Spartan Living Spaces; Choices

I enjoyed this video, and I particularly like the saying on their back wall, not that I agree with it fully.  It’s the parameters of the game of life: You have to choose because you really can’t do it all.

The saying: “Tell me. . . what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

I found that this is from a poem:

The Summer Day

Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

from New and Selected Poems, 1992
Beacon Press, Boston, MA

Copyright 1992 by Mary Oliver.
All rights reserved.

You have to embrace change if you are to have the new and the different.

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Treason: Betrayal after trust.

Betrayal after trust.

It’s funny — I needed to save this image of the definition before bringing it into WordPress, and so I plopped it anywhere, but anywhere turned out to be into the image directory of a book that I’m working on. That book happens to be A Brief History Of Communism by Anatole Konstantin, and the pictures that appeared next to the thumbnails when I went to bring it in were those of Karl Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and other devils whose number of murders are in the many, many millions of human beings. Talk about betrayal after trust. . . . The condition of the entire country remains treason, and will until that country repairs its past ethics condition and comes clean.  The efforts of this author could be considered one man’s contribution toward that end.

The sins of commission tend to be the ones that world focuses on — “WHAT did you DO???!!!” The things one does in a ‘cope’ situation are ugly compared to a management style that sanely leads to victory and success for reason, but aren’t nearly as pervasive, regretful and damaging as no management at all. That’s what we’re talking about here.

I remember at one point in my life I wanted to go into the military specifically for the discipline. I wanted a manager because clearly, I wasn’t it. My mother was desperate to talk me out of it, and did, eliciting the help of an American Chinese medicine practitioner. They gently asserted that joining the Air Force would have been a moral bankruptcy, but underlying it were fears such as “What if I kill someone?” or “What if I’m killed??!”

Truth be known, these were my worries about it, too, but the possible overts I may have committed or may have been committed against me are slight compared to the omission of discipline from my life.

Ironically, the woman who talked me out of getting discipline was the woman who took it away to begin with. At 9 years old, clearly my mother was my manager, and when she left one cold October day with my brother, I stopped having a manager. My father wasn’t it outside of the routine of feeding us, hustling us off to school and the occasional drudgery of clothes shopping. All else was over to me.  At 9.

I never rose above this condition of finding out where my footsteps were supposed to be (from someone else) and putting my feet in them. This was “being good” and 7 years later I eventually rebelled against it by smoking and then smoking dope.

There were a few points where I had passion. I wanted to have camping gear, so I learned to stitch and made it. Then I had camping gear.  I took the journey that far, though I wanted to hike the Appalachian Trail. Then I took all that gear up to my Mother’s house in the Adirondacks and went 1.7 miles up the road and camped and came back after spending the night and taking some pictures of my gear.  It’s like I didn’t want to do any doingness, but rather just wanted the beingness.

Another passion point was when I HAD to be a magician. I was in the basement of a theater. My main part in the play was cancelled because the female lead was devastated that her lover, a married professor on another campus, dropped dead. The play with magic became just a magic show that I had an important offstage part in.

I was so burningly jealous of the magician that I was myself hysterical. THIS spurred me on to quickly develop a show, get birds, and go to Lake George to land an audition in 1981. I didn’t get it (due to my Mother’s error), then I didn’t get another audition (they were trying to scare the producer of the Ice Show, Ron Urban, into improvement by even seeing the audition) and then I became a cook at a restaurant. I had to promise the owner I wouldn’t quit during the season. THEN I got my own magic gig at the Magic Forest. That whole summer, I cooked breakfast, did 4 shows, then came in and cooked dinner.  Kept my word.

Even in the telling, I notice, even now, that it’s all about the beingness for me.

More later.

 

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Past & Future; Spin Me Around for a New Direction?

I’m just going to say it — I’ve never been hyper motivated to seek money or power, or, for that matter, to create a future that’s ideal for me. I’ve never quite gotten my head out of the past. (The one exception to that seems to be where magic is concerned, and that usually had to do with getting the props ready either by making them or getting them bought.)

I always thought that this was a question of passion, but the truth is I’m really passionate either about the past or about performance. This could be other people’s performances, special-effects, a good story, a good book, or really any kind of artistic communication.

But when it comes to my own life, I walk around in a state of resignation about my own inevitable death. I know I will never beat it, so why get excited about a future that I cannot keep?

Art is different because art is for now, so maybe I shouldn’t worry about life but instead worry about art! If ego is projecting me into the future, then maybe I need to cultivate an ego because I’ve never really had much of one outside of art.

In pedestrian life, I tend to give more credence to others than they necessarily deserve and less credence to myself because I’m just doing pedestrian life!

Last Monday and Tuesday I had a reset of sorts in the form of Extreme Vertigo. I do not recommend it, but of course it’s not a choice for people who are having it. It’s like instantly stripping away the ability to have body, or to focus on anything, or do anything, or have a past, or have the future. You certainly won’t have a future because so much is removed, even your breakfast.

The one thing, and only thing, you want is for things to be normal. You want to go about your daily routine and, yes, project yourself into the future even if that’s only one pedestrian step at a time. You would LOVE to be able to take a step, like to the bathroom for instance.

And if things don’t come around quickly, and your life seems forfeit, the Regret starts in. THAT is surely about the past and how you blew it.

So, I’m going to get on with my life and see if I can’t pin the tail on the donkey. Now is as good a time as any.

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This woman was, and is, a badass

This woman was, and is, a badass.

And, yes – she reminds me a bit of Mom, too.

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This makes me miss my Mother so much

Oh Mom, I miss you so much. This makes me think of you, the experiences you must be having, the life you’ve lived, and who you are. I’m happy to have known you, and I thank you for the life you’ve given me. I know that I wouldn’t have remained on Earth without you.  No worries, I’ll ride it out, but I remain in your shadow in all senses of that metaphor.

Love remains.

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