Paradise and Independence Pass

Today after making vegetable bean soup from the produce that I received from the White Buffalo farm organic CSA, I went into Aspen and went to the farmers' market where I bought potatoes and leeks for more soup later in the week. I also bought the most luscious looking pears. They are a yellow pear, with a rose tinge, and perfectly shaped. They smell like heaven and taste as sweet. I miss the neighbor's pear tree in Ann Arbor where everyday last year in August and September I would glean pears while out on my daily walks.

After going to the farmers' market, I went to the Aspen Thrift store which re-opened in a new space. The Aspen Thrift Store is part of the community and raises money for various charities. I bought two wool sweaters, a pair of new Phillips speakers, a cd rack, and a very large basket. The basket is the kind that someone might get kidnapped in in an action movie.

Then I drove up to Independence Pass. On the way I listened to Paradise by Sonia Dada. The lyrics are about how we create our own prisons out of our paradises. The dragon sits in the rose garden burning the weeds and guarding the gates of paradise so no one can enter. But what of the roses? And paradise? "There's a princess in a castle built of stone when darkness descends she can hear her Romeo cry, but the castle walls are too high guarding the gates of paradise." The priests hold an inquisition to guard the gates of paradise and "the martyr bent and broken cried in agony for the crimes of my beliefs you have chained and tortured me-- who are you to be guarding the gates of paradise?" So, is paradise just the reflection of prison? Should the paradox be collapsed into the center and reconciled? Perhaps paradise or prison are where ever one is. The difference being attitude and taking responsibility for one's own happiness.

Independence Pass is at 12,095 feet. It is the top of the Rockies. It is awe-inspiring in its snow covered desolation. It is above the treeline and you can see for miles and miles. You can see the Continental Divide. It takes your breath away with its beauty and makes you feel small. It puts things in a grand perspective. I spent the afternoon wandering the Rockies. I could have just kept going.

Banned Book Week is Sept. 26 through Oct. 3

This information came through in an email at work. Just passing it on.

Top ten most frequently challenged books of 2008
(Out of 513 challenges as reported to the American Library Association’s
Office for Intellectual Freedom)

And Tango Makes Three, by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell
Reasons: anti-ethnic, anti-family, homosexuality, religious viewpoint, and unsuited to age group

His Dark Materials trilogy, by Philip Pullman
Reasons: political viewpoint, religious viewpoint, and violence

TTYL; TTFN; L8R, G8R (series), by Lauren Myracle
Reasons: offensive language, sexually explicit, and unsuited to age group

Scary Stories (series), by Alvin Schwartz
Reasons: occult/satanism, religious viewpoint, and violence

Bless Me, Ultima, by Rudolfo Anaya
Reasons: occult/satanism, offensive language, religious viewpoint, sexually explicit, and violence

The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky
Reasons: drugs, homosexuality, nudity, offensive language, sexually explicit, suicide, and unsuited to age group

Gossip Girl (series), by Cecily von Ziegesar
Reasons: offensive language, sexually explicit, and unsuited to age group

Uncle Bobby's Wedding, by Sarah S. Brannen
Reasons: homosexuality and unsuited to age group

The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini
Reasons: offensive language, sexually explicit, and unsuited to age group

Flashcards of My Life, by Charise Mericle Harper
Reasons: sexually explicit and unsuited to age group

Background Information from 2001 to 2008
Over the past eight years, American libraries were faced with 3,736 challenges.

1,225 challenges due to “sexually explicit” material;
1,008 challenges due to “offensive language”;
720 challenges due to material deemed “unsuited to age group”;
458 challenges due to “violence”
269 challenges due to “homosexuality”
Further, 103 materials were challenged because they were “anti-family,” and an additional 233 were challenged because of their “religious viewpoints.”

1,176 of these challenges (approximately 31%) were in classrooms; 37% were in school libraries; 24% (or 909) took place in public libraries. There were fewer than 75 challenges to college classes; and only 36 to academic libraries. There are isolated cases of challenges to materials made available in or by prisons, special libraries, community groups, and student groups. The majority of challenges were initiated by parents (almost exactly 51%), while patrons and administrators followed behind (11% and 6% respectively).

Banned Book week is Sept. 26 through Oct. 3

Added Links to Writing Resources

I added a few more links to the writing resources because if I put them on my blog then I know where they are and I can share them with other people.

Cat Hellisen, whose blog is called Inarticulations and can be found at http://www.cathellisen.com/, is a South African fantasy writer who passed on the url for the link to edittorrent which is http://edittorrent.blogspot.com/. This is a blog by two editors and it has some marvelous information on it. One of the links in the sidebar is called internet resources (a killer collection of links for writers). I put that link on my blog as well. I also added duotrope's digest which is a tool for helping to figure out where to send your work once it is finished being written.

I'll post more as I find them. Happy writing!

Poetry: Riprap by Gary Snyder

The coyotes woke me up tonight and right now I cannot get back to sleep. It is cold in the house and I made tea. Sometimes I get frightened for no rational reason and cannot get back to sleep so I am distracting myself reading poetry. One of my favorite poets of all time is Gary Snyder. He is considered a Beat poet and he writes poems that include Buddhist elements and environmental thought. I have been enraptured by his poetry since first encountering it as a child. I have a dog eared copy of Turtle Island that has traveled with me everywhere. I have heard him read his poetry a few times and he has the same soothing presence that lulls me to sleep as the high Buddhist lamas. Here is a poem that I discovered this evening. BTW, riprap is rock or other material used to armor shorelines, streambeds, bridge abutments, pilings and other shoreline structures against scour, water or ice erosion. It is made from a variety of rock types, commonly granite, limestone or occasionally concrete rubble from building and paving demolition. It is used to protect coastlines and structures from erosion by the sea, rivers, or streams. It is used on any waterways or water containment where there is potential for water erosion.

'Riprap' by Gary Snyder

Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf or wall
riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way,
straying planets,
These poems, people,
lost ponies with
Dragging saddles --
and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like an endless
four-dimensional
Game of Go.
ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
all change, in thoughts,
As well as things.

Magic in Fantasy Stories: 3 Conditions

A couple weeks ago I watched the movie Wizards and I have been thinking about magic in fantasy stories. Wizards is a marvelous movie-- not for the animation which is a little uneven, but rather for the fact that Bakshi took tired fantasy tropes and wrenched them into a new form. I have also been wrestling a fantasy story into shape to send out for submission and this has had me thinking about magic and its place in the fantasy genre. Over the weekend I had the opportunity to discuss magic and the place of magic in fantasy stories with a few people. I propose that stories utilizing magic must have the following three conditions:

1. it has to have a purpose-- either as a plot device that the character is going to problem solve around and it will show character or as a metaphor for something like conflict or power;

2. it has to have clearly defined parameters and uses. Magic by its nature is the ability to bend things to the will of the magic user and it can destroy stories because of its omnipotence;

3. there has to be more to the story than the magic. Stories have to be about people-- either moving from the internal as in the individual or from the external as a commentary on society but the stories are still about people. Magic can be so golly gee whiz that the story can become far too two dimensional.

I have more thoughts on this. And thoughts on Bond. And pictures from the weekend from making applesauce, peach-raspberry sauce that was supposed to be jam but instead became sauce because it didn't set up because I have never made jam at high altitude, and fresh minestrone soup. And poetry. And thoughts on technomages. And thoughts on grasshopper demons.

More later. I smell coffee.

Bohemian Life Skills--Making Applesauce

Autumn is the time of the harvest and apples. Apples are yummy and easy to make into applesauce. Today I turned about fifteen pounds of apples into a big pot of applesauce. I froze five quart containers for the winter and the rest is a delicious treat that I promised to share with Julie who was so magnificent in helping to organize the White Buffalo Farm CSA delivery at Aspen Schools. She went out of her way to connect me with the apples that I used today.

Applesauce Recipe

10-15 lbs of apples, seconds are fine
I box of golden raisins (if you don't like shriveled zombie fruit you can leave these out)
3-4 cups of water
2 cups of white sugar
cinnamon




Step One
Peel the apples and cut them into small pieces and put them into a big stainless steel pot. I bought a nifty apple peeler and sat and listened to music while I peeled apples. It worked like a breeze and was just so cool it made the task fly by.






Step Two
Pour the 3-4 cups of water into the pot. Stir in the box of raisins, sugar, and cinnamon. Put the whole pot over medium heat and allow it to cook down. Stir it with a wooden spoon regularly so that the bottom doesn't burn.


Then voila! Applesauce!

Bond, James Bond

This weekend Bond came up in conversation and I have been thinking about the iconoclastic Mr. Bond. He is a character that borders on archetypal, if not already having achieved that status, and he has evolved with Western culture over the past three or more decades.

Bond in truth has always been nothing more than a foot soldier.

He has always been a killer. One friend characterized him as an aristocratic thug.

I am not sure that I agree entirely with this, but Daniel Craig's Bond does seem to move closer to that description in my estimation.

To me what sets James Bond apart is not the sex appeal of an extraordinarily handsome and fit man. Or the gadgetry. Or the fact that he is dangerous. He is a thinking specialist with a set of skills for extreme situations that no one else could be expected to manage. He calmly uses his problem solving abilities to think on his feet and use all of the resources whether internal or external to accomplish his missions. In my assessment this is what makes the character extraordinary. Intelligence is what sets Bond apart.

This is why I do not believe that the character is just a thug. A thug acts without thought or intent. There is this marvelous scene in one of the Brosnan films where Bond/Brosnan is all suave and he is putting on these gloves to kill another character. He is utterly charming and chillingly dangerous because you suddenly realize the intent. This is a job and he is doing his job as he has decided is appropriate. The difference between the incarnation of Bond as brought to the films by Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig, is that Craig's Bond at the end of Quantum of Solace comes away after interrogating Vesper's supposed former boyfriend about Vesper and M actually asks him if he left something for them to interrogate. There is this whole ambience that he has acted without reason and only with explosive and uncalculated emotion. The intelligence, intent, and problem solving is gone. He is mere animal.

And I wonder what that says about our current time period and the expectations of the character, action films, etc.

Sean Connery's Bond was suave and misogynistic in an age when the behavior was acceptable and applauded. He was a man's man and considered sexy.

Roger Moore's Bond was a bit campy, but that was something attractive in the seventies. Also the look, feel, and gee-whiz of the Bond gadgetry grew into a larger part of the films.

Timothy Dalton's Bond never really had the charisma or zing of Bond in my assessment, but I have been told by others that they felt he was closer to the James Bond of the books. I am not sure that I agree with that either.

And then there was Pierce Brosnan's Bond. OMG. Still makes me weak in the knees and what they did with the character was brilliant. Brosnan brought a life to the character that the books and stories didn't really have in the same way. I think that the franchise did some marvelous commentary with Pierce Brosnan and turning M into a woman. The first Brosnan Bond film had bite. It showed him to be an anachronistic figure and that he was potentially misogynistic and suddenly he had a female boss. Ooo baby! It stirred things up. The largely inconsequential Siberian computer programmer is the source of the misogynistic humor and he gets absolutely no where with the girl. Brosnan brought life, humor, and a thinking sex appeal to the character.

And then with Craig's Bond in Casino Royale the franchise became confused. It started with a wonderful and exciting and LONG action sequence that took almost twenty minutes without adding very much to the plot. The movie then became a quite nice exploration of Bond's character and the reasons behind him being a misogynist.

And then they shied off.

It was like they just couldn't bear to take the character out in the open to that place and admit it. So it became a lame action movie in the last. Quantum of Solace left Bond as a brute.

I sincerely hope that the character will continue to evolve.

Being Ill

I don't get sick very often. When I first moved into the mountains I experienced headaches, nausea, and probably a bit of dehydration because at higher altitudes the air holds less moisture. Altitude sickness is not something to dismiss lightly and it does take about a month and a half to adjust to higher altitudes.

But I have been doing better and had started running, walking, biking, and swimming again. Last week I ran and biked several days.

This morning I woke up early and I was cold and I felt shakey. As I laid in bed, a friend called me. He was very sweet and we talked a marvelous long time which was good in many ways. It was good in that the conversations with him always give me things to think about later-- things like IT people either being gremlin exterminators or that IT people have been assimilated by the gremlins who had their habitat massively expanded with the invention of the internet and have evolved to now be able to possess IT folk who work in close contact with them. The conversation with him also kept me in bed which was a good thing. After our conversation ended, I made some soup and the effort was so exhausting that when I went to read another friend's story I feel asleep.

I don't like being sick. I don't like the bodily sensations-- chills and sweats. I haven't been able to get warm all day and I have been wrapped in a thick comforter and two blankets. My shoulders are very cold and I keep shivering. My head hurts and I just want to sleep.

Last week at work several people got sick. I work in a preschool and the children have been getting sick and coming in with ooey gooey noses. It is a germ breeding ground! It is almost impossible not to get sick. One of my co-workers went home Thursday with a fever, chills, and a sore throat. Another co-worker had a sore throat and was so pale she looked as if she had sprung to life from a children's coloring book. Some of the home remedies that I heard last week were to take a hot bath or to make a hot rum toddy with lemon. And then take a hot bath.

I don't think I want to exert the effort for the bath. I did drink two immune booster tablets dissolved in a big water bottle and I took some tylenol. Right now I feel a little better, but I still feel cold and limp.

I think this might be why I was feeling quiet and introspective the other night. I get quiet before I become ill. I think I will put on another sweater and climb back into my cocoon of blankets and read.

Hopefully, tomorrow I will feel better and it will be a new day.

The Falling of the Leaves & He Remembers Forgotten Beauty

photo by Norvell King
Tonight it feels like autumn in the mountains. Grey clouds obscure the stars and coyotes are howling. There is a breeze blowing the shuddering aspens that reflect stray silver light off shimmering leaves. A wind chime tinkles in the distance.

I am quiet and introspective tonight. I wrote a couple poems and I am tired. A delicious exhaustion earned by pushing my muscles earlier in the evening. I ran this evening and bicycled. I pushed my heart and had it tick a staccato of exertion that will ensure I sleep well.

I opened a bottle of blackberry mead two days ago and it sits in the refrigerator. I think that it is a good accompaniment for Yeats.

And I cannot live without poetry.

Two poems by W.B. Yeats:

THE FALLING OF THE LEAVES

AUTUMN is over the long leaves that love us,
And over the mice in the barley sheaves;
Yellow the leaves of the rowan above us,
And yellow the wet wild-strawberry leaves.

The hour of the waning of love has beset us,
And weary and worn are our sad souls now;
Let us part, ere the season of passion forget us,
With a kiss and a tear on thy drooping brow.

HE REMEMBERS FORGOTTEN BEAUTY

WHEN my arms wrap you round I press
My heart upon the loveliness
That has long faded from the world;
The jewelled crowns that kings have hurled
In shadowy pools, when armies fled;
The love-tales wrought with silken thread
By dreaming ladies upon cloth
That has made fat the murderous moth;
The roses that of old time were
Woven by ladies in their hair,
The dew-cold lilies ladies bore
Through many a sacred corridor
Where such grey clouds of incense rose
That only God's eyes did not close:
For that pale breast and lingering hand
Come from a more dream-heavy land,
A more dream-heavy hour than this;
And when you sigh from kiss to kiss
I hear white Beauty sighing, too,
For hours when all must fade like dew,
But flame on flame, and deep on deep,
Throne over throne where in half sleep,
Their swords upon their iron knees,
Brood her high lonely mysteries.

13 Mysteries

I was reading New Scientist this morning and there is an article called 13 More Things That Don't Make Sense.

Any of these things would make a marvelous start for a science fiction story.

They are as follows:

1. "Axis of Evil"-- I am not so certain of the title of this one. It is about the pattern of radiation that was left after the Big Bang.
2. Dark Flow-- This one I want to investigate further. Something very large that we cannot see is pulling other massive objects towards it at speeds that can only be comprehended in galactic terms. It is like a giant Hover vacuum sucking in galaxies.
3. Eocene Hothouse-- During the Eocene the temperature on the Earth was MUCH warmer. It is estimated that at the poles the average temperature was between 15 to 20 degrees Celsius.
4. Fly By Anomalies-- Space probes that are used the slingshot effect to get past the Earth seem to get a little extra boost from somewhere and are moving much faster than they should be.
5. Hybrid Life-- This one I need to investigate a bit because I am not entirely certain exactly what New Scientist means by this one, but they are saying that it is not possible to have two distinct evolutionary lines fuse and yet the oceans have examples of this.
6. Morgellons disease which is a disease that isn't supposed to exist. Again, I don't know much about this one but I am going to go looking for info later.
7. The Bloop--In 1997 US ocean monitoring equipment heard some sounds that were very mysterious and very loud and no one has heard them since or knows what they were.
8. Antimatter Mystery-- So when the Big Bang went off why wasn't the Universe instantly annihilated by the equal amounts of matter and antimatter colliding and making whoppee?
9. The Lithium Problem-- Where is all the lithium? There's supposed to be more.
10. Einstein Wrong?--Radiation from a gamma burst reached the Earth 4 minutes later than the lower energy rays and that is incompatible with Einstein's calculations.
11. No Monopoles-- Magnetic poles always have a north and a south pole. Why?
12. The Universe is a Holographic Projection?-- There is some mysterious noise at the edge of the universe. Dud signals from a gravitational wave detector?
13. Nocebo Effect-- Thoughts can kill. A diagnosis of a terminal illness can become reality and kill even if the original diagnosis was wrong.

Fun stuff from New Scientist to play with!

Bacon, Lettuce, and Tomato Sandwich-- Ooo Baby!

I have been looking at a book of superstitions this evening and they really are quite remarkable. Here are are a few examples just form the "B" section.

Did you know that bacon is sometimes associated with healing? I don't think it did any good for the pig, but it is supposed to cure warts. Further, bacon's powers are enhanced by being stolen. And it cures everything from fever to constipation. My personal favorite for bacon is that if it curls while being cooked, in Devon, this is supposed to signify the arrival of a new lover.

I am a vegetarian. Does this mean I have to eat meat to get a new lover?

There are many superstitions around baking bread. For instance leaving any bread dough uncooked is supposed to ruin the loaves and counting the loaves as they come from the oven will spoil the batch and they will go stale sooner. A loaf that emerges from the heat with a cracked crust is a sign that a stranger will arrive to share the loaf.

Maybe break out that rasher of bacon, cook up some bacon sandwiches, and see what happens? Do you think vegetarian imitation bacon might work? Of course hope that no one dreams of yeast, because dreaming of yeast is supposed to signify pregnancy. Of course, I know everyone dreams of yeast. I am sure it is right in line with flying and being chased and arriving too late at a test with no clothing on and the object of one's desire is waiting to wish good luck on the test.

Anyway.

Still in the "B" section. Under "bedwetting" the book (Cassell Dictionary of Superstitions by David Pickering) says, "Superstition is quite clear about the best way to eradicate the problem of persistent bedwetting by a child. The remedy is to roast, fry, or boil a mouse and to feed it to the child concerned baked in a pie." Yup. You read right. A mouse. In a pie. I bet that would cure the horrified child of bedwetting. This is like a recipe straight out of the psycho parents manual for ruining children for life because if the mouse pie doesn't work then the next step is to collect a bunch of rat poo and put it in a bag around the child's neck and if that doesn't work the parents are supposed to take the child to a graveyard at night and have them urinate on the grave of an opposite sex child.

I like that the Scots discouraged children from playing with fire.

Those crazy Scots. Being all protective and caring.

And you probably think that it is to keep the wee ones from getting burnt. Nope. Playing with fire intensifies the problem with bedwetting-- so one shouldn't allow their child to play with fire because they might wet the bed.

Going deeper into the book, did you know that tomatoes are a scandalous fruit? The English Puritans actually prohibited the tomato in their communities because it was considered an aphrodisiac. The list of aphrodisiacs is VERY long. There are exotic things like mandrake root, human hearts, bulls' testes, and semen that are used in love potions. I am not sure that once the bulls' testes are removed that they really continue to do much good in the sexual department much as bacon wasn't a healthy development for the pig. Other things that have been given powers as purportedly being aphrodisiacs are things like apples, artichokes, cabbage, leeks, lettuce, asparagus, parsnips, truffles, and turnips. Sounds like an odd salad to me.

There are also superstitions around anaphrodisiacs-- passion killing preparations to get rid of old affairs and thoughts of acquaintances. You know for when one wants to be rid of the of the guy whose testes should be cut off for whatever reason rather than the poor hapless bull. For whatever reason. You can fill in the blank-- I am actually kind of groovin' on the guys I am in communication with these days.

Mice and mouse poo make another appearance in the listings of anaphrodisiacs. So the same deterrent is used for bedwetting as getting rid of bad lovers-- except the person wanting to get rid of the bad lover is not the one to wear the bag of mouse poo. I guess both are bad habits and bad lovers probably do sometimes deserve the bag of rat poo although it seems a bit harsh even for that and besides how would one get them to wear it. I guess if your lover hands you a bag of mouse poo then you know things are over. Probably better than poisoning by way of poppy seeds though, which is another anaphrodisiac.

Skimming through the book, there are superstitions around everything. Ants, ashes, astronauts, bells, boots, cards, cups, ears, haddock, hydrangea, lemons, mince pie, pictures, rolling pins, shirts, shoelaces, umbrellas, violets, walnuts, yarrow,....

I think that human beings like magical thinking and imbuing things with meaning. Imitation bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich? And you know what that means, right?

Gremlins

I am rather tired again this morning and had dreams last night that scooted by out of the range of remembrance. I have many tasks to accomplish before I go to bed this evening so I have to get on with the day. But for a bit of fun while drinking my coffee I have been looking at some of the books that I checked out from the Pitkin County Library and thinking about fantastical creatures and their evolution. I believe they evolve through temporal and cultural shifts and transform into something with magic and meaning for the people of those times and cultures. Think of the gargoyles on Notre Dame. Do they mean the same thing for us? Or the Sheela na gig on Irish churches?



I have a rather text heavy book called The Magic Zoo by Peter Costello and I just read a section about the sirens and how originally they weren't mermaids. They were birds with human heads that sang. Also, they were male and the allure was their musicality. And they did not sing for women. So, the folklore around sirens has evolved. I think that it is interesting to look at how folklore evolves and the reiterations. How did the sirens go from being musical monsters with bearded male heads that played so compellingly that they pulled sailing ships to their doom to transform into beautiful women with fish tails that sang promises of bliss to the sailors?

Another book that I have been looking at is a beautiful coffee table style book called Mermaids: Nymphs of the Sea by Theodore Gachot. In the book, he writes that archaeologists working in the Middle East unearthed a group of irregularly shaped 3,000 year old bronze pieces that turned out to be "highly stylized and heavily patinaed statues representing women with fish tails." The mermaid has gone from being a sign of fertility and possible danger to Disney's representation of Ariel who longs for nothing more than to abandon her form to marry Prince Eric. The mermaid has transformed from something potent to something that wants to walk on dry land and give up being a monster for love.


I was also reading about gremlins this morning. Gremlins are a wonderful example that folklore is not something from the archaic past. In the Dictionary of Superstitions by David Pickering, he writes that gremlins were "an invention of a British Royal Air Force bomber squadron stationed on the north-west frontier of India shortly before the Second World War. The squadron had been much plagued by minor technical problems and the officers accordingly invented the gremlin as the source of these woes". The name comes from a combination of the Brothers Grimm and Fremlin's brewery whose beer was the brand that the squadron had access to. Pickering also writes that the only way to stop the activities of gremlins is to set out an empty beer bottle to lure them in. Then they will crawl into the bottle and stay there. The tales of gremlins spread throughout WWII and they were blamed for all sorts of mechanical mishaps and breakdowns.


Which makes me wonder what the American Motors Corporation was thinking.


But folklore is an ever evolving thing and our archetypes shift and change. What new mythical creatures can we invent? What aspects of our modern life would give rise to superstitions or imbue energy into a new form of mythic creature? What beasties reside in our computers, cars, and conveniences of daily existence? What might be born of the mating of imagination and circumstance?

Accountability- No Fairy Godmothers

Earlier in the week I wrote about the book How We Choose To Be Happy: The 9 Choices of Extremely Happy People by Rick Foster and Greg Hicks. Their website is at: http://www.choosetobehappy.com/.They interviewed people in various communities who other people identified within the communities as being the happiest people they knew and came to the conclusion that there are nine choices that happy people make. The nine choices are as follows: intention, accountability, identification, centrality, recasting, options, appreciation, giving, and truthfulness.

In the book, intention is described as "the active desire and commitment to be happy and the decision to consciously choose attitudes and behaviors that lead to happiness over unhappiness". I wrote about this a couple days ago and how we might not have control over our situation but we have control over our attitude and we can always find small things that make us happy.

The next of the choices that happy people make is the choice of accountability. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstance. Strong men believe in cause and effect." Accountability is described in the book as "the choice to create the life you want to live, to assume personal responsibility for your actions, thoughts and feelings, and the emphatic refusal to blame others or view yourself as a victim."

By accountability it is not meant that happy people are accountable to anyone else and are trying to live up to the standards of another person. It is the refusal to be a victim. It is the joy and freedom of taking on the awesome task of creating a life that is worth living that is personally created for the individual for themselves. It is constantly problem solving and tackling life's problems and making one's life better.

Happiness can be a very tough thing to achieve-- particularly when things are not going well. To stay happy through difficult stretches of life means taking the problems on head on and not making excuses or wallowing in suffering. It means continuing to be accountable for one's own happiness and acting in an appropriate manner. This is much harder than letting the misery wash over and hoping for a fairy godmother to wish it away.

What is Love? Passion?

I am working on a short story. A rewrite of a story that I wrote a year ago. It is about a young woman who loves an older woman and is willing to work through the night so that her friend won't have to. She wants to escape her situation and a demon is conjured and her love for her friend is what allows her to avoid the potentially lethal consequences of the interaction with the demon. So this has had me thinking on the nature of love for the last couple days.

In pursuing further thoughts on love, I listened to a TED talk by Helen Fisher that was about love. She proposed three types of love-- lust, romantic love, and attachment. But this was between two intimate sexual partners. She did not address love that arises out of friendship. What would this love be characterized as? Initially camaraderie or a type of more involved empathy? Friendly support? Later, caring and attachment?

The most intense love imaginable can be that of a mother for a child. This is not lust, but the attachment is there and very powerful.

A friend also sent along a link for a TED talk by Isabelle Allende. It can be found at: http://www.ted.com/talks/isabel_allende_tells_tales_of_passion.html. I listened to the Isabel Allende TED talk and was deeply moved by it. Please go and watch it.

She does not talk about love as love per se, but there is love. Passion. The passion she talks about is one of living with a fearless heart and engaging one's deepest beliefs and making a difference where one can. This was a FABULOUS TED talk. Very inspirational.

She does not talk about love as in love between two people, but rather love as in expressing one's values through courageous action and in doing so showing the love in one's heart. She talks about love and passion as making the world better through expressing and acting on one's own passion.

I am still thinking on love and the way love adds to the world. Perhaps, love is something that expects nothing in return, implies no obligation, and is freely given. Fleeting because it is mercurial and slippery as water.

Passion moves the world and makes change.

Ethics of Ogling-- Picture Quiz

I am having an ongoing discussion about ogling with a friend. Whether it is okay or not and whether there should be an ethics of ogling. I gave another friend a brief summary of some of my thoughts and he sent this photograph. His explanation of what is happening is different than mine.

I don't know if anyone may care to comment on this picture, but I would be curious to see what narrative other folks would give to this picture. I am curious to know if there are differences in the way different genders would interpret this picture and whether or not there are cultural differences.

The Meadow Mouse by Theodore Roethke

While eating miso soup after getting home late tonight I looked up some of my favorite poets. I read Tinturn Abbey by Wordsworth and then thought of Theodore Roethke. Here is The Meadow Mouse:

The Meadow Mouse

1

In a shoe box stuffed in an old nylon stocking
Sleeps the baby mouse I found in the meadow,
Where he trembled and shook beneath a stick
Till I caught him up by the tail and brought him in,
Cradled in my hand,
A little quaker, the whole body of him trembling,
His absurd whiskers sticking out like a cartoon-mouse,
His feet like small leaves,
Little lizard-feet,
Whitish and spread wide when he tried to struggle away,
Wriggling like a minuscule puppy.

Now he's eaten his three kinds of cheese and drunk from his
bottle-cap watering-trough--
So much he just lies in one corner,
His tail curled under him, his belly big
As his head; his bat-like ears
Twitching, tilting toward the least sound.

Do I imagine he no longer trembles
When I come close to him?
He seems no longer to tremble.

2

But this morning the shoe-box house on the back porch is empty.
Where has he gone, my meadow mouse,
My thumb of a child that nuzzled in my palm? --
To run under the hawk's wing,
Under the eye of the great owl watching from the elm-tree,
To live by courtesy of the shrike, the snake, the tom-cat.

I think of the nestling fallen into the deep grass,
The turtle gasping in the dusty rubble of the highway,
The paralytic stunned in the tub, and the water rising,--
All things innocent, hapless, forsaken.

by Theodore Roethke

Intention- If you wish to sing, you will find a song.

Everyone wants to be happy. Intention is the active pursuit of happiness. It involves volition whether it is in considering the right mind set to be happy within or finding things that make one happy. It doesn't involve spending lots of money or having lots of material goods. It doesn't necessarily mean being with the object of one's desire or a best friend. It doesn't mean being at the perfect place on the earth.

It does mean finding those things that make one's heart glad.

There is a story in the book, How We Choose To Be Happy: The 9 Choices of Extremely Happy People By Rick Foster and Greg Hicks, about two people who were raised in Hollywood with a famous and depressed mother. They wanted to be happy because they saw other kids being happy. They decided to do the opposite of what their mother did and made a pact to find things everyday that gave them joy-- it could be a simple thing like a joke or a new game. This pact and the daily practice of working to find happiness transformed the children's lives and their story was included in the book because both children as grown adults were identified as the happiest people that other people knew!

Over the weekend, a friend and I were driving by a shopping mall and we saw a beautiful fountain. I love the way water sparkles and bubbles in rivers and fountains. I love the shimmer of sunlight on water. It makes me happy. I have a history with fountains-- specifically swimming in fountains. It started in college and is a great deal of fun. People look at you and smile and the joy of the act seems to spread which increases the fun. I have never had a security guard or authority figure approach me and tell me to get out of the fountain and I have introduced fountain splashing to others.

Colors also make me happy and I can lose hours doing collage with the paint sample cards from the hardware store. I am fascinated by the way colors change when they are placed next to one another. I love to sew pieces of fabric together and create quilts of dazzling color, pull out my paints and create pages of layers of color, and dye fabrics by layering wax and dyes.

I love to pursue new topics of interest. I read several blogs and magazines for ideas. Ideas generate ideas and the stimulation gives me joy. I like to combine thoughts and come up with new ideas. I read about a $100 clay oven that one can make to bake bread yesterday and saw a plan for making an enclosed bed. I have been reading about nuclear propulsion for space travel and studying folklore around pacts or negotiations between demons or faeries and people. I have been reading about herbs and riddles.

Poetry makes my heart sing. Words. The combination of words and how they can become more than the singular combination that they represent. I love how a turn of phrase and can spring to life and evoke images and feeling and meaning. I have been reading poetry since spring. I may have to put some poems up this week to share because they are so fantastic!

How we choose to be happy

I do believe that happiness is a choice. Everyday we get up and make decisions-- some conscious and some less so. We can choose to let the world blow us around like a piece of scrap paper in the wind or we can decide how we will react to our situation and react with consciousness and determined choice.

We don't always have control over our circumstance but we do have a choice about our attitude and how we act in response.

I wish I could practice this with absolute perfection and say that I have this down. I don't. But I do work on practicing it. Somedays I do better than others. I read a book once entitled, How We Choose To Be Happy: The 9 Choices of Extremely Happy People. It was written by Rick Foster and Greg Hicks and their website is at: www.choosetobehappy.com/. I highly recommend the book as a place to begin thinking about life satisfaction and it dovetails nicely with many different meditative and religious practices. For the book they interviewed people in various communities that were identified by other people as always being happy. They looked at their interviews and analyzed them for themes and decided there were nine actions/qualities that the very happy people exhibited. The nine choices were: intention, accountability, identification, centrality, recasting, options, appreciation, giving, and truthfulness.

I have a friend named Matt who is always upbeat. I ran this idea of happiness as a choice by him. He just kind of shrugged, smiled, and said that of course it was a choice.

Today I am going to think on these nine choices. Also, I am working on a fantasy short story. Woohoo!