Dancing As Fast As I Can

If there is one movie that is embedded in my heart, it is the original “Red Shoes” with Moirra Sheraer.

I even found and bought a huge, framed poster of the Red Shoes that has hung on my wall most of my life.

After I saw the movie, I insisted my Mom paint my ballet slippers red! The only paint she could find to stick to the leather well enough was bright red nail polish.

Those red slippers eventually found their way to the back of my Daddy’s desk drawer, where they stayed my entire life.

Every so often, I would sneak into his office and pull the drawer open as far as it would go without falling out and find those small ballet slippers. I would pick them up and inspect them for the magic they have always held for me. The smell of the fine leather never seemed to leave them.

I would think of how lovely I could dance because of them.

I don’t know when I put the “shoes” on in my Virtual World, but it would seem that I do not know how to be free of them now, so I will continue to dance until I can dance no more.

How does this happen?

Hanging On Yet

I am here and wonder lately
if I am dying quickly now
without the will
to keep fighting.

The thought and memory
of your bleeding shoulder
makes me sort of smile
(you will understand this,
no one else ever can).

I think it is regret
for the loss of the mind
that touched my mind
that so flattens my heart now.

The chasing, the wonder
of new things and places
of life through the eyes
of another who could actually "see"
the green flashes that I miss so much.

Chorky says hello and
that he misses you too.

Oh yes, some will nail me
to a St Andrews cross
for this post today,
when it is only you
who can do that
and make a difference.

Hanging on my my handcuffs.

A Book By Its Cover

Sometimes the most important people in our lives seem to be the most unlikely. If we are wise we will learn from them, because all too soon they leave us and no one can ever replace them in our lives. Like my Muse who has inspired me yet again. Thank you friend.

Sid & the Gummy Bears

I dreamed last night, for the first time in so long I can’t even remember the last time I could recall a dream. Some things have happened since the last post here, including the real world pulling me to itself with fearsome meat hooks. But for those who spend too much time in the virtual world, I have good news for you, returning to the real world is much like it is with riding a bicycle, you really don’t forget how…and because of the virtual world “exercises” some of your intuitions are heightened in ways you don’t expect (there must be SOME commercial gain from all those hours playing with this grown-up pinball machine!).

And in my dream last night as all things in dreams are it was a bit jumbled but part of it was very vivid. It was about Sid Abraham (who has gone to Glory many years ago). He was sitting in a booth in a diner that I used to frequent in my university days and it was a great surprise to see him there. He was, as always, surrounded by an assortment of food and a near mountain of papers on the seat and on the table before him. I was so surprised because I realised the minute that I saw him that I had been remiss in spending any time with him or even calling him or writing a little note to him for a long time.

He knew I felt embarrassed by this (we all know this don’t we when we bump into someone we have ignored with our friendship and they know we know too) and did what Sid always did, he made sure he sent me that almost undetectable message that it did not matter between REAL friends how often you saw them or wrote to them. He sort of got up from his seat, which was quite difficult with all the things surrounding him – he intended to give me one of his warm embracing hugs.

I could see he was older and shorter and more tired, as old age seems to do to many (is it most or all) people, so I rushed to him instead and paid little mind to the paper mounds and the left over plates of assorted food stuffs and hugged him first. So warm his hugs. Unlike anyone I have ever known, but closest to my Mom’s hugs that were so precious to me.

I pushed some of the papers aside on the bench seat opposite him and just looked at his jolly, round face and relaxed for the first time in ages. We caught up as they say. I went up to the cashier to pay for his meal as a surprise for him and when I turned around, he was gone.

His papers were gone but the dishes remained, including one sitting on the seat next to where he had been sitting. I sat down in his empty place and felt the warmth from his body so recently here, found several blank white intex cards and just tried to see things once more from his perspective and found a silver bowl there on the seat.

Creativity & Politics

I remember Sid so well. I remember how he introduced me to a new approach to creativity and invited me to attend my first of many CPSI (Creative Problem Solving Institute) Gatherings in Buffalo New York (the creativity studies centre of the world, it seems). There, I met some of the most wonderful people and challenged the limitations I had "sensibly" put on my own thinking.

And he helped me apply my natural intuition and creativity to the new dangers of the corporate environment I had so recently entered. I was severely unprepared for the posturing, positioning and politics that surrounded me and promised to end my very privileged career too soon. (and this actually resulted in a life time of study of corporate politics, although as some of you would know, it is still a struggle, because knowing all about it and being able to manoeuvre through the murky waters is never the same!)

Archetype

Sid also introduced me to Jungian psychology in an out-of-book (not to be confused with out-of-body, though close) experience. I ended up studying the topic of archetypes and eventually worked with financial institutions and other large corporates helping them identify and understand their archetype in their world and how it related to deeply embedded behaviour patterns in their customer relationships with them (and how improve and better leverage those relationships) -- well that was always the hope anyway.

It was wonderful; and I even got to work with one of the leaders of this specialty field, Gil Rapaille. I don’t even know if he is still around, but I sucked his brain till it hurt my lips -- just to learn everything he would share with me – which was mountains of understanding and insight.

Mom

Then there was what I learned from Sid about my Mom. My Mom was a troubled woman and she took those troubles out on me. But, by the grace of God alone, I grew up wildly optimistic and hopeful in my little dark world. And no one in my family could understand it and Mom could not squash it out of me either -- although she truly tried -- which used to anger her more than she usually was – which was a lot.

One very cold and dreary February morning, with the Buffalo snow drifted to waist-level over night, I awoke to my Saturday and took the last straw from my Mom and, like a child, bolted from the house running away from the heated words I feared I would say to her.

The next day I was back at work and went straight to Sid’s office and closed the door and like Yoda behind a desk, Sid listened as he always did to my frustration at not understanding yet ANOTHER thing about my life.

I poured out my heart to him, confessing as if this was side by side in one of those movie sets where you’re in a Roman Catholic Church in one of those little rooms with the peep hole door so you can confess to the priest in the other little room that shares the peep hole door, and get to share your deepest darkest sins of the week and then are awarded a "hale Mary".

Sid did what he did best, he listened quietly and purposefully, intently and with love.

Now that is the true value of a good friend to me. He listened. I spoke, then cried, shouted a little and cried some more with utter frustration at WHY my Mom hated me so much (the reason I ran away will remain masked for the time being, but it was her attempt with her trusty broad sword to break my ribs as she ground my heart to mince, for the umpteenth time).

Spent from the telling of my tale I stopped talking and dabbed my eyes with Kleenex, kindly convenient in Sid’s office and blew my noise (not so lady like but effective) and sat back in the uncomfortable chair and waited.

Sid, you see, never launched into his analysis until he had pondered it for a bit (if you ever have a ponderer in your life, keep them!!). He moved some things around on his desk and pulled a white index card from his breast pocket, and began to write on it. He would look up occasionally at me and reach over to the silver bowl on his desk and offer me a gummy bear and then take one himself.

It seemed to take forever for him to get to a point of sharing what he was thinking and I knew all my eagerness or agitation for a solution would not help his process…so I thought about how this man has stayed for over 30 years in this mammoth financial institution, rising from a lowly teller (which when he joined the bank would have been a lowly job indeed and one with no computers!!)

He looked jolly. He moved through the halls more like a snail (do not remind me of the salt please). He knew everyone. Everyone knew him and there was not one office anywhere where he was not welcomed with open and hopeful arms. His hair was thinning and he wore dark-rimmed glasses and was far too heavy for his height and reminded me (honestly) of a happy garden gnome). He was also the only man I ever met in a corporate setting who always wore short-sleeved shirts and rarely a jacket (required anytime you left your office, regardless of your gender).

But he epitomised wisdom! So I waited. No one quite understood how (me) the new “Turk” in the bank has such favour with someone in such demand, but we were friends from the first time he confronted me about avoiding him as trivial in the bank (a painful realisation and the first heavy lesson he taught me – that appearances ARE deceiving in a corporate setting too).

Sid's Wisdom

He looked up at me. Pushed a little away from his desk. Smoothed out the completely smooth index card on his desk and I could hear the dryness of his large hands on the paper. And he began to unlock yet another of my life’s mysteries.

“Your Mom does not hate you, she hates herself.” A paradigm shift of such magnitude, I barely knew where to fit it in my thinking. He continued to tell me of my four choices to deal better with her:

1. I could do as I always did, try not to argue with her and store my anger up until I exploded over and over from her teasing of my weak spots.
2. I could try to ignore her and keep running away.
3. I could argue with her and reason with her for all I was worth.
4. I could just love her with, what is known as, AGAPE love – the love that passes understanding and that is unconditional (the one you hear about at most weddings nowadays. You know the…love is patient, love is kind, is not puffed up stuff)

This was the parsing of a problem by the great Sid. Carefully organised and structured the clarity of his messages and his analysis Stirling.

It changed my life and relationship with my Mom for the rest of her life in regard to me. I chose number four. It escalated her anger toward me for a long time….but she also stopped trying to tease me to anger. (And before she died, I knew it was the right choice too.)

I moved from Buffalo to Australia and left Sid behind although we remained the closest of distant friends until one day his diabetes took him home to be with the Lord.

Silver Bowl

I closed my eyes for just a moment in that dreamed-up diner and imagined the scent of Old Spice (do they still make that?) and remembered how Sid always wore that after-shave cologne.

My hands moved out to rest on the seat on each side of my body and my left one ran into that silver bowl.

I slowly opened my eyes and gently gathered it to my lap and peered down into it. Gummy bears; red and yellow and green ones still resting there for Sid, who was not allowed to eat them ever -- but loved them so much. Sid was a man who taught me so much and gave me hope and love and left me with a love for gummy bears and creativity. I miss him.

Thank you Turner for your words of wisdom and hopefully you will see that I too can write you secret messages to let you know how much you mean to me….you are my new Sid, sans the Gummy bears, the glasses and gnome shape…the wisdom pours from you and inspires me. Thank you so much for “seeing” me.

An Unexpected Birthday Present

Wow. A friend who also has a blog has given me a present: he has stirred me up to write again. Thank you Gorthaur and it makes me miss Turner even more and more as my Muse (where are you?)

Anyway I am going to put some of Gorthaur’s words here and some of my ideas in response. (I was going to answer him in his blog, but my answer got too long), so hopefully this will make sense:

Gorthaur said:

“To my mind there are two types of evil or "shadow." There is personal evil, and there is the collective evil. The "idea" of the collective shadow (or pure evil), for most is an objective reality. Unlike the personal "shadow" which always has hope for redemption often suggested by personal moral effort, the collective shadow leaves one with the idea that no one can stand against it. Many find refuge from the despair this pure evil causes thru their faith and obedience to value systems of their religion or ideologies. Historically this is the way to combat evil.”

I reply:

There is the concept of “sin” and there is the concept of “sins” in the Bible, which is what you have written about here. "Sin" is what entered into the world in the Garden of Eden when Satan tempted Adam through tempting Eve, to wonder if they didn’t actually know more than God did – the attitude and desire to do what is right in your own eyes.

Sin

"Sin" is universal and is no more possible to resist than “Don’t think of a pink elephant” is. As for the condition each one of us lives within in relation to sin, Romans 7 and 8 is the passage we “live” our everydays in as far as every person I have ever met or read about.

Sins

Then there are “sins”. Sins are personal choices that we make moment-by-moment to allow, as one writer puts it, "God to sit in the driver’s seat of my life" or whether I take that place for myself.

Most people worry about the “evil incarnate” – you know the guy (why a guy?) in the red suit with little pointy horns on his forehead, a long tail with an arrow at the end and a pitchfork? Well, the Bible talks about this evil one as an “angel of light”, one that was so beautiful and entrancing that his power was about that concept more than "evil" – to be attractive and therefore tempting -- not to be fearsome and easy to recognise.

It is why we get surprised when we discover we have not resisted evil. (See Bedazzled with Elizabeth Hurley and Brendan Fraser for the amazingly best illustration of this – and Elizabeth plays a very convincingly irresistible "evil" – well for the men at least! Personally, I would be after Brendan in a heartbeat, but that is a different story.)

Gorthaur said:

“Evil has been spiritual and intellectual concerns in human existence since the earliest times. In those olden days, during daylight hours, evil was generally perceived as non-existent. Yet, when the sun disappeared, evil lurked in the menacing shadows. Evil has always been associated with darkness. Much of mythology is permeated with ideas associated with the symbolic and sometimes literal ideas of ‘evil in the darkness.’”

I reply:

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters. Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light.” Genesis 1:1-3

The first improvement God made when He created everything was to separate the light from the darkness.

Let’s face it, if I am going to the bathroom in the middle of the night, I am going to put my fluffy slippers on BEFORE I walk on a floor in the darkness, knowing all those evil creepy crawlies have been running free because it is dark (just flick your lights on in the kitchen in the middle of the night!). Also, men jump out at you in dark alleys and from behind bushes and tend to hurt you. Darkness hides all kinds of evil intentions. Then there is what you do under the cover (and covers) of darkness when you are all alone sometimes (sorry to digress).

So I believe "darkness" is both a symbolic and a literal paradigm for where evil can lurk.

Note I said "CAN"; the greater evil is what we think should STAY in darkness and somehow peeks out and hits us in the face when we don’t expect it, such as what happened on a wonderfully clear day in New York one September 11th or in a school with children and guns.

Gorthaur said:

"To deny evil is foolhardy. Each of us has experienced evil, directly or vicariously - even through impersonal images of the media or fairy tale. Yet some think or teach that evil is not a permanent condition of the human condition. Since St. Augustine, there has existed the idea that evil is nothing but the absence of good. The ultimate conclusion of this idea is that evil can be eradicate by 'good works.' Many religious teachings rests on this concept."

I reply:

Actually, I think it is "evil's" intent and prime activity and key victory to have us think evil doesn't exist. Evil would have us convinced that all is relative and situational and that it is only our thinking that makes it so.

Take away -- for evil's sake -- all parameters. Create confusion about right and wrong. Soften wrong to be -- not only appealing -- but rational, understandable and excuseable. What a victory for evil - to deny it and foist responsibility on anyone or anything else!

And, I am sure there is rejoicing by all evil forces when they survey the numerous bums waving in the air with heads buried in the sand, ostrich style, when it comes to the concept of evil.

Trading Stamps Evil

But in this paragraph, Gorthaur, you have also hit on something I really think is evil. The church of today that has somehow gotten off on the idea of trading stamps.

Trading stamps is an old marketing concept that can be blamed for the many loyalty cards you have stuffing your wallet today. The purpose was to tap into our natural tendency toward self-serving greed and accumulation (creating stacks of money or in this case paper stamps or holes punched in a card). The stated purpose was loyalty, but the hidden purpose was to make you buy more stuff.

Anyway, when you bought groceries (typically) you got an equivalent number of trading stamps (that you had to lick and stick in little paper books). If you got enough books filled with stamps you could get a new toaster -- or in the case of the church today, you can (they will tell you) go to heaven (which is NOT the case at all - an entirely different concept is in place for the Heaven-bound, known as GRACE).

You get trading stamps in the church by serving tea and cookies after the service or the elder's meetings or by visiting the sick in hospitals or by darning socks (does anyone know what darning socks is about?) or you can crawl through glass on your knees carrying a cross in some cultures.

Or you can, of course, pay for new stuff for the church (or the pastor, his wife or kids) through well-documented and noted donations, offerings and tithes (does anyone know what a tithe was supposed to be?) that are then taken as a tax deduction.

Control Them

I think this idea comes from the hope that somehow you can control people (truly, truly an evil idea!). The best way to do this is to beat down their self-esteem and destroy the possibility of a support system with other human beings (See Hitler 101 or "The Wave", if you don’t know who Hitler is) and to ensure they are never really sure they are good enough! (smacking her lips with the deliciousness of this super duper idea)

As to where evil comes from, well God created us with the choice to follow Him or follow “what is best in our own eyes” sense of directions. He did NOT create us to be automatons (or robots) that just obey.

Why did He create us in the first place and give us this freedom? Because God wanted to love us and be loved in return. Can you imagine how sad God is to know that we don’t even have time for Him most days?

My Birthday

Today is my birthday and this is my gift to me: to remember who He is in my life and to thank Him for giving me the freedom to choose to follow Him or not. Sort of like religious freedom gone wild -- or where there is clear separation of the “church” from the “state”.

You see, if you tell me I must do some thing, I will not want to do it. If you, on the other hand, tell me not to do something, you can be sure I will want to and will likely do it.

However, if you tell me I am free to choose, after giving me clear parameters and laying out benefits and consequences for my choices -- then my choices are what is known as informed choice. God gives us INFORMED CHOICE to follow evil or Good.

It is like a TOS statement (Terms of Service) in the virtual world, most of us agree to them, yet never read them. We quote them as if they are law, yet many we quote don't even exisit and those that exist are common sense and easy to follow. Interesting how the virtual world parallels the real world even in this way. Neat huh?!!!

Happy Birthday to me!