The Collaborative Habit: Life Lessons for Working Together
“Collaboration is the buzzword of the new millennium.” So begins The Collaborative Habit, and when author/choreographer Twyla Tharp blends in the dance, I find it irresistible.
The lone hero, she says, are yesterday’s role models. Read the rest of this entry »
by Stuart BrownThe book’s title is Play, so I did what I was trained to do as a child — I ignored my innate desire to play until I was done with all my work. I didn’t pick up the book to read until tonight. My work wasn’t done, but my sense of play was lubed in the company of a dozen women at a sex toy party. Read the rest of this entry »
by Jeff Johnson and Paula FormanI’m watching So You Think You Can Dance, and my body feels what it is like in my arms, my abs, my legs to dance the moves I see. Such joy! When the show is over, I check www.fox.com/dance, and discover the cutoff is age 30. What if, I think, they do a show So You Think You Can Dance and You’re Over Forty! Yeah, don’t laugh at me — I would train my butt off for that, should it come to be!
I do not like the O word — Old. I didn’t physically buy into my mother’s philosophy — she had tummy tucks (I do sit-ups), eye jobs (I smile), facelifts (what’s wrong with smiling), and hip replacement (I dance) all before she was forty. But her message don’t get old or you’ll be rejected sank in — the very idea scares me. My attention shifts to a book nearby called Read the rest of this entry »
I do not want to write this blog, but over the last year I have come to realize that the things I most resist are the things I most need to do – for soul growth. Or maybe I’m just a masochist.
As Eleanor Roosevelt said,
“We gain strength, and courage, and confidence by each experience in which we really stop to look fear in the face… we must do that which we think we cannot.”
Oh yeah. So the thing I cannot do. Accept my age. My mother – who gave birth to me when she was twenty-two – was mightily pissed when I made her a grandmother at age 52. She did not want to be called “grandmother.” She had had a tummy-tuck at age forty – even after my prediction that she shouldn’t because she’d get a hernia. She got the surgery – and the hernia. Read the rest of this entry »
The 7 Great Prayers: For a Lifetime of Hope and Blessings
The 7 Great Prayers is calling to me from the top of a stack of new books. It is Easter Sunday and it is Passover. It makes sense to read the book, and I find myself rising up as I read.
The prayers are simple. The book is simple. Paul and Tracey McManus created the seven great prayers when they lost their home during the dot com bust earlier this decade. And, now their book pubs at the perfect time — when millions are jobless and homeless. Learn more from Paul and Tracey at www.the7greatprayers.com.
As I read, there is an essence of The Secret, but it is more than that. And more simple. I remember how Conversations With God author Neale Donald Walsch told me how The Secret was terribly flawed because it leaves out God. This book is all about God.
I do a little dance around God. Growing up, I had a hard time Read the rest of this entry »
The process of writing opens up channels to forbidden information that the subconscious otherwise protects. It creates a tiny tear in that fabric, and I poke at the edges and pull at it until more truth is revealed.
That is why I have to say more about yesterday’s photo shoot and The Little Book On Meaning.
The author, Laura Berman Fortgang, opens her chapter on meditation – of course there’s a chapter on meditation – with a memory of meditating in the soft summer breeze in the Poconos. And she widens the essay to encompass the absolute silence embraced in the practice of meditation. I drop in for a moment, slide into a meditation, and it rocks back the edges on the yesterday’s event.
This was the first photo shoot in – how long – twenty years – that didn’t culminate with me doing “art” shots alone with the photographer. This photo shoot – like all the others – was free, but there no mention, no expectation, no nuance of my impending nudity. The absence of having to trade nudity for shots left a space I didn’t then understand. Read the rest of this entry »
Magic Words: A Dictionary“Once Upon A Time” — magical words that draw you in and promise you wonder. That’s the first phrase I looked up in Magic Words: A Dictionary by Craig Conley. He quotes Dale Carnegie, saying these are “the magic words that open the floodgates of a child’s imagination.”
Not only that, to all children — especially for those who are abused and tormented and violated — “once upon a time” means a powerful new place of hope and safety. A place where wishes can come true. A place where anything can — and does — happen.
Transcending the trauma takes magic, as well as patience and faith. Read the rest of this entry »
