Then there is the fact that it is approaching the end of February and the next phase of “the card deck project” is not really underway.  Sure I have done a few things, but not enough to get something going in the wholesale market.  That could be it?

There is also the way that an artist has to be self-motivated and find some structure in her days.  When to eat, exercise, write, research the next step, make stuff, and most importantly, make space for the inspiration.  This could be it?

A female cardinal has just landed at the bird feeder right outside the window where I am sitting and writing.  She is a beautiful red-orange with a brilliant yellow-red beak.  Her head feathers are bouncing up and down and she bobs for her breakfast.  She is in one sense calm and in another on edge, ready to fly at any moment. I wonder if she has come to find me? If she is my Grace?  I do not hear the other voices in my head right now and I notice that I have finally exhaled.  This is it.

For me, this message to remember to hold things loosely and lightly is so important. I am SO NOT a technology person and the whole world operating on Facebook, Twitter, blogging, etc. is not really comfortable for me. Comfortable is this easy chair that I am sitting in right now. My morning coffee by my side, my dog curled up in my lap, the heavy rain and wind providing an awesome background for this Monday morning. Discomfort for me is the way I cannot figure out how to write this post directly into the blog, cannot figure out how to “tweet” people on a regular enough basis so that I would get hundreds of followers like my friend, Gretchen, and my complete inability to post things with pictures on Facebook or any other techy tool like that.
AHHHH, taking a breath as that was quite a long sentence.

That is what lack of comfort feels like in my body: one huge run on sentence!

So, for this moment, I borrow the Hold it Loosely and Lightly card, I grab my tight focuser and release it from my tight knit brow, take one long slow deep breath, and I exhale twice as long.

The wind and rain have stopped. Another Monday miracle reveals itself to me!

Angel Messenger: Hold It Loosely & Lightly

Once again I’m sitting in my office wondering what the hell I’m doing here. Are you starting to see a pattern here? Don’t get me wrong: it’s not that I hate the work I do. I like making technology work.

“Too much confusion. I can’t get no relief.”

Trouble is that I see “making it work” from an incredibly idealistic vantage point. And I attach urgency to getting it working. In my original neurosis around this urgency, I left no room for genuine creativity and play.

“No reason to get excited…”

It’s taken me almost 30 years to transform this stressed out approach to my job into one that’s merely over-serious. To those of you who are easy-going, this will seem like no great feat.

Easy Focus round card from the InterPlay Inspiration Deck

“There are many here among us
That feel that life is but a joke”

To me, it was nearly insurmountable. Even after many years working and playing through this, I frequently have to remind myself about what’s really important. And none of it turns out to be “stuff.” In the end, I value my own well-being and my relationships the most. Easy to forget. Easy to remember.

“But you and I we’ve been through that
And this is not our fate”

Yeah. I get it. The call to easy focus really is … well, easy. Of course, today was my day to draw the Easy Focus card from Anita Bondi’s InterPlay Inspiration Deck.  Go figure.  The Deck knows me almost as well as I know myself!

“So let us not talk falsely now
The hour is getting late”

Is it ever too late to wake up to valuing what’s really valuable? No. But, the sooner and more often I wake up to it, the more time I have to enjoy it.

“Outside in the cold distance…”

I’m headed for some enjoyment now!

(Thanks to Bob Dylan for the still-relevant All Along the Watch Tower.)

Inner Authority card in The InterPlay Inspiration Deck

I’m not sure that the cold is gone yet. Maybe my self-care is lagging. How well is my transition into self-fathering going, then? Not as well as I’d like.

My dad was a Protestant (Christian Church – Disciples of Christ) minister and I guess he still is in his retirement. To me, it seemed like he was always there for other people. He’s been a great example to me of an open-hearted man. I still strive to open and soften my heart the way I’ve seen him do. And I would say that he’s done some great self-care in retirement: traveling to many places around the globe while continuing to work part time. I would say that both of these pursuits are dear to him and he does well to go after them with gusto — which is exactly what he is doing.

Shuffling The InterPlay Inspiration Deck

But, back to me… I’m looking for some inspiration to make today’s transition or maybe just to determine what this transition looks like. Yes. I’ll be pulling a card from the InterPlay Inspiration Deck to help me gain some direction. I notice that Monday’s selection “Inner Authority” with its yellow sun is still on top, so I shuffle the deck even more than I usually do.

Surprise! It’s “On Behalf Of” with the cool dragonfly symbol. The colors are enticing. The stylized body seated in lotus position frames the green dragonfly.

Okay. I don’t get it. Why would I get this card today? Don’t I just need to take care of myself at the moment? Guess I’d better read the story on the back. Here’s the phrase that most catches my attention:

On Behalf Of round card from the InterPlay Inspiration Deck

“She sees everyone who has shared their pain with her bathed in warmth and love.”  Nice.  That’s the kind of acceptance I observed in my dad and in the literally hundreds of InterPlayers who have done Dances On Behalf Of for me.  Now that’s music to my internal ears.

What if I were to approach myself the way On Behalf Of (from the InterPlay Inspiration Deck) does?  This small, round card has so much to teach me.  Not that the universe hasn’t tried to bring me this noticing before.  My dad modeled it for me.  All those Dancers On Behalf Of showed me the possibility of bringing this “warmth and love” to myself.  I created my mission in the men’s work in 2002 that incorporates this open-heartedness:  “I open my heart to create a world where I and others are enlivened to appreciate and co-create beauty.”  For whatever reason, I waited for this round card to be my real teacher.  I am grateful.  I am inspired.

I don’t even know what my current transition looks like.  And already it seems less intimidating just knowing that I can bring the open heart I long to bring to others to myself.  How cool is that?

May I bless myself with this kind of ease around my current transitions and adaptations to the changes around and within me.  I bless myself.

Creative blessings to you all.

Dear Anita,

Just needed to get back to you once I had a chance to study your little gift.  What a treasure trove!  Because they are labeled in such vivid ways, ideas from the deck – soft focus, babbling etc. – spontaneously pop to mind in the midst of my day to guide and inspire, like friends. This project was clearly a labor of love on your part to capture and convey useful, healing ideas in ways that stick in memory, enabling them to effectually enter daily life through application.  And that’s the name of the game in the end – living it!!

What is all the more wonderful is to have witnessed you and Stan embodying these directives among us so successfully – for years.  Thank you for this joyful, enticing, practical gift!

Love,

Chery

Here’s my crackpot theory:  people who in some way have “not been heard” are made most vulnerable by playing with creativity or performance techniques centered in the voice.  Even if I’m wrong about generalizing, my own personal experience bears this out.  And I’m inspired to reflect on this now because I’ve just completed my first workshop with Rhiannon at Hollyhock Retreat.

Making way for the trail at Hollyhock Resort

She’s an awesome teacher and performer (live and on CD).  I’m finding renewed passion in myself as I enter into these playful techniques that she has been formulating for years.

It only took me a few hours of the workshop to be feeling deeply.  My inner turmoil came to the surface when I was drafted into the role of beat-box in a quintet.  Beat-box vocal percussion has been an elusive form for me.  I’ve taken workshops in it, but have never been successful at making the techniques come to life in my mouth and vocal cords.

So, when it was my turn to be the “drummer”, I accepted the challenge.  When it was over, I judged that I’d done poorly and felt ashamed.  My impulse was to hide out and minimize the experience.

So I chose another direction.  I outed my shame to the group in the sharing time.

Sunrise at Hollyhock

Bringing shame out into the open (in a safe group of people anyway) is almost always a cleansing and cathartic experience for me — and this time was true to form.

In subsequent improvisations where I needed to be the drummer, I used variations on TaKeDiMi: a vocal form in which I am more capable and practiced.  (Thanks to Rhiannon and everyone else in that workshop community for creating the space for this to happen. There were many more examples of this sort of cracking open at Rhiannon’s workshop.  They were experienced by other memebers of our community of 16, so they are not mine to share. It’s enough to say that my experience was not an isolated happening.)

The fact that the singing involved is spontaneous (improvised) is important as you can imagine.  This is the song of the heart.  That call of longing from the core.  Vocal improvising cracks me open to my own yearning to be heard.  Singing greases the wheel of desire that’s been waiting to roll out.

This is part of what calls me to improvised music and creating “songs” from improvisations.

Playful blessings…

The 20-some must be 23.  The last trio shares a single card.

We’ve been improvising (pure InterPlay) for hours.  Stories.  Movement.  Intuition.  As the card slides into my finger tips, I accept that now-familiar picture and story.  It’s the Practice card.  Again.

Each person in the circle, in turn, shares what the card brings out from their life or experiences of the day.  Many quote from the card.  I repeat the phrase (again): “She knows that to change your life, you just need to change your practice.”  I enjoy that the message is an inspiration, a blessing.  Not the heavy way that I’ve held this sentiment other times.

InterPlay Inspiration Deck display

The sharing is beautiful.  People cry.  There’s a tear in my eye.  Anita is across the circle from me.  She’s in the trio sharing the Incrementality card with two other women.  She is telling us her experience of seeing the cards used in this circle in this way.

I am inspired.

“Atul said.” or “Atul recommended.” or,( and I think this was probably the clincher), ” Atul really made me angry today.”

Before the e-mail about the Dawali holiday it had been weeks since I had heard from Atul. The cards were suppose to have shipped two weeks prior and I was a bit worried about what had happened. His e-mail said that there was a delay because the 42 page, 2.75 inch booklet was sticking out a millimeter over the 3.85 inch circle cards, and that was making it hard to shrink wrap them. These numbers are important because they were the bane of my existence for weeks, as we went back and forth trying to convince the printers that we had the sizes exactly right to fit into our 4 inch packaging tins.

We, would be Marci (my friend and designer,) and myself. She has also worked tirelessly for months on this project with me! There would be no deck without her!

I began to panic! Why was the booklet sticking out? I had paid $1000.00 to have a special die cut for the circles to make sure everything would fit perfectly. Now, they were about to ship and they were not perfect? And, they were only at 50% heat for the shrink wrapping! ( Not that I had any idea what that meant.) All I knew was that it threw me into an immediate stress response that had me shaking. I just sat at the computer wide-eyed, vibrating and spewing a long litany of the details of a process that no one really wants to hear about; a process that has been too much of my world for too many months! Stan just stood there saying, “It will be fine.” He clearly did not understand. Finally, I calmed down enough to hear the voice of a much higher Self saying, “Pick a card. That is what you made them for.”

On Behalf Of is what I picked. At first I hemmed and hawed, still stuck in my victimization. Then I turned the card over and read the story:

“When you call On Behalf Of there is always time for a cup of tea and a bit of conversation. She will make time to stop and listen. If you are at her house, she will offer you special paper and a beautiful amethyst fountain pen to write down everything that is troubling or upsetting you. She places all the papers in a dragonfly jar on her kitchen windowsill. Every week she opens the window on a bright sunny day and sends the concerns off to the light…”

no more concerns!

There is more to the story, but that is the part that made me stop and exhale. I got up and found a beautiful piece of paper and wrote down everything that was troubling and upsetting and scary (okay, just about the card project!). I put the paper in one of the tins and set it on the windowsill. Yesterday, the sun was shining and it was 75 degrees! I opened the tin and put it outside on the deck. That is where I found it this morning. It is empty now and I trust that the beautiful paper with all of my concerns written on it, has been carried off to the Light!

it is as if they are long awaited guests that i have to prepare for-relatives that i have not seen in awhile.  my relationship to them is kind of like that though. for months and months they were so present to me, day in and day out they demanded my attention.  they required patience, dedication and time, in large quantities.  and then one day they left and went to a far away land for a very long journey.  we had some contact at first as they got settled in but then, nothing…….weeks and weeks of nothing.  i kind of lost touch with them, found it difficult to focus on them or even to think about them.

then on monday, october 19th, chris (who works for fedex), called from missouri.  as an aside, he was so friendly and chatty that for a moment i almost considered the midwest as a possible place to relocate.  i am, obviously, easily impressed.  chris is the one that is really responsible for the clean porch.  he is the one that told me that fedex was slated to deliver on wednesday at 4:30pm.  he was getting information from me so that customs in new delhi, india could release the boxes to come to the united states. they left india on monday, went to memphis, TN and are – according to the fedex website-intransit to delaware water gap, PA.  even though there are no cards, i think a picture of the porch could be in order……..as an added bonus, that’s me in the glass of the door.  stay tuned!