Category: Art

A night in blue

by MAÔ, posted in Music, Poetry

I turn on the jazz
The city unfolds before my eyes
Night sky with bright lights
Blazing from imaginary windows
Smoke and fog drifts soundlessly
Creeping over weary streets
From my private perch I watch
Listening to the sounds of the night
The song of the city
A tune that echoes in drums and lobes
Different in percussion for every skull
Notes still piping
Slow, vivid and hot
The picture it paints
Across the scape of my eye
Pupil and cornea alive with musical notation
Dancing, streaming, playing raw
Heat, fire, life.
It is where the soul lives
The heart beats
The mind creates
Those moments that cannot stop
But you can never experience again
Once they pass, gone
And you, holding on in the night
Wait to feel it again
See it again
Live it and know again
That it breathes into you
Inspiration
While I watch this happen
Inhaling air, tobacco and sweat
Breathing heavily
Night not cooling my body
Air just promising to break the heat
While my body feels the beat
The rhythm of music long since played
Echoing over these weary streets
And my bleary eyes
Take in the sights
Feeing no pain
And hoping the morning doesn’t come too soon

On the reading bug

by MAÔ, posted in Books, Faith, Reading, Spirituality, The Artist's Way

Started reading a book (the intro really, plus a few entries) that I had purchased a few weeks ago. Nick Hornby’s Ten Years in the Tub: A decade soaking in great books. First, I love books. The idea of what Hornby did for The Believer, where each month he would just talk about the books he read and ones he bought, was entirely captivating to me.

So, this being the first entry of the month, I’d like to take a cue from Nick Hornby:

June 2017

Books Bought:

  • The Republic – Plato
  • Atlantis: The Eighth Continent – Charles Berlitz
  • Designing Your Life – Bill Burnett & Dave Evans
  • Conversational Spanish in 20 Lessons – Cortina Method
  • Light on Yoga – B.K.S. Iyengar
  • The War of Art – Steven Pressfield
  • Thinking: The New Art of Decision-Making  – Edited by John Brockman

Books Read:

  • Do the Work! – Steven Pressfield
  • Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency – Douglas Adams
  • Outrageous Openness – Tosha Silver
  • The Perdition Score – Richard Kadrey
  • Sept. ’03 – Jan. ’04 of Ten Years in the Tub – Nick Hornby
  • Worth Dying For – Lee Child
  • The War of Art – Steven Pressfield (started)

What can I tell you about the books I’ve read? Or bought? Why do we do this? I found a beautiful passage in the intro to Ten Years in the Tub, written by Jess Walter:

“That the books we buy are almost as important as those  we read. From the beginning there were always two columns [referring to Hornby’s monthly article], Books Bought and Books Read. By my crude math, Nick spent somewhere around ten or fifteen grand on books he hasn’t even read. Besides showing that he did his part to support publishing during a tough economic period, this suggests something important about reading. Looking around my own obsessively crowded shelves, I see there are two categories of books I tend to keep: those I love and those I hope one day to read. If the books we read reflect the person we are, the books we hope to read might just be who we aspire to be. There is something profound in that.”

I checked out Do the Work! and Dirk Gently from the library. Both came precariously close to being returned unread, but something about each grabbed me and made me change course. The library and, by extension, book stores, are sort of a second home to me. And in this in-between period, where the old life I lived has fallen away and the new one is just breaking out of its cocoon, they function more as my first home than the place that houses my stuff.

Do the Work! walks us through the creative process, highlighting the role of resistance in creation. Now, I’m a big fan of Seth Godin. Have been since I first stumbled across The Icarus Deception, oh, three years ago. At that time I was creatively stifled, my professional and personal lives not working out the way that I had intended. He begged his readers to do the work, fight resistance, and ship! Yes! I can get on board with that.

Pressfield’s book does much the same, but not as effectively. I do feel inspired to do the work, yet I get stuck on syntax when he delves into his theory on the contradictory nature of the Universe’s role in Resistance/Assistance. I’ll likely come at this book again a year or two down the road, and see if I agree or disagree more with the sentiment. The War of Art has been on my reading list for a few years, so it was time to pull the trigger and buy it. I’m just starting it, and seeing the themes revisited from Do the Work!

Adams is always fun, and Dirk Gently’s was no exception. The thought and connectivity he puts into a book about interconnectivity gives enough laugh-out-loud moments that I found myself flying through it.

Atlantis and the course on Spanish weren’t bought, per se. Rather free books in a stack at the library. There’s a girl from Barcelona I wish I were better able to communicate with, though she speaks  English more fluidly than I do. Atlantis, eh. Always curious about the esoteric and metaphysical.

In The Perdition Score, I got to resist the character Sandman Slim, aka James Stark, as he moved up and down a supernatural Los Angeles, and back into Hell. I began reading Kadrey’s series last February, what is that, fourteen months ago? Since then, I’ve read eight and just committed to reading the ninth when I saw it in the bookstore. Perdition is probably the best of the series since Sandman Slim, but I’m a sucker for watching Stark get even when someone goes after his friends.

Another series that I just began last year but have managed to put a considerable dent in is the Jack Reacher collection, by Lee Child. Worth Dying For is well-plotted mystery, and I had trouble putting it down as well. I spent the better part of two days catching up with Mr. Reacher in a little Nebraska town run by some no-goods that were, par for the course, up to no good. It’s a satisfying read, and moves the story towards him heading back to Virginia, which they adapted for film in last year’s Never Go Back.

Tosha Silver and Iyengar’s books are part of my required reading for the yoga practice. I bought Light on Yoga from a Los Angeles Goodwill on Amazon, so it’ll arrive soon. It was like five bucks. Outrageous Openness we discussed at the yoga studio, and it seems to be of big help to those of us who have trouble letting go and trusting that Divine help will be coming.

My first experience with that concept was back in November, 2015, when I started Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. I know some crazy things can happen, once you say okay and let the Universe/Divine/God/Source start working on you.

I made it though five whole books this month, with two solid starts, and a few dips into other assorted writings. I can’t guarantee that many, but there is that new Sandman Slim out there, as well as a Reacher novel someone loaned me. Plus, there’s a stack of library books on philosophy that need to be returned this month, so it may be more likely that I get a sit down with Spinoza and Kierkegaard.

9P(R)

by MAÔ, posted in Advice, Faith, Mountain, Music, Spirituality, Synchronicity, Travel, Universe, Work

My shorthand for tarot readings, Nine of Pentacles Reversed. I had a rough day at work, and decided it was time to move on; time to leave there and find a new job. I wanted to ask the Universe what today taught me. This was the card I drew.

“This card in reverse may be telling you that something you are spending a lot of time on will not yield financial or personal gain. You may be wasting effort. Consider if it’s time to throw in the towel on something that is not giving you the results you had hoped for.”

Thank you Universe.

I’m listening to Dvorak’s New World Symphony right now, to relax. I picked up a used album at a library sale a few weeks back. I’ve been wearing that vinyl down. There’s something supremely reassuring about the notes of No. 9 in E Minor, Op. 95.

I had listened to a Chamber Ensemble in Prague, and the Second Movement of this symphony was played. It’s one of my all time favorites.

The title of this blog post comes courtesy of watching Shut Eye, on Hulu. I just got around to seeing it, and really enjoyed. Each episode was titled after a Tarot card, and was relevant to the plot.

The overall thoughts on my mind are new beginnings. Learning that life has a path, a plan. To quote Tosha Silver, “Let what wants to come, come. Let what wants to go, go.”

Amen!

Why work?

by MAÔ, posted in Economy, Income, Reading, Work

What is the purpose of work? Other than making money, of course. Why are some people so satisfied with their professions, while others are left feeling that what they do doesn’t matter, and they just collect the paycheck and move on with their lives?

To me, work is the calling to something more. We all have gifts, notions about who we are and what we are capable of. I believe that people, deep down, all have a desire to provide help to their fellow man. 
Work is the fulfillment of that desire. Yes, work pays the bills. Or it should. Work is a commitment. Work is the place that we spend a good third of our lives.
Work is not the end-all, be-all. Work is not, or should not be, the daily grind. Work should lift us up, provide a sustainable lifestyle for its employees. We work because we have to, but we should also work because we want to. To do that, the work should be a vocation.
To work is to be interconnected. Within a job, we are part of the whole global economy, not merely isolated in our decisions and choices. What we do, how we do it, and the results of our labors are part of a much larger whole. Neglecting this fact, believing that we operate in a vacuum, is detrimental both to our health and the health of society.

I’m curious right now about the relationship between currency and wealth; of income disparity; the economic state of our Nation and the World. One more topic in the litany of interests I’ll be reading about, or studying, over the coming months. 

Find your true North

by MAÔ, posted in Advice, Faith, Growing up, Mountain, Reading, Self Actualization, Spirituality, Yoga

Most of my life now is lived in the phrase,”Recently I’ve…” As in, “Recently I’ve been reading…”; or, “Recently I’ve started a practice of…” Very little in my life as it is can date back to before a year and a half ago. I’d say it would be a positive thing (living in the moment, and all that) but recently I’ve noticed that much of what made me who I was has been lost in the shuffle as well.

Like most things, I sat down thinking I’d be writing about the book that recently I’ve started reading, Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett & Dave Evans. I had heard an interview with them on NPR last year and made a mental note to read the book at some point. 

Thinking of the design problems of life (my life in particular) led me to think of another book that recently I’ve started reading: Wanderlust, by Jeff Krasno. This was a companion piece to the fact that recently I’ve started a practice of yoga. Which, in the full circle way my mind works, brought me back to the fact that the past eighteen months has been a whirlwind and I still have no clue what I’m doing. 

Then I thought, that may not be a bad thing. We got lost sometimes. Lose our way. Think we’re following a path only to look down and see that we’re the only set of footprints to be found. But every path had to be discovered that first time. Not every mistake leads to innovation, but every innovation began with a mistake. 

The cover of Wanderlust invites the reader to “find your true north”. I set the picture of my first tattoo as header because I’ve been searching for true North for longer than eighteen months. Maybe that’s the one constant throughout my whole weird and wonderful existence. Who knows if we ever reach it? But I believe that we can keep moving the needle in that direction.

Namaste.  

My Favorite Pearls

by MAÔ, posted in Advice, Florida, Growing up, Reading

Wisdom. Where does it come from? It seems that much of the past fifteen months, for me, has been an unending quest for wisdom and understanding. As of yet, I’m still coming up short. Mostly I quote Socrates (as Plato has written): Ἓν οἶδα ὅτι οὐδὲν οἶδα.” All I know is that I know nothing.

Yet, over the years, people have given me advice in one shape or another. Maybe I’ve read it in books, or seen it on television. One of my favorites has done little more than make me smile, but sometimes that’s all advice needs to do. So I wanted to provide some of that here.

The early bird gets the worm

Obviously. The earlier you start digging in the dirt, the more likely you are to reap the spoils. 

Measure twice, cut once

I’ve never been one for construction, but this can applied to many avenues of life. It’s about being precise – even if it takes a little longer in the beginning to get it right, it saves time and money on the other side if you aren’t redoing your work.

Breathe

Quite possibly the simplest yet most profound peace of advice I’ve ever gotten, and it still shows up for me today, to remind me how important breath is. In my singing, and reading of music, I’ll see hand-scrawled notes indicitating breath marks in the music telling me to breathe. When I’m feeling overwhelmed by external forces, breathing slowly makes the anxiety manageable. If I’m lifting weights, or holding a yoga pose, and it’s becoming impossible – focusing on the slow breathing gets just one more out of me, whether repitition or moment of concentration.

Don’t sweat the little stuff, and it’s all little stuff

This was a book that I never read. But the advice is sound. There are very few things in life that can improve if you worry about them. And when you start worrying about something, suddenly the problem is obfuscated and you can’t focus on the real issue anymore. It seems to happen a lot in relationships, where the one thing is the problem, but every other thing starts being seen in the negative by not fixing the actual problem. When life seems too much, focus on the manageable. 

Don’t eat the yellow snow

Okay. Thanks Dad. I’ve seen snow a handful of times in my life, and never did I want to eat white snow, let alone yellow. Still, when I was a young boy my dad gave me this advice (even though we lived in Florida) and I’ve remembered it to this day. Never will I eat yellow snow, but I can’t help but smile when I think about it.

And I guess, when it comes down to it, advice is just there to make life easier. To make you smile. So don’t eat the yellow snow. 

Back From Abroad

by MAÔ, posted in Europe, Past Lives, Reading, Travel

To wit, I’ve been back stateside now for nearly a month. I had every intention of keeping this blog going while I travelled through Europe, but there was so little time to sit and ruminate, let alone write. 

I did finish On the Road, which I started on the flight from Toronto to Amsterdam. I think I wrapped up the book on the ferry ride from Swinoujscie, Poland to Ystad, Sweden. Since being back, I’ve read a few more. Right now I’m working through Brian Weiss’s Many Lives, Many Masters. Most of the time back has been spent working, or applying to jobs, and practicing music. 

I’m enjoying the warm Florida weather and a cool tropical breeze out on the back patio. My dog is lounging by my feet, drooling contentedly. I had started a blog post two weeks ago, but it’s been lost in the nether regions of cyberspace, likely never to be seen again. I was lamenting the fact that many people will call someone who is well-read nerdy. 

Mind you, it’s been a long time since someone called me a nerd. Dork, yes. But I’ve been a gym rat for years, at least I was before I developed RA. I was also an avid partier, so people forgave my intelligence and habit of being well-read. No, I was volunteering, writing in one of my notebooks, and someone asked if I liked to read. Of course I like to read. She said that she didn’t, but her son did. He’d even started a book club with his friends, and was trying to read a book a week this year. I thought that was an admirable aspiration. She called him a nerd. So, I ask you, when did reading books & being generally well-educated become nerdy?

That was the crux of that lost post. More later!

Strange Things are Afoot at the Circle K

by MAÔ, posted in Florida, Synchronicity, The Artist's Way

I’ve had a kind of bad week at the office. To wit, I don’t actually have an office. I used to, working a quasi 9-5 office job in Orlando. It was a job in my field (arts administration) and the work was governmental, so it was decent pay and fairly good benefits. It was also wholly unsatisfying. When my life upended, I decided it was time to leave that job as well.

I quit. I left without a safety net, without a plan, and without any job prospects. Somehow, I’ve been fortunate enough in life to have things work out for me. Sometimes it serendipitous, sometime downright miraculous. Julia Cameron calls it synchronicity. 

That’s not to say I haven’t been down and out before. Last year was a big down and out year, and I wasn’t sure that I’d ever get up. Even with that said, within four weeks of leaving my job, I found work. More accurately, my mother knew a guy who just lost a worker, so I was able to step in. Voila! Instant employment.

Turns out, I was pretty good at the work too. Mostly it’s smooth sailing, with very little mental exertion needed on my part. While working there, I’ve been paying bills, taking the occasional travel adventure, teaching, writing, and reorienting myself to what I should be doing. Getting my head right, and my soul in balance, after its misadventures in 2016. Just last week I was starting to look to PhD programs and seeing what other work opportunities might be available to me after I return from Europe. 

Which sets up the drama of this week. On Friday, filling in for someone who needed the night off, I had a customer lose her temper with me, walking out and threatening to have me fired. This didn’t bother me so much, as I know she was just blowing off steam, and she has a history of frustrated rants, especially when she comes in forgetting to take her medication. She suffers from a mental instability of some kind, so we all try to remain very patient with her.

Saturday was a busy day, but I think it was uneventful as my week’s negative aspects played out. Sunday, on the other hand, busy and downright awful. I have a coworker who for some reason has this chip on her shoulder towards me. She has a general chip on her shoulder, but it’s even more pronounced when directed in my vicinity. Sometimes she is in charge, but on Sunday she and I were both working the floor. There was this heated exchange, and I had to walk away. Out of the back door and around the building. 

Now it takes a great deal to aggravate me, and even more so to make me angry. But at one point I noticed my hands shaking, and I knew that there was nothing good that would come of me engaging anymore with her. Now, the owner has said nothing to me concerning the incident, but the other party has been off since then, and it’s possible he would want to talk with her first.

Then, again, a minor incident on Monday and one yesterday, all leading me to the inevitable query: Is it synchronicity’s way of telling me it’s time to leave? 

I haven’t come to a conclusion yet, nor do I think that I’ll reach one prior to leaving on the 24th. I do think that it’s quite interesting that, after eight months of relative quiet, all of a sudden this week it seems to be one thing after another. So I wonder… Is it the Universe giving me not-so-subtle hints that, “Hey. It’s time.” 

The last time I ignored the Universe I had a mountain dropped on my head. Figuratively. I do not need that again. 

Philosophical Art

by MAÔ, posted in Ego, Emerson, Faith, Gaiman, Mountain, Spirituality, The Artist's Way, Thoreau

Been on a brief hiatus, as I reoriented myself in a direction I’m comfortable with. Coming to terms with losing love, the balancing of material and spiritual, energizing my thoughts and, finally, discovering what it means to break life down into manageable segments.  

“It’s not the destination, but the journey.” – Attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson 

Years ago I conceived Michael’s Musings to be a political soap box for my thoughts and views on the happenings and going-ons of American politicians. I was, and remain, an ardent Obama supporter, and remain convinced of his merits as president to this day. I’ve been non-vocal on my views following this past election, partly because I’ve been preoccupied with my own crises. Though not a major factor in the lives of most Americans, my dark night has been the Matterhorn looming in the foreground of my consciousness, waiting to claim a life. My life. 
It’s this mountain, this hard time in my life, this period of reshaping, that reminded me of Neil Gaiman’s Make Good Art speech. In it, he implored the graduates of the University of Arts in Philadelphia to find their mountains. Make decisions that put them closer to reaching it. To achieving those goals. 

Thing was, I had long ago lost sight of my mountain. in my proper job, with a desk and office and chair and computer, I put a little sticky note on the monitor. “Will it bring you closer to your mountain?” I wrote on it, using the Japanese character for mountain (山) rather than the word. And every day I would sit there and look at it. I’d wonder whether I was getting closer to it, not even remembering what I had planned for it to be.

Then, after so long spent wondering, the damn mountain came and crashed on top of me. I guess it got tired of waiting for me to figure out that I was supposed to be climbing it. Figuratively, I was crushed. I was now facing decisions that I had no clue how to handle. And only over the past couple of weeks have things began to once again come into focus. The mountain, now looming large in my vision, is calling to me. Beckoning me to come climb it. So I take the first step.

“1837. Oct. 22. “What are you doing now?” he asked. “Do you keep a journal?” So I make my first entry to-day.’ – The Journals of Henry David Thoreau.  

Everything Changes

by MAÔ, posted in Theatre

We replace our bodies every 28 days, or something like that. I don’t recall the exact maxim that tells how the cells in our bodies die and are reborn. But every month or so I guess we are a new creature, yet the same. 

I think of this after reading the New York Times article on the cast of Hamilton having an impromptu talkback with Vice-President elect Mike Pence. I have no problem with it, for the record.

Still I found myself getting agitated. Not at the political landscape, which is bad enough. But at the change in how I view theatre. It used to be my passion. My joy-bringer. Now I feel sad thinking about it. 

For several years I was a working actor, but after this past year the wind of my theatrical sails was sucked out. I don’t know if they’ll ever catch wind again. Which leaves me wondering, what am I going to do now?