When I was a kid of twelve years old and living in Riverside, CA I had a repeating dream. I was standing on a pastureland cliff, looking out at the ocean. I had never seen a pastureland cliff before, because I had never been north of Santa Barbara. There was a guy standing next to me, shorter than me, with hair flying away from his pony tail and a goatee beard. When I would look at him to see his face from a front view, my dream would end.

The first time I saw Bolinas, it was from the overlook on Panoramic highway over Stinson Beach when I was sixteen. Somehow my mom let me go on a two week camping trip with five other teenagers, average age seventeen. On another trip up highway one, my boyfriend and I picked up John Milan, a famous watercolor painter.
6

It was at planning an "ahrt scene" one day where a bunch of us came up with the idea to make a little cardboard enclosure as part of the event. On the outside we made a sign: "Talk to a Dead Artist." You could talk to the dead artist who was available at the time. People studied up on artists before the event and then they impersonated them from inside the cardboard box.

I've been working on this for awhile. I'm hoping that it's possible to learn to not use dualistic - either/or type comparisons in the way that we talk when we explain. There are many reasons to do this.

One of the best is positivity, the ability to change.

I'm not so sure why positive, happy experiences are regarded by most people in this culture as being so...

In a dialogue group I am still a member of eight years ago an interesting attitude came up about using other people's ideas as sole content. It was quite common at that time that a dialoguer would throw out an idea into the center of the room to see if other people wanted to talk about it - as if it was an idea that came from nowhere, as if they had not said it. The intent was to keep "ego" out of the attachment to the idea.

Yes, sometimes people who don't know me act as if I'm flaunting my freedom. I realize that I would do better for making their fearful reactions go off to turn my intensity levels down a little. But sometimes I just get miffed having to constantly toe the line of a repressed, unaffectionate, confused, dispassionate society.

It has always bothered me that I have such a tricky time using English words to describe the relative percentages of how many different feelings I might have in my relationship to someone or something. When I say something using English, other people I'm talking with can't get past the connotation that what I am saying is the priority quality of what I mean, merely by the fact that I uttered it.

Someone in Dialogue was wondering about the relationship of the experience to the word for it. I think what they were saying was that language is a code for the cultural agreement of experience, and that experience "drives" someone to make a word for it.

Many people are afraid of going crazy in some way. They seem to have the urge to reinforce themselves against this fear. Most people merely remember their personality. I'm not sure that doing this is the best remedy for this fear!

I'm very curious about those who have had many 'unusual experiences' of altered consciousness or awareness, (as I had when only thirteen) who managed to find a way to recocile them with their sense of purpose and meaning through the course of their life.

I have just had someone who was a fast and close friend, who took an unforgivable offense at something that I mentioned about her. I made the mistake of assuming that she was proud of her "freebie" lifestyle, when it seems she wanted to keep the sources of her financial life secret.

I have evolved a conviction that "I only hurt myself." It's the idea that I am responsible for the hurt I feel because I am the one that administered the hurt by reacting the way I did.

It's an idea that assigns the possibility that I could have reacted differently. Nowadays, I never say, "you made me feel..." to anyone.
Blog Archive
Blog Archive
Categories
Categories
Links
Links
Voicebox
Voicebox
Voicebox
About Me
About Me
Loading