Connected and Committed

my cup runneth over

Indeed, it does.

And yours?

not sure which version I like better

This shirt is embossed with characters that are slick and transparent. It's interesting how well they show up in these shots. Perception, man, it's all about perception.

what does it mean

I woke up at some point this morning before my alarm went off and noticed that my bite-guard was no longer in my mouth. I swore I could remember putting it in the night before. So a while later my alarm does go off and I get up eventually, and it’s not sitting in it’s usual spot in the bathroom. So I go back to my bed, and there it is laying on the sheet. I have NEVER pulled it out in my sleep, ever - it would take some doing since it is a fitted appliance, as they call it - and I’ve had one since mid-divorce, early 2000.

I have no idea what this means, but it feels kind of exciting

Wonder Woman

So I started out my day doing some work-related research online about the DISC personality profile. It’s similar to the Meiers-Briggs but has half as many variables. My boss asked me to say something about it in our department meeting today, as she has arranged for all of us to take the test as a group and have some team-building sessions facilitated by the in-house sales training department throughout the rest of the year, based on learning how to work better with each other now that we know who has what characteristics. I did this with a different department several years ago and it was fun, so I’m looking forward to doing it again.

What I found out about the person who envisioned this whole process was absolutely fascinating. William Moulder Marston (I think is the spelling) was a Harvard-educated lawyer who was also interested in the new field of psychology in the 20s and he’s the one who came up with the four character traits in this personality profile. But a friend of his was the one to put the concept to any use and saved it for self-help posterity. He was happily married to a highly intelligent and capable woman, and they also shared a relationship with another younger woman. Both woman had two children and each named the girl after the other. They all lived quite happily together apparently, even after William died in the 1940s.

Before that though, he came up with one of the original lie detectors, and he was the creative genius behind the comic book superhero  Wonder Woman. His thought was that he could, among other things, inject feminist empowerment into the culture subliminally through the illustrated stories. My morning was filled with reading what little there is available about all of this and being quite taken with his energy. I'm left wondering if there is any account of his life available that isn't slanted or derogatory in nature. I think it would be so cool to find out more.

wawho

blissmonger in residence

Repurposing of furniture and of space makes for a much more comfie sleeping area and much more efficient and organized creating area. This is where blissmongering happens - the bracelets, the writing, the fun.

Life is good, people.

rainbarrel

Saw this in the parking lot of Trader Joe's. Thought it was pretty cool. Looked like something I would build if I knew how. What a great idea. And what great advertising.

enlightenment - who knew?

So.

I have to say, first off, that it’s not what I thought it was going to be like, this enlightenment thing.

I thought there would be a steady high of epiphany, once you reached a certain state.

That is not the case.

There may be an initial euphoria when a new insight is attained, but that is just as quickly assimilated as any other experience in the human brain–quick like a bunny, and then it’s business as usual.

My waking state is profoundly different than it was even a week ago, and I’m not able to appreciate that difference any longer. It’s status quo already, as I amble on up the path and see what else is up the universe’s sleeve.

Even a couple of years ago I fully expected where I am right now, if I ever got there, to be so not what-it-is. In some ways it’s not as good, but in many more substantial ways, it’s so much better. Who knew. Certainly not me.

So the work day is winding down, I have the evening free since I had Little Man last night and dad is taking him tonight in exchange, and I am almost giddy about the freedom. Because there are so many options. 1) I could do absolutely nothing; 2) I could work on blissmonger.com; 3) I could work on the plans I have in my head for repurposing the bed in my room and in Little Man’s room (T, I’m still leaving up the loft ) and the rearranging of furniture for optimum efficiency and storage space. I guess I’ll decide while I drive home.

And while I’m listening to one particular Abraham cd that seems to just have it all in one workshop. There are elements about what I want to say about blissmongering in every track, and I’ve already listened to it twice in the last few days.

Life is f#*!ing brilliant.

Alignment Redux

Yesterday and today I am noticing how dissimilar vibrations don't intersect, and it's really making sense to me how people and circumstances can vibrate right on out of our lives when we shift how we feel. Amazing stuff. It can be sad in a way what gets shed, unless of course it's something or someone you'd be much better off without :-), but it's also so cool what good stuff has room to flow in then. I can feel them so clearly that I can almost see the energy fields as they sheer off each other, like two tectonic plates, or glaciers digging out only certain places.

What I used to perceive as someone not happy with me I can see now as our energies doing what they must do as I move up the emotional scale. What I used to mourn as being lost, now I can appreciate as being a vital link in the process.

Not only have I drunk the Koolaid, I've climbed in the decanter.

rain

back to center

Back to the cubicle farm today was a very disorienting reintegration after an amazing weekend. Not so much disturbing as truly a study in contrasts. I'm still not entirely of the day-to-day realm near the end of Monday, and I'm enjoying the lingering feelings of bliss and connection and Source that I experienced during my free time. It feels to me like more than ever a sign that I will be transferring out of this 9-5 reality and into the manifestation of doing what makes me happy and able to be sooner rather than later.

And I would highly recommend priming the pump of whatever it is you believe in - whether it's Elvis or the cleaning power of Tide. Just live it with all you've got. You'll see why.

 

the way it's going

You can never have a happy ending at the end of an unhappy journey; it just doesn't work out that way. The way you're feeling, along the way, is the way you're continuing to pre-pave your journey, and it's the way it's going to continue to turn out until you do something about the way you are feeling. --- Abraham

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Life is what you think about it.

What do you think about it?

That's your life.

In case you've forgotten, you can think differently.

It might have been awhile since you did, but you can.

Really.

Wendy

license plates

This morning I saw a license plate on the car ahead of me that I thought a friend of mine would like to add to his collection of cool license plate photos, so I pulled out my camera and took a couple of shots and then went on my merry way to my destination a few blocks away. When I parked my car, a woman came up to my door and knocked on the window. She asked me if I had taken a picture of her car and what I was going to do with it. I explained my intentions, and she was visibly relieved. She said that it had made her afraid, and I apologized for my fun making her fearful.

It also reminded me of an Abraham track about what it is we attract in any moment and how our vibration affects that attraction. This woman could have been much less gracious about our encounter, possibly violent, possibly demanding that I delete the images from my camera. But she wasn't. Our rendezvous was memorable for other reasons. It reminded me that my actions may not be readily understandable to others, and that's OK. It doesn't mean that I need to stop, or change, or switch course in the middle of the stream.

Unless, of course, I want to.

oh yeah

Wiser words were never spoken.

Thank you, Beth.

Pork and Beans

I can't even begin to describe how happy this makes me. There are so many places in my soul that it touches, so many aspects of who I am that it augments.

It is the theme song of blissmongering.

EDIT: Apparently embedding this video has been disabled by YouTube, but you can still see it there.

the crevasse

There's an earring stuck in a quarter-inch crevasse between the wall and the vanity in my bathroom.

Said earring is one half of a $30 pair I bought at Nordstrom, so there's no way it's not coming out of there.

I'm envisioning a metal flat ruler with some Playdough on it to attach itself to, and then slowly slide it out.

Tonight is the night. You will be mine. News at 11:00.

And it wasn't even on a sports car or anything

studio whisperer

A second person has told me recently that I was helpful in engaging with their studio space, clearing the energy for creating and not thinking about it. I'd like to think that presence of mine is the studio whisperer. Maybe TLC would give me a TV show, eh? Film a few episodes, see what it's like to watch an artist, a buried artist, come to the surface from underneath layers of  expectation and fear, male or female, old or young. Worth a shot.

tree hugger

I just finished doing some laps out in the parking lot, enjoying the beautiful break from high temps, and for the first time ever, I felt compelled to go hang out with a tree.

As I was finishing my third lap, there it was, right in my line of sight, and it said, "Come here." So I did. One of the more mature trees that made the cut (no pun intended) while the parking lot was being "landscaped," it felt like putting my palm on the neck of a horse to set my hand on a sturdy limb at eye level that reached down, it seems, just for this purpose. It felt good. Don't care what kind of tree it is, or whether I do it again.

It felt good.

testing, testing, one, two, three, four

My monitor at home is now stuck on a weird horizontal setting that I can't seem to figure out how to change with my keyboard, as there are no physical buttons on the monitor itself that will affect the numbers. In my frenzy to fix the connection between my laptop and my monitor, I wacked something out and now my photos are all skewed. I'm posting this mostly so I can check it out on another monitor later in the day. Weirdness.

And let me say Firefox sucks when it comes to loading photos to my blog. Invariably it freezes during the transfer process. So what's up with that?

resolution

F4, people. F4.

That was the solution to my monitor dilemma. Press F4 and FN at the same time, and make sure that the box that says, "Extend Windows to this monitor," is NOT checked.

And what a relief. Actually, after the initial irritation wore off, I decided that this was not an issue worth obsessing over, and let it goto the universe to take care of for me.

So thank you, T, for walking me through this on the phone, from Ottawa, of all places, and that it only took a few minutes out of your day. I agree that I shall have to add that city to my roster of places to visit. Actually, I think I'd love to live anywhere in Canada. Seriously.

I'm helping Little Man with his last homework assignment for the year. Here's his spelling sentence that he insists on: "I heard people conversing about debit." Not sure if that's a reference to The Secret, or to an infomercial he might have seen on TV.

nudges 06.06.08

Oooooooooooooo, tomorrow is 6/7/08.

I am so happy and very grateful for:

1) Air conditioning. I wilt without it, and the hot snap we're having here for a few more days is prime wilting weather;

2) How the psyche works, cluing us in to things it wants to process, with dreams, and serendipity, and promptings that lead us out of the darkness;

3) Having nowhere I need to be this weekend;

4) Watching people follow my lead by bringing in food at work to help relieve the craziness of the pace right now. It warms the cockles of my heart to see watermelon, gourmet goodies, chips and salsa, and pretzels brought in since I started it off with organic tortilla chips and dark chocolate-covered soy beans;

5) The ability to laugh at myself, rather than melt into a puddle, regardless of the circumstances;

6) The sprouting cala lilies in the pot by the window. I know now that they will be huge, so they will need to go outside at some point;

7) Libraries, and interlibrary loan. It's like having the world's printed matter at your finger tips. Unless of course what you want is some obscure title that no one ha ever heard of;

8) Organic vanilla ice cream with cinnamon mixed in, and organic maple syrup on top.

and it would be true

I've heard Abraham talk about how, when you've got fast moving energy teeming through you, when you hit a tree it's a tad painful. Or that when you're recalibrated to be hanging out in the deep end of the emotional scale swimming pool and are occasionally thrown into the shallow end, the frustration you feel can be quite intense, simply because you don't feel that way very often anymore.

Well, that would be true.

I'm having technical difficulties with my LCD monitor - it got moved, and then reattached, and now it's blank. Aargh. The sensations I felt in my body, flaring like sunspots on the sun, was disorienting at first. The intensity was remarkable, and now that it's been awhile and I've done what I could and put out some feelers to the geeks I know, I can remember the days when I felt that way a lot. When it was normal. And I am astounded at how bodies manage to handle that kind of flow for years without totally falling apart. Dis-ease showing up is so not a surprise to me.

So, hopefully by the end of the weekend the solution to the problem will appear, and my eyesight will have its high resolution images back.

I hope.

the reckoning

So I've been struggling with the blurriness in my bracelet images and my futile, uneducated attempts to fix that. Yesterday an angel of a coworker gave me several different settings to try, and I could hardly wait to get home to try them out.

I unpacked groceries and made something to eat, all the while savoring the anticipation and awesomeness I was going to feel when this worked - cuz damn it, it was going to. Then I turned on the camera and moved the exposure setting from manual to Av. I adjusted the function menu setting for exposure to Custom and pushed the shutter button while focusing on an entirely white field. I adjusted the ISO to 100. I turned on the macro function and set it for 18-ish centimeters.

Then I placed my bracelet on the white fabric stage, placed the mylar cone over the bracelet for light diffusion properties, turned on my Ott Light, moved the tripod into the horizontal position, set the shutter to auto at 2-second increments, and watched the magic happen.

It was amazing, the difference in focus and sharpness. Thank you so much, angel. I know you get a kick out of helping people figure this stuff out, so I'm happy you get to play with me.

When I next get a chance to get to the photos on my computer, I'll post the difference.

Now that this technical challenge has been solved,  I feel free to pursue the writing part of the blissmonger online presence. I've been listening to old and new Abe cds and have been so inspired with tidbits and scattered ideas that I was nudged to buy a set of quad ruled Moleskin notebook yesterday and start writing them down. The rack they were in was immediately inside the door of Utrechts.

chocolate premonitions

I felt fabulous this morning. All morning. And I mean fabulous. In the last few years, there have been defining moments like this for me where well-being just soared through my system, and I am amazed at how it can happen again, and get better every time. Like this one.

And I’m not even sure what to attribute it to, if I need to attribute it to anything in particular. I ordered some raw cacao powder/superfood/antioxidant, etc. online when I first got up, on the recommendation of someone’s experience with it, and I’m wondering if my belief in what it will do for me was already changing how I feel.

Whatever it is, I want more. Bring it on.

what a difference a little mylar makes

A friend (thank you, C!) had some great suggestions for improving the lighting on my presentation of my bracelets on Etsy, and the difference is amazing. Go from this:

 

 

to this:

 

 

and viola! what a difference a little mylar makes.

Now to work on that focus......

glow-in-the-dark bowling

Hanging out in a glow-in-the-dark bowling facility for the afternoon with a pack of boys celebrating a birthday has historically not been one of my favorite ways to spend my time, but this past weekend has altered my opinion. Maybe it was the state-of-the-art computer scoring system, or the piped-in 70s disco music, or the fairly adequate pizza--whatever it was, I had a good time, and I would do it again.

Amazing.