Feathers and carrots

Back to the beginning is sometimes hitting against the wall to gain strength and accuracy but also to remember the movement. Remembering the feeling is more than halfway there to hitting the ball right.  The physical ability sure.  The strength, accuracy, the feeling from the deep roots of your heels up through your arms. But the real journey of a good connection is from the feeling of the ground running through your legs and arms and into your imagination. That’s where you can really lay into the ball and move it wherever you want. It’s also true whether it takes place on the court, against the wall, or behind your closed eyelids; or whether it’s a soft hit, seriously strong and powered or the surprising fluency from timing. 

When the fear comes or the darkness, it is like a cloud of sand that moves like a wave between the horizon and the plain. If only it were like a water spout, magical and from a distance, astonishing. Crowded by thoughts, by weights not entered on the periodic table core iron is pulled from your blood sending you into a sea darker than any ocean shadow. 

You forget who you are and why. You forgot what makes you smile. How this weight can come between you and what is joyful, that is the puzzle.  There is no set itinerary for the road back. Compasses are not helpful.  Yes it is possible to survive this time and enter your home or go to work. But the going and the coming are empty. In the rush rush world nobody notices. You try to engage. You pump the clutch; pull the gear into position and nothing. You look around for hills to gain momentum and trick the engine. 

Sometimes the carrot is a feather. A gift blessed by ceremony and connection; by meaning drawn from the shared experience of people holding the dream of our world in their songs and visions. You had to pick up the feather. Even as you accept such a gift, the feather always was on the wings of your soul. The light was always the night’s partner. The day is yours to remember who you are and what makes you smile.

Bacon on my brain - again

One of the many recent news articles about bacon noted that it may cause an addiction like response that people have to cocaine.  “Really?” you might say in total disbelief.  But just try not to want it when you smell it cooking.  Just try to resist.   Apparently the feel good hormone, dopamine, rises in rats gorged on bacon.  If you’re sitting there, stunned as I am, read on.

From rats to theories about how to deal with human obesity, that’s the story of this sizzle. It’s true, fatty foods might well be addictive.  They might even taste so good that you’d want them again, and yop, again.

Well then, now is the time to open up a Bacon Den of Iniquity. Don't you think?  Let's advertise the dark, sinister, sexy side of bacon and lure in people with deep fried cheese cake squares whilst our clients are treated to the sound of bacon sizzling as a teaser (and in the back room we're actually shredding paper - it makes the same sound) and then whilst they think they're about to indulge in a sinister delight, we serve them tofu strips, with all the markings of marbled bacon on it and create a sensuous fury and flurry of

Well I cannot continue in this vein. I took a break, sat back, a sip of tea and looked on my desk. Staring me square in the face is a big brown floppy teddy bear. Why is it there on my desk?  Because I was, hopelessly as it turned out, trying to figure out how to use the one size fits all cat harness on it - so that I didn't have to put Molly and myself through the torture of a live fitting. This bear does not bear any resemblance to a cat or Molly, but it was the closest stuffed animal I could find. I'm afraid to say that it wasn't the bear's fault that I couldn't succeed with the harness. It was as complicated to me as imagining a bacon/opium den of iniquity that was made out of tofu. 

My life is either getting more complicated or my brain has been reduced to its lowest level of simplicity. 

Message to self- write

Writing is an interior act and behavior. Anyone that engages in this activity understands this. You enter a world of your own and begin whatever it is that you or others might call writing. It is an inside job. Its such an inside job that it’s strange for me to think of it as a right. It can be interpreted as a human right. It is a human right.
Although we also think that it is what sets us apart from other creatures, it may be what brings us into closer understanding of them rather than distancing them from us in a hierarchical fashion as has often been the distinction.

We know that the octopus and other animals may use ink as a defense mechanism or a way to express something. I was going to write that it might be a way to express an emotional state but it could be possible that the octopus, able to withstand the enormous pressure of the deeps, does not have the enormous array of emotions or the need to express an array of emotions. Perhaps all the output from an octopus’ ink is about more cerebral affairs than it is anything else.

There are bugs that work on tree limbs and leave hieroglyphics. They form their expressions by eating the soft wood once the bark is gone. They leave a path or channel that appears like a glyph. I am not a naturalist but if I were I might be drawn to use language other than this sort. I clearly wrestle with the issue of anthropomorphizing. Or maybe it is more certain that I don’t wrestle enough. In my own fashion I am not trying to ignore the world of science but to see what I see, hieroglyphics on branches as a form of writing. This should not be understood to mean that I suggest there is content or messaging or any sort of deliberate attempt at communication through these writings. It is what it is. Just as my journal writing might be. Please don’t ever find a journal, by anyone, and assume that to be writing that was meant for communication. It is communion if the writer was fortunate to have that relationship with themselves and the method of writing; but it is not meant, unless it is meant, as communication. So I see the writings of creatures in the world. Not as communion but as an act of something that left these marks.

I was told that it is a beetle leaving the hieroglyphics on the branches. These beetles do not go up and down in neat little rows as they eats their way through to the markings that appear like an ancient language. They do not do spirals or circles or any sort of recognizable alphabet. I do not see anything but very small segments of shapes that any random gnawing might produce. Their glyphs speak to me in the way that many things do which are not tied to specific meanings but could be called recognition, or beauty of just the old fashioned sort of being with speaking to that comes when we are quiet inside.
The same could be said about the path of the slugs on the flagstones. Or birds leaving tracks in the sand. It could all be writing. It so happens then that I live in a writing community. It is something I always wanted. Language or a communication or an act of leaving a mark takes physical form, just like the cat paws in the snow. I know that everything a cat does is deliberate. They might be journal writing or sharing their news or just making marks in the snow. As for cats, I would have sworn that Stoner was leaving messages with her nose prints on my windows. All of this could be an interior act pushed to the most convenient surface.

Whatever it might be that you need to write, for yourself or for sharing with others, I hope your find your medium and leave your message. If there’s no message and you are writing to commune with yourself, that is also good. It is the time and the focus that you take to do this which is the gift and the needed communication with yourself or with others. The act of changing your focus from one thing to another as many do today doesn’t generate the kind of compassion toward yourself that you might need from a quiet moment with your journal or another writing project. Peace of mind is also a human right and it goes nicely with writing.

The DN has returned. Long live the Daily Neurotic!

You can also follow any shennigans, stories of the wilds in the suburbs, common complaints of the dailies and what have you @thewildblues.

Once again I have come to the shore of the daily blogger. Humbler than before. Tumbled and smoothed by time.

time and tidepools

Do not give up all metaphors. Though I rather like similes myself, I would be hard pressed to give you three reasons why they are different from metaphors. Some suspect that similes lack the nuts and bolts that make metaphors a more significant construction project. Similes are less formal comparisons and can be used as a description rather than creating a parallel universe that the metaphor is intended to do. Similes are coated with a thin layer of grease if they are elegant similes and can slide into being far more simply than metaphors which require incubation and an elaborate birth ritual.


Eventually, metaphors become dials on the dashboard of your consciousness or switches that click. Eventually, you get touch button controls; then just thoughts. Probably, eventually, you can reach through with your own hand into the deep well of a hologram. Your hand becomes an archetype with robes that are dimensions in time. And you can circle through all the strings of reality the physicists have found until you reach for the contact that is the god or goddess, the holy one, or grandmother, who is really the person you’ve always known when wisdom was a tide pool and you were a new life swimming, just swimming. And the light and the shadows. As Shakespeare might have someone sing, with a heigh and a ho. What we focus on produces heat. Whether fire or foul, the worst that is fear or the energy that is beauty, depends. It depends on everything going on that particular day. It’s about levels. Loren Eiseley saw the entire history of the universe from the formation of the earth through to the earliest life forms, in a small puddle. Or you might have someone like Rachel Carson, knees still working, kneeling down over a tide pool watching all the life going on there in that little ecosystem. The water goes in and out pulsing with sounds and miniature currents.

Thirty years ago scientists predicted that the depth and dimension of holograms would change the way we would store information. Holograms will be the new sea deep and unexplored, with all possibilities, all levels. Imagine shelves, closets, alcoves. This new place and you reach in and pick up a starfish, just for a brief moment, to see its tubular feet searching for solid ground to move along. But your hand is also deeper. It also has more dimensions, more bodies, more territory unexplored. Although you know it is your hand it is also an archetype. Archetypes are from way back and come along with their stories, gift of meanings layered and faceted, shining like the night sky, galaxy after galaxy. Suns and moons all over the place. Many lives. All the languages. All reaching with your hand into the tidepool.

I like to think that I carry the sea in me. I would dive in and the waters would meet. Sea to ocean. Like recognizing like without a brackish water intermediate. This is how some might describe desire met in that pool where identity swims round till the whirlpool comes and everything that is you slides down, merging, becoming the whirlpool – dissipating into another realm of being.

Different people leave different messages, cause different structures to form depending on their need. Whether duck paddled or boat engined. Whether full moon or runoff. The ebb and flow of the tide isn’t as symmetrical as I first thought. There’s a different tide each time but the coming and going remains the same.

 
 
 
 
Coda:  Sometimes there's music and nobody is playing it. 

The Daily Neurotic is getting out of here

Friends and neighbors - keep an eye out for some changes. The Daily Neurotic will be moving to its own site shortly.  Keep checking here for the switcheroo.  The address will be:  http://www.thedailyneurotic.com/
just as you suspected all along. 

What the who ha hay?  What does this mean?  Who knows?  Check with Ms. Whoozywhatsitwhooziewho to find out.  I'm thinking the dailies really don't start until Monday. Check it out. Consider it yourself. If you're stuck on the couch, or in your home for whatever reason and are sitting outside of the Monday through Fridays that have been previously mentioned, are you then experiencing the dailies?  Probably. Right? Everyone has their own version of them.  Most likely.   There's really no need for concern or alarm. There's still every opportunity available to you to be neurotic and to receive The Daily Neurotic for free.  These days, there's so many emails and newsletters and posts and whatnot for free that it almost seems like you're paying for it in a sense with your time. Enough already with the free things. Alright then. Show me the money.  Just send a check to Ms. Whoozywhatsitwhooziewho in whatever amount you can afford, throw in a cookie for Santa, a dish for the angel, pay for the piper and their cut - whoever they are, and consider that we're square. 


Coda:  Adopt an animal. Leave your land to an organization that will keep it undeveloped. Be good.

Writing rights

Writing is such an interior act and behavior. We all do it. So inside that it’s strange for me, sometimes, to think of it as a right. But it can be broadly interpreted as a human right. It is what sets us apart from other creatures. Maybe not the octopus and any other animal that might leave ink writings. There’s bugs that work on tree limbs and leave hieroglyphics. There’s the path of the slugs on the flagstones. Birds are leaving tracks in the sand. It could all be writing and we think we’re special; when really, we just have a language that takes physical form just like the cat paws in the snow. When I think about it, everything a cat does is deliberate. They might be writing all the time and we just don’t know it. Well, they wouldn't be writing all the time given the union rules of soaking up as much sun as possible and their obsession with personal spit distribution.  But I would have sworn that my cat Stoner was leaving messages with her nose prints on my windows. I used to kid with her that it was a cry for help. Maybe it was. She's gone now. Could be her ship came in. 

Coda:  Everything that's interpreted is also everything that it is without the interpretation.