The Late Great Planet Earth

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.--Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

William Wordsworth (1806)

March Madness

Milestones
This is my 100th blog post. I’ve been thinking it begged a more extravagant form of performative utterance than this casual mention but it doesn’t. Onward, upwards and all that.

The same holds true for my writing or lack thereof. In my attempt to find new footing and get some traction again, I’ve been over-thinking what major thing I should write about. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step and so I guess I shall reorient myself from there – that single step.

I get singular steps confused with big steps. They are not at all the same thing. One is measured qualitatively and the other quantifiably. I suppose if I want to justify my lapse of time, I can, indeed, measure numerically the million little things I’ve done of late.

I don’t know that the fruits of my labor (and loins for that matter) add up to anything of substance and tangibility now. All my vested interests feel that way – bound up in uncertain, future dividends. But process is like that – it can’t be measured with any real precision. To quote T.S. Eliot ~ “what we call the beginning is often the end / And to make an end is to make a beginning.” As winter fades and spring fast approaches, I feel that’s where I’m at; a place of resurrection, rebirth and new beginning.

On that note, I’ve begun the next stage in The Artist’s Way series ~ Walking in This World, wherein Julia Cameron, the author, introduces weekly walks to the “tool box” of spiritual-creative outlets along with morning journaling and a weekly artist date. The first chapter in this new book, no surprise, is about discovering a sense of origin.

Fresh start, clean slate, beginner mind – what a great place from which to embark on a creative and metaphoric spiritual journey.

Mindfulness
In this relative state of minding my own business, I’ve been contemplating the mind. I just read My Stroke of Insight, Jill Bolte Taylor’s account of where her brain was at in the days, weeks, months, years following her stroke. I’m also reading Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain and all this brain food has been giving me fodder for thought on the issue of creativity vis-à-vis right and left brain thinking.

Along with this, I’m learning to see negative spaces. Perhaps I should say re-learning. I suspect I was born with that vision but have since forgotten it. Holy Son has a grey and white screened t-shirt that features a woman’s face on it. I didn’t notice the face for weeks. Now that’s all I see. I hope to keep it that way.

It’s starting to work though. Now that I’m beginning to notice negative space, I see a different view outside my office window – the leaves and trees are arranged in such a way as to create a kind of Greco-Roman statuesque face of Picasso proportions. I need to sketch it before a big windstorm comes up and blows the leaves off my face.

Yes, it’s true. I have Picasso on the brain. I headed up Holy Daughter’s classroom art auction project this winter and this is the final result (the background matte was woven by a creative helpmate - one of the other moms who was also juggling a staggering three other classroom auction projects of her own).

It sold last night at the auction for $1050. Unbelievable. And here I was, hoping it might sell for $75.00. Holy Daughter’s creations are second down from the top left and the center image.

Mypopia
Speaking of vision, distant objects have seemed quite blurry to me lately. It’s been a crazy, busy time of late. We’ve been juggling all the usual suspects of after-school arts and scouting round-around madness with the kids, as well as a host of medical appointments, family visits and attraction tours.

I can’t believe spring is almost here – this has been the winter that just won’t end. When it snowed again this past week for like the millionth time here in the past few months, Holy Daughter noted that it must be Mother Nature trying to get rid Herself of the last bit of cold and flakey stuff to make room for spring. There might be something to that.

All I know is I’m ready for spring. Holy Son is off to Washington, DC for a school trip next weekend. He’s most excited about staying at a Great Wolf Lodge during the trip. Holy Hub is trying to keep a low yet high profile at Boeing – a precarious, betwixt and between place if ever there was one. I’m still encouraged that, amidst all their layoffs, engineering jobs aren’t yet being touched. Fingers crossed. And summer is around the corner, for which I have nothing beyond Holy Son’s scout camp in Oregon etched on the calendar to show for it. Holy Daughter is flirting with going to circus camp this summer and I’m flirting with letting her. There are a couple of options in town – an actual circus arts school, as well as a cirque institute. We’ll see how that goes.

Mourning
Sudden death loomed large on the horizon last week ~ first, with news of Natasha Richardson’s unexpected passing, and next with the shocking news that a friend’s husband had suffered a fatal heart attack on Thursday. He was only 45. She does not stray far from my thoughts from moment to moment.

Musical
The kids finish up this afternoon with their Snow White play, which has been playing at Bellevue Youth Theatre to mostly sold-out crowds. Holy Son had a small singing solo in it – he played the role of The Raven and did a good job of mimicking and a great job with his singing Holy Daughter played the Huntsman’s daughter and also gave stellar performances. I look forward to having our after-school time and dinner hour back to normal again.

And to finding time to write again.

Green Green Grass of Home

Shake 'n Quake
Rumblings were felt in the Puget Sound on Friday, no doubt a result of the 7-day stretch of cataclysmic and most-depressing headlines which The Seattle Times has been serving up this past week. All this doom and gloom had the very ground beneath our feet quaking in its boots to the tune of a 4.5 seismic shift. I woke up right about that time but it was to the loud if hollow drip sound of our ensuite bathroom tap.

OK, so I'm anthropomorphising things a bit - but for those of us interested in chaos and integral theories, I don't think it's all that outrageous to presume that all this collective ummm, shall we say, funky energy could take its toll. As above, so below and all that good, cause and effect stuff.

If nature was to imitate us humans in dramatic fashion, I can think of no better method than to posit a foundational crack in the ground. Real estate woes are finally real around the Puget Sound, albeit far less than elsewhere in the country. Our bubble doth done burst and oh woe are the dot-com and other gajillionnaires - investments have tanked everywhere and swindlers have made off with their hard and hardly-earned dough, proving once again that money really is the root of much evil.

And still, the layoff tales continue. Those once dead job fairs will now be packed to the hilt with executives looking to pay the mortgage and feed the kids. It's ugly but there are bright spots. I still contend that sometimes opportunity flies in the face of adversity and than some former corporate lifers may find their true calling from these ordeals.

Green Angel
Speaking of ordeals, some of you may recall that we've been waiting a year for word of our green card status (it was supposed to be a done deal last March). We had almost given up even as we have been apprehensive about next month's Boeing layoffs and how that might affect Holy Hub's job.

But we received notification on Thursday that we've been approved and green cards should be in hand within 3 weeks. Or rather, the entire Holy family has been approved except me - I confessed to my Mom that it had something to do with all that anti-Bush and political rant blogging I've been doing these past few years and she said, "I thought so!!" I then admitted that I was only joking and that it was actually something to do with my fingerprints - I have to re-do my biometrics at no cost to me...(like several thousands of dollars, not to mention several hundreds of dollars of advance-parole (out-of-country travel permits) renewal wasn't an additional cost incurred because of their slow-boat to China productivity, but don't get me started). I will be delighted to go back in and dip my foreign finiger digits in ink in order to get our green cards.

So what does this mean? In a word, everything. It means Holy Hub could get on permanent with Boeing if he so chose. It means he can look for other contract work and not be tied to a trade Nafta visa that permits him employment with only the one employer. It means I can work without having my work permit tied to our annually-renewing visa. It means we're still aliens, but we're legal aliens now...thanks Sting - I now have your mantra singing in my head. It means we won't expire for 10 years, we can come and go as we please, and while we still can't vote and could still get the old DHS black leather boot toe to the butt if we "abuse our status" - (whatever that means), but it mostly means.......

We can have a red, white and green party late February/early March! That's right, it will be happy hour at the Schmidt house with red and white wine and green beer.

I feel very blessed and appreciative, if I can rip a page from this blog to gush gratitudinally to the immigration gods for just a moment. Having to potentially move out of the country in 4 short weeks (if the horrific should happen) was not my idea of fun....especially having just bought a house at the height of the market, having just remortgaged to the tune of a full 2% interest rate drop, and having a kid enrolled in one of the top, albeit lottery, schools in the nation, which has literally hundreds of kids on a waitlist waiting for him to pull out. 'Twould not have been a good time to jump ship.

And I can't lie. I'd like to be both witness and change agent in this momentous, rebuilding time in US history. I'm glad it came through in the week following Obama's inauguration (even though I know it was rubber-stamped in the last days of Bush empire). But mostly I'm just happy, happy, joy, joy, glad. Our relief is palpable.

Bachelorette #1
Holy Hub and the kids were all away this weekend - Holy Hub and Holy Daughter on a Brownie overnight excursion and Holy Son at a Scout camp outing - and so I had 28 hours to myself yesterday/today.

I had all kinds of plans for this magical time. I was going to go on a girlie getaway or maybe take some artsy fartsy classes. Or I was going to go see a chick flick or maybe take myself out on a romantic solitary date. I was going to crank tunes and disco dance with my Swiffer Jet mop turned microphone to this and this, without having to hear anyone yell at me to turn it down, tune out and get with the new millennium. I was also going to get six million manuscript pages written and finish all kinds of incomplete projects and just generally be a lean, mean productive machine.

In the end, I pondered all of the above and chose none. I didn't even eat dinner. I just putzed from one thing to another - revelling in the space of having untold number of possibilities yet having the freedom to ultimately choose none.

I did manage to sneak in the time and headspace to read Daniel Pink's book, A Whole New Mind and felt re-energized that I am that scary, random kind of thinker (I'm an ENFP) who will potentially adapt and thrive in this new conceptual age that he insists has dawned. He hints that MFAs will replace MBAs - this has me secretly scoping out local MFA programs - shhh, don't tell Holy Hub that - it could be grounds for divorce.

But more to the point, I think it's exciting to be raising resilient and outside-the-norm-thinking box children in this new age. I sense a creative renaissance emerging - I spoke of this in the previous blog post - such that they will be the amongst the first generation of Cultural Creative offspring who set about lighting the world on fire in a meaningful and engaging way.

How cool is that?



Anyhoo, here's hoping you have a supercalifragilisticexpialidocious SuperBowl Sunday! Go Cardinals!

New Beginnings

How will history weigh in on 2009, I wonder?

Will it be said that it was the best of times, it was the worst of times? Who knows. I do know this week has seemed to reflect a bit of that dichotomous sentiment.We went from a bittersweet MLKJ day - which proved to be the penultimate celebration and honour for an historic inauguration the next day, to THE day itself Tuesday, where we the people got to participate vicariously in the crowning of a new King, to resumption of doom and gloom headlines later on in the week - more corporate layoffs, more financial messes and quasi-confirmation of our darkest suspicions - that the Bush admin had been spying on members of the press corp and for that matter, on all Americans.

JOB SLOBS
I know of two people laid off this week - Microsoft and L3 Communications. Truth be told, our precarious future hangs in the balance next month, with the advent of 2,400 Boeing contractor layoffs expected. While Holy Hub holds the vision that he might be one of the "lucky" ones not to be axed, on account of his impressive work ethic, aircraft expertise and dare I brag, impressive value he offers to his department, he also knows that when it comes sacrificial lambs in the slaughterhouse world of corporate excess and mismanagement, altruism and pragmaticism don't always win out. Things like union demands and small p-politics and image do, which is all a bunch of do-do, but there you have it.If there was method to the madness, I would get it. I've heard talk that some of these corporate layoffs are nothing more than a legitimate guise for corporations to clean house of deadweight.

In the case of Boeing, I could only wish. It angers me when I hear about employees who didn't bother to go into work for much of the latter part of December, when there was a skiff or two of snow on the ground. These same fraidy-cats would think nothing of playing hooky and taking off to the mountains to go skiing. Or when I hear about employees who rape the company listlessof every conceivable benefit, from sick days to doctor's appointments to mental health days, because it's their so-called God-given right. And let us not overlook the employees who surf the net all day. These are the very employees, the real deadweight, who will be above the law and overlooked come D-day next month. Meanwhile, the contractors, the ones brought in from allover the place to lend their talents and big P produce are the ones who will be ousted.

Robbing Peter to pay Paul in times of famine (which I argue wouldn't be quite so famine had it not been for the greed of the machinist's union last fall, but don't get me started). It's not even a win/win for the company. Because then they end up having to shuffle employees from group to group, thereby incurring increased training costs, and decreased productivity for a great long while. And then when sunnier days come again, these same employees jump ship back to whenst they came, leaving these departments and divisions high and dry, once again, and screaming for contractors who heard the cry wolf one too many times and might now say to Boeing, see ya, wouldn't wanna be ya.

But woulda coulda shoulda. Let it be. Corporate America will not get fixed on the wings of my whining. When push comes to shove, all life is trade-off. We traded safety and security a handful of years ago for this magic carpet ride called the contract world.All we can do is hold the vision. And update our resumes. I finally got my resume updated and I have to confess, I don't feel nearly so reluctant to send it out now. Sucks that my timing is a bit off. On the one hand, while I'm adament on choosing not to participate in this recession when it comes to job hunting - I'm also slightly amused that I picked a fine time to finally pound pavement in these parts. Oh well, it will only make the job-getting more sweet - knowing I had so much more competition.
Today's Career/Workplace section of the paper advocates a bit of workerbee brow-nosing. Not the annoying kind but the fine-line kind, wherein you document your successes, make your boss look good, hunker down uncomplainingly and work like mad.

Which is kind of sad. There are so many talented workers, who prefer nothing more than to stay below the radar, quietly going about their work whilst letting the bafoons and blowhards sing their own so-called praises. And likewise, there are so many hard workers in this country who exemplify hard work ethics and could teach the rest of us a thing or two about the guts and glory of contributing to a team and living the foundational values this country was built upon.

GOBAMA
Speaking of which, I want to weigh in on the inauguration. I confess I got teary-eyed when they announced Obama was officially President whilst still sitting in his folding chair staring off into oblivion in those handful of minutes leading up to taking his botched oath (I so love failed performative utterances, especially an oath of office - let the mistakes be made upfront).Beyond the symbolism and the firsts and foremosts of the day (ie. shift in political ideology from fear to hope, first black President, first true pop-culture, greatest political orator in quite some time) ~ I have this inkling - a dancing in my bones, if you will - that the ushering in of Obamasignals much more than a mere partisan and color spectrum shift.

When I hear of Obama's insistence that the arts have been too long neglected in this nation, and of the grassroots (well OK, Quincy Jones) movement afoot to appoint a Secretary of the Arts) or when I hear Obama speak these words - my heart sings with an excitement that we might well be on the cusp of a new cultural and creative renaissance in this nation, and indeed the world:

Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may
be new. But those values upon which our success depends — hard workand honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism — these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of
progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these
truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility —a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties toourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.

So while these may be the worst of times that recent history has brought us - economically, geo-politically and spiritually - they are also the best of times. I don't often (yeah, OK, never) steal pages from Celine Dion's songbooks, but I have to say, it does feel like a new day has dawned.

I looked back on a blog post from January 2007, when I offered up a little book review about a most-inspiring book I had just read - The Audacity of Hope - and it brings creative expression full-circle, somehow. In the crafting of that book, Obama new that he was launching the little engine that could dare to dream of one day soon becoming the next President of the United States of America.

AUDACITY
Audacity is exactly what is needed. In said spirit, I have re-framed my 2009 theme that I blogged about earlier, from New Gold Dream to Truth or Dare: 2009 Holy Edition (Game On!).

I'm in the process of creating a number of Truth questions and Dare statements for myself that, in the course of the year, I will draw randomly from my Truth and Dare boxes each Monday morning. If I complete the tasks, I can choose another.

For example, a truth question might ask, "When was the last time you blah blah blah? (insert obscure activity here) Go do such and such this week." Similarly, a Dare card might prompt me to go do something just a little bit risque or out of my comfort zone. I re-rented Groundhog Day yesterday. Remember that movie? I'm reading (skimming) a book entitled Groundhog Day: Transform Your Life Day by Day -and he captures this dual-vision nicely. On the one hand, we have our daily, mundane lives which is so same-old, same-old as to make us vomit just thinking of meniality. And then we have this wishful thinking, what if? spirit inside us, that wants to chuck status quo to the cautionary winds and fly kites instead. My what if? spirit destructively emerges like clockwork once each month, wherein I flirt with taking a wrong turn out of the schoolyard and heading down the highway Thelma & Louise style.

Truth or Dare is a cheap and constructive enough thrill, I suspect, for me to marry my inner closet Thelma (or is it Louise?) with my inner Suburban Sally Sue.

So last night, I dared myself to go to the movies alone. I had never in my life sat in a movie theatre alone. It was a little disconcerting but at the same time, it was also a bit exhilerating. I went to see Slumdog Millionaire. It was a great movie - I highly recommend it and if, in fact, it wins Oscars, I would not be at all surprised. I now want to read the book, Q&A, which the screenplay was based on.

I'm not sure what I will truth or dare myself next week. My questions and provocations will be further categorized into areas of focus in my life - (ie. career, home, leisure, etc.). Anyhoo, it could make for an interesting year.

Wyeth Officially Famous Now

Andrew Wyeth died today. He is quite possibly the most brilliant artist this continent has ever seen, in my mind. I stand in awe at his work....he channeled the divine each and every time he placed brush to canvas.

His life and work was not without controversy but that will only make him larger than life in death. Same too might be said of the price of his paintings. Anyone, myself included, who didn't invest in his work prior to his death must be kicking him or herself now because in the spirit of supply and demand and guns and butter, his works will be worth infinitely more now.

Sad that one must die in order to come of age, artistically speaking.

Of Resolutions, Risk and Redux

On the nineth day of the new year, my true love gave to me, nine non-resolutions.

That's my song and I'm singing it. I hereby don't resolve in grand pontification to:

1) seek meaningful work
2) finish my book
3) shop my picture book manuscript
4) blast through unfinished home projects
5) lose weight
6) exercise more
7) eat heathier
8) live life with more reckless abandon
9) buy the world a home and furnish it with love


You see, I can't remember a January in recent New Years' past, where I haven't resolved in good faith, spirit and proclamatin to do something kick-ass and worthy. But then again, I can't remember a February in the past decade, where I wasn't also proverbially kicking my own ass for having ditched said lofty resolution in favour of newfound sloth and apathy.

I've had a few New Year's successes. Well, OK, maybe only one that I can think of. I quit smoking January 1, 1990. I still consider that to have been a most amazing accomplishment but the secret to my success was that I mentally afffirmed my intention and quit date with each puff, drag and inhale of each and every cigarette for two months leading up to my quit date. So imagine how many meditative inhalings of each cigarette that might work out to be and then multiple that by 25 and then again by about 60 and that equates to quite the bombardment of positive affirmations I was assailing in inner addict with.

This year, as per the one the last, I resolve to resolve daily. To wake up and begin each day anew with manageable bite-size resolutions that are apropos for a 24 hour period. Period.

Anyhoo, stay tuned for more on this next week, once I've done some visioning work (tomorrow) on the year ahead.

Shades of Joe Clark

It's an Animal Farm north of the border, politically-speaking, and I won't go there with which breeds and species I think the opposition parties have become. If you're totally clueless as to what I'm talking about, read all about it here.

Suffice to say, Canadian PM Stephen Harper has been reduced to a hunk of prime, mooing Alberta beef awaiting mad cow disease slaughter.

I wasn't at all into politics back in 1979 (pot and lit were more my style), when Joe Clark became PM for only a day or two or however brief his minority-rule stint turned out to be before the Liberals ousted him in a non-confidence vote. Perhaps it was months. It seemed like days.

But the parliamentary rumblings feel similar. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Clark entered into the fray in a very tumultuous economic time in Canadian history ~ post-Pierre Elliott Trudeau and his many "PET" projects, not the least of which was the Petro Canada (Pierre Elliott Trudeau Ripping Off Canada), not to mention the National Energy Program - an endeavor which proved, if nothing else, that "east is east and west is west, and never the twain shall meet."

Morph the decades ahead by two, and here we go again. A young, upstart and rather unassuming PM from Alberta who is way more brilliant a policymaker and leader than others might give him credit for. Sound familiar?

Just replace that old monicker, Joe who? with Harper who? - and exchange the old host of feathered foe of the black, Bloc and bluh (insert French accent here) variety, surrounding and pecking away at the conservative carcass until nothing remains but dried dead meat hardly fit for pemiken, with our new and not so new feathered friends, Dion, Layton and Duceppe, (a name that if you bastardize in a half-arsed attempt at guessing whether 'e' is pronounced as a soft or hard vowel 'e' in huck-too-ey Quebecois francais- minus the accent eh goos and upside down c's and fancy birthday hats and all that-, might easily rhyme with deceit).

So the latest and greatest is that in this coalition attempt to usurp and oust Harper, Harper has had to suspend Parliament.

Didn't emergency measures such as that just happen in Pakistan?! Egads - and Harper's not armed like Musharraf was. Holy hacked-up hockey sticks, Captain Canuck, what's going on up dem dar north of the 49th and east of the 100th meridian, eh?

Now having said all this, while I can't rightly determine where my vote might swing these days ~so far left-leaning am I even though I can't seem to muster up any enthusiasm for the NDP ~ I, nonetheless, still have to confess that any coalition involving the Bloc scares the bejesus and sacriste tabernacle out of me.

It's all a crock of merde (pronounced mare-duh), my apologies in advance for bringing something as lovely as female equine into something so unlovely as the Bloc mix, which is the manure that has lined the political streets for the running of the bulls event the opposition parties have been participating in these past few years.

I seriously don't think the opposition sees him in the light that posterity will prove flattered and prospered Canada in the long run. While I don't think Harper warrants a white cowboy hat and white horse, I do think he has Canada's best interests at heart and soul. And I think he won fair and square - the voters decided. And at the end of the day, that needs to stand for something.

So much for bragging this fall that we Canadians knew how to do elections right - drama and epic just weren't our style. Teehee. I suspect we might be in for a longer haul, if not an overhaul.

But whatever way I look at it, it still feels like 1979/80 redux all over again. Am I alone in thinking this?