Sojourner in the 21st Century

How's Your Soul?

2012-01-26T22:49:00.025-06:00

I wanted to know how she was doing. So I looked her in the eye, leaned forward a little bit and asked "Is it well with your soul today?" I wanted her to know it was okay to take her time and be candid.

Possibly because the syntax was unfamiliar and strange to her, she said "I'm not sure what you mean..."

The next thing I know, I had burst into song:

When peace like a river attendeth my way

When sorrows like sea billows roll

Whatever my lot

Thou has taught me to say

It is well, it is well with my soul.

It is well (it is well)

With my soul (with my soul)

It is well, it is well, with my soul.

One of my favorites from my church-centered childhood.

The wellness of my own soul was affirmed in the singing. Also, she came to understand what I was asking and we had an uncommonly heartfelt conversation.

If my mother hadn't urged me to become a teacher, I would have been a great one.

Pearl

2012-01-18T01:52:00.003-06:00

"Well, yeah.... It's tricky," he said. "We all want people to like us."

Scott Bergey
Please Love Me
mixed media on paper

Do we?

There's a general desire to NOT be disliked. That's a familiar feeling....second grade...the look I used to see in the eyes of other kids from my privileged perch as Teacher's Pet. They didn't like me. And I was outnumbered.

But, a general desire for "people" to like me -- is more elusive. I soften my gaze and whisper into my ear "Sure, sure. Like thirst. Or getting sleepy. Everybody has that desire...me, too" and there it is! Just for a second I'm convinced.

And then I take off the wig and step out of Mommy's high heels.

It's not like that for me. When it arises, the desire is specific. I want "him" to like me. I want "her" attention. And I want it so bad, the taste of my saliva changes in my mouth

and something like adrenaline floods my system and a suppressed scream or growl crawls around under my skin.

Our topic tonight was "why we don't tell the truth" and, actually, I was talking about truths we don't tell/face ourselves.

We want to enter some work in the upcoming Santa Cruz Fringe Festival and he asked if I had any emerging ideas for a solo piece. I answered that lately I have a nagging feeling I'm about to call my bluff. Like there's something I've known for a long time about myself....but kept it a secret. I said my next piece will probably be about that.

But we don't know each other very well and he's mentioned a number of times that he's nervous around me, feels inadequate because of what he calls my "brilliance." I suspect his listening skills suffer as a result.

I offered a few more words to help clear up his confusion.

"Oh," he said. "That's scary."

I think I know what he means but I don't feel scared at all. It's a secret I'm curious about.

Impossibility

2012-01-12T18:13:00.000-06:00

I can do a lot of things:

type with my eyes closed

make cornbread from scratch

dance in high heels

sing a baby to sleep

drive drunk

listen

If I want to, I can learn to

fly a plane

speak Portuguese

create award-winning floral arrangements

weave

Here's where we abandon hope. I cannot

take back what I said to Marianne, Summer of '76

grow an inch taller

live my life over

make you love me

have another baby

predict the future

Truth is: I am okay with the whole thing. Purring....

Creative Maladjustment

2012-01-11T20:29:00.023-06:00

On Saturday, my friend spoke these passionate words of the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as part of a longer written address:

I talk a great deal about the need for a kind of divine discontent. And I always mention that there are certain technical words within every science, which become stereotypes and clichés. Modern psychol- ogy has a word that has become common – it is the word “maladjusted.” We read a great deal about it. It is a ringing cry of modern child psychology; and certainly we all want to be well adjusted and avoid neurotic and schizophrenic personalities. But I must say to you this evening, my friends, there are some things in our world to which I am proud to be maladjusted. And I call upon you to be maladjusted and all people of good will to be maladjusted to these things until the good society is realized. I never in- tend to adjust myself to segregation and discrimination. I never intend to become adjusted to religious bigotry. I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few, and leave millions of people perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of prosperity. I must honestly say, however much criticism it brings, that I never intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism, and to the self-defeating effects of physical violence.

His presentation was moving. I asked for a printed copy. By email today, I received the excerpt above with the following words attached:

“Don’t Sleep Through The Revolution” Delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at the Unitarian Universalist general Assembly Hollywood FL May 18, 1966

When I selected, copied and pasted the text here, I inserted line breaks.

I talk a great deal about the need for a
kind of divine discontent.

And I always mention

that there are certain technical words within every science,

which become stereotypes

and clichés.

Modern psychol- ogy has a word that has become common –

it is the word “maladjusted.”

We read a great deal about it.

It is a ringing cry of modern child psychology;

and certainly we all want to be well adjusted

and avoid neurotic and schizophrenic personalities.

But I must say to you this evening, my friends,

there are some things in our world

to which I am proud to be maladjusted.

And I call upon you to be maladjusted

and all people of good will to be maladjusted to these things

until the good society is realized.

I never in- tend to adjust myself to segregation

and discrimination.

I never intend to become adjusted to religious bigotry.

I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions

that will take necessities from the many

to give luxuries to the few,

and leave millions of people perishing

on a lonely island of poverty

in the midst of a vast ocean of prosperity.

I must honestly say, however much criticism it brings,

that I never intend to adjust myself

to the madness of militarism,

and to the self-defeating effects of physical violence.

Wondering how the words sounded in Dr. King's voice I searched YouTube. I copied the embed code from the first listing in the results and pasted it here.

Tidy Front Porch Notions

2012-01-02T14:37:00.001-06:00

Tomorrow concludes an 8-day house-sitting assignment in Santa Cruz.

Half-way through the gig, a very old acquaintance of the woman who owns this house (let's call her Paula) arrived with his wife. He's a retired college professor Paula hasn't seen since she studied under him in the early 80s. She invited them to hang out here while she's on island holiday and have a happy reunion when she returns.

Somethings I Notice (acronym SIN): Based almost entirely on my esteemed interpretation of "retired college professor," I put in some time making things extra nice in the house the day of their arrival. I thought it would reflect badly on Paula if the house was messy when they arrived. In my head, it was 1972 again and I was a 17-year-old small town colored girl entering a private all-white university on scholarship, trying to make a good impression. I won't go into all the fantasies I had about how the three of us would pass the time until Paula returned.

As I buzzed and hummed around the house that afternoon, I flashed on the vexation I felt several months ago when someone described me as "tidy." Well, look at me now, doing a very good imitation of "tidy."

Santa Cruz is a town where I perform on stage and both teach and study improvisational theater. It's a place where I drink Cosmopolitans and skinny dip. My kinkiest-ever former lover lives here and unexpected sparkly, juicy things happen regularly when I hit the street. In a sense, "tidy" is not what I embody generally in Santa Cruz. But, there I was. Just goes to show you....

After three days together, I can say The Professor and His Wife are nothing at all like what I expected or feared or hoped they would be. He pontificates and she waits on him hand and foot. They consume energy ravenously - most notably, turning on lots of lights in the house and leaving them on and cranking the thermostat to 70 degrees while leaving patio door and windows open. The toilet was flushed more often in their first 24 hours here than I've flushed anywhere on the planet in the last month!

I find myself turning into Sally Sanctimonious. I realize "tidy" is probably a very apt description for me.

Goody Two Shoes

I've shared living space in a variety of settings over the last 10 years. My internal rule of thumb -- especially when it comes to bathrooms and kitchens -- has been to clean up after myself such that the next person in doesn't have to deal with my stuff at all. No stepping over my laundry on the floor or working around my dirty dishes on the counter. I leave bathroom floors and sink counter tops dry, bed linens laundered and beds made. I wipe up spills in the refrigerator and replace anything I use up....

Anyway, this is NOT the universal rule of thumb. I know that now. And what I've observed in these small settings suggests an explanation for the ecological crises and sociopolitical frictions that exist globally.

I think people, all of us, do the best we can based on our world view. If cleaning up after yourself is not a part of your world view, it's unlikely the idea will figure in your contribution to discussions when attending a world summit on climate change. If having more stuff is a measure of success for you, then you'll likely vote "no" on suggestions involving a reduction of consumption or acquisition. If you're tidy and sanctimonious about it, compromise will be a challenge.

If people live in the world the way they live in their closer-in relationships, it's no wonder some of the Earth Village's problems are so hard to solve.

I have decied that today I will NOT pick up after The Professor and His Wife because its just been my passive way of chastising them. I will not turn off lights behind them or turn down the thermostat when they're not looking. That's been my way of saying "Bad professor! Bad wife!"

What I'm thinking about now is that this isn't a good solution for the world -- if corporations aren't taken to task when they dump toxic sludge into the water supply it's more than an annoyance to the larger community. It won't work for the world if guilty parties don't wipe up their spills. So how to make cleaning up after yourself and sharing and compromise a part of everybody's world view.

That, apparently, is still the question.

Happy 2012.

One of These Mornings

2011-12-30T16:35:00.001-06:00

Dear You Know Who You Are

I'm about to disappear. Again.

You don't need me -- or if you do, neither one of us is aware of it.

Last time I unFriended you, you sent me an email to flatter my stage work and let me know that unFriending you broke your heart. You said "I want you in my life." You used those words. I saved the email for awhile as proof. Proof for who, I wonder?

Anyway, there's never a time for us to get together. We make dates and you break them. Every single time. You broke the date in the last 12 hours leading up to meeting time.

I am a confused voyeur, witnessing your FB conversations with others about how great last night was. Yes, I unsubscribed from your feeds and deleted you from the list of folks who can view my updates

but I'm getting to be like a bird lately -- flying with a light load

a light List

There's your name. We live spittin' distance apart and you break every date we make. It's not the date-breaking that's working my nerves. It's me leaving your name on my FB list just so you can see it there. Yeah, I know: better women than I would just ignore you. I'm odd that way.

Best wishes. Every bright thing for your life. I am not angry; I just don't get it and I'm gone now.

Facing Down the Dog

2011-12-29T16:52:00.002-06:00

For Sojourner in the 21st Century, 2011 has been a year of making the acquaintance of well-fed, badly behaving dogs. Back home in the Midwest where I was raised, we woulda called these animals "spoiled."

In 2009-2010 I was still living in the South where, for the most part, dogs lived at the end of a long chain in the back yard. Back home, that arrangement woulda looked about right.

I don't want a dog on a chain in the back yard. I don't want a dog looking shame-faced with a mouthful of my shoe or the sofa in his/her mouth.

Here's hoping that 2012 either settles me in my own space -- likely without a pet of any kind --

or brings more shared spaces and house-sit assignments

where dogs and humans live together more peacefully.

Signs of Mastery

2011-12-29T16:28:00.001-06:00

I just read a draft of one of J_______'s newest poems and I am bowled over by the mastery of craft she achieves in a "draft." My son designed a "mock up" promotional brochure for me not long ago and I was amazed by the professionalism of his "thrown together" work. A short conversation with a small circle of Fools the other day evoked tears of laughter and joy, warmed my heart, opened my eyes, inspired an artistic notion and renewed my spirit. They are very good at what they do, including

Aware of our judgments, we seek to meet people where they are through the arts, education, advocacy and accompaniment. (from their Mission Statement)

All three of these wizardly entities have been steadily honing their crafts for many years, showing up (as far as I can see) nearly every day, putting in time. Now, every time and everywhere they show up to do the thing they do, something beautiful appears. It might seem that simply applying oneself consistently over time raises the quality of everthing overall.

It may be true.

But, where "beauty" is concerned, the mistake in that perception is apparent in the frequent displays of slip-shod workmanship, near-fatal oversights and burnt-out insensitivity among "professionals," service providers, educators, artists and others who, for pay or not, show up nearly every day, putting in their time. Examples are abundant.

Beyond simply applying oneself, "diligence" is the alchemical process:

noun

1. constant and earnest effort to accomplish what is undertaken; persistent exertion of body or mind.

Word Origin & History

diligence

mid-14c., from O.Fr. diligence "attention, care," from L. diligentia "attentiveness, carefulness," from diligentem (nom. diligens) "attentive, assiduous, careful," originally prp. of diligere "value highly, love, choose," from dis- "apart" + legere "choose, gather" (see lecture). Sense evolved from "love" through "attentiveness" to "carefulness" to "steady effort."

Showing up every day, putting in time will produce....well, something or other.

Showing diligence, putting in attentive, careful time, paying dues (due diligence), where the object of interest is valued highly, loved....chosen

brings one closer to divine perfection.

I'm looking for evidence of diligence in my own life. What am I doing with unmistakably more mastery today than 10 years ago?

LOL

2011-12-27T01:58:00.000-06:00

Last night I dreamed I had a premonition I was about to receive an email with "Pumpernickel" in the Subject line announcing my mother's death. I convinced myself the premonition was not to be believed since anyone informing me of my mother's death would not let me know via email.

When I remembered the dream today, the whole thing felt like an episode from a sitcom -- confusing and not really all that funny.

Getting it Right

2011-12-26T13:58:00.000-06:00

One must take off her fear like clothing;

One must travel at night;

This is the seeking after God. – Maureen Morehead, In a Yellow Room

As it appears in epigraph to Ahab’s Wife or, The Star-Gazer by Sena Jeter Naslund

On Christmas Day

2011-12-25T16:59:00.000-06:00

I am stuck.

There are things on my mind that I want to write about but only if I can write well--flawless, clear, strong, beautiful. Without that assurance, I have, for months now, been unwilling to show up here -- or anywhere else -- and put "pen to paper." Unwilling = afraid.

Today, the discrepancy between my fear and the fearless creativity I encourage in my students (what students? Just one of the many news items I am not writing about...) is bothersome. Today I'm talking to myself the way I talk to the kids: Perfection isn't real. Imperfection is more interesting and more fun. Often it takes doing a thing badly for awhile to get good at it. Process matters more than product. Blah blah.

I've developed an appetite for flattery and compliments. Not just for the blog but for everything. I've come to believe that I'm good at everything I do. Exceptional, in fact. I think I'm smart and fluent and perceptive and wise.

Ego at work.

I want more space. Space to fail. To flounder. To figure shit out.

Luckily that space is free of cost and I don't have to ask permission.

What Matters

2011-12-17T21:02:00.000-06:00

Truth
Music
the transforming power of love and art
Presence

Today is

the one-year anniversary of the official beginning of the "Arab Spring"
the one-month anniversary of my grand-daughter's birth
Beethoven's birthday

To Be Brave

2011-12-06T00:04:00.001-06:00

Today I lack the courage to delete from my Facebook contact list

the people whose status updates I never find interesting.

That's today. My birthday is coming up in a few days. I've been known to

find new courage on my birthday.

Time Steps Forward

2011-12-05T02:21:00.001-06:00

Your eyes gaze unblinking at me. This photo is the wallpaper for my computer desktop.

Hello little girl! It's very late where you live. Are you asleep?

I imagine you are asleep. And dreaming...but you don't know what a dream is.

I am looking at your picture and searching for myself, some little evidence that you came into the world through me. Through my son who came through me. I am looking for a trace of my own face.

You don't even know that I exist. You are dear to me even though I have never seen you.

Hello little girl! Welcome.

Planetarium

2011-11-20T00:27:00.000-06:00

I adore this Google gadget.

Planetarium:

'via Blog this'

Ahhhhhhhhh.....Mystic Spa

2011-10-14T14:24:00.003-05:00

Rumi

Speak Little. Learn the words of eternity.
Go beyond your tangled thoughts and
find the splendor of paradise.
Rumi ♥

I really like finding this on my FaceBook wall today: the post I wrote and lost contained a lengthy little piece on "paradise".....

Where I Find Myself

2011-10-11T23:14:00.007-05:00

I spent 3 hours creating a blog post earlier today and managed to lose the whole thing. It was an ambitious post: a good amount of strong, clear writing and lots of hyperlinks and images.

I was upset. I just could not believe it was gone.

A cigarette craving sat up and screamed inside me. Tears welled up in my eyes. My hands went from clenched fists to helpless wringing and back again.

The "pain body" writhing and roaring and flailing.

Five hours have passed since I wrote the last sentence and here's some of what happened between then and now:

Suddenly, my attention went to my breath
[why? how? Spiritual practice.]

In breath
Out breath
Time disappeared
"I" was standing somewhere else;
somewhere outside the eye of the storm of my frustration.

I looked at my hands

I felt fear
and anger
coursing through my body, into my fingers.
Into my eyes, my tear ducts.
Fear and anger and shame rolling through me like a fast river.
My throat was tight. My mouth was dry.

There was also some other pain not clearly or primarily expressed in the body. Something more like cognitive barbed wire. Some conclusion or question my mind kept returning to....and resisting.

I didn't want to accept that the writing was gone.

The cigarette craving was a distinct pang but it was weak and went quickly out of existence.

I prepared and consumed two quesadilla and stood in the sun for a few minutes and played a computer game for half an hour.

Then I got my keys, retrieved the piano music bag from the truck and walked down to the Abbey Cafe to check out piano possibilities.

The sun felt very very good on my skin

It felt very very good to be walking
to be outdoors
to have sun on my skin

I stopped in front of a house where I heard live piano music and a young woman stepped out onto the porch. We talked for a bit: she is the young mother of a 5 year old girl and a 7 or 8 month old boy. She is looking for a piano teacher for the little girl. It was a sweet exchange and I hope I get to meet the little girl. (I will house-sit here for one more week.)

The Abbey Cafe is a large open room. It's part of a church so, perhaps, it's a converted fellowship hall. There's a piano in this room but I would never play casually in a public room this large at this time of day. The clerk suggested 6 to 8 p.m. or 7 to 9 am would be good times if I wanted fewer people but I was welcome to play at whatever time I preferred as long as another artist had not reserved the room or piano.

There's a grand in the sanctuary. Some very friendly young men ushered me there but a meeting was in progress so I could not play.

The young men offered to abandon the room where I found them in conversation to allow me to use the old upright against the wall. It was extremely warm in the room; a single oscillating table fan provided not-much cool.

The sustain pedal was dead but I figured I could do an hour of Bach WTC.

A young man in a wheelchair came in and asked if he could listen to me play. His name is Tim and he sat with me for awhile -- sometime talking when I wished he were silent.

To my surprise, the sostenuto pedal actually had some functionality. Depressing it in synch with the sustain pedal sorta worked... I was sufficiently encouraged to actually attempt the Faschingswank and two Chopin nocturnes.

I'll go back tomorrow around 6 and hope to play either the grand or the spinet in the cafe.

}}}}}}}->->->->->{{{{{{{{{{

I created a blog post and lost a blog post and created a blog post.... The first item on my Facebook wall today was a poem that now seems a very nice way to end the day and this post:

One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster,

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three beloved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

-- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) a disaster.

Elizabeth Bishop

Theater of the Oppressed, Part 1

2011-10-08T22:24:00.000-05:00

“Theater” was the people singing freely in the open air; the theatrical performance was created by and for the people. It was a celebration in which all could participate freely. Then came the aristocracy….some persons will go to the stage and only they will be able to act; the rest will remain seated, receptive, passive…

…the barrier between actors and spectators is destroyed: all must act, all must be protagonists in the necessary transformations of society.

--Augusto Boal, in the Foreword to Theater of the Oppressed

The Tolle Web Meditation

2011-09-25T14:52:00.000-05:00

It's been awhile since privacy and >60 minutes of computer access came together for me. Where to begin?

On a short walk around the neighborhood, I came upon a dead raccoon. My reactions as near as I can recall (not in chronological order) were:

Gasp. Eyes open a little wider and immediately look away.
Rapid data collection during the gaze: mouth open, eyes closed, blood in mouth, a few teeth visible, four legs...
Stomach lurch.
Low-grade confusion. Some fear.

The carcass was less than 10 feet behind me when I began to wish I'd looked longer...wondered about the fear that rose up in me...thought of people I know who would have snagged the creature for an art (or other) project.

It was the blood in the mouth. Yes, I'm sure: it was the blood in the mouth that triggered mental activity, generating mostly unconscious gruesome thinking ----> creating Fear.

I am developing some theme-based workshop series: liberation, forgiveness, surrender, to name a few. It's exciting to think more deeply about this work that has mostly just been fun up till now. To sit still and look closely and begin to discern the philosophy and intention underlying my work.

I've been mostly working in the staring-at-sky-through-trees and scribbling-in-an-ever-present-notebook modes so far. This weekend, I've opened a couple times and shared my ideas with another person. (I'm 'out of town' and there's been more social activity than usual.) It's a little like disrobing ... Sometimes, I wish I had not shared.

Or

wonder why I chose to share.

My life situation includes some very rocky fields and drippy caverns right now. The Power of Now teachings are like finely honed, master tools in my hands.

Or a carefully etched map whose finer details are gradually becoming visible to me.

This afternoon Tolle will lead a mediation online. I went to the website and registered to participate. I'm curious to see how this is done.

I was also ... searching for a word... "hungry" comes closest. "Hungry" to meet others whose lives have been transformed and illuminated by PON wisdom.

Yes, ego is a thread in the hunger. Ego jockeying to maintain identity and a place at the table. Who else is reading the teachings, practicing presence? Am I doing it right? Where is the rest of the tribe?

So-called "simple truth" becomes complex as I look at my life in its light. See the shadows? See the places where my life is transparent and the places where it is opaque? See where it reflects light and where it refracts light and where it absorbs light?

"Being" is a complex idea that exists as a persistent immutable truth. It embraces, permeates and sustains

my life
your life
light
shadows
transparencies and opacities
reflection, refraction
absorption
simplicity
complexity

all of these ideas occur against the backdrop
of Being.

9 minutes till the web-meditation. Time to queue up.

The Sweet Girls

2011-09-03T13:04:00.001-05:00

I was walking down Church Street in Santa Cruz and I thought I wanted a cigarette.

Of course, I didn't really want a cigarette so, after stopping for a minute or two to stare at a most unusual crack pattern in a stone wall

I calmed down enough to decide I wanted a maple creme doughnut instead.

I heard harmonica music and started walking toward it. Two little beauties perched on a flower box playing their harmonicas.

I snapped the picture
the sun came out
I bought a couple local-grown peaches instead of a doughnut.

I just love this kind of sequence.

So Beautiful or So What?

2011-08-19T13:01:00.000-05:00

So Beautiful or So What

« see all songs

I’m going to make a chicken gumbo
Toss some sausage in the pot
I’m going to flavor it with okra
Cayenne pepper to make it hot
You know life is what we make of it
So beautiful or so what
I’m going to tell my kids a bedtime story
A play without a plot
Will it have a happy ending?
Maybe yeah, maybe not
I tell them life is what you make of it
So beautiful or so what
So beautiful
So beautiful
So what
I’m just a raindrop in a bucket
A coin dropped in a slot
I am an empty house on Weed Street
Across the road from the vacant lot
You know life is what you make of it
So beautiful or so what
Ain’t it strange the way we’re ignorant
How we seek out bad advice
How we jigger it and figure it
Mistaking value for the price
And play a game with time and love
Like pair of rolling dice
So beautiful
So beautiful
So what
Four men on the balcony
Overlooking the parking lot
Pointing at a figure in the distance
Dr. King has just been shot
And the sirens long melody
Singing Savior Pass Me Not
Ain’t it strange the way we’re ignorant
How we seek out bad advice
How we jigger it and figure it
Mistaking value for the price
And play a game with time and love
Like a pair of rolling dice
So beautiful
So beautiful
So beautiful

Presence ~ Power ~ Now

2011-08-18T17:29:00.001-05:00

My life grows in

                                   brightness

    clarity

                   spaciousness

Over and over the sensational thought comes:

How did I miss this? How did I not see this before?

Enlightenment: not as a place finally reached or a level finally achieved. More like a mirthful "duh"...realizing I was "there" all the time. Like discovering God was sitting right next to you the whole four hours you were wailing and gnashing your teeth, on your knees, beseeching "Please, please come..."

Yesterday morning I overheard a bit of conversation between two young women at a nearby cafe table. I was meeting a friend of my son's for the first time, a young woman new to the area with some pressing issues in her life situation. I was primed for listening and primed to play the elder sister adviser.

In the eavesdropped conversation, I heard my own words from 25 years ago; the voice was different but the inflection was almost identical. What a breath catcher! What an attention grabber!

Before I knew it, I was standing at their table..."Excuse me. I hope my interruption is not obtrusive. I just heard one of you say something that I said, almost verbatim, many years ago. This moment feels like a chance to take the hand of my younger self and share guidance... Like a friendly time-warped 'pssst'..."

They were both extremely gracious young women. As our conversation unfurled in shimmering strands, they invited me to sit. I declined because another young friend was waiting. We shared a powerful, vibrant few moments more together before I finally took my leave and joined my son's friend. Judging from the temperature of the food on my plate, I was detained longer than I realized. The encounter happened outside of Time.

Later, as I was pulling away from the curb, one of the young women ran out of the restaurant and across traffic to ask one more question and ask for contact information.

In contrast to the singular nature of Now and Presence,

the not-Now has a million faces and gimmicks. A popular egoic strategy lately, as I spend more and more time in Enlightenment looks something like this:

In my temporary guest lodgings, I share communal space with a middle-aged woman, her elderly father and several little dogs. One morning, I woke up to find a pissy mood bumping around inside me, looking for something to attach to.

As I drifted into wakefulness, I tried unsuccessfully to get clear on why I was in a bad mood. Was it the elderly father? Was it the dogs? Was it jealousy or self-pity or arrogance?

Over and over I mentally approached a possible/likely notion but the closer I got to it, the less distinct it became. It was as though the bad mood could only exist in an unlit, shadowy, unexamined corner.

I didn't want to change the bad mood or understand it or heal it. There was no judgment. I just wanted to see it clearly and call it by its own name -- rather than allowing it to masquerade as me.

By the time I sat up and put my feet on the floor, there was nothing. Nothing but the vast unruffled light-drenched vibrancy of Now.

And by the time I stood up, mind was frantic: This is crazy! Freedom from mental suffering cannot be this easily achieved. Wait a minute! Let's look at this again...there must surely be some perfectly good grounds for misery... For several minutes, for example, from edge of bed to bathroom...through peeing, teeth brushing, face washing....I swing between Being and trying to get a closer look at that bad mood.

Finally, I decide to let it go and return to Now. But before I can take a full deep breath -- usually a reliable device for returning to Now -- my mind panics again. Yikes! What was it Tolle said? What chapter contained the instructions for return?! Damn! I don't remember my way back to Now!

There, in the mirror. My eyes... I catch my eye. Eye contact reminds me

There is the noise in my head and there's the One who is the awareness of the noise in my head. The one who looks out/in at me through the baby's gaze in the mirror.

In that instant, I am home again. On the other side of the glass. I am God again. It is Now and I am free.

In the Baby's Gaze

2011-08-15T19:48:00.005-05:00

I am living somewhat nomadic again. Living in places and spaces where I do not receive mail. Sleeping in places and spaces where I receive mail and my stuff is in cardboard boxes.

New keys coming and going on my key ring. Learning security codes and lock-up procedures that I won't need this time next week.

Being introduced to people who are "neighbors" to you and "strangers" to me. Struggling to formulate a response when they ask "Where are you from?" or "Where do you live?" [Note: That isn't true. I don't struggle. I pull out my old standby: "The Earth is my home."]

Cooking less and eating simpler because I'm negotiating someone else's kitchen, i.e., "Where do they keep their spatula?" vs letting the apple and granola bar in my backpack be dinner tonight.

Talking less because most of the humans around me are in a hurry on their way to their usual places...and I am passing through at a decidedly more leisurely pace. There just doesn't seem to be enough time to say everything we need to say. So we say little.

And talking more because stories about travel and new places and new things always seem to take longer to tell. And I always seem to be drinking wine or Cosmopolitans while telling the story.

There are momentary lapses in geographic orientation. Some mornings I wake up and for a full 5 seconds have no idea where I am. It's a very trippy feeling....

There's also the incomplete familiarity of driving down a street, in a town where I once lived, but unable to find my way to Point A, B or C from where I am. Ten years ago I could have driven the route with my eyes closed. Or, perhaps I did, which is why I can't find my way today.

My lifestyle is nomadic again and I am feeling like Sojourner. Feeling somewhat how I felt when I started this blog. For one thing, sojourning still brings out the "reporter" in me. I become very observant and want to share my observations.

Earlier today, I stopped for gas at a station I used a lot last year. The cashier on duty was familiar to me. She is a middle-aged blonde woman who has always seemed sullen and impatient. Today, she seemed different when I went in to leave my debit card as security on a fill-up. When I returned to retrieve the card, she was absolutely beaming.

Making full-on eye contact and wearing a big smile, she asked "Have you seen "The Help"?

"No," I replied. "I read the book last year. Have you seen it?"

"Oh, yes!" she was bubbly now. "It's great. I loved it. I saw it with my girlfriends. Go see it! It's great."

"Well, I'm half-hearing the controversy... I know there's quite a bit of controversy surrounding it..."

"Oh, pi-shaww!" She handed me my receipt and made a dismissive gesture. "Just go see it. It's great."

Day before yesterday, a forwarded email offered links I could follow for "a Black perspective" on 'The Help'. I did not follow any of the links.

Two or three times in the week before, Black friends confiding about current struggles in their lives pointed to how White people contributed to their hardship. Each time the conversation turned that way, it felt like I was entering a lucid dream. Like I could see and hear things but knew my fingers would pass right through if I tried to touch or grasp anything.

I've experienced some thought and feeling reaction to recent "race talk" and the social buzz in the air around the film "The Help" (which is just more masked--or unmasked--"race talk").

But nothing lasted long enough to trigger a blog post. The thoughts and feelings didn't gain traction in my mind and pretty quickly floated away. Forgotten until the next mention of the movie or some other race-tinged comment by friends or media.

Today "disinterested" seemed like the right word. I am not interested enough in my thoughts and feelings about race and racism and etc. to share them with the world through this blog. I am disinterested.

But when I did a Google Image search on "disinterested" --thinking I would blog about my disinterest -- I did not like the results. The faces in these pics looked sad or pissed or bored or repulsed. None of those faces looked like my face.

I stood before the mirror in this room where I slept for the first time last night. I thought about race and racism and media and controversy and I stared at my face. I watched my face while I thought about race and racism and media and controversy.

It was my eyes that my eyes kept returning to. What's in those eyes, I asked myself. What is that look?

The words "baby's gaze" came to mind.

So I Googled "baby's gaze."

The images in this post are some of my favorites from that Google harvest.

Sojourning...with a baby's gaze.

That is the practice.

Beyond Naming

2011-08-05T17:15:00.005-05:00

Brain Storm by Thomas Dodd

A few minutes ago I noticed I was grinding my teeth. "What's going on with me?" I wondered.

What seemed at first to be "anxiety" turned out to be more like sadness or guilt on closer inspection.

Some very good things have happened today and, as far as I can tell, they are happening without any effort on my part. So the unconscious chatter in my mind ran along the lines of "Undeserving!" and "You lazy piece of shit!" and resulted in teeth-grinding and a general feeling of malaise.

Wow (again). Ego is relentless.... Tireless in its efforts to weave a dark, dramatic cocoon for me to live in.

Of course, that's like saying "My lungs are relentless about oxygen intake!"

Lungs do what lungs do, eyes do what eyes do and ego does what ego does -- create suffering.

It was when the message began to shift from "You worthless piece of shit" to "I feel bad; I need a cigarette" that a little bell rang inside me. One of those mindfulness bells that Thich Nhat Hanh talks about.

"Wait a minute.... I don't need a cigarette. In fact, I actually don't want to smoke. Who said 'I need a cigarette?'"

Just because I think it, doesn't make it true.
Doesn't make it false, either. Just makes it a thought.

A few days ago I was returning from a rich three hours at piano in the home of a generous acquaintance. The Bay Area A.M. fog was just beginning to lift; the sun shone high and strong. It was another one of those situations -- good things happening without my control or contribution.

Within minutes, my thoughts turned to self pity: "I don't have a home with a piano...my mother didn't encourage my artistic yearning when I was young....I lost too many years trying to be what she wanted...I'm out of time now to make my dreams come true...how pathetic!--an old homeless lady begging for practice time on somebody else's instrument..."

I was feeling bad. "What's going on with me?" I wondered.

I looked at my thoughts. I became aware that I was believing my thoughts, i.e., taking my identity in that moment from the stream of thought. "Oh, this is how I feel...this is who I am."

"No" said the wise and loving heart of Practice. "That is not who I am. That IS what I'm thinking but it is NOT who I am."

It is true: awareness of Thought as Thought automatically removes identification with the thought. It's not that I stop thinking what I'm thinking. It's more like I abandon the thought and become Awareness.

If I think of my life as a house, it's as though after an eternity of staring at the floor and feeling cramped, I have recently looked up and discovered that there are no walls or ceiling, no doors to lock or blinds to draw... There's nothing wrong. Nothing very good (or very bad) is happening; things just are the way they are.

Meditation

2011-08-01T18:09:00.001-05:00

Sitting in the sun
eyes closed
following my breath
because my hand cramped and I had to lay down the guitar
and that scared me

I was freaking out, imagination running like wild fire
thinking about
mortality
illness
hating myself for years of neglect
guilt

and I went
my attention went to my breath
breathing, the journey of breath in my body.
Almost immediately, I touch Life Source, Presence
the undefined Now.
Just from going to Breath. To say "placed my attention" implies too deliberate a gesture. It is more like acceptance or surrender.

Acceptance of everything: my thoughts
the sound of a distant helicopter overhead
and my thoughts about the sound
of a helicopter approaching overhead.

Surrender to Now
whatever that is.

Ego resists. And I surrender to the resistance. And the resistance disappears, as gently as darkness disappears in the presence of light.
But it always returns. Ego persists in resistance
and I surrender again
when resistance surfaces again.
It is astounding, how ferociously ego resists complete surrender to unmediated Now consciousness.

A child frets in the garden next door.
An insect buzzes in my left ear.
The sun is extravagant warmth on the back of my neck.
I surrender. I accept.

I am in the "out beyond ideas" field that Rumi speaks of.
With God, out beyond ideas of God.

In that moment, flooded with awareness of the vastness of the cosmos
I feel a breeze playing against my cheek and open my eyes; the treetops are rippling in time to the breeze and I think of how a honeybee feels the subtle undulation of flower petals against its wings.
And suddenly I am a honeybee and the tree is a flower.

This amazes me for a moment -- and then it is no longer amazing. It simply is.

And then, in an instant the whole thing is gone: the perception, the amazement....

Back to Now
again.

Dream of the Gypsy Baby

2011-07-31T11:54:00.000-05:00

I dreamed I returned to my dorm room and found a small group of gypsies at my door -- two women and a small girl. The child was no older than 2 or 3 years. She carried a knapsack.

I invited them in and offered them something to drink. The child went immediately to a cardboard box stashed between my bed and the wall. She started pulling out kitchen tools like spatulas and measuring cups and whisks, the kind of stuff that would strike a kid's fancy. As she loaded them into her knapsack, I remembered the gypsies had visited before. I was surprised and impressed that the child still remembered where the box was.

One of the women scooped the child into her arms and pulled away its clothing to check for bowel movement. She scooped the soft, coffee-brown matter from the child's bottom with her hand and began to roll it like clay into a ball. Her gestures were quick and deft and I was, again, impressed. I noticed how the process of rolling seemed to dry out the shit, changing its consistency. I thought you could use this stuff for so many things when it's dry like that.

Friends of Ego

2011-07-28T19:44:00.005-05:00

Every time I stop smoking, the "real deal" zooms into crisp, sharp focus.

I come face to face with the Ignored, Denied, Postponed, Feared, Disguised, and Compromised; and heart to heart with My True Love.

The smoke clears, the latch lifts and all the quiet dirty secrets that usually sleep in the basement, drag themselves upstairs and stand stoop-shouldered around the kitchen. They stare at me and at each other with desperate, innocent eyes.

There's no violence. No screaming or pleading.

Just everybody standing around looking at each other in the light.

"Now what?" hangs in the air around us.

In the past, I'd launch into action: retrieving extra chairs from the other room and taking drink orders. Doing my best to make everybody comfortable in advance of the long night and hard conversations ahead.

This time is different.

This time, for the first time, I realize that this isn't even my house. I don't live here.

What it Takes

2011-07-26T12:26:00.003-05:00

I don't get it.

In the modern era, acquaintances request that I remember

never to call before 10 a.m. except every other Thursday and holidays
use their land line number for calls on the weekends
they have a cell phone but they do not text
they are sensitive to scent so don't wear or use inexpensive deodorant, lotion, shampoo, conditioner, lip balm, soap, or laundry detergent (cheap brands are almost all scented)
also don't wear anything I wore on a day when I was using or wearing inexpensive deodorant, lotion, shampoo, etc.
always take off shoes in their house
don't serve them any foods containing gluten or dairy or meat or alcohol or peanuts or sugar or flour (and dinner invites must be scheduled between 6:30 and 7:30 p.m., weekdays only)

In the olden days, even friends didn't require this much maintenance.

A Mind Space

2011-07-21T13:33:00.011-05:00

My writer muscles are loose and sluggish.

The process of writing has always provided a cool-breeze clear view into my heart and mind. So that's what I think and feel about that!

The process of blogging almost always provokes questions, mostly around the voyeuristic and exhibitionist nature of the medium. So here's my heart and mind....and YOU are watching... What are we doing?

Over the last two months, I have embraced the ideas set forth by Eckhart Tolle. The concept of "the watcher": being present in the moment with the awareness of an observer, watching my thoughts. Without judgment. Without feeling. Breathing and watching. Tolle calls it "the power of Now".

It is a space and orientation that is always available. For weeks now, I am either leaning into that space, or inhabiting it, or sensing it from one of the various frantic, far-flung exiles my egoic mind creates. There is no going back now; no forgetting how it feels to detach from identification with my thoughts.

Breath holds the key. Noticing breath and then following it and then merging...as though breath was breathing me.
Thoughts disappear. Without thoughts, there are no words. Without words, there is no writing.

Tolle points to using the mind -- rather than being used by the mind. This part of the practice does not come as easily for me. It is, of course, just another desperate trick of ego. Some sinister delusion that casts me out, alone, isolated and undeserving; what Tolle calls "pain body."

I resist using my mind because I have doubts and judgments and fears about the worthiness of its product. Actually, doubts, judgments and fears about the worthiness of my self.

Typical ego madness.

Today I'm blaming it on California. I get this way when I'm in California. I feel a familiar loneliness, remembered from when I lived here in the late 90's. It's like an old coat.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I have been cast in this year's production of Tandy Beal's "Here After Here". Most of the cast performed in the show's premiere. There are a few new dancers and, as one of four actors, I am the new member. After three rehearsals, my fellow actors' vague memories of blocking and lines are becoming remembered stagecraft.

I am the new kid on the block. It is fun. And strange.

In rehearsals, I multi-task: making notes on a printed script, experimenting with delivery, listening to Tandy's direction, memorizing blocking, learning names.

Tandy's most frequent "note" for me has been that my voice is faint and feathery too often. I've responded to that feedback with increasing insecurity about speaking; my voice and diction sound odd to me. I feel awkward in my body.

I have listened and obeyed Tandy's direction without comment so far, believing that she and everyone else in the room know the show better than I.

And they do.

And I am a performing artist. An actor in this case. And the actor brings something.

Last night I sat with the script and spoke the lines aloud, varying speed and color and pace. I began to see the outline of my character. I'm feeling it.

It feels like waking up. Like using my mind.

I want to be 80% off book by this Sunday's rehearsal. It will be fun to move around the stage with hands free and full of curiosity about the art we are making together.

Who's Who

2011-07-20T12:22:00.004-05:00

Is it just my circle of friends and acquaintances or does everybody have an impressive title lately?

I'm wondering today: is it possible for everyone to be illustrious, famous accomplished? I mean, does the world require some of us to be worker bees?

Bach

2011-05-31T18:59:00.002-05:00

One of the things I love most about piano study (and, today, Bach in particular) is the progressive, seemingly unending "opening" that occurs. Almost every practice session holds a surprise, a revelation. Something to see/hear for the first time, even when I've already spent months with the piece.

Today I discovered a harmonic line of sustained half notes "hiding" in a passage of Fugue #10 (from the Well Tempered Clavier, Book 2). I have practiced and dissected these four measures for weeks and thought I knew them inside and out...and yet...

How are relationships like musical compositions? How are relationships unlike musical compositions?

Coming to Now

2011-05-30T13:46:00.008-05:00

My heart is not pure.
This is a thought I have about myself. This is one of many thoughts I have about myself.

Something I tell myself about my life.
So I can recognize myself, find myself in the throng....remember who I am. Find my way through my life. See myself.

Through current readings in Eckhart Tolle, I am perceiving a space behind-beyond-around-within my thoughts. A space he calls Being or the Now. A space where I divest and dis-identify with my thoughts and simply observe.

It is a profound practice. And I am disinclined to speak or write, or have been for awhile.

Typically, reading stimulates thinking for me. It is a curious experience, then, to be reading about not thinking.

Typically, reading also triggers a strong compulsion to talk (a thought-based activity) about what I'm reading, as well as what I think about what I'm reading. And I have done some talking about Tolle.

But
because I am absorbing the ideas
because my life perspective/paradigm is shifting
the experience of "talking about what I'm reading" is not the same. I'm especially aware of a diminishing need to convince or teach in these conversations -- usually a defining characteristic of my conversations about spirit...

I had lunch with friends on Saturday and observed myself talking about Tolle (and other things). There were moments when I was simultaneously disinterested and amused by my performance.

Other moments when I stood in God-consciousness and watched my ego dancing and felt nothing. At least, felt nothing about ego, had no "opinion"...felt only the vast, unfettered vitality of being.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This morning I observe with fascination the feisty (if not downright frantic) persistence of certain thought patterns. As I delve deeper into Tolle's teachings on Being, more and more I am drawn to relinquish identification with whatever I am thinking and it's almost as though ego resents the shift in attention. Starts yammering "Hey! Over here! Where are you going? We've got gripes and opinions and fears and judgments to tend! Pay attention!"

~~~~~~~~~~

In a few weeks, what feels like a new chapter will begin for me. Relocation of home base, new social circle, travel for training opportunities in Theater of the Oppressed, new projects... These things do not exist. They are anticipated, near-future, to-be illusions.

Now, right now, I feel weightless and energized. And I am hungry. Hash browns and lightly scrambled eggs...

Blessed are the pure in heart

2011-05-17T23:48:00.001-05:00

"Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." (Matthew 5:8)

Why are they blessed? What does it mean to be pure in heart?

My heart is not pure. At the heart of my spiritual belief and practice is a desire to become fully human, to "get it"...and move on. Move on to God. This is the intimate yearning within the intimate yearning.

"Create in me a clean heart, oh God; and renew a right spirit within me." (Psalm 51:10)

My heart is not filthy. This is the combined result of imperfect practice and endless gifts of divine grace from who-knows-where-or-how.

I've been known to describe my life as charmed. Even lucky. I rarely use either term without remembering that my father often described his life as jinxed (though he always laughed as he said it).

Those who know me say I always land on my feet. I suppose I can see why they say it but wouldn't that mean there are times when I'm tumbling through space? Falling, falling and it's uncertain whether I will land on my feet or on my head?

I hardly ever pray now but I prayed every day when I was 5. And my heart was pure. And I saw God. And Santa Claus.

My heart was clean. No stains of

doubt
regret
shame

I didn't know why I walked on two legs instead of flying but I believed without question that I could fly. I believed God and Santa and fairies and stars were powerful. I believed requests of any of them --
prayers, letters, magic words and wishes -- might yield the ability to fly.
I stood in the rain tonight and turned my face up. To be washed clean. The moon is full. I cannot see her but I know she hangs bright behind the dark clouds. I lifted my face to the rain, the dark clouds, the moon.

Right Before "After the Party"

2011-04-23T12:45:00.005-05:00

XIX. THE SUN: THE ZORYA

In Russian mythology, the three Zorya are goddesses-attendants to the sun god. As well as bringing warmth and light to the world, the sun represents the brightness of intellect, creativity, and fertility.

Meanings: An expansive, life-affirming energy. Creativity. Relationships with children. Fertility. Love. Masculine, or yang, energy. Reversed: Unwillingness to accept affection. Blocked creativity. Problems with expanding to the next phase of a project. Feeling thwarted.

IV. POWER: FREYJA (Associated with the Suit of Staves)

Freyja, the Norse goddess of creativity, love, and beauty, shows that true power lies in the ability to discriminate between aggression and passivity—and the ability to choose between them at the right time.

Meanings: The ability to use power wisely. Awareness of one’s power. The ability to lead and inspire others. Knowledge of how to “work the system.” Reversed: Oppressed by another’s power and authority. Insecurity. Loss of personal power.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

These are my cards right before the "Not For Sissies" Performance and Birthday Bash. Nice.....

I have no script, props, lighting cues, set, recorded sound, equipment. 30 minutes ago, while drinking coffee and having first cigarette, the idea of "After the Party" occurred. I decided last night to dress like african royalty and that triggered a sense of a festive occasion--a party, a graduation, an opening. And that triggered Fannie (my mother) which triggered BDSM protocols.

I think I have my "launch" for the performance.

Over My Head

2011-04-08T13:53:00.007-05:00

This is the sky above me today. When the sky looks like this, the intro to the animated TV show "The Simpsons" always comes to mind so I call these "cartoon clouds."

Sometimes, cartoon clouds inspire me to sing a song we used to sing in my childhood church:

Over my head
There is music in the air
Over my head
There is music in the air
Over my head
There is music in the air
There must be a God somewhere.

Note: The sky has changed completely in the last three minutes. There is no sun and hail stones are hammering the roof...

My sphere of influence in the world is limited. This is a sobering but not disempowering thought. Yesterday I spent the day singing, practicing Chopin and Bach on piano, learning how to use Garage Band software and recording (trying, at least) two songs from "Holy Fire: Ecstatic Heart Songs" (formerly known as The Ecstatic Heart Song Book). In other words, I spent the day taking action within my sphere of influence.

I felt strong
smart
vulnerable
responsible
capable
intrigued

I learned something
remembered something
loved something

I was focused
full of hope
alert
serene
excited
inspired

I speak often about 'the work". The phrase has two applications in my lexicon:

One kind of "work" involves the collection of abilities and personal interests that are sometimes called "talents." They are recognized and distinct from other things I do because

my psyche is flooded with a "yes" sensation when I do them
even challenging aspects are suffused with joy
often, the World disappears and Who I Usually Am also disappears

The other way I use "the work" is in reference to the ongoing inevitable work of my spirit. It involves activities like

thinking
praying
paying attention
studying
listening
crying (and laughing)
surrendering
risking

The two forms of "work" intersect and overlap and interact. Each enables and supports the other. I believe "the work" is all that matters in the end. Seeing cartoon clouds sometimes pulls my wandering attention to pointed focus and reminds me of what I believe; simultaneously setting me free from whatever illusions about priorities might be holding me at the moment. "Oh, yes! I am a part of that music over my head and it is a part of me."

The Mask

2011-04-02T18:35:00.001-05:00

Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906)

We Wear the Mask

WE wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dre

Jeremy Has No Teeth

2011-04-02T14:58:00.004-05:00

I dreamed I was in a crowd gathering for a class or workshop. My initial excitement changed to confusion as I noticed the faces around me: some were familiar but I couldn't remember how I knew them; others were recognizable but wearing uncharacteristic clothing and hairstyles. A dear friend came close to whisper a bit of gossip but I couldn't focus on her message, distracted by her hair styled in a 12-inch, multi-colored mohawk.

A rumble of murmuring set up in the room when the guest speaker entered from a side door. It was Jeremy Taylor (in real life, he was my grad school dream studies instructor)! I was simultaneously disappointed -- because advertisements had promised the guest speaker would be someone none of us had ever met -- and eager, looking forward to speaking with him after his address.

When he was near enough for me to see him, I saw that he'd lost all his teeth, most of his hair and his eyes were strange, unfocused and bloodshot.

I wondered "What am I doing here?"

and woke up.

Line Up, Fall Out

2011-04-02T13:11:00.011-05:00

Last summer, on the last night of a week-long retreat, I volunteered to co-ordinate and emcee an amateur talent night. The show was slated to start at 7 p.m. in the dining hall. Interested attendees were asked to sign up by lunchtime if they wanted to perform.

A few minutes before "curtain" an impromptu birthday celebration was launched. As the last pieces of cake disappeared, several folks decided they had something to share and added their name to the line-up. The show finally started about 20 minutes late. We encountered a few technical glitches as the show proceeded and it was soon apparent that what had been estimated to be a two-hour show was going to run much longer.

Two hours in, I noticed some restlessness in the audience and suggested a brief intermission. "Let's take a little break--go to the bathroom, get some air, some refreshment--and come back for a sure-to-be-stunning second half. Does 10 minutes feel right?" The consensus was that 10 minutes would be too long --"We won't get out of here till after 11!" someone cried. "Let's take just 3 minutes." I reluctantly agreed, doubting seriously that this somewhat rowdy crowd would be back in 3 minutes.

Twelve minutes later, folks were still milling about. Someone had powered on a boom box as musical accompaniment for the break. Two more people asked that their names be added to the roster of performers.

My mood turned sour as I attempted to corral folks back into the room to resume the show. Eventually the show resumed. As it turned out, two of the acts in the second half were sufficiently entertaining to alleviate some of my distress.

An organizer for the event, noticing my mood during intermission, suggested that my frustration stemmed from a conflict between the disorder of the surrounding reality and my strong personal needs for order and beauty. The suggestion felt like an insightful gift that night and has returned over and over again since then when similar varieties of frustration have occurred for me.

cha·os
n.
1. A condition or place of great disorder or confusion.
2. A disorderly mass; a jumble: The desk was a chaos of papers and unopened letters.
3. often Chaos The disordered state of unformed matter and infinite space supposed in some cosmogonic views to have existed before the ordered universe.
4. Mathematics A dynamical system that has a sensitive dependence on its initial conditions.
5. Obsolete An abyss; a chasm.

I don't prefer order over chaos: so-called rules of order that I perceive as arbitrary are as unsettling as unfettered anarchy.

I have boasted that as an artist--and especially a performing artist whose work regularly includes a dash of improvisation--I am right at home with "creative chaos". This is true -- and not true. A visit to a painter friend's studio not long ago comes to mind: full ashtrays, old brushes caked with paint, a horde of flies swarming in a column in the center of the room, a litter box placed dangerously close to a cluster of canvases leaning against the wall.

I also remember a couple of classes in art school whose syllabi contained way too many rules and regulations for my tastes...

Chaos and order exist always hand in hand, cheek to cheek... Neither is "better" than the other.

It is the chaos of broken promises, disloyalty and breach of contract that vexes me, e.g., if you say will return from intermission in 3 minutes, I want to believe you. Sometimes, I'd even say I need to believe you. I'm going to be happiest if you return from intermission in 3 minutes.

Or, if you come to me at the 3-minute mark and renegotiate.

Or, at some point, even much later, if you acknowledge that you were not true to your word.

Here's where I get uncomfortable and a little crazy: you don't return in 3 minutes, you don't renegotiate at 3 minutes, you never acknowledge that you didn't do what you said you'd do AND if/when I say "I am utterly confused, frustrated and annoyed by this situation. I feel like I can't trust you. What is the deal?" I am perceived as "intense" or "confrontational" or "mean".

Or

if I say nothing but make a mental note for the future ("not someone I want to make art with in the future") and don't invite you to participate in the next show, I am "unforgiving," "a perfectionist" or my standards are too high.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Yikes.

I didn't plan to go down that road. I just wanted to muse upon chaos and order. Apparently I needed to vent. I'll save the scholarly discussion for another post....

Oh Freedom...my little truck

2011-03-27T11:50:00.002-05:00

This is my truck. So much for spiritual asceticism: I am ecstatic about this new toy. Freedom and mobility on my own terms and timetable. Yes, this aspect of Self is a Material Girl. Thrilled by this gift.

The Fund Raising Letter, which asked $700, has netted over $900! Again, Material Girl is...what's the saying? "over the moon"?

I'm attending the Theater of the Oppressed training in Port Townsend WA in June probably/possibly driving my own truck to get there.

And even though these are worldly goods, my Spirit is revelling.

We Cry When Moved

2011-03-22T14:32:00.006-05:00

Fat day for the psyche.... Tears.

...for the loneliness of the road as I drove to ballet class this morning. The usual bumper-to-bumper queue didn't happen. Where was everyone? Their absence somehow inspired my thoughts toward a prayer for each of us in our essential alone-ness.

...for the pain... This morning's class was special, marked by first-time interactions among the students and between them and myself as we waited for Barbara, the instructor, to arrive, finally speaking our names to each other after two months of dancing alone together. Everyone's game was elevated today: the instructor taught better, the students danced better and I played better than ever before.

Something marvelous was afoot. Some students quietly departed at 9:30, the official ending time; but Barbara was on a roll. I don't think she even realized it was time to stop. Most of the students kept working with her.

Then, at 9:50, the next instructor entered the studio. Her face told the story. Talking over Barbara, she said, "Barbara, my class begins in 10 minutes." Barbara nodded and kept teaching. Then, in a move that took my breath for its violence, she began pulling the huge drapes, covering the mirrored walls, abruptly obscuring the dancers' and Barbara's view of themselves.

They finished the sequence...a few dancers turned to thank me -- with eyes, clasped hands, bowed heads, silent mouthed "thank yous"...

...for a wallop of insight while listening to the radio in the car after class. A talk show. A caller opined that "things" were better in the old days when the government maintained schools and parks and roads and libraries. A well-paid (in this time of economic stress for so many) "expert" chuckled and proceeded to enumerate the flaws in that bygone "utopian" system, explaining that progress has meant the ascendancy of private over public...

...stopping at the Post Office to drop a birthday card for my father. After decades of estrangement, we are reunited, talking by phone at least once a week. The sweet, simple, profound, soul "yummy" of sending a birthday card to "Daddy."

...finding a Wendell Berry poem in my email-box. Berry at his wildest and most righteous. Reprinted below. Thank you, Y.

Are there more tears to be shed today?

---

Manifesto: Mad Farmer Liberation Front

Wendell Berry

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,

vacation with pay. Want more

of everything ready-made. Be afraid

to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.

Not even your future will be a mystery

any more. Your mind will be punched in a card

and shut away in a little drawer.

When they want you to buy something

they will call you. When they want you

to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something

that won't compute. Love the Lord.

Love the world. Work for nothing.

Take all that you have and be poor.

Love someone who does not deserve it.

Denounce the government and embrace

the flag. Hope to live in that free

republic for which it stands.

Give your approval to all you cannot

understand. Praise ignorance, for what man

has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.

Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.

Say that your main crop is the forest

that you did not plant,

that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested

when they have rotted into the mold.

Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus

that will build under the trees

every thousand years.

Listen to carrion -- put your ear

close, and hear the faint chattering

of the songs that are to come.

Expect the end of the world. Laugh.

Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful

though you have considered all the facts.

So long as women do not go cheap

for power, please women more than men.

Ask yourself: Will this satisfy

a woman satisfied to bear a child?

Will this disturb the sleep

of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.

Lie down in the shade. Rest your head

in her lap. Swear allegiance

to what is nighest your thoughts.

As soon as the generals and the politicos

can predict the motions of your mind,

lose it. Leave it as a sign

to mark the false trail, the way

you didn't go.

Be like the fox

who makes more tracks than necessary,

some in the wrong direction.

Practice resurrection.

The Fund-Raising Letter

2011-03-21T14:17:00.007-05:00

The Mandala Center for change (Port Townsend, WA) is offering a week-long training in Theater of the Oppressed techniques in June. From the moment I read the announcement, there wasn't a doubt in my mind -- I need to be there. I will be there.

To raise funds for registration and transportation costs, I sent a group letter to people who either know me or know my work enough to agree with me as to the perfection and value of this opportunity presenting at this point in my career.

Voices yammered in my head as I composed the letter -- "You don't know how to write a fund-raising letter.....people will hate you....this isn't how real artists make money...this is going to hurt when nobody contributes....." I kept writing and the yammering kept me humble.

Here's some of what I wrote:

Dear Friends

In two weeks, I will have been away from New Orleans for one year... I left New Orleans with tears in my eyes; I hated leaving but had reached the end of the line after struggling mightily for almost a year to support myself. My plan was to live rent-free in CA, take any job I could find, save up my money and return to New Orleans to give it another try.

The Big Hand had a different itinerary in mind. The unexpected theme this year became Artistic Growth. In the last 12 months I have received introductory training in Non-Violent Communication, completed three Landmark Education courses, written and performed a debut draft of a one-woman show, composed six new songs, studied Interplay techniques, and designed and directed a Theater-of-the-Oppressed experience,

As for finding work: I facilitated five improv/body-based workshops and presented as "artist in the pulpit" at three Unitarian Universalist churches. Besides those one-shot gigs, I play piano two mornings a week for ballet classes at Cabrillo College. If not for food stamps, occasional monetary donations from dear friends, the use of my host's beater car and a rent-free living space, I might have gone under this year.

I'm writing now because I am raising funds to attend this year's Theater of the Oppressed/Playback Theater training in Port Townsend, WA. From the moment I learned of this training, I knew I had to attend. I just got off the phone with Marc Weinblatt, the Director of the Mandala Center for Change. Our conversation ...strengthened my resolve to do whatever it takes to be there.

Some of you may know that I am dreaming and scheming to bring Non Violent Communication to New Orleans when I return. The training in Port Townsend feels to me like the perfect kick-start for making this dream real.

... the fee for this training is $475 ($425 if paid by 30 April). The Center handles registration on an honor system: pay what you can. It's operated under this policy for 20 years.

On my current $200/month salary, I cannot easily pay anything at all toward this fee. In addition, there are transportation costs associated. Airfare (based on a search one hour ago) is about $250+ taxes. I have no idea whether it's less expensive to drive (890 miles) but I am willing to drive if it is. My estimate of how much I need is $700 -- $300 for transportation and $400 for the Mandala Center for Change.

You can help in one of two ways:
Host/produce a performance opportunity for me, i.e., a living-room concert, a special event at your church or club, a "special guest" for something already scheduled. My preference would be that you do not charge admission but let people know we will pass the hat at the end of the show. ...

Make a donation of any amount. If you choose this option, please know that the amount of your contribution (but not your name) will be reported to all the other recipients of this message (if you have another idea on how to make this process as transparent and honorable as possible, I'm open to suggestions). ...

Thank you very much for reading this long-ish letter. Thank you for making a donation, hosting an event or holding me in light in your heart.

Response

It's been four days since I sent the letter. Of the 66 recipients, an astounding 28 (42%) have already responded. Nine people (13%) have pledged a specific monetary contribution and five others (8%) say they will send "something". I have nothing to compare these statistics to but they far outstrip my expectations.

The average contribution is $99.

The most surprising aspects of this project:

Six of the people making contributions didn't even know me a year ago.
I did not include a mailing address or instructions on how to contribute in the letter.
A handful of people (including two family members) expressed barely-masked disdain in their reply emails, hoping that this will be the last time I have to "ask for help".
Seven people have commended my innovative approach to fund-raising, saying they wish they had the courage or had thought of it themselves.

Just Don't Look Up

2011-03-20T18:25:00.008-05:00

I found my tarot cards. Besides the sweet surprise of rediscovering something I'd forgotten I had, there's the enjoyable bonus of playing with the cards. My deck is Kris Waldherr's Goddess Tarot. Contemplating the deck perhaps a decade after acquiring it, some of the images are more evocative than I remember; still, the choice of deck is mostly reflective of how drenched in CA culture I was at the time.

I pulled two cards a moment ago: the Two of Cups and the Seven of Pentacles (images in this blog post are not from the Waldherr deck). One interpretation of the Two of the Cups has a noteworthy relevance to my post earlier this week: "Willing to Reconsider"

The Two of Cups shows that a deep understanding is set to develop. Be prepared to see the other point of view....

Yes....that's what I want "other people" to do and this card encourages me to be about nurturing the same capacity within myself.

Drawing the Seven of Pentacles today is also timely: I woke up intending to blog about an interview with filmmaker Steven Soderbergh that I heard recently on New York public radio. Specifically, I was struck by his comment

"I'm a big believer in just not looking up from your work. Just stay focused on what you're doing and don't get distracted by the other stuff."

I heard a similar rigorous injunction in Steven Pressfield's book "the War of Art." Pressfield's discussion focuses on "resistance" but in many instances "distraction" can be substituted without perverting the message.

"Resistance seems to come from outside ourselves. We locate it in spouses, jobs, kids... Resistance arises from within. It is self-generated and self-perpetuated. ... Resistance will tell you anything to keep you from doing your work..."

I know what he's talking about. When I'm not doing my work, the distraction is rarely shopping or watching TV or gambling or drinking or talking on the phone or hanging out in the FaceBook Lounge. For me, it is the folly, analysis, conjecture, reminiscence, etc. fabricated in my own mind that lures me away.

I never feel I work hard enough. I never feel I'm focused or devoted enough.

The message of the Seven of Pentacles is "Harvest the rewards but don't rest on your laurels." An online tarot site interprets:

This card is a clear sign that you should ...continue on your path, any frustrations should be laughed off, ... This card arrives just prior to very well laid plans coming to fruition and a celebration is indicated.

If I set aside all the stuff in my head that has nothing to do with being a transformative artist, it's clear that the work I'm doing now is continuation, culmination and celebration of the plantings and harvests of my whole life. I like being reminded.

A Prayer

2011-03-19T15:14:00.002-05:00

Doing some filing and just found this prayer from a service I did with Rev. Kay Jorgensen and Sister Carmen Barsody, OSF back in 2004 at the San Francisco Unitarian Universalist Society. Right on time...

Now we leave this place to rejoin the world.
Let us walk faithfully
attentively
humbly abandoning our illusions of certainty...again and again
Embracing the vital Mystery...again and again
May we listen closely to the song and the silence at the Heart of the World and thus renew our faith
And may the peace that passes understanding
fill our hearts and guide our thoughts until we meet again.
Amen.

Willing to Reconsider

2011-03-19T13:16:00.004-05:00

My heart hurts when I think about us.

Certainly we don't really want to hurt others. We don't really want to live surrounded by people while isolated from them.

And yet...

We see what we see. We believe what we believe. We think we're right. Of course we do.

And maybe we are right. But maybe we aren't.

There's so much more room, so much more possible between us if we can only allow that maybe we aren't right.....

Maybe the third man from the left in the ninth row isn't bored by my performance (as I assumed); maybe his only brother died last week and he's numb.

Maybe there was no hidden agenda or innuendo (as you assumed) when I asked if you lived alone.

Maybe she's not ungrateful; maybe she declined your invitation because she just doesn't like dinner parties.

My heart hurts. It's time to close FaceBook again.

Make It Happen

2011-03-17T16:45:00.004-05:00

I've been on the road a bit for a few weeks and, outside of playing around with a couple of song lyric ideas, I haven't been writing.

Until today. What I worked on today appears below. When I finished it, I realized there's actually some stuff up with me worth blogging....so here's this for now and I'll share the rest tonight or tomorrow.

---------

Dear Friends

In two weeks, I will have been away from New Orleans for one year. It has been an amazing year. I left New Orleans with tears in my eyes; I hated leaving but had reached the end of the line after struggling mightily for almost a year to support myself. My plan was to live rent-free in CA, take any job I could find, save up my money and return to New Orleans to give it another try.

The Big Hand had a different itinerary in mind. The unexpected theme this year became Artistic Growth. In the last 12 months I have received introductory training in Non-Violent Communication, completed three Landmark Education courses, written and performed a debut draft of a one-woman show, composed six new songs, studied Interplay techniques, and designed and directed a Theater-of-the-Oppressed experience,

As for finding work: I facilitated five improv/body-based workshops and presented as "artist in the pulpit" at three Unitarian Universalist churches. Besides those one-shot gigs, I play piano two mornings a week for ballet classes at Cabrillo College. If not for food stamps, occasional monetary donations from dear friends, the use of my host's beater car and a rent-free living space, I might have gone under this year.

I'm writing now because I am raising funds to attend this year's Theater of the Oppressed/Playback Theater training in Port Townsend, WA. From the moment I learned of this training, I knew I had to attend. I just got off the phone with Marc Weinblatt, the Director of the Mandala Center for Change. Our conversation -- about the trainers and participants from all over the world who will be there, the Center's philosophy as re Theater of the Oppressed, as well his affirmations of my conviction that art, performance, Theater of the Oppressed and Non-Violent Communication are strong, essential tools for all social activism -- have strengthened my resolve to do whatever it takes to be there.

Some of you may know that I am dreaming and scheming to bring Non Violent Communication to New Orleans when I return. The training in Port Townsend feels to me like the perfect kick-start for making this dream real.

If you followed the link above, you know that the fee for this training is $475 ($425 if paid by 30 April). The Center handles registration on an honor system: pay what you can. It's operated under this policy for 20 years.

On my current $200/month salary, I cannot easily pay anything at all toward this fee. In addition, there are transportation costs associated. Airfare (based on a search one hour ago) is about $250+ taxes. I have no idea whether it's less expensive to drive (890 miles) but I am willing to drive if it is. My estimate of how much I need is $700 -- $300 for transportation and $400 for the Mandala Center for Change.

You can help in one of two ways:

Host/produce a performance opportunity for me, i.e., a living-room concert, a special event at your church or club, a "special guest" for something already scheduled. My preference would be that you do not charge admission but let people know we will pass the hat at the end of the show. If you're interested in this option, we can talk about what kind of show would work best. Total proceeds will be reported to all the other recipients of this message. In this way, we'll all know when the goal is met.
Make a donation of any amount. If you choose this option, please know that the amount of your contribution (but not your name) will be reported to all the other recipients of this message (if you have another idea on how to make this process as transparent and honorable as possible, I'm open to suggestions). In this way, we'll all know when the goal is met.

Thank you very much for reading this long-ish letter. Thank you for making a donation, hosting an event or holding me in light in your heart.

Sincerely

I also wrote to the Director:

Marc

Thank you for calling today. Since first reading the announcement about the upcoming training, I've felt it was important to my growth as an artist that I attend. Now I know what I need to do to make that happen.

My fundraising efforts started five minutes after our conversation ended. I've raised $100 so far. My goal is to raise the full registration fee plus travel expense. As a proud member of the CouchSurfing.org community I will try to arrange housing through that resource.

If I raise less than $475 for registration, I can either a) do work exchange (see skill set below) for the balance, and/or b) pay off the balance by Thanksgiving in monthly installments. If I'm unable to find a CS member in the area with an opening, I will request homestay through Mandala Center.

My skills include:

musician: singer, songwriter, pianist, guitarist
administrative/clerical: type 90 wpm, high computer literacy (spreadsheets, presentations, Internet, sound recording, database, etc) and math skills (QuickBooks, basic accounting)
Good people skills: workshop facilitator, greeter, information desk, tour guide, "sounding board," mediation
highly organized, mature, imaginative

I am also happy to walk dogs, wash dishes, set up chairs, etc.

Please let me know if I left anything out.

Alex

Trying to be Grateful

2011-03-02T11:46:00.004-06:00

The question facing me lately is this: with things going so well in CA and a seemingly unending series of new opportunities presenting to me here

how do I justify my continued longing for New Orleans?

At the risk of being perceived as ungrateful, here's my latest peeve about CA (compared to New Orleans):

People and their pets. I am house-and-animal-sitting for some new friends. The detailed information sheet on how to care for the pets is a little bit funny to me--one cat is to be fed "a little less than a third cup" canned food and is not allowed outdoors while care is taken to prop the garage door open just wide enough to allow the other two cats 24/7 access to outdoors while preventing the dogs entrance to the garage (also known as Kitty Kingdom)--

but I was actually annoyed with the dogs this morning. These two large mixed breed animals are apparently most comfortable when hanging around indoors all day following a human around. They seemed utterly confused yesterday to find themselves outdoors alone after I fed them. It was a warm, beautiful day and, yet, they stood at the patio door morosely staring inside for hours.

I compare this with my experience in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast where lots of dogs never see the inside of a house. Some live their whole lives as "yard dogs," chained to a tree or doghouse. "For God sake! Go act like dogs...."

This morning it's about 57 degrees outside with a light mist hanging and one of these animals actually pawed the glass door and barked a "Let me in!" plea after gobbling down his morning rations.

I'm not taking a stand on anything here or launching a full tilt bitch session. Just identifying one more "sissy" characteristic of CA and missing my piano (still in the crowded living room of a former piano student who lives in New Orleans) this morning....

6 Acts of Invitation (annotated)

2011-03-01T20:42:00.009-06:00

A little reflection on the creation and performance of 6 Acts of Invitation.

(I find the word "act" evocative. It suggests a full and formal acceptance of responsibility in the realm of interaction. It is a graceful and heroic notion to me...

My choice of a numeric rather than alpha character as the first is still mysterious to me but pleasing.

"Invitation" is recurrent concept in my work over the years. The bold and humble eroticism of opening oneself to another is timeless and compelling. "Invitation" is a kind of prayer and figures to some degree in all my work.)

Act I - Louisville

[enter whistling “Getting to know you”]

Three months after dropping out of college, I was in a restaurant with my sister. A radio news director at the next table overheard our conversation. He liked my voice and offered me a job.

(This story is half true and half invented: I was offered a job on the strength of my voice in an overheard conversation but it happened at a high school, not a restaurant. I enjoyed this exercise of artistic license. There was freedom and humor in it.)

Shortly after accepting

I was strolling down Broadway on my way into the station one afternoon,

feeling really good about the job

and proud of my all-grown-up,

gainfully employed,

19-year-old Self,

when an old man approached me, smiling and shaking his head.

[his voice]: Look out! Look out! Young lady, your mama never told you “a whistling woman and a crowing hen ain’t neither fit for God nor man”?

I’d honestly never heard that one before. “How does it go again?”

[his voice]: Simple truth: “A whistling woman ...a crowing hen ... ain’t neither one of ‘em fit for God or any man. That’s what I’m sayin’."

I wasn’t sure what he was saying. It was a mixed message. But I thanked him as he left.

(Here, what I want to remember is that it took a while for the physical portrayal of this guy to come to me, to really enter my body. Throughout the 8 weeks of the SpotLife workshop, I was told by my classmates that I have a knack for doing characters but I didn't experience the ability as anything special.

With this piece, I challenged myself to really get this guy: walk like him, stand like him, find the timbre of his voice, see him and feel him and be him, all at the same time.

I still have some development to do with him, but I feel stretched as an artist by the work I've done so far.)

Act II - Introduction

~~~transition~~~: [scarf reveal]

I think of myself as:

a performing artist

a musician

a teacher

a woman

a human being...

(Several other possible descriptors surfaced (an were discarded) during the writing process... Some of them will be reinstated in the full-length version of the show)

but without other human beings—

if I existed alone in space [turn full circle with arms extended]

without you here [gesture toward audience]

reflecting me back to me [gesture “reflect”]

what would I think of myself then?

Would I even know that I existed?

(God I love conveying those lines! I go out to "alone in space" every time I say the words and turn in a slow circle with my arms extended. Such sweet discovery to face the audience again and see that part of Self reflected; a little bit of poignant surprise...)

Act III - Easter

Center stage. I was only this tall [show how tall with RH]

facing a sea of dark wooden pews [indicate span with LH]

filled with church members and famliy -- everyone I knew in the world at that time... all leaning toward me.

[ step into the circle; become the child]

Would you like to know a secret?

Well, I'll tell you one I know:

The Easter Bunny's coming,

Mommy told me so.

He'll bring a basket filled with eggs

And leave it in my yard,

And I will find it Easter morn,

If I look very hard.

I shouldn't tell my secret,

But I think it should be shared.

You ought to know that Bunny's coming,

So you can be prepared!

[curtsey; step out of circle]

(I went looking online for an Easter poem, never expecting to find this one which I recognized immediately as one I recited as a child.)

My grandmother sat in the front row with her arms wide open to me, smiling and cooing: “Precious..., Mammaw loves you.”

There was approval and hope shining on every face in the room.

Act IV – Soul of the World

(This Act underwent the most strenuous revision. It's still not quite right...

Also, the feeling of "animal" in my body and mind is strongly evocative and worthy of more exploration in text as well as improv movement.)

It is hard for human animals to see each other.

We are essentially animal,

our bodies evolving in sync with the heartbeat of creation.

feeding and mating

marking our territory

watching out for predators

Our distinction in the animal kingdom

is that we are Soul makers

creating Soul in the World from the stuff of our lives.

Unlike humans

Eagles witness a hundred magnificent sunrises

and are never awestruck

Camels don’t make midlife career changes.

Lions kill with no regret.

When you look at me

What do you see?

I am more than that.

And I am not that.

I can hardly see you now

for my immense longing

to give you something that matters in these 10 minutes

to be true to myself and true to you

simultaneously

to make an impression

I believe in Soul

I believe human life is Soul’s vital breath.

There is no world without us

dancing blind together

Feeling our way...

~~~transition~~~: [dance with the Other]

(The night before the show, standing out under the stars on a cold night in Watsonville, having a cigarette and running lines, I was inspired away from a "sleep walker" inspired physical improv toward a "dance with the other" idea...feels very good and full of potential for a longer treatment]

Act V – New Orleans

A few years ago I was walking the neutral ground in New Orleans on my way to catch a streetcar when an old man approached me...

[in his voice] “My my my... Good day, my Queen. You are stunning. May I say that?.....

He was a dapper little man. He carried a walking stick and with his meticulous moustache and neat goatee [make gestures to indicate moustache and goatee] he was like a miniature Salvador Dali.

[in his voice ] “There’s a lovely cafe not far from here. I wonder...could I persuade you to join me for a coffee or other beverage of your choice?”

I was flattered

and amused.

I could have picked him up like a doll. [mime]

So, we went for coffee and he confessed that

a shall we say “rigorous, uninhibited sexual encounter” with me

was foremost in his mind.

Well, even though that particular delusion had to be acknowledged outright as an unequivocal impossibility

I did find him charming.

He said he could tell I was “refined” and “extremely sensitive.”

So when he asked if I would have dinner with him that evening, I said “yes.”

He was a predator but he was smaller than me

and

I felt like he really saw who I was...

Act VI - Closing

Here we are

like myriad stars

in the vast sky

you

and me

and Thou

I am not your dream of me.

I want you to see me

even maybe possibly

get to know me

so we can go somewhere

together...

Let’s go! [toss out magic carpet]

(It was as exciting to perform this piece, tossing the bright scarlet cloth into the dark, as I envisioned it. The bright lights in my face so I could not see another face, my arms extended toward the dark void, letting the bright red heart cloth fly out and away from me....ahhh, possibly my favorite part of the entire piece so far.)

BLACKOUT

EXIT

The Right Way to Live

2011-02-28T11:17:00.002-06:00

Is there such thing?

The concept both appeals to me and makes me squirm. If there is a right way to live--if the question has been asked and answered; if there exist documentation of tests and surveys and proofs that make it plain for all to know; if a guide or manual has been produced as a reference for the diligent aspirant--then, it would seem, that peace on earth is possible.

But

if all of the above is true

why aren't we all committed to living the right way? Is the guide book only available to a select few? Is it hard to find? Hard to understand? Full of typos?

Do the particulars of "right living" vary from person to person, situation to situation, historical period to historical period?

I watched (and shared) this video on FaceBook the other day. It demonstrates, in my opinion, one possible illustration of what it looks like to "live right." Since watching it the first time, I have asked myself over and over, what stands between me and choosing to do what Mr. Krishnan did? With a clear sense of right living, what gets in my way and prevents me from acting on what I know?

This is a deep and lengthy contemplation.

In this moment, I can see that worry about what happens after making the decision is a complicating factor: two weeks and 7 hours after stepping into a radical departure from my usual life....what then? After the making decision, if I should find myself with a broken bone or facing an armed bandit or standing in freezing rain in a town where no one knows my name....what then? Might I regret my decision and long to return to the relative comfort of my "wrong living"?

6 Acts of Invitation

2011-02-26T22:53:00.003-06:00

A great show!

A few hours ago I was the opening act in the SpotLife Winter 2011 show at the Broadway Playhouse in Santa Cruz. It was great and there is so much to say about the 8 weeks of workshop that preceded today's performance, my personal creative process, the Helpers that showed up along the way.

But I'm not in a writing way tonight. So I'll just post the "final" draft I worked from (minus the handwritten notes on my print copy) for now and come back in a day or so with an expanded report.

6 ACTS OF INVITATION

A work in progress by Alex Mercedes

Winter SpotLife 2011

Broadway Playhouse

526 Broadway

Santa Cruz CA

26 February 2011

Act I - Louisville

[enter whistling “Getting to know you”]

Three months after dropping out of college, I was in a restaurant with my sister. A radio news director at the next table overheard our conversation. He liked my voice and offered me a job.

Shortly after accepting

I was strolling down Broadway on my way into the station one afternoon,

feeling really good about the job

and proud of my all-grown-up,

gainfully employed,

19-year-old Self,

when an old man approached me, smiling and shaking his head.

[his voice]: Look out! Look out! Young lady, your mama never told you “a whistling woman and a crowing hen ain’t neither fit for God nor man”?

I’d honestly never heard that one before. “How does it go again?”

[his voice]: Simple truth: “A whistling woman ...a crowing hen ... ain’t neither one of ‘em fit for God or any man. That’s what I’m sayin’."

I wasn’t sure what he was saying. It was a mixed message. But I thanked him as he left.

Act II - Introduction

~~~transition~~~: [scarf reveal]

I think of myself as:

a performing artist

a musician

a teacher

a woman

a human being...

but without other human beings—

if I existed alone in space [turn full circle with arms extended]

without you here [gesture toward audience]

reflecting me back to me [gesture “reflect”]

what would I think of myself then?

Would I even know that I existed?

Act III - Easter

~~~transition~~~: [fly a circle with scarf, then drape it on the black box; and walk the center stage circle]

Center stage. I was only this tall [show how tall with RH]

facing a sea of dark wooden pews [indicate span with LH]

filled with church members and famliy -- everyone I knew in the world at that time... all leaning toward me.

[ step into the circle; become the child]

Would you like to know a secret?

Well, I'll tell you one I know:

The Easter Bunny's coming,

Mommy told me so.

He'll bring a basket filled with eggs

And leave it in my yard,

And I will find it Easter morn,

If I look very hard.

I shouldn't tell my secret,

But I think it should be shared.

You ought to know that Bunny's coming,

So you can be prepared!

[curtsey; step out of circle]

My grandmother sat in the front row with her arms wide open to me, smiling and cooing: “Precious..., Mammaw loves you.”

There was approval and hope shining on every face in the room.

~~~transition~~~: [gesture toward a face...and a face..... Continue into movement a la exformation...sounding]

Act IV – Soul of the World

It is hard for human animals to see each other.

We are essentially animal,

our bodies evolving in sync with the heartbeat of creation.

feeding and mating

marking our territory

watching out for predators

Our distinction in the animal kingdom

is that we are Soul makers

creating Soul in the World from the stuff of our lives.

Unlike humans

Eagles witness a hundred magnificent sunrises

and are never awestruck

Camels don’t make midlife career changes.

Lions kill with no regret.

When you look at me

What do you see?

I am more than that.

And I am not that.

I can hardly see you now

for my immense longing

to give you something that matters in these 10 minutes

to be true to myself and true to you

simultaneously

to make an impression

I believe in Soul

I believe human life is Soul’s vital breath.

There is no world without us

dancing blind together

Feeling our way...

~~~transition~~~: [dance with the Other]

Act V – New Orleans

A few years ago I was walking the neutral ground in New Orleans on my way to catch a streetcar when an old man approached me...

[in his voice] “My my my... Good day, my Queen. You are stunning. May I say that?.....

He was a dapper little man. He carried a walking stick and with his meticulous moustache and neat goatee [make gestures to indicate moustache and goatee] he was like a miniature Salvador Dali.

[in his voice ] “There’s a lovely cafe not far from here. I wonder...could I persuade you to join me for a coffee or other beverage of your choice?”

I was flattered

and amused.

I could have picked him up like a doll. [mime]

So, we went for coffee and he confessed that

a shall we say “rigorous, uninhibited sexual encounter” with me

was foremost in his mind.

Well, even though that particular delusion had to be acknowledged outright as an unequivocal impossibility

I did find him charming.

He said he could tell I was “refined” and “extremely sensitive.”

So when he asked if I would have dinner with him that evening, I said “yes.”

He was a predator but he was smaller than me

and

I felt like he really saw who I was...

Act VI - Closing

~~~transition~~~: [“my sweet self” improv; retrieve scarf]

Here we are

like myriad stars

in the vast sky

you

and me

and Thou

I am not your dream of me.

I want you to see me

even maybe possibly

get to know me

so we can go somewhere

together...

Let’s go! [toss out magic carpet]

BLACKOUT

EXIT

Wrong Turn

2011-02-04T06:38:00.008-06:00

It's always been one of the most uncomfortable feelings for me.

Reaching, extending, reaching....repeated attempts to make contact

no response. no argument. no overt rejection.

Things just don't work out for us to connect. Over and over again.

and the niggling thought-feeling begins to snake its way through my guts and flutter against the back of my neck...

"I'm pushing. S/He doesn't want to spend time with me."

It's not a stabbing pain like a broken heart; it's more like a nagging discomfort, like hunger.

In this wee hour of the morning, I am insomniac, trying to suss out an equation or maxim of some kind--to relieve the current discomfort and point a way forward. Something like the "If you haven't worn it in X months, get rid of it" advice of clutter consultants.

What is "X" in the realm of relationship? Is it the same quantity for all kinds of relationships?

If you've made the last X overtures, it's time to let go.

Or if it feels wrong to call again, it is.

Maybe there's no graceful or painless way to say goodbye.

Can't there be a bit of warning? Or some way to acknowledge that we are nearing the end?

It makes me crazy that nothing looked different the last time we were together--the embraces and laughter and talking-with-eyes all unchanged, just they way it's always been for five, ten, 15 years...yet, we walk away from the encounter and you never again call or return my call. From seeming intimacy and camaraderie to utter indifference---just like that.

I don't understand.

It's not the way I do it.

Would it be helpful to make coffee right now?

Look at Me

2011-01-27T20:32:00.006-06:00

Something has moved like a furtive shadow through the underbrush of my psyche all day. As the hours wound out, from time to time, an agitated, momentary rustling of leaves at the side of the road would startle me, but I pressed on. Then, as the sun sinks, quick and surprising, I know what it is.

It is anger.

And I am suppressing it. It has lived in me today as something I fear. Something I would neither release nor face. Something in the underbrush....that might bite me or break my neck... I don't want to know what it is I chanted subconsciously all day.

After suppressing this anger for about two weeks, only today, right now, am I admitting it. And admitting the exhaustion. And admitting the ouch hot prickly sting pain of it in my chest.

There's no urge to scream or flail or break something.

Just spiritual pain

and also relief, in this moment, that I can finally see what it is.

Is it more than coincidence that I received the insight while playing my guitar and singing...for the first time in two weeks? The music felt like massage to my soul, releasing tension and warming cold places in me.

The words--"I am angry"--are never true. Anger is an emotion. I feel emotions but I am more than emotions. Anger is not my nature. Not my essence.

I was afraid to look at the thing in the underbrush today because I was afraid that I might see my own face. I thought that I "was" angry. It was a question of identity. No wonder I couldn't/didn't want to/was afraid to let it go.

How ironic: one of my assignments with SpotLife this week is an exercise done standing before a mirror and speaking the words "Look at me...."

The Sweet Taste of ... Cake

2011-01-14T18:44:00.006-06:00

I want cake.

The craving began as a notion a few months ago. I was in Whole Foods Market and noticed the gorgeous pastry decorations in the bakery display case. The sight provoked a little fantasy about having my own place and serving pretty cake at a dinner party.

I walked on by -- without making a purchase --
and thought about the cakes a couple of times in the days that followed.

Leading up to Thanksgiving, cake sightings and sniffings increased. There was a lot of baking going on in my neck of the woods. I resisted taking a bite of everything that appealed or was offered to me. For the first time in my life, I am exercising restraint around food.

While living in New Orleans, I gained about 20 pounds. And loved every minute of the increase. The food was delicious and consumption was usually accomplished in the company of friends with ample laughter and libation in the mix.

And I don't remember feeling overweight or unattractive once. In fact, it's magical how cute and desirable I felt much of the time, despite my expanding butt.

In California, I don't feel so attractive. California occurs for me as a place where my cake-eating, cigarette-smoking, plain-speaking, lunch-time-champagne-drinking, big butt ways make me either unattractive or invisible to the "the beautiful people."

Anyway, I'm getting all this straightened out for myself today: I want some cake.

I resisted cake through the holidays. I resisted cake on my birthday.

Cake comes to mind and mouth every time I'm at the market these days. Why can't I have some cake please, my precious inner child asks me with polite earnestness.

Because it's spiritual sloth to have everything I want, every time I want it.

Because my butt is too big.

Because I'm single and if I make or buy a cake, I'll end up eating most of it myself and that's just...disgraceful.

Because I don't eat enough vegetables to deserve dessert.

But here's the thing: craving is turning into obsession now. I dream of cake and wake up thinking of cake. I notice cake references in TV shows and movies. Sometimes I feel a little sad because what kind of life is this, living in a house without cake?

Here's what I've decided:

I will allow myself to have cake

BUT ONLY if:

I make it myself and either freeze or give away half of it.

Now, what kind shall I make?

The Land of Presence and Possibility

2011-01-04T17:43:00.005-06:00

From an email written to B______:

My holiday in Portland draws to an end. ... I've been so cold for so many consecutive days I now feel a humility and resignation akin to an inmate at a concentration camp... On the plus side, creative work time has been surprisingly productive. ...

Creative activity....I'm newly amazed by the mysterious, generous, transcendent, profound experience of making art. It involves surrender, among other things. Surrendering my neuroses and predilections and biases and self-loathing. Surrendering my slippery little cop-outs and urges to indulge in empty distractions.

Facing the undeniable truth of my mortality--another birthday, new aches in the body--and witnessing me (and my old dog colleagues) pursuing the same fruitless routines... Enough enough enough! Do I want to get "this" done before I die or not? This music will only be made if I make it...so I've gotten busy these last weeks and I'm astounded. Like getting a glimpse behind the store-house doors where vast treasures of beauty and mystery lie.

For several days, there has seemed to be nothing else to do but make the art. If I had "my own" place or a lover or a car...if I had warm-enough clothes or some friends in town or a good book.... If I had any of these, they might serve as excuse or permission to not make the art. In the absence of all of them, I had only Time and my guitar. And I got to work.

At moments, I actually felt trapped; like I had no choice; like the only thing possible in that precious granted moment of breath was to offer myself in service to the music that wanted to be sung. Like the only alternatives were death or madness.

The song was the only thing in the Universe for me in that moment.

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

This is a strange experience. Freeing and frightening and new. It's a space where there's just God and me reflecting each other infinitely. Familiar self-throttling thoughts like What am I doing here? I'm....I'm not....I crumble like plaster balloons and blow away.

There's no pressure. Just a profound sense of presence and possibility.

Today I see it as my next site for sojourn. The Land of Presence and Possibility. Learning to speak the languages and hold the silences of that land.

Abundance in Nothing

2010-12-31T14:22:00.003-06:00

I have missed my friend.

En route to CA I began receiving reports of his meth addiction from mutual friends who hoped I could "do something." But, given the circumstances surrounding our last contact and what little I understood about addiction generally and meth addiction specifically, I was less than hopeful. My parting words, delivered in a letter written in CO after a frustrated year of either unanswered phone and email messages or verbose, self-absorbed rants on the rare occasion we were in contact, left the ball in his court. "I'll be here forever because that's what I promised when we met but it's your turn to reach for me."

Strong words. A mask for my broken heart.

Five years later, post-Landmark Education, I recognize the "inauthenticity" of my letter. It was authentic to let him see my heart; it was inauthentic to blame him for the pain I was feeling.

In the nine months since I returned to CA, we've had two or three opportunities to sit together when I was in SF for other business. The physical proximity granted a semblance of re-connection but the heart-to-heart connection felt tenuous and and fragile.

He had not responded to several email and voice-mail messages left since Thanksgiving when I decided earlier this week to call him one more time. We played text-and-phone tag for a couple of hours yesterday, finally connecting this morning when he called me a little after 9.

I was still in bed when the phone rang. [Talking on the phone in bed is one of my favorite most luscious indulgences.] We spent an hour together. There were periods of silence. I didn't need to make him wrong. I didn't feel sorry for him. I didn't need to figure anything out or save him. I didn't need answers. I didn't have any advice. I wasn't nostalgic.

I didn't feel happy or relieved or hopeful or nervous or afraid.

I was just on the phone
with another human
in a world where it can be difficult to just "be" -- with myself or anyone else.

Resolution 2011

2010-12-30T14:07:00.003-06:00

I want to dance and sing until the end of Time.

To stand in the open with my head to the sky, breath bringing vitality to every cell of my being, sending my song out into the Forever pool to touch and blend with every Song.

To move and be moved by the endless dance of atoms....feet, hands, neck, hips, lips cavorting and waltzing and spinning, on and on and on.

Dancing and singing with You, in Your arms...

Gradual Clearing

2010-12-27T19:04:00.004-06:00

In this post-Landmark period, one week after my last direct exposure in the Advanced Course, I am sorting through what I "got" and attempting to de-clutter my head.

It's tricky: in any given moment, I recognize I'm using the tools of Landmark to de-clutter my thinking about Landmark. Very odd sensation...

One of the less slippery items, unequivocally identified as problematic, has to do with integrity. A lot of talk about integrity in Landmark....the phrase "you're only as good as your word" is passionately repeated. And yet, better than half of my interactions with Landmark staff and graduates, lack the integrity of "being true to your word."

Given the dominance of logic and justice as "personal tests" in my world view, witnessing inconsistency of action with word within the kingdom of Landmark is remarkable and troubling.

But it's not the lack of follow-through that bothers me most; more troubling than this, is the hypocrisy of holding this principle so close to the core of the teaching, repeating it to student/participants frequently and taking them to task when they stray from it, and creating an atmosphere that makes it difficult for leaders to be taken to task for similar infractions.

We all make mistakes. We all break promises. Acknowledgment and apology reduce potential stress, disappointment and inconvenience. I don't even mind being called out when I screw up -- but outside the framework of a reciprocal, mutual responsibility, it feels unfair and abusive. If integrity is important for the student, I think it's also important for the teacher.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The technology of Landmark Education has changed my life, modifying the architecture of my thinking in deep ways. It will take some time to sort the wheat from the chaff. And it feels like a necessary evaluation and elimination process -- there's definitely treasure for keeping and it would be tragic to let my displeasure with some features lead me to trash the entire thing.

It feels a little like teaching myself to talk.

Event Horizon

2010-12-16T15:01:00.009-06:00

What a time!

Tomorrow is my birthday. It's not a big deal this year .... except the idea of "quitting" (smoking)(again) persists...

I want to write the last of the three new songs I promised in the Landmark Effectiveness Seminar. I attended the last session on Monday and am very happy to be done with that ... experience.

Standing on the deck (at Barb and Pete's vineyard estate) this morning, some sort of insight or awareness about myself arrived: I finally acknowledged the "undies in a bundle" energy I've been carrying for a few weeks about Landmark Education. Not enough to wrinkle my brow or clench my teeth but extant nonetheless.

When the insight dawned today, it cracked me up.

The text for the last (next) song will be from Rilke. Here are the ones I'm considering:

Each mind fabricates itself.
We sense its limits, for we have made them.
And just when we would flee them, you come
and make of yourself an offering.

I don't want to think a place for you.
Speak to me from everywhere.
Your Gospel can be comprehended
without looking for its source.

When I go toward you
it is with my whole life.

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don't let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

[both from Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy]

Whichever text is chosen, I will write for piano and voice this time rather than guitar.

On Monday, instead of attending the final session of the Landmark Effectiveness Seminar, I will board a train bound for Oregon. My excitement and delight are boundless.

Creative focus throughout the journey will be fulfillment of my intention to be "visible in the world as a committed working artist and arts educator." Specifically, I'll spend my time a) polishing the new songs, b) writing my show, and c) mapping the next 12 months of my life/career.

Cup 'o Capo Magic

2010-11-19T19:07:00.004-06:00

Every now and then, magic happens.

Today, I'm composing a song in a key that's uncomfortable for my voice. My guitar technique and theory are amateur at best; I can't transpose.

I was really wishing I owned a capo.

Also, my D string is dying. I checked the little storage box in my guitar case for a D string

and found a capo.

I didn't realize I owned a capo. I had no idea. I have no memory of ever purchasing a capo. And, yet, just when I wished I had one, a capo appeared.

Work A Day

2010-11-16T16:14:00.007-06:00

OK. So, in part, reacting to the encounter with the Landmark Seminar leader discussed a couple of posts ago, my heart and mind hardened. It was not a painful development; I was not depressed or immobilized but my willingness to work diminished.

The internal chatter went something like this:

Ah ha! So the Leader is imperfect. Well, then. Landmark Education must also be imperfect. Therefore, I'm not going to listen any more. I'm going to sneer. I'll keep a correct face on but I'm sneering inside. I'm committed to sneering.

Among the several things I "got" during last night's Seminar was that while I was sneering, I was not getting any work done. When I considered why that was true, I discerned some other concurrent background chatter:

I just can't work unless I'm inspired. I can't force inspiration. Besides I can't work in this house: when she's home. I don't want her to hear me. I don't want her to come tell me she "really liked" whatever she heard. I'm not doing it for you! blah blah blah I need to smoke while I work...blah blah blah These songs aren't that important anyway; I've got other cool stuff happening in my life right now...

"Well," (I said to myself last night), "OK. Whatever. And I'd still really like to have those new songs I committed to create in my Seminar project. So I'm gonna go ahead and work on those songs while you/I sneer. OK? I'm not debating this is not the dreamed-for setting; I'm just saying I'm gonna go ahead and work in it 'cause it's the one I have right now."

And don't you know? Music came. Inspiration came. And remains solidly in this next day -- as, of course, it always does because, for me, once I begin the work, it's easier to work. I'm not facing a blank page. I have something begun before me and so I know where to put my hands.

Just before I picked up the guitar, I responded to an email from dear friend F.

I hoped to call you today but didn't commit to it
so, as the day unfolded and delivered a series of events that I called "strange" to my door step, I was distracted from the hoped-for agenda.

You are interested in "this god who visits and presences" me.

In a recent conversation with [a mutual friend], I said, "F______ is always ever the Poet." It was a comment on how I perceive your relationship to (and "use" of...dance with?) language....

It's also a comment on who I become with you.

I probably have it in me to write to you about "this god" tonight but I'm going to redirect/redistribute that vitality into music. It is late and I made a commitment tonight, to myself and a colleague in the Landmark Effectiveness Seminar, that I would show up every day, beginning tonight, to receive the three new mystical poem-songs that are part of the possibility I created and intention I set in the work of the Seminar.

So I'm going to light some candles
and pick up my guitar
and welcome Rumi
and consider the text

Keep Your Heart Awake

There are many whose eyes are awake
And whose hearts are asleep;
Yet, what can be seen
By mere creatures of water and clay?
But he who keeps his heart awake
Will know and live this mystery;
While the eyes of his head may sleep
His heart will open hundreds of eyes.
If your heart isn't yet illumined
Be awake always, be a seeker of the heart,
Be at war continually with your carnal soul.
But if your heart is already awakened,
Sleep peacefully, sleep in the arms of Love,
For your spiritual eye is not absent
From the seven heavens and seven directions.
MATHNAWI

...

We will talk soon.

I'll speak your name as I light the candles tonight.

Alex

It Was Always Me

2010-11-13T14:20:00.004-06:00

Sitting in the sun with my first cigarette a few moments ago, something happened. I was analyzing some situation in my life -- I don't even remember what it was now -- and became aware of myself as distinct from the situation.

This has happened before, a result of consciously reminding myself that something exists, a part of me, that does the thinking. But this time, the awareness arrived unbidden. A surprise. It was as though Thinker yawned and stretched and winked at me...and the eye was deeply familiar. The eye was my own. And the eye was full of snapshots and clips from all the places and people I've known. I was saturated with realized awareness that I was the common denominator in all those scenes; that I was there then and am still here now.

It felt like falling into something. Alice falling down the rabbit hole. Ka-thunk! I am.

Judging the Book (and other assessments) By Its Cover

2010-11-11T16:48:00.010-06:00

The rumbling in my stomach, fitful sleep and tear-stained-pillows-of-morning started almost from the moment I stepped into the role of Group Leader. There was no job description provided; no "Group Leader's Handbook" distributed; no contract outlining responsibilities and liabilities.

Not that I'm unfamiliar with being "the one": I'm an oldest child of four. I facilitate workshops and have consented several times in the past to be "song leader" at small group gatherings. I've entertained audiences of hundreds. But this experience, becoming Group Leader of a small group in Landmark Education's Effectiveness Seminar, was a first: consenting to lead a group with no advance knowledge of the purpose or objective of the group, for no pay. There's no need to ask "What could go wrong?" If I'd been permitted a glimpse into the future on the night I became leader and allowed to read that descriptive last sentence, I might never have accepted the role.

Then again...I might have (and did, in fact). Adventure, mystery, puzzles, surprises. I have an appetite for such things and often choose to move toward the Unknown and The Thing I Fear.

I'm no longer Group Leader. I resigned two days ago. The Seminar Leader suggests I did not resign; he suggests "quit" and "breaking [my] commitment/word" are the correct or accurate words for what I've done. Those words are OK; it's not confusing that an observer would use those words to describe my decision.

The rub is this: "resign" also occurs to me as a correct and accurate description. It is the Seminar Leader's inability to see it similarly that confuses me.

It's been said that Landmark Education is the land of "ass-kicking" and "two by fours." Never let it be said that I can't appreciate the value of ass-kicking and wielding a two by four; sometimes, those are the perfect antidotes to the clever, evasive maneuvers of human ego.

But

I believe there are other strategies more appropriate and effective in some situations. Landmark Education is a powerful technology, exposure to which has provoked amazing changes in my life already. Without knowing any particulars or details of my life story, Landmark technology has advanced my life cause.

Where I stand now, I crave some of the rigor inherent to the Landmark technology applied to the specific contour and content of my life. I am frustrated beneath the broad brush of "the Landmark Way." It's like wanting to dance but the band only knows how to play one song.

I confront my old yearning for recognition. The universality of the "human condition" permits generic approaches -- food, water, shelter, love, listening, laughter, etc. -- that deliver some benefit to most people in most situations. And what about the unique nature of the suffering or confusion or despair that a particular human experiences?

Somehow I had read Landmark to include an appreciation of this dimension. This week, it feels like a misreading. When the Seminar Leader suggested that I live in an "angry at the World" attitude (and that this attitude is a big source of suffering for me), it did not ring true. I suggested that he didn't know me well enough to offer that diagnosis (though I would not have had a problem accepting it as a ventured guess). My suggestion, as best I can understand from his subsequent coaching, fell in the category of "defensiveness."

So I have no authority with regard to defining how I see the world? To report how things look to me, if my report differs from how you think things look to me, is an attempt to sidestep the truth? Again, this is not a context that works or rings true for me. Ultimately, wouldn't that lead to a total evaporation of my "power"? But, the stated intention of the Education is to increase my "power, freedom and full self-expression"... I'm confused and, so far, have not found a corner of Landmark Education where this apparent discrepancy is addressed.

I am feeling neither heard nor seen inside the house of Landmark Education these days. I am still enamored of and awed by the possibilities for my life that have opened up as a result of my enrollment; I'll probably use some of these tools for he rest of my life.

And

I am coming to see that there are discrepancies between the Landmark Itinerary and my own and the Landmark Train can't take me everywhere I want to go. Trains don't run on water or traverse the sky. I can't see the wonders of the ocean's floor from a train or find the field where the ancestors gather to chant. I am, after all, Sojourner.

Grand Opening

2010-10-20T13:52:00.004-05:00

I have cleared what I viewed as the First Hurdle in the Landmark Effectiveness Seminar: I have created an intention.

My intention is to be visible in the World as a committed, working artist.

It's true -- I'm feeling "tah-dah" and invigorated and clear in mind like I'm standing on top of a mountain. It took a couple of weeks of drafting to come up with this stated intention. It started with something like "I will find or create a stream of gainful employment for myself" and evolved to the statement above. The process was provocative and the result is a statement that feels graceful and powerful to me.

And also

I am scared shit-less when I read it. Who am I kidding? How am I supposed to transform from a wannabe poser to a bonafied artist?

I am terrified, actually because it feels like my last stand. Like if I don't get my act together now, I might as well find a grenade to sit on.

I know this is not my last stand. Intellectually. I only feel like this is my last stand. I consider whether my fear is evidence that my intention is just more inauthenticity: me blowing smoke up my ass.

What is most significant to me, what I've decided to "go with," is the heightened power, freedom, strength, clarity, enthusiasm, willingness and confidence I feel when I say, aloud,

My intention is to be visible in the World as a committed, working artist.

Also significant, everyone who's heard my intention says they are, in the words of Landmark, "touched, moved and inspired" by it.

Yeah, I think I'll go with this.

Inauthenticity

2010-10-17T02:10:00.008-05:00

What is "inauthenticity"? The assignment is to find it. In myself. And to name it.

For two weeks I have walked with this unanswered question, let it tumble around inside me.

Group leaders in the Effectiveness Seminar teleconference once a week. Here's what I know about "inauthenticity" now, after this week's meeting. The Seminar Leader's discussion -- prompted by excellent questions from the Group Leaders -- was clear and dynamic and the light went on for me. I "got it".

Inauthenticity is self-generated. It is born and lives through me. It is estrangement: from God. From myself. From the heart of the world.

Ultimately, I can only come to know God through living out out out in in in
and out out in again
my consciousness breathing
God without and God within
God without and God within
Hallelujah

Whenever Inauthenticity occurs, I experience diminished vitality, diminished joy, loss of connection to...everything. I float alone in a mute universe, with only inner voices chattering, yammering, wailing...inside me. It is a cold place. Dying.

I found a feeling memory of my inauthenticity during the teleconference. How many times in how many years have I approached a new moment full of prejudging, peering at the world through the tight screen mesh of my fear?

Inauthenticity is not sin.

It is powered by human will. It is not as basic as breathing but is similarly automatic and happens in the blink of an eye: that woman walks into the room and I don't like her. It's immediate. And I immediately begin to build the case against her.

We almost can't help ourselves.

And, yet

we can.

It begins with the willingness to see. Then a commitment to seeing. Even when we're afraid. Especially when we're afraid; when we're afraid, we know that a self-preserving psychic instinct is very likely to kick in and we will respond from a primitive rather than an evolved awareness.

We find a still, clear space in the stifling wind of our fear and ... well, what do we do?

I can only speak for myself. I take a few very deep breaths to calm the psychic trembling. Something swirls white and cool/hot in my solar plexus and the crown of my head; it is my Will, reaching toward knowing. Saying "yes" to life. Saying "yes, I am here. I am not hiding. I want to play."

The flip side of every inauthenticity is possibility. That's why the assignment to identify and name every inauthenticity is so important. Inauthenticity is me choosing a cage instead of Possibility.

I'm still uncertain how to name particular occurrences of inauthenticity or whether the task is valuable. Finally apprehending the concept on both sensual and intellectual levels is a breakthrough for me. In the moment I understood the term, I was also aware of the impact of inauthenticity.

To recognize it is to immediately appreciate as well what Possibility means. The flip side of fear, bondage, smothering

is freedom, breath

Song.

Throw It Away

2010-10-14T21:30:00.003-05:00

I worked hard today. It feels good.

I read (and am re-reading) "The War of Art" (Steven Pressfield/Grand Central Publishing) and the book's teaching has grabbed me
shook me
slapped my face and kicked my ass.

And then embraced me, in that way that only deep, organic truth can.

In the language of the other compelling transformative agent currently driving me (and enlivening me), Landmark Education, I AM "touched, moved and inspired" by Steven Pressfield's writing AND by the message he brings.

So

today I showed up for myself. Got busy. Paid attention to my work, i.e., read all email and responded to most of it (including acceptance of a performance invitation for this Sunday); posted two Events on FaceBook; and did an hour of Internet research following up on suggestions received about the Petaluma Situation.

The Petaluma Situation bears capitalization on the basis of how thoroughly my day was devoted to it.

I did a playshop presentation at the Petaluma Unitarian Universalist Fellowship at the end of August. It was a lot of fun for everybody--but no one had more fun than I did. Not many weeks afterward, I was asked if I was available to facilitate a longer version playshop and my fee.

Of course I'm available. But what is my fee? I spent a few days in consultation with friends, drafted a proposal and sent it off. Over the next few days a few other friends weighed in on the topic recommending fees that far outstripped what I'd finally decided on. I felt a twinge of "damn! I undercut myself again!" but I got over it. They agreed to my conditions without modification.

A month has passed and yesterday I received an email from a church member. She was in attendance the Sunday I presented the 20-minute playshop. At the opening and offertory of that service I sang from my Rumi Songbook (working title for a developing catalog, about five songs currently, of Rumi and Hafiz poetry set to music). The woman wrote asking for song sheets of "my" songs for the choir; they are hoping to sing the songs during an upcoming service on poetry.

I don't have song sheets. Or, at least, I didn't have song sheets yesterday. I spent four hours today transcribing a song. I wouldn't have believed I could do it. But I did.

Still, the money part of the thing dangled. Do I charge for this? How much?

My friends' opinions ran the gamut. I was glad I asked them; having a variety of input enriched the decision-making process.

Someone mentioned I would need permission from the author/translator. I'm using Coleman Barks' The Essential Rumi (Castle Books). I looked for him on Facebook, hoping to drop him a line of inquiry. I couldn't find a portal. So I Googled him and landed at a website for Maypop where Barks says:

Please feel welcome to share with me your
comments, questions, and requests.
But be warned. I will probably NOT reply to your email, letter, or phone message, or acknowledge receiving it. This is not from a lack of interest or warmth, but out of necessity. I find that I cannot do my writing work if I try to respond to every message. It is the too-many-things-going-on-at-once situation of a Middle School Band Concert Day. By my next birthday (April 23, 2007) I will have used up the Biblical allotment (70 years). Rumi's complete Masnavi (six books, sixty-four thousand lines of poetry) looms over me as the work I need to be doing, rather than chatting the day away on email.

But I left him a note anyway.

Within the hour, I received an email from him granting his permission to use the translation without charge. We exchanged four or five more short amiable messages. As if email correspondence with Coleman Barks' was not excitement and gift enough for one day, the last email of the exchange resonated at the same timbre as The War of Art and set me to the current blog post. He wrote:

So you have to give them away too. It's insidious.

His words reminded me of Abbey Lincoln's song. I found it online...and cried as I listened.

Why California Gets On My Nerves

2010-10-12T12:03:00.004-05:00

Call 'em inconsistencies or complexities...

or hypocrisy of the most insidious variety. Liberals who think of themselves as progressive and, due to either unwillingness or lack of capacity for self-reflection, are completely blind to their narcissistic rut. Saving the earth by buying the "green" variety of more stuff they don't need.... Complaining about the arrogance of American foreign policy and patronizing "the homeless," e.g., never giving "them" money because they'll buy something Liberals don't approve of...

I find more of these people in CA on any given day than I ever encountered in New Orleans.

Yes, I'm missing New Orleans today.

Hurts So Good

2010-10-12T11:06:00.004-05:00

The last thing I fed my head before falling asleep last night was the first half of Steven Pressfield's The War of Art. Who knows what it did to my dreaming -- not even a fragment of a dream remains this morning -- but I have no doubt it was the prod that shoved me awake around 5:30 a.m.

For half an hour, I alternated between sitting and staring and lying down and staring. It's four hours later now and I've forgotten most of whatever thoughts I entertained. I remember reflecting disinterestedly on the events of yesterday...holding up little snippets of episode and considering them through the filter of NVC (NonViolent Communication)...observing the bubbly rumbling in my gut.

"I want more of that book!" was both a thought and an instantaneous hunger. I hopped up and got the coffee started, unpacking the dishwasher while the espresso machine labored. Outside the window, in the new day's first light, a man older than me strode by with a determined look on his face, his arms pumping.

On the porch, with coffee and cigarettes, I read

It's one thing to lie to ourselves. It's another thing to believe it.

and

Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.

and

Resistance will tell you anything to keep you from doing your work....Resistance has no conscience. It will pledge anything to get a deal, then double-cross you as soon as your back is turned. ...Resistance is always lying and always full of shit.

and, finally

Are you a born writer? Were you put on earth to be a painter, a scientist, an apostle of peace? In the end the question can only be answered by action.
Do it or don't do it.
It may help to think of it this way. If you were meant to cure cancer or write a symphony or crack cold fusion and you don't do it, you not only hurt yourself, even destroy yourself. You hurt your children. You hurt me. You hurt the planet.
You shame the angels who watch over you and you spite the Almighty, who created you and only you with your unique gifts, for the sole purpose of nudging the human race one millimeter farther along its path back to God.
Creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It's a gift to the world and every being in it. Don't cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you've got.

All I can say is "Let's do this" and "Thanks, V____" (who gave me the book) and "Thanks, Steven" (who wrote the book).

Teasing Out Leadership

2010-10-07T14:05:00.007-05:00

Every time I tell the mystery story about my becoming leader of a small subgroup of the Landmark Seminar I'm attending and I say "So, somehow, I became the Group leader,"

the response is the same: a chuckle and something along the lines of "Oh, Alex. 'Somehow'? I'm not surprised at all that you would be leader in any group you're part of."

The comment only deepens the mystery surrounding this development in my life.

Yes, I often present as articulate and strong and smart and willing. And, yes, I'm a good listener. And, yes, I have pretty good "big picture" visual acuity plus good "heart of the matter" visual acuity. All of these traits would be good to find in a leader. I've seen these traits in the leaders I respect and admire.

But I generally resist stepping into a leadership position when I find myself in situations where leadership is sorely needed. It happens a lot.

For one thing, groups generally have some work they're about. The thought of shepherding diverse personalities through a creative process is daunting. I think about everything I've learned about "dealing" with people over the years, all the rules and guidelines gleaned from my upbringing and therapy and human development classes/workshops I've attended and granola/new age/cosmic literature I've read.

"I" statements. Asking rather than telling. Listening without judgment. Time management. "Handling" difficult people. Holding the space. Making sure all voices have a chance to be heard. Supporting and encouraging each individual member for the good of the whole. Maintaining an attitude of service. Patience.

A lot to remember. A lot of lines to memorize.

Willingly pledging to lead while keeping all of these guidelines in mind has always looked to me like becoming someone else, becoming someone other than who I believe myself to be. A role taken on, a full suit of clothing donned. I have believed the grumbling, critical, resigned, hopeless outsider "racket" that typically started up in me whenever I found myself in a leader-less group, was the "real" me. All that patience and holding space and "I" statements crap was some stuff I knew about but not a description of the "real" me.

As the current essential transformation continues to play out in my life, almost everything looks different.

My becoming Group Leader isn't such a spooky and mysterious development.

I played the scene over again in my head this morning (as I have frequently over the last two weeks): Five people sat down in a small circle of chairs with the assignment to "choose a leader." No one said anything but the five of us looked at each other. Finally L______ said something like "Is anyone interested in being Leader?" and I said "Well, I'm interested," meaning Leadership as a phenom has interested me for most of my life.

"Good," she replied. "You can be leader." And so it was done.

Like I said, usually I resist and avoid leadership. I mean that both ways: I question authority and, although I will voice an opinion and claim authority in an isolated instance, I resist that position as a formalized, ongoing arrangement.

The difference this time is the context. This instance occurs in the framework of an educational system in which I've enrolled. The act of leading and my thoughts about it are highly relevant, experiential components of this system.

And I'm not doing it alone. I am neither leading nor exploring leadership alone. It is not a question of me being too "intense" or "deep" or "serious" about something. Intense depth (and expansiveness) is expected here; everybody in Landmark is ostensibly about intense, pervasive transformation.

Five people gathered and one person was interested in leading. A simple process of elimination, in a way. A logical and fitting development.

And, already, the flotsam and jetsam of our personalities have begun to litter the water and bump the sides of our little boat. This time, though, rather than analyzing the psychology and neuroses of group members, my focus is on what we have come together to do. The things I say, how and when I say them, and the how-when-what of the group members' statements and actions are important relative to how they serve or obstruct the work at hand.

We're meeting as a complete group for the first time this coming Monday. I invited the group to come to my house, a house that doesn't actually belong to me...a place that mostly feels like a situation where I'm avoiding and resisting taking leadership.

Which is not relevant to the work of the group.

I'll serve tea.

Storm Tracking

2010-10-03T13:00:00.012-05:00

I woke up feeling lost and anxious. "What?!" Making coffee, checking email, washing my face. Inside my head the voice barks "What?!"

The current Landmark Seminar is on "Effectiveness" and the Intention of the seminar is "For you to develop the capacity to create intentions from possibility and be effective at translating those intentions into results over time." Yes, "over time."

As the leader elaborated on the mission of the Seminar, what yanked my chain hard enough to propel me out of my chair and up to the microphone to share was a concept he calls "turbulence"--those periods when whatever we're doing isn't going the way we want it to. Without making light of the critical roles of creating the intention and seeing possibility, for me, hanging tough through turbulence is the pivotal moment in the process of translating an intention into results.

The mess in my gut and head this morning is the first real turbulence I've experienced since graduating the Landmark Forum. The particulars of my current lifestyle are far from extraordinary (and I DO want an extraordinary life!) but I've taken it all in stride for months. Fueled by what I learned in the Forum, as well as NVC reading and training, nothing has felt like true turbulence. Turbulence is the abject fear of dying that arises when the plane is lurching and things are falling and there's nothing I can do and I know I'm gonna die.

I'm in the house alone this morning and the mantra I muttered to the lonely walls while making coffee was this: "I've got to get out of here!"

I carried my coffee and cigarettes and cell phone to the front porch, muttering "I've got to get out of here!" And a lost, anxious "What?! How?!" whined breathlessly in response from a distant back room in my head.

Browsing the Contacts on the cell phone, I started deleting names. I pressed talked when M______'s name came up and listened to his outgoing message: "I'm usually far too busy to come to the phone when it rings so tell me why you called and I'll call ...." OK. "I'm calling to say hello...."

I left the message and hung up and I realized I was scanning my Contacts looking for somewhere to send an S.O.S.

And "turbulence" came to mind. Yeah. I'm experiencing turbulence.

Nothing has changed since yesterday. It's the same world and the same set of circumstances and today it feels like turbulence. The changed element is how the world looks and feels to me. That would mean...it's me; the turbulence resides in my thinking. It's the "meaning-making machine" that Landmark identifies at work. It's me, busy figuring things out: categorizing, evaluating, assessing. And doing it based on old, familiar stories I've told myself forever and unmet needs.

And the process and results of this meaning making manifest in my life this morning as a feeling of turbulence.

The strength of the resolve driving the process of creating effective results is determined by the integrity I bring to the process. Integrity = Being true to my word and committed to maintaining an empowered internal context. "What does that mean?" is the central question this morning.

It means awareness that there are things I know
and things I don't know
but mostly there is a vast universe of unknowns that I'm not even aware of

There's more space out there
more possibility
more freedom

It means saying "yes." There's nothing to "fix." Things are the way they are. Yes. Things are the way they are. This is my life. Say "yes."

I feel the shift. Nothing shifts when I try to understand myself or try to change my thinking. The trying becomes an all-consuming endeavor. I stop trying and say "yes" and I feel a shift.

"Yes" to what? To nothing. To everything. It's the power of "yes." Everything opens. The struggle ends. The search ceases. I arrive. Life begins.

[Note: M___ just called me back. It was a sweet intimate telephonic experience. I love when that happens.]

I did a Google Image Search on "affirmation" to find something to insert at this point in the blog. Here's the one that hooked me:

Thought I was a teapot but
oops
I'm a sugar bowl.

Say "yes."

Not Like Anything I Knew

2010-09-28T16:16:00.008-05:00

Last night I drove to Santa Cruz and attended the first session of a ten-week seminar on "Effectiveness" being offered by Landmark Education.

Earlier today, drinking coffee on the front porch, a feeling slowly invaded me and produced the thought "I think I drank the Kool-Aid."

People who "believe" in Landmark often remark that personal transformation begins from the moment of registration for a Landmark workshop or seminar. I've experienced it myself. I actually felt lighter, like I weighed less, after my first telephone conversation with a Landmark representative who called to acknowledge receipt of my enrollment packet.

That sensation hasn't happened much since then. More often now, I hang up the phone (or, sometimes, leave the in-person encounter) thinking "Huh? That was weird." And, then just forget about it.

When the Kool-Aid feeling started today, I was reflecting on mental notes about last night's meeting. I remembered the broad waves of laughter that frequently washed through the room and the unabashed sales pitches by the seminar leader. At the end of the evening, we broke out into groups of 5 or 6 and designated a leader for each group.

I became the leader for my group and today the way in which that came to be looked spooky to me: the five of us sat down and no one said a word for awhile. Finally L_____ (one of three group members who have attended Santa Cruz Landmark seminars for many years) said, "So is anyone interested in leading?" I said that I was interested and, almost in unison, A___ , L____ and M____ said, "Great! You can be leader." How did they get me to do that? I wondered, sipping coffee 15 hours later.

I finished my coffee and sat down at the piano. Bach, Chopin and Schumann have been my focus for a few months now but I chose Debussy today. I was not in the mood to exercise precision of technique, time and timbre; I wanted to experience an impressionistic swirl of sound and emotion.

It doesn't happen every time I play but today I found a deeper road into the Sarabande movement of the Pour Le Piano suite. I was attempting a strict rendering of the dynamic markings assigned in the Dover publication I work from. When staccato and pedal and volume and phrasing and tempo were all observed and honored, a new articulation emerged. It was like seeing a brand new world.

The fundamental motivation driving my involvement with Landmark is readiness and longing for transformation. Yet it would seem that when I find myself transformed--taking on leadership of a group of strangers, for example-- skepticism or resistance arises.

In the form of NVC*, I looked first for an objective view of last night's events. What did I observe?

A room full of people laughing at something I either didn't understand or didn't find funny
A man announcing registration discounts through a lavalier microphone
Four people sitting silently in a circle of chairs with me
Me saying "I'm interested in the idea"

And what feeling did I experience in each instance? What was the need underlying each feeling?

lonely from the (unmet) need to belong
embarrassed from the (unmet) need to avoid money (maybe this is actually 'fear'?)
peaceful and free from the (met) need to belong and to be held in positive regard without effort
powerful, realized, inspired from the (met) need for learning, expansion, growth and challenge

I've experienced Breakthrough many times as a musician and performing artist. It doesn't scare me. I have experienced spontaneous peak moments of grace, good fortune and joy in my life and, at the time, referred to them as experiences of Breakthrough. What I "got" last night is that unless my will is applied to the situation, it's not Breakthrough. I can want or need something; I can even be happy and grateful when it serendipitously shows up on my doorstep. Something nice happens -- but I am fundamentally unchanged.

The essential characteristic of Breakthrough is that it shatters the status quo and changes the life it held in bondage. It's not about an alteration in what's happening around me-- although it's common for people to change the world around them as a result of what springs forth from their Breakthrough. It's about an alteration in how the world looks to me and how I look to myself and what I create.

A friend who teaches ballet at a local college called while I was out last night. Her regular pianist is no longer available for two classes and she has invited me to take those two classes! This is a very old dream come true. I started fantasizing about being a dance class pianist from the time I learned such a thing existed, probably from some 50s movie or TV.

The gig starts immediately. I'll go to the administrative offices tomorrow to complete paperwork and get the lay of the land. Eight o'clock Wednesday morning I'll play the first class.

This won't be the last time in the transformation that's turning my life that I'll be provoked to fear I suspect, as the shackles of the old ways fall away and I get acquainted with Freedom. I will see myself in a new light and wonder "Who is that woman in the mirror?" I'll learn again and again that Transformation = Change ...

*Non-Violent Communication

So What Are You Gonna Do?

2010-09-24T21:46:00.006-05:00

After 3 and a half days in bed as a vigorous cold made it's way through my system, I am recovered enough to wander as far as the front porch for a cigarette. A little while ago, blowing smoke rings and watching the moon rise and stars blink on, I noticed a numb tingling in my left foot.

"I'm done!" I said aloud to the listening night. "I quit." I knew without a moment's consideration that the tingling was one more firm but gentle entreaty from my body to give up cigarettes.

A major psychological turning has been underway in my life since completing the Landmark Forum and attending the NonViolent Communication Diversity Retreat. Until the cold struck on Monday, I had enjoyed almost two months of exceptional mental, spiritual and physical vitality. Dreaming and motivated to take steps to bring dreams into reality. New piano music compositions, designing a brochure, initiating process to launch a website, into the studio to make a demo recording, facilitating workshops and presenting/performing for Sunday morning UU gatherings.

The fresh energy of this time is notable for the freedom I feel in it. I'm busy but not for the money or to "look busy"; everything I'm doing is motivated by inner curiosity, inspiration, gratitude or recognition of the incomplete places in the world, places where the world is waiting for me.

At last, life feels possible. I appreciate the simple miracle and unfettered potential of my existence -- not as a caption on a card from a Daily Affirmations deck that I chant with morning coffee and hope that it sticks. More like a fundamental, essential awareness that my life is a paradox, its unfolding shaped as much by mysteries beyond my control as by the choices I make. It's amazing. And also, it just is. I cannot predict tomorrow AND I create tomorrow.

I don't need an Affirmation card to remind me. I can't forget it now. It's in my bones. In my dreams.

Last night I dreamed I was seated in some kind of auditorium with the seats spaced in a comfortable if unorthodox arrangement. I was there with other people; no one I recognized. I was happy. My smile was a warm, bright glow. My mouth was open. Suddenly and very quickly, the entire space became a vacuum and it felt like my lungs, veins and arteries, ear canals, intestinal tract, and every cell of my body was sucked clean.

The uptake lasted perhaps 3 seconds but even before it ended my mind was singing: "The smoke is gone!"

Something out of my control could happen to interrupt my smoking habit. Life is mystery and surprise. In the part of my life that I control, I could choose to stop smoking before Mystery stops me. In the future that I am envisioning and creating, I am not tethered to an oxygen machine or bound to a wheelchair with one leg amputated.

I "get it" more clearly than ever now that I am really here, in a fragile, nonrefundable, nonrenewable body; that what I put in this body, what I subject it to is governed by cause and effect.

I get to make choices and I get to experience the effects of the causes I create.

Natural Compassion

2010-09-13T14:04:00.004-05:00

In "Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life" Marshall Rosenberg speaks of "natural compassion." He says

Believing that it is our nature to enjoy giving and receiving in a compassionate manner, I have been preoccupied most of my life with two questions. What happens to disconnect us from our compassionate nature, ...? And...what allows some people to stay connected to their compassionate nature under even the most trying circumstances?

My first response to the concept of an innate compassion in all people was "Ahhhh, the world is a beautiful place."

My second thought was "Really? Is it true?" followed by "How can that be known?"

From there, my thought process flowed to considerations of myself: do I find a compassionate nature in myself? Yes, I am alive to compassion as part of my nature.

Among other natural inclinations.

Today, over and over again in every "today" miraculously granted me, I can choose to stand for compassion because compassion is part of my nature.

I cannot "act" compassionately. It is not a mask to wear. It is a part of my nature that I must know and own and choose to embrace so completely that I am absorbed as I absorb it.

I choose away from it sometimes. With varying degrees of conscious awareness of my choice.

Trying to become compassionate is exhausting and doomed because compassion never has a chance to appear while we are "trying" to become compassionate. We are already compassionate. It lives in us. The quest is to discover or remember it.

Dream Prism

2010-08-30T16:08:00.005-05:00

Over a week ago now, I had "one of those dreams"--the kind I wake from feeling saturated by the dream, as though it had lived in me for many days before choosing a night to play out while I slept and dream me for hours.

No connective narrative remained after I awoke. Only three strong pieces:

SHARE is a magical word, a talisman permitting access to multiple conceptual spaces. I extend my arm towards you with something in my hand -- this is sharing. You extend your arm toward me with something in your hand -- this, too, is sharing. We stand together and face the same direction to share a view. [There are other extrapolations available but only these three were offered in the dream.]

HOME is both a concept and a feeling.

SATURN. In the dream, the planet had two (and sometimes three) rings. Depending on how I held my focus, the rings either circled the planet or became dissecting discs. An omnipresent but disembodied voice periodically intoned "You can draw Saturn." I stood in a vast dark space saying aloud "I can draw Saturn!" and "I can draw Saturn?"

****************

Sharing the dream with others has led to discovery of an excellent book, "Saturn: A New Look at an Old Devil"; as well as a reminder of the multiple meanings of "draw"; and a reflection that this is a typically multi-faceted dream whose theme happens to be the multi-faceted nature of language and other things.

This dream is a keeper. I'm beginning work on a one-woman show and I believe this dream has material for plumbing.

Surprise Attack

2010-08-26T14:23:00.006-05:00

As I begin to integrate what I learned while attending the Landmark Forum in July and the Non-Violent Communication Diversity training in August into the day-to-day realm, a tingly transformation is taking place. In body and mind, I'm feeling rejuvenated, inspired and....

happy.

I'm in the world and, for the first time in memory since early childhood, unequivocally glad to be here. It feels now like I've been walking around with a broken heart, ill-fitting shoes and a back ache and trying very hard to make the best of the situation. Reaching deep inside myself for scraps of this and that to construct an inadequate but workable frame for my existence.

Yesterday a friend spoke to me of his readiness to move to a cave and speak to no one and live in peace with his incense, candles and spiritual practice. Of course I understood him: that's been my fantasy for a very long time. A cave outfitted with my books and a piano and a comfortable sleeping space. It was my most cherished dream and most potent longing for a long time.

That has changed and is actively morphing even as I write these words. I am on the edge of my seat with unparalleled willingness and curiosity about The World. I am in the world and of the world and that's just fine with me. The world looks fascinating and messy and fertile and scary and hilarious and rewarding to me today and I feel like I have what it takes to be in it.

I can go wherever I want to go. Maybe I'll be the star of the show when I arrive--or maybe I'll be eaten alive! Maybe I'll find the necklace I lost on family vacation 45 years ago or "that [yet to arrive] man o' mine" or the ultimate red beans and rice recipe.

I anticipate surprises to come. I don't mean someone misunderstanding me or being "fired" or a Cat 5 hurricane. Not even an assassination or election of the first woman to the U.S. presidency will qualify as surprises. We know these things are coming; it's just a matter of time.

I mean something completely unexpected. Something that's gonna take my breath away and make my eyes pop wide open. I anticipate I'm in for surprises -- and they won't all be jolly surprises because I'm not seeking a 24-hours-a-day jolly set-up for my life. I'm seeking juicy and provocative and poignant and obscene surprises as well.

There was an exasperated "Why am I here?" whining in the background of my life and it's gone. Maybe you and I will run into each other out in the wide, wide world of possibilities and I'll tell you about what's replaced it.

What About God?

2010-08-18T18:35:00.007-05:00

Last night I was a Guest. Friends served a light supper consisting largely of vegetables fresh from their own garden. We sat at a beautiful wooden table in their dining room, sipping chardonnay and watching the sun fall into the Pacific from high in the Oakland Hills. Every detail of the experience was exquisite.

We haven't seen each other since I left Oakland in 2004. By dinner time, my historical narration had advanced to discussion of my recent introductions to the Landmark Forum and Non-Violent Communication (Search on any of these as keywords to access earlier relevant posts). Somewhere during the unfolding of "Life is empty and meaningless" one of my hosts confessed that she is "a worrier." She said "Horrible things happen in the world and it's not because I make them up or call them "horrible."

We talked for awhile--me offering examples of horrible events that could be viewed in a very different light by another set of eyes with a different history or driven by a different combination of needs.

Out of the blue (from my perspective), she asked "What about God?"

I don't remember where the conversation went from there, but the question returned to me this afternoon. I called a friend whose strongly Buddhism-based spiritual practice is evident even in the outgoing telephone message I heard when I called him around 4. In a calm, natural tone, his voice said, "Good Day to you. Thank you for calling. Let me know what's on your mind by leaving a message and I will get it. Thanks."

After leaving a brief invitation to come with me on Sunday for the service I will do at the Petaluma Unitarian Universalist church, I hung up and reflected on all the work both of us have done in churches--mostly UU for me; mostly Catholic for him. We are both primarily musicians. We've both had love-hate relationships with a variety of faith traditions. We've both had periods of hard-core theism and adamant agnosticism over the years.

I wrote a thesis on my personal theology as a final assignment in the Bachelor of Arts Completion (BAC) program at the CA Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) over 10 years ago. I wonder if I still have a copy of it...

A great deal of insight and inspiration are currently pouring into my life. If God is a set of beliefs in a concept that produces a feeling of safety and brings purpose and meaning to life, then I could say I am having a close encounter with God these days.

There is no sense of a distinct entity of superior intelligence or power. No question of right or wrong winds through my sensorium. I feel simultaneously held and free, in a vast, intimate unfolding.

Trainers and participants shared a ritual one night during the retreat. Various objects--dry leaves, empty bowl, silk scarf--were placed on the floor on a large cloth. Those who wished could take a turn and engage with the objects in an expression or prayer. On my turn, I was profoundly surprised to hear myself invoking "hope" verbally while feeling "full of hope." It is not a sensation I have felt for a very long time. For years, "hope" appeared in my language as "I don't do 'hope'".

"There is no safety." "I don't do 'hope'."

That's been my byline.

This afternoon, as at the retreat ritual, I'm flooded with a new sensation: I am safe and full of hope. I see my own fingerprints on the suffering of my life. I feel my heartbeat and hear my voice in the choices I make and the events of my life. I am alive. I am part of everything. These points of awareness feel like Divine presence. Like there is no further proof needed and I can breathe and smile. I am free.

Need

2010-08-18T16:02:00.004-05:00

I spent last week in the Santa Cruz Mountains at a "Non Violent Communication and Diversity" training retreat. The event was staged at the Pema Osel Ling retreat center, a beautiful campus in a 100+ acre redwood forest.

Like many other "people of color," I cringe when I hear the phrase "diversity training". We've attended too many of them, for one thing. For another, it's hard to detect any growth or change or transformation in ourselves or the world after attending. Eventually, one begins to wonder "What's the point?" of diversity training.

This training was a different kind of training for me and, based on conversations with other participants, also for the other road-weary people of color who attended. One of the first notable differences was the racial and ethnic demographics of both the trainer-group and the participant-group. People of color formed the majority in both cases.

A second important difference was the NVC frame in which the training took place. NVC is based on a number of fundamental beliefs, such as:

all humans have needs
needs are the underlying motivation for thoughts and feelings and behavior
clarification of the needs at work in an encounter can be achieved through empathic listening
awareness of needs (and their attendant thoughts and emotions) makes non-violent communication possible

Not long before attending the training, I was in a difficult conversation with a friend and stated that I was annoyed by her "neediness." She said she believes that everyone is "needy" and people who are impatient with neediness should "get over it." This was a new perspective on "need" and I've thought about it a lot since that day. The NVC training was a continuation of my contemplation.

Is "neediness" the same as "need"? I realize now that, for my friend (who is also familiar with NVC principles), the answer might be "yes" but, for me, they are not the same.

NVC teaches that awareness of an unmet need, in myself or someone else, does not carry a requirement or assumption that the need be met. I might, for example, notice that as I approach a podium to speak to a large group, I am feeling some fear and that this fear is based on needs to be perceived as competent, to receive approval and respect, to be noticed, etc. I can request that the audience members give me their attention, that they not interrupt me, etc. in an attempt to meet my active needs BUT there is no guarantee the audience will grant the request and I make the request with that understanding. To whatever degree I make the request with an assumption or hidden demand that it be fulfilled, I have become "needy". And this is the difference I appreciate between the terms.

One of the world-rocking and comforting precepts of both NVC and the Landmark Forum is the limited (sometimes non-existent) relevance of "right" and "wrong" in the realm of human interaction. My friend and I can hold different definitions of "need" and "needy" and "neediness" and neither of us is wrong; we simply see things differently from where we stand. Neither of us must carry the burden of trying to convince the other to adopt our point of view.

I was reminded again of my experience during the Landmark Forum when the trainer told the story of meeting his wife. "I will never need you" they promised each other during their wedding ceremony. Nuances of the vow become apparent when considered through the lens of NVC. "I will never need you expands to: "During the time we are together, I may experience needs for recognition, comfort, beauty, consolation, entertainment, companionship, encouragement... I promise to never merge my needs with who you are. I promise not to hold you responsible for meeting my needs."

What would the World be like if everyone everywhere took this vow?

Alex is Scary

2010-08-04T15:00:00.018-05:00

Last night's "Six Feet Under" viewing marathon included the disturbing episode from the fourth season entitled "That's My Dog." Yikes! That was, without a doubt, one of the scariest things I've ever seen on film. My heart raced, my breathing became quick and shallow, my palms sweated. Emotionally, my thoughts and feelings veered recklessly from terror to anxiety to grief to horror... A cacophony of voices screamed a collision of messages inside me, "I can't take any more!" "Don't say that! You'll jinx him!" "Pray!" "I don't have to watch this!" "Please!"

I couldn't press "Pause" or "Stop" because I had to hang on and see a happy ending. Otherwise I would be haunted for god-knows-how-long with whatever horrific conclusions my imagination would create.

This morning I'm left with residual physical and emotional distress. (I probably should NOT be drinking this excellent cup of Starbucks' Gazebo Summer Blend espresso...but I am.) Thinking about fear and the differences in individual definitions of and responses to scary things. Thinking about times in the past when I've been told I am scary or intimidating. Sometimes, I only sense that someone is afraid of me. They don't actually say "I'm afraid" or "I'm afraid of you"; the manifestation of the fear, for me, comes as a change in the air or electrical field that surrounds and permeates me and the other person.

They might say "You're intense" or "I'm offended" or "That's inappropriate" or "I don't want to talk about this"; but what I observe is nervousness in the eyes, a tensing of facial muscles, quickening breath and sometimes mild trembling. Sometimes the display looks like anger. Sometimes it looks like sadness. Sometimes it looks like superiority.

My host here and I had an encounter yesterday. The details aren't important in the current discussion. In Landmark Forum parlance, discussing the details would be "running a racket." Discussing the details would be, at base, an attempt to demonstrate I am right and she is wrong. If you accept this viewpoint--and I do--the more compelling and relevant discussion begins with an examination of my experience of the encounter. What meaning did I make around the experience?

Within seconds of perceiving what I understood as fear in her, I ended the conversation. I saw it in her eyes, felt it on my skin and in the air between us. I felt a little nauseous and also frightened. I said "It's okay. We don't have to talk about this" and left the room.

What escaped my notice at the time but sparkles with truth today is my own fear in the situation. At the root of my "story" in the moment was "I don't want you to be afraid of me. If you are afraid of me I must be a scary person--awful, flawed, terrible...and unlove-able." The feeling was profoundly unpleasant. Definitely an experience of suffering.

To continue the Landmark translation: a "racket" consists of "a fixed way of being + a persistent complaint." Despite refraining from a detailed discussion of who-said-what in this post (or anywhere), I am "running a racket" internally. Running the "I'm right, she's wrong" scene inside my own mind, for my private "enjoyment."

Running a racket involves both payoff and costs. The pay-off is self-righteousness. The costs include losses of intimacy, full self-expression and vitality.

This morning's breakthrough is a full awareness of the costs. I think of yesterday's encounter and feel immensely isolated and stifled. I feel heavy and psychically depleted.

In the last few days, two weeks post-Landmark Forum, I have focused on abandoning the "fixed way[s] of being" and "persistent complaint[s]" of the past and creating a new future for myself, out in the vast universe of possibility. I've struggled in this project because my fixed ways of being are...well, persistent. I've been baffled by how exactly abandonment is accomplished. It's reminded me of trying to remove chewing gum from the bottom of my shoe without using my hands.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A smile has been growing on my face for the last 15 minutes or so. A cool, fresh feeling of freedom has begun to invigorate and invade my psyche.

I am alone in the house; my host is away for the day. When I awoke to the empty house today I was relieved -- and simultaneously dreaded her eventual return. In this moment, I'm looking forward to her return because I'm no longer afraid or angry or exhausted. Somehow, acknowledging that I felt afraid during the encounter has shifted something inside me. Feeling the loss of intimacy, self-expression and vitality--actually feeling it still, hours later, in my body--has deepened my understanding of "racket running."

I "get" it. I know where it lives in me and I have stepped into another space.

My learning has been facilitated by a physical experience of the intellectual construct. It's like finally found the dress hanging in the back of the closet and put it on. And laid it aside.

I have designed a new dress and I can't wait to wear it in the world. Not in expectation of the world's approval or rejection but because I love this dress; I made it, it feels great and I know I wear it well.

A Fork in the Road

2010-08-02T15:33:00.006-05:00

I am making my way through a viewing of the entire TV series "Six Feet Under" on DVD. Someone dies at the beginning of each episode, followed by a screen stating the name and bookend dates of the deceased's existence.

The central characters of the series own a funeral parlor and most episodes launch from their planning consultation with the survivors. We learn a little about the life of the deceased during the consultation scene and sometimes a bit more during the memorial service.

The show has sparked some consideration of my own death, specifically "What will they say about me at my memorial service?" In every version of my imagined memorial service, something is said about "Alex' search for sustaining and meaningful work." It's been the centerpiece of my adult life and close friends have gotten an earful over the years about my successes and failures and longing.

Through my work in the Landmark Forum I gained a deeper appreciation of some critical aspects of my work saga. It's always been something of a mystery to me how a powerful resume and an impressive presentation in interviews have been insufficient to open the right career doors. Beginning in high school and continuing to the present day, I have looked like a "winner" to most people -- but my real-life story has been a losing one.

**********************

Twelve hours later...

There are no guarantees. I could die in my sleep tonight.

I want Them to say "She struggled for a long time but she finally won."

Tomorrow my work begins.

Landmark Education: What I "Got" From the Forum

2010-07-25T14:54:00.012-05:00

Last weekend, through the generous contributions of two friends, I attended Landmark Education's Forum in San Jose. Three days plus one night of ...

Friends have urged me toward Landmark for at least 15 years. Initially I resisted because it felt like a cult to me. After awhile, I noticed there was something "special" about everyone I knew who had gone through Landmark and I wanted some of that specialness for myself. I was taking antidepressant medication at the time and had one hospitalization for depression in my past. Landmark policy at that time (late 90s) precluded participation by "people like me."

It is interesting to me that not a soul mentioned Landmark to me during my time in Louisiana or Mississippi. I have some thoughts about that but will save them for some other time.

Soon after arriving in CA this year, the Landmark suggestions started again. Sometimes they were prompted by something I said: "You know you ought to look at Landmark Education, Alex. That kind of thinking is right in line with what Landmark teaches." Sometimes they were prompted by the way I said something: "You'd make a great Landmark Forum leader!" And sometimes they were prompted by something I was struggling with. "Landmark could help you with that..."

So I decided to give it a try. It was the smartest decision of my life. Paying my enrollment fee was the kindest, most generous life-saving gift anyone has ever given me.

As with any system or organization, Landmark has its own jargon: running a racket, meaning-making machine, story, etc. Most of the concepts the jargon treats, however, were not new for me. Concepts like taking responsibility for your sh*t, the impact of personal history and beliefs on our perception of reality and the havoc that results when what we say is out of integrity with what we do.

Applicants to the Landmark Forum are asked to state their objectives for enrollment on the registration form. I was seeking clarification in my process to discern a life work. After decades of struggling to find work, keep work and financially support myself, I was running out of steam and ready for a change. My whole life, lots of other people had regarded me as a powerhouse of talent and potential -- why couldn't I see what they saw and why wasn't all that talent and potential translating into joy and prosperity?

*******************

What I "got" from the Landmark Forum (and this is in no way an exhaustive list. It is the nature of the gift of Landmark (essentially a process of awakening to yourself) to reverberate and continue to stimulate new awareness):

There's "what I know" and "what I know that I don't know" and then there's the vast universe of "what I don't know that I don't know" which can be thought of as a space of being or potential--and that's where I want to hang out as much as possible.
I am a meaning-making machine and in the same way that a toaster or a lawn mower or a washing machine toasts or mows or washes, my machine makes meaning. It's just what it does. There's no problem.
My "view" of the world derives from various sources and my thoughts, actions and feelings will always be in keeping with that view. My thoughts, actions and feelings produce "results" in the world. To change undesirable results, I change my thoughts, actions and feelings. To change my thoughts, actions and feelings, I change my "view".
All of the above also applies to everybody else. Nobody ever sees exactly what I see because their machine and view are unique; they see what they see. Sometimes there's agreement -- this is remarkable. Sometimes there's disagreement -- this is not a problem. It's just the way it is.

The Forum leader, Jan McHenry, was awe-inspiring. He walked the talk without exception. I liked him, then loved him, then was annoyed by him, resented him...and then loved him again. He stayed true throughout, modeling the freedom that's right here, all the time, available to all of us.

Two of several shimmering moments for me during the Forum:

Jan asked everyone in the room age 25 or younger to stand up. Perhaps a dozen of the approximately 100 people in the room stood up. "These are your parents when you were born," he said. In my head, walls fell down, lights went on, my heart broke open. I "got" it. These people looked like children to me. I'd spent time with some of them during breaks in the programming and gotten a glimpse of what they didn't know about the world.

During the next break, I set about getting in touch with my parents for the first time in decades. In the process I discovered they're both ill and beset with some fairly serious mental health issues that preclude my contacting them by telephone. Doesn't matter. I'm still on task to repair and revitalize my familial connections and I owe this change to Landmark and Jan McHenry.

Second shimmering moment: Jan shared the story of meeting and marrying his wife. The journey to finding her was wild, winding and rocky. I saw myself in that part of his story -- "So I'm not the only one wandering around scarred and incomplete, looking for love..." I thought. I was touched but my resigned conviction that I will not enjoy a committed intimate relationship in my lifetime remained unchanged.

Until he spoke the vows they made at their wedding. "I will never need you. I will never know you. And I will always rock your world." In a micro-second flash, I was thrust forward in time and simultaneously saw those words written across a pristine blue sky in phosphorescent letters and heard my voice and the voice of my beloved intoning them in unison. In two seconds the sensation vanished but I WAS THERE for two seconds. And my conviction disintegrated like dust on the wind.

***************************

What I "got" from the Forum is a place to stand in the Universe where the Future stretches wide and unwritten before me; unshaped, unblemished, unlimited and mine.

"Everyone gets a new life on this island. Maybe it's time you start yours."

2010-06-23T14:56:00.004-05:00

I'm watching the TV series "Lost" on Hulu. The blog title is a line spoken by one of the characters on the last episode I watched.

"Everyone gets a new life on this island. Maybe it's time you start yours."

A Google search reveals lots of viewers were struck by this line. There's a FaceBook circle based on it but I'm not hanging out on FB these days.

A new life on the island is one of my hoped-for outcomes from participating in the Landmark Forum next month.

On The Walls of My Room

2010-06-17T16:33:00.007-05:00

Shirley Temple
Audre Lorde
Carlos Santana
Josephine Baker
Bob Marley

A National Geographic map of Earth's "Population and Resources"

A Lunar Phases calendar for 2010

Two postcards: one with the caption "One of my favorite places in the entire world is wherever you are"

and the other a 50s era photo-penciled shot of 24 women in two-piece bathing suits lying side by side in a circle to form a human "sunflower"

A photo of the sculpture "Thermonuclear Family" by my dear now-deceased friend, Jean-Paul Darriau.

A small print of "The Song of the Lark" (Jules Breton). This was one of the first paintings I ever saw outside my home. It hung over my desk in first grade. I looked at it for hours over the course of that year. I remember the girl's broad, dirty feet; the rough texture of the field and the breath-taking imminence of the dawn sky.

These images hang over my desk.

Other items hang on other walls. Three original pieces, created while I was in art school, hang over my bed:

an 11 by 17 inch collage of torn images, a drawing made with black charcoal on black construction paper, and a 9 x 14 inch oil pastel abstraction on coarse paper.

Every day I consider taking them down and throwing them away.

*************************

I have no mirrors on the walls. There are no mirrors at all in my room.

The Shirley Temple picture is framed and under glass. When I need to see my reflection, I stand so the light is just right and look into it.

Opening to Memory at the New Dawn

2010-06-09T14:17:00.010-05:00

The other night, I was wondering "What ever happened to J______" my childhood best friend. Even though I had a vague memory of having tried unsuccessfully to find her online a few years ago, I gave it another try. This time when I typed her name into the search engine and hit "Send," the screen blinked and brought back two pages of hits.

My illustrious forrmer best friend... In the most recent Google citation, a 1997 article in Ebony magazine, J_______ was VP of a Fortune 500 company and former state's attorney general. In the accompanying photo, behind the executive haircut and dark blue power suit, I recognized my first and truest friend. My love for J_________ was intense and unconditional and fragile and I haven't known a friend-love like that since.

When asked by the article's author what it takes to succeed, she said

"...I have to set a standard for myself... independent of anyone else.... I never set out saying `I'm going to beat him or her.' Rather, I say that I want to accomplish this objective or this goal. Then the question becomes how do I get to my personal best.
...first you must define what success means to you as an individual -- not what it means to parents, family and friends. And then you have to be committed to achieving success, ... and that means sacrifice. ... The issue is your willingness to commit to and go after your objective. ... you must like what you do....If you don't like it, you'll never put the energy into it to be successful."

Discerning my "life work" is the #1 project these days. I'm reading and listening and asking questions. I accept Thomas Moore's message in A Life at Work without resistance. It is more difficult to open to J________'s words. For decades I've vacillated between nervous picking at the scar of losing her and disciplined denial, trying to leave it alone and let it heal.

It took a few days but on this day, I'm finally able to read J________'s words as part of the inspiration and information pouring in in this time of discernment and meditation.

Also on this day, a coincidence is revealed: , the day I did the Google search for J____________ was her birthday.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

I don't remember now if Pallas or Carlton first brought Landmark Education to my attention. They're both graduates of the program. In the intervening years, subsequent reminders have come from both of them as well as other voices. Perhaps a decade ago I decided to enroll -- the dynamism and intelligence of every graduate I'd ever met was compelling -- but program policies made me ineligible: I was taking anti-depressant medication at the time and had a hospitalization for depression in my history.

The policies have since changed. When our friend Vanda came through town last weekend, Landmark came up again. Vanda is also a graduate. [Note: I hope the reader follows the link and checks out Vanda's video clip.] Something in the quality of our interactions led both Pallas and Vanda to recommend a re-consideration of Landmark.

Again, scar tissue made consideration difficult. Being rejected by Landmark all those years ago had been painful. Again, it took a couple of days to gather sufficient strength and willingness to override my defenses. In the resulting "clear space," with Carlton and Pallas' generous support, I registered for the upcoming Landmark Forum in San Jose. There's residual emotional matter that feels mostly like a healthy skepticism; but there's also excitement and curiosity.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

Vanda also brought a new conceptualization of "the personal blind spot." I conceive of it now as a psychic space (that feels to be located behind and to the right of my head) where core elements of my "operating system" are stored. These elements are automatic -- no dialog boxes need to open for these applications to execute and run through my behavior and thinking. The files are stored in "System Preferences" and require a series of "advanced" steps to access and modify.

This blind spot manifests as a feeling that there's an auto-pilot "program" running through my life, a meaning-making program that limits and defines my perceptions and understandings. As I make my way, making choices based on these understandings, I experience "effects" with an incomplete sense of the "causes." To enjoy new effects, I must make new causes.

OK. I want to "go there." I'm ready to learn the steps and begin reprogramming... I think, I hope, I believe that Landmark will be a valuable tool in this process.

Against the Wall

2010-06-07T09:53:00.003-05:00

My friend is addicted to methamphetamine. He says he is not addicted. He says there's a malevolent group of men and women who read his thoughts and eavesdrop on all his conversations. They follow him wherever he goes and they are out to kill him. Those of us who love him believe this is a delusion. He disagrees.

I've had alcoholic friends and friends who overeat and friends who could not make it through a day without coffee or shopping or several hours before a computer. I smoke cigarettes every day of my life. But in each of these cases, the "user" was/is aware that the habit/addiction diminishes the quality of their life.

My friend does not believe he's addicted. Periodically, he sees that meth use diminishes the quality of his life but he loses sight of this. He changes his mind.

I am heartbroken. And frustrated by feelings of powerlessness. The experience feels like a painful but necessary lesson in humility. I'm not nearly as smart or capable or powerful as I sometimes believe. There are limits to my imagination and my sphere of influence.

Following the Rules

2010-06-02T14:04:00.015-05:00

In the morning (or whenever I get up) I perform a little ritual: start the coffee, make my bed; grab a cigarette and a lighter (and sometimes a book) and take them to the little courtyard in front of the house; move the chair into the sunlight, return to the kitchen to complete coffee prep and take my beautiful Peet's Coffee thermos outside. I smoke and drink, read, pull weeds, watch the birds glut themselves at the feeder and think.

***********************

In the house where I grew up there was a right way and wrong way to do everything. It's probably one reason I am drawn to improvisation as an adult. There are lots of "right" ways to do things in improvisation and I like that.

There are rules; but the rules govern attitude rather than specific behaviors or movements or sounds.

**************************

I hate being told what to do. When someone gives me an order, it drives a wide, white bolt of lightning down the center of my inner landscape...buildings start crumbling to the ground and trees fall and the air is filled with screams and angry shouts. As a child, I simply did what I was told. As an adult, I throw a tantrum inside my head--visible on the outside to varying degrees depending on the situation.

The psychic dissonance is even greater when the order is delivered in a manipulative or passive-aggressive spirit. The cacophony grows louder with the addition of the snarling voice of my "inner judge" as I criticize the psychology of whoever is issuing the demand.

I suffer when someone gives me an order. It's a ring of my Private Hell.

***************************

Many spiritual and religious traditions speak to the issue of human suffering and how to minimize or eliminate it. Tonight I will attend a dharma talk on Heart Sutra. I anticipate receiving insight on the judgment-inspired dimension of my suffering and I will listen when it comes. As I make my way through the current Life Curriculum on Life Work, it is clear that my journey from "here" to "there", from mostly suffering to more joy, will involve change: change of perspective, practice, opinion, habit, approach... I am willing.

**************************************

Extrapolated from "Don't tell me what to do" is "I hate rules." This morning, I was struck by the predictability and precision of my coffee-cigarettes-weeding-and-reading ritual. I follow the rules closely in my morning ritual.

Following rules is not the source of the suffering; having rules dictated to me is the issue.

"I don't want rules! I want to improvise!" is the mantra intoned as I stamp around in my tantrum. This morning "Don't tell me what to do! I want to improvise!" transformed into "Don't tell me what to do. I want to make my own rules."

The words "improvise" and "imagination" usually operate in tandem in my lexicon. Whenever one is banned the other immediately and automatically deactivates.

This interpretation or perspective appears to me now as a possible contributor to my suffering.

*********************

Another new ritual or habitual behavior that has developed in these first two months of return to CA involves concurrent computer work/play and piano work/play. The piano bench sits only a few inches from the desk chair in my little room. I sit at the piano and work intensely on Bach or Chopin for a spell and then slide over to the desk and answer email or play a computer game or, today, blog. Back and forth between the two keyboards for hours, with an occasional break to step outside and smoke.

The effect on my psyche? A scene of humming industry: my mind's eye sees conversations at cafe tables and gardens being watered and dogs running beneath a sky of pristine blue where wide-winged birds soar in pulsing sunlight. A steady breeze stirs gently and the lungs of everything that lives fill and empty and fill again and empty again.

There is order and beauty. Imagination and improvisation course through every moment, every action, every aspect of the scene. It is the exquisite beauty and order of chaos.

********************************

It is difficult to allow the mind to find its natural resting place (and I do believe a river of tranquility flows somewhere inside each of us). There is so much to think about. There is so much memory to cling to and fret about. So many judgments to pass and defenses to construct. So many plans to make and escape hatches to secure.

But we do much of this kind of thinking unconsciously. Awareness of the ceaseless churning and chattering is a first step toward returning to tranquility. A next step is realizing that we are creating much of the churning and chattering--the World is not shouting at us so much as we are shouting at ourselves.

These two tiny steps "outside" place us a little closer to tranquility. Stepping outside the storm to observe it places us...outside the storm.

*****************************

When I listen for my life's calling, I hear an indistinct song about helping myself and others toward honest, humble, compassionate observance of the journeys of our souls and spirits as represented in the ways we think. And, insofar as, "As I think, so I behave" is true, to change the World by helping people to change the way they think. I want to help us make rules for living that allow and encourage imagination.

This is an important part of my life work and I'd like some company on the way.

The Window

2010-05-16T23:40:00.002-05:00

They stand so close their breath stirs the other's hair.
Mother and Daughter.

Some things cannot be undone.
We make history -- no matter what we choose.
We make a story, we journey together
And arrive continually, again and again
Face to face.

How much truth can be spoken? How much can be heard?
How do we find each other --
spinning in the vast black universe that holds us...
trapped in the tight white cocoon of our imperfection and fear?

Love is a mysterious tie that binds.
Love breathes us.

Open the window.
It's starting to rain.

If Not For Money

2010-05-11T18:26:00.010-05:00

My new friend asked: "If money were no object, what kind of work would you do?" She is retired now but worked as a career counselor for many years. She hired me to help declutter her home office and, among the debris in the bathtub of the bathroom adjacent to the office, I found a copy of Thomas Moore's "A Life at Work: The Joy of Discovering What You Were born to Do."

It's a good question. She posed it two weeks ago and I am still thinking about it. Of course, "work" has been an "issue" for me for most of my life. The difference is that money is less an object now than ever before. The question moves from academic to practical. In the moment, the apparent answer to the question was "When money is no object, I help people bring order to the spaces where they live and work."

With a longer view, thinking back on all the jobs I've had and hated, jobs I took because I needed the money, a different answer surfaces: If it weren't for the money, I wouldn't work. But those were "jobs"...which is not the same thing as "work." I find the question more inspiring when it is reframed as "If money were no object, what would you do with your time?"

Looking at my life now, in this amazingly graceful period where my material and creature needs are met, I spend my time

thinking about what to do with my time
playing piano
hired out to help bring order to other people's chaos
reading
working logic puzzles
taking walks
filling bird feeders
pulling weeds
watching movies
exploring the Internet
smoking and thinking
writing correspondence
writing music
sifting through boxes of stuff from storage I haven't seen in 6 years
playing guitar

Lately, a conviction has begun floating alternately between The Back of My Mind and The Front of My Mind; a conviction that this chapter of my life has a title: Alex Finds Her Life's Work and Begins It. But how exactly does one do that?

Moore writes about alchemists whose laboratories contained precious books, a tiny oratory with an altar where they prayed for success and a big book containing a log of the experiments conducted. They used "liquids and solids, pure stuff and rotten stuff, ordinary material they found...and more refined chemicals," placing the materials in beautiful, glass vessels and subjecting it to various levels and periods of heat. They consulted ancient books and watched for changes in color and texture.

The entire process was known as the "opus," the Latin word for "work." "Work" was "the long process of refining raw material, going through many phases identified by colors...and reaching an end point described variously as a peacock's tail, the philosopher's stone, or the elixir of immortality."

Moore says

It has long struck me that these details of the alchemist at work say something profound about anyone's quest to find a life work. It is deep and mysterious. It involves changes and developments. For it, you will need patience, good powers of reflection and observation, and the courage to keep going when it seems nothing of worth is happening. There is a surface activity and an underlying meaning to this work, and to remain on the surface takes you nowhere.

...the alchemist approached his work as though his life depended on it. ...Your work is equally important...not just as a means for making a living but as the medium through which you become a person [italics added]

This perspective is not new to me; but Moore says it so beautifully
and it is significant for this book to come to me at this time in my life.

I don't have a job.

I have time and love and shelter and food and companions of exceptional talent and intelligence and integrity who treat me well. And I am listening, watching.

When I feel anxious or unfocused I take a deep breath and stretch and then focus

on laundry or weeding or playing piano or reading or walking.

I am the alchemist. Combining elements and observing. This is my opus, my calling, my self. What do I do with my time, my life, when money is no object? Continue the experiment...

This Is Not A Dream

2010-05-06T00:42:00.001-05:00

"Unconditional positive regard." This is how I describe my relationship with my dear friend, P____, in whose home I live currently.

Only Time will tell. I know. I have loved and lost before. I have been loved....and then rejected before.

But for now, this is the spirit of our engagement. I hold it as blessing in my life. We have an honorable relationship (see previous posts on "honor" in relationship).

We are honest with each other. We use considered, sensitive language with each other.

It is a voluntary, fully-conscious improvisation with two women--a mother and daughter. And me...a daughter estranged from her own mother...and her own son. Memory currents of feeling run old and deep in each of us. Conflict is unavoidable between humans. The critical question is "how do you handle conflict?"

These days I talk about the "amazing grace" that holds me. The tender, willing improvisation and the unconditional positive regard are primary expressions of this gifted time. Yes, it is good to have shelter and food without undue stress. It is good to be in a relatively warm climate. It is good to have found, already, a group of artists to play with (I think of us as the InterSplay group...more on this later). My shoulder injury appears to have been only a bad sprain and movement is almost completely recovered.

It's all good. It's all graceful and generous.

It's nurturing. I am drawing, playing piano, writing music for the UU Fellowship that P____ leads, playing guitar, dancing/moving with the InterSplayers.

It's all good. Everything feeds everything else and wraps my life in amazing grace.

This sojourn is retreat. Sabbatical. Furlough.

I had uncertain goals when I arrived a month ago and grew anxious about the lack of definition after a few days. There is nothing to prove here and so each day my relaxation deepens; I am more and more comfortable in my skin.

I am reading

A Life at Work by Thomas Moore
Black Pioneers in a White Denomination by Mark Morrison-Reed
The Cornel West Reader
Mother Teresa; Come Be My Life: Private Writings of the Saint of Calcutta

Even the appearance of these texts at this time in my life is part of the amazing grace.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

What this picture has to do with anything is not immediately apparent but a conversation tonight led to some research online (for starters: WTF is this machine called?) during which I have not yet uncovered any discussion of the history of the machine but did find this image which I like enough to share.

Horseman

2010-04-19T14:30:00.002-05:00

I just found this poem in my Facebook "Notes" from one year ago:

You could become a great horseman

And help to free yourself and this world

Though only if you and prayer become sweet Lovers.

It is a naive man who thinks we are not
Engaged in a fierce battle,

For I see and hear brave foot soldiers
All around me going mad,

Falling on the ground in excruciating pain.

You could become a victorious horseman

And carry your heart through this world
Like a life-giving sun

Though only if you and God become sweet Lovers!

Sojourner in the 21st Century

How's Your Soul?

Pearl

Impossibility

Creative Maladjustment

Tidy Front Porch Notions

One of These Mornings

Facing Down the Dog

Signs of Mastery

dil·i·gence

LOL

Getting it Right

On Christmas Day

What Matters

To Be Brave

Time Steps Forward

Planetarium

Ahhhhhhhhh.....Mystic Spa

Where I Find Myself

Theater of the Oppressed, Part 1

The Tolle Web Meditation

The Sweet Girls

So Beautiful or So What?

Presence ~ Power ~ Now

In the Baby's Gaze

Beyond Naming

Meditation

Dream of the Gypsy Baby

Friends of Ego

What it Takes

A Mind Space

Who's Who

Bach

Coming to Now

Blessed are the pure in heart

Right Before "After the Party"

Over My Head

The Mask

Jeremy Has No Teeth

Line Up, Fall Out

Oh Freedom...my little truck

We Cry When Moved

The Fund-Raising Letter

Just Don't Look Up

A Prayer

Willing to Reconsider

Make It Happen

Trying to be Grateful

6 Acts of Invitation (annotated)

The Right Way to Live

6 Acts of Invitation

Wrong Turn

Look at Me

The Sweet Taste of ... Cake

The Land of Presence and Possibility

Abundance in Nothing

Resolution 2011

Gradual Clearing

Event Horizon

Cup 'o Capo Magic

Work A Day

It Was Always Me

Judging the Book (and other assessments) By Its Cover

Grand Opening

Inauthenticity

Throw It Away

Why California Gets On My Nerves

Hurts So Good

Teasing Out Leadership

Storm Tracking

Not Like Anything I Knew

So What Are You Gonna Do?

Natural Compassion

Dream Prism

Surprise Attack

What About God?

Need

Alex is Scary

A Fork in the Road

Landmark Education: What I "Got" From the Forum