This post is part of a series exploring how we humans interact with time.  So far we’ve figured out that our latest iteration of strategies for dealing with time, Clock Time, is starting to wear down a lot of us post-moderns into frazzles.

The whole purpose of Clock Time is to enable us to get more and more things done.  The Achievement Junkies among us are having a field day.

The rest of us are finding that if we are successful at doing the Clock Time productivity dance well, we get lots of diverse things done and, apparently, we very often wear ourselves down to a nubbin and do ourselves in as well.

Slowing down the pace at which we are run-run-running in our lives seems to be a persistent theme among many of the advice-givers handing out wisdoms, life hacks and such.

There’s all kinds of advice about “temporal modalities” (aka time mindsets) from the Smarty Pants who study such things and the Wisdom Seeker sorts who look at alternative ways of being in the world. Often, they talk about how to get away from the insidious influence of that durned clock.

It’s very confusing, mostly because what works for one human in a particular setting doesn’t necessarily work for another human in a different setting.

As is usual with humans, one size does not fit all and it’s pretty much a DIY (do-it-yourself) project.

Bad-boy journalist Hunter S. Thompson once advised, “Beware of looking for goals: look for a way of life.  Decide how you want to live and see what you can do to make a living within that way of life.”

It’s a good life-strategy, I am thinking.

First, though, you need to figure out how to get back in tune with time that is not governed by clock, calendar and never-ending to-do lists.

RAW TIME AND NATURE’S RHYTHMS

Here’s a little YouTube short film, “Rhythms of Nature,” by my favorite independent filmmakers Green Renaissance.

It features internationally known award-winning musician and music producer Ronan Skillen who has spent more than 20 years exploring his particular fusion of tabla, percussion and didgeridoo.

The video reminds you of another kind of time, one you can feel in your body, your blood and your bones.

It also shows the efficacy of using nature and music to “reset” your senses.  Dance, exercise and body movements (including breathing and stillness) tap into that rhythm as well and can also be used to climb back into your own skin and to reconnect with other people.

• Raw Time is animal time, a time of body reactions to what is happening in the world around you.
• Raw Time can be a Creative’s incubation time when all kinds of sensory inputs, feelings and intuitions roil around, interact and ferment before a glimmering of an idea pops out.
• Raw Time can also be the aspirational and blissful NOW time that meditation practitioners aim for.

A POET’S TAKE ON KAIROS TIME

Embedded in Raw Time is a thing the Greeks called “kairos,” the opportune moment.  It is what many philosophers and mystics call “numinous time,” “deep time” or “qualitative time.”  It is the time we’re talking about where the world seems to stop entirely.

Deep time is measured in a shared and joyous laugh or a piercing look, in a glowing sunrise or a flamboyant sunset and in the touch of a gentle hand.  It can’t be measured or sliced and diced like clock time.

It’s when you say to yourself, “It doesn’t get any better than this.”

It’s also what Franciscan friar and author Richard Rohr refers to when he says kairos are those moments in life where you stop and say, “Oh my God, this is it. I get it.”

In those moments, time stands still.  However, just like perfection, those moments never last. They fly past, but if you can catch them as they go by, they can help you make memories that can feed your soul for a lifetime.

OTHER CULTURES HAD DEEP TIME TOO

The Sanskrit word for qualitative time, time with weight and meaning, is ritu.  Like kairos, it also has a spiritual sense to it.  It refers to time that is lifted out of the ordinary business of life.

In Christian theology, kairos has a sense of “ripeness”.  Think of the words from the book of Ecclesiastes:

“To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven:
“A time to be born, a time to die; a time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal…” and so on.

Meanwhile, the Taoists got to the same game plan in a different way.

For Taoists, time has no beginning and no end.  The practitioners are interested only in the changes and the transformations within time, when time moves and things in the world change from one form to another.

They say that if you can accept the world as it is and can empty your mind of all attachments to assumptions, preconceptions, judgments and desired outcomes, then you’ll be able to clearly see into the nature of things and find the patterns and the order in Life-Its-Own-Self.

Seeing and following the “natural order of things” helps you live life effortlessly and without anxiety, the Taoists tell you.

FITTING KAIROS TIME INTO OUR MODERN WORLD

Incorporating deep time into our modern, productivity-focused and clock-ridden days may seem like a woo-woo, out-there way of thinking.

However, I found a TEDxWilmington talk video, “Kairos Living in a Chronos World,” that was downloaded to YouTube in 2016.  It features entrepreneur, author and marketing coach Donna Marie Duffy.

Duffy moved from Pennsylvania to Nazareth in Israel in 1990 and lived there for 18 years working as an educator and a builder of community in the Middle East before repatriating to the United States.

Click on the button below to hear her seven-minute talk about living in a culture that ran on kairos time.  The takeaway lessons she received when she learned how to live at a more connected and human pace served her well when she returned to America.

Realizing that small business owners could use help figuring out how to reconnect with the rest of their lives and to form supportive communities for themselves  while continuing to build their businesses using the Clock Time dance, Duffy went on to co-found 3E Marketing Solutions in Wilmington, Delaware as well as the Sage Success Studio, an online community of midlife women entrepreneurs.

MAKING TIME BIG, HAWAIIAN-STYLE

For the ones who were raised in our modern-day Hawaiian culture there are still echoes of the older way of living in natural time rather than time ruled by artificial clocks and other measuring devices.

For many years now, we’ve kept telling each other that the higher costs we pay for food, housing, energy, transport, health care and other modern amenities are all just a part of the cost of “living in paradise”.

For many years now we’ve watched as our family, friends and long-time neighbors leave for less expensive places to live.  Few of them come back.

One time I was fortunate enough to meet an old Hawaiian healer who explained the deeper meaning of a Hawaiian word that the aunties and uncles used to toss off at each other when they noticed things were getting a bit too frantic and way too intense: “ho’omanawanui.”

We kids thought they were telling each other, “no worry, be happy.” Usually, it seemed to us, the phrase signaled a suggestion that it was time to take a break (and maybe stop at some watering hole for a drink or two).

“Ho’o” = “to make.”

“Manawa” = “time.”

“Nui” = “big.”

It took me a long time wrestling with that word to finally get that the way you “make time big” in this modern world of ours is to slow yourself way down, stop all the herky-jerky body-startle movements, and actually look at what is going on in your days.

• You make time big by spending the time you need to get your priorities straight and to find out what matters most to you so you can make sure you get those things handled well.
• You make time big by giving yourself enough time to do things right the first time and to finish the things you start by following it all the way through to done.
• You make time big by pausing and seeing how your heart-people are doing and you let the ones who are not your heart-people wander on off without you.
• You make time big by saying “no” to the things that do not matter to you or that are not worth your effort to pursue.
• You make time big by doing things at your own pace, in your own time despite all the kibbitzers and know-it-alls who want you to do theirs because they are right, right, right.
• And when you’ve made time big, it is truly amazing what you find you can include in the space you’ve made and what you can do in that space as well.

Hmmm….

Well, how about that?

Maybe we already know how to transcend being a clockwork person.

They put together an innovative “revolving band,” collaborating with over fifty well-known island musicians and producers across their three albums, “Vanishing Treasures,” “Rhythm of the Ocean,” and “Ohana.”

The following HI*Sessions YouTube video was uploaded in 2018.  It’s the title track from their second album and it brings back fond memories of an earlier, more laid-back time.  Alex Morrison is on bass.

Enjoy!

[HI*Sessions is an ongoing project that was started by video producer Dave Kumoto and musician-producer Jon Yamasato.  Their videos, podcasts and other social media offerings share the music of many of the finest Hawaiian musicians, old and new.]

TO BE CONTINUED

Here’s a poem:

……

FLOATER

 What’s next for me,
I cannot know.
I’m in the middle
Of a flow.

 A rudderless leaf adrift
In a river of time.
How do I do,
Leaf-now-past-its-prime?

 Still the quintessential me,
Detached from my history now,
Unbound by adhesion
To the “always was the how.” 

Unstuck from Before, turned and pushed
By currents unseen,  I float.
The river always flows to the sea.
I guess old leaves don’t get a vote.

By Netta Kanoho

Header Photo Credit:  “Time Lost | Time Found” by Luca Florio 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….)

• STOP PUSHING THE RIVER — Part 1
• STOP PUSHING THE RIVER — Part 2
• STOP PUSHING THE RIVER — Part 3

……

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

The post STOP PUSHING THE RIVER — Part 5 first appeared on Life-Built Poems.

Poet John O’Donohue once beautifully said, “I would love to live like a river flows, carried by the surprise of its own unfolding.”

After about 300 years or so of living on clock time, I think we humans have gotten a pretty good idea of where that mode of moving can take us.  It is not where O’Donohue would want to go.

Clock time tends to turn off the wonder-noticing parts of our brain, it seems.  This is not a particularly good thing.

If you succeed at negotiating your way through clock time, your whole world gets orderly and mostly unsurprising (except in unpleasant and/or unexpected ways).

The problem, of course, is how to do a course correction in the middle of a particularly powerful current that pushes our little boats in a direction that is away from where we may actually want to go.

A SHAOLIN INTERLUDE

I stumbled over a 2023 YouTube video, “The Routine of a Shaolin Master,” that intrigued me.  Apparently, it is a much-requested follow-up interview of Master Shi Heng Yi, the headmaster of the Shaolin Temple Europe in Germany. (The monk belongs to the 35^th Generation of Shaolin Masters, it says here.)

The film offers an intriguing look into the mind of a warrior and achievement junkie who is also a part of a contemplative Buddhist community that values self-mastery above all else.

Interestingly enough, in this video, the master admits that he too has problems dealing with clock-time.

……

The video was put together by the Mulligan Brothers Company (three brothers named Jordan, Luke and William) and is one of many mini-documentaries hosted by Jordan who talks to people who have done extraordinary things in the world.

The boys from Nottingham England use the interviews to make short films that are meant to “inspire change for good in the world.”

Starting out with a home video camera and a computer bought while working at minimum-wage jobs, the three established a YouTube network housing five motivational and inspirational YouTube channels.  They are well over halfway to their goal of “inspiring a billion people.”

……

After I saw the video, the Light of My Life (LOML) and I were discussing the turbulent history of the warrior monks at the Shaolin temple in Henan province, China.

Shaolin remained a hotbed of rebellion and their martial artistry became legend.  Succeeding governments often found reasons to assault the monks again over the years. In the aftermath of each attack there were always some staunch practitioners who returned to rebuild as best as they could and to continue their own legacy.

It was attacked again during the Chinese Cultural Revolution (from 1966 to 1976).  And, once again, the Shaolin Temple rose.

Each time, in the interludes between the attacks, remnants of the group’s practitioners (many of whom seem to have spread throughout the world) continued to practice their art and to expand their base of knowledge and wisdoms.

But, that’s another story.

CHANGING YOUR LIFE-WALK AND AIMING FOR ALIGNMENT WITH YOU

At one point, I asked the LOML what he would do if he were a well-known general or a former power dude who had retired to the Shaolin monastery.  How would he make the transition from being an Uber-warrior or a person of real influence and power to becoming a monk in a contemplative community?

It seemed to me that the old warriors as well as former business power-houses and government leaders would face the hardest transitions of all.  They would need to let go of a life of extreme doing and enter one focusing on just being.

Actually, the video did help me understand that the monks who were once extreme movers and shakers of the world did manage to find an inner peace through the teachings of the monastery, but their way of walking sure didn’t seem to produce positivity-focused, affirmation-spouting, airy-fairy sorts.

The LOML thought on my question for a couple or three heartbeats and then he said, “I think I’d ask myself what I was doing before I decided it was a good day to die.”

“Good answer,” I said, delighted by his choice of words.

STEPPING BACK FROM CLOCK TIME

It struck me that probably, that the LOML’s question would make a good starting point for figuring out how to back away from living in clock time.

Think about it.

The whole point of adopting the clock-time mindset was to further assorted goals and objectives meant to benefit society-at-large as well as help keep a corporate minion’s own body and soul together. In many ways, clock time was a very beneficial social innovation.

So, it stands to reason that if you happen to be stuck in clock-time mode, asking what you were doing before you decided it was a good time to die might be the best way to shed your hard-won “expert mind” and get back to what is called “Beginner Mind.”

FIRST STEP TO MAKING CHANGES:  GETTING BACK TO BEGINNER MIND

“Beginner Mind” is the Taoist concept of an awareness that you are at the threshold to another way of living about which you know nothing.  It is often compared to becoming like an uncarved block of wood and is contrasted with “Expert Mind,” the one where you know a lot about something or other.

As Lina Connerly, the tough protagonist of author Michelle Richmond’s fast-paced and potato-chip novel, THE WONDER TEST, muses:

“I can’t unsee what I’ve seen, I can’t unlearn what I know.  Each place, each decision, each experience, has become a part of me, no more than my head, no less than my heart.”

Life is a series of decisions about all the forks in the road that you encounter: this or that, yes or no, left or right.  You make your own choices and select your own paths (or you make new trails).

As you go through your days, all of your choices – directions taken and decisions made — pile up.   Slowly interweaving, interacting, morphing, compounding (and maybe even mulching) the pile continuously gets built up by you.

The end-result of all that doing is the person you are now.  Who you are doesn’t go away.

In any case, you are not actually aiming to become a new-born baby when you reach for Beginner Mind.  All you’re trying to do is emulate a blank chalkboard, ready to accept new writings.

MAKING A LIST AND CHECKING IT TWICE

Asking “What was I doing before I decided it’s a good day to die” may help you ferret out old curiosities and favored ways of walking that might have been shelved during your own personal clock-time interregnum. Here’s an exercise to try:

• Collect your answers to the question. Write them down.  Make your list a running list.
• Spend a few minutes every day (you can even make it a thirty-day challenge) to keep on coming back to that question and writing down your answers.
• One of the things you might want to explore is the art of doing nothing or just fooling around. Add that one to the list as well.
• Once you’ve got a biggish list, stop. Stick it in a drawer for a week or so.
• Then, take a look at the list and see whether you want to add or delete things from the list.
• You may want to consolidate some of your answers and see if you can fit two or more closely related curiosities in one activity or path you’d like to explore. It can make you feel clever and really productive, that.
• You may think of more things you want to explore. Add them to the list.

The thing to keep in mind when making a change in the way you walk is this:

It all boils down to knowing your Why and then figuring out the What that will make your How the path you want it to be.  It would be good if that path was a way that includes as many of your curiosity-satisfying activities as you like.

(That “quote” is mine.  I just made it up.)

Once your list is finished, there are several possible responses you might have:

• You may find a whole load of curiousity itches you’d like to scratch, or maybe you won’t.
• You might notice that there is one thing you used to like to do.  It still sparkles at you after all this time, even though you decided, once upon a time, that there was no room for it in your life any more.  Maybe there’s might be a way you could get it back into your life again.
• You might realize that all of the “very important stuff” you’ve been doing for whatever reason really don’t mean a heck of a lot to you.  Not only that, but they may also be interfering with doing the things you really feel that you need to be doing to make your own dream come real.
• You may want to learn how to scale back on the amount or the intensity of the things you are doing.
• You may just want to learn how to comfortably do nothing at all.

(You may even think of others.)

Making the list can act like windshield wipers that whoosh the mud thrown up by trying to fulfill a plethora of conflicting expectations, imperatives, and desires put upon you by other people (or even by your own perfectionist self).  The list will help you identify and remove the guck that is blocking your own clarity about your own purposes and your own dreams.

This is a big help when you’re trying to figure out what you need to do to make the time and the space for the things that you value in your life — the things that do matter to you.

And here we are spiraling back again to Life-Its-Own-Self and Time.

In all of this dancing around, keep in mind that you are trying to figure out how to slide out from under the importunings of the clock and other time-measuring devices.

Do try to remember, however, that you will probably never get rid of the need to interact with Time or with Life-Its-Own-Self.

ANOTHER DOSE OF THE SHAOLIN MASTER

If you’d like more of Master Shi Heng Yi’s thoughts, click on the button below.  It will take you to one of his TEDTalks.  The talk is about what he calls the “5 Hindrances to Self-Mastery.” It was uploaded to YouTube in 2020.  I found it very interesting.  Maybe you will too.

[TO BE CONTINUED]

Here’s a poem:

SEED MOON

New moon, seed moon
The dark of new beginning
Pulling me towards the edge
Of yet another void,
Another chaotic vortex that
Challenges and beckons.
Vertigo is going to set in
One of these days, moon.
I’m going to tumble into
That dark and slicker pool
And drown in all the conundrums

That slosh around at the bottom
Of this cliff where I am standing,
Trembling.

Yeah, yeah, I know…it’s your job
And I’m supposed to figure out how to fly.

By Netta Kanoho

Header Photo Credit:   “Making sure of the time” by vivek jena 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….)

• REVAMP ROUTINES
• FLOW WITH YOUR GO
• FOLLOW THE GOD-THREAD (Shaping Dilemma)

……

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

The post STOP PUSHING THE RIVER — Part 3 first appeared on Life-Built Poems.

I remember when “don’t push the river; it flows by itself” was a pop-wisdom phrase on everybody’s lips.  A hippie catch-phrase gone viral in the 1960s and 70s, it was likely to be used to browbeat somebody who was tense or anxious or downright scared and getting naggy behind it.

Commonly, back then, the phrase usually kept company with words like “uptight” or “square” and prefaced shaming statements about being some kind of whiny stick in the mud.

Gestalt therapy was built on various holistic theories and practices that also informed the 1970s Human Potential Movement.  Many of today’s mindfulness practices have connections and roots in common with it as well.

The Gestalt counterintuitive approach to human connection is a powerful one, but it seems that many people found the process to be too confrontational (maybe even invasive). It’s a hard thing having to deal with that kind of in-your-face, up-close-and-personal authenticity and blatant caring when you’re feeling fragile.

If you’d like a taste of the process used by Gestalt therapists, click on the button below for a 2-minute video that features renowned Gestalt therapist, teacher and author Erving Polster attempting to connect with another person in a meaningful dialogue. It was uploaded by PsychotherapyNet in 2012.

MINDING THE RIVER

Now, here’s the thing: we are, many of us, getting raggedy as our post-modern world churns, it seems.  It occurred to me that now would probably be a good time to break out that old river phrase again.

Reminding ourselves to “stop pushing the river” might help to turn the flood of anxiety, despondency and angst that seems to be running amok among us.

THE STORIES BEHIND THE WAY WE LOOK AT TIME

The questions you might want to ask about all this are these:

• What does that phrase about pushing the river actually mean?
• What river are we talking about?
• Why were those hippy-dippy flower children always blathering on about it?
• Why should it matter to us and to other intrepid baby space cadets and techno-dreamers?

To figure out some answers to those questions, maybe we need to look at an even older quote from the Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius.  Aurelius was the last emperor of the Pax Romana, a “golden age” of relative calm and peace for the Roman Empire that lasted from 27 BCE to 180 CE, the year Aurelius died.

He said,

“Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away.”

That quote is just a flat-out description of how humans often perceive the nature of the Time thought-construct we’ve built together through the ages:  Everything just keeps on coming.  It all just keeps rolling on in front of us until we fall over dead.

We’re pretty certain that the Time river will keep on rolling on even when we are no longer there on its banks to see it.  For one thing, it hasn’t stopped yet.  It’s one of those infinite “forever” things.

Like the people living on the banks of a mighty river everywhere, the achievement junkies and the adventuresome sorts among us keep on trying to figure out ways they can use the movements and energy of the Time river to get them to where they want to go.

Wo!

PROBLEMS IN RIVER-SIDE CITY

Here’s a big news flash:  Many of the bright and shiny time-management hacks and clever moves that the modern-day productivity mavens advocate do work.  The problem is, they don’t quite get us to where many of us say we want to go.

So, you get more efficient.  You snip and clip and trim your tasks until they’re little do-able chunks.  Then you tuck and squash the little chunks into smaller and smaller bits of time.

In this way, you can minimize and maybe even disappear all the “unproductive” bits of time–a few minutes here, a few hours there, a few days, or maybe even a few weeks, months, or years.  Whoo-hoo!

The promise of Time Management is that when we become more “efficient” we will be able to make enough room in our lives to comfortably accommodate our to-dos. When we do the moves consistently and constantly, these experts say, we’ll be able to work through the process of fulfilling the assorted promises we have already made to ourselves or to other people with ease.

The first one is that to-dos apparently breed and the slippery things reiterate over and over again.  Not only that, they are infinite and eternal and can materialize out of the ethers without warning.  Let’s break this one down:

• The consensus-world we have constructed together runs on promises.
• It is possible for each one of the people living in our consensus world to make any number of promises.
• The thing is each promise you make—even the ones you aren’t aware you have made—is the breeding ground for yet more to-dos that you will have to do (or con somebody else into doing).

Successfully making the room you need to breathe in the press of to-dos you already carry seems to send off flares that signal your ability to take on more tasks and even more roles.

Ouch!

The other problem is a less obvious but even more fundamental one.  “Productivity” is a measure of the effort you put in to produce goods or services over a specific period of time.

It is not about individual happiness or joy.  It is not about creativity or self-awareness or even about self-development.  It is a whole other movie.

Oh.

CLOCK-TIME TICKING AND TOCKING ==> PRODUCTIVITY

Productivity is based on living by clock-time.  Clocks were developed as a way to standardize how we measure the time it takes to make or do something with other people.

The passage of time didn’t matter quite so much when the whole process could be done by just one person.

However, when a whole group of people were needed to work together within a set amount of time to produce some product or service, and every individual knew a lot about how to do one tiny part of a complex process but not much about doing all of it, then clocks got to be really important.

All of the peeps working together have to get the syncopation and the rhythm right when all the work of all the people down the line depends on the person ahead of them in the process getting his or her part done right.  “Timely” got to be a really common contractual word.

According to one source, this naming the time-bits thing is a fairly “recent” development, actually.  It’s probably only been in the last 1500 years or so that most of the people on the planet even had a commonly agreed-upon system for naming dates.

First the peeps had to stop killing off strangers as soon as they saw them and they had to figure out how to talk with each other.  Then setting up and agreeing upon the length of years, months, days, hours, minutes and seconds had to happen.  (When you think about it, the whole thing is pretty mind-blowing.)

CLOCK-TIME DISSECTED (WITH COMMENTARY)

Clock-time is mechanistic.  It is linear, sequential, and most objectively quantitative.  It is focused on process and grew out of our awareness of the passing of the seasons and the aging of our bodies.  It references time and space.

We measure clock-time by seconds, minutes, hours, and years and locate that measure of time in a particular place.  Our concept of global time zones grew out of that mindset.  For example, we figured out that Tokyo time is 13 hours ahead of New York time, so when it’s 7:49 in the morning in New York, it’s 8:49 at night in Tokyo.

Click the button below for converttime.org’s online time zone map. It’s a beaut.

Nowadays we also take this other time-related absolutely awesome mind-boggle for granted.  (Probably we’re so busy coping with the reality and the side-effects of this innovation of ours that we don’t even notice how totally cool it actually is.)

……

Nobody ever seems to talk about this but, we humans can actually “feel” the movement of time through our consensus-world because we’ve given it a metaphorical space in which to be.

Add this to the fact that our innately categorizing and organizing minds apparently can actually visualize the connections between our actions and the movements, reactions and responses of all the rest of the everything around us and…

Wo! We’ve got show-time.

Those of us who are especially good at connecting dots can actually trace the pathways between the dots we see.  Because of this, targets can be pinpointed, goals can be formulated, plans can be made, and so on and so forth.

Productivity guru Bob Proctor tells us, “If you see it in your mind, you will hold it in your hand.”

Uh-huh.

However, there is one downside to this amazing innately human ability of ours.

Because we have set some sort of a time-frame around the plans we’ve made to reach a particular goal, we have succeeded in turning the whole endeavor into a track and field event that includes a lot of hurdles.

Then we start running.

INTO THE MYTHIC

The ancient Greeks called clock-time “Kronos”.  It’s spelled “cronos” or “chronos” in English and it’s where we get our word “chronology”.

The Greek personification of the concept came down to us as old Father Time, a weary old man with a bent back and a long beard carrying a scythe and (sometimes) an hourglass.  (His resemblance to the Grim Reaper is not accidental.)

The Romans, who marched all over the Greeks, co-opted a bunch of their concepts and built an empire of their own, called Kronos “Saturn.”  The Romans worshipped him as the most important of their Elder Gods, the Titans.  They said that he was the Lord of the Universe and the source of life and death, ruler over the inexorable march from a definitely settled past towards a predetermined future with no freedom for any sort of willed change (except by him, of course).

In the Roman myths, the mostly benevolent but despotic Saturn really over-reacted to a prophesy that one of his sons was going to be the death of him.  He was most proactive about preventing this personal catastrophe: It became his habit to eat each one of his sons as soon as the kid was born.

Jupiter went on to become the king of a new pantheon of gods and together he and his buddies made a whole new era with a whole lot of new and much more exciting stories.

They even got humans involved in world-building and world-changing.  I have always supposed that we humans grew and developed our own rambunctious selves and took over where those good ol’ boys and gals left off.  And now the horses are running away with us.  Oy!

[TO BE CONTINUED….]

Here’s a poem:

JUST ME

 Restless.
I cannot sleep.
Monkey-mind leaps round
From one not-done thing to another,
Screeching out imprecations:
I can’t…I don’t…
I need…I want…
I-I-I-I-I…
Ai, ai, ai…eeeee….

The ubiquitous and eternal
To-Do List throbs in my head,
Its checkboxes are like
Hungry mouths, chanting,
“Not-done,”
“Not-done,”
“Not-done.”

“Feed me, Seymour,” they plead.
Ack!

 Here I sit, fidgeting,
Swallowing down my
Impatience with What-Is,
Constrained to wait
As what is full empties,
As what is empty fills.

 None of it has anything to do with me.
There is nothing I can do.

I know that.
It is not mine to move,
Not mine to point or pinch,
Not mine to push or pull.

I am furious in my helplessness.
I am helpless in my fury.

 That fury will subside.
I know that too.
This is just me,
Yelling at the approaching thunder
In a breathless sky,
Just me,
Trying to push against the placid, rolling river.
Just me,
Pissing into the wind.

This is just me,
Suffering over my suffering.

Just me.

[by Netta Kanoho]

Header photo credit: “The Chagrin River pushing through rocks” by Vince Reinhart 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…)

• STEP BACK FROM THE URGENCY (Another IPS)
• TIME AS A SHAPING TOOL (An Overview)
• ON CLOCK-TIME: An Un-Seeing Exercise

……

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

The post STOP PUSHING THE RIVER — PART 1 first appeared on Life-Built Poems.

Elon Musk is probably right.  Remote work (formerly known as “telecommuting” or “working from home”) is a challenge…for corporations and other organizational entities.

It can cause massive headaches for managers and human resource people trying to round up and ride herd on all the “wild” spirits who want to do their own kind of different and were given an opportunity to try it when the world got hit by a massive pandemic that made the corporate culture standards of behavior unsafe and/or unacceptable.

Writer-business thinker Malcolm Gladwell boldly opined on a Diary of a CEO 2022 podcast episode that remote work was hurting the very fabric of our society…or something like that.

The episode is titled “Working From Home Is Destroying Us!” and Gladwell spends an hour or so telling us why.  It’s on YouTube, as are all of the podcast episodes.  You can click on the button below to watch it:

IS IT REALLY SO?

The reaction and pushback from the populace was not good.

It seems that there are scientifically proven indications that a large percentage of the corporate worker population were at least intrigued by the whole concept of remote working back in 2020.

The Predictive Index (a fancy-schmancy “theory-based, self-report measurement of normal, adult, work-related personality”) was developed and is used by people working in the human resource industry.  They did a 2020 report on the “Impact of Behavioral Drives in a Remote Workplace”.

• At least a third of the respondents to the survey never even heard of remote work.
• The preference for remote meetings varied by personality. Less extroverted workers liked the remote meetings better than their more outwardly oriented colleagues because they felt they were heard more and could think at their own pace.
• Social personalities who enjoy influencing outcomes and the people around them didn’t like the remote work concept as much as the quieter sorts.
• Analytical, task-oriented people who enjoy a fast pace were often less inclined to work at being collaborative. (For them, the effort to reach out to others for help gets lost in their effort to get to done.)
• Most people (77 percent of the respondents) would at least like to give working remotely a try. Some of that total would prefer to do it permanently.

Hmmm….

Stanford economist Nick Bloom, who has been studying remote work for almost two decades, told INSIDER magazine that, probably, remote work could have a role to play in solving the falling birth rate in the United States, as well as mitigating the housing crisis, the climate emergency and the epidemic of worsening mental health in young people.

You can click the button below to get a look at that article:

Hmmm….

And then there are all those people who are cobbling together lives that are not ruled by corporate and other institutionalized culture memes and mindsets.

Among them are makers, creatives, and hustlers of every stripe.  They include artists and artisans, professional freelancers and digital nomads, gearheads and skilled workers in the building trades and in transport, people in personal services and in the hospitality trades as well as solopreneurs and other small business owners.

A lot of them seem to be doing okay with their self-directed styles of working and living.

IN THE BEFORE-TIMES

Prior to the rise of industrial agriculture, factories and peon/minion/human-resources warehouses (aka office buildings and such) many of us humans worked on our own projects or provided services for others all the time.  Some of us worked alone. The rest of us banded together.

A lot of things got done because individual humans learned to collaborate and slip in and out of developed and organized networks of the other people in their consensus- worlds.

Before the Industrial Revolution and before we got all “Modern,” our world was ruled by what time researcher Robert Levine called “event time” in his book, A GEOGRAPHY OF TIME: “On Tempo, Culture, And the Pace Of Life.

Levine spent decades of his life studying time.  He died in 2019.

EVENT TIME = THE TIME IT TAKES TO DO A PROJECT

In Event Time, according to Levine, you move through a series of linked actions that help you get some project or other done.

You may choose to go through these actions alone.  For more complicated or bigger projects you can work in concert with others who are working on other parts of the same project.  You keep going until everybody involved agrees the thing is finished.

It works the same way whether you’re putting together a meal or building a cathedral.

Event Time is not ruled by the clock.  It is ruled by your own intentions and by the momentum built up by the constancy and the consistency of movement and action that you develop as you go along through your days.

In Event Time you are governed by just one rule-of-thumb: “Finish what you start or not – as you choose.”

Of course, you could go overboard with the whole thing.  This really well-done motivational YouTube video by Ben Lionel Scott, “Finish What You Start” was uploaded in 2019 by Motivational Video.

In just under three minutes, the short film sure does get you pumped up, doesn’t it?

In Event Time, you can lay out all of your projects and life-obligations and map out the direction and choose the roads you want to take according to your own values and visions and dreams just as you do in Clock Time.

In this way of walking, you might be more inclined to set up systems rather than static goals.

This 2017 YouTube video uploaded by Big Think features bestselling author Adam Alter who is also a professor at the New York University’s Stern School of Business.

In it, he says, “Goal Setting is a Hamster Wheel.  Learn to Set Systems Instead.”

Adam Alter has written a couple of best-selling books with intriguing titles about marketing:

• DRUNK TANK PINK: And Other Unexpected Forces That Shape How We Think, Feel and Behave (first published in 2013)
• IRRESISTIBLE: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked (first published in 2017)

At this writing, a third book, ANATOMY OF A BREAKTHROUGH:  How to Get Unstuck When It Matters Most is on its way.  Eager fans await its coming.

USING EVENT TIME:  Advantages and Strengths

When you use Event Time you are less prone to get hyper-focused on The One Big Goal that eats up the whole rest of your life.  You can stay aware of an array of options that you can pursue.

(You do have to be alert to all of the possibilities coming at you when you use Event Time, but that is part of the fun of it all.)

There is also room to just flake out and take a time-out to care for yourself.  Slow days and no-go days are easier to slot into the mix when you’re playing in Event Time.  It’s easier to keep yourself sane and healthy and humane.

The most exciting thing is the thinking space you acquire to develop an understanding of when you can make the most efficacious moves in a particular circumstance.  The timing of your best actions can get exceptionally good.

Sometimes you can even make just one move that effectively pushes several of your projects forward at the same time.  (That’s the best fun, sez I.)

The best thing about Event Time is the feeling of being able to flow along with your fellow dancers in the middle of an exciting, ever-changing dance with Life-Its-Own-Self.

There’s less time spent plodding along with your head hung low and dragging your feet along the ground.

USING EVENT TIME:  Liabilities and Weaknesses

The cost of using Event Time can be heavy.

• You have to spend a lot of time learning about your own self and getting clear about what you believe and what you intend to do with your life in a world where other people’s imperatives are also very strong influencers.
• You’ll need  to ponder on where you want to go and then you have to put in  the time to decide which moves will work best for you.
• And then it’s all on you to make those moves and to keep on going until you complete your projects.

In Event Time, uncompleted and half-done or half-assed projects do not count.  This is not throwing horseshoes.  (It can, however, be a lot like throwing grenades.  Caution is advised.)

The whole thing is on you.  All of the consequences (aka “instant karma”) as well as the rewards (“instant karma” again) for making the moves are yours.

BREAK FOR A BIT OF HAWAIIAN HISTORY

Growing up as a Hawaiian during the Boomer era, one stereotype often dinned in our ears was the one about Hawaiians being “lazy” and “unmotivated.”  That was one legacy the sugar planters gave us.

The complaints probably reflected the general planter dissatisfaction with the indigenous uku pau system of contract work.

Uku pau is Hawaiian for “job done.”  Under that system, a certain quantity of work was agreed-upon as a day’s job.  The worker could work as fast or as slowly as he pleased and was free to go once the stipulated work was complete.  Compensation was per job rather than per hour.

This native freelancer system was not particularly compatible with the 10-hour work days the plantation owners wanted from their laborers, according to professor Davianna Pōmaika’i McGregor, a founding member of the ethnic studies department at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

The native approach to agriculture centered around the cycles of the sun and the moon and the two seasons, kauwela (the hot season from May to October) and ho’oilo (the wet season from November to April).  It was not about the hours the worker stayed at the jobsite.

Were the workers willing to put the rest of their lives on hold for ten hours every day?  Not if they had other alternatives. On their own stomping ground, the natives knew how to nurture and work with the abundant land and the surrounding ocean to grow and gather food to feed themselves and their heart-people.  They did that instead.

IT’S ALL ABOUT TIMING

All of the native islander survival tactics depended on paying attention to the world around them.  James Viernes, a Chamorro scholar from Guam whose life work has been studying what motivates workers, has said,

Whether it’s Hawai‘i or Guam or Samoa, our ancestors really did live and die by time. I mean, if you don’t get up and get in that canoe at the right time, you’re going to miss the currents that are going to take you on a successful journey. If you don’t get up on time and plant those seeds, your harvest is not going to feed you.”

Viernes is the Regional Engagement and Development Officer of the Pacific Islands Development Program (PIDP), one of the projects run by the University’s East-West Center.  It was formed in 1980, at the request of Pacific Island leaders to “specifically address the unique issues island nations face as they emerge from decades of colonization.”

You can click the button below to learn more about the program.

Plantation owners, who were mostly descendants of missionaries of the Calvinist work-ethic variety did not “get” the native perspective.

HAWAII’S “MASTERS AND SERVANTS ACT” (a.k.a. “The-Servants-Get-To-Wear-a-Lei-and-a-Smile-No-Matter-What-the-Masters-Do  Law”)

In 1850, William Little Lee, a lawyer from the American South who became the Chief Justice for the Hawaiian Kingdom, under King Kauikeaouli, drafted the brutal Masters & Servants Act, which stated that workers (servants) had to provide work to their employers (masters) according to a contract heavily weighted in favor of the Masters.

The Act was not officially a code of conduct for “slavery,” but it is said that much of the Masters and Servants Act was taken from the slave-laws in the United States.

Shortly after the Act was passed by the Kingdom’s Legislature, the recruitment of workers from other parts of the world began.  The first contract laborers arrived in Hawaii from China in 1851.  More contract workers were shipped in from China, Japan, and later from the Americas and Europe over the next 50 years.

THE ECHOES CONTINUE

The Masters and Servants Act helped to shape the island society that developed out of the coming of industrialized agriculture, affecting the way people related to each other.  It produced some interesting echoes that still resonate today.

Viernes was the outreach director for the Center for Pacific Islands Studies at UH Manoa before he began his work at PIDP.  He has a lot of experience supervising (and being frustrated by) islander students who claimed to be on “island time.”  He did, however, come to see that the students who were using “Hawaiian time” as an excuse for missing meetings or assorted deadlines may have been doing what anthropologist James C. Scott called a form of “everyday peasant resistance,” a small gesture of protest and even defiance.

In an interesting aside, the old conflict between uku pau and clock time was played out in 1996 when the AFL-CIO (United Public Workers Local 646) union sued then-Maui Mayor Linda Lingle when she attempted to privatize or contract out the County’s refuse collection and disposal services.

Historically, the trash collection crews on all of the islands worked on the uku pau system.  When the work was done, the workers were pau hana (finished with work).

Some of the more creative workers were able to do other things besides garbage runs.  Often they could work side-gigs or develop mastery in a wide range of useful skills, arts, and crafts or spend time gardening, farming or fishing.

Lingle, the Union said, “engaged in inherently destructive conduct” when she tried to circumvent the Uku Pau Agreement between the government and the Union.  The courts upheld the Union’s contention and the mayor had to back down.

The Uku pau continues to this day.

Hmmm….

PLAYING IN THE UKU PAU

I’m hearing those whispers again,
The murmur of strong and beloved voices,
A sussuration that fills up the spaces
Between my thoughts
As I plan,
As I move,
As I do.

“Go until pau, bebe…
Go ‘til stay pau.”

My Papa, my Mama, I hear you.
I hear you my uncles, my aunties.
I hear your voices, my teachers and sages.
My kupuna, I hear you all.
And the resounding echoes of your words
Are entangled in the beating of my heart.

The set-up is done
And the project moves forward.
That part is finished now and
The next one’s well-begun.

“Go until pau, bebe…
Go ‘til stay pau.”

I hear you, my sisters.
I hear you, my brothers.
I hear you, my allies and friends.

Taking this detour,
Spanning that gap,
Clambering over and
Digging on through.
The obstacles met and the challenges faced
Melt away as I follow that
Flowing reverberating sound that never ends.

“Go until pau, bebe…
Go ‘til stay pau.”

The ticking and tocking
Of that foreigner clock-thing
Is drowned in the heart sounds
That echo all through me
As I tell my kamali’i —
The ones walking before me:

“Go until pau, bebe…
Go ‘til stay pau.”

[Hawaiian and Hawaiian pidgin words in this poem include:

• pau: done, finished
• bebe: baby
• Go ‘til stay pau (work until you are done)
• kupuna: ancestors, mentors, elders
• kamali’i: beloved children, descendants

By Netta Kanoho

……

Header Photo Credit: “Hard Work” by Dave 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…)

• CANCEL THE SEARCH FOR THE ONE TRUE SELF
• DIFFERENT-BUT-SAME (Un-Seeing Exercise)
• FOLLOW THE GOD THREAD (Shaping Dilemma)

……

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

The post YOU TOO CAN PLAY IN “EVENT TIME” first appeared on Life-Built Poems.

We humans may be the only animals on this planet that are aware of time.  In fact, humans are more than a little freaky about time. We have been fascinated and even obsessed with it for a good long while now.

There’s archaeological evidence that the Babylonians and Egyptians began to measure time about 5,000 years ago.  That development in human thought-constructing was probably built on a long, long line of other previously thunk thoughts and concepts.

Trying to separate out the thought concepts that resulted when humans ruminated and pondered about clock-time from the rest of our alternative perceptions of time was interesting.

TURNING THE POET LOOSE

I finally hit on the idea of checking out the idioms we’ve developed about time.

It occurred to me that idioms are actually mini-poems.  They are like clichés – once-clever little groupings of words that are now widely used because a lot of people have already used them to communicate larger ideas than the literal meanings of the actual individual words.

Every idiom, like every cliché, has a backstory.  They are all established by common usage.  A lot of people liked them and passed them around among themselves and the accumulated meanings and nuances of these phrases grew.

Every language has time idioms.  Check it out yourself, if you like.  There are a lot of them around, embedded in our everyday languages.

A TIMELY STORY

I’m going to tell you a fairytale sprinkled with a bunch of time-idioms that are related to how we postmodern industrial sorts perceive time. (It is, like all of my fictions and illusions, based on a true story.)

Once upon a time, nobody actually measured time. Things happened, of course, but like every other animal in the world, humans lived in an “eternal now.”

• no spare time or free time or down time
• no short or long or limited time
• no time to bide
• no time to do or serve or pass
• no time to keep or give or take
• no time to lose or to lose track of
• no time to find
• no time to manage or master
• no time to waste or squander
• no time to borrow
• no time to make or to make up
• no time to spend or save or invest
• no time to kill
• no time to race against
• no time to arrive in the nick of
• no time to be on or off or out of
• no time to get ahead or behind of

The amorphous time our ancestors lived back when we were feral creatures with a lot fewer words was not the “time is of the essence” variety that came along later.

Time had not yet become an intrinsic and necessary factor in the completion of some cooperative or group project or trade agreement.  Time had not yet become equated with money.

Instead, the time our ancestors lived could be described as “time at large.”  Things did need to get done, but the sense of urgency and of important, unmet deadlines were often missing.

WELL, LOOK AT THAT!

Did you notice?

All of the story that I’ve told so far is laden with an inordinate number of time idioms.  I’m telling this tale in just one language, but the number of different time idioms I’ve used in the telling of it just scratches the surface.

Humans, as I’ve said, are fascinated by time and the words we use to talk about it reflects our preoccupation with it.

As innately orderly creatures, we have an inborn need to catalog, categorize, and describe everything around us.  It’s how we make sense of the world, so it isn’t surprising that our ancestors began to notice time passing. Our ancestors could watch “time go by,” as they figured out how to track the movements of the sun, the moon and the seasons.

As hunter-gatherers and then as farmers and members of larger and larger groups and communities, our ancestors became aware of how time could get “full” with all kinds of doings and activities.

Rascals, scammers and rapscallions could “two-time” anyone or anything, and everybody could use time to heal all wounds.  Humans were able to have “the time of their lives” or they might have “a hell of a time.”  There were happy times and there were sad times.

There were also high or low, hard or soft, and good or bad times to be had by all.  Some of these most excellent folks even had a “whale of a time” or they “hit the big time.”

The accumulation of “years,” “months” and “days” that we called “yesterday,” “today,” and “tomorrow” got broken down further into “hours” and “minutes” and “seconds” and ever-smaller bits as people developed the ways and means to actually measure all those bits and pieces of time.

ONE INTRIGUING HISTORY VIDEO

I stumbled over this 2015 YouTube video, A Briefer History of Time: How technology changes us in unexpected ways.  It was uploaded by Fusion and is the insightful work of filmmaker and video essayist Adam Westbrook.  The film explains a bit about how we humans got good at measuring time concisely when the Industrial Revolution starting revving up.

There are more detailed videos that are also very good, but I like how Westbrook’s shorty touches a little bit upon the ramifications and consequences all of this measuring of time had on people.

Not only did we mechanize time, it says.  We also accidentally mechanized our own selves.  Eeep!

CLOCK TIME AND PRODUCTIVITY TAKE OVER

Even more eye-opening is a second YouTube video, What Life Was Like In the Industrial Revolution, a 2022 episode in the Patreon-funded vlog, The Intrigued Mind.  It details what many ordinary folks experienced during that world-changing epoch.

All kinds of Smarty Pants through the years have expanded on and used the building blocks of the Revolution’s time-measuring systems, processes and technologies.  Clever dudes and dudettes figured out how we regular sorts (and our overseers) could actually “use time wisely” and egg each other on to keep on doing more and more and more.

The concept of “productivity” was born and grew and grew during the Industrial Revolution when we humans got carried away with the “time-is-money” thing.

Basically, industrial-type economic productivity is measured by figuring out how people, businesses and countries can use the least amount of resources available (time, money, energy, manpower, space, materials, and so on and so forth) to produce and deliver the most goods and services to our customers and consumers for the least cost.

It became the chief metric for measuring the “healthiness” of a going concern.

The metrics used were also not so good for the planet either.

Improved productivity with all of its attendant benefits and costs flowed into our collective consciousness as well.  We started assessing and weighing up our own personal doings with these very same standards and systems of measurement.

FURTHER MUSINGS

One result of all of this relentless industrial-strength mind-work is that many regular folks nowadays say they feel like they are drowning in a flood of constantly churning times of change.

(It might be worth noting that this kind of a reaction does tend to happen when one tiny mind takes on the task of trying to understand and encompass any of the big mysteries presented by Life-Its-Own-Self.  It has happened time and time again.)

The story still continues onward.  All of us humans keep on making it up as we go along. That too, it seems, is what we humans do.

TIME THOUGHTS

Time.

It all takes time.

When the dance is slow, is stately,

The dancers move to subtle rhythms

Tied to the heart and no one can say

When the dance will end.

Time is NOT of the essence.

Time IS the essence.

Movement following the Tai Ch’i,

A turtle swims through the mother sea,

Crossing the void slowly,

Not turning from its course.

On its back, it carries the world.

Time.

[by Netta Kanoho]

Header photo credit:  “The Watchmakers Amanuensis” by Jussi via Flickr [CC BY-SA 2.0]

……

SOME OTHER POSTS TO EXPLORE:
(Click on each of the post titles below and see where it leads you….)

• ROCKS AND GRAVEL AND TIME
• TAKE OPPORTUNE ACTION (Another IPS)
• TIME HORIZONS

……

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

The post ON CLOCK-TIME: An Un-Seeing Exercise first appeared on Life-Built Poems.

Here’s the most pretzel-brain-making question there ever was in the history of human thought: “Life is ___________” (fill in the blank).

That’s the deceptively innocuous-looking problem that, given even just a little bit of space and time, can toss you smack-dab onto the back of the Chaos-Beast that takes you on a ride straight down the most convoluted and paradoxical rabbit hole a thinking being will ever encounter.  Argh!

I’ll tell you right now going in: That question actually has no “Right Answer.”

Every wise guy and Smarty Pants that ever lived has had a go at it and finally just made do with whatever it was they made up when, eventually, they fell off the Beast and bit the dust big time.

MY FAVORITE STORY ABOUT THE MEANING OF LIFE

My own favorite story connected with this exercise in paradox-wrangling is the one Kurt Vonnegut presented in his deeply satirical, dystopian novel, CAT’S CRADLE, which was published in 1962.

It was a mind-boggle, that book.  In its time it has been booed, banned, and vilified as well as lauded, praised, and “cultified” in varied and sundry ways.  (I’ll leave it to you to read the thing and find out why.)

So, anyway, there’s this story in that book that goes like this:

Here’s God at the very beginning of Time.  He’s just finished making the earth and, as Vonnegut writes, “…He looked upon it in His cosmic loneliness.”

And like every other Creator there ever was, the Dude decides to gather together an audience to share and check out what He has wrought.  Of all the critters God shapes out of mud and animates, the only one that can actually speak is Man.

Man blinks, looks around puzzled and politely asks, “What is the purpose of all this?”

God answers that question with another question, “Everything must have a purpose?”

Man replies, “Certainly.”

And God tells Man, “Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this.”

And then, Vonnegut writes, “And He went away.”

Oof!

That is probably the best meta-story I’ve encountered about the golden god-thread that runs through the whole tapestry of the history of humankind.

It’s the stuff from which legends get made and we humans are the ones who are supposed to weave it and incorporate it into Life-Its-Own-Self, it seems (at least according to Vonnegut).

COMES NOW ANOTHER BOOK FOR SELF-IMPROVEMENT DIDACTS….

In 2017, writer Emily Esfahani Smith put together a book, THE POWER OF MEANING: Crafting a Life That Matters, that presents a clear and clean overview of the human experience of wrestling with this most annoying question.

Tapping into “maybe-this-will-work” Smarty Pants and wise guy forays into assorted fields of human brain grinding (psychology, sociology, philosophy, metaphysics, biology, literature and just plain living), Smith makes a run at laying out how we humans have tried to figure out ways to find grace and meaning in the mystery and mind-boggle of Life-Its-Own-Self.

Using what she calls the “four pillars of meaning” – belonging, purpose, story-telling,  and transcendence – she makes an exceptionally fine stab at the problem.

The book does not present thoughts that are particularly “revolutionary.”  You’ll probably recognize all of the different stances and such she presents.

After all, we humans have been fooling around with and trying to suss out this quintessential puzzle for thousands of years now.

You might want to check it out.

AND THEN THERE’S A VIDEO TOO….

I also stumbled across a 2013 YouTube video that was uploaded by INKtalks, a platform for creative idea-exchange in India that grew out of entrepreneur and founder Lakshmi Pratury’s penchant for using storytelling to foster community-building and her admiration for the TEDtalks format.

The rollicking exploration, “A crash course on the meaning of life,” features the amazing entrepreneur-turned-philosopher Derek Sivers.

In just under 12 minutes, Sivers lays out all kinds of possible answers to the burning life- and-its-meaning question and provides his own evocative commentary on the lot plus a bunch of bonus questions at the end.

It’s exhilarating.

ONE MORE THOUGHT AND ONE MORE QUESTION

The one thing that helped me dismount after my latest ride on the Chaos-Beast Express was this thought from the late deep-thinker Joseph Campbell:

“Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.”

And that’s the thing, you know.  Each of us is an answer to the god-thread we are holding.

A follow-up question now is “Where are your answers to the god-thread question taking you?”  As a wanna-be shaper the answers to that follow-up question might make a crucial difference between living a life filled with meaning and mana and one that is not.

WRANGLING THE QUESTIONS

Here’s the thing about questions:
They tend to multiply.
They iterate and permutate
Into more and more.
A nest of questions await you,
All pertinent, all relevant,
All suitable for debate with self or other,
Back and forth and back.

Questions can get to be a puzzlement.
They keep on flitting, keep on morphing,
And they can just lead you down more
Alleyways and byways and definitive dead ends
And not to any hidey-places
Where some really special “meaning”
Can be found.

A labyrinth built of asking why and how and where
All the real and magic answers,
(The ones with all that good stuff) might abide
Just takes you ‘round and ‘round and
Leads you right on back to where you began.
(Because, after all, the thing’s a labyrinth
and the end is the beginning is the end.)

Questions can usher you into some
Monolithic ivory tower
Where you can sit and ponder
All day and all night,
Doing nothing more than warming
Some fluffed-up, comfy cushions
While your mind runs around in circles
And falls down all dizzy as you throw up
Watery conundrums all over the floor.

Questions can morph into branching paths
That keep you always wandering
Through a curious wilderness of strange,
Always finding more and more to inspect,
To analyze, to dissect until the world turns dark
And the stars all go away.

The wise guys say you can turn back the tide
Of this plague of trickster questions,
When you’ve had enough of the way
They trip you up and stick a ring through your nose
Then lead you roundabout and down
Yet another stupid byway that goes nowhere.

Here’s how:

Close your eyes,
Hold onto your heart,
Shake your fist and
Stick your chin out.
Mutter mantras,
Inhale deeply and keep breathing.
Be still.

Choose the gnarliest of those questions
And just sit with it.
Then, choose some half-baked,
Stupid answer.

That’s right.
Just do it.
Go on, go on, go on.
Just gulp it on down.
You did that?
Good.
Okay.
Now, live that answer ‘til it’s real.

Simple, right?
Those wise guys are amazing, right?

Hmmm.

[by Netta Kanoho]

Header Photo Credit: “Lantern Festival” by Wei, Shi-Hang 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…)

• SHAPING STARTS WITH YOU
• ON THE ROAD TO MEANING
• CHECK YOUR FILTERS: ROADMAPS AND STORY

……

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

The post FOLLOW THE GOD-THREAD (Shaping Dilemma) first appeared on Life-Built Poems.

A really smart somebody or other once opined that time is what keeps everything in a story from happening all at once.  Since we humans are all engaged in making up some kind of story or other, this is an important concept.

I know.  All kinds of people have weighed in with opinions – esoteric, scientific, and mundane – about Time.  You have probably heard them all before.

Basically, under all of that pretzel-brain making cascade, we are told that either (a) Time is an illusion or a delusion and not real at all, or (b) the only ride we have in this little bit of life we’ve been given is Time and it is a powerful, wild and slippery thing that never stops moving off in all directions.

So, mostly, we post-moderns accept it when we are told that we are more or less stuck with trying to figure out how to develop the skills we need to mount the slippery chaos-beast that is Time and…well, ride!

I have noticed that if you look at the advice with an eye towards the results you get from following them, it really does look like productivity experts and self-development coaches and consultants mostly teach you how to manage your own actions and harness your wild thoughts in order to tame and leash yourself to Time.

Hmmm….

I often find that a lot of this most excellent advice feels very much like leashing a six-year-old kid to a Great Dane and telling the kid to go take the dog for a walk around the block.  (YEESH!)

A BOOK ABOUT HOW HUMANS DEAL WITH TIME

Humans have many ways of playing and working with time.  People around the world in different cultures and during different eras throughout history all developed and evolved their own ways of working with time to shape their own realities.

[I just had to get that book title in here.  It’s just so…1990s.   This pop-sci book was apparently interesting enough for it to keep on selling steadily.

The book was taken up by a reprinter, Basic Books, and another edition was released to the world in 2018 with a slicker subtitle: “On Tempo, Culture, And the Pace Of Life.” It’s available as a Kindle edition and as a paperback.

Here’s a caveat:  Because of the age of the book with the overblown title, the stories may seem dated and possibly politically “insensitive” or whatever.   (This was pre-9/11, guys.)

The lens Levine uses to look at the global nuances of Time is probably just as interesting as the work itself…and, he was there – a very observant and noticing Johnny-on-the-spot.

I like it.]

In the book, Levine broadly categorizes how humans interact with time in three different ways:

Nature time is time in the “raw.” Humans who follow nature time are influenced by and adapt to the rising and setting of the sun, weather phenomena, the changing seasons, and the natural happenings and processes of the world around them.

“Event time,” as Levine calls it, is the time that is needed to organize and perform sometimes complicated tasks that are part of making a something from start to finish. (I prefer to call it “project time.”). You move through a number of connected processes — linked actions that often require a certain degree of knowledge and skill — one after another — and you produce a finished product or accomplish some desired outcome or long-term goal.

Humans on clock time live by the clock. Their lives are tied up and bound in scheduling, performance, productivity, and analyzing and measuring the activities of their lives using the time units on a clock of one sort or another.

Each one encourages and fosters the emphasis and prioritization of different human values as well, it seems.  And they can be mixed and matched, I suppose.  There are all sorts of hybrid forms that humans make up with the basic three.

NATURE-TIME DWELLERS

Humans who live in nature time don’t seem to pay a lot of attention to time.  They are too busy watching the natural world and participating in that ongoing complex dance that has been happening since before some human invented time.

Think of a surfer in the ocean waiting for a wave to rise.

Think about hunter-gatherers working directly with the natural world’s resources and gifts to take care of the needs of their heart-people.

Think about agrarian or nomadic cultures that are tied to the seasons.

A lot of their lives are spent in nature-time mode.

This mode seems best when you’re wanting to savor and appreciate Life-Its-Own-Self.

Proponents tell you these things are good for a healthier and saner you. Nature time can help you to increase your physical energy and vitality.  It lets you dump all the anxiety and stress created by turning away from the “Oneness of the Universe” and so forth and so on.

This is all true.  Every human can learn how to sink into nature time.  When you were a baby, that’s where you lived.  It is still where you can go to feed your soul.

The major problem with nature-time mode, though, is that it really does eat up a bunch of your time that could be “much better spent” (hardcore achievement aficionados tell us) on things that make dents – big or small — in the World-As-We-Know-It, the one where the concerns of us humans are paramount because it’s the one we have built together.

In nature time, Time is all there is.

For this reason, while nature time is our starting place and our best medicine, the majority of us urban sorts do have a hard time staying in that time mode.

TIME MODES THAT HELP US NAVIGATE CONSENSUS-WORLD

• efficiency (for the guys doing the performing and productivity work)
• effectiveness (for the guys pointing the performers in various directions in order to accomplish assorted and valued aims and goals and visionary stuff like that).

Business thinker icon Peter Drucker described these objectives like this: “Efficiency is doing things right.  Effectiveness is doing the right things.”

The Smarty Pants in the white lab coats have done all kinds of studies looking at how differing time scheduling styles can help to promote efficiency and effectiveness.

EFFICIENCY AND GETTING THINGS DONE IS A STRENGTH CLOCK-TIME MODE ENCOURAGES

In a 2014 paper, researchers Tamar Avnet and Anne-Laure Sellier and their team studied how people used clock time and event time approaches to getting things done.

According to Avnet and Sellier, if your priority is to be efficient, clock-time is the way to go. Goals and hard deadlines combined with the clicking of the inexorable passing of minutes, hours, and days can provide a lot of impetus for you to make your moves.

You can get good at doing things methodically and fast. You’ll get to meetings on time.  You’ll meet deadlines, show your respect for other people’s time, and foster connections just by getting good at dealing with the clock-time mode conventions and customs and rules and regs.

(You may also drown in paperwork and data streams, but that’s another story.)

In fact, clock time is now the default scheduling mode for many of the folks reading this and the most familiar way we post-modern achievement junkies tend to deal with the time in our lives:

“Lunch is at noon and I’ve got a meeting at 2 p.m. and another scheduled for a half-hour after that, and I’m expected at an appointment at 3:45 p.m., followed by…” and so on. 

The attitudes that grew out of placing an intense focus on discreet units of time and on how much one human could actually do in whatever time was available bled into every other aspect of human life.

Payment for services rendered during clock-time mode, a key motivator for getting a person to twist their body and mind to match the more machine-like vagaries of that way of moving, is tied to the measured bits and pieces of the time-construct that are depicted by mechanical clocks and calendars laid out like grids.

People routinely sell away their days.  Nowadays, the most respected folks can actually charge a sizeable set fee for mere minutes of their time.

However, the “usefulness” of clock time does depend on whether everybody uses the same time-frames.  When you are trying to coordinate some effort or other to accomplish a particular goal, it can get confusing when the people with whom you are working don’t all agree about what time it is.

Everybody’s watches have to be synchronized when you have a plan involving many people and requiring impeccable timing. Right?

There has to be one standard way of keeping track of time.  Otherwise, the process gets muddled and the wrangling and whining starts and productivity grinds to a halt.

INTERLUDE (A LOOK AT AN EARLIER TIME ON MAUI)

The slender volume is a little bit of local history affectionately told by a lady who was personal secretary to Frank Baldwin (the General) and, later, a companion and friend to his widow Harriet (Mittie).

The Baldwins were part of one of the most influential of the Maui sugar plantation owner families who helped to shape the Maui island lifestyles during that not-so-long-ago historic period.

Like Levine’s book, Irma’s provides another perspective — a sentimental and nostalgic one — of the attitudes held by the people who lived in the not-so-distant past.

My own favorite writings in the book are a collection of little articles that Irma had penned for HC&S Breeze, a company newsletter that was published in the 1950’s.  Here’s a little taste:

“Prior to World War I, every Maui plantation had its own time and blew its mill whistle accordingly.  Kahului Railroad ran on another time.  And ‘central’ gave over the phone yet another ‘correct time.’  Vestiges of this mess persisted until 1948.”

Irma explains that plantation time was adjusted “frequently” in order to take advantage of “every instant of daylight.”

In case you didn’t know, sunrise times vary around the island of Maui.  The massive bulk of Haleakala on the eastern side of the island casts a huge shadow. The mountain can block the view of the rising sun that is visible to someone standing in a Central Maui plantation from the eyes of a person standing on the West Maui beaches for as much as a full hour.

The full hour was the time difference between the clock times at the mill in Puunene in Central Maui and the one in Lahaina to the west (a distance, as the mynah bird flies, of only about 14 miles.)

Residents of the island had to maintain a certain flexibility of mind.  A common question back then was, “Is that plantation time or central time?”

BACK TO POST-MODERN CLOCK TIME

These days, we’ve got Time pretty much standardized.  We’ve factored in things like global geography and time zones and datelines, even, but it doesn’t seem to have helped to make our individual interactions with Time particularly smooth or easy.

We run, run, run, trying to get through the never-ending lists of “things I had to do yesterday.”

However, very often, no matter how fast we run and no matter how much action moves we stuff into our sliced and diced days, we don’t ever seem to have enough time to do what we say we want to be doing.

Another study done by researchers at Standford University led by professor Teresa Amabile found that the busier knowledge workers were, the less creative they became.

The problem is creative work is just not mechanical or methodical.  Ideas come when they will and almost never on schedule.  They morph and wriggle around.

When you’re on a timeline and the deadline is fast approaching you often cannot wait for a draggy-footed Muse to check in.  You stress out, you yell and plead and cry a lot, and your temperamental Muse stomps off in high dudgeon.  (Oy!)

[No, Dr. Amabile and her colleagues did not say that last bit.  That was just me.]

Avnet and Sellier got similar findings as well in their study.  People who depend on the clock to dictate their schedules, they found, were often less present, less able to savor positive emotions and likely to be less open (and not even notice) the unpredictable opportunities that are an inherent part of creative work.

The clock-time dance shuts down an important aspect of doing creative work.  You cannot make something new from nothing. You do have to take the time to feed your Muses new information, new experiences, and new dots to connect in order to get to uncommon, new-to-you solutions.

Not so good.

AND THEN THERE’S EFFECTIVENESS AND PROJECT-TIME SCHEDULING

People who live in event (or project) time are not as concerned about the little markings all around the clock face.  They don’t divide up their days quite so finely.

Rather than planning out their days by the minutes, they decide on what they want to accomplish and then spend their time responding to whatever happens during those days while keeping their eye on the objectives for which they are aiming.

When I’m hungry, I’ll eat lunch.  This meeting will end when we’ve resolved the very important issue we’re currently addressing.  Then, maybe, if it doesn’t take all afternoon, we’ll be able to deal with another, lesser issue.  If this meeting runs into overtime, I’ll need to cancel that hair-dressing appointment I had….and so on.

Project-time scheduling done right can help you make work that may have a lot of meaning in your life.

Think about a master woodcarver who is working on building a spiral staircase by hand with no nails.

Think about a world-class luthier putting together a guitar for a rock star who has been waiting for the thing for two years already.

Think about a car enthusiast taking apart a beat-up and rusty ruin of a 1914 Stutz Bearcat because he plans to rebuild the thing from the ground up.

Think about the native American student learning to carve an eagle’s head presenting his fiftieth attempt to his traditionalist master.  The guy looks at it, nods, and says, “You’re getting there. Try again.”

Think about the poet sitting in her little room wrestling the heck out of words that won’t stand still and say something real.  Her plan is to gather together all of her finished poems, assemble a book, launch it off…and then stand there listening to the resounding silence that comes back.  And then she will sit down and she will try again.

Many creatives – including freelancers, consultants, and other contract and piecemeal workers – work on projects where their renumeration is tied to the work they complete.

If they work fast and are prolific at making good, solid products or services, they can get paid well.  If they work long and do excellent and original work (and have very good salespeople and representatives), they can get paid very well.

I don’t know how many craftspeople, artists, musicians, and writers of every ilk have moaned at me about how little money they get for the time they’ve put into some major work.  (They don’t even talk about the stuff that doesn’t come together and has to be trashed.)

Those same people would probably not trade their lifestyles for the clock-time model.  They know it; I know it.  We laugh.

When you’re in project-time style scheduling, you may not be particularly efficient at checking off all the little boxes on a never-ending to-do list, but you and your work can become extraordinarily effective if you can figure out how to use your available time to address and take care of your most meaningful and important priority items.

Another, more mundane example.  Imagine you want to buy that perfect gift for your beloved partner’s special day. You will put in extra effort to make sure the gift is meaningful and happy-making.

You probably won’t get done with the shopping quite as quickly as you might when you’re being a “Secret Santa” at another lame group get-together.

In project-time mode, the time you spend and the actions you take are tied to the projects to which you’ve given a higher priority and imbued with meaning.  You spend your time doing your “Why”…that latest buzz-word in the achievement addict’s lexicon.

If you have a problem, you give yourself time and space to think and ponder on it until a solution presents itself.  You keep showing up.  You keep doing the things that matter to you.

It’s very likely that things will work out in their own time.

Hmmm….

That one, it seems to me, may be a good way to figure out how to climb onto Time, that big old curmudgeony chaos-beast, and actually go for a ride.

FINAL THOUGHT

My favorite quote about efficiency and effectiveness comes from American author and preacher-man John C. Maxwell:  “Efficiency is the foundation for survival.  Effectiveness is the foundation for success.”

THE PREGNANT NOW

Okay.
I get it.
Now is the time when action is possible.
Right now, this very minute.

But then, there is this:
What if that action taken triggers an earth tremor
That starts a ripple that grows into a wave
That morphs into a megaton monster tsunami
Heading in towards some paradisical beach head?
What is the point, then, of that action taken
Now, now, now?

Action will still be possible in the next minute
And the next
And the one after the one after that.
There is an infinity of Nows
In the pregnant realm of Possibility.

You keep ranting,
You keep screaming.
You want to move.
You NEED to do.
You are losing time, you say
(As if Time is something you own
That you can really lose).
And you are just dying, dying, dying
To go and go and go.

You keep trying to break out
Of all the constraints,
Of all the holding back,
The stillness and in-gathering
Of power contained.
You are itching to rumble,
To tumble, and smash.

And still I sit here waiting,
Watching for the one pivot point
That will leverage the power of
The proper spinning of the wheel.
Here I sit, refusing to give in
To your overweening demands,
Your extravagant lusts for
Outcomes that will benefit only you.

That tipping point has not yet arrived…
Not yet…

Not yet…

Not yet.

It is slow in coming, I admit,
And so, so subtle that
It is getting hard to hold still through
The advent of its coming.

Almost…

It is almost, but not quite, here.

By Netta Kanoho

Header photo credit:  “Heidelberg Project” by Nick Redhead 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…)

• TIME HORIZONS
  
• GET TIME-RICH
  
• HURRY SICKNESS AND SPARE TIME
  

……

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

The post TIME AS A SHAPING TOOL (An Overview) first appeared on Life-Built Poems.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I confess.  I am lost.

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

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

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

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

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

I like my mind and I am a stubborn git.

RESETTING TO YOUR DEFAULT MINDSET AFTER THE MONKEY GETS LOOSE

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

Music also helps.

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

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

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

Ahhh…that’s better.

A SIDE-TRIP INTO ANIMUSIC WORLD

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

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

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

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

OKAY…BACK TO BALANCING MUTIPLE BOTTOM LINES

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

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

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

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

That struck me as a major truth.

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

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

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

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

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

THE QUIET VOICE OF THE ORDINARY

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

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

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

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

ANOTHER QUEST, ANOTHER BOOK

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FINAL THOUGHTS

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

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

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

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

UNREQUITED DREAMS

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

Take that Hero-slash-Crusader Rabbit thing….

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

I mean, look it….

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Netta Kanoho

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

……

SOME OTHER POSTS TO EXPLORE

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

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

……

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

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

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

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

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

Not.

THE FLY IN THE MEASURING OINTMENT

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

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

LOOKING AT WHAT MATTERS

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

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

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

KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS (KPI)

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

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

QUESTIONING AND RUMINATING (WHAT AM I DOING?)

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

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

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

THE CHIEF MARKETING OFFICER (CMO) SERENITY PRAYER

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

It says:

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

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

Amen.

AND THEN THERE’S A BOOK….

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Is THIS all there is?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s a poem:

AM I ENOUGH?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Netta Kanoho

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

……

SOME OTHER POSTS TO EXPLORE

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

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

……

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE MAGIC STARTS WITH SELF-AWARENESS AND SELF-EXPRESSION

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

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

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

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

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

Click on the button below for more of their story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BUILDING AN EMOTION LEXICON

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TURNING IT ALL INTO ROAD MAPS OF THE HEART

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

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

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

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

GETTING TO CLARITY

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

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

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

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

HOW TO USE THE ATLAS

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s a poem:

FORGIVENESS

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

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

That this thing they call “forgiveness”

Is going to “set me free.”

Huh?

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

Then I shall be “at peace” with me

Or something like that.

I say again:  Huh?

I think they lost me, all these ones

When they implied that

I actually understand enough about anything

To take what you do personally.

I’m not sure I am that wise.

Are you?

I mean, who am I to “forgive” you?

Who are you to offer me your forgive?

Does a hawk forgive a fish?

Does a flower need a butterfly’s forgive?

I have to confess:

This makes no sense to me.

As far as I can tell,

We are all walking our walks

In the discreet worlds that we inhabit

As we each make our own way home.

And if your warm leaves me cold,

It could be you’re a penguin

And I’m some sort of tropic bird.

I really don’t know much of anything,

Except…except…

I do wish you well on your journey.

May you find your own heartsong

And may there be joy abiding there.

Oh…and one more thing:

I do know all these lessons never end,

And you are a part of mine,

So, for that,

I’ll thank you now, my friend.

by Netta Kanoho

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

……

SOME OTHER POSTS TO EXPLORE:

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

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

..….

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

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

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

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

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

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

POETRY AS COMMUNITY SERVICE AND A BLESSING  WAY

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

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

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

Wo!

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

……

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

I do ask three things of my guest poets:

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

……

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We agreed it was our best soup ever.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE STONE SOUP TEACHING STORY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE NATURAL CYCLES OF CHANGE

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

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

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

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

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

ONE FARMER AND HIS WIFE, ONE FARM

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

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

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

Among the center’s projects are:

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

EVERY MISSION STARTS WITH LOOKING FOR A BETTER WAY

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

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

Doing these things he could feed his growing family.

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

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

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

THE MISSIONS GROW AND SPREAD

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

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

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

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

Here’s a poem:

THERE WILL BE JOY

There will be joy and obstacles dispersed,

Pleasure and delight will rise out of harmony

Between what is inside and all the rest,

But, first, you have to get through

Another glitch or two on the road to somewhere else.

Birthing is an opportunity after all:

Something new is entering the world,

One foot following another,

Step by step by step.

Order without proper arrangement does not perfect anything.

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

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

To slip your hand into another strong hand

And walk in harmony

And let yourself be guided by

What happens next.

After all that, there will be joy.

Created by Netta Kanoho

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

……

SOME OTHER POSTS TO EXPLORE

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

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

……

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PROCRASTINATION AS A DEFIANCE OF AUTHORITY AND INEXORABLE TIME

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

Hmmm…that one feels absolutely true.

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

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

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

Those questions are somewhat disconcerting to me.

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

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

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

Take a look at this thing:

Go on…tell me that’s NOT awesome!

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

PROCRASTINATION-BY-ACCOMPLISHMENT AS A WAY OF WALKING

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

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

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

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

Cool, right?

WHAT’S PROCRASTINATION-BY-ACHIEVEMENT GOOD FOR?

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

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

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

ACK!

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

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

FINAL THOUGHTS

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

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

Here’s a poem:

SQUARE EYEBALLS

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

Cogs in a machine,

Gears that grind away the days,

Turning hours and minutes and seconds

Into a finely ground powder

That gets into your eyes

And clogs up your head

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

The second hand sweeping across

The big moon-faced clock

Locked us in between those ticks and those tocks.

A giant vacuum sucked up hopes and dreams

And poured them all into other-people schemes,

Belching and burping out thick black smoke

That blocked the sun

And turned the whole world gray.

We’re past that now, they say.

We farmed it all out,

Out-sourced all that

Suck-em-up empty.

Now our cousins get the benefits

Of measured-time Hell.

But, wait…

Along the way somewhere

We seem to have lost our “tock.”

Little plastic shields mounted

On teeny-tiny rolodexes

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

Minute by minute by minute,

And the seconds disappeared….

Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick….

And the one-legged minutes hopped on by.

The moon-faced clock with its sweeping hands

Was remanded for resale and became

A collectible….

As the slow dreams died

And the world got too big

For the little dreamers.

And then the ticking stopped.

Pixels danced as we lost the measure of our days.

We bathe in the interminable Now,

Unconnected, swimming in a

Peculiar electronic vagueness

Where the nanoseconds zip and zap

In machine-driven meditations

That go nowhere.

And so,

Here we sit now,

Living in a plastic Heaven-realm.

Timeless now.

No ticks, no tocks.

No passages, no paths….

Just streaming LEDs and dancing dots

Playing out our thoughts in little boxes

As we connect up the little pips into webs

Like the demented spiders that got stoned on LSD.

Ummm….

Dang it!

I’m gonna go outside now,

Go talk to some trees or clouds or something,

Feel the wind on my skin

And maybe even drink down a rainbow or two.

Go stare at the horizon for a while.

I think my eyeballs just turned square again.

Maybe a dose of the analog world

Will get them back to round.

If not, there’s always peanut M&M’s….

By Netta Kanoho

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

……

SOME OTHER POSTS TO EXPLORE:

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

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

……

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

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

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

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

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

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

About the poem Deelilah has this to say:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s her poem:

Hawaii On a Lark

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

as in a lark.

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

Hawaii.

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

A 747 would fit the plan—

Big-bellied bird, wide with possibility—

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

of Waikiki.

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

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

from miniature shells.

Drumbeats bathed in balmy air
while shadow dancers
with feathered hair

twirled round and round—

A hollow conch horn played.

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

back to Seattle.

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

There’s no forgetting the Hawaiian folk.

Aloha.

By Deelilah (Donna Holden)

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

…..

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

I do ask three things of my guest poets:

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

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

……

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ANCIENT WISE-GUYS WEIGH IN WITH THEIR THOUGHTS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s the video:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ONE LAST THOUGHT

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

Now, go play….

Here’s a poem:

JUST ONE MORE PROMISE

It occurred to me that all of us are promises

Made by some long-dead ancestor to the world,

To generations past, for generations coming,

A promise that continues in full force.

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

Promises made and promises kept (or not) —

And the stories that pile up as time moves on,

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

I wonder sometimes whether I have been a promise kept

Or one that my distant progenitor only flung out defiantly

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

The continuation of Life-Its-Own-Self.

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

by Netta Kanoho

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

……

SOME OTHER POSTS TO EXPLORE:

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

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

……

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PETE SEEGER WALKING

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They include:

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

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

THE MAN, REMEMBERED

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

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

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

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

She goes on to say,

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

THERE IS A BOOK….

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

It’s a lovely book.

BLESSING FROM AN ELDER

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

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

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

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

……

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

……

SOME OTHER POSTS TO EXPLORE:

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

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

……

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

I do ask three things of my guest poets:

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

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

……

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE BOOKWORM TURNS

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

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

I’m a writer.  It’s how I roll.

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

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

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

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

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

It was my way of getting on the bus.

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

AN INTERNET SIGHTING OF THE MASTER

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

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

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

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

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

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

I tried it.  It does work.

STUMBLING OVER THE OLDEST OF HUMAN GAMES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BACK TO MY STORY….

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

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

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

MY OWN VERITIES

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

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

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

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

HOW DO YOU KNOW WHEN IT’S WORKING?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ONE FINAL TAKE

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

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

Here’s a poem:

BETWEEN STORIES

I always hate the murky times –

The in-between spaces that separate

The ending of one passed-through story

And the glimmery start of the next.

Heavy fog rolls in, creepy-quiet, and

All the clearly labeled signs on

Faint outlines of old guideposts are obscured

As the Void lays claim to the landscape yet again.

You know that standing still

Results in your getting soaked to the skin,

Chilled to the bone by the Formless

That keeps gathering all around you.

You freeze inside the crapulous thoughts that arise,

And the worry-loops inside your head

Feature secret, insect claws scrabbling under your skin,

And hard, sharp tiny jaws biting.

Been there.

Done that.

And moving swiftly, making great, determined strides

Through old ghosts and defunct paradigms

Is likely to earn you a whack upside your head

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

Maybe there’s the big surprise of tumbling into

Some unanticipated ditch or falling down some unseen cliff

Or getting tangled up in giant jungle spider webs

Or chomped by randomly laid monster-traps.

Been there.

Done that too.

I always want to know whenever this happens:

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

By Netta Kanoho

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

……

SOME OTHER POSTS TO EXPLORE:

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

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

……

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE BOOKWORM TURNS

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

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

I’m a writer.  It’s how I roll.

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

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

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

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

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

It was my way of getting on the bus.

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

AN INTERNET SIGHTING OF THE MASTER

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

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

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

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

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

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

I tried it.  It does work.

STUMBLING OVER THE OLDEST OF HUMAN GAMES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BACK TO MY STORY….

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

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

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

MY OWN VERITIES

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

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

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

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

HOW DO YOU KNOW WHEN IT’S WORKING?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ONE FINAL TAKE

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

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

Here’s a poem:

BETWEEN STORIES

I always hate the murky times –

The in-between spaces that separate

The ending of one passed-through story

And the glimmery start of the next.

Heavy fog rolls in, creepy-quiet, and

All the clearly labeled signs on

Faint outlines of old guideposts are obscured

As the Void lays claim to the landscape yet again.

You know that standing still

Results in your getting soaked to the skin,

Chilled to the bone by the Formless

That keeps gathering all around you.

You freeze inside the crapulous thoughts that arise,

And the worry-loops inside your head

Feature secret, insect claws scrabbling under your skin,

And hard, sharp tiny jaws biting.

Been there.

Done that.

And moving swiftly, making great, determined strides

Through old ghosts and defunct paradigms

Is likely to earn you a whack upside your head

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

Maybe there’s the big surprise of tumbling into

Some unanticipated ditch or falling down some unseen cliff

Or getting tangled up in giant jungle spider webs

Or chomped by randomly laid monster-traps.

Been there.

Done that too.

I always want to know whenever this happens:

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

By Netta Kanoho

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

……

SOME OTHER POSTS TO EXPLORE:

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

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

……

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway, here’s the quote:

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

And isn’t that a beautiful vision?

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

WE ARE ALL A PART OF A PROCESSION

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

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

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

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

A TRIP DOWN MEMORY LANE

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

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

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

A STRAY THOUGHT:  WERE HUMANS DOMESTICATED BY PLANTS? 

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

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

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

Hmmm….

That one’s a bit of a mind-boggle.

THE WORLD CHURNS

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE POLITICS OF SEEDS

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

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

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

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

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

BIODIVERSITY IS MOTHER NATURE’S BEST DEFENSE

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

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

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

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

BIG IDEAS ARE GREAT, BUT WHEN DO WE EAT?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EVERYDAY PEOPLE DOING EVERYDAY THINGS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s a poem:

SOWING SEEDS

Here they are,

Just hardened dried bits of defiance,

Tightly holding on to the memories of

Old stories lived through ages past

Reiterated again and yet again.

The dreams of glories

And splendid harvests come and gone.

Genesis encapsulated

In tiny little bundles of promises,

Whispering, urging me to make

Yet another leap of faith,

One more time.

Take the chance, they whisper.

One more time, they sigh.

The fecund earth stands ready and

The world holds its collective breath once more.

Waiting for the seed’s release

Just as the seed yearns towards its becoming.

A still point at the intersection of choice.

Once again the seed hits the dirt

And the story can continue.

And every time, without fail, I do recall

The snarling words of Konstantinos,

That old recalcitrant Greek rebel-poet:

“What didn’t you do to bury me…

But you forgot that I was a seed.”

OPA!

By Netta Kanoho

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

……

SOME OTHER POSTS TO EXPLORE:

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

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

……

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

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