The Splinter

Ouch, our splinter will someday work its way out and be this easy to spot.

As Karen and I were muddling around in our third downward spiral dance since she got home, and I was reacting more and more and the anger and the hurt were building and growing, and the terrible disappointment in the crumbled fantasy we each held of the loving-leaping-into-each-other-return, a realization emerged in the incredibly brilliant and insightful Karen/Golden Elks heart mind. That it felt like there was a splinter under the skin of our relationship working its way out. You know that kind of splinter that you don’t see but you know is there and it is irritating and annoying you but you can’t do anything about it no matter how much you try. Well there we both were at the bottom of this spiral of yuckyness when Karen noticed that there could be a splinter in there somewhere trying to get out, and that is a good thing. It’s not an enjoyable experience and sometimes you just need to be a little patient and it will work itself out. The fun part is being conscious and learning something as it takes its journey and finally taking a good clear look at it when it’s out.

The hard part for me was that I should know better how to stabilize my emotions and not have to allow myself to get swept back into victim, blame and wrong. I do in fact know a lot of great tools and spiritual practices to do when the spiral starts to spin. Yet obviously there is still more walking to do down this path of learning. I still need to practice breathing and stepping into the center of my being, that place of patience, compassion and love for mySelf. When I can do that there is no victim, blame or wrong there is only responsibility and ownership of what it is I am creating in this situation and desire and yearning to be in a deeper connection with Karen. When I do that the co-dependent need to please her and make her happy, which leads to all sorts of acrobatics, back stepping and double talking, completely disappears and is replaced by a deep respect, trust and knowing that she too can work out and through whatever she needs to and I am here to support her in any way that is needed. So these are the things I know about me and my relationship with my beloved. Sometimes I really want a magic wand so I can just make that so forever and not have to keep waiting on the splinters to work themselves out, maybe there is some magical universe someday that I can create where that will be the case, however today I am in the universe of splinters and practice and learning. I am happily breathing mySelf into that universe and looking down the path for what is happening as I take this next step.

Just Tell The Truth, Who Knows Where It Will Go.

I woke up this morning grouchy, stiff and in some pain, I think from yesterdays swim. Actually it doesn’t matter what it’s from, what matters is I grumbled and grouched my way to the morning tea. I was thinking about writing a note from that other self to my self, I was filled with yuckyness as I woke up this morning. I wandered up, showerless (I mean why take a shower when you “know” it won’t help) to the office with my cup of tea and settled right into my new addiction of playing my game on facebook. I took a couple whacks at the monster and did a quest or two and I wasn’t feeling any better. I looked outside and saw that it was a cold, gray, murky and rainy day and said to myself “of course”. This was not a good start to my day. In this place I can get very resentful about all the good and brilliant things I say to mySelf and that mySelf says to me. I can sort of look up sideways with scorn and contempt on my face and say something like “who do you think you’re kidding?” So I put some music on that I usually journal to, Carlos Nakai and Peter Kater and their ilk, I make another cup of tea and a bowl of hot cereal and I click on the journaling program that I write in. (One of the features I like about this program is that I can make it be the only thing on the screen, so that there is this light blue screen and the font is large and purple. So that I can pretend there is nothing else going on with the computer behind what I am writing, no emails, no games, no calendar, no browsing the internet, no news, nothing is happening except what is happening right here. It’s sort of cool, but I digress.) After I clicked on my MacJournal program and blot out the world I sat there and stared at the screen “trying” to change my mood, looked out at the ocean for inspiration, thought about something wise or inspirational to say, if not to myself at least maybe I could be smily and inspirational to those of you who might be unfortunate enough to click on this entry and think you were going to get some wisdom, consciousness raising or inspiration from me today.

Well there I sat, nothing, and I sat, nothing, and I sat some more staring at the blue screen and the murky ocean. Finally a little voice said “just tell the truth, tell yourself what is going on and who knows where it will go.” And I started writing. As I wrote those first few words my mood already began to shift, even as I was writing about my resentment and my grouchyness it was beginning to disappear. My chest started to open up and I stopped feeling fat and ugly and started to feel my substantial self. I stopped feeling my pain or stiffness and started to want to stretch my feet and sit up straighter in my chair. I coughed out a few deep breaths and found mySelf breathing again. I’m back.

Man oh man the journeys we humans can take in a short time are remarkable. I truly can move from a contempt filled, resentment generating grouch to a substantial man of power, patience and wisdom in an hour or so. I can move from a body in pain to a body alive in that same hour. I can move from harsh self judgment to beautiful self love. I can also move right back to those nasty places, or wake up in them. That’s not bad, that’s just true. The key is do I have the tools and the listening for that voice that just says “tell the truth, who knows where it will go.” It usually goes in a pretty good and powerful direction.

Note to Self

Note to Self:

You are doing a great job at living and at growing your consciousness. You are integrating all aspects of your Self and finding more love and compassion for your Self. You are not afraid to go into the basement and dig around in the muck and the crap and find the root of bad habits and limiting beliefs. You have done an excellent job at finding work that has meaning for you and meaning for your world. You have done a great job of taking care of the needs of yourself and your family. You have begun to learn how to master your emotions so that you can utilize their power and not get swept away by the sea of possible reactions. You have learned ways to still yourSelf and slow down to enjoy and experience more subtlety in life. You now know how to grow yourSelf and your consciousness and you know the practices you need to do to continue on a journey of deepening and discovery.

You can do better. You know you can. You can maintain your practices with more certainty and clarity and hold to intentions and practices that you create with more commitment. You can be more disciplined in doing what you know that you need to do to move to the next level of your consciousness. You can breathe more and meditate more consistently. You can take even better care of this body that you have learned to love. You can move into spiritual adulthood. I say these things not to scold you or judge you, I say these things as truths that I know you recognize. I say these things because I know that you can hear them without reacting because of all the great distance you have come. It is time, it always has been time, and it always will be time to Do Your Best. Not do what you can get by with or just make it under the wire. It is time to seek out the places where you are sliding by and, slowly, look at ways to do your best.

There is no time like the present.

An Empty Pool

My view tomorrow morning I plunge into this and get the feel again after 25 years or so.

I lucked out. I got to the pool today to go swimming. The sun was out and the temperature was about 75 degrees, in other words it was glorious. As I turn the corner and head into the pool area I see there are only three people swimming, leaving 3 lanes completely open. This had never happened before and I went in to get my suit on and wet myself down in the shower, walked out, not believing my great good luck and slid into the slow swimmers lane, all by myself. I got a beautiful rhythm going with my breast stroke. It was completely quiet and the sun was shimmering on the bottom of the pool. I sank into a meditative state and for the next 45 minutes I just settled in to it all. My body felt terrific sliding through the water, I didn’t feel any energy competing with me for the same space at all so I could just find my own pace and rhythm and go. When I got to about 40 lengths of the pool all of a sudden there were some people talking and standing on one end of the pool getting ready to take their swim. I swam two more lengths, feeling the magic of the moment broken, yet still in the flow of the swimming. One of these folk asked if she could join me in my lane, and feeling complete with my experience and yet not exhausted I said that I was almost finished and she could take the whole lane. Without any feeling of being disturbed or resentful for having the spell broken, which would have been my old patter, I got out of the pool and headed back to the showers feeling such gratitude.

Boy oh boy do I like swimming like that. I have always liked swimming and yet I have been yearning for that meditative feel that I used to have when I swam. It finally clicked in for me. I am looking into how I can find times when the pool is more empty so that I can sink in more like that more frequently. I look forward to the day I can sink in no matter how crowded the pool is, and there is something so special about an empty stretch of water in front of you and no hurry up energy in the air at all that just can’t be beat.

Well it’s a short one today, I am off to catch up on a couple of riffs.

Accountability
Blog – yes
Riff – no
Meditation – yes
Food – 7-10
Movement 8-10
pipe dream – no

Understanding “Missing”

I think I finally get what it is to “miss” someone. I realize that whenever I am away for long periods of time and Karen misses me in big ways, she talks about being so lonely and acting out around food and other things. She talks about these deep tugs of longing and yearning that she feels moving through her. We strategize before I leave what she will do to fill her time and who she will socialize with to relieve the emptiness that seems to take over. When I would call home from somewhere out there in the world I would feel my expanded heart when I talked to her and I would feel closer to her and be able to relate that to not being in this kind of closeness just moments before and I would think that that was missing her, a pull on the heartstrings of love and longing for someone. I see now that what I had been called “missing” her was actually just loving her. Missing is something else entirely.

When Karen left for Black Lodge 10 days ago I started looking for the familiar signs of missing her. Of course I loved her and longed for her presence, that started as I drove away from the airport after dropping her off, and I looked for this “lost” feeling I used to have when she took a trip without me. That feeling of standing still between the kitchen and the living room and the office and not sure where to go and just standing there. I never have that feeling when Karen is here, even if she is down at the apartment and working and I don’t see her for 4 days I am always in touch with her and I always seem to know where to go and what to do. Well the feeling of lost wasn’t there this time, thank god, apparently I have done some good consciousness work and I always had someplace to go and something to do. Other things started happening though that showed me how out of control missing her I have been up to. My consumption of food, alcohol and screens has been 3/3s plus. I am not being bingy about it like I used to but I am acting out based on my new “paradigm” of consumption that I have been fairly consistent with over the last year or so. The two times I have actually had someone here I have turned into a chatty cathy like I haven’t been since I was in my seriously disturbed youth. My mouth just started talking about what ever there was to talk about until I realized I was doing it and stunned myself into silence as I started listening again. Both of these symptoms speak to me of an attempt to feed a hunger. So I have come to the conclusion that missing is a kind of hunger, a starvation actually. It’s not what I thought it was for all these many years about loving. The love of that person I miss is part of what stimulates that hunger. The lack of presence also stimulates that hunger. And for me the pause in the ongoing conversation of relationship really stimulates that hunger. When I am unconscious of the fact that I am starving for something I will respond in the ways I am familiar with, I’ll try to stuff it down my mouth or talk it out of my mouth. I’ll wander around leaving messes or “cleaning for Karen”, I’ll sit on my butt staring at as many different screens as I can for as long as I am awake and have “nothing else to do”. I now know that when I am doing these behaviors all at once, THIS IS MISSING KAREN.

sIt is probably not very profound a realization to most of you out there reading this, and it is remarkably profound to me. I have always said “I miss you” when I am talking on the phone with Karen and inside myself it was just another way of saying “I love you”, I now know that it means I am starving for you, that my universe feels like it has a hole in it and I am desperately trying to find ways to stuff it up. I am also realizing that as I get conscious of what it really means to MISS someone I don’t have to be carried away by the familiar and destructive habits that I have put in place to stuff myself. I can find ways to acknowledge the hunger as a fact and just know that I am on a healthy sort of fast. In fact to treat it like a fast when she is gone, as she will be while doing black lodge, I need to be with the hunger and release it like I release a thought in meditation and then move on to notice the next thing that bubbles up in my consciousness. I need to remember to set myself up to “fast” for Karen when she is gone rather then “hunger” for her. Oh boy I am getting some other ideas that I need to write down on actual paper, because she will read this when she gets home, “Hi Karen, my beloved welcome home, I have really hungered for you!”, and I need to have some things that I do for myself especially around this that are just my business.

Accountability

Blog – yes
Riff – yes
food – no
movement – no
pipe dreaming – yes

Meditation Story

Imagine me with the sun at my back and down in the backyard.

The most common form of meditation I do is a form of zazen meditation that my teacher RainbowHawk taught me a year and a half ago. I sit on the ground on a blanket or a zafu, take a few cleansing breaths in through the nose and out through the mouth pick a spot on the floor, wall or bush opposite me and soften my focus by keeping my eyes open just a bit. I then count my breaths like this, easy full inhale – easy full exhale, say “1” inside my head, next breath, say “2”, until I get to 10 and then start over again at 1. This is marvelous because it gives my mind a simple job to do, and it’s easy to know when my mind starts to wander because I lose count and have to start over again. I bought a little timer so that I don’t have to be aware of thinking about or watching the time, and I set the timer for 20 minutes typically. Well the timer lives up in my little meditation cupola up on the roof of my house, where I usually meditate. Occasionally I like to meditate outside in the back yard, feeling the sun and the breeze on my skin and hearing the sounds of life all around me as I sink into my spot. When I go outside I take my watch with me, and I have this pesky little voice that says every now and then “is it time yet?” that I have to breathe through and return to the count. This voice particularly comes up as I get with in a minute or two of my standard 20 minutes, because the truth is I know the time and my brain sometimes doesn’t trust that I do.

Well, today I spontaneously started giving my brain a little game to play. When I got to the second set of 10 I started by saying internally 1a, 2a etc., and decided in that moment to go to 10z, in other words counting ten breaths 26 times. I had no thoughts or worries about it and just did an internal “ok” that lasted part of the moment between 1a and 2a, and off I went. The meditation went fine, occasionally my mind worried that it was thinking to much by having to remember the alphabet and I breathed through it and kept on going. It settled into a great meditation with the world in my soft focus starting to shimmer and sparkle, up until the S, T, U range and then my body started to complain. My legs fell asleep as they always do but I started to get some pain in my butt and I started to feel like I had to pee. I breathed through it and breathed my posture straight, and when I got to X &Y sweat started to pour down my head and my back. I kept breathing and got to 1z, 2z and everything calmed down and this feeling of appreciation and gratitude swept over me. This was a wave of blissful feeling that started with my body and zoomed out into the universe. I got to the last deep breath 10Z. I began to slowly move my body and stretch out my sand bag legs, put on my glasses and saw that I had been meditating for 45 minutes, over twice as long as I had ever meditated before. My brain and body knew I had meditated longer then I had before but not that much more. As I got the feeling back in my legs and started to stretch I noticed that my brain wanted me to get up and get going and all of the rest of me was really digging just sitting down in the sun with nowhere to go and nothing to do. So I sat there for another half hour or so and slowly got up and made my way back here to write about it.

What I love about this after meditation wondering is that there is NO judgments, good or bad, about what happened, where there would have been in the not too distant past. There were no plans being made to repeat the experience or to avoid it, there were no voices trying to determine if it was alright or proper what I did and if the teacher or some other authority would think I did good. All of those possible voices that I recognize would have been there in the past just aren’t there anymore. I think this is a good thing. This is the medicine of Bear and Turtle at work I think.

Accountability

Blog – yes
Riff – no
Meditation – yes
Movement 5-10 I took a short walk and did some stairs
Food ??? I notice that I think I miss Karen more then I thought and that I have been acting out a bit around food for the last few days and attempting to deny it or fool mySelf in some way. Particularly with sugar and alcohol. So moving forward today I am applying the 1/3 rule to alcohol and removing processed white sugar again from my plate. (dab of honey in the tea and yogurt and teaspoon of Maple syrup in the oatmeal is ok)

Imagine me with the sun at my back and down in the backyard.

Meditation and Imagination

It's sorta like the bubbles in a lava lamp

I was doing a closed eye meditation out on my deck this morning and there was this wonderful psychedelic movement of patterns and colors on the screen behind my eyelids. I know you are all familiar with what I am talking about, at least those of you who have working eyes. The beautiful play of light and dark that is always moving and shifting and the patterns are always changing and colors are splitting off and disappearing only to be replaced by another color. As I sat there in awe, watching this inner fireworks display, one of those pesky thoughts came up, that often come up in a meditation. Most of the time I let them float on by and dissolve or change color, this one though stuck. It was a curiosity, a wondering, “Do blind people see these colors and patterns?” Because this thought stuck I started a whole thinking string that took me to imagination and the question “In a blind persons imaginary world are there images and visions? Are their imaginary worlds also without sight? Are the people and landscapes in their imagination and their dreams made up of sounds, touch, smell, taste, and all of the other senses, as they would be in their waking dream?” Then of course my mind went to other people without one of the senses that I possess, imagining and thinking similar thoughts. Then I started riffing on smell. What would an imaginary world be like with a smell dominated real world? How would music and color translate into smell?“ Oh boy you can see that my meditation was pretty shot now, so I took a deep cleansing breath, and another, and then one more, slowed it all down a bit. Returned to following the breath and seeing what I saw behind my eyelids, hearing what my ears were hearing, smelling what my nose was smelling, and feeling the coolness of the breeze on my skin on the front part of my body and the warmth of the sun on the skin on the back of body. I was filled with a kind of gratitude for all the sensations of life and I swam in that gratitude for a bit, my eyes opened and the meditation ended.

I came out with another realization that was huge for me but at the same time so obvious; Other peoples imaginary worlds are quite different from mine. In fact the way that you and I experience reality and imagination is in two different universes entirely. I had already had that realization around the reality that each of us humans experiencing being entirely different, but i hadn’t gotten that our imaginary worlds and our dream worlds are completely unique and different as well. Any assumptions I had about people seeing things either externally or internally the way I see them have been completely blown out of the water. Therefor what I have dedicated my life to, Brightening the Diamond of Human Consciousness, can only be done by me doing my absolute best to be completely curious about your universe, making no assumptions that there are any similarities with mine, AND to be impeccable in my translation and interpretation of what is going on in my universe so that you can understand, agree, disagree, enjoy, learn and teach. It just requires both of us opening our hearts even more to each other and being really curious about each others universes. Cool.

Accountability

Blog – yes
Riff – yes
Meditation – yes
Food – 6-10
Movement – 7-10 (I went to the pool and after my errands only had 15 minutes left of lap swim time. I sat there in that ”should I go for it, or just bag it cause I can’t get the full swim in“ I went for it and put that voice aside. For which I have given mySelf a gazillion bonus points.
Pipe Dream – I set mySelf up for one and it hasn’t come yet. It will.

Opening the Blinds

Blinds Down in my Living Room

One thing about living in a beautiful house on the ocean with lots of windows that face south and west is that when the sun hits those windows in the late afternoon the light can be blinding, the house can heat up, and the fabrics in the furniture and carpet start to fade in the bright light. So I close the blinds to protect all of that and to not have to wear sunglasses around the house to see through the glare. Now that the blinds are closed I often leave them closed because I know that even if I do open them, I’ll have to close them again later in the afternoon. I also like my blinds down in my bedroom because the bear in me loves the cave at night when I sleep and when I get up in the morning I like to move slowly into the light. All of this makes complete sense. The only challenge is that after awhile I get kind of used to the blinds being down, it’s just easier and when I want to look out I can always open the blinds right next to me, either at my desk or by the chair it sit in in the living room. Back to the challenge part, I start to get closed in a bit, don’t I? I start to feel it’s normal to live in a beautiful house on the ocean and to have this incredible open water and sky in front of me and to have all the blinds down. I don’t even notice after awhile that the blinds are down, if I want to have a bowl of cereal or some lunch in the sun I just step out on the deck for a few minutes and enjoy my meal in the sun, I finish up and go back to a blinds down world.

I am struck by the metaphor of my blinds and the connection to, my own and all of human consciousness. How often do I move into a place of consciousness, a house on the beach with big views and many windows, and then slowly I start to lower the blinds. I lower them for perfectly good reasons, mostly having to do with my comfort, or so I think anyway. Pretty soon, however, I am living in the shadow again, living with blinders on, just taking little forays into the sun of consciousness. I don’t even notice it happening to me, I don’t even notice. Even though I am all about consciousness, I don’t see that the blinds are down. It’s like the story of putting the frog in a pot of water and he is swimming around in it happily and someone turns the heat up under the pot and he doesn’t even notice the temperature going up and then he is a dead cooked frog.

Blinds up in the Living Room.

Today the window cleaners are coming to get the windows all clean for our big thanksgiving feast in a couple of weeks. I went around and opened all the blinds and felt like crying. I got this wide open feeling in my chest and water gathering behind my eyes a little choked up as I took in all that was around me. I feel like I am in this floating office completely surrounded by beauty. How can this beauty not be let into me every day? Sure I can moderate the glare and close and open blinds, but to just black out a little more of the world bit by bit and not notice is the crime most of us are engaged in in some way all the time. How do we keep the blinds open as much as possible, without being stupid, naive or uncaring for ourselves and our world?

I also want to say that none of what I have written here is being written from judgment mind. I am not judging mySelf for closing the blinds. I am sad to see and feel that I let that happen in so many ways in my life. I am overjoyed to notice and to see how easy and beautiful it is to just open them up again. I am feeling compassion for all of us humans as we innocently close the blinds on our consciousness and then forget that we closed them. I am more committed then ever to having all of us humans check the status of our blinds and what we are choosing about opening or closing them. Today I am living with my blinds open, except for the one or two I may need to lower to prevent blindness

Accountability:

Riff – yes
Meditation – no
Food – 6-10
Movement – 2-10
Blog – yes
Pipe Dreaming – no

Intention for today
Riff – yes
Meditation – yes
Food – 8-10
Movement 8-10
Blog – yes
Pipe Dreaming – yes

Accountability and Contemplation

Sometimes you just gotta check off the box

Yesterday I swam!! 36 laps and moving back up to my 60-70 laps. I got out of the pool and after toweling off and feeling great in my body, as I knew I would, I was talking to another guy who was changing and saying how great it felt to swim. He agreed and without looking at me said that it wasn’t a great way to lose weight though. In the past I would have taken that statement very personally and either shut up and go about my business feeling either embarrassed or angry inside, or I would have been very hurt and inauthentically changed the subject to the weather or something, while my broken heart cryed and felt hopeless inside. Well none of those possibilities even poked their heads up. Instead I stood their naked and looked at him, he didn’t look at me, I felt nothing in the way of shame, embarrassment, anger or hurt, and I said “I gave up caring about losing weight years ago, I just love to swim, I love the feel of the water and the exercise of it and I love how it has me feel more fit.” He nodded his head, finished dressing and left. I sat there beaming inside, feeling terrific, because I truly don’t care if I ever lose another pound. I just know that as I keep moving in the direction I am moving in I will get more fit, have a stronger body and heart, and wear smaller clothes. If I do all that and don’t lose an ounce I will be very happy. So chalk up another transformation in this Bear. I have put mySelf back on the swimming calendar and I am thrilled. I am swimming tomorrow and 3 times next week.

I also got my riff of the day written. I wrote a riff on Assumptions. My assumptions about it are that it is alright and there is a deeper cut that I could take on it. Stay tuned.

I did a contemplation, instead of a meditation, out on the deck yesterday and sank into the gorgeous day and contemplated water.

Food – I am not recalibrated yet to my moderation and restraint program. I am back to some old cleaning plate habits. Although the size of the plates I am cleaning are smaller then they used to be, they aren’t as small as I would like them to be in the Moderation 1/3 model. So I will keep tuning that down in the next few days and see what emerges.

Ok that’s it for accountability. Now what am I noticing as I dive down into my consciousness? What am I noticing as I contemplate water? What am I noticing about “holding down the fort” while Karen/Golden Elk is off in the desert getting a spiritual tune up? I am noticing that the volume of the voice of the judge and the emotional reactions has been turned way down. I sometimes don’t even hear them or feel them, and when I do it seems like their voices are not very powerful. There is such a patience that this Bear/Turtle/elder self has with all of that and the voice of that patience is becoming so much more powerful, like a whisper with force behind it or the sound of a pin dropping in a vast silent space. It has such clarity and at the same time is so respectful and easy. If I am headed in a direction that isn’t on the high road, there is no judgment in that voice at all their is only understanding and a knowing that I will find the high road again, and that sometimes a little side trip on the low road is educational. And although I miss Golden Elk/Karen I am not having those old familiar “lost” feelings of wandering around the house not quite sure what I should do. My life is filled with creative possibilities and excellent time wasting opportunities in any given moment and this Bear/turtle voice would love to see me stepping into the creative possibilities and at the same time understands a little time wasting every now and then. It’s fascinating to not feel so dominated by that judge voice.

The depth and breadth of our emotons.

Water – Moriella – It’s interesting that as I sit here and write I look out at a vast ocean and the music playing while I am writing has a flute with some babbling stream in the background, almost like the flute is jamming with the stream. Water all around me. In the medicine work I am doing water is the element in the south and is associated with emotions. So as I look out at the vast ocean I am aware of the vastness of emotions, of the depth of them and the opportunity they give us to navigate to distant shores of possibility. As I hear the flute jam with the stream I feel into the emotions running through me as music and I feel my ability to jam with them and am aware that they don’t run the show, they are just part of the music. As I swim and feel my body moving through the delightful water and feel mySelf held up by it, floating on it, and gliding through it, I feel mySelf relating to my emotions that way. I let them hold me up, I let mySelf float on them, aware that at any moment I could hold my breath and dive deeply into them, swim around for awhile and come up for another breath of clarity and air. I can also feel mySelf gliding though emotions and noticing them flowing past me and around me and not stopping me.

Tonight I dream with the bowl of my pipe.

Finding My Way Back, Again

I think I'll follow the snail, slow is good.

Well here I am on a glorious clear day. Out on the horizon is a big container ship heading north and west, I wonder where it’s going?

I haven’t written in here for a bit, because for the last three days or so I have been writing in other places. I have been doing some “riffs” for my book on Leadership that I am working on with my buddy David Skibbins. I am getting excited by the way it is taking shape and at the rate we are going we should have something of a first draft together by spring of next year. cool. I also have been drawn to a couple of conversations on a couple of networking sites and been spending some time on my Black Lodge site. So many sites to visit and so little time, it does keep it all interesting though.

And the real time burner as well as the mind distractor is that I have gotten hooked on one of those facebook games. It’s one where I go on quests, kill dragons, and do all sorts of repetitive cursor play and feel like I am getting somewhere, when in point of fact I am sitting at my desk and clicking my mouse. Wow between farming, killing mobsters, scrabble, and lord knows how many other opportunities there are, just in facebook, to waste massive amounts of time and join a completely other world. I have 100’s of new “friends” that I just play games with and send virtual gifts back and forth to. These “friends” are all over the world and we meet up in these games and get a peek into each others worlds. It’s fascinating, addicting, burns time up like nothing I’ve ever experienced and a great way not to miss Karen. So I’ve yanked myself away from Castle Age and turned on some Carlos Nakai and Peter Kater music and sat myself down here in front of the computer with nothing on my screen except this in front of me.

It’s time to get conscious.

When is it NOT time to get conscious? There is a sharpening of my practices that starts today. I realize that I say that a lot and it starts to sound pretty pathetic to me at times that I keep needing to “start” today. There is still that one in me that really wants these practices to become habits and not need to ever be “started” again, because they are simply happening as part of the course of my life. This one in me has a close relationship to that one in me that judges me for NOT having it all together yet and for slipping so consistently out of practice. Then there is the one in me that is remarkably patient, has the energy of the turtle and the bear in him and he simply knows that there is no better day to start then today and there is no better time to start then now. There is only starting. There is a paradox really, I think, that I will always be starting and beginning to sink into my practices while at the same time whatever practices I am starting or beginning are working me and I am changed in some way as a result. For example, that Turtle/Bear voice in me wasn’t even audible a year or two ago. All I seemed to hear were the other ones in my circle that seemed to sap power, energy and possibility. Of course that Bear/Turtle voice was always there and patiently protecting the spirit that I am and working with me in subtle ways, keeping me move forward, even when I thought I wasn’t.

Today I am being nudged towards swimming again, which I haven’t done since I got back from the cottage in August. I am being pulled to the water and the exercise of it and I am listening and will be headed off to the pool in a couple of hours. I can feel the cells in my body going “Yippie”. I have some time these next couple of weeks and so I am intending to hit the pool several times. However all that I am thinking about is “starting” today.

The three other practices, in addition to this blog, that I want to bring back into focus with more regularity are meditation, a “riff” a day for the book, and moderation and restraint focus around food. I am going to use this blog for the next couple of weeks to be accountable to those four practices. Ah accountability, sometimes so boring and yet so important to actually getting things done. One other thing that I need to do and don’t know if it is a practice or just something that may happen once or twice is to do some “pipe dreaming”, literally take the bowl of my new prayer pipe and dream with it at night when I sleep and see what I need to do next in my work with this pipe.