Changing Places

Sadly, this young boy is a friend of our sons….

We are heartbroken for John’s wife Deb and their family today…. there are no words….

SignOnSanDiego.com > News > Metro — Man dies on first certified dive

The body of a 45-year-old diver was found yesterday afternoon after a five-hour search off La Jolla Shores.

John Sonsteng, of Poway, and his 19-year-old son were diving for the first time after receiving their certification at a depth of about 150 feet at 9 a.m. when Sonsteng ran out of air, San Diego lifeguard Lt. John Greenhalgh said.

Search teams from the U.S. Coast Guard and lifeguard agencies around the county scoured the sea for hours before finding Sonsteng using a remote-controlled underwater vehicle about 2:30 p.m.

When Sonsteng ran out of air, the two began “buddy breathing,” sharing the air supply from the son’s tank as they tried to ascend to the surface, but they became separated.

The son told authorities that he continued to ascend, but he too ran out of air at about 40 feet below the surface, Greenhalgh said.

When he surfaced in front of the La Jolla Shores lifeguard station, about a quarter of a mile out to sea, he began waving his arms and caught the attention of a lifeguard.

The teen was taken to UCSD Medical Center in Hillcrest as a precautionary measure because of his rapid ascent. He was listed in “stable but guarded condition” yesterday, a nursing supervisor said. It was unclear whether he was suffering from decompression sickness, in which gas bubbles form in the bloodstream.

Rescuers launched an immediate search with dive teams, a helicopter and boats, but by 10 a.m. the mission was reclassified as a recovery effort, Greenhalgh said. Divers from the Coast Guard and other agencies later responded to aid in the search.

Dive instructor Todd Young, with Aqua Tech Dive Center, said his group of student divers had just completed their first dive when lifeguards ordered all divers in the area out of the water.

Young said novice recreational divers are taught not to exceed a depth of 60 feet unless they have more advanced training. Divers who breathe high-pressure gas at extreme depths can begin to feel as though they are drunk and judgment can be seriously impaired.

“We preach that you should always be watching your gauges and compass,” Young said.

In the morning! In August! In San Diego! Weird… and it won’t last long…but nice.

Ah. Apparently this is partly the influence of tropical storm Julio drawing in moisture. Things could get interesting later in the week as this gets closer…

Remember…

Been there, done that…. scattered my parents’ ashes off Kauai four years ago….

ABC News’ Sunlen Miller reports: On his last day of vacation, Senator Barack Obama paid tribute to his mother, who passed away in 1995 from ovarian cancer.

Along the scenic overlook on the South Shore of Oahu – Obama visited the exact spot where he scattered his mother’s ashes after her death.

Obama stood quietly for a moment, then sprinkled the flowers from a lei a few times into the ocean, as some rough surf crashed up to where he was standing. The Senator was accompanied by his childhood friend, Bobby Titcomb who he grew up with on the island.

Obama has said that his most cherished possession is a photograph of the spot where her ashes were scattered.

On his week long vacation to the island – Obama also visited his grandfather’s grave in Punchbowl Cemetery – a WW II veteran who fought in Patton’s Army. Obama brought his wife, Michelle and his two daughters Malia and Sasha to lay a flower lei at his grave.

No One But Us
by Annie Dillard

There is no one but us.
There is no one to send,
Nor a clean hand,
Nor a pure heart
On the face of the earth,
Nor in the earth
But only us,
A generation comforting ourselves
With the notion
That we have come at an awkward time,
That our innocent fathers are all dead –
As if innocence has ever been –
And our children busy and troubled,
And we ourselves unfit, not yet ready,
Having each of us chosen wrongly,
Made a false start, failed,
Yielded to impulse
And the tangled comfort of pleasures,
And grown exhausted,
Unable to seek the thread,
Weak, and involved.
But there is no one but us.
There never has been.

From the book Holy the Firm by Annie Dillard

I don’t think Dubya is in any position to compare anyone to Nazi appeasers.

How Bush’s grandfather helped Hitler’s rise to power | World news | The Guardian

George Bush’s grandfather, the late US senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany.

The Guardian has obtained confirmation from newly discovered files in the US National Archives that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism.

His business dealings, which continued until his company’s assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, has led more than 60 years later to a civil action for damages being brought in Germany against the Bush family by two former slave labourers at Auschwitz and to a hum of pre-election controversy.

The evidence has also prompted one former US Nazi war crimes prosecutor to argue that the late senator’s action should have been grounds for prosecution for giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

Nice thoughts on creating life versus getting stuff from Christine Kane.

Creating vs. Getting | Christine Kane

The laws of creativity apply to everything - not just to works of art.

The gift of practicing art is that it teaches the creator how to create, and how to be a creator. Over and over again, the artist learns the process of making things - including the obstacles that arise, the futility of forcing the flow, and the joy of allowing inspiration. This practice has been nothing less than revolutionary in my own life.

That’s because I grew up learning more about Getting than I did about Creating. And I’m not alone in that. Most of the life lessons we’ve all learned are about Getting.

We gotta get rich, get approved, get things from people, get a job, get a life, get laid, get publicity, get someone to do something, get approval, get high, get married, get a loan, get good grades, get a clue, get into college, get up, get down, get out.

Get it?

Getting is an epidemic. It makes us grab at life. It takes us out of the present moment. It makes us powerless. It forces us to manipulate our own spirits so that we can manipulate the situation. Getting requires that we use our precious creative power to get, rather than to use it for its primary purpose, which is to Create. When we misuse this power, we become contorted. We block the flow. The focus is on “out there” rather than “in here.”

When we become Creators, we turn the whole thing around. Everything becomes an inside job. We experience true power. We create our lives.

Change and risk-taking are normal aspects of the creative process. They are the lubricants that keep the wheels in motion. A creative act is not necessarily something that has never been done; it is something you haven’t done before. — Margaret Mead

“The creative process is a process of surrender, not control.”
– Julia Cameron

“We are the yin and the yang of the creative process.”
– Cynthia Weil

“Imitation is at least 50 percent of the creative process”
– Jamie Buckingham

“Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous.”
– Bill Moyers

“Of all the qualities in your being, that which is most god-like is creativity” - Pir Ilayat Vilayat Khan

“It moves me when anybody is just wandering through life, sleepwalking, and then wakes up. It’s like the caterpillar to butterfly thing - the chrysalis. It’s just so moving because they’re not going to go to their grave with a slipping down life.” — Lili Taylor

I dreamed I was a butterfly, flitting around in the sky; then I awoke. Now I wonder: Am I a man who dreamt of being a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming that I am a man?” — Chuang Tzu

“I embrace emerging experience.
I participate in discovery.
I am a butterfly.
I am not a butterfly collector.
I want the experience of the butterfly.”

— William Stafford

“The butterfly’s attractiveness derives not only from colors and symmetry: deeper motives contribute to it. We would not think them so beautiful if they did not fly, or if they flew straight and briskly like bees, or if they stung, or above all if they did not enact the perturbing mystery of metamorphosis: the latter assumes in our eyes the value of a badly decoded message, a symbol, a sign.”
– Primo Levi

I’ve always been fascinated with the process of change. I remember as a kid doing things like letting berries ferment in water, literally turning water into wine. I didn’t drink it, just enjoyed the process of it and the smell. I would bury things in the yard to see what happened to them, play with the moss that grew in the fountain. I was fascinated by things like my dad’s compost pile, seeing yard clippings change into fertilizer. I loved it when ice formed in the fountain and I could take it out in big sheets. I love watching the changes in my garden, watching plants grow, seeing the little chrysalis form when the caterpillars who munch holes in my passion flowers are ready to change to gulf fritillaries.

I suppose I come to the creative process the same way. I’m not too worried about the results, I just enjoy trying different techniques and materials and playing around with them to see what happens. I admire and appreciate artists who aren’t afraid to do something different, and I think that is ultimately why we consider an artist great - because they create their own unique approach. I was trying to show a friend why I love impressionistic art the other day, with the bright colors and the way the impressionist uses dark and light color contrasts to create movement in a painting. He seemed surprised I knew so much about art. But I would say I know about the art I enjoy, and try to figure out why I enjoy it. My husband is a fabulous art critic, something I didn’t know until I started asking him what he thought about my art. He always mentions something I didn’t even consciously realize I was doing, which is great.

So change and art go together naturally for me. But the risk to show myself through my art - ah, now there is the challenge…

from Wikipedia:

Mudita is a Buddhist (Pali and Sanskrit) word meaning rejoicing in others’ good fortune. Mudita is sometimes considered to be the opposite of schadenfreude.

The term mudita is usually translated as “sympathetic” or “altruistic” joy, the pleasure that comes from delighting in other people’s well-being rather than begrudging it. Many Buddhist teachers interpret mudita more broadly as referring to an inner spring of infinite joy that is available to everyone at all times, regardless of circumstances. The more deeply one drinks of this spring, the more secure one becomes in one’s own abundant happiness, and the easier it then becomes to relish the joy of other people as well.

The traditional example of the mind-state of mudita is the attitude of a parent observing a growing child’s accomplishments and successes.

Mudita is also traditionally regarded as the most difficult of the brahmaviharas to cultivate. To show mudita is to celebrate happiness and achievement in others even when we are facing tragedy ourselves.

The “far enemies” of mudita are jealousy and envy, two mind-states in obvious opposition. Mudita’s “near enemy,” or quality which superficially resembles mudita but is in fact more subtly in opposition to it, is exhilaration, perceived as a grasping at pleasant experience out of a sense of insufficiency or lack.

Somehow, I am still working on this one. I received some excellent news from a friend this week, and it was a bit hard to just be happy for him. He’s one of those friends who has cut me off to a great extent, though not as completely as others, and sometimes I simply miss those people very much. The saddest part of bipolar is that people are often so unforgiving of things that happened during a manic time, in a way that is hurtful. And even when they do forgive, the closeness that was there is lost and can’t be recovered.

Still, I am happy for my friend and wish him all the best. He has all that I ever wished for him and all that I tried to show him how to attain - so I should simply be pleased with that. But intentions are often misunderstood, especially when they are expressed by someone in a hypomanic state, as I’m sure anyone who has dealt with bipolar disorder knows all too well. Even those fun shopping sprees can have repercussions we don’t expect later on. It’s good to not be in that state anymore!

So while I don’t work to “just be normal” anymore, now I think I work beyond that even, to try to come to a place where I can be glad even for those who do not wish me well. And finding joy even for those who cannot let me be a part of their lives is a difficult, but necessary, step for me.

But not today!

It was a beautiful day for riding ponies at Happy Trails in Los Penasquitos Canyon Preserve. My pony Thumper (a beautiful buckskin with a stunning highlight job - she claims it is natural) was not interested in going fast, so we had a leisurely paced ride through some gorgeous oaks and chaparral.

Too bad I’m no longer as cute as when I was little. Still love to ride, though!

“Trickster is a boundary-crosser. Every group has its edge, its sense of in and out, and trickster is always there, at the gates of the city and the gates of life, making sure there is commerce. He also attends the internal boundaries by which groups articulate their social life. We constantly distinguish — right and wrong, sacred and profane, clean and dirty, male and female, young and old, living and dead — and in every case trickster will cross the line and confuse the distinction. Trickster is the creative idiot, therefore, the wise fool, the grey-haired baby, the crossdresser, the speaker of sacred profanities. Where someone’s sense of honorable behavior has left him unable to act, trickster will appear to suggest an amoral action, something right/wrong that will get life going again. ztrickster is the mythic embodiment of ambiguity and ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and paradox.

That trickster is a boundary-crosser is the standard line… there are also cases in which trickster creates a boundary, or brings to the surface a distinction previously hidden from sight. In several mythologies, for example, the gods lived on earth until something trickster did caused them to rise into heaven. Trickster is thus the author of the great distance between heaven and earth; when he becomes the messenger of the gods it’s as if he has been enlisted to solve a problem he himself created. In a case like that, boundary creation and boundary crossing are related to one another, and the best way to describe trickster is to say simply that the boundary is where he will be found — sometimes drawing the line, sometimes crossing it, sometimes erasing or moving it, but always there, the god of the threshold in all its forms.” — Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World

I wonder how many of the boundaries we face are really the creation of Trickster. I find myself looking at the times I have crossed known boundaries and found myself entangled in a mess, but gained from it so profoundly. Perhaps Trickster does create our world, our thoughts, our illusions of separation from others. I’ve learned to respect the boundaries others create and observe them, but I am always questioning my own, wondering if they are something I still need or is it time to erase them, change the lines, move them around a little or get rid of them completely.

I guess I’ve absorbed enough of the Trickster to keep my personal growth constantly moving, and now find myself pressing once again on the boundaries around me. And I wonder where Trickster will next show up in my own life….

In my backyard today…..

You know who you are…. happy birthday!

Love’s End

Though many years have passed since last we met,
Thoughts of thee can make me smile most gladly;
While parting left us echoes of regret,
Golden haze lights love that ended badly.
Time cannot change true feelings of the past,
Nor distance dim the brightest fire’s glow;
Yet love doth change and is not meant to last,
And lovers minds cannot the future know.
There lives a part of me inside of thee,
And part of thee resides within my breast;
The better part of us remains most free,
To love another, better-suited guest.
I would not change what passed between our hearts,
But love is ended when the lover parts.

Diamond Girl
(Lyrics by James Seals; music by James Seals & Dash Crofts, 1973)

Diamond Girl, you sure do shine. Glad I found you, glad you’re mine.
Oh my love, you’re like a precious stone, part of earth where heaven has rained on.
Makes no difference where you are. Day or nighttime, you’re like a shinin’ star.
And how could I shine without you, when it’s about you that I am?

Diamond Girl, roamin’ wild. Such a rare thing, radiant child.
I could never find, another one like you. Part of me is deep down inside you.
Can’t you feel the whole world a-turnin’. We are real, and we are a-burnin’.
Diamond Girl, now that I’ve found you, it’s about you that I am.

Diamond Girl, you sure do shine. Diamond Girl, you sure do shine.
Diamond Girl, you sure do shine. Diamond Girl, you sure do shine…

We May Never Pass This Way (Again)
(Lyrics by James Seals; music by James Seals & Dash Crofts, 1973)

Life, so they say, is but a game and we let it slip away.
Love, like the Autumn sun, should be dyin’ but it’s only just begun.
Like the twilight in the road up ahead, they don’t see just where we’re goin’.
And all the secrets in the Universe, whisper in our ears
And all the years will come and go, take us up, always up.
We may never pass this way again. We may never pass this way again.
We may never pass this way again.

Dreams, so they say, are for the fools and they let ‘em drift away.
Peace, like the silent dove, should be flyin’ but it’s only just begun.
Like Columbus in the olden days, we must gather all our courage.
Sail our ships out on the open sea. Cast away our fears
And all the years will come and go, and take us up, always up.
We may never pass this way again…

So, I wanna laugh while the laughin’ is easy. I wanna cry if it makes it worthwhile.
We may never pass this way again, that’s why I want it with you.
‘Cause, you make me feel like I’m more than a friend. Like I’m the journey and you’re the journey’s end.
We may never pass this way again, that’s why I want it with you, baby…

This is one of my early Tao postings, from November 2004.

_______________________________________________________

Beginners acquire new theories and techniques until their minds are cluttered with options.

Advanced students forget their many options. They allow the theories and techniques that they have learned to recede into the background.

Learn to unclutter your mind. Learn to simplify your work.

As you rely less and less on knowing what to do, your work will become more direct and more powerful. You will discover that the quality of your consciousness is more potent than any technique or theory or interpretation.

Learn how fruitful the blocked group or individual suddenly becomes when you give up trying to do just the right thing.

Tao of Leadership

____

I think a lot of people are running around with cluttered minds these days. We worry about what to do about the direction the country has taken, we worry about how best to deal with personal situations in our lives, we worry about work, way too much. Perhaps the way to unclutter our minds is to stop worrying and start taking more direct action. Talk to the people around you, find out their real concerns and help them find some answers. Take your own problems and solve the ones you can, without worrying about whether you are creating the optimum solution. Get out of your head for a while and take a walk somewhere full of nature.

For me, my uncluttering spot is in my garden. I go outside and wander in the garden for a bit, and find myself feeling better about things. No matter what worries and concerns I have, they are small compared to a day full of sunshine and flowers and growing things. It helps living in San Diego where I can almost always count on a beautiful sunny day.

I think Americans really have a disease about getting things right, though. We want to live in the right house, drive the right car, send our kids to the right schools, live the right moral values. Yeah, sure we do. But how many people do you know who are simply happy with their lives? How many don’t worry about having enough money, even though we are among the richest people on the planet? Do you hear many people saying, “I have enough, I think I’ll just relax this year and not work too much?” No, we just go on with our disease, not realizing that if we stopped caring about having the right things and living the right way, our lives would be so much easier and better.

Perhaps that’s why I’ve come to focus on what is left. What’s left of my life, where I would like to go, what I would like to see, how I would like to live. Not what other people think is right, or even what I may think is right, but the things that are left out of most people’s lives. Beauty, simplicity, artful living instead of filling our houses with cheap crap. Time spent learning and growing instead of watching TV or spending yet another day working at jobs we hate to buy more stuff we don’t need. Why can’t America be about spreading fun and laughter instead of spreading war and trying to control everything? We have enough, people. Let’s learn to enjoy it, instead of wanting more. Unclutter our minds, our houses, our lives, and let’s learn to live again. Let’s share a new American dream - one about making life fulfilling again instead of filling our gas tanks, bellies, and houses full of crap.

Thank you for so much, Sir Clarke….

Arthur C. Clarke, 90; scientific visionary, acclaimed writer of ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ - Los Angeles Times

Sir Arthur C. Clarke, who peered into the heavens with a homemade telescope as a boy and grew up to become a visionary titan of science fiction best-known for collaborating with director Stanley Kubrick in writing the landmark film “2001: A Space Odyssey,” has died. He was 90.

The British-born Clarke, who lived in Colombo, Sri Lanka, for decades, died early today after experiencing breathing problems, an aide, Rohan De Silva, told the Associated Press.

Clarke, a former farm boy who was knighted for his contributions to literature, wrote more than 80 fiction and nonfiction books (some in collaboration) and more than 100 short stories — as well as hundreds of articles and essays.

Among his best-known science-fiction novels are “Childhood’s End,” “Rendezvous With Rama,” “Imperial Earth” and, most famously, “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

“It’s better to be recognized for one thing, especially something of which I’m quite proud, than not to be recognized at all,” Clarke told The Times in 1982.

Although he never intended to write a sequel to “2001,” he wrote three: “2010: Odyssey Two,” “2061: Odyssey Three” and “3001: The Final Odyssey.”

Clarke, who was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 1986, won innumerable international awards for his fiction and scientific writing.

“Natural objects — living things in particular — are like a language we can only faintly remember. It is as if creation had been dismembered sometime in the past and all things are limbs we have lost that will make us whole if we can only recall them…. the reception of objects reveals that the gifted self is a thing that breathes. Their entrance is itself the lesson. We are not sealed in clacium like the clam. Identity is neither “yours” nor “mine”, but comes of a communion with the world. “Ever atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”… Identity is specific, sexed, time-bound, mortal. It is drawn together and then dispersed. The self is more enduring… the self takes on identity through its reception of objects — be they perceived lilac leaves or the atoms of the physical body — and the self gives up identity as it abandons these objects. It is the process (the breathing) or the container (the lung) in which the process occurs. ”

“… there is a middle phase in the process of the gifted self: between sympathy and pride, between the reception and the bestowal, lies a moment in which new identity comes to life as old identity perishes…. Old identity breaks to receive the new. The new may simply replace the old or.. old identity may fuse with the outer object, a marriage, a new flesh…”

“The self that identifies with a cycle of gifts takes its own activity as its identity — not the reception of objects, not the bestowal of particular contents, but the entire process, the respiration, the give-and-take of sympathy and pride…”

“The self becomes gifted when it identifies with a commerce of gifts and the gifted self is prolific. In nature the Osiris-force is the resurrection of the wheat; in a commerce of gifts it is the increase; in the gifted self it is creativity, and for a poet, in particular, it is original speech.”

– Lewis Hyde, The Gift

I got to meet Gene Wilder tonight (briefly) signing his new book, “The Woman Who Wouldn’t”.

I told him “thank you”, and, “it was wonderful”, and he looked surprised, so I said “I read it in line”.

He looked at me surprised and a bit sad, and said, “The whole book?”

So I smiled and said, “Yes!” and “Thanks for everything”, and shook his hand and he squeezed mine. It was awesome.

My favorite passage from the book, the one that made me cry:

“I brushed away a fly that looked like it was about to land on Clara’s eyelid. What an angel face she has. I don’t want her to die. And I don’t want her to fall in love with me on the rebound from that asshole she was married to, or out of vulnerability because of her thoughts of death and cancer. I just want her to be happy, for as many weeks or months or days that she has. The pain is going to come later, Dr. Gross said. Well, watch over her, Jeremy. But I’ll be glad when I’m healthy enough to return to my work and my home, without responsibility for Clara’s happiness.”

That evening I received a note addressed to Mr. Webb, from Mrs. Mulpas. It read:

Dear Jeremy:
Too tired to eat dinner…perhaps because I’m so happy after our lovely picnic. I’ll see you tomorrow. I hope you’re happy, too.

Clara

UPDATE:

This is pretty cool - here’s an interview with Wilder the day after the book signing I was at:

GW: I went to a book signing last night at the Borders book shop in Caramel Mountain. I had never been there before. And there were people who had come at 8 in the morning to get a number. And when I walked in — I’m used to big crowds, but not this big — it was overwhelming. And here’s the answer to your question. When it started, we saw one of the parents carrying a baby. I said , “How old is that baby? It looks so young!” — “Three months.” Then I saw another parent carrying a baby. “How old is that baby?” — “Five weeks.” So there were kids, then there were the parents of the kids, then there were the parents of the parents, and then there were the parents of the parents of the parents. I mean, I had generations! And happened at every book signing! When there were people in their late 70s early 80s, then in the 60s, then in the 40s and then as teenagers or young married couples in their 20s. Age was spread across the board, and that’s a nice thing. But… well, I suppose, I have an ideal. Probably a woman involved, who is reading the book and crying afterwards. My memoir, it used to be called “I Lean Towards Women”, and I thought it was a stupid title because it sounded like a man who had one leg shorter than the other. Then I remembered what Gilda had said 3 weeks before she died “I have a title for you” and it didn’t make any sense to me till 14 years later!

Another Wilder interview here.

I am beginning to understand that there is much of the trickster in my personality. I’ve always identified with Loki, and often use humor to try and defuse situations (not always successfully, like any trickster…)

I’m currently reading Lewis Hyde’s “The Gift” right now, but I think his “Trickster Makes This World” will be in the reading stack soon. (It’s been on my wish list for a few weeks now).

Lewis Hyde

“An important part of any sacred activity is marking a boundary between the sacred and non-sacred. It’s important to build a container so the action is conducted inside sacred space,” he noted. “So, when you get to a character like the Trickster, you now have somebody who is the critic of the boundary, whose position is that all boundaries can be become too rigid and too impermeable, causing the life to dry up inside the container. So you need, both … some way to make the container and some function that is smart about how and where to break it. The Trickster is the sacred boundary crosser. And it’s not just that he crosses boundaries, he does it as a needed sacred function. If all you have is sacred forces who are maintaining their fiefdoms then you can end up with a fragmented heaven. Trickster gets a commerce going among the various sacred powers.”

Speaking of “heaven” - Hyde related in his book the story of C.G.Jung when he was a twelve-year-old schoolboy in Basel, Switzerland, admiring the glorious cathedral in the town square.

Said Jung, “I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the sight, and thought: ‘The world is beautiful and the church is beautiful and God made all this and sits above it far away in the blue sky on a golden throne and … Here came a great hole in my thoughts, and a choking sensation. I felt numbed, and knew only: ‘Don’t go on thinking now! Something terrible is coming …’”

For several days Jung struggled with the thought of whether or not God, who controls all things, could allow him to think a thought he shouldn’t think. Finally, having worked himself around to believing that God wanted him to have the forbidden thought, he relented: “I gathered all my courage, as though I were about to leap forthwith into hell-fire, and let the thought come. I saw before me the cathedral, the blue sky. God sits on His golden throne, high above the world - and from under the throne an enormous turd falls upon the sparkling new roof, shatters it, and breaks the walls of the cathedral asunder … I felt an enormous, an indescribable relief. Instead of the expected damnation, grace had come upon me. I wept for happiness and gratitude.”

Hyde said he was indebted to C.G. Jung, particularly one of his students, Marie-Louise von Franz, and their work with the idea of Mercurius. To the medieval alchemists, Mercury was the metal symbolizing duality - metallic yet liquid, matter yet spirit, cold yet fiery. Mercury was the metal uniting all the opposites. This Trickster energy was known to the Greeks by way of Hermes, the messenger god; in the Roman pantheon, Hermes becomes Mercury.

“C.G. Jung was a fabulously smart guide,” Hyde continued. “The Jungian insight is that the psyche is a community of forces and you need that whole community of forces working together. The pathology is when one member of the community begins to dominate in an individual, so some other part - your Warrior, say, or your sense of justice - gets muted. Or if we’re speaking of a group rather than one psyche, it’s when somebody begins to take over through display of one singular force. In a healthy community, every force will have a counter force. For example, Hermes steals the cattle from Apollo, but at the end of the story, Hermes and Apollo are friends. They find a way to relate. They need each other. You can’t have a boundary crosser unless you have someone who cares about the boundary. Hermes needs Apollo to be able to play with the rules and Apollo needs Hermes to keep things lively.”

To help people come back to a place where they’ve been trapped or lost requires them to become a ‘Hermeneut’ of their own life. They have to be helped to understand that there is an active learnable role to play in relating to the story you tell about your own life, the story you’ve inherited, the story you’re going to create as you live your life. Most Americans are passive recipients of the story that the media wants them to live by and only when you realize it is a story are you able to make different choices. You can interpret the story and be converted - from a passive object of commercial pitchmen into an actor living a life that you yourself create.”

Hyde said he believed a lot of Americans were “numb.” I liked the quote he used from child psychologist Donald Winnicott: “It is a joy to be hidden, but disaster not to be found.”

To explore within ourselves all the limiting behavior we’ve been taught takes a kind of “imaginative amorality,” the author said. It’s not an immorality, but an archetypal motivation in our own psyche to “play with the rules rather than observe them.”

Hubby is back from the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco - and I got presents! Yay! This dragon headed turtle is one of them, along with some yummy Teuscher’s chocolates and a nice hat and scarf from the Scottish store.

Dragon headed turtles are a Feng Shui charm:

The Dragon Headed Turtle brings with it the ancient secrets that can protect a home from negative energies.

The Dragon symbolizes luck, the turtle long life and the baby turtle is a symbol of new beginnings. The Dragon Headed Turtle (Tortoise, Terrapin,) is the symbol of longevity in your home, especially for the head of the house. The dragon headed turtle is also a powerful symbol of wealth, health, prosperity and protection.

Legend has it that the turtle has within his body the secret of heaven and earth and the design of his shell shows the magic square, which is the guide for life.

This beautiful dragon headed turtle can be used to improve relationships by placing a piece of red ribbon in his mouth, to attract wealth use golden ribbon.

If you are having Health problems place a piece of blue ribbon in his mouth.

To increase his strength place him in the North of your lounge or office or place him behind you when you are sitting at your desk to give you support.

To increase your success or improve your options place one inside your front door on a table, in the evening turn him round to face the interior.

Never place him in the kitchen or bathroom.

Younger son Gregory with his new bass guitar, which just arrived today!

Sensing the changes impending
My thoughts are diffused by despair
I feel like I’m swimming straight up
Underwater
Desperately racing for air
I’m racing for air.

And the chords struck at birth
Grow more distant
Yet, we strike them again and again.
And we plead and we pray
For a glimmer of day
As the night folds its wings
And descends
Exposing the loose ends….
– Dan Fogelberg, Loose Ends

Winners never know the worth of losing
‘Til the prize has slipped right through
their hands
Love will take a heart of its own
choosing
And break it if you try to understand.

– Dan Fogelberg, Love Gone By

Once in a vision
I came on some woods
And stood at a fork in the road
My choices were clear
Yet I froze with the fear
Of not knowing which way to go
One road was simple
Acceptance of life
The other road offered sweet peace
When I made my decision
My vision became my release.

– Dan Fogelberg, Netherlands