an exchange about the interconnections between commerce and spirituality.

Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Nearing Midnight

And the Posts of Yore have finally been added to a (hopefully more secure) site, so that True Commerce musings may now continue unfettered by opportunistic virus-spreading geeks with nothing better to do...

You Have To Learn To Love What You Don’t Like

(originally posted August 3rd, 2008)

I remember reading an article in The New York Times Magazine several years ago, an interview with the psychoanalyst who was the editor for the new edition of The Complete Works of Sigmund Freud that is being re-issued. I forget his name at the moment; the article had much to say about the re-interpretation of Freud’s work and its relevance but the last line of the article riveted me; “You have to learn to love what you don’t like.” I’ve pondered this quote often and its inherent paradox.

Here’s how I understand the essence of this dictum. In life, the things we don’t like or have resistance to doing are often "places" that need unearthing. Sure some things are just preferences, the apples and oranges question; others are reflective of a darker, (and thus more fertile) opportunity to discover the mastery that comes when we challenge and push through. I call this process, “mining the shadow.”

An example from own life is my relationship with the computer. I’ve had great resistance to entering the digital world which I “covered” for a long time with various judgmental attitudes, feeling perfectly justified and yet knowing in my more honest moments that I was fearful of confronting a way of working and thinking that is inherently difficult for me. Being more a symbolic thinker than linear, I prefer to “intuit” answers. Following a series of linear steps, remembering a sequence based on logic is difficult for me to remember unless I repeat it many times over until my mind becomes “entrained”….even then if time passes and I attempt the application again, my mind draws a blank (and then “the brain worm” of odd panic) sets in, making it even more difficult to retrieve the steps. We all have different facilities, talents and limitations.

What finally motivates us to surmount our resistances? Well, Love finally. In regards to learning computer language, I love the opportunity it provides to create audience, something I am seeking for my own work. But more than just that….in confronting our judgments and working to achieve mastery in a place of resistance, we enlarge our being, becoming receptive, gracious, compassionate.. more able to receive others in their limitations and fears.

It surprises me that in learning to love the language of the computer, I find myself led back to deeper “commerce” with myself and others. I can love the practice of meeting resistance with inquiry and practice, at least on a good day....

I Gotta, I Gotta, I Gotta

(originally posted April 24th, 2008)

I find this litany often in my head..all the tasks, projects, responsibilities, life changes, bad habits to surrender etc. Sometimes it can be useful to rehearse the “to do list” and see how it stretches out to fill in the days, keep the time line moving forward in one’s life as a way staying on track. Recently, I am having a shift where I see how by projecting the sense of obligation and overwhelm that often accompanies this voice, I am really just sending a mixed message of resistance rather than one of clear intent. The push/pull, split between really wanting things to get done and the fear of it all coming to pass. Someone once said something to the effect, ” I have so much to do, I’ll never die.” Procrastination, which is really just a veil of resistance, is a funny thing.

What’s the counterpoint, the antidote, the tool if you will to use in working with resistance? I find, of course, that the first thing is to have awareness, to feel the resistance, observe it when it comes up. Then sometimes, I can play the inner game of tricking it….”ok I don’t have run x number of miles but I will put on running shoes and run as long as I want…” Giving myself permission, interrupting the punitive voice loop.

Then its the release of just tapping into the divine flow….staying present and feeling the edge of what’s wants to happen next without orchestrating and DECIDING it all….I don’t have to over produce it. Yesterday when I was running in Tivoli bays as I sitting on a dock and I reached out my hand into the all this spring popping energy and brought into my mouth, into my body….feeling myself in the pulse of it all…and trusting that I am not separate from but part of it all..that’s it all just right here, the air on my skin, the opening to the unknown, the love of earth, my heart pounding, trusting to ride the warm air thermals into the day.

Entelechy

(originally posted April 16th, 2008)

1603, from Gk. entelekheia, from en- “in” + telei, dat. of telos “perfection” (see tele-) + ekhein “to have.” In Aristotle, “the condition in which a potentiality has become an actuality.”

This is a word that appeared as a new addition to my lexicon recently; I encountered it in Jean Houston’s book, “The Mythic Life.” In nature, we see this phenomenon all around us especially in this season of vernality; the seed building potency through the dark winter, pushing out its vulnerable green fingers, following its organic essence toward light and warmth to fulfill final morphology. As the platitude goes…within the acorn is the dream of the oak tree.

So it is too with us prefrontal neocortex cursed humans….even with the distinct burden of consciousness that enables choice. Entelechy is that quiet voice, the glimmer of our deepest selves speaking to us about our greatness of purpose. At times, the voice seems to speak in code and we have to shut down our programs and refresh in order to hear it. We hear most often “in the gap” that comes when we are “verbing our identity” or to put it another way, when we are present.

Verbing your Identity

(originally posted February 19th, 2008)

Verbing your identity is an expression from my dancer/choreographer friend Amii Legendre who proffered it the other day as we were brainstorming a project..being a person for whom movement is an essential language, this conceptuality would be a natural….and here is a shot that shows all around Good-To-Go-Down-For-Anything friend and dancer Anne Mulvaney doing just that….utterly in her expressive authentic element, performing a to the rescue, impromptu fire dance.



Isn’t it great when we have those moments where we are our being.

New Moon Manifestation




(originally posted April 10th, 2008)

Here are all the women in Grandmother’s Medicine Circles. We are all happy on a barely Spring day.

Record Store in Hudson

(originally posted April 10th, 2008)

While fighting off the beginning’s of a “Where-will-I-go-what-will-I-do” attack, walking down Warren Street in Hudson, I came across a record store with CD covers displayed art gallery style across the wall with a discrete sign in the front window saying this company records about six records a year with artists whose music they love and admire…a tribute (in this moment of music business history) to a small business doing what it loves: locally, aesthetically, uniquely.

Here is an example of a locally produced MP3, recorded right here in my kitchen. It is called, “Maple Honey Jar Band,” and was made spontaneously as Devin started messing around with a half empty mason jar filled with the maple syrup we boiled down recently from great sap water my trees were giving this year. We had Garage Band (mac recording program) open and he started recording the curious sound, (take a listen and tell me what you hear…) emanating from the jar while he “played” it…..meanwhile, my friend Anne and I are on a frustrating search for a cheese grater in my kitchen drawers which comes in as a de-facto rhythm section.

The Happiness That The Hammer Feels

(originally posted April 10th, 2008)

This is a memorable quote from an old friend of my past, Terri Lucas, lighting designer, technical production manager from my congregation of St. Clement’s, a church whose sanctuary doubles as an Off-Broadway Theatre that I had the great honor to be the Rector of. Terri, a strong woman with a fabulous voice has swung many a hammer in her lifetime. She used to pop this line off whenever we were having one of those great moments, which we had often as a community at St. Clement’s, where the collaborative sum of the parts make a beautiful synergistic whole.

The hammer is happy when it connects its purposeful power to the head of the nail and the wood just surrenders….

The music below is a famous song/dance number performed by Donna McKechnie,
"The Music and The Mirror,” from the musical, “Chorus Line,” about a group of struggling dancers auditioning for a director who really puts them through their paces. The whole play is really about coming to terms with our vocations and what is required to live that life.


musicandmirror.mov

The Unexpected Opening of the Heart; an Easter Sermon


(originally posted March 30th, 2008)

THE UNEXPECTED OPENING OF THE HEART

The bread of the heart
is dense, chewy, durable….
survival for our desert wanderings,
good food for the long journey.

And how do the people who live in the desert
bake bread?
on hot stones of course,
baked in the fire of life’s harsh beauty.
Today still modern bedouins
stir a stiff mixture of grain
and precious, oh so precious water
onto hot rocks burning red
with the kind of passion that is borne from
being inflamed, bursting with desire
and yet still holding the center.

Oh this crackling strong desert bread,
rimmed with rock ash,
we will eat it this morning, you and I,
with our beloveds
remembering again
that death is no failure,
only the narrow gate
through which all us weary, lovely wanderers
will pass only to discover it is merely love’s greatest portal.

II

Do you think Jesus was thinking this, just this…
when he held up stone baked bread, adoring it, treating food as God
and seeing with shaman’s eye
his passionate, brutal death.
Already his collaborators of the heart
reflect their longing, knowing what they don’t know.
He has to love them.
And he is breaking their hearts.

So with astonishing personal significance,
he picks up the bread, tenderly “This is my body but it is our hearts, our pain, our love”
then he breaks it,
does he rip it with ferocious intention
like a bandage from a wound,
with angry strength,
I think so, maybe..

or does he do it delicately, slowly separating the two halves
as lovers do with such delicious poignancy after making love,
oh I think so, maybe…

But break it
he does
And he eats, his friends eat.
What they don’t finish is given to the birds.

You can not trap love, neither can you bind it with lack.
TO share bread,
we must break it
And because we are messy humans,
sometimes to open the heart,
it must first be broken.

THe terrible polarity of his cross appears to him
and suffer he will as humans do with
that great pull in the chest,
from which all our greatest choices are wrought,
Oh we flail about,
seeking truth in extremity,
until and at last we hang,
dripping blood and consciousness,
raw and fertile
finally still enough…
the spirits know we are ready
to be an offering.
And so they eat with us.

Until and at last
all is forgiven,
every last molecule of every betrayal, every lie, every monstrous piteous awful thing, every thing done ever in the vast infinite
explodes with quantum shifts.
The great stone guarding the tomb of our hearts
moves, just simply moves.
and all energy releases, just breathes
lets go.

III
Can we who stand here this easter morning
in the thin warming of spring air and light
at the threshold of this river, this season, this life together
can we look around in each others longing faces
and let this love which will find a way
burst, redeeming every last awful thing we have ever said and done to each other,
all of us here in this specific shining moment
and then weep and laugh and love around this fire,
and for once, just this once
and then know that at last
the terrible, necessary stone
has been removed from our pounding, hopeful hearts

then
Let us bake and brake and bake and break
good bread on these stone of hearts
and simply eat it.
Because we are, after all, collaborators
in this great communion
of the heart.

Kathleen C. Mandeville

Easter 2008

Until you decide

(originally posted February 19th, 2008)

UNTIL YOU DECIDE


Until you decide-

the work that
you’re doing is *about* deciding,
and not
about the work that you’re
deciding (whether or not) to
do.

Once
you decide, then you begin the
work that you’ve decided to
do.

Put some tacky in your wacky

(originally posted March 29th, 2008)

Again one of my true commerc-eers, Devin, who has been partially “wintering over” with me so we have had lots of time together staring at computers and conversing about all manner of things across the work table, flung this line at me the other day, “Put some tacky in your wacky!”

Malcolm Galdwell’s book, “The Tipping Point,” which has become a hit standard in the innovative marketing analysis genre, almost to the point of becoming passé, espouses the principle of “stickiness”, that is to say when an idea, product or service succeeds in meeting that elusive yet precise place of catching on…in the marketplace, in solutions to social problems or in the minds of all us as we evolve toward greater consciousness, an epidemic of energy constellates and things take off.

There is tendency, I find, to reduce towards the least common denominator as a principle of accessibility…the more generic something is, the more probable it is that a larger number of people will buy, relate or share. Yes, there are archetypal patterns, a collective substrate that undergirds our humanity so, for instance, a classic movie, such as “Gone With The Wind,” endures because it deals with issues so potently familiar to the human experience: the devastation of war, the pain of triangulation in love, the power of our connection to the earth to redeem us; but it incarnates these themes through the unique personae of eccentric characters.

Evolution tends toward specificity; the more precise we are in our essence, the more we “call” to us the ever more nuanced circumstances which bring us to the next lesson. This truth applies in the realms of commerce as much as in the realms of the psyche. It is exactly our “wackiness” that is our “bestselling” attribute; the more innovative our wackiness, the more opportunity we create to develope that “tacky” market niche.

When in Debt, don’t Doubt, it will be Death

(originally posted February 25th, 2008)

“When in Debt, don’t Doubt, it will be Death,” so says my soul brother David Schechter, a long time traveler along the path of the soul, as we were playing with mining gold from the shit…if nothing else, one can make poetry out of one’s travails. And the message in this alliterative pithy aphorism is simple but not easy…Debt bespeaks lack and yes there are times when we “owe” someone or something, that in itself, is manageable until or unless one feels resistance. fear, shame and inadequacy in meeting the obligation and we vibrate in lack so that the hole becomes deeper. NO way out but through. The task, then, is to do whatever it is to restore our innate natural vitality. Vitality is based on the exchange and movement of energy…..and it through energetic exchange that the currency of our lives consummate.



So my task today is to raise my vitality; out of that practice comes the pollen of beauty from which the sweet balm of honey will attract more of what it is I am creating.


This is David (with pink bag,) taking a picture of our mutual friend George Smith (with river grass) who was playing Neptune in The Planet Sturgeon River of Light, 2006 and Peter Frank, his ex of many years ago triple-Capricorn

amplify through giving

(originally posted February 22nd, 2008)

Having just come out a relationship where I felt drained and had to learn to protect my energy…a useful corrective; I am just beginning to reconnect to my inherent generosity of spirit. The Modern Resourcer (aka Devie Boy) threw this above title phase at me when I was expressing “Oh-I-am-not used-to this” response to the welcome ministrations of a good friend of mine…he says, matter of factly (a matter of factness, I used to feel without having to reach for it), “yeah, living in abundance…amplify through giving”

On Not “Fitting”

(originally posted February 19th, 2008)

Many of my intimates, people I work, play and collaborate with struggle how to generate a sustainable income for themselves in ways that are congruent with their talents and labors. Why is this? It is an axiomatic and acceptable statement, said with a sigh of resignation that “oh well, its difficult to make a living and a difference.” And we all just keep stepping on that truth, often without questioning its basis. There are many answers to this conundrum. Here is one. We are in a paradigm shift about how we understand the nature of reality. That is a long blog for another moment but suffice it to say that the universe is based on vibration as the essential “stuff” of its operation. Indigenous cultures whose older practices and knowledge have been shrouded and are now being unveiled and taught- like an underground spring arising again at this critical time in Earth’s history-knew how to change vibration so as to change form.

This has everything to do with commerce, abundance and exchange….and most (?) of our social conventions regarding wealth, money are based on a debt service ie. scarcity . Gee…alot of us just don’t fit within the current societal structures as we are about working in the new paradigm. This then puts us true commerce workers on notice to challenge the internalized scarcity fears we harbor within…and seek resonance then with trust and faith in The Field of Plenty.

getting paid nothing to do nothing




(originally posted January 31st, 2008)

I was sitting with my friend and computer pedagogue Devin yesterday morning while he was, in his most patient and humorous way, endeavoring to lead me through the tutelage of various “pathways” to more computer conversancy and as I am not really paying him…I turn and say to him, “You’re not really motivated by money are you, Devie boy?” His rejoinder, ” Why when so many other people are doing it?” We laugh since we are both broke. That’s him with the wacky hat on his cell phone, engaging in all his non-money making true commerce activities.

Removing the stone from our hearts




(originally posted January 24th, 2008)

Here is Grandmother 3 Crow inviting us to step through a flaming heart, singing “Weh weh ee cha”, The Lakota Heart Opening chant.

We've just created this Blogger Blog for True Commerce

Ahh, yes, dear Google strikes again and assists True Commerce under the entity "ignivox@gmail.com" to reclaim what had become an "Attack Site"— in other words: Hello and Welcome to "blog.truecommerce.org" formerly located as "truecommerce.org/blog/" which was a Wordpress blog, being used with numerous audio and video links and a variety of interesting "Podcasts" mostly exclusively by Our Very-Tivoli Reverend Kathleen Corbiére Mandeville. Hopefully soon (perhaps each subsequent "Blog Entry" forthwith) you will be able to view what was previously viewed in the former location, there were, I recall, at least a dozen very interesting episodes previously, and now that we are under this safer umbrella for safely storing thoughts without so much risk that our one little public interface window to the world (the "Comments" area...?) will not be abused and we can share the musings on True Commerce and all general spirituality.