To look back in silence, lightness and love

Something amazing happened last night. I was going to sit down and write this post. The working title was, "Look Back In Anger", and homage to John Osborne's 1956 play. Then, I did some yoga. More exactly, I did the Ali MacGraw - Yoga Mind & Body exercises.

I've been studying yoga on and off for 15 years. I don't do yoga in the sense of a scheduled daily practice; but I do yoga everyday throughout the day as I stand, as I walk, as I breathe. But I did do yoga on a a weekly basis, up until I had Thing #2. There was a time I used to be able to do the exercises in video sequence without batting an eye. I can't these days.

My body, my mind and my soul are living parallel busy lives and have very little time to commune. Mind is cluttered with the cacophony of ideas, anxieties, dreams. Soul has been bettered and bruised with the pain and misery around her but also with the reality of growing old and the heaviness of not knowing if everything she wants is everything she needs. And that has encumbered Body, putting weight and pain and stiffness all around it.

Girl needs quiet, lightness, flexibility. She needs to learn how to move into serenity.

[This is your cue to scream, serenity now.]

I've had the video since it came out because one of my former yoga teachers, Harry Stahl, was a consultant in it. He brought serenity with every class and that was because, as a former student of Erich Schiffman, he was teaching us to move into stillness.

So it's been exactly 11 years since I have had this recording. 11 years of hearing Eric Schiffman give instructions on how to move, how to breathe, how to medidate. And yet, it was only last night that I felt in my body these words :

For all that's left is LOVE after you let go of what you don't need.

Body felt those words and through the eyes responded while mind rather calmly looked on and Sould just stood there in shock. Soul had somehow missed the memo and was not cued into grieving or mourning or sadness. Soul was just standing there doing nothing while Mind looked on with curiosity the optical ablutions Body was lost in.

This happened for like a second; then "I" "cried".

It was the weirdest thing; yet it made complete sense.

2006 is going to be a real treat of a challenge.

As I look back, there is so much to be angry about, yet that is not what I want to bring into 2006. I want to leave the anger, pain and suffering behind. Not to forget it, not to push it aside or hide it under the carpet. That's not what I am talking about. It's about moving into hope, into possibility, into change and lightness and maybe even love.

Love does not come to me that easily on a daily basis because I still to this day equate loving with lose of control, with vulnerability and weakness. And I don't like looking like a sissy. But I wish more people did. It would be easy for me to say, "starting with George Bush"; but I mean people like you and me.

If we worked from a core of The Golden Rule, would we still be in Iraq? Would we still have people like Karl Rove running the country? Would we allow the Michael Browns of the world to drown our contry in a bathtub? Would we still have Samuel Alito conspiring against not just the reproductive autonomy of women but the freedom and autonomy of all US citizens? Would we just stand back and shrug at how our civil liberties are only availble to the highest bidders?

As I look into 2006 and get prepared for a new round of blogging, I am ready to do things differently. The seeds for what I want to build as a blogosphere are here in the technology of this site. And it will be evolving ang getting fined tuned through out the year.

As I have said before, I am not interested in making culturekitchen part of any liberal noise machine. Noise, chatter, anger, anger, anger.

FUCK THAT!

I do anger pain and suffering very well. Sometimes, too well. I mean, look at the logo on this site : The Distorted Molotov.

But that image is the key to what I am looking to build in 2006. Yes, I said build. Not me, personally. Consider me the chief community architect for the team I am putting together and the plan we hope to get funded.

Not to fund the creation of another network. As Jason has said, many will pop-up but few will remain. I'm talking about creating a whole new blogosphere.

Mr. Man has bee re-reading Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. We've been having really intense discussions about how anything that extends our being is media because it transmit our selves.

If this is so, if the media is the message, then this media you have right before you, this media you are using to read this blog needs to be pushed forward or turned on its head so that, in practice and use, it will become a re-volution; a turning around of actions. The interface blogging has to change. The way we extend our selves through blogging has to be exploded. If the media is the message, how we interact with the media is the message. I think this is the key : the practices, the ways we use and think about this extension of our selves and our being in the blogosphere have to change.

If we do not want to extend alienation and exploitation, we need to think of ways for people to understand and use the value of their interaction.

If we do not want to extend passivity and isolation, we need to think of way for people to move from being consumer into being more than participants and commenters, but collaborators.

Blogging to be part of a noise machine is very much about being angry for anger's sake --and that is so easy to do. To rage against the machine and do really nothing about it. Creativity? To use energy to transform reality? That is difficult, not because only the chosen ones get to know the secrets of creativity but because the elites really do not want the masses to be creative.

To use creativity to forge new social, political and economic practices? To shatter alienation and discover new ways of being? So we can be self-sufficient? So we can have a mind of their own?

So while others in the blogosphere spend time worrying about their noise machines, I getting a team to build us some revolution.

I can't tell you how, what, when or where; but that's part of the thrill, the not knowing.

So here is to 2006.
Here is to looking forward
with hope.

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