I seem to have far too much to say in this medium, and just at the point where I have too much to say, I have almost no time in which to say it.

Things have been super busy.  I've just billed the biggest month in four years of consulting history, and have been wrestling with the schedule that comes with such a high revenue.  With semi-daily calls to streamsandpools and what seems like it's going to be a weekly doctor visit, my nights end at dinner and often resume for a few hours to make up the lost time.  Toss in social events and housework needs, and it means most of my waking hours are spent either working or waiting to return to work.  It's a grueling schedule that will continue throughout most of May.  But surprisingly, I seem to be handling it fairly well.

I think I can chalk some of this up to my new daily routine, which involves a half hour walk each morning fresh from bed, followed by a shower and then a big steaming bowl of oatmeal with two eggs.  It's been transformative to start my day with exercise and a big breakfast, to be able to connect immediately with my physical self and give my brain space to process the neighborhood, the birds, the sky, the weather instead of the spin or the thousand things going on in the Big Life at present.  I find that, generally, it's caused a lift in my mood, or at least a decrease in the tendency for a downturn.

Waking up each morning and immediately looking forward to my walk and my oatmeal is a new experience for me as well.  It makes me feel more like the person I'm working on becoming.  Not that there is anything wrong with the person I have been, but he has some destructive patterns that need to go away in order for him to be the old man I'd like to be eventually.

I think this doctor journey, though it's far from over and may even just be starting, is something that is giving me the final last jolt into a healthy practice and a way of looking at myself, my life, and my body that I've felt was needed for years.  I consider the time after my divorce to be a time of reclaiming and rediscovery, and I'm feeling like that particular period is coming to a close.

In the meantime, I've been doing an experiment which involves my child, mainly revitalizing and remapping the places of joy in my life, an exercise that I will be trying to eventually feed into my writing and approach to writing.  I decided earlier this year that I was going to take myself to a movie a week, and see all the big action blockbusters of the year, all the comic films, all the movies that my child would have peed himself over when I was a child.

The experiment, though, hinges on losing the critic mind, which I'm finding to be both very fulfilling and very difficult.  My child never wanted to intellectually dissect a movie when it was over, discussing plot holes and weak parts of the direction and the script.  He never wanted to compare it to other movies, to the book, to other parts of the series or to analyze the actors and their commitment to the part or the part's fit for them.  And yet that's always what my adult does, sometimes even while the credits roll.

The idea is to go to these films without the critic, to find something in them that wows, to connect with the richness of the fantasy, to suspend disbelief.  The idea is to see good where there is good and to accept the good without pointing a finger to what could be better, yearning for more good, or worse yet perfection, to fill up the well of the child and let him swim in the glee of these otherworlds.  And it's been working.  Forbidden Kingdom gave me Jackie Chan as the Drunken Master again, and Jet Li  as the Monkey King.  Iron Man gave me one of my favorite childhood comic book heros brought to life.  And each movie introduced me to worlds that my imagination longed to linger in.

In a sense, I'm trying to get to a place where I'm better able to come to a thing in whichever mind I choose to come to it with, to be able to joyfully be the critic without feeling like I'm naysaying and to be able to joyfully be the childmind without feeling like I'm just swallowing pablum.

The implications for silencing my critic mind when it comes to writing are immense.  I plan to add my reading and writing practice back in to the mix once the work load softens.

And now it is late and I must to bed.  There is more to tell, about my upcoming trip to England, about my dread about Mondays, about my mother and my family, but these will have to wait.  I'll be back whenever I can, and until then, thank you.

Most of this weekend has been spent sitting in my front room with the windows open, either smelling the late April breeze still speckled with cherry blossoms, or listening to the soft rain patter against the dark green leather leaves of the bush tree below the sill. Minutes passed and then hours passed and soon days will pass.

The silent quality of this gentle drizzle, the birdsong behind it, the lack of voices and machines lets me hear my own breathing, uncoils my thoughts that have been so tightly wound around the spoke-stem of my reality. Each day I've gone for a walk, half an hour to an hour throughout my neighborhood in a practice I began when I returned from the doctor some weeks ago. At first it was exercise and my heart rate complained and my legs screamed for the sanctity of sofas and cartoons. But then I hit my stride and the weariness of steps turned to circulation and the feeding of energy into my joints and muscles.

And now when I walk, it is how it used to be. My legs move and my breath rises and falls, and my thoughts and laid out behind me like breadcrumbs, and my thoughts go before me like swallows, and my thoughts spin around me like small planets on which infinitely small civilizations go about the business of ecosystems.

( Continue… )

It's interesting, this view of myself as a mythic figure, someone destined to journey through his life alone, hooked into the silences, glimpsed on the fringes, with all the time and space available to both become expansive and to wallow in indecision from too much choice. I remind myself that I began this trip driving across country ten years ago last September, and that apart from a few robust chapters, I've been able to self-fulfill that image, to live it to the best of my ability, and to become extremely attached to the comforts of the definition it provides.

I feel that somewhere along the line, I may have forgotten the heart of that romantic intent for the sake of the pretty shell around it. This was meant to be a journey of adventure, to live my life as an experiment and to make it somewhat extraordinary. Lately, as change has thrust its multi-hued canvasses across the eaves of my porch and began brewing in cast iron stew pots a concoction that smells of the thickness of exotic meats and many-syllabled spices, I have frowned out my priest hole and closed my shutters. It is far easier to dwell in the small spaces I construct than to fully accept what my beliefs bring me: constant challenge, constant call for transformation, the constant fire of a steel lupine lock-gaze and the tensed haunches begging for action.

But now I am in love with a woman from England who demands of me that I am what I claim to be and that I believe what I say I believe, that I am what I am without the pretense of selective faith, that I act as I act through self-respect and lovingkindness. I am being brought a relationship that will require me to expand and heal. I am being brought a situation that threatens the delicate soul shell I build and sometimes fill with distraction and depression. I am being asked to grow up, and given the challenge of doing so without becoming an adult. I am being asked to end my patterns, to own and ask for the spaces I wish, to take the things I wish to take. But more than anything, I'm being asked to choose the world I have always said I was choosing, to truly accept what these last ten years of solid intent have brought to my door.

It frightens me to be truthful to myself, to act even through fear slavers and shrieks. But I feel a sense of blossoming here, that a very large shift has been building and being co-created for a number of years. And like a small child who doesn't want to go to school, I'd rather roll over and sleep longer, pretend that my summer continues and will never end. But the next day comes, and the structure and the expansion of school is full of joy, and I will find myself sniffing pencil lead and fondly doing my homework and stretching myself sometimes until it hurts in order to become more flexible.

The morning child is not comforted by what the mid-day teen will find, and so it's a process of conversation and self-trust. I will need to step out of this divorce apartment, shake off the stagnation skin of hibernation, push back against the writer's cramp, and immerse fully into the second world. I will need to finally leave behind the fiction of myself for the much more interesting, viable, and dynamic fact. I will need to open and soften, choose spaces and invest in the mindful efficiency of moments.

But I can do these things. This, after all, is the adventure of my life.

Twice every year, the position is right, the skies are clear enough, the night is dark enough so that the moon is framed in the upper panel of the window that sits next to my bed. During it's pregnant blush, the silver sea flows down onto my face and against the flesh of my chest. And I lay curled up in it, comforted, some otherworldly and instinctive belonging hushing my tired eyes.

A month has passed since I was visited by the wind tribes and the raven masks. During that time, I have lost my wolf ring to the unforgiving pipes of a toilet, I have become sick and then well, my mother has gone through two surgeries, and I have helped say goodbye to two animal people. I have struggled with eye maladies, have prepared myself for having to move from my apartment, have worked very hard, and have gone through a depression. During that time, I have performed a Samhain ritual which marked the beginning of 2008. I have had deep conversations with good friends. I have mourned the long dead. I have come to many realizations.

But I have not written anything until now.

There are three flavors of "no". There is the knowing that "no" is the answer. There is being afraid for either very good reasons or temporarily immovable reasons. And there is fear from uncertainty. I've made too many decisions out of the last flavor of no, and many of those decisions, though small, eventually gather together and scurry and soon have weight enough to squeeze shut expression and openness. Spend enough time trying to outfox uncertainty, trying to navigate it without stumbling, and you eventually find you aren't moving an inch.

Saying yes to uncertainty is embracing impermanence. Nothing is certain and all things change. Nothing is fully predictable. The streams of moonlight through my window will be gone in a few months. Already as I write this, they shift position further and further from my face. Last night may be the only clear night this season where I will get to experience them. Or there may be clarity for weeks.

And so the questions I ask myself as a writer who finally wants to take himself seriously, who is more than a bit bored with journaling, are "what's next?" and "where?" and "how?"

Answering those questions is trying to determine something that is uncertain. The only way to determine it is to walk through it. And that's what I plan to do. Tonight, I knew that I wanted to post. That's enough. Tomorrow, we'll see what comes along the path.

Overall, at this moment, I know that I want to go to bed and see if the moon will meet me in that quiet place again. It's a place where wolves dream and howl in their sleep, and everything makes sense. It's a place of vulnerability and promise, and communal with the eternal yes.

The Bad: Shifting my car into drive on one of the steepest hills in all of Seattle (which is saying something), but accidentally shifting into neutral, causing it to plummet at a surprisingly fast speed towards the parked car behind me.

The Good: Video game reflexes and recently repaired brakes.

The Ugly: The guy that watched all this happen and made eye contact with me in that Seattle kinda "you dumbass" way.

Today is today. And I can't seem to stop eating. And I'm eating all the things that aren't good for me, seemingly because sugar and fat and salt and fizz spark a nice pleasure reaction that gives me a well-needed shock. I'm still not really back to any practice, but I am back to having the house cleaned, the bills paid, the taxes handled, and plans for all future 2007 vacations in the can.

Tonight I will break out Google Calendar and see what I can do about carving out creative time. But I'm realizing that I've lost one of the biggest and most vocal reasons why I used to create. I am seeing that a very big reason I created was because it filled something inside of me that was empty otherwise, it soothed a place in me that wanted energy poured into it.

Now that place is filled and complete. And I feel a little lost without it, and without its motivation, like a junkie in withdrawal. But like something unhealthy and addictive, despite the hunger for it, the truth is that it just gets in the way of fulfillment. It served whatever purpose it served and seems to have vanished in the events of this summer. And I'll bet once I can get my footing into connection again, the way forward will be clearer.

So I've decided that, what with so many other things starting anew, that I should start from scratch, and remember and look for those places again of enjoyment, play, and of expression. I'd like to give myself permission now, without hesitation, to grow up, take myself seriously as an artist and spiritualist/shaman, and embrace the integrated power of being a child.

I run Workrave now and I love it. It's a nifty little program that keeps track of the time I spend typing and/or mousing and forces rest breaks at intervals and lengths which I determine. I can snooze-alarm them and even tell them to get bent, but if I do, they remain in the corner, passively fuming with their red "I told you, but you ignored me and now look where we are" negative countdown. It's really the next best thing to having a midwestern mother around.

"You are a big boy. Do whatever you want, but you'll be sorry if you do that. You'll see."

For those of you who think Seattle is the passive-aggressive capital of the country, try growing up in Ohio.

( Read more? )

Well, it's a banner day for the Shark Religion, for the Shark Messiah has come.

In human, that is ME news, all day today I thought it was tomorrow. That's not a nonlinear, hole-in-reality time thing or a non-duality, time-is-an-illusion thing. I just thought it was tomorrow. In fact, since I'm writing this after midnight, it IS tomorrow, so I suppose that means yesterday I thought it was today, but now it is today, so I'm even more confused.

... Hey, what about those Sharks, eh? Eh?

At any rate, I worked myself to dropping Tuesday night, thinking it was Wednesday night, in some attempt to finish my projects by the long weekend so that they could go into product review. Thing is, I didn't realize until noon today that I'd somehow woken up in a Wednesday kind of a day rather than the Thursday kind of a day I had expected. To make matters worse, once I had proved to myself that it was Wednesday by yelling out the window at a small child, "You there! What day is it!?" and received my Christmas goose some hours later, I walked outside to where our garbage cans live and discovered that they had been placed to the curb for pickup. Since trash collection is always on Friday morning and cans are placed out Thursday night, I had a sudden, dizzying sense of temporal vertigo and a desire for revenge against said apple-cheeked urchin.

But then I remembered that Monday is a holiday, and so next week, Tuesday is my Monday. And for some reason that means trash pickup the week previous is completely screwed up and shifted a day earlier.

I passed out slide rules before I started writing this. Please use them if you get lost.

The point is, today was Wednesday. If I play my cards right, my reward for working Tuesday night is having most of Friday off. But I gave up my creative time for it, which I'm not that pleased to have done. And honestly, even though I'll enjoy Friday, it's not worth the cost.

The concept of creating space, the hard rules of the concept, I feel I've let slide. Without the commitment to the time and the keeping of that date with myself, apart from any other impinging factors, it's just a bunch of minutes slung together that I may or may not use as I'd planned. And that doesn't work for me. The message I give myself is that my commitments to those activities are of a lower priority, when really the opposite is true.

So this weekend, I'm back to Creating Spaces and keeping to their creation and the rules of what happens inside them, and what does not happen outside of them. It's a system that works extremely well for me, better than any other system by far. But it only works if I use it correctly.

I'll also be worrying about streamsandpools, who seems to have contracted Dengue Fever from her trip to the Amazon, but who really has Tonsillitis from her trip to Berlin. I think the first thing sounds more exotic, though.

See you back here tomorrow, which is Friday, right?

It's so interesting to be in a place where I am dead tired and my eyes are full of pudding and know that I have to post something. It's even more interesting to have posted two entries that I loved and that received favorable comments. Because if there's one thing I don't know what to do with, it's praise.

I'm pretty good at saying thank you. And when somebody really wants to make something land with me (imtboo is a master at this), I'm able and ready to pull my heart forward and let it land. When it comes to many things, though, especially creativity, good words often leave me thinking "Oh crap, I'll never be able to do that again" or "Huh? I don't even know what I did right!" depending on my mood.

But the point is, I believe in the life of a writer, there is just today. There is the moment you are writing and if anything, perhaps the few moments before, when you inhale. But as somebody trying to live with every day being a new lifetime, there's not too much worth for me in most comparisons. I'll never write what I wrote yesterday again. I'll also never write this again. And tomorrow, what I write I can't even imagine.

It's always been the looking back and looking forward that stops me from looking around. So I try not to do it anymore. All the fun bits in life are what's happening now anyway.

Tonight was supposed to be my creative spaces night, but at the very last minute before transitioning from code monkey to word lemur, the Gods That Are Funny But In A Mean Way (Or NAMBLA) unleashed this massive bug on the windshield of my project. And so I worked to fix it, and like Br'er Rabbit, the more I tried to unstick myself, the more stuck I became.

On a side note, I've just realized I made a "tar baby" reference. I feel strangely uncomfortable about it.

The point is, the evening fled and soon I found myself blearily blinking over the counter at PCC, trying to form the words "Broccoli Waldorf", which are the two hardest words to try to speak when you are very tired. And there they were, both together in the same place!

After I took what I can only describe as "Bruckle Wardoff" home, I had an hour to go, watched some "Deadliest Catch" and slid back into the chair to write this.

Another side note. Any time on "Deadliest Catch" that you see a boat you haven't seen all season with just ten minutes left in the show, it's Star Trek Red Shirt time. Something is about to go down!

Speaking of, my Bruckle went down well. And I let my creative night go, because it was far easier to let things be as they were than wish them otherwise. In half an hour, I do my small dreamtime ritual and after the passage through, I'll see what tomorrow's life has to offer me.

The best thing I can say about this part of my life is that I'm learning the value of myself apart from any skills or actions or demonstrations, just the value at the core of my being, without roles or definitions or effort. Having that core being loved by myself and others holds more freedom for me than I ever imagined.

You know, it occurs to me that the phrase "like a broken record" really doesn't have much meaning for kids raised in the era after vinyl. "Like a skipping CD" doesn't mean the same thing either as CDs tend to skip ahead or skip around and, anyway, don't reliably skip back and play the same piece of the song over and over. Perhaps the popularity of old school rappers and folks like Beck might at least keep the idea of record scratch around.

In fact, "like a broken record" makes me feel the same way as saying "beating a dead horse" or "like a bad penny" does. Kids today don't know from horses and one day soon the penny will be out of circulation. And that will leave me with my adages, which I'll spew forth our the window of my dank apartment at the kids on the lawn.

So what skips? A stone across the water? Do people do that anymore, or has that gone the way of feeding the ducks? Are there still ducks? "Like somebody keeps hitting the Tivo rewind" might work. Maybe "Like an acid loop". I dunno. I'm still working on it.

( Continue.. it's a bigun )

I spent a good two hours outside on my porch today, writing the last post, listening to our podcast, and noticing the two other people on their porches across the street involved in their own reflection and connection. One thing I can say for myself is that I certainly have been busy. But on the whole, I sense that something rather large is missing.

( What is missing... )

The experiment was simple:
1. Say "yes" to any creative project that came in the door.
2. Give yourself the permission to be flaky and change your mind.
3. Use the "spaces" philosophy to make it all happen. Nothing happens that isn't in a manifested space.

( The result of this experiment... )

One night in 1993 or 1994, I left work and drove almost two hours south, through back roads and past tree-flanked streams to see the Indigo Girls at Ohio University. After the show, I fought the expulsion of traffic and the weary, sleep-inducing darkness to arrive home a few hours before I had to get up for work the next day.

A few years ago, I sat in the back row, in nearly the last seat to watch Tom Waits rust and hunker and wiggle and slide across the stage.

To date, these are the only two concerts I've ever been to alone.

( Tonight... )

"Hey, William. Aren't you supposed to be updating every day? I noticed you didn't yesterday."

"Who are you and how did you get in here?"

"Oh, I'm sorry. I thought this was the post office"

"Ah, no that's a few blocks away"

"Right, wow, this is embarrassing. I'll just leave then, shall I?"

"Don't worry about it, happens all the time with you voices"

( Voices... )

My last post regarding the space-creation philosophy and practice has caused a fair amount of discussion and interested questions within my artistic community. Having only just launched the idea as a new approach to myself, I am also busily processing the possibilities of what it can bring to my life. So I thought I'd expound on it a bit more.

( a bit more is here, in fact... )

This is a long one, just to get you caught up with what's going on with the Willie. It's funny how I shift day-to-day in and out of esoteric versus factual, from imagic (my own word) to newsy.

( Let's go... )

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- A man dressed as Chewbacca was arrested after police said the street performer head-butted a tour guide operator in front of Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood.

When wookies go wild...

But that's not important now. What is important is that I'm back to daily writings, whether those be postings here, on the new journal or elsewhere. I'm vaguely playing around with the idea of working on my pieces for "This Wallingford Life" and the proposed book of essays publicly, as in writing and editing in a place that is visible, with a versioning system via tags. I'm not sure why that's intriguing to me today, or why that channel seems to be more conducive to something as experimental as a revealed writing workshop approach. I've never, ever considered displaying a work in progress before, let alone providing a glass window through which to view the process.

At any rate, I'm going to sit with it and see what it wants and what's best for its development.

The recent and brilliant post by my buddy drshorn has me aching for essays of a more simple format and more personal nature, to begin that long-waiting project that lives in Glass, Bryson, Sedaris, Rackoff, and Vowell lands. Actually, his post had me very happy and impressed and then it had me really jealous. THEN it had me aching. The Shorn guy is a great writer, don't let him tell you otherwise.

But the overall idea is to create space. That's the big theme for me this year and probably the biggest shift and transformation of my approach to everything. Create the space. See what shows up. Work your energy to its utmost to make the space welcoming and ready and attractive and flexible. Things will grow in it organically, or they won't. But the creation of space is the key. The providing of experience is the workshop equivalent, but that won't come into play for some time yet.

I've created this space, and one in the new journal. The Blonde Swedes create their own space. So now it's up to me to figure out the spaces that my other projects would like to live in.

As you might be able to tell, I feel better. I slept for just over eight hours last night and woke up not interested in sleeping anymore. So I hopped on the computer and spent some time tweaking the new journal's look and feel, then cleaned and adjusted the living room... and as soon as I realized that I was still in my robe with the loose belt in front of very large bay windows.. I decided to give the neighbors a break and go shower and get dressed.

Nobody needs to see that.

So yes, I am now having the "Yeah, I'm just getting over a bad cold" feelings, bit achy and prone to sudden drops of energy and not too interested in much activity. But overall, I'm good, much, much better. I'm hoping that next week, being well, I can have a clearer and better perspective on things.

I also really, really want my MacBook... but patience is a something or whatever.