I wasn't expecting to get these until next week, but they arrived this morning.
What a fabulous surprise.
It was a magical afternoon, and Josh recorded it all in pixels.
It just depends on who is behind the lens.
Thank you, Josh!
I wasn't expecting to get these until next week, but they arrived this morning.
What a fabulous surprise.
It was a magical afternoon, and Josh recorded it all in pixels.
It just depends on who is behind the lens.
Thank you, Josh!
Life is a blur these days.
In a good way.
The days go by so quickly, it's amazing.
In the not so distant past, I counted the minutes every day while doing work that was most uninspired.
The contrast between the two situations is fabulous.
Appreciating, that, I am.
And the fact that I am able to override the directives that hormones send out.
They were intent on anarchy, they were, desecrating all blissmongering perspectives like so many robot operatives in an action figure movie.
But no, I said.
Even if you can't remember what feeling good feels like at the moment, you can remember that it's been possible to feel that way, and you will feel better again at some point.
So I remembered.
And now I do, feel better.
I have respect for hormones, and for hurricanes.
Both have amazing powers that humans can only dream of possessing, controlling, and never will.
But we have chocolate.
And Yirgochiffe coffee.
So it doesn't matter.
I was talking to a colleague about all the noise out there in the world, all the messages, ads, announcements, pitches and friend requests. "And you're sending even more every day into that maelstrom."
"No we're not," she said. "Ours isn't noise."
Yes it is.
~Seth Godin, blog post 11/27/2010
~*~*~
First, I love that Seth can say this about himself. Because he doesn't take this stuff personally, he can do that. He's part of the solution of awareness, not the problem of obfuscation.
Second, this is part of what's kept me from posting here for awhile.
I've felt like there isn't anything worth saying again that I haven't already said. Let's just go out and live it, shall we?
But there is a tad of resistance in that reasoning. And it doesn't feel good. Sort of what is going on in the photo above.
And of course I know that as humans, we need constant reminders about what it is we've consciously chosen to surround ourselves with, including our thoughts.
Because we forget what it was that was so important. We forget, and lapse into our old habits.
It's what we do.
Until we don't.
So I post today with renewed bemusement about being part of the noise out there, wanting to be part of the silience and knowing that day is coming.
The day when we revert to silince for recharging rather than the noise.
Awareness rather than obfuscation.
Getting quiet instead of acting out.
For some, that is where the relief is right now.
And that's OK.
We are all one. We are eternal. We are fine.
This tree has its leaves still, while others around it are bare.
You'll notice that it's very near the fire hydrant across the way.
It's positioned itself quite nicely in proximity of what it needs.
If you haven't done that for yourself lately, here is your reminder.
Do one of those things that you have identified in the past, or perhaps added into your repertoire lately, as something that makes your heart sing.
Those things that help you move up the emotional scale because they assist in shifting your beliefs about what's true, what's possible, what's real.
Better feeling thoughts become available to you when you do this.
Remember?
I knew you would.
If you are observant in a grocery kind of way, you might be able to discern inside which retailer this photo was taken.
I have had some interesting interactions recently with people who work in retail establishments when I whip out my camera. I don't agree with their stances on whether or not my photographing something in the store they work for has the potential to harm the corporate interests they so faithfully defend, but they get to say what happens there.
So today I was quite forthright and asked the head dude, before I whipped out my camera, if it was alright with him if I did in fact take a picture of these cool beach balls.
Because of the inherant personality of this place, I enjoyed that interaction immensely, and was given tacit approval for said action.
And then when I got to the check-out, head dude helped bag my purchases.
I don't know why these beach balls are hanging from the ceiling, but I am really glad they are there.
Liberation is the theme today.
I unsubscribed to the emails that I am no longer interested in receiving, and I declared my Facebook stream a positive/feels-good-to-me/resonating zone.
And already cyber space is a much more pleasant place.
You get to decide what enters your personal and psychic real estate boundaries.
Even when you don't decide, that's deciding.
Making it a more conscious choice is a baby step in the direction of taking your power back.
Social media is many things, and one of them is a time and energy suck. Being vigilant about the your requirements is takoing your power back, and showing yourself that you keep your promises to yourself.
Those baby steps do accumulate into the critical mass of a shift in your vibe, which means that you're hanging out in a new place on the emotional scale more and more of the time.
Which means new thoughts are becoming available to you, which means you'll start seeing different people and circumstances showing, even if they have the same faces and addresses.
"How does it feel?" - the most effective metrics in the universe one can apply.
And no one knows but you.
The leaves are all crunchy, dry and scattered. There is no more color to wow and soothe.
The coming months loom like thunderclouds on the horizen.
For some people.
For me, they open up with opportunity, fire, coffee, wine, movies, home, friends, family, bread, happiness.
I don't recall ever embracing a winter as much as this one, if ever.
Call me crazy.
I don't mind.
I don't hear you.
I hear winter.
Looking out at life through this window changed my perspective.
I felt alive and invigorated.
There are colors, line and texture here that make my heart sing, not to mention the mountains in the background and the handmade olive oil soap inside the store from which this photo was taken.
Some new joy pullers for me. French decorating accents haven't done it for me in the past, but at this juncture and on this day, they did.
I'm changing.
The place I wake up in, the thoughts I think, the body I currently inhabit, the people I encounter, the food I eat, the music I listen to, it's all changing, right now.
Endless unfamiliarity, and I've never been happier in my life.
Going through this much modification to one's daily round could drive a person batty, but I am reveling in the effects and the results.
I've experienced change from two ends of the spectrum.
One end contained big new bold steps that just didn't feel like they belonged to me.
And the other end contains big new bold steps that feel like my name is engraved on them.
When it's a maybe, or a no, the feel is off, and you might as well pack up and start over or hunker down until things shift.
When it's a Yes!, grab the gusto with everything you've got.
It all depends on your point of view.
That's me, alright.
A little blurry, cuz things are moving so fast.
But in a good way.
Looking straight ahead.
Observing, scanning, inhaling, devouring, absorbing, savoring, reveling in.
Appreciating the contrast, that produces a desire, that launches preferences to my cosmic casting director, who stands with his clipboard of people, circumstances and events in the wings, choreographing them all on the stage of my life according to how I choose to feel in any moment.
He's a busy guy these days.
When I remember to work my joy pullers and my resistance toys, I get to new places of "getting it".
When I don't, I feel like crap.
Until I remember again.
So what If things suck for a minute, or a hundred?
I know what to do about it.
Who to be about it.
And that has tons more legs than staying stuck in resentment.
I've noticed.
Laying low these days. Contemplating contrast and rockets of desire, ancestral lines of unprocessed gunk, choosing a life one wants to live, constructing it with intention and purpose, holding to boundaries and requirements that don't have anything to do with gaining permission from anyone else.
Just me.
Enjoying Trader Joe's dark chocolate.
Gerbera daisies.
Clean shower stalls. Decluttered shelves and closets.
Corners of the psyche swept free of cobwebs and layers of dust decades' thick.
Popcorn.
Lemon verbena soap.
Thunderstorms.
Friendship's good talk.
Not needing to go anywhere or do anything.
Just be.
I recently had the great fortune to be the recipient of not one, but two, arrangements of flowers, within 12 hours of each other.
Let me explain.
The first was ordered via one of those online conglomerate outfits that appear to have great deals. The delivery didn't happen the day it was supposed to. Nor the second day. When contacted about this egregious error, the company couldn't say for sure what had happened, other than that the arrangement was in the truck.
So not a good experience.
Relationship damaged.
No attempt to repair.
Order canceled.
Business taken elsewhere, permanently.
Word-of-mouth currency as negative as it could be.
Enter second vendor, a local concern who, from the moment the conversation began, was 1000% more helpful, dedicated and able to create a magical experience for the person ordering and the person receiving.
First vendor delivery materializes anyway, in spite of previous inability to make it happen and the order being canceled.
Set side by side, the contrast between the two arrangements is stark. The first had tacky plastic tubing on the flower stems to keep them upright, too much foliage that detracted from the flowers, the water was stale from sitting in the truck for two days, in one of those standard, nondescript curved vases.
The second had inobtrusive florist wire implemented to keep the flowers upright, just enough foliage to augment the beauty of the flowers, an elegantly simple cylindrical vase, and it arrived exactly on time, when they said they would.
Now, of course, I will sing their praises and recommend them to everyone who asks.
Since we're dealing with humans here, experiences like these will continue to happen on the planet, just as they have for thousands of years.
A timeless story of business, services, follow-through, personal investment in outcome.
And that's just fine.
It helps preferences to be born, relationships to shift, ideas to blossom, work to change, procedures to improve (or not), appropriate employees to be found, clients to be garnered, talents to be discovered and expressed.
All because something got left in the truck.
There is no tyranny like a perceived "lack" of purpose. The lack is a story. Ditch it, and your purpose can come out to play from behind your desires.
This huge petri dish that we all live in called Culture (I know, the double entendres abound :-) ) would have us believe desires are trouble. They provoke us and make us sad and get in the middle of relationships and otherwise rock the boat of maintaining that pretty facade called life we're all hanging on to.
Well, I am here to state for the record, and affirm all of your vague knowing to the contrary, that our aspirations, dreams, desires, notions, hopes--they are your lifeline. The only reason we might conclude that we don't know what our purpose is, is because we've been taught to forget what it was.
Our preferences, our joy pullers, our proclivity for contentment, they are our unique templates that get smashed and stomped on by various organized institutions over the years from the time we are impressionable, compliant babes in arms.
It's difficult to remember then, when every example we are shown about how to live extols lack. Lobsters pulling each other down trying to get out of the pot, and all that.
The good news is that our unique templates that cache our purpose are preserved in a sort of subconscious hibernation that might even include cryostasis from time to time.
They never die.
Have you noticed?
The provocation you might feel when they do insist on making their presence known again? That's buying into the lack thing, and perpetuating the story that living your purpose isn't possible.
Guess again.
It's impossible NOT to live your purpose.
Sure, you get to decide how miserable you'll allow yourself to be, pretending you can live well without surrendering to it.
But that's not living.
Have you noticed?
He comes in every night, stack of folded, well-worn paper in hand, completely covered with fraction equations to solve that he's written down to remind himself how to do them.
He grabs a pencil from the cup on the teacher's desk and sits down for another evening of filling up his short-term memory with problems he won't remember how to solve the next day.
This used to bother me. I would get annoyed at his inability to remember and wonder what he was doing there, sitting in front of a computer night after night.
I would judge what his body and his brain had endured from the consistent amounts of alcohol he obviously had consumed over the years.
Then this week something shifted.
One night he did remember.
Multiplication and division, least common denominators, mixed numbers and reducing were easy.
He smiled a lot that evening, and it was a pleasure to see him proud of himself instead of frustrated with his inability to control his brain power.
This week he's back to coming up blank when he looks at the notes he's taken. The correct operation will not pop into his head at his bidding to solve the problem on the screen.
But that's OK. I don't care anymore.
I know he'll have another good day soon.
And that is all that matters.
Photowalk is a great concept. Get a bunch of cool people together who love photography regardless of ability or experience, choose an area where they can fan out and capture whatever suits their fancy, and then share what they found. Highly recommended. Start one if there isn't a Meetup or Twitter or whatever social media platform sponsored group where you are.
I recently spent some time at a Mac and Don's playscape with Little Man, something I begrudgingly agreed to do, but I'm glad I did because I had the best time watching the little ones and not having to be responsible for them. This little girl was fearless and exuberant and had the best outfit, a smudge on her cheek, and a smile a mile wide. Thank you for brightening my day, little girl.
The 19th Amendment. The 15th Amendment. On the day each was enacted, these attempts to legislate human behavior were introduced to millions of people practicing thoughts/beliefs/perceptions along a spectrum book-ended by, say, "Discriminatory" and "Embracing".
One minute it's legal to project our least flattering human characteristics onto people of color and of the female persuasion, and the next it's not. Just because the law of the land made it so didn't mean squat to those who believed/believe that women and people of color weren't/aren't entitled to the same inalienable rights that white guys were/are.
Those who had demonstrated publicly for the attainment of those rights or had privately endorsed them had done so from a level of awareness of the human condition that the first group didn't/doesn't possess--an elementary degree of genuine living, meaning behavior based on an objective examination of whether our beliefs and perceptions serve us as a species, and consciously changing them if they do not.
Extrapolate to our individual psyches. An equally complex, interlocking set of contributing factors informs the beliefs and perceptions we learn to practice and burn into our neuropathways from the time we are very small. A small portion supports genuine living, or embraces the sort of thought patterns that serve us, while much of it perpetuates those abhorrent projections mentioned above that rely on knee-jerk, fight-or-flight response thinking that we rarely question.
There's a reason the self-help industry has proliferated to the extent it has. There's a reason that statistics on domestic violence, incest, and emotional abuse are grossly under-reported. There's a reason that litigation is the contention tool of choice.
We learned centuries ago from religious dogma and other cultural institutions to loathe ourselves, deep down, and to project that loathing onto others.
Disingenuous living.
Genuine living includes doing the inner work to send those old, inaccurate perceptions of ourselves packing, with understanding of why we might have bought into them way back when to survive; learning to drop the meaning we inject to situations that just isn't true; learning to thrive on the positive energy of nonreactivity rather than the sugar high of reactivity.
This looks so like what hanging out with the shadow feels like.
It lives in a trunk that's accompanied my ancestry for centuries, and it's lodged right over there on that landing on the spiral staircase.
I opened the trunk this morning and this dark fleecey thing sat down next to me, like it needed a friend.
It isn't saying anything or demanding anything, it's just sitting there, waiting for a cue from me, I think.
Questions float into my head, mostly around, "Why?" And the answers I keep getting are, "Because."
That's just how things work.
Perhaps we are unpacking the trunk together.
It definitely wants to play.
And so we shall.
I bumped into Angela Shelton's work online the other night, and I've been inhaling it ever since.
Just got done watching her documentary.
I've watched video of her speaking to groups of people, video she does from home about how the thoughts in our heads rule so much of our existence, even when they are lies.
I'm not an incest or rape or molestation survivor.
But the stories that have traveled the neuropathways of my brain for decades have gone to some insanely dark places.
And back.
Thank you for speaking your truth, Angela.
Thank you for doing what you couldn't not do.
Thank you for allowing your humor to color your world.
Thank you for living a joyful life.
An anomaly, this.
Whenever I see a payphone, it's an installation of performance art.
I have great memories about pay phones.
Like the one about being able to talk long-distance from Italy to anywhere, for free, from certain payphones, by sticking the end of an ordinary, unbent paperclip into the center of the metal mouthpiece and then holding the other end in contact with the metal cord while speaking.
Bizarre, but true. I did it several times, until the powers that be caught on and disabled that feature.
Now I don't need the paperclip to talk at my leisure with anyone, anytime, anywhere in the world.
Bizarre, but true.
This is a stack of Jenga blocks.
You may notice that it's slightly out of alignment.
On more than one plane.
If we could photograph how our beliefs line up with our dreams and desires, this is how that arrangement would look.
Sort of a curvature to document how we bend over backwards to accommodate others.
Jabs and pokes whenever we judge, criticize, blame and fear something in others.
Jabs and pokes whenever we judge, criticize, blame and fear something in ourselves.
Our inner being knows that neither state is accurate, and doesn't go there with us.
Which makes those emotions feel as uncomfortable as they do.
Our inner being's alignment is like a perfectly cut two-by-four.
And it holds the place for us to slowly line those blocks up when we wake up to the game.
And that feels really good.
If you aren't yet familiar (gasp!) with what Resistance Toys are, enlightenment awaits.
Go ahead, we'll wait until you get back.
~*~*~
Given my dislike of even a vague directive to conform to a list of objectives, I am launching the 'An Unnumbered Grouping of Days of Resistance Toys" campaign.
When I feel like it and when I am inspired with an idea, which is happening fast and furiously these days--hence the campaign--I will be posting a new Resistance Toy that has been created by me and perhaps road tested by other blissmongering types who like that sort of thing.
To celebrate creativity.
To have a ton of fun.
To crack myself up.
And to inspire you to create your own. Once you get the hang of it, Resistance Toys are everywhere, just waiting to lend their transformative talents to your life-enhancement efforts.
I'd love to post images of what you create too, if you are so inspired to send them, or add a link to their existence on the web to a comment below (this does NOT mean you, scum-sucking spam bottom-dwellers).
To get things started, here is a reprise of the one that jump-started this whole wacked thing in the first place:
Intrigued by what resistance toys can do for you? Check out the e-book here.
And if you are drawn to work/play on those pesky beliefs that dredge up the efficacy of Resistance Toys on a 'go-deep" level, contact me.
Single-strand, eye candy creations to consider for your gift-giving delight. Their faces will light up when they take the presentation of the box in their hands, read the blissmonger quote on the tag, untie the hemp twine and breathe in the experience.
And then thank you profusely.
The beauty of giving, and of receiving.
Earrings and bracelets to match are easily arranged.
Need some gift ideas for the holidays for your beloved, or for yourself? Add the URL of this post to your Wish List, and see what happens.
Swooning will occur when she opens the box. Click here to purchase.
I do commission designs for the special people in your life. Click here to initiate the talks for a special design. She will love it.
Earrings and bracelets can accompany these necklaces. Click here for details.
Connected and Committed relationship transformation strategist.
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