Everything Else, a Poem from Peru May 9, 2008
Posted by Yvonne in Continuity of Source, Dynamics of Resistance, Evolution of We, Indirect Approach.add a comment
Recipe for a Curdled Family March 27, 2008
Posted by Yvonne in Evolution of We.Tags: family
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I heard back from both mom and one sister that they didn’t know where to start with the mathematical formua for a life, so I’m offering this option: You could also try it as a recipe, vis:
1 mom + 1 dad
1. Mix mom and dad liberally early, often, and with love and enthusiasm. This will begin to produce some of the brothers and sisters you will need for the step 3.
2. Continue the previous step as you can, but probably only on Sunday mornings for two hours while the first batch of kids are off to church and mom and dad have a bit of time to themselves. This will produce the rest of the brothers and sisters until you get a good amount.
Then several years later, when the youngest have grown to a not-easily breakable size and spirit:
1 empty refrigerator box
4 sisters + 3-4 brothers
3. Take all ingredients to the top of your nearest backyard hill. Open the ends of the box.
4. Place in box the largest of the brothers and sisters, then gently fit in the smaller ones around the edges. Make sure all limbs are mostly inside the ends of the box.
5. On a synchronized signal, mix the brothers and sisters well by starting the box rolling down the hill.
6. When the whole mess gets to the bottom, if there have been any sisters or brothers or body parts that have fallen out, collect them all, go back to the top of the hill and begin again.
Repeat from step 3. until laughter subsids or someone has a better idea. This could take most of a Saturday afternoon, but will produce a lovely curdled, if slightly bruised, family.
Success Factors for Implementing Change February 22, 2008
Posted by Yvonne in Dynamics of Resistance, Frameworks and Focus, Power of Dialogue.add a comment
A friend asked this question via LinkedIn :
Question Details:
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How do you implement changes with 100% success?What are the most frequently overlooked change success factors?
And here’s my off-the-top-of-the-head response:
Authorship: When someone feels the change is theirs, they will make it work.
Partnership: When people feel they are pulling for a common goal, they will make it work.
Ongoing sensing and adjustment: When we keep in touch with a changing reality, we have a better chance of having things go the way we wish them to. “Strategy disolves when the first shot is fired.”
Oh! re: “frequently overlooked” -
Select to change something in the direction it is already going - anyone who wants to have the ice caps melt may win right now. Easier to find a parade and get in front of it.
Say you want as the change what is already the case but just hasn’t been seen yet. When we call out an existing but hidden reality, then it comes into view, we say there is a “change” but not in reality, only in viewing. Sometimes that is much easier than changing reality.
So what is interesting is that I at first, missed the full question, assuming I knew what he was asking. Then what’s interesting next is that both my tips in response to the actual question he asked were about being in touch with reality in a way that when that insight is shared with others the recognition of the “new” fact or reality occurs to them as a “change”.
A Limited Life: A Purpose for a Living Literature October 11, 2007
Posted by Yvonne in Evolution of We, Power of Dialogue.1 comment so far
Interesting to me that in my most recent post, I left out a key learning:
Just a day after I’d heard about Mea’s death, and before I’d gone back east to be with the family, I was at home, just in the kitchen doing some mindless domestic chore - cooking or doing the dishes - and this mild sort of beautiful sadness of an ache came over me. There was emotion, and it was the first time I regreted not being a mom. Odd really, that the reason I should have that regret is because I’d never be able to experience having my heart broken by my child. Most people regret not having the joys of a parent, but for me - I missed the sorrow. Very odd.
Then I realized: as I have a spiritual teacher and when he passed I had a particular human experience of what the loss of that kind of relationship is. Anyone who didn’t have that kind of relationship in life would never experience that kind of human experience.
A human life is so limited. We can only experience what we setup and provide for ourselves. We can only get the kind of surprises and joys and sorrows that we put ourselves in the way of.
So I do sometimes envy those who have the possibility of experiencing the surprises and joys and sorrows that I haven’t set my life up for, and may never be able to experience.
So please everyone, would you have those experiences really, really fully? And then share with others how it is? Because if you don’t, we are going to miss them completely … and we really only have you to give us a glimpse …
Suicide Sister: A Child Chooses To Go October 9, 2007
Posted by Yvonne in Power of Dialogue.1 comment so far
(I started this post in early August; just getting it up now.)
—————
One Saturday in July, I got the call that my 16 year old niece had hung herself the night before. My sister was barely able to speak. Her son helped pull the body down.
For the next 4 days, I was the communication hub for the family. Relaying messages, helping people make travel arrangements, and buffering communcations for my sister. Then flying off to the east coast, attending the family before/during/after the funeral. With my strong spiritual orientation and my training in handling upsets and all kinds of difficult communciations, with my capability to think clearly and produce results under pressure, it was natural and actually pretty easy to go through those times being of service, a contribution, just help things keep working.
I was glad to be there. I was glad to have a body to hug the rest of the children and my sisters.
Then back in my life, home and at the office … the world isn’t back to normal yet. Feeling like it’s time to write … lo energy = gotta get something out.
Knowing what I’d been experiencing, a friend sent me this:
I read an article today in the [SF] Chronicle about a Berkeley man who just completed a documentary on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He said to film it he had to just take a deep breath and do it. When he came back from filming in Japan, he said he collapsed in a kind of depression for 2 months where he could hardly move becuase of the strain of staying focused and not letting the content get through to him during filming.
My current condition and my experience:
- a floating non-specific emotion, sometimes tears, feeling very internal
- Monday night, I had to leave my seminar, just to get outside and breathe. I realized that I wasn’t my “usual self”, I wasn’t able to generate possibility, to be there for another, to listen or be present much at all.
- inability to really generate anything new, i can respond sometimes, but not much creation is available
- have not unpacked
- today I realized that it feels like I just got out of major surgery and will have to recouperate for some time to come.
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Now, another month and a half later, the emotional dip has passed, though there was more to come since beginning of August, and it impacted each family member differently in turn. I feel greatful for being alive enough to feel and participate with my family as I did.
I am more clear that now is the only time we can really live. People will go, and we cannot recover time lost in unconsciousness, being out of communication or in activities which deaden us. And I could see from my attempt at making the post more than a month ago, I had an inkling that being in communication enlivens.
Blog Off, Blog On: How Life Gets Full … Interruptions, Diversions and other seeming Eddies of Life October 9, 2007
Posted by Yvonne in Dynamics of Resistance, beginner blogger.add a comment
After nearly 6 months (yikes!) since I last posted, Mr. Miyagi’s voice, via friend Dave, is now ringing in my ears: “Blog off. Blog on.”
Lots happening, but not why blogging?
Open for Inquiry: Why do I do what I do and don’t do what I don’t do?
Provisional Conclusion: After some weeks of wondering: because I feel like it or don’t. Sadly, nothing else really seems to matter. And yes, there are different conditions in which I feel/don’t feel like doing.
Am now inquiring into:
- The art of practice, discipline, keeping with keeping on even when feeling/emotion/some say otherwise, and at the same time the profound wisdom of following body wisdom and “just doing the next indicated thing,” as Dad would say.
- Intentionally constructing my world for committed action. www.missioncontrol.com has been my starting place.
- How to know when a choice is a diversion. Sometimes I can tell what will occur later as an interruption, a side-trip from what’s the current “mission” of my life. And sometimes I can’t tell before or even as it is happening. Main trouble is that my mind is so supple in shifting viewpoint, it can make anything “fit” … before, during and after! So how am I to “tell” when an inner direction is “wisdom” vs. “wimp out”? Where is the line between “aligned” with my chief concerns of life and “not aligned”?
And a bit of thinking about How Life “Gets” Full:
- I put things in on purpose.
- I let things in sloppily.
- Things put themselves in when I’m looking.
- Things sneak in when I’m not looking.
- Things that are in grow larger in time and space and mass.
- People I care about put things in.
- People I don’t care about put things in.
- The government put things in.
- Some bot gets my email ID and starts replicating mostly irrelevant and uninteresting things to put in.
- Time puts things in.
- I get farther “into” something that is already in and forget to come back out, which has the effect of it overtaking my time and space.
- Things that are in invite and pull other things to come in.
- I have a conversation with a friend, get a new idea or awareness that opens up a whole new and interesting avenue of pursuit. Then I go to Amazon.com or the bookstore and come home with new worlds to explore. Net: Amazon and Google find ways to intice me to put more things in.
- I say “yes” to something.
- I say “no” to something - yes, incredibly this sometimes results in more “things getting in” my life - sheesh!
- My life gets “bigger” - like some kind of expansion of concern, and then a whole new bunch of stuff shows up to include.
- I relax, and notice that there’s more here I didn’t really realize was already in.
- My care puts more things in. If I didn’t care, stuff would just bounce off.
There’s more writing to come, no doubt, and potentially not in the so far future … and some catching up regrading activities of last 6 months as well.
Potential additional future inquiries: Essence and Presence, The Art of Practice
Waking Up, Summer Gone - now a magical moment of making April 15, 2007
Posted by Yvonne in PhD I'm not doing now.2 comments
I wrote this last year. Now, looking forward to another summer coming, I wonder: What will I do on my summer vacation?
And now it was September …
I haven’t been in the garden. The pears are past and the apples now fall. Berries are still happening, and the figs are valiantly pushing for October.
I didn’t ride my bike. The Vespa never came out to play. Guests and people in my life came and went. Some real surprises there, actually.
I hiked. I lay on the beach. I visited the gorges. I smelled the dusty pines and drove fast with the top down. I danced, drank (yes - a new leaf!), and carried on. I cried. I was angry and loving. I laughed heartily and worked my butt off. I travelled way more than expected. My fingernails are toast. I upgraded along the lines of a couple of health issues. I missed seeing family as much as I would have liked to.
And RE: the renovation so well aimed at, I haven’t fired a single shot.
I’m home alone again.
Time seems strange. How can the summer be both gone AND approaching?
