Timeless Willy-Nilly

Missing, as I do now, the familiar comfort of resting in the recent “story” of Solstice – a sense of self-location in the vastness of space, a real reason for less, then more, daylight – or the “story” of the Gregorian calendar, which claimed to finish an old tale, to begin a new one – […]

Floating in Solutions

I’m writing to you at midnight on a moonless night, from inside the warmth of an ink-black pool, a mountainside hot spring in the high desert. Oceans of stars glitter overhead in the clear sweet air. The only sounds are a soft breeze soughing through the trees, unseen critters skittering through pine needles. This is […]

Infinitesimal Star Stuff

Allowing the first Webb Telescope images to sink deep can be perilous. Trap doors can open and drop the soul-mind into a bottomless spiral of unknowing. I found this exhilarating and, at the same time, annihilating – in a good way. To get this effect, one way is through an analogy: the galaxies pictured above […]

Chiaroscuro Time

Equinox sensitizes me to light-dark contrasts. ‘Chiaroscuro’ (clarus: light + obscurus: dark), art’s intense shadowing (Caravaggio, Rembrandt), surfaces from deep memory while looking at stark contrasts in my email in-box: terrifying news and dire philosophies alternating with shiny announcements from a hopeful world, sprinkled with techniques for dealing with the terrifying news. Simultaneously, I’ve felt […]

Welcome to Reconception

I sense an invitation going out – from those of us who’ve been doing inner work for decades, to people new to deep discovery and adaptation. New concerns for themselves, for their loved ones, and for the world at large are prompting more intense reflections in all sectors of society. In stretching to connect with […]

Life as Speculative Fiction

From deep inside the world of fiction writing, I see classic elements of screenplays and novels playing out in our public life. Every day brings disruptive inciting incidents, increasingly large obstacles with higher and higher risks and cascading disasters, conflict everywhere, and point-of-view characters (each of us) going through profound inner changes. Settings themselves are […]

Syncopated Spring

These times feel like a familiar beautiful tune struggling to play – but with missing pieces, interruptions. Turns out that’s what ‘syncopated’ means: all chopped up, leaving gaps (syn – together, plus kop – cut). This sense of something missing came to mean fainting, a loss of consciousness (syncope). The word drifted into language too, […]

Gold Threads in the Dark

Feeling creative is, for some of us, a life-support function – especially in recent times. It’s easiest for those who have shelter and food, while holding awareness of those who don’t. For hundreds of millions, just thinking up and acting on the next step toward survival — if survival is still possible — are supremely […]

Inner Q&A for Chaotic Times

Once again, decades of inner work – as a writer and meditator – are taking on new form. Both activities stimulate and respond to major shifts in perception, to create coherent new narratives. It was no surprise, then, to realize that a technique I’ve been using for years – a quasi-meditative centering exercise for making […]

A Different Spring

Never have so many plummeted, all at once, into existential dread. When I look back at this Equinox (8:50 PT tonight), I’ll be reminded of the millions caught in a pandemic – and all the lockdowns and financial craziness.   I’m having flashbacks – from literary memory – of what it was like for people […]

Polyphasic New Year

Polyphasic: a favorite new word (new for me, a couple of months ago). It’s a quick way to say complicated things about multiple layers of reality (many phases of existence) – in an individual or in a whole culture. It came up when I was listening for what to say at the beginning of a […]

Midwinter Dreamscape

Through a dark time tunnel, morning and evening like midnight, I treasure this season of inwardness,  enfolded in soft wraps against the chill. Warmth and stillness billow into the forefront of luxuries. What I can share here are ways to feel the warmth and stillness any time, ways that have emerged from a convergence of […]

Repurposing Inner Work

As chaos mounts in the perceptible world, I’ve been listening for new ideas about what to offer here. To my surprise, I’ve noticed that some earlier techniques can be dusted off and repurposed, used in new ways, in the new environment. I’ll offer links to them here, with possibilities for working with them in times […]

Generating Quality Time

Poignant synchronicities unfolded as I drafted a post about qualities of time, to celebrate the Equilux (March 16 in my latitude/longitude) and the Equinox (9:15 a.m. PDT on March 20 everywhere). Two days before the day of equal light and dark, my web connections filled with affectionate remembrances on the passing of Stephen Hawking, most […]

Contrapuntal Equinox Experiment

Public life these days is so filled with stories that intend to grip the audience – wildly countervailing narrative and dramatic “melodies” all playing at the same time – that it can be a strain to hear one’s own profound song. My sense is that becoming a deliberate singer/songwriter of life, a benevolent master storyteller, […]

Schrodinger’s Eclipse

In this moment, before it has happened, my personal involvement with the August 21 eclipse is hovering in maybe-space. Will I feel again the shimmering magnetic atmosphere of long-ago experiences, see the dappling on the ground? Will I swim in air made of silver ripples? Will there be a storm that outshadows the shadow? Will […]

dot dot dot dot pause dot dot

This (the dot sequence) means Hi. In code. A wave across the waters. I’ve waited in silence for something pithy and meaningful to say, something that wouldn’t get too tangled up in the outer chaos of our time. I’ve been inspired by hi-signs coming through electronic channels I’ve let stay open – photos of Nature […]

The Light inside the Cave

I became (again?) a cave painter one recent morning, hyper-aware of wanting to inscribe something from deep inside, something from far beyond that would echo through and far beyond me. I was in a new space, in every way: the first spring in a new residence, with a writing chair facing east. In the first […]

An Expression of Pink Trees

I missed it. At least the camera missed it. By the time I realized I wanted to capture the glorious explosion of flowers haloing out from a stand of neighborhood trees, two days had passed and the flowers were turning gray. That was weeks ago, and now it’s a strange mercy: to keep from feeling […]

Self Portraits

In this month of inspiration to bring new visions into outer expression, first I mused on what would feel good to be done with, to clear the field, and in that creative spaciousness got reminded of an enlightenment from long ago. I decided to invoke it in the current moment, not just marvel at it in […]

The Learning Birds of Summer

They’re old enough to be out and about, trying to function in the world for the first time. A young jay, with gray fuzz sticking out from wings that were still pale blue, its head a tufted gray ball, struggled to balance on a low branch in the shrubbery. Its short brilliant-blue tail feathers bobbed […]

Degrees of Intimacy … in Words

Fiction-writing is a different beast – thrilling to engage after so much practice in resolving everything into concepts, expressing them, and inviting an audience to ponder and, ideally, agree. I’ve been experimenting with live readings of fictional vignettes to a group of extremely varied listeners. The group was facilitated by long-time fiction fans who expected […]

Significance

After being tossed an opportunity to list the most significant events of my life, I watched the parades of memory march by – different parades on three different passes of the question. My notion of what ‘significant’ means began to crumble. The first pass included the usual suspects: outer events that changed the course of […]

Seasonal Elixirs

‘Tis the season of Re-vision. Bold Re-view and Re-solution. There’s a comfortable way to parse this out, one that strikes me as touching all our potentials without trapping us into false promises. Public rituals like January 1 can spark private occasions for dropping inward and letting things float in timelessness, unhooked from the calendar’s demands: at […]

Black Light

I’m in a new phase with deep winter: I now feel the ink-cold blackness at breakfast, the shutting down of the world in late afternoon. For days I’ve pondered the people whose pain comes from encroaching darkness, enough to make them stare into banks of artificial light – or take mood-shifting drugs – to keep […]

The Enneagram: Editorial Enthusiasm

I was so moved by an editorial project last spring, I posted an entry about the transformative power of stories. The book I edited in that project has now arrived from England, and I’m experiencing a new set of subtle awakenings after seeing it. I’d known the publishers were going to say something nice about […]

Exper…

I got a sweet little shock when I looked up the etymology of experience and experiment, wondering how they could feel so different while being nearly the same word. Their shared history is adding rich new sensations of fearlessness to daily existence (even to the past and the future, as well as the Now). First, the two exper words: ‘Experience’ […]

A Perfect Score of 42

I found a new way to relax, even feel more creative and awake, when hearing the word ‘perfect’. My mind started chewing on it after two encounters with someone steeped in fashion philosophies: In the first, he announced that painful difficulties reflected the perfection of the moment; in the second, he said he wasn’t perfect. […]

Storied Synchronicity

After an editorial project that enchanted me day and night for a month, I’ve spent days getting back to myself with yoga, deep-tissue massage, and exotic literature to whisk me into other inner worlds. This morning, noticing my mind had again wafted back into the project – one that altered my deep interior and will nourish me […]

All Seasons, All the Time

One small white rose glowed in the sunlight, floating in a dark-green sea. I was mesmerized. This could not be. Yet there it bloomed, staring at me, laughing. This went on for days – no other flowers in the vast hedge, just this one, living its full cycle before the others even began. I wondered […]

The Complexity of Now

It’s January 1: a spirit horse of imagination charging across a clear field. Its tracks are changing the field. Its tracks reflect the infinite factors that went into hooves touching snowflakes in this instant. And you, right now, looking at this picture, are laying tracks, altering the subtle field with each thought and feeling about […]

Resolution Means Flow

Fierce determination, popular while January 1 approaches, feels opposite to going with the flow. Yet they can be the same, considered in a certain light. Traditions of beginning again personally on January 1, when the outer calendar begins again, offer rituals for backward reflection and forward vision. If the ritual is superficial – a Procrustean chopping and […]

Midwinter Relativity

          In a vast field of frozen dark-gray slate, a luminous pearlescence blooms above a slow horizon in the southern sky, this silent dawn near solstice. Moments of enchantment pass before the mind remembers: this is the sun, rising in the south. The wakening mind expands: the sun is not rising – this is […]

Quadraphonic Choices

I just discovered new depths to a technique I learned thirty years ago: creating a four-square grid to hold all the elements of a difficult decision. I’m writing about it here, in case I ever want to recommend it again – now with some updated spin. Back then, it was about intellectual, emotional, and social […]

Sea Legs and Inner Ears

 Waltzing back and forth between the right-brain’s flowing cosmos and the left-brain’s key-tapping to make words, not yet being fully immersed in an all-senses state, I feel a dizziness that brings a memory to the surface, one that resonates across the decades: We’d been on a long sailing trip, eating and sleeping on board, as […]

Rosebud

The world blurred. Fuzzy pale-green clouds billowed around a tiny sharp object, close-up: a fierce-feeling hyper-tight bulb shape of darker green, poised on a branch. Unmoving, I felt the wave of its power wash out into the air, into me. Slow joy started responding –apprehensive and a little agog at the task looming in this […]

Approaching Solstice

I’m marveling at gaps in consciousness, thanks to the Milky Way. I saw a picture of it on the web, and I froze. Something said Wait: What’s so strange about this picture? I stared at it, listening. I collected other pictures of it. Still entranced, I researched other cultures’ names for it, other mythologies. Dimly, […]

Merit in the Marketplace

A phenomenal new wordal popped out of the dictionary this morning: the mer root within merit. Turns out it started as sale value, leading to the Latin meretrix (prostitute) and the English meretricious (attractive in a vulgar way). This surprise led to contemplation of merit badges, merit scholars, meritocracies, certificates of merit, earning merit in religious […]

Voice, Format, Audience

Mercy. Another writing career. The inner machinery of expression – the place I go to inside, to feel words form – is changing again. It’s being altered by the convergence of two worlds from opposite extremes: (1) inside-out: shaping ever-subtler inner experience into outer form, and (2) outside-in: practicing the audience-driven formats of screenplays and […]

Re-Oriented Spring

Rebirth freshens the air, now from a different perspective. My mind’s eye sees Earth tilting, northern hemisphere more warmed and brightened by a fireball, itself hurtling through space at hundreds of thousands of miles per hour in a giant galaxy – a spiral of light among millions. Scoping in closer, I feel, simultaneously, the entry […]

A Kaleidoscope of Women

Visions of “the feminine” started shape-changing for me this summer, watching Beasts of the Southern Wild. Startling imagery, elaborate mythology, a rich resonant soundtrack, poetic and vivid dialogue – and the unimaginable performance of its tiny girl hero-star – coalesced. Ancient self-images, affections, terrors, and enthusiasms got remembered and rearranged, transformed, even though the movie’s surfaces […]

Seven-Story Forgiveness

Every word, every thought, changes along the vibrational scale of consciousness, so that its meaning is different depending on the speaker’s intent and the listener’s awareness – creating the sound of different notes and tones with a single word. I wrote about this earlier in relation to ‘gratitude’: in the lowest vibrations, ‘gratitude’ feels like helpless […]

The Weird Self-Help of Sadness

I’ve been remembering how freeing, how life-enhancing it is, to allow deep sadness to rise and move – becoming fully, even bodily, aware of its origins and meanings – and then to notice it slipping into nothingness, once it’s been bathed in the light of consciousness. In radio stories leading up to today’s Titanic  centennial, […]

Three Liberating Choices

A favorite mind-shift, from long ago, recently popped to mind: a three-way option presented by Eckhart Tolle in The Power of Now. He posed the choices, in a conflict, as Accept the situation, Work to change it, or Separate from it – instead of the “normal insanity” of down-spiraling in non-stop objections. I got a […]

Fight, Flight, Freeze, or Flow?

Awoke to a vibration of wistfulness: glad for the relaxed pleasure in encountering everything with soft regard, and glad to feel only a faint rippling awareness of multiple kinds of violence in the world – sprung from obvious conflicts of identities, motives, and boundaries in the news. It was inspiring to notice the ripples without […]

Adaptation: Not Always Second-Hand

Once again, a word-origin is revealing a hidden coherence: ap, which becomes apt, adapt, aptitude, adept and inept. It’s about fittedness, fastening two phenomena, one or both of them in motion. Like dancing: the fittedness being between the music and the body, or between two or more bodies, in spontaneous or rehearsed choreography (on a […]

Creativity’s Hidden Gateways

Several new emails in the past 24 hours have touted creativity programs and ideas. One of this morning’s emails feels like a goad. It was about setting up the day to be about one’s own creativity, versus  checking the incoming mail and web feeds to see what others are doing. Fashionability (attention to what others are doing), can […]

Accept What?

“Accept what is” – a buzz-phrase floating through the awakening ethos of the transformation culture – carries wildly different meanings, depending on speaker and listener. In its most liberated, liberating, creative sense, it translates as “allow one’s inner vantage point to center in, and perceive/experience everything through the lens of, an awareness so expansive that […]

First Wordals

Wordals – as word-portals – evolved in my writing practice as mind-unlocking gateways into higher/deeper states of awareness. Unlocking the traps of words frees the mind into a more vast experience of being alive. All around us now is talk of potential new universal languages, decryption of recently discovered ancient languages, possibly extraterrestrial symbolic and […]

The Opening

Hilariously, I “open” this website – all about being original, alive, and aware, in the moment – with one of the oldest conventions of public speakers, from elementary school onward: the etymology of the title. Turns out it works pretty well. “Open”  is from upo, meaning under, up from under, or over, which aren’t contradictory at […]