Today’s Words:
manipulate
feeble
ahead
oatmeal
involve
incidental
grace

Grace is this fundamental concept that was missing from my consciousness as a child. I’ve had to learn it, slowly, haltingly, with great effort. What is grace? It is that which is the nature of the Cosmos and life itself: a gift. Something freely given, but which you cannot contrive to receive. More abundant that you need if you relax and let it flow into your life, and frustratingly unavailable if you do not trust it.

As a child we traditionally learn this from our parents unconditional availability, but I didn’t have that luxury. And yet as an adult, I could learn that the field itself supports me.

I wonder about that. What was the wound, and what was the healing? Does any unmet need, if it is unmet long enough or deep enough to be very very painful, create a wound – around which scar tissue builds? If so, then healing would be necessary in order to let new love in – ie to let that need be met in present time. Because the scar tissue, the defenses, keep the pain in and the love out. What an odd reaction. What an odd way of protecting ourselves. I’d like to have a discussion with God about the schematics here.

It makes me wonder about something. Our body has a lot of self-healing mechanisms. But our mind’s self-healing mechanisms seem to need social interaction in a way that our bodies self-healing mechanisms don’t. I mean, it’s a scale of course, as our body and mind aren’t really separate. The mental part of healing also seems to require interaction. Which makes sense of course. But it’s amazing how our cultural myths about ourselves make it seem like we ought to be able to heal in a vacuum when that is actually not true at all. What a strange myth to evolve. It’s almost like the myth is one of those scar-built things, protecting some wound in the social fabric itself. Hmm.

Anyhoo.

Grace is like mercy; undeserved, unasked for, but there nonetheless.

This is what I miss in the “Law of Attraction” stuff. Abundance is not something you wrestle from the Universe through effort. Grace is what you experience when all else falls away. When you release the striving, the ego, the white-knight, the entrepreneur, and the advocate, grace is what remains. The rose does not visualize more light from the sun. The rose accepts what is given, and turns toward the light.

And yes, the rose eventually dies. And there are more roses that bloom. But knowing that it will eventually whither does not sour the rose for the light.

Yet we are not roses. We have capacities for manipulation. That is not wrong either, for aren’t we just another plant in the garden? Yet still, we are the only plants that seem to cut ourselves off from our own sources of nourishment, because we become attached to them. With knowledge of good and evil comes attachment to good and aversion to evil. The Tree contained not simple knowledge, but the ability to remember, to plan, to string events together and label them “good” and “evil”. The ability to abstract.

Or perhaps it’s just survival skills run amok. The evolutionary advantage of learning is clear. Perhaps all the myths we create to explain our existence are just a byproduct of the evolutionary gift of memory and imagination. Perhaps we’re just another species.

Who knows. I know that I enjoy ice cream and building websites and cuddling. My mind is growing feebler at justifying more than simple effort for simple things. Part of me wants to involve myself with grand schemes, and part of me wants to divest my thoughts of whatever lies ahead and curl up in the moment.

Today’s Words:
draconian
slither
pillage
yet
fraught
accolades
coalesce

Ah, fraught. My favorite word.

Giving accolades is fraught. How to celebrate without elevating, how to honor without those betters and worses slithering in? In NVC you bring it all back to the specific, to the here and now I feel happy and gratitude. Not “you are so great”, not generalizing into an abstraction of better-ness that can be hard to climb out of, to break, to dissolve.

All to the good, but is it something in us that tends to generalize or is just our faulty education that we’ve not yet rescinded from our mind. Who knows, I guess the rescinding’s the thing. If we try, and we fail, then we can ask in what ways it might be in us to generalize and abstractify and why, seeking more clarity as to root causes. But only if we need to. Otherwise the whys and wherefores lead astray into more theories and less happiness. I posit.

Today’s Words:
laconic
paper
amorous
lacking
ineffective
get on with
bone

Get on with it! You’ve been lurking in the amorous section of the paper for weeks, cutting out ads, piecing together phrases. If you’re worried about an ineffective presentation you might as well experiment, you’re not lacking in imagination. For fucks sake, Mom!

Young man, go toss out the trash, the ham bone is rotten and stinking up the kitchen. If I wanted advice about the snapshot of prose I am concocting to entertain my theoretical suitors, I’d ask.

Well sooooorry, forgive my forward confession of frustration, I was attempting to catalyze some fornication for my dear mum who seems to extol its virtues daily with nary an indulgence in months.

Well dear, I appreciate your bottomless generosity in that respect.

Well, thank you for that acknowlegement. I apologize for losing my temper with flagrant disregard for your delicate ears. I’ll get on that trash removal request posthaste.

Sigh, what a dandy son I have. What folly have I for flirting with witless men, when I have such an lovely specimen in my own domicile.

Oh but mother, it hardly compares. You can’t fuck me you know.

Oh my heavens of course not. Forgive the comparison. I only meant in terms of attention spent, my cost/benefit analysis returns a high ROI ratio on time spent with you.

I’m flattered and glad. Come my dear mum, let’s have a picnic.

Splendid, let’s.

Today’s Words:
mullet
debutante
apply
ruddy
guest
bargain
muck

My dad’s response to advertising was “I’ll sell you some cowpies at a bargain price.” I guess he was saying that just because it’s on sale doesn’t mean it’s not shit.

I’m sure there are some life lessons to be drawn from this but just now I’m pulling a blank. People buy manure you know. On sale or not.

My dad also said you should never sell hay from your own fields. You should till it back into the soil, otherwise you’re selling the soil itself. See, the dirt makes grass, the cows eat the grass, they re-deposit the grass as shit on the field, which nourishes the dirt. It’s one big circle of life and nitrogen. You start selling off your hay, you gotta start buying fertilizer, which is really other people’s cowshit. It’s an endless cycle.

So we didn’t sell hay. But we bought hay, from the neighbors down the road. (about 6 miles down – in the country, “neighbors” is a looser term). I always wondered if we didn’t sell our hay because of the “cycle of life” or because we always ran out before winter was done and so we had no extra to sell anyway. Sure sounds better the first way though.

My dad read me Just-So stories when I was a kid. They’re all about explaining things by making up stories when you don’t know what’s really true. But you call it folklore, then it’s OK.

I’m not bitter (much). I just like the truth. I like the way it rings inside me, like the bells of an angry cathedral. It comforts me at night. I want to know that I stand on the ground, even if the ground is muck. At least it’s solid. Stories change, but there is always a ground to stand on. Things fall away.

Sometimes the truth is just the present moment, and the ruddy feelings of sadness that overtake you right before the light turns green. You know you feel it. There’s truth in there, somewhere. You can’t name it, you can’t explain it, but you can’t deny it either. It’s there, a pushy guest that won’t just shut up and let things be. Always has something to say.

So you listen, and wait, and things become clear, eventually.

It’s the clearness I crave. I want to wrap myself in it, the calm nothing of the night. Angry visitors come and go, but the night stays. The silence holds everything, even the aching to be held.

You always get what you need after you don’t need it anymore. It’s our human fate, to learn to let go and be content with what we have. It’s the only lesson that endures: that just this moment is enough. Whenever you forget, there is life to remind you. It comes along and steals away the promise of the night, until you remember that you don’t need promises.

You only need the night, and the ground, and the clearness of the air. It is there, in your lungs, holding you from the inside, filling your blood and caressing your cells. Time and space, truth and air, all turn into the breathe and the moment by moment dance of your heart with the world.

Today’s Words:
probation officer
plump oneself
dim
domicile
opiate
Post-purchase rationalization
groom

Jim hated being a probation officer. If he had ever imagined a career for himself as a child, he was sure it wasn’t this. Perhaps he had wanted to be a travelling carnival hand, or a backup musician for Sting. Perhaps he had wanted to go to the moon. He couldn’t remember on account of the bump to the head on this 15th birthday which erased all his childhood memories. But he wasn’t about to delude himself, like a  post-purchase rationalization, fancying that he might have wanted to grow up and be a cop and thus he had arrived. If he had any hope of self-respect, he couldn’t entertain the idea that he had been born with such meager dreams. If all had to plump himself was an imaginary childhood full of eager striving and grand aspirations, he would take it.

The perp sitting in front of him had been involved in a disturbance-of-the-peace which involved selling opiates out of her domicile – a cardboard box located (usually), just a few yards south of the intersection of 25th and Lincoln. She seemed wittier than his usual dim convicts, their brains smashed against the stone walls by other inmates one too many times in their incessent brawling. He supposed that inmates had nothing much else to occupy their time (unless they found God).

* * *

That’s all I have in me. A fragment of a story that I could groom on later occassion but probably won’t. Now needs must nap.

Today’s Words:
rose-light
extremities
prophetess
palaver
elemental
perfect game
disambiguate

So I’m reading people’s GTD systems and I’m struck by this realization: these are people who work 8 hours a day. If I maintained a GTD list, I would be spending half of my work time updating it. I just don’t work that much. I work when I feel like it. Mostly I feel eh. =)

I feel spooky happy lately. Life is fine, and there’s nothing I have to do. I have a workshop coming up tomorrow, should be fun. It’s called Naka-Ima which means something profound I’m sure. It’s all about awakening in the now. I hear you sit in a chair and talk and then people reflect back to you about yourself or some such. I’m tickled. I love getting feedback lately. Um, in certain contexts.

You’d think my elemental precision would attract me to GTD, but no. Blah!

This is my GTD: I rely on the Universe to inspire me to do what it wants me to do next. Hee, yup. There it is. If the Universe wants a new blog post, I get inspired. If not, then I just chill and watch TV. Works for me!

I only have to disambiguate between what-is-alive and what-is-not. No @aliveness or @boredom. No point in keeping track of that, it all changes too quickly. I want to float like a leaf in a stream. =) A happy leaf in a happy stream. Whee!

Today’s Words:
homophile
Patsy Cline
insectivorous
pug
spiteful
nick
sprinkle

I’ve been watching Sliders, which is this old TV show from, oh, the nineties maybe, where these folks get stuck sliding from parallel universe to parallel universe trying to find their way home. And each parallel Earth is similar-but-different. They meet their doubles and doppelganger hijinks ensue. So in one of those worlds, Patsy Cline could be a homophile, or I could own a pug.

There is a lot of buzz lately about our universe actually, and how the laws of physics being so fine-tuned to support life is pretty damn improbable. What could that mean? Why are we here?

I have a plant that I bought recently that has one remaining leaf. All the other fine glorious shards of green withered up and fell off. That one leaf though, is pristine and healthy. It sits there, its spiteful existence keeping me from tossing the whole thing. It mocks me. I couldn’t keep the plant healthy, but it won’t just die and be done with it.

My brother says plants from Fred’s are often sick so if it dies right off don’t take it personally. Ok, I’ll try not to nick my bedpost the number of plants I’ve killed. Why do we bury our pets but not our plants? There are no plant cemeteries, sprinkled with gravestones like “RIP Pothos, you were a viney wonder in your day”. We toss them in the compost heap. Must be mammal allegiance. Plants are nice but we could never bond to them. Except in that freaky movie with the insectivorous plant, L’il Shop of Horrors. Excuse me, carnivorous. That movie freaked me out and I’ve done my best to wipe it from my memory. Not perfectly, obviously.

I’m off to diagram the “forming storming norming performing” stage theory of groups and compare it to how people develop within the social game of the internet where groups are multi-dimensional, ever-changing, and have very fuzzy edges. I want to do a presentation at barcamp.

Today’s Words:
dog tag
gravitas
replete
trafalgar
peregrinate
sequel
hooflike

No gravitas here, I am a Joy Ninja! Yup, I got a new blog. Think of it as a sequel to Tao of Prosperity. When you’ve got your money situation managed, what do you want to do? Change the world! I will peregrinate through the various ideas I find revolutionary and beautiful.

Shine, shine, shine. It’s important that we all shine in our individual ways. Comparisons are over. What is important is not that we be better than the person next to us, but that we find what is uniquely ours to share. The only thing we are going to be uniquely excellent at is being fully ourselves. We must be replete with our own magnificence. One of my teachers once said something like, “Your magnificence is so obvious to you that you are unaware of it”. The Buddha said, “If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change”. Dan Millman wrote “There are no ordinary moments”.

Habituation is the problem: spiritual awareness is about un-habituating ourselves to that which seems obvious but really isn’t. For instance: we are alive. So what? Dude! That fact is so incredible! When another human being stands in front of you, how much can you see their tremendous soul, their beating heart, their incredible mind? Even when they are driving you crazy, can you see the beauty in it?

Well, this is not to say that I can, or that I am somehow graduated from this problem. It’s just to point it out.

I want to tap lightly on the brains of hardworking geeks everywhere and shine a light of dewy awareness into their circuits. I want to bring joy into the spotlight, and encourage a direct connection with it.

I am so happy! I feel at one with my purpose in life. I feel urgent and calm all at once – full of faith that it will all unfold, and excitement to be part of the unfolding. I am imagining dog tags that say “enjoy JOY”. I am sloughing off any remaining tiredness, pessimism, cynicism, and bitterness and embracing the future. It’s awesome.

I am reminding myself daily that I don’t have to know what I am to do next, or how it should all unfold, I just need to walk forward and show up for the ride. I just need to do my best and learn as best I can and be as real as I can.

I worry that my intense glee for life will get in the way of my message. That people will mistake it for some kind of savant-denial-of-reality-Pollyanna thing. Sometimes I just want to roll around on the floor and giggle with the sheer enormous beauty of the world. That doesn’t mean I don’t get all the pain. It means I don’t want to live there. I’ve found a way to live without self-torture, without self-mutilation, and it does last. It is real. So maybe I am a little high.

My secret message is to stop hating yourself. It’s pretty simple. Loving yourself, no matter what, and being your own best friend, the bestest friend you could ever imagine for yourself, the one you wanted your parents to be, or your lover – you do that for yourself, and you get happy. Because you have your own back. You know you will not blame yourself even when you make mistakes. You know you will let yourself feel OK even when things go wrong. You know you will no longer punish yourself for anything, because you are your own friend and you know you are innocent. You know you will find the best way you know how to be and you know you are good. And you really believe it, because you’ve made friends with yourself. It’s not something you are lying to yourself about–it’s something that’s finally true. You’re OK with you. That’s why I’m happy. Because I’m OK with myself. It’s not something anyone can give you. But it’s something you can do. And it’s awesome.

And then I want to say but first, you’ve got to be someone you can really trust. You’ve got to know how to go for what you want, and keep promises to yourself. You’ve got to say yes to your heart, because when you don’t, you break your own heart. And you’ll never trust yourself if you do that. Loving yourself starts with being someone you trust, inside yourself. You can love someone you don’t trust, but you can’t really be close to them. And you want to be close to yourself. You want to whole. You want to be undivided.

See this joyrant, do I publish it other than here? I’m still figuring that out. What is my voice? There is power in the rant. But I worry about its reception. But does it matter? Blogs are experimental. Risks, you’ve got to take risks. Fuck it I will.

Today’s Words:
abyss
idiot
indentured
swaddling clothes
natty
gusto
puerile

I feel like starry-eyed like the purveyer of a new revolution. It’s Web 2.0, man! It’s open source culture! Dig it! I’m writing notes everywhere, trying to figure out my thoughts. I’m reading articles about the rise of Barak Obama and Web 2.0 sensibilities. I’m finding the cool kids and plotting my strategy to be one of them. I feel like I’m in swaddling clothes still though, so much to learn. But I’m hacking away with gusto. The future is here, and I want to be part of it.

Meanwhile, I want to make wordlush better. We’re getting a lot of new users signing up from stumble upon traffic. This is my first community project and I’m excited to learn. How can I give it what it needs to grow, to thrive?  How can I help people feel at ease to jump in and write? What would help? Perhaps more writing prompts and ideas. More tools to facilitate interaction? Actually, I even need to understand what to expect–what is a good ratio of people-who-sign-up to people-who-participate?

Hmm, “puerile” so doesn’t mean what I thought it meant. I think I was confusing it with “putrid”.

Today’s Words:
confess
dreary
maker
sketchy
gutter press
bystander
swagger

I am much taken lately with Twitter. Every day I get much pleasure out of spitting little blurts about my daily goings-on. It’s like having a portable confessional. Meanwhile I also get to follow my friends blurts. Many of which are comments on other frineds, who I then also can follow. It makes an otherwise dreary day full of amusing links, news I actually care about (not gutter press), and online socializing. It’s like working in an office. An office full of really hip, geeky, fun, interesting people. And I’m not just a bystander, wishing I was cool enough to be in the cool conversation.

It makes me want to start a blog about online culture, openness and transparency and authenticity, about freedom of information, and about how the accessibility revolution is the newest cultural shift and how it will impact everything. Accessible in terms of easy-to-use and easy-to-grok, but also freely-available and open-to-everyone. Low-cost, open-source, it’s all happening. The world is changing and the forefront of culture is here, on the internet. The next revolution won’t be televised, it will be podcast. But not just podcast – blogged, tweeted, emailed, YouTubed–there are so many channels and they are all free or very low cost to enter. Every cheap digital camera has a video camera built in. Quality still matters, but ideas matter more some times.

Which is why I think it’s so important to learn how to cultivate your own creativity. This brave new world revolves around ideas, around pure creative output. Can you do something new? Interesting? Funny? We’ve seen funny cat pictures, but can you take it one step further?

How do ideas get created? They don’t. Brilliant ideas come through us, not from us, and therefore we need to keep the channels clear. Open up wide, and flush out the cruft. Picture yourself as a hose, and the energy is pouring through you out onto the page. Are you a firehose? Or one of those lame coffee straws that you can barely suck air through? Either way, keep writing. Keep creating. That’s how it happens. And keep telling yourself I am meant to create. I am a creative being, and this is what I do…I allow brilliance to manifest through me. Shine, shine, shine. Yee-haw!!