Changing Places

Meryl Smith, Excessory Baggage

I dreamed last night that I was trying to follow a woman with graying hair, who seemed to be a bit older version of myself in a way. She moved too fast, though, and I couldn’t keep up with her. I kept having to pick up various bags I had been dropping, and eventually lost track of her.

Perhaps it is time to stop picking up the bags when they fall, to let go of my baggage to become the woman I am meant to be.

Simplicity is making the journey of this life with just baggage enough.”
– Charles Dudley Warner

I think the label of “artist” is loaded and has a strange sort of baggage attached to it. People say, “I’m not an artist! I can barely draw a straight line” and I always cringe when I hear this. What’s so interesting about a straight line anyway? It is not an exclusive club, this artist thing. It’s just a bunch of people who like to play, to make things, to dream up ideas, to color, to sing, to build, to string words together. Don’t we all? I think it helps to remove the labels. — Andrea Scher

Although Patanjali wrote 196 sutras concerning yoga, only three of them pertain exclusively to the asana. The first concerns the means — firm, relaxed postures; the second concerns the end — effortless oneness with what is. The sutra above speaks to the first stumbling block most of us encounter in our practice: we try too hard… we come to yoga with cultural baggage that says we are not enough and never will be. We must improve, we must pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, we must try harder and make some progress. With more effort, we think, and a little more strain, we will get more out of the posture. The mistake is believing we can get where we are going through effort. Patanjali defines success as effortlessness. Floating in the center of our postures, the center of our experience, we succeed by moving into harmony with the moment, our limbs, our breath, our awareness. — Rolf Gates, Meditations from the Mat

The heavy is the root of the light;
The still is the master of unrest.

Therefore the sage, traveling all day,
Does not lose sight of his baggage.
Though there are beautiful things to be seen,
He remains unattached and calm.

Why should the lord of ten thousand chariots
act lightly in public?
To be light is to lose one’s root.
To be restless is to lose one’s control.

– Tao Te Ching, 26

Standing on tiptoe, one is unsteady.
Taking long steps, one quickly tires.
Showing off, one shows unenlightenment.
Displaying self-righteousness, one reveals vanity.
Praising the self, one earns no respect.
Exaggerating achievements, one cannot long endure.
Followers of the Way consider these
Extra food, unnecessary baggage.
They bring no happiness.
Therefore, followers of the Way
avoid them.

– Tao Te Ching, 24

As declining risk appetites manifest in nearly everything in 2009, from our collective views on financial risk to our tastes in culture, music, film and fashion, we will see a focus on declines, destruction and devaluation. Perhaps nowhere will this be more obvious than in the disintegration of large-scale social networks into smaller, more focused and intimate groups.

While peak social mood helped propel the movement toward increasingly open social networking platforms and large scale interactions, the rush to disassociate from the crowd will inevitably manifest as a reduction in broad network exposure and a preference for close-knit, tighter communities. Beneficiaries of this movement will be families, small groups and, to an extent, neighborhoods.

via Mish’s Global Economic Trend Analysis: 2008: An Extraordinarily Long Year.

Part of my efforts the last few years has been to support family, friends, and social groups around me, financially and otherwise, creating small local political groups and discussions, etc. It’s interesting that Mish is picking up on this trend and pointing it out. Tight-knit social groups will be essential to helping everyone survive tougher times. Reaching out to help those around you is going to be extremely important this year, and create tight new bonds for many of us. I think the blogging communities that have been created in recent years are a part of this, too, and will be an essential part of our support networks, while the larger social sites may become less relevant.

Sometimes we forget that there is some upside to the lean years. We learn who is important to us, and who was just there for the good times. We learn what is essential to our lives, and what was just fluff we can live without. Hard lessons, but they will be learned this year…

“We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year’s Day.”
– Edith Lovejoy Pierce (via Whiskey River)

“Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunder-storm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols.”
– Thomas Mann

“New Year’s Resolution: To tolerate fools more gladly, provided this does not encourage them to take up more of my time.”
— James Agate

Via Squid:

Hine Mizushima, a Vancouver based illustrator/animator who makes great squid art and amazing They Might Be Giants videos, recently posted a wonderful “Beware of Giant Squid” holiday card that she made two years ago. The next time you walk by a public Christmas Tree you might think of the happy giant squid that lurks below the surface.

And here’s “A Metaphor of Love” by Dan Santat

Jonathan Coulton » I Crush Everything

I lie below, you float above
In the pretty white ships that I’ve been dreaming of
And I’d like to swim beside you
Getting dizzy in your wake
Getting close enough to touch you
Getting brave enough to take you into my arms
And bring you down to be with me

But I can’t do that thing anymore
I can’t be the thing I was before
Maybe I am better off alone
Because I crush everything
And I crush everything
And I crush everything

One summer day when Carl Jung was a 12 year old schoolboy in Basel, Switzerland, he fell to admiring the cathedral in the town square. In his autobiography called “Memories, Dreams, Reflections” he recalls his train of thought:

The sky was gloriously blue, the day one of radiant sunshine. The roof of the cathedral glittered, the sun sparkling from the new, brightly glazed tiles. 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…”

He was completely panicked and dared not finish the thought. He agonized over it for days, having trouble sleeping and feeling tormented, trying so hard to not finish the thought. In the middle of the night of the third day, he finally decided that “It must be thought out before hand.” So he went through a long process of thinking why he should not think “that thought”. His rationalized reasoning went on for three pages! Now remember, this is a 12 year old boy. Carl finally decided it would be okay with God for him to finish, saying “Obviously, God also desires me to show courage. If that is so and I go through with it, then He will give me His grace and illumination.”

Jung continues, “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.”

Even as a boy, Jung found the scatalogical image redemptive. “I felt an enormous, indescribable relief. Instead of the expected damnation, grace had come upon me… I wept for happiness and gratitude.”

From the start, Jung understood this newfound connection to the deity to be different in kind from anything he’d been offered by his own church. Jung’s father was a Protestant minister but one, we gather from Jung, for whom the church had become lifeless. As a child he thought his father was reliable but powerless, and after his epiphany, he says, “a great many things I had not understood became clear to me. That was what my father had not understood, I thought; he had failed to experience the will of God, had opposed it for the best reasons and out of the deepest faith. And that is why he had never experienced the miracle of grace.”

– Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World with some adaptations from Starstuff’s Journal

Hyde also points out in this chapter that “dirt is always a by-product of order”. My take is that if our gods are too clean, too orderly, they cannot lend us any creative energy, and our lives become too sterile, too orderly. By placing the gods high above us, not allowing them access into our lives or us access into theirs, we limit our own creativity. You have to get a little dirty and messy to truly feel the divine. Make your rituals too sterile, too structured, and they bring no spirituality into your life. Make your home too sterile, too orderly, and it becomes a place where you can’t relax and enjoy life itself. If you’re afraid to get messy, it’s hard to really make interesting art. If you’re afraid of your life getting messy, it’s hard to care about other people and be willing to get involved in their problems.

“I make this look GOOD!!!”

FT.com / Columnists / Clive Crook – Orthodox responses to taxing issues
Orthodox responses to taxing issues

By Clive Crook

Barack Obama and John McCain both expect the ailing US economy to work to their advantage in November. Mr Obama promises to make things better. Mr McCain says they will get better by themselves and he will not make them worse in the meantime. These are the customary postures of the two parties. For a fight between an insurgent Democrat and a maverick Republican, the economics in this election is sadly orthodox.

Mr Obama offers the usual Democratic remedies for middle-class anxieties and grievances: new tax breaks and spending programmes, higher taxes for the rich, sabre-rattling on trade, calls for stricter regulation of finance and so forth. Mr McCain, likewise sticking to his party’s script, says that with the economy in a hole, this is no time to be raising anybody’s taxes, restricting trade or doing anything else to get in the way of American enterprise.

Aside from being predictable, the two have something else in common: fiscal myopia. Their tax plans differ in their distributional effects, but less than you might think in overall burden. Mr McCain opposed President George W. Bush’s tax cuts as unfair and inefficient; now he wants to make them permanent. Mr Obama deplores them still, of course, and says he will let them expire – but only for the sliver of the population that earns more than $250,000 (€163,000, £128,000) a year.

Measured against current law (ie, against a baseline that assumes the Bush tax cuts expire on schedule in 2011) and excluding healthcare (which involves some additional tax changes) Mr McCain wants to cut taxes by $3,700bn over the next 10 years. Mr Obama wants to cut them by $2,700bn. That amounts to a 10 per cent cut in revenue for Mr McCain and a 7 per cent cut for Mr Obama. (The estimates are from the non-partisan Tax Policy Centre of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution.)

If either man gets his way, the larger part of the Bush tax cuts would thus remain on the books. At the same time, both have ambitious plans for new spending – Mr Obama especially. The budget is in structural deficit and the shortfall is bound to worsen as the cost of the Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare programmes rises. Neither candidate addresses the issue. Politically, they are doubtless correct: voters would rather not think about it….

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

Via Bob Cesca’s Goddamn Awesome Blog! Go!: McCain Fever!

Maybe McCain vetoed their beer….

Barack won’t veto your beer!

WHOA!!

Mega Vulcanicity: When Volcanoes Spew Lightning

Several days ago, a volcano that had been dormant for 9,000 years near the coast of Chile erupted spectacularly, hurling liquified metals and lightning many miles into the sky. The results, which you see here, are called a “dirty thunderstorm,” and are quite rare. Nobody is certain what causes them, but according to National Geographic it’s believed to be “the result of rock fragments, ash, and ice particles in the plume collid[ing] to produce static charges—just as ice particles collide to create charge in regular thunderstorms.”

So Cute!!!! Via Boing Boing….

RoadkillToys.com Designer Plush Toys – Twitch (Raccoon) Plush Toy

Our Squash-plush range looks like roadkill. Feels like roadkill. And tastes like roadkill. But they’re not. They’re plush toys. Very macabre plush toys. It’s the way we make them that makes them seem so real.

The blood and guts and gore are made using the latest high-tech stuffing and plush, to give it quite a realistic squidgy effect. The body and head and legs are made from specially sourced plush material, that gives them that tactile quality of mangy fur. The body is partly stuffed with beads, to give it extra dead weight. And unlike real roadkill it’s something you’ll want to take home and arrange on your bed.

We’ve tried to make Twitch and the rest of his Squash-plush chums as life-like as possible. But at the end of the day he’s only a stuffed toy. All the plush materials and stuffing we’ve used are made from 100% polyester fibres, and are fully compliant with British safety laws.

Twitch’s body is stuffed with a mixture of beads and stuffing. The beads give the Squash-plush teddy a bit of extra weight, so he can lie spreadeagled in his blood and gut-pool. The blood and guts and gore are made using the latest, cutting edge stuffing. It’s a special new micro-bead stuffing that gives the guts and organs a more malleable, tactile effect. It makes it more squidgy. More gross-out. You can disembowel Twitch by pulling the blood and innards through the zips that line both sides of the teddy carcass.

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.

Beltane Fire Festival

A roundup of a few Beltane posts:

Beltane is a cross-quarter day, marking the midpoint in the Sun’s progress between the vernal equinox and summer solstice. Since the Celtic year was based on both lunar and solar cycles, it is possible that the holiday was celebrated on the full moon nearest the midpoint between the vernal equinox and the summer solstice. The astronomical date for this midpoint is closer to May 5 or May 7, but this can vary from year to year.

From The Zoo:

Going A-Maying & Bringing in the May — Merry-making and Nature communion. * Midpoint between Spring Equinox and Summer Solstice. * In Pagan Rome, Floralia, from April 27-May 3 was the festival of the Flower Goddess Flora and the flowering of Springtime. On May 1, offerings were made to Bona Dea (as Mother Earth), the Lares (household guardian spirits), and Maia (Goddess of Increase) from whom May gets its name. * Roman Catholic traditions of crowning statues of Mary with flowers on May 1 have Roman Pagan roots. * Marks the second half of the Celtic Year; one of the four Celtic Fire Festivals.

From Owl’s Daughter:

Beltane is a reference to ‘Bel-fire’, the fire of the Celtic God of light (Bel, Beli or Belinus). He, in turn, may be traced to the Middle Eastern God Baal.

Whatever you choose to call it, this is our celebration of the approach of Summer, when the breezes are scented and the evenings are getting warm. Today we honor and emulate the divine union of the Lord and Lady! Celebrations include the obvious pleasures of ecstatic coupling, like most all of Nature is doing around us!

We also celebrate symbolically, by weaving a web of life around the Maypole and leaping the Beltane fires for luck. Lilacs and hawthorn can be brought inside on this day, along with flowers of all kinds to represent the fertility of the earth. This is our great festival of love, lust and fertility. This Sabbat honors the great life force in all things. All life forms! All forms of love!

Pew Research Center: Gen Dems: The Party’s Advantage Among Young Voters Widens

Trends in the opinions of America’s youngest voters are often a barometer of shifting political winds. And that appears to be the case in 2008. The current generation of young voters, who came of age during the George W. Bush years, is leading the way in giving the Democrats a wide advantage in party identification, just as the previous generation of young people who grew up in the Reagan years — Generation X — fueled the Republican surge of the mid-1990′s.

In surveys conducted between October 2007 and March 2008, 58% of voters under age 30 identified or leaned toward the Democratic Party, compared with 33% who identified or leaned toward the GOP. The Democratic Party’s current lead in party identification among young voters has more than doubled since the 2004 campaign, from 11 points to 25 points.

In fact, the Democrats’ advantage among the young is now so broad-based that younger men as well as younger women favor the Democrats over the GOP — making their age category the only one in the electorate in which men are significantly more inclined to self-identify as Democrats rather than as Republicans. Use the interactive tool to track generational differences in party affiliation over time.

While more women voters in every age group affiliate with the Democratic Party rather than the GOP, the gap is particularly striking among young women voters; more than twice as many women voters under age 30 identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party as favor the Republican Party (63% vs. 28%).

I feel my Roxie girl starting to slip away from me. Tonight, she couldn’t keep her food down, poor girl. Yet she is still so strong and brave, doesn’t let her pain keep her from being her loving self. So much to learn from her…

We’ll keep her comfortable and let go when it’s time. Brave girl…

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.

As if they needed any more excuses for the state of their living quarters…

PureLandMountain.com

The neat room is a dangerous illusion, as history is de facto continuously pointing out to society at large via various financial, political, religious and activist groups of righteous room cleaners and organizers of the human race in general, but we in the developed world never seem to learn, because we insist on trying to get all our kids to clean all their rooms, thereby instilling in them the erroneous belief (as with most beliefs) not only that it should be done, but that it can be done. “A place for everything and everything in its place” is the most inimical and least natural thing I’ve ever heard, it is the seed of tyranny. Il Duce had that embroidered on his underwear. This is where it gets insidious, or is it invidious… My dictionary is around here somewhere… In this corner I think, at the bottom of that stack under the lantern… Used to be with my thesaurus, which because of this pile of hats I just moved to– hey this is interesting, I don’t think I’ve ever read this, didn’t know I had it, it’s in the neopile– discovery is a wonderful thing.

Shelves, for example, and drawers and their desks or whatever, impart the chronic and tragic misapprehension that our own thoughts, hence our creativity, are organized in such a way, when creativity clearly indicates otherwise (as evidenced by its loss through education). This has led for example to all the terrible poetry etc. we’ve had to endure down the ages, in amounts far exceeding the sublime bits that survive less and less each year, that came straight out of one wild room or another, created by the diminishing defenders of domestic wilderness.

Neatness interferes, whereas wilderness prevents senility, ever honing the mind to new sharpness. You think Einstein had a neat mind? DaVinci’s was a mess; Beethoven, forget it. Creativity is anarchic, unpredictable and cannot be summoned, as can the devil of neatness. No discovery in the room, no discovery in the resident. That’s a paraphrase of a Frost quote I’ve got in a book right about there, under the beeswax candles in one of those boxes in the corner, under the sweaters. Being one with the wilderness, like Tarzan or Geronimo, I know where all the vines, hideouts and escape routes are (there’s a river in that direction, there’s a butte over there, a canyon beyond etc.), which is quite enough to be getting on with. One only needs so much knowledge of where key things are; the rest is clutter.

My room has been purposely kept wild because at least some places on earth should be kept free of human interference, maintained as reverential venues where the primordial can still be experienced (such places are disappearing by the day). What greater insight can be gained in this modern world than by daily reminders of our primal origins, leading to fundamental understanding of what is truly possible? A room in its essence is our one clear chance at letting the world run free, insofar as this can be done in an enclosed space for which you’re paying rent, mortgage, maintenance, depreciation or whatever, paid for via time spent in a painfully neat office, so why waste what may be one’s only opportunity to experience the primordial on a regular basis?

Or whatever you would like to donate to Heifer – the Gates Foundation is matching donations:

Go here and click on the donation button to give:

Heifer International has received a $2.5 Million Matching Grant Challenge from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to support the new East Africa Dairy Development Project. The project aims to help 179,000 families – one million people – lift themselves out of poverty by giving them a more profitable way to produce and market milk from small farms.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will double your gift to the East Africa Dairy Development Project. Help lift 1 million from poverty – make the most generous gift you can today.

Don’t forget many employers will match charity donations, too. You could triple your gift!

I have never in my entire life noticed what kind of jeans someone is wearing, and anyone whose opinion is worth caring about doesn’t notice or care what kind of jeans you’re wearing, either. If they fit you well and look good, that’s all that really matters. Anything else is just getting you to pay too much for something that isn’t worth it.

Note that this applies to handbags and shoes as well. I really don’t even notice them most of the time. I know as a woman I am supposed to somehow care about this stuff, but — I don’t. I’ve carried the same handbag for three years now and nobody has ever commented on the fact that it’s always the same bag, not even once.

Really — people don’t care about that stuff, unless they are fashion victims. Don’t be one. Your life will instantly become easier, simpler, and much, much less expensive.

Come to think of it, I imagine anyone who associates with Bush and Cheney would develop a layer of poison around them. Probably explains all those clownfish around them.

So my dogs are outside enjoying the sunshine and fresh air while I’m cleaning up the house after my mad weekend alone painting and making collages and listening to loud music and any number of other fun things while the boys were off to visit with his family and go to the Ren Faire in Apache Junction.

And suddenly I had this thought, about the dogs being so comfortable with dirt and mess and never feeling the need to clean any of it up.

The terrible thing about having opposable thumbs and a big brain is this need to constantly use them instead of simply enjoying ourselves.

But then, my kids are comfortable with mess as well, and they have opposable thumbs and big brains, too. I guess I just never guilt tripped them enough into cleaning things up, the way my mom did to me.

Hmmm.

I always cleaned up after the parties I had as a teenager while my parents were away, and never got caught except for the one time they came home and found three hundred beer cans in the storage room, waiting to be recycled.

Yeah, I would’ve felt guilty about not recycling them, too.

Stoopid guilt.