Crossroads Dispatches

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.

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.)

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.

it represents infinite potential - j. j. abrams

“Sometimes your only available transportation is a leap of faith.”– Margaret Shepard

I'll be in Los Angeles Friday attending Transmedia, Hollywood 2 at UCLA. If you're in the LA area, I'll be there for about a week afterwards as well--contact me if you'd like to meet up.

Going to LA completely on a hunch. Originally, I was going to wait until I had enough resources for this trip, but I could die waiting. Instead, I vowed as soon as I had enough for one-way fare, I'd commit. Booked April 7th 'randomly.' And, later, learn that the yearly Transmedia conference would be the following day.

Random? Risk? Or 'twas it inspired?

Well, we'll see. Let the chips fall as they may.

The word hazard features prominently in the title of the participatory storyline, I'm working on. (It's partly set in L.A.) The actual etymology of hazard is interesting, with Spanish and Arabic undertones: a game of chance. So it seems fitting that I take the first "chance." (Does chance actually exist?)

"Who can tell the dancer from the dance?" - William Butler Yeats

This so-called "Hazard" story may unfold to become something immersive along the lines of this Vanished participatory 'game' (partnership of MIT and the Smithsonian) launching today, April 4th.  

Vanished invites middle-school kids to explore a make-believe mystery in a narrative setting as they participate by doing science.

Science in the classroom is a far cry from the exploratory nature of science in the field. Same goes for our own lives--it's not exactly found in books, blogs or workshops. I want to do Life and expand its mysteries, not be lectured at.

“Current science instruction relies too heavily on memorization and activities with predetermined outcomes causing many kids to lose interest in science and have misconceptions about what it means to be a scientist,” said Scot Osterweil of MIT Education Arcade. -- via ArtDaily.org

Reading The Art of Immersion, by Frank Rose, I was quite taken by the snippet where J.J. Abrams (for a person that doesn't own a television set, I was pretty hooked on Lost) is talking about infinite possibility.

". . . Abrams described his lifelong infatuation with Tannen's Magic Mystery Box, a $15 cardboard box he had bought at a New York magic shop as a kid. He never opened it, though it sits even now on a shelf in his office."

"I realized I haven't opened it because it represents something important to me," he explained at TED. "It represents infinite potential. It represents hope. It represents possibility. And what I love about this box, and what I realize I sort of do whatever it is that I do, is find myself drawn to infinite possibility and that sense of potential."

Mystery, he went on to say, is the catalyst for imagination. What are stories if not mystery boxes? What is Lost if not a mystery box? Star Wars? What creates mystery if not the deliberate withholding of information?

... "I mean, look inside yourself and figure out what is inside you," Abrams said, "because ultimately, you know, the mystery box is all of us."

I must admit, I know I would have had to open the Magic Mystery Box--especially when I was a kid. And then go find another treasure to open.... one box leading to the next.... surprise after surprise.

p.s. All new (and current) Encanto newsletter subscribers are gifted with their very own Magic Mystery Box via snail mail through April 24th... a melange* of tailor-selected found objects and handmade inspiration from moi. You are highly encouraged to OPEN the box!  Infinite possibility is infinite--so there's so much more where that came from.

* Definition of MÉLANGE: a mixture often of incongruous elements

ART CREDITS: Pandora by John William Waterhouse. Pandora’s name means “all gifts.” Psyche Opening the Golden Box, (detail) also by Waterhouse.

fluid celebration - blog action day 2010 - water installation

This is my contribution for Blog Action Day. This year's theme is water. I recall a ferry ride across the Mississippi in the setting sun in April 2008. My intuition was going haywire giving me something about a "water installation." As I landed in New Orleans, I noted a department store mall storefront on Canal Street with the words charity : water. I wrote it down since the serendipity was too vivid to ignore. I'd never heard of charity:water before.

I kept getting hits of intuition and inspiration involving a water installation, ("but I'm a writer!" I protest to the universe). I continued to brush these inspirations away.

After the Gulf oil spill April 2010, I understood the urgency and regretted that I didn't follow through. So that's partly the inspiration for the following.

"Water is the driving force of all nature." - Leonardo da Vinci

Setting: Sometime in the "future."

Women dressed in diaphonous cloud gingerly twirl with jars balanced on the tiptop of their crowns. In single file, they tiptoe to a well. One filly breaks into a trot and the rest scatter bouncing and bounding in a frolic to the spring. Behind them the scene is draped in waterfalls. On their return with filled jars weighing up to forty pounds, they circumnavigate the circuitous stream feeding the spring in a slow dance that exudes both sublime saunter and rapturous giggle.

The live installation celebrates the purification of water worldwide and the emancipation of women from retreiving water from miles away and storing emotions.

One grey-eyed dancer takes a large clay jar and pours water tenderly into a thin-necked copper pitcher, another woman with flowing black hair pours a jar into a wide porcelain pitcher. Each chooses her own vessel.

Spritely as a naiad, the porcelain pitchered empress brings the pitcher to a young man sitting in the circle.

He looks into the pitcher as if a mirror, and reflected and refracted in all the pools they see passing emotions skipping across the sloshing oval like a stone across a lake--a flash of fiery anger, an image of an old grudge, the anguish of an ancient trauma...a flood, perhaps---and the stone stops, the ripples fade, the water stills and pitcher is passed to the next in the circle. He stands up and joins the dance.

The celebration is performed on a regular basis. No two the same. We can't tell you when the next one is exactly as time itself is fluid--we'll be expecting you. 

latent talent, or the rays emitted by sapphires can change the molecular structure of other gemstones

 
"Only now I the one who say "keep on keepin' on!" to new girls. I show them how the dialogue journal work. You know how you write to teacher 'n she talkin' on paper and you could SEE your talk coming back to you when the teacher answer you back. I mean thas what had made me really like writing in the beginning, knowing my teacher gonna write me back when I talk to her." - Push, by Sapphire (film adaption Precious won Oscars and Sundance Film Festival awards)

In 1977, Ramona Lofton moved to New York City with twenty dollars to her name. She had wished to become a writer, but instead wound up working in the sex industry around Times Square. She'd changed her name to Sapphire because: "I had read somewhere that the rays emitted by sapphires can change the molecular structure of other gemstones--and that was exactly what I wanted to do with my life."

Later she became a remedial reading teacher in Harlem and the Bronx. With not much more than a pen and sheer talent, her first book "Push" was published by Knopf -- and she received a whopping $500,000 two-book contract. (Source: Wikipedia, Answers.com)

Alicia Keys been singing since she was four. Fortunately, singing isn't too expensive. When she started expressing an interest in piano, it wasn't easy for her family to pay for lessons, let alone get her a piano. "A friend ended up not needing this piano and gave it to us," she explained. She went on to say that people always ask what her biggest break was and her answer is: "That piano." (Source: Iconoclasts, Sundance Channel)

We believe that talent is latent (catch that anagram?) within everyone. Creativity isn't the purview of a few with the studio budgets and mass media connections.

When the Internet started catching on like wildfire in the late 1990s, I was enthused about how much freedom of expression would now be not only possible, but feasible to amateurs (etymology: "one who has a taste for (something)","lover of").

Fast forward to 2010: Sometimes there's a subtle impression given that one needs to wait to produce. Consuming and surfing are nearly free, but the means of production seem to balloon as our expectations for polished content escalates.

We can't possibly start our creative project because _____ (fill in the blank). Until we get the venture capital funding. Until the film is financed. Until we get the recording studio up and running. Until we get the game designer hired. Until we get Final Cut Pro and Adobe Illustrator. Until we secure a job at Electronic Arts or Pixar.

Deftly postponing and deferring the creativity that is bursting to come forth right now.... until we get the ____.

In 1999, I was the CTO at a venture-backed Internet startup. Among our collective mistakes, the one that sticks with me is that we believed we needed the next round of funding to "really" accomplish what we envisioned. I ought to mention that we had $1.4 million in funding, although it didn't seem like "enough".

It was too late to save that particular startup, yet around the same time as dot-coms were imploding, I was fortunate to meet both Alistair Cockburn and Jim Highsmith and they opened my eyes to an iterative, agile approach to completing projects. Not only did it seem that this was the process for the future, it also struck me as the the most engrossing, engaging and effective way to see a software project come into fruition bit by bit with a feedback loop that sought to collaborate with the users.

Fast-forward. I've had a story kicking around my mind two years ago to date yesterday -- August 8, '08 -- opening ceremonies, Beijing Olympics a Chinese-American 19-year-old film student named Mai is birthed in my imagination. Since then an intricate cast of characters has joined her from Iris circa 1915 Montparnasse to Sam in present-day New Orleans.

There's an inner voice... call it The Perfectionist that feels we ought to wait until we have all the resources to tell this story "properly." For some people, that's an option. More than likely, for us, there's a grant, or a patron, or even a fundable business plan that we could pitch that MIGHT line up all the resources we'd need in one fell swoop. Perhaps. We have the option to wait.

Jean-Michel Basquiat, while homeless, wrote poetic tags on Manhattan walls, sold $5 handmade postcards and painted on salvaged materials he found in the Lower East Side. He didn't wait. He couldn't wait.

Precious, the young, urban protagonist in Sapphire's novel, is advised by her case worker to quit school, give up her baby and get a job as a home care aid assistant. Luckily, Precious' teacher spots her potential, and intervenes with something as simple as a journal -- one in which the two pass poems and notes back and forth to each other.

The iterative process is like that.

It starts with a blank page. We pass notes back and forth to each other. Building a body of work, together. Beginning with the barest of skeletal frames that's minimally functional. Starting where you are with what you have. Evolving, expanding from there.

"If you are not embarrassed with your first version, you've released too late." - Reid Hoffman, founder LinkedIn

Bonus: In this current project, Latent Talent: Leaping from de Poverty Line, we aim to show that even on federal minimum wage salary cusping the poverty threshold, anyone can create compelling self-expression because inspiration isn't dependent on income.

p.s. Mai, guest blogger, is announcing her own blog tomorrow/soon. She's had quite the flurry of life and death experience lately. We've both realized we haven't been as risky "real" as we could be. Of late, I've pulled away from astrology as I'm not too intent on knowing where fate lies, and rather create fate, yet I did happen to read this today which sums up love and creativity (is there a difference?) aptly:

"In fact that is probably what you are going to start learning about big time this summer—exactly what love is all about.

It’s really the ability to show yourself, allow yourself to be revealed as you really are with all your strengths and weaknesses. Being able to love deeply means being vulnerable, and when you are vulnerable you are bound to make strange choices. Nobody can criticize or guide you along this new path, mainly because there are no mistakes when you are learning to open yourself up. Opening yourself up romantically is of the same nature as allowing your creative talents to be developed."

until death becomes unreal

Think I caught the drift of your last post. Hope you didn't mean we have to only stick to just stories of "shineshine and rainbows," as Jeremie might put it. I detest the saccharine falsity of Belle Sara. I fret that my depiction of Guanyin will fall into a stock character of self-sacrificing martyr/mother figure that blesses boo-boos on shinned knees. Anyhow.

After my visit to grandmother's, the next day (whoa, that was Sunday and it's already Wednesday) I show up at Jeremie's father's doorstep. Of course, explicitly leaving out his name here as he is too well known in his circles.

He offered me a honeyed-tamarind drink, invited me into his homemade temple -- which is a separate room in the rowhouse.

"How is Jeremie?"

"Very good. And his mother is good too. What brings you here today?"

Now, I only went there to see if he could help interpret my dream (although I should have also asked about nai nai's dream too -- the one where I'm fighting dragons). As I've said, I don't really go for divinations, so I certainly didn't come for a divination. He suggested it, and if that was the form he wanted to use to impart his wisdom so be it.

We sit cross-legged on a tatami-like mat. In the hopes not to reveal anything forbidden (as the Yoruba Ifa divination process is somewhat secret), I'll stick to highlights, what's already written in books, and what applies directly to myself. Starting with I can't tell you how he did the blessing, exactly, but I can tell you he asked me questions like:

"Do you desire success? I am now going ask for blessings of success your behalf."

I scrunch my nose. "Not in the usual way."

"Okay, you tell me. What does success mean to you?"

"A success is if I get to do what I want, and not what other people deem successful."

He breaks into a hearty laugh. Sometimes his laughter is so raucous I can't always tell if he might not be laughing at me. "Ah, so, you're a control freak: Do what I want!" And he laughs, again.

Instead of the popular opele chain of shell pieces, he decides to use the opon Ifa for a more precise reading. He sprinkles a tray with yellow eyeroson powder and sixteen betel palm nuts are thrown like dice from the palms of his smooth cocoa hands. I think it matters that the nuts don't slip through his fingers before they land , as that's a pattern for the oracle too. In the same vein Zen rock gardens' sand is raked into patterns, the tray now reveals the trajectory of the nuts.

He studies the grooves ... or more accurately, how I've strayed from my destiny. A good babalawo, he once told me, will dispense conducting a divination if you are already living in the flow of destiny.

I hear him mutter at a low pitch "Oh, be fun." Later I would ask for the odu name to be repeated: "Ogbefun". There are 16 tetragrams for a total of 256 odus, or oracle verses, in the system. 

"You aren't feeling well." I'm not sure there's a question mark

"Not exactly." I hesitate. He's Jeremie's father. I don't want to seem too lovestruck. "I've been a little down since Jeremie left to Haiti."

"That's all?"

"I don't know really. Not feeling like myself. Kinda dejected. Disconnected. Doubtful."

"I don't intend to scare you, I hope. There is a reason you must have come today this hour. As I did have a client suddenly postpone his appointment, and the afternoon became free. So, nothing is cast in stone, you understand."

"Yes."

"Iku, the spirit of Death, is following you."

I said nothing. Perhaps I wasn't surprised. In Yoruba, I think Death means anti-life, more than the Tarot's concept of Death, which is dynamic change, transformation.

"Or, it's possible... "

My mind flashed back to about a year ago when I borrowed Jeremie's camera. I was experimenting with shadow plays--in the broadest sense.
For the initial experiment, I focused on ambient shadows. It was twilight. The shadows behind school weren't really that crisp yet.

I was peering through the lens. In the back of my mind, I asked or must have asked, "Who is peering through my eyes?"

Pretty straight away, my eyes could shift from one body to another to another like the way a wrist flicks through a kaleidoscope's views. I was seeing as the tree. Then, as the rat. Then, as a shadow. Whatever passed by attention. Not even my attention, just attention.

I pulled my face off the lens. That spacelessness of perceiving through and as everything continued for a few more moments.

"Or, it's possible... someone from the other side is tracking. But your mother and father and grandparents are alive."

"I'll give you a necklace of shells that have been blessed to ward off bad spirits -- maybe all it is, elementals -- when you return."

"Shells?" were the first words I'd spoken aloud since he told me I was dying.

I don't think I'm dying. 

"Yes, if you hang them at the threshold of your apartment the sound of the shells clanking against each other will scatter them off."

I don't think I'm dying. I don't think I'm living. Is un-living death? Limbo? The other day Evelyn, you wrote, "Death will never be defeated until it becomes unreal."

art credits! Mickalene Thomas' works kinda reminds me of Jeremie's family funky sophisticate antics. NYT: “Mickalene is totally unafraid, and that is a quality I love in artists,” said Klaus Biesenbach, chief curator of the media and performance arts department at the Museum of Modern Art, who chose Ms. Thomas for the 2005 survey “Greater New York.”

1. "A Moment’s Pleasure in Black and White” 2. Installation by Mickalene 3. Don't know the name of this one by Mickalene Thomas. Pillow fight? via Art Splash 4. Jeremie's mom getting ready to boogie and sashay? via YMIB.

incantations + imagination

"i have often thought thought of my poetry in terms of incantations: spells (note: magic is done through casting spells which is the same way words are made) or prayers to be recited in the darkest caves and highest mountain tops. in writing, i often feel as if i am deciphering age-old equations and am often as baffled an audience member as any other listener or reader. i have also found numerous occasions where i have felt that i wrote or recited a situation into existence." — Saul Williams, “Saul Williams, "The Future of Language” (complete PDF), from anthology Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture

Mai,
Curious you should mention healers and artists in the same breath. I'm going to synthesize together a few pieces I've recently read that are related theme. I'm full working on the new project (I've told you, but share more soon to everyone here) and thinking about the blessing ceremony I'm leading tomorrow night at Evolver Spore's event, The Spirit of Water.

Saul Williams, once a Brooklynite too, in his "The Future of Language" essay acknowledges the lyrical revolution in hip-hop, and asserts that "vivid, descriptive narratives of ghetto life seem to have come at the cost of imaginative or psycho-spiritual exploration." He continues, "The problem is when we recite the same ol' shit into microphones which increase the sound vibration the same ol' shit continues to manifest in our daily lives, and only gets more deeply embedded. but of course employing one's imagination is problematic when the aim is to keep it real."

Who wants to send a message?

Not surprisingly perhaps, tonight I read this story from the editor of DailyOm newsletter:

"I want to share a story with you. Shortly after the spill began back in April, my husband, Scott Blum, was working on putting the finishing touches on a song he had been working on called "Fragile Day." While he was in the studio with his producer, he was asked what the lyrics meant, "Fish are dimming while they're swimming / Blackened ocean of foam", and he explained that this song, the song he had written two years ago was about an oil spill. Immediately upon hearing this I told him that he needed to release the song and give proceeds to charity."

If it were my song, I'd re-imagine the release of this song as it is written. I understand the value of journaling and expressing whatever may come through us for our own selves, yet disseminating images -- whether in the form of cinema or lyrics or video games -- far and wide is another issue. Imagination is a potent, if invisible, force.

I picked up a fictionalized version of Buddha's life story written by Deepak Chopra yesterday. Here's an example of imagination/healing. Hard to tell the difference, really. Imagination? Or healing? Or is it simply acknowledging creation as it is--Whole:

"The new Buddha arose, adjusted his saffron robe, and began walking toward the road, the same road as on a thousand other days. Once he reached the road, he found it completely empty, even though the time was early morning, when farmers' carts should have been trundling to market. . . .

Buddha could be completely alone in the world. Why not? It was his world to do with as he pleased. He was the one dreaming it. . . .

His powers flowed from the other side of silence, where the mind can make anything happen. For a little while the new Buddha enjoyed himself, pulling the sun through the sky like a toy cart, swirling the winds around on the poles, shedding rain on a parched desert. This private diversion didn't last long. Buddha's world should have people in it whom he could care for. He recalled what Canki had said about a Golden Age--an age without suffering, where abundance was normal and scarcity forgotten in the dim past.

At that moment his vision was shattered by a scream. He saw a woman running toward him, her sari torn to shreds, her arms bleeding. In her panic the woman was blind to Buddha's existence until she was nearly upon him. Then her eyes registered him standing there, still and calm.

With a cry she rushed to throw herself into his arms, overwhelmed with relief. When she was two steps away, he held his hand up in blessing. The woman stopped in her tracks. She quivered with terror, her breast heaving.

"No more fear," Buddha whispered. "Give it to me."

She dropped to the road as if her body had melted and began to weep.

"All," said Buddha. "Give it all to me."

The woman became very still, the crying had stopped. Buddha erased the images of terror from her mind. He saw a knife. Teeth like fangs. A necklace made of severed fingers. The images were nightmarish. With the slightest touch, he made them go vanish. But one image wouldn't melt away--the body of her dead husband. He lay in the dust of the road, his throat slashed.

The woman was touching Buddha's feet now in supplication. Something inside of her knew who he was. She gazed at him through her eyes and said, "Please."

Buddha stopped himself from consoling her. He lifted the woman's head and met her gaze. "It is done," he said. She shuddered and fainted. After a moment, as Buddha stood motionless, a man rounded the corner driving an ox cart. Her husband. Buddha gestured for him to approach, and he sped up. Seeing his wife on the ground, the husband jumped down in alarm.

"What happened?" he cried.

"It will be alright. Let's put her in the cart." The two of them gently laid her in the straw behind the driver's seat. The husband had some fresh water in a goatskin bag; he wanted to splash it on her to reassure himself that she was all right. Buddha stopped his hand. "Let her wake up on her own. She may be surprised to see you, but calm her with loving words. You understand?"

The farmer nodded. By imagining the farmer alive and well again, he had erased the whole attack."

Hope and fear are both phantoms 
that arise from thinking of the self. 
When we don't see the self as self, 
what do we have to fear? See the world as your self. 
Have faith in the way things are. 
Love the world as your self; 
then you can care for all things. - Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

p.s. Did you notice in Persepolis they play "Eye of the Tiger" when Marjane starts to reverse the downward spiral of depression?

art credits: 1. Roughly 15 feet in length, the narrative scroll "Upper River During Qing Ming Festival" resides at the National Palace Museum in Taipei (via The History of the Discovery of Cinematography). 2. Siddhartha (name before he was a Buddha) by the river (via dhammajak.net).

the eighth-grade dropout who could neither play an instrument nor read music

"One's philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes." - Eleanor Roosevelt

More than half of my November was consumed in Salt Lake City sorting, giving away, and packing the remains of a former life not-so-neatly contained in a cavernous storage locker, not to mention the guest room of my sister's home.

A good friend whom has moved many times in her life says she gives everything away, keeping only handwritten letters and artwork.

"Furniture, clothing, you can get anywhere." In short, she cherishes heART expressions over commodities.

In my frenzy to give away all "self-help" books (which I don't consider art), I'd added Pam Grout's Living Big: Embrace Your Passion and Leap into an Extraordinary Life to the pile. Something made me open it up before the pile made it to library. The book was packed with stories (yes, examples with the self-help formula of a moral, or statement to make, yet they still captured me).

I am sharing the story that stopped me in my tracks at the end, and this snippet below: 

"There's a strong sentiment afoot that creativity is frosting [on the cake], expendable, unnecessary. This is the same voice that tells you you're expendable, the voice that assigns you a number, a punch card, a place in line [a rank on Technorati ;-)]. It's the voice that's desperately afraid that you're going to figure it out.

Usually when we aspire to be "spiritual," we think of things like being kinder, being more understanding, saying more prayers. But in order to fulfill our destiny as spiritual beings, we must also become more creative, more open to the magic, the deep vistas that gush through our souls." - Pam Grout, Living Big: Embrace Your Passion and Leap into an Extraordinary Life

About the same time as I'd re-discovered Living Big, I came across a clipping from week of  November 15th astrology that stirred me to a new resolve to share more direct experience, more art, and less opinion:

"Stories interest me more than beliefs. I'd rather hear you regale me with tales of your travels than listen to you regale me with your dogmas. Filmmaker Ken Burns agrees with me. He's worried about the increasing number of people who love theories more than stories. "We are experiencing the death of the narrative," he told the San Francisco Chronicle. "We are all so opinionated that we don't actually submit to narrative anymore. That's the essence of YouTube: Abbreviate everything into a digestible capsule that then becomes conventional wisdom, which belies the experience of art." Your assignment, Leo, is to help reverse this soul-damaging trend. Spout fewer opinions and tell more stories. Encourage others to do the same." - FreeWillAstrology.com

"Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around." - Henry David Thoreau

Actually, I'm fine with the death of the narrative. Quantum, nonlinear, holographic vibes for me. I agree that dogmas disengage, disconnect, whereas art unites. It's the pithy pundit and the didactic pandit that's heralded these days at the expense of the poet and dancer.

By the way, didactic comes from the Greek didaktikos which means "to teach". Whereas, educate comes from educare, which means "to draw forth". Big difference.

Art educates.

Okay, here's the story that inspired me to share my (short-term) vision with y'all finally in this blog. (The long-term vision is the stuff of science fiction for most eARTHlings...but that too in its time.)

"In January 1959, a thirty-year-old eighth-grade dropout from Detroit borrowed $800 from a family savings plan to buy a house - not an unusual goal for a man of his age. Only this enterprising thirty-year-old had his sights set a little higher. He was going to use that unassuming two-story house to start a record company.

The man, of course, is Berry Gordy, the record company is Motown, and the plan, well, let's say it worked. Between 1959 and 1972, Gordy's Motown released 535 singles, 75 percent of which made the pop charts. From a recording studio that's barely larger than a king-sized bed, Gordy produced 60 number one hits before he moved to Hollywood and sold Motown to MCA Records for $61 million.

I tell you this story because it demonstrates the power of opening to a bigger possibility. Berry Gordy could have easily settled for less. He was black at a time when black wasn't yet beautiful. He dropped out of school in eighth-grade, had already failed at an upstart boxing career, and could neither play an instrument nor read music.

But he had a dream. He wanted to write songs. And if nobody else would produce them, well, he'd just do it himself.

Catching a dream is the point at which all of us must start. We see a vision. We hear a tapping on our heart. We start to wonder if "maybe, just maybe, we might be able to"... write a song, dance a poem, leap into a new way of being. We become willing to say, "It is possible."

When we first begin to listen to our dreams, we don't always know where they're leading us. This is good news. If we could see the final outcome, we might get scared off, put on the brakes, and think, "Whoa, Nelly, that's way too big for me." So luckily all we have to do for now is take the first step, put that first toe out the door.

The other thing that the Motown phenomenon demonstrates is the wealth of talent that so often goes undiscovered. Had Berry Gordy been content to plug lugnuts at a Detroit auto plant, one of many jobs he tried before starting Motown, he would have never plucked Diana Ross, Stevie Wonder, and hundreds of other poor black kids out of the ghetto. It seems impossible that superstars of their stature might have taken another path. But had Diana Ross not caught a vision, she could very well be just another bag lady on Ninth Street; Stevie Wonder, another blind kid on welfare. Thank God, they had the opportunity to tap the creative spirit that was within them.

If Gordy hadn't turned 2648 West Grand Boulevard into a "happening" place to be, "Heard It Through the Grapevine," "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," and thousands of other songs would never have been written.

...The same kind of talent that Gordy found in his ghetto protégés is hidden in the people we walk by every day. It lies hidden because nobody bothers to look, nobody bothers to say, "Hey, look what we can do." It lies hidden behind thoughts of unworthiness, behind "masks" that we put on for a good show. 

Each and every one of us has that same creative spirit. But, no, you're probably thinking Detroit was different. The list of superstars goes on and on - the Temps, the Tops, the Vandellas, the Supremes. But you know what? Gordy could have just as easily opened that record company and been just as successful in Cleveland or Chicago or Omaha, Nebraska, for that matter. There are Temps, Tops, Vandellas, Supremes everywhere. There are people who are just as talented, just as musical. The only thing they don't have is Gordy's vision.

This is not to deny the huge talent that existed in Detroit at that time. What they did on that little three-track recording system in Studio A can only be described as the musical equivalent of sitting in front of the bus.

But it only happened because one man was willing to step up to the plate, was willing to say, "I believe."

"Not to dream more boldly may turn out to be, in view of present realities, simply irresponsible." - George Leonard

p.s. In truth, it's just my hunch that I'm Leo ascendant. While I'm first-born somehow my mother seems to have erased all consciousness of my birthing.

p.p.s. Oh, my, will serendipities never cease. The artwork at the top of this post is from a blog I stumbled across Googling for images with search terms like "supremes art" and "musical chairs". The Pro Commerce blog also makes mention of an interesting twist to a "restaurant." (I did still keep my copy of Marketing Without Advertising by Michael Phillips, the blog's author, after giving away almost all of my marketing and biz books. I also kept Brand Hijack, if you're curious.)

After my friend Cindy's recommendation, I ended up eating and absorbing the inspired spirit of One World Cafe just about every single day for a week. It's been influencing the vision. And I knew the visioneer, Denise Cerreta, when I lived in SLC. Much mo later, or l8r, as I say in emails.

UPDATE: Now this is up my storytelling alley - both for my admitted attention span as writer, present sketch focus vs. distillation of memory, and adoration of the first, raw draft as final draft. Via Reckon (twitter.com/reckon): "[Donald] Barthelme's short stories are often exceptionally compact (a form sometimes called "short-short story," "flash fiction," or "sudden fiction"), often focusing only on incident rather than complete narratives. (He did, however, write some longer stories with more traditional narrative arcs.) At first, these stories contained short epiphanic moments."

Art Unknown artwork that I stumbled across (via Google Images on Michael Phillip's Pro Commerce blog); Irish mailbox photographer unknown (via Emerging Writer blog); current photo of Berry Gordy's unassuming recording company, now a museum; cover art for Stevie Wonder's early album, Innervisions.

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)