betaphilings

The boy in the blue hoodie is my son. In high school he created an open source telephony platform that four years later has its very own conference. This picture was taken today at AdhearsionConf 2010 in San Francisco.

I’ve been following the live feed on UStream. It does a mother good to see and hear her child at such a considerable distance. I’m in southeast Texas; he’s in northern California.

The highlight of today’s event was a presentation by a Canadian programmer who described how Adhearsion allowed his team to create an interactive art project for Montreal’s 2010 Music and Technology Festival.  The goal of the Mutek project was to use social media to create good vibrations to help heal the earth and its people.

Passersby called into a number posted on a building and were told how to generate the digital music that can be seen streaming across the side of the building. It’s a beautiful example of collective, harmonic music-making by strangers on a street.

Pretty impressive, I’d say. Way to go, Jay!

Imagine this. . .

You walk into a nice restaurant and hear Paul McCartney singing, only it isn’t Paul McCartney, it’s someone who sounds exactly like him. You are entranced by this young musician. When he takes a break, you go over and speak to him. There is an immediate spark, a connection. A romance blooms. You start going with him to the recording studio where he is making a demo tape. The two of you become lovers.

Flash forward 36 years. . .

You are sitting at your computer, reading articles on your Google Reader, when you see this former lover’s name. You Google his name and discover that he is now an accomplished filmmaker with several documentaries under his belt and an enormous following on Facebook. You write to him and he writes back.

A correspondence ensues. . .

You read things in his emails that fill you with nostalgia and longing. You allow these feelings to swell up inside you and be felt. You have seldom experienced emotions so intense.

You spend your time watching his films online. He appears in them much like Carl Sagan did, seated and calmly speaking his truth into a camera. He still looks and sounds good. You begin to imagine a reunion.

You view a premiere that was recorded at the same theater where the Emmys are announced. You hear a Hollywood notable introduce him as the most important documentary filmmaker of our time.

You know this person. . .

You realize that his talent and his celebrity, combined with the memories of your time with him, are causing you to feel something you have never felt before. It is a huge feeling.

You get an email from him that contains lyrics to a song he says he wrote about you 36 years ago. He says he will bring his guitar with him and sing this song to you someday.

Southern Lady

As I strolled across a country bridge in New Orleans,

While the Moon was shining a silvery light.

I met a silky haired blue-eyed Southern Lady

I knew right then I had to make things right.

It all started by the way she dressed, the way she combed her hair.

I’m glad I made her mine, my Southern Lady.

I took her down to Ruby’s, we had a drink.

We must have stayed up and danced all night long.

It all started by the way she dressed, the way she combed her hair.

I’m glad I made her mine, my Southern Lady.

- - musical solo - -

As we stroll across that country bridge in New Orleans,

While the Moon shines its silvery light away,

It seems so funny now we’re old and gray,

We live our lives just day to day.

I’m glad I made you mine,

I’ve loved you all the time,

It’s just you and me, my Southern Lady…

Mmmm - mmmm - yeah

It’s just you and me, my Southern Lady.

You read these words and your heart turns into something almost too big to bear. You realize that you have just been gobsmacked by the power and allure of romantic love. What a precious gift when you can get it. –

Here is another psyphiling for you from betaphi. Enjoy!

Question: What she did to me was pure evil. Why is there so much evil in the world?

Answer: There is no such thing as evil. There is only the absence of spirit.

The duality that you sense in yourself, the one and the other, is proof of an intact spirit. As long as you can sense this otherness in yourself, you are healthy. All spirits support life and well-being; they cannot do otherwise because they are attached to Source. There are no evil spirits.  There are younger spirits and older spirits but not evil spirits.

Your spirit animates you because the mechanistic mind is little more than an organ formed of soft tissue whose function is similar to that of a computer software program. Because it is capable of generating electrical impulses through its own biological processes, you think it is more powerful than it is.

Attempts to create life without spirit have yielded fish, insects, birds, amphibians, reptiles, and spiders. These groups are know as fibars. Fibars are the oldest creatures on earth for a reason. They were originally cast as toys for spirits and Source to play with.

Is it evil when the lizard reaches out its tongue and catches a fly? Is it evil when the bird swoops down upon the grasshopper? No. It is the means by which these gadgets sustain themselves. No spirits are lost in these transactions. Spirits are never lost.

Source is called the Creator for a reason. When Source accomplishes one thing, it creates another thing. Next to the earth itself, spirit-filled animals are Source’s greatest creations.

In addition to playing with fibars, spirits, who are the offspring of Source, wanted playthings they could ride. They wanted vehicles. Thus, Source created the mammal group to allow spirits young and old this great joy ride.

You are fortunate to be among this most excellent and exciting group.

The mechanistic mind in humans is a marvel of Creation. It can at times come so close to autonomous function that one would hardly recognize the presence of spirit. However, a mind without spirit to operate it is little more than a fibars. Such waste is seldom allowed by Source.

Remember, spirit’s interest in incarnation revolves around its ability to enjoy food and sex. These two great pleasures are a spirit’s only motivation for manifesting in the flesh. Enjoyment is the natural state of all spirits, embodied or not.

Think of the games you play. Rock’em Sock’em robots. Remember that one? The red robot is not injured when its head is knocked off by the blue robot. Similarly, the spirit within you is never injured. It is your mechanistic mind that conjures up images of pain, defeat, humiliation. Spirit has no capacity for such things. If spirit inhabited the robot instead of you, do you think it would be injured by a hit to the head? It would not.

What you call evil is merely a word to spirit. Spirit knows it is invincible and that knowledge can make it appear foolhardy. Spirit will sometimes let go of the reins, or retreat, in order to see what mind will do. It is similar to the thrill of riding a roller coaster with your hands in the air or driving a car with your hands in your lap. Crashes can occur.

Understanding the gamesmanship engaged in by spirits is something beyond your ken.

Humans are not at fault for what may appear to be evil acts. A human mind does not a human make. You cannot be held responsible for your innate insufficiencies. When spirits relinquish control, things can and do go awry, but that is not your fault. Spirits are wholly in charge of human well-being.

Spirits retreat because they can. They exit the body or stay because they want to.

A spirit is as playful as a child. That is precisely why children are so playful. Children are fully operated by spirit.

Question: Okay, but I am no child. What about my problem?

Answer:  If you think there is a problem, an evil, it is your mechanistic mind deceiving you. All you need to understand is that you are more spirit than flesh, and spirit has no problems.

Here is a psyphiling for you, straight from the school of betaphi, my sometimes ardent alter ego!

Question: Why am I feeling so crazy? I can’t sleep, I’m nervous, cranky, I can’t seem to settle down.

Answer: It is not your fault. You are suffering from the heat.

Unborn energies hover around those in heat, the biochemical kind of heat that all animals have. While hovering, they generate a lot of actual heat. This heat affects your body’s energy system, causing you to feel restless. That is why arousal is called heat.

Unborn entities are attracted to your energy much like bees are attracted to nectar. These spirits are made of ether, yet they have form and energy. What they want is incarnation. They want their shot at being human because human food and human sex are highly sought after. They are, in fact, two of the best things in the universe.

Earth is like Costa Rica or Tahiti for some spirits. It’s a highly prized vacation spot that will give them decades of delight. A human lifetime can be seen as a mini-vacation from timelessness. A spirit’s vacation time is dependent on the human’s lifespan. Some spirits vacation for longer periods than others. Of course, the spirit animates the human so they are one and the same.

As for reproductive matters, it is not just estrogen and testosterone and dopamines and all the other words humans use to describe mating conditions that cause those in heat to feel and act strangely crazy. That is part of it, but the preponderance of eager spirits surrounding healthy, fertile humans is what causes all the commotion. These vying spirits stir up a lot of energy, jousting for position to be first to incarnate. They are similar to sperm in this regard, only they carry no gender. Gender is a choice they make. It is much like choosing a hotel.

This is why young people especially seem to have so much “drama” in their lives. Spirits, like humans, value physical beauty, and youth is almost always beautiful. Younger spirits are attracted to younger humans. The process of attaching spirit to DNA is a great thrill ride with many passengers, all of whom want the coveted spot. This process of being bombarded by eager spirits can literally cause a person to lose control. Losing control is what precedes habitation by spirit.

The actual act of spiritual impregnation begins with sexual orgasm. Here in the mad reach of sperm to egg, spirit experiences that which is denied it in timelessness — the ahhhh moment, the shiver of bliss, the great joining of male and female. All spirits gain entry through the stillness of this great bliss.

Sometimes they change their minds or chicken out just as humans seem to do. This is when miscarriages and abortions occur. Humans are in no way at fault for these losses once spirit has attached itself to life. Spirit is the one who forgoes the intent to grow up as human.

Older spirits may choose to incarnate as what may appear to be damaged humans, children with birth defects and genetic anomalies. They do this mainly because they can; it is part novelty on their part and part intention to share valuable lessons. These spirits are just as rare as the lives they inhabit. Often they forfeit good sex in these roles in exchange for special care. They have been here before.

Animals nursed by mothers are spirit-filled as well. Birds, fish, and insects are not. These groups are akin to what might be called robots. It is not within human ken to understand the properties animating those who emerge from eggs.

Aging and dying are similar to a once pristine hotel room that has been altered by extended occupancy. The ends of human DNA strands begin to unravel as spirit prepares to leave the room. It is messy. That is why you see the elderly less animated. This unraveling can be prevented, of course, but spirits have little interest in remaining in the same body forever. There is so much more to explore.

Accidental deaths, suicides, and fatal conditions are similar to miscarriages and abortions. Spirits frequently find reasons and ways to exit a body with intact DNA. Such behavior on their part is wholly benign. Death of any kind does not diminish spirit. Spirit can only enlarge itself.

The process used to animate birds, fish, and insects can be applied to humans as well, but there is little interest in this field.

Question: Okay, so do you have any advice for me?

Answer: Sure. If you want the hovering spirits to leave, you must calm yourself. Sit quietly, breathe fully, lower your vibration, and they will leave.

The summer before my son entered high school, I packed up my little family and moved us to Houston, where I had accepted a teaching job. Six weeks into the school year, I packed us up again and moved back to Beaumont.

On the drive back from my mother’s house last week, my daughter asked me why we left Houston. The story that I heard emerging from my mouth was both sad and hilarious. It’s also a good example of how to know whether you’re on your right path or not. Life will certainly give you clear indicators when you’re not where you’re supposed to be, and my signs couldn’t have been any clearer.

It went something like this.

Rats

They weren’t really rats. They were field mice that had occupied those environs long before houses were built. New construction in the area was driving them out of their habitat. But to me they were rats and they were scary. I found their tiny entry points in my kitchen cabinets and taped them up with whatever I could find, but they chewed right through all of it. At night I would sometimes see them scurrying across the kitchen floor, and I would lie awake worrying about what to do. I’d never lived with rats. Rat poison seemed my only choice. . . .

Air conditioner

We moved in August. Houston is HOT in August. My air conditioner went out, and that’s when you could smell them — dead rats. I called the air conditioner repair people. They charged me $500 to fix the a/c. A week later it went out again. The smell was worse than the heat. I gave them another $500. A week later it went out again. We were dying in the August heat with the smell of dead rats all around us. The air would go out again. . . .

Washer/dryer

The dryer worked but I was missing something I needed to hook up the washer. It was one of those things I would get to eventually, but in the meantime the laundry piled up, which meant frequent trips to the laundromat, which took a couple of valuable hours out of a day. Toting baskets of wet laundry home to dry was too hard, so I sat at the laundry and dried them and folded them and carted them home and upstairs and it was exhausting. It was so hot. . . .

Telephone

The phone worked fine for a while, then it quit. Someone, probably one of the many children who were in and out of the house, decided that it would be funny to turn the batteries around in my single cordless phone (cell phones weren’t out yet). I didn’t know what the problem was at first, and for quite a while we were without a phone, which made it impossible to call repair people or locate missing children. . . .

Car

One morning I got up to go to work and my car wouldn’t start. That had never happened before. Someone from the school picked me up, and I called a tow truck to pick up my car. For several days we were stranded in Houston without a vehicle, which is quite unsettling, especially when your air conditioning and telephone don’t work and you can smell dead rats. The repair bill was equally unsettling. . . .

Smoking

I’ve been an on-again, off-again smoker much of my adult life. I had promised the kids that I wouldn’t smoke in the new house, which meant going outside in the heat to smoke. Quitting smoking during a particularly stressful point in your life is not a great idea. I wasted a lot of time sitting on the patio with a cigarette when I could have been unpacking boxes or mopping floors. But my nerves were starting to fray. . . .

Job

A new job in a new city is always stressful, but this job was killing me. I had 150 7th graders, and I’d never taught 7th grade. The woman who hired me knowing this thought it would be a good idea to give me morning cafeteria duty, which meant I had no time to set up or prepare for the day. When the bell rang for first period, I left the cafeteria with the students. Add to this my total inability to use the schools computerized attendance and grade reporting systems. One of the chief reasons I left my former teaching job was my district’s refusal to invest in computers. I wanted a computer in my classroom, and when I got one, I didn’t know how to use it. . . .

13-year-old daughter

Jill still seldom meets a stranger. She entered 8th grade at the new school with her typical enthusiasm and made friends easily. The only problem with that is that her friends were 8th graders too, and some of their siblings were much older. There was a constant influx of teenagers early on, and somewhere in that mix my phone batteries got turned around. On the second Saturday after school started, Jay and I were sitting up at midnight waiting phonelessly for Jill to show up when the doorbell rang. It was a police officer, asking me to follow him. Well, let’s just say that Jill had gotten herself into a little trouble with some older teenagers whose parents were out of town. . . .

It’s Time to Go

There was no single precipitating event that caused me to write my letter of resignation that Friday afternoon at the end of the first six weeks. Or maybe there was. Maybe my principal’s voice on the intercom reminding me that everyone had turned in their grades but me and that she needed mine NOW is what did it. I recall the total calm that overcame me as I scratched out a handwritten note to the personnel director.

It absolutely was the right thing to do. I had no doubt. I might never teach again for breaking a contract, but it didn’t matter. I wanted to go home and sit in the red porch swing my husband had built. I wanted to look at the beautiful landscape I had created with my own hands over the course of many years. I wanted to talk to my neighbor. I wanted my life back.

The kids were furious, of course. Jay loved the international flavor of Dulles High School. Jill loved all the new friends she had made. I ignored their protestations and returned us to the place from which we had come.

Driving back from Louisiana, hearing Jill’s laughter at the sheer absurdity of this story, I realized for the first time why I had to leave Houston. She was asleep in the car seat behind me. I had to go home to get her.

When my son was in third grade, his teacher told me that he was her classroom barometer. If she wanted to measure how well things were going in class, she would look to Jay for an accurate reading, not because he was overly sensitive to his environment but because he represented the general strength and character of the group. Her observations of him helped her to regulate the classroom climate.

We are all sensitive to our environment in varying degrees. Schizophrenics, for example, are very out of touch with what is going on around them. Children, on the other hand, tend to react to every dropped pencil and cough and crumpled paper. That’s why classroom teachers rely on students like Jay who can remain focused through most of the distractions. When he loses focus, she knows something is amiss.

I’d like to think I used the same technique in my teaching and parenting. My kids certainly seem happy today. I’d also like to think that my son inherited his barometric abilities from me, but that may be a stretch. I have been told many times that I am “too sensitive,” usually by people lacking sensitivity.

Lately, however, I am feeling what might rightly be called “too sensitive.” Something’s going on that is really bothering me, and I don’t know exactly what it is. If you don’t want to risk being saddened by my attempt to work this out, click now. I don’t know where this is going.

Looking back at some of my old posts, I realize that I’ve gotten away from the funny/cutesy/inspiring sorts of things I used to post. Janice’s comment back in February reminds me of this.

I wish every site I opened had a giraffe, giggling baby, kitten, puppy or something cute and uplifting on it. I suspect folk would be an awful lot more light-hearted!

Of course, in February my pregnant daughter and her husband were still living with me. I felt much more connected to life and love than I do now. That may be part of it, but also in February we didn’t have a thick flow of crude oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico.

I think the oil spill is what really kick-started this general feeling of discontent I am experiencing. The Deepwater Horizon exploded on April 20th, a few hours after my granddaughter’s birth. Emotional highs and lows like those rarely occur on the same day. I have been up and down ever since.

I know this disaster weighs heavily on everyone’s heart, but I grew up in Louisiana. A part of me will always be attached to the highs and lows of that state. Most of my family still lives there. Louisiana has taken such a beating, first from Katrina and now with this horrendous oil mess. It is all so bewildering and sad.

Despite these double tragedies, I try to tell myself that these hearty people will be fine. They still have some of the best cuisine in the world. They still have their community spirit and devotion to family. They still have access to fresh running water and clean toilets, which forty percent of the people on the planet do not have. Isn’t that enough to make those who’ve lost their homes and livelihoods feel better about their situation? Probably not.

Psychic pain doesn’t have degrees and increments; it hurts all over when it hurts at all.

Considering the pain of others does not help me feel better. It makes me feel worse. Considering the state of the nation and our failing economy and endless war and on and on is robbing me of joy.

What makes me feel better is seeing how both of my children have managed to surround themselves with things that give them joy.

My daughter has a new baby and a great husband with a large extended family who work together to insure each other’s success.

My son just moved from the high-rise district to the historic district in San Francisco. He is masterful at keeping himself happy.

I think happy kids grow up to be happy adults. My two were happy little children, despite losing their dad at such young ages. Jay was such a calm, focused child. Jill was so full of energy. We were a happy little trio.

Now I am home alone and having difficulty finding my joy. I don’t know exactly what it will take for me to shake this current malaise, but I know it will eventually fade. Meanwhile, I remain open to the possibility of finding joy right where I least expect it.

What’s bothering me is what bothers anyone. You get older. Your children grow up and move away. You lose people you love. Natural and man-made disasters happen. Sometimes these hit close to home. You have peaks and valleys, highs and lows. My mother’s home-spun wisdom speaks to this.

Be grateful for the valleys because that’s where the crops grow.

I think I feel a little better now. Thanks, Mom. I look forward to coming home for the 4th. I’ll try to bring my smile because I know you guys could use some over there, and I could sure use some hugs.

by Fred Burks

Our world appears to be making a profound shift from one paradigm to another. The old paradigm served humanity for many, many years, and in some ways serves us still. Yet an exciting new paradigm is paving the way for a more loving, harmonious way of living and interacting with all around us. The below comparison is an attempt to capture the spirit of the old and new paradigm without the intention of making one better than the other, yet also inviting us to join in welcoming inspiring new ways which can support us all in being the best we can be and making a difference in our lives and world.

Old: Man is born into sin, essentially corrupt at the core.
New: All people in their core essence are beautiful and worthy of love.

Old: Hatred and vengeance are justified for wrongs suffered. An eye for an eye.
New: Love is the most transformative force. Forgiveness is an act of courage and compassion.

Old: Don’t show real feelings, or you will get hurt. Create a convincing persona to present to the world.
New: Welcome authenticity and vulnerability. It’s all about being honest and real with each other.

Old: Emphasis on hierarchies. Focus on competition so that the best rise to the top of the hierarchy.
New: Emphasis on equality. Focus on cooperation in order to support the greatest good for all.

Old: Tend to avoid personal responsibility by blaming those above or below them in the hierarchy.
New: Take personal responsibility for actions and learn from our mistakes.

Old: People need to be led or controlled by those believed to be better or more capable.
New: Each individual is a powerful creator capable of meeting their needs with the help of others.

Old: The mind and science is supreme. The scientific paradigm supersedes God and religion.
New: The heart and personal relationships are of paramount importance. The deepest essence of life is a divine mystery to be welcomed and explored.

Old: Don’t question the accepted scientific paradigm. Focus on three-dimensional, five-sensory world.
New: Foster fluid intelligence. Explore the edges of consciousness, especially other dimensions and capabilities not believed to be possible under the old paradigm.

Old: Categorizing and dissecting nature allows us to better control it and to profit from it.
New: Recognizing the interconnectedness of all life leads to greater growth and harmony.

Old: Focus on order, discipline.
New: Welcome flexibility and even occasional chaos and disorder as means to see new possibilities.

Old: Value boundaries, borders, and divisions. These give security, safety, and comfort.
New: While respecting and honoring differences, look for shared vision and ways to work together. Take risks in order to grow. Short-term pain can bring long-term gain.

Old: You can’t trust anyone.
New: Surrender to and trust in a divine force greater than our egoic selves.

Old: Focus on defeating and conquering the enemy, us versus them. War against evil.
New: Committed to transforming and integrating life’s challenges. The external reflects the internal.

Old: Focus on details, complexity.
New: Remember the bigger picture. Identify simple principles behind the complexities of life.

Old: Look outwards for guidance. Don’t trust self. Have rigid rules and beliefs.
New: Look inwards for guidance. Develop intuition. Have flexible guidelines and beliefs.

We all have our feet in both paradigms. How much we live in each paradigm is but a matter of degree. The old paradigm is not necessarily something to be shunned or avoided. There are times when principles of both paradigms can be useful and beneficial. Yet overall, the new paradigm invites more love, support, and deeper connection into our lives and world. In every moment we can consciously choose the paradigm to which we give our focus, time, and energy.

Remember that all of us to some degree are afraid of our shadows. At times we avoid looking at the disturbing parts of ourselves and our world. Yet consider that a willingness to explore and even dance with these shadows can be a potent catalyst to a new paradigm. And when we set a clear life intention to choose and support what’s best for all, our lives can’t help but become richer and more fulfilling.

Original article by Fred Burks available at:
http://www.WantToKnow.info/inspiration/new_paradigm_shift

“Dreams are necessary to life.” — Anais Nin

I SHOULD KNOW BETTER. Let me make a single, broad, sweeping statement, and almost immediately the edit gods will prove me wrong, thank goodness. In this instance, I’m referring to a statement in my last post about how clueless we are at making sense of dreams. Granted, there is no way to know that a dream’s interpretation is any more cogent than the dream itself; however, after seeing what one person does with a dream, I feel I should at least allow for the possibility that some people do have what it takes to make sense of dreams.

For example, Gil Alan interprets dreams in a way that makes sense. His interpretation of Craig’s dream (scroll down Gil’s page to read it) seems totally plausible. Would I pay $90 for a dream analysis? Probably not, but I might pay $100 for a comprehensive course in how to analyze dreams. I tried my hand at interpreting Ernie’s dream once. The result is not unlike what Gil did for Craig.

Waking Life has had me thinking a lot about the dream world. This dream-like movie about lucid dreaming supposes that death may be a mere continuation of the dream state. It’s difficult to wrap my head around the notion that waking life may be a dream that consciousness is having through me, and that when I and my ego die, my part of consciousness will continue to dream.

I feel like I need a shaman to administer some exotic elixir to get me in touch with the dream world if I am ever to understand this better. My understanding feels so fragmented. Dreams are so slippery; there seems to be a sieve through which they drain as waking occurs.

Regardless, lucid dreaming fascinates me because it is a means of holding onto more of the slippery stuff. While you are dreaming, you become aware that you are dreaming; consequently, there is a hardening of the imagery, much like the vignettes in the movie.

I had a lucid dream some time ago that still haunts me. I don’t mean it was frightening. It was haunting in the way that some memories stay with you for a long time. I have no recall of any lucid dreams prior to this one, but then I seldom pay much attention to my dreams.

In the dream I am reading a book. This is what causes me to realize I am dreaming. I become aware that I have never before read a book in a dream. I notice how odd and somewhat disappointing it feels to be reading a book in my sleep.

I don’t know the book’s title, and its content doesn’t seem to be significant. What begins to appear significant is the sound in the writing. Syntactically, this is the most impressive and perfect piece of writing I have ever read. It is a masterpiece. It is so excellent, in fact, that I am dumbstruck.

In the dream I am aware that this is NOT my writing. Every writer has a personal style and a unique voice, and this is NEITHER my style nor my voice. This prose is written by an ascended master. Reading it gives me the transcendent feeling that I am encountering the hand of God.

I awake with the impression of the dream burned into me. Not only was I aware of my dreaming but also that I’d just had a close encounter with the mystical. I had just had a lucid dream.

There seems to be general agreement that dreams are precipitated by and linked to events of the day. Because I spend so much of my day reading, it makes sense that I would eventually have a dream about reading.

There also seems to be agreement that we create every image, every symbol, every person in the dream and that they all reflect aspects of ourselves. If that’s the case, then my reading dream suggests that God is indeed an aspect of my inner self. The dream then becomes a symbol of my quest to get in touch with my higher self. In it I finally make contact.

In the Tibetan study of lucid dreaming, sometimes referred to as dream yoga, one of the goals is to guide the student to discover that waking life is not so different from dream life.

Dr. Stephen LaBerge, director of the Stanford Sleep Lab and author of Lucid Dreaming, states that sensory perception is the only difference between the two, between waking and dreaming. He compares dreams to poems.

“If you wrote a dozen poems a night every night of your life, what do you suppose you would find among your several hundred thousand poems? All masterpieces? Not likely. All trash? Not likely either. What you would expect is that among great piles of trivial doggerel, there would be a smaller pile of excellent poems, but no more than a handful of perfect masterpieces. It is the same with your dreams.”

My dream about reading God’s writing was one of those most excellent dreams. So too was my dream three years ago about twin baby dragons, which resulted in this sweet little poem. I’ve since learned that dragons are associated with wisdom, so that dream represents my attempt to get in touch with my inner wise woman.

I love poems and dreams.

Project Gutenberg has recently made available Sigmund Freud’s 1920 magnum opus, Dream Psychology, which I am putting here for future reference.

“Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled.” —George Santayana

I LOVE DAYS LIKE THIS when my Google Reader serves up content that literally takes me to another level. That’s what happened today when I clicked on Timeframe TV and read this movie description.

A boy has a dream that he can float, but unless he holds on, he will drift away into the sky. Even when he is grown up, this idea recurs. After a strange accident, he walks through what may be a dream, flowing in and out of scenarios and encountering various characters. People he meets discuss science, philosophy and the life of dreaming and waking, and the protagonist gradually becomes alarmed that he cannot awake from this confusing dream.

That’s all I know about Waking Life when I settle in to watch it. As I’m watching, I keep thinking that the boy, the nameless protagonist, reminds me of Wiley Wiggins, the skinny, long-haired freshman in Richard Linkletter’s 1993 cult classic Dazed and Confused. It’s hard to tell if it’s him because the film has been digitally animated.

Well, imagine my surprise when the credits roll at the end and I see that it was little Wiley in yet another Richard Linkletter film.

I met Wiley when he was 10 or 11. His father and I worked together in Austin in the eighties. I remember hearing the story of how Wiley was approached on 6th Street one day and asked if he’d like to be in a movie. He said sure. That’s how he got the Dazed and Confused job. He was 15 at the time. He is 25 in this 2001 film.

I feel like I found a bright green emerald in the rock pile!

I LOVE THIS MOVIE! Linkletter is still as dazed and confused as ever, but we’re all like that when it comes to making sense of dreams. Wiley is perfect in the role of the dreamer — vulnerable, confused, and relentlessly seeking.

Here are eight minutes from the final scene in Waking Life. The guy at the pinball machine is writer/director Linkletter, and the other guy is Wiley. If you want to see the whole movie, click on TimeframeTV.

(Aunt Shirley and Aunt Rose, April 2010)

I found this picture on my cousin’s Facebook page and now I can’t stop thinking about it. Shirley and Rose are my dad’s sisters, two of five remaining siblings who remember what it was like growing up on a farm with thirteen children. I wish I knew more of their stories. Aunt Shirley is now taking Aricept, which means her stories are unreliable, and Aunt Rose mostly listens since she had the bad car wreck.

When my dad was born in 1928, the first of those thirteen children, there wasn’t a lot of work available in the Deep South, but my grandfather was able to get a sharecropper’s stake in northeast Louisiana, where he raised cotton. The landowner got most of the profit from the sale of the cotton. My grandfather got housing and enough land to grow fruits, vegetables, and livestock to feed his family.

At the end of every calendar year, my grandfather got a check from the landowner. Most of that check went to pay off his debt at Delta Sales and Richland Feed & Seed. My father once commented that his father had to be a genius to do what he was able to do with so little money.

I was the first grandchild, and I loved going to the farm for Sunday dinners. Dinner was the meal served at noontime; the evening meal was called supper.

There was so much FOOD laid out on that long table — peas, beans, corn, carrots, turnip greens, potatoes, yams, okra, tomatoes, squash, peaches, pears, plums, melons — all of it grown right there. My strongest memories seem to be attached to the delicious food and the good will and good cheer in the dining room. There were meats and breads and cakes and cream for your pie and coffee.

How my grandmother cooked all that food by herself every Sunday I do not know. By the time I was five or six and able to remember Sunday dinners, the two older girls, Shirley and Joann, were no longer there to help because they had families of their own. When they and the five older boys showed up with their spouses and children, that house could have thirty or forty people in it. In the end there were thirty first cousins.

That was the real fun of it, so many children.

Sometimes in the summertime I would get to spend the night and hang out with my three aunts and three uncles who still lived there. I have memories of waking to the smell of coffee and bacon and finding my grandparents alone in the kitchen, embracing. Once I even saw them kissing.

There was a lot of love in that home.

There were three separate growing fields on the farm. Across the road from the house was the big cotton field. Grandpa planted purple plum trees and watermelon patches at the far end of the cotton field, his own brand of sweet reward for having successfully worked your way back that far.

In the heat of summer, those sweet fruits were a constant temptation to us kids. The only way to reach them was by horseback, and Caleb was an ornery horse. We didn’t have the height or strength to kick the air out of his gut so the saddle could fit tightly. A half day could be spent trying to saddle and ride, and inevitably, the saddle would start to slide.

Plums bursting their skins and rotting on the ground is probably the saddest memory I have of the farm. I am aware of the temptation to glamorize the past by pulling only the best memories forward, but this was a genuinely happy place all the time. Even the two mild spankings I recall my grandmother giving us were more instructional than punitive: girls, you cannot swim in the pig dip pond, and girls, you cannot use my milk pails for potties in your playhouse.

Summertime was magical because all the crops came in, making it the busiest and tastiest time of year. My grandpa had a huge corn and potato field which required all hands on board to help with harvesting. The big kids pulled corn and the little ones kicked potatoes. That’s how I remember it at least, walking barefoot in the warm loose soil, kicking bulging Irish potatoes to the surface and collecting them in a basket. Perhaps he had run some device through the soil to bring the potatoes near the surface. I don’t know.

I do know that he put an electric fence around the potato patch to keep the wild hogs out. I tripped over that fence with my basket of potatoes and got the shock of my life. I still like to think that jolt is somehow linked to the psychic sensitivity I developed.

Some years he would grow sugarcane there instead of corn and potatoes. The cane was cut and squeezed, and the juice was boiled and converted into cane syrup. We weren’t allowed near the cane plant because it was dangerous around all that fire and heavy equipment.

Another plot of land closer to the house was devoted to more fragile vegetables. This too was a magical place for a kid because of the shaded alleyways formed by arching bean poles and tomato stakes. The only alone time I ever got with my grandmother was sitting on buckets in those shaded alleys, picking butter beans, green beans, field peas, and crowder peas while she told me stories about black panthers and bears she had seen as a child. Her exotic stories and soft, soothing voice turned me into an eager helper.

Looking back on those times half a century ago, I see more than a sharecropper’s farm. I see a mid-sized agri-industrial complex, where every inch of land was put to specific good use and where every individual was valued. There was order and systems and processes in place. There was beauty and fragrance and sound. Crowing roosters sounded the start of each work day, and sunset signaled its end. Honking guineas warned of predators in the night.

There was so much LIFE in that place where LOVE lived.

My generation may be the last generation to remember farm life during a time when there were more farms in the South than there were towns and cities. My blissful childhood memories from the 1950s are things I want my grandchild to know about her heritage.

Aunt Shirley’s Alzheimers may distort her thinking, but all thought is capable of distortion, especially memory. That’s why postmodernists say we should reject all cultural narratives as unreliable. I see their point, but I can’t do that because I’m too fond of story.

I’ve watched the certainty and unity of my grandparents’ generation give way to the skepticism and separation of my own. I’m not sure the latter is an improvement, but it doesn’t matter. Something new will take its place too. The only constant is the steady beat of Life.

(Photo by Lori Mitchell)

OF COURSE there’s no such thing as magic cats, right? Cats can’t just suddenly appear inside a locked house, and even when they do, you can’t blame them for the feeling you might get that you are losing it, that you’re slipping into some other realm where such things as magic cats are possible.

I thought I’d put her outside, yet there she was, sitting on the floor staring at me. Obviously, I only imagined putting her outside.

And there she was again the next day, sitting there staring at me when I knew I’d put her out.  Obviously, I have a hole in my house. The guest bathroom is under renovation. I check it. The new bathtub is sitting soundly atop the drain hole.

I’m just tired from scoring, I decided. I’m stuck in my head and not paying attention to what’s going on around me.

Third day, same thing. Mama is sitting there staring, getting my attention. I’m baffled. Twenty years here and not a single animal break in. What’s different now? How is she getting in?

I go to my bathroom and check everything.

Aha!

She’s managed to tip open the trapdoor to the plumbing. I see how she got in. I secure it thoroughly with duct tape. Problem solved.

Clever cat.

Next day, same thing. Mama’s suddenly sitting there staring at me.

I check the trapdoor. It’s still taped securely. I check the other bathroom. The tub is still there. I call my son-in-law, who started this remodeling project.

Mama’s getting in underneath the bathtub, I say.

That’s impossible because the tub has a flat bottom, he says.

I continue scoring, although now I’m getting spooked about this cat that keeps magically appearing in my house. I’m getting tired too, and I’m losing my focus, distracted by all the mystery.

Maybe she’s not sneaking in, I think. Maybe she’s materializing or astral projecting or teleporting. I ponder transmogrification and other such silliness. I wonder if she has supernatural powers. The ancient Egyptians worshiped cats for some reason, didn’t they? Why?

I think about The Golden Compass and The Temple of My Familiar, stories where animal familiars appear out of thin air to do whatever it is they do. It’s all witchy and arcane and absolutely impossible. At the same time, I can see how a highly imaginative or a highly superstitious person could get those notions if an animal or bird sneaked into their house.

Magic!

Yes, animals sent from the unseen to serve you will always cheer you up.

I keep scoring. I get a call about the death of my friend. I start to feel a bit unglued. I can’t think clearly. I wonder if I’ve injured my brain with  this chronic scoring. For example, when Hitler outlawed jews it would have been unfair for him to hide one himself. Too many sentences like that can hurt your brain. So can grieving.

This brain freeze/mind warp cat/scoring thing wrapped itself around the death of my friend and started to feel really heavy. When Mama showed up on the fifth day, I’d had it! I called my son-in-law to come over. I made him undo the new bathtub drain connection and pull the damned tub out. It wasn’t flat after all. It was curved. I made him stack boards over the hole where the drain pipe is until I can get someone in here to finish it.

That’s all it took. Mama hasn’t materialized her familiar self since. I imagine her sleeping better now, curled up in her pink chair, knowing the house is safe from invaders. Such a helpful little kitty.

Here’s 47 seconds of another magical cat.

(Howard and Macy)

My head is full of tears that won’t come out.

Jill called tonight and said that Howard died.

When Jill was in fifth grade, she started complaining about her new teacher, saying Ms. Pam didn’t know how to teach. For a kid who got a perfect attendance trophy every year and loved school, she was suddenly experiencing difficulty. During my off hour one day, I drove to Jill’s school to investigate, and what I found was alarming.

Row after row of tiny portable buildings were lined up in a muddy yard with wooden planks leading up to them. Each building had a door with a window in it. I found Jill’s building and peeked inside. I saw Ms. Pam, the first-year teacher, standing and staring down at a podium. I saw two little white girls sitting in the middle of a classroom with twenty-five little black children. I saw total chaos.

What I had to go through to get Jill out of that situation was beyond difficult. It took the better part of the semester to get her transferred. By that time, she had missed so much instruction.

One of the biggest hurdles was finding transportation. The buses wouldn’t take her across town. I had to be at work at 7:00. Her school didn’t accept students before 8:00. I needed help.

Luckily, the fates sent Howard to us. He was enrolled at the local college, and someone had referred him to me for help with a paper.

Howard moved in with us. He took Jill to school and picked her up for the rest of that school year. He took her to church on Sundays. He took her to his house to ride horses. He treated her like a daughter. He loved her so much and she loved him. We were like a happy little family for a while.

I don’t even know why we broke up. Probably because he’d never bothered to divorce his wife, so marriage was out of the question.

That picture was taken the day we picked Macy up from the vet. The news wasn’t good. We were going to have to put her to sleep.

Howard dug a four-foot-deep hole in the back yard. We wrapped Macy’s body in my favorite pink bathrobe and laid her in the hole.

My head is full of tears that won’t come out.

Jill called tonight and said that Howard died.

His funeral is tomorrow. He was fifty years old.

He had just completed his Masters in Psychology.

There is a cabin in the woods with two dead people strapped to chairs. The door to the cabin is locked and the windows are sealed. The people did not die from any of the following:

murder
exposure
dehydration
suicide
fire
asphyxiation
disease
starvation

How did they die?

 _________

IF
2 + 3 = 10
7 + 2 = 63
6 + 5 = 66
8 + 4 = 96
THEN
9 + 7 = ____

_________

Three men go into a motel. The desk clerk charges them $30 for a room. Each man pays $10 and they go to the room. Later, the desk clerk realizes he overcharged them for the room, so he sends the bellboy to their room with $5. The bellboy can’t figure out how to split $5 evenly between three men, so he gives each man $1 and keeps the other $2 for himself. This means that the three men each paid $9 for the room, which is a total of $27. Add the $2 that the bellboy kept and the total is $29. Where is the other dollar?

Are you a global thinker? To find out, go to this page and take the short quiz before you read this post. Then come back here and tell me your results. I’m eager to know you better.

I worked for a textbook publishing company in Austin once. A one-eyed millionaire owned the place and a senator’s son ran it. The senator’s son told me he hired me because I was the nicest person he interviewed.

My other qualifications were pretty sketchy. A major in English, typesetting and copy writing experience, a novel.  The owner seemed more interested in my novel than my background. So I was nice and I’d written a novel. Apparently, that’s all you need to work in the publishing business.

The senator’s son would hand me a manuscript and it was my job to turn it into a book. Each manuscript had to be copy edited, designed, typeset, proofread, indexed, printed, bound and shipped. My job was to find the right people to do each of those jobs, assign and check their work, and make sure deadlines were met.

It took nine months to make a book back then. In four years there I made 84 books.

I was perfect for that job because I am a global thinker, which means I process information backwards. I don’t look at a manuscript and see 500 pages. I look at it and see a bound book. Global thinkers process information holistically, from the whole to the parts. Their thinking can appear quite illogical and meandering because most people process information sequentially, from the bits and pieces to the whole.

Most people are not global thinkers. Most people are linear thinkers.

None of us are wholly one thing or the other. We use both linear and global thinking skills just like we use both hands. However, there does seem to be general agreement about hemispheric dominance. Global thinking is associated with right-brain dominance, and linear thinking is associated with the more logical left-brain functions.

Seventy percent of the population is thought to be left-brain dominant, or linear thinkers.

which explains why I’m such an outlier

Right-brain thinkers tend to be more creative and spontaneous. Actors, artists, musicians, and athletes are right-brain thinkers, which accounts for their small percentage in the overall population. These people have difficulty following a simple sequence of directions without changing or rearranging something. Instead of planning every aspect of a road trip, they will just get in the car and drive. Instead of following a recipe exactly, they will change it. They will pick up a magazine and open it somewhere in the middle or towards the back.

Thinking backwards is not a brain disorder but it can appear that way to linear thinkers. Because emotions are processed on the right side of the brain, global thinkers may seem overly emotional or too sensitive. They can’t help it. They make decisions based on feelings and intuition rather than on logic and reason. To the logically minded this can be seen as a fault.

which explains why I’m “so sensitive“

I left the publishing job to have my children, and after that I taught high school English. In the classroom linear/sequential thinkers (most students) are lost without a road map. They need specific steps and procedures on how to go about getting there. Outlining is a linear/sequential processing technique, which explains why I always wrote my outline after I finished the paper. Students who excel in math are linear thinkers because math problems can be broken into small, incremental steps.

which explains why I’m no good at math

Schools do a good job of assessing learning styles (visual, auditory, kinesthetic), especially at the primary levels, but I’ve never known them to address thought processing styles (global or linear). There is a test for left- or right-brain dominance at this site if you’re interested in learning more about yourself or your children. It will require more of your time than the test at the top.

Below are other traits of the global/gestalt/nonlinear/strategic/holistic/right-brain thinker.

• Prefers working in an informal, less structured, more flexible environment
• Tends to be spontaneous and likes spontaneity
• Enjoys doing several things at once
• Learns best when information is presented with humor or emotion or a short anecdote.
• Speaks with many gestures
• Tends to learn the general idea first, then looks at the details
• Can work well with distractions
• Tends to take frequent breaks
• Tends to need lessons which are interesting to them on a personal level
• Tends to work well in small groups
• Needs written and tactile involvement
• Responds well to pictures

(photo by Travis Wright)

So tell me. Are you a global or a linear thinker?

Write about Dad, you keep saying.

OK, I’ll tell you a story about your dad.

It’s a half-remembered story like they all are. All stories are less than whole. There is no such thing as the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth when it comes to memory. Truth exists only in the moment.

This story is like a broken glass with three or four main chunks lying around and smaller fragments scattered about. The big chunks include a hotel, a company Christmas party, a band from Hawaii, and a feast of food and drinks.

You can almost fill in the fragments around those chunks yourself. You could pick any big company to throw the party and any big hotel to host it. The sign out front says SO AND SO’S CHRISTMAS PARTY and the date.

That’s how Tom knew about the party. He saw the sign and came home and told me that we were invited to a company Christmas party.

Yippee!!

He lied, of course, but I came to understand that most of his lies were harmless. He simply loved to have fun, and he had no problem breaking protocols in pursuit of festivity. He had already done the hard job of rearing three children and now with just me he was rolling along carefree. Crashing that Christmas party was so emblematic of the way he approached life. The man was fearless.

Are you sure we should be doing this?

Yeah, everything will be alright.

We were dressed to the nines, looking and smelling good, Tom in a suit and me in heels. The place was packed with lei-wearing celebrants, maybe a couple of hundred in a hotel banquet room. The food was amazing, the band was hokey and loud, the dance floor was set up between the band and the food. We ate and drank and danced the night away.

Tom loved to dance. I used to make fun of the way we danced. We were so awkward together. We had different inner beats and it showed whenever we tried to dance. Still, we danced lovingly and often.

Speaking of beats, do you know anything about the Beat Generation? Your dad was a borderline beatnik because he grew up in that generation. San Francisco became their mecca so if you see any old geysers in their seventies out there, they’re probably former beats. Incredibly interesting people is what they are.

Here’s another story I love. You may have heard this one already. One day Tom came home and said he’d gotten me a part in a Willie Nelson movie.

What!?

Sure enough, the next morning we showed up at a hotel in Austin and I was whisked away to a wardrobe trailer and put into a cowgirl waitress outfit. My job was to traipse around behind Willie, Kris Kristofferson, and Rip Torn carrying a tray and serving drinks. You can see about ten seconds of me in Song Writer. Tom was seated at another table wearing a cowboy hat and tan jacket, acting like a customer. We each got a check for $88 for playing extras that day. I have pictures of us with Willie and Kris.

Your father’s fearlessness rubbed off on me. Once we were on Eagle Mountain Lake in the Texas Steel yacht, anchored in a little cove partying with a group of thirty-somethings. A sea plane began circling overhead and we all started waving. The plane landed on the lake and cruised over to the boat. I asked the pilot if he’d take me up for a ride and he agreed. So I climbed into the plane and got a birds-eye view of the lake where I met your dad. My spirit soared high that day.

Speaking of spirits, the common element in each of these stories is alcohol, which reminds me of a Visine story. We were atop a mesa in New Mexico or Arizona, one of those, laid out on a blanket in the buff when a bug crawled into my ear.

Aachtt!!

A buzzing bug in your ear is a frightening thing. I was screaming and crazy scared. Tom got the Visine from my night case and squeezed it into my ear. The bug drained out with the fluid. Remember that if you ever get a bug in your ear.

If your dad had a motto, it was “Everything will be alright.” He said that to me practically daily for twenty years to cut through my fussing and fretting. It’s funny how when you hear something over and over for that long, you come to believe it. Now it’s my motto too. I know that everything will be alright because it always is.

Tom had another line that worked well on me. No matter where we were, if there was a room full of people, he would turn to me and say, “You’re the prettiest woman in the room.” I loved hearing that. Sometimes I agreed with him and sometimes I didn’t. Most women in their prime are pretty, especially when they’re dressed for a night out.

I never thought you looked like either of us until I put those two pictures up. Now I can see the resemblance—the nose, the mouth, the chin, even the eyebrows. Mostly, you have his fearlessness. I remember you crashing that Astricon conference in Dallas when you were a freshman because you couldn’t afford a ticket. You met Mark Spenser that day and showed him Adhearsion and that became the defining moment in your career. You’ve been on top of the world ever since.

Tom would be so proud of you.

Do the demands of others tend to make people more productive than they would be without such pressure?

That’s the question this month’s crop of aspiring college applicants attempted to answer. Of course the demands of others make us more productive. If it weren’t for Pearson contacting me each month to score essays, I might be one of the least productive people I know.

Apart from Pearson wanting me to read a couple thousand essays every month, I have no one demanding anything of me. Nothing. Nada. No one asking me or telling me to do anything. Where all the external constraints went, I do not know. I just woke up one day and noticed they were gone.

But I’m back in my work chair now, sitting here in my paperless office reading student essays all day, trying to be productive. When I’m not scoring essays, I’m busy all day getting information overloaded. It’s dizzying.

Alvin Toffler coined the term information overload in his 1970 best seller Future Shock. I had to read that book in college and I’ve never forgotten it. In it, Toffler predicts a return to cottage industry brought on by the information age. He describes what this new age will mean.

Society is undergoing an enormous structural change, a revolution from an industrial society to a super-industrial society. This change will overwhelm people. The accelerated rate of technological and social change will leave them disconnected and suffering from shattering stress and disorientation – future shock. The majority of social problems will be symptoms of this future shock.

He got it right—forty years ago. Who says futurists don’t know what they’re talking about? Alvin Toffler certainly did.

Future shock has arrived. Too much change in too short a period of time is what we are all going through right now.  It absolutely is dizzying.

I’m going to play futurist here for a minute and make a prediction of my own. I predict that everything is going to be alright, because it always is. If you don’t believe me, just look out your window right now. There’s your proof. Everything is always alright, it always has been and always will be.

Be kind to yourself, get some fresh air, and remember: That air is shared by every living creature on this planet. What you are breathing right now may once have been inside a baby panda.

We truly are all in this together.

Lisa Ericson at MommyMystic is looking for funny baby stories. I submitted mine about setting my son on fire. Check it out in the comments there.

Lack of imagination is the cause of much human suffering.

I never knew Dr. Guisenberger’s story. I only imagined it. For decades I imagined his story. He was the hot coal in my shoe. I hated him and feared him and blamed him for turning me into a freak.

Over time my anger subsided as a new story began to emerge. The new story was imagined too. In the new, more sympathetic version of the story, Dr. Guisenberger was not an evil monster but a tortured soul, reeling from the horrors of his place in time, a damaged fragment of his former self.

It’s funny, really, how you can look at anything in different ways. One with loathing, one with compassion.

In the old story I was convinced that he hated me because my eyes were blue. I felt that he was using me to exact a morbid kind of personal revenge.  That might have been the case, but I cannot look at it that way any longer. Now I must view Dr. Guisenberger as a pathetic, broken man who had known untold horrors in his homeland. Whether that was true or not, I do not know. I only know that he was psychically sick. In my new version of the story, it was the Holocaust that made him sick.

If one needed glasses back then, one went to Dr. Guisenberger’s office.

“Is this better or worse?” he would ask.

I never knew for sure. I always guessed and I always guessed wrong.

It did not seem to matter to him whether I guessed correctly or not. All he wanted was an answer. If I said I didn’t know, he would persist.

“Of course you know. Which is it, better or worse?”

I trembled in fear of this man for ten years. Twice a year for ten years I was forced to sit in his dark, dank room and smell his coffee breath in my face and say things I did not believe. Twice a year for ten years I would leave his office with a prescription for new lenses that were stronger than the ones I wore.

“Mom, I can’t see.”

“You’ll get used to them.”

“But I can’t see!”

“The doctor knows what’s best.”

Never once did her words comfort me, nor for a moment did I get used to the burden placed on me by my elders. No one knew what to do when I cried with each new pair of glasses.

As the lenses got stronger, the headaches worsened. My childhood was a blur of headaches and heartache.

By the time I reached high school, my lenses resembled Coke bottle bottoms. By the time I graduated, Dr. Guisenberger’s version of my vision had reached a whopping 20/1000.

According to Wikipedia, 20/1000 is considered near total visual impairment, or near total blindness.

I felt betrayed by the adults in my life. I felt that they had allowed near blindness to be forced on me by a black-souled German Jew who had it out for me and my little brother. Yes, he too, my precious little brother, was dealt this same exact blow.

No one in my extended family had low vision, yet somehow my brother and I got labeled nearly blind. That alone is reason to believe the doctor over corrected us. Also, there was that little girl whose innate sense of awareness kept insisting something was wrong.

Were my brother and I deliberately blinded by a demented victim of Nazi terror? Maybe. Maybe not. There is no way to know.

In my earlier version of the story, his actions were deliberate. In the newer version, he was merely incompetent. In the new version, Dr. Guisenberger was dealt a hand much worse than my own. His country incinerated children. By comparison, slowly blinding them seems much less cruel.

I know enough about story to know that any story can be shaped. The shape of this story changed when I began to imagine a less painful way to view it. Imagining the doctor’s story differently made a difference. That and four operations. Now I am 20/350.

My brother still doesn’t trust eye doctors. He refuses to risk having surgery.

If our obstacles are our path, my path became that which was near to me, things I could hold in my hands and see clearly, like books or drawing and sewing. Nowadays it’s a computer.

I have Dr. Guisenberger to thank for shaping my path. He more than anyone else taught me the value of imagination. Imagination lets us forgive.

“Memory is a storehouse of junk on a floor where a few gems are scattered too. Find them, for that is what life is worth.” —Surinder Singh

My first real job after college was as a typesetter for a printing company. One of our customers was an advertising agency that created magazine and newspaper ads for its clients. In those days type had to be ordered from commercial print shops.

Apart from setting type, much of my time was spent interacting with a guy from the ad agency who showed up three or four times a day to pick up type or drop off copy. The designs he brought in amazed me. Somebody at that ad agency really knew what they were doing.

The guy and I became friends and one day he invited me to drop by the agency after work. He said cocktails were served on Fridays after five and lots of people showed up.

I met the owners of Carter & Daniel Advertising that day. Carter was the big, jovial front man whose specialty was hype. Daniel was the quiet former art professor and acclaimed local sculptor who made the magic happen. All the people I met there fit my idea of cool people.

I quickly determined that my life would be greatly improved if I moved from my one-woman composition department to this dynamic advertising agency, so every Friday after work I would head to Carter & Daniel and hang out like I belonged there. I would introduce myself as the typesetter, I would sip gin and tonic, I would hound Mr. Carter to hire me.

“No!” he would bellow. “I need you there not here.”

One afternoon I overheard the two of them discussing the bank surveys. Questionnaires designed by the agency to assess customer satisfaction had been completed by bank customers and were stacked in piles needing attention. That’s when it hit me: offer to do it for them.

I told them I would be glad to take the surveys home and draft a report. In fact, I would do it for free just to help them out since they sent me so much typesetting. Nothing to lose. Potential gain if I do a good job.

They liked my idea.

So I loaded my car with stacks of questionnaires and spent the weekend poring over them. English majors are good at some things, and writing reports is generally one of them.

On Monday after work I returned the questionnaires to Carter & Daniel, along with my ten-page report, nicely packaged as a term paper might be.  They were dumbstruck.

They hired me on the spot.

As production manager there, I worked with many talented people to produce TV, radio, magazine, newspaper, and billboard ads. Concepts came from the owners and execution came through me.

Concepts were often little more than a few words. My report, for example, had shown that bank customers put high value on small things like courtesy and friendliness, so the concept for the bank’s new ad campaign was called “Little Things.” At the time those words sounded fresher than they would today.

The owners gave me a lot of freedom to do what I wanted with Little Things, including writing the copy.

I gave the copy a really sentimental slant, which was popular in those days. I tore through magazines and found sappy photographs that tug at the heartstrings. I arranged and directed a photo shoot that emulated those shots. I worked with the voice talent on the right background music. Finally, I took the photos and audio recording to the TV station and produced my first television commercial.

It was a huge success. The Little Things spot was a bright and shiny gem of a thing.

Wanderlust kicked in at some point, and I moved on from that job, to another state, taking with me a new measure of confidence.

The kicker to this story for me is what happened three years later when I was visiting friends in my former state. I heard something very familiar that drew me into the next room where a television was playing. There it was, of all things — my Little Things commercial, still airing after all those years.

Ah, it felt so good!

“Let me light my lamp,” says the star, “and never debate if it will help to remove the darkness.” — M. Tagore, 1928

We’d sold the house and shipped all our furnishings to the new place. We’d spent our last day together at the marina. In the morning, Tom would drive “Miss Gigi” east along the Gulf of Mexico shoreline toward Port Arthur. The kids and I would drive the car and meet him there. It was our last night in Port Aransas.

Jill was almost two and Jay was almost three. I had just turned forty. It was late July and the fireflies were out. One flew into my hair and got caught as I was walking toward the door with the children. Good thing, because the electricity was turned off in the house. Without the lightening bug, I would have had a hard time opening the door with a baby in my arms.

Inside the darkness, as the lightening bug flashed, the entire room filled with the most beautiful ambient light I’d ever seen. A sense of peace and wonder and gratitude settled over me. A blissfulness.

Thank you, I thought. Thank you, firefly.

The children were tired from a day in the sun and water. The drive to the house had made them groggy. I put them on the air mattress and they went right to sleep, wearily aware that a wondrous thing was taking place.

I lay down beside them, marveling at the truth. On a night when I had no electricity, a firefly flew into my life.

It was a magical moment, the kind that makes you certain there is magic in the world. This is the memory I go to when I want to feel supremely loved.

Here is a supremely lovely poem by Tagore titled “The Unnamed Light.”

1
I touch God in my song
as the hill touches the far-away sea
with its waterfall.

2
“Let me light my lamp,” says the star,
“and never debate
if it will help to remove the darkness.”

3
The flame met the earthen lamp in me,
and what a great marvel of light!

4
Between the shores of Me and Thee
there is the loud ocean, my own surging self,
which I long to cross.

5
Life sends up in blades of grass
its silent hymn of praise
to the unnamed Light.

6
The butterfly counts not months
but moments,
and has time enough.

7
Let my love, like sunlight,
surround you
and yet give you illumined freedom.

8
Birth is from
the mystery of night
into the greater mystery of day.

9
Faith is the bird that feels the light
and sings when the dawn is still dark.

10
My life’s empty flute waits for its final music
like the primal darkness before the stars came out.

11
The world is the ever-changing foam
that floats on the surface of a sea of silence.

12
I leave no trace of wings in the air,
but I am glad I have had my flight.

13
Before the end of my journey
may I reach within myself
the one which is the all,
leaving the outer shell
to float away with the drifting multitude
upon the current of chance and change.

14
When death comes and whispers to me,
“Thy days are ended,”
let me say to him, “I have lived in love
and not in mere time.”
He will ask, “Will thy songs remain?”
I shall say, “I know not, but this I know
that often when I sang I found my eternity.” 

————

SOURCE: Fireflies, by Rabindranath Tagore,
The Macmillan Co, 1928 / Rupa & Co., 2002

“To change, you must face the dragon of your appetites with another dragon: the life-energy of the soul.” —Rumi

Recently, Oprah interviewed Stephanie Meyer, the gazillionaire author of the Twilight series. Meyer said that she got the idea for her book from a dream. She awoke one morning with a memory of a boy and a girl in a clearing. The image was crystal clear and lingered with her through the day, so she wrote it down and that scene became Chapter 13 of her first book.

A similar thing happened to me a few years ago. Right in the middle of May scoring, I awoke one morning with the vaguest memory of twin baby dragons. How my brain came up with a dream about dragons I do not know. I have never been the least bit interested in dragons. There is Puff from the song and Elliott from the movie and that is all I know.

The twin baby dragon memory lingered through the day as a sort of smear rather than a clear image. My fascination multiplied; I felt I was on the brink of some awareness that would link meaning to the dream.

I gave myself over to it fully, meaning I became emotionally hushed and mentally silent, which I cannot do easily and readily but I can do occasionally. Sometimes the trance-like quality of mindless scoring induces this quiet state.

The words “twin baby dragons” lazed around in my brain as I continued working. Later that day I began to become aware of another strange phenomenon as I got up for breaks and this and that. Six words began repeating themselves clearly: It is a sarry story mine. What’s interesting about this is the repetition, for one — the same six words over and over. We tend to notice repetition.

More noticeable, however, was the accent on the word “sorry.” The voice in my head was not saying sorry. It was saying sarry with a distinct Scottish brogue. Great, I thought. I have a Scottish voice in my head repeating, It is a sarry story mine. What am I to make of this?

Then the baby dragons would come to mind and I would find myself in a whale of a quandary trying to make meaning of baby dragons and a Scottish lyricist and score essays at the same time. Soon I came to realize that a poem wanted out.

My inner poet often prefers the stricture and structure of rhymed verse. There is a limiting aspect to rhyme that keeps me off the slippery slopes of free, unrestrained, anything-goes verse where I am vulnerable to a mild form of madness. My “Pinball Nation” poem is a good example of that. It’s a long, rollicking, free-verse poem set within the confines of a pinball machine but just a tad bit wicked crazy. I blame it on the pressures of grad school.

I logged off my work program, picked up a pen and paper and wrote, It is a sarry story mine. The next three lines appeared instantly. About a beast what eats her kind/And how I borne to be a twin/Kept me from meeting my sure end

There it was. A Scottish female dragon about to tell her tale. Such excitement! Droplets squeezed from a dream were appearing on a page. The first half of the poem fell out of me in about five minutes. I remember looking at my watch aghast. I diddled with the second half over the course of several hours.

I love this poem and the way it happened. “Why the Dragons Went Away” attempts to link the demise of the dragons to an ice age. Because dragons are allegorical, this becomes my first allegorical poem, significant because allegory is the highest form of make-believe. Aristotle claimed that allegorical thinking is the hallmark of genius.

No, I don’t think I’m a genius. I think we all have glimmers of genius that are somehow connected to imagination, dreams, and states of consciousness. Albert Einstein claimed that every major discovery he made came through a dream.

What follows is my little ballad about a baby dragon born in a dream, explaining why the dragons went away.

It is a sarry story mine

About a beast what eats her kind

And how I borne to be a twin

Kept me from meeting my sure end

It was a time they ate they younger

So’s to quelch they burnin hunger

Every season another born’d

Every birth a death not mourn’d

Tiny tidbits tease delight

The palette of a thing of fright

A monster mother she for sure

And for her appetite no cure

Except the tiny morsels flung

From twixt her loins onto her tongue

The times they were all full of frost

And little babes they could get lost

But lost to me I’d rather be

Than chomped upon and et by she

So slid I down the frosty slope

Onto the teat of an antelope

Who lay beside me night and day

And succored me till early May

When then my wings began to sprout

And I began to flit about

Unawares that a dragon mum

Was what I’d someday too become

And when the antelope told me this

I yelled aloud Such heinousness!

Yee gads ye gods! I’d rather tromp

With antelope than ever chomp

The babes I bear upon the high

No no! Not there — ye gods come nigh!

Let me Persillia Dragoness

Upon the ground to build my nest

And lie beneath a wingless beast

And on me babes refuse to feast

So days they come and finally

The dragon mums no more they be

Now babes have ground on which to play

And that’s why dragons went away

Lo on this ground are men what feast

Just like me mum on babes of beasts

They think they are the highest thing

When all they are is ground b’ings

They cannot fly like dragons soar

Nor ope they mouths and like us roar

They cannot run like antelope

Nor see in dark like cats do nope

They cannot speak without the word

As beasties do in every herde

They are a kind of lesser beast

For in this world counting us least

They has it wrong of course we know

We beasties do still run the show

While men and wem walks to and fro

Familiars flit, fly and flow

Ay taste for flesh is naught but ill

But men and wem they eat us still

Like dragon mums of long ago

When all there was was snow and snow

And so dragons no more they be

Alas our kind is safe and free

“Excuse me while I kiss the sky.” —Jimi Hendrix

I worked for a small town daily newspaper once, in the display ad department. I was pretty good at selling ads. I always liked to draw and doodle, so it was easy for me to sketch out a boxy little ad and sell it to some retailer who hadn’t realized until I showed up that he really needed to run that ad. It was almost too easy. I was making the owners a ton of money and feeling uninspired doing it.

Then HE showed up in town, this studly, handsome young man who had taken a position with the pilot school at the airport. I was sent there to write an ad announcing his arrival and upcoming training sessions. Something lit up in me that day. All the elements of romance that I adored in film and fiction were staring me in the face. Flight. Adventure. Travel. Attraction. These notions wouldn’t go away as I trudged through each subsequent work day. It was as if the airport had taken a bite out of me and I had to go there to get it back, to be whole again.

So I concocted a grand advertising plan for this company that wanted to promote its flight school. I would convince the publisher to let me run a series of “Women in Aviation” posts chronicling my adventures in the hometown skies in exchange for pilot training. Terrific idea! I thought. It was the mid-70s and women were starting to assert themselves in the workplace and elsewhere. Surely I could fly an airplane just as easily as a man. Sarah Bernhardt had. Groundbreaking idea! I thought.

The publisher didn’t think so, but his wife did. She ran the advertising department and knew what a go-getter I was. After several discussions and many deliberations, it was finally agreed that I could do the series, under my boss’ careful supervision. After all, I was not a journalist. I was merely an English major who had barely gotten her feet wet doing whatever it is that English majors do, which is mostly nothing, according to some. In my case, it was mostly making money for other people.

Super! So now all I had to do was convince the guys at Natchez Aviation to give me free flying lessons in exchange for all this publicity. Not a problem for an ace salesperson like myself, I thought. But there was a problem. The price of fuel. That’s what they kept talking about. The price of fuel. . .

Ground school came before flight school, though, and there was no cost attached to my reading training manuals, so the guys agreed to let me take one of their big red plastic-clad binders home and get started on ground school. Since reading was my strong suit, I figured I’d breeze through that big fat notebook and be ready for flight in no time.

It took longer than I thought, much longer. And it was much more difficult than I thought it would be, especially reading the maps. Flight maps looked like nothing I’d ever seen. There was simply no point of reference to be able to connect them to any form of learning I’d ever done. I persisted, nonetheless, through the tell-tale doubts about whether I should be doing this. My desire to fly an airplane and write about doing it grew stronger with each passing month.

Finally, I finished ground school and it was time to take to the skies.

Here’s the short of it. After logging ten hours of flight in a little single-engine Cessna 152, I ended up in the hospital with a collapsed lung. While I was in the hospital, my flight instructor called to tell me that he had accepted a position in Brussels, Belgium and would be leaving town that week. Double bummer.

Oh, well. I couldn’t understand a word the tower guy was saying over the radio anyway. And those aerial maps still looked like pages from a Tolkien novel depicting some fantasy place. I took it as an omen, a sign from above that I shouldn’t be up there. There would be no more flight time for me, but that was alright. I had a great time and made some wonderful memories. Taking a plane off the ground and flying it from Natchez to New Orleans and back and landing it safely both ways was the best thing I’d ever done.

As for the three articles I’d written about my experience learning to fly, I couldn’t bear to look at them unfinished and unpublished. I crumpled them up and threw them away.

My favorite memory from that time involved a night flight over Natchez. My flight instructor wanted to show me some rolls, the kinds of things you see at little county air shows. Aerobatics.

The night was so clear and the stars were so bright. When he turned the plane upside down and I saw stars where the city lights used to be, it took my breath away.  He flipped the plane again and again, until I couldn’t tell up from down,  earth from sky. There was a marvelous continuity about it, a sense of wholeness and cosmic wonder, a sensation of being enveloped by stars. Those are the kinds of moments you live for, the ones that take your breath away.

Nobody knew what caused my lung to collapse, but I think it was breathlessness.

“Her voice changed like a bird’s: There grew more of the music, and less of the words.” — Robert Browning

I was in a play once, playing the role of a middle school English teacher. The director who cast me didn’t know when he cast me that I’d been teaching middle school English for three years. I thought, this will be a cinch. I’ll just act like I normally do.

After a few weeks of rehearsal, the director lost it one day.

“This is theatre. It has to be larger than life,” he yelled. “You’ve got to act!”

I knew how to act. I had a trophy from high school to prove it. But I didn’t know how to act like I was acting like a middle school English teacher. I only knew how to be one. I couldn’t do it any differently even when I tried.

“It’s boring the way you’re doing it!”

Ouch.

I decided to drop out. The director wasn’t happy and I wasn’t enjoying his jabs. I told the man cast as my husband that I was going to quit.

“You can’t,” he said. “We’re too far into rehearsals for him to recast. Just do what you’re doing. You’re doing fine.”

That helped. We continued rehearsing through Thanksgiving, through Christmas, New Years, and finally January 16th rolled around. Opening night. Dress rehearsal the night before had gone well. We were ready for an audience. Nerves were comfortably subdued, or so I thought.

When it was time for my entrance, a curious thing happened.

I walked on stage to speak my first line, and my voice came out a full octave higher than usual. What? I could see the surprised look on the face of the man playing my husband. I could feel my face flushing with fear. Yikes! What do I do now?

What I did was struggle to stay in that same voice for the next hour. It would have been totally wrong to switch voices after that initial delivery. I sounded like Julia Child, but at least I was acting.

The opening night of “Sylvia” was probably our best night.  The surprising voice that issued forth provided just enough tension to keep things interesting. Sounding like Julia Child was definitely more theatrical than sounding like myself. But it was a lucky accident caused by opening-night jitters. On all subsequent nights my voice came out as it normally did, and we fell naturally into a mode that felt more like rehearsal than live performance.

I love it when life serves up little happy accidents like this one.

We like to think that we are so in control of ourselves, when that is not always the case. The lesson for me is that when things don’t come out the way we intended them, just go with, whatever it is. There is always the chance that something better than we hoped for will occur.

Synchronicity

There are several coincidences related to this story that capture my attention. One is my being cast in a stage role that I also performed in the work world. I heard about auditions while mindlessly switching radio channels in my car one day. I knew nothing about the play when I showed up for auditions, and the director knew nothing about me.

Another coincidence is the date of the opening — January 16th. That trophy I won in high school was for my role in an Ayn Rand play titled “The Night of January 16th,” a courtroom murder drama that allowed twelve members of each night’s audience to serve as jurors and thereby choose the ending. I played the role of Magda Svenson, the housekeeper in the home where a murder had occurred. Magda’s Swedish accent came naturally to me for some reason and was the reason I got the best actress award.

Robert Browning’s quote seems uniquely suited for this post as well, for it was the sound of my voice in both plays, not the words, that made each performance unique.  Her voice changed like a bird’s: There grew more of the music, and less of the words. Both Magda Svenson and Julia Child had voices that exuded musicality.

Finally, there is the fact that after posting this piece, I picked up my copy of this week’s The New Yorker and found a six-page article on Ayn Rand, which brought me back here to talk about synchronicity. Some things are just too obvious to ignore.

I love it when life serves up happy little coincidences like these!

“Only from the heart can you touch the sky.” — Rumi

(Jay at eCOMM)

He left San Francisco on crutches this week and made it to Amsterdam for eCOMM Europe, a three-day conference on the future of mobile and internet communications. The title of his presentation was “Entrepreneurial Advantages with New Open-Source Technologies.” I found this picture of him online today.

God I love this kid! I get so excited when I find pictures of him.

When he was in high school, his computer science teacher and his guidance counselor took it upon themselves to convince someone at the school district office to come up with a code number that would allow Jay to get credit for a new course they created called “Webmaster.” He was the only student in the class. He worked out of the computer science teacher’s office and created the school’s first website. Maintaining the website gave him unparalleled autonomy to roam the campus with a camera around his neck, pop in and out of classrooms at his discretion, talk to whomever he wanted, or sit in a quiet room by himself and do whatever he wanted with a computer.

What a gig!

It’s been all uphill ever since. At the top of that hill is a broad netherworld where the makers of tomorrow reside. The makers say that our future as a species — our ascension — is interwoven with our collective creativity and our technology.

Conference, anyone?

My son is only one of countless talented individuals working tirelessly around the globe to make this shift toward a better future happen. His interests are technological, of course, while mine tend toward the inspirational. I would love to go to a bloggers conference and meet some of the people who have inspired me so much this year.

Airfare, hotel, conference fee, food — it might not be cheap, but speakers get in free. What would you have to say? What would you want to hear? Who would you want to see there? Where would it be? The conference organizer makes the money, or donates it to charity. Are you a speaker or an organizer or both? If you organize, you also have to promote.

Where is the next generation of Katies and Williamsons and Chopras and Dyers? I suspect they are out there now, writing blogs and ebooks, little start-ups each of them, shaping future thought, inspiring us to live better lives. Some are good at organizing and promoting. Some are better at writing. Some people do both well. Some are natural speakers. I know I could name dozens of bloggers I would pay to see on stage, either speaking or reading or doing both.

I want to go to a conference and hang out with makers of tomorrow like Jay does. “Makers Conference 2010″ or something like that. A thought conference. This sounds like a job for Lance Ekum, writer, organizer, and promoter extraordinaire. Check out the Levity Project he is promoting with Katie West in Chicago on November 7th.

On Second Thought

While contemplating conferences, the rational part of me reared its hemisphere and started whispering swine flu! I don’t know. Maybe this is not the best time to be traveling and congregating with people from around the world. I haven’t had an H1N1 shot and really don’t want to get one. Maybe next year, or the year after. This is my first pandemic. I don’t know how long they last.

The days that make us happy make us wise.                         —John Masefield

Is using humor the best way to approach difficult situations and problems?

That was the question students attempted to answer in the writing portion of the October SAT. With humor as a topic, I expected to read some dumb jokes, like what did the fish say when it bumped into the wall? Dam! Or what is invisible and smells like worms? Bird farts. But there were no jokes. Students took this assignment very seriously. I read 1,385 responses, and the majority of them stated that difficulties should be met with seriousness, not humor.

The Serious Side

The question for me is why this year’s crop of students is so serious-minded. I can think of a few possibilities; namely, the current state of the nation, the seeming importance of the SAT, the serious tone of academics in general, and perhaps traditional expectations.

Current Affairs

Students listed a host of current problems, both global and national — war, famine, AIDS, swine flu, depression, recession, inflation, corruption, health care, unemployment, global warming, natural disasters. These definitely are serious matters affecting all of us. Though young people may not give them much thought in general, when asked specifically about “serious problems,” they know what the problems are. One student wrote, “This economic depression that the U.S. has been slipping into has got everybody down.” Another student wrote, “Too many people feel like broken cakes — crummy.”

Importance of SAT

Many students have come to view the SAT as “the most important test of your life,” as one wrote. Adults know this is hardly the case. However, students approach this test with a huge amount of anxiety, which causes them to have a serious mindset. They want to answer questions correctly and may think that the “right” answer to this question is the serious one. After all, most of the adults in their lives are serious people, aren’t they?

Academics in General

Except for the inclusion of girls and minorities, not a lot has changed in public education since 1635 when the Boston Latin School opened. The basic format is still very much the same: sit down, shut up, do your work. Students often write about their favorite teachers being the ones who joke around. They also mention how strict and serious most teachers are, especially coaches and AP instructors. English teachers may seem especially serious, foisting as they do one tragedy after another upon students — The Diary of Anne Frank, The Scarlet Letter, The Crucible, Hamlet, Macbeth. I have never understood why we put so much emphasis on tragedies. Students are led to believe that tragedy is more important than comedy. William Shakespeare wrote ten tragedies and fifteen comedies. That should tell us something.

Traditional Expectations

Tragedy remains in the curriculum because that is the tradition, the same outdated, Victorian tradition that viewed life as serious and play as sin. One brave student volunteered the notion that “Education is a sort of sick joke played on youth by society.” It may be just that, a sick joke, but if it is, nobody wants to admit it and deal with it “head on,” as they say.

Facing problems head-on was the overwhelming response to the question, but that’s not very clear. What does it mean to face something “head-on”? How do you do that? They didn’t know. Only one student in 1,385 provided a clear method, which involved careful planning, correct preparation, and precise execution.  His assessment of the SAT as a serious problem provided him with this strategy.

The Funny Side

I probably read close to a thousand papers describing grave situations, literally. Funerals are no place for humor, I’m told, even though the cast of “Grey’s Anatomy” burst into laughter at a grave site recently. One student wrote that on the day his grandmother died, her horoscope read, “Something will come up to block your normal routine.” Another student wrote that “without death, life is never-ending.” Yes, it is.

Despite their seriousness, they make hilarious mistakes — heart cancer, additude, up most for utmost. Over the Cookoo’s Nest by Kenny Chesney cracked me up. Martin Luther King, Jr. helping to create and enforce Jim Crow laws was pretty funny, along with Africans being captivated by Europeans. There are penalties for language errors but not for factual errors. If a student writes about President Benjamin Franklin, it’s sadly funny and nothing more.

My favorite essay, in terms of the one I remember most, was written by one of those divergent thinkers that every teacher loves. He threw out both humor and seriousness as effective approaches and wrote a beautiful piece about how music gets him through any difficulty. He used lyrics from a song in “Wicked” to make his point. I wish I’d written them down. I wish I could see that play.

The title of this post came from the first sentence of one paper. The John Masefield quote came from another paper.

I agree with this student.

“Laughter helps, and as long a there’s help, then there’s always hope.”

I admire this student.

“Even though humor may not be the best way to deal with some problems, it could be the only way to deal with others.”

I am inspired by this one.

“To be at peace with oneself and humanity is the only truly healthy life.”

I am content with what I’ve seen this week from a sampling of America’s youth. The writing, overall, was quite good, better than I’ve seen in recent years. These students were in 7th grade when the writing test was added, so they’ve had five or six years to prepare for a  two-page timed essay. In this case, expecting more from them has allowed them to rise to the occasion. I think the internet is also helping to create more literacy. When students read more, they write better.  Also, giving them topics that they know something about helps.

The poem that follows was mentioned by several students. It’s tragic, of course, but it shows you what they like. I like “The Walrus and the Carpenter.”

Not Waving but Drowning

by Stevie Smith

Nobody heard him, the dead man,

But still he lay moaning:

I was much further out than you thought

And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking

And now he’s dead

It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,

They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always

(Still the dead one lay moaning)

I was much too far out all my life

And not waving but drowning.

My work schedule follows the school year, and tomorrow my work year resumes. I score SAT essays online seven months a year. I’ve been doing this since 2005 when the College Boards added the essay to the exam.

Pearson Education manages the scoring of SATs. According to LinkedIn, Pearson has more than 10,000 employees. The designation I hold is that of “reader.” During the October and May scoring projects, as many as two thousand readers may be needed to complete the scoring. During December and January testing, as few as four hundred readers may be needed.

Scoring is by invitation only. So far I’ve been invited to participate in each of the 32 tests given since March ‘05. To qualify for scoring, you must have taught a high school or college writing class for three consecutive years within five years prior to applying. Once hired, you then have to qualify for each specific scoring project. Once scoring begins, you have to maintain ongoing standards relating to speed, accuracy, and number of hours worked in order to stay on the project. So far I’ve managed to avoid being booted from a project. There is a stiff penalty for getting kicked off  — you won’t get invited back for twelve months.

Each year in October all readers must retrain and requalify for scoring. In subsequent months, training and qualifying are specific to the writing prompt. Prompts cover broad topics such as compromise, consequences, creativity, ethics, experience. The format may be expressive, comparative, narrative, or persuasive.

The job requires a minimum of five hours a day of scoring and at least 30 essays per hour. I average closer to 40, which means I read about 200 essays per day. That’s more than 60,000 essays since I began this work.

I enjoy reading and scoring student essays. This job allows me to work from home in my pajamas if I want, or pack up my laptop and work from anywhere. It pays me to be online, which I would be doing anyway. It keeps me in touch with the dreams and concerns of young people. Students are very open and honest in their writing because they know that the person reading their paper will not know them. I learn a lot from these high school juniors and seniors from around the world.

Training starts tomorrow. I am eager to get back to work. Sometimes I read amazing stories that inform and inspire me. Occasionally, I’ll get some profound insight. If either of these things happens, I may write a follow-up post.

Recounting an OMG Moment

The great news is that my daughter found out she was pregnant two days ago. The interesting news is that I now find myself confronting yet another mystery, not the conception and birth mystery, but something Slade Roberson set up in his last article.

Slade wrote about the birthday present his mother gave him on his fourteenth birthday — a recorded session with a credentialed intuitive/astrologer/psychotherapist. His mother had observed what she perceived to be psychic sensitivity in her child.

Using his natal chart and her own preternatural abilities, the IAP lady determined that Slade was indeed psychic. She also taught him how to draw on his spirit guides, to bring them closer, something psychics apparently can do. Slade spells out the method in this way.

• Simply be still for a moment.
• Close your eyes if you wish — it helps you curl the fingers of your attention inward.
• Invite the guardians who are watching over you to step closer.
• Tell them you want to feel their presence.
• Pay attention to how your body responds.
• Notice any subtle air pressure changes — your skin and hair are like millions of tiny antennae.

So I tried this and then left the following comment, hoping Slade would write me back.

I bowed my head, closed my eyes, clasped my hands together at my forehead and said, “Guardians watching over me, step closer. I want to feel your presence.” Almost immediately, my daughter entered the room to ask me a question. Does this count for anything, given the fact that yesterday she told me she was pregnant?

Slade replied to my comment with this.

Of COURSE it counts! I believe you got something more than the simple sense of Their presence — you received a full-on Sign, Serendipity, and Synchronicity. I have no doubt the timing of that experience is very significant. Had you perhaps just “sent” your Guardians to your daughter (whether you consciously realized it or not — I bet if you think back to her telling you about her pregnancy, you “deployed” your guardians to be with her for some extra protection, huh?)

I think Slade may be right. When Jill showed up during my experiment, all I could think was OMG, my spirit guide is your baby. It felt like an altered state, one in which I had lost all control of speech and thought yet simultaneously gained a momentary glimpse of clarity.

Hehe! I am so happy to know that guardian spirits have been deployed to protect my as yet unborn future grandchild. Thank you, Slade. You may have helped facilitate a mystical experience, although whether it really was that or not is still kind of a mystery.

A True Story

If knowledge of mysteries come after
emptiness of mind, that is illumination of heart. —Rumi

I once lived near a marina on a lake, holed up in a garage apartment drawing. The view of the lake out my windows inspired me to do little else. For money I cleaned offices and toilets at the marina. I was twenty-seven and very fit.

On Wednesdays I rode sixty miles with my boss to a bookstore in Granbury, Texas. Fran, my boss, was teaching a Science of Mind class there, or it might have been A Course in Miracles. Fran had the face and disposition of the chronically happy — her voice always glee-pitched, her teeth always showing, her big brown eyes constantly glinting.

One of the ladies at the bookstore scared me a little because she never smiled and her eyes held very little light. She sometimes said the strangest things. Once she told me that in a former life I was a Druid priestess. Huh? You can’t know that. Another time she said I would understand everything better when I overcame desire. What? I’m twenty-seven!

The strangest thing she ever said was that I had been chosen by the eye. The eye was a thing I saw hovering in my apartment in broad daylight one day. It appeared out of nowhere just to the right of my bed, calmly gazing forward. The thing turned its gaze on me for a moment, looked forward again, then disappeared, all very slowly and smoothly.

It felt like an apparition, creepy but also non-threatening. It seemed ancient and all-knowing but also a bit cartoonish, like some Egyptian hieroglyph projected into mid-air. An animation program could easily depict it with a heavy black outline, a slightly yellowish filling, a solid black core, and an air of total detachment.

I mentioned the eye to my classmates at the bookstore because I’d never had an experience like that. I was a sensible girl not prone to visions but living alone for the first time, high on a hill overlooking a beautiful lake, drawing every day, creating stacks of colorful abstracts, trying to be artistic. The occult arts did not interest me.

Recently, in my perambulations through our wonderful worldwide web, I came across this statement from Ellie Crystal, which got me thinking about that image from the lake.

“As one’s frequency rises, it activates or opens the third eye, bringing messages beyond physical vision. It is a common experience to see an eye, or eyes, looking back at you.”

I’m quite positive now that this was my experience those many years ago at the lake. I think the compulsive drawing I was doing, along with the vibrant colors I was using, the intense focus, the serene setting, and perhaps some of Fran’s new-age thinking did something physiological to my brain.

I’ve looked online for a similar image but haven’t found anything like it. In clicking around, I ran across a lot of third-eye stuff, all of it linked to the pineal gland (or sixth chakra). I’ve written about the pineal gland here, and there is a picture of it inside the brain here. This pea-sized gland sits dead center between the two hemispheres of the brain. Rene Descartes called it the seat of the soul.

In yogic traditions the pineal gland is known as the seat of illumination, intuition, and cosmic consciousness. Its awakening is linked to prophecy and increased psychic awareness. Dream imagery is thought to derive from the pineal, which shares a common evolutionary ancestry with retinal cells. The pineal contains pigment like that found in the eyes, and it’s connected to the optic thalami. It’s a grand gland for something so small.

We are all students (pupils) of life, experiencing reality and consciousness through the “I” (eye). I still don’t know what to make of the lake eye, but it doesn’t matter. Simple mystery seems somehow sufficient.

As for that strange woman’s comment about overcoming desire, I ran across this recently, which may have something to do with what she meant.

“Why desire at all? Desiring a state of freedom from desire will not set you free, because you are free. See yourself with desireless clarity, that is all.” Nisargadatta Maharaj

An Essay on Emotion

Did you know that the entire range of human emotion falls into four simple categories – sad, mad, glad, and scared? Do you find it curious, as I do, that three of these four words rhyme? Did you know that ad means “toward” whether it’s used as a suffix or a prefix?

The ad component of these words is worth noting because moving toward something is not the same as arriving at something. In our daily dealings with traffic, prices, pollution, crime, etc., we may find ourselves moving toward feelings of sadness or anger. These two feelings do count as half of the full range of human emotions. Whether we actually get there or merely move in that direction depends on our level of sophistication. Babies certainly don’t hold anything back. Dogs don’t contain their feelings very well. Yet adult humans are expected to move toward anger, for example, but stop short of getting there. We are supposed to control ourselves.

Why do we experience negative emotions in the first place? Why can’t we just be happy all the time? Apparently, over the course of evolution we have developed certain responses to our environment that have now become hard-wired into our brains. We see these traits not only in ourselves and others but also in the animals we observe closely. Feelings of fear, sadness, and anger come with being sentient beings.

We want to think that these feelings are unwarranted, that fear, anger, and sadness have no rightful place in our lives, but nothing could be farther from the truth. The sign out front, the sign in front of our emotional warehouse, is programmed for only four words: sad, mad, glad, and scared. Each of these moods gets displayed at one time or another on our emotional signboard. We don’t know why that is. It just is.

It is a very primal urge to let negative emotions show, given that they occupy such a large space in our overall makeup and given that we spend so much of our young lives displaying various bad moods. It may even be healthier to express grief and rage and fear than it is to contain it. I don’t know. I just know that it’s considered more grown up to fight against them — to slay sadness, anger, and fear.

For me it’s more helpful to accept the sad/mad dynamic than it is to try to deny it. There is no overcoming what is inherent. We can hope that brain science will someday bring us closer to understanding why negative emotions comprise three-quarters of our makeup. We can hope that someday our species will evolve “toward” more emotional balance. Until then we are pretty much stuck being alternately sad, mad, glad, or scared.

Of course, the degree to which we experience negative emotions is another matter altogether. Most adults struggle to eliminate negative emotion and stay the course toward gladness. There is nothing I would like better than to be chronically happy, but it is unrealistic to expect that of myself. I think we are too hard on ourselves for feeling less than happy all the time. There are, after all, only four ways to feel, and only one of them is positive.

However, there really are only two ways to feel — good or bad. If we think about the distribution in this way, negative emotions don’t seem so overwhelming in number, and we have at least a fifty percent chance of feeling good. I like those odds.

A friend of mine sent me this photo recently and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. Not that I have a lot of memories of 7th grade. I have, in fact, only three memories from that year. It’s that paucity, that dearth, that lack of memory that I keep thinking about, along with something I learned in graduate school.

A professor in an education class said that the developing brain has periods of dormancy that correspond with odd-numbered grades. If that is true, then 1st, 3rd, 5th, 7th, and 9th grades are pretty much a wash.  By 11th grade the brain and body are both fairly fully formed.

I have taught grades 7 through 11 and have to admit that not a lot got done in 7th and 9th; 8th and 10th were good, and 11th was my favorite both as a student and a teacher.

The kinds of memories I retained from 7th grade are interesting as well. Each memory is attached to a strong emotion.

• returning to the building after lunch and someone whispering “you have blood on your skirt”

• throwing a baseball glove at Sammy Englerth during a lunch game because he cheated

• watching Charles Mosely pull his wallet out in class and show us a prophylactic

I remember the horror and embarrassment of the blood, I remember the rage I felt towards Sammy Englerth, I even remember the little round indentation the rubber had made on Charles’s wallet and the shock I felt at seeing and hearing about one for the first time. But that’s it. Nothing more. Poring over this picture doesn’t help bring one single additional memory to mind.

So I’m thinking that professor must have been right. My brain was asleep that year.

My hope is that parents, teachers, and grandparents of odd graders go lightly on the little folks. They really can’t help themselves. Their brains are idling while their bodies are taking on some rapid growth.

Oh yeah. I’m the girl with the ugly brown glasses. My friend Dianne, who sent me the picture, is right above me. Thanks, Di.

2007 Dodge Nitro

My newly married 20-year-old came home one day last week and said, “Mom, I just got approved for a car loan.” Today she drove this pretty black 2007 Dodge Nitro off the lot.

Jill never told me she was going to the credit union to apply for a car loan. I don’t think she planned it. I think she was in the bank when it occurred to her that the horn was out on her car and the transmission was starting to slip and she needed to get a new car.

WHAT A DEAL

The bank loaned her $10,000. She and Jared came up with the rest on their own. I didn’t have to help them with anything. What a deal.

WHAT A VALUE

When Jill was 16, I bought her a 2001 Chevy Cavalier for $4,000. It was so beat up that she only got $700 trade in for it, which means it ended up costing $3,300. She drove the Cavalier for 52 months. That’s $63/month for a car. That’s a value.

WHAT A PLAN

When she was 18, I took her to the credit union to talk to someone about how to establish credit. Nita, the best loan officer on the planet, suggested that Jill take out two separate $500 loans, a year apart, and pay $30 a month for the loans. At the end of the two years, she would be able to qualify for a major trade loan.

WHAT A GIRL

Jill worked hard for two years, saved her money, paid her two loans off, got married, and then got the car she wanted. She never grumbled about having to drive a “hoodie” all that time. She would say, “I’ll have a nice car someday.” Now she does. What a girl.

Jill’s happy. I’m happy. My baby just bought her first car and likely feels very grown up. What a good day.

**********

Nita, the loan officer from the credit union, got promoted to bank manager at the Brookshire Brothers branch in Silsbee. All the best to Nita for being so smart. Also, best of luck to the now-all-black tellers and loan officers at the main location in Beaumont.

These beautiful striped Bengals are the most expensive cats in the world. Kittens sell for $1,000 - $1,800. Adult breeders can fetch as much as $3,500 or more. Part of that hefty fee no doubt goes to photography shoots like the one above, where this prized Silver Bengal could just as easily have been a dog or a baby. The focus is on the girl rather than the cat.

Less ambitious shots can be found on the site Bengal Cats of Adventure Beach. These breeders really have an eye for the exotic.

Exoticism is an extreme form of romanticism. All things living, natural, earthy, soft, and colorful are romantic. Romanticism contrasts with classicism, which is black, white, grey, hard, traditional, and man-made. My affinity for cats and kids and color makes me and others like me largely romantic in nature.

If I were still teaching, I would use this photo as a prompt for a writing assignment.

Describe this photo shoot. Where are they? What are they doing there? Who are the people involved in the shoot? Who are the girl and the cat? What makes this picture romantic? Is this a great shot or not?

I think it’s awful but even awful has its place.

If you’re not familiar with LOL Cats, you’re missing out on some great laugh-out-loud free entertainment. As a cat lover, this site is part of my daily routine. Some of the faces on my site come from there. I love this one. Who can’t relate to the feeling of being so sleepy you can barely keep your eyes open?

For me, the college years were like that — staying up late every night, overly stimulated by the environment, agonizing the next day during a lecture, so sleepy it hurt.

One year for spring break, I went home with a friend whose parents owned a cattle ranch. Granted, cattle ranches are sleepy places for those who aren’t out rustling cattle or whatever it is they do on cattle ranches. I still don’t know what ranchers actually do, but I know what my friend’s mother did, which at the time seemed truly groundbreaking.

SHE SLEPT TILL NOON!

She slept till noon every day and no one thought a thing about it.  I was dumbfounded. I’d never slept till noon a day in my life. At my house if you were still in bed after daybreak, you were sick. My parents came from farms, not ranches, and apparently that makes a big difference.  Ranch life is altogether more leisurely than farm life.

Another thing I learned at the ranch is how a woman can awaken slowly, cheerfully, without rush or anxiety. It was like being on a movie set, watching her stroll into the kitchen in her long, flowing gown, looking rested and happy, sipping her coffee and talking about making peanut butter pancakes with hot Maple syrup and bananas. Those pancakes were the most delicious thing I’d ever put in my mouth.

Another thing I learned that trip is that not everyone goes to church on Sunday. Some people sleep late and then eat pancakes at noon. Who knew?

My friend ended up marrying a guy she went to high school with, who also went to our college. When I last saw them twenty years ago, she was a stay-at-home mom with one child, a Volvo, and a nice house. He drove a BMW and worked in pharmaceuticals.

When I awoke at noon today thinking about that elegant woman who fed me peanut butter pancakes those many years ago, I googled my friends’ names and found that he is now the CEO of a major pharmaceutical company. Props, George!

I’ve thought about my friend’s mother many times through the years. She seemed to live such a graceful life. The thing she taught me that college didn’t is that, given the right circumstances, it is absolutely okay to stay up late and sleep till noon.

That’s mostly how I live my life now. The funny thing about it is that my son the programmer does the same thing. He sleeps when its sunny and moves around at night. Kinda like a cat.

When I was in San Jose last month, I had the best cup of coffee I’ve ever had. It came from Peets Coffee and Tea. I returned home despondent that my coffee failed to offer up that same rich, deep, full-bodied taste.

I went online and found that Peet’s coffee costs $14/lb. compared to Folgers at $3/lb. I couldn’t bring myself to pay the extra $11 for a pound of coffee, so I began experimenting with what I had.

In graduate school there was a little coffee shop I went to every afternoon for a buck-fifty espresso. This was before Starbucks. Plus, it was located in the deep South where espresso was served in actual espresso cups. On the saucer was a twist of lemon. I got hooked. That shop made forty bucks a month off me for a while.

I found the zester/twister at HEB this weekend. Here are ingredients for the best cup of coffee I can make without Peet’s. The trick is to make the coffee very strong, then subdue it with sugar, cream, and lemon. Note: lemon will cause real milk or cream to curdle so use artificial creamer.

Espresso machine
dark coffee
water
sugar
creamer
lemon twist

The Peet’s story is an interesting one. When they were in college, the founders of Starbucks were Peets customers. You can check out the Peets story here.

UPDATE>>>I broke down and ordered the Peet’s coffee after all. I am now an official Peetnik and loving it.

FURTHER UPDATE>>>I stumbled on Peet’s at Kroger’s in April 2010.

Who knew when a group of high school students sat around after school in 2004 planning a service project and decided on a blood drive that it would result five years later in my son saving the life of a sixteen-year-old boy with leukemia?

Like many of his peers that year, Jay donated blood during a high school blood drive. Then last September, while he was home for his birthday, a card arrived in the mail asking him to contact a woman in Houston about helping a boy with leukemia. Jay called the woman and told her that he now lives in Palo Alto. Not a problem, the woman said. Stanford Medical Center in Palo Alto can do the donor work. So Jay signed on for what would become a six-day stem cell extraction procedure.

Jay’s Stanford contact was a perky woman named Diane who works for the National Marrow Donor Program. That’s her in the picture above. Diane arranged for Jay to have a complete physical to qualify him for the donor program, and when he passed the physical, she arranged for me to fly to San Francisco so Jay would have a family member with him during the procedure.

On Saturday, January 17, Jay began a five-day regimen of two shots a day of a drug called Filgrastim, which causes your bones to go into blood-production overdrive and your lower back to hurt.

On Wednesday, the fifth day, Jay was hooked up to tubes that took blood from his right arm, sent it through a centrifuge that filtered out the stem cells, and returned it via tubes in his left arm. This part took four hours, but he mostly slept through it. The Atavan they gave him knocked him out.

On the sixth and final day, the same procedure was repeated. Four hours in the chair, a good long nap, and he was done. On both days, a doctor bearing a red and white Igloo that ordinarily holds a six-pack came in to retrieve Jay’s stem cells, which looked like watery blood. On the second day this Igloo would be handed to an NMDP transporter, who would get on a plane to Chicago, where the young recipient was waiting.

As we were leaving the unit on the final day, a nurse said, “Thanks for saving that little boy’s life.” Jay seemed content knowing that the boy in Chicago will get another year of life at least and a full recovery at best. His failing blood factory will be totally replaced by Jay’s healthy blood factory, and his blood type, no matter what it was before, will forevermore be A+ because of my A+ son.

I can’t imagine what it must feel like to be fighting for the very life of your child. I am as grateful for my son’s good health as I am for his kind spirit. The generosity of people like Jay helps doctors and nurses save lives every day. Those who support donor programs with their money make it possible for people like me to share a rare and memorable week with my child.

Thanks for all you did to show me a good time, Jay. Coit Tower and Cafe Gratitude were my favorites!

Information about the National Marrow Donor Program can be found on their website at http://www.marrow.org/.

Many years ago when I was young and poor, a tiny sliver of a pork rib bone insinuated itself at just the right angle so as to split my right rear bottom molar when I bit down. The tooth had to be removed because it was split all the way to the root. Not a huge problem.

Thirty years later I awake in the middle of a Friday night with a huge toothache in the upper molar above that missing tooth. Doc in a box gives me antibiotics, which alleviate the pain, and I see my filthy rich dentist on Monday morning.

Filthy rich dentist gives me a prescription for three Atavan to be taken 90 minutes before the extraction. Here’s the story — it’s about how three Atavan will  basically obliterate human consciousness for a while.

I asked my daughter for a recount of the day’s events since I have absolutely no recall of going to the dentist. She laughed. The story she tells about how I acted that day is sadly funny.

Jill gets here at 9:30 to pick me up. I am sitting at the computer with wet hair and really dark makeup on. (I do recall taking the Atavan at 8:00 am and then taking a shower but that’s the extent of my recall.) Jill blow dries my hair and straightens it and it looks really pretty. I love it when she fixes my hair. She’s really good at it. But I have no memory of her fixing my hair.

Jill drives me to the dentist’s office and gets out of the car. I sit there looking out the window. She goes inside to see if they are ready for me. The ladies in the office are laughing, smiling, eager to see another pre-op patient with three Atavan in them.

Filthy rich dentist pulls my sore tooth, then does a root canal and crown on a tooth that isn’t hurting. Then he wants two grand of my hard-earned money. Jill writes the check while I stand there, clueless.

We leave and she drives to the bank and the pharmacy, but I don’t remember that either. We get home, she gives me a Vicodin, I go right to sleep.

I cannot, cannot remember any of this, not one single thing. The Atavan literally blew my mind. 

Consciousness is such a flimsy thing. Obviously, life sustains without it. We lose consciousness when we sleep. We lose consciousness when we’re anesthetized for surgery. I wonder where consciousness goes when it goes. Someone should look into that.

The biggest difference between people who succeed at any difficult undertaking and those who do not is not talent but persistence. Many extremely talented people give up when obstacles arise. After all, who wants to face failure? It is often said about highly successful people that they  are just ordinary individuals who kept on trying and refused to give up.

—-Tom Morris, True Success: A New Philosophy of Excellence

Is persistence more important than ability in determining a person’s success?

Herewith, a brief compendium of notable clichés relating to persistence provided by this year’s crop of aspiring high school seniors writing SAT essays in December.

1. Never give up.
2. Where there is a will there is a way.
3. You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.
4. Nobody ever drowned in sweat.
5. You’ll never know unless you try.
6. You’ll never succeed unless you persist.
7. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.
8. Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.
9. It’s not the size of the dog in the fight; it’s the size of the fight in the dog.
10. Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard.
11. Practice makes perfect.
12. You can do anything if you set your mind to it.
13. I think I can! I think I can!
14. However much you put into something is what you’re going to get out of it.
15. You can only be as good as you think you can.
16. Never, never, never give up!

One of the great things about clichés is how they fit so nicely inside fortune cookies.

Here, by comparison, is a single, powerful, original sentence written by a high school senior when the topic changed to ”acting.”

“The world may never be what it seems, for underneath all its superficialities nests a crouching intention ready to come rushing out.”

Wooo, what a sentence, what a fully loaded, really fine sentence, especially coming at the end of a long day’s night of repeated cliché. Even if the kid who wrote it took it from someone else, it still resonates with sound and intelligence and movement and intensity.

Sometimes you have to read a whole book to find one perfect sentence.

That, by the way, is also a cliché.

It is not a cliché if you’ve never heard it before or read it or thought of it quite like that, or if you find yourself suddenly stopping to admire it and linger over its beauty. The tendency always is to write what we’ve heard, which is safe for having already been said and resaid. The challenge always is to make a brief semantic spark with the juxtaposition of words, large and small — to “spark” the reader’s interest or delight.

Here’s a less auspicious sentence with simplicity and acumen, also written by a young essayist.

“Success comes from the ability of a person to attempt something over and over again until it happens.”

Because Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Jenna was aglow with new information she wanted to share with me at lunch yesterday.

“Have you heard of DMT?”

I hadn’t. But Jenna’s introduction of the term has put me in hot pursuit of more information about what some scientists are calling “the spirit molecule.” This is fascinating stuff!

Dimethyltryptamene, or DMT, is a controlled substance that we are all guilty of possessing because our bodies produce it naturally. When extracted from plants, however, DMT becomes controlled, or illegal.

It’s illegal because DMT molecules share the same shape as molecules of seratonin, the joy juice that keeps us happy. DMT tricks our brain receptors into thinking they’ve found joy juice.

The source of DMT production in our bodies is the pineal gland, a pea-sized gland that sits dead center between the two hemispheres of our brain. Rene Descartes called the pineal gland “the seat of the soul.”

Pineal gland cells share a common evolutionary ancestry with retinal cells, which produce images of outer reality. Dream imagery, or inner reality, may derive from the DMT-laden pineal gland.

The pineal gland is large in children, which may account for their imaginary friends and vivid imaginations. At puberty the gland begins to shrink.

University of New Mexico psychiatrist Rick Strassman, a leading DMT research scientist, has written a book entitled DMT: The Spirit Molecule: A Doctor’s Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences.

In the book Dr. Strassman states that the pineal gland’s release of DMT at day 49 of gestation marks the entrance of the spirit into the fetus.

I told you this was great stuff!

In clinical trials with DMT conducted by Dr. Strassman in the 1990s, users reported a slow, deep spiritual experience similar to that of psilocybin mushrooms but more intense. Sixty percent of his volunteers reported similar experiences involving other-worldly entities who seemed to be trying to share information with them. Dr. Strassman writes:

Indigenous cultures are in regular contact with denizens of the invisible landscape and have no problem straddling both worlds. Often they do this with the aid of psychedelic plants.

Many modern-day scientists possess an abiding faith in the spiritual. But lack of open dialogue about these issues makes it difficult to enlarge our view of the reality of nonmaterial realms usng scientific methods. Instead, we flee from considering the realm of acceptable spiritual experiences.

We may have to rely more on science, especially cosmology and theoretical physics, than on our more conservative religious traditions for satisfactory explanations of “spirit world” experiences.

Near-death experiences. Alien abductions. Lucid dreams. Even gods and goddesses. Try DMT for an explanation and it all holds together.  It’s brain chemistry. It’s neuropharmacology. It’s quite possibly other realms. Whatever it is, it’s the new frontier, a closer examination of consciousness, and it’s very, very exciting!

Thanks, Jenna.

Ernie and I didn’t make it. After ten months of long-distance dating, we have now parted company. This is where I try to figure out what to tell people when they ask, “Why did you and Ernie break up?” I’m not even sure I know why.

We spent ten months together and he never touched me.

He had intimacy issues.

We had intimacy issues.

We had trust issues.

His world-view is too sad.

I’m too prone to despair.

Long-distance relationships don’t work.

We both had crappy childhoods.

Yeah, I like that one. It’s the least accusatory. Wait, I can’t tell people we broke up because we had crappy childhoods. I don’t know what to say.

Ernie kept talking about his childhood as we struggled to figure out what went wrong. I kept saying, “You’re sixty years old. Get over it!” Now I’m starting to second guess myself.  I’m wondering if childhood experience counts for more than we think it does.

When I was 27, I met the man I would marry. Tom was the happiest man I’d ever met. He’d been an only child with polio. His parents doted and fussed over him so much he’d had a splendidly happy childhood — and a full recovery from polio.

We had twenty happy years together before he died.

So Ernie, if you’re reading this, I don’t blame you. I blame the circumstances of our childhood. Unhappy children have a sizable chance of growing into unhappy adults. Fortunately, parents are starting to realize this.

Blessings to the injured child in both of us. I’ll tell folks we’re still friends.

Nothing grabs your attention quite like being bodily sick or injured. Suddenly, all the garbage in your head empties out. Your focus narrows to one thing — pain. You are truly living in the moment, focused on this single, or worse, multiple ailment that consumes your every thought.

This acute thinking about the ailment eventually gives way to healing and you realize: I feel better. That’s where I am today, feeling so much better. Giddy joy is my proof. I keep hearing myself chuckle. What’s so funny?

It’s the memory of waking in the middle of the night with warm water pouring from my nostrils. How often does that happen? Not very.

It’s the memory of a magazine read cover to cover because I could not leave the bathroom. At my house we call it Big D.

It’s scary, some of it, when you’re going through it. Like the chills that overcome you when you’re dressed in flannel and lying under heavy cover. You think: This is scary. Am I dying?

It’s the pounding in your head compounded by the pills designed to relieve pounding in your head. You feel: sick.

It’s not that often that a tropical storm occurs inside one’s body. When it does, it turns us into shipwreck victims, clinging to a pillow for support. In an uncharted sea of miasma we drift, helpless and hoping for shore.

I am finally shored up and able to stand. What a mighty storm this has been.

______

T’was but a lull in the storm. I made it ashore, where the great winds found me and grounded me once again.

T’was the bright green color that caught my attention. My body was exuding green pudding. I thought this part was worth telling, so I told a doctor.

T’was the magic pills he gave me that turned the green pudding yellow. I am now a greenish-yellow pudding plant, which renders me totally useless.

Who wants toxic chartreuse pudding? No one!

Ah, the incurable plight of us humans. We fight to breathe and breathe to fight that which would take our breath away. But not today. Today I will drink red wine and toast the many colors of my being.

Finally, finally, my subconscious served up an answer for the question who to vote for. Good thing because my consciousness was vascillating, depending on who I listened to. I love it when dreams solve problems for me. Here’s how the dream went down.

Obama’s people are looking for more Americans to feature in his next infomercial. An Obama spokeswoman has contacted me. We have tentatively agreed that I will be available for them on Monday.

Then a district attorney contacts me with the news that I can either turn myself in on Monday or they can come and arrest me now. Arrest me now? What have I done? He repeats my two options.

I tell him I’ll turn myself in. I tell him I’ve committed no crime. I’m not so sure about sin. Maybe he’s arresting me for sinning. They used to do that. I am confused and scared. 

Obama calls. He wants me to have lunch with him on Monday. The cameras will be there. I want to be there, but I’m supposed to turn myself in.

“Can you join me?” Obama asks.

“Can you do me a favor first?” I ask.

“No favors,” he replies. “Good luck.”

I awoke mad as hell that I didn’t get to have lunch with America’s reining superstar, even madder at a system that could lock me up for no reason. The feeling I had about Obama, though, was that he was an honest man who wanted to do the right thing. You had to have your ducks in a row if you wanted to have lunch with him.

I don’t know what to make of this dream, but it did wake me up literally and figuratively. Barack Obama came to me in a dream wanting my support. John McCain did not. That’s why I’m voting for Obama.

gee whiz, hill, sometimes I wish you would freshen your image, you know, maybe grow your hair out, dye it honey brown, wear some necklines that show some skin, you know, sex it up a little, look more feminine, less severe. I mean, look at sarah palin. she did all that and it worked for her. c’mon, hill, we need your smarts in american politics, we need your experience, we need for you to look better. there’s nothing wrong with being sexy at sixty. besides, bill deserves a sexy broad. he is still one hunka hunka burnin love. c’mon, hill, do it for bill, do it for the women of america, quit trying so hard, relax, show your feminine side. I promise, we’ll love you even more for it. you won’t regret it. look at sophia loren — in her 70s and gorgeous. I’d vote for her for anything. I wanted to vote for you but you’re just so darned stiff. soften up a little, girl. everything’s gonna be alright. you really are quite beautiful.

(Aquarius)

I keep thinking about Ernie’s dream. The image is stuck in my head like the pencil lead in my thumb. If you read this, you may get the image stuck in your head. It’s a strong image. Here is Ernie’s dream.

He is looking at a huge iron skillet sitting on a fire outdoors. In the skillet is a lot of melted butter and a tiny naked man. The man is slipping and sliding in the butter. He does not appear to be cooking. He’s not red or brown. He’s a tiny little pink naked man in a huge skillet sitting on a fire.

There are several ways to interpret a dream using factors from daily life, many of which come into play when we have a particularly vivid dream like this one.  Seemingly simple things like diet and temperature can affect our dreams. Here’s how I’m breaking down this man dream.

Diet

Ernie thinks about food more than most people I know. He might have been a chef or a cook or a woman in a previous life. He might have gone to bed hungry that night or awoke hungry. Because the skillet is buttered and on a fire, it’s a link to Ernie’s hunger and his fondness for food.

What do you do with a buttered skillet? You put it on a fire and cook something with it. What do you do with a cooked man? You put him in your mouth and eat him. Ernie may be hungry, but he doesn’t eat the buttered man. Still, hunger is a sign of need. Ernie needs more of himself, more sustenance, more man food. He sees a sauteing man, then realizes it’s a preposterous idea and backs away from actually cooking the little fellow.

Temperature

Ernie could have gotten cold that night. The weather is getting cooler this time of year. He could have been lying there naked under the fan with the thermostat set on 70 when his subconscious put in an order for warmth. Hence, a naked man, a fire, a skillet. Fire and food will warm you. So will sliding around naked on a field of warm butter.

 Environment

Because the skillet is huge, it is also a symbol of a cauldron or a crucible. A cauldron is usually made of cast iron like a skillet. If Ernie went to Kroger’s that day, he could have seen Halloween decorations with a witch and a cauldron. He had a Kroger-inspired dream once before.

Sexuality

A cauldron is a large round heating device into which something is put. Thus, it is a strong female symbol. Ernie could have been trying to work out some psychic tension related to his sexuality or his inability to show warmth and affection. Ernie is a cool cat in a literal sense. He doesn’t heat up much. The little man inside the cauldron certainly has the potential to heat up, but he doesn’t. He remains pink and small like a baby. This baby man represents an aspect of Ernie’s inner self. The people in our dreams, the ones we don’t know, are always us.

Stressors

You can have a cauldron of conflicting ideas, too, which leads to a state of great distress resembling that of a boiling vat. The fact that Ernie remembered this dream speaks of his unrest. If we sleep soundly we generally don’t remember our dreams. His unrest may be related to the pressures of catastrophe recovery required by his job. It may be related to the pressures of dating a woman like me.

Culture

There’s also the crucible factor. A crucible, like a cauldron, is made of material that does not easily melt. Something made of the hardest of metals is a seriously masculine image, befitting a manly man like Ern. A crucible is also a time, place, or situation characterized by a confluence of powerful social, economic, and political forces. October 2008 — an economic downfall like no other, our first black President, international tensions. Ernie’s dream takes place in the midst of this cultural crucible.

Relationships

Then there’s the severe, searching test or trial of patience or belief — another meaning of crucible. Ernie has been running relationship trials on me for ten months now. He may feel that he needs more time to gather data. It’s been a test of patience for both of us. Do we have a valid relationship here or not?

Regardless, the little naked man in the skillet remains an iconic symbol of a man in peril. Will he heat up just enough to take the chill off being naked in the outdoors, or will he heat up too much and end up fried? These are the tensions posed by Ernie’s dream. It’s a slippery dream with all that butter, but these are slippery times.

______

Ernie had another naked man dream since I wrote this post. This time he was hanging on a cross being crucified like Jesus, only he didn’t die. Another man was hanging there beside him. The dream switched to a locker room where the two men were showering, washing the blood off them.

I’m going to assume that because Ernie was born in January, all of these naked men are simply versions of Aquarius, the symbol of his astrological sign.

Yes, I know it’s totally wrong to wear a prom queen dress to your daughter’s wedding, but I can’t help it. I never got to be prom queen, and this may be my last chance. I’ll be sixty soon and probably a size twelve by then. Right now I can still wear a ten. And the dress . . . well, it is simply the most beautiful teal gown I’ve ever seen.

“I feel pretty,” I told Ernie.

He scowled. “This is a small country wedding in a Baptist church. I like the other one better.”

Ernie wasn’t paying attention to the signs. The “other one,” a pale blue satin with a jacket, said no in discernible ways. The button popped off the jacket, the back had a smear near the hem, it was too long.  The Dillard’s lady brought me another size 10 and the button popped off that one too. I started to sweat. I could feel it in my armpits. My tummy pooch showed. These are all warning signs that a careful shopper notices.

No, this teal dress is the one. It’s my color. I only have three colors — red, black, and teal. I can’t wear black to my daughter’s wedding, and the bridesmaids are wearing red. It was the only teal dress in Petites, it fit perfectly, felt comfortable, and instantly made me feel pretty. The flowy chiffon matches my flowy hair. Flowy hair doesn’t go well with suits. If it did, Sarah Palin wouldn’t use so much hair spray, and Hillary Clinton wouldn’t chop hers off.

Unless my daughter says absolutely not, I’ll be the prettiest M.O.B. at the wedding, and if I get invited to a Mardi Gras ball this winter, I’ll have the perfect dress for that too.

That girl of mine .  .  . she knows I am a cat person and what does she do? She goes out and buys a six-week-old Beagle pup and names him Parker. Now she expects me to treat Parker like a grandchild.

I won’t. I can’t. I hate puppies. Well, maybe I don’t hate them, but I definitely hate what they do. They chew up expensive shoes and furniture and often the one thing in your home you least want to lose. They crap and pee and throw up on your newest rug. Hardwood floors or old carpets won’t do. Puppies need constant attention.

Cats are so much easier. They don’t try to seduce you into thinking you can treat them like a child.

I haven’t even met Parker yet and already I’m filled with dread. “You’ll love him, Mom,” she says. No I won’t. I’m a cat person.

Period.

******

UPDATE>>>>After six weeks of parenting Parker, Jill discovered that she wasn’t quite ready for motherhood. Parker now resides in the country with Jared’s brother and his three dogs. Reports indicate that Parker is blissfully happy there.

UPDATE>>>>Parker is no longer with us. His fondness for moving vehicles has resulted in a transfer. God bless Parker.

My neighborhood finally got lights today, twelve days after the storm. Thanks, Entergy guys. The front page of The Houston Chronicle today said that Entergy, CenterPoint, and Reliant Energy plan to implement rate hikes in order to pay for this outrageous hurricane season.

Over the weekend, I flew from Baton Rouge to Houston. The 35-minute flight followed the Gulf Coast all the way to Galveston. Because the flight was so short, we were below the clouds most of the way, and I had a bird’s eye view of what thirty-foot storm surges did to the Texas coastline. The sight was quite remarkable.

The Louisiana coastline appeared as a long, thin line of brown beach sand. When we reached the Texas coast, however, the brown sand line disappeared altogether. In its place was a course, jagged edge with many, many jetties, large and small, extending far into the coastal mainland at Crystal Beach, Bolivar, and Galveston. More water was visible over Galveston than land.

At Galveston the pilot turned north and followed IH45 to Bush International. I could see vehicles below streaming to and from the island over the causeway. The whole flight had a strange, ethereal feel about it. Total devastation down there. Total comfort above.

On Sunday I’ll pick up my son at the airport and head home to Beaumont. I can’t wait to see what the tree men did to my yard. Some storm chaser guys from Florida showed up on my street looking for a place to park their truck. My neighbor called with the news: they will clean up your yard if you let them park in your driveway.

Okay.

So three days after the hurricane word was that I had the only clean yard in the neighborhood. How’s that for good luck! Tree mover guys charge $2,000 per tree these days. I had two big ones down. Life is good.

But hurricanes suck. This was my third one in three years. Things must be heating up down here on this carbonized little place we call Earth.

Last Wednesday night Ernie and I watched a PBS documentary titled “Jefferson Davis: An American President.” The next day we found ourselves in Natchez, MS, where Davis spent much of his life. The occasion was my 40th high school class reunion. Its location on the banks of the Mississippi River gave us the opportunity to visit two homes associated with Davis — Rosemont, where he grew up in the country, and The Briars, where his wife grew up in the city.

The picture above is the view from the front lawn of The Briars, high on the Natchez bluff. It felt dreamy standing there. I could imagine children of centuries past looking out over the river and dreaming their childhood dreams. I could imagine the future President standing there with his bride, considering their futures together.

The picture below is a view of The Briars itself. I lost my fact sheet, but I know this is where Davis’s wife grew up and where the two of them were married. The little pink building on the right is the schoolhouse. I was struck most by the view of the river from the dining room in this home. What a lovely place to entertain people and ideas.

Davis’s childhood home is located thirty miles south of Natchez in the sleepy little town of Woodville. The entrance to Rosemont was closed when we got there, but we decided not to let that stop us. There were no signs posted anywhere, so we climbed the fence and began hiking down a long gravel road that wound through heavy brush. Much of the trek looked like this.

Eventually, we ran into signs of civilization, the first of which was this sign.

At this point we had already hiked a mile and didn’t need a sign to slow us down. The August heat was doing that. Dogs were barking in the distance. Soon a fence appeared in the distance and then horses grazing in a field.

One of the horses came right up to us.

I tried to imagine this animal being my sole mode of transportation. I couldn’t do it. It’s easy to forget that for centuries people either rode horses or stayed at home. I’m afraid I would have never made it out of the woods. Horses and big dogs scare me.

Up the road from the horses we could see the barking dogs. They looked huge and menacing, but we were too close to turn back. I wish I had a picture of the three big Dalmatians. They turned out to be friendly but looked and sounded ferocious.

Finally, we arrived at the Davis homestead. I expected a rustic country farmhouse but found this charming plantation home instead. Rosemont is not grand like some of the homes of Natchez, but it would have been considered a nice home in its time, or even by today’s standards.

Jefferson Davis became President of the Confederate States because he had more military and political experience than anyone else in the South. After the Civil War he was imprisoned for treason and lost everything he had, including his citizenship. The man who had fought so hard for states’ rights could never again serve his state or his country.

Part II of the three-part Davis documentary airs tonight. I can’t wait to learn more about this fascinating man who hails from a place I call home.

What I learned last night

We never knew much about Jefferson Davis because the history of the Civil War was written by the victors, who characterized him as a weak leader and made him the scapegoat for the war. But a different story is starting to emerge. Rice University in Houston ended up with all the original Davis letters, papers, documents, etc. in the 1970s, and scholars have been poring over them for more than thirty years now.

Some of these scholars have said that no statesman since Thomas Jefferson had more power and prestige in Washington than Jefferson Davis had at the time. He was the first senator to walk out of the Senate, and ten others followed him in seceding from the Union because their tax monies were being spent solely on Northern projects. There were only 23 states in 1861, and Davis convinced 11 of them to secede. There is nothing weak about that kind of leadership.

The eleven southern states comprised much more actual land mass than the twelve remaining northern states. If there were to be two countries, the South would be a much larger country geographically. There was much at stake for both sides; much of the country’s wealth derived from the plantation economy. The North had Abraham Lincoln and the Navy. The South needed its most able man at the helm. Thus, by unanimous vote, Jefferson Davis was elected President of the United Confederate States of America.

The father of our country, George Washington himself, did not have to start a new country and fight off the British at the same time. He became president of a new country after the war for independence, after we were a country. Davis, on the other hand, had to fight a war while simultaneously trying to set up a new country.

Some have called the Civil War the Second American Revolution. Others have called it the first World War I. Davis sent ambassadors to court international support. He needed a navy. Foreign vessels were starting to line up on the Pacific Coast. Then Lincoln’s navy took New Orleans, and the war was all but over.

What I learned online

Brierfield, the plantation Jefferson Davis built in 1846, lies between Vicksburg and Natchez on the Louisiana side of the Mississippi River. The land there is low lying and extremely fertile from centuries of flooding. The Mississippi side of the river is much higher and hillier. It was common practice for plantation owners of the Old South to farm the delta country west of the river and build their homes high on the eastern bluffs.

What’s curious about Brierfield, however, is that it was originally built on the Mississippi side of the river. An 1867 change in the course of the river took Davis Island from the MS side of the river and deposited it on the LA side. Despite its location west of the river, it remains a part of Mississippi. The plantation is located on Davis Island, on Davis Bend, northeast of Newellton, LA, on the western side of the river, in Warren County, Mississippi. A fire in 1931 destroyed the historic home. In 1953 the Dale family of Vidalia, LA, bought the property.

The Vicksburg Post published an interesting series of articles about Jefferson Davis this year in celebration of the bicentennial of his birth. Click here to see the eleven-part series.

Jefferson Davis lived his remaining years at a friend’s home in Biloxi, MS. His bedroom at Beauvoir looks out over the Gulf of Mexico. One door in his room led to his wife’s bedroom; a second door led to the back porch.

When Davis’s funeral was held in New Orleans, more than 200,000 people showed up to mourn their former leader.

When Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast in 2005, water entered the second floor of the home. The Jefferson Davis museum in the basement of Beauvoir was flooded and everything was lost. At least that is what visitors are told.

This sunflower may be the last image I’m able to post unless Picasa gets itself fixed. I can’t upload pictures without Picasa, and I’ve found a ton of new pictures lately. Words almost seem paltry in their place.

How this works is I sit here in the dead of the night and Stumble through internet sites looking for faces that speak wordlessly to me. When I find something I like, I right click and save the image, then open Picasa and style the shot to my liking. Picasa is a free photo editing download from Google.

I’ve grown fond of cat faces. I find their eyes arresting. With Picasa I can crop the picture so the cat’s face is featured. Then I can adjust the color and light and angle so that every shot is similarly edited. These edits help create a uniform look for my site, which is powered by WordPress and hosted by GoDaddy.

There are rules for photo adoption. One is that it has to be digital. SLR shots pixilate when enlarged. It also has to be beautiful or colorful or interesting. Most of the photos I choose are forward facing because I like looking at eyes. Eyes are pretty. So are flowers and trees and sunsets and day skies. Altogether, I am pretty darned impressed with the beauty others see in nature and share with me through their photographs. Sharing what we find on the worldwide web is what people do these days. It is neither unethical nor illegal.

My purpose here is multi fold. Uploading photos and manipulating them gives me something to do when I can’t sleep. It puts me in touch with the beauty of nature, which is pleasing. It gives me something to show for my time and something to share with my friends. It helps me feel productive.

I imagine my great-grandchildren looking at this site someday and getting a glimmer of the grandmother they never met. Hi guys! This is for you.

I imagine my brainiac son, the grandfather of these future children, figuring out how to help me figure out how to get Picasa back up and running. There’s a picture on my Picasa that’s perfect for this story. It shows a female bent over a keyboard pulling her hair. I could use that right now if I could get Picasa to open.

UPDATE>>>Uninstalled, reinstalled, Picasa now works fine. My son helped by using the same skills set on me that I used on him all those years: figure it out yourself.

“Babette’s Feast” is an award-winning Danish film with English subtitles. It is based on a story by Isak Dinesen and set in turn-of-the-century Denmark, where two elderly sisters live together very simply in a small village. Their father had been the town’s minister. The sisters never married, although each had a suitor when they were young. One suitor was an officer in the military, the other a famous opera singer.

In 1890 a beautiful young woman shows up at the sisters’ door with a note from the opera singer. He asks them to please give asylum to this woman, for the French Revolution has begun in Paris, and the woman’s husband and son have been killed. The sisters tell Babette that they cannot afford to hire her. Babette tells them that she only wishes to cook for them in exchange for a room.

For 14 years Babette lives with the sisters and cooks their simple Danish meals. However, when she wins 10,000 francs in a lottery, she asks the sisters if they would allow her to cook a real French meal for them and their Wednesday night church group. The sisters agree, and Babette orders from Paris all the items she will need to prepare the meal.

The other suitor, now a retired general, happens to be in town on the night of the dinner. He shows up with his aunt for the meal. Babette has hired a local boy to do the serving. The first dish is turtle soup. The general comments that he remembers having turtle soup like this many years ago in Paris.

The meal Babette serves these twelve people is tantalizing and beautiful.

Potage a la Tortue (Turtle Soup)

Blini Demidoff au Caviar (Buckwheat cakes with caviar)

Caille en Sarcophage avec Sauce Perigourdine (Quail in Puff Pastry Shell with Foie Gras and Truffle Sauce)

La Salade (Salad Course)

Les Fromages (Cheese and Fresh Fruit)

Baba au Rhum avec les Figues (Rum Cake with Dried Figs)

[If you don’t want to know the ending, skip the next paragraph.]

The poignant part of this movie is finding out that before the Revolution, Babette was the head chef at one of the finest restaurants in Paris. She was the only female chef in the city. She never told anyone this, and she used all her lottery money on this one meal. When the sisters learn that she has spent all her money on this feast, they want to know why she did it. Babette tells them that once she was a chef in Paris, and a seven-course meal for twelve at her restaurant would have cost 10,000 francs.

“The only thing an artist ever wants,” she says, “is a chance to do her very best.”

This movie is great. It is not only a look at how people lived at the turn of the 20th century but also a glimpse at a true artist. The French Revolution started because the common people were starving to death while the royals were eating elaborate meals like the one Babette prepared. In that sense, it is a cautionary tale, reminding us of what can happen when the gap between rich and poor becomes too great. Foremost, however, it is a movie about the splendor of a great feast.

Much of what we do has become so complex that most activities require groups or teams of people to perform them. However, although groups are useful for some purposes, for other purposes they can be worse than useless. It is important to focus on what individuals can be and do, since focusing exclusively on groups and teams becomes counterproductive. —-Stanley Herman, A Force of Ones

Are the actions of individuals more valuable than the actions of groups or teams?

This was the SAT prompt given to international students this month, students in countries overseas who are applying for admission to U.S. colleges and universities. I love reading these papers because I learn so much. For example, did you know that plastic bags have been banned in China now that we’re trying to save our planet?

The facts they share with me are not nearly as interesting as the approach they take to the question. SATs are designed to be opinion papers, but the international students deliver messages rather than opinions. I love this. As a teacher it always bothered me that I was required to elicit such polarized thinking from my students. Why does one view always have to be better than another? Can’t they each have merit?

We’re famous for polarized thinking in this country. Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative, black or white, all or nothing. Even polarity, I suppose, has its merits, but so too does neutrality. The overseas students reminded me of this because their thinking regarding this issue was so overwhelmingly non-biased and balanced. Group or individual? Both are necessary, they say; neither is greater than the other.

Overall, I am inspired by the placid tone in the writing of these students from Singapore, South Korea, India, Japan, South Africa, even Uganda. There is no hint of radical or racial extremism in their thinking. Children, for the most part, are generally very egalitarian anyway. They don’t want winners and losers; they want everyone in class to succeed.