REvision

I use the blogs to free write which is essentially writing without revision. I have to admit that I feel that writing itself is such a fricking chore sometimes, that I simply cannot go the next mile and marathon into revision country. And so I just don't. There is crap on the blogs, missing words, punctuation failures, grammatical mistakes and a great deal of deficiency in reasoning abilities but what the fuck? I'm not going to revise. Nope. I'm not.

Except for the poems. I love them that much. I will go and do the extra laps for them. They sit in my blue plastic bucket like many beloveds. I go to them. I pick them up. I put them in my arms. I rock them into awakening. I will do revisions for them.

I am listening to Leonard Cohen singing "Alexandra Leaving". This is such a perfect poem. I wonder if I'll ever get to the point where I'm able to take each word and make them attach end on end in a seamless flesh of undetectable epidermal cells?

I see the poem below and I know that perhaps there is only way to get to this type of work - sitting at the writing place and redoing, what you had a hard time making in the first place. It is sort of like taking that blob of clay, dropping it on the potting wheel, creating a clay pot. Looking at that clay pot. Taking water and making back the blob of clay again. Remaking the blob into the pot again. Each time you do the clay, your hands get to the point of final document creation and eventually, you know, instinctively, when you have the pot you will place in the kiln and fire in readiness for painting. But then, it is still not over. Glazing. Refiring. And final product.

Alexandra Leaving
Leonard Cohen

Suddenly the night has grown colder.
The God of love preparing to depart.
Alexandra hoisted on his shoulder,
They slip between the sentries of the heart.

Upheld by the simplicities of pleasure,
They gain the light, they formlessly entwine;
And radiant beyond your widest measure
They fall among the voices and the wine.

Its not a trick, your senses all deceiving,
A fitful dream, the morning will exhaust
Say goodbye to Alexandra leaving.
Then say goodbye to Alexandra lost.

Even though she sleeps upon your satin;
Even though she wakes you with a kiss.
Do not say the moment was imagined;
Do not stoop to strategies like this.

As someone long prepared for this to happen,
Go firmly to the window. drink it in.
Exquisite music. Alexandra laughing.
Your firm commitments tangible again.

And you who had the honor of her evening,
And by the honor had your own restored
Say goodbye to Alexandra leaving;
Alexandra leaving with her lord.

Even though she sleeps upon your satin;
Even though she wakes you with a kiss.
Do not say the moment was imagined;
Do not stoop to strategies like this.

As someone long prepared for the occasion;
In full command of every plan you wrecked
Do not choose a cowards explanation
That hides behind the cause and the effect.

And you who were bewildered by a meaning;
Whose code was broken, crucifix uncrossed
Say goodbye to Alexandra leaving.
Then say goodbye to Alexandra lost.

Say goodbye to Alexandra leaving.
Then say goodbye to Alexandra lost.

http://www.lyricsfreak.com/l/leonard+cohen/alexandra+leaving_20082866.html

Immediate cures

A lot of the time, I am looking for solutions to problems. But sometimes there are no solutions. I have to learn to just wait. The problem will resolve itself. I know this instinctively but I fight against the natural progression of healing of the wound. I do not want to face the wound and know it is there. I do not want to know the wound was self inflicted. I do not want to see the wound raw and infected. And I do not want to wait for the wound to heal in its own time. I want immediate cures.

There are some immediate cures. You fail your courses at university and the problem of a poor academic performance resolves itself pretty quickly with an expulsion from said institution. You steal an item from a store that is caught on camera and you can be sure you will end up with a prison sentence or at least some sort of criminal record. You are rude and unkind to a family member and there is a memory that remains of that encounter that you won't be able to write over.

These immediate cures, mostly negative happen and you are responsible for them. But other cures - such as the cure for your bladder cancer, the cure for you unemployment and the cure for a failure to succeed - these are cures that persist and won't be cured quickly. I think such ills are organic and you must resolve what ails you inside of you before you can progress on healing.

I don't know if I am making sense here. It is this. I feel crappy inside about myself. This inner illness percolates throughout the entire external life I lead. If I can change that nasty feeling to one of self appreciation and feelings of worth - then I can not only change my inner world but also my outer world. But these types of cures take a long time. Sometimes they take your entire life and then you aren't even done then. You just have to keep working at the cure and not expect an antibiotic course to make the pain go away. Sometimes, even, there is no cure.

Immediate cures are nice. But prolonged cures are also useful. They have lessons embedded in them. Getting to the point where we see that life long wound healed with scar tissue on it - is a ongoing process of educating oneself in how to accept, how to endure and how to love. The lessons are worth the length of time required for the healing.

Dandelion field

Older boy is in the shower. My husband is still telling fantastic tales to younger boy who is luring away the hours by resisting sleep. I am still here listening to Leonard Cohen sing "Alexandra Leaving". Yeah, saying those damn goodbyes. Who knew you could do it courageously?

Sometimes, I stop in the middle of the blog entry and just listen to the lyrics and I'm in another time and place and it all comes back and there are tears behind the images and you know what? I really doubt you ever say goodbye to those you love.

In your mind there is a place that is reserved for the past loved ones and nothing uproots your presence in that place and your intercourse, continued and persistent with those loved beings. You are rooted there. No matter if the beloved has died or forever forbid you entry to his heart, you are rooted there like some sort of noxious dandelion weed unable to stop showering the field with a head of dandelion fluff and popping out popcorn style everywhere in the lost field of love.

So when I am sitting here, at the end of a long day with writing done and the song playing, I can just see the field and the dandelion heads swaying hypnotically in the wind and I am there in all those bits of green and white. I am the dandelion field where ghosts roam and where there is no way that I can be evicted.

Rest

Younger boy doesn't want me to read to him. He has time for his dad right now and they are going to do the before we sleep ritual. Mostly this involves the telling of tall tales by his dad.

Right now I'm engaging in my before I sleep ritual. Writing my way to sleep. For the longest time, I had problems getting to sleep. I would rattle along like a old rusting car dropping bits and pieces on the highway, yet unable to slow down and rest. That was a terrible period of time. I am glad to be done with it for the most part. I find that now, I just have that soak in the bath, I write until the mind freezes and then I read in bed and I'm able to encapsulate myself into the pill and be swallowed down by the night.

Rest is something I think we do not get enough of. We have so many entertainment vehicles these days that the ride can be never ending. Access to the Internet provides a cornucopia of endless delights, some of which can be useful and productive and others that are merely idiot things that are a source of decay and mind loss.

I tend to believe that it is best to get at least eight hours of sleep and then to get up early and do some form of work (paid hopefully) and then, to write. Writing comes after work. Unfortunately. Work is necessary and part of the regular requirements of my life. But writing isn't. It is a luxury.

For most of us writing is both a luxury and an illicit pleasure. I feel guilty sometimes when I move out of the family sphere and enter this private, holy place where I go on bended knees to pray for blessings. Hell, I'd be happy with a line.

I used to get up late at night when all of my loved ones were asleep and head for the writing place like a bomb about to explode. I'd held in the writing energy all day and I had to let it out. But usually what happened is that I would be beat the next day. I would be crabby (oh, ok, crabbier than usual) and I would be snappy and my mind would a bone that I couldn't gnaw and get any meat off. So now, I do not do that late night writing. I wish I could but I don't. I write in contained hours through out the day while the boys labor at school and then when I can, I write in the evenings when they are put to bed or are being read to by my husband. I find that writing in this disjointed way means there is no continuity of writing themes and this is why the blogs are useful for continuity isn't necessary for online journals. You just write daily on them and they add up to a formidable body of lines at the end of a couple of years. Of course, the quality of those lines may be of a dubious nature but in beginnner writing we are trying to get out of that self conscious, oh I'm the wallflower at the dance type of feeling and getting to simply moving one's body on the writing dance floor. And the blog writing has got me onto the dance floor. I'm dancing. By myself for sure. But I'm moving on the dance floor, learning all I can from the poets I love to read and from the blog writers I admire and from the fiction or non-fiction writers I consume It is all good.

But like I said, rest is necesssary. You cannot do this writing on and on and not have a mental drop into a chute and be stupid. You will crash. In fact, you will crash without rest anyway - writing just helps you crash faster when you are doing without rest. I have had my years of insomnia and now I know I have to do what is necessary for me to get me to sleep. Walk for hours. Get the writing done. Soak in a hot tub of foamy water. Read before bed. Roast in a tent of blankets. Darkness, warmth and silence. Sleep comes like a robber and steals you away. You get to write another day.

The job of writing

I'm surprised I haven't written here for so long. The other blogs are eating my time. My husband wants a more balanced spouse (why did he marry me if he wanted a sane wife?) If he wanted balance he should have married that normal French girl he was dating before I hustled him off like cattle from the neighboring ranch. The younger boy is needing a book reader. The older boy needs to be told off. There is no time when you have other blogs that just need you to drop in and yak about the family and the doodling work and here, I try not to meander and just write about writing.

So it is more serious. Writing is serious. It is words that I have to pick up, decide if I want to put in my beach bucket and take home from holidays. I can't take all the lovely word rocks home. I have to be selective. I'm not selective on my other blogs. I'm just running here and there like a chicken with its head chopped off, spilling blood and guts and getting to winding down eventually as a corpse. But here, I write about writing. What could be more pure? And noble?

Writing about writing is like writing about sex for me - it is rather dicey. I mean I don't know a great deal about the subjects (writing or sex) and when you aren't knowledgeable then why the hell are you writing? Well, I think there is value in writing about writing (and about sex) from the beginner perspective. In addition, it cheers up everyone in the blogosphere because their writing is so much better than mine.

But writing as a beginner. What do you say? Well, you say first of all it is a matter of just making a place for writing (a writing place) and then sitting at that place (randomly, daily and often) to wait and not leave until writing happens.

That is about it. Beginner writing is not any more complicated than that. You don't have to be god or a goddess to write. You can be a plain Jane like me and still aspire to write like one of the talented ones. Oh, and one other thing. You just have to be plain undeniable. You will be discouraged by everyone because you know what? Everyone wants to be a writer but most of them have given up because they had no faith in themselves and so they will give out the information that there is no point in trying to write because you won't succeed. I know I won't succeed but I don't care. You have to be like that. You have to be undeniable in your pursuit of writing.

You write even when your parents wonder where the hell you disappear to every day and they have been orphaned parents now for almost two years of my steady writing. You write even when your husband suggests psychiatric consults for your "obsession". You write even when you are stuck in your chair like a piece of well chewed gum and your butt hurts and your head feels like a worn out rubber on the end of a stubby pencil. You write even when you have menstrual cramps, when your legs are seizing up from walking to writing, when your arms lose feeling from the cold emanating from the window next to your writing place and even when you really have to go pee but you want to wait until the writing is done first. You write before sex and after sex, before you start work, at work and on the bus home from work, in the library, on the street while you lug your groceries to the minivan, at the blustering street bus stop where you are cursing the non-existent bus that should have arrived half an hour ago. You write. No matter what your state of existence because that is the only way you make the writing happen.

I have tried to give up writing. I wrote in my twenties. Then there was a long gap of a decade where very little writing happened. Then came the babies and I wrote to make their existence real. I wrote randomly as if I was cheating on my family. I wrote sporadically as if I was sick and stopped writing when I was cured. It has only been from 2006 that I have determinedly stopped avoiding writing and just made myself sit here at the writing place and face the job of writing.

For it is a job you see. I never treated it as a job and therefore I never did the time. I thought why should I? I thought writing was a gift given by the fairies on birth to the lucky ones. I failed to realize that fairies may give gifts but you still have to use those gifts to make them true and real.

The writing happens now on a regular schedule. I write when the boys are at school. I write about anything. I make my poems. I school myself. I get the information I need from other poets. I learn how they construct meaning, sounds and echoes. I understand now that I had to go through life in order to come back to poem making. A poem doesn't come like an obedient, well trained seal to your outstretched hand with the fish dangling from it. You have to spend years training those damn seal poems to avoid disasters at show time and even then, the acts are often a bust. Poem making and seal training must be very similar types of jobs.

I come to the writing place. I am undeniable. I will write. Nothing will stop me. Not even my own laziness and inability. I will write.

Group think

I know little or nothing about Zen and I'm happy to reveal that I don't care. I think of Zen as equivalent to words such as "calm", "present", "intense". I use the word Zen in my blog simply to get me to be in my writing consciously.

Fact of the matter - I'm ignorant of most religions. I don't believe in any of them. This leaves a gap I must admit in my spiritual practice. I don't really have one. I don't pray (except at crisis moments and near death experiences). I go to the forest near my home to be spiritual. In nature, I am entirely happy.

I think that is really the way we are meant to be in a spiritual practice = happy. I don't believe religion should be a rules and regulations business. Religion should be something we explore to make our own life, authentically ours. It should not be a superimposed set of values and rules to ensure we make our lives according to a preset prototype.

Most of the established religions of this world have a source code book such as the bible or the Koran which provides guidance for living life according to the guidance of a divine being. These books and their associated book handlers disseminate information to greater and greater numbers of the faithful who are all indoctrinated in the creed. Individual thinking, questioning and evolution becomes secondary to group think. We are all to some extent managed by the group think influences of established religions. Even individuals like myself who do not subscribe to one such coda are limited in our ability to openly admit our atheism. The group is strong in defending its predominant belief web and in punishing those members of society who do not subscribe to group think.

But no matter. All of these group think mechanisms operate in the same way, create the same types of conformity in individuals and repress creative thought. I will not have any barter with any of them. I used Zen in my blog title. I could have used Christian or Moslem or Hindu or even Cat Beginner Writing Practice. It is all the same. But Zen, to me at least represents an important practice for writers - giving up on the extraneous noise and centering into oneself and writing from the present. Being present to whatever is here now. Being Zen. And that is why I used Zen in my title.

Do not fear your losses

I have a dollar in front of me. All over the house, there is change in drawers and pockets and purses. I am a change collector. I think this habit of collecting coins started when I was a child. Growing up in England, my parents were typical starving student family except they were bringing up three kids. Dad was finishing his pathologist degree and mum was unable to work as a nurse. I think they were limited in what food they could buy and as a consequence, we were always rather hungry. When I grew up the seeds of this childhood, has grown into this tree of wanting cash. I collect money, paper money, coin money, money in banks as if this will save me from poverty again.

But why am I so afraid of being poor? Is it the loss of control? Of not having food? I don't think there is any chance of me becoming that poor again unless the entire economic system collapses (and certainly, with the dim light bulbs we have in power, it is possible that this will happen). In reality, I think we will be fine. It is just we all feel a lot poorer these days now that our houses are not artificially inseminated with more worth than they were thought to be.

Having money all around the house is simply a sort of amulet against disaster. I keep cash just in case. Just in case what? Just in case, I need to have money to pay for food. Just in case the banks fail. Just in case, the government goes nuts like Argentina and we have the full scale conflagration of the middle class that is happening anyway in an infinitesimal manner.

I think the only thing we must do when we are faced with dreams that are shattered, when we are left in a room alone with the man we wanted more than anything gone, when we have no net worth except that in our head, heart and soul to do what this poet suggest we do - face it, accept it and go on. Do not bow down to the experience. Go forth despite all of this.


The god forsakes Antony
When suddenly, at the midnight hour,
an invisible troupe is heard passing
with exquisite music, with shouts --
your fortune that fails you now, your works
that have failed, the plans of your life
that have all turned out to be illusions, do not mourn in vain.
As if long prepared, as if courageous,
bid her farewell, the Alexandria that is leaving.
Above all do not be fooled, do not tell yourself
it was a dream, that your ears deceived you;
do not stoop to such vain hopes.
As if long prepared, as if courageous,
as it becomes you who have been worthy of such a city,
approach the window with firm step,
and with emotion, but not
with the entreaties and complaints of the coward,
as a last enjoyment listen to the sounds,
the exquisite instruments of the mystical troupe,
and bid her farewell, the Alexandria you are losing.

Constantine P. Cavafy (1911)
http://users.hol.gr/~barbanis/cavafy/antony.html


Do not fear your losses. They are there to tell you something. You lived your life. Your life and even if it has "turned out to be illusions, do not mourn in vain." No, you must not be a coward. You must be brave. You must say good bye to your losses and not fear their going.

I am asking you....

I'm remarkably direct and open and free about sex. Hubby thinks I'm just a pervert. I'm not. I think it is best to be honest about all areas of your life (with the right people of course - you do not want to be going around soul naked with a clod who hasn't even found out that life isn't about work, diamonds and holidays to Hawaii. Hell, maybe I'm just kidding myself. Maybe it is about those things and I'm just a nut job).

But in reference to sex. I'm of the camp that says that anything this good should be done often, in various places, with imagination and great tenderness and unfortunately, has to be confined to one partner (the one you most adore out of the many lovable men out there). The monogamy part really sucks but you know what? You get over it eventually and there is no one policing your brain and you can be as wild and naughty there as you want to be. Hubby is remarkably patient with my sex drive. I don't know why. He is willing to be used as a man toy anytime. I wake him up sometimes and he is wanting simply to roll over and snooze and I am blathering on and on about my dream about Leonard Cohen and sex and we end up having sex an he will then turn over and go back to snoozing. So you see, what a man. He puts away his desire to sleep for SEX!

Like the subject of how much money do you earn, the question or chatter about sex in our species is rather restrained between ordinary folks. Sure in the media and in movies, in print and in song, sex is ribaldly and multiply explored as if it were a sort of biological fact of life (which it probably is) rather than the amazing gift it is to our species. Imagine a life without sex for a moment. It would be difficult.

The very act of cutting loose with a man is wonderful. You get to explore the creature from head to toe without him fidgeting or complaining or trying to get away since he is probably immersed in a wash of positive affect. Then you get to play with his hanging tools, his hairy chest, his legs, his arms, his lips and mmm...it is all like having a box of your favorite chocolates right there - all for your consumption alone. Sex is probably the reason I married hubby and sex is the reason we have such a great time together as a couple. Sure I lust for other men too but hubby is willing to ignore this failing on my part if I just continue to bed only him.

I frankly do not know why women would complain about sex. If you keep at it, you learn more and more each year and you get more proficient at it. Sex is very much like writing. Practice. It does make perfect, or close to it.

But maybe the problem with sex among men and women is not a matter of poor design choices in bodies, or lack of knowledge about what gives the other sex pleasure or even an understanding of their own sexual wants and turn on stimuli. Maybe the failure in sexual enjoyment, in our proclivity for variety in sexual partners and in our simply lack of endurance in our marriages is this - the poetry has been taken out of sex.

If you think of sex as poetry - images are important. If you think of your partner as a wonderful man, in every way, then you are automatically tender and hot for him. You want not only your own pleasure but his as well. You are into giving him pleasure. You want him happy. You do what makes him happy. You are aroused by his joy and pleasure. Nothing turns me on as much as seeing my husband writhing in bed under my arms and hands and body. That is poetry folks. A line where the body of your beloved is all fluid and under your pen.

I'm also not afraid to tell my husband what I want in bed. I see no shame in saying what I want or what I would like to imagine or what is in my fantasies. I have a great fantasy life and I see no point in keeping my stories to myself. Hubby says my stories are so good I should put them on a site and call them "Sex Fantasies Practice." Hmm.. it may be a good idea but I think I'll keep my fantasies in the bedroom with him.

I think it boils down to this. I've been with hubby for 18 years. I have had enough time to trust him. I know who he is. I love him. I respect him. I think he is the most patient man I know. I cannot be the way I am with him, with anyone else because I haven't had the history, the experiences and the plain day to day rubbing and friction that I have had with him over almost two decades. We have both worn each other down (I have worn him down more than he has worn down me). We are smooth surfaces together. When you have that day to day constant life together, well, it transfers over to the bed.

But why the Leonard Cohen presence in my bed? Hubby is right. I do want him to be more like Leonard Cohen. I don't know what L.C. is like in bed (but I can imagine he is pretty darn good). But I would imagine that he is able to be intimately connected to his partner in words. Every man needs to talk to his wife and tell her the things in his heart. Women are hungry for intimacy as are men (they just don't perceive this as clearly as women do). Sex is intimacy for men. Sex and chatter is intimacy for women. That is why I dreamed L.C. was in bed with me.

In the end, it is all about intimacy. We are all searching for intimacy - in the open revelation of who we are and acceptance of the inner flawed and beautiful human beings. We are afraid to reveal our inner imperfection to the beloveds or anyone for that matter. Don't be afraid. Reveal. It is how we get to understand that intimacy is not something to be feared or a vulnerable spot in our armor. Intimacy is the place that hurts and will only stop hurting when we are open with our hurts.

That is why writers write - to reveal who they are inside of themselves and to encourage you to do the same. I'm not asking for an Oprah style revelation of the inner human. I'm asking for you to encounter another human being and not pretend to be that persona, that incredible, shiny, perfect machine that you have created to protect yourself from harm. I am asking you to be human.

Word stringer affairs

Leonard Cohen was in bed with me. I was rubbing his hairy chest. It looked remarkably like my husband's chest. Unfortunately, that was all I got to do since, my brother interrupted that bedding. L.C. jumped out of bed and that was that. I woke up disgruntled to tell hubby the entire fiasco.

Me:"Even in my bloody dreams I have to be faithful to you! What do you think this dream means?"

Hubby: "That you're horny?"

Me:"Why can't I have an affair in my dreams? I wasn't even the one to stop. I was utterly into it. I had no guilt. It was L.C. that stopped!"

Hubby:"I had a dream about L.C. too."

Me,surprised (hubby rarely has dreams about poets):"Really? What happened?"

Hubby:"Leonard Cohen was in jail for bad singing."

Me, hitting him: "Why do you suppose I'm dreaming about L.C. when I've got you?"

Hubby:"You either want Leonard Cohen to be me with my chest and in bed with you or you want me to be L.C."

Me, surprised. "Hey, you know that is probably it. Now which option is doable?"

We had an enjoyable time in bed trying to find out. Hubby fell asleep soon after we came to a resolution of our dreams. I got out of bed. I'm listening to L.C. singing "It it be your will." I find the best way to handle dreams is to treat them as the promptings of my soul. Maybe my soul just wants more poetical time in my life. Maybe my soul wants a poet to be in my life. Maybe I should just write more poems.

I listen to my dreams since I have so few of them that I remember. This one was vivid because L.C. was young in the dream, I was in close contact with a man other than my husband who has been my only lover and yeah, because he was a word stringer. I am in love with most of my word stringers. I can't help it. Hubby doesn't mind so long as they stay in my dreams.

Do what the soul wants

I've spent most of today reading. I'm utterly packed full of words. I feel like I've been on a journey and the flight has involved many stopovers. I'm exhausted. I wonder if the luggage has all arrived and whether my prearranged ride is here to pick me up.

I've got so many words and ideas and stories floating in my head that there in only one thing I know - I need to read books more often. I've missed the close companionship with books. Books offer the meaty challenges of sustained reading. I'm used to now to fast food reading. I've got used to reading Internet entries, magazine articles, newspaper headlines and yes, small word bites and I'm finding it difficult to plow through the endless fields of pages in real books.

I think what I'll do is this - sit and read like a holy person in the shrine of words for a good portion of each day. I can do this. I have the time. I have the want.

It has been just the type of day I wanted except I did not walk and I made yucky chicken nuggets for supper. Ah, but tomorrow. I'll try and make a meal. I wonder wht tomorrow will be like?

I find when I don't force the day into the corset of my preconceived ideas, the day unfolds naturally, organically and at the end of the day, I'm sooo relaxed and calm. I think the soul needs these gap periods where it gets to do almost nothing or what it wants to do and not what it is forced to do.

It takes a long time to just let the soul be, to just let the soul do what it wants to do. I'm always caught up in the "should dos" and the "must dos" and I don't listen to the deep inner longings of this inner being that wants none of these shoulds and musts. It wants simply to read, play and write. Or it simply wants to be left alone and rest. It is as if we are cut off from the real needs of our soul and we are always trying to develop or organize or push the body that contains the soul forward on some preconceived path. The soul doesn't want development. It wants us to doodle. And let it doodle.

Do what the soul wants and you will be well rested and ready for whatever the world throws at you. Serendipity is what makes for an interesting life. Not conformity. If you want to do something that is not part of the daily ritual, do it. It gives the soul room for breathing. It simply stretches you to grow. It gets you extending adventitious roots into the soil you are already rooted in.

The main tap root is important - it anchors you to the soil and makes it possible for you to nourish yourself but the adventitious roots of the soul are necessary as well. We aren't only what we do. We are what we do not do. Not doing is simply reflection, pondering, digesting what we've read, writing out what we've learned, farting around with nonsense, sifting through all the panned dirt and rocks to find tiny specks of gold. This is what the soul is determined to do and if we do not do it, it sits like a heaviness and misery inside of us, and makes everything unbearable until we listen to it. Yes, we are our bodies and our minds but we are also our souls and if we just listen to the first two, we won't get very far in life. What is missing in our lives is the third element - soul.

The main problem with work is that it is utterly without soul. You go to work. You try to do it as best you can but there is no imagination in any aspect of it. Just doing work in an endless circular fashion is enough to make you feel like your brain is atrophying and what the hell are you doing there losing neurons? It is not sufficient to have cash only at work. It is necessary to have sort of intrinsic satisfaction from the doing of the work. If you cannot extract this satisfaction from work then you are basically doing soulless work and how long can you do such work without rebellion from your soul?

Soulless work is endurable if you have ego in charge and ego is able to rationalize that the work is supplying you with sufficient money and advancement to make the time spent in such conditions worthwhile but in the end, I think this rationalization of work fails and the soul becomes twisted and pathological manifestations of the soul's twisting start appearing. The soul is essential for normal, healthy functioning of the mind and body. When you start to work solely for the money, the corner office, the job title and the position, hell you are doomed.

But if you are forced (I say this temporarily forced) to work at soulless work then perhaps you can manage spending upwards of eight hours in such work, if you can fashion a soulful life out of work. I don't imagine that most of us have a choice about the type of work we do since most work in most places is designed for robot workers so the main thing we can do to counter the ill effects of soulless work environments is to keep ourselves intact in such places and do fashion a world of intimacy and desire and imagination out of work.

It is too bad we need to do this and I'm hoping that eventually there will be a transition from such work places to ones that are more humanistic and adaptive to the true natures of human beings but until that happens the best we can do is to tolerate working in such environments for as short a period as we can and then, porting ourselves through active searching into work that is more satisfying to our souls. It may take us a great deal of our life to find such soulfilled work. Or we may never find it and our after job work may be what makes us soul satisfied but it is necessary to do what the soul wants - as much

When I returned to work after a long absence spent as a SAHM, I thought I could do just any work and make it soulful. I was wrong. I could do any type of work but I could not make any type of work soulful. There is no way that some forms of work can be made to nourish the soul and in fact, some forms of work act against the needs of the soul and in fact, make the soul tarnished, weary and harmed.

I don't believe employers will change the job descriptions of soulless jobs and nor will they change the soulless quality of work environments unless workers stop working in these conditions. It is like this. When you have an endless supply of laboratory rats for each of your experiments why would you seek to change your experiments? Once you lose a rat, you simply find another one to take his place. It is the same place with most work places. The experiments they conduct may be inhumane but the test organisms are plentiful and do not appear to not want to participate. They in fact, work until they conk out.

Such is the nature of most work places. It is up to us to make work more soulful. It is up to us to make all of our lives more soulful. In simple ways it is possible to to do this. In my home, I have rooms filled with books, paper and pens and drawing pencils. I have writing and drawing places. I have notebooks to write in. One section of a book case has piles of past and current journals. There is opportunity to listen to music. No television but the hands, eyes and ears can be fully occupied in this house. Or if we want we can sit rocking by the gas fireplace and ponder. We have a corner loveseat downstairs with two large cushions where I love to lie flat out and simply relax.

Or in the summer, I go out to my garden. There is a metal table with two adjacent chairs and three birdhouses sitting on the ground next to them. I have a coffee outside and I'm covered by the tall stalks of the sunflowers in the raised bed next to the table and chairs. I drink coffee or tea out there. Sometimes, I'll have breakfast there too in the early morning sunshine.

Or all through the year, I'll put on my hiking boots, move to the forest and go worship the tree gods. If you feel that the soul is in need of green, there is green there all through the year. I get to notice the berries, the rose hips fat and crunchy with ice, the black fingers of mold and the solid masses of moss chaired to the planks of fallen trees. I get to move among the clotted snow and I get to sift through the day's events - ordinary, particular and mundane. It is this, the endless turning over of the stones of one's ordinary life that makes for a soulful life.

Do what the soul wants and no matter how empty and fruitless and pointless is the other parts of the world that you inhabit, this soulfilled part of your life will nourish you and keep you going.