Visualising what a frame for the small set of stairs will look like, spatially…
Tag Archives: meditation
Multiple layers of creativity?
How many layers of the creative process do you/I experience?
We experience the consumption of the creative process frequently, especially the creativity of our ancestors who invented language and others tools of our social structure — reading books, watching films/sporting events, listening to other people talking, learning through the apprenticeship method on how to mimic the use of tools to recreate something.
We constantly participate in the creative process when we rearrange words into sentences of our own, or even quoting others in the context of conversations, and when we use other tools in ways we hadn’t directly seen.
We create new tools.
We create new objects/processes with old tools.
We experience thoughts in the zeitgeist when we see/hear something and think/say, “Hey, I already thought of that or should have thought of that myself.” We are massively driven to think up the same independent inventive idea before seeing/hearing it from others.
I travel through time in my thoughts to keep me from being too much stuck in the jointly shared mass media moment. We all do.
We remember moments previously experienced and yet to be conceived in our linearly lived corporeal existence.
How then shall I ensure my future self on Mars gets as equal a stimuli-enriched existence as the one I have now?
How does one keeps the creative juices flowing?
What motivates us to go from thought to action?
What is creativity?
I let my many moods/personalities wander my thought trails as undisciplined and uncontrolled as I can.
In my thoughts, a character who believes only in practical, no-nonsense, utilitarianism struggles for attention with the no-worries, anything-goes, live-and-let-live ambling wanderer who believes nothing is absolute.
Giving time to both characters without a desire to balance attention to them is tougher in some moments than others.
What is true randomness in the thinking process?
How is it related to creativity?
What is the discipline to physically manifest the completion of one (of many) project(s) one mentally creates on the fly?
If it wasn’t for hunger and other body functions like the itching numbness in my buttocks, could I sit here for days at a time watching the weeds and trees grow in my yard during changing weather patterns?
Childhood dreams
All of us doodled during our childhoods, didn’t we?
I sure did. Only one image remains — a childhood drawing on the wall next to my bed, photographed before my parents painted it over…
Returning to centre
For several years, I had meditated upon the quietude of life on the edge of a forest.
I had personally celebrated seasonal events, recording them here, such as tree leafing, flower blooming and concentrated water vapor succumbing to gravity in the form of rain.
In other words, I had developed a new persona after years of cultivating the office manager role.
But my benefactor, my sponsor of this adventure — my wife — wanted her own adventure using her disposable income to include me with her so we took up the social interaction known as ballroom dancing, which led to Balboa and then West Coast dance forms.
We met new friends whom I have transformed into fictional characters here and elsewhere.
My wife saw that our disposable income had soon been almost all spent on dancing, including out-of-town weekend competitions and dance studio showcases, not to mention weekly lessons.
Her happiness lessened.
Thus, it was no surprise that, while visiting a partner of one of our dance instructors, we were [in]voluntarily shown images of polyamorous/swinger sessions involving some of our dance instructors in an unidentified hotel room, my wife found yet another reason to distance ourselves from the dance instructors who had been burning through my wife’s disposable income.
My wife is purely monogamous — I am her only intimate mate.
She has zero interest in extramarital bedroom activities.
It was one thing for her to suspect the possibility that the out-of-town events served as a cover for swingers to get together on the pretense of dance competitions.
It was quite another for her to visually be exposed to images confirming her suspicions.
It raised a lot of questions for her such as the likelihood that a dance instructor and/or another person with whom she socially danced would pass on a debilitating or incurable infection they acquired through extramarital sexual encounters — a bloody sneeze, an open wound accidentally contacting her mouth or other mucus membrane, etc.
Plus there was for her the stigma of general association with swingers, an activity she did not condemn but also not condone, something she was not involved with at any time or in any way during her upbringing.
So it seems we are probably finished with social dancing for now, if not forever (she also has a bone spur under her Achilles tendon that makes walking AND dancing painful).
Although I thoroughly enjoyed social dancing with others, despite the minimal risks, even if I wasn’t all that good, I am happy to return to my hermit’s life in the woods, conjuring up my scientists and team of comedy writers to keep me entertained while watching the flora and fauna around me change with the seasons.
I have other celestial bodies in the universe to explore, leaving alone the political, military and religious arguments of my species.
Next on my list, however, is building a grave marker for Merlin and a small bridge across the wet-weather creekbed that separates our driveway from the woods where Merlin is buried. I would love to construct something fanciful such as the one below but will be satisfied with a simple marker and a minimalist bridge.
WHAT I WANT TO BUILD…
WHAT I WILL PROBABLY BUILD (agile design methodology)…
Meanwhile, I’m staying away from Facebook — my satire/sarcasm is lost on the literalists (as opposed to Federalists (or just not exclusively them)), and some of my posts seem to bring out the “crazies” in large numbers?
I am a forest introvert at heart — best keep to my natural surroundings and enjoy life with Rick as long as he lives!
Farewell, my feline friend!
We said goodbye to our big buddy, our Cornish Rex cat named Merlin, who died in my arms a little while ago. Watching death is never easy (I have a deep appreciation for people working in hospitals and other places where death is frequently observed) — the convulsions, the crying out, looking into your eyes for comfort, help, something…anything…the struggle to restart the heart and keep breathing…the last breath…the last twitches of the ear.
He almost died earlier this afternoon and I comforted him, telling it was all right to go to sleep but he didn’t want to. He perked up when he heard the garage door opener, knowing Janeil was coming into the house. She held him while I ran out to get dinner. She then handed to me after I returned, because he was begging for me one last time, and he was gone within minutes.
He turned 16 Earth years old on the 20th of May. The last three days I had been washing fleece blankets because Merlin could no longer control his bladder. I put him in a warm fleece blanket one more time late this afternoon when I picked up his body, knowing he was dying because his back legs no longer worked. His cooling body is curled up in a box beside me, waiting to be buried after I write this Facebook entry.
Dear boy, you were a great friend to my wife, me, and your [half]brother Erin, who already walks around the house searching for you.
Who would have thought two months ago, when Erin was coughing up blood and you seemed to be fine, that you would be the first to go?
To you, my sofa and bed companion, my lap heater, who a few days ago was pushing me out of the way, even in a weakened condition, for his own corner of the couch, I raise a toast in your name! Beannacht leat go bhfeicfidh mé aris thú!
There was a boy…
There was a boy.
He, in today’s world, might have been diagnosed on the autism spectrum (or pick your other favourite euphemism for “we medical professionals aren’t really sure”).
He was in constant pain, a pain without a locus, a locust without a home, a home without a crop, a crop without a horse.
He did not know he was in pain.
He didn’t even know to assume that his condition was normal or not.
He wasn’t aware he was a boy.
Labels were given to him, labels that others insisted he adopt as his own.
These others, bigger than the boy, operated out of fear, misunderstanding and something the boy couldn’t quite put a finger on.
He knew he was supposed to care about these others.
But he lived in a different world than they did, on another plane, in another universe, somewhere not quite completely connected with the others.
He was alone with himself, sometimes sad, sometimes happy, sometimes mad, sometimes sane, always in pain.
He had a point to make — he wanted to be free of pain.
To be free of pain meant only one thing to him: he wanted death.
People died because of his actions.
People were tortured and survived because of the boy’s temporal wants and needs, wants and needs imposed upon the boy by the others.
The boy really wanted to care about people who suffered and died to meet his wants and needs, people he’d never meet, people who lived out there somewhere in their own imaginary universes, their homes with locusts and crops.
But the boy didn’t care.
The boy didn’t care because he only knew how to be alive.
Whirlwinds of people swept the boy up into their storms, a rush of excitement like a carnival of lights and sounds, making the boy smile, laugh, and forget his simple happiness of being alive.
Left alone, the boy sat by himself in silence.
He sat in his unknown pain and waited to die.
Contented.
Years passed.
A half century or more.
The boy thought maybe he had changed a little.
He forgot a lot.
He repeated himself more and more.
He closed his eyes and slept.
One last, long sleep, drifting into a painfree foreverness…
There was a boy.
No more.
Actions instead of words
Caught in a whirlwind of sets of states of energy called thoughts within a central nervous system of which the spongy portion we call the brain is supposed to be an important portion…
Wondering who someone with my name is like.
Because my life with my name took a different tack.
History repeats itself sometimes, too — novella description from Oct 30 2008:
Even breathing has consequences.
Lee loved his wife unconditionally. Yet, just as domestic love wanted to rivet him down for good, Lee desired to explore free love. Does free love include sex? Is there really no such thing as a free lunch?
Fredirique entered Lee’s life and turned it upside down. Will Lee surrender to Fredirique’s fun and games in the city or will Lee return to the quiet domestic bliss he’d learn to savor in the suburbs?
Lee thought he had to pay the price for unrequited love, his guilty conscience serving in his mind as judge and jury — will he give himself a life sentence or time off for good behavior?
Some people are driven to have so much fun, to push themselves past where pain would stop most everyone else, to achieve accomplishments that no other member of our species has or will again.
I danced because I liked to have fun — my willingness to memorise long sequences of dance moves, to memorise any long sequence at all, has never been my strong suit — thus, I let myself flail around rather than succumb to suppressing my unwillingness to control my body/thoughts in specific contortions.
I love life. My goals are simple: to live.
The wild, uncontrollable part of me is not so wild or uncontrollable as others — not the least nor most wildest, not the least nor most uncontrollable.
However, on this planet we should allow each other to be as wild or uncontrollable as we want as long as we don’t adversely interfere with the same from others.
Civilisation is the intersection of our concepts of wild and uncontrollable, in almost infinite form.
Today, I piece back together thought patterns in an attempt to remove the repetitively painful portions…
To return to my peaceful self again.
Meditating in nature.
Happiness is being myself.
Myself being fluid yet fixed.
Despite years of writing blog entries, still the most popular one read every week: where/when I mentioned the Seven Ages of Man.
I am happy to die today. I have made peace with myself.
I can breathe.
No need to compare my life to others.
I can write about the peace of breathing but words do not do the breathing for me.
Have a great day! Time to spend more time breathing, less time writing.
Zip plus four at five
Lee stood on top of the concrete parapet, examining the old ruins of a courtyard, trees decades old — sweetgum, redbud, mimosa — splitting the pathway pavers, now covered with green and brown patches — moss and lichen.
Hands in a pair of faded blue denim jeans, he looked up at stone columns, chipped and cracked.
A turkey vulture circled overhead.
Lee sighed. A few minutes earlier he’d found a glass-enclosed bookcase full of handwritten notebooks, most of the ink and pencil scratching barely legible.
A mailing envelope addressed from Troy State University, stamped by the government bulk mail office with a date of May 18 ’97, contained a voting ballot that had been faxed on (TUE) 05.20.1997 16:36:
1997 ALABAMA SPORTSWRITERS BALLOT
AMATEUR ATHLETE OF THE YEAR
Please award 3 points to your first choice, 2 points to your second
choice and 1 point to your third choice.
IMPORTANT: Deadline for voting is MAY 21…fax your ballot to
(205) 345-1260…
___ James Cason, Birmingham Southern, basketball.
___ Shalonda Enis, University of Alabama, women’s basketball.
___Tim Hudson, Auburn University, baseball.
___ Pratt Lyons, Troy State University, football.
___Dwayne Rudd, University of Alabama, football.
___ Meredith Willard, University of Alabama, Gymnastics.
1997? Where had the time gone?
Lee had stood on the same parapet in 1997, examining not the ruins of a long-gone civilisation but, instead, the height of victory, himself a sportswriter covering local stories in northeast Alabama, looking for positive, uplifting stories to write about grade school children and their athletic accomplishments despite hardship or because of it.
He made real as an adult the childhood dreams at five years of age of writing for a newspaper.
How many more dreams had he created in youth not yet realised…
He reached for a mug resting on a one-metre tall overturned garden vase and sipped the last of the British tea, a weak concoction squeezed from a teabag that had been steeped too many times to count, the actual flavour of the tea more a memory than a sensation on his tongue, a simple excuse to boil and filter the water before drinking.
Lee sat on the vase and leaned his head back, feeling the sun’s warmth on his face, neck and upper chest, the sunny winter day a respite from weeks of hard snow in north Alabama.
He knew the past and had a heightened awareness of his future, as sharp and clear as a stainless steel knife, an antique cutting device worth more than water in some parts of his home planet, two of which he’d found at the bottom of the bookcase and tucked into his right knee sock.
A sense of calm passed through his body and he smiled.
Although the first few decades of the 21st century had challenged Lee’s sense of place in the universe, he had remained the same, true to himself first and foremost, using humorous deflection and distraction to move obstacles out of his path.
Some days, he did not move at all. A month might pass before he completed a single step.
He accepted the role of chaos in his life without question.
Eventually, he quit questioning why he had chosen a particular route through intertwining and backtracking pathways, trusting his instincts enhanced by experience.
He stood up and turned around, facing the wooded glade that had once been a meditation garden.
Lee bowed in reverence, in deference, in honour, in memory of this place in another time, the end of the last century.
He closed his eyes.
He centered his thoughts, circling them in an imaginary mantra, a sphere that used to serve as an impenetrable shield disguised as personality masks and emotional glue forming the appearance of a logical whole.
Lee meditated upon the misconception of the meaning of time.
He let go of conscious thought as he quietly told himself that time was only the recognition of change, just like taking a smaller or bigger breath would have a ripple effect in his immediate surroundings but little else.
There was a sol when he lived on Earth and looked at a countdown clock showing 13228 days to go.
Lee recalled thoughts of friendships in flux, a constantly interweaving web of changing relationships which spun a cocoon around him that made him feel warm and loved but which he had to keep stepping out of on his quest to get to Mars with the very same friends in the next century.
A leader stays focused on his vision, never letting gravity stopping him from achieving escape velocity when an unexplored galaxy is within his electromechanical cloned arm’s reach.
A pink cement kind of night
This blog has served as a repository for ideas and observations.
Occasionally, real life is so much more interesting than fiction that I want to record every word and action not only for diary/journal recall but also as a way of telling us that no matter what we’re facing in life, regardless of how lonely/insecure/helpless we feel, someone else has probably experienced the same thing and survived.
I have decisions to make and a quiet moment to contemplate where/how to toss pebbles into the pond of life…
treetrunkdings 