WonderBlog

The artist made this work just because she could.

But the powers that be were not amused. It was thought that the work was destroying the order of our civilization. It must be stopped and further, all signs of the first work had to be destroyed, covered up as if it never was

The artist was unmoved. She did it again, regardless of the fate of her first work. It was her joy, and gave the hours of her life meaning. For what other purpose was she made, but for this very thing?

She did not resent the powers, and she gave them no mind.

I saw her work, and was impressed by the layers. The artful strokes showing an admirable strength, and the mix of medium were unusual.

Perhaps this work was destructive. But I was moved none the less.

and a portrait of the artist

Posted by Murphy Horner at 07:35 PM | Permalink

So I was listening to This American Life, and a girl was talking aboiut her terrible breakup. Her breakup was so bad that she spent months doing little other than listening to sad breakup songs. She was wallowing, and wanted to wallow. At last she decided that she must purge the endless wallow by compsoing her own breakup song.

She managed to get the email of Phil Collins, the author of her favorite breakup song "Against all Odds". He wrote her back and they had a phone call about the tragedy of breakups and how to write a good breakup song.

I guess this is why the story is interesting enough to be put on the radio. Oh my gosh! Phil COLLINS! Giving this pathetic girl advice on how to write a break up song.

Phil Collins is very talented.

Talent can be debilitating to those around you. Like, after a concert, the incredible talent of the guy on stage can leave you weak kneed and speechless because you were that close to such an incredible talent.

And even a lesser talent...How about a school play, when the teenagers gave a killer rendition of "Our Town" or "Cyrano"? The other kids fawn and stand back with wide eyes, full of hero-worship.

There are kinds of talent that make people love you...That roll the red carpet out in front of you and make you a god.

But there are different kinds of talent. Or maybe different kinds of reactions to talent.

I ran across an article celebrating the 50th anniversary of Atlas Shrugged.

I love Rand's books. I was telling a friend about Atlas Shrugged, and how when I read it, the book had me by the throat. I like to read, but this book was above and beyond. I was so into it, I was reading it at stoplights while driving.

She talks about the other kinds of talent. How some people can respond to talent by denying it and persecuting those who have it.

The talent of speaking his vision got Dr. King killed.

And then Jesus...I suppose you could argue that he was different, because he was the Son of GOD, but then again, maybe he was exactly the best example of that sort of talent.

Dagny, the heroine of Atlas Shrugged, first felt how it was to be treated for her talent. Her father owned the railroad. She wanted to work there, and started at the bottom to do it.

I will never forget this part of the book:

She took positions of responsibility because there was no one else to take them. There were a few rare men of talent around her. but they were becoming rarer every year. Her superiors, who held the authority, seemed afriad to exercise it, they spent their time avoiding decisions, so she told peopel what to do and they did it. At every step of her rise, she did the work long before she was granted the title. It was like advancing through empty rooms. NObody opposed her, but nobody approved of her progress.

The thing was, she was young as she was advancing in her career. Later, she began to see more of the world and how this particular incidence she had experienced was much broadspread.

I am not sure exactly why some talents are lauded and some persecuted.

It does charge the air, though, when it shows up.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 07:27 PM | Permalink

Luke 11:10-11:13

I'm going to get preachy, just a little bit.

Funny, I'm almost always preachy. But I guess the sermon isn't a sermon 'til we get to chapter and verse.

That verse talks about asking for things.

If your child asks you for something, something that is good for them and not bad for them, you give it.

Kids usually know when the yes is assumed. Yes, it is assumed that they can have a glass of water. A can of soda...maybe not. Yes, they can read a book. Can they watch that TV show? maybe not.

But for good things, they answer is usually yes. So much a yes, that the question is not always asked.

It is assumed that the answer will be yes. Parents set the answer machine to 'yes'.

But there are other times when the answer machine is set to 'yes'. My neighbor had confided in me that it was a problem for her, to refrain for 'yes' when people asked her for help.

Because there are times when yes is not the right answer.

For your children, for your spouse, the yes should be assumed.

But everyone else...case-by-case basis.

I used to be much more about the yes. But...it was abused at a young age. There were so many things that were assumed I would go along with, that the question was never asked.

Did I want to? the thought didn't have a chance to germinate before I was doing it.

And it could get easily tangled. Was it my problem that I did not acquiesce to the unasked? It was assumed that I surely was in agreement.

But since I reached the age of accountability, I was able to contemplate all sorts of other things I wanted to do, things that I would have liked to ask for and hear yes to.

This made me hyper aware of when things were assumed. Yes, I can see that it was assumed I would clean the microwave at work.

My 'yes' was assumed.

But just because it is assumed doesn't mean that it has to be given. I can not do things now, because my volition is entirely within my own power.

HOORAY FOR BEING AN ADULT!

I get to choose.

And there are things that I do choose to say yes to.

And things I don't.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 12:39 PM | Permalink

It was high school graduation, and as the only member of my graduating class, it would have been a tree falling in a forest with no one around to hear.

But that was not my way. I was going to make it into an event.

I had been in home school, with no proms and no homecoming. I had never had any of those fun events, but I was going to have a graduation. And if I possibly could, I would pack that small scrap that fell off the rich table of everyone else's high school experience into my pathetic life--I would pack that graduation celebration with as much of the other things I'd missed as possible.

And of course, the biggest grievance to me was the lack of formal wear. I was going to have a party, and I would ask my friends to dress formally.

Which meant that i would have the occasion to create a confectionary concoction of a gown. I drew it and patched together parts of different patterns so that the sleeves of one, the bodice of another and the hem of the last would result in my fantasy dress.

Sewing was the only way I could conceive of getting a dress like this. We were not people who bought clothes off the rack; it was hand-me-downs or sew it yourself if you wanted something particular.

So, the pattern was ready, but I still needed to find the perfect fabric.

I wanted to go shopping in Anchorage for it. And I thought of a friend to go with. She had graduated last year, but she was willing to go shopping with me.

Becky was always nice. I met her at her house and we made our way into Anchorage. We looked around and found the fabric I wanted, eventually.

It was a very low-key day. And I was not feeling low-key. But I thought about it a little, and realized that I really couldn't expect much else.

"You know, Becky, days can just be like that. That you maybe are wishing for something spectacular, but for the most part, days are just pretty much ordinary."

She looked at me and said, "Yes, days are pretty much ordinary."

I don't know if she had any idea what I was talking about. I'm not sure if it is a feeling that other people have.

Sometimes I feel like a flame, that I am HOT and consuming. Books, ideas, shows, projects, actions...I want to be always in the middle, and maybe enough is never enough.

I graduated a long time ago.

THIS summer, I am getting ready to get married. I am also launching an impressive e-commerce website and having a 350 sq. ft. addition built on my house.

THAT's a lot of a lot.
Any one of those things could become overwhelming. But because there were three things, Chris and I were very focussed and took care of each thing in order.

Two weeks ago, we launched the website very successfully. There are still some loose ends to take care of and we need to organize the exciting world of keeping it running, but our customers are happy and so are we.

Which leaves me now with only TWO overwhelming things to do.

I feel sort of empty.

A while back, when I was even more clueless than I am now, i went to a "networking" event. Everyone was supposed to wear a name tag and put what they were looking for underneath it.

I put down "a challenge."

And I am still looking for a challenge.

The Incredibles talks about this a little. The problem of ability vs. the utter mundanity of life

Should we stretch ourselves to greater capacity?

Like Frodo! Ah, what a glorious tale of an ordinary guy who saves the world.

I am waiting for my chance to save the world.

I found a very cool online comic strip. Yes, I'm a huge fan of Tolkien, and love the movies. But here is a satire, as if the adventures they were having were a kind of Dungeons and Dragons game.

It's an EPIC story, the kind used for fodder in games like D&D. And the dungeon master is narrating their adventure at a certain plot point:

You run tirelessly through the endless grasslands

the players, the HEROES talk back to the narrator/Dungeon Master:
'You mean we run endlessly through tiresome grasslands, don't you?"

And therein is our problem. What does it take to get a good epic? We are heroes, aren't we? Dispense with this ridiculous petty earthbound reality! Where are the dragons to slay?

And don't make me fight through stop and go traffic to get there! I should be impervious to the laws of physics and weakness!

*sigh*

Excuse me, the cell phone is rining to remind to not to forget the cover sheet on the TPS reports.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 10:04 PM | Permalink

In a recent post, i was whining about how hard it is to write about inspiration....about how hard it is to be believable with good news.

i said you had to die or no one would believe you.

But that brought to mine something else.

The greeks, those old drama queens, had strict definitions of tragedy and comedy.

Tragedy pretty much HAD to end in someone dying. Because...well, come on! it has to be SAD.

But that made me remember the definition of comedy...It ends in a marriage:

final scene, in which the predominant note is rejoicing, generally leading up to a feast or wedding. The play may conclude with a cordax or riotous dance.

so...if you look at it THAT way...there are a TON TON TON of happy movies that involve love.

Just because I don't find them believable doesn't mean that others are drawn in. Romantic movies--comedies and tragedies--are ALL OVER.

so, I guess we believe in the transcendance of love.

...i just wish that it were broader than mere romantic or sexual love...

Posted by Murphy Horner at 03:24 PM | Permalink

So I've been listening to this awesome podcast of "Proof" on The Play's the Thing

It's a play about, among other things, MATH.

I don't have a firm grasp on math. It was my worst subject in school. Now that I am older, I think that they way math is expected to be learned in school was part of my problem.

I always wanted to know WHY. I didn't understand the logic behind the math and felt very uncomfortable relying on assumptions that I knew where hidden to me. It felt like a deception, and I didn't want to be taken in.

"Why do I have to show my work? And why do I have to keep both sides of the equation equal? Who says?"

What I didn't understand is that math is a language. Math is an incredibly precisely defined set of symbols (like an alphabet..and often borrowed from alphabets!) to express ideas.

And the gatekeepers of math are super rigorous in enforcing that specific definition. The community of people fluent in the language of math expect precision in communication. It simply doesn't go if it is not correct.

I remember the movie "Close Encounters of the Third Kind"...They said that the aliens would OF COURSE try to use math to initiate the first communication.

And that would make sense, because of the precise nature of math-speak. We would know for sure what we were communicating.

Math is a wonderful tool.

The thing is, though, that a lot of stuff has excluded from math. Math shrunk the universe...or at least lopped off the parts that are not as precise as math needs them to be.

I've talked about this before.

It's a beautiful, elegant tool to help us understand our universe.

I've always thought that the definition of luxury was to have the perfect tool at hand for anything you needed to do. Such as, the perfect chair to accomplish the task of sitting.

The perfect beautiful plate and fork so I could eat.

A good hammer, or screwdriver are wonderful things too.

I have an electric sander that is great...but I'm not so sure that it does exaclty what I want it to do. It may be that I don't know how to use it right, though.

Tools do take that. You have to know how to use them, or they are not useful. I wish that I undestood more math, but I am impatient with math. It does not address the problems that bother me.

I WANT precise definitions...no, I actually want to explore the imprecise. To grab that barely understood idea or experience and nail it down. But they flip past really fast, and it's hard to capture.

I am finding out too, that math is not as precise either. They are making guesses a lot too. Euclydian geometry is great! but it can't tell you how big the earth is.

And the learning shape of the universe (which we don't know for sure) can change everything.

It's easy to think, "The shape of the universe? How could that possibly be important to little me?"

But it is. Knowing that answer would be a huge building block in our ability to...do so many things we haven't even thought of yet.

Math can't tell me the shape of the universe. It is guessing right now.

which means it is not a precise as I want.

Wasn't I just talking about this? I was just saying that I was having trouble expressing the nature of experienced transcendence...or enlightenment..?

[both these terms irritate me with their imprecision. I can't find the correct, elegant word to express what I mean...and then again, even if I did find the word that felt right to me, I would be completely uncertain about whether that same shape and flavor of meaning had been transmitted to the persons I am talkign to]

it's imprecise, and we don't know. The shape of the universe or how to express enlightenment, both these things are being reached for and guessed at.

The beauty of math is in the precision...and yet the imprecision hangs on the edges. And FRUSTRATES those of us who love precision.

And I don't even know any math. I am attracted to learning some. But I think that the learning curve for math is a bit steeper than for my electric sander.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 08:39 AM | Permalink

I've been very busy lately.

Super busy. I have three projects going on that would each on their own justify saying I"m super busy. And I am doing all three.

But those three things are actually chugging along pretty well. I'm past the panic point and have moved on to the part where I am criticising myself for not getting OTHER stuff done.

Yes. I know. I should not be so hard on myself. But it's like clockwork. I could even predict it coming while I was still panicking about the first three things.

Okay. So the part of my life that I am frustrated about neglecting is my writing.

I have this book, you know? Not the one I've already written, I feel bad enough about neglecting that one's publicity program.

But there is that other book that I was writing long before I started and finished the Miriam story.

Okay. So, I've been stuck on the story. I've written the first half, the part where I am in Alaska at home, despairing and losing faith.

despair, losing faith--check.

Now I am trying to write about my trip to Russian and about transcending despair and rekindling my faith.

I am really happy with the first part that I wrote. I did a very good job of tracing the path from innocence to jaded cynic. Metaphor and description all over the place. Very nice.

So in the story, I'm trudging along pissed and angry, but coping because I am playing it smart and close to the chest.

Which is SO easy to do. Meaning, it is easy to write about being pissed off and having unfair shit happen to you.

It's easy because every every every one keeps that feeling of injustice and pissedness right close by. I'd say almost every day everyone has the chance to feel wronged and angry about it.

Every day we have a chance to scoop up a serving of decaying disillusionment and carry it around with us. And which of us can resist doing it? It's a passtime to think about , and talk about all the absurd things that others do to inconvenience or hurt you.

and that's just the everyday petty stuff. What about the really nasty stuff?

Literature is full of those kind of stories. REALLY good stories of wrongs done. Hamlet? Oedipus Rex?

There are so many many tragedies. And they are great. I've written before about how great movies and books are often really depressing

We are ready to believe bad stuff. We are ready to be depressed.

Okay. So how the hell am I supposed to write about transcendance? No one would believe me.

We are sure that the world sucks and that the universe is against us and is most likely totally unfair.

We are not sure that there is a reason and a overarching merciful justice. We...Well, I know _I_ ...don't buy flimsy trite enlightenment.

We don't buy it and feel further betrayed if someone tries to sell it to us.

"Yeah right...blah blah and now the world is full of smiling sunflowers. I don't buy it."

Which is to say, the second half of my book is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy harder to write. The touchpoints of empathy for joy and peace are not worn on anyone's shirtsleeves.

And you know what else? It's not even that easy for me to reach. Yes, I can remember how it felt. But I have to feel it again I think, fully feel and recognize the mountain moving that I know then AGAIN NOW.

So I have to reach deep to find it. And if I can find it, then I have to write better than I've ever written before to make it convincing to someone else.

I was talking with a friend about it.
"Honestly, can you think of a single movie where a person achieved transcendence and it was believable?"

"...maybe Life is Beautiful?"

"Yeah, but he died."

That's the only way to make it believable. You have to kill someone.

Pay it forward? He died.

Mom was talking to me this morning about Tuesdays with Morrie...a book I find utterly unconvincing, but which I recognize as touching many many people.

Not to give it away, but Morrie died.

Martin Luther King jr. Ghandi...dead.

And EVEN JESUS DIED!!!! would NOT have worked if he didn't die. NO one would have believed it.

You have to die or no one believes you have anything worth remembering.

And no one died.

...mom says a cat died in Russia...but that was after I left and it was just a strange cat, not one we knew.

I'm stuck. I can't find someone to die.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 06:03 PM | Permalink

Once upon a time, there were born a people who had holes in their bodies, just like Swiss cheese.

The people did not know why they had these holes. They were inconvenient and even hurt. Different holes would ache at different times. Some of the holes were inconveniently placed, making it awkward and sometimes impossible to go about the business of their day.

Some people were ashamed of these holes, and covered them up entirely with clothing.

Some people decided they were proud of their holes, at least some of their holes anyway. They wore clothes that showed off their favorite holes. They still took great pain to hide the holes they did not like, even while flaunting the other holes.

Some of the people began to look around them, and found stones or pieces of wood to push into their holes. The stones filled in the holes, and they felt strange at first. But the people saw that they could fill in the holes and be better able to do whatever they needed done.

The other people, the ones who covered the holes entirely with clothes, were outraged. “How can you draw attention to your holes in this way? It’s shameless!”

The people who flaunted their favorite holes were outraged. “How can you deny who you are and the way you are made? You are stopping up your natural holes.”

The people with the filled in holes heard what the others said. But they could see that their lives were easier because they had filled in their holes, so they did not change.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 08:06 PM | Permalink

Once upon a time, a little girl had an apple tree. Her parents gave her the apple tree. As long as she could remember, they told her this story:

This is your future, little Nadia. You must tend this tree and make sure it is healthy and bears fruit.

It is a young tree now, but as it gets bigger it will make fruit that you can eat. There will be so many apples that you can eat and be full, and you will have apples left over to sell and buy the other things you need.

When it gets big, you can rest in its shade. When it rains, you can stay dry under the leaves. And if the wind blows, you will be safe under your tree.

We are your parents, and we love you. We give you this tree and you must take care of it, so that you will be safe and secure for all your days.

What an important tree! This tree became Nadia’s whole life. She tended it, and learned all the rules of tree husbandry from her mother and father.

She took great care to water the tree, and to shade it when the sun was too hot. She never strayed too far from the tree. All the things she did, she did with the tree in mind. Always in her thoughts were what the tree needed to be strong and healthy.

Her parents were very proud of her. In all the surrounding areas, people called on Nadia’s mother and father to help them with their trees. Her parents were known for their knowledge of trees.

Nadia grew and her tree grew. She sat in the slender, not-quite-sufficient shade of her beloved tree, dreaming of the apples she would one day gather.

But then her parents came to her with news. A far-away land needed their help and advice. These people had heard of this family’s skill with trees and called them to help plant a new orchard.

Her parents were going to help with this new orchard. Nadia was excited to think of helping these poor far-away people grow a new orchard.

But she would have to leave her tree—her precious tree, with all of her future in its roots and branches. She had cared for this tree for so long.

Her parents urged her to come. Her tree had been tended so carefully, the roots were deep and the branches were strong. It would be fine on its own for a little while. And these people needed her.

Nadia decided it was a good thing to go, so she left with her parents to help the far-away people.

No doubt Nadia knew a lot about trees. But one season followed another and more time than she intended passed.

Her parents were very involved in this new orchard and did not want to leave. Nadia thought of her own tree, though, and decided at last that she must return.

She said goodbye to her parents, who were sad to see her go but still very full of plans for this new orchard. She made her way back to her home and to her apple tree.

She thought of her tree the whole long road back. It would probably have small hard little pippins on it by now. It could be as soon as this fall that should would reap the fruits of all her childhood labors. How sweet it would be!

The landscape seemed changed somehow. It was familiar but not quite right, after she had been gone for so long. When she finally reached her apple tree, she understood.

The tree was gone. It was nothing but a small blackened nub of a stump in the ground.
What had happened? How could this be? Her mind staggered with the shock of loss.

A nearby village had the story. During a storm, lightning had struck her tree, splitting it and burning it to the ground.

Nadia returned to the spot of land where her tree had been. This tree was to be her future. It was supposed to provide and shelter her for the rest of her life. All of her work and hopes were vanished as if they had never been.

She cast herself on the previously happy turf. She cried with despair. All of her life had been for nothing. Her tree was gone. All of it gone and she was totally alone.

After some time passed, she tried to think. Everything she had been taught was for this tree. What could she do? Her future was burned to the ground, but here she was.

She thought perhaps she would be able to go to other orchards nearby and help them. She could find a small fractioned future in this way.

But although they were happy to have her, whenever she began to work with the apple trees she would begin to shake with tears and her heart was too heavy. She had to leave the orchards.

Sad as she was, she knew that she had to do something. She began to find other sorts of plants to work with. Fields of corn and vineyards of grapes— these did not make her as sorrowful as the apples. She learned about the care of many types of plants and was valued in the surrounding farms.

Water still flowed from the rivers and sky. The sun shone to make the flowers open and then to swell the grain and grapes. Nadia learned to read the different leaves and to make sure that pollination and germination happened at the proper times, and the plants under her care prospered.

Nadia began to prosper as well. But whenever she thought of her future, the ghost shadow of a tree fell over her soul and she turned away from the thought. She never went back to the stump of her tree. It was dead and buried to her.

The seasons passed as they always do, and Nadia found herself at the borders of a vineyard after a rainy season. The grapevines were very healthy and Nadia was pleased with them. She walked further away from the plants to see the straight lines of the vines hanging on their strong supports. They looked very strong and full of hope.

Something about this hillside made Nadia look around. Why, this was the very place she had grown up! It had been so long, she had forgotten herself. But even further, she saw a strange collection of greenery to the east.

It was her very own tree, whose roots had grown much deeper than she realized. The stump she had thought completely dead had sprouted new shoots, and the shoots were thick and full of pippins.

Nadia’s surprised hands found her face. How had the harvest she had lost come back to find her? She had never thought such a thing would be. Disbelief bent her knees and she was sitting in the living shadow of the very real tree. Her eyes saw the new growth from the burned stump, and then looked over to the vineyard she had just finished tending.

She could scarcely believe it, but she was now finally going to reap what she had sown.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 01:48 PM | Permalink

It is a constantly running train of thought, but here lately it’s been on my mind—the difference between men and women.

I love men. And I love being a woman. It seems to me that these two, when done right, are very complementary.

I know Chris and I work together very well. We have great love and respect for one another, and we manage to do really well on the various projects and entertainments we take up.

There are other men I have known on the job, who I can really click with, who give me respect and collegial affection. I’ve love working with them and miss them terribly when I’ve had to move on.

What is it that men and women give each other? It’s so much more than just procreation. We are broader than that. What, really, do we need each other for?

Of course, need is relative. Do I NEED to go to the gym and work out in the morning? Not really. NEED is for survival. Food, shelter, air.

But perhaps I am too stoic. Perhaps, for the time being, I can count the survival as a given, and set the bottom standard a little above DEATH.

About 8 years ago, I came to the conclusion that it is best not to need anyone for anything. That I am responsible for myself and myself alone. I wanted to be independent and able to get whatever I needed. I didn’t want to have to wait for someone else to get me what I needed.

It turns out I was very able. I pushed my abilities and pruned my wants appropriate to my circumstances. I learned how to be independent and not need things.

But that opened up other questions.

During our first year, while trying to figure all that out, I asked Chris, “If we don’t need each other, what will keep us together?”

He really didn’t understand the question, but he answered: “We will love each other.”

At the time, it was hard for me to understand how he would stay—how could I be sure?—if he wasn’t dependent on me in some way. He should need me.

I’ve learned a lot from trusting his love.

It turns out that instead of being dependent on someone, you can value them highly. In the same way that you would be unwilling to part with an object of value and beauty, you would be unwilling to part with a person of high value and beauty.
And knowing what I value in him, I can try to foster those same things in myself. When I look at myself honestly, I can see that I am of high value. And I can feel confident that he would want to be with this good stuff that is me.

Okay, that’s the micro. What’s the macro? What do men and women need from each other? What desirable thing is it that we are particularly suited to give to each other?

Earlier this summer, I had that highly annoying conversation with a co-worker. You know the one.

“Men and women cannot be friends, because men only want to sleep with the woman.”

Basically, this argument means that men have no use for any part of a woman except…well, you know what I mean.

He brought it up, because I’d met someone who I thought was interesting but who obviously was attracted to me. I’d hoped that he might get over it and be a friend.

“OH no,” co-worker said. “Let me tell you something about men: they never want to be your friend.”

I brought up examples and hypothetical situations. It was a slow day, and we were getting into it. But he was adamant. Friendship was impossible.

I threw this back at him, “So what you’re saying is, while I want to be friends with a guy, he has no interest in my conversation or friendship. Since I am nothing to him, the only thing I’m going to get out of interactions is whatever entertainment I can create….So I should be the biggest possible bitch so that I can get maximum entertainment value.”

The rest of the guys were laughing, but he wouldn’t back down. “I’m telling you, guys do not want to be friends. Ever.”

Well, that made me depressed for a few days afterwards. Upon reflection, I took away two things:

Guys who have that conversation with females are hoping for something. Note to self: avoid that sort of discussion. It’s just an excuse for guys to talk about sex. I thought I had learned that lesson my first year in college, but I guess I forgot. Or hoped that maturity was more widespread than it is.

Also:
Guys who hold that belief have no clue what to do with the huge amorphous feelings they have about women.
Women are highly desirable, but barely understood. The desire they feel is so scary, they try to cover they metaphorical nakedness with this little insufficient scrap called “sex.”

If they have an answer, they can stop asking the question. It matters little that the answer is wrong (or at the least, insufficient). They can put to rest the discomfort of their ignorance with it.

So that leads to another question. What is it that women give men?

I once knew this guy. He was a friend of my ex. He was the most misogynistic young man (~26) I have ever met. He literally had no interest in anything I had to say. I was a woman, and did not count.

It was kind of stunning to realize this. He was never rude, but he treated me as if I were his friend's cat--simply not a source of intelligence.

He had been dating a 16 year-old (get this, ASIAN). Typical stereo-type. How much more controlling can you be? It was a half-step removed from a mail-order bride. He got married her when she told him he’d gotten her pregnant.

I’d never met her, even though we knew this guy for years while they were dating.

Long story short, after baby boy was almost 2, turned out that wifey had had a boyfriend they whole time and the child was his. She left Mr. Misogynist. He was devastated.

During this bad time, after his wife and erst-while son had left him, he called to talk to my (then) husband. When I told him I was the only one home, he wanted to talk.

I thought he had brought this disaster on himself somewhat, but I felt bad for him. I knew he was hurting.

But the amazing thing is, he wanted to talk to ME.
ME.
The woman he had no use for. The female who might as well have stayed in the kitchen and walked three steps behind for all he cared.

He really wanted to talk to me. He really really wanted to hear words from a kind female. That was all. We talked about small things for maybe 45 minutes.

He needed what I had. He needed womanhood.

I don’t know the boundaries of what masculinity and femininity are. I suspect they are not hard and fast.

But we need each other. And we need each other to be strong and independent in order to receive the good stuff from each other. I think that if we could learn to work together like that, the whole world would change and be beautiful.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 11:00 AM | Permalink

In the days of Caesar Augustus came the decree, that all the world should be taxed....

I'm quoting that from memory, but it strikes me that is a rather mundane and inauspicious way for the saviour to be born.

All the world should be taxed. And in order to keep things beauracratically in order, everyone had to go back to the town of their birth.

What a mess! There was not enough supplies or facilities for this to work out. A perfectly nice pregnant lady had to give birth in a stable.

Shamefull. Who's in charge here?

Well, yeah. Unfortunately...Fortunately?--Jesus didn't come to make the world run more efficiently. Maybe German or a Swede (the home of Ikea!) would have taken that on.

No, restoring love and mercy with supremem generosity was his job.

Oh yeah. Love and Generosity. Which means that the South Park kids were right.

Christmas is all about presents.

There are only three of us here in the house. Me, Chris and the cat. And I gotta say, Skellig doesn't get that into christmas. Apart from trying to lay on top of the presents, he is not too interested in them. He is a cat of gratitude for small things.

A bowl of cat food, a clean box, and the toilet lid left up. Add a few scratches behind the ears, and he's good.

So the presents that are piled high under the tree are really a testament to our generosity and relative affluence. Yay for blessings!

But, a not-blessing...Chris is sick. He has a cold and is sleeping.

We went out to lunch with Grandma and Judy (aka Mother) and Bryan. Chris couldn't do much but prop himself up in the Marie Callendar booth.

Judy said, "Too bad you are sick. You are the one who loves Christmas so much."

He does. He is an exceptionally loving and thoughtful gift-giver. He plots early and long to give unexpected but perfect gifts that people will enjoy.

His family is a good challenge to him. "Good" because they are impossible to buy for. HIs Grandmother will return nearly ANYTHING.

But even so, he has found good things for her.

But this long rambling Christmas post is mostly to say, Christmas is about loving generosity.

Generosity does not have to be with material things. Can we have loving generosity towards each other's faults? Why not? Let's get over the crabby-I-Haven't-had-my-cup-of-coffee-yet attitudes of our co-workers.

Or even when we must confront people for inappropriate behaviour, let us find a generous way to do so.

Imagine. It's easy if you try.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 08:01 AM | Permalink

In the Eastern Sierras is a very salty lake--Mono lake. It is saltier than it used to be. It's smaller than it used to be.

That's because Los Angeles, quite some time ago, began sucking away the fresh water that used to flow into Mono. Los Angeles was thirsty, and also needed the water to grow cows and oranges.

Because Mono lake wasn't getting water to refill itself, the waer level went down. And something incredibly beautiful showed up.

Tufas.

The waters that flow into Mono lake mingle and react in such a way that makes a sort of mineral snowflake. Those mineral snowflakes flow around in the water, and eventually settle or attach themselves to stuff in the lake.

And tufas grow up like ghostly monuments.

This is my metaphor for my thoughts. Some of my thoughts float around in my consciousness, being of some kind of substance that doesn't fade away. The ideas and insights, or questions, float around looking for a place where they fit. And eventually, they end up making their own place to fit. A place--a tufa--that doesn't really fit anywhere, but is still a kind of cool something.

I read once something that may not be true. I can't' confirm it on a quick perusal of the internet, but I like the story, so I'm going to tell it. Take it for what it's worth.

Egyptian cotton was pretty much the best cotton around for a super long time. Maybe as long as it took to find america and fill it with cotton plantations.

It was the best because it had the longest fiber. Cotton is useful for being made into thread, and the thread into fabric. But to make the thread, you have to spin the fibers together.

As I was told, the Egyptian cotton was the best because their cotton had the longest fiber. When the fiber was short, the thread would be all fuzzy and thick. But when the fiber was long, it spun all tightly and smooth. You could have super-fine, satiny almost, cotton fabric.

And people didn't even want to mess with cotton if it wasn't long fibered. That is, until a particular cotton spinning machine was invented to do the work mechanically. THEN the thread could be twisted tight enough, even when the fibers were stubby.

I've been thinking about my stories, and my thoughts. I have a lot of thoughts and stories. YET, I am not posting about them on my blog, or telling other people about them.

Why not?

Like the tufas, I am not sure how to explain what I'm thinking about. I've been thinking about certain stuff for a long time. And I've arrived at some structured ideas and concepts with all those thoughts.

But to explain them, and to share my mental tufas...well...It's not that I wouldn't love to do so...but...that brings me back to the cotton.

But to explain the cotton, let me tell you another story.

When I started at my current job, I realized almost immediately that I was joining a group that talked about themselves a lot. More than any other job I had ever been at.

These people talked a lot about stuff that was not work.

And I couldn't quite deal with that. "Small Talk" was what I thought. I just can't quite do that. I rummaged deep into the topics that are appropriate. Sports? the Weather? The news is dangerous, because that delves into politics and that could get too deep really fast.

So basically, I didn't talk very much. I pretty much avoided my co-workers, because this sort of conversation was too much for me.

But I didn't quit. And eventually I got sick of trying to keep to a line of "Appropriate." I wanted to talk about whatever was on my mind. And if they found me weird, so be it.

So, I decided to start telling a story. I got a little way in, and the phone rang. So of course I dropped it.

But after the call was finished, the guys said, "Keep going."

I started up again where I had left off, and kept on with my story.

The phone rang again.

And they finished and said again, "keep going."

huh.

I realized that most of my life, I had had this experience. I would begin to tell stories and get interrupted before I could finish.

There were only a very few people who could sustain interest through my long trains of thought.

Those are my dear dear friend. You know who you are. I will love and cherish you forever.

But for those who didn't hear the ends of my story...Maybe it's because I abandoned my attempts. I maybe have given up telling it too soon.

Remember the cotton? Maybe my threads are long. Maybe my threads are fine and marvelous and desirable, a part of a superior experience.

For sure sure sure my stories and thought-trains are long.

And like the tufas, they are often curiously formed.

For example, this very blog entry is long and curiously formed. But this is the way it came to me, and I am choosing now to share it with you all.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 07:31 PM | Permalink

IMG_6365
Originally uploaded by murphy_h2001.

This is how I began to understand about human territories. Just like creatures in the woods, we have our trails we follow. And even if a certain thing is not far at all from our territory, we may still never go to see that thing. Because it's 'out of the way'.

And the storage space was out of the way. It just was.

This range of territory can be especially true in Los Angeles. This huge sprawling populated area is close to everything and far away from everything. When I lived in Los Feliz, Pasadena seemed very far away. It was not actually far away, but it seemed easier to get to Canter's Deli than Vroman's bookstore.

Los Feliz was more or less in the middle of things. But I do not live in the middle of L.A. anymore.

I live in Claremont. That's definitely not the midle of Los Angeles. But it's kind of in the middle of the populated area of Southern California.

Kind of.

But my new hometown, in combination with my new job, has widened my territory. I have to go to a lot of places not. There are a lot of places that are no longer out of the way.

I spend a lot of time on freeways.

Which brings me to my point:
Freeway are beautiful.

I mean really, These are amazing works of architecture. They soar, and often have 5 different levels of street. Each one has it's own particularities.

It makes me think.

Remember the part in the Lord of the Rngs movie, where Aragorn and the fellowship of the ring are passing through the Valley of the Kings? These enormous statues of kings, carved out of the sides of mountain, loom over the group as they float on the river?

I feel similarly about these freeway overpasses. They are majestic.

And that leads me to think. How much money are we spending on these things? They are not cheap. And if we are already spending money on these extremely useful stuctures, why can't we make them a little more beautiful?

Look at the photo I have included. It's on highway 15, between L.A./Orange County and San Diego. I love that bridge. It's gorgeous.

Why not do more of that?

Posted by Murphy Horner at 09:36 PM | Permalink

Not so long ago, I came to the conclusion that I am a deeply unsatisfied person. Almost at any given moment, I am thinking of how that moment could be better. How I could be doing something, being something, or experiencing something higher.

I usually consider it my own fault—that I am not organized enough to be the best self I can be. Or perhaps I am lazy and slothful. And St. Paul’s words echo in my mind: the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do [Romans 7:19]

I never get around to doing what I want to do, but all the shit I say I will stop doing—that’s what I end up being very faithful with.

For these and many other reasons, I figured out that I am just an unsatisfied person. This will not change, and I had better find a way of living with it.

I don’t mean that I don’t have things I enjoy. There are also the exciting and exceptional moments of action that absorb my total attention. Sometimes I get in the zone while writing; very very often when I am dancing I am utterly taken away, and sometimes a project can fill me and satisfy me well.

But those are rare and precious moments. For all the other moments, I am wishing for the higher thing—the greater, the more.

I was trying to explain this to Chris. The explanation went somewhat awry, since he is a sweet and wonderful man who wants me to be happy. For him, it is not a good thing for me to be unsatisfied. It is a problem, and must be fixed.

We are both interested in my happiness—he even more than I. But this new understanding I had about my nature seemed both under and over the stuff of “happiness.” Metaphysical realities are not so susceptible to temporal fixes.

But what was it I had really discovered? What did I mean by all this? Maybe it is really a personal problem, something that pills or prayer would fix.

Maybe it was all in my head.

But then I read this from John Stuart Mill:

It is indisputable that the being whose capacities of enjoyment are low, has the greatest chance of having them fully satisfied; and a highly endowed being will always feel that any happiness which he can look for, as the world is constituted, is imperfect.

But he can learn to bear its imperfections, if they are at all bearable; and they will not make him envy the being who is indeed unconscious of the imperfections, but only because he feels not at all the good which those imperfections qualify.

It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides.

Mill, no fool, got it! I discovered my dissatisfaction on my own, but I am not on my own in the feeling.

AND I am a “highly endowed being.” I’ll take that.

Of course, I am also required with my endowments, to bear all the imperfections I so keenly perceive. That brings my mind back to the Bible, this time the red letters of Jesus’s words:
For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more. [Luke 12:48]

I guess the Endower of my gifts would have a right to require me to do something with them.

And I would not have it any other way. I want to be and make the best of myself that I can.

I’ll just have to find a way to bear my imperfections.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 09:08 AM | Permalink

They should tell you to wear chapstick. Heck, they should provide you with chapstick. With your mouth hanging open for hours and your whole head anaesthetized so you can’t feel anything, split lips must be common.

I hate dentists. But they are something that must be endured.

I’d wished I’d had chapstick on my last visit to get my teeth x-rayed. I came prepared this time, so my lips were well lubricated. But why do dentists expect you to converse with them while your mouth is full of their hands and metal equipment? I suppose for the same reason none of them ever think of providing lip lube for the procedure.

I was scared. There were needles. It took three injections to make me numb. One big needle, then ZZZZZZ goes the drill. “Ow!” goes me. In with another needle. Repeat.

Think peaceful thoughts. Tell yourself how professional this dentist is. The mantra: he knows exactly what he’s doing. He knows exactly what he’s doing.

Why does it feel like he’s drilled entirely through my upper canine into the other side? What’s going on?

Breathe. He knows exactly what he’s doing.

I breathe. Then I count to one hundred repeatedly to tick off the necessary seconds it will take to complete this.

Then I search around in my head to think of something else to think about. I decide to think about my credenz. In my head, I imagined all the things I needed to do to refinish this piece of furniture.

First, I would need to take the old and discolored stain off. The top, the sides, the drawers would all need to be stripped and scrubbed. I’d take off the drawer handles and scrub every nook and groove down to the bare wood.

I’d wash it, and then sand it, and wash it again.

There would be a few repairs to make. The two front legs are wobbly. I think that just takes a nail to secure in place. But the one drawer sticks when you pull it in and out. I’m not sure how to fix that. Maybe I can look it up.

These thoughts kept my mind away from the dentist drill.

I love to think about all the parts and steps of a process. One of my earliest memories—I was maybe three years old—was lying under the pew at church trying to figure out how it was made.

Naturally I was bored with the sermon. So I wiggled underneath the pews, which had been lovingly made in the pastor’s garage.

First, I was struck by how different the pew looked from underneath.. I even got up to look at the pew from the top again. Yes, it was the same object.

Then I started trying to understand why it looked the way it did. I saw the bare wood and the edge of the fabrics tacked down by staples. I saw edges of nail on the sides where the legs were.

I began to see how this pew was constructed! It was very thrilling to me. I could see in my mind, how they very carefully tucked the fabric around underneath and stapled it in place, and then took the backs and sides and nailed them in place after the upholstery was there and not before.

I could tell how the whole thing was put together. I ran it like a movie in my head, all the steps along the way to make this familiar thing.

All the steps that must be done carefully and in their right time—any other way and it wouldn’t work.

I think of these sorts of things all the time. What step? What’s needed? When? Anything else? How will it get there? How will people know they need it and find it when it’s needed?

Not everyone thinks this way. Perhaps some people just can’t. I can see the far goal and the immediate steps that start the motion towards that goal.

I try to have patience with those who don’t see that near/far view. The little and the big make the world go round.

Of course, my credenz is an unchanging object. It will stay still until I get around to it. Other projects are actually processes.

Processes are things that you do repeatedly. Every morning I must wake, shower, dress myself and drive to work.

Can I improve that? What would happen if I set my clothes out the night before? What about the shoes? Shower the night before? These are all ways to work on and improve a process.

It takes thought. It takes FORE thought. It takes AFTER thought. It takes awareness and willingness to notice and try.

It takes faith. You have to believe that what you are doing is important and worth doing better. You have to believe that your time and your life’s quality deserves attention and thought. You have to believe that you CAN improve the processes.

I saw a representative from Wal-Mart discuss this principle on TV. Wal-Mart is known for squeezing their suppliers to get the best price.

There is a bottom to how low the prices can go. Even Wal-Mart can’t get all their stuff for nothing.

But they have a commitment to getting more and better ‘deals’. If they can’t get a cheaper pair of shorts, then let it be a better-sewn pair. And once it’s quality workmanship, there is still a way to go one better.

Let it have cute little flowers sewn on the pockets—‘fashion.’

Never never rest. Always look for a way to do better.

Is it any wonder Wal-Mart has the staggering success it has?

I want that. I want to be with a bunch of people that want the bar of ‘better’ to be raised on a regular basis.

Good enough should never be good enough. Good enough is boring.

I want to be like the kids playing outside. ‘Can you reach that tree branch if you jump? Jump as high as you can. Yay! Made it. What about the next one?’

Jump high! Be better. Because it feels good to be good. And it feels good to be better.

That’s what I want for my credenz. I want to remake it beautiful, and I want to do a good job at this difficult task. I know that I can do it all by myself and I don't have to rely on anyone else. No worries, I can make it perfect. It makes me happy just to think about it.

The dentist is finally done. He tells me that my new crown is “temporary” and I have to come back for a permanent one in two weeks.

Bad process. Why didn’t they tell me this when I made the appointment? Come to think of it, they didn’t even tell me what work they were doing before I arrived.

Bad process.

I think about telling them about my chapstick idea, to help with patients’ lips.

But I do not have faith in them. I do not think they will hear me.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 09:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Every woman has a magic mirror in her heart. In it, she can see foggy images that others don’t see. She can see her family her friends, and the wider world in that mirror.

She will share her visions with the man in her life. For him, to believe what she sees takes faith.

If he doubts, it infects her and the mirror gets even foggier. And she may need to fight him to find her mirror again.

But if he can find that faith, her vision grows stronger. She can believe and be strong and wise. Both of them will be blessed.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 09:04 PM | Permalink

I don't share my poetry on this blog. I figure maybe I should. I wrote this one today. Enjoy!

This one doesn’t count
Because who’s counting anyway?
It’s for you
All of you

But I’m lying
Someone is counting
One Two
Tick Tock
Fast Handing
Around the clock

I’m getting very sleepy. Things are feeling freaky
Roman numerals with Egyptian eyes
Sphinx eyes turning me to unkinetic stone
Unmotioned by the unbroken hand sweep
The caged bird in my chest batters the cage
FLEE! MOVE
No amount of panic is enough
The soft black feathers scatter and flutter from the violence
The hopeful bird croaks “Evermore!
More More MORE.” Battle this cage
With every small mustered strength
One nudge must one day be enough
To jostle and break the gaze

I am not stone. The eyes tell lies
Motion is my birthright.
Action Production
Distance before and behind
Each footfall might be
Well-placed and unstumbled
Unbungled
Disturb the road dust
The coal dust
Mighty step of weight and substance
Pressuring the stuff of the world
Reform
Realign with beauty and order
My steps to leave diamonds underfoot

The road untraveled stretches
I can’t see it
Snowshoes and machetes plow the ground
Follow stars and leaning shadows
The sun wheels overhead

Let the path find me
It’s for me and for you
I know you are counting on me

Posted by Murphy Horner at 01:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Miriam now lives in the pages of a book.

Go get your copy!

http://www.lulu.com/content/290192

More to come

Posted by Murphy Horner at 10:07 PM | Permalink

Okay, i thought of what I want to write about. It's disorganized, but let me see if I can explain it.

"Open-Minded" used to be a popular phrase. I don't hear it as much as I used to, but certainly, "Closed-Minded" is a well-established bad thing.

I am seeing more and more the stance that used to connote open-minded as being a closed minded one.

I met a woman at a social event, and she worked with gangster kids. This caught my interest right away. 'Tell me more about that. I am astonished at the lack of attention given to helping kids stay out of gangs.'

She was surprised at my interest. "What do you want to know?"

I said that I thought we needed to ask until we got an answer. That we should not stop and be satisfied with the bad situation that our children are in.

She was taken with that idea. To ask until you find an answer. But she wasn't sure you could ever find an answer. In any question, really.

She had a good point. What happens when you find the answer? Are there questions with no answers?

I believe no. There are no questions without answers.

But then, like the hitchhiker's guide tells us, are you sure you are asking the right question?

Often, the answer to a question will be another question. And when you reach that the question/answer to the question, have you made progress?

I believe yes. I believe that as we sincerely question, even if our questions result in more questions, the understanding broadens. And when we understand we can do more or better than we have before.

I like people who question. I like it when people ask. But I have noticed there are people who ask, but do not believe in the answer. Not that they think the answer isn't correct, but the deny the premise of an 'answer's existence.

They enjoy questions, but only for their own sake. No answers required, or, indeed, allowed. These clever people can deflect any proposed answer with reasons to deny it.

It is as if they wish only to maintain the integrity of the perfect unanswerability of the question.

They stick tot their question until a new more intrigiung question presents itself. Sometimes, this question is what I would call and ANSWER to the first question. But, they don't think of it that way.

I am interested in asking to the answer. Questions are TOOLS to me, not toys.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 12:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I knew it was coming. It was waiting for me when I got home.

I picked it up. I had to find a knife to open it. But I had to pace around is an addled way first.

I found a knife. I sat on the couch. Chris sat with me.

I slit the tape, but I had to stop. I held it a moment longer. Then I opened it all the way.

I held it. It rested in my hands. I turned it over. Chris touched my shoulder.

Only a few moments more. I couldn't breathe.

I put it away.

I paced around the house in my addled way again.

I knew the next day at work would be long.

It was. But I didn't forget about it.

It was waiting for me when I got home.

This time, I remembered to breathe when I held it. I flipped the pages.

I smelled it. It smelled subtley wonderful. I know the smell will mellow nicely.

I walked around addled some more, but this time I was holding it.

Then, I sat down to read it.

It was bound. It was a book. It was mine.

It felt like a book. When I read it, it had pages with numbers. I turned them, and I read it again like I wanted to know what happened.

I got about 20 pages in before I stopped myself, laughing. Of course, I already know what happened.

I wrote it.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 02:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

There are times when thoughts come together like objects, and bump against each other. I want to share this thought-object group with you.

I am finishing Buddha by Karen Armstrong. It's a book on CD.

And I just finished Cold Mountain by Charles frazier, read by the author.

First, I would like to say, both of these books were much easier to take as being read to me. I would have found the book about Buddha not such a page turner, but I did want to hear about the enlightened one, so having it 'pushed' at me suited.

And Cold Mountain...well...First, I have seen the movie, which was a good movie, but it was so sad.

But beggars can't be choosers, when it comes to my little library and it's collection of books on tape. I took it.

The book is a masterpiece. The recording of the author reading his book is a masterpiece. I have high standards for books, and this one exceeded my expectations dramatically.

Wow. And wow again. The words. His phrasing and timing. I didn't know it was the author reading it until I sat down to write this post. I continually thought that the reader was perfect for the work, little did I know how perfect. Authors are not always the best ones to read their work, but this one was.

Now, it would have been an excellent read. I loved his writing.

But remember, I saw the movie. I knew the ending. The book, however, was so much richer than the movie. So very many things happened, and so many ponderances took place. It was a leisurely story.

I forgot about the ending, and was enjoying the journey. I was enjoying the way he said 'of' and the old-fashioned-to-the-point-of-ancient phrases he used. They seemed deeply rooted in the time.

But the end of the book got closer. And I couldn't help remembering the end of the movie.

And I couldn't help but hope it would end different. At times I hit stop. I couldn't face that lilted voice telling me what happened next.

I cried sheets of tears fully through the last two cassettes. I remember thinking again that I was glad to be listening to the story. I wouldn't have been able to read the words through my crying.

What a powerful story.

Next thought-object:

In Buddha Karen Armstrong had talked about Siddartha's journey to enlightenment. Siddartha is Buddha's pre-enlightened name, if you didn't know. I didn't know.

He was born Siddartha, and the Brahmin prophesied that he would achieve enlightenment. Either that or be the King of the Universe. Buddha's Dad prefferred Siddartha to be King of the Universe rather than just a boring old enlightened one.

Siddartha, however, chose the path of enlightenment. And when I say "chose" I mean to say he leaned into it. He didn't just meander along and WHOOPS--fall into enlightenment. He worked really hard at it, and sacrificed a lot to get it.

Ms. Armstrong said something that stuck with me about Buddha's road to enlightenment:

Siddartha was totally and completely sure he would achieve it. He had no doubt, he had utter faith, that enlightenment was a destination that existed and he would get there.

She mused for a little bit about what might have happened if he had given up. No Buddhist monks, no marvelous Buddhist scripture, what a loss, she seemed to say. Buddha knew the end of his story: Enlightenment. It was just a matter keeping going until he got there.

Now, I am not Buddhist. I know very little about Buddhism, but from what I've learned, it does not quite appeal to me. It does not fit the world I see around me, and although I would be pleased to learn more about the philosophies of the Buddha, I am a Christian to my core.

It was interesting to hear that Buddha is not supposed to be a god. Literally, he's "The guy who figured it out"--how to avoid suffering and pain. In his world view, and according to Buddhist thought, there are gods and he is not one of them. He is actually better than a god, because the gods need him to help THEM figure it out.

Now, that's a mind-bender to a mono-theist like me. Whoa. It made me think about the nature of Christ.

Next thought-object:

So, Christ is God. And Christ is Man. That's a mind-blower for anybody.

What knife could separate the God from the Man? According to orthodox philosophy, he totally God and totally Man. Which doesn't answer anything at all, really.

Easter is coming up, you know. It's Passion week for most of America. Passion, also known as suffering. Just the sort of thing that Buddha was trying to avoid.

Jesus did not avoid His suffering. In fact, He walked right into it. The whole story of the crucifixion is how He gunned for the cross.

Which part was doing that? The man part? I have always tended to think that it was the God part that gave Him the character to do it, but the man part was the body that they tortured.

But, comparing the story of Buddha to the story of Christ put it in a new light.

How confident was Jesus that everything would turn out okay? Did He ever wonder if He was nuts-a faltering of confidence? Did he have a little voice in His head saying, " 'Son of God'--give me a break! Who are you kidding?"

What was the nature of Christ's faith? Buddha had faith in his story; he believed he would reach enlightenment.

Did Jesus have such faith? It is human to falter. In my experience, it is the nature of faith to include faltering. Part of the mustard seed that is faith includes the part that doesn't quite believe. The part that doesn't believe but does it anyway.

Was that how Jesus had faith?

While I was listening to the end of Cold Mountain, and crying and wishing-wishing-that it would end differently, I thought about suffering. All the suffering that Inman and Ada has been through, and the whole country suffered in the Civil War. All they had struggled and suffered for...why did the story have to end that way? I wanted so badly for it to end another way.

And I remembered Christ in the garden of Gethsemane. He suffered terror and dread, a suffering before the physical suffering. Sweating blood in his pain, he asked God the Father if there was another way for the story to end. He really wanted a different ending.

O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me

He knows what's coming. He knows he's going to be tortured and killed. But does he know the rest? Does he have confidence that He will be the saving of all mankind? What if He didn't know? What if all He knew was that God said he had to suffer and die?

Suffering and dying is the state of all humans. Suffering and dying doesn't require godhood. God could require me to sacrifice my life, and I can only hope I would do as he demands. It is possible that He would enable me to do it. It is certain, though, that if I died for some noble purpose it would not result in the redemtion of all creation.

In Jesus's case, though, it did. My life doesn't have the currency of Christ's.

But that doesn't mean He knew that. Perhaps He knew no more than I know. That the bigger story of suffering, pain and death is in God's hands and He works it all to good.

Jesus suffered so much in His death. And every step along the way, He could have stopped it.

I think about that, and how much I wanted to stop the sad suffering end of Cold Mountain.

Jesus didn't stop his end. Because He believed in the story. I don't know how much He knew of the story. I don't know how much _I_ know of the story. But in this case, in this story, I know it works out with perfect justice, symmetry and beauty. It's the story that God is telling, and it's a story about Him.

Me, and my experiences with suffering and beauty, is only a story inside the big story.

The story, not even a real story in the sense of historical fact, of Cold Mountain is an experience of suffering and beauty and justice because it lines up with the big story, the way the world works, the way God works.

God is the original storyteller. It makes me feel humble to put my spun stories inside of His.

Believe in the stories. That is saving faith.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

There are times when thoughts come together like objects, and bump against each other. I want to share this thought-object group with you.

I am finishing Buddha by Karen Armstrong. It's a book on CD.

And I just finished Cold Mountain by Charles frazier, read by the author.

First, I would like to say, both of these books were much easier to take as being read to me. I would have found the book about Buddha not such a page turner, but I did want to hear about the enlightened one, so having it 'pushed' at me suited.

And Cold Mountain...well...First, I have seen the movie, which was a good movie, but it was so sad.

But beggars can't be choosers, when it comes to my little library and it's collection of books on tape. I took it.

The book is a masterpiece. The recording of the author reading his book is a masterpiece. I have high standards for books, and this one exceeded my expectations dramatically.

Wow. And wow again. The words. His phrasing and timing. I didn't know it was the author reading it until I sat down to write this post. I continually thought that the reader was perfect for the work, little did I know how perfect. Authors are not always the best ones to read their work, but this one was.

Now, it would have been an excellent read. I loved his writing.

But remember, I saw the movie. I knew the ending. The book, however, was so much richer than the movie. So very many things happened, and so many ponderances took place. It was a leisurely story.

I forgot about the ending, and was enjoying the journey. I was enjoying the way he said 'of' and the old-fashioned-to-the-point-of-ancient phrases he used. They seemed deeply rooted in the time.

But the end of the book got closer. And I couldn't help remembering the end of the movie.

And I couldn't help but hope it would end different. At times I hit stop. I couldn't face that lilted voice telling me what happened next.

I cried sheets of tears fully through the last two cassettes. I remember thinking again that I was glad to be listening to the story. I wouldn't have been able to read the words through my crying.

What a powerful story.

Next thought-object:

In Buddha Karen Armstrong had talked about Siddartha's journey to enlightenment. Siddartha is Buddha's pre-enlightened name, if you didn't know. I didn't know.

He was born Siddartha, and the Brahmin prophesied that he would achieve enlightenment. Either that or be the King of the Universe. Buddha's Dad prefferred Siddartha to be King of the Universe rather than just a boring old enlightened one.

Siddartha, however, chose the path of enlightenment. And when I say "chose" I mean to say he leaned into it. He didn't just meander along and WHOOPS--fall into enlightenment. He worked really hard at it, and sacrificed a lot to get it.

Ms. Armstrong said something that stuck with me about Buddha's road to enlightenment:

Siddartha was totally and completely sure he would achieve it. He had no doubt, he had utter faith, that enlightenment was a destination that existed and he would get there.

She mused for a little bit about what might have happened if he had given up. No Buddhist monks, no marvelous Buddhist scripture, what a loss, she seemed to say. Buddha knew the end of his story: Enlightenment. It was just a matter keeping going until he got there.

Now, I am not Buddhist. I know very little about Buddhism, but from what I've learned, it does not quite appeal to me. It does not fit the world I see around me, and although I would be pleased to learn more about the philosophies of the Buddha, I am a Christian to my core.

It was interesting to hear that Buddha is not supposed to be a god. Literally, he's "The guy who figured it out"--how to avoid suffering and pain. In his world view, and according to Buddhist thought, there are gods and he is not one of them. He is actually better than a god, because the gods need him to help THEM figure it out.

Now, that's a mind-bender to a mono-theist like me. Whoa. It made me think about the nature of Christ.

Next thought-object:

So, Christ is God. And Christ is Man. That's a mind-blower for anybody.

What knife could separate the God from the Man? According to orthodox philosophy, he totally God and totally Man. Which doesn't answer anything at all, really.

Easter is coming up, you know. It's Passion week for most of America. Passion, also known as suffering. Just the sort of thing that Buddha was trying to avoid.

Jesus did not avoid His suffering. In fact, He walked right into it. The whole story of the crucifixion is how He gunned for the cross.

Which part was doing that? The man part? I have always tended to think that it was the God part that gave Him the character to do it, but the man part was the body that they tortured.

But, comparing the story of Buddha to the story of Christ put it in a new light.

How confident was Jesus that everything would turn out okay? Did He ever wonder if He was nuts-a faltering of confidence? Did he have a little voice in His head saying, " 'Son of God'--give me a break! Who are you kidding?"

What was the nature of Christ's faith? Buddha had faith in his story; he believed he would reach enlightenment.

Did Jesus have such faith? It is human to falter. In my experience, it is the nature of faith to include faltering. Part of the mustard seed that is faith includes the part that doesn't quite believe. The part that doesn't believe but does it anyway.

Was that how Jesus had faith?

While I was listening to the end of Cold Mountain, and crying and wishing-wishing-that it would end differently, I thought about suffering. All the suffering that Inman and Ada has been through, and the whole country suffered in the Civil War. All they had struggled and suffered for...why did the story have to end that way? I wanted so badly for it to end another way.

And I remembered Christ in the garden of Gethsemane. He suffered terror and dread, a suffering before the physical suffering. Sweating blood in his pain, he asked God the Father if there was another way for the story to end. He really wanted a different ending.

O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me

He knows what's coming. He knows he's going to be tortured and killed. But does he know the rest? Does he have confidence that He will be the saving of all mankind? What if He didn't know? What if all He knew was that God said he had to suffer and die?

Suffering and dying is the state of all humans. Suffering and dying doesn't require godhood. God could require me to sacrifice my life, and I can only hope I would do as he demands. It is possible that He would enable me to do it. It is certain, though, that if I died for some noble purpose it would not result in the redemtion of all creation.

In Jesus's case, though, it did. My life doesn't have the currency of Christ's.

But that doesn't mean He knew that. Perhaps He knew no more than I know. That the bigger story of suffering, pain and death is in God's hands and He works it all to good.

Jesus suffered so much in His death. And every step along the way, He could have stopped it.

I think about that, and how much I wanted to stop the sad suffering end of Cold Mountain.

Jesus didn't stop his end. Because He believed in the story. I don't know how much He knew of the story. I don't know how much _I_ know of the story. But in this case, in this story, I know it works out with perfect justice, symmetry and beauty. It's the story that God is telling, and it's a story about Him.

Me, and my experiences with suffering and beauty, is only a story inside the big story.

The story, not even a real story in the sense of historical fact, of Cold Mountain is an experience of suffering and beauty and justice because it lines up with the big story, the way the world works, the way God works.

God is the original storyteller. It makes me feel humble to put my spun stories inside of His.

Believe in the stories. That is saving faith.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

[All quotes taken from Diving Deep and Surfacing by Carol P. Christ]

Walking through a store, three beautiful ladies shopping. My friends and I stop to admire some boots. One friend says:

"I have fat calves. Boots never fit me right."

"Me too!" I say.

The third woman says quietly, "Boots never fit me right either. But...why do we all assume that we are fat? Why don't we just say they make the boots too small?"

We stare at her, amazed at her wisdom.

Instead of recognizeing their own experiences, giving names to their feelings, and celebrating their perceptions of the world, women have often suppressed and denied them. When the stories a women reads or hears do not validate what she feels or thinks, she is confused. She may wonder if her feelings are wrong. She may even deny to herself that she feels what she feels.

I spend a huge amount of time between the pages of a book. This has been true as long as I could read.

When I was a teenager, I began to write poetry. It occurred to me that nearly all the writers I loved to read were male. The obvious conclusion was that men had greater talent at writing, that females simply were unable to produce strings of beautiful words.

Men were, categorically, better writers than women.

This did not seem in keeping with my assesment of the young men I know. According to the evidence, these boys must be capable of producing poetry and metaphor to an even greater extent than myself.

I watched them, waiting for jewels to drop out of their mouths. But the only thing I heard was re-telling of last night's movie rental, or TV show.

Hmm. No precious nuggets there. Perhaps their poetic talents were private. I approached them straight out, taking a survey of my aquaintances:

"Do you ever write poetry?"

To my surprise, almost all of them said they did. Of course, I didn't ask and they did not offer to share their efforts with me. But I was sure that their poetry must be far superior to my feeble efforts.

Women have lived in the interstices between their own vaguely understood experience and the shaping given to experience by the stories of men. The dialectic between experience and shaping experience through storytelling has not been in women's hands.

A grieving and battered woman sits with her parents. She is on the cusp of a tragic choice. Weary and toneless, she speaks to her mother and father:

"I have told you how it's been. You know the story. I have tried all I can try. He won't listen. He won't change. I cannot stay with the way things are. I will have to divorce him."

Her father answers, "You are too emotional right now to make that decision."

She lifts her heavy head to stare at him. After a moment, she turns to her mother. "Do I sound emotional to you?"

Hesitantly, the mother replies: "No. But what your father means is..."

In a very real sense, there is no experience without stories... Stories give shape to experience, experience gives rise to stories. At least this is how it is for those who have had the freedom to tell their own stories, to shape their lives in accord with their experience. But this has not usually been the case for women. Indeed, there is a very real sense in which the seeming paradoxical statement "Women have not experienced their own experience" is true.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 10:45 AM | Permalink

Other people started the Internet. The military started off with DARPA. Just like General Eisenhower had to use the threat of military action on our own soil to push through funding for the interstate highway system, it was the threat of nuclear disaster that let the government come up with an inter-network of communication technology.

Well, we aren’t even close to tapping all the possibilities DARPA started, now become the world wide web, that trinity of double-yoos. It’s my internet. I’ll share it with the rest of you, but it is mine like the air I breathe.

Grizzled military contractors in their 60s will scoff at me, but I was an early adopter of the DARPA enterprise. My college had a system that connected up with it, and I latched on like a leech to that possibility of communicating with interesting people. I spent hours and hours chatting via green glowing text with all the other people who lived by the light of the computer lab monitors. It was 1990 and no one had heard of e-mail.

Back in the college days, I learned nothing about computers. I mean, nothing. I knew to hit the enter key when I was done, but not much more than that. I did ask for help to understand, I did. But I can’t help it if the nerd boys in the lab dissolved into blushing confusion when I asked them to explain. They just found it easier to do it for me. Speaking face to face with a freshman coed was too much.

I repented at my leisure for not asking more questions.

But look at us now! In a satisfyingly ironic twist, I now work as a video conferencing professional. I have progressed to a pretty darn sophisticated method of e-communication.

And email and the Internet are huge and getting bigger every day. I have been able to take my English major writing ambitions and get my stuff out there. I have my own blog, and I even have been a major contributor to starting up this cool website, Blogcritics.

I heard about BC, and it fit exactly what I wanted at the time. It was a place that was designed to get more of an audience than my own little webpage. Okay, so I really didn’t see how it could actually make a profit, but I was living in Silicon Valley at the time and had seen about 10 bazillion start up companies with worse ideas. Funding wasn’t my problem. BC was a place where I could be published and be read by more than just my mother. And I was thankful to Eric Olsen and Philip Winn for giving me that chance.

I practiced the art of writing, doing tons of reviews of whatever came across my path. I got pretty competitive with other writers, wanting to stay in the top ten frequent posters. It was fun! I admit I tossed off some posts that were fairly content-free at times. But then, I also composed some really great bits on Blogcritics.

Lo and behold. I got to be a significantly better writer, through the process of exercising that writing muscle. I wrote and wrote and finally began to work on some projects that were bigger than a website could hold.

I outgrew my blog. I was struggling out of the chrysalis and discovered that I didn’t have a home there anymore.

Which is not to say I don’t still enjoy tossing off the occasional posts on my blog. And whenever appropriate I cross-post to BC. But, as a writer, I’m in a different space. Doing reviews of things doesn’t interest me as much. I have my own things to say.

Okay, so, while I benched myself, the game goes on. BC has become a force, winning awards and attracting new contributors and becoming positively successful and viable. Way to go!

Now I am in the terrifying position of having completed—or nearly completed, there is still the last editing—a longer book-project. In giving myself a shake to look around at how to position my book in the market, I remembered my old stomping ground. Blogcritics would be a site to be seen on, so I could get some publicity as an author and sell some books.

So, I started posting a few things, and tossed off a review that I didn’t put that much effort into. I knew it was short, but it was the sort of thing I would have thrown up in my old competitive-to-be-a-top poster days.

I was shocked to get this reply from Connie Phillips:
“I wanted to drop you an email to let you know I have put a hold on the article you have in pending…You have a really intetersting seedling started here, and I'd love to see you expand on your thoughts just a bit. Give a little bit more information about the CD itself, or…”
Seedling indeed! Who did this person think she was? I stewed around about it. Hmph! What was wrong with my post? What were other people posting anyway?

I went back to the site and did some reading on the music section. I saw post after post of lengthy reviews, full of interesting info and opinions about the album and artists.

Wow. Blogcritics sure has come a long way.

Connie had the annoying quality of being right. I knew I had done a half-assed review, but I arrogantly thought that half-assed was good enough for the Internet.

Not so, my friends. We complain all the time about the sucky state of old guard journalism, and the dividing lines being blurred. The stuffy suits in the Times and News towers say that they have the right to be right, that they are more professional and accuse us bloggers of poor spelling and merely opinionating.

Well, I’m no Instapundit, but I have the right to be right as much as anybody.

However, the bar has been raised and we who have the soapbox have the responsibility. Here on the World Wide Web, we have the generational turnover of fruit flies. Been on the web two years? You’re the elder statesman! No more screwing around. “Good enough” isn’t good enough anymore.

The “child” I helped in my small way to bring into the world grew up to tell me to get with the times. Now that I’m over the shock, I’m really proud.

Fact is, I will probably never be as frequent a poster as I was in the early years, but I will never again take this forum lightly. With my right hand raised, I swear I will always and forevermore spell-check.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 12:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

There was a time when formal conversation was a highly respected and desirable art. For the rich upper class with nothing better to do than entertain themselves with their own exclusive company, being interesting, inoffensive and, if you can manage it, witty, seemed just about the epitome of human grace.

The period of the salon it was, an era described in The Age of Conversation by Benedetta Craveri, translated from the Italian by Teresa Waugh. My heart squeezes with envy at the thought of those drawing rooms. There is a reason they called that time the age of enlightenment. Conversation is one of the very best ways to learn anything. To be exposed to new ideas and perspectives.

America was born during the enlightenment. Interestingly, the age of conversation and enlightenment was a thing that suggested its own demise. America’s crazy ideas spelled the end of the upper class. The concept of a class who did not need to produce anything but conversation was rejected by the conversations that ensued.

America had work to do. America, and everywhere, had projects to start and research to do and the world to change. They did not have time to merely sit and converse. That has continued forward to this day.

But that didn’t mean the conversations had become unnecessary. Humans need to talk. They need to clear their psychic buffers and build on half conceived ideas. I think it might be nearly as essential as sleep.

It might be time to take a page from those salons again. Craveri writes “talent for listening was more appreciated than one for speaking. Exquisite courtesy restrained vehemence and prevented quarrels.”

I, for one, would like to prevent quarrels. World peace would be a little closer, if we take this idea as true, if listening could have that effect.

There are two people who have been working on this exact issue. I don’t know if they have read Craveri’s book, but Bill and Liz have taken a chunk of their lives to bike around the U.S. and wear a sign that says:

Talk to Me

These guys knock my socks off. I first heard about them on “This American Life”, the “Say Anything” episode. Bill and Liz sat on a busy Manhattan street holding their sign. People just came up and talked to them about anything.

Imagine my shock and delight to actually see with my own eyes these two fabulous people at the Los Angeles Book Fair last year. They sat with their sign and I walked over and talked to them!

I asked them about TAL, what they thought of Ira Glass, and barely restrained myself from asking for their autograph. They did, however, ask for mine, and my email address.

They surprised me with their sweetness. They really seemed sincere and interested in what people had to say. How could people maintain that kind of interest after so long?

I really wanted to get them to talk to me, actually. I thought they were fascinating. When I told them where I lived (Glendale), Liz told me she was part Armenian and had promised to go visit Glendale on their trip(Glendale’s population is more than 50% Armenian). I recommended some busy spots and a bus line to take to get there.

I tore myself away, at last. These guys are so great! I can barely get my mind around what they have chosen to do. I asked them about what was “next”, what they wanted to make of their experiences. They seemed not to have concrete plans.

In some ways, I think that’s good. Commercializing their endeavor could ruin the integrity of it, and they seemed to be so sincere.

I got an email from them. They have circled the lower 48 states on their bikes with their sign. Check out their website: http://www.nyctalktome.com

Ponder this, my friends. What does it mean to really listen?

Posted by Murphy Horner at 09:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I sleep hard, but sometimes I dream things. Things that haven’t happened yet. Sometimes I remember them, wonder about the dream. Then I go on my way and forget them.

Until they come true. They call it déjà vu. But I know I dreamed it. Stupid, everyday, unimportant things. Like looking for a notebook when someone is walking down a hall towards me. Or holding a conversation, when in the middle I realize I know exactly the next thing I am going to say. I would step into the now that had already happened months ago, years ago, in my dream.

It feels like a spell; I am split in two. The me who dreamed the conversation, or should I say, the me in the dream from the past, was fully engaged in what she was saying.

But the present me, the one living in the event which had already taken place, became distracted by the memory of the present.

How do I dream these future scenes?

How could I possibly see what hadn’t happened yet? What let me see the future? And why such irrelevant ordinary scenes from the future?

This makes me wonder how time works. Am I in time? Like I am in the universe? Or am in time like a fish in water?

A fish can jump out of water. Leap up high and dive back in.

For that matter, am I traveling through my life like a fish through a stream? Where the direction is laid out, only I can't see far enough ahead to know that the biggest choices I have is whether to swim on the left side or the right.

Or maybe I am the stream. Maybe I am flowing for the first time. Perhaps my journey from the heights to the sea is unmarked. I, the water, flow because I must, but minute by second by future moment the way is chosen. Each obstacle changes the whole course. Over that pebble, pool below that hill, rapids here, waterfall there. Something new under the sun.

My dream moments might be telling me something. Who knows which moment is the decisive one? What choice is the fulcrum for an irreversible direction? Is some extra-temporal being trying to draw attention to the unnoticed as the start of some fork in the road?

But if that’s so, what am I supposed to do with this?

When the spell of a dreamed scene comes over me, and I am split between the layers of the dream memory and the identical present, I shift.

If the dream turned right, I go straight.

Who knows what’s at stake? Nothing? Everything?

But illusion, delusion or otherwise, I chose where to plant my feet.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 03:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Sticks and stones will break your bones
but names will never hurt you

...that's a crock of bull...Names are extremely painful. All kinds of words can conspire to hit you in the middle and throb.

Each person has a sense of themselves. I am not the only one to have a way that I wish to be seen, a presentation of myself projected to others. I want to be seen as clever, or funny, or good-looking. All three even.

But when others poke a hole in my bubble, when they dash my polished surface. They could show me up as stupid. Or not laugh at my jokes. Or something much more embarrassing.

Something that makes me feel like everything about me is undesirable and even despised.

Uhhll. That's a horrible feeling.

I want to be loved. I want to be accepted and cherished.

That doesn't always happen. There are times when I am very NOT.

It's ironic, because I know that I am not always desirable and lovable. I live with me every day. I know my flaws.

Then again, it is especially painful when I hear from others about a flaw I was unaware of. How withering to learn that they outfit I thought so cute has a big hole in it. Or the speech habit I thought endearing was percieved as condescending.

It's a sick, skin-crawling self-loathing feeling. It's the sort of feeling I want to be rid of as soon as possible, but it lingers.

I remember one particular embarrassing moment. I was in a new town, and had been embraced in a new friendship--possibly romantic!--which was all the more exciting because there was no one else vying for my attention.

He had loaned me his guitar, a great trust, and told me where he lived so I could return it after a while.

It seemed appropriate to me to bring it back after a few weeks. Still warm from his attention, and not wanted the friendship to fade away, I followed the directions he had given me to his apartment, where his lived with his family. I brought the guitar back, hoping for a little visit.

I came to the door and was greeted with a wall of hostility. His sister left me in the hall, and went to get her brother. He took his time. When he finally came out he asked why I had come.

To return the guitar.

He looked down at the guitar and took it from me at last. Then he said I should not have come.

I left as soon as I could. I was mortified. I felt like a bug that narrowly escaped death, only because I would have soiled the shoes it would take to squish me.

I was reeling. I wanted to find some comfort somewhere. But I had no one I could go to. I wanted to have some friend--someone!--tell me, "hey, don't listen to them. You're okay."

But I was new to the town, and I had no way of communicating with any of my old friends. It was all me. And I felt like a pimple on the butt of the world.

That part of me that stays on the side tried to think of something. Some way to comfort myself. I began to realize that the thing that was hurting was my pride.

What is Pride? "... it's not a hand, nor foot, nor arm, nor face, nor any other part belonging to a man..."

And yet it can be hurt. Was it important? or was this pain like the hiccups, something uncomfortable that was not serious and would pass?

Pride...Pride is the original sin. Lucifer was proud and he screwed everything up.

In that case, pride SHOULD be hurt. Pride should be ignored, torn down, attacked. It was a good thing to have my pride damaged. I should be humble, not proud.

And yet...There is another meaning of pride. Pride in opposition to shame. I will not be ashamed. If I am ashamed, it means I have done something wrong. Something shameful.

But if I am proud, I am proud of myself, I am living right. I should strive to be proud of my work. I should preserve my pride.

How can this be? Two things that mean the opposite.

Here is how I have determined the difference:

For the false, destructive pride, the source comes from external things. If I am proud of what I did not create, what I did not work for, then this is false. If I take pride in my appearance, my status or how people regard me, then that's wrong.

But if the source of my pride comes from my own work, and the affirmation comes from myself, then it is good pride. Yes, I should work hard and take pride in my work. I should be careful to be honest and have integrity. I can be proud of that integrity, but my pride can be an internal affirmation. I don't need to broadcast my good deeds, it is enough to know them myself.

A shameful pride would be trumpeted and draw from other peoples' opinion.

But a humble pride would be quiet and only need affirmation from oneself.

That is basically the litmus test. And it places my pride, my self-worth, inside my sphere of control. I don't need anyone else's opinions to know.

I can hold my own with pride.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 11:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

They put them in the middle of the mall. They were brightly colored posters; but they didn't have any kind of picture. People stood and stared at them as if mesmerized.

I didn't get it. I didn't see anything.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 05:20 AM | Permalink

1. Always remember the purpose of the conversation is the exchange of ideas and experiences. The point of the conversation is to hear others' point of view and to share your own.

2. Kindness and respect should be the mental stance throughout. If another person is listening to your convictions, they are doing you a kindness. If they are sharing their own convictions, you are receiving the reflected light of their revealed truth. Respect is appropriate at such times, and indeed, necessary for the exchange to occur.

3. Be secure in your own convictions. Do not be needy, asking for affirmation during the conversation. If what you think it true, no one needs to tell you so. You should not try to convince the other person to agree with you.

4. Ask questions and listen to the answers.

5. If you don't understand something someone is saying, ask them to clarify: "When you said X, I'm not sure what you meant. Can you explain?"

6. Don't press too hard for explanations. New ideas may take some time to get your mind around. By pressing too hard for evidence, you may cause them to feel defensive.

7. Should your conversation partner be persistent in trying to get affirmation from you when you don't feel in agreement, do not answer insincerely. A soft answer, for example "I really need to think about that, I can't answer right now" might help to get past the sticking point

8. If you begin to feel angry, disrespected or cornered during the discussion, try to direct the conversation toward a less sensitive area.

9. If your conversation partner expresses a racist, sexist, or violent idea, SPEAK OUT. If you let such ideas go unchallenged, you are lending support by your silence. Say something like, "I heard what you just said, and I disagree. Every person deserves respect as a part of our shared humanity." If violence is mentioned, say, "It's really not right to hurt anyone. There are better ways to handle the situation."

10. If you feel close to responding in anger or otherwise behaving unkindly, excuse yourself. Try saying "This conversation is bringing up a lot of feelings for me. I really can't keep talking about this. I'm sorry. Excuse me." Abandoning the conversation is much better than hurting someone.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 09:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The 60's changed the world, and all those goofy hippies who did it had babies.

I'm one of those babies. And I'm 32 now. What's left for me? I watched by parents really do the stuff that the hippies-cum-yuppies bragged they did. They really went all over the world and changed wherever they went.

Not that I approve of their methods necessarily. Now that I'm as old as they were when they did some of their revolutionary stuff, I just think, "there must have been a better way."

But then again, it's tough to change the world. Not many people are trying any more. There lingers a desire, maybe a reminscence of once having been a revolutionary. Starbucks sprays that scent around all it's stores. It doesn't have any substance, it's a synthetic aroma.

Another hippie-revolutionary nostalgic institution...NPR...Their very tone of voice is soothing. It makes me think they are all open-minded, well-educated, fair and balance citizens.

And yet. They are not. I repeatedly find them to be increasingly uninterested in democracy and more interested in the democratic party.

What kind of revolutionaries are they?

So here's my new beef. NPR has fired a guy for giving an opinion that the Museum of Modern Art in New York finds embarrassing.

Shame. Turn in your card, National Public Radio. You have tromped on journalistic integrity and free speech. Your very existence is supported by our government AND the listeners who send in their 10 bucks a month because you are supposed to be free from corporate advertising alliances.

Sell Outs.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 05:12 PM | Permalink

Apostate:
One who has abandoned one's religious faith, a political party, one's principles, or a cause.

A couple years ago I observed a sort of behavioral tendency in one individual, and it's amazing how the same pattern carries through in many different people I've met.

I call it being apostate to your own intelligence.
Apostate is a word with religious implications, and since I come from a very religious background it seems natural to me. I understand it to mean someone who deliberately turns away from God, knowing and understanding that God is God and still turning away from Him.

Of course the same principle applies to other things. For example, a person could knowingly and with full understanding turn away from the smart thing to do.

Here's where I first saw it:

I met this man , let's call him Joe, through a friend. When I met Joe, he was cleaning carpets to feed his wife and children.

My friend said, "Joe has a degree in industrial engineering."

"Good heavens! Why would he want to be a carpet cleaner if he could be an engineer? What happened?"

A few years prior, there had been an infestation of Multi-level marketing in the area. Ponzi's dream lives on, and it became the dream of Joe. He bought into the product line, bought into the pre-packaged marketing material. He contacted all his friends and spent time trying to recruit them beneath his level on the Ponzi pyramid.

As is easy to guess, this diligent effort did not result in the millions, or at least hundreds of thousands, that the marketing materials implied.

Here comes the point of decision. Joe started this endeavor to make money. He wasn't making money. Logic would indicate that he abandon this method of making money and find a different method that produced the desired result-money.

But Joe did not choose to do this. He decided that there was a reason he wasn't making money. It must be because he had not comitted to the plan. He needed to quit his job and do this new job full-time.

He chose to continue on with his original choice, affirming the first decision with a second one.

Now, he's stepped away from logic and begun to act on faith. Why would he, an engineer, a man of science, choose to act against his own logic? Let's follow him further.

Joe quit his job as an industrial engineer. He began to sell the MLM products full time, on the belief that the products and the system were reliable and the problem lay in his dedication to them. He fully believed that he would be able to support his family on the money he would be certain to recieve with his new commitment to the plan.

It wasn't long before his new plan had consequences. His wife and kids had to leave their home and live with her mother because there was no money to pay the bills.

And here came the second point of decision. Should Joe give up his MLM dreams and go back to work as an engineer? There were definitly jobs available. Or should he pursue his MLM career further?

Yep, ol' Joe believed. He chose to find a supplemental job, one that wouldn't get in the way of his real job, selling the MLM product.

He took up a franchise to start cleaning carpets. It didn't pay enough for his family to leave Grandma's house. As a matter of fact, Joe had to live with friends to get back on his feet.

This is a true story. This man was a fool. He consistenly chose the same stupid decision.

What the hell was he thinking? He must have thought that something other than reason or logic (also known as reality) was more important to him.

What could be more important than reality? And what sorts of things fall outside the boundaries of logic and reality?

I have two answers:
1. Self Image
2. Being percieved as being right

Maybe they are just two aspects of the same thing. When Joe chose to join the MLM program, he had a certain image of himself. Rich, successful, prosperous, admired, whatever. That was who he was going to be.

When he came to his first point of decision, he could abandon that first image and admit that he was wrong. This course of action would have made it possible to find another way to gain the rewards he was looking for.

But he didn't want to admit he was wrong. He didn't want to crack the image he had of himself, the one he thought he was portraying to others, that was so attractive.

He affirmed his first decision, and chose to act against logic. This was only the first real time he acted against logic. It might have worked, that scheme. But once he tried it, he could empirically know that it didn't work.

He chose to ignore the reality of the situation, and embrace his inner vision of himself, and shore up the image he assumed he projected to others. That he was a guy that knew what he was doing.

He didn't see that others were not impressed with him. That he looked a fool.

Just because he had found a way to superimpose his self-image over reality did not mean that anyone else was fooled. It only showed up his foolishness more starkly.

Now, I have seen a number of people decide that they have a story about themselves, they have an image, that is more important than reality. They can take the weight of their supposed position or importance and try to flatten the reality of the situation.

This only shows up the contrast between the truth of the situation and the ridiculous story they are putting forth.

True importance, such that would make a person worth of respect, comes from acting and speaking in accordance with reality.

Which is to say, respect is earned not owed.

And to turn away from Truth towards self-gratification (also known as fear) will only hasten what you fear.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 02:04 AM | Permalink

we're still reeling from the Bush and Kerry showdown. Some dude was talking about how angry the different sides were at one another. He wore a Bush t-shirt in the middle of my Kerry-country city.

One of the reactions to his shirt was "That's really funny dude."

I know what section of town he was in. Same section that used to sell the "Free Winona" Tshirts. Irony is the air they breathe, the first thought, not the second.

It didn't even occur that Mr. Bush T-shirt was being sincere.

I was talking with this guy at work, certainly not a guy I would think of as overly ironic. He and I like to talk about my homestate. I am from there, and he really wants to visit there.

He keeps putting it off though, for reasons I can't fathom. His latest scheme was to visit Talkeetna and fly around on the rivers and lakes.

I said, "Oh you're going to love Talkeetna! It's a real Alaska town."

I found this website, to illustrate what kind of town Talkeetna is. The picture of their home, especially, struck me and being true alaska.

His response: "I thought it was a joke. I mean, it's not painted or anything."

A joke! a JOKE!

Alaskans joke all the time, but we know shelter when we see it. Paint is not a requirement for a home. Please!

Now, this is a trend I am seeing. People are walking around with pictures of what they expect to see drawn on their pupils. Can you see real people through your expectations?

This takes us back to Kerry again. The democrats were shocked and amazed that the majority, albeit a slim one, did not want the democratic candidate.

They couldn't understand it. What could the problem be? Finally, the answer:

...they are full of original sin and they have a taste for violence.
...they prefer to be ignorant.

well, that answers that. Unfortunately, Jane Smiley's attitude is not isolated. This kind of post-election analysis is all over the web and in coffee conversations.

This goes back to my previous post regarding the political parties.

The stereotype of democrats is the inclusive, diverse party. So why can't they see anything but stereotypes?

How many figures and polls about the percentages of this group and that group were going to vote for this candidate or another?

PEOPLE ARE NOT DEMOGRAPHICS.

I am all kinds of things. I am not a republican or a democrats. I am an informed voter.

I resent the pigeon-holing happening from the "intellectual" democrats. I resent that they expect certain things from certain people.

Isn't that the definition of prejudice?

That is a raging hypocrisy that turns my stomach. Don't tell me who I am. Don't put me in a box.

I am looking for a leader that can see the problems of real people, and address them.

Or even a person that can see real people. That would be nice.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 07:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

"In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was God"

Great quote for writers to remember, huh? Gives us delusions of grandeur.

But there is great power in words-even in just one work. In his book Creativity, author Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi talks about how just asking the question is incredibly useful. HitchHiker's Guide taught us that. "Are you sure you're asking the right question?" Finding a new way of looking at a problem can get you a lot closer to solving it.

And this morning I found a word I'd been looking for:
Tyranny

This is a twisted and long thread of thought. Bear with me.

Funny I didn't think of it earlier. This is the presidential election season, after all. Kerry is busy talking about how he has a plan, and President Bush is talking about how people in the Middle East are now free and not under tyranny.

Tyranny is a nicely flexible word. It can refer to a whole country, or it can refer to just one person.

You know, my professor of classical literature told us that the original meaning for tyranny was just a King. It is a Greek word, and it was the real name for Oedipus Rex (Rex being pushed in later, because Tyrant had a bad name). I've written about Oedipus before, actually. This just adds to the soup of what I've been thinking about.

The Founding Fathers, those instigators, knew that Tyranny was a cooperative endeavor. 'Tax our tea, will ya? I don't THINK so...'
Over the side it goes, and those new world colonists showed they were not going to cooperate with the percieved tyranny of England's taxes. The American Revolutionaries pulled in their powers and refused to cooperate with tyranny.

It's kind of funny, because the things they were complaining about seem so insignificant when we take a look around at the sorts of tyranny we've become used to now. Too much taxes! Give me a break! How does that even get on the same page as getting stoned to death on the streets for flashing an elbow?

And yet, these things start small.

That's the problem. They start small. Some leader, some person given the power to rule over people, makes a small move that's not right, and people accomodate.

Cooperate.

They go along to get along. I mean really, you can't argue over everything. What's a little tax? What's a little religious zealousness? It's for the greater good.

Until it takes over. And then you have tyranny.

The founding fathers were big readers. They were into the whole enlightenment, Thomas Paine, Plato's Republic, humanism and all that.

They came to an understanding of how politics work. They were attuned to it, so that they weren't letting the ol' monarch get away with anything. Nope, not even a little tax. And they thought and conversed and read and argued and came up with a GENIUS bunch of documents that were meant to protect our freedom.

And the big basis of this protection was that the power was distributed. They wanted people to be able to hold on to their power and not be compelled to cooperate with tyranny. The message was, 'if you fall into tyranny, it's your own fault! The keys to your freedom are in your own hands.'

And this is so much a part of who americans are, that we don't even think about it. We have had this policy, don't get involved in other people's business. Other countries can hold a revolution if they want change. We did. The keys to their freedom are in their own hands.

Sometimes we get impatience, and the CIA plays dirty. They 'assist' the revolutionaries of a country with overthrowing a government they don't like. But we do believe that it's up to the people to take the reins for their own government.

That's why we like democratic governments. Democracy for everyone!

But not everyone comes to democracy from the same angle.

Let's go back to a more recent revolution. The Russian one, less than one hundred years ago, had a whole different philosophy. Communism, which I've also written about before.

The communists, of whom the US of A became terrified , had a desire for democracy and a very strong emphasis on being 'for the people'. But they took it another way.

There were a set of smarty-pants, well-read, rich, idealistic and politically active men who started the whole thing and foisted it upon everyone else. Just like America so far.

But they really clung to the ideology. It was all about the ideology. This particular political philosophy happened after the advent of psychology. It was kind of an organized "power of positive thinking" in some ways.

Their idea was that if they could just educate the masses in the principles of this great ideology of equality and wonderfulness.

And maybe that's where it went wrong. It got kind of messy when people tried to guide...FORCE...other people into actions for their own good.

The 20th century was a lot about that. A lot about ideological movements. There was the Russian revolution. Early in the 20th century. That happened during world war 1, which had it's own sets of ideological movements on all sides. I have been thinking about that one a lot, too.

Then world war 2 happened. There was the National Socialist movement...Also known as the Nazis...Boy, they were a set of idealists. Scary scary. And ever after, we use them as examples of the ultimate bad dudes. But it was ideas that gave them power. All those people in the concentration camps were there because of a large cooperation of tyranny. The force of all the collective people going along to get along, going along because of the greater good was crushing.

Did the word holocaust exists before world war two? Maybe it had a meaning like Tyrant had during Oedipus's time. No real meaning. The Nazis filled out the word like no one else.

Alright. But the Nazis burned out, basically. After world war 2, we were left with only the communists to fear. The communists, starting their political will to power in Russia...Which oozed over into places that had not been Russia...The Ukraine, Belarus, Estonia, Roumania. They were not Russia, but they were assimilated into the blank sweep of map known as the USSR.

And the communists were not done. There was Eastern Europe. They began licking their lips and swallowing chunks of Europe like cake. Germany, Poland, Chekoslovakia.

It was scary scary. I could go on with all kinds of examples, but history is not my forte, and I'll probably be inaccurate.

The thing I am remembering, thinking about now is Milan Kundera. He wrote the Unbearable Lightness of Being, which I've talked about before.

I just recently finished another of his books, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. This blows me up, just like the last one.

He's talking about how his country was taken over by the Communists. He's talkign about Czechoslovakia, and what people choose to remember. How political powers, whichever one was in power, would revise the history, erase people from photos and memories.

I remember another book that was about American revisionist history. I don't know if anyone else would see it that way, but I did. It deals with America's bugaboos, race, slavery and class status. And all the people in the story seem to remember things differently. The hero is left trying to sort out what 'really' happened.

What the heck happened? That's the question Kundera was dealing with. What the heck happened to my beautiful ideas? what the heck happened to my beautiful country? When did this tyranny take over? How did we allow it?

And wasn't Oedipus also thinking this? What the heck happened? How did this horror come to pass?

We never meant for this. And at last we get to the heart of this:

I also walk with my head in my hands. What the heck happened here?

I am trying to write a memoir. It is the story of how my life was when I was 18 and 19. It is a story of

Tyranny

Religious tyranny. It's a story of how certain people were given power and control, and how other people cooperated. It's a story of how I struggled to break free.

It's also a story of how I went to Russia, landing in Yakutsk, on the same day that the Soviet Union dissolved.

So, these are two parallel stories. Me, breaking free of American religious tyranny, and Russia, breaking free of Communist Soviet tyranny.

Now that I have the word, tyranny, I feel like I can better express the story.

I understand Kundera, with his grief and his confusion, 'What happened?' He struggled with his country, he struggled with the fate of his country. I struggle too. I have spent my life wondering 'What happened? How did my family, my church, come to this?'

It is not simple. It is not normal. Tyranny is not a phase of life. There were things that happened that should not have happened. And I, as a teenager, was left grasping at straws and struggling with the why.

I looked high and low for something to explain what happened. Why did my parents make the choices they did? Why did the pastor do the things he did?

How did my brother come to the conclusion that he was could no longer make his own decisions, but always had to go to the pastor for direction in everything?

What was that about?

My first word for it was "spiritual abuse" This made sense.

But it was bigger than that. I kept looking. After time I found another word:
Mind Control

More and more, the behaviors I had seen were coming into focus. And researching mind control led directly into a new field:
Cults

And that word, cult, has satisfied me for a very long time. As I thought about it, sifting through my experiences and memories, it fits.

And as I gained courage to talk more about it with others, I began to see that these methods, these patterns, were far more universal than I thought.

And eventually, I looked over to my right and saw some nasty methods and patterns coming from the man I was married to.

It's not that uncommon, I guess. I hate to think of myself as a victim demographic, but it's common for abuse to go on and not be identified by the person recieving it.

It's little things. 'He couldn't have meant to do that.' But nothing wins an argument like slamming your opponent against the wall. And he probably felt a lot more in control, a lot smarter when he told me that I didn't know anything.

It wasn't until I began to understand how spiritual abuse, mind control and cults work that I could at last recognize what was happening at home, and be empowered to leave. Boy, it was not easy, let me tell you that!

But those three words didn't cover what was happening in my home. They call it wife beating, emotional abuse. But it was so much of a piece with all the others.

And none of those words covered what was happening in Russia, under the communists. I thought of Totalitarianism. Yeah...

And then came the taliban, who chilled my bones. That's back to spiritual abuse and totalitarianism.

Until today, when I finally found the word, the oldest word of them all.

Tyranny. That covers all the bases. It even covers things not in my listed experiences. It doesn't take two to do this tango. There are ways that one person can be a tyrant to themself.

We already know that tyranny requires cooperation.

I do not have many answers. I'm thrilled today, just to have a question. Here's the question:
What does it take to resist tyranny? How do we not cooperate with the forces of evil (cue George W. here) or the forces of misguided good intentions that push us into the arms of tyranny?

I don't know exactly how. I think that having a strong sense of right and wrong, and an attitude of mercy is the only place I know to start.

Tyranny is bad anywhere you find it. It must be resisted.

And I still don't have full answers. But I have to keep trying.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 08:31 AM | Permalink

So, I am thinking about this attitude I am seeing among the political parties. Republicans are the traditionally conservatives. Democrats are the compassionate liberals.

So they say.

I feel compassionate. I feel liberal. But why don't I feel very much affinity for the Democrats? I feel like I should like them more than I do.

Democrats are against war, right? So am I. But I still feel there are times when it is necessary. Those times should be determined with careful consideration. I think force is justified in certain thoughtful circumstances. Yet, I am not hearing as much thought from the anti-war protestors as I need to be intellectually satisfied.

And even more than war, which is a once in a while activity, I am concerned about people who are oppressed. People who may not have had the opportunities that everyone deserves. The litany: women, minorities, etc.

And the democrats are the ones supposedly for the underdog. The party for women, the party for the minorities, that's what they think they are.

And yet, something about it is sounding funny to me. It's a little too canned. Political correctness is getting stale. Affirmative action, women's rights, all those things may or may not be sincere. The question is, are they working?

This is feeling wrong to me. Is the goal truly to have an equal playing field or not? What is the exit strategy to the war on civil rights? Is there a reason why we want to have a set of underpriviledged people to help?

Okay. It's hard for me to understand. I just don't get it. Where I grew up...I don't know. Maybe everyone was underpriviledged. It just felt very equal.

So here's the thing that gets me thinking. I look around at the neighborhoods here in Los Angeles. I started thing when I wanted to become a home owner. Which areas have good schools? Which ones will keep their value?

Chris grew up in Claremont. Claremont is one of the snootiest ordinary places I have ever seen. These people have a sense of how superior they are. I didn't get it. They talk about the surrounding areas, Laverne and San Dimas and Upland and Rancho Cucamunga and Pomona.

The voice changes. When they talk about the different cities. But it's not just the people from Claremont. Everyone who is from LA talks about cities with different tones of voice. And the tone of voice depends on the person talking. Baldwin Park is not a scary place to a brown person. And Long Beach and Inglewood is comfortable to an African American.

But to a jewish friend, Silver Lake can be scary, depending on where you get out of the car. But then, maybe she worries too much.

I find this confusing, and I am not really sure what to thing of these different tones of voices. What are all these people talking about? Are they just being prejudiced?

I found a website talks about it. What are we really talking about, when the tone of voice changes? Bottom line is crime.

Chris grew up in Claremont. In 2002, Claremont had no homicides. Next door, the city over, San Dimas, had 0 homicides. One city over from there, Pomona, had 18 people killed.

What the hell just happened here? Why does Pomona kill people? Why does San Dimas live peacefully and Pomona not?

Chris told me that there were a lot of Hispanic gangs in Pomona. THe houses are a lot cheaper in Pomona. Pomona had 448 incidents of robberies and 805 incidents of aggravated assaults. What is going on?

I do not think that Hispanic people are more inclined to violence and killing. I think that people do the things that make sense to them.

Somehow, San Dimas and Claremont have a society where killing people does not make sense. Why does killing people make sense to the people in Pomona?

Have the police come to expect that assault and robbery and murder happen in Pomona and not in San Dimas? What the heck are the police doing over there?

And Pomona is not the worst. Long Beach had 67 homicides, and Compton had 52. What the heck are the police doing?

Why is this an accepted thing? Why does Compton kill people? Why does Pomona kill people?

I can't tell you. I don't know. But I do not believe it has anything to do with a person's ethnicity. I know it has to do with what those residents believe, the story they tell themselves about what is necessary to get through life.

And what story are the liberal types telling?
"You're going to need help. You're pathetic."

I reject that condescion. I don't believe in liberality that disempowers.

You know what I think? I think that this whole thing is a lot more about economics than almost anything else. Having money is having independence, it's having choices.

But money comes from hard work. Protestant work ethic, "he who shall not work shall not eat."

Handing out money for disempowered people does not empower them. Getting anything for free does not make a person better on the inside. Hard work and challenges are what make people grow, you grow to meet the challenges you face.

So, I am not impressed with the flavor of compassion I am hearing from liberals. If a helping hand is required, and I do not reject the idea of a helping hand, let's give one that allows for decency. Let's find ways of letting people exercise their own power, their own dignity growing.

THe problem is large, but so are most that are worth solving. I can't help thinking, what does San Dimas know that Pomona doesn't?

Posted by Murphy Horner at 08:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Life rolls out in front of you like a ball of yarn. You can affect where it goes, but only a little. You just have to follow it.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 10:08 PM | Permalink

Valentine's day and President's day are very close to one another.

Chris was saying, "I wish they had left the President's days separate."

"You don't like it being so generic? You mean we should not celebrate all Presidents?"

"Well! It doesn't seem fair that the guy who caught the flu on his inauguration day and died two weeks in office should be celebrated as much as the other presidents"

Being president is something Americans are all supposed to be able to aspire to. How many American babies are cooed over in their cribs, and hear the pronouncement, "maybe this one will grow up to be president."

Yes, This is america, the place where you can carve your own destiny. ANYONE can grow up to be president.

I wonder how many presidents aspired to the office? If they are like most people I know, the choice of becoming president was not really their own. They may have started along a political path and just sort of pushed, bumped, promoted along until they got to the White House.

Huge life decisions are not made that way. Decisions are made before you know you've made them. Swerve one way or the other, and your feet have changed paths.

The decision comes later. When it comes, it is less of a "will I go?" question, and more of a "Will I stop going?" question.

I think love is the same way. The small decisions are often unseen. Will you be my valentine? How often is that question asked when the answer is not known?

I think most decisions come after the fact. The momentous changes in direction are never recognized until they are past.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 09:05 PM | Permalink

Those of you, and I am so grateful for you, who read my blog on a regular basis would be aware that I haven't written very regularly this month.

Perhaps I have been extraordinarily busy with work.

But also, at the beginning of the month, I had my piano tuned. It's needed it for some time. I just hadn't gotten around to it. I was feeling a vague sense of guilt that I never play it, and then I realized that I didn't like the way it sounded, all out of tune. So, I had it tuned.

I've been playing it madly ever since. I pass it, on the way to get something from the kitchen, and I can't resist playing some tricky part of a song, some trilly part that's hard to get right.

And I'm learning to paly new songs. I was getting tired of all the old ones I knew. I have been trying to learn some old irish ballads, and some old jazz songs.

Ballads are so pretty; they tear my heart out. I will often cry as I play and sing them.

But jazz is another animal entirely. They seem so simple when you hear them, and somehow, they slip away. You try to sing them, and then find you can't remember the words. What was that again? It just slips out of your mind.

It was surprising to me to realize that most of them were just two or three very simple verses. Why is that so hard to remember?

So when I sit down to play these simple songs, I also find they are not so simple to play. I learned to play piano by teaching myself. I learned to play melodies on my own, and then I pestered other people and read things until I got an understanding of how music works. For any song, there is a structure, a musical structure. It's like a grid that you can place down over any song, and know how you can place the parts of the song in relation to itself and in relation to music as a concept.

Jazz does not fit the grid very well.

If you read about jazz, read what they said about it at the time, the people were freaking out at how innovative and weird and NEW it was. "Jungle music" they called it, among other things. Some people couldn't get enough of it.

Since I've been so fascinated with my newly tuned piano, music has been on my mind, I found my harmonica, and I was trying to play some of the same songs on it as I was walking to the bus stop.

"Danny Boy" worked pretty well, but "Pennies from Heaven" was hopeless. I realized that the harmonica does not have all the notes that a piano has. There simply was nowhere to go, nowhere to reach for the notes I needed.

And it clicked with me. That is why Jazz was so exciting to these people when it was new. They had their minds in the grid. And when the jazz musicians reached out for a note that wasn't in the grid, it was practicially like reaching into a fourth dimension. It was blowing their minds!

I am thinking of the novel by Sinclair Lewis, Flatland. New things are so hard for us to come to terms with.

So why does the piano keep me from writing? I don't know. My mother raised me on theories of right-brain and left-brain functions. I will say that when I play the piano, my mind does not think in words very well. I don't know why, but even the words in songs do not interrupt the flow of concentration created by my hands on the keys of the black and whites.

I am disappointed, because I donot play as well as I used to.

But even when I was as I used to be, I was not as good as I wanted to be. I feel a push to do more than I can, more than I even know how to do.

I am not writing as well as I wish, or as much as I wish. And I am not playing as well as I want.

I have been feeling a hunger for a sewing machine, lately. I want to make something, create something that has not been done before.

I haunt the craft shop, and I tell myself, "you can't find the time to write, you can't find the time to practice your piano enough, how are you going to have time to sew?"

But I can't leave.

I feel the urge to reach out in a direction that has not been traveled before, or even discovered. And I fight myself all the time about it. I don't know the way to start, or to find what I am looking for. What use would it be if I did? What would it matter? Who would care? How could I possibly succeed? What would good would it do if I even did?

But still I am haunting the craft stores, feeling the materials, and fantasizing about vagues shapes and colors and textures.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 08:08 PM | Permalink

I like Dr. Phil. He's not as judgemental as Dr. Laura, but they both have this get-it-done attitude. They both say, Why you do what you do may be interesting and important, but How to do what you wish you would do is way more important. So if you can skip the 'why' and go straight to the 'how', you should.

I remember Dr. Phil was giving this one woman advice, I forget about what, but he handed her what I assume to be a well-worn platitude:
You did the best that you knew how to do. When you know better, you do better. Now you know better.

I think he was right. I think the woman was trying to do the right thing.

But at the same time...
"best" is a squishy word. How do you know if you've done your best?

Doing your best...That would be when you stop and carefully think about something, judiciously decide on the correct course of action, and then put forth strong and consistent effort to take that course of action.

Boy, that sure would be doing your best. Gosh, i wish I did that every time I had a goal to accomplish.

But what if you did that--did your best--and you were wrong?

There are all kinds of ways that can happen.

Like, what if you did your best to keep your car in good shape. You noticed that the brakes were soft, you took it in to be checked. The mechanics looked at it, and said it was fixed. What if you drove that car, the brakes failed, and a child died in a car accident?

You did your best!
And the child remains dead.

What if
You choose to become involved in a relationship with someone, and because of what you know of that person, fall in love and get married. You tie your life and your future to that person.
What if that person had lied to you about who they were and misrepresented thier life?
You would remain tied to them.

What about this?
What if you looked at the world around you, saw suffering, injustice and poverty and decided you had to step in and help. What if you thought long and hard, and discussed with your friends, the wisest ones you could find, and read and studied books to find a solution. What if you came upon a plan to stop that suffering injustice and poverty, and you worked hard to put into place that plan. What if you were able to do it?

And then...
What if you were completely wrong? What if your cherished, well-thought-out plan did not end poverty, suffering and injustice? What if, instead, it brought on an inhumane system that was far worse than the previous situation? What if those same wise friends you talked with were persecuted, tortured, and killed? What if discussion were outlawed, and poverty increased?

And your plan, the one you worked hard for, had been the cause of this tragedy.

This is what the character in The Unbearable Lightness of Being contemplates. He is caught in the middle of the communist revolution in Czechoslovakia, as an intellectual, and he sees what was done in the name of communism.

He is shredded by what has happened in his country; and he remembers the story of Oedipus.

I hated the story of Oedipus when I first read it. He killed his father and married his mother. In a nutshell.

But the gripping drama is not in a nutshell. It doesn't tell the story.

The story tells that Oedipus did everything he knew how to do. He really did his best. He didn't want to kill his father; he ran away so that he wouldn't.

but he did kill his father.

And do you remember his response? His wife and mother hung herself. Jocaste figured it out a split second before he did.

Oedipus put his eyes out.

And when I was a teenager, I was so upset by this! What else could he have done? He did the best he could! There was no way out for him, he tried his best.

But the consequences of his actions remained.

And what about the communist activists in Czechoslovakia? They were, perhaps, doing the best they could.

But the consequences remain.

Here is my story:
A married couple, tired of the middle class stifling morality and hypocrisy of suburbia go looking for sincerity and being REAL. They try the usual 60s things, talking, reading and thinking about new ideas. This path eventually takes them to becoming involved in community. They want to help build community in a church. They really join in.
They stop being around their old friends, and some family members. Those folks drink, and the church members don't do that.
The woman gives up her feminist magazines. Church women aren't feminists.
They dive in, work for the church even.
Then, the pastor of that church wants to move on. "God is calling me to leave the pastorate"
So a new pastor comes in. He's dicey, because he is hyper-opinionated and has been insensitive to other people's needs in previous situations.
But the couple wants to preserve the community. They think, we should be a loving and accepting community. Let's work with this new pastor; we want our community to be healthy and intact.
And so they tolerate some things; it's a transition period.
This dicey pastor moves in. He demands respect for his God-given opinion. And they aquiesce.

as time goes by, more and more toleration occurs. This man twists words, and pietizes all his actions. As time goes by, they learn to consult him in any major and many minor decisions, since he claims to have the special ordainment of God.

Their youngest child looks at them and says "Who are you? What do you really think? What is YOUR opinion?"
And her father says: "I sincerely believe what the pastor tells me."

As time goes by, the pastor is not satisfied with his control. He decides to flex futher power. The youngest son, upon reaching adulthood, is instructed to shun his oldest brother. "Your brother is the enemy of Christ" the man says.
and the son says: "my heart is black with sin. I cannot trust my own judgement. I must always consult the pastor before I make a decision."

The family is sick and wounded. The community is betrayed and sincerity is a word without meaning.

But the couple did the best they could.

Thomas, in Unbearable Lightness, was angry with the communist revolutionaries. He wanted them to understand that they had done something wrong.

Like Oedipus.

They were busy crying "We are innocent! In our hearts, we know we did the best we could!"

And what about the consequences? The consequences, the pain caused by their innocent best--what about them?

What about that poor dead child from the bad brake job?
What about that spouse, lied to?
What about the family, the church, the children that were part of the community?

Actions have consequences.

Bad things can come from good motives.

The greeks knew that. LONG ago. We know that still, even though it makes us profoundly uncomfortable.

"The Human Condition"

I heard a guy tell me once, and who knows? He was always spouting crap...
But he said he had done a study of lots of religions, and the difference between Christianity and the rest of them was that Christianity offered forgiveness.

Forgiveness.

Jesus said it: "All have sinned and come short of the glory of God."

Like I said before, I don't always do my best.

But sometimes, even when I do, even when everybody does their best, the consequences accuse.

THomas said, "You are responsible, you czech revolutionaries! This did not come out of nowhere! What intentions you had, good, bad, rose-colored from the past, these heinous consequences remain."

What shall they, what shall we, what shall _I_ do with these consequences?

Oedipus put his eyes out.

I believe that Oedipus was a better human being than I am.

But what shall we do?

That is what haunts me, that is what made me pace up and down when I read The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Tomas did not want the communists to put their eyes out. He wanted acknowledgement.

Because how do you move on, unless you acknowledge where you are?

I could stand and accuse. I could point my finger. The dicey pastor taught me that.

Or maybe I learned it before.

Or maybe I was born with it.

Or maybe it doesn't make a damn bit of difference when I learned it. Maybe it is important to move on.

To open the hand, and give a hand out to others to move on.

Like Dr. Phil, who says it doesn't matter why, only how to get to where you need to go.

I don't think that covering up pain has to be part of the forgiveness.

Shame, judgement, accusations--guilt or innocence--these are not relevant.

We all have tried and we have all had the best of intentions. And we have all had not so good intentions at times.

That just doesn't matter.

What if we could make forgiveness so much a part of life, that it is a given, just the way that we get by?

Just help each other move on, keep going and keep trying to do better.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 01:35 PM | Permalink

Looking for something else, I stumbled upon a notebook musing from a few years ago:

I like best to see my face reflected in a window at night. The outline is clear, but the details are less distinct. It's such an accomplished [self-contained] pleasure, admiring my own reflection.

I once asked a man, at the beginning of a new romance, when we were first shyly revealing the traits we found marvelous and fascinating in each other, "Don't you think I see you differently than you see yourself?"

He considered and replied, "It's only natural. I know myself better than you do."

It was so easy for me to admire and cherish him. But he to himself and me to myself--it's not as easy. We know the blemishes.

When I look into a mirror--a clear flat, distinct and well-lit reflection--my eyes seek our all the imperfections. I put my face right close and examine all the planes and crevices. I wonder what I'm looking for? Don't I know my face already? I don't linger over the good features, but I move straight to mottles in my skin, or to my crooked teeth. Are my eyebrows incorrect? And which standard should I choose?

I want to believe I am beautiful. I want it so very badly. Because if I am beautiful, I will be loved. And if I am loved, then I will live in the sunshine and nothing can be wrong.

I don't undersatnd this trap, a slippery slop to never-fulfillment. What if I am loved, but am not beautiful? What if it rains on me and the ones who love me? It must be a flaw in me. When hard times come, it must be because I am not loved enough. But who could love me enough? I am not beautiful enough for that kind of love.

When I see myself in the night-window reflection, I am less distinct. I don't have to see the confusing minutia of my appearance. I can be pleased with the outline. I can love myself, forgive the imperfections. I can have what I so crave and not be indebted to someone else.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 07:22 PM | Permalink

..."in the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much the the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little. The story of their coming to be shapen after the average and fit to be packed by the gross, is hardly ever told even in their consciousness; for perhaps their ardour in generous unpaid toil cooled as imperceptibly as the ardour of other youthful loves, till one day their earlier self walked like a ghost in its old home and made the new furniture ghastly. Nothing in the world more subtle than the process of their gradual change! In the beginning they inhaled it unknowningly: you and I may have sent some of our breath towards infecting them, when we uttered our conforming falsities or drew our silly conclusions..."
George Eliot, from Middlemarch

I haven't finished Middlemarch yet, but that passage stopped me cold. Eliot wrote it 130 years ago, and how true it remains! We all know those people "fit to be packed by the gross", and I for one fear daily becoming one.

But the path lays so simply and easily in front of me, of us. The path from the bed to the closet full of work clothes, the path from the door to cubicle, then back to the prepackaged, demographically designed entertainment and commercial marketing

What disturbs me so much about the demographically designed entertainment is how ACCURATE they are! yes, I AM entertained by the same things that so many others of my age/sex/ethnicity/economic strata are!

And what better proof that I am fit to be packed by the gross?!?

I have, in the past, combat this by being scornful and suspicious of anything popular. If too many people liked something, I should not. Very simple. I can't be like everyone else then.

Levi's, Disneyland, popular film, music, television, all these things were to be dismissed, or if not, became guilty pleasures. Perhaps I could intellectualize a movie, if I liked it too much. "You see, Mulan is struggling with her gender identity and trying to come to terms with her own conception of herself!"

The major problem with this approach to life is it's essential FALSENESS. It is reactionary rather than reasoned or real. It did not take into account the merit of the thing.

If I refused to like things that were popular, and tried to embrace things that were alternative, edgy, or avant garde for no better reason than because they were DIFFERENT, I am not seeking a higher path.

I realized that I must look closely at the thing in question. Be engaged in my life; and to evaluate and try to understand what I engage it. This is responsibility at work. THIS is greater individuality.

And yet, the earlier way was better defined. It is frightening to leave behind easy labels.

I was QUITE nervous to visit Disneyland. My boyfriend would not accept my dismissal of it being evil. He said, "you have not been there since you were five. How do you know it's evil?"

So. I have been to Disneyland, and I guess it is not evil. It is a tool, and it can be USED for evil in the wrong hands. That's all I will say about it for now.

Naturally, I do not have to live my life in Disneyland. I live my life between the lines from the bed to the closet and the door to the cubicle. In between the lines, and on the margins, I look for ways to creatively express my individuality. There are flashes of poetry on the meeting notes I have on the table, and I can find time to read Eliot on the bus.

But I strive to remain engaged. Does it have to be this way? In between and on the margins might be a little shabby for my individuality.

Is there another path? Surely, there are other ways to live. Millions of people have lived their lives in millions of other ways.

I have heard a story about a man who put into his margins what I have made the lines.

Sam Hamill, who I only know about because books from his publishing house have been nominated for an award, drew his own lines. He decided a life dedicated to poetry would be his. I am awestruck. He created a publishing house for poetry.

Poetry, that difficult and indescribably beautiful artform that humankind has been turning and returning to since words were formed:difficult, because we must let go of pre-established equational connections and form our minds to new synaptic leaps.

Hamill chose poetry over a pension. He decided that renewing his mind was more important than stability.

I am amazed, astounded and envious.

I heard on the radio (I have searched, but I can't find it again...suffice it to say, it was an NPR station) the story of how he started Copper Canyon Press. He found an old 1907 printing press! He set the type by hand!

Later, he moved from Colorado to Washington, because he could get free rent there.

It is not like I haven't heard of people moving around, and doing "irresponsible" things like that. I grew up with people who did not want to be packed by the gross.

Alaska. There are barely enough people to MAKE a gross there.

So, I understood the "free rent" allure. I knew family after family that moved there, bought a plot of virgin land for practically nothing, and meant to build their dream home, their special individual place for THEM and THEIR FAMILY to be unique.

So, in the three months of summer, they threw up an A-frame structure, and did their best to insulate it against the quickly approaching winter.

And for years afterwards, the pink fiberglass and bedsheets for walls became stained with use, and the path to the outhouse grew bare and hardened.

This sort of individuality was common and not admirable, in my mind. Sure, it could be called "the path less traveled." I'm sure the (non-Alaskan) parents and extended families of the people who chose this life thought their children were the only ones in the world to live this way.

Well, I was FROM Alaska and not so easily impressed. These were the people who could be packed by the gross for me.

What purpose did this lifestyle serve? "Anti-materialism" or "anti-establishment" is only a negation. What is the positive contribution?

Hamill lived in his Washington home without the "basics", in the same way as those crazy Alaskans. However, HE made a lasting contribution to the world.

I feel challenged.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 07:12 PM | Permalink

I’ve blogged before about creativity; I consider creative thought and expression to be of high value and usefulness. It is something I want to foster with my life and habits, and to encourage those I know to pursue their own creative endeavors.

I’ve described creativity very loosely, as any type of artistic expression. Drawing, Music, writing, sewing, dance—all these are easily identifiable as creative expression.

But as I thought about it, I realize that those ART categories are not the only way people are creative. I have known a lot of folks who considered their computer programs as a creative expression, and I can agree with them. Computer science, Mathematics, chemistry, and other sciences can be a framework to express creative minds.

In fact, many of these sciences rely on the creativity of their practitioners to directly improve the products and services used every day.

So, maybe creativity is not what I really mean.

If I use a pattern from Butterick, and create a poodle skirt for a Halloween costume, that is being creative. But I didn’t really create anything new.

And if I play a popular song on my piano, I haven’t really created anything new.

Not really. A little bit, I guess. Because I took an old favorite and made it my own. But I didn’t add much.

But if I sat at my piano and wrote a whole new song, that would be quite creative. That would be original.

I think that originality is the highest pursuit of creativity.

It is SO exciting to come upon an original idea. I know that one of the things I love so much about going to school was encountering new ideas. Even when they are not original, they are new to ME.

I never learned to play it cool in the classroom..I am the girl sitting in the front row that raises her hand and makes the point the teacher was just about to make before he can make it.

The teacher is droning …”And so, this leads to the 2nd law of thermodynamics, which says…”

Me: “You mean everything in the universe is tending towards entropy?”

Pause

Teacher: “Why yes, thank you…”

Sometimes, I would connect the dots long before the teacher got to them. I would have figured out what he was about to teach, maybe a week in advance. I would be all excited, thinking I had understood something in a new way that no one had ever seen before.

But then we would get to that part of the chapter, and I would discover that my incredible new theory about the universe was already fully articulated by the ancient Greeks.

It sort of let the air out of the balloon. I was thinking I was brilliant and original, possibly a hidden genius for my great idea! But everyone else in the world already knew it.

What can you do?

I would often go to talk to my teachers about some idea I had, and they would always say, “Have you read this particular book? The author talks about that theory you are discussing.”

It makes me wonder if I have any original ideas at all. Apparently, all the licenses on original thought are sold.

But it also doesn’t take very much originality to go very very far. If one person comes up with a new idea, a TON of people are right there to copy it in a million different ways.

I mean, look at fashion. The fashions always seem to be regurgitations of the previous fashions from a respectful distance in the past.

Some major designer comes out with his or her expensivoso designs, based on older designs by some previous expensivoso. Then those are instantly snapped up by all the knock-off designers who make clothes for Target and Wal-Mart and K-Mart and all the other places.

There maybe have been, like, 5 grams of creativity in the entire fall clothing lines of the entire United States of America. Do you see what I mean? A little creativity goes a long way.

Also, creativity doesn’t usually happen in large amounts. I don’t know why, maybe it just doesn’t work like that. But most original ideas are simply a rearrangement of ideas already lying around.

The printing press, that boost-us-out-of-the-dark-ages device, was really thrown together out of ideas that had been used for the whole darn dark ages anyway.

But it did open people’s minds. Rearranging what has been there all along, and juxtapositioning things that had never been together before is enlightening.

Kind of like the fashion of the 70’s, which we seem to be reliving…free your mind:
Red and Pink CAN go together!
NOW ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE!

Baby steps, my friends…Our minds open slowly.

Very slowly. We don’t move even incrementally towards new ideas. I think it’s more like fractions of increments towards new ideas.

Some though, have minds set to be open. The really creative ones, they have their minds ajar, as it were.

That’s how I would like to be. Always open to new ideas.

At the same time, there is the fear, a real fear…At what point does the mind’s door become unhinged?

It’s well known that genius is close kin to madness.

Daily life rewards routine and patterns. Step outside of the pattern, and people will be bothered by the asymmetry.

But maybe some, maybe just enough, would be delighted.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 05:53 PM | Permalink

Still busy. Here’s another old journal entry on this subject:

WISDOM, UNDERSTANDING AND COURAGE

So I need to understand the heroic imperative for repose.

I need to have a better understanding of the difference between wisdom and understanding.

Understanding is knowing things. Wisdom is knowing what to do with the things you know.

I can know something. Like, I can know that my best friend’s husband is cheating on her. But I need wisdom to know what to do with that knowledge.

[Editor’s note: this is a theoretical situation!]

So in life, we first have to get the understanding. We have to know what is going on, what the pieces are. We have to know how it works. Then we can take that knowledge, that understanding, and find the wisdom to use it.

The problem is, we can never have full understanding. And life goes on. We can wait for understanding, try harder to look for it, and know more and more. But the moment of wisdom passes us by. There are times when we have to act on the understanding we have. We have to go forward, make a decision, take action. DO what we need to do. But we are acting on incomplete information!
Always.
It takes wisdom to know when to make a move.

Then there are times, when action is not yet required. When the right and proper thing to do is wait for the wisdom to come. Or the wise thing to do is nothing.

In the first case, doing nothing is a form of cowardice, not facing that fact that something needs to be done. It’s a smoke screen, saying, “I don’t understand, I don’t understand.” Really, you need to act, to move forward on what you do understand.

But the second case takes courage too. It’s very scary to wait, when you want to take action. To pause. To see what others will do. To let God work out a situation. I have found that I want to rush in, and fix and solve, and do whatever it takes to make it happen. But there are things that are out of my control. I can’t make them happen. When I try, I beat myself senseless against a brick wall. I am frustrated, worried, upset. I work myself into a frenzy over something that I cannot control.

How absurd!

This is not the way God intended things to be.

But how do I know when I am supposed to wait, and when I am supposed to move?
It seems to me that I can’t always know. I am destined to make mistakes.
I don’t want to makes mistakes. I want to do it correctly all the time.

But the setup is such that I’m not perfect. Even if I wanted to be (and I do!), I can’t be. Not yet anyway. It takes a process to become more perfect. I don’t think I can attain it in my lifetime, but I think that every right choice I make leads to a better life for me. So I keep trying.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 11:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I have dredged up an old journal entry on the subject, from about 3 years ago...It's a little disjointed, but can start the process of exploring the idea.

UNDERSTANDING AND WISDOM

So there is a combination of time and understanding that leads to wisdom.

I want so much to do the right thing. I want to look at any given situation and see through all the details and confusion to the perfect action. I love to take action. I love to take up my sword and shield and attack the dragon, kill it, and impress the whole village. It feels so GOOD to conquer evil and fight entropy. Sometimes I fight things that don’t even need killing. And sometimes I fight things that can’t be killed.

But I am finding that taking action is best done after I take a look at the situation. I have discovered that I need to gather some data before I run off half-cocked. I need to stop and take stock of the situation. I need to know that I understand the problem.

I also find that while I can sometimes define the problem, I can’t necessarily figure out the solution to the problem.

So I suppose the first step in understanding is understanding what it is that I’m even trying to understand. I have to stop and define the problem.. I have to pin down what it is that is really going on. I see all sorts of symptoms of a problem, but that doesn"t mean that I am aware of the cause of this problem. Often, it takes a lot of digging and contemplation and discussion with friends and writing and despair to find the root.

Sometimes, I think I have found the symptoms, the root and the solution all at once. Then I go to sleep, wake up and discover that I was completely off base. And I have to start again. I’ve begun to tell myself, “Hey, that’s what you ar thinking NOW, but tomorrow you will think something completely different. And next month will be totally changed again.”

So, finding the cause is really hard. And then, it isn’t even always useful, to pursue finding the cause. There are certain things, problems whose symptoms are the problem, and it doesn’t matter in the least what the root of the problem is.

Like when I was 8. I sucked my thumb. I was far too old to suck my thumb. Now, my parents could have had me psycho-analysed to discover the root cause of my thumb-sucking habit. But what happened was, one day, at eight years old, I decided to stop. Just like that. I never sucked my thumb again.

In that case, the cause was more or less unimportant. I just needed to stop.

Sometimes, though, digging deep to find and understand the cause is really important. Sometimes, you aren’t able to ‘just stop.’ Sometimes, the symptoms are complicated and spring out in odd angles that you can’t predict, and you need to have a firm grasp on the source of these outbreaks, so that you can head them off. It is then that serious head work is required, to find and isolate the root.

Defining it is hard sometimes. It takes courage to look at some things we have hidden from ourselves as too painful. Because we hide these painful things because we truly believe that we will be irreparably harmed by letting them out. And just because they’ve been aging like wine doesn’t mean that they will feel LESS scary and painful and life-threatening now than they did when we first repressed them.

We are stronger than we think we are, though. And those things need to be brought out to light, so they don’t crop up at odd angles and screw up our lives.

So then, sometimes, after some time has passed, we get to the root, and find a way of explaining it to ourselves, to put handles on it, so we can grasp it. Then comes the part where we have to do something about it. Just because you know what a problem is doen’st mean you can solve it.

There are some situations and some individuals who “Just say no” works great for. And there are some that aren’t so easy. Then you also have to think and talk and discuss and pray and read and hope and beat your head against walls to find a way to surmount the problem. That’s another level of understanding.

And then comes the part of wisdom. After all that information gathering, you have amassed a certain amount of understanding. You have some measure more of understanding than you had in the beginning.

Wisdom is the part where you take all the understanding you can get, and look at the timing of the thing, and decide what to do.

Sometimes, wisdom is not taking any action at all. That’s very hard. But there are times when you look at the situation, and you realize there is nothing you can do to change it. That the wisest thing to do is conserve your energy.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 11:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

More on Barriers To Entry:

Jay, who is an Economist, introduced his little bit about "signal to noise" with this comment:

Economists tend to look at puzzling phenomena and
Ask themselves, "what problem does this phenomenon solve?"

Perhaps I should be an economist. I ask that question too! But I usually don't stop there. I believe it is important to understand the uses of personal and societal structures or habits before altering them. It's similar to finding out the uses of your house's walls (are they weight-bearing) before knocking one of them down.

Common sense and personal responsibility require you to know something about what you are doing.

But if you stop after understanding the problem, you have wasted your time. Understanding should lead to action. Find a way to work within the structure usefully, or come up with a better structure.

Now, if, after understanding the structure, you see that it is flawed (it does not solve the problem it was originally intended to fix, or solves it at too high a cost), you must work on it to "fix" it.

This is very difficult, and a very worthy task.

Not everyone can do it. Oh wait; did I just put another barrier up?

Let me put it this way:
Not everyone can work towards the solution for every problem.
BUT
Every individual has at least one, and probably more, area of expertise.

If those who had expertise in an area were given access to more information (the kind usually reserved for those with THE RIGHT TO BE RIGHT) and were listened to, their expertise could be captured and made useful.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 03:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

THE RIGHT TO BE RIGHT

I’ve already talked about barriers to entry in this blog. I got a response from a reader, my friend Jay.

Yes, I do have a reader! Wow!

He made a good point about the barriers to entry as useful devices, screening out the “noise” from the “Signal.” That is to say, the signal is the useful information and the noise is the garbage created by external circumstances. As a person who has been (may still be, soon) professionally engaged with computer networks, I understand this concept. However, the only difference between the “Noise” and the “signal” is in whether the receiving end can process it in a useful way.

Bear with me.

Paolo Freire, a Brazilian law professor, did some very interesting work about the process and theory of education. He articulated the idea of the “banking” concept of Education. In this model, the teachers act as retainers and distributors of knowledge and the students are empty vessels for the teachers to fill. The teacher’s “task is to fill the student with the contents of his narration.” Students are perceived as unable to contribute, and are without knowledge until it has been given to them by the teacher. The students do not contribute to or interact with the knowledge to change or add to it; they merely receive it.

What students are supposed to do is take the static commodity that is knowledge information and shape it into the required forms—in the case of classes, it would be homework assignments, test, or papers. But they should not significantly add to the knowledge or change it. The authority to modify the knowledge information is restricted.

Okay.

In the business world, the persons who have the authority to make policies are restricted. The executives hand down decisions and policies, a static commodity, for the employees to shape into the required form—a product, an organization scheme, a metric to meet.

In the military, Officers give orders that the enlisted people are not allowed to question. They must execute the order.

But even the military, the example that seems most suited to a strongly hierarchical system of authority benefits from allowing knowledge to come in from “below”.

In his popular book Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, the physicist Richard Feynman talks about his experiences with the military. He was stationed at Los Alamos to do research and testing of the atom bomb. When he discovered where the military was procuring the radioactive material from, he freaked out. The men who were handling this volatile matter were doing it such a way as to endanger the entire base and blow it to smithereens. He immediately went to the military authority and told them about the danger they were in. Feynman wanted to tell the men working with the radioactive materials how to do is safely.

The general told him that the information was classified, and the men could not be informed about their danger. (it was the military’s knowledge, they owned it, they would do with it what they willed)
But the laws of physics supported Feynman’s plan and the general decided to let Feynman inform the men of what they were handling and how to handle it properly.

When he recounts the story, Feynman says that once the men were told what they were doing and given the information, they themselves came up with more efficient and better ways of handling the material than HE could have devised.

Here is the crux of the matter. When knowledge is retained and acted upon only by a few people, expertise is wasted. But if more people are empowered to act and interact with the knowledge then greater efficiency, greater results will be achieved.

But when knowledge and authority (the right to be right) is out of reach for most, most are powerless.

How many of us, in the company we work for, or the school we are in, found that we have to go against company policy to get our jobs done? As in, do the task first, and sidestep the proper procedure? Ignore or violate security measures to get something done?

Or who has had a truly beneficial idea that will have significant results for the company, but which will never go anywhere because the ones in POWER will not listen?

Then again, there are the majority of workers and students who have ceased to have ideas, since they have no way of implementing them in a system where action and power are reserved for the few.

In the realm of government, we used to have a system that put barriers of entry between the common person and power. It was called a monarchy. But the American democratic system was designed with faith in the individual to be able to operate meaningfully on information to take action and create policies. The framers of the constitution had faith in the people to create more “signal” than “noise”.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 10:00 PM | Permalink

I've been contemplating the issues of barriers to entry. Barriers that stand in the way of ideas being recognized.

Ideas, or creativity, are really important. On a low level, they might be called problem-solving skills. You know? Looking at a problem and finding ways of resolving it. Or sometimes just finding a way of re-framing it that reveals new avenues of approaching the solution.

An extremely unpronounceable author, Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi, has written a book about creativity, and how it works. He's a psychologist, so he uses the tools of psychology to attack the issue. He likes to say that the world is dependent on creativity. Well, that's not really over-stating the case. Here in Silicon Valley, everyone is familiar with Moore's Law. "Moore predicted that the number of transistors per integrated circuit would double every 18 months." In order for Moore to make that prediction, he depended on innovation and creative responses to the problems that arose in trying to get more transistors on that integrated circuit. Naturally, Moore'law had wider implications that affected other kinds of hardware, and software, and bandwidth expectations, etc.

BUT! My main point is that we KNOW we need innovation. We rely on those geniuses to come up with answers to the problems. We build it into the plan, "At this point in the time line, inspiration will strike"

And yet. The barriers to entry into the echelons of the creative contributors are very strong. It is hard for just anybody to contribute.

Part of this has to do with expectations. I've never been able to forget one thing I learned in a linguistics class. The professor was demonstrating how different languages have different sounds. He said that if a person's first language does not contain a certain sound (for instance, Russian does not have the "th" sound) not only do they have difficulty pronouncing it, they can't even hear it. If they are not expecting to hear it, they won't. Many of my ESL students in Russia could not pronounce "th" at first, they used "s" or "f" instead.

But this is the point: if people are not expecting to hear creative contributions from a certain sector, then if or when those contributions are given, they will not be heard.

Let us leave aside the obvious problem, that the "unexpected" groups might not be given access to information about the problem to begin solving it.

As I mentioned before, there are significant barriers to entry into the "creative contributors" group. Credentials, money, ethnicity, gender, things like this bar the overwhelming majority of the world's population from working on the world's problems.

It's not fair to anyone to block off potential sources of creativity. We need help to solve big problems. But it is not only that the non-contributing population should be brought up to the level of the creative contributors. The creative people, and the executors of the ideas, need to learn to hear the unexpected.

Posted by Murphy Horner at 07:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)