Crossroads Dispatches

the higher, wider, more blazing, beckoning pull

"The only things that concerned the sheep were food and water... They’ve forgotten how to rely on their own instinct, because I lead them to nourishments." - Santiago the shephard boy hero on page 7, The Alchemist

In the bestselling fable, The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho (full audio) opens as the Andalusian shephard Santiago deciding to follow a vague hunch pieced from a night dream with hesitation, and eventually wherever it may lead. 

For beings with a heart pulsing to the tune of the Infinite Eternal and a spark of life burning within them, food and water become insufficient as nourishment. Hunger and thirst isn't only a matter of matter.

As I write this in early February, the sunlight peaceably filters and palm trees sway through and outside the windows in New Orleans. I have the knowledge of the security of future supply of the basics of water, food, and the welcomed stay to caretake rent-free here as long and languidly as I wish.

It has been an unexpected sojourn this past year -- an inward plunge into sublime solitude. Although I wrote of impending adventure, that's not at all what unfolded. There were a few season of pruning and weeding everything second-hand and unoriginal and untrue.

A season of feeding and nurturing the malnourished. Time and space in the sensory rather than the virtual. Chopping carrots, mincing garlic, sauteeing kale, stirring miso, steaming salmon and gathering at the oval dinner table at an old landlord's home with a cancer diagnosis rather than checking Twitter feeds. Reading The Little Prince on the grass in the little neighborhood pocket park with the lumbering live oak and swing rather than reading my email.

Now, you'd think, should be a good time to sit back and simply enjoy the upcoming Mardi Gras festivities. There's no rationale to go anywhere, do anything different. In fact there is the subtle lull of inertia to remain. 

Although I typically have the house all to my self, a houseload of street performers and musicians tumbled in and out the last two months. In the midst of the bustle, I carved out sacred time to be still and listen. In that silence, the raw fragments of surrender cohered and crystallized into the fragrance of the next step. This verse jumped vivid for me, and has riveted my attention:

"Forget the former things;
    do not dwell on the past.

See, I am doing a new thing!
    Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?
I am making a way in the wilderness
    and streams in the wasteland." - Bible (NIV), Isaiah 43:18-19

Comfort aside, I cannot deny the higher, wider, more blazing, beckoning pull. “We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down," said Kurt Vonnegut. The day BEFORE the coalescing crescendo into clarity, viscerally I felt the intensity of ego terror before the cliff of the Unknown: the heart constricted, the throat strangled, the breath short, the air dense and thick, the clenching what-ifs of the finite.

"The comfort zone is supposed to keep your life safe, but what it really does is keep your life small.... A few rare individuals refuse to live limited lives... They have something that gives them the strength to endure pain--a sense of purse.... A sense of purpose doesn't come from thinking about it. It comes from taking action that moves you toward the future. The moment you do this, you activate a force more powerful than the desire to avoid pain. We call this the 'Force of Forward Motion.' Its power is the power of life itself. Everything in life is evolving into the future with a sense of purpose--from a single organism to a species to the entire planet. Dylan Thomas called it "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower."” - The Tools, by Phil Stutz and Barry Michels

Even with the immense discomfort of fear, the green fuse that drives the flower kept on fulfilling life. 

Ten years ago EXACTLY today, February 6, 2014, I commenced this Crossroads Dispatches blog. It's not my first blog. It's not my second either. The first I began on Dave Winer's Rdio platform, the second was called The Bigger Picture on Blogger. I abandoned both. We've had ups and downs, but I think the reason this one struck a chord is the thematic and name "Crossroads Dispatches" speaks to my deep draw for multi-layered meanings and High Romance (I read three versions of the Arthurian legends of the Round Table in 2013) even though at the time of this blog's founding I was ensconced in logic rather than lyricism. (It's easy to forget I was formerly a computer engineer, even when others do not so easily forget.)

My first post and fifth blog post cited this book and quote:

"In Africa, they say there are two hungers, the lesser hunger and the greater hunger. The lesser hunger is for the things that sustain life, the goods and services, and the money to pay for them, which we all need. The greater hunger is for an answer to the question "why?", for some understanding of what that life is for." - Hungry Spirit, Beyond Capitalism: A Quest for Purpose in the Modern World, Charles Handy (via very first Crossroads Dispatches blog post I wrote 10 years ago)

 

Someone once asked Helen Keller a provocative question. She answered, "What would be worse than being born blind? To have sight without vision." Concern for sheer survival alone feels like a tedious ministering to death. Survival needs are not a compelling vision. Perhaps there's a kernel of usefulness in them: "I need a job." -- What if instead of seeking provision from others, we were the creators of provision for others? Imagine opportunities to thrive for ourselves + together, junto, with others. "I need money." -- What if rather than compromise and cage our inspiration for wages, we unleashed our gifts unto the world? etc, etc. Flip the tedium of needs and problems and duty into desires and destinies (destinations) that catapult into captivating and enchanting and fulfillling visions to follow through.

"... don't be satisfied with stories, how things 
have gone with others. Unfold 
your own myth, without complicated explanation, 
so everyone will understand the passage, 
We have opened you.

Start walking toward Shams. Your legs will get heavy 
and tired. Then comes a moment 
of feeling the wings you've grown, 
lifting." - Rumi (via Howardism.org) 

Despite the immense shield of fear, the green fuse keeps sprouting through and as me. I breathe deep and I buy the one-way ticket to San Francisco this past Sunday. I wasn't planning on California in 2014 whatsoever yet that's where all the calls and clews whispered to me. Even Paulo Coelho's most recent Feb 5th post reveals a stepping stone in the path I'm walking which is more unusual, more unnerving, more daring than I'm letting on. Our clues are tailored and unique, yet I'll share it with you: "... behind the icy mask people wear - there is a heart of fire. That is why the warriors risk more than others."

A rush of release follows as the overlay of fear dissolves into its no-thingness revealing the foreground of peace and joy. Since that decision other contorted contractions have emerged in the simple spaciousness as it fathoms and figures out How, yet the Yes remains and shines in the foreground.

"When each day is the same as the next, it’s because people fail to recognize the good things that happen in their lives every day that the sun rises. In order to find the treasure, you will have to follow the omens. God has prepared a path for everyone to follow. You just have to read the omens that he left you."  - Paulo Coelho

---

This spring I'm planting a seed of vision.

Perhaps you'll join me in the garden. It's free (and freedom) online. Or join face-to-face in a "Innovating to the Heart's Delight" workshop in the San Francisco Bay Area (a work in progress--so don't be surprised if the content completely kaleidoscopes in a few days), or come walk-the-talk journey with us into Spain this summer or Ethiopia this fall. 

It's not solely mine or your own Personal Legend coming into ripeness, but widens inclusive of the whole cosmic pulsing symphony of which you are part. 

"Perhaps you will ask me, "Why are there no other drawing in this book as magnificent and impressive as this drawing of the baobabs?"

The reply is simple. I have tried. But with the others I have not been successful. When I made the drawing of the baobabs I was carried beyond myself by the inspiring force of urgent necessity." - 

“Run my dear,
From anything
That may not strengthen
Your precious budding wings.” 
― Hafez

p.s. This post is slowly easing us into a new tone, a new voice for this blog. Similar themes yet with more of our bold, whimsical, fantastical, imaginative, visionary, slightly futuristic "a new heaven and a new earth" facets revealed.

Art credits: Saharan caravan photo from fan blog, "The Journey of Santiago"; illustration from The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (an online version of The Little Prince book); photo by Ankur Sharma via DeviantArt.com; and lastly, the baobab tree illustration from The Little Prince as well.

Follow Your Satcitananda

"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

There's never a perfect time, which makes now the perfect time.... paraphrasing Sam from The Perks of Being a Wallflower.

Day 1, or one day:

 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) 

~~~

Last week I learn of a brand new New Orleans tourism advertising campaign launching today, May 6. It appears inspired by a mythic sense of journeying. The Times-Picayune article categorizes the just unveiled website as a "choose your own adventure" geared for the "discoverer" sort of traveler "who like to guide their own vacations and serendipitously find experiences." The new tagline 'Follow Your Nola' and accompanying hashtag #followyournola evokes shades of Joseph Campbell's famed quote, "Follow your bliss."

~~~

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

~~~

Clue: #goldenedge

Clue: From The Diamond Cutter: The Buddha on Managing Your Business and Your Life, by Geshe Michael Roach:

"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:

1928: Aracataca

GARCIA MARQUEZ

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)

Too much email? I'd like to pick up the pace of my writing here, so if receiving these dispatches in your treasured inbox is too much email, consider instead using an RSS reader such as Feedly, visit this site frequently, or join the 1-2 times per month newsletter distilling the highlights of the Crossroads Dispatches journey.

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

Art credits: Still from the 1963 film, Jason and the Argonauts; Argo by Lorenzo Costa --tempera paint on wood circa 1530 from Museo Civico di Padova via Wikipedia Commons; photo via Southwest Florida Water Management District

choose the story with wild animals, magic, and divine intervention

Hearing (and living) lots of adventure stories lately. Recently regaled with Hamdi Ulukaya's story of growing up milking sheep at his family’s dairy in near the Euphrates River in Turkey. I listened to CEO Ulukaya's tale unfurl into Chobani Yogurt's entrepreneurial odyssey with all its adventurous twists at New Orleans Entrepreneur Week.

Yesterday, I heard the ups and downs of Edgar Degas' storied life and his journey to New Orleans for a respite from post-war France.

While I adore true-life epics--unless the protagonist of the tale is deceased leaving behind all their authentic private journals and letters--what happens often is so much of the nitty-gritty roller-coaster ride of life is portrayed as a flattened-out glide towards overnight success, or gussied up for its publicity effect.

Obstacles omitted, accolades exaggerated. Something gets obscured, even lost, in the veneer, and I'm not sure what's tossed out is not the pearl in the oyster.

Last week, I had an epiphany when I attended a talk on the three-act structure motif of "The Hero's Journey" for screenwriters (see the slides here: Hero's Journey Three-Act Structure for Screenwriters courtesy of New Orleans Video Access Center). The most vivid quotes (from my notes) were:

• "The plot is just a vehicle for inner transformation."
• "The character reluctantly surmounts a trial or obstacle but in order to prevail he must first conquer his own flaw or inner fears," as well as often an external embodiment of those fears and resistance in the form of an antagonist.
• "[In Act II,] Create highs and lows in the quest and the first hard setback."
• "The most difficult obstacle yet has to be overcome and the hero must do--or die."

And, most significantly:

• "The inner change of the character is put to the test."

Listening to the Hero's Journey talk while stepping back from being the star of my own life, I witnessed the stage from a spectator's distance. Rather than bemoan the obstacles in my life, these could be easily interpreted as what makes for a fascinating, unfolding mythic tale of an explorer. Then donning back the heroine's role, obstacles appear to keep individuated life in step with the dynamism of Life rather than stagnating.

I googled the active, verb form of "adventure" and received back:

ADVENTURE: "Engage in hazardous and exciting activity, esp. the exploration of unknown territory: "they had adventured into the forest". Synonyms: verb.  risk - venture - hazard - jeopardize - dare - jeopard."

I googled "expedition," which is more the word that has been coming up for me for months. EXPEDITION:

1. A journey or voyage undertaken by a group of people with a particular purpose, esp. that of exploration, research, or war.
2. The people involved in such a journey or voyage.

Guess what?  The synonym for "expedition" is "dispatch." And the name of this blog is Crossroads Dispatches!

Embarking on an expeditionary series hosted here over the next month (or so), and everyone's invited. We'll call the spontaneous scribing, "Everyday Adventure." Expect (as in expectancy more so than expectation) enchantment, experimentation, experiential engagement, and perhaps excruciating epiphanies (alas, perception doesn't always come cheap) to abound. Echoing Marcel Proust's aphorism, we won't be seeking out new adventures as much as welcoming the one we're already on with fresh eyes. This might emcompass a turnabout and facing and embracing obstacles as they come as part of the spice of the story we're inhabiting, for instance. It's playing improv with life (in improv the key words are: "yes, and....") to keep the story rolling. 

Count this as Day Zero.

All I'll intend to be doing is breathing, living, morphing, shaping, and sharing stories, experiments and puzzles--mine as well as others--that elicit your own creative and uniquely woven yarn, not passing out step-by-step prescriptions. (How adventuresome would that be?) Lest I forget, I'll repeat this as mantra to myself: "Think questions, not answers. We're storytellers, not teachers,"  as presenter Ashley Charbonnet said at the start of the NOVAC Hero's Journey for Screenwriters talk.

Bonus: From Lazi Yogi blog (love that blog): 

dontmilkme asked: In Life of Pi, which story did you choose to believe at the end, or which story do you believe is true? And why?

"Given the option, I will always choose the story with wild animals, magic, and divine intervention.

 Being the fact that the Life of Pi is itself a work of fiction, both stories are of course untrue. Why not choose the story of transformation and wonder? :)

Namaste"

 
Art credits: First, two expeditions diaries: sketch of trout in William Clark's expedition diary from the Lewis and Clark expedition; and a page from Keri Smith, author of "How to Be an Explorer of the World" own personal journal (plus she quotes Thoreau from his own journals in that blog post); and the curious Hypatia of Alexandria via Wise Women Pinterest board.

Sometimes we have to travel to the edge of ourselves to find our center. - Buck Ghosthorse

"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader." - Robert Frost

It appears that my "about" bio is at least three years out of date. Yet, one thing on it remains relevant (not much else!). And that is that I love this quote: "Sometimes we have to travel to the edge of ourselves to find our center." - Buck Ghosthorse, Lakota Medicine Man. In the spirit of truthfulness outlined in the last post, I need to continue pushing the envelope, not necessarily to be trendy or anything fancy, just because that is what greenness feels into, what life nudges: grow.

Whenever I hold back, I lose my enthusiasm for sharing (and living) because I'm shying away from the fertile verge and the lunatic fringes and, uh, vulnerability too.

"[B]logging success comes from pushing your own personal edge. Too many young bloggers are trying to write what they think other people want to read, instead of writing work that actually challenges themselves.

Culture exists on the fringes. The center is boring, and secretly everyone wants out of the mediocre middle." - Everett Bogue, "How Blogging Evolves(ed)", Far Beyond the Stars blog

As I'm piecing this post together, I'm drinking Jasmine Green Monkey King tea, listening to lyrics "...just love as you are." Yes, we'll continue to grow here but I suspect some of you have more pressing demands than this little tea parlor in cyberspace. However, if you've the inclination there are a couple of other "levels" of play--if you want to notch up and engage deeply with me and other visitors here--and best yet, with life.

"There are three words that convey the secret of the art of living, the secret of all success and happiness:

One With Life. Being one with life is being one with Now. You then realize that you don't live your life, but life lives you. Life is the dancer, and you are the dance." - Eckhart Tolle

1. Encanto. Intimate, interactive salon straight to your inbox about 12-20 times per month. $25/month beginning The Year of the Cat/Rabbit February 3, 2011. Of course, newsletters aren't in and of themselves at all interactive. The interactivity occurs both online--and offline between participants and, predominately, with life. Here's my description so far, it'll evolve with the participants:

"Your everyday life will give you all the koans you need to get enlightened." - Richard Rose

"Patterns, signs, subtle variations in rightness and not-rightness, flow and obstruction; this is how it works. I make it sound as if the universe and I were two separate things, but it's actually the absence of that artificial distinction that I'm talking about." - Jed McKenna

Encanto is a private newsletter where the reader isn't "along for the journey," but full-fledged travel companions. This is an experiential undertaking. Do you accept the challenge of walking into the unknown? Accept every cue and clue and call and nudge that the Universe throws you? (Otherwise, reading this newsletter will be utter nonsense as it becomes further removed from your own experiential reference point.) Be willing to engage wholeheartedly with your life as it shows up along with me... 

You'll know via your own instinct if you desire to subscribe.

2. Narrative "game" on the web, akin to Jane McGonigal's Evoke in terms of "inspiration," but not quite an alternate reality game (as Life is the puppetmaster in this one). I'd like to use Web artist Jonathan Harris' upcoming storytelling platform (it's still months off) although I hardly know much about it. It's a hunch I have. I "met" Jonathan Harris through watching the video of his Cold: Bold talk--highly recommend the video.

And I love Jonathan's answer to:

"How can a website be art?
By its very nature, my online work is designed to be experienced by as many people as possible. This runs against the traditional art world model, which is premised on the scarcity of precious objects. The idea of "acquiring" a website is still foreign to most museums and collectors. Some curators are beginning to consider how a museum might acquire a work that continues to exist in the public domain. For instance, MoMA's Paola Antonelli is interested in having her museum acquire a Boeing 747, and having it continue to operate commercial flights with a small MoMA plaque attached to the plane. Similarly, the Dia Foundation supports environmental artists like Michael Heizer, Donald Judd, and Robert Smithson who install their work in natural settings, for anyone to see. Meanwhile artists like Banksy present their art in the street, among road signs and billboards. I prefer to keep focused on making my work, and not to worry too much about the semantics of what can and cannot be considered art. Sooner or later, with the help of curators like Paola and working artists who continue to insist on the web as a medium, the art world will catch up."

The whole multimedia narrative game will be interactive as is innate to the Web, and freely online if I have a say so (perhaps through sponsorships? suggestions?). It flows out as street art in the way it enages you in your life out there on the streets, in the way that you yourself are public art.

An excerpt from a potential scene in this narrative written by moi to demonstrate as it's not at all this style of blog writing:

Three years later.

The subtlety of jasmine.

Surrounded by huge legs of pork, hanging chickens, a cacophony of bustling shoppers scurrying around me, jostling in long lines and vying for their butchered meat. The scent is outside on Mulberry street wafting from the bakery next door. The scene cuts to grandmother's place off Hester, pouring from a clay pot the juice of blooming flowers and rain and wind chime symphonies swirls into the porcelain cup I'm holding.

Then, the memories drop into vast space like an untethered astronaut.

I'm pouring from a large, silver Thermos pot used to keep coffee warm, but the liquid is silkier and less opaque than coffee. Instead of the burlap sack looking tents I just saw on TV, I'm in a sturdier canvas one and outside yet sturdier wood domes filled with bamboo futons and straw-spun pillows. There are metal platters of food like a buffet in here.

I smell of ginger and turmeric and spices I'm not sure of. I pour out jasmine tea into small white porcelain cups sketched with blue phoenixes. I hand one over to the first man in line. There's dozens behind him. He's wearing a camo hoodie with his youngest son riding his arm, held close to his chest. 

"Favorite year. There was an animated chandelier. The Temple of Gravity," he turning to his companion behind him. His other, older son, is taking the plate of lentils and rice from another volunteer.

Someone in the crowd breaks into song, "We're coming to America... never looking back again.... we're traveling light today..."

Cut. "Alright, let's go to Vegas," I announce.

Shen doesn't seem startled by my statement. "I thought you said we would, ya know, work remote."

"Of course," I reply. "There'll be film people too. Maybe I can pitch the mind movies." Even when she had done the film projects at NYU with Jeremie as cameraman, the result never quite measured up to the vivid images rolling in her mind. She'd learned a lot since then.

"Uh huh, and then we'll sell them Santa Claus," Shen shot back.

"Oh, I'm not about to explain it. I'll show them."

p.s. For those of you that are wondering, I'm serious about the three questions and curious about this one: What if I gave YOU precisely $100? Would you use it to plant seeds? How? One reader totally grokked the intention of the three questions, and wrote: "I am grateful that immediately after reading your blog post the next email was a local opportunity to help someone out. Someone in a wheelchair is raising money to compete in an athletic competition by selling cookies. It's a small amount, but it feels right for now. I like the one to one help rather than giving to a large organization." Thanks!

ART CREDITS: Pale Blue Door is a funky-fertile-fun pop-up underground restaurant. Pictured above is its incarnation in Berlin; photos by Manuel Vasquez. This photo evokes the intimacy and casual artistry I'm seeking in a Salon of peer "travelers." Truthfully, it's the spirit of what I'd like to have manifest more in real-life. And if there was ANY way to evoke a quaint cozy cafe culture in a blog, that's the ticket. Secondly, Dr. Brene Brown's C.S. Lewis quote from her blog, Ordinary Courage; and the rest of the art comes from Ginger Huebner's art (portfolio here) including Ginger's mixed media Touching the Edges, Nourish, and Home.

"Our internal artist is always our creative child." - Julia Cameron

This morning I woke up, and wondered how many people think, "Another day, so many problems to solve, and a world to fix."

I doubt children wake up that way.

It's play!

It's mystery to explore and the unknown to throw yourselves at.

When I go walking, I pretend everything isn't quite so serious and solid, I sit down and play with a pile of raw umber and burnt sienna rocks. While arranging them into a star, I stay to watch a black beetle navigating the same ledge as my sculpture.

At the playground, young tykes were playing soccer, and the goalie squeals, "A unicorn got caught in the net!" Other kids came scurrying over.

I wondered too if the Japanese and Chinese are right, and there are three soul centers, then perhaps the mind center is masculine, the belly feminine, and the heart center is the offspring: the innocent wonder of a child.

A week ago I was surfing Kickstarter (after I saw that $1M funding for the iPod Nano watch kit). Lo and behold futzing around on "Brooklyn" category I come across a whimsical, unscripted, improv film project featuring kids and their random mysterious objects that they are find along the way, called Spirit Ship.

"As scientific research has shown, the time young children spend participating in open-ended imaginative play has a direct effect on their brain development. Complex extended make-believe play is characterized by invented (both fantastical and seemingly very real) scenarios and characters, often takes place while children are outside of their classrooms and homes... [C]hildren are becoming lost in a series of hoops adults have laid out for them to jump through." - Spirit Ship: a mysterious short film narrated by children, Kickstarter project backing proposal

Spirit Ship video below:

 

In "scratching my own itch," I'm working on creating an imaginative, inquisitive overlay to the game of life, rather than defaulting to the typical interpretive overlay. I am so feeling that make-believe and what-if is the spirit of the whole thing (I'm not 100% sure how it'll manifest...it's a Mystery).

Just play as we go along. Purposefully deliriously silly if need be. Look at it as MYSTERY!! Rather than.... this is the way things have always been, and it is very very serious and heavy. Oh well.

The consummate explorer: a child.

Your internal artist: your creative child.

Just imagine whatever you want to and say it is so: There is a unicorn in your soccer net.

"You know, it's a truism that writers for children must still be children themselves, deep down, must still feel childish feelings, and a child's surprise at the world. "- A.S. Byatt, The Children's Book via Little Augury blog

Bonus: Excerpt from Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way including "This is why artists may feel shame at admitting their dreams."

art credits: "I wonder if you're crunchy" card by PaPaYa!; Spirit Ship video by Kristin B. Eno

i can't talk to all the theoreticians because there don't exist theories where i am

I smiled when I saw my buddy DK Brainard's post after all the science talk yesterday... now science fiction. He's admits to reading tons of science fiction and fantasy genre lately, and not any mainstream or classics. I can relate:

"Part of me has a hard time copping to my current obsession. You see, I have a Master’s in French Literature, obtained jointly from the University of Paris and the University of Cincinnati. I have a double B.A. in English and French

...[Eventually,]

I stopped looking at the world as this fundamentally fixed environment and I realized that the more radically I change my internal reality, the more the Universe I perceive changes also.

We hear all the time, “Change your mind and you will change your life.” But what I’ve found is that this is true far beyond what most of us are willing to consider.

I think that’s why I’m so drawn to fantasy literature right now. Because it’s pushing me further out of my preconceptions about what is possible for me. You see, after nearly ten years of dedication to a meditative practice and the spiritual path, I’ve seen that the mind can work amazing changes on my outer reality. But I also know I’m just scratching the surface of my potential.

The more I read these books – and reflect on the many well-documented accounts of remote viewers, spoonbenders, shape shifters and people who can levitate objects using only the mind – the more I wonder, “Why aren’t we doing more with what we have?”" -excerpt from D.K. Brainard, "Reality vs. Fantasy", WordsForThePeople.com

I've also gravitated toward science fiction and fantasy myself--that is when I read any linear novels anymore. Strange, as I'm the gal who won regional contests in high school for essays on Jane Austen. Why read Cliffnotes--that's like skipping out on desert? I devoured The Classics--even ones that weren't assigned. I wished to study English Literature and Philosophy in college, but I was fiercely into financial indendence at that age and opted for a Computer Engineering degree, instead. Part of me always wanted to be a creative writer.

I put in a whole year coming up a narrative alternate reality game that would push the edges of people's consideration of possibility by relying on the age-old "suspension of disbelief." I put my money where my faith was and even showed up to Book Expo America in New York to grok the publishing world even though that meant I left a weekend job behind, and showed up with $50 (I don't do credit cards) in my pocket at JFK. (That's another story--the prosperity hunch and experiments have altered yet again.)

I found myself being so drawn into the storyworld and its characters, I'd abandoned the original mission... which is Life itself. The whole ARG was to get people more engaged with their own life and see it as an adventure. I didn't want folks to be so entranced by the storyworld that they willingly push aside their own life to find out "What happens next..." to fictional characters. I tabled the whole project recently; although it might find a form later if I make your life the main storyworld.

I wondered why can't we talk openly about possibilities and paradoxes and miracles and marvels without the pretense of fiction (although that can be fun)? Why make taboos or heresies out of exploration and experimentation and edges?

This is the hunch I have: that your life right now as it is is guiding you to the edges of possibility, to the unknown. Yet I'm thinking we also take the lead in asking the questions.

It's pretty tuned to your specifics, too. Don't do bibliomancy?--no problem, it'll spill from the mouth of babes. Don't do external clews?--no problem, you'll get inner inclinations, lurching gut, tingling pulsing currents or emotional beacons. Anything I say may or may not apply, it's tailored for you. Be skeptical of common wisdom and theories and be wary of bandwagons, and go for your own data--directly (sometimes 'experience' is a bit less visual, and more visceral or employs other senses besides the eye).

I recently read The Hunt for Zero Point after a deep quest to learn more about Vickor Schaumberger (originally my interest was water... but I never know what I'm going to uncover.) The point here is that the author started following threads of personal interest in a taboo topic in his field of aviation journalism. It's just "science fiction," they scoffed around his office. He followed his gut and kept digging into anti-gravity propulsion. Years later, he interviews a brilliant scientist at an aerospace company that he thinks might give him more clues.

The main takeaway the scientist tells him is you get to a point--which if you look at Life as the grand experiment--where you've gone as far as the theories take you, or the data pouring in is altogether new and not quite fitting in. That's how new theories develop.

The data is important--not adhering to an established theory.

You have to pay close attention to your life, to reality as it is showing up for you. And maybe even entertain the notion that perceived reality (not necessarily Absolute/Formless reality) is dynamic, so that even a theory that worked yesterday may be obsolete. Or even that that last sentence may be utter nonsense if time is simultaneous.

"But now that the interview was over, the minders [there's always PR people monitoring corporate interviews] were looking the other way. They'd done their job and I'd done mine. Boyd Bushman had spilled no secrets either on or off the record and that was what mattered. Nor had he in any way tarnished the reputation of the Lockheed Martin company. [Funny, I used to work for what is now known as Lockheed Martin--in the million-dollar video games department, aka flight simulators.]

That I had learned nothing of value must have shown on my face, for without warning, Bushman leaned forward and put his hand on my shoulder.

He asked me what was wrong and I told him.

"It's a lonely walk, but a rewarding one," he said, so quietly that I almost missed it. I looked into his eyes, which were quite blue but for that superficial milkiness that sometimes denotes the onset of old age.

He smiled at me. "Keep traveling the road and you might just find what you're looking for."

"What do you mean?" I asked cautiously.

"In all my years with this company, no one has asked me the questions you came here with today." He paused a moment, then said: "Here, I want to show you something."

He produced a videocassette from the folds of his loose-hanging suit and gave me the same smile that had crossed his face a number of times during the interview; usually, I noticed, when he needed a moment or two to think about a particularly awkward question I'd thrown at him. He looked not unlike Walter Matthau, the Hollywood actor, with a kindly, hangdog expression and thick straight hair to match. Instinctively, I'd liked him. But more to the point, I knew that I could trust him. Unusually for someone who toiled in the heart of the U.S. defense-industrial complex, he looked somewhat like someone who was incapable of telling a lie.

Bushman appeared beyond the retirement age of most good man-and-boy company men, which in itself spoke volumes about his ability.

Before I met him, I'd been told that he was a one-off, one of those people who liked to think out of the box--defense jargon for a guy in the trade who looked at things differently. Just how differently, I was about to find out.

The picture on the TV screen steadied and I found myself staring at a scene of such ordinariness I thought for a moment that Bushman had plugged in the wrong tape.

From the graininess of the film and the way the camera trembled, it rapidly became clear that this was some kind of a home movie. It depicted the interior of a garage or workshop. In the middle of the frame was a saw on a pockmarked wooden work surface. Beside it was a pair of pliers and a handful of nails.

For a while, we both just stood there watching a picture in which nothing happened. The minders had taken a quick look and apparently decided it was an eccentric end to a quirky afternoon's work, because they went back to their own conversation.

My gaze drifted back to the TV just as one of the nails in the center of the screen began to twitch and the pliers moved--jumped, rather--a centimeter to the left. Within seconds, everything was shaking, as if rocked by a series of earth tremors. And then, quite suddenly, the nails stood up, like hairs on a cold forearm.

I looked at Bushman, who was studying the screen intently, "Watch," he urged, "this is the best bit."

One by one, the nails took off and shot off the top of the screen. A moment later, the pliers started to do a crazy nose-down dance across the work surface and the saw began flapping around like a fish out of water. Then they both went the way of the nails, shooting out of frame toward the ceiling.

Then, the picture switched: same background, different still life.

Ice cream was creeping up the sides of a see-through tub. A lump of it broke away and rose toward the ceiling trailing little pearls of cream. Seconds later, the whole tub jumped off the bench.

My skepticism was working overtime. But Bushman read my thoughts. "It's no fake," he said. "This is as real as you or I." He cast a look over his shoulder at our companions. "The man responsible is a civilian, nothing to do with the defense business. That he's a genius goes without saying, of course. You needed to see this, because it's confirmation of the data." He emphasized the word as if somehow it would help me understand what I had just seen. "You must get to see this man. I think, then, you will be closer than you think to the end of your journey."

"Data? What data?" I looked at him more closely, hoping for more, but he said nothing.

As I was ushered out of the room, the scientist looked down at the thick pack of material he'd handed me before the interview. I hadn't had time to look at it. Now, I wished I had.

That evening, I sat down with Bushman's file in my hotel room. He'd loaded me down with so many papers, I didn't know where to begin or what I was really looking for. There was a stack of photostats relating to the patents he'd filed during a long and illustrious career that had included stints at some of the giants of the postwar U.S. aerospace and defense industry: Hughes Aircraft, Texas Instruments, General Dynamics and Lockheed.

There was his resume, which noted his top secret security clearance, as well as copies of scientific papers, stapled neatly at the corner, with exotic-sounding titles that meant little to me.

My eyes swam over pages of complex mathematical equations and algebra sets. I was looking for clues, but seeing nothing that made much sense.

I pressed the "play" button on my tape recorder.

From the tenth floor of my Fort Worth hotel room, the lights of the city shimmered in the sizzling 90-degree heat, even though it was a good half an hour after the sun had slipped below the skyline. Inside, the air-conditioning was cold enough to prickle my skin.

". . . I went back to some of the first work on gravity done by Galileo. . . "

[Aside on Galileo: "When he later defended his views in his most famous work, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, published in 1632, he was tried by the Inquisition, found "vehemently suspect of heresy," forced to recant, and spent the rest of his life under house arrest.]

Bushman's voice crackled in the darkness, clashing for a moment with that of a CNN reporter on the TV. I adjusted the volume on the tape recorder, hit the fast-forward button and pressed play again.

"So, what I think is: Follow the data and log your data very well and don't throw it away because you have a theory. The theory of gravity is just a theory. Einstein improved on the original theories of Newton and he was verified by data--and data gave precedence. No one believed Einstein until the data arrived. Well, our data's arrived. . . "

I scrolled the tape again. As I did so, I spotted something among the collection of papers Bushman had given me. Tucked beneath the patents and company brochure material on weapons technology was a grainy photocopy of a UFO flying low over a straight stretch of desert road. A handwritten caption underneath identified the location as Santa Ana, California, and the date as 1966.

Flicking past it, I found another cluster of photostats taken from the "Ramayana of Valmiki--Translated from the Original Sanskrit." A stamp on the title page identified the book as belonging to "Lockheed/Fort Worth."

Puzzled, I toggled with the buttons on the tape recorder and finally found the part of the interview I'd been looking for.

"Nature does not speak English," Bushman had been telling me. "Not only that, but if we verbalize it, we're probably approximating, but not telling the truth. Math comes close, but it isn't there either. What Nature tells us is what must be honored. It has been talking to us on many domains."

I let the words echo in my head for a moment.

Bushman was a senior scientist for one of the world's biggest defense contractors; a member of the fraternity that I'd looked to for expert comment all my professional life, and he was telling me to trust in what I saw. Folllow data, he's said, not theory. He worked on programs that lay beyond the cutting edge of known science.

"I can't talk to all the theoreticians," he'd told me, "because there don't exist theorires where I am."

"For the past ten years, I had been following data and the data had shown me that existence of something real. And yet some of the brightest minds on the planet were struggling to produce theory to underpin it. How could there be no theory for effects that were genuinely manifesting themselves in the environment?

What Nature tells us is what must be honored. It has been talking to us on many domains.

And we'd only understood a fraction of what it had been saying.

If we verbalize it, we're probably approximating, but not telling the truth.

And then it hit me. That's all theory was or ever had been--an approximation of the truth. Sometimes that approximation worked out and held fast, becoming scientific currency; other times it didn't and was superseded by another theory.

In this case, there were so many holes in our knowledge, it had allowed for people like Podkletnov and Schauberger to fall through the gaps, to show us things that science couldn't account for. Because science theory hadn't mapped them yet.
...
Einstein had followed Newton and data had verified them both. But in this field, as with other fields of scientific endeavor, the data was still coming in." - Nick Cook, The Hunt for Zero Point: Inside the Classified World of Antigravity Technology

Bonus: I have my own notes from the book I'll share. It's worth a read if you're peering over edges, especially related to energy research.

Art/Photo Credits: Sylvia Ji's Spring; can't find the original artist source, but I got this whimsical illustration via Copper Witch's cached blog; going for the labyrinth myth and clews angle too, this awesome digital composition is by loutremauve on DeviantArt.com; gravity-defying levitator is a photo effect via Geekologie; the 3D rendered anti-gravity propulsion vehicle is by Victor Alatorre (can't find his website) via Paranormal People; and, whoa 'miracles' that look really fun...walking on water ball.

True fearlessness comes from the knowledge that we will never lie to ourselves, that we will never evade a single moment of our lives.

I'd never watched Heroes until a few weeks ago when I saw a few episodes of Season 1.  (Mostly I was curious what producer Tim Kring had done before his latest "fictional experience using interactive theatre, mobile and alternate reality gaming (ARG), music and physical participation ‘to do good in the world’..")

Anyhow, there's a scene in Heroes, where Nathan has just won the Congressional election. He won't allow his wife who's now completely healed from her paralyzing injury to walk on stage of  her own accord. So she carries on with the facade of being strapped in the wheelchair because Nathan tells her behind the curtain, "People don't believe in miracles."

How many times do we hang behind the curtain, resist rocking anyone's illusions (including ours) and pretend we're paralyzed (i.e. unaware) on the stage of life?

[Eduard:] 'I used to wonder why they always depicted the Virgin like that.’

[Veronika:] 'And why do they?’

[Eduard:] ‘Because the Virgin equals female energy and is the mistress of the snake, which signifies wisdom. If you look at the ring Dr Igor wears, you’ll see that it bears the physician’s symbol: two serpents coiled around a stick. Love is above wisdom, just as the Virgin is above the snake. For her, everything is Inspiration. She doesn’t bother judging what is Good and what Evil.’

‘Do you know something else?’ said Veronika. ‘The Virgin never took any notice of what others might think of her. Imagine having to explain to everyone that business about the Holy Ghost. She didn’t explain anything, she just said: “That’s what happened.” And do you know what the others must have said?’

‘Of course. That she was mad.’ " - Veronika Decides to Die, by Paulo Coelho

I don't have any concise, articulate reason (although I may just have a rhyme), yet I've been nudged to form a peer group of 25. Maybe it's for the same reason that Ernest Shackleton or Meriwether Lewis (Lewis chose Clark as his co-captain) sought a crew for those expeditions--uncharted terrain isn't necessarily a solo pilgrimage.

Below is the legendary advertisement that Shackleton placed in a 1912 London paper that drew an influx of 5000 applicants.

"We don't hold ourselves back for fear of being confronted by something that's unpleasant, uncomfortable, or overwhelming. Rather than close down and try to protect ourselves, or drive ourselves forward through fear of missing out on some valued experience or opportunity, we face everything that arises in our experience and avoid nothing, without resisting it or believing it shouldn't be happening.

Opening up in this way--accepting what is without any resistance--is heroic because we risk losing everything we're attached to. In order to open up to what's happening, we let go of our sense of self-control. "True fearlessness comes from the knowledge that we will never lie to ourselves, that we will never evade a single moment of our lives," says Shyalpa Rinpoche. "We will be fully present for every moment and every consequence." - Radiant Mind: Awakening Unconditioned Awareness, by Peter Fenner

As best I can see there's only space for 25 total (and that includes me). I can promise if we're sincere, that we will inevitably lead creative lives that spring from the infinite fountain of Intelligence moment-to-moment rather than re-creating and re-acting from memory and conditioned extrapolations of the past. Paradoxically, we will be pushing the edge of known human experience (in form) by not pushing against or pushing away. (It may appear like "pushing" the wave, but the surfer is cooperating with the inevitable motion of the ocean.)

We will be on a journey together for possibly two years, although it doesn't necessitate any geographical treks. Most of the space we may transverse is vertical. This is not a class. This is not a workshop. It's more akin to an experiment, and an adventure. We'll communicate online via a role-playing interactive mixed-reality game+group blog, via dream and telepathy. You have a option to bail after about six months, but it's best to simply commit wholeheartedly once and for all.

"The game is tailored specifically to each participant. Think of it as a great vacation, except you don't go to it, it comes to you." - The Game

I'm purposefully not making this a sexy or exciting announcement. Perhaps, we shall time travel and bilocate and chat up rutabagas, and perhaps not. So often expectations can obscure what we don't know we don't know. Expectancy is okay; expectations, not so much.

"One way to begin to accept our experience is to simply say yes to it when we realize that we are saying no to it. When we hear ourselves objecting to what's happening, we can think, "Okay, I will be present to this experience.

It's easy to think that in order to let go of our resistance, we need to change and become a different type of person. But when we let go of our resistance, nothing needs to change. In fact, that's exactly what we're doing in letting go of our resistance. We're letting go of our need for anything to be different.

We let go of what we think is happening, and we let go of what should be happening, in order to allow ourselves to be present to what is actually happening." - Radiant Mind, by Peter Fenner

BONUS:  Since I've two Asian-American characters in our role-playing "game", I decided to  consult the I Ching about the motivation for the group of 25, and got Hexagram 8. A beautiful explanation below by Brian Donohue written on January 1, 2010 (nutshell, Hexagram 8=Union: "...this is the message of Hexagram 8, that “holding together brings good fortune.”):

"Numerologically, the year we have entered is a 3, in contrast to the 2 we have left (you simply add the numbers in the year until you have one digit: 2010 adds to 3; 2009 adds to 11 which in turn adds to 2). As unnecessary as it might be, there is too much potential for opposition and conflict in the binary; this is one reason why Pirsig, in his classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, proposed that Nature operates according to a trinary code (I have a full quote of the passage here).

I tend to agree with Pirsig, and I think that much of the more mature wisdom of the world, from both past and present, is in tune with the value of the trinary. The I Ching speaks frequently of a third presence, of a helping third, of the value of three. Three is the number of beginning, of opening, of two being joined and supported, nourished, by an invisible but genuine third presence. As they often do, Anthony and Moog vibrantly express this natural dynamic of completion, in their commentary to Hexagram 8, Holding Together:

"All unity between two people is made possible by their recognizing and respecting each other’s boundaries; this being the prerequisite, the Sage then makes their harmonious connection possible. An image of a harmonious relationship between two people is the horizontal figure eight. The two circles of the eight represent the respective spaces of each person. It is their seeing the true self in each that enables them to connect. The point at which their two circles connect is love (mutual respect)."

Perhaps another association has occurred to you as you read that selection: the figure eight laid horizontally is, of course, the mathematical symbol for infinity. A successful and natural relationship — a friendship, a love relationship, a marriage, even a professional relationship — partakes of and connects with the infinite, even as it operates amid the realities and vicissitudes of daily life. The two are not, however, the source of the infinite touch to the relationship: the noumenal energy that flows through them, connects them, and guides them is the invisible third that nourishes their union of form (the dark) with light.

As with most of what we teach here, this phenomenon has to be experienced, or else it is a mere stream of words across a page, easily brushed off as New Age fluff. For most of us, however, it is fairly easy to turn inward and look back on our relationships to discern those that were superficial and coldly pragmatic from those in which you could feel that third presence, the pulse of light, inspiration, or love that gave it an amazing vibrancy, a depth of meaning and a sense of endurance.

I’ll mention once more that I do not ask anyone to believe in this third presence, this Sage. It is better, in fact, that you do not believe. Personal experience is a far better teacher, a far truer guide, than belief or faith. So I’m merely suggesting that this year of 2010, this year of three, may be a good time to explore your relationships — those of the past and your current ones. Examine them, ask questions of them, and let your feeling response to them flow freely through and around you. Even the most skeptical of us can try this much: your beliefs (and certainly your anti-beliefs) will be easily recoverable after you’ve tried this experience. But if it goes well, perhaps you won’t need them all back, or have to grip them so tightly as you did before.

For many of us, myself included, 2009 was a year of reversals — outer misfortunes, losses, and stagnation. But it was also a year of contemplation, realization, and a sense of a burgeoning recovery. The coming year may be one of inviting that third presence into our lives, our relationships, our paths of healing and growth. It is not a god or some magic or other esoteric, religious miracle: it is simply a wave-form, an energy of the universe that is always there for those who will open themselves to its refreshing and restorative flow. The Chinese called it chi, the Japanese ki, and it is referred to as prana in the Sanskrit. In our human relationships, it may even be called quantum gravity, because it is, as Anthony and Moog indicate in the passage quoted above, a principle of attraction that honors each individual as it joins them with an energy that enhances them both. It is the completion that overcomes separation and dissolves division: this is the message of Hexagram 8, that “holding together brings good fortune.” "

urban fantasy alternate reality what if's breathing our world into being

"He believes in respecting forms already established for the novel. I believe in a form which is constantly mutating." - Anaïs Nin

Don't want to say too much more this minute. Let it unfold. But my semi-fictional character, Awen M. Currie, has a new blog, http://revelocean.blogspot.com. (Yes, nevermind linear storytelling, like most blogs it's reverse chronological which still isn't very sensical in a nonlinear reality.) And he's been twittering away at twitter.com/awen8.

I'm experimenting with new ways of playing What If. Visioneering.

"Your weakness is due to your conviction that you were born into the world. In reality the world is ever recreated in you and by you. See everything as emanating from the light which is the source of your own being." - Nisargadatta

The inspiration series was enlightening. The imagination series was fun. Yet there's something richer, more immersive about memoir and fiction that pulls you square and center into the picture in a way that self-helpy non-fiction and expository blog rants can't.

Check out World Without Oil (weekly story index here) if you've a few minutes. Rather than preaching and lecturing (yawn, if you ask me) on a post-carbon peak oil possible future, they've posed relevant scenarios.

You're asked to imagine this is happening. So you've just walked into this global storyline, suspending disbelief, how do you react? Discuss on the porch, over tea, at the water cooler, via blogs and phoned-in calls. Act as if. Live it. For instance, their Week 1 began:

Supply uncertainty drives prices higher    

"Fuel prices jumped this week, led by gasoline which gained over a dollar a gallon on average. Oil distributors pointed to several "renegotiated" delivery contracts as proof that a long-rumored shortfall in the supply of U.S. oil has finally arrived. Oil producers were tight-lipped about the adjusted contracts, and as I write this it's still unclear how extensive the shortfall will turn out to be."

Weave us into a possible future, let us picture ourselves in the middle of a plotline, rather than just spout out more statistics in a news item. I like.

"If we see it from the scientific, intellectual point of view, we see it as almost impossible. If we see it from a magic point of view, we can feel that yes, we can make a difference." - Mayan priest Gerardo Barrios Kaanek

p.s. Jane McGonigal is one of the creators of World Without Oil.

(Psssst, it's no secret, I'm a utopian.) Thus what-if possible futures I'll throw out look radically different. I'm a believer in: Whatever we can conceive of, we can build. Although, the challenge is our collective imagination muscles have been weakened by centuries of defeatism, centuries of utter rationality. Build it, and they will come.

Art I just finished reading The Magician's Nephew, and The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. Tres immersive storytelling. Dreaming of Narnia, by Sarah Carter. What I'd like to call the Wood Between the Worlds, photo via Tamo-Do: The Academy of Sound Healing, Color Therapy and Chi Movement. ("You could almost feel the trees drinking the water up with their roots. This wood was very much alive. When he tried to describe it afterward Digory always said, "It was a rich place: as rich as plumcake." - The Magician's Nephew, C.S. Lewis)

genesis of alternate realities

I want to set the record right. When Niall MacMhuirich died in 1726, the bardic order did not become extinct in Scotland. Oh, sure their presence were no longer needed at Court. And maybe thereabouts is whence the term "singing for your supper" came into being. What a fall from the heights of paradise for bards!

Yet the tradition has always continued backwards and forwards in time.

So maybe that's when and where Awen Mihir Currie comes into this picture, or more accurrately the frame (the picture's much Bigger) I call my life.

Not too many blue moons ago, I replied back to a friend that now feels more like an online avatar since we haven't seen each other in this dimension in a very long time:

there are many that roam the earth
in these epic times

we are the Stars of the epic
I started to write a [10-minute] play with you as
my inspiration called "Where Angels Fear to Tread"
and then I quit writing because I realized
I might write the future into existence
something felt true about it
I'd fast-forwarded to time maybe 2011
and your character collaborating with dolphins & whale

to record their song
for a musical score or something like that
& then you started to understand their tonal
language because it is like singing and star languages
and they warned you about a quake
to come in bay area, and we do have time to warn people

just before the quake
there is a superconductivity like after a crop
circle, and there is an information charge, magnetic?
i quit writing, too true

epic times

and we both have a flair for the
dramatic
(look at your life, stuff of movie
script, no?)

these are going to be epic times, the reason
you were born on this plane at this time
is upon you - the pressure you feel is like
the pressure you felt in the birth canal before
you came into this world, something wants
to be born, allow your destiny

many angels roam the earth at this time,
but not all of them, appear as you'd
imagine

few do,
myself am muse-magician-mystery
more sorceress than saint
past lives include temple prostitute,
courtesan,
whore
too - not all self-aggrandizing holy angelic
tho truth is Every blooming thing holy

i found my peoples in nola
gypsies & Geminis
time travellers & tinkerers
wizards & wandering bards
carny kid & crystalline child
dakinis & dragons

when my Powers [not 'mine' or anyone's; omnipotence ] started growing
i would magnetize my thoughts accidentally

magnetism & creativity go hand and hand
electricity too
planets and Sun increasing in both fields
tho physics NOT my subject nevermind that I
have electrical engineering diploma -
i kinetically feel this

anyhow, i would magnetize thoughts into
reality
so that if i was feeling guilty bout anything
whatsoever, unrelated too, or
even not having an up-to-date registration
on my car, I guarantee you I would be
pulled over by a police officer
over & over & over in the same week
UNBELIEVABLE
different officers - finally started dawning
on me that something was up
(i gave up driving too, as wanderers and wonderers
are wont to do eventually)

your Creative powers trump mine, I suspect

they are there for a reason O musician-magician

nothing to worry about, plenty to glory about

your friend at your service whenever wherever,
e

You may ask if Awen is real. I have a different sense of reality than the average person. So does my clan.

Yet even in the flesh, they still don't exist to most people.

Invisible.

They are not represented in The New York Times, Vogue magazine, or even Live Journal. A lot of them when seen, seem as drifters and dilettantes. Surface appearances.

Awen is an ambassador of sorts for these clanfolk. A composite character of my soul family. I'm the bridger of the bunch. One foot precariously perched in both worlds.

Why Awen came online when he did he shall reveal soon enough. There is a little bit of urgency. You see August 28th is a lunar eclipse. September 11th a solar eclipse. And September 14th...but I'm getting ahead of myself. He's still fleshing out online. Twitter is easiest for him to update - twitter.com/awen8. And since all stories happen in turning point moments, it may connect you more intimately with the day to day.

You definitely should check the Twitter "with friends" too. Everything happens in the mirror of relations, after all.

The blog (as is) isn't going to work. Tumblr's great for someone that's hypercreative (used to be diagnosed as a disorder called A.D.H.D. back in 2007; can you imagine!?), but ughhh! it really needs comments. So Awen's is yet another abandoned blog. (Maybe I'll let him piggyback on my Typepad Pro account?)

The MySpace page, myspace.com/revelocean, for his sound (band doesn't quite capture) is just a start. There he says:

A friend told me that you don't "exist" until you have an online identity. Well, I don't really believe that as I meet plenty of peeps that are off the radar so to speak. I see them at the BART station, pushing a cart of jangling cans and clinking bottles, watching the whales off the coast, squatting at the top of city hills and abandoned warehouses, and travelling the highways and biways of this fine country. We exist all right.

p.s. Some would want to characterize this genre of play. Genre of writing. Maybe chaotic fiction? Alternate Reality Game? (Recommend checking out World Without Oil for another example.)

Wink: Hmmmm, how about Alchemical Reality Game?

Art Yoshitaka Amano's Iris; many bards were seers, fortune-telling nomads as child too... Yoshitaka Amano's "Miraishi-tachi" - The Future Foreseeing; Awen looks a little like Yoshitaka Amano's Lord of Dreams.

Bonus: A beautiful thumbnail gallery of Yoshitaka Amano's work here. I adore his Fairies art book.

learning edge, or you can't stop the waves, but you can learn to surf

"A university can provide you with a library, but what makes the book you are not looking for fall off the shelf into your hands to give you the material you need is not understood by any university." - William Irwin Thompson, Darkness and Scattered Light (kinda like this book jumped off the shelf, kaboom!, at Kaboom book shoppe in New Orleans)

My blogging bud, Colleen at Communicatrix tagged me with the What's Your Learning Edge meme (p.s. she'll be delving into hypnotism): "I invite you to pick something that you’ve always been curious about, and dive into it with all the passion of a two-year-old on a playground." Goodie!

"Feel free to mention any books you’re reading, classes you’re taking, people you’re learning from or collaborating with, etc. Tell us about the gems you’re picking up, the fun you’re having, etc., especially if they’re shifting the way you look at what you do." - Adam Kayce, Monk at Work, "What's Your Learning Edge?" (p.s. he'll be delving into the Law of Attraction)

"To know the pine, go to the pine. To know the bamboo, go to the bamboo," scribed the wandering hermit haiku poet Basho eons ago. (BTW, all who wander are not lost.)

I'd like to edge myself to draw forth my own innate sage and abide by that sage especially when it veers from convention. To swing when and where my hip feels the beat especially when I'm not on a dance floor. To rekindle the communication that transcends language, that expands the soul and speaks fluidly to Yours, especially when my brain clings to encylopedias. And trust the soul knows how to do this in the doing of it.

And when you come to the crossroads
And you're deciding in the dark
You've gotta listen to the whisper of your heart - Trisha Yearwood, Listen to The Whisper in Your Heart

In short, to learn how to commune directly, immediately, with higher self's Will to guide my soul's highest evolution.

1. plumb my own innate wisdom

So no searching out books, classes, workshops, websites, experts, etc. on how to be a soul pilgrim, and confirm that I'm on the right track. (If I'm supposed to be exposed to an outer teaching, it'll effortlessly drop in my lap.)

I'll be going to straight to the pine, touching the bark, smelling the needles, hearing the roots heave sighs, seeping pine bark tea with the spring water from the Well, for myself. Then sipping this tea with wise children and mischievious merlins for companions. I shall leave the comprehensive, illustrated field guide to North American pines at the library.

"When the living descendant of the lineage of Rumi - his name was Jelaluddin Chelabi - visited Atlanta, he sat me down and said "What religion are you?" I just threw up my hands. He says, "Good. Love is the religion, and the universe is the book."" - Coleman Barks, "Fall in Love the Rumi Way", Beliefnet.com

When I am a stranger in a strange land, without any maps, I want to be able to call spontaneously on higher guidance, be aligned with true north, follow the signs strewn through the universe, and sense my own way Home.

Ian Schrager, born in the Bronx and raised in Brooklyn, has always run his business – by instinct ["not market research or logistics"]. “I always work viscerally. I throw myself into new projects like a man who’s besotted with a woman. It’s completely emotional. When I want something, it’s a gut-reaction…” - "But Who Is Ian Schrager?" French Vogue

2. sway from the hip

"If someone has a reputation for "telling it like it is," he is often said to shoot "from the hip." For a cowboy, such an action would indicate impulsiveness, and perhaps a lack of self-control. For a martial artist, it could indicate total readiness at all times, acting instinctively without need for aim or preparation.

For a Star Child who is totally connected and operational, being "hip" is about living within a kind of FLOW. It is an alignment that happens between nature, circumstance, and one's deep inner self. When we live "from the hip," we are functioning at all times from this balance of spontaneity and Oneness with All That Is." - Daniel Jacobs, "The Star Children"

3. speak in the tongue of the soul

I twittered today, "i imagine schools where the tongues of color sound light geometry glyph & symbol are teacher, deepening conversation w/ sphinxes, scarab, ravens, river Niles, trees, trolls &"

"Little by little, the planet is developing a UNIVERSAL TONAL VOCABULARY -- consisting of physical symbols, sounds, colors, words, and phrases that immediately invoke virtually the same inner experiences, wherever they appear." - Daniel Jacobs, "The Living Language of Light"

4. just do it even if it's never been done before, learn by doing, the total immersion approach

"The residents of the Haight [pre-1967], remembers Richards, were mostly students and artists, drop-outs from various political movements. "San Francisco was a magnet for those kind of people," says Richards. "It attracted people who had been involved in social protests and were tired of preaching about it." They came to San Francisco, he said, "to be what they were talking about." - Dave Richards, Janis Joplin roadie and her Porsche artist

I'd love to tag Nick Smith, Siona van Dijk, Marilyn, Leah, and Eve to join What's Your Learning Edge? foray. No child needs an invite to explore and expand. It's an open call, eternally calling in sweet song.

p.s. The quote in the headline is from Jon Kabat-Zinn. Imagine I shall be practicing my fluency of the soul language of light, color, glyph, and myth more here.  Perhaps a wee less D.J. remixing, and more of my own original live music? Yearning for immersive sensory multidimensional experience that's only possible in the world of matter, beyond bits and bytes.  Love to collaborate with a few magical kids in San Francisco to weave together something hands-on in July if you're in the neighborhood (I'll be in the Mission, near 24th and Folsom).

p.p.s. Heeding the truth of my own soul guiding itSelf towards its highest evolution automatically is congruent with the law of One, law of love, law of creating (a.k.a. law of attraction), and glides one to fulfillment, grace, ease, love and abundance.

Art: Children painting mural photo via Rochester Art Center's "art in the classroom" program site; a Lineage II game character, a hip and ready elven; unknown painting of a bard via Druidry Information Pack, by David Smith.