True Qualities vs. Conditioned Responses

Power ----- Abuse, domination

Presence ----- Absence 

Strength ----- Hardness

Clarity ----- Judgment

Assertiveness ----- Aggression

Creativity ----- Achievement, ambition

Meditation ----- Reclusiveness

Will ----- Stubbornness 

Courage ----- Machismo, Compensation

Leadership ----- Control, politics, law and order

Protective -----  Authoritarian

Wildness ----- Brutality

Spontaneity ----- Performance

Wisdom ----- Arrogance

Charisma ----- Manipulation

Sun, life giving ----- Sunburn, ecological destruction

Expression, articulation ----- Pomposity, boorishness

Action ----- Activity, bullishness

Independence ----- Isolation

Heartfelt ----- Insincere

Loving, Compassionate ----- Selfish, egotistical

Your world, your choice.

Presence

There is stillness

and emptiness now

I'm waiting

listening

If nothing happens

something still changes

I trust this space

Accept Uncertainty

Focusing on worst-case scenarios won't keep bad things from happening. It will only keep us from enjoying the good things we have in the present.

Two Zero One Two

allowing the dead to die
metal rabbit runs away
one more time
on new year's day

who will I walk with?
to whom will I say goodbye?
where am I going and why?

water dragon asks

who am I?

The 2nd Commandment of 2012

ARM YOURSELF WITH THE FACTS

Faith & Science

Faith is taking the first step even when you don't see the whole staircase.

~ Martin Luther King Jr.

8495 Strides

I'm on a table with needles in my feet, head, stomach and chest. She tells me my pulse on the surface is wiry, like a guitar string being plucked. When I leave, it's with the assignment of moving out of my mind, staying out of my mind, and being in my stomach instead. "Be in your belly," she says as she puts her hand on my stomach. "Life is a lot different down here."

Half an hour later I'm on a Precor USA elliptical cross trainer. Sixty minutes of cardio every other day. That's the drill. Eleven minutes in I can hear Jimmy Carter: "Stop talking and start sweating." I am. Today I'm on the cross-country program, skiing up and down a skyline of boxes and yellow lights. Sometimes I'm flying, sometimes I'm climbing through sludge, as if I'm on an alien world with stronger gravity.

I drop into my stomach and look for my core, my truth. I know it's here somewhere. Not sure where the lights are though. I wonder if I'm in a dark underground cavern, about to slip beneath the liquid surface of a burning chemical fire that boils the flesh from my bones. That doesn't happen. I enter my fourteen billion year old soul and discover something like taffy, gum or Silly Putty. It's elastic, stretching and rotating around an invisible axis as I pump out another cross-training revolution. It feels like a rope connected to an anchor adrift in a bottomless ocean. I stay there and decide this must be my core -- an island of nothing, floating in the glow of a golden sun no one can see.

The TV keeps trying to suck me back into my mind, then out of it through a plastic straw into the artificial dream. They're talking about politics and Facebook again and I don't care. I refuse. I defy. I imagine a barbell flying through the screen and landing in the lap of the commentator. "Stop talking and start sweating." The media does not dictate my reality or what I think about. Better to stay in my belly. I'm founding a new country. I'm raising a flag of sovereign self on an island of nothing. Life is different down here. While needles and guitar strings dance across the surface, I'm building an empire of love, progress and strength.