Not so fast...

Over on the bg site I frequent, they are already shouting "HNY!" Happy new year, in case you can't figure it out :)

But... It's December 27th. There are 4 days left. Inside my head, I am screaming, "Nooooooo, waaaaiiiitttttt! It's going too fast!"

2011 was a hard year. It was hard, financially. I'm just not very good with money, and the recession hasn't helped.

It was hard, personally, emotionally. I took some risks and they have paid off, my life is richer for them. But there were also some losses and disappointments, which I took very hard. I keep looking at my heart charm and seeing that little heart, ripped open (see Shambhala) and trying to remember that's how it is supposed to be.

It was hard, healthwise - but not really. I'm fine! A little anxiety as frosting on top of the already-overstuffed anxiety layer cake - but I'm fine! Except for the bills... Too low levels of thyroid medication, as it turns out, didn't help much either. But I'm fine now! Almost.

And it was hard, creatively. Or rather... it was very rich creatively, almost too rich. I have way more ideas than I have time, and this year it wasn't just my own natural procrastination that got in my way.

When I did make time for it, it was very fruitful. The Radical Jewelry Makeover was RAD, a tremendous blessing, a very healthy kick in the pants. I need to write my thoughts about it, for it changed my creativity and thinking profoundly, and I want to complete that writing before the year is out... 2011, SLOW DOWN!!!

Overall, my creativity was fruitful and fitful, lots of stops and starts.

2011 was just so full of clutter.

Here's hoping that 2012 is more fruit than fits!

But please, please - can we wait until Saturday before we begin?! I'd like to get through this year in one piece first...


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rafting

I woke up yesterday with the image in my mind of a wobbly raft out on the ocean. I thought, perhaps meditation is the raft that keeps us afloat.

Then I thought, perhaps meditation is supposed to help us get rid of the raft, help us be in the ocean, one with it, one with life with all its saltiness, endless horizon, the overwhelming reality. Learn to float.

I don't know.

I'm going to start reading Shambhala again.


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why Shambhala is related to creativity

I remembered to ask my teacher yesterday.

Courage.

Shambhala is about courage.

Making art is about courage.

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the void (or the sphere of sensibility)

Dealing with some loss, and the griefing process, and also still with Shambhala and Pema Chodron,  I've had some.... not depressing thoughts, but... um.... thoughtful thoughts.

I'm not sure when I started thinking about the void.  Maybe it was last week, when I decided to cancel the cable.  I used to be a rabid television watcher, but the first part of this year I stopped almost completely.  (BP?  Oil spill?  Huh?)  Going back to it this summer, I noticed I wasn't really watching it, so much as endlessly flipping through the channels in search of something TO watch.  There was not much interesting to see.  And WAY too many commercials.  Plus, Comcast has added a crawl on the bottom of the screen, something about "digital improvements" blah blah blah - which will either cost me more money per month, or it means I have to buy a new television because mine isn't... digital enough, I guess.

I called Comcast to find out, and the customer service woman implied that I was stealing channels - getting channels that I wasn't paying for.  As if I had hacked it.  Which I didn't.  I can't help it if they can't keep track of what gets piped into my home.  Anyway, she made it very easy to cancel it in an indignant huff.  Plus, I'm getting a new ISP, so I think I'll be able to stream most shows I want to see.  And I have 464 movies on my list at Netflix.  There will be plenty to watch.

Still, there is a sense of losing a connection to the world.  The ability to see things in real time - watching the news on September 11th comes to mind.  But for the most part, it doesn't seem to be information I need to know, or that has any real bearing on my life, or that I can't access elsewhere, like the library or the internet.

It does, however, seem to make me be less present to what is directly around me.

I had this thought, a few days ago, that the only things I can truly know are those things directly in my line of sight.  Or smell, or taste, or touch, or hear.  As if there is a sphere of sensibility that surrounds me, and moves with me, and that is what I can actually know.

And it is all I can know.  Everything beyond, or outside of the sphere, is essentially void.  I cannot know it, I cannot possess it, I cannot control anything outside the sphere.  I have to trust, as I move around, that my body carries the sphere of sensibility with it, so I can be present anywhere - but then the other stuff no longer in the sphere becomes void.

The visual of it is not unlike the photos of the planet Earth as it drifts in space.  All the blackness of the void.  Kinda scary :(

These electronic things - cell phones, internet, television - seem to extend our sphere of sensibility.  Little thin lines of electrons spewing out to and fro, circling the world.  If you are very active... well, there's a reason they call it the web.

Yet, the digital age is so ephemeral.  Not like when you used to get a postcard, or a letter.  If it were special, it gets a pretty box, and the letter lives in it, and the box lives in a special drawer.  Go to the box, open the drawer, take the letter out and look at it again.  Hold it in your hand, and show it to other people.  Eventually, it would show the wear and tear, the patina of the journey, developing a worn spot where your fingers touch it, and a fine progression of wrinkles where the paper bends as you turn it over time and time again.

Now, in our digital age, when the line is cut, it's gone.  No evidence that it - the feeling, the thought, the memory, even the person - even existed.  Disposable.  Don't even have to carry out the trash.

Poof.

It's one reason I think I am really going to like this business that I am starting - silver charms for charm bracelets.  Little shiny memories, feelings and thoughts you can roll around in your fingertips.  Keeping the void at bay.

I know, I know.  That's an illusion, too.  Paper doesn't last.  Silver doesn't last.  In some ways, maybe the digital age is more honest.  The void is ever encroaching, bigger than our powers can comprehend.  

As I said elsewhere, it is why we must be brave.

Sound depressing?  It could be.  But I realized this morning - what Shambhala is trying to teach me is that the only way to live, the only way to keep the darkness at bay as a human being, is to remain open.  To know and accept that the void is there, to shine the light as bright as possible, and to expand the sphere - this gift of existence that I have been given - as much as I can.

Ephemeral or not.  :)
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messages, thoughts, and beliefs

I am ruminating about Shambhala, tumbling the words over and over in my head, which seems to resemble a rock tumbler...  complete with rocks.

There is a section in Chapter Nine: Celebrating the Journey, the part about the bow and arrow, and messages.  When I read it the first time, I had great trouble with this section, but it seemed very rich and full even though I didn't understand it, or know how to incorporate it in a practice.

I was thinking about messages, and thoughts and beliefs today.  I verbalized for myself the idea that it is not the thoughts that are troublesome.  According to this book, you just label them "thoughts", and allow them to float away.  To this end, I like to visualize my thoughts being written on little scraps of some sort of melty paperlike substance, and I catch them and pin them on the inside of my skull and let them dissolve, rather than let them float around.  It gets clogged in there if I don't pin them down.

But I have the habit of letting thoughts solidify.  They become rock hard, then immoveable.  Or sometimes they become brittle and then they break and become shards and stab me with their little sharp edges.  It's not the thoughts that are troublesome.  It's my habit of making them solid. They become beliefs.  Big, beefy, heavy, sharp, brittle, rocklike beliefs.  Even if they aren't true. Then I eventually do something neurotic because of them.

So, thinking these things, I went back.  I looked up "messages" in the index of the book, and found that section again, and there were these words that leapt out at me:

"You want to look at every situation and examine it, so that you won't be fooling yourself by relying on belief alone..."

Maybe I am absorbing some of this book after all!  That whole section now makes a kind of sense to me.  And it's great.  I love these kinds of books - so rich, and so deep, and you can go back to them year after year and discover something new.

In case anyone is wondering, this book does have something to do with creativity.  I'm not sure exactly what yet...  but I was originally introduced to it by one of my art teachers.  She assigned it as the text for a previous jewelry-making class, two or three years ago.  If I remember, I'll ask her when I see her next week (I am currently in another of her classes.)

If nothing else, I am hopeful that it will prevent me from making neurotic art.

To that end, work progresses; here is the lil boat today:

lil boat

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people who care

Working on Shambhala, he talks a lot about tenderness of the heart, the broken heart.  I've found this confusing, and unspecific.  I haven't been sure how to work with it.  Sometimes I think, "Oh, I wish this were in English!"

But it is in English, and there's nothing wrong with the English.  It's the concept that's foreign.

Yesterday, I had a thought.  "People who care don't let go."  I was very pleased with myself.  It was all nice and tidy.

"People who care don't let go."  Oh, I thought it explained so much!

As I kept thinking about it though, I realized - it's too easy.  I'm right at Chapter Seven, the part about the cocoon.  Is this something I have pinned to the wall of my cocoon?  Right there next to the Peter Frampton poster?

"People who care don't let go."

There's something trite about it.  Something self-righteous.  Something controlling.  It allows me to vilify, and to stick everyone who has left into a category.  It's judgmental.  It's a good line in a bad movie - the kind of line they would put in the trailer to make you think, "Oh, this movie is going to be good, it's clever!"  Then you watch the movie and you realize.... no, it isn't.

Then I changed it.

"People who care do let go."

Wow, that's painful.

But it explains a lot too.  It feels more open.  Anger and fear drops away, and all that's left is truth and space.

"People who care do let go."

There is space, but there's no room left for vilification or judgment.  Or ego.  It is only space.

It just is.  It isn't "about" and it isn't "because".  It just is.

It makes much more sense.

It's a real good poke with a stick, that.

The heart does feel more tender, and more full.

It's why we need to be brave.

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warrior world

That combination of love affair and loneliness is what enables the warrior to constantly reach out to help others. By renouncing his private world, the warrior discovers a greater universe and a fuller and fuller broken heart.

-Shambhala, The Sacred Path of the Warrior, by Chogyam Trungpa


Oy, I need to redesign this thing today, or at some point. I'm still working on my other website.

But this one needs some visual depth...

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