Angelhood

One of the characteristics of listening to you own "Angelhood" is senselessness. It seems that when people are embodying what it means to be an Angel for someone else, they do things that don't make sense at the time. But somehow people who act like angels find ways to sustain the motivations that come to them intuitively that may only make sense in hindsight. "Angels" must do these things with a faithfulness that their actions will make sense - and maybe their action will never make sense at all. The ability to do "Angelic" things for others is something that happens sort of "accidentally on purpose." I'm sure that you can think of this happening in your own life at some time. Here's a story about how this happened for me...

Many decades ago, I was out walking in my brand new storm gear to see the waves crash on the bulkhead after 10pm. While watching the violent sea waves, I decided to stop in at my friend Susan's house, which was 30 min out the way of my long walk home. I knew she would be awake because she was a "night owl." When I arrived, all the lights were on, but nobody was working on the bottom level as usual, so I let myself in to Susan's & Colin's house and walked up to the second kitchen level, calling out. Hearing Susan's voice from the bedroom on the third level loft, I climbed the third set of stairs and discovered her having severe menstrual cramps; pains so bad she could not move. Her partner Colin had flown out of town on a trip that morning; it was now almost midnight and she had not been able to come down from the loft for the last two hours to call anyone on the land line for help. She did not think her problems serious enough to ride the hour to the hospital along a storming, bumpy winding road.

I had learned that if a helper very gently lets the weight of their hands fall on the tailbone of the person lying on their stomach having cramps, that the gentle shaking motion of the weight landing on the pelvic region can shake free the cramping. As the thumping is very gently repeated and perhaps gradually increased in force, pain from cramping will subside by itself. So we tried this strategy. It did work to entirely relieve Susan's significant menstrual pain. Susan later reported that evidently the episode was related to a miscarriage rather than a difficult menstrual period.

How had I gotten the idea to show up in the middle of the night, walking half an hour out of my way (total of an hour walking both ways!) without changing my desire to want to visit Susan at midnight for no particular reason, and without calling ahead? I followed a desire that did not make much sense on the front end, but made a great deal of sense once I arrived.

I'm sure you have a story about this in your own life, either being the Angel...or naming someone as your Angel.

Car-less in Hawaii

Finally our Hawaiian car is being fixed at the mechanic's today. After being without a car for a week and a half, it's been challenging for Chris. He's managed to make enough money to fix the car without having to spend it on gas, so that's how there was extra money, strangely enough. He also managed to work some extra hours with an electrician.

Evidently Chris has been surreptitiously investing in his boss's business to the tune of about a hundred and fifty dollars a week paying for gas. We're going to have to talk to his boss about that, because that means we've been living off of Chris working for a little more than $7.50 an hour! No wonder Chris has had to borrow money from me at the end of each month to pay for gas to get to work. given that Chris has been expected to foot the bill for the mileage of driving his car around for his boss, it seems that it was quite unreasonable for his day job to demand that Chris quit his second job.

But if that wasn't the case, we would have never started to track expenses to determine how much of the gas bill I should be paying to split the costs with Chris for rent, food and other expenses. Keeping track of your money and where it's going is a really good idea to find these things out ahead of time before the car breaks and there is no money to fix it. I'm hoping that Chris gets a raise out of this fiasco.

Hanging Out With Tater

Today I'm helping my friend Tater start her new blog. We've run into some troubles uploading her images to her new blog. I'm not sure why it won't work, so I've uploaded the image here to show her how it will look.

Tater is a very prolific artist. She's just learning to write cursive. It's really fun to teach such an already accomplished artist to write script; writing script is something that I do easily, so it's a pleasure to teach it to someone. I'll narrate how we learn it on her blog, which is

http://tatersbook.blogspot.com

If her family will contine to bring Tater by to visit, I'll also continue to post and preserve her drawings and paintings, of which there are many!

Later Tater!

Tacit Agreements

Like my musician friends here, tacit agreements coming from a shared subculture can sometimes give the conviction of bonding by how easy it is to “read” each other's intentions and needs in the context of circumstances. The challenge in tacit agreements is to make ways to determine how much it matters if the agreements are or are not done, so another tacit agreement can be substituted or created to take the place of an outdated one.

It is this feature that can make tacit agreements can be tricky to manage. Often they are made below the awareness level of their long-term effects – as if the people involved are playing a role that may or may not fit who they really are – or who they are becoming or have become. In a sense, being able to do this artfully will avoid the ritualistic ways of fulfilling the expectations of a relationship that most people must fall back on. Instead, by being able to make these agreements purposefully, the people involved have delightful surprises and potentials that change with the times.

With the context of your every action concerning the other person, it's easy to evolve a tacit agreement of how people are supposed to treat each other. Problems come when you tacitly agree to match slightly different cultural standards, causing what could become endless confusion where these differences overlap.

At some point, you'll want to find out how it matters to the others involved in proportion to how much trouble it is for you. Tacit agreements may require you to do more than you really want to continue doing, or to accept or assign a meaning that you don't want your actions to have. If either person can't make changes for implied or expressed agreements with their partner, it’s not good for either of them or the longevity of the relationship. Either way tacit agreements can lead to big disappointments when people figure out that the deal they thought they were making or definitions of bonded love was quite different for their partner than they expected.

If you could foresee a problem coming about tacit demonstrations, it would be handy to know how to avoid problems.. Something you will do, have already done or are about to do for each other could become troublesome, (or the business you have together. These ideas can be applied to any close partnership.) It would be an eventual problem to be expected to continue or indefinitely expand your intention to do for your partner or with them. The problem for the demonstrator, is you wouldn’t really know how much it matters to them that you do those demonstrations of for them. (Or in the case of a business partnership, they may not acknowledge or agree on the need for what you might think should be done to expand the business to make more money.) Because you don’t really know, you can’t tell if it makes any difference to them how you continue to expand your demonstrative actions, or change them. So this can become a real puzzler for the later stages of the relationship, and make people who are perfectly suited for each other go their separate ways.