The phone rings. Who? Why?
I look at the screen.
UNKNOWN
I wouldn’t have answered anyway.
They call too much.
UNKNOWN
Or otherwise.
In this darkness,
The glowing face of the phone is unwelcome.
In this silence,
The rat-a-tat-tat of some digital ring is unwelcome.
In my loneliness,
The connection with someone else is unwelcome.
The phone rings again.
Who?
Why?
A gifted and persuasive arts advocate I know once told me of advice he received from his mentor. It had to do with focus.
This arts advocate was doing so much – a musician, a fundraiser, a public speaker. He worked with and for numerous organizations. His mentor gave him this advice:
“You can either be a grenade or a rocket. Imagining that the grenade could explode with the same force that the rocket ignites with, the scattering effect of the grenade will reduce the force of the explosion. You want to be the rocket, taking all the force in the direction you want it to go.”
Same energy, but one goes in all directions, and the other is a straight shot. One singular course. A focused ignition.
I think about this in relation to various decisions we have to make; crossroads that arise in life. Sometimes, when we think we’re on a singular course, we remain tethered to the crossroad, able to go back should failure occur.
But we can’t utilize the momentum if we’re tied down to where we started. It’s only when the tether is released that we can use the force of the rocket.
Sometimes, the untethering can look to observers like irrational behavior.
Steven Pressfield, in Do The Work!, states, “The three dumbest guys I can think of: Charles Lindbergh, Steve Jobs, Winston Churchill. Why? Because any smart person who understood how impossibly arduous were the tasks they had set themselves would have pulled the plug before he even began.”
Pressfield advocates staying stupid. Don’t let rationality get in the way of your creativity. I don’t necessarily agree with his word choice, but the sentiment resonates with me. Stupidity could be described as irrationality. I can think of several times that I’ve acted irrationally, and I know it was when I moved beyond any safety net I had in place. That’s when failures can happen. Often, they do happen.
But it’s also when the most staggering achievements can be reached. That’s why the following questions are so important:
You want to learn to play the piano? Or code a computer? Or write your novel? Get back into shape? Eat better, or learn to cook?
“Do you know how old I’ll be when I get done,” you may ask?
Julia Cameron responds to that question in The Artist’s Way: “The same age you’ll be if you don’t.”
When we lose sight of the crossroads, we turn our gaze to the road ahead, and move unwaveringly towards our destination.
I was cleaning out some drawers today, and found an old note, possibly ten or twelve years old. It made me laugh.
It said: "I’m struggling to write. I’m searching for inspiration in an automobile drive. ’91 Lincoln Town Car around Chicago. Lights, towering buildings."
Not sure what my Town Car had to do with Chicago, because I don't recall ever driving it there. But, it's possible. There were some crazy weekends back then.
The thing that stuck out was the struggling to write. I don't recall ever wanting to be a writer. But I liked writing. Always. I used to write poetry, and stories. I have numerous scripts and longer stories, started or abandoned. Ideas always popped up, but I never took them to fruition.
I was actually taking all these old papers out of the drawer and getting them on my cloud in a document called Collected Junk Writings.
But, in a way, this blog is the creative interpretation of my enjoyment of writing. Things I think about I get down in a post, I leave it up for whoever happens across it, and I'm honing an activity that I like doing.
I'm passionate about so few things right now, in this awkward between state that I'm in. Now I'm looking for a job, having quit my other one. I'm thinking about whether I want to stay in Central Florida or move away. About whether to try and start a Ph.D. program next fall, or wait another year.
All these things rattle on in my head, and still I give this blog weekly attention. Now, it's three posts a week, and I'm ahead (for the most part) by about a week. Which means I'm writing this on Tuesday, and you may not see it until next Friday.
I'm sure that when life comes crashing in, and the Universe points me in that direction, I'll not be so ahead on my blog. I'll probably be scrambling for deadlines.
I love the bit in Terry Pratchett's A Slip of the Keyboard: Collected Nonfiction, where he describes what he calls "A bit of writing about writing."
"Get up, have breakfast, switch on word processor, stare at screen.
Stare at screen some more."
This staring at screen, plus elements of procrastination come in for about the next thirty paragraphs. Finally: "Midnight…"
"Stare at screen. Vaguely aware right hand has hit keys to open new file. Start breathing very slowly. Write 1,943 words. Bed. For a day there, thought we weren't going to make it."
This is my blog. I write I because I like it. It's not an exceptional blog, and it's not terrible. But it's mine, and I get to share with you, the reader.
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
I want fewer email. I want more messages.
Rather than getting the daily appeals from every organization I’ve ever given to, bought from, volunteered for, etc., etc., send me something worth reading.
We receive way too many emails in our inbox now. It’s not fun. It’s a disaster.
Early days of email were about distant, instantaneous connection. Now it’s about instantaneous selling.
From connection to consumerism. When something loses its ability to connect, only to be replaced by the need to create profit, then it has gone off the rails. It’s not expansion, and it’s not engagement. It’s assault, and it needs to need to stop.
Companies – Stop forcing us to give you our email. Ask for it. Maybe you’ll get it, if we feel it’s worth reading what you have to say. Don’t assume. Many times, we don’t want to hear it.
I want content worth reading. I want an inbox that is less full and more interesting. I want a connection.
When I first started Michael’s Musings, oh, some point early in the Obama Administration, I really just wanted a platform to rant and rave about what I saw as wrong with politics. Or, what I saw as right about Obama. Or, honestly, who knows. I made one post, and have since moved that to the trashbins of cyberspace.
Still, I’m civic-minded, and I see many things going wrong, and some that are going right. (It seems we always focus on the wrong, and rarely on what’s going right.) I’d like to devote my Sundays to writing about politics, about civics. About discourse that I muse about. So that’s going to be my Sunday devotional. Starting today.
This past week, Jon Ossoff lost in Georgia.
For the record, I was sick of hearing about this race.
I live in Florida. I’m a registered Democrat. The amount of emails was mind-numbing, mostly asking for money, and not giving me a damn lick of information that I cared about.
Problem number one: The message.
What is it you want the American people to know? The voters? The immigrants? The wealthy and the poor, the blue-collar and white-collar? And, most important, you need to stay honest.
Problem number two: How we lose.
I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about political races, about why we get into politics, about how we run campaigns. (I’m using the Royal “We” here, but I’ve considered running myself from time to time.) I have to believe that we get into politics to make the world, our world and our nation, a better place.
In my opinion, there’s a way to do it, even if you lose. Be better.
That’s it. Be better. Don’t smear, don’t snipe, don’t attack. You may not win a race running it fair, clean, and good. But if the only way you can win is by playing dirty, are you even winning?
That’s the nation that Trump became president in. We live in fear, and we live in troubling times. But even in losing, we can show the nation a better way.
I love the line from Hamilton: The Musical:
George Washington speak-sings, “If I say goodbye, the nation learns to move on. It outlives me when I’m gone.”
Be the example. That’s the point of politics. Be better. And that’s all I have to say for this week.
We spend our lives mired in the weeds of mediocrity. The big problems are hidden from us now as television, work, and society vies for our attention. We’ve consigned the larger questions to arenas of academia. Why should we progress any further, we ask ourselves? We have everything. Don’t we?
Sure, we have TV dinners and auto start coffee makers. We have fifty-hour work weeks, commutes and audio books so that we can ignore our commutes; roadside billboard so that we can ignore our commutes; blasting radio stations in Bose car audio systems so that we can ignore our commutes.
We drive by the poor, the homeless, and the disenfranchised, then drive into fast food drive-through lanes. We live in our own bubbles of invisibility. If we look up, we may see Wonder Woman going by in her invisible airplane.
Why not stop being invisible? What’s the cost of saying hello to your neighbor? And why stop there? If you’ve gone that far, why not have a conversation? Did you know that your neighbor has a passion, a hobby? My neighbor hands washes his fifteen-year old VW every week because he loves it enough to keep it in pristine condition. You probably have something you love like that. A hobby, or a passion.
I’m a proponent of the conversation. Of going to farmer’s markets rather than Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart’s business model is one of invisibility. (I’ll have to explore that thought in a later post). Finding the small ways that life can be joyful.
I’ll leave you with this thought, from Leo Brouwer. “To be useful is something incredible, because you’re at the service of the world.”
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!
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.
I lost a poem last night.
“Where,” you ask?
“Did you mislay it, or place it
on a shelf, behind some
knickknacks, or under that
pair of old, wooden Foo Dogs?
“And I looked,” so I’d answer,
simply. “I lost a poem.”
“Well which one?” you might reply.
“It was unnamed,” I’d say.
“It came to me while I lay in bed,
awake, though I had tried
counting clumsy sheep.
“It blew in on a cold air,
streaming up from the
open bedroom window.
It settled on me, along
with the cool air, and I
struggled with the thought
of getting up, the first
few lines still fresh in my
mind, or staying warm and
oh so sweetly near the confining embrace of slumber.
“And so you lost the poem?”
“I did,” I say sadly.
“But I found this one while looking.”
Michael's Musings 