you can be anything you want to be

Holiday vs. Vacation

What do you do when you aren’t feeling motivated? What do you do when you feel like you’ve come up to a dead end–when nothing seems to be panning out and you aren’t especially excited about where you are at, and you have no faith in your ability to get anywhere else? Well, this is what the holiday is all about.

Funny thing about the use of words. Here in the States when you go away for a few days we call it a vacation. You are vacating your place at work, basically. So when we go away to get refreshed and enlivened it’s in relation to coming back with more energy to place into our jobs.

In Britain and such they call this same thing going on holiday. Wow. That’s a completely different concept. Holiday is Holy Day–so it’s taking some time to get in touch with all that is holy–it’s some time to commune with our deeper selves, our free selves, the selves we are when we are not chained to a desk, etc.

So. Totally different concepts. Vacations are in relation to work. Holidays are in relation to Spirit, Universe. And so a vacation becomes an escape of sorts, an opportunity to get away from something we are going to come back to, while a holiday is something different, a going into something, a getting closer to and a basking in a sort of freedom that is our birthright, all too often abdicated in the name of honor, duty, and fear.

So whatever the weather, and it’s raining raining raining as I pen these words, and the forcast for the next week looks like we’ll be getting more of the same, taking a holiday feels like exactly the ticket for getting that ticket of refresh and renew that is so necessary from time to time, or as often as possible perhaps.

But I might die tonight!

It’s been a steady drum beat from this neck of the woods that we are all working too much over here, meaning the USA, and that once you factor in commuting, a regular 40 hour job ends up taking up virtually your entire work week, leaving a few hours at the end of the work day to eat dinner and wind down before going to sleep in order to get up the next morning and start the whole damn thing all over again, and then the weekend to try getting in some time for fun and laughter in between shopping, doing the laundry, and all the other little life-chores that we don’t have time for during the work week, which after all is all about work.

Whew.

And for some reason the mentality of the self employed goes down that same damned rabbit hole if not even worse. Remember the white rabbit? “I’m late, I’m late! Oh my ears and whiskers!” It’s the make it happen now so I can enjoy my life later syndrome, which Cat Stevens sang about thusly, way back in 1970 or something like that:

I don’t want to work away
Doing just what they all say
Work hard boy and you’ll find
One day you’ll have a job like mine…
But I might die tonight!

Final Screed

So this seems to be a good week to put a wedge into it and remember that we work that we may live, and that there is something completely screwed up about 100 years of rapidly increasing wealth and productivity and people still working just as much if not more, to the point that they don’t even raise their own children any more!

So anyway, that’s about all I have to say. Tomorrow I’m lighting off to the lakes of New Hampshire, to holiday amongst the vacationers!

photo by Robert Scoble

Tags: birthright, but i might die tonight, cat stevens, freedom, funny thing, going on holiday, holiday, holy day, motivator, neck of the woods, or something like that, sleep, universe, vacation

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Later is Earlier is the Same as it Ever Was?

Sitting on the couch at 6:02 and noting that oddly enough, with the Sun coming up earlier and earlier, I’m getting up later and later, which confused me for a few until I realized that hey, it’s also going down later and later, especially with daylight saving time, so that on the one hand, I’m staying up later and so of course I’m getting up later, and on the other hand, it’s still bloody 5am as far as the Sun, the Earth, the Moon, and my damn body are concerned. So there.

Doing less and enjoying it more

Also in the realm of time and such, I’m really feeling the effects of Summer (despite the rain rain rain we’ve been having here in Boston), which is ever and always the season of Huck Finn to me, the season that whispers in my ear:

Hey. Whatcha doin’? Wouldn’t you rather be fishing?

And hey–funny thing I don’t see too many of those I’d rather be fishing bumper stickers here in Boston, ‘cos in Iowa they’re on like every third car, along with my kid beat up your honor student and if you are reading this you are too damn close to my bumper so back the fuck up, jack.

Oh well. I actually am going fishing next week! It’s Story Land time, which Rowan is super excited about, meeting Humpty Dumpty and all, and going for a ride in Alice’s Magic Teacups. And it’s camping in New Hampshire time; five days in the woods with no internet connection woo hoo hoo!

Well, I’ll have my iPhone, so I’ll post something on Friday cos, as Havi says, it’s a tradition, and traditions are important. And still…it may not be the Wilderness, and I’m going to light out to it anyway! Yeah.

Food Inc.

So anyway, it’s Summer. The garden is doing nicely. Full of weeds and I don’t mind. I just pick them before they get too big and add ‘em to the compost. More grist for the mill, you know? At least I know where my food comes from.

And if you ain’t so sure of where your food comes from I suggest heading down to your nearest enlightened movie house and taking in Food Inc., which I saw at the Coolidge Corner Theatre on Wednesday, just after Ran and I took Tal’s class over at Yoga Now in East Dedham.

It felt good to me moving together, side by side, breathing, breathing, breathing, getting in touch with the mind behind the mind, or some Hippy Yoga Consciousness kind of thing, and then it felt good to go see a movie that reveals the true cost of our Techno-Frankenstein Food Production System, the Environmental cost, the financial Tax Dollars Supporting Mega Corporations cost, and the Human Beings getting Squeezed by said Mega Corporations cost.

Michael Pollan is in the film, and served as an advisor of sorts, and that by itself is worth the price of admission, and there is so much more than that. Enlightening and Moving, Film Inc. gets 2 thumbs up from this household. Check it out!

Little Fishes

We also picked up a fish tank that afternoon, and are now the proud caretakers of 3 new little swimmers. Graceful and Grape, the tetras, and Giraffe, the we’re not sure yet, now join Gilbert and Glasses, the guppies, in our little water menagerie.

Rowan named them, bless his heart, and isn’t it ironic that we boost up the bounty of fish for pets just days before we take our first trip in search of fish for food. Ah well. Such is life. The one hand giveth and the other hand taketh away! It’s all a wheel of Creation, Sustainment, and Destruction on this Earth that we love so dearly.

That’s it for today. Enjoy your weekend! Keep Moving! And listen for the voice of Summer whispering in your ear!

Love,

Chas

photo by jelene

Tags: boston, brahma, camping in new hampshire, doing less and enjoying it more, food inc, havi, heart, huck finn, humpty dumpty, love, michael pollan, shiva, vishnu, yoga

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Completing the Core

The past two weeks I’ve been working on truing the wheel of my life, starting with the most core areas and working outward. All of this is part of the ongoing theme of self healing that began way way back on January 1^st 2009. Remember back that far? All the changes so far this year! Who’d a thunk it, eh?

So the quick recap is that 2 weeks ago we took on food, and last week we took on intimacy. Following the spiral of human development, once we have met our needs for food nourishment, and touch–connection–intimacy, the next step is to begin to increase our ability to move about.

Primary for the development of language and the nervous system, movement is one of the core areas of Self. As we move, so we think; as we move, so we speak; as we move, so we are.

Movement as Energy

So when we are truing our wheel and bringing ourselves into balance and wholeness, the sooner we get into movement, the sooner we examine our movement, the sooner we increase the range and quality of our movement, the sooner we will experience an increase in our vitality, in our sense of calm, and in our sense of place, of being in the right place at the right time to do what we are here to do.

If eating and touching, food nourishment and physical intimacy, are the core of our beingness, then movement is the thing that completes out core and then begins the transition outward into expression and doing. Movement helps us to ascertain and develop our sense of place in the world.

So as important as movement is, why are we so limited in our expression of it?

Consider the child, in constant expression of movement. Running, jumping, dancing, squirming, wiggling, giggling–so much energy expressed at movement. It is this movement itself that we call having energy, it is the movement of the child that tells us the child is full of energy. Energy expressed as movement.

Busting a New Move

And then consider the adult. For most of us, we live in a world of repetitive and limited movement. We do the same thing every day, from the time we wake up to the time we go to sleep. Our range and palette of motion is so very narrow, and hardly ever do we surprise ourselves by busting a new move, and when we do, it’s usually not a good thing! Like a fall, or something strenuous that wakes us up the next morning with an ouch!

The result of this movement streamlining is that our emotional and mental lives have become streamlined as well–we emote and think in the ways that we move, and we get narrower and narrower as the years go by. The groove becomes a rut.

What to do? Well, everyone is different, and there are so many options!

• Hiking and biking.
• Dancing and prancing.
• Tai chi and chi gong.
• The burgeoning world of yoga.

It’s an endless list of possibility, and the important thing is to shake it up and surprise ourselves, and in that spirit my project for the week is to walk ever day–on a new path! To find a different way to get where I am going, and to find a couple of new places to take some walks for pleasure.

And then to add to that a daily 15 minute session of Shiva Nata, that wacky brain training movement thingy that gets the arms and legs moving in all directions at the same time. Noting will shake up your nervous system in a good way like Dance of Shiva. Talk about let’s get lost! And laughter of course. No point getting intentional lost in the dance without working in a solid sense of humor.

Ultimately, it’s an impossible practice, as the whole point of the thing is to keep progressing to the point at which it becomes impossible! In some respects, Shiva Nata is the practice of making the impossible possible, and then abandoning the possible for the impossible. Woo hoo!

So that’s the week ahead. Shake up the movement, inspired by my son who is completely uninhibited in his crazy life of movement, who dances like no other, and who loves to run, jump, and climb.

Free your ass and your mind will follow, as they say. And may this be the week of free your movement and your life will follow. Salut!

photo by ^riza^

Tags: balance, boston, change, dance of shiva, havi, intimacy, love, motivator, self healing, shiva, shiva nata, the true wheel, yoga

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Hand Crafted

As far as theme weeks go, this one was a doozy, and it will certainly bear repeating on a regular basis, as it seems that intimacy is a core issue, perhaps the core issue as we’ll see a bit later, and it also seems to bring stuff up–out of the frying pan and into the fire perhaps, and yet up as in a synchronous feast!

The week began with the bottling of another hand crafted batch of kombucha, a fermented beverage I’ve been brewing every ten days for the past year and a half. A bit like a slightly vinegary green tea ginger ale is probably the best way I can describe it, although not so fizzy unless I’m really lucky.

Kombucha is full of probiotics like lactobacillus, one of the primary missing in action items from our contemporary diets, much more power packed in that way than yogurt, the catch all for these little digestively beneficial critters, and it’s fun to have something alive in the house in a science experiment kind of way!

I’ll write more about kombucha soon, and ill even post a how-to for those of you who like to do. And for those of you already a bit in the know about kombucha, yet lacking the requisite scobies to get the project going, I do have some babies available–zap me on the contact form and they are yours if you need them!

Hand Cut

On the hand crafted front it has also been a week of spinach and arugula straight from the garden. I’m overwhelmed actually. Amazing abundance this year, one benefit of all the rain we’ve been having. And not only lots of harvesting–lots of yumminess! This is literally the best spinach and arugula ever!

And hand cut! Does that add to the yumminess? Is there an intimacy/yumminess factor going on? Perhaps!

Hand picked

Further from home, via the radio and the internet, it was a week of synchronicities. I decide that it is Intimacy Week and then On Point runs an interview with Christina Nehring, author of “A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-First Century”, making the claim that contemporary love is a “poor and shrunken” thing.

On that same day I write a post about how Prevention of Disease and Promotion of Health are two completely different animals, and we’ll never be healthy or have a decent healthcare system until we switch our thinking around health, and then Mark Hyman, one of the few doctors I can roundly applaud for thinking out of the box, writes a piece for Huffington Post about 9 things we can do to solve the health care crisis in America–very worthwhile reading indeed.

Enlightened Intimacy

And finally, in the midst of all of this realization of just how core intimacy really is, Christina Sell, an Anusara Yogi living in Texas, uses a Jack Kornfield quote as a blog post header–a quote that just really blows this thing open:

Enlightenment is intimacy with all things.

Yikes! Yeah! There we go! Talk about a sound bite!

And so that’s the kind of week it was. And the week coming? Sunday is Summer Solstice, longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, and Father’s Day to boot! As tough as it can be navigating the waters of love and the shores of authority, sailing through the straits of being a man and being yourself, fathers need all the help they can get! Give them your love, give them your gratitude, give them the gift of massage from someone who knows!

photo by Amanda M Hatfield

Tags: anusara, father, health, intimacy, kombucha, lactobacillus, massage, nehring, prevention, probiotics, spinach, synchronicities

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Sharing the Morning Pages

I’ve been starting my day with 3 handwritten pages off and on for the past 10 years, full-on steady for the past 9 or 10 months. I wake up, walk to the couch, sit down and let the words pour out. It’s a process I initially lifted from Julia Cameron, author of The Artists Way and several other books on developing the Creative Spirit, and which I have over the past 6 months more fully developed into my own thing.

In Julia’s World, these are called Morning Pages, and they are basically a brain dump, useful only as a process, written and then stored away for eternity, recycled perhaps, or used to create a bit of fiery warmth in the Winter. Who knows. At any rate, written and not read.

For myself, they began to shift a bit 6 months ago into what I called Directed Morning Pages, 3 handwritten pages on a pre-determined subject, mostly as a way to explore certain qualities that I wanted to increase in my daily life, specific areas of gratitude, perhaps. More recently I’ve begun reading and even sharing my morning pages, the ultimate taboo in The Artists Way, as I have discovered that going to sleep with a subject in mind can lead to waking up with plenty of words just waiting to slide out of my Pilot G-2, onto the blank pages of my u:create sketch diary, and eventually, via the tip tap of my fingertips, onto the digitized screen that you are reading now.

Scratching vs. Pecking

The immediacy of writing with ink pen and paper is so much more satisfying to me than the peck peck peck that I’ve been using since I first bought a typewriter some 30 years ago. I don’t know if I will ever go back to composing at the keyboard. I love sitting on the couch cross legged, for one thing, and the early morning quiet for another. There is something soothing about the sound of the pen scratching the paper that the tap tap tap of a keyboard can never hope to match.

And mostly it’s just the feeling of directness. When I write by hand there is a sort of magic in the movement. It’s an art by itself, handwriting is: word sketching. Perhaps this is why I write in a sketch book. And the pace seems perfect–not too fast and not too slow.

Piling up a Mess of Words

There’s a Mark Twain quote about typewriters in which he says that they can pile up a mess of words real fast, or something like that, and for me there is something about that pace that gets in the way a bit. I reach many more stopping and waiting points with the keyboard, like I’m waiting for the buffer to fill back up, while by hand it’s just a continuous flow.

Perhaps this just comes from ten years of practice in writing without stop whatever flows out of my hand, which is usually so perfectly synchronized with the words I ”hear” in my head that I’m not really sure which is leading and which is following, or if it really is just some sort of seamless co-creation!

At any rate, it’s a satisfying way to get the words out, to share on this most public of  media words put down in such an intimate way…pen to paper, straight from the heart, 5:15 in the morning. Just me and the birds. Peace.

Addendum: According to a recent poll 399 out of 400 people prefer a massage from a real live human being to a massage from a machine. See what I’m saying?

How about you? What’s your writing process? Any thoughts on the relationship between Public and Intimate? On maintaining your Humanity in the midst of Technology?

photo by Kristian D.

Tags: create, creative spirit, eternity, heart, immediacy, ink pen, intimacy, julia cameron, love, mark twain, morning pages, or something like that, pen and paper, pilot g-2, sleep, typewriter, writing

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Prevention Doesn’t Healthy Make!

The new Time Magazine is out. It’s the Health Issue and it purports to tell you How to Stay Out of the Hospital. According to Time,

It’s all about Prevention.

I think they got it bassackwards. There is no relationship between Prevention and Health, and while attempting to keep yourself out of the Hospital may succeed, it won’t necessarily make you Healthy.

I Ain’t No Doctor

So what the hell am I talking about and how the hell do I know? And who the hell am I to be disagreeing with Time Magazine and the Well Paid Doctors they interviewed while putting their health care thesis together?

Well. My name is Charles Faris and I Ain’t No Doctor. I’m a Heart Centered Holistic Health Counselor, and I don’t know bleep about disease. Seriously. I leave that to the Doctors and the entire Health Management system. I don’t know anything about Management either, unless you count getting a 4 year old up, dressed, fed, and off to school three days a week.

I do know how to stay out of the Hospital and the Doctor’s Office, however, and I’ve successfully done both since 1993, when I needed stitches due to a nasty fall at the beach, and before that all the way back to 1986, when I had a very disappointing visit to an Osteopath who prescribed me some pills I never took for a cold that I cured by getting some extra sleep and drinking more water.

I think my last visit before that was a trip to the Student Health Clinic while I was still in college, circa 1980. I liked to use their scale.

How Time Magazine Got Healthy Wrong

Now. Here’s the thing. Health is not the absence of disease. Health is Shiny and Radiant. Its a Positive. Prevention is based on the notion of Preventing Disease, like blocking a Negative. It’s not really based on Health at all. If it was they would call it something like Creation. That’s a much better word, eh. Creative Health. Has a nice ring to it.

Driving in Reverse

See, if you are Preventing Disease, you are focusing on the thing you don’t want. You are driving in reverse. It’s a crazy way to try to get healthy, because driving away from one type of disease might get you smack dab into the territory of another.

Disease is legion. There is an infinite number of possible Diseases. They are discovering and inventing new Diseases every day!

Health, on the other hand, in a Unity. It’s just Health. There’s just one type. All health is Holistic Health, because the words Health and Heal and Whole and Holistic all come from the same root. Health is all about getting Whole.

Follow the Yellow Brick Road

Health is like Oz. It’s the place to be, it’s where the action is, and you only get there by following the Yellow Brick Road. You can run away from the Wicked Witch all year long and it won’t get you to Oz. You have to move towards Oz, not away from the witch. And so it is with Health and Disease.

Now. The Yellow Brick Road is magical and mysterious, it takes on many shapes and forms, so practically speaking, there are Many Roads to Health, and some of them come from a State of Disease, and still yet, they all have this in common–they are all about where you are going, not where you have come from. They are about driving forward with a clear destination in mind, not about driving in reverse, trying to get away from somewhere.

Who you gonna call?

Okay then. I’ve said my peace. Just wanted to get that off my chest. One more thing, though. When you are looking toward Health, longing for Health, searching for Health–who are you going to talk to? Someone who is an expert in curing Disease? Someone who can guide you out of the State of Disease?

Now. That may be a very good place to start. By all means get out of that place! It’s dark and dismal and I won’t step foot in there. And then what? What are you going to do once you are over that border?

Well hopefully you will look for a guide who knows the way to where you want to get, to that Emerald City on the Hill–hopefully you’ll look for someone who specializes in Health!

Amongst our weaponry:

Two of my favorite tools for achieving Shiny Happy Health are Yoga and Massage. I’ve been practicing massage professionally since 1993 and I’ve learned a thing or two along the way. And for the rest on June I am offering a Father’s Day Special on Traditional Table Massage, or on Thai Yoga Bodywork.

It’s a good deal, meant to honor the love and guidance of the Fathers among us. If you have a Father in the Boston area, or you share a child with a Father in the Boston area, or you just plain love and respect a Father in the Boston area, consider offering them the gift of massage, a solid step in the direction of Pure Radiant Health. Namaste.

photo by M@rg

Tags: creative health, health, health counselor, health management system, heart, i ain't no doctor, massage, prevention, Pure Radiant Health, radiant health, student health clinic, thai massage, thai yoga bodywork, time magazine

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The Promise of Intimacy

Intimacy. Is there any more misunderstood word in the English language? Any word that promises so much, yet seems so challenged to deliver the smallest amount? Any greater desire on the part of the average human being?

When I wrote last week that I was going to bring out intimacy as the self healing area for this week,  such an obvious choice on one level and yet so dreaded on another that it has taken me almost six months to approach it, I knew I was opening a can of worms. And yet the time has come. One can only stall for so long, and then the moment of truth always arrives.

In the comments for my Human Scale post last Friday, Richard Reeve of CCSeed brought up the idea of looking people in the eye, something so uncommon in street life that I had almost forgotten to miss it! When I was growing up it was so common to greet everyone I passed on the street, and certainly to be greeted by everyone that I didn’t acknowledge first, with a hand wave, or a smile and a head nod, or a salutation of some sort: a “hello”, or “how’s it going?” or a “what’s up?”.

Over the years this has diminished to the point that it almost seems a violation to burst into someone’s private bubble; to say hello to someone on the street is to interrupt their phone call, distract them from their iPod, their private thought. So privacy and intimacy, once bed partners to be sure, now seem to be at opposite ends of the spectrum.

Pornographers vs. Marketers

Of course, this is almost inevitable in a society such as ours in which we are continually bombarded with attention grabbers, advertisements and quasi-pornographic images, on billboards, buses, store windows, telephone poles, in which we are induced to buy that which cannot be bought: love, contact, connection.

At this point it has even become hard to speak of intimacy without seeming to imply sex, yet when I think of intimacy and its centrality in our lives, the first image that comes to mind is that of a newborn baby laying on it’s mother’s belly, skin to skin, flesh to flesh, with hardly a true notion of where one ends and the other begins.

This seamless contact between mother and newborn is emblematic for me of intimacy in its most true and intense form, and the next image that comes to mind is equally simple, yet perhaps surprising. It is the image of a hand, wet and sudsy, holding a half submerged coffee cup, and another hand holding a sponge, washing the cup.

For some reason this simple image of washing dishes by hand, the very simple and aware contact of that, brings to me a feeling of deep intimacy, of deep contact and mindfulness. And a lost art, almost. So I’m not sure who to blame the most for the dearth of true intimacy in our daily lives, the Marketing Pornographers, of the Appliance Makers!

Oh well. Since blame and a buck fifty will buy you a decent cup of coffee, I’ll  set that aside and look at a few simple ways to bring some human scaled intimacy back into our lives, with the aim of deepening our connection with the here and now, which is the true home of intimacy, of increasing our mindfulness, and of bringing us into a more holistic state of health and well being.

Another List of Things to Do

1. One thing at a time.
2. Slowly, slowly.
3. Use your hands.
4. Quiet time together.
5. Extra Credit!

First Things First

The first thing is to take some time doing just one thing at a time. I could rail against the computers for this one, as never before have we had such an opportunity to do so many things at the same time, to divide ourselves up into such a fractionated existence, so that I don’t know if it is even possible to sit down at a computer and remain in any sort of intimate state (compare and contrast word processing vs sitting down with pen and paper, even better quill and ink!).

And yet we are focusing on what to do here, so regardless of whether you are washing the dishes, driving your car, eating breakfast, or talking to someone on the phone, getting down to the simple one thing at a time will help to bring on the mindfulness and human scale that is so necessary for a sense of intimacy in life.

Take it Easy

The second thing is to slow down. Whatever it is that you are doing. Speed and intimacy are pretty much antithetical, I think, and unbounded time is necessary to really get into a deep connection with what you are doing, and who you are being, at any given moment.

Of course, a bit of simple math reveals that this is going to require a lot of pruning on that list of things to do. If you are only doing one thing at a time and you are taking twice as long to do it, that’s easily a factor of 2×2=4, and quite possibly 3×3=9! Yikes! That’s a lot less shit happening! Of course, when we ponder what happens when shit happens, thats bound to be a good thing.

Do It Yourself

The third thing is to try to do things by hand which you have relinquished to some automatic processing machine (even the human ones!). Like washing the coffee cup by hand, the feel of warm sudsy-ness, of sponge and cup, each hand feeling something different, involved in different sensations, and the hand! The hand being the greatest instrument of intimacy in our arsenal!

Or actually making that coffee or tea or favorite hot beverage for yourself (or yourself and a friend!). Pouring the water into the kettle, putting the kettle on to boil, grinding the beans yourself for each cup, rather than buying your coffee pre-ground. Smell that freshly ground bean! And then pouring the hot water onto the freshly ground coffee and watching the process, the swirls the colors the bubbles. Smelling the instant transformation of dry coffee to wet grounds, of wet grounds to coffee.

If you count the number of times in a day that you stand in line waiting to give someone money so that they can have your experience for you, trading time and money (which is pre-traded time) for experience, it is not wonder our lives have been drained of the real juice, the real intimacy.

Another great thing to rescue from the machines is written communication. When we write a letter we actually get to include so many of the elements of intimate experience, the touch, the smell, the sound of paper, pen and ink, the formation of complex figures by hand, the closest that most of us ever get to drawing, that we are bound to bring all of these elements into the communication itself. And something that used to be commonplace is now experienced a few times a year at most, at birthdays and holidays.

I could go on and on, for the opportunities to regain intimacy in our daily lives are all around us. There is virtually nothing we do that isn’t an opportunity for deep contact and connection. And my last suggestion is the one that will perhaps be followed the least, for it is a bit of a challenge.

Alone Together

Suggestion number 4 is to take a few minutes each day to sit quietly with someone, a friend, a family member, a lover; just to sit quietly and be present with each other. No tea, no snacks, no television, no music. Just you and another person being present with each other. And just noticing and being present with anything that comes up.

Extra credit is to look into each others eyes. Smiling is permissible.

Extra extra credit is to do this every day for the next week. With one person or with many. One at a time though, please! It’s just the simple silent being-ness that creates the sense of contact and connection, of simple pure intimacy.

Whether you follow one of these suggestions or many, the sense of intimacy in your life is sure to increase, leading to a greater sense of, you guessed it, health and well-being, and all the things that go with that, happiness, creativity, energy…

And please share your experiences as well as your own thoughts about intimacy and how to bring more of it into daily life. Pax!

photo by eviltomthai

Tags: charles faris, creativity, hats, human scale, intimacy, love, motivator, roxy music, self healing

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Knives are a really good Invention!

So going for real, fresh, unprocessed food definitely calls for more use of knives and less use of scissors, can openers, etc. And cutting out the excess of bs that can come flooding in as soon as you open the lid of your laptop calls for another type of knife. Yikes. Funny how as soon as I made the commitment to get down to basics, starting with food, I immediately became aware of just how tired and overloaded I am feeling lately.

So step one was just to step back…focus on the food…and make the observation that things aren’t falling apart. Wow. I’ve stepped back and things aren’t falling apart.

Step two, which will intensify next week when I take on Intimacy, is to get things back to a Human Scale. Given that the projects and tasks in my life seem to multiply faster than open browser windows, this is going to take some fancy knife work. 

Human Scale

The ironic element being alive and well, the first thing that happens when I contemplate the human scale is that I come up with another Project. The Human Scale Project! Let’s look at Humanity from the dawn of time to yesterday at noon and then extrapolate outward to 2020 and see just how long it will take to reach…

On second thought. I think I’ll start right here in the center of my heart and discover what is actually necessary for me to be happy and fulfilled. And then start cutting away all the excess. After all, isn’t the perceived need for more more more what got us in the economic,and environmental crises that are filling up the pages that the rapidly sinking newspaper industry continues to decimate forests which are the largest consumers of the CO2 that is threatening …

Maybe I should get off this train before it gets moving too fast.

Yep. That’s the kind of week it’s been. 

2 3 Questions

1. Is it possible for a human being to really grasp something as large as the internet, the federal government, the banking industry?
2. Hell, is it possible for a medium sized city to get it’s buses to run on time?
3. Is it possible to step back from this huge and unwieldy system of macro macro macro, into something of a size that we actually can grasp?

3 Strikes?

Okay. So I think I know the answer to number 1 and 2. Which leaves me placing all my chips on number 3. Which means that instead of hitting one big giant Babe Ruth Barack Obama Home Run, it’s all going to come down to billions and billions of little tiny solutions coming from billions and billions of beautifully shining Human Hearts.

Which means no more Business As Usual. No more Master Plans. No more Templates. No more Step by Step Solutions.

Which brings us right back to human scale intimacy.

See you next week!

photo by cogdogblog

Tags: barack obama, heart, human scale, intimacy, obama

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Let’s go Fly a Kite!

It has been a cold and rainy spring so far up here in boston, and this past weekend May have been the defacto beginning of summer, as we hit a trifecta of sorts here at the roslindale ranch.

First off, I began harvesting the mesclun mix from the garden. That certainly seems like a summery thing–food from the earth in my own backyard. No more going to Whole Foods to buy the stuff in clear plastic tubs shipped in from California or who knows where.

Second thing, on Saturday afternoon Rowan and I went out to fly kites! I flew the swoopy swoopy tiger and Rowan flew the ready steady black cat. This was Rowan’s first real opportunity to fly a kite completely on his own, and he did a great job, discovering and mastering the little flippy flippy wrist motion that let’s the kite go way way way up up up. And then Randi showed up with a picnic lunch that included those mixed greens I had cut from the garden! How much more summery does it get?

And thirdly, we busted out the grill and spent the afternoon in the backyard. There is something about sitting outside at a table in a garden eating corn roasted on the grill, with the house in easy sight, under a big open sky—it just gives a feeling of outdoorness that means summer to me.

Working the Wheel

To celebrate the onset of Summer I thought it would be fun to Work the Wheel, see what would happen if I took a systematic trip through my own wheel of life, truing it one spoke at a time through the Summer to see what I’ve got at the end of August. Funkily enough, this Summer is also host to a rare planetary alignment of Jupiter, Chiron, and Neptune, part of a little dance that Chiron the healer and neptune the mystic are engaged in over the next couple of years.

According to Dan Furst, 

When Chiron meets Jupiter, some will act their healing purpose on a truly heroic scale, others will party heartier than they ever have before, and they will serve us some of the most useful lessons in non-judgement that we’ve ever had.

Well, that sounds like a beautiful combination to me, especially the part where he talks about “the festival in the meadow…dancing barefoot on wild thyme under the Moon,” so I’ll be acting the part of the party hearty healer for the next twelve weeks, playfully adjusting the spokes of my wheel to get the truest, fastest, smoothest ride possible.

Starting with Food

And I’m going to start right at the start, at the place we all start when we come into this world, totally helpless, defenseless, and dependent on the love and good will of the Mother who brought us here. I’m going to start with food.

Now, I’m not going to go on a diet of mothers milk, yet I am going to spend the next 7 days interacting with food as an offering of pure nourishment from my Mother the Earth. As unprocessed as possible. As close to the Earth as possible. As local as possible. As nourishing as possible. 

In fact, I’m going to get this show on the road right now, going outside to harvest a mess of greens to toss with olive oil and balsamic, avocado, strawberries, and pumpkin seeds for my lunch. I may even soak some alfalfa seeds to get some sprouts going. It’ll be a week of beets and apple kale smoothies, of carrot and kale juice straight from my counter top juicer.

Then for the next 12 weeks I’ll recapitulate my life as a growing and individuating human by working the wheel as much as possible in the order we engage it as we grow from little dependent diaper dirtiers all the way to our interdependent figuring-out-how-to-make-a-new-world shiny selves. 

Precapitulation

This week food, next week intimacy, the two of which are inextricably linked to the young squirt who came into the world fresh from it’s mama’s womb, and which grow and flourish in increasing physical separation and psychic communication as we grow older. Somewhere in the middle of that I’m sure I’ll have some insights about comfort food, and I’m sure I’ll sure those along the way.

Now…it’s time to grab the clippers and harvest some baby kale, arugula, oak leaf lettuce, red romaine…

What are you eating this week to nourish your life energy and creative spirit? Any advance thoughts about comfort and food? Feel free to share your thoughts!

photo by pk2004

Tags: alignment, boston, chiron, dan furst, healing, heart, intimacy, life energy, motivator, neptune, plastic tubs, rare planetary alignment, raw green smoothie, saturday afternoon, spring, summer, the true wheel, whole foods

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