ANOTHER IPS (Inner Peace Symptom):  A growing understanding that life is all about “multiple bottom lines” and the way you balance the lot of them promotes inner peace or inner chaos.

[If you start getting frazzled, you know something’s gotten out of whack and you have to go hunt it down and bonk it back into line…which doesn’t SOUND particularly peaceful, but is kinda fun.]

For weeks now I’ve been mired in a bog of paradoxes of the finest kind.

I’ve been trying to execute another one of my explorations of an admittedly complicated foundational question:

How does the energy you are generating as you walk in the here and now affect this consensus-world of ours through which you are walking and living your questions?

I’ve been looking at the thoughts and ponderings of wise guys and Smarty Pants – all those seemingly endless theories, postulates, formulas and philosophies about walking through the world.

I confess.  I am lost.

Explanations by proponents subscribing to various beliefs of one sort or another are often balanced by the pontifications of the nay-sayers who dis the other guys and delineate in detail why such-and-so does not work before offering up their own thing.

After a while it all became a lot like reading those horrifying tell-all pharmaceutical ads that I used to see many years ago in the old Reader’s Digest printed family magazines to which an elderly friend subscribed.

In each of the long, printed ads, in very dense blocks of text, there would first be a benefits list marketing squib about how some drug or other purportedly fixed a specific, narrowly defined chronic health problem.

This was followed by maybe two or more “truth-in-advertising” pages listing all of the horrendous side-effects of the wonder-drug that usually included failures of assorted essential body systems as well as madness or death.  ACK!

Unfortunately, while abandoning this monkey-mind inducing project is an option, dumping my mind is not.  This replica of a very twisted and crunchy bit of dough has replaced what is the only mind I’ve got to work with.  (Sigh!)

I like my mind and I am a stubborn git.

RESETTING TO YOUR DEFAULT MINDSET AFTER THE MONKEY GETS LOOSE

When I get to the brink of nutso, I tend to go looking for something that calms my inner primate.  If I go for a nature-walk outside or stare at something that is simple but sufficiently complex, somehow the visuals I encounter turn my twisted pretzel-mind into a more manageable stack of skinny pretzel sticks.

Music also helps.

(There are probably all kinds of scientifically proven explanations for this.  We are not going there.)

And now, I present to you (and my aggravating monkey) this short YouTube video, “Pipe Dreams,” a 2008 upload by AnimusicLLC.

It was one of the offerings on the now-classic Animusic 1 DVD that went viral when it came out and generated massive interest in animation art, giving a giant boost to the artists and designers who specialize in the film industry’s computerized special effects.

Ahhh…that’s better.

A SIDE-TRIP INTO ANIMUSIC WORLD

That video and the other works that followed it were the brainchildren of creator and company founder Wayne Lytle and his longtime side-kick David Crognale.

If the video calls up feel-good fan-memories for you, you might want to click on the button below to access an excellent 20-minute video, “Does Anyone Remember Animusic?”

This video is a history of the company and its Creatives put together by The Science Elf in 2022.

[The Science Elf is a vlogger who is a mega-fan of fascinating techno-world gadgetry and hardware that he has described as “weird in some way.”  It is truly worth a look.]

OKAY…BACK TO BALANCING MUTIPLE BOTTOM LINES

In the middle of all the mad mind-bending, I was reading a lovely novel by Jessica Francis Kane, RULES FOR VISITING. It was superbly restful as a meditation about friendships, connections, and staying open to life.

It also seemed to provide a balance for all of the aspirational, high-flying concepts that were rattling around in my poor over-amping brain.  At least it muted the more strident voices beautifully.

The story follows May Attaway (a mostly solitary 40-year-old botanical gardener who is better with plants than with people and a most observant story-maker) as she visits four of her oldest friends who welcome her as their guest in their analog lives.

In the book, May says, “It seems to me that your oldest friends can offer a glimpse of who you were from a time before you had a sense of yourself.”

That struck me as a major truth.

Another one was this: “We don’t get to write from scratch the whole story of our life.  We are given certain plot points that must be incorporated.  Maybe we settle when we’ve done the best we can.”

As a fellow believer in the power of words and stories to make sense of things, this one resonates for me way more than all the motivational hoopla about individualism, self-sufficiency, and powering on through obstacles and so on and so forth.

Humans make all kinds of plans and the schemes and dreams that multiply and mutate and morph as Life-Its-Own-Self presents other, different possibilities.  Just being open to and looking at all of those different possibilities may actually be a better way of navigating on through the thickening plots that surround us.

The beautiful mundanities of a story about Life-Its-Own-Self is soothing.  It seems to me that it is the ordinary, quiet things in my life that seem to bring me back to better clarity.

The book ends with a blessing: “I have very few friends and not one of them is replaceable.  May you settle and find good friends.”

THE QUIET VOICE OF THE ORDINARY

Here’s a little YouTube video uploaded in 2018 by The School of Life that explains, “Why an Ordinary Life Can Be a Good Life.”  It is, I am thinking, another quiet affirmation of a truth that tends to get drowned out by our postmodern mega-phonic urgencies engendered by our effort-filled strivings.

There is a word, “koinophobia,” which was coined by The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. It means “the fear that you have lived an ordinary life.”

“Sorrows” is an online dictionary created in 2009 by writer, graphic artist, video maker and voice actor John Koenig as a blog that he later expanded to YouTube and then made into a book of the same name.

Like many of the entries in the Dictionary, I think we needed that word.  The School of Life video might help to mitigate the fear that it names.

ANOTHER QUEST, ANOTHER BOOK

Another book that crossed my path was AND THEN WE GREW UP:  On Creativity, Potential and the Imperfect Art of Adulthood by Rachel Friedman.

This one is written by a former child prodigy who went on a real-life journey visiting a number of her old friends with whom she who attended a remarkable arts summer camp for extraordinarily talented creative young people run by the Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan.

In the book, Friedman tracks down a number of her childhood friends from the camp sessions she attended.  She arranges talk-story sessions that take a “where-are-they-now” look at how the early creative ambitions of these baby musicians, dancers, actors, and visual artists and the supportive adults who surrounded them, translated into their adult lives.

She also reconnected with some of those friends as a result.

Cadillac potentialities and expectations – realized, morphed, or transcended with the help of Life-Its-Own-Self — are explored in Friedman’s book.  The result is a wonderfully nuanced look at the various ways in which people focused on creativity and living the life of an artist have made of their own life-journeys.

As Friedman says, the process takes as long as it takes and you can only do what you can do today.  Researching and writing the book helped to clarify her own thoughts about the course of her own life as well.

She is finding her way to singing her own heartsong more joyously.

FINAL THOUGHTS

In case you haven’t noticed, this post has been another sort of exploration as well —  one that takes the hood off a number of my own strategies for taking back my battered brain after my Inner Monkey gets loose.

Among the things I do in the aftermath of yet another Monkey coup d’etat attempt are the following:

• Notice when I’m starting to topple over into analysis paralysis or, even worse, burn-out.
• Run around finding some way to take a break. In this case I dived into an awesome bit of digital art that includes peppy music.  I could also have grabbed a snack, gone for a walk outside, found somebody to hug, danced around singing silly songs, spent some time digging into some dirt, taken a nap…well, you get the idea.
• Open my head up to counterintuitive, non-mainstream perspectives and thoughts like the little School of Life riff (once the monkey got sent back to its corner). Please note that if I’d done that before banishing the monkey, it would just have added one more thing to the chaos.  (Timing’s important here.)
• Trip over cool, new, and totally “useless” but very interesting things to explore like the THE DICTIONARY OF OBSCURE SORROWS or more Animusic videos.
• Go find a friend and reconnect, or make new connections with other people.
• Make a poem or tell a story.

Have you got any go-to solutions for beating back analysis paralysis or a flirtation with overstuffed content catatonia or even a complete burn-out?

UNREQUITED DREAMS

A question to ponder:
How do you deal with unrequited dreams?
Those empty shells of constructs
Built of brightly colored hopes
Are sitting there melting
Like runny, old tri-colored jello salad
On some plate left out in the hot sun…
Sticky, viscous stuff that’s still sweet to the tongue,
Now bait for ants and other scavengers.

Take that Hero-slash-Crusader Rabbit thing….

The problem with the Crusader Rabbit gig
Is one nobody ever mentions
When they’re pumping up the wannabe heroes…
Stuffing them into garish hero armor,
Handing out the paper swords and cardboard maces.

I mean, look it….

If you’re lousy at the Hero trade,
You’re just another crazy on the side of the road.
There you’ll be, clunking and clanking
In your outmoded armor,
Screaming epithets at the pro-ductive people,
Streaming past your soap box,
Busy, all of them,
Stabilizing the status quo and
Keeping this old world turning.

They’ll keep on streaming past,
All those tick-tock minions,
When you’re just another unremarked body
In another unremarkable grave….
And there you’ll be,
Another grain of coffee
In the dried-out pile of filtered grounds
From some dictator’s cappuchino.

Fair-to-middling level Rabbits
Drown in the rising frustration of petty la-la-la-di-dah.
Their true-believer constructs get flushed away
In the regularly timed floods of
Expediencies and short-term objectives
That look awfully good on paper
(And just plain awful on the little peeps)
As the Big Cheeses and their attendant Cheeselets
Keep right on rolling on.

Oh…and if you’re good…really excellent,
Why, then, you get the Grand Prize!

They shoot you dead
And put up a bronze statue in the park –
Another public pigeon landing pad.
They’ll probably throw a parade.
They’ll probably shoot off fireworks.
Yay!

Wise guys will tell you that Rabbits
Stuck in Jurassic Park need another plan.
Wise guys say you sit…you watch…you witness.
The world turns and it all changes.
Up goes down, down goes up.
Wise guys advise that you spend your days
Untangling your own jungle lianas,
Chopping aside all those wild vines
So that when you need to move, you can.

Me, I say the best plan’s going to bed for the day
And pulling the covers over your head.
Maybe some other dreams will drop on by.
A pitcher of iced tea and a plate of chocolate biscuits
Would likely be appreciated, I bet.

And all those beloved, unrequited dreams?
The ghosts of futures past?
It’s best to toss them out, I think,
Bidding them a fond farewell,
Before they gather scavengers.

By Netta Kanoho

Header photo credit:  “Lost Highway” by Ewen Roberts via Flickr [CC BY 2.0]

……

SOME OTHER POSTS TO EXPLORE

(Click on each of the post titles below and see where it takes you….)

• FORGET BALANCE (Move the Whole Thing)
• FINDING YOUR OWN BALANCE
• TRAIN YOURSELF TO CLIMB OUT OF THAT BOX

……

Thanks for your visit.  I’d appreciate it if you would drop a note or comment below and tell me your thoughts.

The post INNER PEACE AND BOTTOM LINES (IPS) first appeared on Life-Built Poems.

Okay, listen up all you Achievement Junkies:  Measurement matters!

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You’ve heard it all before:  “Measurement drives improvement,” it says here, and we’ve got an array of metrics that can measure just about anything….

We can measure how far, how long, how big, how high, how wide, how deep, how many and on and on and on. We can measure anything and everything and we’ve got the numbers and comparisons and indicators to prove it.  Yup!

Not.

THE FLY IN THE MEASURING OINTMENT

There is one really glaring major flaw in that game-plan.

This is not a real help when we’re prognosticating, trying to plan future moves, making important decisions, and stuff like that.

LOOKING AT WHAT MATTERS

So, then we come to another concept:  not everything that can be measured matters.

As Albert Einstein once said, “everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted.”

At the same time, it is worth noting that the old business adage, “What gets measured, gets done,” is not wrong.

KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS (KPI)

Actually, in any given system, there are only a handful of key metrics that really deserve our limited attention.

In the business world, these things are called Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).  Name any human activity – business, sports, academics, health, success, meaning-making – and there are going to be people who’ll be more than happy to tell you where to focus your attention so you can suss out whether you are actually making progress or not.

QUESTIONING AND RUMINATING (WHAT AM I DOING?)

To bring a little clarity to the whole thing, there are, perhaps, three questions you might want to ponder in all of this:

• What matters most to you in this life you are living?
• In the sea of performance metrics for this goal, system, or whatever-the-heck-it-is that you’re doing, which ones are absolutely crucial?
• If one of these many metrics will lead directly to improvement and success, which one would it be?

Separating out the few that really matter from the many that don’t is not an easy task.  Knowing what you are trying to actually accomplish is the first step.

THE CHIEF MARKETING OFFICER (CMO) SERENITY PRAYER

A tweet posted to Twitter by @elroythecat (aka copywriter David Moore who’s the creative director and co-founder of Kingswood and Palmerston, consultants for business-to-business marketers) is a beaut.

It says:

“Grant me the courage to zig when others zag,
The patience to measure what matters,
The strength to have faith in the things we cannot track
And the wisdom to know the difference.”

The line that gets me in that Serenity Prayer iteration is the one about having the strength to “have faith in the things we cannot track.”

Amen.

AND THEN THERE’S A BOOK….

In self-help blogger extraordinaire Mark Manson’s book, THE SUBTLE ART OF NOT GIVING A F*CK: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life, the author pinpoints our values as the essential underpinnings to everything we are and everything we do.

Manson says it’s important to ask these three questions:

• Why do I consider this to be a success/failure?
• How am I choosing to measure myself?
• By what standard am I judging myself and everyone around me?

These are not easy questions to even look at.  They are unlikely to have simple answers.

But, as he says, “If what we value is unhelpful and what we consider success/failure is poorly chosen, then everything based upon those values will be out of whack.”

Everything we think and feel about a situation is ultimately going to come back to what we consider “valuable,” i.e., the things that align well with our own set of values.

“Is THIS all there is?”

As Manson points out, “the objective truth about your situation is not as important as how you come to see the situation and how you choose to measure it and value it.”

This does tend to echo the old wise guys and their assorted takes on figuring out what makes your own life meaningful.

“VIEW FROM THE TOP” – A SERIES OF TALKS PRESENTED BY STANDFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS

I’ve stumbled across a trio of short YouTube videos from the Stanford Graduate School of Business “View From the Top,” an extraordinary student-led program that brings top global business and government leaders to the school to share their insights on leadership, business and life.

The videos are clips where the individual speakers answer the question, “What Matters Most to Me and Why?” and were uploaded in 2021 by the school.

The first is an interview with American billionaire venture capitalist Doug Leone who was the former managing partner of Sequoia Capital until he stepped aside in 2022.  The clip is from a “View From the Top” interview recorded in 2014.

The next one features Meg Whitman, the US ambassador to Kenya, an American business executive and a former gubernatorial candidate for California.  At the time of the interview, which was recorded in 2015, she was the president and CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

The final one is a clip with Da Vita Healthcare Partners CEO and chairman Kent Thiery which was also recorded in 2015.

This speaker series is one of several organized by the school.  It began in 1978 and is “the dean’s premier speaker series.”  You can click on the button below to access more of the recorded sessions of a unique educational series that began in 1978.

Here’s a poem:

AM I ENOUGH?

Am I enough?
That seems to be the central question
I am always trying to answer lately.
And it’s only now that I am beginning to wonder…

Enough what?
Enough how?
Enough why?
Enough when?

What is this “enough”?
Where did I get this question, anyway?
Who is asking it?
Why?

All I am is what I am.
If that is not “enough,”
Then what am I supposed to do about it?
(Maudlin tears do not help.)

And only now it occurs to me that
Nobody ever defined “enough.”
Nobody ever pointed out where
The line between “enough” and “not” was.

So…does the line wander?
Or does “enough” depend on who is watching?
Or….
Ummmm….

And now I have to wonder:
Who set up this dumb contest?
And why am I even entered in it?
Do I even care?

By Netta Kanoho

Header Photo Credit:  “How Tall Am I Now?” by Lars Plougmann via Flickr [CC BY-SA 2.0]

……

SOME OTHER POSTS TO EXPLORE

(Click on each of the post titles below and see where it takes you….)

• SHAPER CHALLENGE (An Un-Seeing Exercise)
• BEYOND STUFF-LOVE (PART 5): Lifestyle
• JOURNALING 201 (Mind-Mining)

……

Thanks for your visit.  I’d appreciate it if you would drop a note or comment below and tell me your thoughts.

The post MEASURE WHAT MATTERS (Shaper Challenge) first appeared on Life-Built Poems.

Hawaiians have a saying: “In the word, is life; in the word, is death.”

As a poet and a writer, I believe in the power of words.  It’s a part of the nature of the scribblers in the world, that.  We believe our words make a difference.

No, I lie.  Real writers and poets believe we are magicians who remake the world.

When all is said and done, it seems to me, all of us humans are little more than a collection of words.  The stories we tell ourselves about our lives, about ourselves, and about each other as we walk through our days shape the way we see the consensus-world all of us build together.

One of my favorite wordsmiths, Patrick Rothfuss, has said,

“The truth is that the world is full of dragons, and none of us are as powerful or as cool as we’d like to be.  And that sucks.  But when you’re confronted with that fact, you can either crawl into a hole and quit, or you can get out there, take off your shoes, and Bilbo it up.”

The stories we tell ourselves can give us the courage to “Bilbo it up.” And, if we get good enough at that, maybe we can go on to emulate Gandolf or Merlin or Zed.

THE MAGIC STARTS WITH SELF-AWARENESS AND SELF-EXPRESSION

The ancient wise guys and the Smarty Pants who study such things tell us that self-awareness begins with being able to notice and to describe to ourselves and to others what is happening around us and how we are feeling now.  Very often the words we use to tell our stories affect how we walk, and the ways we walk help to make our world.

There is a remarkable and ongoing project that illustrates how the ways we express ourselves can have a major impact on the shape our lives take.  This concept is highlighted in the work done by The Actors’ Gang Prison Project among adult and juvenile prisoners in the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) system.

The Prison Project is a series of acting and team-building training workshops for incarcerated felons that include group discussions, rehearsals and performances. These workshops have proven to be remarkably successful in helping the prisoners learn to recognize and express their emotions more effectively.

The prisoners work with teams of professional actors who belong to a group who sees the theater stage as a sacred shared space where humans can come together and tell their stories and their truths fiercely and with rigorous honesty.

The Actors’ Gang began with eight UCLA students who formed an experimental theater group in Los Angeles in 1981 that has continued to evolve and grow through the years.

Click on the button below for more of their story.

One of the original eight, actor and filmmaker Tim Robbins, serves as the artistic director for the group.

Over four decades, the group has managed to meld a cocky, anarchistic punk-rock sensibility with the rigorous and demanding traditions of the commedia dell’arte style of theater.  It is this style of theater that apparently resonates with the inmates.

In commedia dell’arte there are no scripts to memorize.  The stories are already in place – old, familiar stories of love and hate and heartbreak.  The characters are hackneyed clichés that everyone recognizes.

The words are improvised.  The performers work their way through the stories using their own words and movements and feelings, building on the words and actions of the actors who are with them on the sacred shared space that is their stage

The Arts Council featured the project in a short film uploaded to YouTube in 2016.

The Art Gang’s endeavors have won international recognition as an innovative rehabilitation program that actually gives the prisoners tools they can use to help them find better ways of dealing more effectively with other people in the world outside prison walls as in their current situations.

Among the tools the inmates take away from the Project are the new ways they have learned to look at the emotions that they are feeling and the new words they have learned to use to describe those intense emotions.

BUILDING AN EMOTION LEXICON

I’ve been thinking about all of this as I swim around in Brené Brown’s extraordinary master-work, ATLAS OF THE HEART:  Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience.  The gorgeous reference book came out in 2021.

I am fascinated by the tale of the book’s making.

It began with a content analysis of comments from the extremely popular online courses in 2013 and 2014 that were based on Brown’s work as a research professor at the University of Houston.

Brown calls herself a “grounded theory” researcher.  She and her research team start with the real-life experiences of the people they are studying.  They watch what their subjects do, make up theories about why they do like that, and then see whether those theories hold up in real life.

What Brown and her crew study, mostly, is how people make connections with each other and with themselves.

• What are the emotions and experiences that emerge most often?
• Which emotions and experiences do people struggle to name or label?

In the process, the crew asked for and got feedback on all of these feelings and life-stories from a group of experienced therapists actively working in a wide diversity of mental health settings that stretched across the gamut from addiction and community health and counseling to inpatient psychiatry and individual and group psychotherapy.

Meanwhile, over a three-year period, Brown and her senior director of research Dr. Ronda Dearing, reviewed close to 1500 academic publications about studies done on the emotional lives of humans.

And then Brown and her team had to present their massive tangle of factoids and data to the rest of us in a form that was understandable, meaningful, and useful.  Whew!

TURNING IT ALL INTO ROAD MAPS OF THE HEART

How a mapmaker chooses and arranges the data included in a map will definitely affect the way people travel through an area.

As one who lives in an ancient, many-storied historical place that is also an area that is environmentally fragile and is a tourist destination as well as a much-desired place for people who want to buy a piece of our rock, I have encountered a wide range of very different maps of the very same small area.

The stories that are embedded in the markings and labels included in these different maps present aspects that are a part of the place but not the whole of it.

However, every story is true on some level.  You just need to know how to read them and what to use them for.

GETTING TO CLARITY

As Brown points out, ‘We are meaning makers, and a sense of space is central to meaning-making.”

She goes on to say that the questions that are central to understanding our physical world are also central to understanding our internal world.

• Where am I?
• How did I get here from there?
• How do I get there from here?

I agree with Brown that we need landmarks, always, to orient ourselves in the world and that the language we use to label what we are experiencing in our lives can help us get to a clarity that will allow us to make better decisions about where we go next.

HOW TO USE THE ATLAS

Of course, there is a proliferation of book reviews and “ooh-ooh-I-like-it” videos floating around on You-Tube as well as several of Brown’s very shiny promo stuff.

One reviewer is using the book as a springboard for family discussions and explorations about feelings.

Another has a circle of friends who are doing book club-style gatherings centered around the book.

I found one YouTube video, by Nathan Lozeran, the creator of the Productivity Game blog, that presents pragmatic thoughts on how to use the information presented in Brown’s book to expand your ability to make meaningful connections in order to improve your productivity at work.

It is a great model for developing your own ways to explore how you can make use of the results of Brown’s research.

The video, “ATLAS OF THE HEART by Brené Brown | Core Message” was uploaded in 2022.

Here’s a poem:

FORGIVENESS

I am looking at the forty-ninth quote by somebody famous,

One of a series that tell me this so-called Truth:

That this thing they call “forgiveness”

Is going to “set me free.”

Huh?

They tell me if I forgive your me-defined trespasses,

Then I shall be “at peace” with me

Or something like that.

I say again:  Huh?

I think they lost me, all these ones

When they implied that

I actually understand enough about anything

To take what you do personally.

I’m not sure I am that wise.

Are you?

I mean, who am I to “forgive” you?

Who are you to offer me your forgive?

Does a hawk forgive a fish?

Does a flower need a butterfly’s forgive?

I have to confess:

This makes no sense to me.

As far as I can tell,

We are all walking our walks

In the discreet worlds that we inhabit

As we each make our own way home.

And if your warm leaves me cold,

It could be you’re a penguin

And I’m some sort of tropic bird.

I really don’t know much of anything,

Except…except…

I do wish you well on your journey.

May you find your own heartsong

And may there be joy abiding there.

Oh…and one more thing:

I do know all these lessons never end,

And you are a part of mine,

So, for that,

I’ll thank you now, my friend.

by Netta Kanoho

Photo credit:  “A Different Ball Game” (Sculpture by Kevin Atherton) by John K Thorne via Flickr  [CC0 1.0 – Public Domain dedication]

……

SOME OTHER POSTS TO EXPLORE:

(Click on each of the post titles below and see where it takes you…)

• CONJURING FEELINGS
• WALK LIKE A HAWAIIAN
• CANCEL THE SEARCH FOR THE ONE TRUE SELF

..….

Thanks for your visit.  I’d appreciate it if you would drop a note or comment below and tell me your thoughts.

The post NAME IT, GAME IT (An Un-Seeing Exercise) first appeared on Life-Built Poems.

There is a poem written by a much-respected performing poet and the author of at least five collections of original poems, Brendan Constantine, that captures an exploration of the power of language and the creation of meaning quite beautifully.

The poem, “The Opposites Game,” arose out of a writing exercise for Constantine’s elementary school creative writing students at Windward School in Los Angeles, California.  It was also a powerful look through the eyes of children about a perennial and perhaps quintessential American question: “What is the opposite of a gun?”

Blank Verse Films, a project to film spoken poetry started by filmmaker Mike Gioia, turned Constantine’s poem into a short film that quickly went viral on YouTube in April, 2018.  Here’s the video:

The following year, in 2019, the “The Opposites Game” poem was made into a TED-Ed short film by Anna Samo and Lisa LaBracio.  If you click on the button below, you can also see what they did with the poem.  It’s a very different take.

POETRY AS COMMUNITY SERVICE AND A BLESSING  WAY

Besides being a teacher at local schools and colleges, an award-winning poet and a popular performer, Constantine is an ardent supporter of the poetry communities in Southern Calfornia.  Among other things, he has helped to organize poetry workshops for veterans, hospitals, foster care centers, and shelters for the homeless.

Constantine is especially proud of his work with the Alzheimer’s Poetry Project, an initiative developed by Gary Glazner in 2003, that brings interactive poetry reading into the lives of those with Alzheimer’s and their families.

(You can find out more about it by clicking on the Book Club name above.)

Wo!

HEADER PHOTO CREDIT:  “Rijksmuseum – The Gun Room 1, Amsterdam” by Gilbert Sopakuwa via Flickr [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

……

Please note:  If you would like to contribute a poem to this LIFE-BUILT POEMS:  Living Out Loud blog, please click on the button below and check out the “Guest Poet Portal.”

I do ask three things of my guest poets:

• a poem of your own making that has great meaning and mana for you,
• the back-story for the poem — what inspired you or how you made it or whatever you want to tell about it, and
• an image you own that I can use as the featured photo in the header. (The last is optional. I do ask that the image you share is one you own — either an image of yourself or something that relates to the poem.  If you choose not to send an image, then I’ll go find something that works.)

……

Thanks for your visit.  I’d appreciate it if you would drop a note or comment below and tell me your thoughts.

The post OTHER VOICES: Brendan Constantine first appeared on Life-Built Poems.

Another IPS (Inner Peace Symptom):  an understanding that what you already have is the starting point for building the space where you want to be.  [Gather your resources and see what you’ve got.  What you choose to use and how you choose to use them breathes life and form and definition into the Why you are already living.]

The Light of My Light (LOML) and I made some “What-Get Soup” again the other day.  The soup is a throwback to younger, leaner scavenger days in our individual histories when we had to make something out of the next-to-nothing we had on hand to feed a crowd of hungry bellies.

The name of the soup comes from the Hawaiian pidgin phrase, “What get fo’ eat?”  In regular English, that’s “What have we got to eat?”

It makes us grin when we remember how we each were able to “make do” back in the days of not-too-much-of-nothing. (I don’t recall it being quite so entertaining at the time.)

We looked at all the leftovers from our latest round of feeding each other goodies – dibs and dabs of this and that, all too good to throw out but way too much to assemble into just one more meal.

The LOML lives off the grid and eschews refrigeration so we don’t have the option of accumulating a hoard of cold, old, and hairy leftovers.  When we get carried away with our creative cooking habits, everything we don’t consume sits around demanding to be used up now, now, now.  (Sheesh!)

He did a bit of chop-chop-chopping of some garlic, ginger root, chili peppers, and such to liven up the taste.

I threw the assorted scraps into our favorite big old soup pot, threw in a mélange of freshly gathered herbs from the garden and some salt and spices we had hanging around, poured coconut milk and Mexican crema over all to round it out, and we let it all simmer for a bit.

We agreed it was our best soup ever.

AUDITING THE RESOURCES YOU’VE GOT CAN HELP YOU FIND THE DIRECTION TO TAKE WHEN YOU’RE AIMING FOR YOUR BEST LIFE

In the middle of all this cooking, it occurred to me that making “What-Get Soup” might be a great metaphor for figuring out how to build a life that nurtures you and helps you feed the world around you besides.

Most life coaches, gurus, and assorted pundits, philosophers and them will agree that all humans have resources that are available to them – the things they can use in their own life that helps them walk their walk.

Often they identify the resources as things like time, energy (which could include money as well as connections to other people), personal skills (or the lack thereof) and space and the freedom to move around in it.

Some folks have a lot of this stuff available to them. Others have only a little. The experts slice and dice this pile of stuff in all kinds of different ways.

The Smarty Pants do all agree that if you don’t know what you’ve got available to you, then it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to use these resources to do anything.  That’s a truth, I think.

One guy, Adam Sicinski, an Australian life coach, went a bit overboard with the thing.  A great believer in the value of mind-maps when you’re trying to get on top of the overwhelming amount of information in the world, the guy founded IQ Matrix in 2008.  It’s an attempt to use mind-maps to encompass and encapsulate all of the everything in Life-Its-Own-Self, it seems.

One YouTube video, “Building a Life Resources List,” which he put together in 2016, gives you a taste of what his sort of life audit looks like.

You can check out his website by clicking on the name of his company above.  The guy has put together over 400 mind-maps, he says.  He’ll even give some of them to you for free.  His blog is very interesting, but the whole, elaborate mind-mapping thing really does seem like a mind-boggling, time-consuming bit of overkill to me.

THE STONE SOUP TEACHING STORY

There’s an old European teaching story that involves soup as well.  Maybe you know it.

Some travelers stop at a village, get permission to spend the night, and set up a camp near a stream that runs past the settlement.  The village is so poor that the people there are reluctant to share their meager food stores with the hungry strangers.

The travelers set up their camp build a fire.  They fill a large pot with water from the stream, place the pot over the fire and plop a stone into the pot.  The villagers are curious, of course, and one asks what they are doing.

One of the strangers says that they are making stone soup.  It will be a most delicious soup that they would be delighted to share with the villagers, but, he admits, it really could use a little something to help make the taste better.

As word spreads, more villagers bring some of the little bit they have on hand – some dried peas, a tawdry vegetable or two, a little bit of dried meat, some milk.  Someone even donates a smidge of salt.

A little of this, a little of that, and the soup does, indeed, become a delightful meal for the villagers who have crowded around, bowls in hand, to watch their guests cooking up the soup.

The cook fishes the stone out of the soup and places it aside carefully.  When they leave the next morning, the strangers give the stone to the head man of the village so the villagers can continue to make their own stone soup.

THE NATURAL CYCLES OF CHANGE

It seems to me that this centuries-old stone soup story also demonstrates how change and transformation can work.  At the beginning of the tale, the villagers are locked into their feelings of lack and are unwilling to share what they have with the travelers.

The strangers and their stone sitting in a pot of water that has been set to boiling over a little campfire as well as their story of the marvels of their soup encourage the villagers to add their own resources to the pot in anticipation of a tasty meal they can all share.

Gradually, step by step, the soup in the pot changes as more and more ingredients are added to it.  These gradual changes all come together and trigger a spontaneous transformation of all of the added small bits of nothing into a nourishing and abundant meal that feeds everyone.

All kinds of transformations seem to work that way – gradual small changes keep on adding up and eventually lead to a big, major change.

The stone in the soup then becomes a trigger that can help to change the mindsets of the stingy villagers. Who knows where that might take them?

ONE FARMER AND HIS WIFE, ONE FARM

I found a 2017 YouTube video, “How to Become Self-Reliant in Thailand” that features Thai farmer Jon Jandai and his wife Peggy and illustrates how a person’s “Why” (their mission or overall purpose for being) can change as they keep working on finding better ways to live their own best life.

The video was uploaded by Aspeer, a “platform” which says it is dedicated to “sharing sustainable and tangible initiatives favouring a transition towards a new model of society.”  They do a good job.

Jandai became internationally renowned when he appeared in a TEDxDoiSuthep Talk in 2011 to tell the story about how the organic family farm outside Chiang Mai that he started in 2003 has become the Pun Pun Center for Self-Reliance, a learning and self-development center that explores an older, more humane and sustainable way of living.

Among the center’s projects are:

• Practicing and experimenting with different methods and techniques of organic farming in order to nourish the people who live and work on the farm;
• Developing a research center and seed-production operation that models how to save seeds for other organic farmers;
• Exploring ways to build earthen homes as well as other alternative natural ways of building shelters; and
• Teaching one another philosophical stances that help to foster sustainable ways of living together

EVERY MISSION STARTS WITH LOOKING FOR A BETTER WAY

Each of these Pun Pun “missions” grew out of Jandai’s determination to find an alternative, more satisfying life than the one he encountered when, following conventional modern-day thinking, he left his village to seek his fortune in Bangkok at the age of 18.

When he returned home to the rice fields where he had grown up in the northeastern province of Yasothon, he began to understand that the realities of life as a modern rice farmer were not much easier than life in the big city.

Doing these things he could feed his growing family.

When he was growing more food than his family needed, Jandai sold the surplus produce and fish, saving the money he made until he could eventually purchase his own land in 1997.

Around that time, a friend invited Jandai to visit New Mexico.  It was there that he learned about building adobe houses.

The house worked well for him and his family and Jandai became a vigorous advocate of the natural building movement in Thailand while he and his wife simultaneously also worked on making his own organic farm and seed-saving project a viable enterprise.

THE MISSIONS GROW AND SPREAD

Among other things the farm they started developed into what they began calling a “learning center.”  People who came to visit the farm fell in love with the lifestyle the family had and wanted to stay and participate in it.

Eventually, people from all over the world came to spend time at the farm and to learn and share their knowledge and understandings about sustainable living and appropriate technologies that could also helped the family maintain their goal of nurturing themselves and their world better.

In 2020, the organization uploaded a YouTube video with the story behind the continuing evolution of the Pun Pun Organic Farm.

The center continues to grow and change as Jandai and his friends and family keep on learning how to live a human-sized, more natural life.

Here’s a poem:

THERE WILL BE JOY

There will be joy and obstacles dispersed,

Pleasure and delight will rise out of harmony

Between what is inside and all the rest,

But, first, you have to get through

Another glitch or two on the road to somewhere else.

Birthing is an opportunity after all:

Something new is entering the world,

One foot following another,

Step by step by step.

Order without proper arrangement does not perfect anything.

Having the recipe means nothing if you don’t do it.

And you need to remember it is necessary, after all,

To slip your hand into another strong hand

And walk in harmony

And let yourself be guided by

What happens next.

After all that, there will be joy.

Created by Netta Kanoho

HEADER PHOTO CREDIT:  “Glowing in the dark” by Susanne Nilsson via Flickr [CC BY-SA 2.0]

……

SOME OTHER POSTS TO EXPLORE

(Click on each of the post titles below and see where it takes you…)

• POST-MODERN MEANING AND MANA
• CULTURES OF MEANING
• HOW TO LIVE WISDOM

……

Thanks for your visit.  I’d appreciate it if you would drop a note or comment below and tell me your thoughts.

The post USE YOUR RESOURCES TO FIND YOUR WHY first appeared on Life-Built Poems.

I am reading Andrew Santella’s book, SOON: An Overdue History of Procrastination, from Leonardo and Darwin to You and Me.  Again.  This little book is setting off all kinds of firecracker strings in my head.

Santella, like me (and maybe you too?), is a self-confessed procrastinator so he’s at least well-practiced in trying to suss out the whats, the whys, and the wherefores of that almost universally censured habit, procrastination.

His stories are about people like scientist Charles Darwin, polymath Leonardo da Vinci, poet and writer Edgar Allen Poe, architect Frank Lloyd Wright and that dharma bum-cum-hipster Jack Kerouac who inspired a whole generation of seekers to take up wandering.

All of these guys are noted achievement junkies.  They did things…just not always the things they were supposed to be doing in the time-frames they or their clients and other important people had set for them.

“Simple” just naturally seemed to get complicated around them.  Time started warping, it seemed.

PROCRASTINATION AS A DEFIANCE OF AUTHORITY AND INEXORABLE TIME

Says Santella, “One reason procrastination is so reviled is that it can lead people off the path proscribed by whoever is in charge.  The habit challenges authority, flouts the mandated way of doing things.”

Hmmm…that one feels absolutely true.

He says procrastinators often put off stuff because they tangle themselves up in knots wondering about whether what the world wants them to do is worth doing at all.

In the book, he poses three questions right up front (and then proceeds not to answer them).

• Are we really and truly ethically required to make the most of the time allotted to us?
• How do we reconcile our individual autonomy with our obligations to others and to the relentless demands of a never-ending workday?
• When seemingly all information and every entertainment is available, how do we distinguish what is worthy of our attention and what is not?

Those questions are somewhat disconcerting to me.

They are exactly the ones that continually trip me up and send me down side-tracks of one sort or another when I’m on a deadline and bent on maximizing and enhancing or optimizing and fine-tuning some list of thought-constructs that are of extreme importance to somebody who isn’t me.

All the side-tracks are quite interesting and are often useful (eventually).  None of them are what I’m supposed to be doing.  They just add to the complexity of my dance and they waste a lot of time.

It’s not about being lazy.  It’s not about not wanting to work hard.  As humorist Robert Benchley once pointed out, “Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn’t the work he is supposed to be doing at the moment.”

Take a look at this thing:

Go on…tell me that’s NOT awesome!

Myself, I think it is probably also the “something else” on which Windell was lavishing tremendous effort in lieu of getting on with what he was supposed to be doing.

PROCRASTINATION-BY-ACCOMPLISHMENT AS A WAY OF WALKING

As I pointed out, Santella does not present any definitive answers to the meta-questions he presents in his book.  Mostly that is because every person who ponders these things will probably come up with a different answer.

Instead, he maintains that a dedicated procrastinator has to put up with paradoxes.  (Ah, those ubiquitous paradoxes strike again!)

Sometimes the best things you do are the ones you do only to put off doing something else that is way boring.

This YouTube video, “Foil,” was uploaded in 2019 by Comical.  The short animated film was put together by Jacob Varley, a guy who was probably procrastinating-by- achievement as well.

Cool, right?

WHAT’S PROCRASTINATION-BY-ACHIEVEMENT GOOD FOR?

Conventional ways of doing things lead mostly to the same-old and is part of the survival dance that maintains your own vested interest in the status quo.

But, what if your “quo” isn’t what you actually want to continue doing?

If you’re a Creative then it is likely that you’ll choose to pursue your mad idea while going crazy trying to keep the promises you’ve already made and the obligations you’ve taken on.

ACK!

That’s when the Santella questions can be useful.  You can use them to help you figure out how you want to sort and prioritize all this stuff you’re doing and get yourself back to clarity.

There are all kinds of systems and advice and books and videos galore if you don’t know how to prioritize your to-do list.  This 2017 You-Tube video, “How to Prioritize Effectively: GET THINGS DONE” is a quick review of the Eisenhower Matrix.  It works….

FINAL THOUGHTS

If you can make it past the procrastination-potential built into the whole prioritization dance, you might even have a chance to catch your breath.  That’ll be a novelty, right?

1. Look over the Santella questions and think your own deep thoughts. (You may even want to read Santella’s book for inspirations.)
2. Do the Eisenhower Matrix on your life.
3. When you figure out your own answers, go play.

Here’s a poem:

SQUARE EYEBALLS

Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock world,

Cogs in a machine,

Gears that grind away the days,

Turning hours and minutes and seconds

Into a finely ground powder

That gets into your eyes

And clogs up your head

As the wheels roll on, roll out, roll away – always away.

The second hand sweeping across

The big moon-faced clock

Locked us in between those ticks and those tocks.

A giant vacuum sucked up hopes and dreams

And poured them all into other-people schemes,

Belching and burping out thick black smoke

That blocked the sun

And turned the whole world gray.

We’re past that now, they say.

We farmed it all out,

Out-sourced all that

Suck-em-up empty.

Now our cousins get the benefits

Of measured-time Hell.

But, wait…

Along the way somewhere

We seem to have lost our “tock.”

Little plastic shields mounted

On teeny-tiny rolodexes

Tick-tick-ticked through our herky-jerky days,

Minute by minute by minute,

And the seconds disappeared….

Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick….

And the one-legged minutes hopped on by.

The moon-faced clock with its sweeping hands

Was remanded for resale and became

A collectible….

As the slow dreams died

And the world got too big

For the little dreamers.

And then the ticking stopped.

Pixels danced as we lost the measure of our days.

We bathe in the interminable Now,

Unconnected, swimming in a

Peculiar electronic vagueness

Where the nanoseconds zip and zap

In machine-driven meditations

That go nowhere.

And so,

Here we sit now,

Living in a plastic Heaven-realm.

Timeless now.

No ticks, no tocks.

No passages, no paths….

Just streaming LEDs and dancing dots

Playing out our thoughts in little boxes

As we connect up the little pips into webs

Like the demented spiders that got stoned on LSD.

Ummm….

Dang it!

I’m gonna go outside now,

Go talk to some trees or clouds or something,

Feel the wind on my skin

And maybe even drink down a rainbow or two.

Go stare at the horizon for a while.

I think my eyeballs just turned square again.

Maybe a dose of the analog world

Will get them back to round.

If not, there’s always peanut M&M’s….

By Netta Kanoho

HEADER PHOTO CREDIT:  “Tapping a Pencil” by Rennett Stowe via Flickr [CC BY 2.0]

……

SOME OTHER POSTS TO EXPLORE:

(Click on each of the post titles below and see where it takes you…)

• CHANGE IS AN INSIDE JOB
• HOW ARE YOU BUSY?
• AT A CROSSROADS

……

Thanks for your visit.  I’d appreciate it if you would drop a note or comment and tell me your thoughts.

The post DRAGGING YOUR FEET (Un-Seeing Exercise) first appeared on Life-Built Poems.

As you know, if you’ve spent some time rummaging around in this blog, I’ll ask my readers to share a self-made poem that has meaning and mana for them.  I am always surprised and pleased by the work of the people who take the time to respond to this request.

This latest lovely is a story-poem by fellow online entrepreneur Donna Holden (a.k.a. “Deelilah”), a wonderfully down-to-earth storyteller who has lived a lively and adventuresome life.

She has, she says, “a major case of wanderlust” and in her free-wheeling journeys with her husband Steve, for eight years as a long-haul trucker (between stints in the food industry), Deelilah has visited almost every state in the Union except Vermont and Maine.

The couple has lived in Hawaii, Alaska, Arizona, Ohio, Michigan, Oregon, and (currently) Washington State.

About the poem Deelilah has this to say:

“The poem is the story.  One day we, my now-husband and I, got a little high on Margaritas and decided to move to Waikiki in Honolulu, Hawaii.

“It was very hard to make the decision to leave Hawaii, but because I had family obligations back in Seattle, we left– at the six-month mark. (They say at six months, you either stay or go.)

“We had begun to fit in with the culture — especially Steve, who had found a job as a Captain in the Kon-Tiki Restaurant in the Hilton Hawaiian Village. He was one of two “Haoles” in the entire operation– and they liked him.

“I worked downtown in a high-rise private club restaurant (I can’t remember the name).

“We took no car. We rode the bus everywhere, including, for me to work, and around the island several times, etc. We lived a short walk to the beach, and we grew to love it.

“After a while, we imported a roommate from Seattle, Dione, from the Space Needle, where we had all worked together in the restaurant on top.  Ironically, Dione stayed on for another two (maybe more) years, another benchmark for leaving.

“She dated “Tavanna” from a famous Tiki Dancer show (I hope I got that name right). Many of the images I brought back with me were from that show, and another one on Kauai. 

“Drums, tiki torches, and soft night breezes are in my blood. 

“Except for the expense, now that the kids are gone, we would move back. Of course, there is much more to the story. Maybe someday, a book….”

Here’s her poem:

Hawaii On a Lark

We sat one day in a Mexican Bar
on the patio next to the park—
Tequila flowed freely
and dreams grew wings

as in a lark.

The breezes were warm and inviting
in Seattle that time, reminding us
of beaches we longed to see,
speaking of which, it must be

Hawaii.

“Let’s fly to the western shore,” I said, then.
Liquor talking, he said, “To be sure—when?”
“We’ll go right away, soon as we can pack.”
And before he knew it, we got on track.

A 747 would fit the plan—

Big-bellied bird, wide with possibility—

Nine or ten hours until it lands
in time for cocktail hour
on the sands

of Waikiki.

We stepped off the plane into a bath
of orchid air—
The wind blew softly through our hair.

Blue surf pounded the Pacific reefs
as totems imagined mermaid myths.
Magnolias around our necks were hung
with beads that were strung

from miniature shells.

Drumbeats bathed in balmy air
while shadow dancers
with feathered hair

twirled round and round—

A hollow conch horn played.

But six months later, from our dream we woke—
Our lark had flown away broke

back to Seattle.

Filled to the stars with Hawaiian lore,
we are Haoles no more.
Six months is all it took
To be forever on the hook.

There’s no forgetting the Hawaiian folk.

Aloha.

By Deelilah (Donna Holden)

Header photo credit:  “White Terns, Waikiki, O’ahu, Hawaii” by J. N. Stuart via Flickr [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

…..

Please note:  If you would like to contribute a poem to this blog, please let me know by leaving a comment below.  I’d be happy to hear from you.

I do ask three things of my guest poets:

• a poem of your own making that has great meaning and mana for you,
• the back-story for the poem — what inspired you or how you made it or whatever you want to tell about it, and
• an image that I can use as the featured photo in the header. (The last is optional. I do ask that the image you share is one you own — either an image of yourself or something that relates to the poem.  If you choose not to send an image, then I’ll go find something that works.)

If you click on this thing –> “Guest Poet Portal” you can submit a poem right now.

……

Thanks for your visit.  I’d appreciate it if you would drop a note or comment below and tell me your thoughts.

The post HAWAII ON A LARK (Memories of Flight) first appeared on Life-Built Poems.

Despite assorted life-coach advisories and dictums, I have never actually found the search for and contemplation of my own self particularly interesting.  When you’re adept at making (and living) in stories and poems, searching for your one “true” self seems like a waste of time.

Delphic pronouncements about the importance of “knowing thyself” are fine, but then there’s that New Age-y corollary that says you have to also embrace and love that self unconditionally or something.  This last bit is likely to set off agonized moans from me.

“Self?  Self?  Umm…what Self do you want me to hug or whatever?  Some of those selves of mine, I just want to whack!”

The fact is, the me I show the world is likely to shift around some from day to day, but the selves I deploy in the world are all me.  I am not wildly different from one day to the next.  (My life is probably just not chaotic enough for that.)

However, the moves I make and the persona that is out there on the playing field are shaped by the skills and propensities of mine that I need to call up in order to respond to whatever is happening in the world around me.  All of my skills and talents have -–errr—various “personality traits” attached.

None of the bennies I get from trying to deal with Life-Its-Own-Self comes from a consciously directed search for my one special shinier-than-shiny self.  I’m usually too busy looking for answers that help to unkink yet another conundrum or dilemma or problem I’ve come up against.

ANCIENT WISE-GUYS WEIGH IN WITH THEIR THOUGHTS

However, I’ve just run across a little YouTube video, “Why ‘Finding Yourself’ Is Dangerous Advice,” that was uploaded in 2016 by IVY, “the world’s first Social University.”

The video features Michael Puett, a professor of Chinese History at Harvard University and co-author, with journalist Christine Gross-Loh, of THE PATH:  What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life.

That book grew out of Puett’s very popular general education course, “Classical Chinese Ethical and Political Theory,” which has consistently been the third most-enrolled undergraduate course at the school since 2012.

(The other two classes with higher enrollment, year after year, are the introductory courses to Economics and to Computer Science.)

Gross-Loh tells the story of how, in 2007, the second year in which the course was offered, so many students signed up for it that the pupils were sitting on the stairs and the stage and the crowd was spilling out into the hallway.

The class had to be moved to Sanders Theater, the biggest venue at the school.

The classical Chinese wise guys, it seems, were much more concerned with overcoming the mess of emotional patterns and ruts that the wise guys thought we took on as we interacted with all the other people around us while we were growing up.  All that hemajang (inharmonious) mess, they said, shapes and influences us.

The wise guys thought that if we did not pay careful attention to all of the baggage we grew into and haul around, we would likely carry on throughout all of our born days living out all of the confused tangle of unthinking reactions, strategic blunders, and bad moves we adopted when we were Littles.

Some of these counterintuitive ways of walking are real mind-stretches for us post-moderns. All of them helped to build up complex cultures and civilizations.  None of them are made for popping into a microwave.  All of them take time and effort even to understand.

AND THEN THERE’S USING CONTINUITY (NOT SELF) AS A SPRINGBOARD FOR ACTION

There is one thing on which many of the Smarty Pants in the white lab coats agree that we modern folks don’t actually find such a mind-boggle.  Those guys tell us that story-making is how we humans make sense of the world and of Life-Its-Own-Self.

At any given moment, they say, all of us humans are likely to try to either

1. fit our life into some story or other we’ve already made, or
2. make up a story to fit how our lives happen to be trending.

This is a given, it seems.  The sense of continuity, of time flowing on through our lives, and the feeling that it is likely that the same kinds of familiar things will continue to happen over and over again can either be comforting to us or they can engender our discontent.  This naturally give us an incentive to either wrap all that comfort even more warmly around us or chuck the unsatisfactory bits out of there.

The continuity flowing through the lives we’ve already lived, the Smarty Pants say, assures us that we are probably going to exist for some time yet and might actually become that “better future self” we would like to be.

It is also this sense of continuity that can help us start and stay motivated enough to work through building the dream we would prefer to live.

We might even feel moved by that sense of continuity (which is quite elastic and can stretch to include our ancestors and our descendants) to start working on doing legacy goals that use up our whole lives.

As a work in progress, the series is an illustration of how you, too, can use continuity to build the future life you want.  All you need to do is commit yourself to putting together something every day that takes you toward the goal you are trying to reach.

On Day 85, Mage presents an idea she got from Dr. Dan Siegel called “Name It to Tame It” – a practical way to deal with intense emotions that can hijack your ability to think clearly and act graciously.

Here’s the video:

(Siegel is a clinical professor of the UCLA School of Medicine as well as the executive director of the Mindsight Institute as well as an author of several useful, best-selling books.)

You might want to dip into more of Mage’s Challenge YouTube video series which presents her curated collection of ideas for “navigating change, mastering transitions and making dreams come true.”  Mage says she put the thing together to fulfill her coaching year two certification.

About the challenge, she says, her mentor told her, “You have to be willing to suck before you can unsuck.  And, that(!) requires practice.”  By number 85, she has gotten pretty good at putting together videos.

And that’s the point of the whole thing, isn’t it?  If you commit to doing something that furthers your project onward, then eventually you’ll get to the end of that bit of walking and can see where you need to go next.

ANOTHER WAY THAT WORKS:  LOOKING FOR THE LIFE THAT FEELS LIKE A FIT

The biggest problem about walking towards your own dream in your way is this:  You cannot be a spectator to your own life.  It is, after all, your own story.  Somebody’s gotta do it.

In order to test your premises and your theories you have to have skin in your game.  It will be hard.  You will get beat up.  You have to decide whether you want to keep getting up every time you get beat down.

The following 2022 YouTube video by Green Renaissance, my favorite makers of beautiful short films about people finding meaningful lives for themselves, is this one, “Living With Intention.”

The video features Sarah Beckett, an artisanal baker who went looking for and found a life that feels like a better fit for her than the ones many of her friends and acquaintances would choose.

I think this video illustrates a way of walking that, should you choose to pursue it, can put genuine soul into your game.

ONE LAST THOUGHT

If you, too, find the Quest for Your Own True Self a yawn-inducing chore, I hope you got some good takeaway ideas from this post.

Now, go play….

Here’s a poem:

JUST ONE MORE PROMISE

It occurred to me that all of us are promises

Made by some long-dead ancestor to the world,

To generations past, for generations coming,

A promise that continues in full force.

And I think about how my own life has run on promises —

Promises made and promises kept (or not) —

And the stories that pile up as time moves on,

An inexorable river that never pauses…no, not for a second.

I wonder sometimes whether I have been a promise kept

Or one that my distant progenitor only flung out defiantly

As a hope or a wish and a quiet vote in favor of

The continuation of Life-Its-Own-Self.

For some reason, that last one always makes me smile.

by Netta Kanoho

HEADER PHOTO CREDIT:  “Into the Abyss” by Mark Seton via Flickr [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

……

SOME OTHER POSTS TO EXPLORE:

(Click on each of the post titles below and see where it takes you…)

• SELF-THIS AND SELF-THAT AND MORE SELF
• PLAY WITH THE ADJACENT POSSIBLE
• CHECK YOUR FILTERS: Roadmaps and Story

……

Thanks for your visit.  I’d appreciate it if you would drop a note or comment below and tell me your thoughts.

The post CANCEL THE SEARCH FOR THE ONE TRUE SELF first appeared on Life-Built Poems.

There once walked a gentle, funny, and very stubborn man, a musician who believed passionately in the power of people singing together out loud.

It was his skill to induce crowds of friends and strangers to join their voices together and create transcendent harmonies that lifted up the people’s hearts and spirits and set the world to shining for a while, cloaked in visions of belonging, of unity, and of peace.

With his long-necked five-stringed banjos, his 12-stringed guitars, and his ineffable voice and presence, this man kept on showing folks – young and old – how to do that over and over again throughout his good, long life.

He once said, “”Sometimes I think [about] that old saying,’The pen is mightier than the sword.’ Well, my one hope is the guitar is gonna be mightier than the bomb.”

When Pete Seeger died in 2014 at the age of 94, the world mourned his passing and remembered the joy he shared in the making of his music.  The staunchness of the stands he constantly took for freedom, for peaceful coexistence and compassion, and for the need to take care of our living planet and of each other were honored.

PETE SEEGER WALKING

Talking story in a 1976 Pickin’ magazine interview, Seeger told his interviewer Roger Siminoff about the consequences of being a creative swimming in the dangerous waters of social change-making:

“…back in the 1930’s when I first dropped out of school and got involved in singing for labor unions along with Woody Guthrie, I faced the fact that if you got involved in controversial politics, it would probably cause you to lose jobs.

For entertainers, that’s the least of your problems; all kinds of people lose jobs—teachers or ditch diggers or cooks because they get involved in controversial politics.

 And learning how to agree or disagree is the big thing that the world’s got to learn.”

Despite everything, Seeger never did stop working.  He was just too busy writing music and picking on the strings of his banjos and guitars, listening to and collecting other people’s music, educating young people, writing little teaching books, helping to expand assorted musical genres like urban folk music, bluegrass, protest music and rock and roll as well as influencing younger musicians who watched his ways of working with an audience and learned, and so on.

The causes and movements he personally supported, for which he turned up in his solo career is mind-boggling:

• Labor unions and migrant workers rights in the 1930’s and 1940’s
• Banning nuclear weapons and opposition to the Cold War in the 1950’s
• Civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements in the 1960’s
• Environmental responsibility and opposition to South African apartheid in the 1970’s
• Peace and human rights throughout the world, always

A number of the songs by the prolific songwriter and constant musical collaborator are now iconic anthems and touchstone songs that are part of the history and cultural landscape of several generations that lived through the turmoil, chaos, and strife in the world that has speeded up considerably during this one man’s lifetime.

They include:

• “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” (with additional lyrics by Joe Hickerson)
• “If I Had a Hammer” (with Lee Hays of the Weavers)
• “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine” (also with Lee Hays)
• “Turn! Turn! Turn!”
• “Waist Deep in the Muddy”

Seeger never seemed to pay much attention to the honors he garnered.  He just kept on walking his walk.

THE MAN, REMEMBERED

When Seeger died in 2014, his friend English singer-songwriter and fellow activist Billy Bragg wrote,

“Pete believed that music could make a difference. Not change the world, he never claimed that – he once said that if music could change the world he’d only be making music – but he believed that while music didn’t have agency, it did have the power to make a difference.”

One of my favorite remembrances about Pete Seeger comes from a 2014 National Public Radio podcast by NPR’s cultural critic and correspondent Linda Holmes who talked about how Seeger influenced her thinking:

“Pete Seeger understood something fundamental about humans and music, which is that many people can’t sing on key, but all crowds can. Even without rehearsal, public choirs can be stunning to listen to and thrilling to be part of.”

She goes on to say,

“… he believed that everyone should do it, that people should retain the ability to get in a room and sing, because it was good for you, and because it taught people to pitch in and be brave.”

THERE IS A BOOK….

In 1993, the songwriter’s autobiography, WHERE HAVE ALL THE FLOWERS GONE?: A Singer’s Stories, Songs, Seeds, and Robberies was published.  There was a second printing in 1997 and the book was reissued in 2009.

It’s a lovely book.

BLESSING FROM AN ELDER

In 2012, Amnesty International put together “Chimes of Freedom,” a collection of 50 Bob Dylan songs, as a fundraiser and a celebration of the organization’s 50^th anniversary.

One of the featured artists on the album was Pete Seeger performing Dylan’s “Forever Young,” one of the songs that evokes the youthful aspirational memories of an entire generation.

There’s a YouTube video, a mini-documentary put together by co-producers Martin Lewis and Mark Hudson about this segment of the album.

After that, how could I not also share the Amnesty International video of the song itself?  Enjoy!

……

Header photo credit:  “Center” by Steve Banfield via Flickr [CC BY-ND 2.0]

……

SOME OTHER POSTS TO EXPLORE:

(Click on each of the post titles below and see where it takes you…)

• HEART, PASSION AND THE WORLD
• MARY OLIVER: Peace and Poetry
• OTHER VOICES: Joy Harjo

……

Please note:  If you would like to contribute a poem to this blog, please let me know by leaving a comment below.  I’d be happy to hear from you.

I do ask three things of my guest poets:

• a poem of your own making that has great meaning and mana for you,
• the back-story for the poem — what inspired you or how you made it or whatever you want to tell about it, and
• an image that I can use as the featured photo in the header. (The last is optional. I do ask that the image you share is one you own — either an image of yourself or something that relates to the poem.  If you choose not to send an image, then I’ll go find something that works.)

If you click on this thing –> “Guest Poet Portal” you can submit a poem right now.

……

Thanks for your visit.  I’d appreciate it if you would drop a note or comment below and tell me your thoughts.

The post BLESSING FROM AN ELDER (Pete Seeger) first appeared on Life-Built Poems.

The thing about living your life as a poem or a story or any other kind of art is that there’s got to be a theme to the thing.  (It’s one of the rules, according to grade school English and art teachers when it comes to analyzing some bit of self-expression.)

This online dictionary I am looking at tells me that a theme is “an idea that recurs or pervades a work of art or literature.”  It’s how you make sense of the art (or the life) you’re making.

I was browsing through my bookshelves the other day and it occurred to me that the life I am living now has been shaped not only by the experiences and people I’ve encountered through the years, but also by many of the books now sitting on those shelves.  It got me to thinking about the prequel to my now-story.

In the middle of this reverie, I was drawn to aikido master Wendy Palmer’s book, THE INTUITIVE BODY:  Aikido as a Clairsentient Practice.  

As I looked at it, I was struck again by that subtitle. (The online dictionary.com says “clairsentient” means “the ability to perceive emotional or psychic energy that is imperceptible to the five senses.”)

Okay, yeah.  I know – woo-woo to the max and all that — but, hey, it’s a book about martial arts.  For me, that resonates.  As a long-time fan of old Run-Run Shaw movies and a really lousy kung fu practitioner, I still consider the thing a keeper.

I found the book during the first year after the death of my husband Fred, at a time when I was trying to figure out how I was going to walk on without him.  It took a while to suss that one out, and Palmer’s book was one of the resources that I tapped.  It helped.

So did an extreme number of self-help and self-improvement manuals, a mind-boggling array of psycho-pop and microwaved New Age publications, and as many old and antique philosophy, religious, indigene and ancient wisdom tomes of whatever ilk that I could get my hands on.

THE BOOKWORM TURNS

I spent the first two mourning years with my head constantly in some book or other.  (It is my default move.)

I also spent a heck of a lot of time writing long-hand in old-style grade school composition notebooks.  I did journaling.  I wrote poetry.  I did essays and opinion pieces.

I’m a writer.  It’s how I roll.

(At the time, I was in a very volatile emotional state.  It was all sturm und drang.  My left brain took a hike.  In that condition, until I write something down, I don’t actually know how or what I am really thinking. It is an uncomfortable place for me.)

I distilled the thoughts I stumbled across into pages and pages of notes that I then re-read until I got all dizzy from the multiplicity of viewpoints.  It took a lot of effort to pull together my own thoughts and reactions to all of these (often contradictory) mindsets and attitudes.

(I figured it was way better for me and my dignity to do that rather than consuming large quantities of alcohol or opiates or initiating wild-assed dancing or mad jungle sex – even though, I admit, the last two really did look like extremely attractive options.)

When I did write something down that had real resonance and meaning for me, I had the teachings of Palmer’s book to help me work on starting to “embody” my philosophical tunings and turnings and bring them back down out of my head and into my body.

Once I thought on and embodied all these different kinds of knowing and knowledge, I could actually use them to help me navigate through the world and make my way through all the confusion and crowds of people around me.

It was my way of getting on the bus.

Through the many experiments, explorations and iterations in which I’ve engaged as I went forward in my life, I often returned to Palmer’s book to remind myself of the questions it helped me ask and the answers and lessons I learned along the way.

AN INTERNET SIGHTING OF THE MASTER

I stumbled across a YouTube video (uploaded in 2015 by the Fetzer Institute) about Wendy Palmer’s Leadership Embodiment course that she took to South Africa and other places to teach people how to be centered under pressure, and to speak and take action in non-aggressive ways.

Palmer has been practicing aikido and her own brand of philosophy, it says here, for 45-plus years.  She was already a master teacher when I first read her work more than 20 years ago.

My own biggest take-away from the book was this thing:

“Without a firm root system or foundation, intuitive perceptions cannot be focused in embodied action.”

What that told me was that all of the most beautiful thoughts in the world mean little if you don’t enter fully into the life situations around you and engage with them.

Getting through and past the demands of Life-Its-Own Self gives you a way to reach a place where your own dreams are more likely to become a reality for you.

I tried it.  It does work.

STUMBLING OVER THE OLDEST OF HUMAN GAMES

In my forays into the book-stacks and the pools of deep-thinker words and words and words, I also stumbled across one other book that helped me set up the parameters of my explorations of Life-Its-Own-Self.

This mind-boggle of a book, FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility, was written by the late James Carse, a professor who taught religion at New York University for many years.  It was published in 1986.  I think it’s timeless.

I wrote a review of the book in a previous post that you can access by pressing on the button below.

In 2019, author and inspirational speaker Simon Sinek explored the ideas and thought-constructs presented by Carse in a book of his own, THE INFINITE GAME. Sinek’s been running with it ever since, it seems.

The following YouTube video, “Finite vs Infinite Game” was uploaded in 2019 by Generate Insights, and is an introduction by the author to the ideas in his book.

The Sinek book is, I think, a worthy attempt to bring a most important and very esoteric rule-of-thumb into the awareness of entrepreneurs and business leaders — people who are very much grounded in the “Real World” and who may be more than a little bit impatient with the woo-woo factor that the thought-construct tends to invoke.

In any case, the Infinite Game idea was one I adopted whole-heartedly in my own search for meaning and mana.  It resonated with me and it led me into some very interesting situations and side-roads on my own journey.

What I found is that it’s a heck of a lot of fun to be playing in a game where the overriding goal is to keep on playing.

WHEN YOU COME TO A CROSSROADS, ROADMAPS CAN BE A GOOD THING (OR NOT)

Lately I’ve been reading a lot about how “aspirational” lifestyles are keeping us post-moderns from “growing up” and getting on with “adulting.”

My guess is that some of that is probably a backlash reaction arising out of years and years of being subjected to an ever-increasing number of folks who are bound and determined to fix your sorry ass (for a suitable and often exorbitant fee).

Meanwhile, buried under all the bunk and the snake-oil (scientifically “proven” or otherwise) and dogmatic rigidities and such, the thought-constructs of deep-thinkers and those who are truly paying attention to the mysteries and the wonders of Life-Its-Own-Self still flourish.  They still have their own validity and vitality.

BACK TO MY STORY….

In my own journey, I went looking for my own truths.  I figured it would be a good thing if I could walk my own talk and make my life congruent with my own self-definition.

I checked out other people’s ways of thinking and ways of walking, and, after getting a feeling for the shape and the themes of their journeys, I tried out the ones I was curious about and kept an eye on where those ways of walking went.

Using that information, I started to construct my own roadmap that I now tend to use as a filter for any decisions I might make every time I reach another crossroad in my life.

MY OWN VERITIES

Just for the heck of it, I’m going to share my four “verities,” the truths through which I’ve learned to filter all of the decisions I choose to make in my life:

• The Creative has no limits and I am a conduit for the power of the Creative. (Basically, this is a reminder that I am way too small to actually encompass the all of everything, but I am still one way that the Divine can move into and through the world and I can honor that.)
• Freedom is the basis of the Universe. (I am free to choose how I respond to anything that happens to me.)
• Now is the moment of power. (Now is when something can happen.  The past is gone; the future isn’t here yet.)
• The World is a mirror of my mind. (What I see in the world around me tends to match what I believe the world to be.  This one is a good stance, it seems to me.  I can use it to choose beliefs that help make the world around me a good one.)

Your verities are probably going to be different.  Mine do work well for me and they do come in handy whenever I get to yet another crossroad in my life.

Have you checked out your own filters lately?  How are they working for you?  You might find out some very interesting things about how you are looking at your own world.

HOW DO YOU KNOW WHEN IT’S WORKING?

One of the main things a lot of the people I’ve studied keep saying is that you need to be able to measure your progress on your own road-trip.  Otherwise, you can’t really tell whether you are getting anywhere.

A lot of the self-help guys tend to start slicing and dicing Life and compartmentalizing everything.  They spend a lot of time affixing labels on these categories and sticking bits of life into the little boxes.

The motivational mob has piles and piles of numbers and statistics and such that they then interpret in whatever way seems to sound good to them.

Myself, I could never stand dissecting frogs and pinning dead butterflies to foam boards.  The poor critters lose their tiny little lives when you do that.  Pfui!

The numbers that sing for other people just gag and giggle when I come around.  When you’re prone to transposing numbers in a series and you tend to screw up basic arithmetic, numbers really are not such good tools to use, I say.

Whenever I take on another stance or taste the effects of a different mindset, I tend to watch the effects that happen because of that way of walking.  I keep an eye on what happens next and next and next.

Then I look at where I want to be going and figure out whether the way I’m moving from point A looks like it really is going to take me towards that point B I want to reach.

And then I look past the gut-reactions and check again to make sure that the moves I’m contemplating are really the most effective ones I can do in a particular situation.  Sometimes your gut can get you trapped in crappy stories that keep on repeating themselves, ya know.

That’s what default moves do.  They work really well at getting you to replay some old story.  Maybe different will work better.  It’s worth a look.

I check out how the world around me is showing up in my life.  I notice, pay attention to and appreciate the good things that happen as well as the not-so-good things like bad breaks, dangerous beasties, and other uncontrollable catastrophes.

I think on and feel what my gut has to say about these things and hunker down sifting through possible moves trying to figure out the best way I can respond to whatever is going on.

If I feel safe enough to make moves that further my own imperatives, I know I am in a good place.  If I am full of confusion and angst and angers and fears, I know I have further work to do.

ONE FINAL TAKE

The YouTube video below, “All In the Mind,” was uploaded in 2018 by Green Renaissance, a couple of passionate filmmakers, Michael Raimondo and his partner Justine, who are dedicated to putting together extraordinarily poignant and heartful works that are also visually beautiful.

The short film features Elrieda Pillman.  It moves your heart in a good way.  Enjoy!

Here’s a poem:

BETWEEN STORIES

I always hate the murky times –

The in-between spaces that separate

The ending of one passed-through story

And the glimmery start of the next.

Heavy fog rolls in, creepy-quiet, and

All the clearly labeled signs on

Faint outlines of old guideposts are obscured

As the Void lays claim to the landscape yet again.

You know that standing still

Results in your getting soaked to the skin,

Chilled to the bone by the Formless

That keeps gathering all around you.

You freeze inside the crapulous thoughts that arise,

And the worry-loops inside your head

Feature secret, insect claws scrabbling under your skin,

And hard, sharp tiny jaws biting.

Been there.

Done that.

And moving swiftly, making great, determined strides

Through old ghosts and defunct paradigms

Is likely to earn you a whack upside your head

As you slam into some blasted rock or broken tree limb.

Maybe there’s the big surprise of tumbling into

Some unanticipated ditch or falling down some unseen cliff

Or getting tangled up in giant jungle spider webs

Or chomped by randomly laid monster-traps.

Been there.

Done that too.

I always want to know whenever this happens:

What kind of “happily-ever-after” IS this?

By Netta Kanoho

PHOTO CREDIT:  “Torn in half” by Kate Kend via Flickr [CC BY 2.0]

……

SOME OTHER POSTS TO EXPLORE:

(Click on each of the post titles below and see where it takes you…)

• YES-BOOK VS NO-BOOK
• PUT SOME SOUL IN YOUR GAME
• SHAPER CHALLENGE (An Un-Seeing Exercise)

……

Thanks for your visit.  I’d appreciate it if you would drop a note or comment below and tell me your thoughts.

The post CHECK YOUR FILTERS: Roadmaps and Story first appeared on Life-Built Poems.

The thing about living your life as a poem or a story or any other kind of art is that there’s got to be a theme to the thing.  (It’s one of the rules, according to grade school English and art teachers when it comes to analyzing some bit of self-expression.)

This online dictionary I am looking at tells me that a theme is “an idea that recurs or pervades a work of art or literature.”  It’s how you make sense of the art (or the life) you’re making.

I was browsing through my bookshelves the other day and it occurred to me that the life I am living now has been shaped not only by the experiences and people I’ve encountered through the years, but also by many of the books now sitting on those shelves.  It got me to thinking about the prequel to my now-story.

In the middle of this reverie, I was drawn to aikido master Wendy Palmer’s book, THE INTUITIVE BODY:  Aikido as a Clairsentient Practice.  

As I looked at it, I was struck again by that subtitle. (The online dictionary.com says “clairsentient” means “the ability to perceive emotional or psychic energy that is imperceptible to the five senses.”)

Okay, yeah.  I know – woo-woo to the max and all that — but, hey, it’s a book about martial arts.  For me, that resonates.  As a long-time fan of old Run-Run Shaw movies and a really lousy kung fu practitioner, I still consider the thing a keeper.

I found the book during the first year after the death of my husband Fred, at a time when I was trying to figure out how I was going to walk on without him.  It took a while to suss that one out, and Palmer’s book was one of the resources that I tapped.  It helped.

So did an extreme number of self-help and self-improvement manuals, a mind-boggling array of psycho-pop and microwaved New Age publications, and as many old and antique philosophy, religious, indigene and ancient wisdom tomes of whatever ilk that I could get my hands on.

THE BOOKWORM TURNS

I spent the first two mourning years with my head constantly in some book or other.  (It is my default move.)

I also spent a heck of a lot of time writing long-hand in old-style grade school composition notebooks.  I did journaling.  I wrote poetry.  I did essays and opinion pieces.

I’m a writer.  It’s how I roll.

(At the time, I was in a very volatile emotional state.  It was all sturm und drang.  My left brain took a hike.  In that condition, until I write something down, I don’t actually know how or what I am really thinking. It is an uncomfortable place for me.)

I distilled the thoughts I stumbled across into pages and pages of notes that I then re-read until I got all dizzy from the multiplicity of viewpoints.  It took a lot of effort to pull together my own thoughts and reactions to all of these (often contradictory) mindsets and attitudes.

(I figured it was way better for me and my dignity to do that rather than consuming large quantities of alcohol or opiates or initiating wild-assed dancing or mad jungle sex – even though, I admit, the last two really did look like extremely attractive options.)

When I did write something down that had real resonance and meaning for me, I had the teachings of Palmer’s book to help me work on starting to “embody” my philosophical tunings and turnings and bring them back down out of my head and into my body.

Once I thought on and embodied all these different kinds of knowing and knowledge, I could actually use them to help me navigate through the world and make my way through all the confusion and crowds of people around me.

It was my way of getting on the bus.

Through the many experiments, explorations and iterations in which I’ve engaged as I went forward in my life, I often returned to Palmer’s book to remind myself of the questions it helped me ask and the answers and lessons I learned along the way.

AN INTERNET SIGHTING OF THE MASTER

I stumbled across a YouTube video (uploaded in 2015 by the Fetzer Institute) about Wendy Palmer’s Leadership Embodiment course that she took to South Africa and other places to teach people how to be centered under pressure, and to speak and take action in non-aggressive ways.

Palmer has been practicing aikido and her own brand of philosophy, it says here, for 45-plus years.  She was already a master teacher when I first read her work more than 20 years ago.

My own biggest take-away from the book was this thing:

“Without a firm root system or foundation, intuitive perceptions cannot be focused in embodied action.”

What that told me was that all of the most beautiful thoughts in the world mean little if you don’t enter fully into the life situations around you and engage with them.

Getting through and past the demands of Life-Its-Own Self gives you a way to reach a place where your own dreams are more likely to become a reality for you.

I tried it.  It does work.

STUMBLING OVER THE OLDEST OF HUMAN GAMES

In my forays into the book-stacks and the pools of deep-thinker words and words and words, I also stumbled across one other book that helped me set up the parameters of my explorations of Life-Its-Own-Self.

This mind-boggle of a book, FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility, was written by the late James Carse, a professor who taught religion at New York University for many years.  It was published in 1986.  I think it’s timeless.

I wrote a review of the book in a previous post that you can access by pressing on the button below.

In 2019, author and inspirational speaker Simon Sinek explored the ideas and thought-constructs presented by Carse in a book of his own, THE INFINITE GAME. Sinek’s been running with it ever since, it seems.

The following YouTube video, “Finite vs Infinite Game” was uploaded in 2019 by Generate Insights, and is an introduction by the author to the ideas in his book.

The Sinek book is, I think, a worthy attempt to bring a most important and very esoteric rule-of-thumb into the awareness of entrepreneurs and business leaders — people who are very much grounded in the “Real World” and who may be more than a little bit impatient with the woo-woo factor that the thought-construct tends to invoke.

In any case, the Infinite Game idea was one I adopted whole-heartedly in my own search for meaning and mana.  It resonated with me and it led me into some very interesting situations and side-roads on my own journey.

What I found is that it’s a heck of a lot of fun to be playing in a game where the overriding goal is to keep on playing.

WHEN YOU COME TO A CROSSROADS, ROADMAPS CAN BE A GOOD THING (OR NOT)

Lately I’ve been reading a lot about how “aspirational” lifestyles are keeping us post-moderns from “growing up” and getting on with “adulting.”

My guess is that some of that is probably a backlash reaction arising out of years and years of being subjected to an ever-increasing number of folks who are bound and determined to fix your sorry ass (for a suitable and often exorbitant fee).

Meanwhile, buried under all the bunk and the snake-oil (scientifically “proven” or otherwise) and dogmatic rigidities and such, the thought-constructs of deep-thinkers and those who are truly paying attention to the mysteries and the wonders of Life-Its-Own-Self still flourish.  They still have their own validity and vitality.

BACK TO MY STORY….

In my own journey, I went looking for my own truths.  I figured it would be a good thing if I could walk my own talk and make my life congruent with my own self-definition.

I checked out other people’s ways of thinking and ways of walking, and, after getting a feeling for the shape and the themes of their journeys, I tried out the ones I was curious about and kept an eye on where those ways of walking went.

Using that information, I started to construct my own roadmap that I now tend to use as a filter for any decisions I might make every time I reach another crossroad in my life.

MY OWN VERITIES

Just for the heck of it, I’m going to share my four “verities,” the truths through which I’ve learned to filter all of the decisions I choose to make in my life:

• The Creative has no limits and I am a conduit for the power of the Creative. (Basically, this is a reminder that I am way too small to actually encompass the all of everything, but I am still one way that the Divine can move into and through the world and I can honor that.)
• Freedom is the basis of the Universe. (I am free to choose how I respond to anything that happens to me.)
• Now is the moment of power. (Now is when something can happen.  The past is gone; the future isn’t here yet.)
• The World is a mirror of my mind. (What I see in the world around me tends to match what I believe the world to be.  This one is a good stance, it seems to me.  I can use it to choose beliefs that help make the world around me a good one.)

Your verities are probably going to be different.  Mine do work well for me and they do come in handy whenever I get to yet another crossroad in my life.

Have you checked out your own filters lately?  How are they working for you?  You might find out some very interesting things about how you are looking at your own world.

HOW DO YOU KNOW WHEN IT’S WORKING?

One of the main things a lot of the people I’ve studied keep saying is that you need to be able to measure your progress on your own road-trip.  Otherwise, you can’t really tell whether you are getting anywhere.

A lot of the self-help guys tend to start slicing and dicing Life and compartmentalizing everything.  They spend a lot of time affixing labels on these categories and sticking bits of life into the little boxes.

The motivational mob has piles and piles of numbers and statistics and such that they then interpret in whatever way seems to sound good to them.

Myself, I could never stand dissecting frogs and pinning dead butterflies to foam boards.  The poor critters lose their tiny little lives when you do that.  Pfui!

The numbers that sing for other people just gag and giggle when I come around.  When you’re prone to transposing numbers in a series and you tend to screw up basic arithmetic, numbers really are not such good tools to use, I say.

Whenever I take on another stance or taste the effects of a different mindset, I tend to watch the effects that happen because of that way of walking.  I keep an eye on what happens next and next and next.

Then I look at where I want to be going and figure out whether the way I’m moving from point A looks like it really is going to take me towards that point B I want to reach.

And then I look past the gut-reactions and check again to make sure that the moves I’m contemplating are really the most effective ones I can do in a particular situation.  Sometimes your gut can get you trapped in crappy stories that keep on repeating themselves, ya know.

That’s what default moves do.  They work really well at getting you to replay some old story.  Maybe different will work better.  It’s worth a look.

I check out how the world around me is showing up in my life.  I notice, pay attention to and appreciate the good things that happen as well as the not-so-good things like bad breaks, dangerous beasties, and other uncontrollable catastrophes.

I think on and feel what my gut has to say about these things and hunker down sifting through possible moves trying to figure out the best way I can respond to whatever is going on.

If I feel safe enough to make moves that further my own imperatives, I know I am in a good place.  If I am full of confusion and angst and angers and fears, I know I have further work to do.

ONE FINAL TAKE

The YouTube video below, “All In the Mind,” was uploaded in 2018 by Green Renaissance, a couple of passionate filmmakers, Michael Raimondo and his partner Justine, who are dedicated to putting together extraordinarily poignant and heartful works that are also visually beautiful.

The short film features Elrieda Pillman.  It moves your heart in a good way.  Enjoy!

Here’s a poem:

BETWEEN STORIES

I always hate the murky times –

The in-between spaces that separate

The ending of one passed-through story

And the glimmery start of the next.

Heavy fog rolls in, creepy-quiet, and

All the clearly labeled signs on

Faint outlines of old guideposts are obscured

As the Void lays claim to the landscape yet again.

You know that standing still

Results in your getting soaked to the skin,

Chilled to the bone by the Formless

That keeps gathering all around you.

You freeze inside the crapulous thoughts that arise,

And the worry-loops inside your head

Feature secret, insect claws scrabbling under your skin,

And hard, sharp tiny jaws biting.

Been there.

Done that.

And moving swiftly, making great, determined strides

Through old ghosts and defunct paradigms

Is likely to earn you a whack upside your head

As you slam into some blasted rock or broken tree limb.

Maybe there’s the big surprise of tumbling into

Some unanticipated ditch or falling down some unseen cliff

Or getting tangled up in giant jungle spider webs

Or chomped by randomly laid monster-traps.

Been there.

Done that too.

I always want to know whenever this happens:

What kind of “happily-ever-after” IS this?

By Netta Kanoho

PHOTO CREDIT:  “Torn in half” by Kate Kend via Flickr [CC BY 2.0]

……

SOME OTHER POSTS TO EXPLORE:

(Click on each of the post titles below and see where it takes you…)

• YES-BOOK VS NO-BOOK
• PUT SOME SOUL IN YOUR GAME
• SHAPER CHALLENGE (An Un-Seeing Exercise)

……

Thanks for your visit.  I’d appreciate it if you would drop a note or comment below and tell me your thoughts.

The post CHECK YOUR FILTERS: Roadmaps and Story first appeared on Life-Built Poems.

One of my favorite quotes about seeds comes from writer-filmmaker-cum-social entrepreneur Kenny Ausubel who co-founded Seeds of Change with his wife Nina Simon in 1989.  The seed- growing company’s mission, “to restore ‘backyard diversity’ into the food web through marketing organic, biodiverse heirloom seeds to gardeners,” continues to this day.

Around the same time that Ausubel was doing that, he was also helping to put together Bioneers, a non-profit group that holds an annual conference which, it says here, functions as a “hub of social and scientific innovations with practical and visionary solutions for the worlds’ most pressing and social changes.”

Their annual award-winning radio and audio series, “BIONEERS; Revolution From the Heart of Nature” is available free for the listening.  For more than thirty years, the group has been an exceptionally joyous celebration of human ingenuity and creativity, connecting people with solutions and with each other.

[You might also want to check out the group’s website and audio | podcast series.  (Click on the different-colored titles above.)]

Anyway, here’s the quote:

“Seeds carry life from generation to generation without end.  Through the seeds speak the voices of the ancestors.  Each time we plant a seed, we become ancestors for the generations to come.”

And isn’t that a beautiful vision?

One short YouTube video featured on the Bioneers organization’s purpose page is “Bioneers: It’s All Connected.” The clip, which was uploaded in 2019, is taken from a series called, “Seeding the Field: 30 Years of Transformative Solutions” that showcases the best moments of the Bioneers conference through the years.

WE ARE ALL A PART OF A PROCESSION

The way of seeing that Ausubel and his Bioneers talk about in the video resonates with one of the foundational mindsets held by various native peoples of Oceania.  The traditional Oceanic ways of relating to the world around us are a part of our culture and part of who we are as people.

Feelings of connection to Life-Its-Own-Self are a large part of the meaning the ones who live in the Real Old-Style give to being human.

This way of seeing and the way of moving through the world that it engenders arises from a deeply felt connection to earth that humans can intuit, a connection to place and to every living thing in that place.  The mindset gives us access to an energy that even modern sorts like us can tap.

This energy flows out into the world through our mouths and imbues our stories and poems and songs with tremendous power.  It touches every action we make, no matter how ordinary, with magic and it can help us to shape the world around us into beauty.

A TRIP DOWN MEMORY LANE

My grandfather was a home gardener dedicated to the rituals of food production as only someone who had raised up a large brood of young ‘uns with a bad-tempered, shrewd and sharp-tongued wife could be.

The thing is, I never did see Papa buy any seeds or plant starts for any of his gardens.  I still remember all the jars of seeds lined up on a shelf in the old work shed.

Inside and around the work shed, there was an abundance of simple digging tools and beat-up handmade wheelbarrows to haul stuff around. Assorted sharp implements and hand tools, an array of empty pots, and lots and lots of buckets and hoses and pipes were all neatly arranged in that shed.

A STRAY THOUGHT:  WERE HUMANS DOMESTICATED BY PLANTS? 

The plants in Papa’s garden came from all over the world.  They were brought here by voyagers, traders, refugees, colonists and other settlers who came here from other far-flung places.

Throughout all of our story-making days we humans have lived, we know that this is one of the ways plants have spread all over our planet.

Sometimes I think the plants domesticated us humans so we’d carry them around to all of the new places we found.  After all, plants use everything else they can to spread and propagate themselves, including insects, birds, animals, and even wind and wave action.

Hmmm….

That one’s a bit of a mind-boggle.

THE WORLD CHURNS

By the time I had the wherewithal and the inclination to do some home gardening my own self, the world my Papa knew was dead.

People were no longer saving seeds from the plants they grew in their gardens.  Instead, there were all these mail-order seed catalogs with glorious pictures of lovely fields of plants.  The seeds I got never seemed to do quite what I thought they were supposed to do.

People no longer made their own dirt.  You could buy way-better-than-dirt planting stuff as well as stuff to make new and improved dirt.  These things all came in big old bags that took up a lot of room.

I also came to realize that the whole home gardening thing had become a model for “better living through chemistry” somehow, and it was actually dangerous for many living things to hang out in gardens.

There were all kinds of evil-smelling chemical warfare potions that decimated bugs and other living things and other mysterious (but very scientific) magic stuff that was supposed to pump up plant production to greater heights or something.

The Industrial Revolution had gone agrarian and I had not really noticed it.

THE POLITICS OF SEEDS

The story about that is interesting.  It is, predictably, the one about who gets to decide what we do with our resources.  Surprise, surprise!

Starting in the mid-1800s, the notion that living organisms and their genetic material were resources that needed to be regulated and controlled started gaining ground.  A series of government based programs, policies, offices and associations were formed to discourage everyday people from saving their own seeds.

The bureaucracy that grew up around the plant-growing control effort spent a lot of time putting obstacles in the way of little farmers who just wanted to grow food and flowers and other useful things in the Real Old-Style.  Similar stories in other countries played out in the same way.  It also gave corporations and other non-living entities the ability to own the right to control what kinds of plants could and should be grown and (not so incidentally) allow these entities to charge rent on the use of the seeds that they controlled.

Similar stories in other countries played out in much the same way.

(Personally, I think the model the power dudes used was the fairy-tale where the farmer’s daughter conned the rich guy into believing that she could by golly turn wheat-straw into gold.  Too bad Rumpelstiltskin wasn’t around.)

BIODIVERSITY IS MOTHER NATURE’S BEST DEFENSE

Even though the law only affected commercial farmers who now have to pay rent on the seeds they use to plant their fields, the trickle-down for home gardeners and other regular people was the loss of an enormous wealth of knowledge and cultural practices that helped ensure the biodiversity of our food web.

Think “Irish potato famine.”  That’s the go-to model for why it is a bad idea to grow just one iteration of any important food crop.

Scientific studies made since the power move to take control of the world’s seed stocks have shown that the commodification and patentability of seeds was responsible for the loss of countless varieties of plants.  Some of these studies estimate that we’ve lost close to 75% of the different iterations and variations of the plants we used to grow, mostly because we did not save the seeds.  ARGH!

Instead of millions of people all over the world saving seeds and helping the plants they grow to adapt to their specific local conditions, in the intervening years since the paradigm-shift, the places where we can get seeds for growing the plants we need to live have dwindled down to a few hundred.

BIG IDEAS ARE GREAT, BUT WHEN DO WE EAT?

Once the effects of the decision to turn food and other useful plant materials into gold mines was understood, there were all kinds of fix-it things (also mostly government-sponsored).

Some of the fix-it things are mighty impressive, like scientifically engineered seed vaults like the Svalbard Global Seed Vault that opened in 2008 in Svalbard, Norway and the National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation located in Fort Collins, Colorado.

My reaction when I encounter the stories about the fabulous collections of seeds the human race has got stashed in case of the Apocalypse always seems to come down to, “Wow!  That’s awesome!  When do we get to play with those things too?”

My own gut-feeling about all that is that if the world blows up, how the heck are we going to be able to break into those temperature-controlled, ultra cool seed vaults?  It’s not a gardening shed, ya know.

To get an idea of the variety and scope of the worldwide efforts to encourage seed biodiversity, click on the button below.

It will take you to an 2020 overview by writer Katie Howell titled “27 Organizations Working to Conserve Seed Biodiversity.”  The list includes initiatives and efforts by many good people to help work on the problem of mitigating the rapidly shrinking inventory of plant resources around the world and to improve on what we’ve got left.  Mostly these are assorted seed libraries, seed banks and lots of educational efforts as well.

Like the seed vault things they are magnificent.  Looking over them, however, I am mostly stymied by what (besides throwing money at them) I could do to help their efforts.

EVERYDAY PEOPLE DOING EVERYDAY THINGS

Fortunately, there have been many people like Kenny Ausubel and other deep-thinking sorts who have started organizations that are working at a more grassroots level to encourage the resurrection and revitalization of the practice and process of developing diverse home-bred, locally and regionally specific seed varieties.

These varieties are more likely, over time, to become adapted to local and regional changes in climate, incoming pests and brand-new diseases, improved growing practices and technological advances as well as rising energy costs or space limitations.

Part of that process of local adaptation comes down to saving and sharing seeds. The people who are growing plants for the seeds live with those same changes and environmental conditions.  They have an incentive to work on preserving or encouraging plant characteristics that can deal with them.

Founded in Minnesota in 1975 by husband and wife team Diane Ott Whealy and Kent Whealy, they now are based on 890 acres in Winneshiek County, Iowa at Heritage Farm.

Along the way the Whealys and their crew have created a network of more than 13,000 members.  Among the members, the Exchange grows over 20,000 heirloom and heritage varieties that do well in a wide variety of different regions around the world.

This 2015 YouTube Video, “Seed Saving Advice to Beginners,’ is an introduction to their award-winning book, THE SEED GARDEN BOOK:  The Art and Practice of Seed Saving, which is now in its second edition.  The book was edited by Lee Buttala and Shanyn Siegel.

If you are not up for a whole book about saving seeds, you might want to click on the button below for a quick tour of hacks for doing that very thing by the online magazine Modern Farmer.  The post it takes you to is titled, “SEED-SAVING 101:  Ten Things to Know If You Want to Start Saving Seeds.”

Here’s a poem:

SOWING SEEDS

Here they are,

Just hardened dried bits of defiance,

Tightly holding on to the memories of

Old stories lived through ages past

Reiterated again and yet again.

The dreams of glories

And splendid harvests come and gone.

Genesis encapsulated

In tiny little bundles of promises,

Whispering, urging me to make

Yet another leap of faith,

One more time.

Take the chance, they whisper.

One more time, they sigh.

The fecund earth stands ready and

The world holds its collective breath once more.

Waiting for the seed’s release

Just as the seed yearns towards its becoming.

A still point at the intersection of choice.

Once again the seed hits the dirt

And the story can continue.

And every time, without fail, I do recall

The snarling words of Konstantinos,

That old recalcitrant Greek rebel-poet:

“What didn’t you do to bury me…

But you forgot that I was a seed.”

OPA!

By Netta Kanoho

Header Photo credit:  “Seed Saver” by Taryn Domingos via Flickr [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

……

SOME OTHER POSTS TO EXPLORE:

(Click on each of the post titles below and see where it takes you…)

• MIRACULOUS ABUNDANCE
• THE BEAUTY REBELLION
• BEYOND STUFF-LOVE (Part 5):  Lifestyle

……

Thanks for your visit.  I’d appreciate it if you would drop a note or comment below and tell me your thoughts.

The post HELP SEEDS FULFILL THEIR PROMISE first appeared on Life-Built Poems.

Another IPS (Inner Peace Symptom):  an understanding that anger energy can be used to unify rather than divide.  [Anger is a wake-up call, a signal that change is needed.  If you can respect other people’s ways of dancing while working towards making room to do your own dance, the anger can lead to more understanding, communication, and caring.  Not easy, but doable….]

Three ‘R’s make up the Anger Trifecta:  Resentment, Rage, and Regret.  We all know that.  And almost every human that’s ever lived has experienced these emotional states.

How not?  They are body- and gut-reactions to Life-Its-Own-Self and one of the complex internal body working systems that kept our survivor ancestors alive long enough to produce each and every one of us bobos.

Smarty Pants who study social interactions among us humans as well as every wise guy and every little judgy old uncle or aunty and P.C. advocate that ever lived have spent all kinds of time telling the rest of us slobs how we are supposed to handle the effects of our own personal Anger Trifecta so that we don’t blow up this consensus-world we are building together.

The world keeps on spinning.  We humans keep on packing ourselves onto it and we keep tripping all over each other’s feet.

Because the Anger Trifecta is such a potent part of each and every one of us, the stacks of social behavior “shoulds” and “oughts” and the parameters and restrictions and constraints on the actions that arise out of this very human emotional stew has gotten huge.

Anger really is a built-in, organic, specialized information-gathering mechanism that’s focused on personal survival.

ANOTHER PARADOX, ANOTHER PROBLEM

Here is an extraordinary little YouTube video, “Learning To Be Angry,” which was uploaded in 2020 by the School Of Life.  It explains a bit about why developing the ability to express our own “rightful sorrows” is an important skill to develop and learn how to use.

According to the video, “For every person who shouts too loudly, there are at least twenty who have unfairly lost their voice….”

To me, at least, it seems that the absence of all those other gone-silent voices and their different perspectives of Life-Its-Own-Self add up to an incalculable loss in the possibilities for meaning and mana that we humans can pursue in our consensus world.

This does not seem like a good thing to me.

Hmmm….

Maybe some D.I.Y. life-hacks for dealing with the individual components of the Trifecta might help.

RESENTMENT AS A TEMPER-ATURE GAUGE

Resentment is very often a sign that you are feeling the effects of an unmet need that has consistently not been resolved or satisfied.

At some point or other, at least some of these important-to-you needs are not going to be met by your own self or by the other people in your life.

When that happens, it hurts.  It can make you feel sad and bad and pressed-upon.  Irritation, annoyance, and indignation are likely.

Because it is so very hard to look at what hurts you and makes you feel vulnerable, you may not be able to look at your unrecognized fears and the unresolved pains and griefs you’ve experienced in your life.

Resentment is a kind of nebulous, undefined cover-up for all of the really crummy stuff you’d rather not look at.

If you just “can’t get no satisfaction” and you start feeling frustrated that these same needs are not being met over and over again no matter what you try to do about it and regardless of how long you wait for the situation to resolve itself, this can become problematic.

Also, it seems, ignored or set-aside resentments are cumulative.

The older you get, the more resentments you acquire (unless you are good at letting them go).  This pile of resentments can breed more and more connected resentments that can work themselves around into becoming triggers for episodes of full-blown rage.

All kinds of systems – scientific, spiritual, and heart-based — have been developed that can work for you, and lots of people have been trained to help you get yourself past the resentment-collecting when it starts to adversely affect you in your life.

I did find a really good YouTube video, “Anger Management: Warning Signs + Anger Thermometer,” which features Woody Schuldt, LMHC talking about how you can identify your own personal warning signs.  It was uploaded in 2019 by Therapist Aid.

Using this “thermometer” can help you notice.  It can send up signals that you need to pay attention when you are starting to feel the nudges of some resentment or other.

If you look at the incidents that start the resentment and temper build-up from your ground-zero calmness, maybe you can start to figure out why you are getting mad and where your trigger points happen.

If you need more ideas for the physical effects of the rise of your temper, you can click on the button below to access a post, “Recognizing and Owning Your Anger,” on the Affordable Quality Counseling website.  Dr. Paul Standal and his team present a list of common signs of anger and upset as well as a checklist that details indications for hidden anger.

RAGE AS RESEARCH

Spiritual teacher-author Eckhart Tolle tells us, “Where there is anger there is always pain underneath.”

That is a truth.

One of the very best how-to’s for using anger as a gude to finding your own self-expression can be found in a post on the Tiny Buddha blog by life-coach, psychologist and healer Anne K. Uemura.

As she says, “Embracing anger may be counter-intuitive, but in doing so you become aware of old, unconscious reactive patterns.  In becoming aware of these patterns you free yourself to choose from a place of power.”

Click on the button below to access that post.

I think her strategies and tactics make a lot of sense.  (Also, I’m here to tell ya they do work.)

However, for all of that, I do have to admit that my own inclinations are delineated by that icon of icons, Edna “E” Mode, in Disney/Pixar’s silliness, “The Incredibles.”

In this 2011 YouTube video clip uploaded by Pixar, that quintessential feminist gives the self-pitiful Elastigirl some right-on relationship advice….

REGRET AS A STEPPING-STONE

Science writer Daniel Pink is “a recognized authority on the science of motivation, the science of timing and the business zeitgeist.”  His bio on the Thinkers 50 website says so.  I have been a fan for years.

His 2022 book, THE POWER OF REGRET:  How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward, is the result of his analysis of more than 16,000 stories he collected in his World Regret Survey.

The regrets Pink points to are as follows:

• FOUNDATION REGRETS. These are the regrets that revolve around a failure to behave like a responsible person and includes the bad habits that have negative long-term consequences for life.  Things like overspending, skipping school, neglecting your health and all the other stuff the Bigs used to tell you were important for a “good life.”
• BOLDNESS REGRETS. These come from being fearful and over-cautious.  They are the you-coulda-but-you-didn’t ones that comes from too much risk aversion.
• MORAL REGRETS. These are centered on the other people that our actions and failings have hurt.
• CONNECTION REGRETS. These regrets encompass lost relationships with family members, friends, colleagues and community.  It’s the sad that comes from finally understanding that you really don’t get a second chance to make new old friends and the pain of knowing that you messed up in your dealings with the heart-people in your life.

Of all the regrets, the last one – connection – turned out to be the most common experience in Pink’s survey.

In his book Pink does touch on strategies to cope with the regrets we already have.

Not keeping the things bottled up and hidden away is the first of the strategies.  Acknowledging your bad and figuring out what you did and how that managed to screw things up for you allows you to take a hard look at even the most painful of the regrets you carry.

The trick to this, Pink tells us, is avoiding hitting yourself over the head over and over again with all the bad stuff.  Self-forgiveness needs to happen…and that one can take a good long while to get through.  If it’s bad enough, you might even want to ask for help.

This self-disclosure can be a most private thing locked in the pages of your journal.  And if you can’t stop beating yourself up, you can always go find somebody who can help you with your angst.

In all of this, you do have to recognize your errors and cut yourself some slack.  (Eh! You are probably not the worst super-villain the world has ever seen.  Stop being such a braggart, you!)

At the same time, Pink also advocates what he calls a “pre-mortem” every time you are in the throes of making some decision or other.

What you do for that is imagine the worst possible potential outcome that might arise if you make this or that one move that could compromise your values or wreck your future health and happiness.

None of this is new stuff, but it makes for good reminders about the lessons you’ve already learned and may help you find better ways to move in the future.

Here’s a poem:

GO GOOD, MY BRADDAH

You have your issues

And they push you –

This I know.

Your wants color the air around you

And perch on your shoulders

Grimacing at me like

A crowd of gremlins.

Their yammering fills up your ears,

Blocking out the words

Trying to climb in.

Their fingers cover your eyes,

Letting you catch glimpses only

Of the world around you.

Their fragrance clogs up your nose

So you can’t smell the scent of rejection,

The signals others send.

The taste in your mouth

Comes from the ashes

From the burning fire in your gut.

The gremlins have hold of you.

They’ve made a fortress all around you

Out of all the knives and smokes and mirrors

In your mind.

Nothing I can do or say can reach you

Through that shifting kaleidoscopic shield they’ve raised up.

It all gets lost in the flickering movement

Of your tumbling thoughts.

Auwe, brah!

No can, li’ dat.

Sorry, eh!

(Sigh!)

Go good, my braddah….

 By Netta Kanoho

HEADER PHOTO CREDIT:  “Sailing Into the Wind” by G. Lamar via Flickr [CC BY 2.0]

……

SOME OTHER POSTS TO EXPLORE:

(Click on each of the post titles below and see where it takes you…)

• BE A MARTIAL ARTIST OF THE MIND
• OVERRIDE “STAIRCASE WIT”
• RULES OF THUMB FOR WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE

……

Thanks for your visit.  I’d appreciate it if you would drop a note or comment below and tell me your thoughts.

The post TRANSMUTE THE ANGER TRIFECTA (Another IPS) first appeared on Life-Built Poems.

New Zealand’s Grace Iwashita-Taylor is a Shaper and a poet.

She lives her life as a single mother, as a loving daughter trying to deal with the realities and challenges of her beloved mother’s decline into dementia and as a youth worker in a place that is one of the most expensive places to live on the planet.

She is also an award-winning spoken word and published poet, playwright, and performer.

The poet’s upu (words) circle around and around the varied ideas of self and identity, of race and culture and the politics thereof, and of transcending the ramifications and nuances of living in the modern aftermath of the historic dispossession of the island peoples of Pasifika.

Published poet Taylor has gathered her life-built poems into two books so far.

Her first book, AFAKASI SPEAKS:  Poems by Grace Teuila Evelyn Taylor debuted in 2013 and features the work that grew out of her earliest attempts at self-discovery and self-expression.

Her second book, FULL BROKEN BLOOM, was published in 2018 and presents poems that documents and exposes the ways she navigated through the pain and the anger resulting from betrayal and the end of a long-term relationship and exposes how she moved through it towards her own healing and a new beginning.

As a Shaper, she lives her answers out loud as she builds her own life around the truths and the people she holds dear.

LIVING THE ANSWERS LEAVES NOWHERE TO HIDE

Taylor self-identifies as an “afakasi”, the Samoan word for “mixed-blood.”  (The connotations of the word are a more intense version of the Harry Potter “mud-blood” epithet.)  The poet’s mixed bloodlines of Samoan, English, and Japanese are an important piece of the package.

Growing up, her sensitivity about being afakasi (and “not-belonging”) was her greatest vulnerability.  It became the lens through which she focused her exploration of her world, the people around her, and her own sense of self.

She stands on-stage and offers up her guts to her audience.  There is no hiding away from Life-Its-Own-Self in her work.

This 2012 YouTube video, uploaded by Dietrich Soakai, features Taylor reciting her poem, “Being Afakasi”.

Sometimes her thoughts led her to tell stories about the realities of the struggles of the island peoples in our postmodern world, like this poem she spoke at the 2013 Creative New Zealand conference.

And sometimes, like this poem presented at the Auckland Museum’s “Urbanlife 2012: Navigating Spaces” show that showcased the poetry of Polynesian youth, Taylor’s poems hold out gifts of hope and an urging to keep on dreaming, to keep on making your own truths real.

Through the years she continues to grow and evolve as her creative visions expand and embrace the world she inhabits.

GROWING LIKE A TREE

The group was one of the sprouts that grew from the poet’s work with a fifty-year-old national initiative, Youthline, that nurtures and supports young people throughout New Zealand.  The SAPC poet group uses spoken word and written and slam poetry as tools for positive social change.

Another sprout was The Rising Voices Youth Poetry Movement, which grew out of the need to develop a poetry slam for young people outside of the pubs and bars where most slams are held.  Taylor collaborated with another champion slam poet Jai MacDonald, to help bring that one to life.  It helped to spark an international effort that provides a place for young poets to find their own voices and tell their own stories.

She even has her own TEDx Talk, “The Power of Words,” which she presented in 2013 at the TEDxAuckland event.  (You can click the button below to access the talk.)

She has “made theater” as a director and as a playwright. She has even explored digital storytelling.  And Taylor still joins with other fellow poets and creatives to organize public shows and exhibits that feature the voices of Pasifika peoples.

THE VALUE OF VULNERABILITY AND BALANCE

In a Serum Digital Magazine post published in 2020, Taylor explains to her interviewer Aleyna Martinez,

“I’m not the best writer, poet or performer but vulnerability…that’s my strength as a creative. It has taken me some time and skill to understand the strength in that, and be able to be open, and from the gut, but to also keep myself safe…

As a fellow-poet, there was another thing she said that really resonated with me:

 “I decided for myself, that I really do believe that my words can change shit. Anything I share with anyone whether it’s one-on-one or whatever, it doesn’t have to have a resolution or a pretty ending but it has to be life-giving.”

In the Serum Digital interview, Taylor admitted that she was still working on developing a synergy that uses and embraces all of the varied elements of her life – the 9 to 5 day job that pays the bills, working on creative projects as a side gig, speaking her own truths, and taking care of her son and devoting time and attention to her mother too – to achieve a better balance in her life.

I think the biggest impact has been becoming aware of my energy as a currency. When I first started in my arts career I’d say yes to everything and I would just run myself fucken ragged.

She continues,

Now I know my worth as an artist. I’m very clear about my boundaries so I’m not going to say yes to a creative project just for the moment or just because who is involved. It has to align with my own values and my own kaupapa (aspirations, vision and purpose).

At the time of the interview, Taylor was still trying to get the balance right.  Like the rest of us she keeps working on it.

Header Photo:  “Mysterious Balance” by Andy via Flickr [CC BY-ND 2.0]

……

Please note:  If you would like to contribute a poem to this blog, please let me know by leaving a comment below.  I’d be happy to hear from you.

I do ask three things of my guest poets:

• a poem of your own making that has great meaning and mana for you,
• the back-story for the poem — what inspired you or how you made it or whatever you want to tell about it, and
• an image that I can use as the featured photo in the header. (The last is optional. I do ask that the image you share is one you own — either an image of yourself or something that relates to the poem.  If you choose not to send an image, then I’ll go find something that works.)

If you click on this thing –> “Guest Poet Portal” you can submit a poem right now.

……

Thanks for your visit.  I’d appreciate it if you would drop a note or comment below and tell me your thoughts.

The post OTHER VOICES: Grace Iwashita Taylor first appeared on Life-Built Poems.

Okay.  Almost everybody agrees:  we humans can shape our own worlds.  All we have to do is make the choices that help us get to our own bright and happy place.

Making choices, deciding where and how we want to go, is our best and brightest super-power, it says here.

So, why does it keep going glongy?  Every time we use this supposed super-power of ours, why is it that the options we choose rarely transport us over the threshold of the gate into the world in which we want to live?

The life-hack mavens, one and all, say some of it is circumstance and some of it is all these other guys tripping all over your feet.  They say there isn’t too much you can do about life- or world-events.  What other people do is also not something you control.There is one bright spot, however.  Mixed in with all that stuff you cannot control are the ones that you can.  You just need to be able to pick out your most effective moves from all the rest.

SHAPING IS A REALLY A MARTIAL ART

The actions that allow you to step back from a situation for a sharper look at what is happening work better when they are part of an automatic response.  Sometimes the hammer comes down on you swiftly or you get blindsided by a totally unanticipated something that just blows up in your face.

Like a martial artist you can develop ways that allow you to accurately assess an oncoming threat and immediately pick out and make the appropriate responses that will keep you intact as you move forward towards your own goals.

You can train yourself to get very good at this.

The swiftness (and the accuracy) of the response systems you develop will allow you the mental space to pick out and execute the most effective moves you can make that will further your own agendas.

The 2017 YouTube video below gives a taste of the philosophy and sensibility that allows a serious martial artist to engage effectively with the world both physically and with his or her mind.

The video features Sensei Todd Ryotoshi Norcross of the Dojo Martial Arts in Mason, Ohio, about 25 miles northeast of Cincinnati.  The Dojo calls itself a Samurai/Ninja school.

In the video Norcross talks a little bit about the three mindsets a warrior needs to develop in order to deal effectively with conflicts:  Isshin, “one-mind, one-heart”; Mushin, “no-mind”; and Zanshin, “alert mind”.

According to Norcross, the three mindsets are ways you deal with any situation you encounter in the world.  (Since the guy is a warrior, he tends to see differences of purposes and opinions as possible arenas for confrontation and conflict.)

Isshin, he says, is about connection and interdependence and is appropriate as your ground-zero mindset.  With it you can deal with the regular day-to-day stuff.

If some problem develops between two people, Mushin is a way to cultivate the ability to assess what actions by you are needed to resolve a situation and to take those actions.  

Zanshin is about remaining alert and paying attention after you have taken some action or other, noticing the effects and aftermaths of the action you’ve made.

A great deal of the mental training in the martial arts, Norcross says, is a reaching towards perfecting the Mushin or “no-mind” mindset, which is built on the ability to stay absolutely focused in the present moment and to see what is actually happening and what is unfolding as it progresses.

The past inevitably calls up thoughts about old lessons — historic judgment-calls, old rules of thumb and the results of previous actions.  Thoughts about future possibilities can engender worry, anxiety and misgivings.

If your head is stuck in the past or distracted by the future, you are not going to really be seeing what is right in front of you now.  That other stuff gets in the way of clarity.

As some wise guy or other once said, “NOW is the moment of power.”  In warrior-world, that power is expressed physically and in combat so a lot of the rest of the martial arts training is geared for that.

Learning about and developing these mindsets may be a thing a wannabe Shaper might want to pursue.  It does help.

RULE OF THUMB NUMBER ONE

The only heuristic you need to keep in mind when you set out to build your own world is this one:

“It doesn’t matter what happens to you.  What matters is the way you respond.”

Every wise guy there ever was always says that it really does all come down to controlling your own self.  (It is actually the only thing you have any kind of chance of controlling.)

Mostly what you can control is your responses and reactions to the rest of the world.  This YouTube video, uploaded by Fearless Soul in 2018 has some handy hacks you might want to explore:

LESSONS FROM A COUPLE OF ELDER MASTERS

For those among us who are not gearing themselves up to be superlative warriors of one sort or another (and even for those who are), another resource to explore is a beautiful book that became an international bestseller when it was published in 2016.

THE BOOK OF JOY: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World features the thoughts of the Tibetan 14^th Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso and Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town Desmond Mpilo Tutu from South Africa.  Writer Douglas Abrams worked with the two men to make the book real.

Abrams has spent his career as an author, editor and literary agent “working with visionaries bent on creating a wiser, healthier and more just world,” the book jacket says.  For more than a decade before undertaking this book project, he worked with Archbishop Tutu, among others, as a co-writer and editor of other works.

The book documents a series of loving dialogues between two old friends who also happened to be among the most revered and beloved spiritual leaders on the planet.

For the first (and only) time in their very busy lives, the two were able to spend a week, hanging out and enjoying each other’s company at the Dalai Lama’s home in Dharamsala, India.

Together, with Abrams as their moderator, the monk and the priest spent a part of their days exploring the concepts and beliefs of their own spiritual practices and the life lessons they learned in their own tumultuous lives as they considered the best ways they have found to reach for a joyful life.

Both men were no strangers to Life’s challenges and frustrations.  As catalysts and historic change-makers, both men stood before power and spoke their truths.

The men faced hardships and great sorrows and pain in their lives.  And both men, throughout their lives, were renowned for their extraordinary joyousness, their empathy, their humility, and their kindness.

They were old men at the time of the visit, which was part of a celebration of the world’s most famous Tibetan monk’s 80^th birthday.

The visit almost did not happen.  The Archbishop’s pancreatic cancer had come back and it was feared that he would not be able to visit his friend.  They did it anyway.

The video below, which features the Dalai Lama, was published by CBS Sunday Morning in 2016.  It is a lovely taste of the flavor of the book.

The Archbishop died in 2021 of the disease which had plagued him since 1997.  He was 90 years old.

ACCEPTING REALITY IS ONE OF THE PILLARS OF JOY

In the book, the pair of holy men presents what they call the “Eight Pillars of Joy.”

Four of these pillars are “qualities of the mind”:

• perspective
• humility
• humor
• acceptance

The other four are “qualities of the heart”:

• forgiveness
• gratitude
• compassion
• generosity

The dialogues in the book consider each of these pillars, explaining why they are important for engendering happiness and joy and going into some detail about effective ways to work on developing them.

ACCEPTANCE AS THE PLATFORM FOR DANCING WITH CHANGE

As I pondered on these pillars of joy, it struck me that the mind-quality of “acceptance” might well be the foundation for developing the martial artist’s three mindsets for responding to disconnection, confrontation and conflict.

Of all of the qualities the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Tutu explored, acceptance is the one that seems to be most aligned with the martial artist’s focus on staying in the Now.

“We are meant to live in joy.  This does not mean that life will be easy or painless. It means that we can turn our faces to the wind and accept that this is the storm we must pass through.  We cannot succeed by denying what exists.”

Abrams does a riff on the spiritual perspective of “accepting the inevitable frustrations and hardships as part of the warp and woof of life.”

He summarizes the two holy men’s thoughts on the importance of learning how to figure out how to use the obstacles and challenges we encounter as something that can be used to make a change.

As the Archbishop says in the book, “The acceptance of reality is the only place from which change can happen.”

This is because your acceptance of all of the vulnerability, discomfort, and anxiety of every-day life and the events around you helps you to stay in the present moment where you can make your best responding move using Mushin or one-mind.  This kind of acceptance of reality at the beginning of a situation can naturally lead to an almost instantaneous acceptance of whatever happens after you make your responding move.

ACCEPTANCE AS THE PARADOXICAL FOUNDATION OF CONFLICT RESOLUTION

Staying “in the moment” means you will make the move that Isshin (one-mind, one-heart) helps you see by using Mushin (no-mind) to execute the move as well as you can.

Once you’ve made your move, the situation will likely change.  Time moves on.  The moment you were in becomes another moment, another now.  The situation you first faced is either resolved or not.

You pay attention to what happens after you’ve made your move using Zanshin (alert mind) to take a reading of the situation in this new moment, noticing the changes your move has helped to make.

Then, as quickly as you can, you return to an attitude of Isshin (one-mind, one-heart) again in order to see the whole new situation.

If there is a need for another move, then you reach for Mushin (no-mind) and you make your next move.

You can continue through this sequence of mindsets again and again and again until you reach a place where you can be at rest, standing in Isshin (one-mind, one-heart) once again.

Hmmm….

JUST GET UP YOU

I am hiding again.

Like a turtle that has lost its shell,

I am curled up,

Trying to shield my one raw heart

From the sands of uncertainty

Blowing all around me.

It is not working.

So many fears,

So many wants,

So many needs,

So many aching hopes,

And softly dying dreams.

Not all of them are mine.

There they are, all around me.

The demands keep on coming,

Beating at me,

They surround me,

Nagging me and ragging me to

Just get ON with the help-help-helping

That’s become a tiresome chore.

I am turning into rubble,

Getting ground down into grit and dust.

Bolting would feel good, I bet,

Except…

Nothing good ever came of it

Whenever I tried that one.

Running away just took me further

Into empty landscapes

Devoid of any moisture, any juice.

Maybe I could just tune out all that fuss,

All these demands,

All those details…

These whimperings,

Those sobs,

All that pain.

Numbing out would just

Make my day, I bet.

Except…

I’m remembering all of the times

I collapsed in on myself and

Ended up in that

Vast and withering empty

That sucked the life and joy

Right out of me and left me

Drowning in my tears.

That one doesn’t work.

It has never worked.

It probably would not work

This time either.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

I got it.

I do get it.

Shoots!  We go!

Just get up, you!

Uncurl yourself.

Expose that bleeding heart of yours

To all that you-sand that’s blowing ‘round.

Lift up those arms and

Let those storm winds shake you.

Let the rain beat its rhythms

Right down into your bones.

Listen to the water chuckling down

The riverbed rocks.

Wrap the beauty of this world

Like a blanket all around you.

Feel the blessing of the sun’s warmth

Spreading all over you.

Get up…

Get up…

Get up…

Here is your chance to dance…

Again.

Created by Netta Kanoho

HEADER PHOTO CREDIT:  “Acceptance” by Jay from Norway via Flickr [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

……

SOME OTHER POSTS TO EXPLORE:

(Click on each of the post titles below and see where it takes you…)

• MAKING ROOM
• SHAPER CHALLENGE (An Un-Seeing Exercise)
• SHAPING STARTS WITH YOU

……

Thanks for your visit.  I’d appreciate it if you would drop a note or comment below and tell me your thoughts.

The post SHAPING IS BUILT ON ACCEPTANCE first appeared on Life-Built Poems.

One time a friend asked one of the old-timers who had lived his whole life on the island of Maui through the decades that made up the beginning of the end of the twentieth century what it was like to live his life in this place.  They were digging holes for pasture fence posts at the time.

The island had gone through numerous transitions during that one lifetime.  Henry Burns had seen many of them.

The laconic old man stopped what he was doing and leaned against the ‘ō’ō digging stick he was using to settle in one of the fence posts they had just inserted into a hole they had dug into the ground.

He looked away across the distance past the rolling green hills of Kula pasture land towards the expanse of the central valley isthmus below them.

HISTORY IS JUST A BIGGER STORY

The place where Henry had grown up had been one of established old sugar cane and pineapple plantations, cattle ranches and family homesteads, and fishing villages plus a little bit of small town action.

Slower-moving steam ships and inter-island freight barges and ferries, horses, wagons, and the remnants of an old plantation train system lugged stuff and people around.  By the mid-1900’s the technological advances of the times had inserted their tendrils into the place.

Time kept speeding up and the world was starting to get busier and more crowded.  The sleepy, quiet, “Real Old-Style” way of living Henry had known was dying,

After some thought the old man said, “Some people come, some people go.”

That was it…the truth he had learned through the decades of his life.

STORIES MAKE A PLACE COME ALIVE

It was a profound thought, that.  Underneath it all was a deep sense of the stories the people who were born and grew up here hold dear.  The ones who had come from other places brought their own stories with them.

Henry knew.  The stories he held were all about the lives of all of the people who lived together in this place the old man loved.

Many years later the same friend, who has spent a lifetime on the island as a transplant from another place, told me that when he travels through the highways and byways of our Maui it feels as if he is wandering through the shades and shadows of the old ghost towns that he once knew.

A NATIVE PERSPECTIVE ON A NEW-FANGLED COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT IDEA

In case you didn’t know, among some of the more innovative urban planners, community developers, policymakers and other big-thinking Smarty Pants and creative sorts, there’s a fairly “new” concept of planning and community building strategies that’s growing stronger.

They recognize a community’s artistic and cultural assets and work with a particular community’s sense of heritage-based traditions and customs to develop programs and public art projects that help to revitalize and energize communities that have stagnated and faded.

The Smarty Pants call it “creative placemaking.”

Native Hawaiians know all about this newfangled concept.  They know that the spirit of a place is evoked when you name the winds that blow through it, the rains that fall upon it, and the mists that embrace it.

Indigenes, poets, artists and musicians know that bringing to mind a certain kind of tree or plant or animal or bird, and delineating the rolling movements of the water in the ocean waves and the tumbling waters of rivers and streams flowing amid the frozen energy of a mountain range that glows in the shimmering light calls up the ghosts of all the ones who have lived in this place.

You can hear that knowing in the island music that shivers and pounds in time with the beating of a human heart and the voices of generations echoing the rhythms of wave and wind.

The following video, “Island Style | Õ’iwi Ē” is Playing for Change’s second “Song Across Hawaii” collaboration with the nonprofit @ Mana Mele.  It was uploaded in 2017.  Enjoy!

WHEN A COMMUNITY EVOKES THE MEMORIES OF PEOPLE AND PLACE, CONNECTION HAPPENS

The thing about evoking the spirits of a place is that the calling is quite likely to go fractal, unfolding outwards into patterns of beauty and shadow and light.  It is all call-and-response as people come together to share their own bits and pieces.

On the leeward side of the West Maui Mountains, Wailuku is often described in travel books as the “quaint” town located ten minutes away from the airport in Kahului.  They usually throw in the part about it being the “gateway” for ‘Iao Valley, once a sacred burial ground for Hawaiian chiefs.

Wailuku town was a part of all of that and the remnants still remain.

AN ISLAND TOWN RESUSCITATION

Since 2012, one of the major priorities for the Maui County Planning and Development department has been the revitalization of Wailuku town, the historic civic and business center of the county.

The town was suffering from the “dwindles” that began in the as the 1960’s ended. The beginning of the decline of the sugar industry that was a major part of the economy happened around that time.

The town that had been the civic and business center of the island faded.  For a while, empty storefronts amid a proliferation of pawn shops, second-hand stores and aging legacy businesses sat waiting for the next chapter in the story.

Over the years the County’s efforts to breathe new life into Wailuku has produced various programs and projects that are featured in the WailukuLIVE website.

Before the advent of the pandemic, the monthly Wailuku First Fridays were very popular and brought new businesses and liveliness to the town’s streets.

Improvement projects to the infrastructure of the place continue to upgrade old systems and work on new structural improvements to the town.

LOCAL CREATIVE PLACEMAKING GETS AN NEA BOOST

Then, in 2017, Kelly McHugh-White, an art administrator and advocate of development programs, wrote a grant proposal for an “Our Town” grant from the National Endowment for the Arts [NEA].  It was the start of a two-year pilot program (2018 to 2020).

(McHugh-White is the founder of Little Rhinoceros LLC, a company that consults with non-profits on content development for public relations and fundraising.)

One of the biggest differences between the creative placemaking projects grants and other NEA awards is the requirement that the artists who are involved in the project co-create the public art works with the community in which they will be displayed.

The call goes out for established artists to participate, but they don’t work alone.

In producing their works for these projects, all of the artists are welcomed into the community.  They are also required to experience different aspects of the place through a process of community consultations, artist workshops and panel discussions in order to get an idea of the direction their work will go.

For the Wailuku project, public paint and play days that involved school children and their teachers and caregivers, as well as consultations and feedback from the people at Hale Ho’ike’ike (the Maui Historical Society’s Bailey House Museum) and with local people who were willing to share their stories and their lives helped to inspire the artists.

Wailuku’s first work of public art, Nā Wai ‘Ehā, was painted by nationally recognized muralist Eric Okdeh with the help of dozens of students of the Hui No’eau Visual Arts Center and other local volunteers.

STARTER WORDS THAT CALLED UP THE STORIES

Other communal and public art projects soon followed, all of them informed by a list of Hawaiian proverbs selected from Mary Kawena Pukui’s ‘Õlelo No’eau:  Hawaiian Proverbs and Poetical Sayings by Sissy Lake-Farm, the executive director at the Maui Historical Society’s Bailey House Museum, who was a staunch advocate of the project, remained closely connected to it.

This list of proverbs was a reflection of the values of the community and helped to influence the works that were eventually produced by the artists involved in the project and their helpers.

Here is the list:

• Ma ka hana ka ‘ike (In working, one learns)
• ‘Ike aku, ‘ike mai. Kōkua aku, kōkua mai. Pēlā ka nohona ‘ohana (Watch, observe. Help others and accept help. That is the family way)
• ‘A‘ohe hana nui ke alu ‘ia (No task is too big when done together by all)
• O ke aloha ke kuleana o kahi malihini (Love is the host in strange lands)
• E aloha kekahi i kekahi (Love one another)
• Ma kāhi o ka hana he ola malaila (Where work is, there is life)
• Hoʻolaukanaka i ka leo o nā manu (The voices of birds give the place a feeling of being inhabited)
• He lei poina ‘ole ke keiki (A lei never forgotten is the beloved child)
• Ka i’a mili i ka poho o ka lima (The fish fondled by the palm of the hand)
• E noho iho i ke ōpū weuweu, mai hoʻokiʻekiʻe (Remain among the clumps of grasses and do not elevate yourself)
• Mōhala I ka wai ka maka o ka pua (Unfolded by the water are the faces of the flowers)
• Wailuku i ka malu he kuawa (Wailuku, in the shelter of the valley)
• E kūlia i ka nu‘u (Strive to reach the summit)
• E ala! E alu! E kuilima! (Up! Together! Join hands!)

From there, the project which was spearheaded by the three women — Wade, McHugh-White and Lake-Farm — just kept on going and growing.

AN ON-LINE WALKING MAP

One of the best things to come out of the project, which was extended an extra year (through the end of 2021) by the County of Maui, is an interactive walking map app that shows the location of the ST*BA installations and projects scattered throughout Wailuku town.

Click the button below to see the map and check out the works that resulted from the project and the stories of how they were developed.

Maybe you’ll be able to figure out which of the proverbs served as a springboard for each of the works on display.

TO BE CONTINUED….

In January, 2022, the NEA approved a second two-year Grant for Arts Projects to support the Wailuku Town creative placemaking program and to make plans for countywide expansion.

The smalltownbig.org press release said,

“To date, SMALL TOWN * BIG ART has successfully implemented public art projects with 200+ community partners that have directly engaged 17,808 Wailuku participants. Virtual participation is consistently growing through a COVID-19 pivot strategy that has yielded 12 project documentaries designed to capture community impressions, ideas and context, as well as a 43-page interactive website and social media platform.”

Bragging rights deserved!  Not only that, but there are more works on the way.

AND THEN THERE ARE THE OFFSHOOTS….

Excited by the success of the Wailuku SMALL TOWN * BIG ART project McHugh-White is spearheading the Maui Public Art Corps, a newly formed nonprofit that is a public-private partnership with the County.  The group’s mission, it says here, is to “connect people, place and story through the development of exceptional public art.”

Like the sprouting shoots on a growing tree, other collaborations formed and continue to inspire even more outward expansions.  One of the project’s artists was kumu hula Leilehua Yuen who put together an interactive series of workshops from April to July 2021.

During the pandemic response, when the world shut down, Yuen put together several storytelling videos that would have been delivered at various sites in person.  I’m including one of them to give you a taste of the lady’s style.

Working with StoryCorps DIY and Akakū Maui Community Media, ST*BA hooked up the Yuen workshop participants with community kupuna (elders) for recorded “talk story” sessions.

During this time, ST*BA also partnered with Ball State University’s Center for Emerging Media Design and Development (EMDD) of Muncie Indiana for a yearlong collaborative project in trans-media journalism.  Eight international EMDD graduate students analyzed the “problem-space” of building the Wailuku story story. They worked on  creating a story bank and making the bank publically accessible as part of their Masters Thesis project.

Meanwhile, most recently, there’s also planning afoot to establish a new Hawaiian cultural art center, Hālau of ‘Ōiwi Art, that is a collaboration between a group of Maui kumu hula (dance teachers) and the County.  It will be located in Wailuku, they hope.

THE PAST IS ALWAYS PRESENT

The past is always present.  It is just hidden.

Like the blossoms that once bloomed in glory, now turned sere and brown and lying crumbling into dust as they finally, finally lose the persistent essence that once announced their presence in the world,

And the bones of bodies once taut and strong and proud crumble down into the dirt, the food for worms and other agents of decay that take back again the gifts of once-brilliant minds, of hearts once-passionate,

Like the crumbling ruins of massive stones that were once proclaimed most marvelous of the wonders of the world, the works of hands long-stilled fade and disappear among the onslaughts of mold and atmospheric conditions into dust.

The past is always present. It hides in the dust of the world.

By Netta Kanoho

HEADER PHOTO CREDIT:  Maui Wailuku storefronts by emmett anderson via Flickr [CC BY-NC 2.0]

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SOME OTHER POSTS TO CONSIDER

(Click on each of the post titles below and see where it takes you….)

• TELL YOUR STORY
• WALK LIKE A BESTOWER
• UBUNTU

……

Thanks for your visit.  I’d appreciate it if you would drop a note or comment below and tell me your thoughts.

The post SMALL TOWN * BIG ART ON THE ISLAND first appeared on Life-Built Poems.

I like watching Judy Bruder be.  She is one of those people who seems to be comfortable in her own skin – what Hawaiians call being “pa’a”, grounded.  It does look lovely on her.

Judy loves art.  She has a “good eye” for it and a warm tendency to nurture, celebrate and take delight in the people who make good art.  These tendencies of hers have stood her in good stead as she continues to develop and build her shop, DUCK SOUP MAUI INTERIORS.  She’s been doing that now for more than 20 years.

[If you click on the shop name, you’ll get whisked to her shop’s Facebook page.  Enjoy!]

This is a poem Judy wrote a number of years ago.  She shared it on her FB personal profile stream when a multitude of friends and admirers love-bombed her with messages on her birthday recently.

SWEET DRINK OF WATER

What a sweet drink of water a day can be

Long gulp of pureness

Light shining

It is all happening right now

From around this blue spinning planet out here

And we watch

Stars and moon

Here is the sun and spring and winter

Here is your life

Bright shards like the thing that shatters light on a merry go round

Here come these love letters…into my envelope taped ever hopefully

To the corner of my desk…

And it became endless filled yesterday on the anniversary of my 61st spin around

Here is randy from highschool and tom…here is my sister naming my mom and my dad and my sister kit… nieces…cousins a brother…here are the soul sisters of the planet…some reside in the big sky country…some travel

Lights all over the place

Sending information

Here are people of my soul

People I admire greatly…

You readers and writers…

Hawkers and saints…Floral wizard

Artists you know

Sellers of dreams

To you all love and love and thank you

To be so remembered

Decorated with love like a Christmas tree

By Judy Bruder

HEADER PHOTO CREDIT:  “See the Light” by Mike W via Flickr [CC BY-SA 2.0]

…….

Please note:  If you would like to contribute a poem to this blog, please let me know by leaving a comment below.  I’d be happy to hear from you.

I do ask three things of my guest poets:

• a poem of your own making that has great meaning and mana for you,
• the back-story for the poem — what inspired you or how you made it or whatever you want to tell about it, and
• an image that I can use as the featured photo in the header. (The last is optional. I do ask that the image you share is one you own — either an image of yourself or something that relates to the poem.  If you choose not to send an image, then I’ll go find something that works.)

If you click on this thing –> “Guest Poet Portal” you can submit a poem right now.

……

Thanks for your visit.  I’d appreciate it if you would drop a note or comment below and tell me your thoughts.

The post SWEET DRINK OF WATER first appeared on Life-Built Poems.

Lately I keep tripping over people who are either “building a legacy” or are trying to convince me that I should be doing one too.  It’s beginning to make me all kinds of grumpy.

These strangers are telling me that my life will only have “meaning” if I do stuff that will somehow “impact the future” after I’m long-gone.  That one makes me scratch my head.   It’s even a bit intimidating.

Me, I’m still walking towards my dream and I’m trying very hard to walk lightly in the world.

It seems to me that when you aim at making a BIG and LASTING impression, you’ve got to stomp mighty hard to leave deep footprints in the sand.  If it’s all mud or concrete or asphalt, you might as well fuggedaboudit.

The thing I notice is these so-called legacy-builders seem to be doing pretty much the same-old things they’ve always done.  It just looks like they hauled out a stash of dumb bumper stickers so they can puff out their chests and go sticking their noses in where they may not be welcome.

I recognize it because I’ve done it myself.  I get irritated because it is just another jiu-jitsu mind-game.  Been there, done that, got the t-shirt.

I’m afraid “legacies” don’t mean so much to a person who once gleefully cruised through estate sales and garage and yard sales looking for the “treasures” that other people’s descendants put on offer.

REMEMBER THE “MISSION STATEMENT” MOVEMENT?

There was a time when every company in the world absolutely had to have a “mission statement.”  It was the thing to do.

Little business creators and founders (me included) spent hours whacking themselves upside the head (in between the times of hustling like hell to keep from drowning) trying to come up with some portentous-sounding blather.

Corporations threw big money into their own efforts and there were lots and lots of committees and meetings and consultations and studies. Mountains of forests got chopped down to make the paper for all those meeting notes.

Apparently, it was all on the way to building that aggravating automated voice-mail response message that now tells me I am “important” to some anonymous corporate clone as I sit there for thirty minutes waiting for service.  AND they have the nerve to play dumb ads in my ear while I wait for a human being to talk to me…but, let’s not even go there.

The resulting mission statements from all this effort sounded like the humming of bees in a hive.  Unfortunately, they were not as entrancing.

THE PROBLEM WITH “WORD-POWER”

I love words.  I’m a poet, a storyteller, and 100% part-Hawaiian, so I have to believe there is power in words.  It’s my “thing.”

However, that doesn’t blind me to their flaws.  (It probably also doesn’t help that I am also well aware of our own failings as humans.)

The thing is that some words, when combined right, have power, but all the words there ever were actually don’t have much juice.

Words are just air sucked up by your nose and mouth.  The air runs through your lungs and gets shaped by the vibrating cords in your throat and all the ways you can move your tongue and other mouth accoutrements before it flows past your flexing lips, making its way to other people’s ears.

Make a note:  Humans + Action = Value Added (to words)

What does have power are the humans saying the words as well as the humans listening to them.  Power manifests in the actions those humans take as a result of saying or hearing or reading or thinking on those words.

FIRST COMES UNDERSTANDING

The first step when trying to infuse power into words is getting somebody (especially your own self) to understand what you are actually saying.

Somebody urgently jabbering at you in a foreign language is not going to get you to lift your big foot off their little tootsies if you don’t understand what they are trying to tell you.

Sign language works better then.  All the other person has to do is point at your clodhopper shoe grinding into her bare foot and you “get” it.  What you do after that is up to you.

HUMANS ARE GOOD AT NOT-REMEMBERING EVEN WHEN THEY UNDERSTAND THE WORDS

The guys in white lab coats also did other studies and experiments and figured out that human short-term memories can only hold a really limited number of separate items.

Never mind what all those savants and dazzling fancy-pants mind-athletes can do.  The Smarty Pants figured out that your average human can remember about seven items, plus or minus two, depending on the individual.

You can test this out your own self.

• Grab a friend and read a series of words that have no connection to one another and ask your friend to repeat them back to you.
• Start with one word. (That will be a piece of cake for them.)
• Do two more different words.
• Now do three different words…and so on.
• Watch what happens when you get up to about six or seven words. Unless your friend’s some kind of savant or is in training for the Mind Olympics, it’s likely that there will be mistakes.

Have your friend try the same experiment on you.  I bet the same thing happens to you as well.

AND FURTHERMORE…WITH AN ALTERNATIVE THROWN IN

Not only do humans not remember lots and lots of things, we get distracted easily.

Human short-term (working) memory, the Smarty Pants found, cannot retain information for more than a few seconds.  All it takes is a minor distraction and your working memory will get all jammed up.

It gets worse as you get older.  Ever had the experience of standing in front of the refrigerator wondering what you are looking for?  Uh-huh.  Right.

To remember something for longer than a few seconds, the Smarty Pants tell us, you have to keep repeating it to yourself several times.  That’s how you put an idea or concept into your long-term memory.

That is why complicated, more-than-seven-words mission statements and legacy goals and so on and so forth just don’t stick.

And that’s why very short mottos or mantras might.

A MOTTO IS LIKE A PILL

A “motto” is a word, phrase or sentence that “expresses the principles or beliefs of a person,” the Cambridge English dictionary says.  Oxford Languages says it is a short sentence or phrase “chosen as encapsulating the beliefs or ideals guiding an individual, family, or institution.”

Uh-huh.

Does that “encapsulating” thing remind you of a pill?  It does me.

For instance, the American motto that’s inscribed on all our coins and other money says, “In God We Trust.”  Easy to remember, right?  (Not so easy to do, but, hey, we do keep trying.)

And that’s the whole point of a motto.  You will remember a motto if you put in the work to make it real.  If you fall down a lot…well, that’s par for the course.

[NOTE BY AUTHOR:  Humans fall down a lot.]

If the motto you make for yourself really does “encapsulate” your beliefs and ideals, you’ll be able to use it as a filter and a guidepost for how you are walking your walk.

The results you get from your actions in this consensus-world of ours will test, temper, and prove your motto.  And that is a good thing.  How else are you going to know that it works?

HERE’S A BOOK

One of the very best books I’ve come across that talks about the realities of making a business that makes sense is REWORK:  Change the Way You Work Forever by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson.

Jason Fried and his friends Carlos Segura and Ernest Kim started a Chicago-based web software company in 1999 with an online manifesto called “37signals.”

Click on the different-colored bit above and you’ll be whisked off to the company’s original manifesto.  The thing will twist your head back around to looking at what is Real, I think.  This book is an expansion, and is more of the same.

The company name, according to the Wikipedia entry, was a reference to the 37 radio telescope signals identified by astronomer Paul Horowitz as potential messages from extraterrestrial intelligence.  (I like that quirkiness.)

The guys were young and they were nerds.  They also maintained a firm focus on minimizing the interruptions and distractions that took them away from building a small company that was of real service to their customers and clientele.

They declared themselves uninterested in the “how to be a business” mind-games that were likely to distract them from their real work, which was, they said, serving their customers.

They also made a lot of bucks.

AND ANOTHER STORY

There’s an old Zen teaching story about a monk who is lost in the wilderness.  He comes to a river too wide and wild to swim across and builds himself a raft out of downed limbs and vines.  The monk uses the raft to get across the turbulent waters safely.

Once he gets across the river, he carries the raft for a long time…until he can no longer smell the scent of water in the air.  He puts the raft down and sets it on fire.  Once the flames die out and the fire is dead, he goes on his way.

Usually the listener of the story wants to know, “Why did the monk burn the raft?”

The storyteller says, “Once you no longer need a tool, it’s time to put it away.”

Sometimes the listener asks, “Why didn’t the monk leave the raft for the next guy who gets lost in the wilderness?”

And the answer is: “Sometimes you just have to build your own raft.”

Hmmm….

MEDIOCRE POEM

This is a mediocre poem.
It doesn’t dance or sing.
The words don’t want to come out and play.

[PUH!]

Maybe they are watching tv or something….
Being l-a-z-y, getting fat,
And there isn’t some nationally-known athlete-word around
To inspire them to get off their couch-potato asses.
They’re playing video games, I bet.
They’re getting zombied-out, lost in the Internet webrings,
Flying through that world of ones and zeroes.
They’d rather be on Kindles,
Packed in e-lectronic, plastic rectangles with zero percent fat,
Cavorting among the scrolling lines.
(Paper and pens are so-o-o-o yesterday.)

Or maybe they all grew up
And now they’re stuck in
Boring meeting minutes…
Interminable staff reports…
Clumsy PowerPoint presentations,
Wedged in cages made of graphs and illustrations.
Maybe some guru guy or ad man or politician
Bought them up wholesale.
Maybe now they’re all exhausted
From getting twisted and squeezed and bent out of shape.

Nope. 
They just aren’t coming….

Oh, well…
Fine , then.
I’m outa here….

Created by Netta Kanoho

HEADER PHOTO CREDIT:  “New tree” by Peter Blanchard via Flickr [CC BY 2.0]

SOME OTHER POSTS TO EXPLORE

(Click on each of the post titles below and see where it takes you…)

• UNFOLD YOUR OWN MYTH
• DEVELOPING PRESENCE
• FIND YOUR OWN VOICE

……

Thanks for your visit.  I’d appreciate it if you would drop a note or comment below and tell me your thoughts.

The post LEGACY-SCHMEGACY, KEEP ON WALKING first appeared on Life-Built Poems.

Very often it is the little things that make a big difference in lives that are lived on the edge.

In poorer parts of a city, where people’s homes often do not have access to reliable electrical service and where windows that let in light might be a bad idea in terms of home security, people either spend a lot of time outside their unlighted homes or use open fires, candles or oil lamps as light sources.  These can be problematic.

In 2002, Alfredo Moser, a Brazilian mechanic, had a literal “light-bulb moment.”  He lived in the city Uberaba in southern Brazil where frequent electricity blackouts were a fact of life.  The only places that had access to fairly reliable energy were the factories and not the homes of the people living around them.

One suggestion was filling a discarded plastic bottle with water and using it as a lens to focus the sun’s rays on dry grass to start a fire as a signal to rescuers.

That one didn’t quite work, but Moser kept playing around with the idea, filling up two-liter plastic bottles and making circles of refracted light, big and small.  His greatest innovation was developing a metal collar that fit around the bottle and held in place on the roof of a structure.

Moser installed the resulting bottle lamps he developed onto the roof of his house.  Light from the sun illuminated the house during the day without electricity, using nothing more than plastic bottles filled with water and a tiny bit of bleach plus some epoxy as sealant.

Moser earned a few dollars along the way installing the things, but his open-source idea did not make him rich.

However, it did give him a sense of satisfaction that he had made a real difference in the lives of his neighbors and friends and many other people besides.

In a 2013 interview for the BBC, Moser said, “It’s a divine light.  God gave the sun to everyone, and the light is for everyone.  Whoever wants it saves money.  You can’t get an electric shock from it, and it doesn’t cost a penny.”

He tells a story about one man who installed the lights in his home.  Within a month the man had saved enough to pay for the essential things for his soon-to-be-born child.  “Can you imagine?” Moser asks the interviewer.

THE LITTLE LIGHT THAT COULD

Many years later, as the light gained in popularity among sustainable lifestyle activists who work at trying to improve the lives of the metro poor, an engineer measured the light output of the bulbs and found that on a clear day the lamps gave out a refractive light of 40 to 60 watts.

• The light bouncing off the water in one bottle lit up a 40-square meter (more than 430 square feet) room.
• The simple lightbulb could be put together using materials that cost less than one US dollar.  (The labor involved for each bulb was minimal.)
• An installed plastic bottle lightbulb lasts for two or three years, providing free light.

The following Vimeo video, “How to Make a Liter of Light” was uploaded by UP Junior Marketing Association, a university-wide student organization based in the Cesar E. A. Virata School of Business, University of the Philippines, Diliman.

CONNECTING THE POINTS OF LIGHT

It took another man, Filipino social entrepreneur Illac Angelo Diaz, the director of MyShelter Foundation, to take the simple lightbulb idea around the world.  He knew how to make connections.

At the time, they were filling the massive pile of donated bottles with mud to create walls for makeshift houses.  They also filled other bottles with water to make windows.  When Diaz learned about the Moser lamps, he adopted them and he ran with the idea.

THE LIGHT REACHES MORE AND MORE PEOPLE

One lightbulb installation in a Manila slum shack led to more and more.  The organization began training people to create and install the Moser lightbulbs.  The installers could earn a small income while helping their neighbors to the light.

Other people came along and figured out how to add a little solar-powered LED light built out of recycled electronic parts to the design.  Students at MIT and Harvard University got involved and helped to make that happen.

The day-time light gained the capability of lighting up the night as well.  Streetlights as well as solar-powered lightbulbs that glowed into the night became a possibility for poorer neighborhoods.

The following Vimeo video, “Manila – Liter of Light” was shot in Manila for Al Jazeera  (an independent news organization in the Middle East), and features Diaz talking about the project.  It was uploaded by peteconnor.

The simple idea spread from metropolitan areas into the countryside.  Living conditions improved.  New economic enterprises were born in the wake of the coming of the lightbulb.

Diaz and Liter of Light formed partnerships and collaborative efforts with other organizations around the world and inspired many more initiatives to bring light into the dark places.

WOWING THE WORLD, MAKING A DIFFERENCE

In 2012, Diaz commissioned South African designer Stephen Lamb, the founder of Touching the Earth Lightly and an icon in the South African sustainable development industry, to design the Liter of Light’s pavilion at the Shanghai Biennale.

Together with artist Andrew Lord, Lamb created the first-ever mushroom farm grown in bamboo containers using locally sourced bamboo logs that were split open, filled with mycelium, and then drilled back together.

The elegant design used an array of rooftop solar bulbs for lighting up a warehouse-like corrugated metal structure hung with the bamboo mushroom planters.  A timed mister kept the environment moist.

Another project resulting from the collaboration between the Liter of Light Foundation and Touching The Earth Lightly as well as Greencube Nursery combined the Moser lightbulb idea with the concept of “green-blocking,” installing vertical food garden walls on shacks in Cape Town, Africa as a fire-preventative as well as a food resource.

Here is a Vimeo film clip of an award-winning documentary featuring that initiative:

One 2018 collaboration that captured the world’s imagination was the 100-day “Voyage of Light” undertaken as a partnership between Liter of Light and the Peace Boat.  The Peace Boat is a Japanese-based international non-governmental and non-profit organization that works to promote peace, human rights, equal and sustainable development and respect for the environment.

The voyage, which stopped at 19 ports around Asia, Africa and South America, is still a major feature of the Liter of Light’s website.  (Click on the button below for a glimpse of it and to access the site.)

There were many other connections and collaborations made over the years that kept the idea spreading.  Wikipedia lists over 20 countries where projects inspired by Diaz’s Liter of Light are in place and are continuing to grow.

It is an amazing testament to the power of connection and networking and the power of small ideas that work.

POWER OF THE SMALL

I am noticing the power of small things,

The tiny little bits that overturn

The huge, the loud, the strong, the dark

And gently, gently calls us back to the quiet

At the center of the turning.

In the right place,

At the right time,

One little word can open up a heart,

One small smile can heal a painful rift,

A tiny giggle from a friend can brighten up alone,

One gentle touch can bring a soul back to itself,

And the striking of one little match pushes back the engulfing dark.

At the right time,

In the right place.

It’s said that the light is born

Knowing that it rules the universe.

The stars that twinkle in the deepest dark

Of the vastness of the void

Remind us of that one.

Have you ever noticed

Just how many stars there are?

By Netta Kanoho

HEADER PHOTO CREDIT:  “Pet Rooster and Shadow in Doorway, Cebu City, Philippines) by Adam Cohen via Flickr [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

……

SOME OTHER POSTS TO EXPLORE

(Click on each of the post titles below and see where it takes you….)

• CHANGING THE WORLD
• SONG OF PROTEST
• BEYOND STUFF-LOVE (Part 5):  Lifestyle

……

Thanks for your visit.  I’d appreciate it if you would drop a note or comment below and tell me your thoughts.

The post LET THERE BE LIGHT (The Power of Small) first appeared on Life-Built Poems.

New year, new start, new plan, but same old you.  Ai-yah!  It’s the perennial conundrum that!

At the start of every new year, it’s “traditional” for those of us who follow the 365-day Gregorian calendar to make some sort of list of resolutions at the start of the new year.  Many of us do.

We start the process by reviewing our actions and our lives over the past year.

Self-flagellation ensues.  Some of us pull out special whips for the occasion.  (Most of the rest of us use wet spaghetti noodles to beat ourselves up, I think, but some folks get really serious with it and go S&M on themselves.  Ouch!)

WHAT USUALLY RESULTS WHEN YOU MAKE NEW YEAR RESOLUTIONS

In any case, we take the Polar Plunge, driving ourselves into the freezing-cold waters of the self-judgmental seas of You-Ain’t-Enough.  Our Inner Critics have a field day.

We make up special to-do lists of outrageously ambitious, overblown goals that target our awfullest “faults” that we are determined we should obliterate once and for all, or we aim to acquire esoteric skills we say we should absolutely have.

And, for at least 80 percent of us who do this dance, the Smarty Pants in the white lab coats say, our latest new year plan somehow dies a quiet death within a couple of weeks of its inception.  Again.

ANOTHER TAKE ON NEW YEAR RESOLUTIONS

One of the gentlest and most insightful looks at this annual phenomenon is this “Ask a Psychologist” YouTube video uploaded by founder Dr. Elliott Carthy in 2021.  It is called “Watch This Before Making Any New Years Resolutions.”

In his notes that accompany the video, the good doctor says, “I have no training in making resolutions as part of being a psychiatrist, but there are some really interesting parts of my training that have translated to more broad goal setting in my life.”

Then he explains about a thing called “meaningful reflective practice.”  What this training does, he says, is help the practitioner focus on better understanding their own self and what works in their life instead of the more usual focusing on other people’s expectations of them.

SOME KINDS OF GOAL-SETTING MAY BE LIKE DOING THOSE STUPID OUTLINES BEFORE YOU ACTUALLY START TO WRITE…

Carthy’s little explanation of the meaningful reflective practice reminds me of my earliest lessons in writing essays.

It occurred to me that all of my English writing teachers started out by trying to get me to write an outline, laying out all the points to be covered in a piece, and then writing the thing.

I suck at outlines.  I don’t know what I think before I get it down on paper.  I have to play with all the potential ideas and likely-looking concepts first.

Essays became my favorite way of arguing.  Nobody could talk back and distract me with other interesting concepts or get me so riled-up that I start spluttering.

Eventually I got so good at it that I could write the piece and put together the outline at the same time.

I have noticed, though, that writing’s a lot more fun since I tossed the outline thing into the cylindrical file.

ONE MORE LESSON = ANOTHER INNER PEACE SYMPTOM

ANOTHER IPS (Inner Peace Symptom):  an understanding that your life is your very own story and it all begins and moves and ends with you.  [The only thing you can change in the story is you.  The rest comes along after that.]

Hmmm….

SO, HOW DOES A LIFE-STORY WORK?

The thing about your life-story is this:  it runs through your head all the time, every moment of your life.  Whatever you tell yourself about your life, you need to be aware that all the thoughts you’ve ever thought about it, keeps cycling through over and over.

It’s how you make sense of this very big and confusing old world all us humans are creating together with Life Its Own Self.  It’s like you are standing there watching the world unfolding all around you and you keep saying, “See, see!  I’m right!  This is how it is!”

The story that keeps repeating in your head is so familiar that it is likely that you don’t even know what you are actually telling yourself.  (Fish don’t notice that they are swimming in water, you know.  The water is just there.)

Many times the story in your head keeps you doing the same old stuff over and over again.  Those thoughts keep you repeating the same old stuff you always do.  Usually you keep on getting the same old results you’ve always gotten.

Sometimes this is good.  Sometimes not so much.

WHY WE DON’T REALLY WANNA CHANGE ANYTHING

The only way to get yourself to do different is to start telling yourself a different story.  At least, that’s what all the wise guys down through the ages keep telling us.

However, if you actually try to do that, you may find that you really do seriously consider your life-story to be like your life’s blood.  You may not be so yipsy about interrupting or changing its regular flow.

After all, to stop or divert the blood flowing through you by yourself, you have to do something drastic. And that’s why, despite all the urgent motivational talking about it and all the rah-rah-rah, for most people committing life-story hara kiri is actually not a popular option.

BECOMING THE CHANGE YOU WANT TO SEE IS HARD

It isn’t easy to change the story in your head.  It takes a heck of a lot of effort to move your life around to accommodate any kind of change in your story because everything around you in the life you’ve made so far can be a major thing that anchors you to your old story.

You have to make room in your life for even a little change because any change in your story is probably going to displace something that’s already in your life.  Who wants to CHOOSE to do that kind of hassle?  Haven’t we got enough to do already?

SO WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT THAT?

Veteran coach and management consultant David Allen has a whole system that you can use to manage your actions and tackle the conundrum of personal productivity.  You may want to take a look at his book, GETTING IT DONE:  The Art of Stress-Free Productivity.

His later work, READY FOR ANYTHING:  52 Productivity Principles for Getting Things Done, is also a good one and a lot less intimidating.

Using Allen’s strategies can help you figure out how to set up systems that allow you to stay on top of all of the everything coming at you, especially during times of severe stress.

Click the button below to explore the GTD website.

Allen’s work and the massive numbers of people who have gotten good results by following his method do make a case for the concept that managing your actions well can help you reach a point where you can get yourself out of the overwhelm threatening to engulf you.

• You can use it to clear the space around you so you can see where you are standing and what is all around you.
• It can even help you figure out which of the available options and actions you can choose will help you start to make some needed changes in the old same-old story that keeps running in your head.
• It can make room in your head to go figure out your new story.

FIELD NOTES

I actually immersed myself in the GTD thing for a time.  Getting through deconstructing, dissecting, reframing and reconstructing the various aspects of the actions I was making in my life using the methods Allen delineates took me at least five years of concentrated effort.

I maintained the thing for quite a while after that.  I still fall back into patterns I formed then when things get hairy.  The GTD system helped me enormously when I got serious about changing my own life story.

GTD was one of many systems and aids that I tapped, trying to answer the question, “So, who is just-Netta NOW?”

It worked because it suited my way of walking.  It worked because I already had space in my life so I could actually set aside time to practice it with the kind of intense focus that is needed to make anything of this sort work.

The system does take a lot of time and it does take a lot of effort.  As usual, half-assed effort and trying to short-time it do not work so well. You do have to put your whole butt into it.

Every system is a series of routines strung together so that they all work effectively and well.  Open-ended ones like the GTD method can help you shape your world.

AND A METAPHOR

It seems to me that playing in a brand-new-to-you system feels like moving into an older, fixer-upper house.  Some parts of it will work for you, other parts need to be worked around and still others leave you cold or just have to go.

If you bang away at it, move walls around, give the thing your own kind of styling and do a bunch of living in it, the old house can become home.

And that can be a very good thing.

AGAIN

Over and over again I am shown that I do not control

The way the world dances and flows onward.

I can only do what I can do.

Nothing more, nothing less.

One more time I am shown that I am a helpless leaf

Fallen into some burbling stream, moving on to I don’t know.

I can only stand empty.

Nothing more, nothing less.

Waiting and trusting that the Tao will flow as it flows

And clarity will come one fine day when I do not expect it.

I can only keep on trying.

Nothing more, nothing less.

By Netta Kanoho

HEADER PHOTO CREDIT:  “Old Friends” by Jenny Tañedo via Flickr [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

……

SOME OTHER POSTS TO EXPLORE

(Click on each of the post titles below and see where it takes you…)

• A QUESTION OR TWO
• VALUES-BASED WRITING
• THOUGHTS ARE YOU

……

Thanks for your visit.  I’d appreciate it if you would drop a note or comment below and tell me your thoughts.

The post MAKE ROOM FOR CHANGE (Another IPS) first appeared on Life-Built Poems.