Missive # 18: Wildly Improbably Options

There is a legend in my husband's family about the time pop quit the ad agency (he's an artist) in frustration, left all four kids with his mother in law and took his wife to Mexico for six weeks. I'm trying to treat this period as my Mexico. 'Cept I'm not in Mexico (Martha's Vineyard this week, vacationing with the Obamas). Also, my kids are not with my mother, my step mother or my mother in law. And also it's only for a week. But whatever. I am still contemplating wildly improbably options.

I just wrote to a friend that I am practicing insight meditation to open my mind to these previously unconsidered notions. Perhaps I should explain my method. The first four days here it rained and the wind blew. Nor'easter style. You would think the god who is our president would order up better weather for his vacation. But perhaps like me he just wanted an excuse to read ceaselessly. I wonder if he is also on book # 5.

As a minor digression, here's what I've read this week:

1. Anita Brookner's Strangers (heartwrenching loneliness)
2. Jeanette Wells' memoir The Glass Castle (affirming)
3. Jayne Ann Krantz Burning Hot (trashy mindlessness has it's place)
4. Bad Things Happen which is a first novel by an author who's name escapes me but a first rate mystery
5. Menonite in a Little Black Dress, also a memoir by another forgotten author but funny

If my friend Elise ever finishes the current Janet Evanovich I'll read that next. Otherwise it's Ian McEwan's Saturday. And actually since tomorow is Saturday perhaps that's as it should be.

That digression was not in fact a tangent but the point. How I practice insight meditation. I read. I also sit in the sun, at the beach, on the porch and watch the sky water clouds letting random thoughts pass through. Wildly improbably options.

Just this morning I was thinking about how much I love music. It is my mother's greatest frustration that I don't have a piano because despite years since the last time I touched a piano, I can sit down and play simple pieces well. I love the piano. And listening to music of any sort. I would truly enjoy being a programmer or producer or musicologist for Muzak or some other company that programs the sound track of your life. I'm one of those people who actually listens to the music in the grocery store Urban Outfitters Buddha Bar and tries to identify the songs I have in my collection. Is it too late for me to go back to school for music? I hear Columbia has a great program.

Missive #17: A Vacation of the Mind

This is my Mexico. It's a legend of the family myth type. In my version of the story I don't actually get to decamp to the desert southwest surfing coast flutterby land. In the true...accepted? version of the legend, the protagonist and his lovely wife leave the kids with gramma and jet to the mexican riveria for six weeks. Soul searching meaning of life insight seeking experiences follow until the path forward to follow the bliss is revealed.

My mexico is all in my mind. Forty days in the desert, sweet as it sounds, never gonna happen. But bliss searching meaning of life insight seeking might be kind of interesting.

Or I could just go to the beach (check), read a trashy novel (double check) and drink wine (no doubt) until the fog lifts and awareness descends.

Missive # What? Life in the Country

Creak. Groan. My daughter beat me at Scrabble today. We shopped for antique postcards and chocolate. Patrick Wolf, Edward Sharp, Florence's Machine and Debbie Reynolds entertained us. Life is my employer and I am a free agent.

Will get back on track with a new and improved message soon.

Missive #15 - Stumbling

I'm stumblingly @ http://www.stumbleupon.com/productdemo.php

and am feeling like I've arrived at the gateway to online nirvana. Am I late to the game? Maybe. But so what. I'm a fan of Pandora almost since its inception and like Last FM too and the main reason I like these music sites is because it always me to expand my more esoteric music tastes with no effort whatsoever. These sites make recommendations based on my preferences and refine those suggestions based on my thumbs up/thumbs down ratings. Looks like stumbleupon does the same thing.

Now if only I could figure out how to work it for work!

Entry #14: Blogging is hard

Whine whine whine. I don't have anything to say and anyway no one's watching to who cares?

Entry #13: Shift. Coltrane on my mind.

Shift. Nudge. Outlier. Outsider. Conundrum. Paradox. Paradigm. These are some of my favorite words.

They say we live in a world in flux. Whitewater change. The only steady state is constant change. There's so much noise and chatter and information unleashed. So much is knowable. Data is king. Information is knowledge.

I heard a magazine editor declare the other day that it is not about accuracy but speed. Information fast so what if it's wrong, unreliable, incorrect. Speed to eyes is all that matters.
This info drenched world is perfect for me. I thrive on information. The more input the better. Google is god.

But I also crave quiet reflection to chew on digest assess what I've read heard seen and draw my own distinctions conclusions connections.

They say the ability to be adaptable flexible go with the flow is the key to success in these times. Maybe but I think zagging when everyone else zigs is a better approach.

Those who know me will recognize this as my willful stubbornness unwilling to acknowledge authority deliberately obdurate just because it's oppositional. Yeah, so?

While everyone is running headlong after the pack with blinders on crying about the falling sky, I think I will step back and riff on the paradox; use the time wisely waiting out the craziness plotting my next dream.

It is a conundrum that there's so much info but nobody knows anything. Powerful smart leaders of all stripes and colors nudge us this way and that while watching or not the outside outliers to sketch in the boundaries. They manipulate our paradigms to madden our perceptions while relying on our inability to shift.

Shift people. If it is one thing, it must be the other. When it is nothing, it is all things considered. Watch for the they for they are the we. Nothing is new everday a new sun.

Entry #13: The interconnectedness of everything

Everything is connected to everything else, right? We are all part of the same organism or system if you prefer. Religion teaches this. Science confirms it. Even a child understands this. It's a simple concept.

But sometimes as we grow more (misunder)educated, sophistijaded and become “experts,” we lose sight of this concept by becoming specialized and too narrow in our thinking. We also learn to deny our senses and believe (mistakenly) that facts and figures connote the only truth, when any good statistician has probably read lies, damn lies and stats.

Let's play this out to one really worrisome possible outcome. Are we eventually all going to become datapoints with identifying signatures that define who we are and help those who should find us find us in the internether? What happens when the beauty of interconnectedness is turned on its head and we are turned into bits and bytes? When we are all just one degree separated? Is it possible to be too connected?

Interconnectedness is a beautiful idea; everything is ultimately connected to everything else implies a certain amount of responsibility to one another and stewardship of the planet. Doug Adams riffed in this idea in a few of his books when Dirk Gently’s (Holistic Detective Agency) expensed his trip to the Bahamas as part of the search for the woman’s lost cat which disappeared in London, justifying it by invoking the "interconnectedness of everything." (If you haven’t read any Doug Adams, you should).

Then there’s the butterfly effect, a related popular concept - "when a butterfly flaps its wings..." The phrase refers to the idea that a butterfly's wings might create tiny changes in the atmosphere that may ultimately alter the path of a tornado or delay, accelerate or even prevent the occurrence of a tornado in a certain location. The flapping wing represents a small change in the initial condition of the system, which causes a chain of events leading to large-scale alterations of events. Had the butterfly not flapped its wings, the trajectory of the system might have been vastly different. While the butterfly does not cause the tornado, the flap of its wings is an essential part of the initial conditions resulting in a tornado. (Wikipedia). Wings flap in China, Hurricane in New Orleans, you know? It’s all connected.

From Buddhism we also know this to be true. There's karma - the law of moral causation which says basically that nothing happens to a person that he or she does not for some reason or other deserve based on present doings or past (life) actions (for Christians and farmers it’s "you reap what you sow"). Usually, you cannot see the actual and direct reason or reasons, but it's all connected.

But like you can’t know life without death, light without darkness, good without evil, is it also true that you can’t have interconnectedness without being found?