heathervescent

Being in the Present

It's morning. I'm sitting in my sun porch, drinking coffee. The dog is sleeping nearby. The windows are open and I breath the sweet, moist California air. I feel the heat under the moist cool. I know today will be hot. 

I'm listening to my ambient/Boards of Canada station. It mixes well with the noises from the neighborhood. Gates opening. Birds. Weed wackers. The jingle of dog tags on their morning walks. I look out the window at my favorite plants. The bush with the petit purple flowers. The spring green of my Brugmansia leaves. The tall stalks of my sun flowers. Deep green of Rosemary. Fecund fruit trees. Spiky palm leaves and soft willowly Jacarandas, dropping their carpet of fragrant sweet purple blooms. 

I've got that feeling again. The softness in my heart. Content in the present moment. To accept what comes. I think of my friends. So many that I love. The various connections. These moments I share in present space, expanding the love I have for them. Connecting over our love of shoes or film  making or SciFi or years of friendship and often over long distances through the magic of technology and text messages and twitter. I am thankful for them. I work to be a better friend. To be there for them. And when I am, when I give, I feel so much return. 

This present moment, this bliss, this is what I try to give attention to. Awareness and enjoyment of the moment.

Momentary Happiness

I've threaded my way through Beverly Hills, raced a Telsa, reaching up to 70 mph on Sunset. I zip through the construction by the 405 and find myself a spot in the parking garage. I wait for the tram and then ride up the mountain, looking at traffic on the 405, the Ocean beyond Santa Monica and Venice. I disembark. I'm early. I find a cafe table in the shade. At first I fuck around with my phone. Then I decide to be present.

I sit there. I breathe. I watch people taking pictures. (I stop myself from tweeting snarky comments.) I lean back in the chair, my feet propped up on another chair, close my eyes, arms behind my head, breathing. The breeze comes. Caressing my face, my hair, finding its way into my lungs through my nostrils. Utterly luxurious, pleasurable. I exhale. Only to inhale another magnificent breath, a part of the wind, which continues to caress my skin, tease my hair. I'm in heaven.

I am calm. Chemicals flood my brain. And then I feel it. The Happiness. With each breath it sustains and I revel in the momentary feeling.

Calm with the Challenge

These luxurious mornings. Up early, thanks to the #globalnow brain. I awake. Morning coffee ritual. I grind the beans today, the ritual changed due to mispurchasing whole beans. It keeps me aware.

I walk the dog. The Jacaranda purple above and below me. I inhale deeply of the moist air. Count to six. Exhale. Calm. Birds singing, chirping, tweeting. I walk among, through. The familiar dive bomb whir of the Hummingbirds. Stopping to smell the roses, admire the flourishing greenery of neighbor gardens. 

Today, I practice being calm. I've been running at a fast pace. I unconsciously felt I had to make up for lost time, the failures of the past year. Well, that's me choosing to focus on the things that went wrong. Analyzing how to avoid those situations in the present/future. I really have nothing to complain about. Life is about as dreamy as anyone could dream. So I'm gonna enjoy it for a while.

One thing through all this is the learning. Each morning I am greeted by a Joshua Tree painting in the bathroom. It reminds me of the challenge of finding my grounding while I flew around the world. It took a wider view to find that grounding, but I did. Even now, at home, not traveling the world, this view serves me. 

New challenges feel uncomfortable. Learning new skills, one sucks. That's why the zen mind, beginner mind is helpful. To release expectations. Put in the hours for the skill and one is bound to get better. Now is the time to stop with the dream and get down to action. The hearth is cold, chop wood. It's time for coffee, carry water.

Unraveling, Integrating

Note: I wrote this on December 13, 2012, with an update from tonight.

I always wondered what it would be like when one of my parents died. You see people fall apart when their parent dies. They become someone different after the experience. I watched it with my mom, when my grandmother died. I've seen it in other people. I knew it would happen to me, sooner than later. Mom told me she had cancer in 2009. I was at SXSW when she told me. I had a lot of road trip driving to think about what it meant.

I feel like I have a good relationship with death. It is a real friend of mine, whom I use on an almost daily basis to motivate myself to be conscious, aware, to be the person I want to be, to realize my potential. Death and I, we're old friends.

My grandmother, who was the most important person to me, died 7+ years ago. I dreamt her death days before she died. I felt her acquiesce into it through my dreams. I was in a strong personal place, and able to send her off well. When my grandfathers passed, again, I was in a place of power and strength, able to send them off on their next journeys. Back in August, I knew my mom was going this time. I was in denial of course. Until I saw her in Portland in October. The face of death does not lie.

And here I am, barely two months later. What's it been like, this experience of my mom dying? 

The last week she was alive, I experienced life very different from my usual way. (I usually live partially in the past, present and future. Past and future give information I frame and interpret in the present to act in the present.) With my mom, I lived 100% in the moment for several weeks. The past, the future, had no meaning. I knew they existed as two bookends, but they were abstract. I knew I would think about them, and visit them again, but in the moment, they did not matter. At one point I was sitting and talking with my mom and her friends and I described my experience like Burning Man, but I wasn't on drugs. There are a variety of experiences that force one to live in the moment. When I perform or put on events, I plan, but the moment comes and the planning ends, performance or execution happens in the present moment. Like last Saturday. The event begins, and you enter into present tense.

Re-entry to everyday life (moving between past and future) was difficult. Much like re-entry to life after a week in the desert. However this re-entry feels harder. There's an echo. And frankly, I continue to reference those moments of presence in October even now. 

Part of this is that I have the burden of unraveling another person's material life. I'm sharing this burden with my brother, so this helps; but we each have a lot more than usual going on. My own life is completely unstable - part of this was of my own doing as an attempt to stabilize for a different paradigm (a traveling all over the world for work paradigm).  

So that's the material challenge. But there's the emotional. 

I've got the usual cocktail of emotions around this, but on top of it all is a lot of anger. Anger at the timing. Anger at me being already in a reduced state due to other set-backs. This anger is compounded by a lack of trust.

Despite this impossible situation, I move forward. But often, each forward step is replied with a push backward.

-----

Fast forward to today - June 16, 2013. Mom's been gone for months. I've had time to get comfortable with her absence. The anger has subsided - as has my focus on unraveling her estate and dealing with the material world. 

Last Sunday, her ashes were scattered into the Pacific. With that act, a sense of relief, a weight I did not realize I felt, was lifted. 

Sure, I've had moments of missing her. Especially when all her furniture landed out at the Dome. I really wanted to call her to tell her all her stuff arrived. Of course, it's not a phone I could ever make to her alive. 

Like my grandmother and aunt who passed before her, I have her, their things. My writing desk was my Great Aunt's. Much of my furniture and cocktail ware was my grandmother's. These things comfort me. They trigger the positive memories of these women - a version of themself in the strange loop of my brain. 

I work now to integrate, discriminate, differentiate, decide what I want in my life, as part of my character. It's a strange piece of work; this braiding, dovetailing one life into another. I will be someone different and yet the same after it is done.

 

Swimming in the #globalnow

I did the math a few weeks ago. I spend 80-90% of my time alone. Solomente. Ok, my dog is with me most of this time, but I do not share physical space with another human. I am in my cocooned environment of my integrated life/work-space.

But am I really alone all of this time?

My past days have been session after session of Skype, Google Hangout, with phone calls, text messages, emails, back channel chat sessions, private network messages, monitoring activity of friends, interacting/responding with/to them. Passive and active interactions. Push and pull. I've had lots of face to face meetings too. Lots of time in the cocoon of my car, an autonomous node circulating around the physical grid.

Always connected. Always on. But not always monitoring. Not always streaming. Not always receiving. 

I awoke from my work trance yesterday, to realize I was in my living room. For hours I had been jacked into a virtual workspace with a variety of friend & colleagues. In reality, I was sitting on my couch, with Mr. Dog. But I was more than my physical. My virtual counterpart was elsewhere - in some liminal space. 

I am not alone in this space. I am connected to many brains. I extend my own brain tendrils, thoughts, actions, interactions and converse linearly and non-linearly. This nonphysical space becomes more and more real. Abundant for sharing and connection. 

So while I spend 80-90% of my time physically alone (with Mr. Dog), I am also a node in the #globalnow, connecting, re-connecting (and disconnecting) from this rich nonphysical space. 

Anarchy Anti-fragility Evolution

"I think it's important that there are professional people working to inject a sense of anarchy into our day to day lives. It's more important than it used to be."  - Mark Pauline. SRL

"When faced with a threat, living things move to the edge of chaos." - Todd Gentzel

 

 

Acolades

Last week I found out I won the 1st place prize from the Association of Professional Futurists for my paper on The Human Problem, where I unpacked and described how to solve every human created problem we have today. 

I wrote the paper when I was in a dark place. My mother had died a few weeks prior and I had lost faith in almost everything. I was suicidal, I was stuck in rainy Portland. The problems of the world meant nothing to me. Caring for nothing in myself or the world, with detachment and death by my side I plunged in. I rarely work half-assed. I'll share with you my opening paragraphs. 

When I sat down to think about the big questions or problems in the world I could not find a big problem worthy of attention. The questions and problems that keep my mind occupied are ones about human consciousness, awareness, identity and the evolution of these concepts. These are ideas that most people do not find to be particularly important. So I went on a quick search to find what other people thought were the big burning questions of our age. 

A survey of three lists of big wicked world problems resulted in the following common set of problems:

• Pollution
• Limited Resources (especially water and energy/oil)
• Various Crisis (Economic, Environmental)
• Global Warming
• Rising Population

I pondered on these big problems. They are truly problems we must face. But why were they problems in the first place. How did they become problems? It’s not like we, as a human species, set out to destroy the environment, use all the resources available and engage in destructive activities to bring about crisis. 

Writing this paper changed my attitude. I entered the writing process from a dark place. I finished with my optimism renewed. In the journey, I uncovered many societal beliefs and unserving myths. And the change has already begun. A ripple effect of positivity coming from a dark part of despair. Blossoming into the changing of the world.

 I am happy the paper won 1st place. Thank you Association of Professional Futurists!

The High Cost of Dreams

I'm heading to Houston for some grad school stuff. I delayed booking my hotel because I assumed the University hotel would be empty during summer. Not so.

Now, I wouldn't take no for an answer. I know hotels always have a few rooms, so I went to work. But before I started, I executed my backup plan. Then I called one of my favorite credit cards: American Express.

I love American Express. So I decided to see what they could do. I called them up, explained my situation, told them what I wanted and asked them to wave their magic wand. And wave their magic wand they did. They found those rooms I knew the hotel had (and that Hilton Reservations denied). But here's the thing, the cost was high. 35% higher than my backup. And the room, while unique, was not, in my mind worth it.

I was sad. All this work. Breaking through the barriers. Finding the rooms I knew were there. Only to turn it down in the end.

Jacaranda Phase Shift

Nine years ago I took a chance. I followed my heart. I packed my things in my car. I stopped for one last coffee at my favorite cafe and I drove south. To dream a new dream. It's the time of year I remember that journey. I remember the start of the adventure. I remember trusting myself following the whisper of a dream. The destination opening a whole new playing field - my most beloved city, full of adventure and possibilities.

So much has happened. Many adventures. I've created, lived the life I wanted. I still do. 

I've been thinking a lot about the way I was at that time. The trust I had in the universe. The trust I had in myself. To take off in a direction, because that's where I felt the pull, because that's where the path with heart lead. Despite my logical brain saying, "that's crazy." Despite knowing where things would lead, where I would go, who I could become. Trusting strongly. Dreaming Big. Fishing for David Lynch's transcendental big fish.

It's phase shift time. A magical moment in my year where the realization of my dreams are closer to the surface. An invocation, an homage, a tribute to that day: Phase shift June 6.