My Craving For Milk

How getting Vitamin D3 supplements affected my thyroid problems

    Since I'm not sure where anyone else would get the benefit of my experience in this area of my health, figured that I would put it here. At least if it is online, hopefully someone could possibly find it here - possibly.

    An old friend of mine, named Conrad Oho, (RIP) spent much of his life being a citizen researcher of health issues. Many of his friends considered his focus to have Asperger-like specialization and intensity. Long before research was published on the importance of Vitamin D3, Conrad had my health in his mind.

    Research found that the old level of Vitamin D3 of 400 IU per day was just enough to counteract rickets. Doctors were taught that high levels of Vitamin D3 were dangerous. Conrad taught me that these researchers were finding something important for me. For optimum health, the levels of recommended Vitamin D3 are now much different.

From 400 IU per day, the recommended daily is now 2000 IU per day. If you get your Vitamin D3 levels tested, you want your levels to be mid-range now instead of barely up to the new minimums.

    When the research first emerged, doctors had a difficult time updating their preconception of what these new levels could mean to their patients.

    I have inherited a thyroid condition called hyperthyroidism - meaning, a thyroid that generates too much Thyroxin, too often. Vitamin D3 is a precursor of thyroid health. Some people describe Vitamin D3 as a hormone because of how it acts in our bodies. 

    This is why my friend Conrad thought this new research on Vitamin D3 might be very important to my own health. To understand what it was he did for me, you'll need a bit of background information.

    Essentially, Conrad believed I had a Vitamin D3 issue, one that affected my thyroid levels. My health problem had been misdiagnosed as a thyroid problem because Conrad believed the way I processed Vitamin D3 was being played out in my health by affecting my thyroid health.

    There was something to Conrad's logic. When I was able to do testing for Vitamin D levels, it was determined that for me to hover in the mid range of the new research levels....I needed about 8,000IU per day, taken with my thyroid medication and some other fish oils to help the D3 to be properly processed. 

Evidently it's also possible to have trouble with how Vitamin D is processed. There's a form that's more easily processed that I don't seem to need.

    After I began to take Vitamin D3, a strange change happened to my endocrine system. To understand what it was will take some explanation. I had been diagnosed as having "Graves Disease." When my Thyroid Stimulating Hormones (TSH) levels were tested, they always came out as non-existent....even when medicine I was taking pulled down the thyroxin in my blood to super low levels usually present in people who had LOW thyroid problems that would usually make the TSH levels go up to tell the thyroid to produce more. This wasn't normal - it meant that my TSH had been shut down entirely. 

After I took Vitamin D3, suddenly my TSH level began to act as it should - reflecting a need for my thyroid to produce more thyroxin. This meant that I could cut back on how much Tapezol I was taking that could affect my liver over time. Less medicine means less affecting my liver over time. I learned that the testing available about the health of our liver works like an idiot light on a car that only goes on when the car is already broken. If you want to monitor the health of your liver before things get broken, you need to look at pointers evident in the health of your skin, ankle swelling, other inflammation and other indicators (for a list and how to help your liver, head over to YouTube!)

I also found that immediately once I began to take D3, my craving for milk subsided to very low levels. Evidently I was sensing that I needed D3 and this meant I craved milk that has a little bit of D3 added. Supposedly mild from A3 cows has higher levels of more accessible D3. But to get the D3 I really needed, I had to drink milk to the tune of almost a gallon a day - now after raising my Vitamin D3 levels to the high range of what is the "new normal," I drink more like a cup a day of milk in tea. 

The point here is to pay attention to what your body is telling you that you want to eat, because this may tell you something useful about what your vitamin deficiencies are before they get bad enough to cause health problems.

...Unless you're talking about a craving for sugar! 

Perfectionism

I think our culture of trying to "blame" someone is the culprit of why perfectionism is so rampant. Our culture has also become a culture of specialists, "the niche," the authorities. Generalists are out of style right now...(but I can look for evidence that's changing.) What do you think?

Anyone can blow off perfectionism by declaring, "I don't care!" (I've certainly had to surrender and semblance of perfect for extended periods of time!!)  But how to deal with it when you DO care about quality and you know you have time to make things better?

I've discovered that own desire for quality is an emotion of pride - without fear. It's the fear of the result not being good enough in some way that's the problem.

What does it for me is thinking about what's important for me personally. But I've learned some ways to decide where to draw the line on how much work on perfection is too much in various ways.

• I try not to use the deadlines of the project to "get myself moving" so I don't have to run faster or more efficiently from having procrastinated. I'm deadline-driven, but I'm getting better and parsing out how much time I've really got left.

•  I pay attention to how I'm doing what I"m doing, as I'm doing it. (This helps quality to happen by itself, so I make less mistakes by omission.)

• For me, using a thinking skill helps. For instance, spelling out the factors (by making a list of plus, minuses and "interesting") helps me prioritize what is more important and helps me stick to not wasting my time on what is merely urgent but not important.

• Sometimes there's a key site of applied effort which I've learned to search for ahead of time - where if I concentrate my efforts there, it acts like a kingpin of influence that has a ripple effect on the whole.

• If I can, I practice it before the "big show." But sometimes the first time is my best effort. Whether I chose the practice or the "wing it" approach depends on if it's a "hard-wired skill" or a "integrated concert" of many integrated skills and factors.

•  Maybe I get a chance to decide how much time I really have to improve on quality and I might be able to use the strategy of spreading that time I have to improve quality over the whole project.

• Finally, I put the desire for perfectionism on cue, and then give the cue when it's more appropriate. In certain situations where I have decided it's appropriate, I just give myself permission to do something with the highest quality and take however much time I feel that the objective needs. Purely because I enjoy being absorbed in making something happen exactly the way I imagine or know it could be. I invest the practice, the dedication, and embrace the effect of long-term, gradual gain. What's the harm in that if I'm not hanging someone else up?

Anyway, just some of how I deal with perfectionism. What activates a desire for perfection for you? How have you managed to make peace with a desire for quality when you know you're going to be falling short?

Love of Camping

 I used to love camping more than anything. My love of being in beautiful places has always been expressed in where I chose to live. Do you lead a lifestyle that expresses itself in where you live?

Dawn

Currently, I'm living in a beautiful place in Hawaii near a stream, under a roof in a "coffee shack." It's been around two years that I've been carrying my drinking and cooking water from a purified source and using ice in coolers for refrigeration. I have a two burner propane stove top that needs to be lit. My water for washing drips off the roof (fortunately, it's not hot water as it is in some places in Hawaii where the plumbing travels over lava rocks and heats up.) On the Big Island, you can pick your temperature by choosing where you live in altitude, and I'm 1450 ft. up from sea level. This means it never gets too cold and rarely gets too hot. Although I don't have hot water at home, I have been able to get regular hot showers at the huge local public pool, which isn't far away. My place is so remote, I don't even have an address. My friend quips it's "third world middle class" because movies and Internet are possible with the generator running. I probably have the lowest carbon footprint of anyone you know personally.

Spiderweb on the front lanai

Previous to this lifestyle, I lived in an RV while it was parked in a beautiful spot, but without movies and only library Internet. So this particular lifestyle has been a slight improvement. But it's been more expensive, mostly because I'm a half hour drive from a food store. I need a car because it's too far for me to walk straight uphill that is a few miles from where the bus stop is located. But I do enjoy the quarter mile "hike" to my shack from where I park my car by the road. The road to is too rough for anything but a four wheel drive vehicle. Keeping the grass short that protects the road from turning to mud is hot work.

Accepting this lifestyle hasn't been so foreign or unacceptable to me, given my previous love of camping. If I add the time up I've been doing some form of "camping," it appears that I've been living in an extended camping situation for over a decade.

Perhaps because of my current situation, it probably shouldn't be surprising that I don't go camping when I go away on vacation anymore...which is what I used to do every time I traveled anywhere. I think that I'm finally getting tired of camping. So now when I go away, I stay with friends in their houses for a little bit of "civilization" for a vacation from camping. When I come home, again I'm happy to be there, away from the B-flat hum of electricity - for awhile longer. Who would not want to come home to something like this?

Evening Rainbow

 

Aware Expectations

I was just a kid, excited about going on a trip. Because the logistics of going on a trip were beyond me and depended on many factors about which I knew nothing, the anticipated fun event didn't happen. Or course, I was crestfallen. 

Fortunately, I had very wise parents who took my childish disappointment very seriously. They apologized for giving me the idea that this exciting thing was going to happen. But they also made me realize that I had built up the expectation on my own, with very little encouragement from them. They hadn't committed the family was going to go on this trip, they had stated they were going to explore making a decision about it after they researched the details. The trip was going to happen eventually, but not when and how I had expected it.

They attributed me building up my expectations to how much I like to make up stories; making me see that I had created my own disappointment because I had a talent and a passion for storytelling. They helped me to realize that I couldn't blame them for being the cause of my distasteful disappointment. If fact, I came to understand that because I liked to make up stories and explanations for many things, that I couldn't blame anyone else for that talent in me. The nature of talent is that it is irresistible. Paradoxically enough - talent can be almost an obsessive curse.

But still, here I was, causing my own emotions, feeling bad and how was I going to deal with it? Surely this expectation that I'd built so carefully into a blissful state of excitement wasn't a negative thing?

Even if an adult promised me who had the ability to make these things happen, was it really in my best interests to expect it and possibly make myself feel bad if it didn't happen? I realized that, so many events and factors were out of my own knowledge and influence, things could go wrong for grownups too that were unexpected. It was possible for disappointment to happen to me at any time because of what I had packed with meaning by doing this expecting.

My family offered me a much more interesting question about expectations: How was I going to use my irresistible ability to tell stories to make me feel good instead of bad?

Wolf Teacher

I have known a couple of wolves,
and they were pretty socialized
animals, but they also did have
their own agenda, which might
or might not include you
as a human in their plans.
The most striking difference
between dogs and wolves was
the wolves’ lack of being
affected by what you
thought of them.

Dogs always care and want
to know you are pleased
with them – and adult wolves 

could pretty much care less 

what your needs were. It's 

part of why wolves have 

self-respect.
I have experienced exceptions 

to that lack of care. One of the
wolves I knew I accepted the 

responsibility to take care of as
a house sitter for six weeks 

while her people traveled. Of 

 course I had been friends 

with the wolf, having met her
previously. But I did not really 

appreciate how the wolf had
accepted me into the pack as 

a “family” member when I 

began to take care of her. 

Ten days into taking care of 

the wolf, I got some very bad 

news that a former boyfriend 

of mine had committed suicide. 

I was on the phone for days 

helping my ex’s relatives find 

places to stay when they 

arrived from out of state. Our

 ten year relationship had continued 

with his family, despite the two of 

us breaking up the five years
previous to his death. Of course, 

there were many cleanup details 

of sorting out the loose ends of an 

end of life scenario.
The strange thing was, with the 

wolf and I having spent only ten 

days together, for three days 

following the news, that wolf 

did not leave my side when I was 

with her. I was both touched and 

shocked to have become adopted 

as a pack member by her so 

absolutely as was evidenced by 

this wolf’s actions. The wolf was a 

source of solace by matching my 

state of mind and then transitioning 

me out of it better than any ever-enthusiastic
doe-eyed dog could have been. I’d 

never experienced anything like it 

then or since.
Strangely enough, this experience 

with the wolf made me understand
how many advantages there were to 

tempering my blinding enthusiasm
with a little friendly reserve. I began 

to show certain others with my actions 

their relative importance to me, and 

people responded.
People in my community took me 

so much more intentionally (even
when I wasn’t serious) as I made 

these changes in being aware of
how I affected them. It was quite 

a rite of passage for me.
But maybe there was perhaps 

another thing going on entirely...
Have you had experiences with 

a wolf?

Sprain

Decades ago in my early forties, I was driving on my way home to Bolinas after dropping the guy I worked for off at a doctor appointment and where he was staying overnight. I hadn't eaten all day and had just picked up something to nibble on the way home. Stopped at a long, level traffic light line of cars at Tam Junction, I had taken my foot off the brake to kick off my slippers and open the container in the seat next to me. WHAM! The drunk pulling out of the liquor store parking lot had assumed that since my brake lights weren't on, my car was going 30 mph. He pushed my car into the car in front of me, causing me a whiplash injury.

I'd never been in this situation before. What happens is the insurance company wants to have their chiropractor look at the damage and access it. So I thought I'd stop doing Alexander Technique for three weeks before the assessment. My logic was if there was anything that was going to go wrong, I wanted to get paid for it. Big mistake!

A day after the appointment came and went, (when I really expected to get some help, but didn't,) I feel asleep after some circus-sex (I'll leave you to imagine what that means, OK?) with a towel underneath half my hip. I woke up with a hip sprain and sciatica. Ouch!

If you know anything about Alexander Technique, we believe that the head and neck relationship is key for every coordinated move in the body. Having a problem there and not using Alexander Technique to stop it, meant something likely to go wrong.

This sort of sprain wasn't the sort of thing you can use rest to recover from, because resting stiffens it. So every morning you must move to get some relief from pain. It takes about six to eight weeks minimum to recover. I wasn't. The way I was twisted when I learned to walk funny as a baby happened to feed into the likelihood of how the sprain had happened.

Because I knew Alexander Technique, I could mitigate staying in pain and move out of what was hurting me. But it didn't work to prevent the pain from returning, and I had no idea why. Later I learned that many women who are in their early forties gain mass in the bones of their hip area, so that may have been a factor.

Eventually, I did find out why healing wasn't happening. One thing I did discover is that going to a sauna and cold plunge helped. I was socializing in a public sauna, and a guy there said I didn't sound like most people who had chronic pain, so he thought maybe he could help me. He was a hypnotist counselor. I told him my story, (which included breaking up from a ten year + relationship, partly because of being injured - good riddance!) He said that he thought I was hanging onto something; for most people that was a recent breakup. I didn't think that was the case for me. He gave me some breathing exercises that I practiced on the long, windy drive home over the Fairfax-Bolinas back way home form the sauna.

Having spent about three hours at the sauna, I pulled over to shut my eyes for a bit on the way home, because it's not good to drive when you're about to fall asleep. I draped myself over my pile of laundry in the passenger seat next to me and had a nice snooze. When I woke up, all of my pain was gone!

I got out of the car and walked around a bit to think about what had happened. I felt around in my hip and back area with my hands to see what was going on that I hadn't been able to feel on the inside. There was some strange pulling on the inside of my pelvic bone that I hadn't noticed before, because of surrounding background tension. It turned out that many moons previously, I had unknowingly developed uterine fibroids, which caused my belly to pooch out on one side. Being vain, I'd trained myself to hold in the side of my abdomen to even out my appearance that nobody else probably noticed. That's when I put into place the habit of tensing my hip that was preventing me from recovering from this hip sprain. Of course, once I figured that out, I used Alexander Technique to quit that. In a little more than a month, (after being in chronic pain for a year and a half) I had an almost full recovery.

I learned a few things from the experience. From my past, already I knew what it was like to be limited and hurt and imagine that it was going to last my entire life with no solution. But this time many people had a well-meant solution that I could try. Now I understand how discouraging it will be to try and fail when it comes to chronic pain. Rather than blaming yourself, you tend to get stubborn; most of the time this leads to discouragement against trying anything new. This is why my rescuer said my attitude didn't resemble most people in chronic pain.

So - what was it that I was "holding onto" that I had been thinking about before I fell asleep? The last time I had a mysterious problem with my coordination, I stumbled on Alexander Technique...and it was a really amazing ride. Since I had gone through all that pain, I wanted another benefit on the other end of it like my roller-coaster ride with learning A.T. dammit!

Later I realized that I did get a benefit that I could pass onto others from my experience. It was in the form of a sort of "reset button" that interrupted my hip tension pattern that intermittently caused sciatic pain. It was based on the ideas of an osteopath named Jones who originated a technique called "Strain and Counter-strain." But that's another story...

Touchy

 I used to feel self-righteous about the level that my culture doesn't want to touch each other - almost to the point of "forcing" or "training" people to allow me to touch them and to invite being touched. I wrote a bit about that on my other more public blog. 

There were many other actions I did that violated people's cultural expectations about autonomy, independence, personal space and respect that I needed to become aware of and problem solve.  Lots of times, who I was trying to change showed me their sharp teeth and I had to learn not to take it personally. I've had to learn so much about body language to be able to deal with feeling rejected, isolated and misunderstood. For instance, being near-sighted and not comfortable with glasses or contacts, I tended to stand too close to people when talking, encouraging them to back away from me or flee during a conversation.

When I finally gave in and accepted that it was OK that people in my culture did not want to be touched, I think others lost out on the value I could offer them about the importance of being touched. But they didn't seem to want it.

It happened at the point where the mother of my stepson gave me this little talk about how the people closest to children are the ones who are most likely to be sexually molesting them. She got it from the news, so I could have merely cast it off as a fad. But I couldn't help but take what she had said personally. Because it resulted in her son no longer wanting to enjoy being read to while sitting in my lap, or hang out with the family and friends on the couch draped over each other. It was as if his mother was, in a roundabout way, trying to accuse me personally of molesting her six year old son by cautioning him not to trust people about an issue which he had no clue what it meant at the time. It really made me angry. But it also made me realize how an accusation like that is pretty much the same as a conviction. So I decided to let sleeping dogs lie and stop trying to get people to touch each other more often. I think my decision at that time was a mistake, in retrospect.

But I'm still on the fence whether it's a good thing to be "training" people to accept being touched - or to just accept them the way they are. In the last year, I have been adopted by a stray cat who doesn't like being picked up. But over time, he's learned to accept me doing that for him to hoist him up to where he gets fed, without scratching me. I reason that some day, I'm going to have to pick him up when he's upset and I don't want him to freak out and attack me. But it's really just that I like his fuzzy ass in my arms and I like enjoying his trust. It's a bit like that with my friends too.

Enjoy Learning

When I was a kid, I learned by imitation; gaining rapport with my teachers was irresistible. When I was a teen, I learned by accident, in spite of myself. I was lucky to have teachers who accepted that I was learning while half asleep. Once I got to college, I began to learn by absorption - so I started to choose my teachers carefully because I realized I had no idea what I was absorbing. After college, I thought knew how to spot a fantastic teacher. I became fascinated with what makes a teacher worth the topic they're teaching.

For this community musical "Carnival" in 1989, I learned how to walk on stilts, how to juggle clubs, how to hang and build sets, install stage lighting and manage drama queens. There I am on the ladder.

Sometimes I would just learn whatever a fantastic teacher had to teach. Fantastic teachers seemed to bring out talents their students never knew they possessed. I had to admit that often what attracted me to being taught was trivial, irrelevant or downright foolish. It was only after my ignorance had subsided that I could say there was "a method to madness" for wanting to learn that particular thing. My tolerance extended for learning about something before making up my mind about its value. While learning, I gained and defined the value and use of what I'd gotten on the fly.

Absorption is still my favorite style of learning, because I realize that many people who attempt to teach come up with an explanation that doesn't really match what they actually do. It's the doing of something that I'm often interested in more than the explanation. People teach how they learned - if they take what they learned further, they often don't have ways to explain what they're really doing, so they use their former teacher's words. A learner sometimes needs to ignore that presentation, and get to the source in a more direct way.


What I mean by "absorption" is to merely open up as wide as possible to the skill that is being demonstrated. With absorbing, time of arrival or sequence does not matter. Pretend as if you can already do the skill, even though you are vastly inexperienced. Imitate everything you perceive - body language, attitude and facial expression. Cast your attention wide to take in as much as possible at once, and see if it's possible to juggle all these unknown factors. "Fake it 'til you make it." Count on "beginner's luck" to fill in the blank spots. You have nothing to lose, because you have nothing invested.

Since college, have always been able to learn from books. Surprisingly to me, this is rare. People seem to get a book to "have" the contents or refer to it, seldom do they get a book to really learn it. I outline a book if I think it's something I want to learn.  Learning using a book by outlining it can be done with a library book; it's cheaper than buying the book - and I have the contents that I want to use or remember after I outlined it.

The learning skill that has been the most useful for me as a learner has been to observe. Observation pays off when choosing a teacher; barefaced self observation allows faster learning. Each discipline, skill, world of knowledge or study has it's own sense, body language and lexicon, which  it pays off to learn - but not at first. I find that I want to directly experience a subject first, before I'm trained into looking at it from the traditional point of view of how most people learn it. After that direct experience as a complete beginner, I'll understand what the classic solutions have answered. Sometimes confronting a subject directly will allow me to innovate beyond the classic learning procedures. Sometimes the way I give back to teachers is by asking them original questions that they haven't yet thought of asking themselves. The way to come up with these original questions is to note what puzzles you or fascinates as you first encounter the skill or subject, before you know what others think is "important" about it.

How do you learn best? What do you enjoy about learning?

Recluse

There are many reasons why a person ends up being alone. Some of them are negative, and some are positive, and some are accidental, and some of these choices happened "accidentally on purpose."

Sometimes you make choices to do what you think you want to do, and only later find out that you've inadvertently chosen to do it all by yourself after you're entirely committed. If you think about how long it takes to get exactly what you want, how long people work to set themselves up for retirement - it's a long haul. Most people don't know what they're going to do with themselves when they retire because they never had a chance to do what they loved to do - or they're not able to reinvent themselves.

Sometimes it is just that we cannot "sell" to others our desire to have things the way we want. There has to exist someone else who wants share that situation with us, and that is sometimes a tall order if our dreams are unique. Or sometimes, we end up alone because there is something we do that is not socially acceptable to others who would usually want to hang out with us - too much "baggage."

I am overwhelmed with how many of my peers have become alcoholic as they age - probably somewhat because "it doesn't matter now." Some people go through a process of "giving up" (sometimes necessary) without ever coming out on the other side of it to understand what they positively do want. Some just decide not to bother learning anything new and get along with what they have. For them, it's just too much trouble to feel like you don't know what you're doing. This is one example of circumstantial isolation. If you don't change with the times, you get left behind. And possibly disillusioned about what you believe is not possible now.

Relationships teach you about yourself. (At least, that is how they have always worked for me.) In a way, it's expending less effort to be alone. All those character defects that are irritating to someone else don't matter when you're alone. Nobody else is there to accept the consequence except you. If you're OK with what you do, you can have things be any way you want. Of course, some older folks get very "set in their ways." But think of the advantages, you don't have to explain or apologize about the way you are, how you work, why you do what do. There is nobody to answer to. Being alone is both an advantage, and a disadvantage.


Someone asked an old woman past 100 what is the best part of being old - and she said, "No peer pressure."

Lightly skipped over by most is underestimating the power of a significant booby prize that is the strangest feature of being lucky enough to get old. Watching those twenty, thirty, forty year friendships dissolve or suddenly disappear is not for sissies.

I don't know what your experience with death and the process of grieving is, but in my peer group - people do not want to hang around someone who is grieving. Oh, after someone dies, people will gather to console one another and commemorate, but then, they go away. They don't call, they don't make contact again for another...three months or so. Then it's only a light check-in.

Somehow the person who is grieving is supposed to "get over it" or "deal with it." Most of your friends will get tired of hearing about how you feel when you miss someone who has died. This distaste perhaps reminds them of how they have trouble thinking about their own death. Maybe it's just too close to how unpleasant it would be to be the one who is left after best friends and lovers are gone - as you are now. It's as if grief is a state of social quarantine.

There isn't much social support either for accepting each person's unique process of going through their own grief. Instead of recognizing that grief is a special time of self-knowledge, if the process of grieving goes on "too long," it is labeled "depression."

It's not depression, it's grieving - but this is the cloak that society wraps it in. This mistaken label for grieving as "depression," is yet another very good reason for circumstantial isolation. 

In A Fight

In brain science and in hand-to-hand combat, the person who has the ability to calm themselves while under the threat of fighting has the upper hand. A person who can calm themselves can use an incidental strategic advantage collected by their slower upper brain as well as their faster reactions of their reptile survival brain. 

A friend of mine was once in a bad situation where a group of thugs were threatening to roll him and rob him. He looked around, figured it would be easier to defend himself if he were in a small space where one person at a time was going to come at him. So he backed in between two parked cars against a dead end wall and proceeded to wait. The thugs taunted each other to go in after him; but eventually one of them said, "Look at him - he's too calm. He's got a gun. Let's go."

Defending oneself in real fight is a whole different matter too, but again - calm observation and questioning one's own assumptions can pay off...

At 24 years old, I was once walking uphill on a one-way switchback to the little Mesa to a party in a remote place in Bolinas near the beach at night. As I walked, I began to suspect that someone was behind me, matching my footsteps. Was it in order to sneak up on me for some nefarious purpose? I shuffled my feet. The person behind me matched my footsteps again. The houses I was passing had occupants who were on vacation, or gone to bed and locked their doors... So I decided my advantage was that he did not know that I suspected what might be going on.

At fifteen paces, I turned around, still walking backwards and started blabbing to him in an over-friendly way in the dark silence. "Oh, hi! Were you at the beach like I just was? I didn't notice you there. Did you get that shirt at the freebox? I love the Freebox... I'm going to a party; are you going there too? "

He stopped, somewhat shocked...not answering me. Which indicated to me that he might have the nefarious intentions I imagined. Now I knew how he was dressed. But there we were...walking along, twenty feet apart. So I kept blabbing to him and decided to choose my battle ground to conduct a little test. I wanted to control where I was going to allow him to get closer to me to see what he might do when we came to a steep switchback.

When I reached my chosen spot, at that point I said, "Oh shit! Forgot something at the beach, gotta go back..." Sure enough, he ran the last ten feet uphill across the street towards me and pushed me down. But because I was smart to think ahead, I was on the ground parallel to the outside edge of the road; next to me was a steep drop off. I had a significant advantage of familiarity with the terrain.

While I was on the ground as he was coming close to me, I realized that my legs were a whole lot longer than his arms. I remember thinking, "Some part of me must have been planning this." As he loomed over me, still saying nothing, I crouched in a fetal position, saying, "Oh, you're going to help me up." He still said nothing. As he bent over me, all I had to do was extend my legs and plant them in his crotch to toss him over the steep edge of the road. I got up and ran. When I breathlessly arrived at the party, I explained what had happened. The guys in the part all went out looking for this attacker. But there was enough time to for him to disappear.

Later in the daytime, I went back to the scene of the crime. I saw that what I had done to evade the attack was an even better plan than I imagined. Where he'd landed off the side of the road, there were many poison oak bushes...

Manifesto

I'll put what I mean in the positive,
leaving behind passé routines and shortened regrets.
Who, how and what I love shows my genius.
Coincidence-control is my delight.
I count on timing to take my talents for the ride they deserve 
Around a cycle of return, they're crying, "Me! Me now!"
Humility dazzles wealth.
  
I'll help with respect, merging with your bonding language  
to inspire, laugh & free you -  
because I am so often connected,
helped, awed and laughed. 
 
May my ruthless emotions be artful & tactful;
allowing others to misunderstand,
accepting who they are now,
releasing the curse and blessing
of glimpsing what is not yet born in everyone.
 
I'm always learning what "appropriate" means,
expanding connections & meaning-making.
My complaints are fodder.
I will design a way though artfully
dancing around my own resistance & fears,
forgiving myself again, in gratitude
as I learn what I can do, and
how I can do what I know.

Where's the Music?

 Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
        Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
    While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
        And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;
    Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
        Among the river sallows, borne aloft
            Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
    And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
        Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
        The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
           And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

(The last stanza of Keats's "To Autumn." when he was dying of TB.)

When I read a poem, I wonder..."where is the music to this?" For me, unless a poem has a tune and is sung, it's not complete. When I hear poets read their poems, or rappers rap their lines, I think, "that person really wants to express themselves and they haven't learned to sing yet."

 I love it when poetry is lyrical or when poetry is an expression of meaning that has additional images or experiences in context with it. But by itself, usually poetry just doesn't do much for me. Part of the reason I don't really get into poetry is probably because there's no music attached, or I'm not connecting with the emotional content that's being expressed.


Words and grammar structure meaning - and poetry is where words become free of their structure. Poetry is how you can rub words together and they can become something original that hasn't been meant before. But unless you're skillful, the reader won't know what you're really saying and will read things into what you wrote that you didn't mean. Understanding is constructed by the person who is experiencing it. Their assumptions and perceptions trump your intent as an artist.

Sometimes poetic words will be so delicious on the page that I can actually imagine them complete without a tune attached. But usually that is when I can imagine images that go with the words instead of a tune, as I can do with this stanza from Keats. The poetry that goes beyond this "lack"of no music will evokes its own images that completely affect me. If a poem doesn't "do it for me," then usually it just doesn't contain enough of what it's hinting at. It's not "juicy enough." Hints are OK, I guess, for those people who like them, but I'm after experiences, or the hints of experiences that I have yet to embody.

Oddly enough, this is also the reason I listen to mostly instrumental music. It's also the reason I carefully select the films and video content to which I expose myself. If I listen to music with lyrics without selecting the content of it, (the radio, for instance) I am often so disappointed with how much drivel is out there. It's that I'm so affected by any art that I must be deliberate. When there is a song with words worth listening to, I never get tired of hearing it and may even take the time to learn to play and sing it. But frankly, most of what my culture imagines is valuable to say in a song or violent movies are ...not what I want to program into my psyche by repeating it. We humans seem to be preoccupied with the sounds of our own self-indulgences - we're verbal and like to blab - even when we don't have anything to say.

Being an artist, how can you tell if what you have to say is going to be considered notable by others unless you say it? Any expression seems to find it's audience. It's always interesting how "great" works of art continue to grow in meaning as the culture changes. People continue to find new meanings in "timeless" artistic vision. What is most personal becomes the most universal, as it is artfully expressed.

What do you think?

Being Santa

When I was a teen, my boyfriend's family in San Diego had adopted a Mexican family from Tijuana to be the recipient of their donations. I was the first person who could translate between the two families and got to hear an interesting story.

It all started when the San Diego family had bought a used car and wanted to fix it up and sell it to make a little money. They found this shop over teh border where eleven kids were running around. The mechanic did an excellent job on the car, and later an excellent job redoing the interior - the reconditioning was perfect. After realizing the poverty level of the Mexican family, the family from San Diego decided to buy another car and this time give all the money they made on the sale of the car after it was fixed to the mechanic and his family.

They did this multiple times.

It took the sale of four cars for the mechanic and his family to figure out what was going on. Each time the San Diego family came with another car and some money, the mechanic assumed that as a customer, they wanted an even BETTER and more expensive job fixing up the car they had brought. ...While the family from San Diego just wanted to give the Mexican family some money that represented their true efforts from the sale of the cars on the other side of the border.



Hope that you're in a position to make someone's life better this Holiday season!

Always Loved

We are not the roles we assume. Roles are like jobs that can be replaced. People are not their roles of being a spouse, lover... Although the world assumes this is true and react accordingly.

Once I open myself to being intimate with someone else and grow to love them, from that point on it doesn't matter what they do next. I will always love them wherever they go. They must work hard to injure and destroy that love of mine - unintentional injury doesn't count.

If enough time has gone by, that can't be done completely - unless they intentionally and willfully work pointedly to do so. Even then, the time we spent when we were in harmony is always mine should I choose to keep it for myself. In time, I may find someone else to craft an alliance with that is more appropriate to needs, but that second person is not a "replacement" for the first. If we part, nobody can ever hold the same connection we shared because it was and is still unique. With each connection, (believing that great relationships are made and not found) I have been indissolubly changed by my experience of intimacy with them. In knowing them. It is as if I grow appendages that are uniquely shaped just for their connection of holding hands with me.

At least, that's my experience so far.

In Another Life...

What I Almost Became...


Perhaps in another life, (one I got very close to choosing,) I would have been a translator. Being born in California, the only living language that I could learn was my local dialect of Spanish. Mostly from a brilliant teacher in middle school, I learned enough to fluently play the translator between two families who had become friends without knowing each other's language. Then a full scholarship took me away from the border town where I was raised. Without use, I forgot most of what I had learned. Now after not using what I knew for decades, I know enough to tell what someone is talking about, but I no longer know what they are saying about it!

I had stumbled on the I Ching one day in the library when I was twelve while looking for "magic books." Here was the first completely foreign universe of completely dissimilar symbolism that I could not grasp, although I could read the words. So I began to collect different translations of the I Ching and compare them as I used the book for an oracle. The ability of the I Ching to give the same reply to similar questions, even when asked years apart, this completely fascinated me. How did this synchronicity Jung talked about really work? I am still fascinated with this question. In my documentation of my experiences with the I Ching, I now have a sort of catalog of my questions about what to do with my life, what choices to make and why make them. Using the I Ching has helped me gain the benefit of being able to compensate for time of arrival of possibly related information. 

My lifelong interest in the I Ching was partly fueled by a college professor I had when I attended U.S International Uni. He was a scholar from mainland China who's affiliated institution bestowed a degree on the head of my school merely for hiring him!  Because I already knew the content of the class in the I Ching he was offering (and because I could already handle a brush as an artist,) this professor taught me Chinese for seven weeks while giving me a guaranteed "A" in his I Ching course. 

Of course I had a private teacher and no classmates to compare myself against, but it was only later that I learned we had gone at a breakneck speed of a little more than 100 characters a week. He made it simple for me, after learning about my ability to memorize song lyrics. Essentially, he showed me about how different "character families" were related to each other symbolically. He did this by taking a very complex character that had many brush strokes, and teaching it to me backwards, one stroke at a time, using a story to link the meanings together. We did probably five of these "character families" each day and they were somewhat related to a larger story. When I think back about it, this was inspired teaching.

Probably the one decision in my life that I regret was to keep my college scholarship to go to art school instead of taking advantage of an opportunity offered by this professor, Dr. Dun Fong Lee. This professor, (who I'd spent quite a bit a time with socially,) offered to set me up teaching English and to continue our lessons in Chinese - as he was returning to Taiwan when I was getting ready to transfer my credits at that school to art college. Leaving my boyfriend was unthinkable, (it didn't occur to me that perhaps he could accompany me!) there was no way to stay in touch from so far away in that era except for letters that took forever to arrive - and I was an orphan who had no parents to remain interested in what happened to me. So there were many reasons to not go. Still, I wish differently. I did attempt to contact him a few years later, once I had taken advantage of my art school scholarship, but I could not find him. Perhaps he had died, because his was in his late sixties when I had turned eighteen.

But my interest in languages remained. It was another stumble during college that took me into a book about the Wharf-Sapir theory. Here was another book I couldn't understand, even though I could read the words. It suddenly made me realize that there were worlds of cultures out there containing different thinking styles that possibly could not be conveyed in English...

Later in college I designed an independent study class in "communication" to explore how many ways meaning could be conveyed. It took me from animal training, (inter-species communication) through symbolism and body language via gestalt therapy experiments and the examination of how adapting built habitual routines and contexts, into artificial intelligence, toward learning a bit of the Hopi language, back into polling surfers who were encountering dolphins to evaluate the surfers on their proprietary sense of owning their surf spot.

Eventually I finally buckled down and spent the ten thousands hours plus in learning to write in my own language. The experience of traveling to Europe encouraged me to start a "travel journal," ...and the rest you can read right here.

 

Hunch or Prejudice?

What is the difference between an intuitive hunch and a prejudice? This is one of my virtual questions that I enjoy asking.

It's curious to me how each and every perceptual attitude that someone can adopt seems to have alternate ways of describing it. These descriptions, definitions and interpretations seem to color how the subject and person is defined to express another bias or prejudice. Some can get quite...colorful, with pointed accusations.

For instance, students often stop themselves from asking a question of a teacher out of respect for that teacher. But from the teacher's point of view,, "why don't my students ask ANY question?" In my culture, you can have rapport or you can have respect, but not both.

Another instance, it's obvious from my posting here that I enjoy to take the time to offer the benefit of my observations to other people. I've taken the time to learn to write to do this, which has been an effort for me because my talking style isn't easily translated into the forms of writing.  But now others are coming to recognize my investment of being able to write. Whenever there is recognition of "talent" or ability, people inevitably wonder why you do such a thing. They assign a motive to your actions - sometimes these motives are not what you would answer if they had asked you. In some cases, they react as if the person who has invested value in an opinion must be a proselytizer or a salesperson.

But sometimes, people complaint that I am being "too" helpful. They seem to not appreciate my motives or my open-mindedness because I don't communicate that very well.

If I come up with creative thinking ideas on their behalf without warning them or getting their permission to do so, they react strangely. They're slightly intimidated. They don't know why I can do it or why I would do such a thing for them. Perhaps they assign nefarious motives to what I'm doing or why I'm doing it. I've been accused of "co-dependence," but I just don't have the vested interests and addictions to go along with the profile. Demonstrating my ability to think has also often gotten me defined me as "analytical," as if I am an inflexible one-trick pony.  Am of the opinion that everyone has multiple talents, often undeveloped.

I've learned to actively refuse to defend myself and instead invite participation. But sometimes it just doesn't work. People misread my communicating as being upset. They don't dare to confront or engage, fearing they might offend.

Would love to open a conversation to suggestions on how to better this state of affairs, because I think this same issue affects many, many interactions with many people. Perhaps I just need to joke about it more often.

Anyone have any suggestions or explorations...stories? Probably not. Somehow, the way that I write doesn't invite comments. Not sure what to do about that.

Sploosh!

Fifteen years ago my then-significant other named Pearl and I had loaded the back of the pickup truck camper for an extended trip to Baja California. We were located along Highway One an hour north of San Francisco along a tightly winding road. After situating everything we could possibly need in a primitive desert environment such as Baja by the means of car-camping in the back of the pickup truck, we set out at a leisurely pace for a ten hour drive to San Diego to my brother's house.

It wasn't slow enough. Or perhaps we hadn't tied in the water container well enough. Or perhaps we were too excited about who else we were about to visit on the way there. At any rate, as the driver I swung a little wide on one of the turns and over-corrected a little too fast...and the 5 gallon water container dumped it's contents on our bed.

My significant other pointed to a steep driveway to pull off the road. With the nose of the car pointing up, most of the water went out the back of the tailgate so didn't spend more than thirty seconds soaking the back of the truck. We got out of the car and re-tied the water container after mostly emptying it.

Back in the car and driving down the road, we admonished ourselves for filling up the water dispenser before we left, and not tying it down properly so it fell over.

"Hey," I looked at my significant other and said, "SPLOOSH!" and I started laughing.
"Sploosh? What is Sploosh?" he ranted. "How can it be so funny that our bed and stuff in the back is soaked!"
"Sploosh!" I explained. "We're driving for the next ten hours in the desert with the windows open, blowing hot air on our bed for hours."

Later, we found ourselves halfway down Baja to "Bahia de Los Angeles" on the Sea of Cortez side of Baja. I had become more than a little worried because somehow, despite having a really cool calculator-calendar, Pearl had mis-calculated the amount of gas required to get home. (He had an excuse, which was he had just quit smoking and wasn't in his right mind.) We talked about calling my brother for a rescue when we got closer to the Tiajuana border, or leave our truck and getting just ourselves back to San Diego and going back for the truck...or something. In the meantime we figured it wasn't any different if we continued our camping trip; only the change of heading home the most direct route.

A little closer to the border, I was cleaning out the car near Bahia Conception to repack after camping for our last week, intending to get the dust out of the car. Hidden under the driver's seat footwell mats by the previous owner, I found three stained old travelers checks that totaled three hundred dollars.

"Hey, check this out! As I brandished the checks. "Apparently, a fateful redemption."

"Oh yeah," Pearl quipped. "Sploosh!"

Back-firing, Suggestions?

I have many talents, but many of them seem to be back-firing on me at once. My headlights went ON when I discovered creative thinking as a teen. Since then I've been experiencing what I've read is quite common that many inventors run into head-on as they attempt to present their new ideas to others.

Proselytizers are icky - that's how many creative people interpret and respond to my enthusiasm when I bother to show it. They don't understand why I have suggestions for them. (Only Barbara Sher's Idea Party crowd really gets it.) My magic power is a high-idea talent generator that keeps the ideas coming when everyone else is spent.

Evidently, there is a cost to doing what is new. People can't imagine what motivates, so they assign the motive they can imagine. Most people are not very imaginative. Most commonly they become quite concerned with self-preservation while they freak out.

Of course, you're different. You're imaginative! You love to think!

Here are three situations where my brilliant creative thinking is causing chaos rather than solutions. Please offer your suggestions and bright ideas!

1. My ideas and experience of Alexander Technique are random acts of senseless beauty here:

In the situation of being able to come up with many ideas for their benefit, people mistakenly assume that I have some sort of investment in controlling them by telling them how and what else it is possible. This doesn't happen on the internet, because I don't know who they are, where they are or if they take my ideas for a ride or not and I've put a great deal of thought behind making it simple.  This is great deal why I put so much of my energy into writing about creative thinking and writing about Alexander Technique. This takes up a great deal of my time without me getting much personal benefit back from it. But it's fulfilling on many levels because at least my intent is clear to others. So I spend 'way too much time doing it online - how can that be more productive time?

My way of teaching Alexander Technique in private lessons doesn't happen with the right timing for people. When I show someone how to get free of restrictions, (and what else is possible once you get free,) it's sometimes too effective hands-on. But teaching that way it takes too long and makes students dependent. So I make it more simple and  "hands-off" so students can do it themselves from the very beginning. Then it's too simple and repetitive so they trivialize the usefulness of the information. (Obviously, there's a fine line between simply accessible and a topic being so conceptual that it becomes watered down and useless.) What would you prefer?  Hands off or hands on? Or what else? Could you suggest a way to solve both these issues at once?

2. Relationships

If I know the person intimately, I'm a great observer with a long memory who can compensate for time of arrival. So I can describe for them what patterns of behavior I see them doing over this long period of time, (patterns that they have determined are in their way from before they met me.) So when I give them a way out, they tell me I have an investment in changing them and fight me because I handed them this observation and gave them keys to significant improvement. So, I let them fly on their own and they fall down, because someone who was "trying to change them" for their own selfish convenience wouldn't allow that freedom. Them identifying my care-taking as "twisted co-dependence" meant I could not express my care for them at all! Perhaps because I predicted their fall after seeing the pattern, they get rid of me because I "caused" them to fall, (the "kill the messenger" approach.) I regard this as being part of a pattern that is bound to re-occur because it's inherent in the caretaker/care taking role. This issue is surely to evolve if I hook up with a partner who will eventually need care - or I will eventually need help.

3. Social Change

Other people who don't know me very well imagine I'm really weird to broadcast my bright and wild ideas that shows them what else they can do (to be more imaginative about relationships, for instance.) If I show the benefit of my own inner understanding of myself, (my lack of jealousy, for instance,) they react by being afraid of me. The feedback I've heard about that is I am flaunting my maturity and insight... toward various negative effects only limited by their lack of imagination. In one case, my motive, (according to one person,) was supposedly to make a splash and incite controversy as if discussing the idea was going to result in me doing the idea personally. (Not my intent. But I can see how most people personally identify with their ideas. So at least I can understand where this assumption originates.)


OK - any ideas on one or all of these three? You can blog a long-winded answer, leave a comment, give a tweet on #ideaparty or call me up on the phone and talk to me... if you have my number. I'll add them to future posts...

Surpassing Expectations

"What is it about your environment, history and values that encourages you to surpass limiting social expectations?" It's a very interesting question to ask in polite conversation of any grownup.  Asking it in a non-specific way leaves the answer open.

Curious answers occur. When you ask the question of a woman, you must take the replies with a grain of salt. Women tend to "tell troubles" to bond with other women. To understand much more of how all this happens and more about what the issues are concerning women and those who do not match the current social trends in their conversational style, I recommend the very conversational but content-rich books written by linguistics professor Deborah Tannen, PhD - especially her book "Talking 9 to 5."

It took me a great deal of thought about this question to find the answers for myself. There were three pivotal experiences for me.

What made the biggest difference motivating me to think for myself first happened when I was only five years old. My idol, which was my elder brother of eight years, gave me a snake for a pet - sanctioned by my parents. It was 1959, and in that era, snakes suffered from many social misconceptions about their nature. At a crucial stage when I was going to transfer my family's authority toward the authority of school & a greater social world...Here were these serious mis-matches about snakes that I knew was completely urban legend. People I did not know or trust mistakenly thought snakes were dangerous, contradicting what I knew to be true according to my family and the San Diego Zoo. This experience encouraged me to think for myself and put out effort to learn the true nature of things before I accepted societal norms. It inoculated me against cigarettes as well as sent me to college, because I decided at five that you could be free of fear if you knew more of the facts.

Of course, the most obvious solution to change the minds of young people would be world travel. Becoming an exchange student during middle or high school is the most socially acceptable way, but spending at least six months in another culture works just as well. Once you have been a young person in a radically different environment, you return and realize how self-absorbed your peers are. Not to mention how regional fashion codes really are.

The other pivotal issue was attractiveness and the social authority that went along with it. It upset me that, according to society, women were expected to be helplessly manipulative to get things done. The social fact that an attractive female asking for a "favor" gets it from a male who has temporarily lost his reasoning - this bothered me.

For me as a young girl, there seemed no way to "opt out" of that game gracefully. I did not want the power men handed me; they wanted me to deny or accept their attention. Because of the accident of birth making me coincidentally attractive, I had to deal with this issue early on. Only later I realized that this was a social reality for almost every girl. (If you're a straight guy reading this, imagine if you had to deal daily with attention from people you did not want - from other guys, for instance. This is the environment young women find themselves.)

What eventually remedied this issue for me was learning about body language. After this education, it was indisputable that how I behaved was evident for anyone to see. What sort of a person I was, my values, showed beyond my physical features. A person's character is expressed in their walk, how they move, where their attention goes & the quality of attention used. After learning about body language, I had to accept there were, in me, obvious additional desirable qualities of character. That they were there in addition to matching social definitions of beauty - well, I could accept the attention I was getting now. The attention was my fault, instead of purely an accident of nature.

So I would recommend to teach body language as part of a relationship communication class as a solution for the common desire for membership and bonding - in high school or earlier. (For me, studying Alexander Technique in a classroom situation worked.)

There are many reasons why there is a sudden drop in confidence when girls (and boys) reach middle school age. They realize how they do not match the social norms, and there is the tendency to envy what they are not. This is when girls first must grapple with social questions about how they are going to deal with sexual attention. A desire to for membership and to belong becomes important, as well as trying on what roles might suffice to deal with this big question.

The last pivotal experience for me was when I discovered creative thinking skills. Not just the result of thinking creatively by making things artistic, or modeling creative people I admired. I'm talking about the actual nuts and bolts of how to do problem solving in a situation of decision-making.

Creative thinking skills taught me HOW to think for myself. Wanting to think for yourself in spite of societal norms and actually doing this thinking constructively are two very different things. Edward de Bono has a series of proven simple but effective creative and strategic thinking skills designed for middle school aged students and older. Again - not What to think - but How. Young people have refreshing bull-pucky detectors. These natural talents can be fostered into effective and constructive rebellion. In fact, the more rebellious, the better this education works to help you go your own way more intentionally...against the crowd.

Probably nobody is going to take my word for it. But if creative thinking skills and relationship classes were taught in high school (instead of so much of what is ridiculous mind-reading for "correct" information that is taught now,) society would experience a big jump in social responsibility from all young people.

Stereotyping and trying to be "right" affects everyone.

Heartbreak Resistance

It's very personal. What is most person can become the more universal when expressed. I'll leave some of that really personal stuff out, but I'll try to tell enough of this story to make you understand how much of a cross-roads it was for me. Well, maybe I shouldn't parade a story this heartbreaking here, since everyone knows who I am here in real life. Ah - I guess it doesn't matter what the content of the problem was. You can guess. It was a baaaad thing. Instead I'm going to talk about the solution.

You know all the stuff people tell about how to get past your self-sabotage? Well, it doesn't work when things are really baaaad. This is a story of what did work for me.

The problem was a huge gaping wound. It had already been resolved, and now I had to deal with how I felt about having resolved it the way I did. Talking about it didn't help. Crying about it didn't help. Freaking out about it didn't help. Couldn't stop thinking about it either. It was eating out a heartbreak.

I'm trained as an artist, but for some mystery reason I was resisting making art. I think what happened is that this thing heartbreak was preoccupied with bothered me badly. Suddenly, making the art became less stressful than everything else I was experiencing.

That's the thing about resistance that I've just learned about from a podcast by Barbara Sher. Learn it yourself here.

Behind resistance is an avoidance of something important, something that totally makes sense. You've got to find out what that is, because it's often hiding from you. Using positive affirmations just signals the resistant part of you that it's time to protect you even more - positive stuff doesn't really work. Positive thinking never helped me stop procrastination; it actually made it worse. In fact, using affirmations can make the resistance so strong, it can cause me to hurt myself to put a stop to all progress. As my friend Chris once said, "Got in a fight with myself and I lost."

If you can find the source of your resistance, then the stress and pressure of not being able to do the thing vanishes. You can go forward with no problem into whatever you've been avoiding. The tricky part is finding something inside of yourself that part of you is dead set about protecting you from noticing while you're busy running in the other direction.


So that's what happened with me. My concern that was eating at me finally outweighed the resistance I'd been experiencing about being an artist. I began to make art. I had to make art - I had no choice. I painted and painted and painted. I hung a huge roll of paper on the wall in my garage and slung paint at it. I pulled out another length of paper, got more of the paints and did it over and over and over. I painted like a fiend for a solid week.

I felt better.

A week later than that, I stood back and looked at the art. It was completely and totally abstract. I had done it without any thought of what I was making. Yet, somehow, accidentally on purpose, images, symbols and scenes had emerged in every single painting.

I sat there and looked at what I had painted. I hung them all over my walls and looked at them. they went floor to ceiling - they were huge. Somehow, these paintings had turned out to look like exactly about what I was upset about. I don't know why I was surprised about that. All of the images in every one of these paintings was directly related to why and how I felt about being upset.

What I had painted in each picture was just like one of those "magic" drawings for kids in "Highlights" magazine, (does that magazine still exist?) where there were images hidden in other images, and it was a game to find what they were and where they were. I had done it by slinging paint around - completely by accident, yet, obviously not by accident at all.

The whole process of what happened totally blew my mind. How could I have been painting completely abstract and had these images emerge in the work? What was really going on that something like this could happen? I rolled up these paintings, stuck them in my storage unit. Later I burned most of them. Think that I have one left somewhere. I have never again painted like that since. It scared me, but at the same time, being able to paint like that satisfied something big inside of me.

I've done little glimmers of being able to paint like that before. I'd been told that I could be a great painter by someone who knew enough for me to believe they knew what they were talking about. They said, "Not just good, not just famous - but great." Tried it for a little while, being a painter. But I didn't like the art scene and had no clue how to get into a gallery. So I became a sign painter. It allowed me to work big, which was something I liked to do. It paid the rent, which was also nice. I didn't like painting in a studio, I liked painting where there were people around, so painting on the street was fun for me.

The really weird part was that, after making these hugs paintings, I wasn't upset anymore about this thing that I'd been preoccupied with for months and had tried to accept but couldn't. Whatever I had done when I painted had resolved what I had been so upset about. It scared me that in order to paint like that, I had to feel that intensity of emotion. But painting worked as the solution to express the pain. I guess it worked because the pain got expressed in a non-verbal way - accidentally on purpose. I did something to externalize how I was feeling that went beyond words. So now - art is what I resort to when I can't use words.

So now, even though it's can be difficult to remember what works when I feel that nothing is helping me. When I get really stuck, sometimes it dawns on me that I can paint.

What do you do when nothing works to express how you're feeling?