Nouveau Riche

Pic by David Sky under creative commons licence

To live among objects that are not cheap, but made with consummate skill, attention and care, would be true material wealth.   Can you imagine a society where each person's talents and gifts were fully expressed in their work, and not suppressed in the interests of machine life?

Charles Eisenstein, The Age of Reunion:Work and Art United from the book
Ascent of Humanity, a pondering of how the future will look, (available for free or for a fee)

Possibilities

Possibilities, if they were to behave in a verifiably predictable manner, would surely bubble.  What else are possibilities going to do except bubble?  Unless they're a more languid sort of possibility.  I imagine that the longer-held ones, tempered with time and doubt but then boosted with more bubbles, would change consistency.  They would become more floaty, sometimes almost completely still, trailing their hands in the breeze :)

I am reminding myself of the possibilities this morning, the day of my return to work after the Christmas/New Year break.  Granted, a return not to the gruelling physicality of an eight-year-old working a 12-hour shift down the mines.  My work situation is a trial in other ways.  I work from home providing transcription and secretarial services.  It bores me beyond tears, but there are freedoms to my current situation that I so appreciate.  I can climb out of bed at 9 and still be at work on time.  That's if I decide work is going to start at 9.  Some days it's a much better plan to write for an hour before getting down to work.  Some days, when energy is low, work time starts after lunch.

Working from home is the perfect scenario while you're sorting out your health.  I have had chronic health issues for 13 years, but am now excitingly closer to having the pieces to the health puzzle sorted than ever before.  I really value the flexibility and space in my working day.  But there's not a whole lot of soul.  Really, it's boring as batshit and I am chronically understimulated.  And so that's why today, as I feel the chafing of the admittedly free and part-time tie tightening around my neck, I am thinking of possibilities for change.  New possible work directions that make me bubble on the inside.

A decent baseline level of health is important when it comes to being able to step into your possibilities.  And I'm not there yet.  Sometimes I don't realise how restrictive health issues are until I get a bigger burst of energy, and then I see the world open up, and consider how many things I could do in one day.  And then, sadly, the bubble pops and the days snap back into a smaller place like a piece of giant elastic.  That's what happened this last week.  The day after Christmas we went for a bike ride, and then the next day I went for a two-hour walk, and the day after did some yoga.  It felt so nice to do those things and have a bit of leftover energy for other things as well.  The days opened up.

But then the day after that, my energy levels dropped, and all I felt like doing was sitting outside on the decking with a giant pile of books and the umbrella up, reading away the hours.  Which was lovely and delicious in itself, obviously.  And I soooo enjoyed it.  But it wasn't freely chosen.  I have so many pent-up bike rides in me, but yet again the window, at least for that day, was closed and the curtains drawn.

Something goes on in my body to make it more fatigued after anaerobic exercise.  It's a longstanding question, a big piece in the puzzle to sort out.

After reading about the experiences of one of the wonderful peeps on the Pyroluria page on Facebook, I've begun to suspect maybe ammonia overload is the problem.  Yeah, ammonia.  Slightly unpleasant smell on your floor or in your toilet, but sometimes after I have exercised, or when I'm having a sauna, I can smell it in my nose.  Which is sorta creepy.  My poor body, along with all of the other shit it's accumulated over the years, seems to have issues getting rid of the stuff, and takes the opportunity when some anaerobic activity comes along to dump it, and that causes my energy levels to drop a few days later.

I need to do more research into exactly what happens in this situation, but I feel like I've maybe hit upon a reason to the problem.  It makes me very grateful that I bought my sauna all those months ago to help my poor ole body;  it is proving invaluable.  As is the advice and experience of those on the Facebook group.  From the wisdom shared there I have now begun a protocol of taking activated charcoal tablets a couple of days out of each week, which help mop up the ammonia. 

Charcoal.  Burnt wood.  I mean, is there any end to the life-givingness of trees?  Even when they're dead, and burnt to a crisp, they're sexing it up.  Trees, I bow down to you with my hat doffed low.

Where was I?  Possibilities.  I have bubbly hope that improvements on the health front this year mean more space for bubbly possibilities.  Work possibilities.  Finding a niche or two.  Having some of those elusive spaces come close enough for me to actually touch them.  I'm feeling inspired by the example of others - like The Pollinatrix, who has come via spine bubblings of synchronicity into a fascinating niche of her own.  I'm feeling inspired by the different ways people find to do things which shake up the situation and bring freedom where there wasn't before.  One small example of that is these people, who run guided tours.  There are two options - take the tour for free, if you so wish, or pay what you think the tour was worth if you want to pay.

I love that idea of "pay what it's worth".  It throws out compulsion and opens up the possibility of generosity.  I suspect that many people, in that situation, would find generosity welling up into that space and would end up paying close to what they would have paid if there had been a set amount to begin with.  But freely given.

Half Full AND Half Empty

Today, NaBloPoMo poses the question, Is the proverbial glass half empty or half full?

My personal proverbial glass is not static.  It moves as if it's liquid, like I'm constantly glassblowing it.

I imagine the DSM-IV and the DSM-V would probably have a few different pharmaceuticals for that floppiness, to stabilise the ship.  But I don't think the ship is meant to be stabilised in that fashion.  A bridge is built so that it sways.  It is the in-built sway which gives it its strength.  It's learning to lean into the curves that is the beginning of wisdom, not trying to straighten them out so that every road is a ruler.

But this is especially true for me lately because how that proverbial glass appears on any given day is determined by what is happening in my body.   I try to listen to what my body needs in order to do what it does - heal, magically, with the right ingredients.  But sometimes taking the very ingredients your body needs can make you feel temporarily worse before you feel better.  Sometimes stopping what you are doing because it is making you feel worse is the very worst thing that you could do.  But then sometimes it's the best.  And sometimes it's hard to know the difference.

In the times when I am laid low, through healing crises, bodily malfunctions, or through simple colds and flus, the glass can be as empty and as dry as if it had always lived its life in the desert and the only time it is filled  is when it's caked up with dead, dry sand that is threatening to submerge it entirely.

But those times pass.  Just like the good times must pass too.  When my ship is on a more even keel, and the seas are calm, then that glass does seem half full.  There is something within me that returns to optimism, and joy, when I feel well, like one of those babies' toys that are weighted in the base so that they never topple for good.  Beauty siren-calls me back, and possibility, and simply the lack of suffering.  But when wellbeing hits, it is its own reward.  It's remembering when those times hit that bad times will return again, and not being averse to that, which puts the extra weight in my bottom and wind in my sails, to mix a couple of metaphors.  It's not the absence of those bad times that makes for good times.  But it's so easy to forget this.

When I think of the collective glass, the world I live in and take my part in, and whether it's half-empty or half-full, it becomes more complicated.  I know that the times we are living in now are dark, and the way we are living may possibly destroy the very earth that we depend upon.  We are knowledgeable but unbelievably stupid, and allowing ourselves to be led by the nose by corruption that leaks out of all of the institutions we have depended upon in the past.  There is much to be depressed about in this insane world, and it's here that it is tempting to see the glass as half empty, and that human stupidity and ignorance will be our downfall for good.

But maybe not for good.  I like to look at the march of time not as linear, in the stupid and boring way that is our Western inheritance, but as circular.  That is a much wiser way to look at it.  I read this the other day about traditional Hindu conceptions of the passing of cultural time:

... the Iron Age is the last in the great cycle.  It begins with the Golden Age, a period of great stability and very slow change, in which the wise are recognized, and rule.  In the Silver Age, things are changing more, though still slowly.  In the Bronze Age, change is faster, people are turning more outwards, "doing" more.  Finally, in the Iron Age, which is the shortest of the four, change becomes more and more rapid, the wise long ago ceased to have any say in the form of our outer life, and we all become more and more materialistic.  It ends in self-destruction, but from the flames arises the phoenix of the next Golden Age.

(Tilo Ulbricht, 'A thousand roots: an introduction to the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke,' Parabola magazine

I love this recycling and composting view of the degeneration that comes at certain periods of time :)  How very wise.  Whatever comes up must go down. But then, whatever goes down must come up.  And so in this instance, when I look at the way the Western civilisation works now, knowing that it is not sustainable for us or for the earth, the most positive way to view the future is to go right through the most negative, and to see that our current way of living must destroy itself.

Paradox.  The seeds of the new are in the midst of the old and will sprout, just the way they do after fire.  And that's a beautiful thing, and it's both glass-half-full and glass-half-empty all at the same time.

Which are perhaps the most beautiful moments of all.

Daydreaming

I chatted last night to my blog bud Manuela, who has moved into an intentional community several hours from her house. She is excited, full of happiness and fervour and is nagging imploring me to find something like this myself, she's that happy :) Haha.

Well, I must say, though that particular flavour is not mine, the whole intentional community idea has been something I've contemplated on and off for many years. Talking to Manu last night about it has set the fire burning again. One of my workmates was back after holidays today, the first time I've seen her in a month. She is a Buddhist nun, lives in a community in Montrose. I chatted with her today about the things that scare me silly about such an idea but the way she talked about it, it was definitely a doable thing. She has been living this way for over 10 years now.

Of course, the thing that concerns me the most about a thought like this is the lack of solitude. I mean, I am seriously almost a hermit. I can go for three or four days without seeing anyone and be fine with it.

She pointed out that there is plenty of space within a larger intentional community to disappear for days on end if need be.

But I don't know if I want an entire community. I was thinking I would like to try the idea of an intentional share house, say start off with five or six people and see how I went from there. The thought occurred to me early this afternoon and the more I thought about it the more I contemplated a share house for solitudinal people who need plenty of space could not only work but could be a cool thing. Maybe it could work. A shared house for creative contemplatives. Christians please but no doctrine definitions, the grottier and more real the better. Two rooms for each person - one bedroom, one studio. An intentional shared house wanting to share life and creativity together, and to reach out to other people, whatever that could mean.

Is such a thing possible?? It's a terribly scary notion.

I've been dizzy with the romance of the thought all afternoon. I wonder once the reverb has clanged its way in if it will still seem like a possibility to me out the other end or if it will dwindle down to just another possible thought. This afternoon it has buzzed so loud, feeling like a God whisper, a future possibility.

If nothing else, it's given me a real buzz for the afternoon.