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.

Poet, artist and musician Joy Harjo is a member of the Mvkoke (Creek) Nation.  (More usually, that word is spelled “Muscogee.”)

Harjo became the first Native American to be appointed as a Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the American Library of Congress in 2019 by Librarian Carla Hayden.  In case you didn’t know, the Library is the nation’s oldest federal cultural institution and is said to be the largest library in the world.

As well as other things, national poets laureate get to help the huge library develop programs that foster the art of poetry, expand the library’s collection of all things related to poetry and help them figure out how to provide services for poetry makers, scholars, and the rest of the citizenry.

When she elevated the poet to the post, Dr. Hayden said, “Joy Harjo has championed the art of poetry – ‘soul talk’ as she calls it – for over four decades.  To her, ‘poems are carriers of dreams, knowledge and wisdom,’ and through them she tells an American story of tradition and loss, reckoning and myth-making.”

A POP-UP POETRY READING

Shortly after she became the poet laureate for the United States of America, Harjo stopped by the offices of the Academy of American Poets, where she was a member of the Board of Chancellors, in order to do a pop-up reading of her poem, “Grace.”

The reading was uploaded to YouTube by the Academy.

The last lines of her poem still resonate with me:

“I would like to say, with grace, we picked ourselves up and walked into the spring thaw.  We didn’t; the next season was worse….And, Wind, I am still crazy.  I know there is something larger than the memory of a dispossessed people.  We have seen it.”

WE INDIGENES ARE POETS TOO

When she accepted the position as poet laureate, Harjo was working on a major book project.  She was acting as the chief editor for the first-ever comprehensive collection of poetry by indigenous writers ever made.

The book was a 400-plus page anthology with works from 160 indigenous poets who represented 91 of the more than 500 federally-recognized tribal nations in America.

The ages of the featured poets range from high schoolers whose poems appeared in tribal or community newspapers more than 100 years ago, to more mature spoken-word artists, to the late Louis Little Coon Oliver (Mvkoke), whose first poetry collection was published after he turned 80.

Harjo was helped in this endeavor by her fellow editors, Leanne Howe and Jennifer Elise Foerster, by her students at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville where Harjo was teaching at the time, and by “contributing editors” who were all expert native poets knowledgeable about at least one of the five different geographical sections into which the team somewhat arbitrarily divided up the country.

The collection has been called a “landmark” book.  It is the first time anybody tried to recognize and honor such a wide diversity of native voices and viewpoints.  The book has also been credited with helping to make our collective story as a country bigger and more layered.  More of the missing voices can now be heard and acknowledged.

We are poets, we have accomplished poets, and we had poets long before there was an entity called America. We were here, we are here, we didn’t disappear or die; but, we are living voices and we are poets.

 The Norton anthology is proof of that one.

(For the complete interview, which includes a very interesting account of how the book came to be, click on the button below.)

THE POET LAUREATE’S SIGNATURE PROJECT

About half of the poets laureate appointed over the years have created and developed large scale poetry projects designed to raise awareness and appreciation of poetry on a national scale.  These major works are called “signature projects.”

When she was appointed for a second term as the national poet laureate in 2020, Harjo began work putting together “Living Nations, Living Words.”

This amazing digital project which includes the works of 47 contemporary Native American poets from across the country including Harjo, Henry Real Bird, Joan Naviyuk Kane, b: william bearheart, Alex Jacobs, Mahealani Perez-Wendt, and Luci Tapahonso.

Each of these poets were asked to choose a poem based on the theme of place and displacement.  They were also asked to choose poems that focused on visibility, persistence, resilience, and/or acknowledgement.

The STORY MAP – an interactive ArcGIS web map – is the foundation of the signature project.

The map was developed by Harjo with the Library’s Geography and Map Division after she asked the poetry makers to pinpoint the place on a map of the United States that each participating poet gave as his or her point of origin.

You can click the markers on the map to access each of the poets and their work.

Harjo says (and I agree) that “place is central to identity, to the imagery and shape of the poems, no matter what country, culture or geographical place.”

The words of poets rebuild the worlds they have known and create the worlds of their dreams.  That’s one of the most awesome power of words.

The map is connected to an ONLINE AUDIO COLLECTION.  These are the captured voices of each of the participating poets in the “Living Nations, Living Words” project reading one of their original poems and then talking about their work is housed in the Library’s American Folklife Center.

Hearing the poets adds another dimension to the project.  Poems are meant to be heard.  The voices of the native poets reach out for your ears and for your heart.  Maybe it might be a good thing to light a fire or listen to the poets speak by candlelight.

AND THEN “GREAT” GOT EVEN BETTER

In 2021 Harjo became the second poet laureate ever to be appointed to a third one-year term by the Librarian of Congress.  Harjo still had work to do as the 23^rd Poet Laureate of the United States.

During her final year the poet collaborated with her anthology’s book publisher as well as with a group of educators as she worked on expanding the usefulness and the scope and outreach for her remarkable signature project with two more elements:.

A book, LIVING NATIONS, LIVING WORDS:  An Anthology of First People’s Poetry, was published in May, 2021 by W. W. Norton and Company in association with the Library of Congress.  The book is a compilation of all of the poets featured in the project.  Readers could hold the poems in their hands.

Then a COMPANION EDUCATOR GUIDE was released by the Library of Congress in November, 2021.  Harjo, an educator herself, wanted to point out various resources that can help teachers of children in grades 7 or older to do their work.

This guide for teachers was developed with help from an advisory committee of educators that included members of the National Council for the Social Studies, the National Council of teachers of English and the National Indian Education Association.

[If you click on the names of the different elements in Harjo’s master work, you’ll be able to access or get information about each of them.]

LAST THOUGHTS

Harjo pointed out in her interview with Clancey D’Isa:

“We can speak out in poetry in a way that allows people to hear multi-dimensionally. A poem can be constructed of many dimensions. Therein is the gift of metaphor.

“Collectively the arts are like that; but, poetry, because we’re humans and we speak, has that power.”

The lady speaks a profound truth, one that she has served for her whole life.

Header Photo Credit: “Giving of Life and Spirit” (painting by artist Allan Mardon at the Booth Museum of Western Art, Cartersville, Georgia) by JP R via Flickr [CC BY-NC 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 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.)

If you click on the “Guest Poet Portal” in the menu above 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: Joy Harjo first appeared on Life-Built Poems.

It’s a perennial bit of advice from most of the entrepreneurial advisers and advocates of DIY bootstrapping in the world to get yourself organized by working out routines and systems of routines that will help you get ‘er done and help facilitate your making that run towards your dream.  It does work.

It has occurred to me more than once that we humans are routine-building fools.  For some of us the whole routine-building thing may even be automatic.

We can do lots and lots of stuff over and over again, day in and day out, without thinking.  We can get an awesome lot done.  We can even use those routines and systems to bulldoze our way through all kinds of obstacles on the way to our dreams.

Being an ersatz Tonka Toy might mean that we pass through our days without noticing much of anything except how far down we got on our never-ending To-Do List.

A friend of mine, artist Phil Sabado, used to make the 23-plus mile (38 km) run between Kahului and Lahaina towns every morning to get to his job as a graphic artist for one of the independent newspaper rags on the island at the time.  It took close to an hour when the traffic got going good.

He is now a wonderfully successful painter, Phil is.  None of his old friends can afford to buy his work these days and his collectors are many.  Murals and other art installations he designed grace several public buildings and parks and so on and so forth.

He is also a Molokai fisherman, born and bred.  The idea of him going past a fishing spot without even checking to see whether the fish were running is a mind-boggle for me.

OKAY…WHAT ARE ROUTINES, REALLY?

It seems to me that the best and most effective explanations for how to do basic life moves often come from the people who have had a harder time either doing them or making them work well.

These folks find effective workarounds because they must.  If the rest of us are lucky, they are willing to share their experiences, their mindsets, and their strategies.

I stumbled across this sprightly 2017 YouTube video that explains, step-by-step, how we humans build routines.  It was uploaded by the “How To ADHD” organization and features the lovely and upbeat American actress Jessica Lauren McCabe.

McCabe is best-known as the host of the “How To ADHD” YouTube channel which she started in 2016.

She tells about that time in a 2017 TEDxBratislavia talk that she gave at the University of Iowa.  The talk was titled, “Failing at Normal: An ADHD Success Story.”

McCabe started the YouTube channel when she was 33 years old.  Coming off a divorce, McCabe was a broke college dropout who had gone through a string of jobs one after the other, and was miserably wondering what she was doing with her not-so-together life.

As a child just starting middle school, McCabe had been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, ADHD.  Prescribed stimulant medication during her adolescence was an effective treatment for her and she seemed to be on-track to a bright future.

As life grew more complex, she experienced more and more difficulties and challenges that resulted from trying to do her walk through our world without making allowances for the very real differences in the way her brain was wired compared to more “neurotypical” folks.

The self-help books did not help.  Inattention, impulsivity, and hyperactivity, the three primary characteristics of a person who has a high degree of ADHD tendencies, make for a chaotic sort of life.

The channel, which is dedicated to all topics relating to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, presents tips on how to take advantage of the neurodivergent brain type and all things ADHD.  It has grown considerably, with more than 900,000 subscribers.

McCabe says that when she first started out, she thought she should do a channel about how NOT to ADHD.  Her brother talked her out of it, pointing out that most people don’t even know the kinds of challenges someone with the condition faces on a day-to-day basis.

It occurred to her that she, herself, did not really know much about the condition and how the ADHD brain architecture can affect other people who are either more or less affected than she is by it.

She went looking for more knowledge and understanding about ADHD, talking to experts working in that field of study and to members of the ADHD “tribe,” which makes up (it has been estimated) between five and eight percent of the global population.

She used the channel to share her feelings and her findings and to build a community of volunteers and others who added to the work she began.

The organization she founded is now a crowd-funded Patreon membership business and can be supported by clicking on the button below:

It is a very cool thing.

MCCABE’S TIPS FOR BUILDING NEW ROUTINES WHILE NAVIGATING LIFE CHANGES

The previous “How To ADHD” YouTube video helped to explain how to set up routines and systems.  The next, also put together by the same people, tells you what to do when things go kerblewy and life changes happen.

FINAL THOUGHTS

In her TEDx talk, McCabe tells her audience, “…seeing the positives in fellow ADHD brains helped me recognize and appreciate my own strengths, ones I couldn’t see when I was just staring at my weaknesses, which I’d been doing for decades.”

And maybe that’s the biggest take-away in all of this:  If you spend all of your time looking at what you’re doing wrong, you might not be noticing what you’re doing right.

Here’s a poem…..

ONE MORE TIME

One more time…

One more time…

Just sitting there spacing,

Looking at the all of everything and doing…NOTHING.

I used to call it “being overwhelmed.”

I used to call it “procrastinating.”

“Hanging fire,” I’d call it,

And “foolish” – a thing to overcome.

Set-up’s done,

Motives seem right,

And those be-bopping, recalcitrant ducks

Are all lined up and straight and sure….

And I stop, go catatonic.

And, hey…you know ducks:

The dummies have probably shifted again

While I was blanked out.

I don’t make the “right moves,”

The ones with the quotes implied,

The ones that Everybody says

are the very best ones.

They say those moves get you to that Heaven

Where there’s no sorrow and no hardship,

No suffering, no pain, and everything’s

Wrapped up in a warm, beige gentleness.

And here’s me moaning and whinging.

F’r real, I do have to ask:

Why does that perfect prefect

Look like a boring sort of blah?

And now, here I sit in post-stupor mode,

Coming out of my non-drug-induced daze,

Feeling like street pizza and wondering,

What WAS that?

By Netta Kanoho

Header photo credit:  “Hammerers” by RedCraig 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…)

• JUST PAY ATTENTION
• SHIFT TO IDLE
• FLOW WITH YOUR GO

……

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

The post RENOVATE ROUTINES: An Un-Seeing Exercise first appeared on Life-Built Poems.

Maya Angelou’s life story always reminds me of a quote by William Blake that never fails to lend me heart when I’m feeling low:

“No bird soars too high if it soars with its own wings.”

The woman probably qualifies as a “force of nature.”  What can you say about someone whose first autobiography, I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS, which was published in 1969 when she was 41, has gone through 154 editions so far?

That book wasn’t her last.  There were six more autobiographies, stretching from her childhood in Arkansas to Africa and back to the United States, covering a span of time from the beginnings of World War II to the death of Martin Luther King.

She was a steady and prolific poet as well and gave powerful performances as a spoken-word artist.  There are at least 18 books of her collected poems.

The following YouTube video, “And Still I Rise” is my favorite.  It was uploaded by mohitbahi in 2007.  What I love best about it is the interplay of emotions that move across the lady’s face and her delightful laugh.

The poem itself was published in 1978 in her book of the same name.

Angelou wrote screenplays as well as plays for the stage.  An accomplished performer and actor, she was also the first African-American woman to direct a major motion picture, Down in the Delta, in 1998.

Besides this, Angelou was a sought-after public speaker, joining the lecture circuit in the 1990’s and giving talks until she was in her eighties.

She has been called, “one of the most honored writers of her generation.”  The awards and honors rained down on her.  One more wonderment:  the woman received more than 30 honorary degrees from all kinds of bastions of higher education.

The Poetry Foundation has a page devoted to Maya Angelou.  Click on the button below if you’d like to find out more about her.

About her work, Angelou once said, “All my work, my life, everything I do is about survival, not just bare, awful, plodding survival, but survival with grace and faith. While one may encounter many defeats, one must not be defeated.”

That one resonates with me.

——

This is the first in a new series of posts, “Other Voices,” that I’m trying in this thing.  I’ll throw them in the mix whenever I stumble across spoken-word poets whose words make your heart open.

We need more of that, I am thinking.

Header photo credit:  “Soaring” by Jim Roberts via Flickr [CC BY-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: Maya Angelou first appeared on Life-Built Poems.

I have some most excellent, scientifically correct news:  We humans are a lot more than big old naked brains riding around in vehicles that are kind of like animated meatballs with feet.  I have to admit that is a bit of a relief.  (I like albondigas in their place, but life, it seems to me, is more than a tapas bar.)

All during my growing-up years, I was dragged kicking and screaming into the prevalent paradigms that told me that my cerebral matter was the only thing about me that was of any value.  All the rest of me was supposed to be some kind of fidgety wild beast or kooky goofball that had to be tamed and brought into line by the all-important, almighty encephalon.

For the whole rest of pre-rationalist human history, it seems to me, the ancient wise guys believed that we humans actually were more than just a brain walking around and cogitating.   In the old days, we had things like a body that included guts and a heart as well as a spirit and even a something called “essence.”

The guys in the white lab coats did rediscover what the ancients knew.  Lately, the leading-edge guys who are doing work on artificial intelligence have come around to the notion that our bodies and their reactions to the environments in which we live are an integral part of how we get to be conscious beings.

The Smarty Pants have apparently figured out that a brain floating around in blah soup probably won’t reach a mindful, humanistic awareness no matter how much you poke at it and tweak it.  It’s just a bundle of sweetmeats with built-in electrical wiring, after all.

Our brains need feedback from the world to grow good minds.  We get that because we have a body with all kinds of cool senses and sensations.

COMES NOW “EMBODIED CONSCIOUSNESS”

This 2018 YouTube video was uploaded by THUNK, Josh Pelton’s YouTube channel that promises to “tickle your brain.” It has a great explanation about “embodied consciousness” – what it is and what it means to the world at large.

Pelton is a mechanical engineer-cum-philosopher whose thought that “until you’re actually standing under something you’ve built, it’s all just ‘thought,’” resonates with me.

If you’re curious about Pelton, you can click on the button below.  It will take you to Daniel Podgorski’s The Gembok blog for a fun interview with the guy.

Pelton’s YouTube offering is especially exciting to me because it references the book, METAPHORS WE LIVE BY, written by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.  That book, is now a classic.

Lakoff, it says here, is a professor at UC Berkely and was one of the founders of the field of cognitive science.  The book he wrote with Johnson in 1979 has since gone on to become a go-to resource for guys who are studying how we humans think and how we express our thoughts.

[Poet-Me stands around wrapped in smugness, bathing in the reflected glory.  Poets and metaphors are naturals together, ya know.]

EMBODIED COGNITION ALWAYS GETS PHYSICAL

The ideas uncovered by the philosophers, psychologists and sociologists studying embodied cognition in all its various flavors that have big, long tongue-twisting labels like “phenomenology” and “enactivism” and “connectivism” and so on do resonate with regular humans.

Before his untimely death in 1962, French philosopher-turned-phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty built on the work of his predecessors, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, to bring up arguments against the view that the way our minds work and grow can be completely explained by a mechanistic, nuts-and-bolt approach.

We are not just fleshy machines full of circuitry and chemical reactions and our minds are not made up of streaming and morphing inner symbols that dance around each other and merge and break apart.

In his masterpiece book, PHENOMENOLOGY OF PERCEPTON, which was published in 1945, Merleau-Ponty says:

“The body is the vehicle of being in the world, and having a body is, for a living creature to be interinvolved in a definite environment, to identify oneself with certain projects and be continually committed to them.”

What the philosopher is saying is that you learn about the world through your body.  It’s what you use to figure out your own individual “point of view” about the world.

Since you and your brother have different bodies, is it any wonder that you might have very different points of view?  Your mind and his mind are sitting on different rocks even when your bodies are both in the same place.

Anyway, assorted phenomenologists agree that “all cognition is embodied, interactive and embedded in dynamically changing environments.”  Your mind grows and changes because of the way your body interacts with your world.

(Yay!  We moderns talked ourselves back into believing that Bodies Matter Too!)

All the various flavors of phenomenology and its offshoots have proponents and every one of them blathers on and on and on.

Whatever.

MIND MOVES BODY UNTIL BODY MOVES MIND…ONE STORY

I have a confession to make.  I am a lousy practitioner of Southern Style Praying Mantis kung fu.  I actually got into it because, at the time, it was the only way I could learn how to do “Six Healing Sounds” ch’i kung, a system of body movements, breathing and visualization that helps to ground and center you in your body.

David Moragne, a disciple of the late Grandmaster Gin Foon Mark (the fifth lineage holder in Kwang Sai Jook Lum Southern Style Praying Mantis kung fu school), became my sifu (teacher) in a serendipitous confluence of events.   He was there in my life when I needed a way to get past some hard, when I was shattered and scattered and in a lot of pain.

Frankly, the kung fu style my sifu taught was not really one for martial arts sports tournaments.  The style is not particularly showy even though it can be devastatingly effective for real fighting if you’re into that sort of thing.

I didn’t care.  I was in the class for the ch’i kung.  I did the kung fu part because I liked feeling like I was in a Jackie Chan movie.

Sifu indulged me.  I’d bring a battery-operated CD player to the classes which were variously held in an old rackety pineapple plantation camp community center or in the moonlight on a sandy beach in Paia or on the expansive green lawns of the Maui Community College which has since become part of the University of Hawaii.

I’d play world fusion music and Carlos Nakai flute CDs so we’d have a sound-track to do our moves.  (You gotta have a soundtrack if you’re in a movie, ya know.)  We students would sit around after class with Sifu and talk Tao-ish philosophy and kung fu mindsets even though we all had to go to work the next day.  It was cool.

Sifu would often tell us students that the way we trained our bodies to move would become the way our minds would begin to move.  He told us that we would struggle to learn to dance the ch’i, maybe for years.  Then, he said, one day the ch’i would dance us.

[You see why I loved the guy?  He even sounded like a kung fu movie.]

He was right.  When we students were learning a new form, we had to deliberately and intensely focus our minds to embed each of the movements we learned into our muscles.  In time, we trained those muscles to flow smoothly from one movement to the next without needing to think about how or when or why to do each move.

Sifu called the training we did “sinking the lessons into your bones.”

The first stance at the start of every Southern Style Praying Mantis kung fu form is called “begging hands.”  You stand strong and balanced with your body relaxed, your elbows close to your body, and your open hands out in front of you with your palms held up facing the other.

Standing like that, you wait for your fellow player’s first move.

That one was a mind-boggle for me.  It became a model for me, the first stance I always aimed for (and was never able to do right).

The system also taught us to instantaneously respond to whatever our partner did, to block the initial move and then answer with a series of attacking moves of our own.  We practiced a lot.

About a year and a half into the training, I complained to my Sifu that I was starting to “trip” over other people.  They would do something and I would spontaneously begin responding to their mind-moves with a bunch of my own.

If they were up to the dance, my stuff often caused them to joyously come play with me.  We could zip along having a grand old time, getting things done and tackling any obstacle or problem facing us.  If they were slow on the uptake or if they were reluctant or fearful, they would stall out and things would go like molasses.  I often found myself wanting to scream.

Sifu laughed and laughed.

After several years of this, life changed and I no longer had room in my life for the kung fu classes.  At the last class I attended, which happened to be held at another school’s kwoon (training hall), my Sifu did his “begging hands” demonstration before all of the other students and, again, nobody had any urge to attack him.

I stepped up behind him, wrapped my arms around his still body and hugged him.  He rolled his eyes, laughed, dropped his arms, and gave up immediately!  That one made everybody laugh.  It is still a good memory.

My sifu died in 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic had been raging through the world for a while.

I still do the ch’i kung exercises.  I am still trying to do the first form I learned — “Three Step Arrow” — better.  And I am still sinking new, not-kung fu body lessons into my bones and learning how to use them to do better mind-moves.

Here’s a poem:

KWEI

(Opposition, Disharmony)

Opposition and divergence

Resistance and disharmony….

It seems a given:

Strength calls to strength.

Push and you hit a wall of shove

Coming right back at you.

Wise guys say you do better

When you can turn sideways,

Let the oncoming force flow on past you,

Let it turn you ’round

With your striking hand extended

To tap that incoming power,

Influence and turn it

Towards the place it wants to go…

(Right out of your face).

Circles and angles and lines,

Leverage and motion,

Spin you in and out of the slipstream,

Sliding you away to your own place

Again and again and again.

By Netta Kanoho

Header photo credit:  “Kung-Fu Style” by Henry Sudarman 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…)

• DEVELOPING PRESENCE
• PRACTICE THE GIFT YOU WANT TO BE
• ISLAND-STYLE VIRUS FIGHTING

……

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 101: Your Body Moves Your Mind first appeared on Life-Built Poems.

I’ve been circling around this latest concept I’ve stumbled across like I imagine an awestruck fan would do to take in Michelangelo’s Pietà at the Vatican.  My head keeps going, “Wow…wow…wow.”  My heart is drowning in the swelling sound of some Gregorian chant or something.  OOOH!

The idea that each human being’s ability to make choices can absolutely affect and shape both the forms their own lives take as well as the world in which they live is a mind-boggle of the highest order to me.

The only problem is that, at the same time, I am also getting the same feeling I used to get when I opened my uncle’s fishing tackle box and found yet another tangle of fishing line from the last time somebody or other used the thing.  ACK!

It does amaze me that we humans take this singular super-power of ours so much for granted.  It is even more astonishing that most of the Shapers in the world (who are actually all of us) often march around routinely denying that we even have this power in us.

WHAT IS UP WITH THAT?

Every one of our actions can do a number on this world of ours – even something as innocuous as planting flowers.

We Littles were endlessly given some version of the Spider Man mantra: “With great power comes great responsibility, you boob!”

We probably heard some version of that every time we messed up by doing something that either went against the Laws of Nature or missed the mark of the Sweet Spot of Same-Old towards which we were, all of us, supposed to aim.

Somehow, the majority of us did not get the part about what the great super-power we were supposed to be holding was.

MAYBE IT’S A CULTURAL THING

I noticed a while back that tucked into each of the Hawaiian teaching stories is the unspoken assumption that we humans are all cousins somehow and that we are all descended from gods.

Of course, it could be that’s just me being delusional.  Whatever.  (I like my delusion way better than that other thing, guys!)

AND WHAT IF IT’S REALLY TRUE?

Let’s suppose for a minute (or ten) that it’s a truth that each of us humans carry within us the ability to shape ourselves and to shape the world

Let us also suppose that this ability to shape stuff arises from the perfectly learnable skills that surround the making of decisions and choices that align with and are congruent to our own natures.

We can think of it as the spark of the Creative that we carry into this world we are making together.  We might even think of it as the gift that Life has given us to carry with us into this learning place that is the world.

How else can you explain that our species — one that lacks major physical prowess (compared to, say, lions and tigers, bears and sharks) — is actually at the top of the food chain here?  All those gnarly predators are our prey.  Wo!

SO WHAT CAN WE DO WITH THAT?

Lisa Bilyeu who is co-founder of the billion-dollar company Quest Nutrition is also the president of Impact Theory, a company whose supremely vague-sounding mission is to “give people an empowering mindset.” What they do, basically, is sell you on the power of your own self.

Bilyeu has a podcast show, “Women of Impact” that features conversations with women who overcame “incredible hardship to achieve massive success.”

One of Bilyeu’s guests on the show was Mel Robbins, an American lawyer turned television host, who is also a noted motivational speaker and author.

Robbins uploaded a 9-minute segment of her “Women of Impact” conversation with Bilyeu on her own You-Tube channel.

In it Robbins delineates how she is using a really simple, non-verbal high-five gesture to activate and access her own shaping power.  She tells us the gesture helps to strengthen her own feelings of self-acceptance.

Robbins is convinced that developing a strong sense of self-worth is the key to clearing the way for you to take effective action in the world.  She can point to all kinds of scientific evidence that supports this, even.

It does resonate with common sense, I am thinking.  Without a strong sense of self-worthiness, after all, how could you even begin to imagine that

1. you actually can change the world for real, and
2. you will like the changes you are likely to make?

As Robbins says, “it all starts with you.”

I have been testing the high-five thing my own self, and, by golly, it sure seems to be working!  At the very least the thing lets me start my day with a smile and that’s a good thing, I say.

An old Buddhist teaching story tells about the student monk who was asked, along with all the others in his class, how many mantras he was going to pledge himself to recite every day in order to reach enlightenment.

Every one of the other students came up with larger and larger numbers, trying to outdo each other and impress their teacher with their extravagant goal-setting.

This student looked at his teacher and quietly said he was going to commit himself to doing only one mantra every day for the rest of his life.  The teacher beamed at him and told him that he was well on the road to enlightenment.

Just because a goal is small doesn’t mean it is not powerful.  Powerful goals are the ones on which you don’t give up.  Small goals help you practice for tackling bigger ones.

WHAT SOME OLD WISE GUYS SAID

On the slopes of Mount Parnassas in Greece, the remnants and ruins of an ancient temple to Apollo, the Greek god of music, harmony, light, healing, and oracles still stand.

Over the centuries, there were at least five recorded iterations of the structures on the temple site.  Eventually the temple housed the ancient Mediterranean world’s most-consulted oracle.  These buildings kept getting destroyed by assorted conquering armies and by natural disasters over the centuries.

The last one, the Pausanias “modern temple” was made of limestone and was built in 330 BCE.  That one survived until AD 390 and was destroyed (along with a lot of “pagan” statuary and artwork and other wonders) by the Roman emperor Theodosius I in the name of Christianity.

Delphi got to be a powerful city-state in the ancient world because of the fame of their oracle, who had a really long waiting list as well as a team of devotees to take care of the place and priests who charged her customers a heck of a lot for her services.

Like modern-day oracles (economists, political analysts, and other such forecasters) the Pythia’s answers to the questions of the day were often obscure riddles that left everybody scratching their heads.  (That one reaction hasn’t changed much with our own modern oracles either.  They, too, also charge a heck of a lot for their prognostications.)

Whatever.

Inscribed on the columns that stood on a porch outside the temple’s inner chambers were as many as 147 wise sayings or proverbs that were variously attributed to assorted popular traditional sages.

The three main ones are usually listed as follows:

1. Know thyself.
2. Nothing in excess
3. Surety brings ruin.

Notice that the one that’s come down to us as the most important in all this collected wisdom of the ancients is “Know thyself.”  If you don’t know yourself, none of the other aphorisms works as well, it seems.

And maybe that’s another clue.  You have to put in the work of getting to really know yourself in order to figure out what you’re going to do with all of that potential power you’re carrying around.

ONE MORE TAKE

This engaging 2017 YouTube video was created by UPROXX Studio and features surfboard shaper Tyler Warren who is very much aware of and honors his own super-power of shaping.

Enjoy!

Here’s a poem:

A NOTE FROM STUPID

Another conundrum,

Aa paradox and puzzlement

That dogs my heels like

Some mangy, lost, lonesome pup:

The “waiting-for-my-savior-to-come,”

(A stance encouraged by a world

Apparently determined to transform

And morph persons Into

Clingy, wet sops,

All tears and self-sorrow)

Is alive and well.

“I can’t…

“I cannot do this.

“Oh, help me, help me,

Help, help, help.

“Sure, SOMEBODY has to do it,

But that’s not me, no, not me,

Because…because…because…

“Well, I can’t,

“And I won’t,

“So YOU have to.”

Ummm….

Lemme get this one straight.

I do mine.

I take the blows that come

When I inevitably misstep or

Some other dumbness happens.

I carry my own load.

(Okay, sometimes I grumble….

But, hey, I’m still carrying it)

And I make my way.

The gait gets gimpy sometimes,

And there are harrowing moments,

But I go along.

You stand there telling me now

That I have to carry you too?

When did I get elected the hero of your story?

Did I miss the nomination?

Can I decline the honor?

Gee, wow!

See, I’m the hero of my own story.

I decided that a while back,

When the poo’-thing-me thing

Got to be kinda stupid-looking.

(I do so hate looking stupid.)

So, lemme ask you something:

Did I forget to take the “STUPID” label

Off my forehead or what?

 By Netta Kanoho

Header Photo Credit:  “Friendship is a sheltering tree” by Duane Romanell 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…)

• ABUNDANCE THINKING
• MAKING ROOM
• 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 SHAPING STARTS WITH YOU first appeared on Life-Built Poems.

John Milton (an English poet who wrote epics in the 17^th century) once wrote:

“The mind is its own place, and in itself

Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.”

Milton did call it right.  All of us humans do have one super-power.  Every single one of us can shape our own reality and make up our own world.  It’s why we find everybody else’s stories so fascinating, I suppose.

Because we each have our own mind and every single one is different from every other one, we often confuse each other.  One person’s way of seeing the world is often not at all like the one the person standing next to them is seeing.

The disparate choices the people around us make and the ways they walk are likely to be consistent with whatever world they are looking at in their own minds.  Since these minds can be so very different from our own, it’s likely that we are going to be a lot confused by other people.

At the same time, because we are all human and we all have the same need to survive and the same desire to thrive, we do have many commonalities and similarities with which we can hook our worlds together and play that way.

The super-power we each possess is the foundation of our ability to shape the world around us and it helps us to connect with other people as well.

People who see pieces of the world in the same way can join together to do and make lots of grand things together.  People who don’t see things in the same way tend to blow things up fighting about it.

IT’S SIMPLE…BUT IT’S NOT

Somebody not-so-famous once said, “At the end of the day, it always comes down to small and simple things.  That’s the way the world really works.  It’s just us humans who make it so complicated.”

And that’s another truth, I think.

It occurred to me that, for real, there is only one big conundrum with which every renowned wise guy and smarty-pants in every relatively complex society down through the ages has spent considerable amounts of time wrestling. 

The thing that had them scratching their heads and formulating theories and strategies and systems and such is this one: 

What are we humans supposed to be doing with our in-born power to build and shape the worlds we are seeing in our own minds when we choose from among the actions we can take in any given situation? 

The wise guys and smarty-pants invariably tell us it’s supposed to be pretty simple to make your own choices because there are only two basic ways you can actually use that inherent human super-power of yours:

1. You can shape yourself to fit into the consensus world in which you want to live.
2. You can shape the world around you so that there is room for you to sit or stand or move in it as you like.

And then those know-it-alls have to elaborate…because (except for the guys who like to keep you dizzy) they ALWAYS have to elaborate.

They tell us that sometimes you do one way and sometimes you do the other.  They then go on to tell us that sometimes you have to do both at the same time.  The worst part is when they tell us about how sometimes you can do nothing at all. 

ARGH!

The wise guys point out that all kinds of complications arise or ensue because, no matter what, you are also obliged to take care of yourself, your heart-people, and your own little bit of the world around you.

Hmmm.

Actually, that does makes sense.  Here’s why:

1. If you get broken, you can’t play.
2. If you squish the other people around you and leave a trail of street-pizza behind you, then eventually nobody will want to play with you.
3. If your playground falls apart because you are not paying attention to maintaining it, after a while you won’t have a place where you can play.

See?  Simple.  Right?

But then, of course, there are all those other people who are not you.  They are likely to have their own ideas about it all and if their ideas are a lot different than yours, everybody’s going to be tripping all over each other.

It’s enough to engender a lot of sighing and grinching and whining, that.

A COUPLE OF VIDEOS TO ILLUSTRATE THESE AMORPHOUS THOUGHTS

I stumbled across a 2017 YouTube video of a spoken poem made by a young Arizona middle-schooler, Olivia Vella, for her seventh-grade writing assignment. 

The video went viral.  The thing has received over 19 million views so far and garnered 1.2 million Likes and not one Dislike.  ABC Television Stations uploaded it onto YouTube.

It’s a perfect model of what happens when you focus entirely on trying to shape yourself to the world in which you want to be.  (As we know, middle-school-aged girls are notorious for making this a specialty.)

And then there was this ESMA animation movie, “Sauve qui pneu,” a playful spoof on the “Fast and Furious” movie franchise, was uploaded to YouTube in 2021. 

The little film is apparently the work of students who attend an art school in Montpellier, France.  It struck me as a giggle-inducing, highly flavored commentary on some of the ways you can use your one human super-power to shape the world and make room for you.

It’s interesting to note that the title is a play on the phrase “sauve qui peut” which literally means “save himself who can” and has come to mean “every man for himself.”  The word “pneu” means “tire” (like a car tire).  Hmmm….

The little fantasy gets a bit uncomfortable when you remember what your mama or your aunty (or somebody who was more certain than you about the ways and means of this old world) always used to say, “What if everybody did that?” 

Ummm….not so good, maybe.

THE SHAPER CHALLENGE = FIGURING OUT WHAT TO DO WHEN

There are, of course, many wise guys and smarty-pants and know-it-alls and such who are more than happy to tell Shaper-you what you are “supposed” to be doing in this world.  You can probably stack up these guys and gals and their words, ideas, and mind constructs like cordwood in a corner or something.

I’m here to tell ya they are not much of a help if you’re really trying to figure out how to move your own way in the world to get to a place where you want to be.  The thing is anybody else’s systems and strategies very often does work, but maybe not for you.

Remember, though, that it’s human to make the simple stuff complicated. 

The whole thing is really, really simple if you can actually see what is sitting there in front of you.  Unfortunately, that can be the hardest thing for humans to see, it seems. 

(Click on the caption of the image and read the story behind this simple picture.  It adds a whole other dimension to what looks like a “simple” picture of a dock on a lake.)

My own feeling is that all that stuff from wise guys and other smarties are only supposed to be fuel for your own fire.  You try them out and burn them up to make your own light so you can suss out how You, Your-Own-Self, are looking at this world that enfolds and encompasses all us humans.  

The next very short YouTube Video was uploaded in 2014 by MindToolsVideos.  It asks, “What Are Your Values?” and gives some simple pointers on how you, too, can pinpoint what your own values are.

I’m going to spoil it for you and tell you what it says to do.

1. Think on the times you were happiest, the times you were proudest, and the times you felt fulfilled
2. List the values that you were following that led to those moments and ponder on the other values that you hold which could lead to the same kinds of moments.
3. Then list your top five.

This admittedly dorky little video is attached to an article written by expert, Big-Brain People Who Know about figuring out what your own values are and how to find the meaning in your life.  (Okay…maybe it actually doesn’t say THAT.)

Be aware that it’s likely that all of this is really just a reminder of stuff you already know.  And that’s the thing:  YOU ALREADY KNOW THIS STUFF.  You probably don’t need anybody else to tell you what you already know.

However, if you are feeling like you need some help, then the little video and accompanying article can be a good starting point. 

Once you get a handle on your values and the principles that you are already embracing to make your own life run well (or not), then you can go make your own plan of action. 

If you follow your plan, making assorted course-corrections and such as needed along the way, it is likely that you will end up in a world that matches your own perceptions better.   

The thing is, it’s still all on you whether you build yourself a Heav’n or a Hell.

Here’s a poem:

PAPA WAS RIGHT

Papa was right.

Every day is a blessing,

He used to tell me,

Every day you start out with a smile.

But me, I was the smart one:

I thought that was TOO simple,

Not the Real Deal nor worldly-wise.

I knew better; I was cool; I had it wired.

Now, I sit here, thinking ‘bout my Papa,

Sit here thinking how he lived and died,

Thinking of the hard that dogged his dancing,

Thinking of the sad hidden underneath the smiles.

He’s gone now, but mostly, I remember

The laughter and the songs he used to sing

And the quick, wide smile that always drew an answer,

The sparkle in his eyes and his jaunty swing.

He walked and walked for miles and miles and

His hands were tough and calloused from work unending,

But his heart, oh, his heart stayed baby-soft,

So tender, he was, so warm, and oh, so very kind.

I’ve been living out my life for a while now,

Been knocked around by lessons not too sweet,

Tried dancing hard and fast and playing it fancy,

Moved in the groove and flowed with all that go.

And I thought…well, gee, I’m really very smart.

And my hands stayed soft

But my heart got tough and calloused

And my eyes, sometimes they turned to stone.

And then the world dropped me a memo, a reminder,

That all its glittering games are rigged somehow,

That power and control is all illusion,

That the Real sits just quiet underneath.

Life pounded and it hammered me to gravel,

Left a raw heart that lay bleeding in the Real.

It took some while to stitch that back together

‘Mid raging storms and floods of flowing tears.

So now I sit here thinking ‘bout my Papa,

About days you bless and honor with your smiles,

And how you build your heart with song and laughter,

And rub it baby-soft with tear-washed love.

I think ‘bout love that lights you up and sparkles

As your hands get tough and calloused while you work,

And the sweet, sweet joy that sprouts and grows inside you

As you walk your jaunty way for miles and miles.

By Netta Kanoho

HEADER PHOTO CREDIT:  “geometry shapes 3” by frscspd 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…)

• SET UP YOUR OWN RULES
• GET TO CLARITY
• 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 SHAPER CHALLENGE (An Un-Seeing Exercise) first appeared on Life-Built Poems.

I didn’t get it; really, I didn’t.  It took a long time, but finally a light dawned.  The whole pseudo-argument about Life being a “journey” rather than a “destination” is a crock.

I mean, think about it.  How can you have a “journey” without having a “destination?”  It’s sort of a package deal.

If you’re a tourist yearning to go traveling, you’ve got all kinds of professionals – a whole industry — trying to help you find a way to get to some destination or other.  Isn’t that why they call tourist traps “destinations?”

DON’T BLAME IT ON WALDO

Some dork-head saddled poor Waldo (Ralph Waldo Emerson, that is) with the blame for starting the whole thing.  Ever afterwards, assorted nerds and other wannabe wits have constructed those silly memes in his name.

Emerson, in case you didn’t know, was an extraordinary 19th-century man of words.  He was an American lecturer, a poet and an essayist-philosopher whose lectures drew rock star-sized crowds.

A young Unitarian minister in Boston, Emerson quit the clergy in 1832 about a year-and-a-half after the untimely death from tuberculosis of his beloved first wife, Ellen Louisa Tucker, brought on an identity crisis.  He was deeply affected by her death.

Emerson did some traveling then, wandering about in Europe looking for answers to his Big Questions.  When he returned home, he began giving public lectures (at a then-new-fangled form of paid-for entertainment that got really huge).

In the lectures, he told larger and larger gatherings of people about the questions he pursued throughout his life and the conclusions he reached in his ponderings.

He also wrote and published essays that were based on those speeches that often stirred up a lot of controversy.  He made a career of it, eventually giving over 1,500 lectures all over the northern United States and publishing books of his thoughts that sold like hotcakes.

In this 2020 “NBC News Learn” YouTube video, David S. Reynolds (Professor of English and American Studies at the City University of New York) talks about the man.

Emerson was a firm believer in self-reliance, individualism, and clarity of thought as well as an advocate for the abolition of slavery at a time when it was not politically correct.  He also helped to start the American version of the transcendentalist movement in New England.

The man died in 1882 at the age of 79. His legacy of words has inspired generations of deep-thinkers ever since, despite the shifting landscapes of prevalent mindsets and the assumptions, premises, hypotheses, and such that have developed since his time.

Many of his thoughts and ideas might seem out-of-fashion, dated, or just plain unpalatable (aka Politically Incorrect) these days, but many more seem to be spot-on still.

Emerson remains, always, a quintessential maverick, following his own path.

WAYFARING IS A WAY OF WALKING

Emerson was famous as a “wayfarer,” a person who travels by walking.  He was also a great believer in the value of walking for the thinker.  He once opined,

“Few people know how to take a walk. The qualifications are endurance, plain clothes, old shoes, an eye for nature, good humor, vast curiosity, good speech, good silence and nothing too much.”

That was Emerson…the same guy who also advised, “Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”

Click the button below for a map of the walks the two men used to take.

(You might also want to explore NATURE AND WALKING, a book put together by editor John Elder that brings together thoughts on “Nature” by Emerson and Thoreaus thoughts on “Walking.”)

THE “UBIQUITOUS THEY” (UT) AND WHAT THEY SAY

So, what does all this blather about dead deep-thinkers have to do with journeys and destinations?

Let me introduce you to the “ubiquitous They” (abbreviated by me as “UT” to avoid having to continue to repeat that queasy-making phrase over and over again).

Since everybody’s got their own definition of what “good” is as well as their own purposes, agendas and all that, this can be a big Problem (with a capital-P).  It can certainly get dizzy-making.

POINT A –> POINT B = JOURNEY

The thing about Journeys, the UT will tell you, is that there is always a Point A (where you are) and there is always a Point B (where you want to be).  After that, it gets complicated.

If you choose to proceed, you, the Wayfarer, are officially on a Journey.  (The story-telling part is optional.)

If you don’t get to Point B, then you face a choice:  continue onwards towards the destination Point B or quit.  At that juncture, the story takes a different turn as your stopping place becomes your new Point A (because that’s where you are now), whether your Point B stays the same or not.

If you do get to Point B, you will have accomplished your mission and all sorts of celebrations will ensue all over the place.  (Whoopee!  Whoo-hoo!  Yay, you!  Cue the fireworks.)

What the UT usually neglect to tell you, though, is that when you do reach Point B your old destination point will automatically morph into your new, where-you-are Point A, replacing the old Point A from where you began this trip.

They also don’t tell you that once the celebrating’s done, Wayfarer You will probably start looking around for another Point B that you will then want to reach because (the UT will say if you ask) that is what us humans do.

Okay.  Fine.

So, like a good little Wayfarer, you go look for another point B.  When you do find your new Point B, obviously, it will become your new and improved destination.

This will mean that, of course Wayfarer You will then start on another leg of your Life-Journey (notice the capitals) which will continue onward until you either decide to stop goofing around doing this stuff or you drop dead.

Dropping dead signals the end of the ongoing Journey-story of Wayfarer You.

That is how it is.  Ask the UT.

There will, of course, be a lot of advice, suggestions, recommendations, guidance, pointers, admonitions, directives, and so on offered and even pressed upon you at all times.  All the people talking at you only want to help you, the UT say.

Right.

These helpful sorts will also routinely toss in many warnings and caveats and cautions and downers at you.  (More “help,” one assumes.)

ACK!  A whole bunch of other choices to face!

SOME THOUGHTS…NO ANSWERS

My major problem with all of this is that, for real, I am a wayfarer born.  I am going to do this thing regardless of the very real consequences of getting dizzied, confused and frustrated by all the steep switchbacks and nonsensical detours and useless spinning around trying to figure out where I am in this old world.

I’m just too fidgety to do otherwise, I suppose.

Knowing the pitfalls of being a wayfarer who focuses on just destinations to the exclusion of noticing and enjoying one’s surroundings and circumstances is one way to be aware of and try to mitigate the effect of having your mind turn all of your world into a gray and featureless wasteland that you have to get through in order to reach some ecstasy point or other.

However, the biggest bennie of it all is that it also means that I can turn down the volume on the UT blather.  Someday, maybe, I will even be able to switch the thing off.

That last would be a mighty relief, I say.

Here’s a poem:

HUBBUB AND STRIFE

The push-me, pull-you continues

As this one’s needs and that one’s desires

Just do not mesh.

I must confess:  I am nonplussed.

I do not know how I am supposed to move

When extreme polarities insist on standing toe-to-toe

In direct opposition to one another.

What am I supposed to do?

Each one is so very sure

That theirs is the only Real that counts.

They act as if the whole balance of the universe

Will tip over into the Abyss

If this one or that one does not move out of the way.

Rigid, they stand, nose-to-nose and scowling,

Trying to stare through the other one and insisting

That I must lend my weight to one side or the other.

(As if me joined with one of them

Will be able to disappear the other;

As if the Universe is not big enough to contain us all.)

This is too weird, guys.

I do not want to play.

Guys…guys…can you hear me?

Yeah, right….

Me, I can hear the sun laughing

And the breezes are dancing through the trees.

I’m going to watch the grass grow now.

Call me when you’re done, guys.

Call me when you’re ready to stop standing there.

Call me when you want to play nice.

By Netta Kanoho

PHOTO CREDIT: “Lonesome Traveler” by Ram Yoga via Flickr [CC BY-NC 2.0]

……

SOME POSTS TO POSTS TO EXPLORE

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

• POST MODERN MEANING AND MANA
• SEE THE WHOLE GLASS (AND USE IT)
• BE TOO BOLD:  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 BEYOND STUFF-LOVE (PART 6): WAYFARING first appeared on Life-Built Poems.

Urgency, the repeated hammering on the direness of some situation or other that absolutely requires your personal immediate attention (or else), has become the go-to stance for so many of the professional and amateur persuaders in our lives these days.

They tell us that urgency is different than panic.  Panic is a freak-out.  You run around like a chicken without a head, not knowing where you are going, bumping into things and falling down a lot.

The proper response to urgency, they tell us, is supposed to be purposeful action, perseverance, and an empowered determination.

Right.

LET’S LOOK AT THE REAL

You can get a major dose of urgency about every issue there ever was every time you tune in to the various information channels and assorted media outlets – on the Internet, on television and the radio, and on the printed page.  Continuous wake-up calls are sounding all around us.

You get them in casual conversations and serious discussions with the logic bullies and the passionately opinionated people in your life.  Even your own Inner Crusader Rabbit is likely to have a go at you on any given day.

I stumbled across this cute YouTube video that is the first episode of “Crusader Rabbit,” the very first animated series produced specifically for television.  The show starred a most idealistic little fixer-rabbit with big dreams and his sidekick Ragland T. Tiger (a.k.a. “Rags.”)

The pair made their debut in 1950 and the series ran for 195 episodes until 1951.  The cartoon animation was created by Alexander Anderson and the show was put together by Jay Ward who went on later to create the long-running “The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.”

The video was uploaded by candolex in 2006.

Back to the diatribe….

On top of all of the dizzy-making doom-mongering, there are also the mind-games marketers play to get you to pull out your wallet and buy, buy, buy.  The games push buttons that trigger another sort of urgency — the possibility of missing out on something rare and really good unless you act now, now, now.

When everything is urgent, all the spazzing about it drowns out thoughts of what you yourself value and hold dear.  How many purposeful and effective actions are you really going to be able to make in response to all of this when you can’t get two ideas to hang together right in your head?

There is also no shortage of inequities, injustices and suffering in the world that do need our attention.  The who, how, what, and when that is needed to mitigate these situations are all open to endless, mind-boggling, time-wasting debates.

You can get lost in the discussions rather than just getting on and doing what you can to help.

ACK!

WHAT DO YOU DO WHEN IT GETS TO BE TOO MUCH?

The ever-growing pile of accumulating urgencies has grown huge and it seems to be having a deleterious effect on us humans who are living in them.  What do you do when you and everybody else around you are heading into a major case of overwhelm?

I know this is going to look sort of weird, but it seems to me that this 2019 National Geographic YouTube video, “’Zombie Parasite Takes Over Insects Through Mind Control” is an analog for the way all the accumulated mass of “urgency” live-streaming through our lives affect us.

The video is part of National Geo’s “Hostile Planet” series hosted by Bear Grylls.

The musings and blatherings of the urgency mongers seem to me to be like the spores of the featured parasitic cordyceps fungi that take down ants and other insects in order to reproduce.

All the endless Urgents piled up all around us and on top of us seem to be having a similar effect on us humans as the growing spores of the fungi have on the ant in the video.  We seem to be turning into vehicles for the Urgents that are conquering the world.

This is not a happy picture.

BACK TO BASICS

These days we’ve even got scientists and other guys and gals in lab coats studying resilience and other responses to rapidly moving change and lots and lots more advice about coping with the anxieties these transitions and transformations engender.

The biggest bit of advice common among all of these wise guys and smarty pants boil down to the same basic things:

• Step back.
• Take a breath.
• See where you are and look towards where you are wanting to go.
• Feel your feelings and think on it all using your powers of research, focus and analysis.
• Figure out what you’re going to do next.
• Go do that.

One particularly lovely book about standing back and assessing where you are so you can make effective responses to all the sturm und drang came out in 2019.  Jenny Odell’s best selling book HOW TO DO NOTHING:  Resisting the Attention Economy reminds us that we do already know what we need to do in times like these.

Odell is a multi-disciplinary artist, writer and educator based in Oakland, California.  She has taught Internet art and real-world design at Standford University since 2013.  One commenter says the lady’s fascinated by the in-between transitional spaces that happen in our everyday lives when things really start to change all around us.

Her book shares her thoughts about her own journeys through these spaces and she brings her artist’s eye and thoughts and feelings upfront and center so we can put together our own takes on whatever is going on around us.

Here’s a newsflash for you:  Plans don’t come easy in the middle of a hurricane.  You can’t control the weather, but you do have the ability to control your responses to it if you can get yourself away from all the whoot-whoot-whoot blaring and the images brought to you by your friendly neighborhood doom-sayers.

Odell’s book might be a good place to start to work on making the space you need to get to your own kind of strategic planning.

ANOTHER IPS (Inner Peace Symptom):  an understanding that the tumult and turmoil of an “urgent” situation may actually be somebody else’s attempt to rearrange your priority list or it might be a filler story for a No-Big-News day.  [Step back and look at the whole glorious mess in all of its nuance and emotional hoo-hah.  Give yourself room to think on the best way to maintain your own smooth running.]

Here’s a poem:

PROTECTING THE COLLATERAL

Two warrior-chieftains square off,

Revving up their steam-roller engines

That scream out challenges, strong and fierce,

As each one stakes out their territory.

Blare of trumpets, beat of drums

Boom-ba-da-boom, boom-ba-da-boom.

Cue the skirling of the pipes.

Start the thrill of fifes.

They are not noticing the collateral damage

In their fierce drive for victory –

One over the other.

I am.

They do not see her distress,

Too caught up in their own imperatives

And “shoulds” and “musts” to see the gentle one

Tearing apart like tissue-thin paper

Melting in the rain.

I do.

It makes me strong, that –

Me in the middle of these titans with

My Teflon shield held high.

I keep my sword sheathed, though.

Swords don’t help in the middle of

Threats and counter-threats of

Weapons of mass destruction being deployed.

I am watching.

She has turned into a puddle of tears,

And my heart goes out to her.

This other stuff’s just rubbish:

A fire-fight between two passionate ones

With exactly the same goal,

Arguing about how to get there and

Throwing their armies behind their words.

I am seeing her trying to understand,

Trying to grab and hold onto

The peaceable harmony the warring beasts

Have thrown out the window with

All their stupid shouting. 

I roar my own self,

Backing the titans off each other in shock,

And I drop to my knees and hold her strong

So she can bring herself back

Out of the hopelessness and despair

Into which she has fallen.

She is so strong, this one.

She just needs a stopping place,

A little time and space to pull herself

Back together.

And as the useless battle-idiocy subsides,

I am pleased that I can see her

Coming back to herself.

The battle will end,

But she is not broken.

A good thing.

Warriors forget

When they are in the middle of

All their guts-and-glory puissant posturing

That there are gentle ones crying in their storm.

I won’t.

By Netta Kanoho

Header photo credit:  “Frenzy” by Oblivious Dude 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….)

• REVIEW: F*CK FEELINGS
• SET YOUR OWN RULES
• 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 STEP BACK FROM THE URGENCY (Another IPS) first appeared on Life-Built Poems.