Category: Miscellany

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.

The ripping and stripping continues here. Somethings definitely coming down and new things wanting to step to the fore. Some of those have nothing to do with computers, writing, even words. Now what?

I notice that the four Main Ingredients listed in the side bar and last posting are not the only main ingredients. They’re the ones that are captured most easily here, no big surprise in that. They are my work, my passions, my practices, my offerings. It seems that the relative weight and attention given to each is being rejiggered now. The whole mess pressing for restructuring. The relative sizes and shapes and the ways they’re wired together no longer fit who I think I am.

To see what I mean, take out your own business card, or have a look at your website. Look at the company name, your name, and other info there. Look at font-sizes, domains and colors. Or look at your office or home space. Is it you? Is it enough? And are the biggest and brightest things the most important things? Do the connections feed and reflect reality as you know it? Shut the computer and email and blogging down for days at a time. Step back from any of your central projects and passions. Who would you be without it? Notice that passion means suffering. Does that fit?

These are some of the questions I’ve been bumping into lately, in that totally unplanned and inconvenient way that is Life’s habit. Far away from most of what has been my work and my world, not unhappily in it or out of it mind you, I simply have the opportunity of noticing what is solid and sure and what is not. And for now, the sure list is shorter than the not. [grin]

I’ve just finished the heaviest lifting in restructuring things at GlobalChicago.NET… making distinctions, cleaning up the parts, and reshaping my own mind a bit. The latter task being really the central affair, and accomplishment. I guess i make it so public just in case it’s of use to anyone else. And for the pressure or energy that comes when you bring and share your attention here, thank you.

For some time, “my work” has been a sort of undifferentiated, but definitely expanding universe. As of this weekend, some real clarity has emerged… planets, I suppose. Or maybe I should hope they are suns? Either way, these chunks suddenly seem real enough to stand on their own, or go away:

• GlobalChicago is now presented more clearly than ever as a hosting project.
• MichaelHermanAssociates offerings and explanations are significantly updated and evolved.
• SmallChangeNews is giving in action, and wanting to come alive next.
• OpenSpaceTech is a simple and deep facilitator learning and practice resource archive and OpenSpaceWorld (which I manage) finally feels really stable on its own.

And finally, this weblog, though I’ve been recently questionning it’s future, suddenly seems to have some purpose in sorting out how these pieces play together, an intricate web of informing and depending on each other.

The most interesting phenomenon in all of this is that even though I’m obviously still the primary instigator of all of them, all of these pieces suddenly feel significantly more separate from “me.” Some of them have their own domain names, and MichaelHerman.com has really been in the background… until now.

Over the weekend I made a central page for myself. Just me. Michael Herman. No Associates. No Global. No Network. Not even any initials or credentials. It was refreshing and a wee bit startling to have just me, and a simple little list of the things I do, there on one main splashy sort of page. Simple. It seems something new is emerging. The old forms can die if they want to. Something new is emerging… and it has the same name as me. How curious.

Been struggling here of late. Forty hours per week of what passes for daylight in London working at a Buddhist practice and meeting center, plus setting up life here with a newish partner, keeping up with emails, and generally having a look around a new town leaves precious little time to do all the things I used to do as a full-time occupation. I’m bursting with ideas about what ought to happen next on several fronts here and there’s just not the bandwidth in the brain or the clock just now to do them as fast as I’m thinking them up.

Last night, another big chunk of everything came clear. PeaSoup is the result. It’s the first in a long list of moves I’ll make here in the coming days (god i hope it’s not weeks!). New clarity about how GlobalChicago, MichaelHermanAssociates, OpenSpaceTech, and SmallChangeNewsNetwork play together. For now, I think of these as the leading characters in what I hope will be a clearer story unfolding here, as PeaSoup.

Which is to say that PeaSoup is one of those ideas that pops up and seems absolutely brilliant while peering into the darkness of the wee hours… and after a few days in the light of pixels might turn out to be so much more rubbish. We’ll see. It’s clouding here in London today, so for now, this new idea is safe from brightest light and scrutiny. And I’m off to clean up after yesterday’s Christmas party. Wish I had a good pea soup color code for the background here.

Regular readers will notice immediately that I’ve made some big changes here on the homepage lately. For all my tinkering, I can’t seem to get font sizes to look right on all browsers. I’ve sleuthed it out in google and some weblogs and been as tricky as I can with new CSS skills.

So how does it look? Is anything way too big or too small? Out of sync or size with other things? Is it out of line with what you see in your browser elsewhere on the web? Your comments would be a big help… and mention which browser you’re using so I can calibrate that too. Many thanks!

Last week I went into a local shop here in London and heard Christmas music playing. “Wow,” I thought, “I haven’t heard Christmas music in a store since… since… since… Halloween!” …when I was still back in Chicago. It is nice to be in a place that knows how to keep Christmas in its place.

Then today, I come up out of a Tube station and run into perhaps 20 carollers, laughing and singing and collecting donations for the homeless. They were obviously really enjoying the whole process. I’m all for the Salvation Army guys on the corners in Chicago with bells and buckets, but I’m thinking the carolling approach is really great.

Christmas is coming to the Centre here, too. Wednesday of this week we, yes we here at the Buddhist Centre, will be hosting a big Christmas party for “carers” …folks taking care of elderly or otherwise disabled friends and family members. And yesterday, after the Tara Retreat ended, a couple of retreatants sat out in the courtyard, stoking what was left of the Fire Puja embers, singing “…chestnuts roasting on an open fire…” When somebody asked if they had any real chestnuts, they said “No, we’re tantras… we’re just visualizing them!”

A group of about 15 people just finished a 17-day White Tara residential retreat here yesterday. During that time, our morning duty shift started earlier than usual, while it was still dark out. Much of the day we were given to whispering, while retreatants were practicing in the main gonpa. What they were doing is mostly saying this mantra over and over again: Om Tare Tuttare Ture Svaha.

White Tara is associated with long life. Each retreatant said 108,000 mantras, so we must have had more than a 1.5 million mantras filling up the house here these last two weeks, tiny, coherent sounds in the ultimately subtle shape of Tara, health and long-life. It’s been a long two weeks. With retreatants living here in the center, it’s as if the office never closes. I don’t think these long days are what they mean by long-life!

I’d been here in London just a couple of weeks, working housekeeping and hospitality here at the Center, doing apparently nothing important and feeling pretty darned good about the whole scene. So I went to the house manager here and said I could stay on longer, if that was possible or needed. She said she wasn’t sure about rules and schedules and such, to which I heard myself saying, “That’s okay. I’m here. Use me if you can.”

I’ve been playing that line back every so often over the last few days, after hearing that they do indeed want me to stay on, switching roles to be the “Kitchen Yogi,” aka Cook’s Assistant. That’s all well and good. I’m looking forward to it. But I’m also wondering about other kinds of roles and organizations to which I’d be willing to make the same offer. “That’s okay. Do what you need to. I’m here. Use me if you can.” Feels like the edge of practice meeting practice.

At the same time, it feels an awful lot like what I’ve done with my facilitating work, corporate or community, in OpenSpaceTech. Opening space, holding a space, clearing the space, paying attention to the space… in which other people can do what they see that they need to do. In this way, I’ve not come so very far from home at all. More like gone closer to it.

I’ve posted previously about scenarios in which secession becomes a practical option for some states. I’ve suggested that when the brand name goes to crap, the costs of defending it get large, and the other costs and conditions pressure the organization, then the whole thing (even a whole country) can come down in a hurry. As my friend Mark Pixley once said when I asked about the future of China, where he lives: “A country’s only a country because we say it’s a country.” And we only do that as long as it “pays.”

Today, I find this in DailyReckoning for 09-Nov-04, quoted from The Wall Street Journal:

“In a development that underscores the growing concern over America’s twin deficits, some investors and analysts are starting to question the unquestionable: The U.S. government’s Triple-A bond rating.”

They are anxious about years of budget and trade deficits. Their fears have been compounded by a weakening dollar and looming questions about how the United States will pay for Medicare and Social Security, as scores of baby boomers start retiring.

To suggest that the United States is a Triple-A credit, “would be to suggest that it can pay its bills over a long period of time in a stable currency,” says William Gross, chief investment officer at Pacific Investment Management Co., or Pimco, which runs the nation’s largest bond mutual fund. “That is no longer true.”

Now to understand what this really means, please notice that the value of EVERY financial asset in the world is calculated based on a “risk-free” rate plus a risk premium. The benchmark for risk-free has always been US Treasuries. Not only does this shake up and confuse the value of every financial asset on the planet, but if the perceived risk of US treasury securities rises, so too does the cost of the interest payments required. Lump this on top of already mounting healthcare, defense, education, etc. costs… and it starts to look like a GIANT Arthur Andersen just waiting to happen.

The good news is that much of the accounting that AA used to do is still being done by somebody, and most of the accountants once employed there, are now doing some sort of accounting work, somewhere. It’s just the transition that gets pretty dicey. In God (not dollars) We Trust.

ta da! welcome to the new look. the real techies among you will probably see that i’m still making this with tables rather than css. if anybody’s got good source(s) for simple style sheet learning or templates, your hints would be greatly appreciated. i’m still wrestling with css for small change news, so good resources and references will be put to use right away.

…some of the things running through mind lately:

• a lot of good things happen around here, lots of work gets done, without my ever having to do anything. these are gifts, the gifts of community/communal living. i understand this as a bigger kind of family household. it must be true of larger community as well, though we don’t often notice it this way, clouded as we are so often by transactions.
• there is a sect in japan, many decades old now, of people who’s spiritual practice is cleaning, especially cleaning bathrooms. they go out door-to-door and ask to clean for people. some have been born into this community and grown up in it. remarkable. that really is a lifetime of service. must be very satisfying. i know the cleaning i’m doing here at jamyang is informing inner, outer and cyber cleaning for me.
• it might be that learning anything, even how to clean a place like this, or how to navigate a city — anything — has the same inner sensations of satisfaction, flow. as long as the learning curve keeps extending itself, flow only requires that demands and skills be matched. and it seems that that really can happen anywhere.
• words, thoughts, stories are outer expressions (or repressions) of inner feelings that are themselves constructed on (of?) sensations. there is a space still beneath the sensations. something flows through it. and it might not be so different from the flow of learning.
• what if the recent run up in housing prices, and other assets, financed by excessive consumer borrowing is actually a new form of a run on the banks? mostly it’s a security-driven movement by individuals, seeking to assure their own individual safety, to withdraw their assets from productive lending and stuff it under the mattress in the form of new carpet, a new living room, a pile of vacation pictures, whatever. but how can so much withdrawing be re-deposited and re-applied to productive purposes?
• it feels good to work so hard at outer and inner and cyber involvements, at all hours, that scheduled days off generate deep, long, entirely guilt-free afternoon naps and other kindnesses to self.
• geshe tashi, resident teacher here, has been taking a little time between teachings after lunch to build cabinets for the library. ikea specials, easy to build. been wondering a bit at the focus and care he brings to this work. and the in-out, on-off switch that lets him work for 20 minutes and then leave the project in whatever state, until tomorrow. or next life. focus and care not separate. been testing same on emails and weblogs, with partial success. it is my habit to work until it’s done, rather than only so long as ease and circumstances allow.
• Time for the next thing…

greetings and thanks to everyone who posted in the comments to my last posting. great to see so many friends gathering in one place!

these last few days i’ve been watching mind change shape, moving between soft and hard, wispy and thick, top and bottom, local and distant. the range of demands and the boundaries imposed by set schedules has been giving cause for quick changes and also the opportunity to watch mind change shape.

made a quick trip to amsterdam this past weekend and confirmed something that i noticed last week. something has snapped in brain and i’m now mostly looking the right directions when i cross the streets here in london. when i got to amsterdam, it was neural network chaos, not sure where to look all over again.

Making a reputation here for my own personal flavor of American practical know-how. Have built out a bit of the network here, handled Hoover repairs and replacement, and helped with a handful of other minor gizmo repairs and improvements.

It feels good to be useful, even as I notice most everyday — as I’m loading the dishwasher with tea mugs, refilling the tea station, hoovering the lobby and cleaning the bathrooms, greeting students, making repairs, and yes, posting blogs and emails and other e-things in spare moments — that I’m not really doing anything “important.”

It’s just really impossible to make an “importance” story out of what I’m doing… and yet I’m thoroughly enjoying the place and the processes and the people here. Enjoying the little connections I make with fellow staff and with visitors. Small kindnesses I’m able to perform. Indeed, my job is pretty much to generate small kindnesses, visible and invisible, all day long. It’s good work.

After about a week and a half here I’m starting to get the feel of the waves, of tasks and needs and people, that wash through here. Getting the hang of this surf. Was nice, too, that today was mostly preparations for retreat that starts tomorrow. It got a lot quieter here today, which allowed a bit of that familiar Thanksgiving quieting to happen in sync with the feasting back home.

Getting the hang of things here, then, just in time for the whole thing to be changed because December is full of special retreats, rather than the usual classes and meetings. Impermanence never ends! Nothing that is made clean will stay that way, of course. But sometimes that speed and the extent to which it gets fouled again just blows my mind. Practice, practice, practice… [grin].

Shifting gears here today, from mostly words to mostly what my Dad would call real work, mopping, cleaning and also some reception work. Grounded and grounding. There is a fair amount of vaccuuming, locally known as ‘hoovering,’ to be done here. This morning as I got started on it I imagined what it might be like if I were going to do this hoovering forever… and ever and ever. I relaxed and the work became a joy.