betaphilings

My friend Julana and her team at Something Special Bakery outdid themselves on this one.

The boy in the blue hoodie is my son. In high school he created an open source telephony platform that four years later has its very own conference. This picture was taken today at AdhearsionConf 2010 in San Francisco.

I’ve been following the live feed on UStream. It does a mother good to see and hear her child at such a considerable distance. I’m in southeast Texas; he’s in northern California.

The highlight of today’s event was a presentation by a Canadian programmer who described how Adhearsion allowed his team to create an interactive art project for Montreal’s 2010 Music and Technology Festival.  The goal of the Mutek project was to use social media to create good vibrations to help heal the earth and its people.

Passersby called into a number posted on a building and were told how to generate the digital music that can be seen streaming across the side of the building. It’s a beautiful example of collective, harmonic music-making by strangers on a street.

Pretty impressive, I’d say. Way to go, Jay!

Imagine this. . .

You walk into a nice restaurant and hear Paul McCartney singing, only it isn’t Paul McCartney, it’s someone who sounds exactly like him. You are entranced by this young musician. When he takes a break, you go over and speak to him. There is an immediate spark, a connection. A romance blooms. You start going with him to the recording studio where he is making a demo tape. The two of you become lovers.

Flash forward 36 years. . .

You are sitting at your computer, reading articles on your Google Reader, when you see this former lover’s name. You Google his name and discover that he is now an accomplished filmmaker with several documentaries under his belt and an enormous following on Facebook. You write to him and he writes back.

A correspondence ensues. . .

You read things in his emails that fill you with nostalgia and longing. You allow these feelings to swell up inside you and be felt. You have seldom experienced emotions so intense.

You spend your time watching his films online. He appears in them much like Carl Sagan did, seated and calmly speaking his truth into a camera. He still looks and sounds good. You begin to imagine a reunion.

You view a premiere that was recorded at the same theater where the Emmys are announced. You hear a Hollywood notable introduce him as the most important documentary filmmaker of our time.

You know this person. . .

You realize that his talent and his celebrity, combined with the memories of your time with him, are causing you to feel something you have never felt before. It is a huge feeling.

You get an email from him that contains lyrics to a song he says he wrote about you 36 years ago. He says he will bring his guitar with him and sing this song to you someday.

Southern Lady

As I strolled across a country bridge in New Orleans,

While the Moon was shining a silvery light.

I met a silky haired blue-eyed Southern Lady

I knew right then I had to make things right.

It all started by the way she dressed, the way she combed her hair.

I’m glad I made her mine, my Southern Lady.

I took her down to Ruby’s, we had a drink.

We must have stayed up and danced all night long.

It all started by the way she dressed, the way she combed her hair.

I’m glad I made her mine, my Southern Lady.

- - musical solo - -

As we stroll across that country bridge in New Orleans,

While the Moon shines its silvery light away,

It seems so funny now we’re old and gray,

We live our lives just day to day.

I’m glad I made you mine,

I’ve loved you all the time,

It’s just you and me, my Southern Lady…

Mmmm - mmmm - yeah

It’s just you and me, my Southern Lady.

You read these words and your heart turns into something almost too big to bear. You realize that you have just been gobsmacked by the power and allure of romantic love. What a precious gift when you can get it. –

Here is another psyphiling for you from betaphi. Enjoy!

Question: What she did to me was pure evil. Why is there so much evil in the world?

Answer: There is no such thing as evil. There is only the absence of spirit.

The duality that you sense in yourself, the one and the other, is proof of an intact spirit. As long as you can sense this otherness in yourself, you are healthy. All spirits support life and well-being; they cannot do otherwise because they are attached to Source. There are no evil spirits.  There are younger spirits and older spirits but not evil spirits.

Your spirit animates you because the mechanistic mind is little more than an organ formed of soft tissue whose function is similar to that of a computer software program. Because it is capable of generating electrical impulses through its own biological processes, you think it is more powerful than it is.

Attempts to create life without spirit have yielded fish, insects, birds, amphibians, reptiles, and spiders. These groups are know as fibars. Fibars are the oldest creatures on earth for a reason. They were originally cast as toys for spirits and Source to play with.

Is it evil when the lizard reaches out its tongue and catches a fly? Is it evil when the bird swoops down upon the grasshopper? No. It is the means by which these gadgets sustain themselves. No spirits are lost in these transactions. Spirits are never lost.

Source is called the Creator for a reason. When Source accomplishes one thing, it creates another thing. Next to the earth itself, spirit-filled animals are Source’s greatest creations.

In addition to playing with fibars, spirits, who are the offspring of Source, wanted playthings they could ride. They wanted vehicles. Thus, Source created the mammal group to allow spirits young and old this great joy ride.

You are fortunate to be among this most excellent and exciting group.

The mechanistic mind in humans is a marvel of Creation. It can at times come so close to autonomous function that one would hardly recognize the presence of spirit. However, a mind without spirit to operate it is little more than a fibars. Such waste is seldom allowed by Source.

Remember, spirit’s interest in incarnation revolves around its ability to enjoy food and sex. These two great pleasures are a spirit’s only motivation for manifesting in the flesh. Enjoyment is the natural state of all spirits, embodied or not.

Think of the games you play. Rock’em Sock’em robots. Remember that one? The red robot is not injured when its head is knocked off by the blue robot. Similarly, the spirit within you is never injured. It is your mechanistic mind that conjures up images of pain, defeat, humiliation. Spirit has no capacity for such things. If spirit inhabited the robot instead of you, do you think it would be injured by a hit to the head? It would not.

What you call evil is merely a word to spirit. Spirit knows it is invincible and that knowledge can make it appear foolhardy. Spirit will sometimes let go of the reins, or retreat, in order to see what mind will do. It is similar to the thrill of riding a roller coaster with your hands in the air or driving a car with your hands in your lap. Crashes can occur.

Understanding the gamesmanship engaged in by spirits is something beyond your ken.

Humans are not at fault for what may appear to be evil acts. A human mind does not a human make. You cannot be held responsible for your innate insufficiencies. When spirits relinquish control, things can and do go awry, but that is not your fault. Spirits are wholly in charge of human well-being.

Spirits retreat because they can. They exit the body or stay because they want to.

A spirit is as playful as a child. That is precisely why children are so playful. Children are fully operated by spirit.

Question: Okay, but I am no child. What about my problem?

Answer:  If you think there is a problem, an evil, it is your mechanistic mind deceiving you. All you need to understand is that you are more spirit than flesh, and spirit has no problems.

Here is a psyphiling for you, straight from the school of betaphi, my sometimes ardent alter ego!

Question: Why am I feeling so crazy? I can’t sleep, I’m nervous, cranky, I can’t seem to settle down.

Answer: It is not your fault. You are suffering from the heat.

Unborn energies hover around those in heat, the biochemical kind of heat that all animals have. While hovering, they generate a lot of actual heat. This heat affects your body’s energy system, causing you to feel restless. That is why arousal is called heat.

Unborn entities are attracted to your energy much like bees are attracted to nectar. These spirits are made of ether, yet they have form and energy. What they want is incarnation. They want their shot at being human because human food and human sex are highly sought after. They are, in fact, two of the best things in the universe.

Earth is like Costa Rica or Tahiti for some spirits. It’s a highly prized vacation spot that will give them decades of delight. A human lifetime can be seen as a mini-vacation from timelessness. A spirit’s vacation time is dependent on the human’s lifespan. Some spirits vacation for longer periods than others. Of course, the spirit animates the human so they are one and the same.

As for reproductive matters, it is not just estrogen and testosterone and dopamines and all the other words humans use to describe mating conditions that cause those in heat to feel and act strangely crazy. That is part of it, but the preponderance of eager spirits surrounding healthy, fertile humans is what causes all the commotion. These vying spirits stir up a lot of energy, jousting for position to be first to incarnate. They are similar to sperm in this regard, only they carry no gender. Gender is a choice they make. It is much like choosing a hotel.

This is why young people especially seem to have so much “drama” in their lives. Spirits, like humans, value physical beauty, and youth is almost always beautiful. Younger spirits are attracted to younger humans. The process of attaching spirit to DNA is a great thrill ride with many passengers, all of whom want the coveted spot. This process of being bombarded by eager spirits can literally cause a person to lose control. Losing control is what precedes habitation by spirit.

The actual act of spiritual impregnation begins with sexual orgasm. Here in the mad reach of sperm to egg, spirit experiences that which is denied it in timelessness — the ahhhh moment, the shiver of bliss, the great joining of male and female. All spirits gain entry through the stillness of this great bliss.

Sometimes they change their minds or chicken out just as humans seem to do. This is when miscarriages and abortions occur. Humans are in no way at fault for these losses once spirit has attached itself to life. Spirit is the one who forgoes the intent to grow up as human.

Older spirits may choose to incarnate as what may appear to be damaged humans, children with birth defects and genetic anomalies. They do this mainly because they can; it is part novelty on their part and part intention to share valuable lessons. These spirits are just as rare as the lives they inhabit. Often they forfeit good sex in these roles in exchange for special care. They have been here before.

Animals nursed by mothers are spirit-filled as well. Birds, fish, and insects are not. These groups are akin to what might be called robots. It is not within human ken to understand the properties animating those who emerge from eggs.

Aging and dying are similar to a once pristine hotel room that has been altered by extended occupancy. The ends of human DNA strands begin to unravel as spirit prepares to leave the room. It is messy. That is why you see the elderly less animated. This unraveling can be prevented, of course, but spirits have little interest in remaining in the same body forever. There is so much more to explore.

Accidental deaths, suicides, and fatal conditions are similar to miscarriages and abortions. Spirits frequently find reasons and ways to exit a body with intact DNA. Such behavior on their part is wholly benign. Death of any kind does not diminish spirit. Spirit can only enlarge itself.

The process used to animate birds, fish, and insects can be applied to humans as well, but there is little interest in this field.

Question: Okay, so do you have any advice for me?

Answer: Sure. If you want the hovering spirits to leave, you must calm yourself. Sit quietly, breathe fully, lower your vibration, and they will leave.

The summer before my son entered high school, I packed up my little family and moved us to Houston, where I had accepted a teaching job. Six weeks into the school year, I packed us up again and moved back to Beaumont.

On the drive back from my mother’s house last week, my daughter asked me why we left Houston. The story that I heard emerging from my mouth was both sad and hilarious. It’s also a good example of how to know whether you’re on your right path or not. Life will certainly give you clear indicators when you’re not where you’re supposed to be, and my signs couldn’t have been any clearer.

It went something like this.

Rats

They weren’t really rats. They were field mice that had occupied those environs long before houses were built. New construction in the area was driving them out of their habitat. But to me they were rats and they were scary. I found their tiny entry points in my kitchen cabinets and taped them up with whatever I could find, but they chewed right through all of it. At night I would sometimes see them scurrying across the kitchen floor, and I would lie awake worrying about what to do. I’d never lived with rats. Rat poison seemed my only choice. . . .

Air conditioner

We moved in August. Houston is HOT in August. My air conditioner went out, and that’s when you could smell them — dead rats. I called the air conditioner repair people. They charged me $500 to fix the a/c. A week later it went out again. The smell was worse than the heat. I gave them another $500. A week later it went out again. We were dying in the August heat with the smell of dead rats all around us. The air would go out again. . . .

Washer/dryer

The dryer worked but I was missing something I needed to hook up the washer. It was one of those things I would get to eventually, but in the meantime the laundry piled up, which meant frequent trips to the laundromat, which took a couple of valuable hours out of a day. Toting baskets of wet laundry home to dry was too hard, so I sat at the laundry and dried them and folded them and carted them home and upstairs and it was exhausting. It was so hot. . . .

Telephone

The phone worked fine for a while, then it quit. Someone, probably one of the many children who were in and out of the house, decided that it would be funny to turn the batteries around in my single cordless phone (cell phones weren’t out yet). I didn’t know what the problem was at first, and for quite a while we were without a phone, which made it impossible to call repair people or locate missing children. . . .

Car

One morning I got up to go to work and my car wouldn’t start. That had never happened before. Someone from the school picked me up, and I called a tow truck to pick up my car. For several days we were stranded in Houston without a vehicle, which is quite unsettling, especially when your air conditioning and telephone don’t work and you can smell dead rats. The repair bill was equally unsettling. . . .

Smoking

I’ve been an on-again, off-again smoker much of my adult life. I had promised the kids that I wouldn’t smoke in the new house, which meant going outside in the heat to smoke. Quitting smoking during a particularly stressful point in your life is not a great idea. I wasted a lot of time sitting on the patio with a cigarette when I could have been unpacking boxes or mopping floors. But my nerves were starting to fray. . . .

Job

A new job in a new city is always stressful, but this job was killing me. I had 150 7th graders, and I’d never taught 7th grade. The woman who hired me knowing this thought it would be a good idea to give me morning cafeteria duty, which meant I had no time to set up or prepare for the day. When the bell rang for first period, I left the cafeteria with the students. Add to this my total inability to use the schools computerized attendance and grade reporting systems. One of the chief reasons I left my former teaching job was my district’s refusal to invest in computers. I wanted a computer in my classroom, and when I got one, I didn’t know how to use it. . . .

13-year-old daughter

Jill still seldom meets a stranger. She entered 8th grade at the new school with her typical enthusiasm and made friends easily. The only problem with that is that her friends were 8th graders too, and some of their siblings were much older. There was a constant influx of teenagers early on, and somewhere in that mix my phone batteries got turned around. On the second Saturday after school started, Jay and I were sitting up at midnight waiting phonelessly for Jill to show up when the doorbell rang. It was a police officer, asking me to follow him. Well, let’s just say that Jill had gotten herself into a little trouble with some older teenagers whose parents were out of town. . . .

It’s Time to Go

There was no single precipitating event that caused me to write my letter of resignation that Friday afternoon at the end of the first six weeks. Or maybe there was. Maybe my principal’s voice on the intercom reminding me that everyone had turned in their grades but me and that she needed mine NOW is what did it. I recall the total calm that overcame me as I scratched out a handwritten note to the personnel director.

It absolutely was the right thing to do. I had no doubt. I might never teach again for breaking a contract, but it didn’t matter. I wanted to go home and sit in the red porch swing my husband had built. I wanted to look at the beautiful landscape I had created with my own hands over the course of many years. I wanted to talk to my neighbor. I wanted my life back.

The kids were furious, of course. Jay loved the international flavor of Dulles High School. Jill loved all the new friends she had made. I ignored their protestations and returned us to the place from which we had come.

Driving back from Louisiana, hearing Jill’s laughter at the sheer absurdity of this story, I realized for the first time why I had to leave Houston. She was asleep in the car seat behind me. I had to go home to get her.

Jill, Brooke, and me at Mom’s house in Louisiana

Baby Brooke started holding her head up this week.

When my son was in third grade, his teacher told me that he was her classroom barometer. If she wanted to measure how well things were going in class, she would look to Jay for an accurate reading, not because he was overly sensitive to his environment but because he represented the general strength and character of the group. Her observations of him helped her to regulate the classroom climate.

We are all sensitive to our environment in varying degrees. Schizophrenics, for example, are very out of touch with what is going on around them. Children, on the other hand, tend to react to every dropped pencil and cough and crumpled paper. That’s why classroom teachers rely on students like Jay who can remain focused through most of the distractions. When he loses focus, she knows something is amiss.

I’d like to think I used the same technique in my teaching and parenting. My kids certainly seem happy today. I’d also like to think that my son inherited his barometric abilities from me, but that may be a stretch. I have been told many times that I am “too sensitive,” usually by people lacking sensitivity.

Lately, however, I am feeling what might rightly be called “too sensitive.” Something’s going on that is really bothering me, and I don’t know exactly what it is. If you don’t want to risk being saddened by my attempt to work this out, click now. I don’t know where this is going.

Looking back at some of my old posts, I realize that I’ve gotten away from the funny/cutesy/inspiring sorts of things I used to post. Janice’s comment back in February reminds me of this.

I wish every site I opened had a giraffe, giggling baby, kitten, puppy or something cute and uplifting on it. I suspect folk would be an awful lot more light-hearted!

Of course, in February my pregnant daughter and her husband were still living with me. I felt much more connected to life and love than I do now. That may be part of it, but also in February we didn’t have a thick flow of crude oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico.

I think the oil spill is what really kick-started this general feeling of discontent I am experiencing. The Deepwater Horizon exploded on April 20th, a few hours after my granddaughter’s birth. Emotional highs and lows like those rarely occur on the same day. I have been up and down ever since.

I know this disaster weighs heavily on everyone’s heart, but I grew up in Louisiana. A part of me will always be attached to the highs and lows of that state. Most of my family still lives there. Louisiana has taken such a beating, first from Katrina and now with this horrendous oil mess. It is all so bewildering and sad.

Despite these double tragedies, I try to tell myself that these hearty people will be fine. They still have some of the best cuisine in the world. They still have their community spirit and devotion to family. They still have access to fresh running water and clean toilets, which forty percent of the people on the planet do not have. Isn’t that enough to make those who’ve lost their homes and livelihoods feel better about their situation? Probably not.

Psychic pain doesn’t have degrees and increments; it hurts all over when it hurts at all.

Considering the pain of others does not help me feel better. It makes me feel worse. Considering the state of the nation and our failing economy and endless war and on and on is robbing me of joy.

What makes me feel better is seeing how both of my children have managed to surround themselves with things that give them joy.

My daughter has a new baby and a great husband with a large extended family who work together to insure each other’s success.

My son just moved from the high-rise district to the historic district in San Francisco. He is masterful at keeping himself happy.

I think happy kids grow up to be happy adults. My two were happy little children, despite losing their dad at such young ages. Jay was such a calm, focused child. Jill was so full of energy. We were a happy little trio.

Now I am home alone and having difficulty finding my joy. I don’t know exactly what it will take for me to shake this current malaise, but I know it will eventually fade. Meanwhile, I remain open to the possibility of finding joy right where I least expect it.

What’s bothering me is what bothers anyone. You get older. Your children grow up and move away. You lose people you love. Natural and man-made disasters happen. Sometimes these hit close to home. You have peaks and valleys, highs and lows. My mother’s home-spun wisdom speaks to this.

Be grateful for the valleys because that’s where the crops grow.

I think I feel a little better now. Thanks, Mom. I look forward to coming home for the 4th. I’ll try to bring my smile because I know you guys could use some over there, and I could sure use some hugs.

“We run the world. We dictate the terms of the global economy. Others find a place in that structure or they risk annihilation. No challenge from another system or another state is acceptable.” — America

by Fred Burks

Our world appears to be making a profound shift from one paradigm to another. The old paradigm served humanity for many, many years, and in some ways serves us still. Yet an exciting new paradigm is paving the way for a more loving, harmonious way of living and interacting with all around us. The below comparison is an attempt to capture the spirit of the old and new paradigm without the intention of making one better than the other, yet also inviting us to join in welcoming inspiring new ways which can support us all in being the best we can be and making a difference in our lives and world.

Old: Man is born into sin, essentially corrupt at the core.
New: All people in their core essence are beautiful and worthy of love.

Old: Hatred and vengeance are justified for wrongs suffered. An eye for an eye.
New: Love is the most transformative force. Forgiveness is an act of courage and compassion.

Old: Don’t show real feelings, or you will get hurt. Create a convincing persona to present to the world.
New: Welcome authenticity and vulnerability. It’s all about being honest and real with each other.

Old: Emphasis on hierarchies. Focus on competition so that the best rise to the top of the hierarchy.
New: Emphasis on equality. Focus on cooperation in order to support the greatest good for all.

Old: Tend to avoid personal responsibility by blaming those above or below them in the hierarchy.
New: Take personal responsibility for actions and learn from our mistakes.

Old: People need to be led or controlled by those believed to be better or more capable.
New: Each individual is a powerful creator capable of meeting their needs with the help of others.

Old: The mind and science is supreme. The scientific paradigm supersedes God and religion.
New: The heart and personal relationships are of paramount importance. The deepest essence of life is a divine mystery to be welcomed and explored.

Old: Don’t question the accepted scientific paradigm. Focus on three-dimensional, five-sensory world.
New: Foster fluid intelligence. Explore the edges of consciousness, especially other dimensions and capabilities not believed to be possible under the old paradigm.

Old: Categorizing and dissecting nature allows us to better control it and to profit from it.
New: Recognizing the interconnectedness of all life leads to greater growth and harmony.

Old: Focus on order, discipline.
New: Welcome flexibility and even occasional chaos and disorder as means to see new possibilities.

Old: Value boundaries, borders, and divisions. These give security, safety, and comfort.
New: While respecting and honoring differences, look for shared vision and ways to work together. Take risks in order to grow. Short-term pain can bring long-term gain.

Old: You can’t trust anyone.
New: Surrender to and trust in a divine force greater than our egoic selves.

Old: Focus on defeating and conquering the enemy, us versus them. War against evil.
New: Committed to transforming and integrating life’s challenges. The external reflects the internal.

Old: Focus on details, complexity.
New: Remember the bigger picture. Identify simple principles behind the complexities of life.

Old: Look outwards for guidance. Don’t trust self. Have rigid rules and beliefs.
New: Look inwards for guidance. Develop intuition. Have flexible guidelines and beliefs.

We all have our feet in both paradigms. How much we live in each paradigm is but a matter of degree. The old paradigm is not necessarily something to be shunned or avoided. There are times when principles of both paradigms can be useful and beneficial. Yet overall, the new paradigm invites more love, support, and deeper connection into our lives and world. In every moment we can consciously choose the paradigm to which we give our focus, time, and energy.

Remember that all of us to some degree are afraid of our shadows. At times we avoid looking at the disturbing parts of ourselves and our world. Yet consider that a willingness to explore and even dance with these shadows can be a potent catalyst to a new paradigm. And when we set a clear life intention to choose and support what’s best for all, our lives can’t help but become richer and more fulfilling.

Original article by Fred Burks available at:
http://www.WantToKnow.info/inspiration/new_paradigm_shift

“The soul returns to earth in a body similar to its last one and has similar talents and inclinations.” – Plato

(left Edgar Cayce, right David Wilcock)

FINALLY, after eight years of flitting around the internet like a butterfly in a field of flowers, I FOUND WHAT I WAS LOOKING FOR. It’s all right here on this single link — four hours that answer every question I’ve ever had about who we are, what we’re doing here, and where we’re going. If you haven’t heard David Wilcock speak, please scroll down his page to the first video in the 2012 Event Horizon series. There are four videos in which he talks about the prophesies and science leading up to our forthcoming Golden Age. It’s mind-blowing. It’s what I’ve been looking for.

“Dreams are necessary to life.” — Anais Nin

I SHOULD KNOW BETTER. Let me make a single, broad, sweeping statement, and almost immediately the edit gods will prove me wrong, thank goodness. In this instance, I’m referring to a statement in my last post about how clueless we are at making sense of dreams. Granted, there is no way to know that a dream’s interpretation is any more cogent than the dream itself; however, after seeing what one person does with a dream, I feel I should at least allow for the possibility that some people do have what it takes to make sense of dreams.

For example, Gil Alan interprets dreams in a way that makes sense. His interpretation of Craig’s dream (scroll down Gil’s page to read it) seems totally plausible. Would I pay $90 for a dream analysis? Probably not, but I might pay $100 for a comprehensive course in how to analyze dreams. I tried my hand at interpreting Ernie’s dream once. The result is not unlike what Gil did for Craig.

Waking Life has had me thinking a lot about the dream world. This dream-like movie about lucid dreaming supposes that death may be a mere continuation of the dream state. It’s difficult to wrap my head around the notion that waking life may be a dream that consciousness is having through me, and that when I and my ego die, my part of consciousness will continue to dream.

I feel like I need a shaman to administer some exotic elixir to get me in touch with the dream world if I am ever to understand this better. My understanding feels so fragmented. Dreams are so slippery; there seems to be a sieve through which they drain as waking occurs.

Regardless, lucid dreaming fascinates me because it is a means of holding onto more of the slippery stuff. While you are dreaming, you become aware that you are dreaming; consequently, there is a hardening of the imagery, much like the vignettes in the movie.

I had a lucid dream some time ago that still haunts me. I don’t mean it was frightening. It was haunting in the way that some memories stay with you for a long time. I have no recall of any lucid dreams prior to this one, but then I seldom pay much attention to my dreams.

In the dream I am reading a book. This is what causes me to realize I am dreaming. I become aware that I have never before read a book in a dream. I notice how odd and somewhat disappointing it feels to be reading a book in my sleep.

I don’t know the book’s title, and its content doesn’t seem to be significant. What begins to appear significant is the sound in the writing. Syntactically, this is the most impressive and perfect piece of writing I have ever read. It is a masterpiece. It is so excellent, in fact, that I am dumbstruck.

In the dream I am aware that this is NOT my writing. Every writer has a personal style and a unique voice, and this is NEITHER my style nor my voice. This prose is written by an ascended master. Reading it gives me the transcendent feeling that I am encountering the hand of God.

I awake with the impression of the dream burned into me. Not only was I aware of my dreaming but also that I’d just had a close encounter with the mystical. I had just had a lucid dream.

There seems to be general agreement that dreams are precipitated by and linked to events of the day. Because I spend so much of my day reading, it makes sense that I would eventually have a dream about reading.

There also seems to be agreement that we create every image, every symbol, every person in the dream and that they all reflect aspects of ourselves. If that’s the case, then my reading dream suggests that God is indeed an aspect of my inner self. The dream then becomes a symbol of my quest to get in touch with my higher self. In it I finally make contact.

In the Tibetan study of lucid dreaming, sometimes referred to as dream yoga, one of the goals is to guide the student to discover that waking life is not so different from dream life.

Dr. Stephen LaBerge, director of the Stanford Sleep Lab and author of Lucid Dreaming, states that sensory perception is the only difference between the two, between waking and dreaming. He compares dreams to poems.

“If you wrote a dozen poems a night every night of your life, what do you suppose you would find among your several hundred thousand poems? All masterpieces? Not likely. All trash? Not likely either. What you would expect is that among great piles of trivial doggerel, there would be a smaller pile of excellent poems, but no more than a handful of perfect masterpieces. It is the same with your dreams.”

My dream about reading God’s writing was one of those most excellent dreams. So too was my dream three years ago about twin baby dragons, which resulted in this sweet little poem. I’ve since learned that dragons are associated with wisdom, so that dream represents my attempt to get in touch with my inner wise woman.

I love poems and dreams.

Project Gutenberg has recently made available Sigmund Freud’s 1920 magnum opus, Dream Psychology, which I am putting here for future reference.

“Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled.” —George Santayana

I LOVE DAYS LIKE THIS when my Google Reader serves up content that literally takes me to another level. That’s what happened today when I clicked on Timeframe TV and read this movie description.

A boy has a dream that he can float, but unless he holds on, he will drift away into the sky. Even when he is grown up, this idea recurs. After a strange accident, he walks through what may be a dream, flowing in and out of scenarios and encountering various characters. People he meets discuss science, philosophy and the life of dreaming and waking, and the protagonist gradually becomes alarmed that he cannot awake from this confusing dream.

That’s all I know about Waking Life when I settle in to watch it. As I’m watching, I keep thinking that the boy, the nameless protagonist, reminds me of Wiley Wiggins, the skinny, long-haired freshman in Richard Linkletter’s 1993 cult classic Dazed and Confused. It’s hard to tell if it’s him because the film has been digitally animated.

Well, imagine my surprise when the credits roll at the end and I see that it was little Wiley in yet another Richard Linkletter film.

I met Wiley when he was 10 or 11. His father and I worked together in Austin in the eighties. I remember hearing the story of how Wiley was approached on 6th Street one day and asked if he’d like to be in a movie. He said sure. That’s how he got the Dazed and Confused job. He was 15 at the time. He is 25 in this 2001 film.

I feel like I found a bright green emerald in the rock pile!

I LOVE THIS MOVIE! Linkletter is still as dazed and confused as ever, but we’re all like that when it comes to making sense of dreams. Wiley is perfect in the role of the dreamer — vulnerable, confused, and relentlessly seeking.

Here are eight minutes from the final scene in Waking Life. The guy at the pinball machine is writer/director Linkletter, and the other guy is Wiley. If you want to see the whole movie, click on TimeframeTV.

(Aunt Shirley and Aunt Rose, April 2010)

I found this picture on my cousin’s Facebook page and now I can’t stop thinking about it. Shirley and Rose are my dad’s sisters, two of five remaining siblings who remember what it was like growing up on a farm with thirteen children. I wish I knew more of their stories. Aunt Shirley is now taking Aricept, which means her stories are unreliable, and Aunt Rose mostly listens since she had the bad car wreck.

When my dad was born in 1928, the first of those thirteen children, there wasn’t a lot of work available in the Deep South, but my grandfather was able to get a sharecropper’s stake in northeast Louisiana, where he raised cotton. The landowner got most of the profit from the sale of the cotton. My grandfather got housing and enough land to grow fruits, vegetables, and livestock to feed his family.

At the end of every calendar year, my grandfather got a check from the landowner. Most of that check went to pay off his debt at Delta Sales and Richland Feed & Seed. My father once commented that his father had to be a genius to do what he was able to do with so little money.

I was the first grandchild, and I loved going to the farm for Sunday dinners. Dinner was the meal served at noontime; the evening meal was called supper.

There was so much FOOD laid out on that long table — peas, beans, corn, carrots, turnip greens, potatoes, yams, okra, tomatoes, squash, peaches, pears, plums, melons — all of it grown right there. My strongest memories seem to be attached to the delicious food and the good will and good cheer in the dining room. There were meats and breads and cakes and cream for your pie and coffee.

How my grandmother cooked all that food by herself every Sunday I do not know. By the time I was five or six and able to remember Sunday dinners, the two older girls, Shirley and Joann, were no longer there to help because they had families of their own. When they and the five older boys showed up with their spouses and children, that house could have thirty or forty people in it. In the end there were thirty first cousins.

That was the real fun of it, so many children.

Sometimes in the summertime I would get to spend the night and hang out with my three aunts and three uncles who still lived there. I have memories of waking to the smell of coffee and bacon and finding my grandparents alone in the kitchen, embracing. Once I even saw them kissing.

There was a lot of love in that home.

There were three separate growing fields on the farm. Across the road from the house was the big cotton field. Grandpa planted purple plum trees and watermelon patches at the far end of the cotton field, his own brand of sweet reward for having successfully worked your way back that far.

In the heat of summer, those sweet fruits were a constant temptation to us kids. The only way to reach them was by horseback, and Caleb was an ornery horse. We didn’t have the height or strength to kick the air out of his gut so the saddle could fit tightly. A half day could be spent trying to saddle and ride, and inevitably, the saddle would start to slide.

Plums bursting their skins and rotting on the ground is probably the saddest memory I have of the farm. I am aware of the temptation to glamorize the past by pulling only the best memories forward, but this was a genuinely happy place all the time. Even the two mild spankings I recall my grandmother giving us were more instructional than punitive: girls, you cannot swim in the pig dip pond, and girls, you cannot use my milk pails for potties in your playhouse.

Summertime was magical because all the crops came in, making it the busiest and tastiest time of year. My grandpa had a huge corn and potato field which required all hands on board to help with harvesting. The big kids pulled corn and the little ones kicked potatoes. That’s how I remember it at least, walking barefoot in the warm loose soil, kicking bulging Irish potatoes to the surface and collecting them in a basket. Perhaps he had run some device through the soil to bring the potatoes near the surface. I don’t know.

I do know that he put an electric fence around the potato patch to keep the wild hogs out. I tripped over that fence with my basket of potatoes and got the shock of my life. I still like to think that jolt is somehow linked to the psychic sensitivity I developed.

Some years he would grow sugarcane there instead of corn and potatoes. The cane was cut and squeezed, and the juice was boiled and converted into cane syrup. We weren’t allowed near the cane plant because it was dangerous around all that fire and heavy equipment.

Another plot of land closer to the house was devoted to more fragile vegetables. This too was a magical place for a kid because of the shaded alleyways formed by arching bean poles and tomato stakes. The only alone time I ever got with my grandmother was sitting on buckets in those shaded alleys, picking butter beans, green beans, field peas, and crowder peas while she told me stories about black panthers and bears she had seen as a child. Her exotic stories and soft, soothing voice turned me into an eager helper.

Looking back on those times half a century ago, I see more than a sharecropper’s farm. I see a mid-sized agri-industrial complex, where every inch of land was put to specific good use and where every individual was valued. There was order and systems and processes in place. There was beauty and fragrance and sound. Crowing roosters sounded the start of each work day, and sunset signaled its end. Honking guineas warned of predators in the night.

There was so much LIFE in that place where LOVE lived.

My generation may be the last generation to remember farm life during a time when there were more farms in the South than there were towns and cities. My blissful childhood memories from the 1950s are things I want my grandchild to know about her heritage.

Aunt Shirley’s Alzheimers may distort her thinking, but all thought is capable of distortion, especially memory. That’s why postmodernists say we should reject all cultural narratives as unreliable. I see their point, but I can’t do that because I’m too fond of story.

I’ve watched the certainty and unity of my grandparents’ generation give way to the skepticism and separation of my own. I’m not sure the latter is an improvement, but it doesn’t matter. Something new will take its place too. The only constant is the steady beat of Life.

(Photo by Lori Mitchell)

4/19/2010

You are inside my daughter,

trying to make your way out.

This is the week of your birth.

I am sending you love and spirit and

strength to do what you have to do,

what all of us must do.

Life is yours already.

Breath is now yours to find.

Breathe not what you find around you right now.

Seek the light at the end of the tunnel.

There you will find the sweet breath of life.

I will be here to guide you, as will others.

I will teach you that suffering is illusion.

4/20/2010

It is the day of your birth, my dearest.

I am here pulling for you, pushing and

pulling all my thought toward you.

You are the perfect, angelic, fully formed

being of light, the pulse of energy, the star

from that other domain where life catches

hold and holds tightly, moving always

toward earthly delights so unfathomable

that it makes you gasp in awe.

Gasp, my child, and grasp at last the

breadth of delight that is your right.

I am here waiting for you, my darling.

I will teach you that suffering is illusion.

Who would think
a little black boy
raised by whites
on one island
then another
would go to Harvard
then the White House

But he did and now
all people of all
races can see
America as a
country wiser
kinder

humbler

Oh how I hope this
boy’s brilliance and
audacity will
make
America

better

A Poem by Claude McKay

Far from this foreign Easter damp and chilly
My soul steals to a pear-shaped plot of ground,
Where gleamed the lilac-tinted Easter lily
Soft-scented in the air for yards around;

Alone, without a hint of guardian leaf!
Just like a fragile bell of silver rime,
It burst the tomb for freedom sweet and brief
In the young pregnant year at Eastertime;

And many thought it was a sacred sign,
And some called it the resurrection flower;
And I, a pagan, worshiped at its shrine,
Yielding my heart unto its perfumed power.

OF COURSE there’s no such thing as magic cats, right? Cats can’t just suddenly appear inside a locked house, and even when they do, you can’t blame them for the feeling you might get that you are losing it, that you’re slipping into some other realm where such things as magic cats are possible.

I thought I’d put her outside, yet there she was, sitting on the floor staring at me. Obviously, I only imagined putting her outside.

And there she was again the next day, sitting there staring at me when I knew I’d put her out.  Obviously, I have a hole in my house. The guest bathroom is under renovation. I check it. The new bathtub is sitting soundly atop the drain hole.

I’m just tired from scoring, I decided. I’m stuck in my head and not paying attention to what’s going on around me.

Third day, same thing. Mama is sitting there staring, getting my attention. I’m baffled. Twenty years here and not a single animal break in. What’s different now? How is she getting in?

I go to my bathroom and check everything.

Aha!

She’s managed to tip open the trapdoor to the plumbing. I see how she got in. I secure it thoroughly with duct tape. Problem solved.

Clever cat.

Next day, same thing. Mama’s suddenly sitting there staring at me.

I check the trapdoor. It’s still taped securely. I check the other bathroom. The tub is still there. I call my son-in-law, who started this remodeling project.

Mama’s getting in underneath the bathtub, I say.

That’s impossible because the tub has a flat bottom, he says.

I continue scoring, although now I’m getting spooked about this cat that keeps magically appearing in my house. I’m getting tired too, and I’m losing my focus, distracted by all the mystery.

Maybe she’s not sneaking in, I think. Maybe she’s materializing or astral projecting or teleporting. I ponder transmogrification and other such silliness. I wonder if she has supernatural powers. The ancient Egyptians worshiped cats for some reason, didn’t they? Why?

I think about The Golden Compass and The Temple of My Familiar, stories where animal familiars appear out of thin air to do whatever it is they do. It’s all witchy and arcane and absolutely impossible. At the same time, I can see how a highly imaginative or a highly superstitious person could get those notions if an animal or bird sneaked into their house.

Magic!

Yes, animals sent from the unseen to serve you will always cheer you up.

I keep scoring. I get a call about the death of my friend. I start to feel a bit unglued. I can’t think clearly. I wonder if I’ve injured my brain with  this chronic scoring. For example, when Hitler outlawed jews it would have been unfair for him to hide one himself. Too many sentences like that can hurt your brain. So can grieving.

This brain freeze/mind warp cat/scoring thing wrapped itself around the death of my friend and started to feel really heavy. When Mama showed up on the fifth day, I’d had it! I called my son-in-law to come over. I made him undo the new bathtub drain connection and pull the damned tub out. It wasn’t flat after all. It was curved. I made him stack boards over the hole where the drain pipe is until I can get someone in here to finish it.

That’s all it took. Mama hasn’t materialized her familiar self since. I imagine her sleeping better now, curled up in her pink chair, knowing the house is safe from invaders. Such a helpful little kitty.

Here’s 47 seconds of another magical cat.

Every year on my birthday I post a current picture. This is this year’s shot. My friends gave me a party on Sunday with wine and cheese and gumbo and cake and gifts. So much fun. The moon was full, we were full, the weather was beautiful. Someone took this picture.

I get to be a grandmother this year. Grandparents tell me it’s the best feeling they know. All I know for sure is that life is good and love is the best part of life. I am happy to be so loved.

(Howard and Macy)

My head is full of tears that won’t come out.

Jill called tonight and said that Howard died.

When Jill was in fifth grade, she started complaining about her new teacher, saying Ms. Pam didn’t know how to teach. For a kid who got a perfect attendance trophy every year and loved school, she was suddenly experiencing difficulty. During my off hour one day, I drove to Jill’s school to investigate, and what I found was alarming.

Row after row of tiny portable buildings were lined up in a muddy yard with wooden planks leading up to them. Each building had a door with a window in it. I found Jill’s building and peeked inside. I saw Ms. Pam, the first-year teacher, standing and staring down at a podium. I saw two little white girls sitting in the middle of a classroom with twenty-five little black children. I saw total chaos.

What I had to go through to get Jill out of that situation was beyond difficult. It took the better part of the semester to get her transferred. By that time, she had missed so much instruction.

One of the biggest hurdles was finding transportation. The buses wouldn’t take her across town. I had to be at work at 7:00. Her school didn’t accept students before 8:00. I needed help.

Luckily, the fates sent Howard to us. He was enrolled at the local college, and someone had referred him to me for help with a paper.

Howard moved in with us. He took Jill to school and picked her up for the rest of that school year. He took her to church on Sundays. He took her to his house to ride horses. He treated her like a daughter. He loved her so much and she loved him. We were like a happy little family for a while.

I don’t even know why we broke up. Probably because he’d never bothered to divorce his wife, so marriage was out of the question.

That picture was taken the day we picked Macy up from the vet. The news wasn’t good. We were going to have to put her to sleep.

Howard dug a four-foot-deep hole in the back yard. We wrapped Macy’s body in my favorite pink bathrobe and laid her in the hole.

My head is full of tears that won’t come out.

Jill called tonight and said that Howard died.

His funeral is tomorrow. He was fifty years old.

He had just completed his Masters in Psychology.

“On a quiet night, in the early hours, when all the crickets have retired and a peacefulness abides in the desert – the silence of the universe is recognized as the eternal presence. You are that.” — Gilbert Schultz

Get your twitter mosaic here.

There is a cabin in the woods with two dead people strapped to chairs. The door to the cabin is locked and the windows are sealed. The people did not die from any of the following:

murder
exposure
dehydration
suicide
fire
asphyxiation
disease
starvation

How did they die?

 _________

IF
2 + 3 = 10
7 + 2 = 63
6 + 5 = 66
8 + 4 = 96
THEN
9 + 7 = ____

_________

Three men go into a motel. The desk clerk charges them $30 for a room. Each man pays $10 and they go to the room. Later, the desk clerk realizes he overcharged them for the room, so he sends the bellboy to their room with $5. The bellboy can’t figure out how to split $5 evenly between three men, so he gives each man $1 and keeps the other $2 for himself. This means that the three men each paid $9 for the room, which is a total of $27. Add the $2 that the bellboy kept and the total is $29. Where is the other dollar?

Are you a global thinker? To find out, go to this page and take the short quiz before you read this post. Then come back here and tell me your results. I’m eager to know you better.

I worked for a textbook publishing company in Austin once. A one-eyed millionaire owned the place and a senator’s son ran it. The senator’s son told me he hired me because I was the nicest person he interviewed.

My other qualifications were pretty sketchy. A major in English, typesetting and copy writing experience, a novel.  The owner seemed more interested in my novel than my background. So I was nice and I’d written a novel. Apparently, that’s all you need to work in the publishing business.

The senator’s son would hand me a manuscript and it was my job to turn it into a book. Each manuscript had to be copy edited, designed, typeset, proofread, indexed, printed, bound and shipped. My job was to find the right people to do each of those jobs, assign and check their work, and make sure deadlines were met.

It took nine months to make a book back then. In four years there I made 84 books.

I was perfect for that job because I am a global thinker, which means I process information backwards. I don’t look at a manuscript and see 500 pages. I look at it and see a bound book. Global thinkers process information holistically, from the whole to the parts. Their thinking can appear quite illogical and meandering because most people process information sequentially, from the bits and pieces to the whole.

Most people are not global thinkers. Most people are linear thinkers.

None of us are wholly one thing or the other. We use both linear and global thinking skills just like we use both hands. However, there does seem to be general agreement about hemispheric dominance. Global thinking is associated with right-brain dominance, and linear thinking is associated with the more logical left-brain functions.

Seventy percent of the population is thought to be left-brain dominant, or linear thinkers.

which explains why I’m such an outlier

Right-brain thinkers tend to be more creative and spontaneous. Actors, artists, musicians, and athletes are right-brain thinkers, which accounts for their small percentage in the overall population. These people have difficulty following a simple sequence of directions without changing or rearranging something. Instead of planning every aspect of a road trip, they will just get in the car and drive. Instead of following a recipe exactly, they will change it. They will pick up a magazine and open it somewhere in the middle or towards the back.

Thinking backwards is not a brain disorder but it can appear that way to linear thinkers. Because emotions are processed on the right side of the brain, global thinkers may seem overly emotional or too sensitive. They can’t help it. They make decisions based on feelings and intuition rather than on logic and reason. To the logically minded this can be seen as a fault.

which explains why I’m “so sensitive“

I left the publishing job to have my children, and after that I taught high school English. In the classroom linear/sequential thinkers (most students) are lost without a road map. They need specific steps and procedures on how to go about getting there. Outlining is a linear/sequential processing technique, which explains why I always wrote my outline after I finished the paper. Students who excel in math are linear thinkers because math problems can be broken into small, incremental steps.

which explains why I’m no good at math

Schools do a good job of assessing learning styles (visual, auditory, kinesthetic), especially at the primary levels, but I’ve never known them to address thought processing styles (global or linear). There is a test for left- or right-brain dominance at this site if you’re interested in learning more about yourself or your children. It will require more of your time than the test at the top.

Below are other traits of the global/gestalt/nonlinear/strategic/holistic/right-brain thinker.

• Prefers working in an informal, less structured, more flexible environment
• Tends to be spontaneous and likes spontaneity
• Enjoys doing several things at once
• Learns best when information is presented with humor or emotion or a short anecdote.
• Speaks with many gestures
• Tends to learn the general idea first, then looks at the details
• Can work well with distractions
• Tends to take frequent breaks
• Tends to need lessons which are interesting to them on a personal level
• Tends to work well in small groups
• Needs written and tactile involvement
• Responds well to pictures

(photo by Travis Wright)

So tell me. Are you a global or a linear thinker?

Write about Dad, you keep saying.

OK, I’ll tell you a story about your dad.

It’s a half-remembered story like they all are. All stories are less than whole. There is no such thing as the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth when it comes to memory. Truth exists only in the moment.

This story is like a broken glass with three or four main chunks lying around and smaller fragments scattered about. The big chunks include a hotel, a company Christmas party, a band from Hawaii, and a feast of food and drinks.

You can almost fill in the fragments around those chunks yourself. You could pick any big company to throw the party and any big hotel to host it. The sign out front says SO AND SO’S CHRISTMAS PARTY and the date.

That’s how Tom knew about the party. He saw the sign and came home and told me that we were invited to a company Christmas party.

Yippee!!

He lied, of course, but I came to understand that most of his lies were harmless. He simply loved to have fun, and he had no problem breaking protocols in pursuit of festivity. He had already done the hard job of rearing three children and now with just me he was rolling along carefree. Crashing that Christmas party was so emblematic of the way he approached life. The man was fearless.

Are you sure we should be doing this?

Yeah, everything will be alright.

We were dressed to the nines, looking and smelling good, Tom in a suit and me in heels. The place was packed with lei-wearing celebrants, maybe a couple of hundred in a hotel banquet room. The food was amazing, the band was hokey and loud, the dance floor was set up between the band and the food. We ate and drank and danced the night away.

Tom loved to dance. I used to make fun of the way we danced. We were so awkward together. We had different inner beats and it showed whenever we tried to dance. Still, we danced lovingly and often.

Speaking of beats, do you know anything about the Beat Generation? Your dad was a borderline beatnik because he grew up in that generation. San Francisco became their mecca so if you see any old geysers in their seventies out there, they’re probably former beats. Incredibly interesting people is what they are.

Here’s another story I love. You may have heard this one already. One day Tom came home and said he’d gotten me a part in a Willie Nelson movie.

What!?

Sure enough, the next morning we showed up at a hotel in Austin and I was whisked away to a wardrobe trailer and put into a cowgirl waitress outfit. My job was to traipse around behind Willie, Kris Kristofferson, and Rip Torn carrying a tray and serving drinks. You can see about ten seconds of me in Song Writer. Tom was seated at another table wearing a cowboy hat and tan jacket, acting like a customer. We each got a check for $88 for playing extras that day. I have pictures of us with Willie and Kris.

Your father’s fearlessness rubbed off on me. Once we were on Eagle Mountain Lake in the Texas Steel yacht, anchored in a little cove partying with a group of thirty-somethings. A sea plane began circling overhead and we all started waving. The plane landed on the lake and cruised over to the boat. I asked the pilot if he’d take me up for a ride and he agreed. So I climbed into the plane and got a birds-eye view of the lake where I met your dad. My spirit soared high that day.

Speaking of spirits, the common element in each of these stories is alcohol, which reminds me of a Visine story. We were atop a mesa in New Mexico or Arizona, one of those, laid out on a blanket in the buff when a bug crawled into my ear.

Aachtt!!

A buzzing bug in your ear is a frightening thing. I was screaming and crazy scared. Tom got the Visine from my night case and squeezed it into my ear. The bug drained out with the fluid. Remember that if you ever get a bug in your ear.

If your dad had a motto, it was “Everything will be alright.” He said that to me practically daily for twenty years to cut through my fussing and fretting. It’s funny how when you hear something over and over for that long, you come to believe it. Now it’s my motto too. I know that everything will be alright because it always is.

Tom had another line that worked well on me. No matter where we were, if there was a room full of people, he would turn to me and say, “You’re the prettiest woman in the room.” I loved hearing that. Sometimes I agreed with him and sometimes I didn’t. Most women in their prime are pretty, especially when they’re dressed for a night out.

I never thought you looked like either of us until I put those two pictures up. Now I can see the resemblance—the nose, the mouth, the chin, even the eyebrows. Mostly, you have his fearlessness. I remember you crashing that Astricon conference in Dallas when you were a freshman because you couldn’t afford a ticket. You met Mark Spenser that day and showed him Adhearsion and that became the defining moment in your career. You’ve been on top of the world ever since.

Tom would be so proud of you.

The same thought is always in the mind—there’s something wrong with me, I am missing something, something is lacking, I need something. It is not true. You don’t need anything. Nothing is missing. — James Swartz

1952

by betaphi

My baby’s gone outside to start his day

He is the most amazing little boy

At three he’s full of life and loves to play

He heads out down the path bouncing with joy

He stops to pick up something from the ground

Perhaps a rock or stick or once-prized toy

I watch and wonder what it is he’s found

A ball, he throws it far for Mac the dog

Young Mac returns with just a curl of bark

He’s taken from the nearest Birchwood log

Now Joey’s squatting down, he’s found a frog

He’s showing it to Mac who starts to bark

They play like this each day from dawn to dark

Poets try to help one another when we can;

however competitive we are, and we are,

the life’s so chancy, we feel so beleaguered,

we need all the good will we can get.

Whether you’re up from a slum

or down from a carriage,

how be sure you’re a poet?

How know if your work has enduring worth, or any?

Self-doubt is almost our definition.

Someone once said that to make a poem,

you first have to invent the poet to make it.

—from “The Poet” by C. K. Williams

“It’s perhaps not coincidental that a younger post material generation, while more empathic and spiritual, is less religious and less prone to otherworldly or utopian visions. If one is living an embodied full life of deep participation in the here and the now, there is less likelihood that he or she will dream of finding solace in a perfect state sometime in the distant future.” — Jeremy Rifkin, The Empathic Civilization

Do the demands of others tend to make people more productive than they would be without such pressure?

That’s the question this month’s crop of aspiring college applicants attempted to answer. Of course the demands of others make us more productive. If it weren’t for Pearson contacting me each month to score essays, I might be one of the least productive people I know.

Apart from Pearson wanting me to read a couple thousand essays every month, I have no one demanding anything of me. Nothing. Nada. No one asking me or telling me to do anything. Where all the external constraints went, I do not know. I just woke up one day and noticed they were gone.

But I’m back in my work chair now, sitting here in my paperless office reading student essays all day, trying to be productive. When I’m not scoring essays, I’m busy all day getting information overloaded. It’s dizzying.

Alvin Toffler coined the term information overload in his 1970 best seller Future Shock. I had to read that book in college and I’ve never forgotten it. In it, Toffler predicts a return to cottage industry brought on by the information age. He describes what this new age will mean.

Society is undergoing an enormous structural change, a revolution from an industrial society to a super-industrial society. This change will overwhelm people. The accelerated rate of technological and social change will leave them disconnected and suffering from shattering stress and disorientation – future shock. The majority of social problems will be symptoms of this future shock.

He got it right—forty years ago. Who says futurists don’t know what they’re talking about? Alvin Toffler certainly did.

Future shock has arrived. Too much change in too short a period of time is what we are all going through right now.  It absolutely is dizzying.

I’m going to play futurist here for a minute and make a prediction of my own. I predict that everything is going to be alright, because it always is. If you don’t believe me, just look out your window right now. There’s your proof. Everything is always alright, it always has been and always will be.

Be kind to yourself, get some fresh air, and remember: That air is shared by every living creature on this planet. What you are breathing right now may once have been inside a baby panda.

We truly are all in this together.

Lisa Ericson at MommyMystic is looking for funny baby stories. I submitted mine about setting my son on fire. Check it out in the comments there.

Lack of imagination is the cause of much human suffering.

I never knew Dr. Guisenberger’s story. I only imagined it. For decades I imagined his story. He was the hot coal in my shoe. I hated him and feared him and blamed him for turning me into a freak.

Over time my anger subsided as a new story began to emerge. The new story was imagined too. In the new, more sympathetic version of the story, Dr. Guisenberger was not an evil monster but a tortured soul, reeling from the horrors of his place in time, a damaged fragment of his former self.

It’s funny, really, how you can look at anything in different ways. One with loathing, one with compassion.

In the old story I was convinced that he hated me because my eyes were blue. I felt that he was using me to exact a morbid kind of personal revenge.  That might have been the case, but I cannot look at it that way any longer. Now I must view Dr. Guisenberger as a pathetic, broken man who had known untold horrors in his homeland. Whether that was true or not, I do not know. I only know that he was psychically sick. In my new version of the story, it was the Holocaust that made him sick.

If one needed glasses back then, one went to Dr. Guisenberger’s office.

“Is this better or worse?” he would ask.

I never knew for sure. I always guessed and I always guessed wrong.

It did not seem to matter to him whether I guessed correctly or not. All he wanted was an answer. If I said I didn’t know, he would persist.

“Of course you know. Which is it, better or worse?”

I trembled in fear of this man for ten years. Twice a year for ten years I was forced to sit in his dark, dank room and smell his coffee breath in my face and say things I did not believe. Twice a year for ten years I would leave his office with a prescription for new lenses that were stronger than the ones I wore.

“Mom, I can’t see.”

“You’ll get used to them.”

“But I can’t see!”

“The doctor knows what’s best.”

Never once did her words comfort me, nor for a moment did I get used to the burden placed on me by my elders. No one knew what to do when I cried with each new pair of glasses.

As the lenses got stronger, the headaches worsened. My childhood was a blur of headaches and heartache.

By the time I reached high school, my lenses resembled Coke bottle bottoms. By the time I graduated, Dr. Guisenberger’s version of my vision had reached a whopping 20/1000.

According to Wikipedia, 20/1000 is considered near total visual impairment, or near total blindness.

I felt betrayed by the adults in my life. I felt that they had allowed near blindness to be forced on me by a black-souled German Jew who had it out for me and my little brother. Yes, he too, my precious little brother, was dealt this same exact blow.

No one in my extended family had low vision, yet somehow my brother and I got labeled nearly blind. That alone is reason to believe the doctor over corrected us. Also, there was that little girl whose innate sense of awareness kept insisting something was wrong.

Were my brother and I deliberately blinded by a demented victim of Nazi terror? Maybe. Maybe not. There is no way to know.

In my earlier version of the story, his actions were deliberate. In the newer version, he was merely incompetent. In the new version, Dr. Guisenberger was dealt a hand much worse than my own. His country incinerated children. By comparison, slowly blinding them seems much less cruel.

I know enough about story to know that any story can be shaped. The shape of this story changed when I began to imagine a less painful way to view it. Imagining the doctor’s story differently made a difference. That and four operations. Now I am 20/350.

My brother still doesn’t trust eye doctors. He refuses to risk having surgery.

If our obstacles are our path, my path became that which was near to me, things I could hold in my hands and see clearly, like books or drawing and sewing. Nowadays it’s a computer.

I have Dr. Guisenberger to thank for shaping my path. He more than anyone else taught me the value of imagination. Imagination lets us forgive.

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the
Indian in a white poncho lies dead
by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone who journeyed through the night
with plans and the simple breath
that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness
as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow
as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness
that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day
to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

— from this lovely site