Autumn Morning

Today I tried to run faster than the squirrels.  I can’t believe they can stay ahead of my strides.  

They cheat, of course, and race up a tree when I begin to overtake them. I doubt they could outlast me on today’s run.They don’t even follow me over the bridge to the duck and heron ponds.

Summer plays tug-a-war with fall for the last days of sunshine. In three days, fall has sneaked up on summer. Leaflets on the Honey Locust trees have turned golden by my window.They fall into the spiders’ vertical lines and twirl in front of my door. 

Sugar Maples have started to shoot their magenta, orange and lemon hues to scare the green away. A crisp in the breeze invites the clusters of leaves to bounce and play tag along the sidewalks. Apples, pears and huckleberries have ripened and look ready to eat.

For me, autumn represents change, abundance, and a time to express gratitude. With nature exploding its wonder all around, I appreciate the subtle aspects of life that stimulate my creativity and enthusiasm for every moment in movement. 

   

What does the changing season represent to you? 

Child's Mind

Do you recall your childhood association with words? Did you create names for animals and plants? Did you tell stories?

Where’s your child’s mind today? Do you still have a loving relationship with words? 

Frederick Smock, a teacher of creative writing, learns daily from his students to think with a child's mind. One student astonished him with her words when she wrote from the point of view of a coconut. “I never have to go on vacation because I carry the waves inside of me,” she wrote.

Today, delight yourself with possibilities and let your words scurry around corners and under bushes. Look into the sky to capture connections. Consider all your areas of knowledge: animals, insects, gardening, travel, economics, and relationships. 

How will you communicate the awareness that makes your days and nights glitter? 

Let your words flee and flourish. Delight in metaphors to tell your stories.

Delve into the Mystery

Living in the universe feels elusive, exciting, and mysterious. In the pursuit of that mystery, we discover ourselves.

Often we receive explanations rather than understandings.

Explanations clip our wings and tame us. Stories free us and encourage flight.





Describe the mystery found in an ordinary event. Write the details.

Capture a scene in nature that overwhelms you with emotions.

Dialogue with the sea, a flower or a tree.

What do you learn from nature's sense of existence?

Look, question, wonder. Use sound, scents, textures, and tastes.







Delve into the mystery.

Reasons to Laugh

Did you know that five-year-olds laugh 400-500 times a day? Grown-ups laugh only 15 times a day on average, says Leigh Anne Jasheway who believes laughter is the best medicine.

Jasheway is concerned that people are, "peppered daily by angry talk radio and news media reminding us to feel angry or to panic." She claims, "levity is the opposite of gravity."  We need to express ourselves in laughter.

Studies reveal that laughter produces basic mammalian benefits of reducing tension snd fear.  

Check out rats laughing:   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-admRGFVNM.

Create a humor antidote to your frustrations.
Laugh about the weather.
Giggle when you make a mistake and try again.
Enjoy a few ha ha ha moments when you're at a low ebb.

You will discover how the funny bone takes over to energize the mind and spirit. Take a negative situation and turn it into a laughter solution. 

Just get silly!

 

What's Right

Once in a yoga class our instructor had us hold poses longer. In the middle of an intense "hold" he suggested we focus on what we were doing right.

It seems rare these days that anyone asks us to focus on right. The media blitzes us with broken aspects of life and what needs fixing. 

Do we have a model of right?

Thomas Armstrong in his book, Neurodiversity: Discovering the Extraordinary Gifts of Autism, ADHD, Dyslexia and Other Brain Differences, suggests that instead of calling the above "conditions" dysfunctional, we should view them as aspects of the brain's function. He focuses on the brain as an ecosystem rather than a machine.




Brain differences among individuals become as essential and enriching as differences among plants and animals. Armstrong would like to use the concept of neurodiversity to reverse the trend to medicalize and patholgize people who respond differently to life's challenges.

Armstrong says, "Knowing we are all connected to each other just like ecosystems means we need to have a greater tolerance for those who neurological systems are organized differently."

Funding for brain research deals with what's wrong with the left hemisphere of the brain. Armstrong indicates, "Little research, however, exists on an area in the right hemisphere that processes loose word associations and may be the source of poetic inspiration,"

He hopes researchers, teachers and families will assist these "labeled individuals" to discover their places in the web of life rather than to let them exist as outcasts with dysfunctions. They need to learn what they are doing right.

Spend a day acknowledging what's right about your experiences, challenges, and writing.

Focus on what you do right.

Writing Stimulates Neuroplasticity

Following the routine of a writing practice assists us to shape thoughts, feelings, and adjust behaviors in all aspects of our lives. After a period of time and word enthusiasm, we learn about ourselves and how to excavate ways into our lives with words. This takes advantage of the brain's ability to form new habits.

Scientists used to believe that after childhood development, the brain remained fixed. Nothing replaced brain cells as they aged or became damaged by substances. Now we know from PET and MRI technology, that the brain can add neurons as a result of our activities.  It can reshape itself throughout life. As we increase an activity, the more connections the neurons discover. The wiring strengthens.

Yogis have experienced this neuroplasticity in their practices. In the Yoga Sutra, Patanjali explains how steady practice without interruption builds habits over long periods of time.Even though the way to remove bad habits by replacing them with good ones sounds too easy, the discipline of writing works to enable neural links.

As writing practice increases over time, it becomes a new habit that competes with old ways of thinking, doing and problem solving. It systematically energizes the ability to feel what's happening in mind, body, and emotions. When writing probes into the psyche, it guides many areas of life.  

Writing with our senses, we become involved with awareness and even taste food in a different way. Touch, scents and hearing heighten along with sight and perception.  We learn what gives us a thrill and what it takes to remove angst and frustration as we write from mood to mood.

If we reach for a pen when frustrations or other emotions set in, we will return to that habit. Writing just 15 minutes a day will energize the brain into new wiring.

Focus on a writing meditation today.  Begin with a frustration and write your awareness deepens or ideas emerge.

Window of Interpretation

Stories engage the reader's attention in simple and subtle ways. One might share an imbedded message or leave it up to the reader to decide the theme. 

Consider the following story once told in Wales.

A young couple had just settled into their new home in Cardiff. The next morning while they ate breakfast, the wife watched her neighbor hanging the wash.

“Look at that dirty laundry,” the wife said. "She doesn't know how to wash. Perhaps she needs better laundry soap?”

Her husband looked but remained silent.

Every time her neighbor hung her wash to dry, the wife made the same comments.

A month later, the wife commented on the clean wash on the line and remarked to her husband,“Look, she has learned how to wash correctly. I wonder who taught her this?”

The husband said, “I got up early this morning and cleaned our windows.”

What does the story reveal?  Is it coaxing? Or, does the message mean that what we see when watching others depends on the window's quality?

Develop a story that leaves the reader wondering.

To Understand Something

If you want to truly understand something, try to change it.  ~Kurt Lewin 

Alberto Villoldo, anthropologist, believes we are moving into possibility. He has studied the healing practices of the Amazonian and Incan shamanism for 25 years. Villoldo says, "You can only change the world by changing your inner life.”  

It sounds so simple but takes discipline and dedication to make progress in changing inner lives. 

Price Pritchett feels, "Change always comes bearing gifts."  If you made three recommendations for change in your inner life what would they include? 

Search for three gifts today. Begin by writing the ideals. You might start with: self-respect, responsibility, reciprocity.  Write into each of your chosen words to show examples of how you might accomplish them.

The birds are molting.  If only man could molt also - his mind once a year its errors, his heart once a year its useless passions.  ~James Allen

Moments

Hot weather persists

    Socks lose their mates

          Leaf blowers annoy

Tastes fade

   Friends lose interest

           Ideas wander

We notice a

  slide

    a dwindle

         or a drain

Without looking

    backward

       or forward

One moment

    lingers

      for attention

   

Then buoyancy

    lifts

      when we marvel

             at sunset

Discomforts

      slip away

           into the sea

Live from the Inside Out

How do you live from the inside out?

Here's a place to start.

Grow yourself each day. 

Exercise the mind and body.

Add healthy food for fuel.

Spend time alone and with others.

Keep a Positive attitude regardless of the situation.

Permit your emotions to cycle. 

Give. Give. Give.

Express gratitude.

Learn from making mistakes. 

Explore nature's wonders each day. 

LOVE

Help others help themselves.

Discover a spiritual practice. 

Make sleep count. Take naps. 

Let laughter conquer fear and frustration. 

Make FUN the most important discipline of all.

Write rather than worry. Live from the inside out!

Light Saving

Didn’t you realize a career as lifeguard means water work? 

Even with posted warnings of riptides and undertows,

people wander and plunge into the currents. 

Many do not understand the use of sunscreen.

When their screams coil into spindrift and arms 

rise in signals of distress, you will feel needed.

Dragging orange buoys into the sea, your

shouts to the waterlogged probably won’t help. 

The water thrashers will clutch and scratch,

and draw you down. You might keep their heads 

above water . . . for a time. Engage your kick, 

as your breath surges into a sky bright with blue.

Don’t try rowing a boat to the needy. They will

clamber atop one another and swamp it. Then

you’ll paddle back to shore, fingers and toes 

ridged into prunes, eyes salted nearly shut. 

Purchase a flashlight on your next trip to the beach. 

Try light saving from the shore. Resist all distress calls

by counting back from one hundred. Plug your ears

and learn to hum your own tunes. Breathe.

Twirl the light, bounce it off slants of rocks. 

Make hand shadows into kaleidoscopic notions. 

A few will notice and follow the light to shore. 

Others might stumble, blinded by the sun instead.

Keep time with the light and your days will bloom wiser. 

Linger, wriggle ten toes in the sand. Smell the spray, 

until the ball of fire eases beyond the horizon

and busyness of day glides without force into night.

Awaken Attention

"I wake to sleep and take my waking slow."  - Rilke

Awaken to pay attention in slow motion.  
          Paint the day with the precision of perception. 
                     Propagate ideas and punctuate notions with possibilities.


Stride into a lyrical life.  
     Stimulate the raucous brain.  
         Shake creativity from its cage.

Slow the chatter or raise a voice in rebellion. Both will revolutionize.

Excite the mind's music. Mono-colored days request the musicality of words.

In what ways is intuition nurtured? Does it rattle in the background of experience, knowledge and synaptic connections?

Is heightened perception aroused at times where sensory imagery leads to discovery?

Will a flash in the corner of the eye flame into an idea or concept?
What unlocks mysteries and reaches for connections?

A high level of curiosity pushes with every sense to uncover flickers, fragrance, and fun.

Awareness draws to movement hiding in stillness. 

Objects release beyond what they appear.

Stimulate your perception. 

Awaken attention.

Adventure in Words

Happiness is not a station you arrive at, but a manner of traveling.

- Margaret Lee Runbeck

Take a break from your real world to travel on a writing detour. You're given a Gypsy wagon and a credit card for a month.

Set out on an adventure in words.

Describe your vehicle. What will you pack? Who will you bring for adventure?

Where will you drive?  Which territories speak to you that need exploring? Delve into the wild, grand, and meaningful. 

If you were an animal where would you go?

Will you add wings?


Let yourself create beyond all possibilities.

Write into fun and fantasy.  

Start your writing engine.

A Turtle Life

Six a.m. - 
the small pond turtle 
lifts its head 
into the air 
like a green toe. 
It looks around. 
What it sees 
is the whole world 
swirling back from darkness. - Mary Oliver


How to live like a turtle: Semper Paratus (always prepared).

You have all you need for a life of amazement and amusement.
        Always believe from the inside out.
            Stay unaffected by negativity from beyond the shell. 


Stay Buoyant. Patient. Steady. Relentless.

Remain secure but never hiding from challenges.
     Love from the inside out.
         Power yourself with energy for a life of wonder.

Staying Nine

Eyes roll when I claim, "Yes. I'm nine years old."
I show how a digit's singularity bends to a curl.

Its balloon waves and blinks a forever age for me.

A time of bare feet that romp in glistens of grass, 
Days bring treasures with finch and phoebe chatter. 

Their wings linger, flicker me into a belief of flight.

Discoveries in wriggles and tangerine beetles emerge

from under rocks. Scents mingle in daffodil creases 
with hints of muffin. Eucalyptus floats on the breeze.

A climb in oak and magnolia branches reveals cloud

castles in the blue. Fearless of gravity, I slither down,
taste an apple and a tease of lemon on the tongue.

No boundaries exist. Creativity claims the moments

that dangle in leaves and swirl of aubergine whiskers. 
Polliwogs unfurl into frogs in the spirit of twilight.

Age challenges amateurs as puberty and years tug.
Stalking wonder forges a focus in curves of nine.
I will remain in a single digit on my inner starship.