^{If you're reading this, you are the 99%. You are my brothers and my sisters and we all have inherited this Earth equally. No one man, government, corporation or belief system has absolute authority over your life. In 2012, may we all embrace the spirit of equality, peace and justice for 100% of humanity}.

Current Music: "Separator" by Radiohead

Current Mood: Esoteric
 

If Not Now, When?

If not now, when will it be time to find your internal light?

         What wakes your mind?

         What beats your heart?

         What stirs your soul?

         What moves your body?

It's time. It's time. It's time.



Current Music: "If Not Now, When?" by Incubus

Current Mood: Actionary
 

A Place on this Earth

Apote’- The art of living in sync with your environment; the ability to achieve balance, awareness and well-being from your surrounding environment by consciously incorporating proportioned elements of:

Purpose of Apote' :

         To achieve the art of living in sync with the five elements of your environment.

         To achieve balance, awareness and well-being from your surrounding environment.

         To connect a bridge to a place on this earth that extends into the light of the universe

This isn't meant to be your wake up call, unless you need it to be. At a certain point, we become hardwired to our inevitable life, with only small windows of opportunity to seek out change. However, unlike our parents and their parents before them, we have one thing they didn't have...unlimited knowledge and up-to-date information to empower us.

Or is it more a case of dependency on our part? Have we become so successful in our integration with the world wide web, that we can't function without it? Are your finances, employment info, legal and medical records, address books, photo albums, friendships and personal lives woven into the very fiber of the web's net?

Consider there is a real posibility that the internet may one day cease to function as we know it. So take the best away with you while the wisdom tree bears fruit, but remain cautious of the potential to be woven into a tangled web. Beyond internet pirates, if satellite transmissions are blocked by floating debris or through some other natural or unnatural event, we would no longer be able to rely on the very technology that sustains our existance. Truth be told, I have it on good authority, that we can expect this to occur one day. Just Sayin'..


Current Mood: Concerned

Current Music: "Fire On Babylon" and "Just Like You Said It Would Be" by Sinead O'Conner
 

I have been writing again. And it would seem I have the time to do this again. Although this luxury of time is all attributed to holiday/economic conditions, I'm ever-so-greatful for the opportunity to pour myself into the writing. There are three projects proposed for top postion on the board. So, I give each brainchild equal time, attention and imagination and watch to see which one wants to blossom first. Some are original to Writing.com that I'm editing and updating.

I'm excited about this opportunity that I never thought would come my way again (except maybe at retirement) and will be using the new year as a springboard for the discipline necessary to keep the momentum high.

There is a sense of urgency surrounding the end of this decade....The first decade of the new millenium.

As the first generation at the helm of the new millenium, I suggest we strive to become aware and proactive about the legacy we are leaving behind.

Current Mood: Motivated

Current Music: "Keeper Of The Flame" by Martin Page
 

§tarting from as far back as I can remember, the elements have given me clues about the universe. Subtle hints of things to come. And usually the hints become more like alarm bells as they got closer to an event. I don't know why I attract tornadoes, storms and lightening to the point of loosing my roof (twice) . And if you count mom's roof, that makes a total of three. I don't know why cell phones and car stereo systems sometimes fail in my presence. I don't know why I'm electronically challenged and have fried, purged, crashed and rebooted more computers than the law should allow.

I do have a few theories about this and so much more. Some of these theories are borrowed from places and people that have influences on my life. Some are born from the left-handed, right-brained thinking that I have grown to depend on as an internal navigation system. My attempt at a novel is being written under the guidelines of the NaNoWrMo Annual Writing Marathon. The criteria for this event is simple.

Write a novel of 50,000 words or more in thirty days during the month of November. The novel must be a new writing with no previous work permitted. It is expected that this will not be your best writing because it will have little forethought or premise. Chapter outlines are acceptable prior the start of the writing month. But for the most part, we're all on a trapeze without a net. I've read that most don't make it. I've also read that the ones that do are rewarded with the sense of accomplishment and will probably discover a lovely surprise about the craft of writing spontaneously.

I look at this experience as an inward journey that begins with the eye of perception focused on a goal worthy of pursuing. Call it self-discovery, connecting the dots, or perhaps literaracizing the ripple effect. That all said, this left-handed Indigo with tap roots into the ether will at times speak in alien tongues to reach the writing plateau that promises literary nirvana . I hope others can find their own jigsaw puzzle piece as they journey through personal writing paths.

RubyRed

Write from your heart.....but first, listen to your soul

Current Mood: Mysteriously Discursive

Current Music: "Whispering Wind" by Moby

 

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I've committed to NANO this year. My first attempt at completing a book in many years. I've got two subject matters to consider. One is a fictional story based on a current event that has been in the headlines most of the year that I have first hand experience with. The other is something I call "A Theory of Everything".

Either one promises to give me lots of material to draw from. Now, on to the time management issues.

More to come.


Current Mood: Lineal

Current Music: "By Some Miracle" Philip Selway
 

It's common for a person to repeat the same habits throughout the course of their lifetime. With any luck and a lot of dedication, we can try to embrace the good habits. Writing.com is one habit I will always come back to - the great creative comfort zone. If you remember me, stop and say hi. If you don't remember me, stop and say hi. Either way, send me something to review.

RubyRed

Sometimes, when you reach inside and discover a pearl, mere words dishonor the passion felt at the moment of translucence.

After such an event, my resistance is disarmed and my sharpened perceptions are endowed and guided by my new-found Pearl.

Along the way, it brought me here......

"Sometimes life throws a lot at us. It seems as though, in those instances, unfathomable to think there is more on the horizon, but alas there is. As life sends these things our way, remember they are opportunities! Opportunity exists in everything and our task is to stay the course of living a worthy life, even if at times we have to slow down to make it happen, one little bit at a time.

Have a great day!"

-----------Sanford Brown

This message within a message (sent by a co-worker) was another reminder of life's intent.

Current Mood: Reflective

Current Music: "Fix You" by Coldplay

RubyRed

Write from your heart.....but first, listen to your soul




 

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Since when.....Did writing change from passion to pastime?

Since when.....Did music change from feeling inspired to feeling expired?

Since when.....Did careers change from lifetime vocations to much needed vacations?

Since when.....Did trusting your neighbors change to putting up fences and locking your doors?

Since when.....Did network TV change into one biiiiiiig... looooong neverending pharmaceuticals infomercial?

Since when.....Did leaving your troubles behind change into the pill you took today?

Since when.....Did an honest day's work stop paying for an honest day's living?

Since when.....Did eating a healthy balanced meal turn into cholesterol, cellulite and carcinogens?

Since when.....Did going to the Dr. turn into the reason you lose your health insurance?

Since when.....Did voting for your favorite candidate turn into the empty subdivision down the street that shouldn't have been?

Since when......Did going on a vacation turn into risking your life and your identity?

Since when......Did being an American turn into "It's not a good time to go on vacation?


Current Music: "Time" by Blind Melon

Current Mood: Solicitous




 

I’ve decided to do this because without the writing I’m just another human being using up precious resources. The written word can move men and mountains...or not. It's always the writer's choice where the journey should go. It's the reader's decision whether to follow.

There are homeless people out there suffering, looking for any kind of hope, faith or charity that might come their way. Waste of a gift is an unforgivable sin. When our resources depleat the food of mankind, the food of the soul will have the power to sustain millions.

I recognize and accept that some things in my life that have been most affected by change have been beyond my control.

Karma keeps a tight reign on the scorecard, but so far hasn’t been unreasonable in her demands of me. I’ve given up some in order to keep others and adjusting the perspective along the way. For today, these words inspire me to create some passion in my life…

To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science......................
--Albert Einstein

Current Music: "This Heaven" by David Gilmore
Current Mood: Agnostic

RubyRed

Write from your heart.....but first, listen to your soul


 

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Like a lot of others, I often ponder the meaning of our existence. I embrace Einstein's theories and although I can't fully wrap my head around infinity, acknowledging the vastness of the universe helps me put this in perspective. My hypothesis centers on accepting that humans are an important link in the chain of relevance.

Professions of Christianity, Buddism, Thaoism, Judism, Paganism or any other belief doesn't altar the importance of the internal individual and its' potential to effect the universe. Beyond the triviality of our day-to-day existence, we need to recognize and react with purpose. Things happen in life for a reason.

Earth has been a great incubator, providing a sense of order in a chaos universe. Our nursery, the Milky Way, offers child-proof puzzles just beyond our reach. Many of us find adolescence intolerable, fraught with impatience and boredom. Every day something new is discovered by those of us clever enough to escape through the cracks in the system. Some of us are like lightening rods, plotting ethereal road maps for the future.

Current Mood: Cognizant
Current Music: "Ruby Falls" & "Lightening Rod" by Guster




 

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Consider that we are the sons and daughters of our fathers and mothers and try to dwell in the shade of their wisdom tree.

Consider that we've made transgressions and have more to make in this life.
Vow to admit the errors while trying to prevent their repetition.

Consider that while breathing air on the earth, not to knowingly aide anyone nor
guide your own soul toward regression in the next..

Current Mood: Agreeable (considerably)
Current Music: "The New Underground" by Guster

 

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This year has awakened something ethereal in all of us. If you haven't quite felt it yet, I suggest trying some simple meditation techniques to losen up the ole "psychic muscles". Find yourself a restful spot, preferably outdoors. Deep breathe, center, clear, pause to contemplate the LIGHT and grab onto the first beam you find.


The story below is from today's issue of: http://www.dailygood.org/more.php?n=3558

To All Artists, Known and Unknown

Richard Berger 1998

I remember seeing a threadbare individual sitting in the cafe of the San Francisco Art Institute in 1992. He was very different from the rest of the students and staff personnel. He was old; old in hard years, not with the mellow patina of the well ensconced. He was in the cafe every day I came in, always sitting alone, always smoking and nursing a cup of coffee. Most striking in his appearance was the discrepancy between his physical, and what seemed to be his psychic, circumstances. He was worn, his physical being was worn, his clothes were fragile, almost brittle, garments different from the casually abused garments the students sometimes wore that said, "I don't care," clothing being low in the priority of the things they stood for, for reasons of social demarcation as well as economic urgency. His threadbare garments said, "I do care," not only about preserving the garment for economic reasons, but about the ritual of caring itself, a precious continuity, a ritual of anchorage expressed in the threadbare trousers worn at the seams, white at the line of the upturned cuff, perhaps pressed nightly beneath a mattress; his clothes and his bearing were a diagram of that caring. He was always clean-shaven and fastidious in his appearance.

His flesh was another matter. Too much sun, too much liquor, too many times the senses wide open taking in too much, not enough sleep, not enough food, the reddened eyes drawing another blank at dawn after a tumultuous night; too much life to ever be arrested in likeness. His visage reminded me of some of the portraits by Ivan LeLoraine Albright, an obsessive curmudgeon and astonishing painter who revealed mortality in his subjects by painting every molecule with such individuality that their coherence into a personage isolated the fragility of life by revealing accord in its complexity, evoking and then animating through an infinitely accurate diagramming of a membrane of competing tensions. His visage was just such a diagram.

The complexity produced a radiance about him abetted by the discrepancy between his clothes and his flesh. He seemed the temporary residence for an enduring elsewhere tangent to the worn, but radiant and frail man; and at times, he shone actively with the brilliance of that elsewhere. He was always looking elsewhere, as if he saw things that we didn't, and I experienced one indelible impression of him as he sat at the cafe table with a cigarette smoldering in his lips, warming himself in the morning sun. He suddenly gestured, still sitting at the table; it was a gesture that I imagine an only child would make toward an empty room populated by imaginary friends, a gesture exclaiming, "Look at all my wonderful boys and girls!" Within his gesture was the certainty that these boys and girls constituted a heavenly choir which he was conducting, they bearing him aloft with their song as he guided them. His gestures were the traceries to some paradise via his tattered being, a deliverance beyond comprehension. This went on for a very short time and then he became still, smiling and smoking.

The radiant little man died at the Art Institute. I knew he was homeless and hanging out at the school, but I was unaware that he was living there. He died of exposure over Christmas break, and when he was found beneath a concrete overhang on the Jones Street side of the school, they found a number of sketchbooks in a backpack. He was an artist, a "street artist" as he had described himself to Greg, an employee of the school and one of the few people who had any conversation with him. An unknown artist thrust into our midst his own portable Lascaux, astounding images conceived and executed outside the channels of legitimacy and validation that so many of us need to sustain and guide us, challenging all our notions of the route to authenticity, indicating another depth of being in our midst.

The sketchbooks reveal in obsessive detail the sweetness and mystery of his elsewhere, a realm more compelling for him than our imperfect world, a realm of elsewhere we will only know through him, which seems to welcome us. The last fragment revealed to me in this puzzle that will never be complete was his name, which became known to me only after his death via his signature on a few of his many drawings: Wallace Allen Healey. Greg said that people called him "Wally."

Wally was cremated as John Doe because his family wouldn't or couldn't come from Oregon to verify his identity. Wally's identity, Wally the street artist. What I knew of Wally through his physical being, the posthumous discovery of fragments of his life via others, his images and lastly, his name, represent memorable components in an unusual order of encounter. They are fragments which cohere in spite of their spareness and intermittence, that which is not there being as potent as what is.

I have glimpsed a foreshortened version of such a coherence in several chance observations of how the rooms of people who have been around for a long time can become a summary of their lives. The pared down fragments of Wally's life had no final room in which to reside because he didn't have a home, and yet those surviving fragments of his images and his life cohere somehow to define in summary the sweet elsewhere that was in his images and his being.

I sometimes wonder if these events in their unusual sequence have compelled me to romanticize what might be only a wincing pathos, retroactively endowing it with a magic I hope exists because it is the only bearable reconciliation of Wally's pictures with what there is to know about him. A more remote memory returns in considering this question, by way of Famadou Don Moy, the percussionist with the Art Ensemble of Chicago. He performed solo at the Art Institute some years ago; he filled the stage with an enormous array of percussion instruments, big, small, formal, informal, Chinese gongs and hubcaps, a night clerk's bell and a trap drum set among many others. He came slowly to the stage from the back of the auditorium, playing a drum with maracas, the movement of every extremity expressed in sound, and he chanted: "To all great Black musicians, known and unknown."

Known and unknown. It was an invocation to acknowledge ALL those who gave their lives in pursuit of the great human service, the service of the artist, transforming the sometimes unbearable discrepancy between the way things are and the way they ought to be, into something that makes us want to dance.

An Open Letter to My Writing.Com Friends:

Hi. I sometimes wonder what many of you are doing these days and what I've missed here at a place I once thought of as my second home. Many of you have befriended me and encouraged and supported me through some of the toughest times in my life. Frankly, I don't think I would have come through everything without the encourgement many of you offered.

And now, I find myself wanting to give back to a community that gives. Call it Pay It Forward Payback...lol! The link above has the option to be emailed to you daily. So do your heart and soul a favor and take the time to subscribe and read "The Daily Good" by Charity Focus. They are a real gift. Enjoy!

Economic time have presented interesting alternatives to our daily circumstances. Personally, I made a decision last month to quit my job. My income was goal and commission-based, dependant on the construction industry and economic health of every other profession and the base pay wasn't enough to continue giving away my daily life for. Budgeting, coupon-clipping, attic cleaning and home cooking now replace room plans, color boards, fabric swatches and house calls. And I don't know what waits for me around the next corner, but somehow I believe I might just be more prepared for it now.

An interesting sub plot to my resignation: Later that same evening, I checked my email to find an offer to contribute another article to the January issue of one of our local magazines. Not having much time to prepare a piece of fiction, I sat down and wrote:



An Open Letter To 2009:

Welcome! Your visit here will be brief. It will amount to a mere 8,760 hours. And in the scope of the entire Universe, you’re nothing more than a hiccup. But to us, you represent the most valuable commodity in existence - TIME.

And time is of the essence! It’s been called a thief, although we lose more than ever gets stolen. Time has been known to fly, race against us, be unkind to us and once in a while, even be on our side. And most will agree that timing is everything. Time waits for no one and takes nothing for granted. You’re going to be bringing lots of changes. Change will probably be the one word that best defines your time here.

When your visit comes to an end, you will have given us three hundred and sixty-five unique sunrises and sunsets. And if I were to make a resolution, it would be to witness most of them while using each sunrise to ponder the questions and every sunset to justify the answers.

‘Ode to ‘09

May you bask in the seasons and wink slyly at the Sun
Mark time with the stars the moment sunset’s done

May your days bring glory to months with your name
As they placate Father Time and keep Mother Nature tame

May wisdom teach mankind the reasons for peace
Make wartime a conclusion that no one chooses to reach

Tomorrow is just a promise
Yesterday is simply gone
Today the clock is ticking
As time passes on

Current Mood: Diaphanous
Current Music: "Morning Yearning" by Ben Harper

RubyRed

Write from your heart.....but first, listen to your soul


 

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Mothers sleep less each night
Sons sleep little more
Life rock perpetual cradle
Womb sustain umbilical core

Catch a breath
Hold a pause
Gift of life
Not a cause

Vessel seeker
Find a home
Take up lodging
So you can belong

Tell yourself and your soul
What this life can give
Make a day that marks time
Teach yourself to live

Eternal tower of wisdom form
Foundation poured room by room
Explanation keep it simple
Imagine what I could assume



Current Music: "Jigsaw Falling Into Place" by Radiohead

Currnet Mood: Intense
 

Perhaps it was when the clock started ticking backwards
Or the sight of nature marking time
Maybe it was the moment winter became spring
Or the instant first morning light cast a shine

It could be just the seasons
Changing guard with a broken clock in tow
Winter was such a friendly visitor
Can we stay a little longer before he has to go?

Current Music: "Garden" and "Present Tense" by Pearl Jam

Current Mood: Supplicated