The Direction of Intention

412.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Bobby is a sports massage therapist. Most doorframes are not made to accommodate a man of his size. He is strong. He is big. He has been known to the block the sun when passing by, sending confused patients in the rehab center scrambling outside to see the eclipse. Bobby could spin me like on his finger like a juggler spins a plate.

The first time I saw him (in silhouette, of course, he stood between me and the sun) I thought, “This is going to hurt.” He said, as if reading my thoughts, “Don’t worry. I’m a shoulder guy. I promise not to hurt you. Much.” He grinned as I followed him back to massage room, the room so far removed from the rest of the center that screams cannot be heard. My first sports massage performed by my first giant. It was a day of firsts!

Bobby is helping me recover the use of my shoulders. He knows the exact spot to press in a muscle set to release traumatized muscles. He is the largest magician I have ever known. There are handstands in my future. I might even pitch a baseball or reclaim my yoga master superhero status (I demoted myself to yoga bystander when I lost my downward dog). While Bobby had my arm going places it had not gone in 4 years, he fell prey to what I now call, “that thing about me.” Roger used to call it my geek magnet. I am like a roving bartender; people spontaneously tell me their troubles or their life stories – even if they don’t want to – and although Bobby is a Sumo to my twig, he began telling me why he couldn’t be an engineer. I asked no questions. He just started, “Ah, that’s the one. Did you feel it let go? I always wanted to be an engineer,” he said. It was the math. Specifically, it was algebra. He could get the correct answers; he just couldn’t show this work. He told me he barely passed algebra class, squeaking by with a “D” so the course of his life was altered forever. “I had the answers!” he repeated, “but I really started to doubt myself. How could I know the answers but have no idea how to get there?”

I laughed (through my grimace) and said, “You’re lucky! Most people spend their lives looking for the answers AND have no idea how to get there. Imagine their doubt!” He said, “Hold on, I think this next one is going to hurt.”

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401.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

I told Scott that I was at zero; all around me was a blank slate. He smiled and said, “That reminds me of a poem by Hafiz I recently heard:

Zero
Is where the Real Fun starts.

There’s too much counting
Everywhere else!”

I laughed when he said, “You’re right where the real fun starts.” How does this always happen: seeking sympathy my pals hit me with a poem and I realize with cartoon stars swirling around my head that I am again standing right where I want to be! Zero is the beginning of the adventure. As choices go, Zero can be utter stillness, the wasteland, lost in the woods, a score on a math test, or the moment before the big bang. It most certainly is a state of mind.

Once, I was represented by a gallery whose owner was also a painter. His home was his studio and in one of the seasonal fires sparked by humans and blown into conflagration by the Santa Ana winds, his house and all of his paintings burned. He was at zero. He said, “There’s nothing but space around me and I’ve never felt more alive.”

Scott watched my thought train and said, “It’s a good one isn’t it.” I said, “Now that I know better, Zero is the only place I want to be.” I’m tired of counting.

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399.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Riding my bike over the low bridge out of West Seattle, I shifted into an easier gear and my bike locked up. No pieces flew off like the last time this happened. It was as if I tossed the anchor off the back of the bike and moored myself to the spot. I lurched and stood, secure in the knowledge that I was going nowhere. My gears where broken. I heard Megan’s voice in my head saying, “metaphor alert!” I did not want to consider the implications of the metaphor. So, instead of my bike carrying me to my studio I carried my bike half a mile back to the new cycle shop that opened the previous week; I noticed it as I passed on my way to the bridge. Another metaphor alert: if your bike is going to drop anchor in the middle of nowhere then how fortuitous is it that a bike shop chose to locate itself on the edge of nowhere? I chose this as my metaphor.

I was jamming on my bike because I had a call with Alan so, instead of doing the call from my studio I found a nice bench overlooking Puget Sound. There was a drive through coffee stand a few hundred yards before the bench so I walked through, got a coffee, and had a call with one of my favorite people on a beautiful spring day with a hot morning latte from my bench office with a spectacular view across the Sound to downtown. I took off my helmet as my head was swelling with imagined status. Also wearing a bike helmet without a bike requires people to ask, “Are you okay?” Two people asked in addition to the barista. I never know how to answer that question. I did know how to answer the man loading the truck who asked, “What happened to your ride?” I responded, “It threw a shoe so I left it at the blacksmith.” He laughed and I laughed because he laughed.
Later (from my studio – I drove) I had a call with Teresa who is helping me rethink and market my business. She said, “Let’s start from the inside out,” and I almost wept for joy; no marketing plan on the planet has ever worked for me because, as Teresa said, “People come to work with you because of who you are – not everyone is ready for that (another metaphor alert!) so they must come to you when they are ready.” She told me I was like guy in The Giver who helps people when they see color for the first time. “They see the color red and think they are going crazy and you help them know that red is what they are supposed to see. You help people know that their creativity isn’t crazy; it’s natural. Then, you help them find all the colors of the rainbow.” It’s a good thing my helmet was already off.

She made all of the metaphor alerts come into focus. I am just like the bike shop; I’ve chosen to place my shop on the edge of nowhere because that is where the seekers pass on their quest to find color. She laughed when I told her my target audience is people whose bikes have spontaneously dropped anchor and then she said, “Now we’re getting somewhere.” That was my plan all along.

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389.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

The sand hill cranes leave prints in the mud. They return to the river each night, find a nice sand bar, swoop in by the thousands and land en masse to await the return of the sun. Although I don’t know this to be true I imagine they huddle together, moving like a river eddy, impressing the sand and mud with a map of their movement. It’s an incredible map to see! The natural world’s Jackson Pollock made more impressive when you consider they’ve made versions of this map at this time of year for centuries!

Remove your shoes and walk the map and you’ll receive a crane reflexology treatment. Their map is 3 dimensional and massages the bottoms of your feet! All of life’s stresses slip away when you add your impressions to their map. Tragic tales and stories of woe melt like butter as crane perspective fills your body and soul. I felt an entire year’s worth of life gumbo leave with a sigh.

As I stood on the map I wondered what geography I scribe in the mud of my life. What mark does my eddy leave? Of this I am certain: if you removed your shoes and walked my mud map you would be more likely to break a toe than leave behind your stress. Now that I have had crane reflexology and filled my metaphoric cup with their perspective I am committed to tracing a different life map. Smaller steps, more circles, with attention paid to my natural migration pattern instead of walking the concrete paths and straight lines of urban human flight. At the end of my days I want my fellow walkers to be inspired to take off their shoes, stand in my impressions, and feel the goodness of the being that once walked in this place.

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381.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

I see him coming as I pull up to the crosswalk. He doesn’t look well. He is a tall man, thin, maybe 70 years old. I know he is going to cross the street so I stop well in front of the walkway. He looks tortured. He is in pain and I wonder what ails him. I think of Parcival sitting on the couch with the Fisher King, wanting to ask, “What ails you?” but social convention keeps his question unasked. I honor my urban social convention and keep my window rolled up. His clothes are curious, an odd assembly of worn blue jeans, high top sneakers, a rumpled misbuttoned shirt covered by a black pin striped suit jacket. He has a pink baseball cap tipped slightly to the back of his head.

As he continues across the street I am taken aback by the writing on the back of his jacket. In white paint, big bold lettering he has written: Rapture by Death in Progress.
“Easter must be nigh,” I think to myself. And, then, “What does that mean, really? Rapture by Death in Progress?” Several years ago I lived on the central coast of California and one chilly Easter Sunday as I walked on Pismo Beach I saw a man, dressed in a loincloth and a turban, crawling across the beach. Dragging behind from a length of rough rope he’d fastened around his waist was a large cross. He was in agony. He had a similar sign strapped across his shoulders though I can’t recall the exact wording. Something about his suffering setting him free. I learned that this crawling man tortures himself in the same manner every Easter.

Rapture (noun): 1. Overwhelming happiness. 2. Mystical transportation. Since there is no apparent happiness, overwhelming or otherwise I have to assume that both men’s desire is for mystical transformation. I wonder if the death that is in progress is intentional and imminent or the type that awaits us all. Either way I have no doubt that death, by definition is transformative; on the list of mysteries it holds the number one position so it is almost certainly mystical, too.

Suffering or exhaustion is common in the ritual practices of mystic transportation in many traditions. There are many routes available to go beyond the threshold where your rational mind is willing to go. I understand the desire to see what is on the other side of that portal. Yet, I know enough to know that the initiate or priestess has to be ready for the experience, mature. The vision is certainly personal but the point of a mystical experience is to benefit the community. If they are going across the boundary for personal gain alone, or to demonstrate their capacity, they are dangers to themselves and the community. The impulse to put a sign on your back announcing your pain is a warning that you are not ready. The journey is self-abuse for self-aggrandizement and should not be taken.

I pulled through the intersection and down the road I passed a man at a bus stop, plugged into his earphones and dancing ecstatically. “Ah,” I thought, “Rapture by Life in Progress.” I knew what it was even without a sign.

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363.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

On my drive home a few days ago I caught a bit of an interview with Mahatma Gandhi’s grandson, Arun. He was explaining an essential idea that he learned from his grandfather: passive violence is the root cause of all physical forms violence. “When we see people in poverty and do nothing,” he said, “that is a passive form of violence.”

I immediately thought of how we fund our public schools. Each school is funded according to the tax base of the property surrounding the school. The schools surrounded by wealthiest homes receive more money; the schools surrounded by modest homes receive less; the schools that receive the least amount of money are in the poorest neighborhoods. India has its caste system; the United States has its tax code. Is not this what Arun Gandhi means by passive violence? Add to this the application of a standardized test applied equally to all schools with the jaw-dropping assumption that all schools play on a level playing field. Is this passive violence or something more intentional? Certainly the children know the difference; the children feel the impact.

Here is a question I asked in one of my first posts:

What world would you embody if your desire was not a response to personal lack but an impulse toward greater wholeness for everyone?

What would be your dedication? What story would you tell?

So I change the pronoun and ask it again:

What world would we embody if our desire was not a response to personal lack but an impulse toward greater wholeness for everyone?

What would be our dedication? What story would we tell?

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356.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Last night I watched Werner Herzog’s film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, about the incredible paintings found in the Chauvet caves in southern France. Over 30,000 years ago, for reasons about which we can only speculate, people painted images of horses, bears, lions, and rhinoceros; they left hand prints and other markings. These are the oldest known images created by humankind. They are shocking in precision, shape, and delicacy of line. They are contemporary – in some of the shots as the camera panned across the images, I could swear that Picasso had spent some time in the cave working out his chiaroscuro. Many of the images overlap and carbon dating tells us that there was 5,000 years between the earlier and later images yet they live as one cohesive intention as if drawn by a single hand.

In the film, Herzog made a statement that seems especially appropriate to ponder on this day. He said, “These people did not live in history.” They did not have clocks or calendars. They did not take classes in the history of the ice age or tribal war in the year 37,000b.c.e; they would never think to distinguish between before and after the contemporary era; the concept of an era would be meaningless, the word “contemporary” would be lost on them. They did not locate themselves in their lives in the same way we do.

It is a leap year and we think we have an extra day. I’ve read the same question in multiple places over the past few days, “What will you do with your extra day?” Having just seen the film I ask myself, “Isn’t every day of life an extra day?” If I lived “out of history” would I note this day as somehow special? I hope so, but not because I consider it a bonus gift in the cereal box of my life. This leap year notion is made possible by how we count, a small hiccup necessary to keep our numbers in line with the cycles of the moon. If I count this day as special, how do I count the other 365 days? Ordinary? I guess a better question is, “What am I counting?”

What if, like today, you went out tomorrow and did something special to mark the extra day of life that you have. And the next day, too. And the next. What if you woke up every morning and asked yourself, “What will I do with my extra day?”

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353.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

The tagline to this blog is something that I think about a lot: it’s not in what you get from life, it’s in what you bring to it. To me, this tagline is more than a clever phrase or nice sentiment. It’s more than a philosophical guide-star. The more that I think about it and do the work that is mine to do in the world, the more I realize that it’s an imperative of our time. It’s also an opportunity. Here’s my thought trail:

Something extraordinary is happening in my lifetime; it is something that has never happened before in the history of humanity. It lives under the broad category of The Pace of Change but this one we rarely talk about or factor into our news of the day even though it impacts every nuance of contemporary life. The first time I heard about it I was sitting in a classroom in elementary school though it meant almost nothing to me at the time. The second time I heard it I was in college and I leaned into it because I knew it was far more important than I could grasp as the time. Now, I’m living in the time that my teachers told me was coming; it’s not an abstraction, no need to think about it, I see it all around me every day.

It is this simple fact: it took many thousands of years for the population of human beings to double. The next doubling only took a few thousand years. The next doubling took a few hundred years. Never before now has the population of human beings doubled in the span of a single lifetime. And, in my lifetime, assuming I will live to a ripe old age, the population will triple. There were 3 billion people on the planet when I was born. In the space of 80 years, a mere blink of the eye, and there will be 9 billion people.

“What’s the big deal?” you might ask. Simply this: our systems and economic ideals – our way of thinking about the world – are rooted and structured in colonial intentions: it’s all about commanding and controlling the resources. It’s all in what we get. Manifest Destiny was a nice idea for the folks playing on the chosen team but was a horror story for the rest of the world’s people. It continues to be a horror story though now we have television and the internet so we can look at it if we choose to look. It might be new news but we citizens of the United States of America consume far more than we produce. We were the only nation on earth to occupy that special category until the late 1970’s. Now, each year, more nations join us in our model of consumption. It is an old and increasingly untenable idea to be in the world according to what we can get. It’s a global economy. That is more than a nice phrase; it is a functional reality and economies, local and global (no separation) run on the movement and flow of resources.

We are quite capable of going to war for oil or water or spice (salt was all the rage before the age of oil) but I suspect we’ve outgrown the good guys-n-bad guys storyline. The chosen people story is another variation of the good guys-n-bad guys story; it’s a useful story to mask a resource war but in a truly global economy it seems a bit out dated. We can do better. The earth’s belly is pregnant with people so obviously interconnected that it requires gargantuan hubris not see that we are, in fact, in this together. Transcending the tribal thing and the colonial thing is, in my mind, the real challenge of our times.

Life lived according to what we get prospers a few in the short term and wreaks havoc on everyone in the long term. It is an operating principle that worked really well for a few people when the population afforded lots of space and we communicated with smoke signals and pigeons. Today, it still works well for a shrinking few but since there are more and more of us… well, you get the picture.

The opportunity is not to continue cycling through models of dominance. The opportunity is to grow and reorient to the world in which we live now. We live in an extraordinary time because the opportunity for real change is present. We can continue to live according to what we get or we can pull our heads out of the sands of the past and take a look at what me might actually bring to the feast.

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