Wisdom Quotes - I Read Tea Tags

Oct 2009 revisited

What is it about October and being overcome by life? 

Mark Twain  is quoted on the teabag tag:

                                 The worst loneliness is not to be comfortable with yourself. 

This tag does not make it into my trash. I tell myself it is a reminder of my intent to visit Twain's CT home. But, it is more. 

Too often it is an outcome. A most genuine young person's  discomfort overcame him on Oct. 3rd, 2009.

A wise friend eulogized this life as --- an anomaly. 

He was genuine. Do not underestimate the interminable value of such a quality. It made his words drip with honesty, his gestures bleed sincerity, his compassion captivate with clarity, and his life – touch every person who found themselves fortunate enough to cross its path. He was a good man. Let me repeat this statement, for it seems to necessitate an extraordinary emphasis. He was a good man. In these lives we lead, such men are as rare to find as they are difficult to lose.

Being genuine is often a lonely road. I agree with this characterization. As hundreds of young acquaintances and some true friends mingled among disarmed friends-of-family to pay respects or say farewell... another anomaly played out and spoke to the dissonance that created such profound sadness and ultimately, loneliness. 

I am left to wonder if good humor was a mask on this soul, and sadness, the ultimate poison. Masks do more than hide. They reimagine. They cover up and that is not a road to healing.

The Christian burial of this non-believer provided a hyper-view of how anomalies of existence contributed to discomfort.

At the LGTB Rally [National Equality March] many lay claim to the temptation of life taking in the face failure to be accepted and the possibility of equality. To all those attending and knowing such a pain -- may they find strength in the self-knowing exemplified by Lt. Dan Choi. 

May those who feel the pain of distance from family for any reason - may you find a larger human family to connect every day - not just at this rally. 

I am grateful that a trip to the theater helped me know the story of Matt Shepard. I was encouraged as a mother on  10.08.09 that the nation was one step closer to being a better union thanks to a conference report in support of the Matthew Shepard Act before the Senate. Matthew Shepard was a gay student who was beaten to death in Wyoming in 1998. But it was a step, a legislative rider, limited to facilitating investigations of actual acts of violence, not threats of violence or other verbal conduct. Later the Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009 was passed

 ~~~ Back to Quotes At age 10, my life's goal was to have a published quote in Reader's Digest. 

In 2009, there were  4242 pages of RD (Reader's Digest Quotes) quotes online. They were categorized as Wit & Wisdom. Now Twitter-sized on-line world, everyone is self-published and searchable. Wisdom is metered out in blogs. It remains a habit, an immediate go-to to find the quotes when I come across an RD magazine.  And I am still in search of wisdom within from with my own experience.

Eating Ants

From The Body's Question: Poems Tracey K Smith US Poet Laureate 2018

Ants love sweets. I relate. I relate.

Crave is me.

Save the colony, are they.

Alone in my honey ...

Swarms about my crumbs ...

My home in their planet.

He chides. More Protein.

Eat more insects, scientists say. 

I am without their predictability
a persistent pheromone informed calculus 
I am tornado like shadowing above them 
in my fear of itchy contamination. 

It is in my head: automatic negative thoughts.
Bait them, slow to the queen they go. 
No.

Voices in my head;
I'd rather not kill the ants but I do want to be rid'f 'em. 
What of an Option B?

Mock (giggle)
Eat ANTS.

Chorus
We need ants.

Refrain 
There is science! 

Yuck surfaces from my gut's own microbiome.


I am not at the ready to extinguish life
to partner with residual guilt
I am open to sharing space with planet savers
oblivious to true knowing

It is in my heart: be mindful
seductively resilience comes among the pharmakons 
vinegar and cinnamon.

Notes: 
This poem evolved from a satirical exchange about real life ants in the kitchen. While writing I encountered nudges on this poems' purpose as I try to wedge into my life more time for poem-ing. 
After a chat with a local poet I seek and find again the inaugural reading by Tracy K Smith. I scan and listen soon to hear the poetic reference to ants and purpose and reach Joy and poem such that "The body is memory". 
In my next attempt to squeeze in some writing time - I listen with some disappointment to Dr. Daniel Amen reading of his children's book. 
Distracted from life-balance again by tasks at the intersection of me and work [In chunks it appeared on my LinkedIn while posting my 5th anniversary search for collaborators] I click; nudged by prior knowing through Community TV curation and a friend who often connects me to a world bigger than my box. I take time to listen to informing promotional videos by Adam Grant and Sheryl Sandberg about the nonprofit Option B which just so happens to be more on what to do about ANT specifically when beset by trauma.

And as I revel in the puzzling of words, word usage examples play along: 

mindful eating will allow you to savor your food and eat more intuitively rather than emotionally

and end in a surreal wrap-up with the term pharmakon (Jacques Derrida Plato's Pharmacy) and inference by David Foster Wallace 

The self-conscious appearance of unself-consciousness is the grand illusion behind TV's mirror-hall of illusions; and, for us, the Audience, it is both medicine and poison

Sips

when one opens
doors passed by in bygone days
inhales 
up-close a fragrance of Prosperity Roses 
teeters on that edge
a foothold in now

sips
a wine nuanced with bourbon barrels
being neither wine nor bourbon
being other
assertive by review and outcome

when one opens
doors in policy of equal chances
rising to the top
sinking to the bottom
flocculating peradventure
intimate and forgiving
carnality
a privilege 
stamen defunct 
musky with age a short blush 
decades rooted 
thus extroverted and demoded 
desired consequences flower
peak masterfully
among seductive
sips

It is the talk that lingers.

~~~~
The poem began as this .... Did it evolve or devolve with a day of attention.

when one opens
doors passed by in bygone days
sips
a wine nuanced with bourbon aged barrels,
being neither, being other, assertive
by review and outcome

doors, in policy of equal chances,
desired consequences
peak masterfully
among seductive
sips.

It is the talk that lingers.

Eternity Made Visible

Upon reading Merton’s elegies
To Hemingway, Thurber and the Monastery Barn
In days closer to my ashes
I appreciate the container – eternity, formed in words.

My Mom tells her Doctor

I am the last. There are no others. I lost my brother.

In this moment she does not belong to the remaining quintet of her children, broken                        two decades before when she lost a son, her favorite.

In this moment she is wandering an eternity made visible, in skies undiluted by humanity.              Her captcha distinguishes her soul from the involuntary carrying-on of her heart.

In this moment her face lightens as if a Spring sun just reminded her of a new season, or                  her one good ear heard the caterwauling of their youthful mischief.

My Mom tells her Doctor

My brother did not know his present. He would not have known                                                                                                     I was not there.

My Mom tells her Doctor

They said "He had a smile on his face." Me too.                                                                                                                                  When I remember.

In this moment I kiss her brow and we carry on.

Too many MEs

When the cloud world merges you -- it can be so confusing. Originally my silos were to help process different types of tasks and associations and to stay safe (There is a backstory with guns, and deaths and threats currently locked away).  Now my multiple identities trip me up more than they help. But the web is there figuratively and literally with its need for keys  (passwords that insist on caps, letters & characters...when i prefer to use all lower case). Ugh. 


I have not kept up with the wonders of the random distractions of each day.  The discussion of conspicuous consumption (a.k.a. Prius effect), the betterthinking video that really just needed audio, the tweets of Colbert or the walks that farting dogs give notice about -- missing.

I tried to make something of this distraction -- pictures of the Amistad statue in New Haven - but I really did not transform it in any way. 

Here are the letters that my fingers are slowly building a relation ship with.
fasde  jkl;i  ddddd this finger is most challenged.  I quess it has not had enough reason to be used to have a natural flow form brain to hand. Anyway i am looking forward to the mavis Beacon typing lessons software.  Hopefully $15 well spent.

Reoccurring Realizations and Rain

‘Ah, that is what I was doing.’ The voice in my head says ‘you should count these’, these times that you were lost & found. Then the idea passes. Counting that is, immediately distracted by how familiar this eureka, what was once mere recall, seems over the most mundane of things: cat food cans open, tea in microwave, shoes in room x, list on table b, vitamin on the counter, stove on…with unmonitored scary outcomes, lights left burning. Sometimes the smells call me back to the kitchen. And I fear that more times, will be alarmed for smoke, if I do not get more connected. Yes I think the issue is staying connected.

When I try to speak of these instances of forgetfulness, the ‘me too stories’ of misplaced keys, missed b’days or late recall of appointments are instant retorts from the listener. And I know that it is common to forget – maybe due to excessive busyness or poor list management; but when is being ‘disconnected’ from what you are doing become outside of the understandable. What is the benchmark, the count? What is not common?

My son suggests it is not a topic for jest, or discussion. It is not real – this loss of mindfulness. My partner – jests. He shares the room and the life that will become more unknown to me and he too does not want this to become more real.

I have a T-shirt and bumper sticker that says “I do what the Voices in my head tell me”. In jest, the retort is it would be a better imprint if it said “I do what the Voices in my head remember to tell me”. Lists I try them. Forget them. They find different places like cell phone and keys and those documents made specifically to not go in such circles again. My life’s work was geared toward removing redundancy and now I feel captive to it.

The silver lining: I like the feeling of remembering ideas previously connected to. Not experiences so much. With ideas I rehearse remembering, the voice in my head repeating key phrases so that in the short term I will be able to engage in potentially engaging conversations. If too much time passes, and I am not certain what the duration is, these key phrases come back to me as sounds I cannot quite catch. Not quite the same as searching for a name to go with a face; it is more like a hum of words to a song that is familiar but you really do not know the lyrics. This happened to me before. When I tried to learn another language and when my Instructors had strong accents. One thing I do recall is this feeling associated with my Final Exam for Russian Literature.

As I try to recall – I think her name was Nona (it just came to me as I stretched into remembering) Welleck (spelling to be confirmed). She was particular taken with an author whose name began with a G. I was too; but without doing an Internet search I will not be able to tell you the author or the compelling interest. She was a young communist by lack of options. She was married to a significantly older man (maybe too due to lack of options) and they lived on St. Ronan St. (a street that holds some intrigue). He too was published and in many languages. He was employed by Yale and she was slumming teaching at SCSU. All this is shallows from a time that I ingested ideas and seemed full of excitement connecting literature, history and social relevance together. But not one of these bits of knowledge come to me…but I know if I see something in print I may feel a Eureka rush of recall – that will be like mist within no time at all.

I know the mind is capable of more. I see its elasticity and girth in the gifts of my son and partner and I vaguely recall such capabilities from my childhood. I know I scored incredibly high in mechanical aptitude (Military Entrance Exam) at 17 when my only exposure to such things was overheard conversations between my brothers & father at dinner. There was a time when I was connecting. I wanted to study Russian via immersion. Long ago assumptions of capability.

As I post I realize that this scribble has taken a few hours to construct and that I started it in the middle of the night because the rain was making me anxious: intense downpours, winds and thunder. I actually felt afraid...and wanted distraction. I am now hearing it again through the voices and I am tired...so I will go back to my pillow and wish intently for sleep.

Weekend -- and sinus pain

Today there was news of another life extinguished early; not a direct victim of war like the 20 year old with 2 weeks left to serve a few towns away. Rather a 20 something whose life never got on a sustainable track. As a boy he welcomed a new comer into the neighborhood; provided a middle school life line. I remember afternoons of manageable mischief at the pool just cleaned again for another summer. Sometimes there is too much murkiness to clean up without intervention. Sometimes the chemicals are wrong. I am not sure what to do with this news or the better understanding of genocide I got with an investment of time with BookTV yesterday. I will be buying When The Stars Fall to Earth by Rebecca Tinsley because the proceeds support solutions. I wonder if there will be a compelling section I can read on Community Television that will add to the awareness that I still have no clue what to do with.

So I continue to absorb and wonder and get distracted by sinus pain; What is to become of these connections before I too am extinguished: either by serving or facing something unsustainable?

A researcher --- storyteller

I needed to hear this today and lay claim to this:
Wholehearted living is about engaging in our lives from a place of worthiness. It means cultivating the courage, compassion, and connection to wake up in the morning and think, No matter what gets done and how much is left undone; I am enough.

enough said.

Welcome New Year.

consuming but MUCH more rewarding

So I am hearing or rediscovering more trigger phrases that deserve exploration or commitment via this space but the next few months are still designed as Overload: Transitions, renovations, new and discovery. A few technology bumps...much relearning, and interesting challenges like making TV with thumbprint digital images.

Much of what I am accomplishing is with my grown children and others like them whose mothers I have yet to meet.

If children do not believe that you care, they will not care what you say,,,,

It is great to see values grow into accomplishment; especially, in the service of others.

Time it passes...then something reminds you of just that

Time notations.
My best gift - from the middle...24 years ago today.
My job 30 years - a token award to select - most challenging - shall it be a watch.
My last entry - many iterations of bruises and floor plans.

I fail at habits.

I get inspired by random stories of lives that random did not devour.

I seem to know more of muddle, than middle these days.

Daylight will soon be saving time again.

Perspective on Reading

I randomly listen to talk programs. I happened upon a program on Literacy. It was inspiring. Brought me to tears. It included stories about adults making the commitment to read and how this commitment and the reading transformed their lives.

I took away this new perspective on Reading.
The transition from Learn to Read to Read to Learn is where many non-readers get lost in the system. This transition most commonly happens in about the 4th grade.

quake & waves --- the world became even smaller

Of the Sea - it is hard to imagine the magnitude of the ocean horizon so the tremors of that same ocean is even more remote a plausibility to imagine. But the mother in me suspects its vastness does not compare to the distance created by not knowing about someone dear who is in harms way. I am blessed not to have a child in a war, or ill, or desperately lost in circumstances ... but today I was given a taste of what if. It is so crushing.

Prayers seem an inadequate but appropriate response.

For those in harms way today, I will add my prayers.

[Response to American Samoa - Towering tsunami waves spawned by a powerful earthquake.]

How many contradictions does it takes to come into humanness…

I have been graced in recent days by the poems of Edgar Gabriel Silex and the archives of the Library of Congress.

I found a book of poems among many books of poems... I do not recall the specifics by which on the day in February 1998 I came to include this book Through All the Displacements in my collection. Someone went with a group of us to a reading and I recall 3 poetry books being purchased. I took one home. It is inscribed to Sue a name that I do not favor and did not use for myself during this stage of life. I do not remember who made the spontaneous gracious purchase or the specific occasions ---- but in recent days I have felt blessed by this random life event that put in my purview this particular collection by Edgar Gabriel Silex.

The last poem, full of irony for me with the title 'poem without title' sent static through my heart and set a tear in my eye for my own son. My head is now full of distractions; the kind that I hope come to some purpose...but that I fear will just wile away my day.

Pencils, white text and the revelations as history

As I begin to tap at the keyboard -- I sense that I am facing challenges yet to be overcome. Contributors to this sensation include that I do not type, trifocals challenge accuracy in seeing, and what it feels like to write with a pencil is a very distant memory. I face the New Year with fatigue, lack of momentum and an intention to commit to basics. I am half-heartedly assessing the public medium for which I find that ideas must be coaxed, shuffled, strained and simplified to have value. This requires resources that have been depleted.

Therefore I must challenge the purpose of glimpses through stained glass as a blog. Is this just a public scribble? Does it qualify as a journey journal? Can it be more than an expose in my inconsistency and ease of distraction?

Random memory: a peer who communicated with another peer at the day job playfully included personal hidden messages in his emails. His messages were hidden by changing the text from black to white. This sharing was discovered unexpectedly because the email was sent to print and all printed text is in black. What does this story memory invoke? Other memories like the lemon juice experiments of my youth (play, discovery) and thoughts about understanding cloaking,exposure, innovation and all of there potential impact on privacy.

So no deep dives here - just nagging thoughts in response to popular media. Our former VP speaks and I quiver. He infers that terrorists did not succeed in attacking on American soil after 911 - and the true level of threat must remain cloaked. So if Truth is cloaked in fear and hyperbole --- will history reveal if we were protected or scammed by these fear mongers. In the 80's I took a course on International Law. Terrorism was a key subject matter. I believe a Lesson Learned from that course was that terrorists are empowerd by breeding fear. It seems that this is now a living history.

images, dandies, and tweets

Some images are come by accidentally. Some take on lives of their own. Most can fill-in the blanks of a story. Some images also need blanks filled in. I named this image: aftermath - wearing liberty. I took it at Ground Zero. Because I know it is Ground Zero - it speaks to me. Without knowing this, the picture is incomplete in its telling. Clarity takes many forms. Maybe this too is true of truth.

Sometimes information can saturate. Saturation can cloak memory. Lack of sleep can do the same. Together, too much input and too little sleep, form a haze of thought something like scrabble with an acute random connectedness. I often get to a point of saturation. Today it happened. I know I heard things of interest to me but my mind feeling intent upon this knowing - registered blank. Distractions fill in these blanks. Blogging with conviction becomes more difficult in the haze. (I am the generation of purple haze- Are You Experienced? not the generation of hazegame.)

Some distractions: Papa wants to know if I can Google backwards to find a word he can not spell. The word is bat poop. Last night I Googled radish-tops-eat and confirmed what he had wondered about for years: Yes radish tops can be eaten much the same way he eats dandelion greens or wild spinach. I did not take any real time from the day job to be with him, or to be good to me today. And last evening's sleep was again interrupted about 4 am with noises of raccoons in the kitchen. We have relocated 10 so this visit was not expected.

Another word that entered my sphere of distraction was tweet. A week ago I declared I had no awareness or knowledge of tweet as other than bird sounds. However, the Twitter social-networking message tweet is now in my purview: through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question you can be known between the lines. Tweet is the way I have overheard my children talk on the phone for years. I am not ready to go there. But I did discover If about the future... which from book to tbd; is a place for further exploration. It is the archival references to free spoken word ripe for my future visiting, that compel.

WOW, surge and buzz

It rained very intensely a few times today. The air feels so much better now that my brief walk with Jake was truly enjoyable. I connected with a few neighbors. Rare to find others out during these walks. It made for a nice break in the day.

I did not connect with the Internet, TV or radio directly today. I did share with others, an excerpt from a note to me, I titled proud tears. The extended audience shared vicariously as I had a WOW response. WOW has such different meaning in the parlance of our teens. Many loose hours of their life in WOW space. But the gut reaction WOW is what I received and shared. Getting inspired sharing gives me an energy surge. Surge, now there is a term becoming well worn: military, economic and radio. Now this place WHERE NEW ARTISTS SURGE TO STARDOM was somewhat new to me, and it is currently NOT surging. But I enjoyed these pics and may send thus one along to add to the collection. I look forward to seeing the caption if they continue to be monitored. Captions suggestions are welcome in coments..

Conversation and the value of versus: Poems

Tension is a building block that can engage the audience within story; it is known to add challenge to conversation and is said to exist naturally between science and faith. Its value is 2 sides of a coin: and often a headache. As an element of style - it must be worked, to work.

The New Poet Laureate is getting air time. I listen. I wonder if a good poem every 10 years does a poet make? I wonder if a poem a day is a good expenditure of time. And then I know the truth: calories need burning. So I borrow an impromptu haiku from the poet from my middle and smile knowing birth is not under-rated, poetry is.

Time displaces truth

Tumbling down the rabbit hole

I am far too late

Really productive serendipity

When I selected serendipity as one of my labels, the voices in my head said blogs can breed LIKEthink and this label will be a reminder that your intentions include making chance connections that could influence your destiny in actions or words. I do not associate or bond well. My people interaction is based on in-common stuff: work, certain interests, life circumstances. In this I am not alone. And in this in-common I do select bonding levels – most often shallow levels. I tend to focus on the tasks, prefer observation and often lead out of frustration. I have good friend qualities for emergencies but no one calls me just to chat. No one. To blog is to let the voices in my head chat and it kicks up the dust on dopamine the feel-good neurotransmitter. Maybe it will improve my conversational skills. There are bloggers I have come to enjoy thru their words (Amy) and actions (Jason). There are others that will be revealed as I work the RSS technology of this world.

But as these conversations occur I do notice that the in-common stuff among people can breed – good and bad. I was reminded in the overheard conversations about politics this week about in-common bad. I will connect an old essay here on this distraction at some point.

Callouts: This past week I had a small victory in the in-common world of Community Access TV and a moment of awkwardness in the in-common world of work. The victory: successfully getting clarification with DPUC docket 08-04-09. For more than a decade, some volunteers were being held hostage by power tactics that included fear of reprisals and threats of underwriting changes. Truth had a small victory. The awkwardness: a public description of me. While it shared that my values and skills have made a difference there was large irony in that few folks will ever have such a lens on my life and work again because of my failure at the basic art of sustained conversation.

Lifelong…then retirement or into retirement

Life-long: what are the benchmarks? Is it duration or duration in relationship to the length of one's life. When must a lifelong relationship, idea, pursuit, regret begin to qualify? Is meaningfulness implied? What are the shades of meaning: continuous until a person's death, continuing through all or much of one's life? This out-of-place meandering began while at a retirement event of a co-worker.

When something is more than 50% of your life and the majority of your daylight it probably qualifies. Family relations most often do. A person’s work can qualify and sometimes that work is at one place of business. This is a phenomenon that is changing. It is one I never expected to be part of but one for which I can now claim a duration maker of more than half of my life.

For my co-worker the years are 36. The retirement is about to start with a summer vacation at the camp of his making with his best friend who is intended to be the rest of lifelong. He practiced retirement for a week before deciding that he was ready. Ready and able are not mutually exclusive but the able part usually comes far later than readiness for most (maybe I am projecting here). If employment is more than making a livable wage then one may never be ready. There are very few positions on 60 Minutes, or tenured professorships in the perfect climate, or artists that can sell enough to sustain daily bread or piano men or living poets with solid indirect income sources.

As I tried to kindle connections I found rhyming words: The batches of rhymes seem to speak to me about passionless day jobs: along phrases are scrape, rush, shove, stretch, play, pull, tag, or come along.

Lifelong is now a learning buzzword. It is something we are all expected to make claim to. I invested in this claim six years ago when I processed through a second graduate program. Sometimes I think it was only proof that I could type ever more poorly with more sleep deprivation. The brain exercise was sometimes fun and challenging enough to make me feel that I was evolving. However, I am not sure that the benchmarks for lifelong learning sited herein.(p.2) were achieved in my personal journey. I am often reminded of the three word marketing rule, as it is often deployed, and the challenges of good tauts. Grad school is where I learned I too could make hyper Connections like one of my most favorite books and made 4 television adventures by James Burke. (And I too have a box and scribble that may become bones or blog entries or remain for future ruminations.)

And then I get totally distracted in the world of connectivity and find bliss.

evolving

Well I was not sure I would be remembering the momentary distraction word for today: but in passing it connected and was recallable. Am I evolving, too? Is this buzz word informing or reforming or self-involving? The term infers substantial change. This term reconnected me to something else I wanted to explore: Guerrilla Marketing and the idea of unintended consequences that I anticipate commenting on here after June 5th.

As a business analyst I have always been informed by errors, challenged by defects, and found that gaps suggest opportunities. Are these tools for evolution?

I need to evolve further the potential of FREEMAN PENNY QUINN, the 1st. I need to evolve further the toolkit for citizen journalists. I need to evolve further the daily practices that promote good health (yes I did walk Jake today!).

Evolution is a very busy thing but since it is nearly tomorrow I will need to get busy with it later... (but 1st a bedtime story about the other word of the day to which i can say I am often far from being gruntled ...unless of course, there is word play. nite cliffy)