In my experience it is not good to rush some creative moments. There are at least two aspects of this. The first is that I can get my mind set that a certain set of circumstances are going to be the context for the work only to have someone change something fundamental – the budget, timeline, venu, etc. With so many players in the piece at the ROM I sense that this is about 100% likely to happen in the next few days.
Secondly and most significantly, listening to that other space is essential – the space beyond my personal mind where better answers to good questions come from. A few “sleeps” improves the quality of what I’m up to immeasurably.
So I am quite the procrastinator in some areas of my life – like in producing a creative brief for the May exhibit. I do know that I must produce a good draft on Monday or risk putting the whole show in jeopardy.
I was whimsically considering how my mind distracts me when this invisible process is unfolding. There are numbers – counting things. For example, I noticed many days ago that these writings go from page 1 to page 2 somewhere around lines 44 to 46. So I will look down occasionally (like now!), see that I am at line 20 and calculate that I’m about 48% of the way to being able to call this a two page document. If I’m not too excited about what I’m writing I do more calculations – go figure (joke!)
Then there are a growing variety of computer games that I can play using my Morse Code interface. Freecell is my stand-by since I stop using a Mac (traitor!) a few years back. Macs have a built in jigsaw puzzle program where you can insert one of your own photos or drawings. I miss that distraction in a big way.
Recently I was introduced to Farmville on Facebook. That promises to be a very effective tool of distraction! A player even gets ribbons for ever higher levels of time wasting behaviour.
I used to be an avid builder of Sim Cities. When I built my first one I sat for 5 hours straight thinking I had been at it for maybe 1 ½. No wonder my aging butt hurts so much! The Windows Vista OS doesn’t run Sim programs, much to my despair. Just what was the point of Vista anyway? Last week Nick introduced me to a program called Virtual Computer that partitions part of the hard drive and allows the owner to use an older Windows OS. I have downloaded Sim Towers, but not yet actually used it. Farmville!
I do not have a TV as I consider the whole thing to be designed to make one stupid. Nevertheless, Nick eagerly downloads episodes of House for me. One show lasts just as long as his evening break. It is to our mutual advantage that I have become rather interested in this melodramatic hospital show.
And the most effective tool of procrastination of all is to do something else that I have been meaning to get around to but: “haven’t had the time”. Just as some suddenly discover a closet that NEEDS reorganizing the day before a big exam, I have a storehouse of old e-mails and other writings that can easily become suddenly urgent and take up a couple of hours of creative space.
This is line 5 on page 2! Good night!
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Monday, November 29, 2010
November 29, 2010
Today brought the first meeting with the ROM.
Mike Skubic, Michael Rubenfeld and I with Sarah Garton Stanley on a speaker phone met six officials of the museum in a huge board room after passing through two sets of secured entrances. It left me feeling a little like Bambi meeting Godzilla, but not too much. The gathering was still very much about me, my art, the play and my legacy and I was very much being listened to and taken seriously.
A few moments were nearly incomprehensible to me – like when I was asked what the insurable value of my art would be. So many of my pieces are on dollar store canvas boards. Most have been produced in less than two hours. The largest price I have ever earned was $500. Insurable value?
The meeting was useful for us to get our bearings. Godzilla has traditions, policies, internal politics, union reinforced job descriptions, rigid time schedules and really bad coffee. We have to learn the ropes. Inclusion isn’t about “doing our own thing” – it is about seemingly incompatible entities finding ways to authentically express their essences while being mutually supportive and, in so doing, creating space for the unimagined to emerge.
It was good to see the space within which the 3 to 6 month exhibit will take place. It is a relatively small but well lit and not to noisy room. It really is an anteroom, along the pathway to the dinosaurs. This means that there will always be lots of traffic through the room but that many “visitors” will not initially have the inclination to stop.
At this juncture, because of this pathway, I am imaging designing a “highway” where signs will be posted that there is to be no stopping due to dangerous circumstances. At the same time there can also be more subtle invitations to stop and stay awhile, to discover something magical about life and yourself!
I don’t feel that this exhibit will be as much about my art as about the various stages I have been through in developing my own ideas about Inclusion. My art will be one vehicle of several used to get the ideas across. We will be using the play, video and I hope something interactive that pulls people into the exploration. I also hope that the exhibit can appeal to children and teenagers. Currently the ROM officials mainly talked about children as if the main concerns about them are their safety and that they might destroy stuff!
There is no sense at all of what, if any, financial opportunity there is in this. I attempted to express that to do this well I, and others, would have to give up other opportunities to make money. The process does not reveal anything about money at this point. First things first in the ROM’s way of doing things is to produce a document – a proposal with a creative theme – that gives them a sense of what they will be committing to. They get to say back if it’s doable. They say back what they are willing to do and not do. To me it’s like negotiating in the dark, but at least after today, it’s a little less dark.
I am in a very strange space indeed. On the one hand my creative juices are being called on like never before. On the other I am dollars away from bankruptcy, only weeks away from serious illness and suddenly playing with the “big boys” – people who have the capacity to take my legacy very far indeed but also who have very different agendas than mine.
Mike Skubic, Michael Rubenfeld and I with Sarah Garton Stanley on a speaker phone met six officials of the museum in a huge board room after passing through two sets of secured entrances. It left me feeling a little like Bambi meeting Godzilla, but not too much. The gathering was still very much about me, my art, the play and my legacy and I was very much being listened to and taken seriously.
A few moments were nearly incomprehensible to me – like when I was asked what the insurable value of my art would be. So many of my pieces are on dollar store canvas boards. Most have been produced in less than two hours. The largest price I have ever earned was $500. Insurable value?
The meeting was useful for us to get our bearings. Godzilla has traditions, policies, internal politics, union reinforced job descriptions, rigid time schedules and really bad coffee. We have to learn the ropes. Inclusion isn’t about “doing our own thing” – it is about seemingly incompatible entities finding ways to authentically express their essences while being mutually supportive and, in so doing, creating space for the unimagined to emerge.
It was good to see the space within which the 3 to 6 month exhibit will take place. It is a relatively small but well lit and not to noisy room. It really is an anteroom, along the pathway to the dinosaurs. This means that there will always be lots of traffic through the room but that many “visitors” will not initially have the inclination to stop.
At this juncture, because of this pathway, I am imaging designing a “highway” where signs will be posted that there is to be no stopping due to dangerous circumstances. At the same time there can also be more subtle invitations to stop and stay awhile, to discover something magical about life and yourself!
I don’t feel that this exhibit will be as much about my art as about the various stages I have been through in developing my own ideas about Inclusion. My art will be one vehicle of several used to get the ideas across. We will be using the play, video and I hope something interactive that pulls people into the exploration. I also hope that the exhibit can appeal to children and teenagers. Currently the ROM officials mainly talked about children as if the main concerns about them are their safety and that they might destroy stuff!
There is no sense at all of what, if any, financial opportunity there is in this. I attempted to express that to do this well I, and others, would have to give up other opportunities to make money. The process does not reveal anything about money at this point. First things first in the ROM’s way of doing things is to produce a document – a proposal with a creative theme – that gives them a sense of what they will be committing to. They get to say back if it’s doable. They say back what they are willing to do and not do. To me it’s like negotiating in the dark, but at least after today, it’s a little less dark.
I am in a very strange space indeed. On the one hand my creative juices are being called on like never before. On the other I am dollars away from bankruptcy, only weeks away from serious illness and suddenly playing with the “big boys” – people who have the capacity to take my legacy very far indeed but also who have very different agendas than mine.
Sunday, November 28, 2010
November 28, 2010
I had the best dinner tonight!
Over these last two months food and beverage have been a constant concern. My recovery from the infection, my loss of bladder function and the effort to live creatively with pain (and increasingly less pain!) all depended in some way on what I eat.
During the hospital days and immediately thereafter the concern was THAT I eat. My various accommodations to swallowing difficulties, nausea from pain medication and the infection left me dangerously malnourished. By the way malnourishment is a theme that ran through my transition from Cycle 1 to Cycle 2. Hmm!
It was truly comforting deep in the hospital days to have Stanley, the nutrition researcher, glow over practically every mouthful I took and to have him rejoice as the quantities of food I ingested increased day by day.
As soon as I got home my friends, especially Gloria, filled my kitchen and freezer with very excellent food – so much that six weeks later I still have some of it!
With Jen’s guidance it soon became apparent that I needed to, and actually wanted to, shift what I consider to be an ordinary day’s way of eating. I literally felt like I was starving for the first few weeks and that certainly helped my motivation to try eating differently. This was boosted by the realization that different habits would let me stop using those foul laxatives!!
The fundamental problem was that any pain medication that works for me also slows my bowels, creating the blockage that interferes with my bladder (and shut it down for a month!) thus increasing the pain and driving up the use of medication, which slows down my…..
The three necessities were to eliminate gluten, increase noncaffeinated fluids and get more fibre into me. As straight forward as this may sound there are tricky conundrums, such as that oatmeal, though high in fibre is also high in gluten, as is chicken – the one meat my friends (not Gloria!) most want to provide. I have never been a big vegetable eater and now my limitations in chewing and swallowing eliminate any chance of salads. Day by day I found better combinations AND experimented with how much of my old habits (cheese anyone) were tolerable (not much!)
I got a slow cooker, discovered congee, started to carry a thermos of herbal tea and made many, many other changes.
It has become clear that it is useless to go to the Food Bank because everything they have is no longer food to me – wheat pastas, hot dogs, milk, etc.
Like everybody else I exist in a cultural pattern and such a drastic change has been confronting along with welcome. I am basically British in heritage and inclination. The first time I went to my ancestral homeland, England, I was amazed and awed that I was offered cream on nearly everything I ate. After a few days I reconnected with memories of my Mother’s cooking – stewed hamburger, cornflakes and tuna fish, boiled cod – and I realized that in the English soul food is fundamentally brown. That is, the colour of British food varies from the white and brown of crusty bread, through the cream to beige of fish and chips, puddings and pasties, to the deep brown of sausages, burnt toast, gravy and blood pudding.
Tonight, in complete agreement with food that works for me, I had roast beef (brown), potatoes and onions baked with a rosemary dressing (lighter brown), sauerkraut (beige), pumpkin pie (orangy brown) and lemon herbal tea (yellowy brown).
I am full and in heaven!
Over these last two months food and beverage have been a constant concern. My recovery from the infection, my loss of bladder function and the effort to live creatively with pain (and increasingly less pain!) all depended in some way on what I eat.
During the hospital days and immediately thereafter the concern was THAT I eat. My various accommodations to swallowing difficulties, nausea from pain medication and the infection left me dangerously malnourished. By the way malnourishment is a theme that ran through my transition from Cycle 1 to Cycle 2. Hmm!
It was truly comforting deep in the hospital days to have Stanley, the nutrition researcher, glow over practically every mouthful I took and to have him rejoice as the quantities of food I ingested increased day by day.
As soon as I got home my friends, especially Gloria, filled my kitchen and freezer with very excellent food – so much that six weeks later I still have some of it!
With Jen’s guidance it soon became apparent that I needed to, and actually wanted to, shift what I consider to be an ordinary day’s way of eating. I literally felt like I was starving for the first few weeks and that certainly helped my motivation to try eating differently. This was boosted by the realization that different habits would let me stop using those foul laxatives!!
The fundamental problem was that any pain medication that works for me also slows my bowels, creating the blockage that interferes with my bladder (and shut it down for a month!) thus increasing the pain and driving up the use of medication, which slows down my…..
The three necessities were to eliminate gluten, increase noncaffeinated fluids and get more fibre into me. As straight forward as this may sound there are tricky conundrums, such as that oatmeal, though high in fibre is also high in gluten, as is chicken – the one meat my friends (not Gloria!) most want to provide. I have never been a big vegetable eater and now my limitations in chewing and swallowing eliminate any chance of salads. Day by day I found better combinations AND experimented with how much of my old habits (cheese anyone) were tolerable (not much!)
I got a slow cooker, discovered congee, started to carry a thermos of herbal tea and made many, many other changes.
It has become clear that it is useless to go to the Food Bank because everything they have is no longer food to me – wheat pastas, hot dogs, milk, etc.
Like everybody else I exist in a cultural pattern and such a drastic change has been confronting along with welcome. I am basically British in heritage and inclination. The first time I went to my ancestral homeland, England, I was amazed and awed that I was offered cream on nearly everything I ate. After a few days I reconnected with memories of my Mother’s cooking – stewed hamburger, cornflakes and tuna fish, boiled cod – and I realized that in the English soul food is fundamentally brown. That is, the colour of British food varies from the white and brown of crusty bread, through the cream to beige of fish and chips, puddings and pasties, to the deep brown of sausages, burnt toast, gravy and blood pudding.
Tonight, in complete agreement with food that works for me, I had roast beef (brown), potatoes and onions baked with a rosemary dressing (lighter brown), sauerkraut (beige), pumpkin pie (orangy brown) and lemon herbal tea (yellowy brown).
I am full and in heaven!
Saturday, November 27, 2010
November 27, 2010
Once upon a time according to the calendar above my bed this was going to be a “do nothing” day. Ha, ha. I am busy dealing with contractual and fundraising issues that have already arisen days before my first official meeting with the ROM, and the shock to some of this sudden apparent change of plans.
I am not blaming anyone who thinks I am unreliable due to this sudden shift. I COULD have said “No” to the ROM. I could have said: “Sorry, I have been busy creating a very different spring, and I won’t have time for you.” I didn’t.
Anyway, enough of that. Nothing is “real” until contracts are signed and until then the emotional energy is best directed elsewhere, in my opinion.
So I went dancing.
There is an annual party put on by and for caregivers who are mostly women and mainly Philippino domestics who are intent on getting landed immigrant status in Canada while sending as much money home as possible to bring family members here. Another typical scenario is that they are saving to buy a home in the Philippines. I got to know several such people through a long term friendship with a man – Tim (now pronounced “Teem” since he married such a caregiver) who has a lifetime commitment to providing good support to vulnerable people.
I am aware that the situation surrounding “imported” caregivers is fraught with abuses and fundamentally is established to put these people at an economic disadvantage. However I have never met such a person who wasn’t enthusiastic about the arrangement. Those I have met seem to have been planning since early teenage to become either nurses or caregivers, to marry a man who will follow a similar path but in Saudia Arabia or Hong Kong, to meet up with him for six weeks every two years, and otherwise work six days a week and go to evangelistic church then party on the seventh. Five nights a week caregivers sleep at the “employer’s”, and on the other two nights they sleep two women to a bed in a two bedroom, eight person apartment.
It’s not an arrangement that many Canadians can fathom as a choice. Since running across this sub-culture I have marvelled.
One clear aspect of this lifestyle is that the women are very close to each other, hugging and kissing openly and frequently, dressing for each other – tonight they held a beauty pageant reminiscent of the “meat market” shows long out of favour in Canadian Caucasian culture – and paying much less attention to “eligible” men than I would expect in my familiar circles.
When they party they bring home cooked food and eat extravagantly, they sing and they dance – mostly with each other although men are not obviously excluded.
I love to dance when people are not coupling. When people are dancing in pairs moving a wheelchair on the dance floor can be an awkward and lonely effort. When it’s more free form, my presence seems to give people permission to strut their stuff in any way they can and to have a good time. People will try me out in ones or twos, doing their personal gyration for a short while, then move on. In the general moving on I get to go from person to person too, which is way easier to do in a wheelchair and more fun anyway to me.
Three times I have successfully done the couple thing on the dance floor, twice with a man. One guy and the woman are trained dancers, and all moulded their dance steps to the movements a wheelchair can actually do. I was able to keep up the dance in close “formation” for more than an hour – a feat of tremendous stamina and exhilaration for me and my partners.
I rarely get to dance. It’s something I love to do. Occasionally I remember and take steps to find an accessible place. Typically it’s too expensive or fixated on couple style dancing and I “forget” to pursue this pleasure.
But tonight I danced with Philippino women (and Teem). I had a great time. It is good to move my sore body again and to lose myself in the beat. It is a way to feel that I am “me”.
I am not blaming anyone who thinks I am unreliable due to this sudden shift. I COULD have said “No” to the ROM. I could have said: “Sorry, I have been busy creating a very different spring, and I won’t have time for you.” I didn’t.
Anyway, enough of that. Nothing is “real” until contracts are signed and until then the emotional energy is best directed elsewhere, in my opinion.
So I went dancing.
There is an annual party put on by and for caregivers who are mostly women and mainly Philippino domestics who are intent on getting landed immigrant status in Canada while sending as much money home as possible to bring family members here. Another typical scenario is that they are saving to buy a home in the Philippines. I got to know several such people through a long term friendship with a man – Tim (now pronounced “Teem” since he married such a caregiver) who has a lifetime commitment to providing good support to vulnerable people.
I am aware that the situation surrounding “imported” caregivers is fraught with abuses and fundamentally is established to put these people at an economic disadvantage. However I have never met such a person who wasn’t enthusiastic about the arrangement. Those I have met seem to have been planning since early teenage to become either nurses or caregivers, to marry a man who will follow a similar path but in Saudia Arabia or Hong Kong, to meet up with him for six weeks every two years, and otherwise work six days a week and go to evangelistic church then party on the seventh. Five nights a week caregivers sleep at the “employer’s”, and on the other two nights they sleep two women to a bed in a two bedroom, eight person apartment.
It’s not an arrangement that many Canadians can fathom as a choice. Since running across this sub-culture I have marvelled.
One clear aspect of this lifestyle is that the women are very close to each other, hugging and kissing openly and frequently, dressing for each other – tonight they held a beauty pageant reminiscent of the “meat market” shows long out of favour in Canadian Caucasian culture – and paying much less attention to “eligible” men than I would expect in my familiar circles.
When they party they bring home cooked food and eat extravagantly, they sing and they dance – mostly with each other although men are not obviously excluded.
I love to dance when people are not coupling. When people are dancing in pairs moving a wheelchair on the dance floor can be an awkward and lonely effort. When it’s more free form, my presence seems to give people permission to strut their stuff in any way they can and to have a good time. People will try me out in ones or twos, doing their personal gyration for a short while, then move on. In the general moving on I get to go from person to person too, which is way easier to do in a wheelchair and more fun anyway to me.
Three times I have successfully done the couple thing on the dance floor, twice with a man. One guy and the woman are trained dancers, and all moulded their dance steps to the movements a wheelchair can actually do. I was able to keep up the dance in close “formation” for more than an hour – a feat of tremendous stamina and exhilaration for me and my partners.
I rarely get to dance. It’s something I love to do. Occasionally I remember and take steps to find an accessible place. Typically it’s too expensive or fixated on couple style dancing and I “forget” to pursue this pleasure.
But tonight I danced with Philippino women (and Teem). I had a great time. It is good to move my sore body again and to lose myself in the beat. It is a way to feel that I am “me”.
Friday, November 26, 2010
November 26, 2010
Moods can be annoying!
Of course with yesterday’s great news there are complications. What will this do to my ODSP income, if anything? How does this affect the people who are expecting me to be more available to WPIT? Already I have had an offer to purchase four paintings from a speculator. Another person wanted me to share the news NOW with a group I haven’t gotten to yet.
None of this changes anything substantial. It just leaves that mood – that unwelcome sense of a “bad moon rising” – that sense of distraction that comes with having multiple agendas to untangle. What of all this is me – my expression?
Perhaps that is the point anyway. What is my expression in the face of being recognized? It’s one thing to be “out” trying to get “in”. It’s quite another, I suppose, to have come home to find that home is no more interested in Inclusion than anywhere else was.
Not that I thought it was – I just got disoriented for a moment! Whoops - sorry.
Inclusion hasn’t happened in the world yet, except for those momentary, seductive occasions that give one both a sense of what’s possible and the necessity to not hope unrealistically. There is still much work to do. The question is what is the good work to do now?
I love the heady beginnings of fun things. The video game project, the ROM. I’m not so fond of the negotiation part – sorting out mine and other’s agendas, often in a competitive stance.
There is nothing wrong with either the competition nor the fact that I don’t like it. In fact this is precisely where I get to show that Inclusion can actually happen. If we/I can come to grips with all the needs and diversities and have it work out with no one left out then the world really will have something to pay attention to!
So can I like it, or at least cease to resist it? Can I be the perfect matador and simply not be there for the moment the bull passes through the cape?
It’s not a challenge I had anticipated but neither is one I am unfamiliar with. This is just taking a Rubik’s cube life to another level.
I wonder when and what I will paint next. My familiar tracker quit this week, and although Mike is a good tracker, if he tracks for me on the days he works as a personal assistant it limits his break time. It seems ironic indeed that at the moment when the world will want to see me paint, I am almost as unprepared to do so as in the beginning in 2004.
So perhaps the genuine question for me to address now, in the few months before the exhibit happens, is who will paint with me in this upcoming year of public scrutiny?
Of course with yesterday’s great news there are complications. What will this do to my ODSP income, if anything? How does this affect the people who are expecting me to be more available to WPIT? Already I have had an offer to purchase four paintings from a speculator. Another person wanted me to share the news NOW with a group I haven’t gotten to yet.
None of this changes anything substantial. It just leaves that mood – that unwelcome sense of a “bad moon rising” – that sense of distraction that comes with having multiple agendas to untangle. What of all this is me – my expression?
Perhaps that is the point anyway. What is my expression in the face of being recognized? It’s one thing to be “out” trying to get “in”. It’s quite another, I suppose, to have come home to find that home is no more interested in Inclusion than anywhere else was.
Not that I thought it was – I just got disoriented for a moment! Whoops - sorry.
Inclusion hasn’t happened in the world yet, except for those momentary, seductive occasions that give one both a sense of what’s possible and the necessity to not hope unrealistically. There is still much work to do. The question is what is the good work to do now?
I love the heady beginnings of fun things. The video game project, the ROM. I’m not so fond of the negotiation part – sorting out mine and other’s agendas, often in a competitive stance.
There is nothing wrong with either the competition nor the fact that I don’t like it. In fact this is precisely where I get to show that Inclusion can actually happen. If we/I can come to grips with all the needs and diversities and have it work out with no one left out then the world really will have something to pay attention to!
So can I like it, or at least cease to resist it? Can I be the perfect matador and simply not be there for the moment the bull passes through the cape?
It’s not a challenge I had anticipated but neither is one I am unfamiliar with. This is just taking a Rubik’s cube life to another level.
I wonder when and what I will paint next. My familiar tracker quit this week, and although Mike is a good tracker, if he tracks for me on the days he works as a personal assistant it limits his break time. It seems ironic indeed that at the moment when the world will want to see me paint, I am almost as unprepared to do so as in the beginning in 2004.
So perhaps the genuine question for me to address now, in the few months before the exhibit happens, is who will paint with me in this upcoming year of public scrutiny?
Thursday, November 25, 2010
November 25, 2010
It’s relatively early in the day. I usually write these near 11:30pm and it’s just past 11:30am. I have just heard momentous news, and I am going to be writing e-mails to friends and colleagues everywhere. I figure I may as well do it this way, and take parts of this and turn it into the e-mails later. It might save some Morse Code puffing!
I have just heard that my paintings and the play – The Book of Judith (http://bookofjudithplay.blogspot.com/) – are going to be exhibited at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM). I am to be a guest curator. The theme will be my legacy of Inclusion and my growing understanding and message portrayed as art, video and other interactive elements. After a stationary instalment in the museum itself, we will tour both the play and art. This will be in partnership with the Trillium Foundation who are already backing a spring and fall tour of The Book of Judith.
In all it’s a year’s commitment to celebrating Inclusion and diversity.
Michael Rubenfeld and Sarah Garton Stanley are integral to the creation, development, production and presentation of the play. We will be in close collaboration for all of it!
Even the World Peace through Inclusive Transformation will get a leg up as this theme and initiative are very much part of my legacy. Will I finally be able to get research backing for the BMX Model of Inclusion?
Recognition and the opening of doors come in quiet and unassuming ways. Yesterday included a last minute rearrangement of my schedule so I could participate in a teleconference with the ROM. It was no big deal – I am always rearranging my schedule last minute. Staff needed on the spot support to put a last minute proposal in front of the museum’s exhibit selection committee. Today I was in bed, getting ready to get up so the technician could fix the electronics of my bed. The call came and my future shifted.
It’s such an ordinary moment that my emotions haven’t caught up. I get what Mike was saying about meeting with the video game producers on Monday. It’s such an ordinary day, unlike a special day that one has been preparing for - a wedding or graduation - that the obvious next step is to go have lunch. The overall mood is so ordinary, so: “Well, of course – what else would we do except say yes.” In the absence of a big high it nearly feels like a low.
Yet I have been preparing for this day in one way or another since I was four – 57 years. I am coming home to a rightful place in the world. I don’t need a big high right now. I need to place myself firmly in the passion for Inclusion that has carried me through these 57 years. I need to fully feel and express my gratitude for the opening, for the many hands – seen and unseen – that have carried me to this day, and for the vision, energy and courage I have been given to keep on working the path when there was no sign that this future was realizable. Hallelujah!
Michael and I will be at the ROM on Monday for the first production meeting, to find out really what we need to do to set up the contracts, partnerships, etc. Then we will go have a beer. By then I think I will be ready to celebrate!
I have just heard that my paintings and the play – The Book of Judith (http://bookofjudithplay.blogspot.com/) – are going to be exhibited at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM). I am to be a guest curator. The theme will be my legacy of Inclusion and my growing understanding and message portrayed as art, video and other interactive elements. After a stationary instalment in the museum itself, we will tour both the play and art. This will be in partnership with the Trillium Foundation who are already backing a spring and fall tour of The Book of Judith.
In all it’s a year’s commitment to celebrating Inclusion and diversity.
Michael Rubenfeld and Sarah Garton Stanley are integral to the creation, development, production and presentation of the play. We will be in close collaboration for all of it!
Even the World Peace through Inclusive Transformation will get a leg up as this theme and initiative are very much part of my legacy. Will I finally be able to get research backing for the BMX Model of Inclusion?
Recognition and the opening of doors come in quiet and unassuming ways. Yesterday included a last minute rearrangement of my schedule so I could participate in a teleconference with the ROM. It was no big deal – I am always rearranging my schedule last minute. Staff needed on the spot support to put a last minute proposal in front of the museum’s exhibit selection committee. Today I was in bed, getting ready to get up so the technician could fix the electronics of my bed. The call came and my future shifted.
It’s such an ordinary moment that my emotions haven’t caught up. I get what Mike was saying about meeting with the video game producers on Monday. It’s such an ordinary day, unlike a special day that one has been preparing for - a wedding or graduation - that the obvious next step is to go have lunch. The overall mood is so ordinary, so: “Well, of course – what else would we do except say yes.” In the absence of a big high it nearly feels like a low.
Yet I have been preparing for this day in one way or another since I was four – 57 years. I am coming home to a rightful place in the world. I don’t need a big high right now. I need to place myself firmly in the passion for Inclusion that has carried me through these 57 years. I need to fully feel and express my gratitude for the opening, for the many hands – seen and unseen – that have carried me to this day, and for the vision, energy and courage I have been given to keep on working the path when there was no sign that this future was realizable. Hallelujah!
Michael and I will be at the ROM on Monday for the first production meeting, to find out really what we need to do to set up the contracts, partnerships, etc. Then we will go have a beer. By then I think I will be ready to celebrate!
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
November 24, 2010
Today I was asked if I thought certain items of my writings were poems. I replied that I thought they were a bridge between poetry and prose.
Specifically, when I write – or speak – I start off saying something I want to say. Prose. At some point – frequently – I am saying what wants to be said! Poetry.
Actually, it’s the same with painting.
I guess I am saying that to be an artist is to be willing to start the – dance, statement, picture, dialogue – and to ALSO be willing to have the process taken over by a deeper, more eternal process and to allow oneself to be the vehicle.
I am willing. Much of these writings have been about the history and the flavour of that willingness.
I met the only man I have married and divorced in 1980. Laurence and I were friends for seven years before our two years marriage. Laurence was very interested in how I think. He would ask me questions and very often my answers came from some fount of knowledge or experience that I was unaware of before I heard the question. When we broke up among the elements of our relationship that I missed the most was this searching dialogue that revealed to my own self a well of understanding that by myself I don’t typically access.
Both Gabor and Mike have this effect on me, each in different ways. This has the magnifying result that WPIT is moving from being a concept I could barely articulate in 2006 to being an organization with new and growing capacity.
I have a similar experience when I am speaking in public. This week I have spoken to a class of about 20 student nurses and another of about 30 student video game creators. In the first class I presented by myself and I went into the “zone” shortly after the introduction and was essentially there for about forty-five minutes. In the second class I was part of a presenting team of 3. Zoning in didn’t occur until we were bantering back and forth with the students and later in the parking lot with the professor about what an inclusive video game might look like.
I usually can’t remember what I said after such situations. I am always glad of the times when someone has written down or videoed such moments so I can find out how I came across and what I actually expressed. Painting, of course, is better for leaving behind a more permanent record of what “Judith as vehicle” has been up to!
I am not saying that I am some kind of psychic or medium. As I have written before, it is more like I am personally involved in the creation of an articulated or painted expression yet the ultimate source is connected to me from beyond me.
So now “the cat’s out of the bag”. There are at least a dozen people who read these writings and they all know by now just how weird I am.
As if they didn’t know already!
Specifically, when I write – or speak – I start off saying something I want to say. Prose. At some point – frequently – I am saying what wants to be said! Poetry.
Actually, it’s the same with painting.
I guess I am saying that to be an artist is to be willing to start the – dance, statement, picture, dialogue – and to ALSO be willing to have the process taken over by a deeper, more eternal process and to allow oneself to be the vehicle.
I am willing. Much of these writings have been about the history and the flavour of that willingness.
I met the only man I have married and divorced in 1980. Laurence and I were friends for seven years before our two years marriage. Laurence was very interested in how I think. He would ask me questions and very often my answers came from some fount of knowledge or experience that I was unaware of before I heard the question. When we broke up among the elements of our relationship that I missed the most was this searching dialogue that revealed to my own self a well of understanding that by myself I don’t typically access.
Both Gabor and Mike have this effect on me, each in different ways. This has the magnifying result that WPIT is moving from being a concept I could barely articulate in 2006 to being an organization with new and growing capacity.
I have a similar experience when I am speaking in public. This week I have spoken to a class of about 20 student nurses and another of about 30 student video game creators. In the first class I presented by myself and I went into the “zone” shortly after the introduction and was essentially there for about forty-five minutes. In the second class I was part of a presenting team of 3. Zoning in didn’t occur until we were bantering back and forth with the students and later in the parking lot with the professor about what an inclusive video game might look like.
I usually can’t remember what I said after such situations. I am always glad of the times when someone has written down or videoed such moments so I can find out how I came across and what I actually expressed. Painting, of course, is better for leaving behind a more permanent record of what “Judith as vehicle” has been up to!
I am not saying that I am some kind of psychic or medium. As I have written before, it is more like I am personally involved in the creation of an articulated or painted expression yet the ultimate source is connected to me from beyond me.
So now “the cat’s out of the bag”. There are at least a dozen people who read these writings and they all know by now just how weird I am.
As if they didn’t know already!
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
November 23, 2010
I am almost too tired to do this, although it has been a momentous day, more than worth writing about. My mind has dissipated to the level of playing Freecell for an hour, knowing I want to write and that have lots to do and respond to. I am just tired – in a very satisfied and somewhat overwhelmed way.
Sometimes – tonight – I imagine myself when I was 30 or 45 years younger and try to figure out if I could have ever predicted my life as it is now from the perspective of those days. I was with Mike at supper. He is 36 years younger than I am (as I often remind him!) and I was losing myself in a reverie about IF I could have believed then that today COULD even happen.
Some things are clearly enough in a line to have been comprehensible. Four walls, table cloths, stuff like that. But much beyond this mind numbing simplicity and clearly my life has leapt into so many dimensions that the child and young adult Judith had no imagination of. A simple example – I have many ceramics – very beautiful pieces – given to me by the artists who made them, and more than one each! I could not have permitted myself at 25 to imagine that I would have such friends. That I myself would be an artist was certainly not in my purview.
Tonight Mike, his friend Kevin and I presented a potential WPIT project to a class of young students who are learning to design and develop video games. The idea is to create a series of video games that require the players to build inclusive solutions to the games’ problems. Without getting into details (perhaps in the near future!) we were met with focussed interest and enthusiasm. Some twenty students and the teacher signed up to find out more and to start designing and writing the required code.
When I was twenty-five I had spent a summer coding data onto charts printed on legal sized paper so key punch typists could create the cards that fed an apartment-sized computer.
Three professors had at that same time showed off to me their personal computers and proudly demonstrated how to play Pac Man.
I understood Inclusion to mean that I should be fighting for the right to share an apartment with someone who had quadriplegia and with whom I had no particular relationship. In this apartment and ONLY in this apartment I would be able to get six hours a day of personal assistance given to me by someone I did not hire who was trained by someone else to “take care” of me. It was the best I could hope for at 25.
I understood that I was lucky to hope that someday I would be employed by some corporation to do something like HR work. I had been told by knowledgeable professionals that I would not live past thirty and that I would have few if any friends.
Tonight Mike and I were talking about a certain quiet feeling, almost like a let down, that one can have after a very successful event. In this case we are having the kind of experience that hard work, good luck and a really good idea are coming together. In one sense it should be perfectly obvious that such a thing as Inclusive video games can be created. On the other hand I think we both know that this evening and this project could easily go the other way.
I said to Mike that I recognize that quiet feeling as being different from enthusiasm. For me, it is about passion and gratitude. Enthusiasm is a cheap high that easily dissipates when circumstances change or even when it’s just the next morning. Passion is a long term energy and one is very fortunate indeed to be able to live inside the space of one’s own passion.
And this is where gratitude comes in, at least for me. I am deeply moved that my life has been given so many opportunities to extend beyond anything I could or still can imagine. Not only am I someone who gets to do what I love to do; I am also someone who is blessed with unique surprises that take me well beyond the kind of life I would have created for myself if it were all left up to me.
Call it God or call it whatever makes sense to you. My life is clearly in the hands of a power greater than myself and in my opinion that is a very good thing!
Sometimes – tonight – I imagine myself when I was 30 or 45 years younger and try to figure out if I could have ever predicted my life as it is now from the perspective of those days. I was with Mike at supper. He is 36 years younger than I am (as I often remind him!) and I was losing myself in a reverie about IF I could have believed then that today COULD even happen.
Some things are clearly enough in a line to have been comprehensible. Four walls, table cloths, stuff like that. But much beyond this mind numbing simplicity and clearly my life has leapt into so many dimensions that the child and young adult Judith had no imagination of. A simple example – I have many ceramics – very beautiful pieces – given to me by the artists who made them, and more than one each! I could not have permitted myself at 25 to imagine that I would have such friends. That I myself would be an artist was certainly not in my purview.
Tonight Mike, his friend Kevin and I presented a potential WPIT project to a class of young students who are learning to design and develop video games. The idea is to create a series of video games that require the players to build inclusive solutions to the games’ problems. Without getting into details (perhaps in the near future!) we were met with focussed interest and enthusiasm. Some twenty students and the teacher signed up to find out more and to start designing and writing the required code.
When I was twenty-five I had spent a summer coding data onto charts printed on legal sized paper so key punch typists could create the cards that fed an apartment-sized computer.
Three professors had at that same time showed off to me their personal computers and proudly demonstrated how to play Pac Man.
I understood Inclusion to mean that I should be fighting for the right to share an apartment with someone who had quadriplegia and with whom I had no particular relationship. In this apartment and ONLY in this apartment I would be able to get six hours a day of personal assistance given to me by someone I did not hire who was trained by someone else to “take care” of me. It was the best I could hope for at 25.
I understood that I was lucky to hope that someday I would be employed by some corporation to do something like HR work. I had been told by knowledgeable professionals that I would not live past thirty and that I would have few if any friends.
Tonight Mike and I were talking about a certain quiet feeling, almost like a let down, that one can have after a very successful event. In this case we are having the kind of experience that hard work, good luck and a really good idea are coming together. In one sense it should be perfectly obvious that such a thing as Inclusive video games can be created. On the other hand I think we both know that this evening and this project could easily go the other way.
I said to Mike that I recognize that quiet feeling as being different from enthusiasm. For me, it is about passion and gratitude. Enthusiasm is a cheap high that easily dissipates when circumstances change or even when it’s just the next morning. Passion is a long term energy and one is very fortunate indeed to be able to live inside the space of one’s own passion.
And this is where gratitude comes in, at least for me. I am deeply moved that my life has been given so many opportunities to extend beyond anything I could or still can imagine. Not only am I someone who gets to do what I love to do; I am also someone who is blessed with unique surprises that take me well beyond the kind of life I would have created for myself if it were all left up to me.
Call it God or call it whatever makes sense to you. My life is clearly in the hands of a power greater than myself and in my opinion that is a very good thing!
Monday, November 22, 2010
November 22, 2010
Jen was here today (the masseuse) and will be again on Friday. We have reached another higher step in my managing and being with my body and my pain. This is even more miraculous given that yesterday I felt flattened - virtually defeated - by how unbearable it was to sit and even lie down.
In her remarkably intuitive way she found an older injury, from when I was eight, and released the shock, judgement and distrust looked in my nerves, muscles and bones. With the release came tears, doubt, pain and with them joy, laughter and tentative willingness to believe that I can forgive myself and others for the awkward and incompetent ways we handle ourselves and each other.
The acupuncture needles went deep today, one drawing a little blood. When there is pain, it is the good pain, like picking an itchy scab, that comes with letting go of something that long ago served its purpose and now must be discarded.
I am now wearing in my left ear five acupuncture “seeds” – tiny pin-like devices that stimulate an energy meridian when pressed. The pressing is mildly painful. I have had one in particular pressed several times today, when I felt hip pain building. It has been six hours that I have been sitting up and I went to Lorraine’s class tonight to talk for an hour and a half. I am nearly pain free, though tired.
Could it be that I have actually found the path that permits my body and my purpose in life to cooperate? Today was the first time in nearly a year and a half that I have felt confidence in the options available to me!
The rest of this day has had a very different flavour. I’m working on five different fronts. (I am tempted to write “suddenly working” but it’s just not that way. This busyness has been building since my birthday.) The Book of Judith, Laser Eagles, World Peace through Inclusive Transformation, the Wisdom City Team, and even Leos Skilled Caregivers have all been part of my life for years in one way or another. Today they all want something from me NOW.
It seems that as I am completing this transition I have become stronger and clearer about what I want to contribute to and get from these “doing” areas of my life. With this clarity and renewed courage have come both genuine partnership and a great deal more engaged conflict.
So now I am busy, and even double booking myself. I am achieving more and also forgetting to do certain things again. And – most interestingly – I am engaged in many more intense conflictual conversations. These are somewhat like fights, but not really. They are, or have the potential to be, ways for people to be honest, to release fear and anger and to also say what they really are unwilling to do or be. Less hiding and greater honesty can lead to much cleaner and effective work.
Previously I avoided such conversations. Now I nearly enjoy them, or at least they frighten me much less. I believe that this fundamental shift that is now happening is that I am allowing myself to recognize that I don’t do things perfectly nor do I have to. This means that I know I am capable of unintentionally doing harm and that I can recognize and clean up what doesn’t work. With less to avoid or hide I am experiencing an “OKness” in being powerful and active. My energy is up, I am nearly TOO busy and I am happy!
In her remarkably intuitive way she found an older injury, from when I was eight, and released the shock, judgement and distrust looked in my nerves, muscles and bones. With the release came tears, doubt, pain and with them joy, laughter and tentative willingness to believe that I can forgive myself and others for the awkward and incompetent ways we handle ourselves and each other.
The acupuncture needles went deep today, one drawing a little blood. When there is pain, it is the good pain, like picking an itchy scab, that comes with letting go of something that long ago served its purpose and now must be discarded.
I am now wearing in my left ear five acupuncture “seeds” – tiny pin-like devices that stimulate an energy meridian when pressed. The pressing is mildly painful. I have had one in particular pressed several times today, when I felt hip pain building. It has been six hours that I have been sitting up and I went to Lorraine’s class tonight to talk for an hour and a half. I am nearly pain free, though tired.
Could it be that I have actually found the path that permits my body and my purpose in life to cooperate? Today was the first time in nearly a year and a half that I have felt confidence in the options available to me!
The rest of this day has had a very different flavour. I’m working on five different fronts. (I am tempted to write “suddenly working” but it’s just not that way. This busyness has been building since my birthday.) The Book of Judith, Laser Eagles, World Peace through Inclusive Transformation, the Wisdom City Team, and even Leos Skilled Caregivers have all been part of my life for years in one way or another. Today they all want something from me NOW.
It seems that as I am completing this transition I have become stronger and clearer about what I want to contribute to and get from these “doing” areas of my life. With this clarity and renewed courage have come both genuine partnership and a great deal more engaged conflict.
So now I am busy, and even double booking myself. I am achieving more and also forgetting to do certain things again. And – most interestingly – I am engaged in many more intense conflictual conversations. These are somewhat like fights, but not really. They are, or have the potential to be, ways for people to be honest, to release fear and anger and to also say what they really are unwilling to do or be. Less hiding and greater honesty can lead to much cleaner and effective work.
Previously I avoided such conversations. Now I nearly enjoy them, or at least they frighten me much less. I believe that this fundamental shift that is now happening is that I am allowing myself to recognize that I don’t do things perfectly nor do I have to. This means that I know I am capable of unintentionally doing harm and that I can recognize and clean up what doesn’t work. With less to avoid or hide I am experiencing an “OKness” in being powerful and active. My energy is up, I am nearly TOO busy and I am happy!
Sunday, November 21, 2010
November 21, 2010
Last night I monetized this blog. I decided to do so because WPIT needs ongoing funding and this seems to be one easy way to have an income. We’ll see. I figured that readers these days block out such stimulate and if the mere fact that a number of people see the ads makes a financial difference then it’s worth it. I apologize if anyone is truly offended. If you are, let me know, because clearly I can stop it if it’s a real issue.
I guess I have crossed my self imposed watershed – again. To invite advertising and money is clearly to move beyond expression to communication. After writing for more than a month the two seem like both sides of the same thing – like the palm and back of a hand – distinct but inseparable.
I am contemplating the third dose of Morphine for the day. It’s after 10:30pm so likely I will just sleep instead. Two and a half days in bed and one half up, acceptable “poos” on all three days, lots of good clear peeing and still the pain has been brutal. I am discouraged!
I got offered a chance to buy another elixir tonight – at $80 for a month’s supply. It feels something like being held hostage.
Writing two pages seems undoable tonight too. I imagine ways to cheat! Of course I define cheating.
I was talking last night with Mike about how much I have written over the past ten years or so. I have taken steps on three occasions to write a second book (or third if I count my input into “From Behind the Piano”). Now I have three blogs. There are also a number of articles, letters, lengthy e-mails and other documents. Somehow none of it has gelled in my imagination into enough of a theme that I can design a coherent approach to a book.
Perhaps I need to dump copies of a representative sample in front of an editor and get knowledgeable help.
Writing “What’s Really Worth Doing…” in 1993 was a very different story. (Is that a quibble?) It was urgent and it was done essentially in eight days. For many years now I have wanted to write but there is no such urgency nor a clear sense of whom I might be writing to.
How come there can be urgency, drive, energy and courage sometimes while for no particular reason I can perceive procrastination rules most of the rest of the time?
When I was a child my body handled its blood sugar, its elimination and more. Now I am the manager and I consistently measure my inputs and outputs. As a child my reasoning and emotions were tempered and guided by others. Now I get to handle all that. It seems that getting older brings with it a series of shifts where some aspect of life – handling money, sobriety, work/life balance and much more – suddenly move from being simply experienced in some sort of automatic, unconscious way to requiring some sort of consistent, even complex, structure of intention, balance and limitation.
Is this what this relentless pain is all about? Is there yet another way that I must grow up and be responsible?
If so, where’s the g d manual??
I guess I have crossed my self imposed watershed – again. To invite advertising and money is clearly to move beyond expression to communication. After writing for more than a month the two seem like both sides of the same thing – like the palm and back of a hand – distinct but inseparable.
I am contemplating the third dose of Morphine for the day. It’s after 10:30pm so likely I will just sleep instead. Two and a half days in bed and one half up, acceptable “poos” on all three days, lots of good clear peeing and still the pain has been brutal. I am discouraged!
I got offered a chance to buy another elixir tonight – at $80 for a month’s supply. It feels something like being held hostage.
Writing two pages seems undoable tonight too. I imagine ways to cheat! Of course I define cheating.
I was talking last night with Mike about how much I have written over the past ten years or so. I have taken steps on three occasions to write a second book (or third if I count my input into “From Behind the Piano”). Now I have three blogs. There are also a number of articles, letters, lengthy e-mails and other documents. Somehow none of it has gelled in my imagination into enough of a theme that I can design a coherent approach to a book.
Perhaps I need to dump copies of a representative sample in front of an editor and get knowledgeable help.
Writing “What’s Really Worth Doing…” in 1993 was a very different story. (Is that a quibble?) It was urgent and it was done essentially in eight days. For many years now I have wanted to write but there is no such urgency nor a clear sense of whom I might be writing to.
How come there can be urgency, drive, energy and courage sometimes while for no particular reason I can perceive procrastination rules most of the rest of the time?
When I was a child my body handled its blood sugar, its elimination and more. Now I am the manager and I consistently measure my inputs and outputs. As a child my reasoning and emotions were tempered and guided by others. Now I get to handle all that. It seems that getting older brings with it a series of shifts where some aspect of life – handling money, sobriety, work/life balance and much more – suddenly move from being simply experienced in some sort of automatic, unconscious way to requiring some sort of consistent, even complex, structure of intention, balance and limitation.
Is this what this relentless pain is all about? Is there yet another way that I must grow up and be responsible?
If so, where’s the g d manual??
Saturday, November 20, 2010
November 20, 2010
It is just past 10:00pm and this is the second day that I have not gotten out of bed – or washed either. Yikes! What has become of me? (Ha, ha) A drugged, slovenly old lady!
I’m kidding – well mostly. It has actually been another busy day. I worked on my Wisdom phone list this morning, responded to e-mail and made some calls. Between lunch, dinner, pain breaks and mutual naps Mike and I worked on the presentation we will give to video game developers next Tuesday. Throughout it all there have been talks and explorations – ranging from funny to emotionally intense - of Inclusion, WPIT, Laser Eagles, the design of a good interactive presentation, how we will organize ourselves, what inspires us and frightens us – a strong flow of interchange.
Mike has been at work for some 10 days on www.wpit.org. It has to be a working website by Tuesday evening for the students who design video games. It will be.
There are some strong similarities between my time with Mike and the more than a year with Gabor. Mike wants to know, wants to drive Inclusion and WPIT, wants to read the years of writing I have done, wants to push me! Gabor was and is very different, but he continuously caused me to examine and expand the metaphors through which I think about Inclusion and all that I am trying to articulate and create.
Mirror, mirror on the wall! Often people meet me (or anyone) as if what you see is all there is or was or will be. It is an inexpressible joy to be met as an unfolding mystery, with depth and untapped directions to grow into.
The question of my legacy is often on my mind. When I am with Mike and Kimberly I feel a direct connection to a distant future that I will not personally be present in. This is a profoundly satisfying work to engage in.
Throughout the day I searched out old documents and PowerPoint slides. I saw that just nine years ago World Peace was not something I thought or wrote about. Not so very long ago I had not imagined the BMX Model of Inclusion. I was still working on articulating Giftedness and personal support. I have fundamentally altered my direction between then and 2008. This realization takes some power away from the metaphor of 30 year cycles that forms the basis of these writings.
Even seven years ago there was no painting and peace activism. At that time I began to engage in an intensely explorative and creative time – a six year span from 2004 to 2009 – ages 54 to 59 in chronologic time.
This was the time I also engaged in the Landmark Education Wisdom Unlimited course, Partnership Explorations, Power and Contribution in which I invented World Peace through Inclusion, and several Year End cruises, seminars and teleconferences about discourses. I also was and am still on the Toronto City Team – the group of volunteers who work with the Landmark Education headquarters, consultants and staff to produce the Wisdom Unlimited course in our area.
I transformed myself and my creative nest has been the transformational work supported by Landmark Education.
It’s funny to look back this way because I have felt that I was “me” all along. Without reflection I would have said that I had changed, but not THAT much. Now I see that Judith took some fundamental shifts – in particular I have moved from being a rights and services advocate to being an artist and peace worker.
This seems to be akin to moving from caterpillar to butterfly. And now this beautiful creature is laying her own eggs.
I’m kidding – well mostly. It has actually been another busy day. I worked on my Wisdom phone list this morning, responded to e-mail and made some calls. Between lunch, dinner, pain breaks and mutual naps Mike and I worked on the presentation we will give to video game developers next Tuesday. Throughout it all there have been talks and explorations – ranging from funny to emotionally intense - of Inclusion, WPIT, Laser Eagles, the design of a good interactive presentation, how we will organize ourselves, what inspires us and frightens us – a strong flow of interchange.
Mike has been at work for some 10 days on www.wpit.org. It has to be a working website by Tuesday evening for the students who design video games. It will be.
There are some strong similarities between my time with Mike and the more than a year with Gabor. Mike wants to know, wants to drive Inclusion and WPIT, wants to read the years of writing I have done, wants to push me! Gabor was and is very different, but he continuously caused me to examine and expand the metaphors through which I think about Inclusion and all that I am trying to articulate and create.
Mirror, mirror on the wall! Often people meet me (or anyone) as if what you see is all there is or was or will be. It is an inexpressible joy to be met as an unfolding mystery, with depth and untapped directions to grow into.
The question of my legacy is often on my mind. When I am with Mike and Kimberly I feel a direct connection to a distant future that I will not personally be present in. This is a profoundly satisfying work to engage in.
Throughout the day I searched out old documents and PowerPoint slides. I saw that just nine years ago World Peace was not something I thought or wrote about. Not so very long ago I had not imagined the BMX Model of Inclusion. I was still working on articulating Giftedness and personal support. I have fundamentally altered my direction between then and 2008. This realization takes some power away from the metaphor of 30 year cycles that forms the basis of these writings.
Even seven years ago there was no painting and peace activism. At that time I began to engage in an intensely explorative and creative time – a six year span from 2004 to 2009 – ages 54 to 59 in chronologic time.
This was the time I also engaged in the Landmark Education Wisdom Unlimited course, Partnership Explorations, Power and Contribution in which I invented World Peace through Inclusion, and several Year End cruises, seminars and teleconferences about discourses. I also was and am still on the Toronto City Team – the group of volunteers who work with the Landmark Education headquarters, consultants and staff to produce the Wisdom Unlimited course in our area.
I transformed myself and my creative nest has been the transformational work supported by Landmark Education.
It’s funny to look back this way because I have felt that I was “me” all along. Without reflection I would have said that I had changed, but not THAT much. Now I see that Judith took some fundamental shifts – in particular I have moved from being a rights and services advocate to being an artist and peace worker.
This seems to be akin to moving from caterpillar to butterfly. And now this beautiful creature is laying her own eggs.
Friday, November 19, 2010
November 19, 2010
As I was checking dates today I realized that I have been writing for more than a continuous month. This will be the 34th posting in this blog. I am “chuffed” as I somewhat expected that I would have missed a day by now, or written less than 2 pages or given it up all together. So far so good for me. I’ve never run out of gas either since owning my first car in 1980 (a yellow Fiat), except for the time that a block of ice severed the fuel line and the gas all ran out in ten minutes –I don’t count that one!
A funny thing happened today… Sometimes the Morphine hits me more than others, especially the evening dose. Tonight I was listening to some Moody Blues in my I-Tunes on my laptop. When Jay was here from Phoenix during our birthdays he left about 22 days worth of music in my folder. I’m not a big listener to music anymore and Jay likes a lot of stuff I don’t it seems, but at supper in bed tonight I found this familiar album from the late ‘60’s.
I realized that the last time I listened to this particular album I was likely stoned too – much more stoned than I am tonight and on a very different, non-prescription drug – but still in a recognizably similar state. Ah, it takes me back!
It felt humourous and good - a recognition and a bridge to a very different yet familiar version of myself. In many ways I am happier now than then, and I NEVER could have imagined today from the perspective of that day. The similarities are there, though. I am still idealistic, searching, self-centred and committed to making a real difference.
My circle meeting was intense last night, leaving Mike and Kimberly put off to some extent. Thank God Gloria was here today. She got sick last night and missed the circle meeting but came today to collage and lunch with me. She has a great connection with Mike and I expect a growing one with Kimberly. We talked together and told many stories about Scott and his supporters, trials and joys of previous trips to Georgia, and of the kind of clashes people have when they care, when they are confronted and when finally they are honest with each other.
Of course both Mike and Kimberly are 25 years old. I am frequently and stereotypically confronted with the depth of their passion, energy, creativity and intelligence and how differently they look upon or simply are unaware of how I, and now my circle, see risks, fatigue, areas that need more careful attention or even some potential directions to take. To me my age shows up most around them. I both want to and don’t want to think and be like them. It seems both wonderful and exhausting.
I guess that it is a blessing that I am not young and they are not old. So far we have been able to work out an amazing variety of ideas and issues. I will do my best to keep it clean and good, not because of either them or me, but because the possibility of World Peace through Inclusion will do so well in their hands.
I am writing this while I am still in bed. Nick and I finally rigged up my laptop and Morse Code so I can use my interface while I am semi lying down. All the pieces that are necessary were in my bedroom. I just didn’t see the last essential part until this afternoon. How often we can’t see what we are looking at!
The collage I did today is about me being reluctant to stick out. Of course I love to have everyone’s attention too. But there is a fear that shows up when I get close to noticing I’m a leader.
After I finished the collage I saw that it has many eyes and points of light in it. It’s hanging over the foot of my bed. I hope I dream about it tonight.
A funny thing happened today… Sometimes the Morphine hits me more than others, especially the evening dose. Tonight I was listening to some Moody Blues in my I-Tunes on my laptop. When Jay was here from Phoenix during our birthdays he left about 22 days worth of music in my folder. I’m not a big listener to music anymore and Jay likes a lot of stuff I don’t it seems, but at supper in bed tonight I found this familiar album from the late ‘60’s.
I realized that the last time I listened to this particular album I was likely stoned too – much more stoned than I am tonight and on a very different, non-prescription drug – but still in a recognizably similar state. Ah, it takes me back!
It felt humourous and good - a recognition and a bridge to a very different yet familiar version of myself. In many ways I am happier now than then, and I NEVER could have imagined today from the perspective of that day. The similarities are there, though. I am still idealistic, searching, self-centred and committed to making a real difference.
My circle meeting was intense last night, leaving Mike and Kimberly put off to some extent. Thank God Gloria was here today. She got sick last night and missed the circle meeting but came today to collage and lunch with me. She has a great connection with Mike and I expect a growing one with Kimberly. We talked together and told many stories about Scott and his supporters, trials and joys of previous trips to Georgia, and of the kind of clashes people have when they care, when they are confronted and when finally they are honest with each other.
Of course both Mike and Kimberly are 25 years old. I am frequently and stereotypically confronted with the depth of their passion, energy, creativity and intelligence and how differently they look upon or simply are unaware of how I, and now my circle, see risks, fatigue, areas that need more careful attention or even some potential directions to take. To me my age shows up most around them. I both want to and don’t want to think and be like them. It seems both wonderful and exhausting.
I guess that it is a blessing that I am not young and they are not old. So far we have been able to work out an amazing variety of ideas and issues. I will do my best to keep it clean and good, not because of either them or me, but because the possibility of World Peace through Inclusion will do so well in their hands.
I am writing this while I am still in bed. Nick and I finally rigged up my laptop and Morse Code so I can use my interface while I am semi lying down. All the pieces that are necessary were in my bedroom. I just didn’t see the last essential part until this afternoon. How often we can’t see what we are looking at!
The collage I did today is about me being reluctant to stick out. Of course I love to have everyone’s attention too. But there is a fear that shows up when I get close to noticing I’m a leader.
After I finished the collage I saw that it has many eyes and points of light in it. It’s hanging over the foot of my bed. I hope I dream about it tonight.
Thursday, November 18, 2010
November 18, 2010
Another banner day – poo wise! And that’s enough said about that.
The pain is ridiculous today. Enough said about that too!
I had lunch today in my tiny studio that I set up by my south facing window. I call it “Beach”. I made a room by lining up two stand alone closets and putting storage bins on top to give a wall that permits light and air into the rest of the main space. Beach is where my personal assistants sleep and surf the internet. It is also where I occasionally paint and where guests sometimes stay.
I call this space Beach because the view faces Lake Ontario. One can see easily to the Niagara escarpment and occasionally one of those strange refractions occur that gives the illusion that Rochester, New York, is only a few kilometres away. Rochester is on the southern coast of the lake and certainly is two hundred kilometres or more due south of Toronto.
There are about four by six city blocks of neighbourhood between my eighth floor window and the lake. This neighbourhood includes six other high rise coops and condos, three parks with various amenities such as a basket ball court, swimming pool, toddlers’ play ground, walking and bike lanes and dog exercising facilities. There are two rows of small business establishments on either side of the main route, a street car track and two bus routes, two or three evangelistic style churches, two schools and multitudes of townhouses, duplexes and single houses. Even though we are a twenty minute drive from downtown Toronto or Canada’s biggest international airport (depending on which direction you take) I essentially live in a low key small town – a trick of geography.
My neighbourhood also includes flocks of Canada geese, swans, ducks, gulls, starlings, black and grey squirrels, beavers and at least one muskrat. There are oak, maple, chestnut, walnut, elm, willow and several varieties of evergreen trees in every yard and public area. Homeowners grow roses, coop residents plant marigolds and corn flowers, and an enormous variety of beautiful plants – names unknown to me – flourish in the parks.
At this time of year the deciduous trees have dropped their leaves, which turned from green to a riot of yellow through orange to red, then from pale to golden brown before being blown off their branches in the early winter wind storms of ten days ago.
As a watcher this is my favourite time of year to be looking out my Beach window. The dropping of leaves gives me a clear view of the lake, the neighbourhood between and the rocky shoreline, including the spit at the end of the park that is part of Humber College’s campus. When the weather is friendly I can stroll to the end of this spit (and along three or four other pathways) to be close to the water, birds, weeds, rocks and clouds.
I have travelled on cruise ships and to parts of eleven other countries as well as across Canada. There are many breathtakingly beautiful places in the world. South Etobicoke is one of them.
Today I was struck again by the strangely vertical and linear pattern that is visually embedded in my Beach view. There are mast heads on the sail boats in the marina south of Humber, myriads of lamp posts and hydro poles, hundreds of tall and naked trees, and blocks of tall, skinny townhouses with their steeply peaked roofs, built one against the other like European tenements. This afternoon even the clouds cooperated in the illusion of linearity. A lower bank of dark rain clouds scudded in a diagonal direction to a higher array of white fluffies creating patches of rain and sun light falling on the grey water in those straight piercing lines one sees sometimes on religious greeting cards.
Last winter I attempted to paint this strangely linear pattern of my neighbourhood. I worked on the canvas for months. The trackers who supported me teased me by telling stories to anyone who listened of how I tortured them with rulers and masking tape, trying to reproduce the pattern. I felt my result was inadequate. The painting hangs on my wall but it rarely draws comments from visitors.
This afternoon I felt the urge to try again. It is intimidating to think of both the trackers’ dismay and my inadequacies at replicating what my imagination so simply perceives. This aspect of my physical limitations – that my trackers must struggle on my behalf – leaves me with a wish that I could privately struggle on my own. Then I could have the space to learn what I don’t know now.
Perhaps it’s time to look at a MAC based drawing program again. Previously I couldn’t find anything that I could make work with my Morse Code interface. But who knows!
The pain is ridiculous today. Enough said about that too!
I had lunch today in my tiny studio that I set up by my south facing window. I call it “Beach”. I made a room by lining up two stand alone closets and putting storage bins on top to give a wall that permits light and air into the rest of the main space. Beach is where my personal assistants sleep and surf the internet. It is also where I occasionally paint and where guests sometimes stay.
I call this space Beach because the view faces Lake Ontario. One can see easily to the Niagara escarpment and occasionally one of those strange refractions occur that gives the illusion that Rochester, New York, is only a few kilometres away. Rochester is on the southern coast of the lake and certainly is two hundred kilometres or more due south of Toronto.
There are about four by six city blocks of neighbourhood between my eighth floor window and the lake. This neighbourhood includes six other high rise coops and condos, three parks with various amenities such as a basket ball court, swimming pool, toddlers’ play ground, walking and bike lanes and dog exercising facilities. There are two rows of small business establishments on either side of the main route, a street car track and two bus routes, two or three evangelistic style churches, two schools and multitudes of townhouses, duplexes and single houses. Even though we are a twenty minute drive from downtown Toronto or Canada’s biggest international airport (depending on which direction you take) I essentially live in a low key small town – a trick of geography.
My neighbourhood also includes flocks of Canada geese, swans, ducks, gulls, starlings, black and grey squirrels, beavers and at least one muskrat. There are oak, maple, chestnut, walnut, elm, willow and several varieties of evergreen trees in every yard and public area. Homeowners grow roses, coop residents plant marigolds and corn flowers, and an enormous variety of beautiful plants – names unknown to me – flourish in the parks.
At this time of year the deciduous trees have dropped their leaves, which turned from green to a riot of yellow through orange to red, then from pale to golden brown before being blown off their branches in the early winter wind storms of ten days ago.
As a watcher this is my favourite time of year to be looking out my Beach window. The dropping of leaves gives me a clear view of the lake, the neighbourhood between and the rocky shoreline, including the spit at the end of the park that is part of Humber College’s campus. When the weather is friendly I can stroll to the end of this spit (and along three or four other pathways) to be close to the water, birds, weeds, rocks and clouds.
I have travelled on cruise ships and to parts of eleven other countries as well as across Canada. There are many breathtakingly beautiful places in the world. South Etobicoke is one of them.
Today I was struck again by the strangely vertical and linear pattern that is visually embedded in my Beach view. There are mast heads on the sail boats in the marina south of Humber, myriads of lamp posts and hydro poles, hundreds of tall and naked trees, and blocks of tall, skinny townhouses with their steeply peaked roofs, built one against the other like European tenements. This afternoon even the clouds cooperated in the illusion of linearity. A lower bank of dark rain clouds scudded in a diagonal direction to a higher array of white fluffies creating patches of rain and sun light falling on the grey water in those straight piercing lines one sees sometimes on religious greeting cards.
Last winter I attempted to paint this strangely linear pattern of my neighbourhood. I worked on the canvas for months. The trackers who supported me teased me by telling stories to anyone who listened of how I tortured them with rulers and masking tape, trying to reproduce the pattern. I felt my result was inadequate. The painting hangs on my wall but it rarely draws comments from visitors.
This afternoon I felt the urge to try again. It is intimidating to think of both the trackers’ dismay and my inadequacies at replicating what my imagination so simply perceives. This aspect of my physical limitations – that my trackers must struggle on my behalf – leaves me with a wish that I could privately struggle on my own. Then I could have the space to learn what I don’t know now.
Perhaps it’s time to look at a MAC based drawing program again. Previously I couldn’t find anything that I could make work with my Morse Code interface. But who knows!
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
November 17, 2010
Today was a !banner! day. Yes, those are exclamation marks.
We don’t talk much about having a bowel movement – I am reluctant even to write the word used very commonly around here – “poo”.
Having a poo has become the ULTIMATE signal of progress or regression in my physical state since Oct. 4 when I went to the emergency room and was admitted for nine days. Nearly everything tried before or since that event to relieve or manage my pain has had the effect of slowing my bowels. On that day the situation became life threatening due to bowel/bladder interaction and infection. (Read previous posts!) Since then there has been effort on my part, Jen’s, the medical people, my personal assistants and my friends to get IT to come out right each and everyday. Practically a National project! It hasn’t been all that successful. The regular use of Morphine, and I suppose the added factor of my AGE constantly works against my good results and has led to this need to sustain a virtual preoccupation with the frequency, size, colour and consistency of my …. poo.
Today I had one – (a poo) – unaided by laxatives, stool softeners, suppositories, litres of herbal tea or other intervention. I realize that it is TOO SOON to imagine that life has returned to a pattern of elimination that I might consider “normal”. Just the same this is the very day when I was remembering nostalgically how I used to eat and drink a whack of foods now considered “bad” for me because they tend to exaggerate the bowel freezing effects of Morphine – coffee, bread, crackers, oatmeal, cheese, milk and SO many more.
I haven’t been very good at keeping to a mainly vegetables and herbal tea diet. Initially I was better behaved but I basically felt like I was starving. My masseuse recommended, by the way, that if I was “starving” I should drink more water. It felt like some sort of criminal punishment.
I basically cheat about a third of the time – a little bread here, a miniscule bit of cheese there, some pasta on rare occasions. But today I got curious. If it wasn’t for the Morphine it would certainly look to me that the supposedly healthier diet is actually plugging me up. Shortly after that thought – the awaited event happened.
Crazy - I know. But this six weeks of focus on my body is making me a little crazy!
Well enough about that.
Tomorrow Mike, Kimberly and I are going to present the idea to my circle that we go on a short tour of the east coast of North America for World Peace through Inclusion. Basically I miss the pelicans. But the concepts around WPIT are gelling and I am restless and M and K are ENTHUSIASTIC and it’s clearly looking like time to get on with it.
I’m expecting – even hoping for – push back from the circle. When we go I want to do so with some stability – not in the naïve way that Gabor, Erin and I left. More than anything I don’t want this to be more running off to prove myself, or ourselves. I want us to be welcomed, understood and celebrated.
Gabor and I spent time over breakfast today. Bit by bit we are carving out a way to have a future around WPIT and friendship. It is good.
I’m signing off on the short side of 2 pages today. Maybe that’s enough for my first “real poo” day in a LONG time!
We don’t talk much about having a bowel movement – I am reluctant even to write the word used very commonly around here – “poo”.
Having a poo has become the ULTIMATE signal of progress or regression in my physical state since Oct. 4 when I went to the emergency room and was admitted for nine days. Nearly everything tried before or since that event to relieve or manage my pain has had the effect of slowing my bowels. On that day the situation became life threatening due to bowel/bladder interaction and infection. (Read previous posts!) Since then there has been effort on my part, Jen’s, the medical people, my personal assistants and my friends to get IT to come out right each and everyday. Practically a National project! It hasn’t been all that successful. The regular use of Morphine, and I suppose the added factor of my AGE constantly works against my good results and has led to this need to sustain a virtual preoccupation with the frequency, size, colour and consistency of my …. poo.
Today I had one – (a poo) – unaided by laxatives, stool softeners, suppositories, litres of herbal tea or other intervention. I realize that it is TOO SOON to imagine that life has returned to a pattern of elimination that I might consider “normal”. Just the same this is the very day when I was remembering nostalgically how I used to eat and drink a whack of foods now considered “bad” for me because they tend to exaggerate the bowel freezing effects of Morphine – coffee, bread, crackers, oatmeal, cheese, milk and SO many more.
I haven’t been very good at keeping to a mainly vegetables and herbal tea diet. Initially I was better behaved but I basically felt like I was starving. My masseuse recommended, by the way, that if I was “starving” I should drink more water. It felt like some sort of criminal punishment.
I basically cheat about a third of the time – a little bread here, a miniscule bit of cheese there, some pasta on rare occasions. But today I got curious. If it wasn’t for the Morphine it would certainly look to me that the supposedly healthier diet is actually plugging me up. Shortly after that thought – the awaited event happened.
Crazy - I know. But this six weeks of focus on my body is making me a little crazy!
Well enough about that.
Tomorrow Mike, Kimberly and I are going to present the idea to my circle that we go on a short tour of the east coast of North America for World Peace through Inclusion. Basically I miss the pelicans. But the concepts around WPIT are gelling and I am restless and M and K are ENTHUSIASTIC and it’s clearly looking like time to get on with it.
I’m expecting – even hoping for – push back from the circle. When we go I want to do so with some stability – not in the naïve way that Gabor, Erin and I left. More than anything I don’t want this to be more running off to prove myself, or ourselves. I want us to be welcomed, understood and celebrated.
Gabor and I spent time over breakfast today. Bit by bit we are carving out a way to have a future around WPIT and friendship. It is good.
I’m signing off on the short side of 2 pages today. Maybe that’s enough for my first “real poo” day in a LONG time!
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
November 16, 2010
It was a good Laser Eagles day today. Of course, just about every Laser Eagles day is a good day. I enjoy being with the other artists. I enjoy working with a tracker – today my tracker was Mike Skubic. I enjoy the process of painting even when I don’t like the result that much. I don’t really like my last two paintings, but I’m not sure that I’m finished with either one of them anyways.
I thought I would start painting anger today. It ended up being a whole lot more yellow than I thought it would be, and a very bright yellow indeed. Paintings have a way of doing that – I mean turning out very differently than I thought they would be in the beginning. I have never really painted with yellow before, so maybe that is an angry colour for me. Just the same, it’s not what I thought anger would look like.
The other reason that it has been a good Laser Eagles day is that we had an organizational meeting and I was pleasantly surprised, perhaps even a little overwhelmed, at how it went. For one thing, I am learning to keep my mouth shut around Kimberly Fu who has an amazing capacity to say things quite differently than I would say them and yet end up with a similar or better result than I could have. In the last few weeks, the CAVE Board, particularly Paul and Bill, have gone from being kind of distracted and even a little resigned about the future of Laser Eagles to being very solid around the possibility of building and expanding. Paul in particular expressed a solid vision for having Laser Eagles be an organization that can sustain itself and be true to its mission. It was very easy to have him see that Kimberly should be the person who will stickhandle the next few months of shifting the organizational foundation.
I see where I have let some important aspects slip. In particular, it is much clearer now why it is important for the artists to sometimes use a way of showing to others that they are directing their trackers. Our familiarity with our trackers and, I believe, a certain laziness has caused us all to use methods of painting where it is easy to imagine that the tracker is choosing how the painting will go. Paul made it clear that others cannot actually see how the artists are making their paintings, and this is detrimental to the potential for fundraising.
Beyond that, the artists have never risen to the challenge of raising money or selling their art and giving the money to the program. I have sold a good number of paintings over the years, but have considered my volunteer efforts to be compensation for the supplies I use. Other artists have stacks of paintings sitting around in their bedrooms or have given some away as gifts. A few have sold paintings but kept all of the money. I don’t begrudge them the money but it is clear that they have not developed a sense of what it takes to sustain a consistent support system for themselves.
We have a real opportunity to show that we are capable of contributing to the organizational aspects of the world. I hope that we are able to actually grasp this opportunity at this time. It would be a big shift in the culture that we call inclusion.
Today I also had an insight into how I keep chaos happening in my financial life. At some point in the meeting I offered to do radio shows to promote Laser Eagles during the Christmas season. One of the CAVE Board members owns a radio station. Paul turned my offer down.
He pointed out that, without the organizational foundation in place, promoting Laser Eagles was detrimental to its long term stability. This is simply because anyone who might want to donate or get involved would not see accountability at this point but would see only our appearance of instability and – I guess what you would call “flying by the seat of our pants”.
How many times in my life have I gotten publicly enthusiastic about a possibility or a project and had nothing concrete to back up my enthusiasm! It is one thing for me to be a blue hat visionary. But visionaries cannot get very far on their own. And so, I have pushed away the very resources that my own life and my creations depend on.
Well, a new part of my history has begun. Cycle 3 has a genuine potential of being a time when I and others realize our wonderful ideas!
I thought I would start painting anger today. It ended up being a whole lot more yellow than I thought it would be, and a very bright yellow indeed. Paintings have a way of doing that – I mean turning out very differently than I thought they would be in the beginning. I have never really painted with yellow before, so maybe that is an angry colour for me. Just the same, it’s not what I thought anger would look like.
The other reason that it has been a good Laser Eagles day is that we had an organizational meeting and I was pleasantly surprised, perhaps even a little overwhelmed, at how it went. For one thing, I am learning to keep my mouth shut around Kimberly Fu who has an amazing capacity to say things quite differently than I would say them and yet end up with a similar or better result than I could have. In the last few weeks, the CAVE Board, particularly Paul and Bill, have gone from being kind of distracted and even a little resigned about the future of Laser Eagles to being very solid around the possibility of building and expanding. Paul in particular expressed a solid vision for having Laser Eagles be an organization that can sustain itself and be true to its mission. It was very easy to have him see that Kimberly should be the person who will stickhandle the next few months of shifting the organizational foundation.
I see where I have let some important aspects slip. In particular, it is much clearer now why it is important for the artists to sometimes use a way of showing to others that they are directing their trackers. Our familiarity with our trackers and, I believe, a certain laziness has caused us all to use methods of painting where it is easy to imagine that the tracker is choosing how the painting will go. Paul made it clear that others cannot actually see how the artists are making their paintings, and this is detrimental to the potential for fundraising.
Beyond that, the artists have never risen to the challenge of raising money or selling their art and giving the money to the program. I have sold a good number of paintings over the years, but have considered my volunteer efforts to be compensation for the supplies I use. Other artists have stacks of paintings sitting around in their bedrooms or have given some away as gifts. A few have sold paintings but kept all of the money. I don’t begrudge them the money but it is clear that they have not developed a sense of what it takes to sustain a consistent support system for themselves.
We have a real opportunity to show that we are capable of contributing to the organizational aspects of the world. I hope that we are able to actually grasp this opportunity at this time. It would be a big shift in the culture that we call inclusion.
Today I also had an insight into how I keep chaos happening in my financial life. At some point in the meeting I offered to do radio shows to promote Laser Eagles during the Christmas season. One of the CAVE Board members owns a radio station. Paul turned my offer down.
He pointed out that, without the organizational foundation in place, promoting Laser Eagles was detrimental to its long term stability. This is simply because anyone who might want to donate or get involved would not see accountability at this point but would see only our appearance of instability and – I guess what you would call “flying by the seat of our pants”.
How many times in my life have I gotten publicly enthusiastic about a possibility or a project and had nothing concrete to back up my enthusiasm! It is one thing for me to be a blue hat visionary. But visionaries cannot get very far on their own. And so, I have pushed away the very resources that my own life and my creations depend on.
Well, a new part of my history has begun. Cycle 3 has a genuine potential of being a time when I and others realize our wonderful ideas!
Monday, November 15, 2010
November 15, 2010
I’m a little tired of writing about the pain. Last night I attended the Sunday evening session of the Landmark Forum. It’s something that Landmark graduates do when we have a friend taking the Landmark Forum for the first time. It became really clear to me that a good part of this journey will transform when I am willing to fully accept my body as it is, my pain as it is and my personality as it is.
Of course, I imagine that I have already done this – more than once. But I guess this is another layer and a different journey after all.
Jen, the masseuse, was here again this morning. Most of what we talked about and most of what we worked on was to support me to express anger. Anger is not something I have been willing to freely express. In my world the social cost is too high and the physical jeopardy too great. In the Wisdom way of looking at things I am experiencing an opportunity to upgrade my relationship to expressing my anger. I am no longer a child who might get hit, or a teenager facing getting shunned.
Jen told me a few stories about singers who began their careers by renting a sound booth and privately singing until their voice emerged. I never told Jen that I used to sing or that secretly I would love to sing again. Her intuition makes me marvel.
My good friend Savoy is a boxer and she has often invited me to come to her gym. Who knows what we might invent together that would allow me to vent the fire that currently burns my bones?
Sometime yesterday I began to realise that I have a version of Gloria’s Emu oil and Med Marijuana in my bedroom with me. I have a bottle of capsules of marijuana oil produced in Alberta and carefully rendered to be non-hallucinogenic. I have a tube of generic Hydrocortisone cream. I have begun to mix them and have them massaged into my lower back from where the rod ends to my tailbone. The concoction tingles in a nice way and already I feel a difference.
Much as I want to get out of bed and get on with life, today was a good example of what I can do while I’m lying around. Mike Skubic and Kimberly Fu were over and we did planning around Laser Eagles, a potential WPIT tour, a ten session seminar on personal support that I will give in December and January and a presentation that Mike and I will make to students that create video games. We did a full days work within five or six hours.
I love working with enthusiastic people. I love working with young people. I love creating when there is minimum resistance and good solid questioning. If most of my days were like today, I could happily live from my bed.
Sometimes I think too much in terms of either/or. Perhaps I don’t have to choose life in bed or life out of bed. Truly, together with others, I can create life with the best of both.
There is a certain discipline in committing myself to write more than one page a day. There have been days when I have written a great number of emails or other documents for other reasons and where I have been tempted to count them as part of this commitment rather than keep up this form of expression. I have also been tempted to consider averaging my numbers as there have been several occasions when I have written three to five pages in one sitting.
But this is not the point really. My experience has been that there can be something available beyond the point where I run dry. It is relatively easy for me to write and so it is also easy to not dig very deep.
On the few occasions when I have run dry it has been an opportunity to pause and wait. Beyond the waiting is there more? That is the faith and that is the exploration.
My friend, Martha, has taught me that people who do not easily use language will often seem to be completely nonverbal unless someone is willing to sit and wait long enough for them to speak. For example, one might ask such a person a question and then wait nearly half a minute before the person answers. In the absence of other people’s willingness to wait such a person rarely gets to express any unique perspective in the world.
Part of the faith and journey in creating these writings is my assumption that there is part of me that I have not yet expressed. Jen was pointing to this this morning when she questioned my willingness to express anger. She was pointing out that expressed anger could even lead to singing. What songs have I not yet song?
Of course, I imagine that I have already done this – more than once. But I guess this is another layer and a different journey after all.
Jen, the masseuse, was here again this morning. Most of what we talked about and most of what we worked on was to support me to express anger. Anger is not something I have been willing to freely express. In my world the social cost is too high and the physical jeopardy too great. In the Wisdom way of looking at things I am experiencing an opportunity to upgrade my relationship to expressing my anger. I am no longer a child who might get hit, or a teenager facing getting shunned.
Jen told me a few stories about singers who began their careers by renting a sound booth and privately singing until their voice emerged. I never told Jen that I used to sing or that secretly I would love to sing again. Her intuition makes me marvel.
My good friend Savoy is a boxer and she has often invited me to come to her gym. Who knows what we might invent together that would allow me to vent the fire that currently burns my bones?
Sometime yesterday I began to realise that I have a version of Gloria’s Emu oil and Med Marijuana in my bedroom with me. I have a bottle of capsules of marijuana oil produced in Alberta and carefully rendered to be non-hallucinogenic. I have a tube of generic Hydrocortisone cream. I have begun to mix them and have them massaged into my lower back from where the rod ends to my tailbone. The concoction tingles in a nice way and already I feel a difference.
Much as I want to get out of bed and get on with life, today was a good example of what I can do while I’m lying around. Mike Skubic and Kimberly Fu were over and we did planning around Laser Eagles, a potential WPIT tour, a ten session seminar on personal support that I will give in December and January and a presentation that Mike and I will make to students that create video games. We did a full days work within five or six hours.
I love working with enthusiastic people. I love working with young people. I love creating when there is minimum resistance and good solid questioning. If most of my days were like today, I could happily live from my bed.
Sometimes I think too much in terms of either/or. Perhaps I don’t have to choose life in bed or life out of bed. Truly, together with others, I can create life with the best of both.
There is a certain discipline in committing myself to write more than one page a day. There have been days when I have written a great number of emails or other documents for other reasons and where I have been tempted to count them as part of this commitment rather than keep up this form of expression. I have also been tempted to consider averaging my numbers as there have been several occasions when I have written three to five pages in one sitting.
But this is not the point really. My experience has been that there can be something available beyond the point where I run dry. It is relatively easy for me to write and so it is also easy to not dig very deep.
On the few occasions when I have run dry it has been an opportunity to pause and wait. Beyond the waiting is there more? That is the faith and that is the exploration.
My friend, Martha, has taught me that people who do not easily use language will often seem to be completely nonverbal unless someone is willing to sit and wait long enough for them to speak. For example, one might ask such a person a question and then wait nearly half a minute before the person answers. In the absence of other people’s willingness to wait such a person rarely gets to express any unique perspective in the world.
Part of the faith and journey in creating these writings is my assumption that there is part of me that I have not yet expressed. Jen was pointing to this this morning when she questioned my willingness to express anger. She was pointing out that expressed anger could even lead to singing. What songs have I not yet song?
Sunday, November 14, 2010
November 14, 2010
Some time last night I realized that I was swearing a lot. This is not a form of expression that I want to develop in myself, so I committed to reducing and possibly eliminating this behaviour! Today, in the space of 7 hours I have sworn twice. That’s a great deal better than yesterday.
I really don’t like myself right now – or at least I don’t like myself when I am at home and especially when I am lying around in bed. Of course, I have managed to be productive. In fact, I’m probably a bit more productive than is good for me at this time. What I don’t like is the restlessness, the boredom and the anxiety about the level of pain that I am experiencing. The boredom is more anticipatory than anything. I am imagining that if life continues in this way I will be bored, and therefore right now I am getting anxious about it.
In fact, there is nothing actually boring about life right now at all. The continuous search for comfort and the daily shocks when pain shows up in familiar - or worse yet - new places is a form of fascination. In fact, I think it’s this seduction to be fascinated by my own comfort/discomfort that frightens and annoys me the most. I have seen other people become focused only on their pain and their limitations. I don’t want to become like that and yet I see that path opening up. This is the reason I’m swearing a lot. It is kind of like being trapped in a net and trying to chew one’s way out!
Beyond this, my life is quite interesting. My personal assistants are either very engaging, or occasionally annoying as hell and rarely in between. When they are annoying, I have a whole other subtext of talking to myself in attempts to either shift the annoyance or try not to make the situation worse by barking back. Very much like when I am in physical pain, when I am annoyed at someone I have a whole book of self-referential conversations that are time consuming and not very effective.
Beyond this, my room especially is full of mementos of my life. My very act of mind is constantly reminded of someone, somewhere, something. As I have written about before I believe that this activity of remembering, consolidating and sometimes simply noticing is part of the gift of getting older. What would the richness of life be if no one ever had the time and space to appreciate it?
So in reality, even if I were to spend the rest of my life in bed, I am sure that I could find a way to never be bored. It is the other stuff that makes being in bed problematic. First of all, it’s more difficult to stay healthy in this position. But more importantly than that, life - and especially people - is a continuous invitation to get up, get out and go play.
I can truthfully say that I am frustrated, sad and frightened. I am not ready to live as if I were like Nelson Mandela. Although my cell is much more inviting than his ever could have been, I am unwilling to stay in it.
But then, he must have been unwilling as well, at least at the beginning. I really must see the movie about his 27 years in prison. More than this, it is my own body which is limiting me to my bed.
My experience of the last week is that if I sit up for more than 20 minutes I will be in pain and if I sit up for more than 2 hours the pain becomes nearly unbearable and if I sit up for more than 5 hours I will still be in pain even when I’m in bed the next day. This is my reality.
Of course, when I have been up, I have been up for more than 5 hours on most occasions. Once up, there is so much I want to do that no amount of comprehension of the consequences has been able to get me back in bed quickly enough – well, most of the time anyways. Perhaps I will learn.
But really, I would rather find a way to get out of this pain.
I really don’t like myself right now – or at least I don’t like myself when I am at home and especially when I am lying around in bed. Of course, I have managed to be productive. In fact, I’m probably a bit more productive than is good for me at this time. What I don’t like is the restlessness, the boredom and the anxiety about the level of pain that I am experiencing. The boredom is more anticipatory than anything. I am imagining that if life continues in this way I will be bored, and therefore right now I am getting anxious about it.
In fact, there is nothing actually boring about life right now at all. The continuous search for comfort and the daily shocks when pain shows up in familiar - or worse yet - new places is a form of fascination. In fact, I think it’s this seduction to be fascinated by my own comfort/discomfort that frightens and annoys me the most. I have seen other people become focused only on their pain and their limitations. I don’t want to become like that and yet I see that path opening up. This is the reason I’m swearing a lot. It is kind of like being trapped in a net and trying to chew one’s way out!
Beyond this, my life is quite interesting. My personal assistants are either very engaging, or occasionally annoying as hell and rarely in between. When they are annoying, I have a whole other subtext of talking to myself in attempts to either shift the annoyance or try not to make the situation worse by barking back. Very much like when I am in physical pain, when I am annoyed at someone I have a whole book of self-referential conversations that are time consuming and not very effective.
Beyond this, my room especially is full of mementos of my life. My very act of mind is constantly reminded of someone, somewhere, something. As I have written about before I believe that this activity of remembering, consolidating and sometimes simply noticing is part of the gift of getting older. What would the richness of life be if no one ever had the time and space to appreciate it?
So in reality, even if I were to spend the rest of my life in bed, I am sure that I could find a way to never be bored. It is the other stuff that makes being in bed problematic. First of all, it’s more difficult to stay healthy in this position. But more importantly than that, life - and especially people - is a continuous invitation to get up, get out and go play.
I can truthfully say that I am frustrated, sad and frightened. I am not ready to live as if I were like Nelson Mandela. Although my cell is much more inviting than his ever could have been, I am unwilling to stay in it.
But then, he must have been unwilling as well, at least at the beginning. I really must see the movie about his 27 years in prison. More than this, it is my own body which is limiting me to my bed.
My experience of the last week is that if I sit up for more than 20 minutes I will be in pain and if I sit up for more than 2 hours the pain becomes nearly unbearable and if I sit up for more than 5 hours I will still be in pain even when I’m in bed the next day. This is my reality.
Of course, when I have been up, I have been up for more than 5 hours on most occasions. Once up, there is so much I want to do that no amount of comprehension of the consequences has been able to get me back in bed quickly enough – well, most of the time anyways. Perhaps I will learn.
But really, I would rather find a way to get out of this pain.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
November 13, 2010
Somehow I have been kind of giddy all day as if I had taken too much of my two daily doses of Morphine. I didn’t. Part of it is sheer enjoyment of spending a day with Mike Skubic. A fine personal assistant, Mike is also very in tune with my personal purposes. So in one day we have improved the design of our under-construction WPIT website, looked at fundraising plans, spent exhilarating time with Tom James working on the inclusive video game project, and also accomplished all sorts of typical daily stuff – eating, washing and so on.
Perhaps I am just tired! It’s been a full day and it’s not done yet and I have been “up” – not in bed – for a big part of it.
Then there is the Morphine. This week I started to take 2/3 of the doses permitted to me each day, but regularly whether or not I was feeling pain at the time. Practically this works out that I am taking 2 ml at 11:00am and 5:00pm. The reasoning behind the reduced overall dosage is to give my bowels a good chance to empty themselves in the morning, before I slow them down with the narcotic. The reasoning behind regular administration is to give myself a chance to lower the base amount of pain I feel day by day.
The concern remains – in Mike, in others, in myself. Am I, will I become addicted? The effects of the drug are minimal, yet at about the 5th hour I am counting down - when can I have the next dose or when can I lie down again!
I am swearing more, getting excited more, going from grumpy to happy and back more quickly. Is it the blogging that is releasing my social inhibitions?
This afternoon I picked up the misplaced prescription – Amitriptyline Hydrochloride. Its potential side effects include constipation, nausea, urinary retention and other worse stuff. I am terrified to take it.
I guess my point is: “When you are up to your ass in alligators it is hard to remember that your original objective was to drain the swamp.” I want to be comfortable enough to fulfill my life. Apparently there is no treatable “cause” of my pain, so I must learn how to live with it. I do not want to shift my life goals to managing financial burdens and side effects. Yet the government funded allopathic pathway keeps throwing me into waiting lines and medication hell. To go outside this system promises more effective approaches but continuous and prohibitive costs as well.
The past few weeks or so my expensive, government funded, high quality hospital bed mattress began to develop wrinkles in the plastic cover. These wrinkles became more persistent and were developing into ridges. I cannot move my own body so these ridges are a risk not just of discomfort and pain, but also of skin breakdown and infection.
I called the distributor requesting immediate assistance and the person at the other end said it could be weeks before the problem could be rectified – but, she suggested, in the meantime why didn’t I remove the cover?
Now I have owned three or four hospital bed mattresses in my life time and slept on many more and never has one had a removable cover – until this one. So it never occurred to me to look for a zipper. It’s there! The wrinkled cover is now in a closet and I am sleeping on the best mattress you can imagine.
So, when it comes to me and my pain, is there a zipper?
Perhaps I am just tired! It’s been a full day and it’s not done yet and I have been “up” – not in bed – for a big part of it.
Then there is the Morphine. This week I started to take 2/3 of the doses permitted to me each day, but regularly whether or not I was feeling pain at the time. Practically this works out that I am taking 2 ml at 11:00am and 5:00pm. The reasoning behind the reduced overall dosage is to give my bowels a good chance to empty themselves in the morning, before I slow them down with the narcotic. The reasoning behind regular administration is to give myself a chance to lower the base amount of pain I feel day by day.
The concern remains – in Mike, in others, in myself. Am I, will I become addicted? The effects of the drug are minimal, yet at about the 5th hour I am counting down - when can I have the next dose or when can I lie down again!
I am swearing more, getting excited more, going from grumpy to happy and back more quickly. Is it the blogging that is releasing my social inhibitions?
This afternoon I picked up the misplaced prescription – Amitriptyline Hydrochloride. Its potential side effects include constipation, nausea, urinary retention and other worse stuff. I am terrified to take it.
I guess my point is: “When you are up to your ass in alligators it is hard to remember that your original objective was to drain the swamp.” I want to be comfortable enough to fulfill my life. Apparently there is no treatable “cause” of my pain, so I must learn how to live with it. I do not want to shift my life goals to managing financial burdens and side effects. Yet the government funded allopathic pathway keeps throwing me into waiting lines and medication hell. To go outside this system promises more effective approaches but continuous and prohibitive costs as well.
The past few weeks or so my expensive, government funded, high quality hospital bed mattress began to develop wrinkles in the plastic cover. These wrinkles became more persistent and were developing into ridges. I cannot move my own body so these ridges are a risk not just of discomfort and pain, but also of skin breakdown and infection.
I called the distributor requesting immediate assistance and the person at the other end said it could be weeks before the problem could be rectified – but, she suggested, in the meantime why didn’t I remove the cover?
Now I have owned three or four hospital bed mattresses in my life time and slept on many more and never has one had a removable cover – until this one. So it never occurred to me to look for a zipper. It’s there! The wrinkled cover is now in a closet and I am sleeping on the best mattress you can imagine.
So, when it comes to me and my pain, is there a zipper?
Friday, November 12, 2010
November 12, 2010
Today the pain clinic took place. It was a distinctly deflating experience.
I imagined white coated medical technicians, and of course, the mandatory doctor, giving me sermon-like discourses about the importance of learning to live with pain and not trying to get rid of it. I expected to be introduced to the mysteries of “managing” without medication. I was braced to be told about classes, approaches, required behaviour changes and, through some kind of ritual, to be initiated into membership with those who “live with pain”!
There was only one other person waiting when I arrived (on time) and when I left less than an hour later, still only one other. The receptionist was the only one wearing a white coat. I met two doctors – the resident in training and, after him, a lovely woman originally from London, England.
The eight page questionnaire that I turned in to the receptionist – filled out – never appeared again. The young man took an incomplete history and referred largely to the computer record of my recent hospital stay and previous clinical visits going back ten years.
The doctor in charge did not balk at my statements that most medications make me sick, or that I find them hard to swallow. However I was also told that although I will be given return appointments to try acupuncture and a TENS machine, nothing “alternative” will be covered by OHIP (Ontario’s health insurance) or ODSP (Ontario’s benefit for those labelled disabled). All she was really willing to offer is – another pill.
I left with the prescription, filled it at the hospital pharmacy and then my personal assistant either left the bag at the cash register or dropped it. I arrived at home with no medication and no recollection of its name. I only know that its other use is as an anti-depressant and that I have been given a paediatric dosage. It is to be taken before bed as it will make me sleepy. So it goes! My pain makes me like a sad and restless baby.
For this I waited more than ten months!
There is a song from the ‘50’s – Peggy Lee? – that goes: “If that’s all there is, if that’s all there is, if that’s all there is my friend then let’s keep dancing, let’s break out the booze and have a ball, if that’s all there is.” I don’t really know why this should be such a let down for me, but somehow when I compare what the best official medicine in Toronto has to offer with all my masseuse Jen and my friends have been coming up with for the past six weeks to support me in this crucial life shift, I’m a little stunned.
This morning my friend, Gloria, was recommending a pain relieving ointment made from the combined oils of Emu and marijuana. I have no idea where to get either, but clearly I have friends who do. It sure has got to beat drugging myself into insensitivity.
In any case in my reality the pain clinic of Nov. 12 was the watershed after which I would have all the information and experience necessary to make some concrete choices and plans about my Cycle 3 life. The clinic has come and gone. Disappointing as the outcome is my life awaits my direction.
I imagined white coated medical technicians, and of course, the mandatory doctor, giving me sermon-like discourses about the importance of learning to live with pain and not trying to get rid of it. I expected to be introduced to the mysteries of “managing” without medication. I was braced to be told about classes, approaches, required behaviour changes and, through some kind of ritual, to be initiated into membership with those who “live with pain”!
There was only one other person waiting when I arrived (on time) and when I left less than an hour later, still only one other. The receptionist was the only one wearing a white coat. I met two doctors – the resident in training and, after him, a lovely woman originally from London, England.
The eight page questionnaire that I turned in to the receptionist – filled out – never appeared again. The young man took an incomplete history and referred largely to the computer record of my recent hospital stay and previous clinical visits going back ten years.
The doctor in charge did not balk at my statements that most medications make me sick, or that I find them hard to swallow. However I was also told that although I will be given return appointments to try acupuncture and a TENS machine, nothing “alternative” will be covered by OHIP (Ontario’s health insurance) or ODSP (Ontario’s benefit for those labelled disabled). All she was really willing to offer is – another pill.
I left with the prescription, filled it at the hospital pharmacy and then my personal assistant either left the bag at the cash register or dropped it. I arrived at home with no medication and no recollection of its name. I only know that its other use is as an anti-depressant and that I have been given a paediatric dosage. It is to be taken before bed as it will make me sleepy. So it goes! My pain makes me like a sad and restless baby.
For this I waited more than ten months!
There is a song from the ‘50’s – Peggy Lee? – that goes: “If that’s all there is, if that’s all there is, if that’s all there is my friend then let’s keep dancing, let’s break out the booze and have a ball, if that’s all there is.” I don’t really know why this should be such a let down for me, but somehow when I compare what the best official medicine in Toronto has to offer with all my masseuse Jen and my friends have been coming up with for the past six weeks to support me in this crucial life shift, I’m a little stunned.
This morning my friend, Gloria, was recommending a pain relieving ointment made from the combined oils of Emu and marijuana. I have no idea where to get either, but clearly I have friends who do. It sure has got to beat drugging myself into insensitivity.
In any case in my reality the pain clinic of Nov. 12 was the watershed after which I would have all the information and experience necessary to make some concrete choices and plans about my Cycle 3 life. The clinic has come and gone. Disappointing as the outcome is my life awaits my direction.
Thursday, November 11, 2010
November 11, 2010
Today I was tired. The pain is now creeping into my nights. I went back to sleep after breakfast and slept solidly until 1pm.
I awoke after a short and vivid dream. I was observing myself lying on my side, perhaps in a more foetal position than usual. I was physically represented just as I actually am, with some emphasis in my dream awareness of the wounds done to my pelvis and leg bones when my hip joints were removed 39 years ago. At the same time I was aware that this person lying before me was the infant Judith.
As I was waking up I understood myself to be receiving a message from my physical body – which is very like the body of an infant in many ways. That message is: “I am willing!”
This is no small message. If I am to continue to live fully in Cycle 3 my body will continue to bear much wear, suffering and strain, though I am now more aware of what it needs and conscious of wanting to provide for this foundation. I am “willing” is a message I am giving to myself in the certain context that the path will continue to be arduous.
Sometimes I speak to my personal assistants about willingness. When a person is committed to accomplishing something that is complex or difficult there is a natural (or at least cultural) tendency to rely on external benefits and perks to keep on working or participating. Money, meals, acknowledgement, public recognition, extra breaks, introductions to people who can forward one’s career and other additions to regular compensation can “sweeten the deal” as it were. However eventually these will usually fail and a person will find themselves resenting the task they originally freely chose.
At this time a person has the choice to learn or recreate the capacity to sustain their own willingness to bring the best of themselves to their commitment. This can include of course making requests for necessary changes in the circumstances. My point is that making these requests and having them met will not support renewed comfort and happiness in keeping the commitment if a person does not also restore their own willingness to carry on.
This is not the first time in my life when I have faced the necessity of restoring my own willingness. I simply did not understand until this morning that I was face to face with this essential choice.
Certainly when I was deeply ill in early October I questioned my will to live. This moment was qualitatively different. Then the issues I faced were physical too but they revolved around the serious infection, the collapse of my bladder function and the urgent need to undertake difficult treatments that were somewhat harmful in their nature and were not guaranteed to succeed.
The current issue is of a different quality. If I live a full life of expression and accomplishment in Cycle 3 I will continue to cause wear and stress on my body. I am learning to be more gentle with myself. Still my path won’t be that different, the resources likely will be similar and my imagination will probably continue to dominate my other capacities. My body will continue to be the overladen burro of my great adventures.
In the face of this demanding job description I am humbled and grateful that, at the core of my existence in this world, my body is saying: “Yes”.
I awoke after a short and vivid dream. I was observing myself lying on my side, perhaps in a more foetal position than usual. I was physically represented just as I actually am, with some emphasis in my dream awareness of the wounds done to my pelvis and leg bones when my hip joints were removed 39 years ago. At the same time I was aware that this person lying before me was the infant Judith.
As I was waking up I understood myself to be receiving a message from my physical body – which is very like the body of an infant in many ways. That message is: “I am willing!”
This is no small message. If I am to continue to live fully in Cycle 3 my body will continue to bear much wear, suffering and strain, though I am now more aware of what it needs and conscious of wanting to provide for this foundation. I am “willing” is a message I am giving to myself in the certain context that the path will continue to be arduous.
Sometimes I speak to my personal assistants about willingness. When a person is committed to accomplishing something that is complex or difficult there is a natural (or at least cultural) tendency to rely on external benefits and perks to keep on working or participating. Money, meals, acknowledgement, public recognition, extra breaks, introductions to people who can forward one’s career and other additions to regular compensation can “sweeten the deal” as it were. However eventually these will usually fail and a person will find themselves resenting the task they originally freely chose.
At this time a person has the choice to learn or recreate the capacity to sustain their own willingness to bring the best of themselves to their commitment. This can include of course making requests for necessary changes in the circumstances. My point is that making these requests and having them met will not support renewed comfort and happiness in keeping the commitment if a person does not also restore their own willingness to carry on.
This is not the first time in my life when I have faced the necessity of restoring my own willingness. I simply did not understand until this morning that I was face to face with this essential choice.
Certainly when I was deeply ill in early October I questioned my will to live. This moment was qualitatively different. Then the issues I faced were physical too but they revolved around the serious infection, the collapse of my bladder function and the urgent need to undertake difficult treatments that were somewhat harmful in their nature and were not guaranteed to succeed.
The current issue is of a different quality. If I live a full life of expression and accomplishment in Cycle 3 I will continue to cause wear and stress on my body. I am learning to be more gentle with myself. Still my path won’t be that different, the resources likely will be similar and my imagination will probably continue to dominate my other capacities. My body will continue to be the overladen burro of my great adventures.
In the face of this demanding job description I am humbled and grateful that, at the core of my existence in this world, my body is saying: “Yes”.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
November 10, 2010
Today it is very tempting to give up my idea that this is about expression and simply to paste in some of the writing that I have been doing today, to try and sustain some order in my life.
At the beginning of all this writing was (and still is I think) a sense that Cycle 3 offered an opportunity for me to express myself in ways that I didn’t see or didn’t choose previously. I invented a distinction between expression and communication. “Communication” is all the speaking, writing, art work, etc. that I might do in order to influence, negotiate with and manipulate the world of people trying to get each other to do things with and for each other. “Expression” is speaking, writing, art, etc. for its own sake or perhaps for no sake at all! Of course there is no clear boundary.
Today I was writing email and ended up producing a large piece in defence of my financial situation and how I have managed it over the past – 28? – years. As the evening grows late it is tempting to simply paste in that email. The rest of the temptation is that the entire requirement to write that email came from another large message that questioned my situation and financial management. It pissed me off royally and I would love to just take a virtual slap back at the writer by making the whole thing public. Of course it’s going to get public anyway – this particular email that I responded to was sent to nearly every member of my family.
So what am I actually angry about?!? I think it is that (sucky baby?) I am unwilling to explain and defend myself, what I believe in and the pathways that I have chosen and WILL choose to fulfill my life.
It would be blissful, although clearly naïve, to imagine that in Cycle 3 I have gained enough trust and permission to do as I please without question. Sigh! It is not to be, is it?
At the same time I don’t want to get sucked into filling these two pagers with communication. Even though lots of people read these, the point of doing this is not to promote my “case”, but for me to actually get to see what my case is. As a friend said this morning, these writings are like verbal collages. After they are done and often in the process of doing them I get to understand myself and my world with a fresh perspective.
A strong theme has emerged in the past week. I have received many, many gifts over the years and particularly in the past few years as I have been living on a limited government pension. Many of these gifts have been financial. People who give me money frequently seem to feel that they are helping me out of a crisis. I believe that in the past I have actually believed myself that I was in a crisis. I guess I sometimes was!
The truth is though that there is a distinct difference between being in a crisis and being able to benefit from other people’s generosity. To define it somewhat simplistically – a crisis is when I am out of options. Many times when I have requested money from others or accepted money that wasn’t requested the appearance of that money has seemed like a very good option or at least the best option at the time. But rarely was it the only option. In other words, I have felt that I was making a choice in accepting the offer and not in any way agreeing to give up my capacity to choose what my next step in life would be.
It has become quite clear in both trivial and larger ways that many times people who are giving me money are then expecting me to make similar choices that they imagine they would make in my circumstances. In fact people often feel the right to insist that there is a path that I should take. Consequently over the years I have collected a number of people who are close to me who carry a bag of stories with them of how I have somehow failed to keep up my end of a bargain – a bargain that I was unaware of or only dimly aware of making.
Once again, I have no interest in blaming people for this. Even more so I have no interest in continuing the pattern. I see that it has been part of a convoluted pathway that leads me to either make poor choices or try to avoid certain situations or take on more than is good for me to take on or try to do things that I don’t want to do or to do things that make no sense to me. In another blog called “Ah, but that’s another story” I have written about how the process of receiving the benefit called the Ontario Disability Support Program limits and warps the lives of others who have been labelled disabled. I am now beginning to see how receiving largess is affecting me in similar ways.
I imagine – I dream – that I can gather the people who have been and continue to wish to be generous with me in some sort of large dialogue, and see if we can come to a basic agreement about what is the purpose of their generousity and what do they actually expect of me. This would give me the choice to turn down some people if the expectation is too different from the life that I intend to live. On the other hand it would give others and me a chance to be honest in a way that has not been possible in the past about how I make the choices I make and why I do some of the things that others find so odd.
I believe that people would come to realize that I largely steer my life through three lenses. The first is a strong sense that I have always felt that I have a God given purpose – a vocation. This sense is shifting strongly – I have written about this previously. I feel that I have more space than ever to have a personal enjoyment of my life as well as vocational accomplishment.
My second lens is a commitment to be served by my personal assistants in a way that benefits them and leads them to be able to live their lives more strongly conforming to their own sense of what is right for themselves. This leads to some intense dialogue and deep relationship – not with everyone of course – but with a large number of the people who have been in my life over the years. Many choices that I make are in the context of supporting these relationships.
The third lens came to me when I was twelve years old. I was sitting in the back of a church, behind a sea of adult heads, unable to see the minister or any of the activities that were taking place. I was miserable having recently been thrown out of Girl Guides because of my “disability”. I was encountering other barriers as well, and was rapidly learning that the world planned for me to fade away in a small room in my parent’s house.
I heard the minister read that God is love. It occurred to me that either this was a heinous lie and God had no interest what so ever in me or that God would participate with me in opening pathways for me to live a full life. As full as I was then, and now, of passion to have and do it all, I could not imagine the hell that lay before me if I was to be stopped at every turn.
And so on that day I choose to believe that God is indeed love and that that love would be expressed in my life by my always being able to find a way.
Of course how I see God now has changed from when I was twelve. However the principle upon which I live my life has not changed. I believe based on no evidence what so ever, but simply as a belief, that there is a way and I will find it. This has always given me the courage and the permission to pick up pieces, look for new pathways, make new friends, try new projects, ask boldly and otherwise live in search of possibilities that I do not yet know exist.
But the extreme way of looking at it that a twelve year old had perhaps is not the best way to look at it now. Perhaps my friends and family and I really could work out a way that would take out some of the concern and distress that they feel for my safety and sanity and still leave me with the freedom to choose new relationships, opportunities and pathways as they show up day by day.
I am looking forward to this dialogue.
At the beginning of all this writing was (and still is I think) a sense that Cycle 3 offered an opportunity for me to express myself in ways that I didn’t see or didn’t choose previously. I invented a distinction between expression and communication. “Communication” is all the speaking, writing, art work, etc. that I might do in order to influence, negotiate with and manipulate the world of people trying to get each other to do things with and for each other. “Expression” is speaking, writing, art, etc. for its own sake or perhaps for no sake at all! Of course there is no clear boundary.
Today I was writing email and ended up producing a large piece in defence of my financial situation and how I have managed it over the past – 28? – years. As the evening grows late it is tempting to simply paste in that email. The rest of the temptation is that the entire requirement to write that email came from another large message that questioned my situation and financial management. It pissed me off royally and I would love to just take a virtual slap back at the writer by making the whole thing public. Of course it’s going to get public anyway – this particular email that I responded to was sent to nearly every member of my family.
So what am I actually angry about?!? I think it is that (sucky baby?) I am unwilling to explain and defend myself, what I believe in and the pathways that I have chosen and WILL choose to fulfill my life.
It would be blissful, although clearly naïve, to imagine that in Cycle 3 I have gained enough trust and permission to do as I please without question. Sigh! It is not to be, is it?
At the same time I don’t want to get sucked into filling these two pagers with communication. Even though lots of people read these, the point of doing this is not to promote my “case”, but for me to actually get to see what my case is. As a friend said this morning, these writings are like verbal collages. After they are done and often in the process of doing them I get to understand myself and my world with a fresh perspective.
A strong theme has emerged in the past week. I have received many, many gifts over the years and particularly in the past few years as I have been living on a limited government pension. Many of these gifts have been financial. People who give me money frequently seem to feel that they are helping me out of a crisis. I believe that in the past I have actually believed myself that I was in a crisis. I guess I sometimes was!
The truth is though that there is a distinct difference between being in a crisis and being able to benefit from other people’s generosity. To define it somewhat simplistically – a crisis is when I am out of options. Many times when I have requested money from others or accepted money that wasn’t requested the appearance of that money has seemed like a very good option or at least the best option at the time. But rarely was it the only option. In other words, I have felt that I was making a choice in accepting the offer and not in any way agreeing to give up my capacity to choose what my next step in life would be.
It has become quite clear in both trivial and larger ways that many times people who are giving me money are then expecting me to make similar choices that they imagine they would make in my circumstances. In fact people often feel the right to insist that there is a path that I should take. Consequently over the years I have collected a number of people who are close to me who carry a bag of stories with them of how I have somehow failed to keep up my end of a bargain – a bargain that I was unaware of or only dimly aware of making.
Once again, I have no interest in blaming people for this. Even more so I have no interest in continuing the pattern. I see that it has been part of a convoluted pathway that leads me to either make poor choices or try to avoid certain situations or take on more than is good for me to take on or try to do things that I don’t want to do or to do things that make no sense to me. In another blog called “Ah, but that’s another story” I have written about how the process of receiving the benefit called the Ontario Disability Support Program limits and warps the lives of others who have been labelled disabled. I am now beginning to see how receiving largess is affecting me in similar ways.
I imagine – I dream – that I can gather the people who have been and continue to wish to be generous with me in some sort of large dialogue, and see if we can come to a basic agreement about what is the purpose of their generousity and what do they actually expect of me. This would give me the choice to turn down some people if the expectation is too different from the life that I intend to live. On the other hand it would give others and me a chance to be honest in a way that has not been possible in the past about how I make the choices I make and why I do some of the things that others find so odd.
I believe that people would come to realize that I largely steer my life through three lenses. The first is a strong sense that I have always felt that I have a God given purpose – a vocation. This sense is shifting strongly – I have written about this previously. I feel that I have more space than ever to have a personal enjoyment of my life as well as vocational accomplishment.
My second lens is a commitment to be served by my personal assistants in a way that benefits them and leads them to be able to live their lives more strongly conforming to their own sense of what is right for themselves. This leads to some intense dialogue and deep relationship – not with everyone of course – but with a large number of the people who have been in my life over the years. Many choices that I make are in the context of supporting these relationships.
The third lens came to me when I was twelve years old. I was sitting in the back of a church, behind a sea of adult heads, unable to see the minister or any of the activities that were taking place. I was miserable having recently been thrown out of Girl Guides because of my “disability”. I was encountering other barriers as well, and was rapidly learning that the world planned for me to fade away in a small room in my parent’s house.
I heard the minister read that God is love. It occurred to me that either this was a heinous lie and God had no interest what so ever in me or that God would participate with me in opening pathways for me to live a full life. As full as I was then, and now, of passion to have and do it all, I could not imagine the hell that lay before me if I was to be stopped at every turn.
And so on that day I choose to believe that God is indeed love and that that love would be expressed in my life by my always being able to find a way.
Of course how I see God now has changed from when I was twelve. However the principle upon which I live my life has not changed. I believe based on no evidence what so ever, but simply as a belief, that there is a way and I will find it. This has always given me the courage and the permission to pick up pieces, look for new pathways, make new friends, try new projects, ask boldly and otherwise live in search of possibilities that I do not yet know exist.
But the extreme way of looking at it that a twelve year old had perhaps is not the best way to look at it now. Perhaps my friends and family and I really could work out a way that would take out some of the concern and distress that they feel for my safety and sanity and still leave me with the freedom to choose new relationships, opportunities and pathways as they show up day by day.
I am looking forward to this dialogue.
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
November 9, 2010
I have been in my chair since 11:15am. It is 9:00pm. I am typing this myself. I have taken Morphine twice. I went for a walk to the lake with Aki. I went to Laser Eagles and finished 1 ½ paintings. I have pooped – an important daily milestone these days. I ate three times and drank plenty of fluids. I cheated on my diet only once with about 2 ounces of cherry cheesecake. Mike Skubic and I reserved the domain name WPIT.ca. I discussed doing some development and admin work with the play – the Book of Judith.
Is this recovery or recovered?
Life seems pretty normal except for pain and the continuous reference – out loud and self talk – to when I can get out of and return to bed.
Likely I “should” return to bed NOW and let Eva finish typing this. My body is tired and sore; my thoughts jumbled by fatigue and intoxication. I am stubborn. I will finish and post this if I can. The reader will certainly recognize the compromise with my body in that the writing will be jerkier with more truncated sentences.
Laser Eagles. Currently there are five artists – at our peak we were twenty. Currently we paint at a community drop in centre funded for adults who live with mental health concerns. In the beginning we painted at an arts and cultural centre. Today I rounded up a “warm body” because we were going to be short a tracker. At our best there were ample volunteers – sometimes even two trackers for one or two of the artists. (Tracking is described at www.lasereagles.org.)
At one time we trained the trackers to sustain the quality of our work - to be certain that every artist guided his or her own work. Today at least three artists passively let their trackers dictate the process. Six weeks ago we nearly shut down. At our peak we had three locations running. This is all a sort of shake down, yet I feel that we are at our strongest in some fundamental ways.
Today the five of us experience each other as colleagues. To a certain degree this is also true of the people who support us to paint. It is clear that we come to paint AND to be together. Laser Eagles has lost the flavour of being “a good deed” and is, at least for the artists, truly a time of expression.
I and one other artist speak as a regular way to communicate. The other three are largely silent. On three or four occasions one of us has started laughing or humming and soon we are all giggling. When we had more space I would dance among the other four.
Today, most of us weren’t really into painting that much. The trackers carried on and we mostly just quietly sat enjoying each other.
I have a small art studio in my apartment and I paint there when Laser Eagles is closed. I could do so much more often. However I want to be with my fellows. This weekly moment gives my life a balance. In this context I am like my colleagues in a way that is not so in any other part of my life. It is a time when I get as close to being a “quiet” person as I ever can be. And I am accepted by my peers in a way that is unavailable to me in any other “regular” part of daily life.
Laser Eagles was and remains among the first three things that I knew I wanted to live for in Cycle 3.
Last week, “out of the blue” as they say, we received a $10,000 grant. I am taking it as a sign that now is the moment to fulfill on the unique collegiality that we, the five quiet artists, have.
Is this recovery or recovered?
Life seems pretty normal except for pain and the continuous reference – out loud and self talk – to when I can get out of and return to bed.
Likely I “should” return to bed NOW and let Eva finish typing this. My body is tired and sore; my thoughts jumbled by fatigue and intoxication. I am stubborn. I will finish and post this if I can. The reader will certainly recognize the compromise with my body in that the writing will be jerkier with more truncated sentences.
Laser Eagles. Currently there are five artists – at our peak we were twenty. Currently we paint at a community drop in centre funded for adults who live with mental health concerns. In the beginning we painted at an arts and cultural centre. Today I rounded up a “warm body” because we were going to be short a tracker. At our best there were ample volunteers – sometimes even two trackers for one or two of the artists. (Tracking is described at www.lasereagles.org.)
At one time we trained the trackers to sustain the quality of our work - to be certain that every artist guided his or her own work. Today at least three artists passively let their trackers dictate the process. Six weeks ago we nearly shut down. At our peak we had three locations running. This is all a sort of shake down, yet I feel that we are at our strongest in some fundamental ways.
Today the five of us experience each other as colleagues. To a certain degree this is also true of the people who support us to paint. It is clear that we come to paint AND to be together. Laser Eagles has lost the flavour of being “a good deed” and is, at least for the artists, truly a time of expression.
I and one other artist speak as a regular way to communicate. The other three are largely silent. On three or four occasions one of us has started laughing or humming and soon we are all giggling. When we had more space I would dance among the other four.
Today, most of us weren’t really into painting that much. The trackers carried on and we mostly just quietly sat enjoying each other.
I have a small art studio in my apartment and I paint there when Laser Eagles is closed. I could do so much more often. However I want to be with my fellows. This weekly moment gives my life a balance. In this context I am like my colleagues in a way that is not so in any other part of my life. It is a time when I get as close to being a “quiet” person as I ever can be. And I am accepted by my peers in a way that is unavailable to me in any other “regular” part of daily life.
Laser Eagles was and remains among the first three things that I knew I wanted to live for in Cycle 3.
Last week, “out of the blue” as they say, we received a $10,000 grant. I am taking it as a sign that now is the moment to fulfill on the unique collegiality that we, the five quiet artists, have.
Monday, November 8, 2010
November 8, 2010
Jen, the masseuse, was here again today. I recognised that somewhere in the past few days I have passed over an invisible watershed. I have a certainty, and unmistakable feeling of knowing who I am. I am a warrior. I was a warrior and I continue to be one.
I’m not entirely happy about this. In the moments when I was barely in my body or when I was blissed out with unattached energy the question before me was more like: “Will I live and if so will I be able to just be simple and happy?” Clearly I am living. But the capacity to lie down and be happy has faded away.
Again I am full of energy and passion to do as well as be. Today we have already had our WPIT meeting and it is just gone 5pm. Our whole evening of activity, full of potential, awaits. In the previous few weeks the people who have passed through my apartment have come from Phoenix, New York, Halifax and many parts of Ontario.
Today 4 of us are planning the next World Peace through Inclusive Transformation tour. Clearly I have not been able to cease to imagine that somehow my body, my energy and my drive will align once again, and very soon.
What sort of warrior have I become? I don’t like the idea that I am at war. At the same time I am culturally and genetically aligned with generations of warriors – both men and women. I know that warriors are not necessarily people who bring harmful fights into being. I know that Shiva includes both destruction and creation. Yet it is challenging for me to face that I am not simply a “nice guy”, although I know perfectly well that I have never been such a person.
As I lay in the arms of my masseuse my understanding of my body is shifting. Layers and layers of stories and memories emerge from me as she finds the places that have been locked up and injured. Typically, Jen will say something is painful moments before I notice the agony. Somehow she keeps the experience from being truly agonizing and I can remember and tell the story, sometimes even with humour, and always with a distant perspective, while she moves through the pains, the blocks, the anger, the frustration and opens spaces that I never knew could exist. In fact I am certain that even Jen doesn’t always know that they can exist.
The majority of my wounds are warrior wounds. My battles have not been in a field of combat. My battles have been with a world that could not appreciate either my body or my perspective. My wounds are from scalpels that were either experimental or careless and from my own unwillingness to notice the scars and bruises.
But deeper than this – I believe potentially the deepest of all – is that I was born into a world where my mother herself lived in frustration, depression and anger. She felt herself thwarted in expressing her creativity, her strength and her vision. The world of women in those days was far too narrow for her. Response was to live in a slow burn of rage. My body carries, or has carried, that template.
Today Jen and I began to separate the template from the essential Judith. The obvious truth is becoming clear with the simplicity that makes it believable – I have always believed in the light, sought the light and somehow or other found the light. My stance in life from the very beginning separated me from the world my mother understood to be true. In some ways I sharpened her rage. In other ways I gave her an opening to express her creativity and strength. In yet other ways I was her guide and anchor in her worst days.
What is healing now is for me to just let it go. This is not yet done but I can conceive that I will succeed. I do not belong to the narrow vision of myself and my body that I inherited even into my cellular levels.
So I am a warrior – a warrior for light. It seems so perfectly obvious now that I chose to connect Inclusion and World peace.
I still must await the healing of my body. Today, even with Morphine I could sit barely two hours. God grant me a pathway to move forward in my dream.
I’m not entirely happy about this. In the moments when I was barely in my body or when I was blissed out with unattached energy the question before me was more like: “Will I live and if so will I be able to just be simple and happy?” Clearly I am living. But the capacity to lie down and be happy has faded away.
Again I am full of energy and passion to do as well as be. Today we have already had our WPIT meeting and it is just gone 5pm. Our whole evening of activity, full of potential, awaits. In the previous few weeks the people who have passed through my apartment have come from Phoenix, New York, Halifax and many parts of Ontario.
Today 4 of us are planning the next World Peace through Inclusive Transformation tour. Clearly I have not been able to cease to imagine that somehow my body, my energy and my drive will align once again, and very soon.
What sort of warrior have I become? I don’t like the idea that I am at war. At the same time I am culturally and genetically aligned with generations of warriors – both men and women. I know that warriors are not necessarily people who bring harmful fights into being. I know that Shiva includes both destruction and creation. Yet it is challenging for me to face that I am not simply a “nice guy”, although I know perfectly well that I have never been such a person.
As I lay in the arms of my masseuse my understanding of my body is shifting. Layers and layers of stories and memories emerge from me as she finds the places that have been locked up and injured. Typically, Jen will say something is painful moments before I notice the agony. Somehow she keeps the experience from being truly agonizing and I can remember and tell the story, sometimes even with humour, and always with a distant perspective, while she moves through the pains, the blocks, the anger, the frustration and opens spaces that I never knew could exist. In fact I am certain that even Jen doesn’t always know that they can exist.
The majority of my wounds are warrior wounds. My battles have not been in a field of combat. My battles have been with a world that could not appreciate either my body or my perspective. My wounds are from scalpels that were either experimental or careless and from my own unwillingness to notice the scars and bruises.
But deeper than this – I believe potentially the deepest of all – is that I was born into a world where my mother herself lived in frustration, depression and anger. She felt herself thwarted in expressing her creativity, her strength and her vision. The world of women in those days was far too narrow for her. Response was to live in a slow burn of rage. My body carries, or has carried, that template.
Today Jen and I began to separate the template from the essential Judith. The obvious truth is becoming clear with the simplicity that makes it believable – I have always believed in the light, sought the light and somehow or other found the light. My stance in life from the very beginning separated me from the world my mother understood to be true. In some ways I sharpened her rage. In other ways I gave her an opening to express her creativity and strength. In yet other ways I was her guide and anchor in her worst days.
What is healing now is for me to just let it go. This is not yet done but I can conceive that I will succeed. I do not belong to the narrow vision of myself and my body that I inherited even into my cellular levels.
So I am a warrior – a warrior for light. It seems so perfectly obvious now that I chose to connect Inclusion and World peace.
I still must await the healing of my body. Today, even with Morphine I could sit barely two hours. God grant me a pathway to move forward in my dream.
Sunday, November 7, 2010
November 7, 2010
Today's post is a departure. I have had a GREAT deal of assistance from Mike Skubic in pulling together basic work for World Peace through Inclusive Transformation. I have spent much of my out-of-bed time working on an organizational summary today, SO,
I thought I will just share it with you today (rather than write ANOTHER 2 pages.
WPIT – World Peace through Inclusive Transformation
WPIT is a commitment to have people around the globe understand differences and develop skills so that peace is available to all. The sustainability of world peace will emerge when enough communities appreciate diversity as an asset and have the skills to build personal and social value from interacting effectively with differences.
In society, we often look at diversity as a source of problems – things to be fixed like gang conflicts or situations to be managed like sustaining mixed income neighbourhoods. We rarely look at diversity as a source of opportunity for everybody, except in relatively minimal ways like encouraging “ethnic” restaurants, funding mixed heritage cultural experiences or subsidizing an “alterative” movie industry.
If you ask a typical person how they would describe the community they are part of they would likely say it is a group of people who do the same thing – like my bridge club, or believe the same thing – like my church, or are attached geographically to the same place – my town. People haven’t been taught to look at how diversity is essential to community and every kind of interaction.
If we weren’t different from each other we wouldn’t have the need or capacity to interact. It is not just that interaction would be boring or useless. It would not be possible! It is differences that allow for the capacity to communicate. This is just one of the powerful gifts of diversity.
THE WPIT MISSION
Our mission is to have the concept of Giftedness appreciated everywhere. In addition we aim to have all peoples have the capacity to benefit from diversity so as to have social and economic abundance. This in turn will bring peace to communities everywhere – in other words – world peace.
Giftedness Defined
A gift is anything that you are, have or do which creates an opportunity for you to interact with someone else. Under favourable circumstances such interactions can then be built into sustainable relationships and social and economical opportunities.
Any difference is potentially a gift. If someone has black hair and they discover that some people have red hair, it may become for them an opportunity to dye their tresses. Out of many people acting to fulfill this desire an entire hairstyling industry can be built.
The diversities that get labelled as dangerous, awkward, socially incorrect and disabling, are also fundamentally simply differences and therefore potentially gifts.
In the Giftedness approach, the work of Inclusion is simply to create the circumstances under which people will see their differences as opportunities for each other and know how to fulfill these opportunities.
Interestingly and importantly, when people adopt a Gifted perspective they also become more peaceful. This is simply because they have developed the skills to be creative with diversity and they are also conscious of the social and economic benefits that are being made available. There is less impulse to fight and do harm when there is nothing to fear and everything to gain.
When the world has people experience the concept of Giftedness in everyday life the result will be Inclusion and this will foster peacefulness. This connection between Inclusion and peace is at the heart of what we stand for.
Integral to inclusion is the development of creative and unique social and economic opportunities in local communities. It is a fundamental part of our mission to have Inclusion experienced as a multidimensional set of interactions where creativity can be expressed and to foster sustainable social and economic experiments.
OBJECTIVES
One of WPIT’s key objectives is to research the BMX Model of Inclusion and to have it taught as a practical model for social and economical development.
The BMX Model of Inclusion
We propose that three distinct states of Inclusion co-exist. Neither is better than the other, but often there is an emergent pull to move from one state to another. We are calling these states B, M, and X:
State B (Basic): Groups allow the presence of people with diverse characteristics. State B’s principal quality is that the includers share presence with diversity, but no other changes are anticipated or offered. The includers like their community as is, expect no major shifts, and the included are expected to adapt to the ways and means of the includers and to get along as best they can. Typically the included express gratitude for the opportunity and work hard to not cause difficulties.
State M (Mechanical): Includers recognize that the included are struggling to get along, and are willing to make “accommodations”. The included move beyond simply being grateful for the opportunity to coexist and begin to advocate for support. For example, service providers currently tend to segregate individuals with cognitive challenges and the professionalization of supporters tends to turn citizens into helpers and volunteers instead of friends and colleagues.
State X (Crossover): Both includers and the included recognize that another world is possible, one that benefits from the gifts and contributions available in the cultures, characteristics, and experiences of members of both the including and included groups. The perception fades that there are two sides and a distinct boundary.
Operationalizing the BMX Model:
State B (Basic) A teenager with autism and no speech is kept at the back of a regular classroom, with no attention paid to whether he is building friendships.
State M (Mechanical) All teenagers with “disability” labels are given opportunities to be in a homeroom for 1st period. The school has a resource room for tutoring, an “inclusive” lunchroom, and Special Olympics classes to replace regular gym.
State X (Crossover) Ninth grade students are invited to form a support circle with a teen who loves music, and who also has autism and no speech. Twenty-three students respond. They meet regularly and enthusiastically at different points in their day and week for the next four years. The teen who focuses the circle enjoys participating in the school band, gym and many more classes than anyone originally expected. The other teens express their appreciation at having an alternative to being “Nerds”, “Preps” or simply left out. The school administration notes a dramatic decrease in fights and vandalism.
Another WPIT key objective is to see POISA projects grow communities locally and around the globe.
The Peaceful Open Inclusive Spaces Alliance (POISA)
POISA arises from the experience that communities, work places, schools, etc. can become more peaceful when people of diverse backgrounds come together in ways that draw on diversity as a social asset rather than a liability, and where people are free and supported to create and shape their own activities. The future of POISA is to teach people that Inclusion makes peace possible, to foster the sustainable development of real examples of POISA and to have strategic buy-in around the world. People will come to expect their world to be made up of such spaces.
PEACEFUL Having the capacity to resolve conflict to the benefit of all concerned
OPEN Participants shape their own agendas and activities
INCLUSIVE Diversities among participants are welcome and drawn on as valuable resources
SPACES Locations, contexts, and rules and principles that give participants a safe and facilitative bounded area within which to generate their activities
ALLIANCE Agreements between organizations and individuals to work together to create and preserve a valued experience
On the ground POISA is a complex process of community development consisting of:
the development of a community’s principles of Open Space
supporting the community’s invitation process to become more diverse
capturing the learnings as the community becomes more peaceful
facilitating story telling that deepens the community’s ability to be diverse and peaceful
WPIT HISTORY
Judith Snow has done groundbreaking work throughout her life to have people notice and appreciate the contributions of people who are labelled disabled. She has travelled and taught that, rather than being problems to fix or hide, the differences we call disabilities create a context for relationship and community building and for greater social and economic sustainability. Over time she developed a storehouse of examples of peace making through Inclusion drawn from fields such as education, health care, community development and economics.
In the mid ‘90’s, Judith Snow realized that Inclusion of diversities, if they are appreciated as gifts and contributions, creates the context for people to become peaceful.
WPIT was born when Judith Snow, Gabor Podor, Erin Socall and Jason Wiles toured several states for seven months, speaking with and learning from others who were transforming fear of differences into passion to build social and economic sustainability.
At this time WPIT is conceived as an umbrella organization, seeding and guiding other initiatives and projects that look very different from each other, but which have the common characteristics of being able to teach people and have them build from their differences in ways that foster sustainable relationships, abundance and peacefulness.
PROJECTS
WPIT WORLD PEACE TOURS
In 2008, Judith Snow, Gabor Podor, Erin Socall and Jason Wiles began on an exploration throughout the United States and Canada. This 7 month journey took them deep into the heart of a learning and engagement experience. They worked together with many people who were creatively dealing with deep exclusion in their own lives. From the stories and experiences of the people met along the way, the BMX model of inclusion was developed.
This journey gave the evidence that peace really is available through Inclusion. To experience some of the stories for yourself, you can read the blog from the tour at http://peaceforinclusion.blogspot.com/
The World Peace Tour is scheduled to go back on the road in early 2011 officially launching WPIT’s 2011 projects and spreading Inclusion everywhere it goes. Locations on the current timeline range from Ontario, Minnesota, Georgia, New York and Arizona.
THE “DO SOMETHING GOOD” CAMPAIGN
The Do Something Good campaign is a movement founded by Kimberly Fu in 2005 to get people involved in the community during the holiday season. It started as a simple trip to the Salvation Army with some friends and has now expanded into co-ordinating visits to many different locations and service centres to do many different kinds of tasks. This is an opportunity for people to give from their own gifts to people who are in need. The opportunity appeals especially to people who have always wanted to help but had no idea where to start.
Originally the campaign operated just during the holiday season but now we are functional from early October to the end of the winter season. People aren't required to volunteer for the whole 4 months - whatever can be mustered is perfectly okay. Doing something good can be small or can be large, just as long as the opportunity is there to do something!
There is no reason why we have to restrict ourselves to just the holidays. We hope that every year we will grow in numbers, so we can make this a year-round campaign.
WPIT GAMES
The fastest growing sector in the entertainment industry is video games, surpassing both movies and music combined in 2008, and just like movies and music, the themes in games do not always provide the players with the very best social messages. Imagine the power of fostering peace and reinforcing it through game play!
WPIT Games is a project to do just that. By creating a series of fun, Inclusion themed video games we are generating a community of online gamers who come to a website on a daily basis and are reinforced with themes of diversity and Giftedness. We are expecting that this learning will play out in the rest of their lives, giving gamers a background to act in more Inclusive ways.
We are in the process of creating an alliance with several game development companies for this project, both upstart companies and big businesses. In this way we can tap into the large audience that bigger developers can offer while working with new, unshaped game creators.
Our first project is on track to be released online in early 2011, in time to be entered as part of the 2011 Games 4 Change Festival in New York City.
Examples of On-the-Ground WPIT Projects
Do Something Good 2010 Events
The Brown Bag Drive
Do Something Good is launching the Brown Bag Drive this year, where we will be putting together several large brown bags full of clothes and toiletries for people who are homeless and delivering it downtown during the day, along with a brown bag meal.
Other Current Opportunities
- Toy sorting
- Serving meals to people who are homeless via a shelter/church
- Gift wrapping
- Visiting the elderly/sick kids
- Participating in at-risk youth events
- Food drive sorting
COMMUNITY POT-LUCKS – A POISA PROJECT
The Robert Cooke Community Movement
As a step in building community at the Robert Cooke Housing Co-operative, we are providing space for the members to meet for the purposes of making visible the gifts of everyone in the co-op community—families and singles, young and old, vulnerable people; in other words—everyone. This will support the elements of a satisfying life for all co-op members.
The concept is that each floor comes together for pot-lucks (a meal where everyone brings something to share) so that the residents on every floor in the high-rise and the townhouses can share a space together for socializing. Along with the space—drinks, food and help in facilitating the evening for both adults and children are provided by the people on the floor.
The first pot-luck gathering took place on October 30th 2010 for everyone on the 8th Floor and it was a great success.
Robert Cooke Housing Co-operative operates under the assumption that in community people turn to one another. Everyone has something to give. Together, we operate out of 5 core principles:
1: Assets: Everyone has something to give;
2: Work: Building home and community is real, important work,
3: Reciprocity: Giving is stronger when it’s more than a one-way street,
4: Community: We’re stronger together, and
5: Respect: We deserve it from others – and we owe it to others.
We are making no claims to change anything. What we are doing is setting up a means for people who live in a neighbourhood to come together to tell their personal story. Anybody can throw a party or arrange a pot-luck.. It is the design of this gathering that sets this project apart and makes it a POISA project. The goal of POISA and this project is to develop a model of gathering that educates the participants to the power of Inclusion.
LOOKING FORWARD
From the mid 90’s to 2010, one person’s (Judith Snow) realization that peace can be available through Inclusion has developed into an international collective of projects and activities. We have grown from discussion groups and celebrations into the beginnings of sustainable organization.
For this dream to stay alive, we must continue to put down deep roots into cultures everywhere, especially so that young people will see the opportunity and lend their energy and creativity to the work.
Now is the time for WPIT to emerge as “real”. This will happen as many people join the commitment and the efforts. The question that must be answered now is: “Are you – as an individual or a corporation – are you willing to build World Peace through Inclusion?” If so, please join us in whatever way makes sense to you.
I thought I will just share it with you today (rather than write ANOTHER 2 pages.
WPIT – World Peace through Inclusive Transformation
WPIT is a commitment to have people around the globe understand differences and develop skills so that peace is available to all. The sustainability of world peace will emerge when enough communities appreciate diversity as an asset and have the skills to build personal and social value from interacting effectively with differences.
In society, we often look at diversity as a source of problems – things to be fixed like gang conflicts or situations to be managed like sustaining mixed income neighbourhoods. We rarely look at diversity as a source of opportunity for everybody, except in relatively minimal ways like encouraging “ethnic” restaurants, funding mixed heritage cultural experiences or subsidizing an “alterative” movie industry.
If you ask a typical person how they would describe the community they are part of they would likely say it is a group of people who do the same thing – like my bridge club, or believe the same thing – like my church, or are attached geographically to the same place – my town. People haven’t been taught to look at how diversity is essential to community and every kind of interaction.
If we weren’t different from each other we wouldn’t have the need or capacity to interact. It is not just that interaction would be boring or useless. It would not be possible! It is differences that allow for the capacity to communicate. This is just one of the powerful gifts of diversity.
THE WPIT MISSION
Our mission is to have the concept of Giftedness appreciated everywhere. In addition we aim to have all peoples have the capacity to benefit from diversity so as to have social and economic abundance. This in turn will bring peace to communities everywhere – in other words – world peace.
Giftedness Defined
A gift is anything that you are, have or do which creates an opportunity for you to interact with someone else. Under favourable circumstances such interactions can then be built into sustainable relationships and social and economical opportunities.
Any difference is potentially a gift. If someone has black hair and they discover that some people have red hair, it may become for them an opportunity to dye their tresses. Out of many people acting to fulfill this desire an entire hairstyling industry can be built.
The diversities that get labelled as dangerous, awkward, socially incorrect and disabling, are also fundamentally simply differences and therefore potentially gifts.
In the Giftedness approach, the work of Inclusion is simply to create the circumstances under which people will see their differences as opportunities for each other and know how to fulfill these opportunities.
Interestingly and importantly, when people adopt a Gifted perspective they also become more peaceful. This is simply because they have developed the skills to be creative with diversity and they are also conscious of the social and economic benefits that are being made available. There is less impulse to fight and do harm when there is nothing to fear and everything to gain.
When the world has people experience the concept of Giftedness in everyday life the result will be Inclusion and this will foster peacefulness. This connection between Inclusion and peace is at the heart of what we stand for.
Integral to inclusion is the development of creative and unique social and economic opportunities in local communities. It is a fundamental part of our mission to have Inclusion experienced as a multidimensional set of interactions where creativity can be expressed and to foster sustainable social and economic experiments.
OBJECTIVES
One of WPIT’s key objectives is to research the BMX Model of Inclusion and to have it taught as a practical model for social and economical development.
The BMX Model of Inclusion
We propose that three distinct states of Inclusion co-exist. Neither is better than the other, but often there is an emergent pull to move from one state to another. We are calling these states B, M, and X:
State B (Basic): Groups allow the presence of people with diverse characteristics. State B’s principal quality is that the includers share presence with diversity, but no other changes are anticipated or offered. The includers like their community as is, expect no major shifts, and the included are expected to adapt to the ways and means of the includers and to get along as best they can. Typically the included express gratitude for the opportunity and work hard to not cause difficulties.
State M (Mechanical): Includers recognize that the included are struggling to get along, and are willing to make “accommodations”. The included move beyond simply being grateful for the opportunity to coexist and begin to advocate for support. For example, service providers currently tend to segregate individuals with cognitive challenges and the professionalization of supporters tends to turn citizens into helpers and volunteers instead of friends and colleagues.
State X (Crossover): Both includers and the included recognize that another world is possible, one that benefits from the gifts and contributions available in the cultures, characteristics, and experiences of members of both the including and included groups. The perception fades that there are two sides and a distinct boundary.
Operationalizing the BMX Model:
State B (Basic) A teenager with autism and no speech is kept at the back of a regular classroom, with no attention paid to whether he is building friendships.
State M (Mechanical) All teenagers with “disability” labels are given opportunities to be in a homeroom for 1st period. The school has a resource room for tutoring, an “inclusive” lunchroom, and Special Olympics classes to replace regular gym.
State X (Crossover) Ninth grade students are invited to form a support circle with a teen who loves music, and who also has autism and no speech. Twenty-three students respond. They meet regularly and enthusiastically at different points in their day and week for the next four years. The teen who focuses the circle enjoys participating in the school band, gym and many more classes than anyone originally expected. The other teens express their appreciation at having an alternative to being “Nerds”, “Preps” or simply left out. The school administration notes a dramatic decrease in fights and vandalism.
Another WPIT key objective is to see POISA projects grow communities locally and around the globe.
The Peaceful Open Inclusive Spaces Alliance (POISA)
POISA arises from the experience that communities, work places, schools, etc. can become more peaceful when people of diverse backgrounds come together in ways that draw on diversity as a social asset rather than a liability, and where people are free and supported to create and shape their own activities. The future of POISA is to teach people that Inclusion makes peace possible, to foster the sustainable development of real examples of POISA and to have strategic buy-in around the world. People will come to expect their world to be made up of such spaces.
PEACEFUL Having the capacity to resolve conflict to the benefit of all concerned
OPEN Participants shape their own agendas and activities
INCLUSIVE Diversities among participants are welcome and drawn on as valuable resources
SPACES Locations, contexts, and rules and principles that give participants a safe and facilitative bounded area within which to generate their activities
ALLIANCE Agreements between organizations and individuals to work together to create and preserve a valued experience
On the ground POISA is a complex process of community development consisting of:
the development of a community’s principles of Open Space
supporting the community’s invitation process to become more diverse
capturing the learnings as the community becomes more peaceful
facilitating story telling that deepens the community’s ability to be diverse and peaceful
WPIT HISTORY
Judith Snow has done groundbreaking work throughout her life to have people notice and appreciate the contributions of people who are labelled disabled. She has travelled and taught that, rather than being problems to fix or hide, the differences we call disabilities create a context for relationship and community building and for greater social and economic sustainability. Over time she developed a storehouse of examples of peace making through Inclusion drawn from fields such as education, health care, community development and economics.
In the mid ‘90’s, Judith Snow realized that Inclusion of diversities, if they are appreciated as gifts and contributions, creates the context for people to become peaceful.
WPIT was born when Judith Snow, Gabor Podor, Erin Socall and Jason Wiles toured several states for seven months, speaking with and learning from others who were transforming fear of differences into passion to build social and economic sustainability.
At this time WPIT is conceived as an umbrella organization, seeding and guiding other initiatives and projects that look very different from each other, but which have the common characteristics of being able to teach people and have them build from their differences in ways that foster sustainable relationships, abundance and peacefulness.
PROJECTS
WPIT WORLD PEACE TOURS
In 2008, Judith Snow, Gabor Podor, Erin Socall and Jason Wiles began on an exploration throughout the United States and Canada. This 7 month journey took them deep into the heart of a learning and engagement experience. They worked together with many people who were creatively dealing with deep exclusion in their own lives. From the stories and experiences of the people met along the way, the BMX model of inclusion was developed.
This journey gave the evidence that peace really is available through Inclusion. To experience some of the stories for yourself, you can read the blog from the tour at http://peaceforinclusion.blogspot.com/
The World Peace Tour is scheduled to go back on the road in early 2011 officially launching WPIT’s 2011 projects and spreading Inclusion everywhere it goes. Locations on the current timeline range from Ontario, Minnesota, Georgia, New York and Arizona.
THE “DO SOMETHING GOOD” CAMPAIGN
The Do Something Good campaign is a movement founded by Kimberly Fu in 2005 to get people involved in the community during the holiday season. It started as a simple trip to the Salvation Army with some friends and has now expanded into co-ordinating visits to many different locations and service centres to do many different kinds of tasks. This is an opportunity for people to give from their own gifts to people who are in need. The opportunity appeals especially to people who have always wanted to help but had no idea where to start.
Originally the campaign operated just during the holiday season but now we are functional from early October to the end of the winter season. People aren't required to volunteer for the whole 4 months - whatever can be mustered is perfectly okay. Doing something good can be small or can be large, just as long as the opportunity is there to do something!
There is no reason why we have to restrict ourselves to just the holidays. We hope that every year we will grow in numbers, so we can make this a year-round campaign.
WPIT GAMES
The fastest growing sector in the entertainment industry is video games, surpassing both movies and music combined in 2008, and just like movies and music, the themes in games do not always provide the players with the very best social messages. Imagine the power of fostering peace and reinforcing it through game play!
WPIT Games is a project to do just that. By creating a series of fun, Inclusion themed video games we are generating a community of online gamers who come to a website on a daily basis and are reinforced with themes of diversity and Giftedness. We are expecting that this learning will play out in the rest of their lives, giving gamers a background to act in more Inclusive ways.
We are in the process of creating an alliance with several game development companies for this project, both upstart companies and big businesses. In this way we can tap into the large audience that bigger developers can offer while working with new, unshaped game creators.
Our first project is on track to be released online in early 2011, in time to be entered as part of the 2011 Games 4 Change Festival in New York City.
Examples of On-the-Ground WPIT Projects
Do Something Good 2010 Events
The Brown Bag Drive
Do Something Good is launching the Brown Bag Drive this year, where we will be putting together several large brown bags full of clothes and toiletries for people who are homeless and delivering it downtown during the day, along with a brown bag meal.
Other Current Opportunities
- Toy sorting
- Serving meals to people who are homeless via a shelter/church
- Gift wrapping
- Visiting the elderly/sick kids
- Participating in at-risk youth events
- Food drive sorting
COMMUNITY POT-LUCKS – A POISA PROJECT
The Robert Cooke Community Movement
As a step in building community at the Robert Cooke Housing Co-operative, we are providing space for the members to meet for the purposes of making visible the gifts of everyone in the co-op community—families and singles, young and old, vulnerable people; in other words—everyone. This will support the elements of a satisfying life for all co-op members.
The concept is that each floor comes together for pot-lucks (a meal where everyone brings something to share) so that the residents on every floor in the high-rise and the townhouses can share a space together for socializing. Along with the space—drinks, food and help in facilitating the evening for both adults and children are provided by the people on the floor.
The first pot-luck gathering took place on October 30th 2010 for everyone on the 8th Floor and it was a great success.
Robert Cooke Housing Co-operative operates under the assumption that in community people turn to one another. Everyone has something to give. Together, we operate out of 5 core principles:
1: Assets: Everyone has something to give;
2: Work: Building home and community is real, important work,
3: Reciprocity: Giving is stronger when it’s more than a one-way street,
4: Community: We’re stronger together, and
5: Respect: We deserve it from others – and we owe it to others.
We are making no claims to change anything. What we are doing is setting up a means for people who live in a neighbourhood to come together to tell their personal story. Anybody can throw a party or arrange a pot-luck.. It is the design of this gathering that sets this project apart and makes it a POISA project. The goal of POISA and this project is to develop a model of gathering that educates the participants to the power of Inclusion.
LOOKING FORWARD
From the mid 90’s to 2010, one person’s (Judith Snow) realization that peace can be available through Inclusion has developed into an international collective of projects and activities. We have grown from discussion groups and celebrations into the beginnings of sustainable organization.
For this dream to stay alive, we must continue to put down deep roots into cultures everywhere, especially so that young people will see the opportunity and lend their energy and creativity to the work.
Now is the time for WPIT to emerge as “real”. This will happen as many people join the commitment and the efforts. The question that must be answered now is: “Are you – as an individual or a corporation – are you willing to build World Peace through Inclusion?” If so, please join us in whatever way makes sense to you.
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