Getting on the right track Or The Choice is mine.
Or How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb.

I once encountered many blind alleys,
but today, as long as I have faith, my path is clear.
This has all been slow progress for me.
Like so many, I do not always surrender completely;
I allow the cares and worries of the day distort my thinking.
But as soon as I get back on the right track, I realize that I have everything I need.
Whatever problems confront me, large or small, they can be solved wisely.
Or they can be solved my way. The choice is mine.

Seinfeld on George Burns...

George Burns was a master of enjoying life, which as you grow I think you find is a very rare quality amongst the human species, that we kind of go through this experience and we struggle with various things and we often times fail to stop and go - you know what, this is pretty great, just on a basic level. And George Burns was one of those people who just appreciated “Hey, I’m in show business, life is great…” One thing I did kind of get from him is like, if I get a really good cup of coffee, I like to just go — you know what, just hang on a second. This is a fantastic cup of coffee. Isn’t this a great, and I’ll ask everyone, isn’t this great coffee? Cos you know, it’s not always great. This one is great, you know... And that is one of the things that I really did learn from him. And why I had such respect for him is that I will stop and make that moment. You know, you will enjoy life more if you do that. You know, you get a great parking spot, just go… Hold it a second, I mean look at that spot. I mean it’s--we could have been blocks away and we’re right here.


Hang on a second... just hold on for a moment. And take in the moment- suck it in with a deep breath and just...notice. Become aware. The packages don't need to get there on time. Even if they were sent on time, they might not have gotten there. You will not be forgotten entirely. The message that you love these people will still be received, will still be heard. Just -slow- down-for- a- moment. Realize what is here now. Realize what is here. The cup of coffee. The ice cream. The sunset. The evening. The crunch of snow underfoot. The warmth of stepping inside from the blustery evening, getting warm... et cetera, et cetera.

I dug this post. I will try to read it more often. From the Milkman's Sobriety MSN Group Bully.

when you begin to realize that you have options about the thoughts that you activate and entertain — then you will be the Deliberate Creator of your own experience. As long as you think you don't have a choice about what you think because you don't have a choice about the circumstances that surround you, then you are like a cork bobbing on a raging sea, going wherever it bounces you. But when you understand that you have options, choices in every moment, on every subject, then you begin to make those choices because of the way those choices feel as you make them.

And now, you are using the Guidance that comes forth from within you to guide you to the Well-Being; to the prosperity; to the love of self and others; to the experience that you knew you would have — the experience that is possible for all — to the experience that really is only experienced by those who come to understand the Art of Allowing.

So, it is good for you to reach for some thoughts that give you some relief from the discord or resistance that you have presently going on, for with each attempt at reaching for a thought that feels better, you release more resistance. And as you release more resistance, you fill back up with who-you-are, and your thriving resumes. And we want to really emphasize the word "resumes," because thriving is always the dominant part of your experience. But, we will acknowledge that some of you are going to have to croak before you resume thriving, (Fun!) because some of you have pinched it off pretty good. Some of you have developed some powerful habits of thought. Some of you have developed some strong enemies that you take great delight in every day pushing very hard against.

And some of you thrive on some subjects and suffer on others. You have different vibrational frequencies, depending upon the subject at hand that is activated. But we want you to know that you have access to Guidance that will lead you always in the direction of your thriving on all subjects. But you've got to figure out which direction is going toward your objective, and which direction is going away from your objective. And before you can do that, you've got to figure out what your objective is.

Today I am grateful for:

-medication
-taco & nacho bar from Romeo's for lunch
-green grapes
-art (contemporary)
-sunshine in the middle of winter frost
-naps
-my girlfriend's smiling picture to get me through the day
-well-written essays
-crossword puzzles

I'll be damned, I thought, and I saw Seamus' name in the paper, not for any charity, or award,

no accolade of any kind, not murder, not molestation, not yet. But a $100 fine and 9 months' probation for driving on a suspended license. Who knew what the penalty was for something like that. But I knew I was doing that back when we were 17. He may have done when we were in the same car. Suspended license. What the hell do you have to do to get a license suspended? Not that I have any room to judge. It's never happened to me but that doesn't mean it couldn't.

So I thought I'd check it out just to see what you really would have to do that and here it was:



-Accumulating too many points on your driving record
-Lying on a driver license application
-Driving with no proof of insurance
-Being convicted of driving while under the influence of alcohol or drugs
-Leaving the scene of an accident
-Using your vehicle to flee from a law enforcement officer
-Refusing to pay a traffic ticket
-Failing to comply with court-ordered child support or alimony payments
-Violating the terms of Nebraska's graduated licensing system for teen drivers



It's a weird feeling, trying to piece together another person's life, or just know what still goes through their minds. It could be as simple as not paying a traffic ticket. And that's understandable for someone who rarely abided by the law, stiff upper lip toward the drudgery of authority. Even if it's speeding or wrong u-turn or failure to stop. Stuff that the average citizen will get stopped with. Driving is a privilege is that saying of the statement. From the time I turned sixteen years old, driving is a privilege. I don't make light of it, there's truth in that. I've driven with reckless abandon over the years, thinking that's just a quickest way from point A to B. Plus, I drove several different cars over the years, and haven't wrecked one for a long time, no big deals. I'm still sixteen, I'm still prone to trying to get there faster, to display some erratic driving. But for the most part, I drive within the lines. No reason to get real stupid out there. That's more of a truth than anything else.



Anyway, we all have our vices, I suppose. For Seamus, it's breaking the law, and God knows what else. I know it's at least his second time on probation. There's a guy running from himself, avoiding the consequences. Trying to just get away with it. Hopefully, it's nothing more than that. He'd be off probation by now. That was February. It's be his month. And he turns 33 tomorrow. That's a hard thought. Just coincidental how I found that. I am beginning to imagine that everything happens for a reason, that God puts us in people's paths to offer us opportunities for grace, for learning, to give us knowledge about what we are doing here.

Just like that it comes up and bites you in the throat, this corporate shit they sling your way
And I have had on several occasions thought to myself as I walked in the door...you're a lucky son of a bitch you think these guys still want you around. You could say that for just about anything I suppose. You're lucky these people even want you around, you say. But you go to the show anyway because it's where you are at. It's street cred, if nothing else. It doesn't make you who are, but it's something you know how to do. But then the boredom sets it, the discontent, the happiness that you have a place to go everyday. I ask myself often if this is living. It's not hell. Far from that. You've been to hell and you're trying not to go back... hell is a shattered state of the mind, the core of selfishness, where you are a shell. Anyway, it's not hell. Until you feel it wrap its tight talons around the base of your neck like it's been. Soft. Soft place in the heart of the concrete landscape... The quiet, nothing going on, you're biding time there. Trying to make things look like youre busy. They said that something like 250,000 lost their jobs last year. I mean, fine, the news is depressing, and to say so is not news. It's all yellow journalism. We read it, watch for confirmation. Or gratitude, depending on which side of the envelope you want to write. But looming in this environment we see that jobs are scarce, it's a bitch and not a bull market. Act like you're busy, act like its your purpose. The question is which percentage of those 250 thou were acting like they had a purpose, like they were producers. Those are the real tragedies. They went to work everyday to please somebody and something and it just wasn't enough. Or something had to be done. I'm not in that class. I still earn a paycheck because I didn't leave, decided I would stay until they made me, or until I just up and decided to make another move. I can't admit that entirely but every now and then it shows... not here for anything but plug the time that will wind up into my bank account. There for dollars. At one point it was different. In the beginning the light at the end of the tunnel was a train. I couldn't stand it because I never had my feet under me. I wasn't just passing time. I was trying not to drown. I tried to take a job at my last employer that would land me serious dollars. And it would have. If I had any skill at it. If I had had any inkling of how make it work for me. I would have cleared something like 40 thou. I was living in a shithole apartment in the city and with that money I could have probably rented or bought a house. But it wasn't right for me. It was a bitch deal when they needed me to be a bulldog out of the gate. So I flopped. Then I got this gig and training seemed like enough, until I hit the floor and then...then it was rough sailing...lots of shit to remember, lots of people to please, and if you didn't remember it, you were in trouble. But somewhere someway over about a year I felt things clicking. I wasn't dreading going to work in the morning. I was starting to like it... they gave me projects, assignments, responsibilities. I mastered a few things that were valuable. I was making it work. I fit in. For a short time, until I balked at the wrong assignment. I said, I'm not sure if I want to be doing this ALL the time. Not without a little extra incentive, what is my incentive? How will I be graded when this is part of someone else's job. All the little wormy things you say when you just really want to know the answer to the question, how am I gonna get mine?? Stockading, bivouacing. Waiting for the apocalypse. Summer break, what above my 401K wilt thou bequeath unto me. Selfish to the core. The slip from purgatory back into hell, greed.
Anyway, I'm entirely sick of this story. It's been my story the last couple years, until... I fell soft. I went back into the underbrush, trying to hide. And within the last couple weeks, a total meltdown. This shit is not that difficult really. Not at all. Unless you aren't paying attention, unless you are asleep at the wheel. Then, shit gets tough. You have to put out fires again, you've gotta surf instead of merely wade. You're running for your life so you don't join the ranks of the 250 thou. You can't afford that, you won't make rent. You won't be able to breathe and you will begin to panic. You'll look at banks in that special way, you'll be calculating bank vault volume. You'll need to have a gun which is the last thing anybody wants. It'd be like having a pack of cigarettes when you're trying to quit. You'll carry it with you everywhere. Just in case. Suddenly, you're putting out fires again. You're bargaining with your chips, you tell them anything just to get them off your back. You tell half-truths. You twist it in your favor. I told them today how I gave someone a chunky rate because that's all there was but someone else found something that saved $300...I said they okayed it. They didn't even put up a fight. They hadn't but I don't know where I got the price, how I got the price. Why, you'd practically have to be asleep at the wheel not to see that it was something fishy. I stuttered, stammered through it, I didn't know where it came from.

There are some that have been hurt by trusting another and this hurt is from within themselves and without bounds and takes their focus and they think and ruminate over and over making the hurt within then grow. The key is that this hurt is within them; the other has already gone and time passes and with the passing of time, all hurts begin to heal naturally provided we can get out of the way of that healing nature. I tell you that if we keep opening up the wound, we are wounded over and over. Fact is, and please get what I’m saying here… this hurt keeps some together even they shouldn’t be together and it tells us that we really do give some of our personal space to the other person that we love. This hurt warns us by giving us a feeling when we sense that our beloved is leaving; it is the early warning system of mate retention, and it can be wrong; it is just a warning. Yes warnings can be false alarms, like a car horn that is stuck on; that loud warning only means the horn is stuck on! So I say the hurt caused by breaks in trust are like car horns, they get our attention so we can make wise choices

The man holding on for dear life to what still remains is often as tethered to tragedy as the man who has everything to lose and is quite blinded from what he cannot see.

The reason being that the former will begin to see that he no longer has breathing room and will focus all his attention on the act of breathing, hoping that the berth will widen. His hope is gigantic and yet, he still finds himself believing that he has some sort of role in that widening.

But his insight may be that the least bit of error on his part could spell yet another setback, in a time where setbacks are not affordable.

The man who has everything to lose spends much of his time building ramparts around him as well, because he lives with the awareness that there is rope to burn, and he acts accordingly.

He changes at his leisure, burning bridges as he sees fit, without any regard for the wider consequences, occasionally to him making needed changes to his life and never truly assesses the damage. This man could later become a man who leads himself blindly into the fold. He may at some point become aware of the wreckage of his past and find the need for a freer life. Or he never changes at all and loses everything.

But so to the man looking for the rescue. But the closer to the bottom one becomes, swiping at all he has like an old man on his way home with his groceries, the more desparate with fear he realizes he now has become. The fear alone promotes failure. Once you've lost everything then the burden of keeping it all together is no longer there. No need to play defense, no need to toe the line. What a treacherous way to live it seems.

grateful for:



-PB & J at 12:30 in the morning

-that last few minutes before you have to get the hell out of bed

-dual car keys, one to start & heat up the car and the other to have to open other doors

-Grape juice (looove grape juice)

-a workout facility just a stone's throw from my apartment

-composition

-prayers for the highest power



Strap boots on. Walk 100 paces and begin workout. It's pretty uncanny since I never would have exercised in past times. Not entirely the truth, as I remember going to the Creighton gym by myself and asking to chevk out a basketball. Off and on since I left high school. I like exercising, staying somewhat focused on my physical well-being. My physical well-being is not always so well, I think. A fine line maintainence of the joints, tendons and yes even the limbs. It's all connected, I've been able to verify that for myself... mental, physical, spiritual and emotional--- which seems to belong in some rambunctious pot.

http://www.reuters.com/article/entertainmentNews/idUSTRE4B21JC20081203

I couldn't believe I remembered this one but I specifically remember her being on the PBS Blues special they had a couple years ago. Not sure which volume it was but it very well may have been the first diected by Martin Scorscese. He did a pretty faithful job of attempting to put all the folk and blues singers into their proper perspective. If you weren't terribly grounded in the blues, which I don't necessarily think I am, Odetta came off as a little strange-sounding. I remember she had this way of singing and then give a loud-WHOP sound from her mouth, deep lungs. Anyway, I can't say much about her because my knowledge is very limited, only that I know she was an influence to many. Dylan gives her props in this article as being highly influential as do a lot of civil rights activists and anyone who appreciates the maintaining of a strong musical base as means of preserving the culture and mores of a people. But that's a bit high-flown, I suppose.

Interesting take on Amsterdam. I try to keep in touch now that my relatives are getting older.
I like revisiting this because it shows up in my dreams. The only place I really have been
able to call the home of my family. Omaha, yes, but Amsterdam is where all the points
converge for us. It was pretty well calcified when I saw my whole family and their tombstones
lined up in the cemetery, one by one...

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.zillowblog.com/zillow_blog/images/sanfordcarpet.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.zillowblog.com/my-hometown-amsterdam-ny/2006/07/&usg=__YLQmbt4U8cdRuNthlVo9E8e_lMM=&h=320&w=505&sz=73&hl=en&start=1&um=1&tbnid=NVOg3SFJbZ_YWM:&tbnh=82&tbnw=130&prev=/images%3Fq%3Damsterdam%2Bny%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN

Someone brought up a point about the new Wal-MArt which opened up recently, which Brooke and I decided to go shopping at this weekend. The location is up on the hill on 72nd Street where the Ranch Bowl used to be. Of course, that's my frame of reference because the fact of the Ranch Bowl is as old as my any of my memories of Omaha. Then Angie makes a comment, God, I just don't know because we used to do so many things at the Ranch Bowl and now it's a Wal-Mart! Which was a point I hadn't even connected at all, but God, amazingly true...then immediately, I got to thinking about the various shows I was able to see at the Bowl... one hell of a bruiser of a place to see a gig...
It started back in 1991 with Pearl Jam for me. My first real concert ever. My parents let me go out on a Thursday night, school next day for the first time ever. And I had enough to go see this show. Went with Sigler in his parents' grocery getter to see Eddie Vedder and the boys. Tribe After Tribe opened. 311, a few times. Mudhoney, Frank Black, Mike Doughty, Blue October, Galactic, Koko Taylor, Clutch, Shannon Curfman, James McMurtry, Bob Mould, and of course, I can't remember any others for some odd reason... when a band came through there, without fail, the drumbeats would ripple through you and the guitar would wail through the air. Total bruiser bar with a hard concrete floor and chain link separating the bar from the main floor. I know it was during a couple of the 311 shows where the crowd was so thick, everybody so excited and moshing around I also got knocked over and stomped completely. You had to fight the tide through that, because it would skin you alive if you succumbed to it. Tickets to the Bowl were never more than 20 or 25 bucks and I guess that's maybe due to the hike in cost for tickets or something like that. Toward the end, when I saw Koko Taylor in what must have been 2001, they set up tables on the floor and put drapes over them, lit candles. That particular show was probably one of my first blues shows (not many since actually) where it was all class and the rest was blues. Totally different atmosphere than anything I could have hoped for. The back story of how I got in there, involving me picking up the guitarist and drummer from the airport, still kind of blows my mind.
I suppose a major reason why I can't remember a lot of shows was because the ones I mentioned already were the big ones. The Bowl was legendary for their local shows and I couldn't count how many bands I saw there. Crappy, thrashy, junky bands. Bands that so far as anyone knows went nowhere. But that was the beauty of the place... I know my friend Garrity said he saw Widespread Panic there a while back in its history and the show got called because neighbors had filed a complaint for the noise. Something like that was said to have happened for Bob Weir's Ratdog. I thought that was the point of having music in bars and not outside. Even so, the place would get packed so tight that it was like a sweat lodge in there. During the winter, the windows would fog up on the outside, and then people would be ducking outside real quick to have a smoke, freeze near death, then come back in and pick it up again.
The thing you could never truly forget was that there WAS in fact a bowling alley. My sister and her friends used to play there on weekends, for lack of anything better to do. It was a real deal bowling alley and rock joint. You could play volleyball on a team during the summer if that was your thing. Now it's a f*&%in Wal-Mart for all that's worth. In its last days, the place looked delapidated, its spirit crushed.

Accents. I hear them all day as anybody who plays on the phone all the day will... but I'm trying to tune the ear to that very thing... Texas will be difficult but they're generally a dead

Today I'm grateful for

Democracy
Barack Obama

Don't get me wrong. Looking back, I might have taken John McCain. Joe & Kari & I stood downstairs at the 48th St and shared our own visions. Mostly Joe and Kari, they're both very heated in their expressions of passion. Joe was saying how John McCain was actually a good man, a good politician who might have seen his better days pass him. He still has that special spark within him to try to make his country a btter place. But maybe his methods and his focus has wandered a little bit. It would be hard for him to keep up with it all. We needed someone younger, with the vitality needed to man up for the job every day for 365 x 4. Palin was a nail in his political coffin. Crazy bee-zo that she is. I guess now we're finding out just how crazy she really is. Just my opinion from what I'm being given. McCain might not have made it for years not because he was 72. There's Viagara for 72, but just out of the sheer volume of mess that he would have had to sludge through. That Obama will have to sludge through, God bless him. As Willard said in Apocalyse Now, "the shit piled up so fast here you needed wings to stay above it. " And that's the best you can say right now to this man, God bless him. I think this guy is a leader, a politican of a different kind. Sure, a politician but a guy who will try to help this country reclaim its true feathers. A true leader leads from his gut. That's the kind of guy I think we gave ourselves now. He'll make mistakes, sure, but he'll also try to make good. You could see it on the night of the 4th. Standing triumpant, arm raised high with a fist. This guy's here to roll up his sleeves and try to get to work. He got the Congress to do it to. He is starting to look like a leader, like he did in '04 at the Democratic Convention- a man on fire. I thought it was possible back then when I heard him speak. I sit here now, four years later, amazed. A meteoric rise. He was gone a couple years and then he was back with a vengenance. People have hope now. Never mind that "a little hope is a dangerous thing" like Red said in Shawshank. We don't want to think about that now. We're hoping we never have to look back.
And one thing is true, as Kari was saying now there's a crack in the foundation, and no matter what happens, they won't be able to fill that crack enough. It's too late for that. The door is opened. I reflected upon my recent education about Native Americans, wondering if a tribesman would ever make it all the way to the top like that. If the country will ever completely turn around that way, see land return to their lawful owners. Anybody with any sense would say hopefully it's not in my lifetime. The hell to be paid. Still, this is the beginning, this where democracy will spring forth, if it ever completely does. The way Obama ran his campaign from start to finish was the way it needed to be done. The way it gets done in the world of the forefathers. I could hear some saying that Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, all of them would likely be wiggling in their graves a little bit. Not Lincoln I imagine. No old Abe probably cracked a little bit of a smile from beyond the pale. They've been talking about King, Kennedy, Bobby and John, Malcolm, George Washington Carver, WEB Dubois. Frederick Douglass. You can't help but feel that warm feeling come over you if you think about it, how far back the legacy goes. The bricklayers for hope. The beginning of a new day.
The economy will be one thing. Iraq, Iran another. Foreign policy. I say to hell with foreign policy right now. Screw it. Economy is job number one. You get this baby flying again and those cats will be filing for green cards, they'll want to come over here, not wait for us to go over there. That'll be a whole new problem. This talk of working toward more efficient forms of energy, creating new jobs with a new enterprise all together is particularly interesting. The idea of getting scientists and physicists, engineers, architects together and make the approach toward developing new sources of energy as industry. It seems obvious now that the machine has been busy just grinding the gears, trying to make everyone happy by just whitewashing everything. What a bunch of clowns. What a bunch of infiltrators, intruders and magicians. Giving us the old bait and switch now for eight years. They watch us get bombed four times in one day, and then spent the next seven years tap-dancing so we would forget. What a bunch of jackasses.

Today I am grateful for:

sleep and naps or both
sense of humor
redemption
warm blankets
dogs
hugs, holding hands w/ someone you care about
food - spiritual food and leftovers
my cubicle which I've finally decorated
my family
college football on Saturday (no major allegiance)
the end of the World Series (looking toward next year)
the last remaining warm days of autumn
haircuts (badly needed ones)
fruit (healthy produce)
songs that are beautiful but don't get stuck in my head
the talking heads
the grateful dead (I'm grateful for the... get it?)

Grateful that slowly I can bounce back a little bit better from harder realities. But it's like this guy told us last night, trying to kick the drink again, "I just don't bounce back like I used to." And no doubt he doesn't. What the good doctor Evans once referred to as "resilience," why some of us are weak and others tend to have more visible fortitude. Even so, it seems important to just keep on with whatever one has in front of them.

I don't know why you thought I needed to hide

the night I let my father slip into the night

it was cold and rainy and I just wanted to cry

and there you stood, waiting by the bedside

waiting for the big demise, you knew it was coming

just a matter of how it all came out

Today I am grateful for:

-the clear, crisp coolness of the morning, reminiscent of autumn
-leaves on the linoleum, they make me want to clean, but I walked
into a building yesterday and it looked like they were part of the decor
-poems, with my feet kicked up on the ottoman
-curling up on the couch with a comfy blanket
-chinese food, with Brooke, waiting for the crab rangoon at the end
-the importance of pictures on the wall, throughout the day
-cranberry juice in the morning
-knowing I miss being in the right bed when the alarm goes off
-driving on tires that I feel safe with, when other people's tires spin on the wet pavement
-the alkaline smell of the wet pavement
-the measure of standing still, of staying the course (even if a Bush first said it)

Today I'm grateful for:

-laying on the bed and reading poetry
-freedom to not run anymore, standing still, sitting still
-having the chance to see Mississippi in the morning
-Halloween candy
-fog machines
-prayer chains
-silences for a long time, quiet

The older I get, the more I listen to people who don't have much to say.


Today I am grateful for-

-my father, plain & simple, that I have a relationship where I can open up to him

-that I can admit my faults to people who love me, and they still love me

-that this experience teaches me greater that unconditional love is possible

-that people close to me still try to teache me lessons

-for ham sandwiches waiting for me in the fridge

-redemption and the promise of resilience

-humor, that anything can seem funny after a vail of tears

-the right to vote

- the right to shrug off my heavy coats.



The heavy coat. Bearing down on yourself, don't know why I ever think that's going to be beneficial, maybe on a watch for the rudiments of pride. Can you really ever smash pride?

There's this other sense that you want to be somebody, stand up, be counted, have people

recognize your true worth. That, out in the real world, when your glad-handing your way through the day, it will amount to a steady progess. Trusting the process. That it is a process even if it just feels like a continuum.



After the weekend, with my father here for such a short period of time, I reflected on the several pictures that he showed me and Brooke before we ate dinner. I asked him at one point, seems like you have had occasion to see some pretty heavy things from other countries, other histories. Not in so many words, mind you, but that was the gist. He could tell about the different places of St. Petersburg, Moscow, Warsaw, and their direct ties to past history, and let's say, recent times. He showed me St. Isaac's Cathedral in St. Petersburg, which had been ripped down one side by shrapnel by German bombs in World War II. Entire buildings which echo the haunting shadows of the past. The train lines which go south in one direction, or west, or else north, strecthing all the way to Siberia where prioners were taken for the gulags... We do and do not possess these kinds of tokens of a dark past. Only we do not recognize them as such always, we are not always to carry them with us. Not the daily reminders that the country we are continuing to become and the country we are really still very close to one another. Not like there. Not the reminder of sixty to a hundred years of history stacked on top of us... though I'm not so naive of that as to think of what happened South of here, or through the northeast, the midwest for the people who were here long before us. Enough of that soapbox.



Keeping it simple. My father mentioned that at my grandmother's funeral. How she managed to do that on many occasions, throughout the life that she knew of her. So it comes back to trying not to complicate things... give oneself the chance to settle down a little bit, settle down and keep it simple. But keeping it simple has a great deal to staying true to yourself again. Knowing where your place is in the world. I read an article about how to build resilience- which I've heard defined as "the ability to bounce back." That life gives you the punches sometimes and it's all how you beat it. Not look at it in terms of how it beats you down, how much its wearing on you. There's the Time that weighs you down, but then there's also keeping up with time, staying in the present moment. Knowing that this moment is right now/ not forever. It can be changed in the second moment if that is what is required.



I know I take things too seriously sometimes, maybe more than most people. But I don't know how it is for most other people. I just don't know what it's like for a tremendous amount of people. Onlya precious few. But those words keep coming back to my lips it seems, "life is short... life is short" and conversely, time flies. And forever may be a long time to contemplate, so it should and can be taken only one day at a time. At least for folks like me...

Gratitude... be grateful for afternoon naps, morning coffee, Brooke singing while she gets ready for work in the morning... memory, "I know something about you that you don't know," it had always been a mystery, but it was something I could guess, something I could look at it. I need to be reminded that I deserve to give myself a chance, a chance to really work something through to its completion, to get lost in the process for awhile, to stand with the winds of time and be swept

Just spent a few minutes viewing a google search on Hubble space telescope images for various parts of the galaxy. If you can say that the galaxy is the largest term that you can use. It seems, instaed, that what must be larger would be the universe... since you have to think of it in terms of Frank Zappa's notion that it is all one note... all one big loud sound in the echoing, burgeoing universe. And maybe that's just what I came away with today as I viewed the Christ-C nebula or even the Pleiades, hard, white, crisp stars -some brighter than others. But I often ask myself, as must the astronomers, viewing these entities from light years, literally hundreds upon thousands of light years away, where and how far and what must exist in that space? Why did we wind up here amid these galaxies of seeming lifelessness. It's not so much an extraterrestrial thing... but the billions of years which must have had to occur before the inevitability of human life began to stir in the marshes and the reeds of this planet. And then there's us, adapting making ourselves more in tune with being able to function in this world, with all its hazards, all its challenges, sometimes we make terrible errors which seem costly beyond our understanding. Other times, we simply hurt other people, seemingly without reason, but mostly because we are in conflict with someone and cannot bear a something, basically things aren't running our way. So we go through this whole song and dance with another human being, all the while forgetting that there are stars which may or may not have already burned out, whose light still reaches, whose light protrudes through the fabric of the universe. That we are not stars in the least, our light is quite comparatively short to the rest of the existant plain. But it is still a light, and greater light we seldom see, though we forget that that very thing is a light of sorts. So there are those stars and perhaps they are reminders of the formula, the greater design that seems to permeate all things. The Crab Nebula, the Horsehead Nebula, all reflectant of other entities we find in our world. But it makes us feel small, insignificant on the one hand while on the other, it seems there is no limit to the power of a creator of such wild and terrific things. That that power must weild and have such great force for its creation, that it must have limitless intentions for a race like ours.