Attention – paying attention – is bringing more energy to whatever you are attending closely. Thus, one of my few finely-honed skills (ignoring stuff) can be shown to have value.

Some things you don’t want to have more energy. Cool, just ignore ‘em. Put your attention on something you want to become more energized.

Ignore-ance is bliss,

LWIII

This logo is the kind of thing that has to be done by someone with a lot of time on their hands, but it tells the story of our fair doctor as only words can do, with some help from an umbrella, of course, since the visual theme of my new writing and editing website (www.wyrddoctor.com) is steampunk – and an umbrella is Victorian if not in nature, then in nostalgia. 

I don’t have much done on the site except registering the domain and making this logo in Photoshop. Plus some ideas and our slogan, “We make it better!” It sure was a lot easier to come up with the logo idea than it was to make. Didn’t realize it would run over half a minute. That’s why I’m not so keen on conceptual artists: “I had a idea, now pay me.” Sheesh.

At this size it’s over 400k, which is not good, though may be okay with present connection speeds. It’s only 8 colors, and still that big. Ouch. 125 frames, fyi. I’ve set this version of the gif to pause for 30 seconds, since it should be stopped for almost as long as it runs, or it will probably drive you crazy. One play only on the actual site.

Ever a friend to the word,

LWIII

And so I watched as well as read my way through Intro to Shakespeare. Our professor was a massive bardaholic, an ancient fella with a huge passion. His belief was that the only way to begin to understand a Shakespeare play was to read it seven times. So I did that with Romeo and Juliet, right in a row. The sacred 7.

Talk about word heaven. Don’t know about understanding, but I did get steeped in the sound. So much so that for two weeks I dreamt in iambic pentameter. My soul no longer had its seat in modern times, but was sucked by the sound back to times of yon. And anon and stuff.

Which brings us to the present. When I first joined Twitter I had the good fortune to find @IAM_SHAKESPEARE,  a guy who auto-tweets one line of Shakespeare every ten minutes on the dot, consecutively, all 120,000 of them. The entire godlike ouvre.

Twitter is so great. Readus Interruptus, an ever-changing kaleidoscope of earvision. Every ten minutes, without fail if you’re watching your timestream, you get a reminder of what the human race is capable of, such music, such humor, such terrible insight, the kind that gnaws at you and makes you wonder and go yeah. I had to get me some of that.

So I started tweeting back to Shakespeare, playing with his words. I would take a word or four (it has settled pretty much on three, as the personal mini-form has evolved) and snag it from William’s latest line then use it to start my own poetical plagiarism tweet.

As an example I’ll paste in my last, posted less than 5 seconds ago from web:

A deep indent you make in me, a place inside the mystery where you are. Once I was there but now are you. Am I blue? No freakin’ way. Yay!

Not my finest hour but a good example. I try to stuff as much rhyme into the piece as possible. 140 characters. Rhyme on. I don’t even mess with slants to differentiate lines. A waste of the form which follows from its short function. A perfect “twoem” ends with a period at 140 characters exactly. Sometimes I leave out punctuation to fit it all in.

That last one was from the line “It shall not wind with such a deep indent,” spoken by Hotspur in Henry V, in reference to a river. We just recently finished Hamlet, the most glorious collection of words ever slapped between a cover, by my lights. That was awesome. A little like dancing with the muse in person.

I find the quality of my quasi-verse often declines abruptly towards the end of the tweet, but that comes with the territory. No arguing with 140. And no diddling around forever. Part of the high-wire property of this format is the good chance I’ll write a real dog. Happens frequently, I’m afraid, but it’s the nature of this expression. Postmodern art and all, y’know. You have to make it suck occasionally to keep your hand in.

Here’s ten of my favorites from the past few months:

Again to lie with myself, I plump the pillow finely, sigh and rub my ass divinely. To sleep with me then, again. And so it goes, alone.

1598 was the year grandpaw exploded. Ate a whole pig. Done turned the house pink, insides anyway. Not much use for a blown-up gramps.

Tell my story, an thou will’t. Give your listeners a stilt to climb thy words, and a wrap against the wind, for these are chilling rhymes.

Will not wrong my simple song by singing it to you, nor shall I ever pen a poem to your beauty too, for my words are of love and you hear hate.

Madness is poor when madmen prove insane, and left their ticket to the normal train in their neighbor’s coat. The mad castle has no moat.

Very soft society, for it builds on rumor and mends by trends, a body of nothing but hot air long-exhaled. We are by our own rat, tailed.

Enter Hamlet and his duck: “Bad luck, mad quacker, I am no whacker of the dad, not bad like you, you ducky goose. O my feathery caboose!”

Wonder-wounded hearers gape away, for I have something strong to say and your ears must stand it. I can land it, I promise. Just let me try.

For no man is an I, land where he will, only I can be that. I am me, you cannot be, nor can I be your I too, for we are always I and you.

To my bow I bend my thought, see that recurved shape that wrought such hidden power, backwards-bending, thus with power arrow sending.

LWIII

…with thanks to @Guy_Vincent, who showed me how to look at a tweet as its own artistic format.

Of course, like everyone else, I’ve had a lot of input in that direction over the years:

According to my father, I was born to please him. According to my mother, I was born to love her. According to society, I was born to fit in. According to my employers I was born to work harder and not screw up so much. According to the U.S. Navy, I was born to polish brass, swing a swab, and hoist signal flags. According to my ex-wife, I was born to accommodate her. According to my cults, I was born to give them money. According to the television, I was born to buy stuff.

Now I’m sure there is a kernal of truth in all they say, but it never really struck me as the real deal. I hadn’t the least idea myself, so have been dependent on the wisdom of strangers until now. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I’ve made a lot of guesses over the years. Always felt like a bit of a communicator and an artistic sort, but never had the chops to make it work. Or the guts.

To set the scene:

This dream was set in a multidimensional quasifabularium, that is, a hotel. Or a funhouse. Or a funhouse that was also a hotel of multiple meanings, full of rooms that opened to infinity. A house of many mansions.

One of the rooms was formed into red rocky outcrops so that it was like passing through a small dark narrow canyon, and as I moved through it little black shapes began to move up behind me, coming up from the shadows of darkness, shapes of pure darkness themselves, like bipedal ratlike rats or little demons. Very scary, the embodiment of all my fears. And soon they came in such huge numbers that they turned the floor into a writhing mass of them and I was carried along in their deadly black midst.

At first I was fearful, but soon realized I needed to surrender to them, let them do with me whatever they wanted, to let go and let be. As soon as I did that, they de-individualized.

I fell into them and all became black. And I moved instantly from there into a place of pure bliss, surrounded by distant mighty lights like galaxies in the deep harmonious blackness. I was floating in a vast universe of harmony and peace, a tiny flick of joy in a vast rotating emanation of cosmic perfection.

It was so easy, so natural, and such an astonishing and gratifying revelation – to give in to one’s deepest fears and find they lead directly to pure heaven. Fear = bliss. Who knew? All this time I’ve been running like an insane dog from exactly what I needed.

And then it came to me, whether as a voice or as pure knowing I don’t recall, but I do recall the message: My life’s purpose is to support the feminine process.

What does that mean?

To me, who has long studied Jungian thought, psychological alchemy, dreamwork, and the artistic realm (by study I mean dabble in), it was instantly obvious and feeling-true. I am here to be a conciliator of the weak with the strong, of the sissy with the bully, of the intellect with the feeling realm, and to do that not only in society and in others, but mainly in myself. My anima is the goddess in me, and I need to let her out, to set her free, to be the rock on which she stands tall, flinging love like flowers from her arms.

You go girl!

LWIII

If you could bring one character to life from your favorite book, who would it be?

~ Rosefleur

Dear Rosy,

Had I my choice I would bring God to life, from the Bible. I know, I know, you’re saying “We have you, what do we need God for?” but modesty is a good portion of wisdom, and it precludes me from answering that question.

So there you go: God – even though the Bible does not, alas, actually qualify as one of my favorite books. I do like it, what with all the wisdom and stuff.

Your ever-pious,

Wisdom Boy

If one’s heart skips a beat, is that Love, Lust or Cholesterol build up?

Is flippancy, even used as a self-defence mechanism, and said with a twinkle in one’s eyes, ever justified?

Why can’t I ever stick at one question? Have I got questionitis?

I made a word up today…Healable, I liked it, tho’ embarrassed.

~ Truly Troublable.

Dear Troub,

When your heart skips a beat, that is love, or cardiac arrhythmia, both of which are caused by abnormal electrical impulses. Lust only causes extra beats, and cholesteral only slows beats down.

Flippancy is always justified, if not in the best taste at funerals. You can hurt feelings with it however, so I might recommend moderation, even with the best of intentions.

You cannot stick to one question because you have questionitis, but not to worry – that is how I got to be so wise, from the same aliment. The only cure is to amputate your curiosity, which I do not recommend.

Healable is a very good word. Thank you for inventing it.

Still your,

Wisdom Boy

Think I finally may have the answer.

Always figured I would have to find a spiritual answer to that question, my existential yawp. An implied communication from God or something. Some kind of deep soul experience of truth. But no, it comes from science and reason. Who would’ve thunk it?

The answer lies in M-theory, which to my shallow understanding is among the latest of quantum mechanical shots at a Theory of Everything. According to some proponents, there are an infinte number of parallel universes to ours. Not just different dimensions, but entire universes. These places – this infinity of complete universes – could vary from completely different from us to almost identical.

By the very definition of infinity that means that whatever can happen does happen. If something is rare or unlikely, infinity just keeps going until it happens, since the odds of something possible happening are always greater than 1 to infinity.

So that means that anything that can happen must happen, in one universe or another, at some time. There is nothing that doesn’t happen. Which leads us to my conclusion – Next time somebody asks, “Why is this happening?” you just say, “Because it had to.” It’s infinity’s fault.

Everything happens,

LWIII

And it may be merely my hedonism, but art to me, almost by definition, includes a sense of exhilaration and enjoyment, a feeling – even if reversed somehow – of beauty. So modern art, both the confusing and the ugly kinds, creeps me out.

Maybe I have a fetish for meaning. Must…have…meaning….

One time I got to see, face to face unexpectedly, my favorite painting of all time, Van Gogh’s The Starry Night. The dream of a lifetime, something I never thought would happen, plus it was a suprise. I had no idea that that painting was in MoMA.

When we went there years ago, I was really excited, off to The Big Apple to see not only the greatest artists of our time, but most likely the greatest artists of all time, since these modern guys had all the past to build on…at least that was my theory.

We started on the opposite end of Starry Night (woe to my fate that made me turn right) and worked our way through the galleries. I already knew of course that modern art was generally weird, but had no idea it could be so totally incomprehensible. And I did expect a certain amount of beauty.

Hick hits the bigtime. Duh.

By the time we had wended our long, long, long way through all those galleries, my brain was about the size of a peanut: IQ, 8. Why? I kept asking, both to myself and aloud, as we passed all those leering mysteries. The one that finally did it for me was some penciled French scribbled on a brown paper bag under broken glass, saying, “To be viewed for six hours from a distance of six inches.” Oh, the cad! From intrigued to bemused to baffled to furious, my journey was inexorable, my fate an evil doom. Unfortunately I was sober.

So when I finally stood in person before the opus of my imagination, the painting I had dreamt on and spent so much time looking at in a book: my beloved Starry Night, I projectile vomited. Not actually, but I sure was done. Who cares about this shit? The poor dear girl who accompanied me on that trip kept assuring me that the reason these abominations were in the museum was because it was the first time it had ever been done. That was small consolation for me, in my bereaved and bitter state.

So imagine my shock when I first stood before a Jackson Pollock painting, in the Milwaukee Art Museum, later on. We were skating quickly through the modicum of modernists – having learned my lesson – when we came upon the glorious sight of a Pollock, a huge painting practically vibrating off the wall. Don’t recall which one it was, by name, but it was one of his drippings, kind of like this:

 Lavender Mist: 1954, Jackson Pollock

Since I’d only seen his paintings in books, I had always scoffed at Pollock as the squiggles guy or something. But when you stand right in front of one of those giant walls of color, it’s a whole different story. Those paintings are deep, not intellectually but visually. They stand out from the wall like a fat horizontal tone-dance. It’s as if it’s alive in there. – Almost like you can see beyond physicality into the innards of things. Nanoquantumvisiospectravision, freaking amazing. First time I ever saw into the spirit world.

Anyway, point was supposed to be that I saw the movie Pollock last night. Ed Harris was great. Watching him drip-paint, in imitation of the master, was a joy. Made me realize that one of the precious times the genius of a human being lived wholly inside art was when Jackson Pollock dripped in a pure dripping mood, involved in the moment like few people have ever been. Creating something alive.

Yay art!

LWIII

I’m Gwen McCauley and I’m a mapaholic.  I know, I know. How on earth could I have allowed myself to get this far without having requested an intervention of some sort.  But it just sort of snuck up on me, you see.

My love of travel is not an obsession, nor is my deep love of all things Portuguese travel.  I can happily spend weeks and months on the road.  In fact, I do spend weeks and months exploring the wonders that are the Algarve, bringing clients along for non-religious spiritual retreats, for explorations and explosions of creativity and now for culinary and dining experiences.  That is all wonderful.  And while to some it may seem a tad obsessive, I know that it really is about focus and commitment.

But what I’ve managed to keep secret from most is the shame of my true obsession:  maps.  In all forms, in all sizes, I am not fussy.  However, I must say that large fold-out maps are infinitely preferable to those books of maps that send you searching higgledy-piggledy for the stretch of road just off the page you’re reading.

And free maps are perhaps best of all: free, fold-out maps.  I can be cheap and feed my obsession at the same time.  Wow!  All that paper, all those folds to get back into perfect alignment, all that countryside to fantasize about, to be curious about, to wonder what it hides …be still my heart!

I have files of maps I’ve collected. I have drawers of maps I’ve been holding on to just in case I need them.  I have collections of maps – maps of outlet shopping mall layouts, village and town maps, city maps, state & provincial maps, country maps, topographical maps, ski-trail maps, hiking maps.  And my latest is a regional snowmobile map that I got for FREE!  All the land surfaces are covered in white snow so it has a lovely 3D effect to it.  What a great little map that highlights the spaces between roads in Ontario’s back woods.

Oh oh, I just realized that perhaps I’m obsessed with maps because I’m searching?  Perhaps I’m on one of those ‘life journeys’ everybody talks about these days?  Oh my, I guess I’d better stay away from all those helping professionals then; I’d best not ‘find myself’ or I’d have to give up this delightful obsession that brings me such joy.  Living life lost …now there’s an interesting approach towards moving into a New Year.  Perhaps it should be ‘living life lost …and loving it!’  Now there’s an intention that could take me far, especially if I could only find a map big enough to cover that territory!

Gwen McCauley, author, artist, poet, coach, facilitator, educator and concierge. I’m in love with all things Algarve and lead retreats and culinary experiences there to feed my own love of the place as well as to invite people to be all they can become.

I love to live life large and especially enjoy working with women who are seeking more in life.  Whether I accomplish that through my writing, coaching or travel experiences is less important than seeing the light of self discovery shine in someone else’s eyes.  Visit www.ouicoach.com, www.algarveexperiences.com or www.myalgarve.wordpress.com.

For a while I enjoyed my miniature fame as a sort of eyeball magician, the lone guy in our small circle who could make tears run out of his eyes whenever he wanted. But then, to my horror, I found it was becoming involuntary. Oh no! I started to tear up merely when I was talking to someone. O lordy, let it not be so. But it was so. I couldn’t stop it.

That was the beginning, and that ghost story has haunted me the rest of my life. Ever since then, whenever I speak feelingly about any subject to anyone, tears start to my eyes, and if I talk long enough and strong enough, they run down my face.

Eek! One reason I joined Scientology in my early twenties was my hope that they could cure this damnable curse. My dream was that they’d say, “Oh yeah, that’s XXX, all you have to do is YYY and it’ll ZZZ.” But no, no ideas, no name, and no cure. And all of my army of therapists (oh, okay, squad) were let in on the secret, and my other cults. Nobody had ever heard of such a complaint, or had a cure for it.

So I call it lachrymosia, for lack of a better, or an actual, word. Never underestimate the value of not crying when you’re talking to somebody, especially when you’re asking them out, or in a job interview, or manning up with your buddies about football or golf, or cracking wise, or trying not to make your interlocutor abashed and uneasy.

Waaaa,

LWIII