dry well

Posted on by March 26, 2014

bazooka joeWe still heat primarily with wood.

For years we heated only with wood…and then we got a propane wall heater that comes on when it cools off in the room so that it wasn’t freezing in the house when we got up in the morning.

It’s still pretty cold here early in the Spring, so this morning one of the first things I did was to get a fire going.

Heating with wood is pretty simple. It’s not a complicated process to get a pile of kindling together and light the newspaper under it…and then put some more substantial wood on top when the kindling has started to burn well.

That process is about as simple as it gets….the stove is just a stout metal box with a fire inside.

The stout box gets hot from the fire inside…and then it heats your house.

I was pondering what to write about this morning…afraid that I was a tired, dry well. I’d run out of whatever let any ideas leak through…I was an early morning husk…just a shell…a caffeine-less empty hole without an idea in my head.

I was “tabula rasa” in a bad way.

And then I saw that woodstove…and thought, “BAM…there’s my idea….a black box of heat potential…my ticket out of the horse latitudes of creativity…my ship has come in…”

But then I back-pedaled a little and thought , “What the heck?! Why is that an idea? That’s crazy and really, really boring…”

If nothing else, my doubt and indecision will always keep me entertained. It makes for some interesting “self-talk”.

By the time that I was a couple of hundred words into writing the blog, it was too late. I was committed. There was no turning back…it was the “wood stove” or nothing…and nothing was never an option.

So the heat box was the topic…the simple heat box.

That would be the word for the day.

And then I had a revelation about the wood stove….my simple, ordinary wood stove.

My revelation was that it sure does take a lot of work to keep something as simple as a wood stove going.

You have to find or order some logs, maintain the chainsaw, saw all the rounds, split it all…either by hand or with a splitter…stack it to dry, bring it up to the house, get and store the kindling from the sawmill down the road or go up in the woods for some twigs…whewwwwww.

I’m sure that I’m forgetting a lot…more and more as I get older…. in spite of the morning fish oil.

There is so much interconnected activity involved with even the simplest of lives.

There is so much going on all the time.

The house is warming back up now…the stove has been “on” and full of fire for the start of the morning.

But…nothing is all that simple.

And there’s never a reason for feeling like there’s a “dry well” situation in the creativity department.

To say, “I never have any BIG IDEAS!!! I can never think of anything good to write about…” is such a cop out.

Maybe the problem is really that I couldn’t see the “bigness” in a small idea?

There isn’t anything that doesn’t touch everything in some way. We breathe in what someone else breathes out. We don’t see the ways we depend on each other.

We are all connected…all the time.

Dangit…I don’t even want to think about it all….makes my head hurt to expand my thoughts too much.

Maybe I should just drink some more coffee and watch “Dragon Tales” with Nate?

First, I need to put some more wood on the fire….

 

the least

Posted on by March 25, 2014

100_1585

I write sometimes about my morning “routine”.

My morning routine consists of me getting up, throwing my sweatshirt and pants on immediately if it’s cold, going to the powder room for my morning ablution, then quietly creeping past my sleeping sons so that I don’t awaken the “Krakken”…so that I can get downstairs and put some water on for coffee.

While I’m waiting for the water to boil, I pour myself half a coffee cup of orange juice, take my vitamins, rinse the cup out in the sink to prepare it for the coffee to come, and listen to the cat yell for me to come out onto the porch so that I can support her routine.

My cat’s routine is one new can of cat food, fresh water, and the removal of the old can of cat food…every day.

E…V…E…R…Y  D…A…Y

She’s a creature of habit driven by her needs…just like me.

I saw her hanging on the door…looking in that window…and then I saw here on the washing machine…looking in that window…then I saw her looking in the door window again…then the washing machine window…then…

She is a focused feline when she wants me to support her habit.

After I’d gotten her the food, I had a flash in my brain.

It might have been a thought…it might have been something else…I’m not really sure.

I’ll go with “thought” for now.

My thought was this: In the Bible it says that the way we treat the “least of these” is the way we treat Christ.

That cat is such an irritation sometimes…jumping up on the window like that, yowling for a can of food, underfoot until she can get her mouth on something fresh.

She’s a pain when I’m half awake in the early morning.

So what would be “less” than that?

Sometimes we pay attention to our compatriots around the world who have needs.

Sometimes the people around us are taken care of.

We notice things sometimes. Sometimes we act. Sometimes we help these people in trouble.

But what if the “least” included animals?

(Now, the word on the street is that animals don’t have souls… so they must be in a different category. I guess that means they’re more like a “thing” than someone requiring consideration. I don’t know about that…I think that there might be a bigger spiritual connection with the animals around us than we’re willing to admit. Of course, I still would have to claim “dominion”…I still have the “power” over all these non-human “things”…I need to take my “props” where I can find them…)

So here’s the thought…”what if” we get to the end and we proudly say, “Check this out, God….did you see what I did?! Well…I know you did, but…anyway…remember that time I leaned out my window and gave that dude with the cardboard sign a dollar? Do you remember what his sign said? It said ‘Homeless Vet…Hungry.. Will Work for Food…Need Gas”. How about that? Does that count for the ‘least’ thing?!! It does, doesn’t it!! Great…now let me in…”

And God says, “Ahhhhh…you misunderstood, I think. I was talking about that other big chunk of ‘leasts’…all those animals around you that you didn’t mistreat…but didn’t go out of your way to treat really well, either.”

“That’s the ‘least’ that I was talking about…”

“How did you ever get up far enough on your high horse to decide that any of these people around you were ‘less’, anyway?”

I’m not racing to the point…not even really meandering towards a point very well…where I suppose that Jesus wants anything like a can of cat food. It’s not like that. I don’t want to be blasphemous. That’s not the goal.

That may be why animals aren’t mentioned in the “least of these” example…to avoid awkward comparisons.

Maybe that’s why….I’m not sure.

I guess that all life deserves some reverence….from the biggest, most accomplished and powerful…like the President or Warren Buffett or Bill Gates or even Vladimir Putin…really powerful guys…(I’m kidding…being on top of the jungle gym doesn’t mean that you’re the king of the world)…down to a hungry cat hanging on a doorway.

REVERENCE.

I wonder if there isn’t more to all of this than I suppose I see? My connection to God and to Christ is bigger than the “width and breadth” I give it. It’s bigger than anything that I can understand on my own.

That cat’s not really a pain, either…I just need to wake up some.

the good parent party

Posted on by March 24, 2014

bad_parenting_6

We watched “Frozen” for the first real time last night.

I say “real time” because we sat around the computer monitor with some popcorn and watched a Chinese “cam” version that we streamed over the internet one evening …but it wasn’t the same as watching a real DVD on a real TV.

What a great movie.

And “Let it Go” is a great song….sung by a great singer.

Mangina Lenzell is excellent …and I can see why there was such an uproar when John Travolta mispronounced her name.

Talent like that deserves the proper and correct recognition.

Yesterday, in my blog….MY BLOG!…I questioned why, when all these parents all over the world have the same motivations and are doing the same things to take care of their children…why we don’t get along better.

You would think that we all have some strong common ground to stand on.

So….why don’t we all get along better? You’d think there’d be sideways glances of recognition…little smiles all over the world acknowledging “Oh…you, too?” when we see each other…questions like, “How’s it going with little Shakira or Mussrat..or Shanti or Yuki or Olaf or even….Sparrow? Are you guys doing OK?”

Then my mind wandered to the potential utopia of a political system that was set up in a way that only allowed people to serve who had young children in their households.

These people would be allowed to enter office when the child was a baby…and their term was limited to a certain period when the child was very young…and ended when the child exited that target age.

Parents with young children have to prioritize…they have to pick the activity that has a reasonable chance of benefiting their family the most…and sticking with that activity to the best of their abilities.

They don’t have time to drop a bomb…they’re too busy changing a diaper.

They don’t want to steal resources…they just want to fix the roads so that they don’t screw up the minivan.

They don’t want to go to war…they just want to find a really good macaroni and cheese recipe…or hummus or sashimi or….

People with babies are too busy to fight outside of their own families. They’ve got bigger fish to fry than wasting a lot of time with all this “political stuff”.

Cabinet meetings would be more efficient…lots of “Just FIX it!!! This baby just threw up all over me and I’ve got to go change!! Just find it and fix it and we should be OK…”

I guess that if everybody could operate on that common denominator…if all over the world the men and women were taking care of the babies…and running the world at the same time…well, I guess that we’d have some different priorities and might handle some of our issues in a different way.

“Good parent” is kind of nebulous…it probably changes definition from culture to culture…but the basics are probably the same…keep the baby healthy….keep him/her warm and fed and encouraged and educated…give them a life that lets him/her know that they’re loved…and grow a good person.

But “good” is always relative. I’m sure we can, as a global culture, figure out a way to complicate things.

It can’t be that simple.

So…I’ve got to wrap this up…simplify, simplify, simplify. No one serving in government who isn’t also a “hands on” parent…terms limited to the young life of the child…no “grandfathering” for the “grandfather politicians” (the old fat cats who stick around forever).

Nothing complicated about that.

Now the trick is finding somebody with a baby who has the time to listen to an idea like that…even listen to it, not enter the political arena.

Dangit…I just wasted six hundred and forty words talking about an idea that won’t even get off the ground.

Shoot.

You can’t fly a plane while you’re changing a diaper.

sleeping late, getting up early

Posted on by March 23, 2014

james-franco-127-hours

Normally, I get up pretty early in the morning.

It’s my developing “old man” style. I think that I’m trying to work up to the day when I can make a Saturday morning call to the kids at 6:30 AM. I’m working up to that….I know that if I get up early enough now, that later it will feel like the whole world should have been up for hours if I give them until 6:30 to sleep.

Maybe I just can’t sleep.

Sparrow couldn’t sleep last night…upset stomach and congestion were a bad combination for her….so I walked with her for a couple of late night hours while Jenny tried to get a couple of hours of sleep in between bouts of trying to comfort her.

The baby was fine as long as I kept moving…when I stopped walking she would wake up and start to cry.

When she finally got fairly vocal and didn’t fall right back to sleep, Jenny came out of our bedroom and got her and took her back in with her…and I finished sleeping the rest of the night in Zoe’s vacant bedroom.

With our oldest children, it was like that for what seemed like a long time when they were babies. We never knew what room we were going to wake up in.

When we heard a child cry out, we’d move wherever we needed to go.

It wasn’t really sleepwalking…but it was as close as you can get and still be kind of awake.

It’s better now…we just have one really young baby who is actually a good sleeper to deal with…but last night was a reminder of those harder days.

It’s good to sleep…so even though I slept in more than I usually do this morning…I felt like I got up early.

Maybe I sleep too much, anyways. Maybe I’m missing stuff when I’m asleep? Maybe it’s a blessing to miss some sleep and get to spend some time trying to comfort our newest child? Maybe that’s the spin I need to remember when it all feels blurry and exhausting?

I do have some pretty interesting dreams, though.

Maybe that’s what it’s all about…the dreams?

This blog isn’t only about me. But I’m the only one looking out through this skull, seeing through these eyes.

I’m no robot…nobody’s working me through remote control.

So I guess that it may be “all me” after all.

No matter how I interact with the world…or walk for a while with a hurting baby….it’s all about me.

Dang…it’s all me…and I’m kind of boring sometimes. I need a distraction from me for a while.

Like a crying baby.

It’s raining here this morning…coming down hard and steady…wet after a sunny, nice day yesterday.

That’s a good kind of day after a tiring night…you don’t feel guilty for being lazy and recovering when it’s wet outside…and it’s awkward to get out and be active in the sunshine.

And the funny thing about staying up walking with a crying baby is that, all over the world, no matter the religion or political situation, no matter what the culture is like, there were probably hundreds of thousands of parents doing the same thing we were doing at the same time we were doing it…. trying to comfort their own version of Sparrow.

This is all about me…but we’re not so different.

So what’s all the fighting about?

“I’m So Tired” the Beatles

 

 

the man who quit money

Posted on by March 22, 2014

When I was going to school at Georgia State University, there was an older fellow who used to “preach” or maybe “pontificate” out in a central area of Atlanta…kind of a courtyard area close to the college… where people would eat their lunches.

He was homeless…dressed in the costume of the homeless…but he could go on and on about any subject he chose to land on…and he had a following.

People sat and listened to this fellow spin big convoluted loops of conversation…entertaining ellipses that occasionally landed on something comprehensible.

It was crazy intellect at work….it was amazing at times.

I was so up on this guy, Daniel Suelo, until I watched the videos and started thinking about what was really going on.

And I just now figured it out….

HOLMESTEIN IS A BLOCK DOG!

“Block Dog” David Wilcox

Now, living in a cave…spending all your time on “me time” sounds pretty great sometimes.

I like having my family around me all the time, though. That’s how I roll. They roll with me. We are a unit.

I don’t want to live in a cave…no matter how big a “HEY…I COULD…” the thought elicited when I first heard about Daniel Suelo.

He had a book written about him by an author named Mark Sundeen called “The Man Who Quit Money”.

sundeen-the_man_who_quit_money

I don’t suppose that he ever thought that he was going to do any of this on his own.

He’s pretty upfront about the help he gets from friends…the food he forages or scavenges…housing that he can take advantage of.

He’s not an island…but he never claimed to be.

We live in a land of “crazy plenty”…so to be able to make it in the world without any income is possible.

I think it’s just that most of us go the easier route and get some kind of a job…and start generating some kind of income.

We get an income going….and then we get some possessions…and then the possessions need some propping up with more possessions…and before long, we need to buy some insurance because it would be a tragedy that would put us back at the beginning if something happened to all the possessions that we’d managed to pile up.

I don’t know what we’d do if someone stepped on the anthill we’d managed to push together.

Daniel Suelo was depressed in Boulder…so he moved to Moab and gave up the system.

I don’t know if it’s jealousy or something else that makes me want to exhale a sarcastic “wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee”.

It’s probably jealousy.

I know what can be done in this society. If we live in a situation like Moab…with a population and the natural world close by…if we have community that supports us with food and housing…good possibilities of getting clothing and entertainment…if we have that around us every day…well, it would be pretty possible to live without money.

It’s kind of like being a perpetual teenager.

My father used to always pick up the tab when we went out to eat.

Maybe that’s what’s going on? I don’t need money if someone else can pick up the tab….

I haven’t read this book yet…but I’m going to in the coming weeks.

Daniel Suelo is an interesting fellow…and I appreciate the effort to live in a different way.

I just wonder how those efforts would fare without all his resources to pull from….

Check this last video out…is he saying that we all depend on the “producers”…but then complaining about the people profiting from something that they didn’t actually produce? Bless the “producers”…you’d be dead by now if someone else hadn’t made an effort to make the things that support you, Daniel Suelo. What would they call you? The ultimate end-user? What do you contribute except your personal philosophy?

Money is a ghost. It comes and goes…and in the end doesn’t matter all that much. It’s just a bunch of numbers that we run our lives by sometimes.

I sure like having some if the kids need something, though.

 

 

call to joy

Posted on by March 21, 2014

I’ve heard about Pavlovian response…don’t really understand how it comes to work, really….but I was listening to some music the other day and thought how much I’m like one of those trained dogs.

Of course….I’M A MAN!!…so I’m not really like one of the trained dogs….it’s just that these songs come on and I’m transported.

It’s my “call to joy” that can hit at the most unexpected moments.

And it’s not necessarily the full song that can be transporting. It can be a section or a swell, an unexpected dynamic….a “beat with a funky break”.

This is the song that started me thinking along those lines…

“empty pages” Traffic

It’s something about that first line…”found someone who can comfort me…” that really sets me off towards feeling better about whatever my situation is holding at the moment…and if I’m in a good mood already, well…it’s like MSG on Chinese food. It accentuates.

Or check this one out…

Just to set the scene…imagine a pre-adolescent, with a pre-adolescent voice… hitting all the high notes still, singing in the back of a 1967 Ford Fairlane station wagon…and this song comes on.

It didn’t take me long to learn all the lyrics…even if I didn’t understand what they were really about…and soon I was singing along with Betty Wright…singing a song about “losing your man to the ‘Clean Up Woman’ “.

That wasn’t really part of my experience as a pre-adolescent…but I loved singing that song about a lady who really kept her house in order. It’s a good thing to be clean.

It made me happy to get funky in the family ride…bopping along and shouting out “JUST MAKIN’ IT EASY…FOR THE CLEAN UP WOMAN!!”.

My parents must have loved it.

“Clean Up Woman” Betty Wright

I’m not alone in finding joy in music.

Lots of people are in love with music. It’s not uncommon.

But sometimes I meet a person with no interest in music…but they don’t tend to become my friend…not a deep friend, at least.

They aren’t sympatico. They don’t go to my “church”.

It is hard to understand how someone wouldn’t be moved by music.

Here’s a complete genre of music that makes me happy no matter the weather or the situation.

It sets the tone…it makes the mood better no matter what I’m doing.

“Trench Town Rock” Bob Marley

Reggae…that’s an easy choice. It’s sunny island music…it’s a mood generator supreme…good times.

It’s a no brainer to say that reggae music makes me happy and mellow.

Now, some people are going to say that they hate reggae music…that they don’t like white boys with dreadlocks… that they don’t like any easy skankin’ (what is “easy skankin’ ” anyway?)…some people just don’t like easy skankin’.

I say…”to each his own”.

That freaking rooster is crowing to beat the band outside my closed window…he’s going to wake everybody up.

Dang.

I need to crank up these headphone jams while I still can do it…before the patter of little feet starts up and it’s time to get a cup of juice and some breakfast together for Nate before the ride to my work and his preschool.

I do loves me some music…could you tell?

 

 

 

 

 

pulling the boat

Posted on by March 20, 2014

This week is my “day off week”.

I am very excited.

I’m so excited that I lose track of time….Tuesday feels like it should be Friday, Wednesday feels like it should be Friday…you can only imagine what Thursday must feel like.

There are happy storm clouds rumbling off the coast of Pleasure Island…and I can hear the approaching day off like it was…. only days away.

So, yes….I am excited.

I woke up this morning thinking that I was hearing someone whisper my name, but when I opened my eyes saying, “What?!”, everyone in the room was asleep.

That was pretty weird..but I’d overslept by about an hour, so I considered it provident and jumped quietly out of bed to throw my clothes on and start writing this blog.

Some of these weeks that have a day off waiting at the end of them make me feel like I’m pulling boats to get to them…dragging all the days that are in between “what I do all the time” and “what I think that I want to do when I’m not doing what I do all the time”.

Pulling these boats…straining through the water…not looking back….making it through to the other side.

I wonder what I’m missing just looking forward?

That’s the way a person lives to be successful, though, right? Plow on…push forward…eye on the prize. You have to be “goal oriented”…you have to rush forwards towards the carrot or you won’t get anywhere. You won’t “arrive”.

You won’t be a winner.

But where do all those days go that are in between what you rush towards and what you’re doing “right now”?

What happens to them?

Do you get so fixated on the boats you’re pulling that you don’t even notice the water you’re swimming in?

Or, if you notice the water at all, you curse it because it’s the thing that lies between what “is” and what “should be”?

My waiting for a rare Saturday isn’t some kind of existential emergency. I’m not overwrought about much these days….and I enjoy most of what leads up to the “fun stuff”.

I’m not in such a hurry that I don’t enjoy things.

Why, just the other day, I went to a store we have in our town that’s kind of a “liquidation center” where they sell damaged freight and store pulls, etc. and bought ten dollars and fifty-six cents worth of candy. They sell candy bars 5 for a dollar…so it was ….lets see….a bunch of candy bars. It was bags of candy.

Don’t tell me that I don’t live in the moment. I know how to have a good time.

(What would Jack LaLanne say about all that candy?)

But the day off dangling ahead of me is just another day…the icing on a big cake. I love not doing what I have to do sometimes. I like it when I can get close to doing what I choose to do.

Who doesn’t like that? That’s a “no brainer”…not a blog topic.

But I’ll keep pulling these boats…sure that there is a reason for the things at the end of the rope that slow my swim to Pleasure Island…pushing through this water and missing things along the journey.

It’s, after all, what I do.

my faith walk

Posted on by March 19, 2014

indian-coffee-house

Every morning, I get up and make myself a little pot of coffee.

I use a french press…so I guess I could say that I make myself a little french press of coffee…a french press pot of coffee…a carafe of coffee…the glass thing on the french press is full of coffee when I’ve poured the hot water over the pulverized beans.

I don’t know how to say that righter…or mo’ bettah.

Every morning, I do that.

And every morning, after I grind the beans, I put my finger into the plugged in grinder and sweep the grounds that have stuck to the grinder…the ones by the sharp little bean cutting blades….out into the french press so that I don’t waste any potential coffee goodness.

And every morning I think, “If this was a Stephen King novel, this thing would….”.

You don’t stick yourself into a machine that has sharp blades when the thing is plugged in. That’s not something that’s done.

It is dangerous to do that.

But…most mornings…I justify it and think that anything that small…even if it was designed to pulverize hard coffee beans…might not do all that much damage to me if it came to life in an unexpected and demonic fashion.

That’s probably why Stephen King hasn’t featured a demonic coffee grinder in any of his novels.

It has potential…but a novel about it would be more of a psychological thriller than a real terror fest. It’s scary…but it probably wouldn’t keep anyone up at night.

That’s a little walk of faith…the thing hasn’t come to mysterious life yet, so I’m getting to the point where I believe that it just won’t happen…ever.

I have faith that it won’t happen.

The occasional pessimist in me knows that those silent blades can always choose to get me at any moment if I test the universe by putting my fingers into their path.

They can whir into life at any weird moment….and chop the heck out of the end of my “sweeping finger”.

So where’s the faith in that?

I’m looking for nail holes before the crucifixion.

I’m watching for the end before I even found the book.

I’m guessing that real faith is trust without limit…it’s not something that needs to be supported by experience.

It’s not supposing that the whirring blades aren’t going to get you….only because they haven’t gotten you yet.

It’s not situational.

It’s something that we give ourselves over to…and never stop giving ourselves over to.

Ah, faith…that’s a deep, deep pool.

How long can I tread water in that pond? Shouldn’t I know how to swim by now?

I’m a hypocrite…not some big “man o’ faith”. I’m fragile and angry and weak. Give me a sword and I’d chop the ears off of whatever soldier comes into the garden. I would express devotion inappropriately. I have faith in myself that I would probably do something inappropriate.

I don’t always do the right thing…in fact, I probably seldom do the right thing.

But I am loved.

L…O….V…E….D.

That’s enough to buy me some time while I try to figure things out.

And the chopper didn’t get me this morning…either.

“One More Cup of Coffee” Bob Dylan

hallelujah

Posted on by March 18, 2014

Sparrow projectile vomited over my shoulder last night all over my favorite sweatshirt that I was wearing to keep warm while we were trying to figure out why she was so agitated…and as a result of that, I slept too late.

So this will be a short and quick blog post.

Short and quick has to be about something that doesn’t take any figuring out. You have to have an idea about what you might say about something if you have to say it fast.

It doesn’t take much thought to know what to say about Jeff Buckley.

It doesn’t take work to figure out how good he was.

This is an interesting documentary…lots of footage of performances and insights about his life and career that I hadn’t heard before.

I guess that he released just one studio album before he drowned swimming in a channel of the Mississippi….floating on his back and singing a Led Zeppelin song. When his friend on shore looked back to see where he was…he was gone.

What’s good is good is good is good. This guy was so good. His father was pretty darn good, too…but that’s not what this frantic post projectile post is about.

That one album that he released…before all the live and unreleased material came pouring out after his death…is one that is going to be around for a while.

It’s a great album.

I’m tired…better go.

Here’s a song from the “Grace” album…..

“Lover, You Should Have Come Over” Jeff Buckley

right likelihood and the interplanetary monkey

Posted on by March 17, 2014

space monkey ham

I don’t think that the interplanetary monkey has anything to do with this post.

It just sounded so darn catchy that I couldn’t resist.

I think about “right livelihood” all the time.

From what I understand, it’s a Buddhist term…where occupation lines up with conviction…where abilities are perfectly matched to the task at hand.

It’s a good thing.

I think about it all the time…or at least some of the time…because I don’t think that I’ve figured out how to arrive at that destination. I don’t know what it means. The phrase could be some kind of cryptic zen koan as far as I’m concerned.

I don’t think that driving the mail around is what I was put on Earth to do, though.

Whoa…suck it up, you freaking whiner…it’s a good job….get off the “meeeeeeeeeee” track and bloom….enjoy what you have while you have it….BREATHE.

Just breathe…and enjoy the life around you.

Now that I’ve convinced myself that I’ve busted through the “right livelihood” conundrum momentarily…or just pushed it back into it’s own dark corner for a while…I can hit up something else that I just started thinking about again this morning.

OK…check this out….here’s a term that I’ve never heard anyone use….

How about….” RIGHT LIKELIHOOD”?

How about that? That’s pretty clever of me….”right likelihood“.

See what I did? Changed the word?!

I shouldn’t brag, though…forget that I said anything about “clever”. It’s not so clever…I just have too much time on my hands and a full pot of coffee in front of me.

So I obsess over reaching the nirvana of “right livelihood”….always. I’m always mulling that over. It colors my worldview.

How about I obsess over figuring out how to expect “right likelihood”?

From the definition that I’ll make up on the fly for “right likelihood”…. right now…I suppose that it’s the ingrained expectation that things are working in a way that supports a favorable outcome. “Right likelihood” might also be the willingness to understand that outcomes, even if they aren’t exactly following the plan I laid out at the onset, can be “right”.

“Ingrained expectation” is the key part of that phrase for me. I can force optimism…I can override my occasional pessimism and try and replace it with an optimistic worldview…I can battle my demons of doubt…but I’m not to the point yet where my optimistic viewpoint is “ingrained”.

I vacillate. I guess that I vacillate…sometimes. I’m a changeable man…nothing is constantly consistent. I guess that sometimes I can vacillate…some.

“Vacillate” is an interesting word. I wonder what I look like when I’m “vacillating”? Is it something visible to the “naked eye”?

Sorry…I digress.

I guess that what I’m trying to say is that, like trying to approach “right livelihood”, approaching “right likelihood” has to become more than just some weird theory that I pay lip service to and never get any closer to attaining.

I have to get to the point where I believe…deep down in the marrow of my spirit…that good things are the predominant (or eventual) outcome of everything that happens to me and to the people around me.

I need to pursue the concept of “right likelihood” like my life depended on it.

And…I need to find this “interplanetary monkey” sometime soon.

That fascinates me.

Look at his little monkey space face…he’s so trusting and optimistic.