Category Archives: Random

a moment in the movie Ice Age, I believe, when one of the character is facing impending doom but gets distracted by a squirrel as it passes–these posts represent the best of my tangential magpie-ness…

Language of the Birds

The Kid Needed a Prom Dress

Chloe (daughter) and I set aside time today to go prom dress shopping. Her dad (my ex) has douche tendencies when it comes to money and pulled a typical shaming message about financial responsibility right before we were set to leave to buy a dress for prom. She’s a 4.0 student athlete whose AP research project is about financial literacy. Total dick dad move.

As we were getting ready to leave, I pulled the Seeker’s Lenormand. I told her I work with the kinds of energies that created the world, the Vastness of the Ocean, the Expansiveness of Air, the Connection to all Things and wondered what she thought about bringing the search for the dress to them and getting an assist. She was down with it.

We took some time to clarify what she was looking for: wanted to feel sexy but not vulnerable; surprisingly well-priced; easy and fun to find; overall great experience; absolutely find it today in the couple of hours we had alloted. We made the appeal. Then I told her to pick the very first card her eye was drawn to and fanned out the deck.

I asked her what came to mind with the card: what did she notice?

She noticed that the bottom half was one piece and the top half was energetic and less structured. She’s a Gemini and she made the connection with the bird’s two heads. Bird in flight, able to move freely (important for a dance). She said she was really drawn to the head.

Then we went shopping.

She picked a couple dresses in a couple sizes, liked them all but wasn’t in love. She pointed to one she’d brought in that she hadn’t been able to figure out – turns out the top was confusing to her and she needed some help figuring out where all the straps went. Plus it felt like it had been a size too small.

The lovely sales lady offered to get her a size up and I helped her figure out where all the body parts went. Her whole face lit up when she saw herself!

So the bottom was one piece, fitted but designed to be able to provide free movement. The top was a strappy affair with about four different strings for hanging and keeping it all together. Totally covers the “chesticles” with a high front, but is strappy in the back where it’s fun and less revealing. She loved the way she looked, the sales lady was awesome, the experience was fantastic, it was the fourth dress she tried on, and it was just over 50% of her budget. We were out in just over an hour.

When we got to the car she told me she’d just picked the dress because she thought it looked fun but that she didn’t think it would be the one she got.

Then in the parking lot, we started comparing the dress to The Bird, and she was absolutely blown away! “The current’s always there, Babe. You just have to plug in.”

On the way home we talked about how ‘sure you can work work work hard for what you want, but it sure is fun to tap into the magic behind all the things and feel like a collaborator in creating what you want.’ (Object lesson for Mom too)

We looked at The Bird card again once we got home. I pointed at the birds’ heads, and she just laughed. A velvet burgundy, just like her dress.

What a fucking glorious day! Thanks, Others, for taking care of my girl!

Thank Goodness for the Goddamn Mirror Principle

In the following blog, I talk about energy work which may tweak some people out and rape which is contextual but may be a trigger for some. I’m not asking you to believe in the modality – I am using it to illustrate a more aerial principle. I am also not advocating that we do not hold perpetrators responsible for crimes. I am addressing the energetic impressions that impact our collective conscious when breaches in humanity occur and how to make long term personal peace with them. 

Dove in flight

I was in an energy modality training recently, and we were working through some energetic clearing. The story we were working on involved a priestess who had been raped by a priest, resulting in a pregnancy. The energy that was blocking the person in question and needed to be cleared was that the was influencing the soul of the yet-unborn baby from the mother who was in this situation. As the story was unfolding, I had a visceral reaction to the priest in the story. I literally wanted to stand up and strangle him and call him names that started with and ‘F’ and ended with an ‘ucker.’ And granted I couldn’t do that because it was just the name ‘priest’ written on a white board. It was bizarre to me how visceral this reaction was because the story wasn’t mine – it belonged to someone else.

I told the instructor, “I am having a serious reaction to that character. I am in massive judgment, and I want to strangle him. This makes no sense as it is a word written on a white board.” She asked me to check in and see if energy in me had some connection to that particular priest. No. Then she asked me if I had been a similar character in my past. Yes.

Whaaaaaat?

“When we run into roles that we have played in past lives and we hold residual shame or self-hate for the roles that we had in hurting people, we often have strong reactions,” she explained.

It was time for lunch.

After lunch we returned and the patriarchy came up. While I like the idea of actual mature, whole men very much, I am not a fan of the patriarchy. It represents to me the power-over dynamic that controls people through financial and emotional means. It exploits our planet for the sake of profit. It shames the poor and blames them for their poverty. It trains the masses to be passive and compliant. It defines bold, direct, powerful, and sexually expressive women as hags, sluts, dikes, and bitches. It likes submission. It colonizes, appropriates, inflicts, and consumes.

Not a fan.

After lunch the patriarchy came up. Again I had a visceral response. “There it goes again. Not a big fan of the patriarchy,” I said.

“This work teaches us to not be in judgment because it is likely that in past experience, you have been a part of perpetrating the patriarchy,” she explained. “Remember the goal is to acknowledge, research what needs to be released, and release it. No judgment. Just find out what allows it to hold on and ask Spirit to clear the energy behind it.”

Dammit.

Holding on to the energy of feeling righteously indignant feels so much more satisfying than offering up broken pieces of our experience up to the light for clearing and release. But only at the ego level, it turns out.

The drama of righteous indignation fuels gossip and chat groups, clicks, and factions. Us vs Them. Tension. Accusation. Hatred. Hierarchies. Regulations. Scarcity. Fear.

When we operate, instead, from the belief that the discordant energetic underpinnings of any challenge can be cleared, educated, and released to their perfect origin of unconditional love, we are left with a quandry: what to do with all the possibility and open runway?

It turns out we often derive benefit from our judgment and our very own blocks:

  • With judgment, we can identify ourselves – but against ‘other’ instead of ‘as part of’
  • With victim thinking, we can escape responsibility and blame – at the expense of maintaining personal sovereignty and power
  • With hatred, we can cloak the vulnerable feelings of existential separation we feel – while causing more separation
  • With indignation, we can feel righteous – but be robbed of joy and peace

It’s expensive, holding negative power in our bodies and thoughts in order to fill these shadow needs that our tender egos insist we fill. Instead of using those visceral reactions we have to people and circumstances to trigger shadow reactions, we can use them to self-reflect.

This is how the process looks, before and after.

positive and negative reactions to triggering events
 

I am reminded of a modified version of the fake Buddha quote, “Unforgiveness is like drinking poison and hoping the other person dies.” It just doesn’t work like that. We die instead.

What if our hatred of other people is really just a reflection in the mirror about what we need to be able to forgive within ourselves? What if the biggest offense we need to forgive is the harshness that he hold against ourselves as it we see it manifest outside of us? What if we looked at points of tension as sacred gifts of insight that could guide our active participation in making the world a better place?

We might find ourselves happy. Aligned. Filled with joy and creative energy.









Connections

collective consciousness
Flickr user charles.bukowsky, Creative Commons 2.0 license

I will commune with the sum
of conscious humanity.

Born, gone, yet to be

To share our truths and learnings.
To dance about our differences
and celebrate our failures.

It is these that spur us to take the journey.

I will throw all ego to flame
and as its curly edges turn to wispy ash,
collect it and rebirth it
as hope
and contentment
and service
and play.

I will watch sound re-create,
colors align,
scents evoke forgotten knowings,
the taste of belongingness.

…the Earth and her stones, our plants
the bodies in heaven,
the flame, the sea, the air, the crust,
hold their space.

Through these, tethering us to what is.

All that we are
and hope to become again
or finally:

Healed, celebratory –
generational threads of all knowing,
connected in love.









The Sweet Spot

Not THAT sweet spot. The one where I am in a state of extreme gratitude for having lost everything. And when I say everything, I don’t mean a kid. I mean everything but a kid. And I don’t mean everything either in the sense of having to live outside.

Enough disclaimer: Here’s a list of what I’ve lost and lessons I’ve learned. There will be more perspective as time passes, but in terms of today’s gutcheck we have:

MARRIAGE: I miss the social acceptability of marriage but I like who I am on my own, my new friends, and I have a feel for what is important to me if I choose to share the journey with someone at that level.

HOUSING: From big house in the country to a one-bedroom apartment with three kids. Appreciate having lived in Japan where small is just the deal. I’m not defined by my stuff (stay away from my books, or I’ll eat your head) and I like setting up new spaces and new beginnings. My home is where my kids live with me.

STATUS: Separating my worth and identity from how much money I make or what position I have has left me bruised, bloodied, and gasping for air. How do I do a fix up project without my staff, my fleet, and my warehouse? But I depend on people more because I have to and this is putting a chink in my pathological independence. Still not comfortable, but I value my friends more — and have more compassion. The delusion that my resources define my worth will be a nice one to let go. Choices are vital to me. I will trade the uncertainty of creating my own way to have more autonomy.

FAITH COMMUNITY: Trading ‘neatly defined’ and ‘following expectations’ for living with freedom and abundance. I don’t like judgers and people who know what I should be doing in this new paradigm. I’m choosing a more creative path, and it makes people uncomfortable. I’m okay with that. My new tribe rocks. The intangible wealth that comes from struggle is largely under-rated. Permission to remind me of that if I start whining again.

Something inside me has changed. I passed the Mid Point on the ‘Life is Like That’ Continuum:

*———————————————-*——————————————————————–*

                        Life sucks, and I’m a victim                                   Life is full of amazing opportunities, and I Co-Create

 

Something I sincerely dig about myself is that some deeper intuitive part of me seems to make decisions for me that I know are in my best interest even when they don’t make sense to the fretful mask of me (quitting my job, trusting that I will make my way with writing). I’m going to honor that better part of me and start trusting her. She hasn’t led me astray, yet there are countless times that my fear and need-to-be-a-victim have sabotaged our forward motion. Just getting out of the way.

Having a text conversation with a good friend as I write this. “The whole thing of itemizing what used to be will forever prevent enjoying what you have now,” he writes. BINGO! He is a good friend.

Don’t think I would feel this alive if I hadn’t shaken it all up.  What I have now is pretty fucking fantastic. Take that, Dragon!

 









Hero training has never been sunshine and butterflies: biblical archtypes that still resonate

Geo-politics aside, the story of the Exodus is a brilliant archetype about our journey as humans. As spiritual beings.

What’s not to love about a breeding cat-fight between two women and their respective hand-maids? The resulting twelve brothers, sons of the iconic Jacob (Ya’acov) / Israel, sell the favored eleventh into slavery. A series of political misadventures and supernatural intrigues compel him along the plot line from disfavored prisoner to Vice Regent of all that is Food for Egypt, Inc, the biggest nation on the block in its day. Worldwide famine hits; band of duplicitous brothers schlep to BFE to find food. Disrespected though once-again-favored bother reveals himself much to their shock. Hugs all around, loads of forgiveness and tadah, the Israelites find themselves safely protected and fed in Egypt. After all, one of their own had effected the largest transfer of wealth into the Kingdom which had ever been known. (Turns out the ability to foretell the future coupled with food supply logistics is a sound combo.) You have just met Joseph / Yosef — the guy with the ‘colorful’ cloak.

The Israelites prosper in Egypt, stout breeders though they are.

Four hundred years later, a new Pharaoh is in power. The Israelites are hearty and prolific. Pharaoh 2.0 fears a coup and institutes a power grab. In a ploy to knock the snot out of their collective will, he subjects the Israelite nation to slavery. Pharaoh 2.0 mandates the murder of all Israelite boys, two and under. From favored status to brutal slavery in four centuries. One baby’s mom is unable to follow the directive: rather than hand her son over to those who will murder him, she seals him in a woven, reed basket and launches him downriver in a current of hope and sacrifice. Better the unknown than certain death.

Sometimes our best option is the least icky of two choices.

The next bit is a twist I particularly love. The baby’s sister follows along the bank as her baby brother floats downriver. The floating package is retrieved by, of all people, Pharaoh 2.0’s daughter. When he is retrieved, the girl hollers across to the Princess that she knows a woman who would be able to suckle the child. Thus it is that the Israelite boy is raised as an Egyptian right under Poopyhead-Pharaoh’s nose by his own mother. (I’ve often wondered how much she revealed to him about who he was.)

By all appearances, he is Egyptian. The boy learns the ways of the kingdom–he is, after all, a son of the Pharaoh. During a critical management training, the now man sees one of the Israelite slaves brutally beaten. Without thought, he lashes out, killing the abuser. Fearing he will be found out for being a sympathizer, he escapes to the desert, marries, and learns the ways of the herds. After 40 years, he is instructed to return and be his people’s redeemer. By a burning bush. He is reluctant. He likes his peaceful life. And that would be Moses / Moshe.

Whatever your view on the Biblical narrative, these characters paths’ provide great insight on for those wanting to travel the road to great impact. Through geo-political circumstances beyond their control, they spent long seasons of waiting in deserts and jail cells; they lived among foreigners instead their own tribes; they were conflicted about their tribal loyalties; yet because they were showed up everyday and did what was in front of them despite the vagaries of life, their meteoric  status-changes gave them power to dynamically benefit the people they cared most about.

Joseph was betrayed by his family and sold as a slave to a band of traveling foreigners. He ended up second in command in the largest nation in the world. Moses was sent downriver by his mom to avoid having to hand him over to the Pharaoh’s assassins. He was raised in the very household of the man who tried to destroy his entire bloodline. He delivered a nation of slaves out from under its oppressors. (Estimates are 600,000 men, plus women and children. No US aid convoys).

You have a call for greatness and impact. It sounds arrogant, but it’s true. It shouldn’t. We are amazing creatures with the capacity for big things. We won’t all follow our real soul paths. It is hard. But inside each of us is a mom who will choose the unknown over our children’s deaths; each of us is a sister who will approach a Princess to see our brother is cared for; each of us does stints in the enemy’s house to get the skills and connections we need; and each of us has seasons of wondering ‘how the hell am I going to get there from here?’

I’m not advocating that we settle for lessons learned only from suffering and trials, isolation and doubts. But I am encouraging all of us to remember that until we are ready to embrace our charges and start walking steadily toward them, our difficulties are what forge our character, get us emotionally vested. For that is the backbone on which our impact will build.

Without our own buy in, we cannot step on the path of greatness and impact. And until we learn to deal with the weirdness that comes our way, we can never become great.

 









Releasing the Kung Fu Death Grip on Your Motivation

Forget trying to figure out why you feel stuck. You just do. Welcome to the human race. Feeling stuck is a signal that we are facing some consequential changes. When we don’t feel ready for those changes — when we aren’t to the point of clarity from which action comes, we enter into a state of stuck.

The more you resist being stuck, the more stuck you get. Think monkey’s hand in the bell jar. Rather than magnify the self-loathing because you feel stuck, try this: “Hey, I’m stuck. I don’t like this feeling, but it isn’t going to kill me. This is part of the experience. I don’t have to figure it today. I’m just going to floss.”

Unsticking from a long term state of stuck takes time, gentleness, and soul-searching. In the meantime, here are 15 simple tasks you do that will break inertia’s Kung Fu death grip on your motivation.

1) Floss. Get the kind that doesn’t fray between your teeth. That would stop anyone in their tracks. Then brush. A clean, minty mouth never stopped anyone from greatness. Resist plucking chin whiskers — you can lose days here. Buy some Nair.

2) Mercilessly show that bitch, Junk Mail, who’s boss.

3) Spend an hour making a racous playlist for the gym. You have good music. It brings back good memories. And you’ll need some good playlists for the gym.

4) Go to the gym. Promise yourself you only have to walk, flat, at 2 MPH for 20 minutes and then you can leave. If you leave after 20 minutes, you get a hard man point. If you stay longer, you can add bragging rights. Just because you did more than the goal today doesn’t make you a failure if you just hit the goal tomorrow. And if you don’t make it to the gym tomorrow do the following.

5) Do ten girlie push ups. Or frog squats. Or plank for 30 seconds. Add two a day. Or five seconds a day. Feel empowered:  this baby step is activating your muscles.

6) Clean off your night stand. Dust it. Five minutes tops. You only get to keep two books on it.

7) Set the time for twenty minutes and organize your book shelf. This will remind you that you are freaking smart and you have interests and areas of competency. Also: BOOKS! Pick one to read by the end of the week. Turn off the TV and do it. Bonus points if it’s a book that makes you feel expansive. You are hereby forbidden to compare yourself with the success of the author in any way.

8) Wrangle your laundry. And by wrangle I don’t mean get it all done, I mean separate clean from dirty. If you feel like taking the next step here, pull out the clean towels. Fold them and put them away. Call that good. Feel virtuous. Might as well through a load of dirties in while you’re there. Moldy laundry in the washer? Easy. Load it up with water, more soap, and toss a cup of vinegar in. You don’t have to do every load of laundry on planet earth into eternity future. Just this one load.

9) Hydrate. Drink a real glass of water. Try this every hour or two. While you’re there, offer to get a glass for someone else too.

10) Do something small and unexpected for your neighbor. Even if he’s an ass. Offer to pick up something from the store. Go to the store. Buy the Nair and three postcards that make you feel happy and whatever your neighbor asked you to pick up. (Ideally you should get dressed for this. If your pants don’t fit anymore, feel okay about sweats. Hey, you’re vertical!)

11) Call an old friend. “I’ve been stuck in my head. I miss you. How are you?”

12) Make a clemency list: all the things you feel guilty about having not done. Feel okay about writing it. It’s just a list. Assign yourself five points for bravery.

13) Buy three post cards. Write brief thank you’s to three people that helped you or inspired you this week. Send the post cards. Expect nothing in reply.

14) Think about the person who really ticks you off and come up with one way he or she has helped you. Did he reflect something to you about yourself that may not have been uncovered without his poking; did she piss you off to the point that you were willing to leave an abusive environment even if it was earlier than you were prepared for? Do you need to rearrange the power of the relationship so that it is more equitable? Just ask the questions. you don’t have to have answers right away.

15) Without the need to answer the question, ask yourself: am I genuinely stuck or do I feel stuck? Let that rattle around in your head for awhile. As all the ideas come up, don’t judge them and don’t give them the power to condemn you. Just notice their insights.

Pick two or three of these to do each day.

Let me know how it goes.

 

 

 

 









Professional Manifesto & When She Realized She Thinks She’s Robin Hood

I trust my heart in making decisions.

I work with likeable, competent, collaborative people.

I confront verbal abuse with, “What did you just say?”

I develop opinions of all people based on how they treat others.

I represent me in all of my dealings, and I do so consistently.

I value self-respect and soul purpose over profit and security.

I learn from the flow and the challenges, and I treat them both the with respect.

I reject blame, confusion, mind-reading, defining, controlling, arrogance and judgment. Mean people suck, and I won’t waste my skills supporting them.

I use my influence and skills to support the people and things that I believe in.

I admit mistakes, am gentle with myself while I am learning, and I strive to become more competent in areas that represent my strengths and giftings.

I contribute where my talents are recognized and valued.

I express my known’s with confidence and ease.

I don’t try to be what I’m not.

I demonstrate my character by living in alignment with these  principles.