The 30th & 2nd meet

Two more from www.reverb10.com

December 30th Prompt: Gift. This month, gifts and gift-giving can seem inescapable. What's the most memorable gift, tangible or emotional, you received this year? The most memorable gift I received this year was multi-part; the gift of insightful, meaningful & genuine teachers in my current phase of life.

December 2nd: Writing: What do you do each day that doesn’t contribute to your writing — and can you eliminate it?
Three things:
1)Tell myself I don't have time. (I know this is untrue. If I just hold myself accountable I can definitely make time/find time every day.)
2)Being apathetic or indifferent, therefore no good, write-able observations. (Find something to write about every day.
3)Self-criticism. (Say the criticism out loud or write it and use it as writing.

This Body (December 12)

For December 12 the #reverb10 prompt was on Body Integration, as follows: This year when did you feel most integrated with your body?

Luckily this prompt is for 2010! If I had had to think about "Body Integration" any year previous I would have had to do an Internet search to see if that was the name of a cutting edge dance song...then I would have scoffed and made a generic, sweeping comment and then illustrated some mental tangent. But for this year - perfect!

I have been so lucky to have had a superb revelation about this, but not without some excellent guidance. In early spring I noticed my awesome lunch-away-from-the-cubicle-jungle yoga classes were cultivating something deeper. A relatively unfamiliar phenomena of my mind being in my body. May be basic but it took me awhile! In one position (pigeon pose) I felt I had "mastered it" and was going to ask after class how to extend the challenge. Then, a few seconds later, my favourite yoga teacher Eileen Chan said something like "for some of you this will be a challenging posture, but if you feel distracted see if you can challenge yourself to keep your mind in this pose and in your mat." I was surprised! Just what I needed! So I promptly lost my focus in excitement... but had two seasons of practice until late autumn... I got it! One unexpected day it clicked and I felt totally in my body thanks to good ole stretchy pigeon!

The mental flurry settled into the physical space: together, integrated. Just there. Finally there... always there. Well, starting with increments of, like, 35 seconds.

MM WW

Levitate

You hover
in space
like you were born in that place

roll 'round
in the air
upside down as you dare

just watch
as I wait
trying to levitate

attempts
leave me bruised
spell-bound & confused

you warn
not to frown
as it's the coming down

... that's really the tough part.

LyndiaP November 22, 2010 (PoemADay 22 of 30 and submission to Jingle Poetry's Poetry Potluck - theme: MM WW - Magic & Miracles, Wonder & Wizardry)

Create-A-Fear

I have just realized how easy it is to create fear...but how equally easy it CAN be to create yourself OUT of fear too. Some may call this an all-to-wordy paraphrase of "fake it 'till you make it" but I think I'm trying to say something a bit different.

Sometimes when you are self-effacing something (i.e. jargon-filled way of describing the "fake-it" scenario) you are merely (or astoundingly) managing to forget the fear or push it into the subconscious. I'm not a psychoanalysis expert but I don't see how self-effacing can be a good long term plan.

An example before I continue, so you are getting ready for a big job interview and feel nervous. You really can't prove your calm self confidence when you are so eye-twitchingly nervous - the two are rather contradictory. Fake-it-'till-you-you-make-it (self-effacing) would have you repeating confident phrases to yourself in the mirror or simply putting it out of your mind until the situation is over. Then you have your stellar un-nervous interview and try not to wonder to where all that negative nervous energy went. If you are truly successful at self-effacing you should never even consciously think about that interview-nervousness again. But that feels rather short term an likely to explode one day...
so I say Create-A-Fear... or rather create your way out of the fear - you invented it in the first place!

I think there are many thing to create that can eliminate fear but it depends on the situation. (*note: I'm not saying you should 'create' your way out of a healthy fear of, say, going swimming in an electrical storm. I only mean non-bodily harming fears...)

Identifying my own fear to be sharing my crazy ideas, I decided to create an ongoing opportunity when I could express some of them: Open mic nights. Then I created a format that felt genuine and fun and armed myself with these crazy idea poems. I have already (in four months) gone from a shaky hand signing up to read to the name being down before I knew I had anything to say.

So where am I going with this you say? Ha, I dunno... but it sure was a wonderful feeling today when I realized I was no longer afraid.

Finding Things

There is a certain positive connotation with successfully 'finding' something that can't be replicated in successfully 'ignoring', 'fixing' or 'finishing' something. In the last two days I've found my favourite jacket, three dollars, a bit of underlined newspaper I could make into a poem, the perfect box to store some books under my bed and a bill that needed paying. Each of these things had drastically different outcomes but had the same sense of tangible, practical, sanity-restoring relief.

Only rarely does someone find something and think, 'curses! I finally found x!' Granted, It's probalby fair to say no one really ever says 'curses!' at all anymore in any real-life, unscripted context but nonetheless. Not being happy to find something is merely unsuccessful avoidance, a totally different undertaking. Even when it's that payment-due-tomorrow statement, boring report to submit or the email your boss needed you to forward - it is tangible success that allows your potentially panicking mind to take a deep breath and move on to something else.

So today, I hope you find something - especially if he/she/it in his/her/itself IS wonderful. Then, if you're on a roll, also take a second to be grateful that you found him/her/it - like a whole moment-of-silence style. Finding that feeling of gratitude will just be icing on the cake of un-lost stuff!

Now, I've got a bill to pay, some books to store and a jacket to wear and I'm grateful to be able to do all of it!

TGI*gasp* Friday! The Thirteenth!

I have to say it. I have to! Friday the 13th is wonderful!

I will spare you the tirade into the roots of the superstition (being predominantly that of lunar cycles and goddess worship that became "passé" -understatement of the year- with the advent of monotheism. But feel free to read up on it here  for starters. There are also more 'academic' sources if you are so inclined, just ask...me or Google.)

However, my reason for thinking Friday the 13th is wonderful is beyond that. It is even more than the fact that it is FRIDAY the 13th (that's *Friday* people!). THIS day unlike all others is a fantastic was to become positively self-aware. And it's easy! Because you'll likely be doing it already (i.e. worrying about mirrors that shatter when you sneeze in their general direction, black felines that may have possibly ever touched the same pavement as you are about to step on and evil spells bound to conjure up simeltaneously an epic bought of -now no longer pandemic- Swine Flu-and cause you to lose your job in an instant.)

You will be totally aware of all these thing and reflecting on all kinds of other 'hidden meanings' and the like. So turn this awareness to some good use today! Just make it a bit more focused: look for beauty instead of mirrors, words of gratitude instead of those that harm and love instead of cats (fine! That last one's subjective...maybe I'm more of a dog person, but you're picking up what I'm putting down.)

Celebrate your everyday today! Start a movement... Happy Friday the thirteenth!

Poe-a-Tweets

Today, like many other days I felt as though there were too many things to remember. I don't mean groceries or errands or long To-Do lists but rather the stories and mini-adventures that took place from rolling out of bed until, well, now and that's only mid-afternoon:
I picked delicious summer berries, went on a jog and passed an open moving truck filled with amazingly interesting stuff, drove through a colourful downpour and took a windy walk around in a strange city (see Urban Hiking).

This is, of course only the beginning of each story but you know as well as I do that there is never enough time to actually write all the adventures with due attention and still keep up with things like sleep (or the more pesky: work). So I came up with a plan (inspired by a book by Jill Jepson which I'll explain some other time): Poe-a-Tweets... or colloquially: "TodayInAPoem." If you aren't the technology enamoured type then Twitter may not be your thing and if you aren't interested in another channel to access the barage of human banality (for the large part in 'Public' land) than Twitter may also not be your thing.

Let me just say that it took a bit of effort and great deal of searching for interesting people to 'follow' before I found a use. For one thing, instant 'publication' of mini-poems and my soon-to-be Creative Challenge of the Month.*

So for the next 30 days (pending reliable Internet connections each day) I plan to use my LyndiaP Twitter feed and my beloved hash tag (or in English 'searchable theme name') #TodayInAPoem to help me digest all these servings of wonderful and share the sweeness. (I'll try to post the weekly results on Tourist Candy too)

I like TodayInAPoem (or TiAP if you prefer a good acronym) because it forces you to get to the essence of the story and they are so short that I can pump out quickly, say ten, in one end-of-the-day writting session.

Today's TiAP (pardon the redundancy)
Raspberried soles/tracing province-crossing pavement/imagination so colour saturated/slate grey skies weep/golden canola tears

*the Creativity Challenge of the Month is basically like a New Month Resolution in creativity and is a sure fire way for me to motivate myself to find time to make stuff. I always thank myself later too because it's such a Happy-Inducing challenge.

Writing Safari

I am starting this blog with a recent wonder-seeker invention of mine. I hope it will give insight into the purpose of recording and reflecting on my exploration of wonderful. At first I was calling it a Writing Road Trip, which is accurate but I didn't think it was broad enough. The notion of a Safari is going to be the over arching term that I'll break up into specific categories including the Writing Road Trip and others I haven't figured out yet.

Here was how the plan was born: I realized that often times I make this same highway drive at maximum speed (which is, OF COURSE, the posted speed limit... or something like that...) and thereby make the trip at maximum efficiency and perhaps minimum wonder. Recently, I found myself thinking about the concept of 'exploration' (for interesting reasons I will not get into here, but delved into something that began to sound like post-colonial discourse) and how there is no longer "uncharted territory." It seems that if everything is already discovered that there is no longer a sense of wonder to it all. I just couldn't believe it. Even though the ground has all been 'found' there must be someway to pluck out a healthy dose of wonder, through observation and allotment of time, from what is already growing there. Frankly, it was just that: wonder-in-bloom!

In this unexpected adventure I got some really great ideas. The biggest was the possibility of a simple act of opening my mind to this previously-mundane trip being an exploration of wonderful. Opting to take some side roads and make notes about the unique local signs, streets, parks and buildings opened up the potential in everything and it was hard to see anything that was not some how wonderful. I stopped four times as the maps and signs directed me along the secondary highway. In each community I tried to get a feeling for some part of its essence so made sure to pick a one-of-a-kind place that didn't have a corporate headquarters or nation-wide advertising. I let go of expectations and deadlines and all things to do with efficiency and felt a wonderful sense of freedom. Two of my stops were indoors and food related and the other two were outside. For anyone considering recreating this experience I didn't limit my writing to the things at the location but rather from my whole experience in the community. Through walking, eating, watching and talking I managed to write over 10 pages, drive over 140km and open up a whole new world.

The more I thought about this Writing Road Trip the more ideas for Safaris came to me. You wouldn't have drive, write or even leave your neighbourhood. I suppose you could even try it in your house or apartment, but I like the idea of moving around a bit more than that. I think it would also work perfectly well to do this on a bus or train trip inverting the use of road-time and the stop-time. You could write about one thing from location 1 to location 2 and then change to the second project for location 2 to location 3 etc. I am also convinced that you wouldn't even need to write on a Writing Safari. I know, it ruins the name, but it's really the sense of observation and then the capturing of the story of wonder somehow. You could just tell it, photograph it, videotape it, sketch it or invent a melody.

So now in the aftermath of this Writing Road Trip I am finding myself excited to start observing all the other wonders that are close to home. And I am even more excited to tell the next person who asks me "how long does it take to drive from there?" that my two hour drive turned into a seven hour vacation with a journal full of wonder as my prize for being excited instead of efficient.