mermaidcamp
Keeping current in wellness, in and out of the water
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World of Creation
November 18, 2012
Mollie’s prayer shawl
I was in temple yesterday much longer than I might have liked. This time, however, Rabbi Frank rocked the universe with his profound statements about Shabbat. The need to rest and restore is a universal requirement for anyone who wants to attain a spiritually inspired life. The Jewish practice of turning away from the worldly work and habits for 24 hours a week is a basic way to tune in to divine guidance regularly. If this is never done, people become convinced that they are completely at cause for everything that happens, and must work harder to control outcomes. Nothing could be more delusional.
The phrases he used were poetic and charged with symbolism. This is the kind of wording that sticks in the mind of listeners. I paraphrase his message here: For 6 days we live in the world of time, one day we step out of time and live in space. For 6 days we deal with all the creations of the world. For one day we deal with the world of creation. For me, this was a stellar explanation of the need to reverse the flow of that everyday grind to find inner guidance. If you think of God the creator in heaven, or believe you are a creative part of the universe, always guided by eternal grace, the concept is still powerful. Be still and know. Go Rabbi Frank.
Jon Thomas
November 17, 2012
— 3 Comments
Jon at Carlsbad
I was introduced to Jon Thomas by my friend Cathy Murakami, generally considered to be the pickiest woman on the earth. I, for one, will go try something based on her recommendations because I hardly ever meet anyone with standards as high as my own. Jon practices his healing arts at Cat’s studio in Encinitas, Synergy Systems. I really enjoyed my session last month. It left me feeling super balanced and energized. I learned his style of Tui Na is distinct because he learned it from his father in law, a famous Tai Chi master from Shanghai. It is a very funny combination because Jon’s soft West Virginia accent and his very unassuming calm presence reveal neither the recently retired Marine, nor the Asian powerhouse of healing he really is. Once you get to know him it all makes sense. He is fully embedded in his wife’s family as a regular kind of Chinese guy.
My treatment yesterday was in my room right on the beach, which was not too shabby. I also was able to tune in better to the way the system works by talking while he worked. Ligaments are the focus of this work. To balance and restore life energy ( aka chi) to the body, the ligaments are carefully worked and compared to each other. During the time he worked I was able to feel amazing changes by noticing where he was touching me. This time at the end of the session I felt super great, and woke up today feeling wonderful too. He works on people to cure problems, but in my own case feeling good to feeling incredibly good also can be his cup of tea. I am already wondering if I can fit one more treatment into my weekend visit. If I lived out here I would see him regularly. He, in my opinion, rules, and I haven’t even gotten to the Tai Chi master part yet.
Ishvara-Pranidhana
November 16, 2012
— 2 Comments
PSO at Heinz Hall
Last year I was very lucky to see the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra perform Handel’s Messiah as a fully staged opera. Everything about it was remarkable, even the serendipity of finding an excellent seat the day of the performance by just noticing the box office while I was on a walk. I grew up in Pittsburgh, but the Heinz Hall was new to me. Syria Mosque where I saw them in the 1960’s was gone like Forbes Field. In the lobby there was a great display about the life of Handel and the composition of the Messiah. He signed it SDG, in other words, he gave full credit to God for the music. I had seen this phrase before. It was written in German (those incredibly fancy letters you can’t read) on the outside of the school in Langweis, Switzerland, a small alpine village where my friend Steffi Burger lives. I love all that writing on the outside of old Swiss buildings, including hex signs to protect the contents of the buildings. They declare their faith and ask for protection in bold ( but hard to read) statements. I had some trouble with the reading, but was sure God was involved (most of them are about God and work) so I asked my friend, who also could not read it. We asked Walter Engle, whose family had crossed the Davos pass with their cows to settle the area centuries ago. He informed us that it said all glory to God (SDG).
School in Langweis
The protestant reformation was very into this idea and that is why it landed on the wall of the school. I relate it to the Niyama, or internal practice, of surrender to God as it is written in Sanskrit, Ishvara-Pranidhana. Apparently Handel went into a kind of trance and did speed composition under the heavy influence of spirit when he wrote the Messiah, signed it SDG and everyone knew what he meant. Bach was into this also. In yoga practice Ishvara is about trusting the divine flow, not so different from thy will be done. I wonder if by being a big student of linguistics I have stumbled upon the lowest common denominator of all religions. Surrender to God.
Apathy, the Mother of All Crime
November 15, 2012
— 5 Comments
fledgling hawk at the condo village
We know there is fraud and corruption all around us. We are aware that we pay these highly disputed tax dollars to government employees less than interested in serving the public. We know laws are broken all the time because there is not even a tiny itsy bitsy effort to enforce them. I am not sure why we have so many (but that is another subject) if they are all just recorded somewhere in case lawyers need to use them. The public believes that somehow having cops is having law enforcement, but this highly simplistic notion is every criminal’s best friend. People allow bold and disgusting crime to happen before their very eyes without trying to stop it just because apathy is so strong that they are basically controlled by it. There is no expectation that our surroundings can be kept crime free, but rather a new normal of home security and paranoid, anti social collection of weaponry. Full disclosure, I live in Arizona, so I am speaking about my own ‘hood.
I live in a condo village that looks like a fake Taos Pueblo in central Tucson. There are only 30 homes, a pool, a jacuzzi and a small guest parking area. For the last 10 years the HOA board has had the same two members every year. They return to office, even though they are not even known to most residents or owners by keeping completely out of touch. They meet without any interaction with the other homeowners, send a paper newsletter with vague and meaningless report of the meeting in the mail, and continue to survive in this isolated way because they discovered apathy. When one of them celebrated the death of her father by stealing $50 from our dues money and making a donation to a hospice in her father’s name, I called to inform her stealing dues money is both disgusting and illegal. She hung up on me. I learned by asking for neighbors to help get them out of office that the most important element of life for them is denial and ignorance about what is happening in the real estate market and in their surroundings. I reported the theft of the $50 to the attorney general of AZ who responded that they did not handle such cases. I inquired at the city council office to locate the office that could handle this crime. The real estate department no longer helps HOAs with crime infested boards, and the fire department is now in some way attached, but there is no resolution other than to get the homeowners to get the stolen money returned. The homeowners’ prime goal was continued apathy, so that was not workable.
They continued in office and started running a charity scam in our public areas. They solicit food, money , and any kind of junk to their keep the homeless outside campaign. They do not believe in supporting the existing shelters and non profits that serve the homeless community. They believe in trashing the environment of their neighborhood, and some other neighborhood with a public park, in order to feed the homeless outside like animals. They think they are entitled to run a charity scam blocking our driveways and driving down the price of our real estate value because they know that apathy will protect them. They have run this operation for years in broad daylight begging on the internet for donations. I have reported the crime to the IRS, AZ revenue, the County Health Dept, the Ward 3 council office, and of course the TPD. None of these entities cares if we have a charity scam operating in our neighborhood. Neither do the owners of the homes that have lost more than half of their value while these board members made this special jurisdiction for themselves in our public areas. The neighborhood watch cop tells a story of neighbors watching a house be cleared out by thieves, but never report it because nobody knows their neighbors. Here, the homeowners sat silently inside their own homes while their very own property value and quality of life was willfully destroyed and decided that it must be fate. I own a lot across the street from the HOA property with a rising value, while these home values have sunk like rocks. Foreclosure has come and stayed.
I do not believe in competing unfairly with legitimate non profits that need all the help they can get today. It is easy to pitch in, volunteer, or donate to many worthy and wholesome programs that assist the homeless, rather than demean them ( and possibly give them food poisoning) in a public park. I would think that most people would be grossed out by this, but strangers drive through and donate junk without thinking, “What am I doing in a residential condo village blocking the fire lane to do my charity work ?” But then, those people are just dropping off a few old socks they no longer want. The homeowners have been willing to loose their socks just to stay apathetic.
Triberr is Toastmasters for Bloggers
November 14, 2012
— 2 Comments
The blog sharing, syndicating, and supporting system known as Triberr is the blogging parralell to Toastmasters for public speaking. i was invited to a tribe about a year ago with my not so regularly published Tumblr blog. I met cool people, read their blogs regularly and tweeted them to my mini following. We do bond as a tribe, and some are founded around specific areas of interest. The personality of each tribe is vastly different as are the styles of each chief. Everyone is a chief if the initiative is taken to grow and lead a tribe of one’s own. I enjoyed my first tribal experience, and noticed that the tribe existed even after our chief quit blogging and abandoned the tribe entirely. This indicated the power of the structure, the system, the potential of place we do all of this syndication…Triberr. The obvious limitations of being in a tribe with no cheif, and having only one person in my own tribe,(who really had not fully registered or blogged) lead me to a fabulous decision. I made up my mind to meet my only tribal member in New York City for the first TribeupNYC event to check the vibe in person. I am pleased with my decision to go for all kinds of reasons, including the fact that I enjoyed lower Manhattan in a pre Sandy state of bliss and perfection. There was no sign of impending doom.
I had risen before dawn for many years to attend Toastmasters meetings at a hospital to fine tune my public speaking skills. Our diverse and dedicated group proved to me how many different reasons there can be for wanting to speak in public. I already was a total ham, and won every week the extemporaneous table topic event. I covered my office with blue ribbons from table talk. Conspicuously absent from the ribbon display were ribbons for prepared speeches. I maybe got one 3rd place…or none. This is easily explained by my fellow Toastmasters’ diligent hard work. Like ants they attended conferences and competitions, put hours of prep into the speeches done in the meetings. I was the grasshopper who did little homework because the table topic ribbons looked good enough to me, and I knew I would win another one every week. Resting on my improvisational laurels yet again, I learned a lot. I thought the critique and evaluations skills were of the utmost importance. The supportive structure resembles the blogging tribe in the simplicity of the mission. Both Toastmasters and Triberr are designed to improve by practice and critique.
Triberr is a modern-day literary soiree with bloggers tribing up to read and share each others’ work. It has the same individuality that each Toastmasters chapter offers, and many participants are in more than one tribe, just like active Toastmasters who speak daily at different meetings. It has the same few stalwarts who keep it going, and the same number of flakes who come and go without much impact. Toastmasters is modestly priced, as is Triberr Prime, the paid version of the system. I am working my way up to Priming it. I have grown my own tribe since the conference on the equinox, and been invited to join some others. I love the way it exposes us to each other and to an unknown set of others based on our own cultivation of a news stream. There is no doubt in my mind that this power is working well for me, and even has the potential of moving me out of the table topic section of the creative world. I do really appreciate the thorough work and preparation dedicated to the blogs I am reading from my tribe mates. Perhaps I will try it.
In the meantime, I have dedicated my Tumblr blog to a new tribe I formed around the Three Book Diet cult I have joined as a superfan of the ever brilliant Brother Brogan. The ability to have a book club about an intense interaction with the material rather than a cursory and meaningless consumption of words is something brand new. It is the opposite of the high volume book club…..no review and abandon…not this year..we will live our books, live our yoga, live our true Epicurean literary lives. I do remember that at the end of Trust Agents there was mention of using what you have just read rather than hurrying away to more reading. Chris and Julian are teachers, not so much authors, even though they have written these great books. Business Design is the new community management. By styling his own business as interactive with ease it is my opinion that Chris has figuratively reopened the ancient Greek schools of philosophy that required direct transmission from the master. Socrates did not believe in the written word, thought it would ruin education. I am sure he would freak right out if he saw PowerPoint. I think that Triberr and the book dieting cult can combine very nicely. Ironically diet books that tell you how to eat are always best sellers, but nobody I have seen has chosen a diet book for the book diet.
How to Become a Super Model
November 13, 2012
— 1 Comment
Find the essence of who you are meant to be through refinement and distillation.
Mollie Lu and the still
Keep your options open.
Mollie Lu
Enjoy the ride.
Jumps for Joy
Take some calculated risks.
Letting Go
Remember to thank the fam.
Max, Mollie, and Ben
State that you are one, and firmly maintain it.
Mollie Lu Looks at You
Lifeboats on the Ship of Dreams
November 12, 2012
— 2 Comments
stormy seas and lifeboat
There are 4 lifeboats on the ship that sails through the darkness of dreams. Instinctively you decide to trust one of them in panic, in fear, in the dark. Dawn reveals the name and the nature of the little craft you chose as your vehicle to take you to a safe shore. The secure/happy boat contains anchor, oars, personal floatation devices, and provisions. It has been named Providence. The insecure/unhappy boat has no anchor, oars or provisions. The personal floatation devices are inadequate and the hull has a hole in it. The name painted on this lifeboat is Fate. The other two boats are ready for the happy /insecure and lastly for the secure/ unhappy. The happy/insecure boat has a mainsail, a jib, provisions that include rum, personal floatation devices, but no rudder, anchor or oars. This little lifeboat bears the name Hope. The secure but unhappy boat has provisions and an anchor, nothing else. It has been named Greed. If you find yourself in stormy seas, which lifeboat will you choose, and where will you sail with it? Have you been lead to believe that you must choose between security and happiness? Can you adjust your definitions of happiness and security to fit into your dream voyage when you are in both stormy and calm seas?
Claim Your Acronym
November 12, 2012
To enhance communication of any kind it is necessary to address a specific audience, even if it is digital. In the book Impact Equation I have been presented with a concept that I have been living for the last few years. Brother Brogan proposes that for an idea to evolve and be refined the qualities that cause audience to be interested in your message must be considered. He mentions that presenting in public with instant feedback from direct observation is entirely different from the digital world of presentation. This is the understatement of the decade as well as the theme of my study and effort for the last 3 or 4 years. I have always taught in person to groups and individuals. If I say so myself I have done this so much that I do instinctively know how to teach and drive a message home to people I can see and hear. However, my in person methodology involves much humor and stealth to distract and weave fairy tales of deep lessons. With real live people it is easy to stop when you are bombing, change course, redirect. It is digitally difficult, since we are communicating blindly with no visual of our intended audience. We now have no idea why or how anyone pays us attention, but need to fill in that blank in some cohesive way.
To plant a memorable seed in the digital arena that is both considered and spread by evangelists, there must be an easy way to evangelize. This is exactly the point at which I, as the charismatic in person snake oil saleswoman, completely failed to execute my core beliefs to what I know to be a very large audience wanting to feel good and feel healthy at the same time. I always look to the ancestors for deeper meaning. My parents were extreme acronym adopters in the 1950’s. The created codes such as SUS ( sit up straight) and COP (chin over plate) to give me orders in public and at home about how to enjoy dining with them. Like many other of my parents’ futuristic practices, virtually nobody else I knew did such a thing. My giant aversion to all acronyms can be directly traced to eating with my parents. This does not serve me at all and can not hurt the feelings of my dead parents. OMG, is it ever time to stop boycotting the acronym.
Starting from scratch, one would have acro’ed in initially before going out and getting and international trademark, if one had been aware. Since I was in the less than aware group, and only recently liberated to appreciate the beauty and power of the acronym, I must start where I am. Floatli is my trademark and my invention for water exercise. It is for those who like to feel good while moving, and appreciate the fact that they can move. Today I step into this century and happily debut the Floatli acronym:
- First
- Love
- Own
- Ass
- Totally
- Like
- It is
This means that taking care of your own body for the most pleasurable healthy outcome will involve radical acceptance of what is. The sensual pleasure of water as an exercise medium is empowering. It can be a haven for injured athletes, a playground, and a social bonding agent. If your first ( and maybe only) consideration is the flawed appearance of your bathing suit look, the good feelings stop before they begin. I am an evangelist for loving your own ass, because if you don’t nobody else will.
British Bible Belt
November 11, 2012
— 8 Comments
William and Lucinda Jane
My great grandfather, William Ellison Taylor, was a farmer and a preacher in the Church of Christ in Texas after the Civil War. He had beautiful handwriting which I have in the form of his Confederate pension application. He was shot in the knee at Second Manassas, but still had to get back to Selma, Alabama. He survived to marry Lucinda Jane Armer, who ironically is a descendant of the Plantagenets. They moved to Texas along with Lucinda’s parents after the war.
The place and time Lucinda and William lived was an echo of the dramas of their ancestors who had Bible issues of biblical proportion back in their homeland of England. Lucinda’s family was playing music in the court of Henry VIII when he killed some wives and made himself the head of the new Church of England. Other members of her family were Plantagenets, being royal.
King of France Louis IX (1215 – 1270)
is your 21st great grandfather
Son of King of France
Son of Philip The
Daughter of Charles
Daughter of Jeanne
Son of Philippa
Daughter of John of Gaunt – Duke of
Daughter of Joan
Son of Duchess of York Lady Cecily
Son of Henry
Son of Henry
Son of John
Son of Francis Gabriell
Daughter of John
Son of Elizabeth
Son of Richard
Son of George
Son of George
Daughter of David
Daughter of Minerva Truly
Daughter of Sarah E
Mary Tudor disrupted the reign of the Plantagenets and made martyrs of William E Taylor’s ancestors. The big problem was the way everyone felt about the Bible and who should read it. William Taylor may have been named for his 8th great grand uncle, William Tyndale, who was burned at the stake for translating and publishing the Bible in English. His niece Margaret was married to Rev. Rowland Taylor, also burned at the stake for his religious convictions. The British Bible belt was worse that just burning crosses…..they actually burned the people they found to be heretical.
William Tyndale (1507 – )
his 8th great grand uncle
Father of William
Daughter of John
Son of Margaret
Son of Thomas
Son of Thomas
Son of Col James
Son of John
Son of John
Son of John
Son of John Nimrod
Son of John Samuel
Certainly William and Lucinda lived the Bible belt philosophy. I went to the Church of Christ a couple of times with my cousins when I was visiting in Houston as a kid. It was very foreign to my church experience, being fully stripped of all remnants of fancy dressing. No pipe organ, no choir, no stained glass, very austere, and they went there twice on Sunday and again on Wednesdays. I did not relate to the whole thing. I grew up in Pittsburgh in a post industrial country club culture with cocktails. I never understood the cousins and all that Bible stuff because my parents did not do it. I think I am starting to know why they still had that in the Taylor family. Once somebody dies for something, the least the family can do is go along with the belief for a few generations.
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