The Furious Spinner

This is a wandering post. Care to wander avec moi? Okay. Here goes:

There appears to be light coming through my blinds. I'll get up and check it out. As I suspected, it's just a myth, the sun, I mean.

I just went outside. A friend of ours is pulling weeds from our front flower beds. I love it when she comes; things look better after she's gone. (This is partly how she makes her living.) It has stopped raining. It is a good distraction this stoppage of the rain; I shall go outside and saunter around our little town.

Okay. I'm back. It was beautiful. No sun but no rain. Fog draped itself over the river like a long lost lover. Lovely, lovely, lovely. I'd show you pictures, but my camera's battery went dead.

Now Mario and Barbara are planning my party in the kitchen. We're going to have a combination book launch for Broken Moon and b-day party for me at a local coffee place. (Yes, I know, I don't drink coffee, but that's not the point. It's a very cool space, and it feels rather Persian or Arabian, something out of Tales of a Thousand and One Nights.) I've always wanted a party that someone else organized. I'm always organizing celebrations or parties; I'd like to know what it's like to have someone else do it. So I told Mario I wanted a party but I didn't want to organize it. I've been saying this for about twenty years. I never asked him to do it because Mario isn't a party guy, and he doesn't like doing those kinds of things. And who would want a party put together by someone who didn't want to do it? Yuck! But this year, Mario said, "I'd like to throw you a party. I’d like to try it." Yeah! (By the way, when COTOM gets published, I'm going to celebrate with multiple book launches and parties all over the continent, so get ready, everyone! Start planning your Old Mermaids par-tays.)

I got several sweet letters from people about the work brouhaha. They helped me get my mind right. I was sneezy this morning, and I suspect it's from stress. Now I need to get my body right. I go see the surgeon Tuesday, so I'm imagining clear healthy wonderful sinuses. (Don't worry; I won't ask you to imagine my sinuses in any capacity.) Anyway, I was also reminded by a dear friend that some organizations can be toxic and inherently unhealthy despite changes in administration for reasons we don't really understand. This makes me think of Rupert Sheldrake. Perhaps a kind of morphic field or morphic resonance forms around organizations, and repetition of behaviors/actions/thoughts creates a kind of rut in space and time. I don't really know. But I have to be careful not to tumble into that field—or whatever it is.

I know you've all heard the buzz about the law of attraction and The Secret. Well, the law of attraction or the concept of attraction certainly isn't new. In many ways, attraction is an old cool witchy idea. Why not have a positive attitude? Why not imagine a great future? Why not take responsibility for our lives? Nothing wrong with that. The problem comes when people take it to the extreme, as usual. I've said before that New Age extremes get on my nerves at least as much as religious extremes. I was channel surfing the other night (yes, I got TV for the Oscars and I haven't turned it off yet) and I came across Joe Vitale, one of the people from The Secret, on Larry King Live. King asked Vitale something like, "What about this little girl who was just murdered in Florida, did she attract that?" And Joe Vitale said something like, "I know it sounds harsh, but yes, she did." Now that's just horseshit. And it was a cruel and heartless thing to say. Even if it were true (and I don't believe it is), it was horseshit. (And just because you can "attract" doesn't mean other things aren't going on in the world that also have influence over how our lives go.)

Mario has taught me through example to find the treasure in horseshit. (And that statement by Joe Vitale had no treasure in it.) So I can find treasure in something like The Secret that seems to be covered and surrounded by a lot of horseshit. Mario and I have consciously "attracted" things to us before, but for some reason after it works, we forget about it. It's odd. Many many years ago, we were in a bit of debt (from medical stuff), and we fussed and worried all the time about our debt and money. Every day we worried about it and talked about it. Then we checked How to Get Out of Debt, Stay Out of Debt, and Live Prosperously out of the library, and it changed our lives.

One of the first things he tells you to do is to stop thinking about debt, stop thinking about the bills. Pick a day, once or twice a month to go over your bills and pay them. He has you pay a little bit on each bill you owe a month. He says that most places will re-negotiate with you so that you can pay less, as long as you pay something. He asks you to keep track of everything you spend for a month: everything. And he tells you to cut up your credit cards. (We only had one credit card, so it wasn't a big deal. We didn't cut it up since around here they use that for identification, but we didn't use it. Now we use it occasionally, but we always pay it off that month.) And he says to think prosperously. He says money will come your way. The same day we read the book, we went out for a walk, and we found a $20 bill on the side of the road. We got out of debt by doing what he said, and we've stayed out. We have immaculate credit. It's funny, though; we never took that next step: live prosperously.

I think many of us have difficulty with that next step, especially those of us who believed we could change the world. Mario and I always said we wanted enough money to get by, and that's exactly what we've gotten. That has been great, and I am very grateful. But I'm aiming higher now: I want a home and land. I've always wanted that, and now I'm ready to do something about that.

I'm now reading Sacred Choices: Thinking Outside the Tribe to Heal Your Spirit by Christel Nani. Again, I'm learning to sort the wheat from the chaff. I ignore the New Ageisms and the somewhat threatening tone of the book: "If you don't do such and such, you'll get diabetes (etc.)." Things like that. The good part is what she says about limiting tribal beliefs. We all have things that we believe (consciously or unconsciously) because our parents told us so or society told us so. (I just had a flash of the punk kid in Repo Man who says, as he is dying, "I blame society." Okay, that’s only funny if you actually saw the movie.) Anyway, I think many of us have limiting tribal beliefs about prosperity—and other things. So I'm going to rewrite some of mine and see if that helps remove some of the proverbial brick walls I've run into over the years.

So we’ve wandered all around, haven’t we? And I’ve monopolized the conversation. Ah well. It was fun.

I just opened my blinds. The fog and the river are still making out. The clouds move across the sky like an old gray quilt someone is dragging behind them. My sweetie went to the store. I was going to write an Old Mermaids story tonight, but the day is almost over. The Old Mermaids understand.

Take care.

May You Saunter in Beauty! 1 comments

Sup & Stuff