blogging

I used to blog a lot more. I used to get a regular trickle of readers.

Now i have my mailing list, and I get a lot more appreciation from that than my blog got.

Funny how things work out.

And yet, I blog less frequently. I think the quality might be higher, though the output is less

I find myself coming up with ideas for the next weekly wonder throughout the week. and then forgetting almost all of the ideas. Sometimes I remember them, but discard them because they don’t hold my interest.

I wonder if I made it a goal to blog every day if I would.

I wonder.

Would I like my life better if I wrote every day?

that’s the real question, isn’t it?

Would my life be improved?

 

Elevator exercise

A book recommended I go outside my comfort zone by ( among other things ) facing the rear of the elevator when it’s full

I tried it today. Elevator full of ladies. I was startled to see al women . I faced them and said “I’ve gathered you here…”

They laughed and kidded with me. I told them I was doing an exercise to go outside my comfort zone. I thanked them for being gracious

Natural Resources

A few weeks ago, my employer paid for the group of us to get personality analysis. We rolled our eyes and convened in a hotel convention room for a day of personality training. This particular method (Emergenetics) had the usual four types of personalities, and each person had their recipe of the four types.

And this one had something I hadn’t seen before: behaviors. As they put it, personality is how you think, but people see how you behave. They are not as related as one might expect. They ranked three kinds of behaviors:

Expressiveness- do you express how you feel?
Assertiveness – Do you fight for what you want?
Flexibility – are you willing to compromise?

At the end of the class, we lined ourselves against the wall according to our percentile of each.  I was ranked 95th percentile expressive. So I hung out just below the 100 hanging on the wall.

I was alone.  Most everybody else was bunched way over to the other end of the scale. I moved down a little for the next two, as we went through exercises.

Nothing in my life has ever made it so clear to me what an outlier I am. My co-worker friend cocked his head at my amazement and said  “duh! You didn’t know?”

No. I had no idea.

Well. I am some kind of geyser of thoughts, feeling and words. This can make some other people uncomfortable. Hmm. I want to analyze and manage it better.

I would like to think of a sort of smokescreen. A sort of white noise setting for myself. Not that I don’t want to be myself, yet I would be willing to adjust somewhat for others.

This weekend, I was thinking of this as I heard a favorite podcaster talk about the death and life of Pete Seeger. Seeger spent his life collecting songs that were very singable.

I love those kinds of songs.

I went to go find some Seeger on YouTube. I found his performance of This Land is My Land for the 2009 presidential inauguration.
Look at him. He is singing a song that every American kid learns. His white hair and beard makes me think of every single kindly gray beard who has been kind to me–so many! –over my life.

He waves his arms “Sing! Everybody Sing! You can do it! I’ll give you the words.”

I was crying. I had to turn it off before I upset my daughter.

Look at all those people together! I felt the togetherness…and the sweet childlike chorus.

In between all the weekend work of mothering and maintenance, I thought this might be the sort of thing that I was looking for. A white noise. I would be delighted to burst into song around people at work.

Singing strikes people and disarms them in ways I recognize and do not understand.

I thought I would love to gift that calm and goodwill to other people around me. That sense of us. Would it be possible?

I started singing some of these kid songs, trying them on for size for use in a corporate environment.

Another thing about Pete Seeger is that he was an activist. He had some strong political opinions.

Politics is power, right?

Power.

Power is so nervous. So skittish. It’s hard enough to be confident and secure in one’s own personal field of life. Then add on this political power, and the chaos increases.

I imagined going to a performance review, and singing This land is my land as we prepared to get started.

Hm.

Business power might not like the reminder that we are the same. The suit there might consider it a threat. “THIS IS NOT YOURS! IT’S MINE!”

Not calming.

So I started singing a tune I really like
I’ve been working on the railroad All the livelong day
I’ve been working on the railroad Just to pass the time away
Can’t you hear the whistle blowing? Rise up early in the morn

I rise up early in the morning. Quite early. I wonder what a boss would read into that?

Dang. These are not white noise at all. Music is not to be trifled with. These kids’ songs are more than I realized.

I wish that songs would not make people nervous.

I wish that my expressiveness and assertiveness did not make people nervous.

These are simple and natural things, both of them. Simple and natural isn’t, in our man-made complicated world.

Sorry Boss, it’s me. There’s no helping it.
~

Intuition

I woke in a quiet bedroom. I was on the trundle bed but my friend was not in her bed. Before I was fully awake I knew something was wrong. Every alarm bell in my heart was ringing.

I knew I was in trouble. How did I know? An empty room with no sound and I knew. What would it be this time?

I tried to tell myself that I was being ridiculous and I didn’t believe myself.

I had to go in the silent house from the basement to the fourth floor to find my friend. She had slept in that spare bedroom instead of her room.

“My dad is really mad. I think you are going to need to apologize.”

She had begged me to stay at her house while I was on missionary furlough. I hadn’t wanted to because I didn’t really like her pastor dad, but she was my friend and I felt sorry for how alone she was.

She continued, not looking me in the face, “He didn’t like how late you came in last night….and there is other stuff. He’ll make an appointment to talk to you in his office.”

How had I known? How had the air vibrated with warning before any discernible message had been given to me?

I will never forget that morning. It is a touchstone to me for intuition.

I am not so great at intuition. I talk myself out of hunches and impressions. I like data and analytical proof.

Some things…a lot of things…the best things?…do not match with analysis.

In the last couple years I have been working on happiness. If happiness is to be analyzed, and God knows I must analyze it because that’s what I do, all experiments must be subjective.  I want to know about my happiness.

I am the scientist and the subject for my happiness experiments.

And to adequately measure my own happiness after I try a hypothesis I have to use intuition.

I hate intuition. It is subjective and not provable and not what I really want.  I began by completely rejecting it as something to pay attention to. As a matter of fact, I doubted it’s existence. You can’t measure intuition!

Then I remembered that one morning on the trundle bed. I could not deny that experience. It happened, it happened to me, and I will never forget it.

So. If intuition exists, how do I grasp it?

I had to step onto the flying carpet. Intuition involves my subjective slippery self.

Having spent a lot of time re-wiring reflexes to the schema of  what I was supposed to want and feel, intuition was not readily accessible.

“Doing what comes natural” and “Follow your bliss” were nonsensical statements for me. I appreciated the sentiment.

My natural bliss was in a corner behind a lot of heavy boxes. At least I think it is. That’s where I started looking.

A couple things I’ve discovered about intuition. It is:

  • important
  • equal parts easy and impossible
  • God’s voice

That last part turns out to be the most important. My intuition is the divine spark of knowing and creation that God put inside of me. That’s why it is so ineffable, and also why it is so important.

I think I want the security of repeatable and provable analysis. What I know, though, is more important than what I can logic out. How frustrating! And how much faith is required to know without security.

I know.

I’m not done moving the heavy boxes out of the way to find my natural intuition. I’m not going to be done for a long time, maybe ever. And I know it’s worth it.

ipad blogpost

i suppose that if I were abel to use a keyboaard and had the right software, I might not need to carry around a full computer anuymore.

I wonder if I could write out a book on an ipad.

Whoa

Lists of what I’m about

Character

Beauty

Self-reliance (Emerson’s essay)

Consciousness

Freedom

Discovery

Courage

Exploring

Spiritual/Religious

Introspection

Ambition

Interests

education/learning

Travel

Adventure

Technology/Systems

Music

Art

Reading

Maker (Like this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maker_culture)

Creation

Cooking/Food

Wandering

Foundation

Family

Home

Cooking/Food

Friends

Ecology/Responsibility

Connection

Career

Partnership