starting a group

i wanted to belong to a women's group...and i wanted it to be the way i wanted it, full of different types of people, like gestalt is, in a ".there is absolutely no reason many of us would have ever met, except we happen to be in the same training program" type of group. we had talked about the desire to ave a more regular gathering of women the weekend brooke medicine eagle was in town, but i really wanted it, so i sent out an email to the women i know that i felt comfortable trying out my facilitating skills with....

i sent an email explaining why i wanted to do this, abnd sent the link to about 30 women, thinking in the long run, the four i was closest with would be the ones to actually reply....

i have heard back positively from 14 women, and only one asked me not to keep her informed cause she just wasnt interested in it. this is overwhelming me a little, i fear my own authority

so now here i am, putting alot of energy into arranging a gathering-where, when, yada yada yada- for women that live as far eaast of me as bloomfield as far south as colombus, as far west as 26 miles, but i am grateful that there is a lake direct north (its one less thing to think about)- and totally unsure what this will be about now, getting so lost in the logistics (its too bad my friend leigh anne just moved to texas, she would love to do this part for me)

but i will just keep breathing (and doing my best not to lose my temper at the ones who feel pressureful in attempt to make it more convenient for them)... oh, and by the way, let it be known that i am aware that i have been known to be the one that pressures...my mother would call this sweet justice, lol

birth chart

even the stars know it,
that her life is meant to be
a bumpy, jerky, start-stop
motion-lurching toward
some undefined future,
and not a smooth safe-sailing
type of priveledged
design most mothers dream
up for their children.

no, no

even the stars know,
and told,
of how the cloistered
affair between venus and neptune
keeps the woman-heart secret
and the Woman alone.

Idiocracy: where we will be if.....

i saw the movie "idiocracy" last night with luke wilson and maya rudolph...it didnt seem like something i would like, but it turned out to be a sartical look at a world that we are quickly heading towards if people dont remember why its important to learn, to be outside, to read for enjoyment and knowledge (and not just for the "is your man cheating?" quizes in cosmo)

there is nothing wrong with knowing things, there is nothing wrong with thinking about things- truly, it givesz you power....and i really believe the wealthy and powerful are greatful that the lower classes are becoming mindless masses again....it creates a field where they are free to take and exploit

....just head over to havecoffeewillwrite and read jeff hess' continued coverage on the current walmart openeing in cleveland ohio....6000 people applying or three hundred low-skill, minimum wage jobs is a sign of both a lack of educated employees for higher skilled businesses and the desperation of a dying city (since even my family moved the business out to solon, making it difficult for inner-city clevelanders -as my grandfather always had in the warehouse-making it difficult for them to get to the shop...)

Song of the day: i will not obey- utah phillips

andy's memorial

just a few shots till i can get the album together

ex and current tenants (chi, debbie and andy) and random others i didnt know
a crowd shot
andy;s brother David and the god-dess lorraine
Song of the day:

barking spider

the barking spider heating system
a note on impulse control
a visitor during the show
Song of the day:

sunrise

Song of the day: good morning starshine- from 'hair'

leadership

leadership
-for little one and g.
and for the one who feels she has nothing else to teach me

i see you, i do, watch
you draw wheels in the soil
planning for the hour or crisis ahead,
and even though youve said
"dont follow me"
i parrot you, i do, arrange
a circle of stone on the table,
i look for direction,
-just this subtle inflection-
a prayer to change course.

gestalted अगं: the thematic experiment

ok, gotta work today and tomorrow, so i will be brief until wednesday, but this weekend we worked on building an experiment with a client to help bring clarity around a dilemma through polarity and how it keeps the client from getting what they want...i personally, am a little unclear on the difference between the thematic experiment and an awareness experiment, except that almost everything you do in a gestalt session has the flavor of an awareness experiment, its the job of the facilitator to help the client see themselves....and the thematic experience involves "fattening the figure" , which i would discribe as putting more energy into one specific aspect/person, making it as large as the room

oh, and hess, the theme in gestalt was desribesd as "distilling the essence of a dillemma", asnd the dilemma is always a polarity...very flakey, i know, but when you work with it, it makes sense, you just need to open the body to it, feel it in your bones and you gut

Song of the day: case of you- joni mitchell

something to look at

since hess was whining that there was nothing new to see

medicine wheel

my friend alex and i set up this medicine wheel tonight, though i am tired and do not feel like running over the whole thing tonioght, i will add text tomorrow....

....i kn ow i said i would write text, but its the first day of a gestalt weekend, ive already overslept, need to get to the bank so as to have quarters for parking, need to dress to the nines because i have a meeting at weahterhead over at case western reserve university with a gender and diversity professor in the organizational behavior program...theres more, but telling you why i dont have time to write this morning is taking up an awful lot of time

Song of the day: circle round the wheel- brooke medicine eagle

ladybugs

there is a nest of lady bugs that llive beneath the front stoop of my apartment building...i dont think ive ever seen anything quite like this before...ofcourse, most people arte barely noticing that they are swarming around and keep stepping on them....totem-wise the ladybug is a message of renewed joy in life (and thank god, i crave joy, but have been surrounded by sorrow and resentment)




Song of the day: you never get over it- ladybug mecca

so my mother calls me this morning, so sad! she finally had gotten tickets to see "cyrano" on broadway, and she and her friend get to the theater yesterday afternoon to.......a darkened stage, the hands had gone on strike. its going to be a rough entertainment season this holiday, and it will involve loss for most us folks (it makes me sad that episodes of real time with bill mahr are now repeat only, since its a live show there are no saved up fresh ones to be aired)....

kudos to the stagehand's union; we seem to have forgotten the importance of the power of workers united, REAL WORK FOR REAL WAGE!!.

from the full moon to the new moon

so back in september, i cycled with the full moon....ive never much payed attention to my period in relationship to the moon before, but i had a workshop in early october where we talked about our "moon time" alot, and the facilitator mentioned how all women used to cycle with the new moon- that it is a powerful time for vision

now, i know her ideas among her own community are very unpopular-she is an assortment of cultures, but mostly centers herself in her native american ancestory- she says she designates a great amount of her time to finding information on the "ancient women's way", stating that when the europeans came in and occupied, a few boys were taken into the wood and taught the old indian ways, but that nothing was passed down through women, no girls were taken away from the invaders and hidden in the woods such as some boys were, and she does her best to piece together a picture of the womens life- she believes mopst of the great visions of tribal people came through the women from their time in the womens losdge every month, that the combination of menstruation and the new moon is highly powerful

so i decided i wanted to cycle with new moon instead of the full and despite my very regular, 28 day cycle, have managed to be early for the past tweo months and today, the first day of the second to last new moon of the year, i have

here's to great and directional visions

Song of the day: send me your voice- brooke medicine eagle

jesus walks- kanye west

from the movie "jarhead"...a must see movie..

Song of the day: jesus walks- kanye west

a picture for hope

someone sent this to me earlier this week, and i found so much hope and desire inside of myself when i saw it....and since i woke up crying again this morning, i thought i would pin it up

so thank you to my elders

Song of the day: "The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out to Get Us!"-sufjan stevens

why i will keep the thought of coup on the field....

from the bbc this morning:

There are only two groups of people who would appear to have the capacity to move against Gen Musharraf and arrest him.

One is his immediate subordinates in the army, including the heads of the intelligence services.The other is the corps commanders who constitute the second tier of the leadership of the military.

Gen Musharraf's position depends on the personal loyalty to him of those who serve him and also the institutional loyalty of military men to their chief. On both counts, the odds looked stacked well in favour of Gen Musharraf.

The only positions from which it looks as if a coup could be organised are those of the deputy head of the army and the chiefs of two intelligence services, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and Military Intelligence (MI).



Gen Musharraf has handpicked his top men


The present holders of those posts were hand-picked by Gen Musharraf, apparently on the basis of his understanding of their loyalty and competence.

now, i have hope that our military would rise up if something like this happened here, but of course, now our military is not only countered by, but actually is incorporating a private security firm that has, in the past, disarmed out military in iraq....its very, very concerning...privitization is NOT the answer in very case.

....and then i googled "united states military, bush appointments"and found these

Former Iran-Contragate Officials Call the Shots

Bear in mind that Richard Armitage had served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security under the Reagan Administration. "He worked closely with Oliver North and was involved in the Iran-contra arms smuggling scandal." 16

In many regards, the pattern of Bush Junior appointments replicate the Iran-Contragate team of the Reagan and Bush senior administrations:

and

Published on Thursday, October 16, 2003 by the Los Angeles Times
General Casts War in Religious Terms
The top soldier assigned to track down Bin Laden and Hussein is an evangelical Christian who speaks publicly of 'the army of God.'
by Richard T. Cooper

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon has assigned the task of tracking down and eliminating Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and other high-profile targets to an Army general who sees the war on terrorism as a clash between Judeo-Christian values and Satan.

Lt. Gen. William G. "Jerry" Boykin, the new deputy undersecretary of Defense for intelligence, is a much-decorated and twice-wounded veteran of covert military operations. From the bloody 1993 clash with Muslim warlords in Somalia chronicled in "Black Hawk Down" and the hunt for Colombian drug czar Pablo Escobar to the ill-fated attempt to rescue American hostages in Iran in 1980, Boykin was in the thick of things......

I knew my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol."
Lt. Gen. William G. ‘Jerry’ Boykin, speaking about battle with a Muslim warlord
Yet the former commander and 13-year veteran of the Army's top-secret Delta Force is also an outspoken evangelical Christian who appeared in dress uniform and polished jump boots before a religious group in Oregon in June to declare that radical Islamists hated the United States "because we're a Christian nation, because our foundation and our roots are Judeo-Christian ... and the enemy is a guy named Satan."
Song of the day:

and

Christianizing the Military

by Mary
Earlier this week, Chris Hedges wrote about how deeply embedded the evanglical Christian movement had become in the Pentagon and the military. Chris warns that it is particularly dangerous for the military to be so strongly associated with the Christian Right, and it is even worse that this is happening while there is such a strong suspicion on the part of the Muslim world that the United States was waging a religious war against Islam. And he warns that having a large continguent of the military proclaiming fealty to the Christian Right movement is particularly worrying.

The drive by the Christian right to take control of military chaplaincies, which now sees radical Christians holding roughly 50 percent of chaplaincy appointments in the armed services and service academies

it scares me that we have become so religious in our representations, and that the military is now heavily weighted with bush's so called "base"....i dont want to believe that our military would allow this, but with blackwater and religion, all is fair game, i guess

blackwater: christian supremacy and coups

i have always been greatful that we do not have coups in this country, but if president bush decided on the second of january, 2009 to declare martial law (much like our ally in pakistan) he could easily pull out blackwater and overpower our own military if they tried to rise up...a must see and a must read

from wired
World's Most Notorious Merc to Oversee Blackwater?
By Noah Shachtman October 31, 2007 | 1:59:11

The New York Times is reporting today that the Department of Defense is taking control of the State Department's convoys of security contractors, like Blackwater. The Pentagon already coordinates its outsourced security details through a single, Defense Department entity, the Reconstruction Operations Centers, which tracks movement of security convoys.......But here's the interesting twist: The Reconstruction Operations Centers are themselves outsourced, through a recently renewed $475 million contract to the British firm Aegis. And Aegis is run by the infamous old-school gun-for-hire, Tim Spicer. He's the guy, you may recall, who tried to use his mercenary army to launch a counter-coup for the government of Sierra Leone; his associate, Simon Mann plotted the overthrow of the authorities in Equatorial Guinea. Later, in Iraq, one of his ex-employees circulated online a rather nasty “trophy video,” in which contractors are seen shooting at civilians.....

it just gets scarier and scarier

IMPEACH BUSH NOW!!

sunday sadness

i really miss andy this morning.....i think that sundays will be hard for awhile.....i do my injection on sundays, a chore that has much long term implications but brings little satisfaction in the moment, in the short-term of things....i used to balance that with the knowledge that andy and i would have about an hour guaranteed together, for that fatherly support and attention (since my own dad was such a bust)....robin has been practicing on an orange, so she can be involved in my injection, and it will be nice to know that someone else is going to learn how, since there are weeks where i cannot stomache the thought of sticking a needle into muscle.....but right now, i just miss andy

Song of the day: fire and rain- james taylor

monks return to the street

so cnn may be ignoring this truth (i cant find mention of it....of course, thwey dont have a well mapped world news section, such as the bbc does), but a small band of monks have resumed their protesting despite the junta's crackdown

since have coffee will write has done such an excellent job of gathering together many different sources for the continued struggles in myanmar/burma (to ackowledge all that live within the borders), i have pretty much kept silent on the issues at hand(rooting out protesters, detaining large masses of monks, continued increase in energy costs, etc...) but i did need to shine light on the continued courage and integrity of the monks

Song of the day: