Author: Michael

Somewhere along the way, these last some years, I have let the yearend reflection and planning questions dissolve into how I am all year round. I’ve let yearend mind pop up at any and all times throughout the year.

A couple of days ago I noticed so clearly that it’s not how do i limit that is important, but ratherthatI limit. Also, that I limit because it is necessary.

The mind that fiddles with the code of the blog template has a different shape, scale of focus, density of awareness than the mind that does the posting. The template mind stretches out into future use considerations while the posting mind is often bounded and shaped by one moment, now or recently past.

And the posting mind is different, smaller, more rigid, I find, than the mind that walks down the street holding hands. Or the mind that has international conference calls with clients. The mind that is satisfied with picking off a few blogroll blogs to read this morning is different from the mind that insists that if I read one, I should read them all.

In this way, it seems that limits are not to be overcome. Limits support life. Mind has shape. The only reallimitis not a how but a that. A condition. A truth. I choose shapes, and the range of shapes of mind that I choose, is limited… but can be stretched. So too, the speed with which I am able to change shapes. And it seems that the soup one seems to swim through, that space between known and familiar shapes, is uncertainty, chaos, not knowing… and flow.

There is a pulsation then, between knowing and not knowing. In this way the obvious limits are two: certainty, a refusal or inability or unwillingness to let go of this shape and move to another and ignorance, a refusal, inability, or unwillingness to notice what is really going on now as self and others.

Limits are not something I do… they are what I am, even always I am also the movement in stretch stretch stretch flow snap twist dodge parry thrust spin…

When I am really paying attention, it’s really hard to tell who’s leading and who’s following. Johnnie Moore reminded me of this yesterday at lunch here in London. And that what any of us have to say to each other is likely not as important as our showing up in the first place. And that none of this is happening to any one of us. (It was a long lunch!)

So this was, I think, my first “we met first in the blogosphere” lunch. Then I came home and stayed up way too late tricking out the new Lumina Coaching blog for my old friend Karen Sella, me in London, her in Seattle. Six months ago, Karen and I had a milestone sort of mutuality conversation in Chicago. So of course she’d show up in my email on the same day as my mutuality chat with Johnnie.

I’m looking to connect this practice of mutuality, letting others be as real to me as I am to myself, with practices and premises that allow for commerce as well as conversation. Mutual conversation, mutual commerce. Not me consultant, you paying client. Not me coach keeping you company. Not me researcher, you sharing data and stories. But us in it together. If you’re in London and interested in mutual exploration, I want to meet.

• Under-resting and over-vigilance have a way of getting in the way.
• Showing up early enough to sit and do nothing before a meeting feels surprisingly kind to self.
• It really doesn’t take long at all, in a genuinely quiet moment, to come back to self, stability and sensation.
• Life is incredibly resilient, even and especially in the face of the unimaginable and inescapable.
• It seems more important to be able to pulse between knowing and not knowing than to master either one of them on its own.
• More and more it seems that the most important leadership act is simply participating in the flow.
• Elevated subway trains run past Royal Festival Hall. Sitting there in the cafe feels like home sweet chicago.

Jill posted yesterday in London Calling about dissatisfaction, suggesting that the way to shift satisfaction to dissatisfaction must somehow be related to letting go of expectations. I love the question, the openness of the inquiry, the quotes, and the way the whole thing springs from what she read in newspaper story i say lying on the kitchen table yesterday morning.

And… i think expectations are very different from desires and needs. expectations are made in brains. desires and needs and appetites spring from our ground, the ground, as we come into these bodies we have now.

i think it’s not possible to let go of desires and needs, but it is possible to move more deeply into them… to not be swayed by their surfaces but to get into them more and more so that we can see and satisfy them more directly.

on the surface i desire chocolate or cookies, but when i look into what i really want in the moment i’m dipping into the goodies jar, i often want rest. when i don’t think i can have what i want, i choose other options.

the key it seems is not letting go of the desires and needs but letting go of confusion about them. i think we need to work to get really clear about what we want. to dare then to ask for it, to see if satisfaction is possible. to inquire into others’ requests, to go further into figuring out what it is that they really want and need, beyond what they’re asking for. and we need to practice noticing when we already actually have what we really need and want.

this is letting go of the expectation or assumption that we can’t get what we want, which is different from expecting that we’ll get the promotion or that dinner will be on the table for us when we get home. one way to make this easier is to keep looking for the things we do have that we do want. i’ve heard from various sources that finding and naming at least four goodies for each one baddy is the ratio necessary to affect neurochemistry enough so that we actually *feel* a difference.

in this way, there need not be any loss or sadness, only an adding on, increasing our attention and capacity to notice what’s good and desirable and working. satisfaction guaranteed, though not necessarily immediately!

…the blog over at sCNN is starting to roll again. i did some good, i.e. satisfying, work on the outside this past weekend, not including this little sketch on a napkin while waiting for our pizza last night.

hoping to get the innards completely retooled in the next week or so, with some of that spiffing shining through on the outside, too, as skills and artistic donations allow. back on our way to wide open community blogging for the common good. please stay tuned.

UPDATE: Progress as promised. My cartooning notwithstanding, the artwork side of things ain’t half bad, either.

Thanks to Christy for posting these Hafiz lines in a comment a few days ago.

There are so many gifts, my dear,
Still unopened from your birthday…

A good way to start the year, I think. And something too that speaks simultaneously to this recent shifting, deep undersea and the big waves that have been crashing to shore in Asia. Not sleeping so well these days. So many gifts, so much energy and movement, so much churning and changing. I don’t imagine that anyone escapes untouched by these waves, even if we can’t quite say how.

Out this morning running an errand, I stopped at a little local bakery shop for a little bit of morning food. I chose this bakery because I like to support the little guys when I can… but I’ve gotta say, that the stuff I got was crap. This was actually my third trip to this guy, for three different kinds of food. So I’m afraid he’s now struck out.

But it’s bigger than that. As I was walking along this busy London street, noticing the Safeway’s and Tesco stores, and thinking about getting a second breakfast, it occurs to me that this crummy little baker has momentarily soured me on all little guys. This is how the big guys win! Because the little guys don’t ever realize that they’re all on the same team, representing a way of life and a way of business, not just themselves. Wake up, little guys!

Andy Borrows has some beautiful pictures days in Older and Growing. Words days ain’t bad either, btw! He’s also the first blogger I’ve seen blogroll this here weblog by its new PeaSoup name. Good to see the new name getting a little traction.

We came into the kitchen this morning to find a coat, purse, keys, etc. looking a little bit, shall we say, randomly placed. In the bathroom the cap to the toothpaste and a bit of that goo were found not exactly where expected. Kudos for the attempt at brushing.

The real achievement, however, was when our friend arrived in the kitchen with one of the two-burner iron grates that sit atop half of the gas stove. “I don’t have any idea at all what this was doing in my bedroom this morning.”

I wonder if she was out the same places as Euan was last night?

As I was playing lead blocker for Jill today in the post-holiday throngs on Oxford and Regent Streets, we came to wondering which was bigger, London or Paris. Here is a great answer: tables and maps of all agglomerations and cities of the world with a population of 1 million inhabitants or more. And you gotta love this part: “The population figures of the agglomerations and cities are computed for following date: 2004-08-17.” …and would that be as of noon, midnight or maybe the close of business in each city?

I’ve got speed bump mind. In Chicago, I had ready access to the computer, always connected via DSL. Here in London, I share an internet connection, have access mostly when I’m off duty as housekeeper and receptionist. At Jill’s place, internet access means dialup via shared phone line. All kinds of things popping up through the day and not the time to sift through them, figure out what’s post-worth… and not enough time to keep up with other blogs. Blogging’s definitely not the same when it’s done in a vaccuum with speed bumps.

Coming off of a big push to clean up the whole of GlobalChicago.NET, I’m also noticing the difference between the technical and personal dimensions of a blog/site. Both can be messy or clear, bumpy or flowing… but the technical stuff stores better. I can make a list of technical to-do items, but it’s harder to keep track of the juicier bits of writing that go by in a day. What to do with the brilliance that comes in the middle of cleaning the bathroom? …not knowing when my next access will be. Letting go. Letting flow. Life smears.

Life, everything I know of it just now, all the forms and levels and edges I find now are simultaneously bumpy and smearing. Living in two places. Working in the Center and online and on the phone. Phone and internet access shared. The duty schedule whipping all around with special retreats and events for this whole month of December. I make a list of accomplishments this year and count 29 or so. All but 3 or 4 connected in some way to endings. And still, Life feels seductive now. I protest. And go on.

After six weeks of tending the cookie jar as part of my job, a more recent wave of all kinds of high- and not-so-high-quality chocolates here, and then almost a week of Christmas feasting, I really needed a little dietary punctuation. Needed to put a bottom the slippery sugar slope I’ve been sliding down. For me, sugar is nothing but television for the mouth.

As luck would have it, however, this week at the Center there are a dozen or more folks doing a purification retreat. Part of that involves prostrations, getting up and lying down. Moves a lot of fluids, pumps out toxins, and makes you strong. They’re doing some fasting and some prayers that essentially wish well and happy everywhere. And I’m riding the wave of their practice a little bit, these last two days, in a short fasting and cleansing program.

This might last as long as tomorrow before returning to veggies and beans and rice. For now, though, I’m running in a sort of altered energy state. Sharper and foggier all at once. I’m less inclined to sprint to do more work. Finding my edges, accepting my limits, and looking out for ways to be kind to myself. I don’t find that many dependable kindnesses, really. That’s something to ponder and practice in these next few (potentially) quieter days.

The key, it would seem, is simply to let things be just as they are. Everything is compassion. Now there’s a resolution. Non-doing. But why does it always start out feeling like my un-doing. [grin] Yikes.

When people ask me if I’m a Buddhist, I usually shrug my shoulders and say I don’t know. I do some Buddhist sorts of practices and I’m currently working in a Tibetan Buddhist Centre, but most Buddhists wouldn’t recognize me as one of their own. Still, I don’t fit in very well anymore back in the places where I came from.

Growing up very Catholic, I was never a big fan of Christmas and the accompanying hoopla. Perhaps even less so in recent, shall we say less Catholic, years. So this year it was more than a little surprising that I was genuinely excited when it arrived. Perhaps that was because it actually arrived in the last week or so of December, instead of the last week of October. Whatever the reason, I set my sights on Midnight Mass at Westminster Cathedral, preceeded by an excellent, if not exactly traditional, Indian dinner out and my very first look around central London, with Jill.

Our walking tour turned into a bit of a photo adventure, the running joke(s) being that I’ve been in London for more than six weeks now and have not managed to see any of these famous places, and now it’s too dark to see anything!

We got to the Cathedral, which somehow escaped photography, two hours early and joined the trickle of people that was appearing out of a totally deserted business district. The place is cavernous, of course, the ceiling black and invisible, giving the impression that it didn’t exist at all. We seemed surrounded by four marble walls under a vast winter sky.

Flipping through the program for the evening, I was disappointed to find it so unfamiliar, full of latin verses and missing favorite carols. I thought to leave. Then I looked around at the gathering crowd that seemed all too familiar, so I thought again to leave. I didn’t didn’t want to be stuck for a couple of hours in another flat, narrow, boring Christmas rote only to be dumped back into the deserted business district hours after the trains and buses had stopped running. Westminster Abbey (Church of England) was just up the street, and a real temptation.

As luck would have it, the place filled up, time ran out, the mass began… and it turned out to be a simple, elegant and beautiful little celebration. An intimate gathering of perhaps 3000 of us? When the time came for the Cardinal to give his sermon, he came way down the aisle, into the crowd, and climbed up into a pulpit balcony. Everybody turned sideways in their seats to listen and the whole place suddenly felt like we’d all gathered ’round for a story.

“I want to wish you all a Happy Christmas,” he says. “Now you all know about Christmas,” he continued, “but I want to talk to you tonight about being happy.” He goes on to give a brilliantly clear little sermon on the importance of making peace and being happy in one’s own heart, then one’s home and family, so that it will trickle out and add in small but important ways to peace in the world. “My God, I marvel, we’ve got a Buddhist Cardinal here!”

The choir and Latin chanting were gorgeous in that accoustic heaven, and the whole thing turned out perfectly. On the way out, we got a 2005 Cathedral calendar which made good fodder as the photo adventure continued. It was a long but surprisingly warm walk home, keeping watch of course for Santa, in the cold, clear, long-past midnight sky…

For the record book now, on Christmas Day I cooked my first turkey for a dinner that turned out to be every bit as surprisingly good as the mass the night before, shared with here with friends. Still working on the leftovers, two days later.

The Tibetans revere Bodhisattvas, beings who come to this world to help others, and they celebrate abundance in Tsok rituals that overflow in light and food offerings. This year, the Buddhist view seems more familiar, the Christmas rituals more spacious, and peace and compassion more important, than ever. Happy Christmas to you!

I’m a month or so into six months in a volunteer working program at a buddhist center in London. Nothing like a 140-year-old building to remind you that work never ends. Mostly I work under the assumption that I’m going to finish… but more and more in this building, in this website and in this world, I am noticing that the work and some other things (suffering and desire, but also space and kindness) seem to go on and on and on.

More and more coming to wonder how work and the rest might be different if I hold both the desire to finish and the reality of forever more clearly in mind, simultaneously. Mutually. Both true, without conflict. How might work, or a website, serve me and other directly and still ripple out for all beings at the same time? Think there just might be a bit of Christmas somewhere in that wonder. Joy to the World.