The Wanderer

 

I have often quoted Steven Pressfield, author of “Put your Ass where Your Heart Wants to Be.” 

 

For a writer, it's writing. For a musician, it's making music. For a computer programmer, it's programming. That is if those things are where your heart wants to be. 

 

Now I know a person must make a living—that is, pay the rent and buy groceries, but there is a desire to do the thing that feeds our spirit.

 

I’ve been paying my dues to become a Real Estate Agent, and I like houses, helping people, and making money, but what I really want to do is write.

 

See, I’m writing now. 

 

Most of today was sucked up with taking an Ethics Course required to become a REALTOR and a member of the Multiple Listing Service. It required study and taking ANOTHER FINAL EXAM. I thought I was complete with those. 

 

I’m fried.

 

It was nice to think that someone (William North in 1913) wrote the Code with 16 Articles (plus ten million “Standard Practices”)

 

Before that, it was “Buyer beware,” for there were many unscrupulous characters out to fleece the public—Multiple First mortgages, get-rich schemes, and the attitude of “Public be damned.” 

 

The idea behind the Code is “Under all is Land.”

 

The principle is that in a democracy having many people own many small parcels of land is strength. 

 

Big land barons controlling great amounts of property suck the strength out of a society.

 

Kinda makes you want to run out and buy a piece of land, doesn’t it?

 

But I’m here talking to you, and my fingers and brain like it. I can settle down. I feel calm. I’m writing. It’s the thing I want to do.

 

I wanted to talk to you about the “Wilderness” that Pressfield talks about.

No, it isn’t a piece of forest such as the land I was talking about. His “Wilderness” is that time when you are avoiding your calling. 

 

Many people wander around in the Wilderness for months, years, or their entire life.

 

Many excuses exist: “My dad wants me to be a doctor when I want to be a pilot.” “I can’t do it; I’m not smart enough, good enough, beautiful enough, talented enough,” or other not-enoughs.

 

“You can catch the ride early or catch it late,” writes Pressfield. “But, like it or not, you were born with your ticket. Sooner or later, the conductor will call, ‘All Aboard!’ and the train—with you on it—will pull out of the station.”

 

Some might object to the use of the word, “Calling.” I believe, for some, it is. For others, it is a deliberate decision that can grow into a want, desire, or dream you desperately want to fulfill.

 

Pressfield talks about a friend who is into a “Shadow career.” He knows his calling is out there, but he's still in the Wilderness, and it will be no surprise to learn that his social drinking has taken a dangerous turn. 

 

Pressfield wandered in the Wilderness for years, basically being a bum, until he pulled himself together and sat down at the typewriter. (He put his ass where his heart wanted to be.) Now he is helping other writers get their act together.

 

I don’t know if I am describing him accurately, but that’s the gist of it.

 

I guess we can have a “shadow career” to eat and keep from freezing to death while also pursuing our calling. I’ve heard of people getting up at 3 a.m. to do their writing before going to work. They sneak it in. They practice. 

 

So, I guess, what I am doing here, is to say. “Go for it.” I know I’m a wanderer, but I do it purposefully, as in the search for the berries, find ripe fruit, go for a swim, to sit under a waterfall (a little one) and wear plaid with stripes.

 

 

 

 

Movie of the week Lilies of the Field, 1963,  with Sidney Poitier, who won an Academy Award for his role. I remembered it, staring Poitier, with nuns, and singing Amen. That was it. Watching it again was a delight. What a charming film.

 

 

How Can They Ruin Bacon?

Occasionally my husband and I go out for breakfast, and my usual order is bacon and eggs. However, of late, I find bacon to be terrible, I skip it. I did find a good source last Thursday on our trip to Portland. I only ordered it because my daughter said it was good, and it was.

After I washed down the cupboards around the stove at our house, I don’t want to fry bacon anymore. Made as Hors d’oeuvres in the oven, that’s okay.

Why am I talking about bacon? I don’t know. It popped into my head as I was driving to the store. Trivial, I know. I have other questions rattling around in my head. Like why are we, as a society, so concerned with growth? Not the sort of growth that advances our souls but businesses. You could say that the shareholders need to see growth. However, I remember an owner of a motorcycle factory in Italy when asked why he doesn’t grow his business, answered, “Why? It’s steady. I make a good living. I pay my employees a good wage. Why should I change it?”

Probably he sleeps well at night too.

Would you invest in that company?

I began tthinking about this because as a fledgling Real Estate Agent, (incidentally, my search RMLS (Regional Multiple Listing Service) for home listings is not attached to my site yet), I saw that there are more Real Estate Agents than there are houses for sale. And they warned us about sharks. Meaning other agents that want the job.

I’m a guppy—much too small for sharks to bite. Our Brokerage has a Pink Flamingo for a mascot, for heaven’s sake. We must protect our delicate legs, and as with Flamingos, we can fly; sharks can’t. We want to be light and have fun and care for customers. Statistics do not apply. Put wonderful people in a beautiful house—that’s a good plan. Give them good service. And I heard from someone last week that her landlord keeps raising her rent, so she will be looking for a house. As house prices come down and rent goes up, I expect the tide to shift.

And maybe restaurants will smell the coffee and start offering good bacon again.

Once as my daughter and I drove up from Southern California to Oregon—that California state is a long one, folks—we stopped at a Denny’s Restaurant for breakfast. They were advertising their bacon— bold signs extolling the virtues of bacon appeared in every window. Now, Denny’s used to have good breakfasts. Did you know they used to use real butter to fry their hash browns?

Not that day.

That was the worst food we had ever eaten. It was tasteless. Daughter Dear said, “How in the world do they suck the taste out of food?” Rattlesnake meat was terrible, but it has a taste. (I only had a micro-millimeter piece.)

It kind of makes me think that the more something is hyped, the worse it is. And we have never eaten at Denny’s since.

Isn’t that as though Denny’s shot themselves in the foot?

I wonder if the more often you tell people something, even if it is a lie, the more they will believe it.

I don’t believe we are the masses. However, the masses are out there. And I don't want to separate people or think less of them, but our recent step back in time has caused a blip in my optimism.

Do you have any words of wisdom for me?

I Hate New Year's Resolutions

 

Although I must admit that the thought of cleaning the garage has been lurking in the back of my mind, not to mention that the storage in the Wayback (our auxillary building) needs organizing. When I was studying for my Real Estate exam, clutter bothered the heck out of me. Now that the exam is over—who sees clutter?

It's fascinating how perceptions change, and I understand why the world has appeared so crazy for the last few years.

Many people have been on edge, out of work, sick, irritated, or tired of being home all the time. That isn't a good recipe for world peace and happiness. And we see clutter--you know what I mean, not in the house or yard, but out there, in the marketplace, the airwaves, and the media. It seems that many people thought a reset was in order. But we aren't computers that can go back to a previous date—when we thought the world was grand… but wasn't.

We are ever-advancing creators on the leading edge.

And where are the bright-eyed, busy-tailed young people of the sixties? Oh, one cut my hair yesterday. When I asked her why she was in Eugene, Oregon, having lived in Florida, she said she followed the Grateful Dead.

The youth of the 60s were out to change the world, and they did. They worked on Civil rights. Martin Luther King Jr. was hard at work trying to end segregation, and people from the North and the South marched with him in peaceful protest. The NAACP was busy negotiating. Reproduction rights were coming into effect. Dress codes were addressed, and a man could grow facial hair and not be penalized. That women should have equal pay for equal work was considered fair and reasonable. Many followed Martin Luther King, Jr. in his efforts to promote change non-violently, following the premise of Mahatma Gandhi, who used non-violence resistance to end colonial rule in India. Yet both men were shot down-- Luther doing his work, Gandhi on the way to a prayer meeting.

We still have Saber Tooth Tigers lurking outside our caves.

Oh, but I was talking about New Year's Resolutions, saying I hate them. I don't hate them. I just don't do them, and why people jam them in our faces is beyond me.

They just make us feel guilty for not doing the cleanup things that ought to be done.  Even proponents of New Year’s resolutions say they don’t last. We’re focusing on minutia when we could be aiming for the skies.

What if we decided to end  our resistance of doing the thing that ignites our souls and go for it. That's the work.

Most everyone has a dream, something they wish they were doing but aren't, or their vision has yet to materialize, and they are frustrated. Don't despair. That's part of the process.

Our soul is advancing.

Our spirit is uplifted by the dream. We plan and fantasize, being creative gets our juices flowing. Keep telling yourself that it is possible. Dreams uplift the spirit.  And imagine, what if we got happy along the way to it? Are we afraid if we get happy, we will give it up? Yet being happy escalates the process.

We have the great privilege of living on this gorgeous planet. Yes, dream of space and advance into space, but to look at it to leave behind something we have messed up seems to be wasted energy to me. Doom’s Day people have made some of us believe our planet is a lost cause.

It’s winter now, but I trust that spring will come, the grass will grow, flowers will sprout, baby birdies will appear in nests and fawns will appear in the forests. I trust that life will continue. It is our job to steward the planet so they will thrive.

Even though the shortest day of the year appeared on December 21, my chickens began laying again. You know chickens have clocks attached to the sunlight, so I was surprised to find three eggs, as I have three hens, plus Blackie, who could be old, I don’t know her age, she adopted us. I will know if she begins laying again, for her eggs are a light brown, while the others are sea-foam green. In the fall, chickens molt, meaning shed old feathers, and need to grow new ones. That takes protein, and they usually stop laying. I turned them out today to scrounge in the yard, and to pick up some additional protein. They talked to me, so I guess they forgave me for leaving them in their pen for the last few days.  

Our pioneering spirit will carry us through. We want our babies to grow up and have babies. That's the natural order of things. And respect your mother, sisters, and girlfriends. Don’t cover them up and keep them ignorant. Talk about a waste.

I praise the people who do clean up. They remove plastic from the beaches. They wash shore birds encased in oil. They recycle. They search for an alternative to plastic wrap and create non-plastic packing materials. Now some companies are using mycelium, a fungus mat that grows beneath the soil. This information came to me this week from my grandson.) If dried, mycelium is absorbent, lightweight, and works better than Styrofoam. Plus, it composts.

And we can grow food for everyone on the planet without poisoning the soil—for if we kill the land, we're in deep doo doo. Speaking of doo doo, I have heard that the cows have saved India (where the people do not eat them). The cows keep the soil fertilized, pull carts, and give milk.

The wildlife here are exquisite, and if you have ever befriended animals, you know how superb they can be. Recently a native tribe writer wrote about the Orcas of the Northern US and how they have a matriarchal society, where the elder female leads the pod to the best food and show how to teach the young. The Orcas mirror us under the water/ They love their pod, mates, and babies the same as we do.

We love the animals. We go to Zoos to see them. We go to Sea World, aquariums, and museums to see them, or replicas of them, and to learn about them. We adopt them. We save them if we can when we find one orphaned or injured. We go to Africa to view them in the wild. We cruise Alaska’s shores hoping to see a bear, a moose, or a whale.

We owe it to our life forms to keep the planet livable. And we owe it to our children. Do the people who put up billboards proclaiming that a baby's heartbeat begins at 22 days gestation also work to see that the world is a friendly place where all that precious life can grow wild and free?

Don't tell me about parasites and fleas.

Carry on, my dears. You are the hope of the future.

Jo

Giving Up Resistance Isn’t Easy

 

Ice Dec. 23 by the front door. Lethal driveway.

Pink, our pink flamingo in the arbor. Pink was last year's Christmas present from Daughter number 2 to me.The pink flamingo is our mascot for our Real Estate Brokerage which is called Vibrance Real Estate LLC. Oh, his little leg is drooping, but then, he's tired after holding it up for a year.

 

Resistance is the block that comes when you avoid something or bump into a wall. Steven Pressfield uses the word Resistance. I thought he was talking about Procrastination, but that’s not quite it.

 

Pressfield said that for years he had been avoiding his true calling. That was writing. However, finally, he sat down at his typewriter and wrote for an hour. “It was crap,” he said, but he got up and immediately washed the dishes that had been accumulating in the sink for a week. He had broken his resistance.

 

Let’s say you dream of starting a business. It’s a beautiful dream. You focus and plan, and it’s a fun adventure—the dreaming part. And then your business manifests. You have a business to set up, but now there is much to do. You have fees and dues and worry about how much it will cost. You have people to speak with and to hire. You need to market and get together materials. You become a doer. And you push and struggle, and it isn’t fun anymore. You say, “Well, it isn’t all fun, and it is necessary to work. And so, you push, you stay up nights, and that business occupies most of your waking hours.

 

Abraham, a teacher I listen to, says, “You have turned upstream.”

 

The dream, the planning, was downstream. You were going with the flow, and then you got into a struggle and turned upstream where the water was tumultuous, and rowing was tough.

 

But that’s the way it is, you say. It’s not all fun and games. It is necessary to do the work. Yep, that’s what schools, parents, and society teach us. 

 

And Boy, Howdy, that belief in hard work is hard to give up. There are monuments for people who have struggled, which tells us those people were important.

 

I’m not saying that overcoming a challenge isn’t satisfying. However, I agree with Abraham, who said, “Nothing you want is upstream.” (I think that College degree was. I wanted it. I did it. It was upstream.” I wonder, though, if there is a way to go with the flow while entangled in a system set up to make it hard?) 

 

That business analogy isn’t exactly my situation, but there is a ring of truth to it. I have struggled for the past month and got a simple website for our Real Estate Brokerage —that was the easy part. However, I’m still dealing with transferring domains, and with two people’s emails involved, and codes and all that. I think I got caught in a whirlpool.

 

It happens.

 

A few days ago, I picked up Aldous Huxley’s book, The Art of Seeing. Perhaps you remember I blogged about Vision Training in the blog post, Hello Beautiful, Check Your Eyeballs. Huxley commented that the eyes and the brain both like relaxation. 

 

The harder you scrunch down your brain, you try to remember something that has slipped away or find a lost object.

 

But eventually, you surrender. You let the severe concentration go—especially the anger at yourself for having lost or forgotten something. And, you sort of forget about it. You’ve turned downstream, and Viola’, it appears.

 

The eyes, like the brain, operate better when relaxed. You can feel it when you finally let go and allow the eyes to see and the brain to think.

 

There is much to learn in this life. I need to live another 1,000 years.

 

Wait, another 1,000? I haven’t lived the first 1,000 yet.