conference's The Yoga of Writing students). Today.

And if this was the last post I wrote would it be reflective of what I am for? I think of this not only because of this Death Meditation, but I was reminded of it reading Steven Vincent's last post last week (more context: my RIP post). Yes, at any time this could be my last post. That's not meant to stop me dead in my tracks. Unperfect is what blogging is all about (as Tom Guarriello and I joked at a Starbucks in Manhattan when I meant to say imperfect!). There are days where I rant and days I whine. So I wondered: What was my very last post before the tsunami? Yes, thankfully, it's precisely what I'd have left behind. It's titled: A Story of Peace and Goodwill.

I read about the concept of survivor's guilt the other day (why am I alive when all these others perished?). Strange, I don't feel guilty about surviving the tsunami. My heart goes out to those who lost loved ones and those we lost. I do feel like I have a responsibility to really live and to give and to share.

But the honest truth is I don't feel the quite the same urgency as I did in, say, January without constant reminders.

This morning as I laid there I thought of calling up a few family members and friends and catching up with personal email (including to some of you out there). I called up a friend to go on a hike this afternoon. It's not about the hike, though.

I won't get to it all today, but I get a chance to die again. I hope.

p.s.  Just finished The Diamond Cutter (and am still too spellbound to do a proper review). It's hands down the best business book I've read this year - maybe ever. If it matters at all Roach was founder of Andid International Diamond Corporation which has sales in excess of one hundred million dollars a year. He started out as an errand boy (ok, not your typical errand boy - he'd been Princeton-trained and is an ordained Tibetan Buddhist monk). 

ART CREDITS: All photos are of Candy Chang's work and from Candy Chang's website; her blog is here.

They had no problems understanding light speed and teleportation except that they could have done it more discreetly. - Malidoma Some

"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."

"Your not knowing is your being prepared." [replied his sister] - Malidoma Some, Of Water and the Spirit

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 as Hidden 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

Bonus: Excerpt from Malidoma Patrice Some's introduction to his memoir here. It speaks to the fluidity of 'reality' and the power of imagination.

Announcing: I'm offering Tarot readings (the Tower archetype of 9/11 got me thinking about Tarot again) as a whimsical way to do a personalized consultation for your creative idea--be it a new business venture, new product line, or a Black Rock Arts Foundation grant proposal. Whatever you desire to make tangible through your sheer creative expression and exuberance. I'll throw in my own quirky amalgamations to the alchemical William Blake Tarot deck's two cents. All proceeds to fund a month-long online vignette du jour (there's more to it than that as you may infer from the above post) creative project using the setting of the city of New Orleans. (Thus, the tie-in with Tarot as Nola is where I learned the archetypal craft.)

ART CREDITS: All photographs on this post by Brooke Shaden. (Brooke's blog here.)

I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia. - C.S. Lewis

"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)

Yes, yes, place your entire identity on the line.

".... it still matters what other people think, right?"

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

Bonus: Sharing inspiration behind new narrative 'game' (game as in leela) project on Google+, I  added:

"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."

Another Google+ post that peeps within one creative risk on my project.

Bonus: Click on this link to accept my invitation to you to join my private circle a.k.a. "creative cluster" for folks that congregate at this blog on Google+.

"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 Nephew better 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.

Not what we have But what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance. - Epicurus

"Not what we have But what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance." - Epicurus

Interesting article in the LA Times today on how today's Web 2.0 millionaire entrepreneurs pour their wealth into start-ups and non-profits, rather than consumption.

This is a good a time as any to delve at least through the surface of what I see as a potential Renaissance birthing (potential, as in it's a matter of desire--not imposed).

This deserves more consideration, but here's a start.

WHAT WE BUILD, rather than WHAT WE BUY

"This is not a community that values good looks, visible wealth or having a hot body. Those are not the ways that they distinguish high status from low status," [Alice] Marwick said. "Technology millionaires don't hobnob with celebrities or buy a fancy car. They travel to Thailand or they fund an incubator. These things are just as expensive, but that's the classic hacker ethos that prizes the mind, not materials."

. . . Silicon Valley measures achievement by what entrepreneurs build, not what they buy." - "Silicon Valley status symbols emphasize mind over material", LA Times, by Jessica Guynn, June 18, 2011

Before I spotted the LA Times piece, I sent this (excerpted) to the Encanto fellow wayfarers and members:

"I've been playing a game where each day I pretend I am given a written check of a different denomination--for instance, day 1 I receive a $1000 check. Day 2 I receive a $2000 check, and so on---thus day 20 would be $20,000 and day 52 would be $52,000. It is a tougher game to play than I had imagined.

Most days (I'm only on day 10) I use the money to do some sort of public art installation, publish a journal (with artwork from a collaborator I have in mind), or arrange a retreat, conference or Salon with other folks, or otherwise spend it on things that aren't for me, alone. This is partly due to the fact that I'm a minimalist, and partly because I enjoy producing things much much more than consuming things.

I've made a lot of money in my yuppie past, and found that stuff just never did it for me; back then I was into experiences--that meant marathan-running or eating out at new restaurants or traveling to exotic countries or having front-row seats to the Pioneer Theatre. (Fine, marathon-running is NOT a spectator sport but generally much of what I did for pastimes was to pass time.)

Nowadays experiences don't appeal to me that are sit-down, sightsee, spectator-based either; I prefer to produce, participate, play. I'll be in the parade banging the tambourine along with the others, not watch from the sidelines." - Evelyn Rodriguez

In the LA Times story, Alice Murdock asserts that hacker culture is a masculine culture. I like my culture hackeresque... that's indie, that's self-organizing decentralized bubbling up grassroots rather than hierachical top-down gate-keepered, that's freedom of expression, an expressed culture (yeah, we were that idealistic in 1997)-------------------->

Actually, hacker ethos is a pretty whole-brained, holistic thing. It's sort of Whole Earth catalogy, even.

Recently, venture capitalist Fred Wilson--and, note he's based in New York City--mused about the next 'Net thing (in other words, Web 1.0 was about investing in building block infrastructure, Web 2.0 is about applications) and bouncing off Carlotta Perez' work he forecasts a coming cultural revolution. I would like to agree with him. (What I mean by that is I doubt it's a sure thing unless we want it to be so.)

All I know is, count me in for a cultural Renaissance (adore that word a bit more than revolution).

One reason I left Silicon Valley is I didn't feel an epicurean sensitivity to simple refinement and beauty I desired. I suppose the pendulum swung wee too far yang ever since they decimated the plum orchards for those semiconductor labs.

Looking back, I believe an awakened sublime and sensuous cultivation for the yin was nurtured by savoring Italy three times in a single year (while consulting to Telecom Italia's Internet portal division, Virgilio, and to the ISP division).  I pitched them social networking (using Ryze and Friendster as examples--there were no others yet), and they pitched me conviviality (including face-to-face old-fashioned rapport and authentic networking).

I've never been the same since Italy.

I enjoyed picking ripe tomatoes out in the family I was staying with's garden (outside Turin with Monte Bianco a stone's throw away), drinking handmade vino from their own vineyard, sharing a potluck al fresco feast with friends, and returning to my dreamtime in their mulberry treehouse. Bested any five-star experience I've ever had.

Italian imagination and midsummer night festivity influenced the first Salon I hosted August 2006 to mix and mingle media, food, techie, and arts folks.

Then, after a while all fancy restaurants had this sense of "been there, done that," (plus the sense of doing for me rather than with me). At least for me, I'd come to the point where I wasn't nurtured by consumption. (You may think yin is passive, but it's also the creative numinous, the fertile imagination painting visions in the aether--otherwise known as ideas, etc.) There was something more engaging and enthralling to participating with than being pampered to.

I concur with Andrea:

"One of my favourite movie scenes has always been the alfresco birthday dinner party that Juliette Binoche’s character throws Armande (Judi Dench) in the fairytale-like film, Chocolat. The casual backyard setting, in a quaint French village, features a rough-around-the-edges wire framed canopy, folding wood chairs and a long, linen-covered harvest table. Completely proletariat but utterly timeless and stylish in a way that the French pull off better than anyone. This kind of comfortable and chic setting inspires easy conversation, drinking copious amounts of red wine and gathering with friends well past sunset  — and ends with empty bottles, burned-down candles, live music and dancing into the wee hours. My kind of dinner party!" - Andrea Mills, Canadian House and Home

THE WILL TO DO IT

Nowadays, perhaps because I've lived in five cities since I left San Jose, CA in 2008, I am more inspired by an encompassing, planetary vision of Renaissance, rather pinning it to a specific place be it New York City or London or name-your-tangible-patch-of-land.

Renaissance... it's little like the etherealness of the Internet (which isn't tied to geography) and the etherealness of Shambhala, "a borderless kingdom of meditation practitioners committed to realizing enlightenment and social harmony through daily life." And mostly like the way James Carse describes the attitude of horizons (see Bonus below).

The other day I was thinking how much I enjoyed the Foothill Writers Conference when I participated in 2006, and how much my writing flourished from my attendance there that summer, and checked online to see if I could make it an excuse for visiting the Valley this summer. Lo, and behold, I find that it was cancelled in 2010 due to lack of sponsorship, and that may be its fate this year too. In Los Altos, where the Foothill College, the hosts of the writing workshop, is located: "According to a 2007 estimate, the median household income was $158,745, and the median income for a family was $185,848." Having been there, it's true that the Valley peninsula is a prosperous place (by banking standards) so much so that the lame economy excuse doesn't really explain why arts are left to languish.

"our kids attend schools where art is required every day. as it should be" -- Fred Wilson in the comments to his own post, "To Science and Art"

When John F. Kennedy asked Dr. Wernher von Braun what would it take to build and send a rocket ship to the moon, he replied, "The will to do it."

Last night, I was reading Reflections on the Art of Living: A Joseph Campbell Companion, edited by Diane K. Osbon, and this popped vivid. Oh, so relevant:

"From what I have seen in the history of the arts in New York, when money is poured on something it flowers. With money there has to be a flow. I had a beautiful experience of a man with money when I was a trustee of the Bollinger Foundation, which was founded by Paul Mellon, an enormously wealthy man. He and his wife had been in analysis with Carl Jung when the war came and they had to leave Switzerland. They asked Jung what they could give him in the way of a gift to express their gratitude for what he had done. He suggested they establish a foundation for the interpretation and study of symbols. That's whay they did, and it is an example of a lot of money being put to the right use. The influence of that Bollinger Series on on the literature and science of America has been enormous.

. . . When you put the money in the wrong place, it can be devastating. Where is the money [and its activating of priorities by what it attends to] going and where is it coming from in the economy of a nation, the economy of a city? You can turn a flowering culture into a desiccating culture just by wrong channeling. What factor in your own consciousness are you going to favor in the spending of the money? For instance, I have a seventy-five-dollar book coming out. Some people will say that is expensive, but those same people will spend one-hundred-and-fifty dollars to have dinner in a restaurant with another couple. So, is the money going up here in your mind or is it going down there in your stomach?" - Joseph Campbell (recommend the longer excerpt of Campbell's money musings in, "Money is a Congealed Energy and Releasing it Releases Life Possibilities")

 YIN YANG OF CREATIVE CULTURE AND INNOVATION

"Science and art are seen as two very distinct endeavors and I suppose they are. But I see science and art as the yin yang of creative culture and innovation." - Fred Wilson, "To Science and Art"

This is not meant to be a treastise on art, nor a plea for art. Rather liken it to seeding the inquiry that maybe art is different. Different from technology (and I'm a computer engineering grad, so I'm not making that up), as different as day is from night or female from male or inside from outside. Different. Not implying better or worse. Not hierarchy; rather, harmony. Complementary contraries. Technology often strives for functionality. Not so art: its purpose is, well, different (almost pointless in that it can often precipitate in a primordial pre-thought). Since it's fresh, and resonant, for me, quoting Campbell from last night's book again:

"What I understand art to be, then, is the revealing power of maya: the production in music, in dance, in the visual arts, and in literature of such "divinely superfluous beauty," of objects for esthetic arrest which are of no practical use, but which open up dimensions within. And the projecting power of maya, on the other hand, I take to be desire and loathing, which link you in phenomenal discourse to the object as object. It is as clear and clean as that." - Joseph Campbell, Reflections on the Art of Living, edited by Diane K. Osbon

I don't exactly advocate swinging the pendulum from yang to yin, from active to receptive, from external to internal. The equinimity of equilibrium might be nice for a change (who knows, I've never seen it fully yet).

In Sufi master and author Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee's essay, Invoking the World Soul, quoted below (I've enjoyed hearing him speak several times when I lived in the Bay Area), he is sharing Platonic ideals (and overall newfound appreciation for philosophies and arts of antiquity--Greek and Egyptian that the printing press made easier to share) embraced by  many Renaissance philosophers and artists that diversified and expanded some of the pendulum extremes of the prior Ages and of the times (i.e. the Inquisition was still pretty robust, ask Pico della Mirandola):

"So one can go back, for example, to Plato who understood the cosmos is a single living creature, which contains all living creatures within it.  So from the very origins of our Western civilization there is this deep understanding that the Earth is a living spiritual being.

. . . .In the Renaissance, the world soul animated and formed nature according to divine proportions.  And once again the garden of the world was enchanted with magical power and transcendent meaning — implicit in every part of nature. This was this wonderful relationship in the Renaissance between the imagination and the creative principle in life.  And there was this extraordinary flowering that really came from the divine feminine within the imagination, within life, and it was celebrated.  Once again the garden of the soul was here in this world.  It wasn’t just after you died in heaven, in paradise; it was here in the art that the Renaissance masters created.  And this is why, for some of us, the Renaissance touches the soul now so deeply and why there has been a revival of understanding of what happened in the Renaissance. " - Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, Invoking the World Soul

This is corroborated in several Wikipedia entries (my better resources are in storage) of the greatest influencers of Renaissance look and feel, for instance:

Marsilio Ficino "espousing the Neoplatonist view of the world's ensoulment and its integration with the human soul. "[...] There will be some men or other, superstitious and blind, who see life plain in even the lowest animals and the meanest plants, but do not see life in the heavens or the world [...] Now if those little men grant life to the smallest particles of the world, what folly! what envy! neither to know that the Whole, in which 'we live and move and have our being,' is itself alive nor to wish this to be so."" - Wikipedia

I'm coming full circle to the title of the collection of Joseph Campbell writings I am reading, I mean the title itself is worthy of reflection:

Reflections on the ART OF LIVING.

And, considering the kind of culture we are creating is the one we are devoting ourselves to day by day minute by minute, not the culture 'they' are creating as they includes us (remember, we're hackers).

And, I come back to Italian ethos too again,

"I thought -- and now I know -- that Italians claim more time for their lives." - Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun

p.s. This post was setting a bit of context-setting, however, I'd prefer future ones on new Renaissance to be more off-the-cuff, spontaneous and daring in a improvisational sense so it leans more towards the future than past history (while planted in present, and presence too). If there are any excerpts or article links--they'll be in the footnotes, at the end.

BONUS: Sramana Mitra wrote a great 3-part article on her compelling vision for a Silicon Valley Renaissance, that also values arts and culture. I added my two cents in the comments in part three.

BONUS 2: Really worth reading James Carse on his refreshing view of the Renaissance and metaphorically referring to cultures as horizons: "There is nothing in the horizon itself, however, that limits vision, for the horizon opens onto all that lies beyond itself." An aside, Flickr founding team was very influenced by Infinite and Finite Games, too. Kevin Kelly, in What Technology Wants, praised it for "alter[ing] my thinking about life, the universe, and everything."

Here's wee tidbit (my favorite longer excerpts of "Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility" here):

"Who lives horizontally is never somewhere, but always in passage. [Note to ourself: Thus,  the crossroads...always a new crossroad. Always liminal, infinitely unfolding at the edge...]

Since culture is horizontal it is not constrained by time or space.

To the degree that the Renaissance was a true culture it has not ended. Anyone may enter into its mode of renewing vision. This does not mean that we repeat what was done. To enter a culture is not to do what others do, but to do whatever one does with the others." - James Carse

ART CREDITS: "Once given the marvelous new capabilities..." quote box via 1997 essay (it does still rock conceptually), Create or Be Created: How the Internet Cultural Renaissance is Turning Audience Members into Artists, by William Butler O'Conner; Photo still from one of my favorite movies, Chocolat, via Heirloom Philosophy; photo from backyard birthday party created by Jeremy for Ashley (they're the photography duo, we are the parsons) via 100 Layer Cake; exuberant public art (and very metaphoric!) via Honestly WTF: "Not only was it balls to the wall amazing, it was 110% real! And honestly, who doesn’t love bouncy balls? Danish photographer Peter Funch was there to capture the impressive spectacle and thanks to my new favorite online art store, Lumas, the limited edition prints are available for sale."; btw, my $2000 bcheck went to secure a Solar Blossom, "a pop up art gallery that is powered by solar and is inspired by the Bluebonnet flower" via Treehugger.

when an archer is shooting for fun he has all his skill - chuang tzu

When an archer is shooting for fun 

He has all his skill – Chuang Tzu

I enjoy checking in on Kickstarter creative projects to (a) support other artists and (b) for inspiration.

At Karakasa Games' website, there's a video where indie game developer Wiley Wiggins mentions how the current game industry caters (for profit's sake) to the lowest common denominator with the result being "a lot of beautiful games--a huge spectacle--but are kind of soulless."

I've spent effort to dilute the spark of my ideas to appeal to executives' conceptions of what is blockbuster!! mass! appeal! No more! So I'm very encouraged by these indie trends. Congrats to Wiley and his team for raising $24, 221 for their game.

Anyway, you may also enjoy scouring Kickstarter projects for allies, inspiration, and fun yourselves.

p.s. I also adore the story-telling game Do! The Pilgrims of the Flying Temple. They raised $24, 383 for their whimsical storytelling for children project (updates here):

"Premise: There are hundreds small worlds orbiting a flying temple. Like islands, these small worlds often have strange cultures and unique problems. Whenever the people have a conflict that cannot be resolved on their own, they send letters to the temple requesting assistance. The temple sends young monks on a pilgrimage across the universe responding to a stack of letters one at a time. Their goal is to leave each world with less trouble than when they arrived." - Daniel Solis

They ask backers to collaborate and write make-believe letters to the "pilgrims" (i.e. future players of the story-telling game) for an imaginative, yet simple [i.e. NO computer necessary] game. This game also appealed to me, as serendipity would have it, it has some common elements to one of my projects, too.

what is best in music is not to be found in the notes - Gustav Mahler

"What is best in music is not to be found in the notes." - Gustav Mahler

It's been difficult to write lately, as I didn't wish to be explaining... I yearned to express, but it wasn't happening. There was something that needed to complete and be directly experienced first.

Last night, I was watching what to me was an amazing video. It consolidated a concept I'd been thinking about myself. I kept wondering why some art was able to convey a transpersonal and direct transmission of the divine.

Sometimes I call that "black hole" art.

For instance, one day last September I was feeling pretty down and out. Even an art museum could not cheer me up. Room after room in a fog of color splotches. Yet the moment I entered the room with Van Gogh's Olive Trees in a Mountainous Landscape (with the Alpilles in the Background) all was right with the world again. It's a difficult thing to explain as it is experiential. Right now, looking at a photograph of the painting doesn't have that same knowing that takes one into that felt sense of Absolute. (I reckon it may be because the photographer resists going there.)

So, of late, I've been calling that "quality" as black hole art, as in:

"I have contacted a place of internal gravity within myself beyond my own doing or my own will that is pulling the impulse and energy of the "I Am" thought into Itself." - in a letter to Adyashanti from one of his students

Back in 2003, I was in Berkeley improving my Spanish at a local language school while vaguely hoping the tech economy would pick up again so I could get back to work. Although the truth beyond all the obvious is I was on a pretty hardcore spiritual journey ever since 2001 when the dot-com startup I was at (first employee after the founders, so I was very emotionally invested) imploded followed rather quickly by my divorce and other sundry personal disasters. When I went to the bookstore looking for a good Spanish-English dictionary, I wasn't quite expecting to find a book that would accelerate this 'journey.' But once I opened the book, I couldn't stop reading it. That book led me to an intense study of A Course in Miracles. I read the entire thousand-plus pages over a course of days (it may have taken a week or so, as it's not easy reading) sitting in that studio apartment. I probably ought to have been looking for work, but even then I guess I was starting to realize this is my work.

"It is not Goethe who creates Faust, but Faust which creates Goethe." - Carl Jung

Since then, I have spent more time in my own sort of self-study into the nature of Reality and my own true nature that has taken me on many paths including Buddhism and Advaita, yet I have a lot of respect and appreciation for A Course in Miracles to this day, and also for Ken Wapnick whom I've studied in person several times at the Temecula classroom.

Anyway, that's a long-winded way of saying that I have a thorough appreciation for ACIM and Ken, although I don't really even know where my big blue book is (I suppose it's in storage). The words in the book aren't the point anyhow.

The beautiful part of the video is when Ken shares his own personal journey on how he realized his psychotherapy grad school studies were coalescing with an understanding of why he was so drawn to music, and in particular some of Beethoven's later compositions.

"I wrote from the heart, may it reach the heart of the listener." -- dedication in one of Beethoven's scores

Two aha! moments to pay attention to are when Ken shares how he wished to create a mood in the room, an environment in his therapy practice that was as palpably peaceful as he had experienced at a concert of Beethoven's music the evening before. (Ken was in grad school at the time, and said he couldn't pull it off.)

 

The other aha! is when Ken talks about the felt difference between Schubert and Beethoven's compositions he experienced. Listening to Schubert he could feel the sadness that he would not allow himself to go "there". This sadness I recognize now as the core of the Dark Night of the Soul. And the "there"?...

Part I and Part II of "Music, Melos, and Miracles: The Art of Listening" are twenty minutes in video--I thoroughly believe it is worth it, as it conveys so much of its own.

Plus it explains everything I've failed in past to convey in my art (akin to how Ken says he failed to establish a presence of peace in his early psychotherapy practice), and why I set aside everything--paid work that might have provided living wage, relationships, et al-- to go through this Dark Night of the Soul... and, actually to go "there"--all the way.

"Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him." - Carl Jung

p.s. A great interview with Jeff Foster on the Dark Night and the end of seeking (and, of course, the seeker as well).

the creative act is primitive - steven pressfield

"Have you seen this great New Yorker cartoon:

A perplexed person stands before two doors. One door says HEAVEN. The other door says BOOKS ABOUT HEAVEN.

What makes us laugh, I suspect, is that all of us feel the pull to pick BOOKS ABOUT HEAVEN.

Are we that timid? Are our huevos that pocito?

When we're offered a chance at heaven, what diabolically craven force makes us want to back off--just for now, we promise ourselves--and choose instead heaven's pale reflection?" - Do the Work, by Steven Pressfield (free Kindle version available through May 20, 2011)

Having spent a week in Los Angeles in deep observation (far from my first visit in LA), I realized the town is set up in a rock-star-and-million-fans model for sheer survival's sake. In order to have enough reach to rake in the advertising dollars, which pays the bills, stories have rote mass market blockbuster hit appeal (code for "least common denominator"). Sure, I also met many indie folks, but that was the exception, not the rule. For instance, one indie transmedia/locative-cinema producer said, "I want to serve the story, not the P&L."

While walking in Venice one day, I came across this book, "One Buddha is Not Enough," named after a retreat in August 2009 to be led by Thich Nhất Hạnh:

"Did we come to a retreat to see Thay the way we'd go to a rock concert to see Madonna or to a basketball game to see the star center? If the rock star or sports hero doesn't show up, we're entitled to a full refund."

"The book is dedicated to the idea that awakening is a collective process, and that we and our community are our own most important teachers."

In the perfect and oft ironic Way of the universe, the Infinite saw to it that Thay (as he is affectionately known by his students) was bedridden in a Boston hospital and could not attend the retreat in Estes Park. People were "heartbroken and angry," and feeling gipped--even though sixty of his closest monks still were in attendance. It is a testament to the capacity of the sangha to perceive the actual intent of a retreat entitled, "One Buddha is Not Enough," that only eight out of a thousand walked out.

Someone else must be the guru, someone else knows, someone else has access we don't, someone else is the expert, someone else is that Buddha-nature, the Infinite is out there--you know, out there in the Heavens, or anywhere... certainly not here, not now, not us. Heaven is for special people like Thay. We? We're not worthy. Old scripts re-written for contemporary times. We'll just take the book about Heaven, thank you.

"A perplexed person stands before two doors. One door says HEAVEN. The other door says BOOKS ABOUT HEAVEN."

Rick Carter, production designer for Avatar and Jurassic Park, at the UCLA symposium, Transmedia, Hollywood 2, told the story of his grandmother, born in 1882, laughing with her sorority sisters at the turn of the 20th century at the absurdity that anything heavier than air could fly. Guffaws at the gall of anyone to conceive of such silly scenarios.

Of course, his grandmother would eat her words as she lived long enough to see heavier-than-air ships land on the moon and stepped onto airplanes herself. Jules Verne had already introduced the conception of a flying ship made of metal into the public consciousness in his fiction. I believe Leonardo da Vinci may have preceded him. Verne's visioneering planted seeds that would spur inventors seventeen years later to build the prototype for the perplexing metallic sculpture I boarded to get myself to Los Angeles (and pay only $29 plus tax one-way!).

When Rick told that story, I instantly grokked that I was like Jules Verne, and never ever would I be the practical tinkerers like the Wright Brothers. Simple, really, in retrospect, yet have I spent so much of my lifetime berating myself for having fantastical ideas that I don't know how to implement on my own. So I plant seeds of possibility--they may or may not take hold in physical reality, but to each his own gifts.

Some other intriguing parts of Do the Work: (Btw, I don't completely buy into the idea of any ongoing war as even resisting Resistance reinforces a false sense of duality.)

"Next to Resistance, rational thought is the artist or entrepreneur's worst enemy.

Bad things happen when we employ rational thought, because rational thought comes from the ego.

Instead, we want to work from the Self, that is, from instinct and intuition, from the unconscious.

Homer began both The Iliad and The Odyssey with a prayer to the Muse. The Greeks' greatest poet understood that genius did not reside within his fallible, mortal self--but came to him instead from some source that he could neither command nor control, only invoke.

When an artist says, "Trust the soup," she means let go of the need to control (which we don't do anyway) and put your faith instead in the Source, the Mystery, the Quantum Soup.

The deepr the source we work from, the better our stuff will be--and the more transformative it will be for us and for those we share it with."

---

"Don't prepare. Begin.

Remember, our enemy is not lack of preparation; it's not the difficulty of the project or the state of the marketplace or the emptiness of our bank account.

The enemy is Resistance."

---
"The creative act is primitive.

Babies are born in blood and chaos; stars and galaxies come into being amid the release of massive primordial cataclysms."

p.s. The current work that I'm resisting is facetiously code-named (just a working title) after Revelations 21, http://bit.ly/revel21

p.p.s. If you also gravitate toward the interactive and intimate model in lieu of a blockbuster rock-star model (even 1000 fans is too broad and "fans" way too fourth wall for me), you might be interested in this free online magazine by In Treehouses on reaching your 1000 True Fans.

ART CREDITS: Your handy-dandy Green Muse via Magpie's Nest so there is no excuse for "My Muse hasn't shown up yet"; according to this site, fictional characters Frank Reade Jr. and his daugher Kate Reade envisioned helicopter airships a few years before Jules Verne's "Albatross." I like it: Fiction begets more fiction begets 'real' airships.

i lower my standards - william stafford

Today is the first day of the Casi Cielo Intensive Salon--an online group encouraging living in the present moment and sharing the art that emerges from Now with other artists. Daily blog posts consisting of contemplative and writing (and sketching) prompts through Easter are public (subscribe to Casi Cielo Salon blog free here via email).

I have plenty of material for this blog, and so the daily tidbits of inspiration will stay separate and over at the Casi Cielo blog. Yep, you can still sign up to participate in the private, shared space with fellow Salonistas, and/or donate. To give you a peek, sample post today is below:

"Contact with the awareness of the Absolute can come about only when the mind is fasting, when the process of conceptualization has utterly ceased. When the mind feasts, Reality disappears. When the mind fasts, Reality enters."  - Ramesh S. Balsekar,  A Net of Jewels

Today is Mardi Gras. Fat Tuesday. I've lived in New Orleans--and in fact, was residing in the Marigny neighborhood during last year's Mardi Gras. Fat Tuesday is a holiday, and traditionally the last big hoorah to indulge before Lent begins. (Although, in New Orleans curbing indulgence isn't in the city DNA.)  Alhough I was marginally raised as Catholic--I quit after my communion, I don't observe Lent either, at least not in any typical sense. 

Me? This year I'm "giving up" memory. I'm giving up rehashing the past for Lent.

Live by the current of inspiration alone.

Perhaps, spurred by the quote by Balsekar above (just serendipitiously sent by a friend this a.m.)  give up believing in my thought gyrations. Reality happens in the present not in the synapses of my brain. Beyond (or more accurately, below) what I think it is, it is.

Today I'm not providing a writing prompt. 

Indulge your intuition. Feed on your inner muse. What does It prompt?

When I Met My Muse

I glanced at her and took my glasses
off--they were still singing. They buzzed
like a locust on the coffee table and then
ceased. Her voice belled forth, and the
sunlight bent. I felt the ceiling arch, and
knew that nails up there took a new grip
on whatever they touched. "I am your own
way of looking at things," she said. "When
you allow me to live with you, every
glance at the world around you will be
a sort of salvation." And I took her hand.

-- William Stafford

Most people 'paralyze' the muse with their thought gyrations of perfection. Consider that anything you write is okay, and that you can not write it wrong. Trust in simply showing up... each day for 40 days (minus Sundays). When poet William Stafford was asked how his daily practice of writing one poem a day could possibly produce quality poetry of high standards, he replied:  "I lower my standards."

"William Stafford woke up every morning, seven days a week, at 4 a.m., made himself a cup of instant coffee and a piece of dry toast, and stretched out on his family's living room couch. There, notebook on lap, he wrote until the sun came up. He wrote a poem a day, a process he describes in the short lyric "Just Thinking": "Got up on a cool morning. Leaned out a window. / No cloud, no wind. . . . Let the bucket of memory down into the well, / bring it up. Cool, cool minutes. No one / stirring. No plans. Just being there." Stafford was a late bloomer whose first major collection of poems, Traveling Through the Dark, was published when he was forty-eight. It won the National Book Award in 1963. He went on to publish more than sixty-five volumes of poetry and prose." -- "The Poets Laureate Anthology" edited by Elizabeth Hun Schmidt

ART CREDITS: Sure takes a lot of showing up every day to a blank page to get this vortex of words. Book sculpture and architecture by artist Matej Kren.

"to all the muffled... joyfully add yourself, and cancel the count" - Rilke

Be--and yet know the great void where all things begin,
the infinite source of your own most intense vibration,
so that, this once, you may give it your perfect assent.

To all that is used-up, and to all the muffled and dumb
creatures in the world's full reserve, the unsayable sums,
joyfully add yourself, and cancel the count.

- Rainer Maria Rilke, “Sonnets to Orpheus”, II:13, translated by Stephen Mitchell

Those stanzas of poetry distill the spirit of Casi Cielo Salon that is going to delve into present awareness, ordinary rapture, and shared writing starting March 8th.

"Unmuffle yourself; come close to the hearth. Come into the circle of home," intones the portable quotable online I Ching.

Come from wherever you are whoever you are. You don't need to book a flight to a deserted island to be. You don't need lots of eccentricities or 'character' either.

I'm currently living in the edge of the suburbs in the Mojave desert. It's not the kind of atmosphere that I normally find inspiring. There's an constant urge to say, Not this, not now. To postpone to perhaps some other place, some other time.... later, when it's better, or shinier... rather than be and write from here as just me.

Funny, I was skimming through one of Byron Katie's books and her husband, Stephen Mitchell, wrote this in the Forward (yep, same Stephen Mitchell as translated Rilke's poem above):

"The Mojave is bleak even by desert standards, it lacks the whimsy of cactuses, yet becomes truly beautiful if you start to pay attention to it. If you take a walk with Katie there at sunset, the warm wind seems like a caress and the rocks are subtle in their shades of brown and yellow and black and red, and the shadows are blue. She will lead you up canyons to places where hidden water drips and you might begin to see the desert as kind and believe her when she says it was her teacher."

Bleak, or not (that's an interpretative layer anyhow...).... it too is Wholeness. So are you. "Unmuffle yourself; come close to the hearth. Come into the circle of home."

Casi Cielo will have a free, public, online component as well, but if you really want to jump into the sandbox with us....

WHAT: Facilitated Intensive Salon of peers interested in living in present awareness, ordinary rapture and sharing their everyday writing. Loose and structured. Loose in that you decide on your topics of rapture and length and style of writing--erotica or renku or brochure or video game or watercolor sketch....; structured in that there are optional daily prompts (excepting Sundays) and I'll nudge you to submit something to the private group shared space if we don't hear from you in a while (i.e. no spectators).

WHEN: Seven weeks March 8th-April 24th. (Sneak start for early-birds starts March 1st.)

HOW MUCH: Seven weeks for $40 covers all daily prompts, feedback, facilitated online group (private and cozy as most writing circles are). Included as a bonus if you subscribe to Encanto newsletter+pilgrimage ($25/month). Register Encanto+Casi Cielo here. Register Casi Cielo Intensive Salon here.

ART CREDITS: Leonard Knight painted the hills at Salvation Mountain and it's now a "National Folk Art Shrine", photo via Life magazine; Kelso dunes in the Mojave photo by Cami Renfrow

the harbinger of joy in every and any circumstance

Winter is the season to turn inward. When fields lie fallow. Respite. Refuge. Rejuvenation.

As the clock on the year winds down, we may mull over the past year.

Except today I don't want to mull over 2010.

I want to take a pencil upside down, smudge the eraser across the page, scatter it to the four winds, wipe it away from history: an error.

Yesterday, hearing Pamela Wilson is like a balm, "You can relax. You really cannot mess up the unfolding. You cannot put it back together--Humpty Dumpty has fallen off the wall."

This morning I wake up and it's still 2010 and it still exists in history. (I'm not always this cranky, should this post be your first stopover, by the way....)

In an undeniable funk, I go for a long walk today, the longer the better although it's in the mid-40s and a howling wind cuts through the open ranges between the cookie-cutter homes which when you can find them bunched together in cul-de-sacs act as welcome wind barriers like being sheltered in a slot canyon. (I know that doesn't sound cold, yet in Las Vegas it's a precipitous drop from the balmy temperatures.)

I'm walking mindlessly rehashing wounds and rerunning stories of overt resistance chippering away in my brain. (Yes, another form of sly resistance itself.) I'm oblivious to the sun and the sky. But any zombie can walk this route. There are only so many rearrangements of roads and desire lines through the desolate fields around my Mom's condo, and I've criss-crossed them all these two months.

"Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while a great wind is bearing me across the sky." - Ojibwa saying

In short, I am not paying any attention to the world. I'm still fussing with the pencil eraser.

Suddenly tiny iridescent wings capture the corner of my eye. There silent, sitting, a glittering green hummingbird with a rosy neck.

Odd. There are no bright flowers. Make that there are no flowers and no color besides muted brown, sage, bark, chalk. No bird feeders in sight. The miniature bird's about to fly away when it spots me spotting it. Immediately, I calm down and am totally present. It relaxes too, and decides to perch on the leafless tree limb for another minute. I smile inside--and out. We turn to leave. Lift off and flicker away.

I knew it was a symbol, a message:

"The Hummingbird is the only bird that can fly backwards. This is a reminder that the past can't be changed but the past can teach lessons. The Hummingbird comes when it seems that what needs to be done is impossible. It teaches how to find joy in any circumstance." - Hummingbird totem via Crystal-Cure.com

That's worth reading again, sipping like nectar, and stapling to the history book on 2010: "The Hummingbird is the only bird that can fly backwards. This is a reminder that the past can't be changed but the past can teach lessons. The Hummingbird comes when it seems that what needs to be done is impossible. It teaches how to find joy in any circumstance." 

I don't know about you. But that message couldn't be more precisely perfect and tailor-made for 2010 and 2011.

The species I saw is broad-tailed hummingbird. Its summer range includes Great Basin states like Nevada. December 30th is hardly summer, although I did spot him nearby the intersection of Sunny Days and Starry Nights (no joke). So, why isn't he sipping hibiscus in Guadalajara or Quetzaltenago by now?

A few weeks ago thinking towards 2011, I selected blithe as my themeword. Its etymology includes the Old Saxon "bright (said of the sky)," and a connection to the Anglo-Saxon "to shine" sharing its roots with words bliss, and bless, too.

HAIL to thee, blithe spirit!
Bird thou never wert—
That from heaven or near it
Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art. - beginning of To a Skylark, Percy Bysshe Shelley

May be time to jam with the language of birds.

I watched this beautiful video yesterday where Pamela Wilson tells a story about resting in our natural Presence, deep listening itself, music, life's invitation, and "all of a sudden a little bird...":

 

begins you,
small, superlative being,
you are a miracle,
and you blaze - from Ode to a Hummingbird, Pablo Neruda

Bonus: A short, blithesome (==irreverently wholly) hummingbird-infused story of Pamela Wilson's "teacher", Robert Adams here.

Excerpt: "The sweet, natural happiness that I experienced in his presence was so very thick and blatant. All the ideas I had picked up about what it is to be in the presence of Truth were permanently cracked. The mind just couldn’t get around the chasm between what it thought holiness was supposed to be like and what it had actually met that day with Robert Adams. In its attempt to cross that chasm, it had fallen into it, giving rise to an absolutely undeniable experience of joyfulness and peace."

art credits: Broad-tailed Hummingbird photo by Inga Brennan via Birdzilla.com; Hummingbird, by Fred Tomaselli