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One Moment of Many

June 4, 2016 //
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It’s a quiet dawn ahead of a hot day to come. The sun shines in my eyes and the light fills my studio; the day will get no cooler than this hour, now, and the windows are open to the cool morning air, the blinds raised to ensure ample freedom for uncertain breezes. The night didn’t cool off so much as it has been. Summer is here. I take my coffee iced this morning, and toast the rising summer sun with a smile – it’s well before 6:00 am, and full daylight.

I have “install the AC” on my calendar today… I still haven’t worked out which window I’ll put it in. The heat expected today is motivation to at least determine which window the AC will go in. lol

Iced coffee, birdsong, and a quiet summer day to enjoy without firm plans. It sounds nice. I’ll water the gardens before the heat of the day becomes unpleasant, and get my walk in before noon. There’s nothing exciting about any of this… except for the bit about how calm it is, how comfortable, how sustainably ordinary. I’m not meaning to brag, so I’ll make the point of saying it hasn’t ‘always’ been this way – there was a time when it was almost ‘never’ this way, and life seemed fairly pointless… or worse. I’m no longer merely enduring an unavoidable cycle of sleeping and waking, separated sometimes by nightmares, sometimes by despair. It’s a nice change.

Being here isn’t a given. Being content isn’t a passive thing. There are so many every day choices involved, and every day I take actions, and practice practices, to bring myself closer to being the woman I most want to be, living a beautiful life of sustainable contentment, comfortable with myself, and moving forward. Every day enjoyed is ended with a moment of delight and a bit of surprise that so much of it is in my hands, and of my own choosing – and much of it was, long before I understood that it could be.

Ready? Verbs!!

Ready? Verbs!!

Iced coffee goes down quickly…and summer days begin to warm up early. It’s already time to get to work watering the garden, and adjusting windows to continue the flow of cool air, and now to also limit the sun’s light reaching into the east-facing rooms. Time to put some verbs into action, and time to make some choices and begin the day. Today is a good day for verbs, for choices, and for a delightful summer day. I can’t change the weather, but I can change what I do about it. 🙂

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Categories Free Will, gardening, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Perspective, Summer, The Art of Being, Words

Distracted and Mildly Annoyed

May 26, 2016 //
2

This morning I woke with a headache. It’s okay, it’s not a bad one, just a garden variety probably-slept-too-long-with-my-neck-in-that-position headache. I feel fortunate that I didn’t wake with significant pain, otherwise, nor a kink in my neck – a particularly uncomfortable pain, when it is my turn to endure that experience.

My coffee is good this morning, but I’m struggling to bother with drinking it. I feel emotionally comfortable, though less so as the morning develops around this other strangely specific bit of discontent lurking in the background. It is mystifying and unsourced, and I am disliking the feeling that ‘there is more to know’ and I’d like to read about it. I think my first mistake was allowing myself anywhere near the news. lol I’d like to ‘settle in and read the paper’, honestly, but it is a feeling that hearkens to another time in my life, when the paper was actually reliably paper, probably inconveniently large for anyone else wishing to sit at the table with their coffee (or breakfast) and when being the person thusly engaged (in reading the paper) was also a sign of household status; everyone else made room for that person to do that thing, as if reading the paper were a critical function, respected and accommodated.

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My father read the news at breakfast. My mother read the news privately. Implicit biases are more subtle than can be effectively discussed in sound bites, or memes. This observation is not apropos to this post.

I think my discontent comes from the experience of reading what amounts to ‘news’ this morning. I bounce from one news source to another, some domestic, some foreign, some right-wing, some left-wing, some ostensibly neutral (which lately I find only means that they have not made clear what their agenda may be). I even check a few favored trade journals and niche periodicals (usually science, medicine, and areas of artistic interest). I would enjoy spending the morning reading short informative factual articles on clear topics, thoroughly researched, well-cited, and relevant to my experience of life and the world. It’s not going to happen today. What the fuck is up with all the hate? With all the finger-pointing and blaming? With all the artificial outrage and vile mud-slinging? I’m not a fan of news-via-meme. I also really really like it when terms are clearly defined to ensure the best possible shared understanding. Unfortunately for me, factual, emotionally neutral, ad-free news reporting doesn’t keep readers coming back to generate more revenue.  Most of what is put forth as news lately seems to be [mostly unsupported] opinion and reactionary rhetoric, and ‘sponsored content’. It’s a big uninformative emotionally provocative downer. Clearly – I am emotionally provoked, right now. It’s our own fault as consumers; we take the bait. The click-bait, I mean. Yeah. Me, too. I gotta stop doing that – it’s not informative, and it takes a toll on my consciousness in an unhealthy way. I’d be better off re-watching South Park season 19, episodes 8, 9, & 10 before clicking on another headline, anywhere, ever. I’d ‘lol’, but I’m quite serious.

I rarely read the news these days. I actively avoid it. Unfortunately, my best effort there still results in reading many more pages of utter garbage, without meaning or value, than is healthy for me. Impulse control issues affect me in this area of life, too. Click-bait is most particularly designed to overcome our impulse control… and I’m a little short on that already. The internet is vast – and just filled with shiny sparkly nonsense intended to get my attention for purposes not my own. It takes practice to avoid it all. There are plenty of opportunities to practice.

What to do about my fractured unruly consciousness this morning and my cold coffee, is now the question… I sip my coffee (honestly, if I’ll drink it hot, and I’ll drink it iced, is there some reason to resist drinking it at room temperature?) and look out the window at the flat gray sky. Was I grumpy when I woke up? I sure am now. I am irked even about that.

asdf

There is value in literally stopping to smell the roses.

I sit for a moment, listening to birdsong, breathing deep calm breaths, and feeling myself relax. I take a mental step back from the internet, and consider the morning without all that. The dark green of the pine just beyond the window, and the brighter greens of the grasses of the lawn, then the meadow beyond, stand out from the flat neutral gray of the morning sky. Cyclists, runners, and walkers pass by, some distance from the window, beyond the playground at the edge of the park, too far away to see facial expressions or hear conversation. The stop/start rhythmic tapping of fingers on the keys seems loud in the stillness of morning; one observation at a time, one sentence then another, I rebuild the morning of better parts. It’s a good start to a better day. My coffee is cold, sure, but still tasty. I think ahead to a fresh cup of coffee after a hot shower, and consider taking a few more minutes for me on the cushion by the patio door; meditation is the thing that comes through for me most reliably to calm a busy mind, to soothe restlessness. “Easy” doesn’t describe it well, as a practice. Meditation is not costly. Meditation does not require special gear, elaborate equipment, or specific specialized coaching; given the interest, and the willingness to do the verbs, I’m pretty sure anyone could build an effective meditation practice on their own, with some bit of reading on the topic, and some… practice. Yeah. It’s about practicing, whether you want to play the piano, or calm your monkey mind. Skills take practice.

It's not always an uphill climb... there are definitely steps to take.

It’s not always an uphill climb… there are definitely steps to take.

Strange start to the day. Certainly a few uncomfortable moments don’t determine the day. I smile to myself, remembering my lunch plans a bit later, and later still my date with my traveling partner. Yeah… I’m okay right now… and this is totally enough. 🙂

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Categories Anxiety, Brain Injury, Fiction, Free Will, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Metaphors, Mindfulness, more than a little bit of bitching, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, The Art of Being, War and News of War, Words

Opening Up

May 15, 2016 //
1

A few days ago I went into my Facebook settings and ‘followed’ everyone on my friends list. (Over time I had ‘unfollowed’ several friends, for a variety of reasons, and recently recognized how limiting that could potentially be for those friendships.)

I consider myself fairly open-minded at this point in life – though, actually, I ‘always’ did… and… I just wasn’t, for a very long time. I grew up with hate, primarily racism, sexism, and homophobia, with plenty of extra hate laying about for ‘strangers’ and ideas that didn’t suit my community – or my father. He was a fairly well-educated man, professional, with broad life experience and a good intellect. He also thought of himself as ‘open-minded’. He also was not. Definitions of terms are surprisingly stretchy, varying rather a lot between how we apply a word to others, versus how we apply it to ourselves. Why do I mention it? The quantity of peculiarly subtle hate that cropped up in my Facebook feed when I followed everyone on my friends list. I admit I was taken by surprise by the rationalized lack of tolerance, lack of compassion, lack of understanding, and the intensely dogmatic (and more than a little nationalistic) ‘us versus them’ perspective on the world. Fear-based thinking. Entitlement. Ad hominem and straw-man fallacies in abundance. It was an eye-opening and thought-provoking experience. It got me thinking about hate… and the woman in the mirror.

I don’t hate much. I mean that in the verb form, as in “I don’t indulge in the experience of feeling hate, or acting on impulses that may have their source in the experience of hating” when I recognize and can avoid it. I qualify it in that fashion (‘…when I recognize and can avoid it.’) because I’m human. Prone to irrational fears of the unknown, prone to seeing threats where no threat exists, and prone to negative biases – because at one time in the evolution of humanity, we needed those characteristics to secure our safety. Not very useful at this point, I must say, and obviously damnably difficult to let go of, based on what I see in my Facebook feed this past couple days. I’m not immune. I tend toward reactivity, versus responsiveness (as do many of us, it’s very human). I practice another way, deliberately, willfully, and with use of plenty of verbs – because I don’t find positive value in hate. Full stop. No need to justify my values there. This is who I am.

Now.

Yep. There’s the thing; it’s who I am now. I’ve grown and changed a lot over the years. There was a time when I wore hate like a luxurious cloak of finely made fabric; I brandished it, justified it, and felt righteous about my hate. I didn’t call it hate. I didn’t recognize the hateful nature of my words and ideology. I didn’t understand that I was hateful. I didn’t see that I was hurting people. I had little self-awareness and less compassion. I look back on that much younger self of long ago and I am embarrassed – and relieved to be transformed over time, through experience, through choices, and through the patience and acts of loving friends and associates who valued me beyond the hate, the prejudice, and the ignorance.

Thank you. (You know who you are.)

Hate is pretty ugly stuff. A lot of it sources with our fears, and our insecurity about our selves. Worse still, a lot of our fears and our hate, culturally, is manufactured bullshit – created to fatten up someone’s bottom line, either at the polls, or in the marketplace. That’s some sick shit right there, when a human being is willing to foment hate to profit from it personally. I’m not okay with that. I’m okay with being uncomfortable with what I don’t understand. I’m okay with being uneasy about what is strange or new or different. I’m okay with wanting or needing to set boundaries for myself, or having limitations as a human being – I’m a human being. Hate though? Not actually okay at all – not if I intend to say I am a civilized, rational, reasonable, good-hearted, compassionate, human being. The ‘us/them’ bullshit used to justify hate is precisely that – it’s bullshit. We are all human beings – even the fairly hateful loathsome ones who push my ability to tolerate human stupidity – and we are each having our own experience. I can’t actually ‘fix this’, though… except with regard to the woman in the mirror. I don’t do hate. It’s a choice. There are verbs involved.

…I have friends (and family) who do. Hate exists because people hate. That’s an unpleasant thing to have to accept… that there are people who matter to me who embrace hate. These are good-hearted people, generally, who likely don’t see themselves in that light, and who don’t recognize their words or behavior as hateful. They feel justified. They are also having their own experience. I am uncomfortable with hate. I find myself facing an interesting life lesson here. I am thankful that friends and loved ones who knew a more hateful younger me didn’t turn away from me; over time it changed me to see another way modeled by people I value.

There’s no denouement here, no handy lesson, no easy solution or catchy final paragraph wherein the good guys win. This is life. This is messy. This is challenging. Change and growth don’t come easily – and can’t be forced. I can continue, myself, to grow, to do better than I did a year ago, and to practice good practices, learning to treat myself – and the world – truly well. I can refuse, myself, to hate. I hope it’s enough.

 

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Categories Free Will, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Love, Mindfulness, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, The Art of Being, The Big 5, Words

One Important Change

May 11, 2016 //
0

I sat down with a state employee yesterday, a requirement as I go through the various processes involved with shifting gears from ‘gainfully employed’ to ‘not so much’ for the time being. It was inevitable, and as indicated, required. It was a pleasant enough experience, like a jingle or a pop song, purposeful and fairly cheery… with one wrong note. Discussing skills and experience, she dismissed both my painting and my writing as ‘hobbies’ and told me in a frank and practical tone that those “don’t count” and I “should stay focused on real work skills” when seeking employment. I laughed and playfully pointed out what a buzz kill that must be for graphic artists, and technical writers… she looked at me oddly and said she didn’t understand what I meant. Oh my. Say it with me, People, “art is real work, so is writing, so is acting, so is philosophy – yes, people can (and should) be paid to think, and paid to create.

Can we please just make one change in the way we view productivity? Can we please recognize the inherent value of creative works? 🙂 Hell, the most important work I have done as a human being has been artistic work; not a damned thing I’ve ever done for corporate America has been worthy of further consideration once the moment has passed. (This is likely quite true for most ‘gainfully employed’ human beings – most of the effort for which we are compensated lacks meaning, it is simply revenue generating for that employer, and therefore valued sufficiently for [required] compensation – and based on the brouhaha over increasing the minimum wage, they grudge workers even that.)

Again and again, I am struck by how reluctant we seem to be to pay artists. It’s a little weird, isn’t it? We pay the barista who makes our coffee, the cashier who rings up our groceries, the mechanic who services our vehicle, the firefighters who stand by ready to fight fires (and who get paid even when nothing is on fire), we pay CEO types who may do literally nothing besides attending meetings and answering emails (and we pay them very well), hell – we even pay athletes to play games they’d likely pay for free, to secure the reliable playing of the game at a venue large enough for paying crowds to attend. What’s with expecting artists – any kind of artists – to work for free? (By the way, working for ‘exposure’ is the identical same thing as working for free!) How is painting not work? How is writing not work? How is acting not work? I mean, seriously folks… if you allow the average CEO, or executive manager, or pro athlete to identify their compensated activities as ‘work’, then how is a painter not working? How is a novelist not working? How is a poet not working? Seriously? Don’t be dicks. It may not be easy to place a painter in a paid position as a painter – but for fuck’s sake is it necessary to denigrate that meaningful work, by saying it isn’t ‘real work’? I’ll admit to being more than a little irked that the government will subsidize farmers, but not artists. It’s easy to see that filling the stomach of the nation is important… Is it so difficult to see that feeding our hearts, minds, and souls is important, too? Would we perhaps be better human beings if we more easily recognized artistic endeavors as valued work? I think it is worth thinking about. (End rant. 🙂 )

work

Not yet ready for ‘real work’, there is real work to be done to finish moving into my studio. 🙂

It is a lovely morning. I plan to spend the day [working] in the studio, aside from one pause for an interview call. The practical requirements of life must still be met, and I hope to find a position from which I can invest more time in artistic endeavors. I feel unhurried and well-prepared. My traveling partner shared a great quote with me yesterday that fuels and encourages me. “Chance favors the prepared mind.” (Louis Pasteur) I take additional steps to be that ‘prepared mind’ as I live my life and study life’s curriculum, extending my studies into new areas that have the potential to enhance my existing (monetarily valued) skills; I have enrolled in some coursework in analysis and economics. (I continue to be a big fan of continuing education, and it has served me well over the years.)

Today is a good day to be spent on practical matters and taking care of this fragile vessel. Today is a good day to invest in infrastructure (through educating myself, tidying up my studio, maintaining an organized living space, and practicing the practices that build emotional resilience and self-sufficiency). Yes, there are verbs involved. 🙂

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Categories Art, art and the artist, Free Will, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, more than a little bit of bitching, Perspective, The Art of Being, The Big 5

Walk With Me?

May 6, 2016 //
2

This menu of choices is pretty vast… Even when life has backed me into a corner, when I’m willing to be honest with myself and willing to open my eyes to opportunities and possibilities previously unconsidered (or even previously discarded), the menu of choices life offers up is indescribably vast, varied, and there for the taking (more often than not). My results have varied – and not just the results of the outcomes of the choices; my own willingness to choose, the nature of what drives the choices, and the inclination to go one direction versus another has varied as well. I walk on, metaphorically, from one moment to the next – change is (very few other things so clearly are).

I woke to sunshine and birdsong this morning, and a lovely sparkling Friday without any specific plan and nothing urgent on my agenda. My ‘to do list’ has things on it like ‘be mindful’, ‘live beautifully’, and ‘enjoy the day’. It’s Friday, and while I am between things and focused on taking care of me, creative endeavors, and figuring out just what exactly the next thing could be, I keep Friday in reserve as ‘a weekend day’ – and why not? My path. I’m the one walking it. I say Friday is a weekend day. 🙂 My ‘new routine’ begins to sort itself out.

It’s nearly 7 am as I write this, and another detail of life these days is the consistency of my morning walk. I’ve loved the commute through the park almost enough to hold on to a job that was slowing tearing me down… keeping the walk makes every bit as much sense as letting the job go. Time to lace up my hiking boots and hit the trail! It’s a lovely bit of paved trail through a very well-kept little park (part recreational and part nature preserve, the meadow is dotted with playgrounds, and the forested trail winds back and forth across the creek), and I can get an easy hike between .5 miles (on days I can barely move) up to 6 miles. It’s a comfortable delight, and very nearby. I take my camera and my monocular.

A detour? An obstacle? An opportunity? A choice.

A detour? An obstacle? An opportunity? A choice.

There are a lot of choices in living well, in taking care of this fragile vessel, and in nurturing the being of light within. I get to make most of them myself. I take a moment to pause and appreciate what that really means for me as an individual, and what it can mean for my tribe, my community, my culture, and my world… choice is a big deal; we guide change with our choices. That seems fairly obvious a thought. I finish lacing up my boots and head out in search of wiser words, and more insightful thinking… today is a good day to be aware of how many choices I have, and to give thought to how I change the world through my choices. 🙂

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Categories Anxiety, Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Oregon Trails, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, solo hiking, Spring, The Art of Being, The Big 5, Words
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