Posts Tagged ‘how to thrive’

Smuzzle Stick!

Posted: May 21, 2016 in restraint, thriving
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Most of us are afflicted — at least somewhat — with amassitude, anothery and an acute strain of likewiseness.

Last night, for a snack, I took seconds and thirds and a small fourth on some yummy Frosted Mini-Wheats. I added honey and almond milk.  Sweet on sweet, or double sweet.  Yum!

Then I got a yearning to see my Padres hit another home run against the Dodgers so I stayed up late to watch. They did, and again. Watching them play so hard made me tired, so I went to bed happy, and I got double-sleep by rolling over twice this morning and sleeping in.

“Ah and oh,” I love my firsts — and my seconds, sometimes my thirds. But I don’t like it when my waist line increases because of too much sweet cereal, or my sleep cycles are interrupted by too much coffee. I sometimes tend toward a little too much.

Thus and so, mostly and consistently, we are all, at times extendawonkers, increasaboys, supplementicators, expandimongers.

We indulge, then ask politely — sometimes not — for more, more cereal, condiments, compliments, constaments, cashiments, communications, curiosa,

A bit of this is normal, and good, but there is one unpleasant side effect to dipping in again and again and again — insatiably. It’s discontent. And its dissatisfaction. We may feed a human penchant for never-enough. We may become addicted to an incessant always-a-little-more.

What to do?

Don’t push it. Don’t feed, grow and propagate addiction. Be very happy with your one portion, perhaps a small second; be good with good that isn’t jumboed, big-gulped, value-added, honeyed, home-runned or supersized.

I think of Solomon and his erotic poem in the Bible, his sage, “Do not stir up love until it pleases,” smack in the middle of his well-kindled romantic ardor.

Pleasures will come to us when they will come to us, but if we force them we risk ruining them. To be puke-drunken, gorge-mucked, sex-smuckered or gagged-guzzled — it may be fun for some,  kind of, sort of at first (do you think so?), but it’s not that much fun, especially in the end.

Surfeit and its consequences — this is suffered willingly by fools, but the wise moderate, and enjoy life, and contentment. They partake, then they stop and they are happy holding back until the just-right-once-again-moment.

I had one latte this morning, brewed with my favorite, smooth Best Friends blend of Dark Horse coffee and 2% milk. So good!

Nothing in excess; some things not at all.

Smuzzle-stick!

My Talking Family

Posted: April 26, 2016 in family
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I really like talking with my family.

I like the way our talking tastes, savory, like pizza;  I like the way our communication smells, strong, like night blooming jasmine.

Tonight my younger daughter and I Facetimed on our iPads. We like to see each other when we talk.  I reassured her about a concern. She comforted me about a stress. Her cat sat on the screen. We laughed. We are totally open with each other. We adore each other and tell each other so.

I like the way open family communication feels, soft like my fluffy cat Megan — but from time-to-time sharp, like a surgeon’s knife, the good knife that heals.

I like one-on-one conversations with my people — the safety and honesty. I like my wife, a lot, and this is partly because we are able to be very honest with each other, everyday. She is safe to me. This morning we sat with our coffee — as we often do — and shared ideas about the future. We had the same ideas. We are like-minded about our plans.

We agree on most things: politics, religion, the uses of money, the value of morality, kids, cats, green vegetables, exercise, traveling, books and dark chocolate (all the important things) and thus the relationship is so easy and super fun. She is my best friend. I completely adore her. We almost think as one — except about avocados, French roast and my behavior.

Tomorrow I’ll drive my oldest daughter to her program. In the car we’ll talk. Although she has learning difficulties, she is exquisitely  verbal. She says the most fascinating things. Our whole family quotes her — her neologisms, syntaxtoblemes and her occasional charmitudes.

After dropping off my daughter,  I am going to drive on to Los Angles to have coffee with with my dad and spend some time with my older brother. My dad told me on the phone tonight — in anticipation of seeing me tomorrow — that he wrote out about 20 questions on 3×5 cards that he wants to ask me.  I can tell from this that he cares about me. He always asks me lots of questions. I come by talking genetically.

Tomorrow I’ll see my older brother. He has cancer. I care deeply for him. We are close. We talk a lot on the phone. I think the cancer has brought us closer. We share the same career, and we support each other by candidly discussing our career challenges.

I love my family. We are a talking family. We are an honest and safe talking family.

I feel so fortunate to have a family who talks — openly, emotionally, lovingly; it has made me who I am.

I am one of the talking beasts.

 

Does God Have a Sense of Humor?

Posted: April 25, 2016 in god
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Recently, my office manger, Tasia, and I were chatting in my office when we looked over at the couch and saw a giant cockroach sitting there, watching us.

Apparently he had come in for counseling. We have said the door of REFINERY Church is open to everyone.

What to do with this expectant cockroach?

Tasia went to the supply closet, got out a can of the aerosol spray used to dust off computer keyboards, turned it upside down so that only the cold aerosol would come up and fired it off at our en-couched counselee.

He turned white; he was literally white, with frost — frozen. We put his little frozen body in the trash.

Tasia  — or as I now think of now, Elsa, the ice queen — retell the story and just laugh.Why did God make cockroaches anyway, in such numbers? It has been noted that he seems to have an “inordinate fondness for beetles.”

Maybe he gets a laugh out of watching our reaction to them.

Which brings up the question: Is God funny? Does God have a sense of humor? Did he laugh,  when he made cockroaches, when he made us?

Alfred North Whitehead, the esteemed British mathematician, logician and philosopher once wrote, “the total absence of humour in the Bible is one of the most singular things in all of literature”

Alfred was wrong. The Bible is full of humor.

Maybe it was Alfred who wasn’t funny.

Humor is fundamental to God’s character.

In the Bible we see God engaging in an abundance of wit, sarcasm and irony. The Old Testament is full of funny stories and crazy situations.

A woman who has gets pregnant at 90, a country overrun by frogs, a donkey that talks, a prophet barfed up by a whale — the Bible is funny

Ecclesiastes 3:4 confirms humor’s esteemed place in God’s design saying, There is a “a time to laugh …”

The Bible weeps; it also laughs. God takes time to laugh.

To see God’s humor, begin at the beginning. Creatures are the first proof that God laughs.

The Pygmy Seahorse, the Blob fish, the Aye-Aye, us — you can’t look at some of the faces of creation, and not think God has a sense of humor.

Think of how he must chuckle, guffaw, even howl over you and me.

Secondly, God’s humor shows surprising enough, shows up in his discipline of us, his designer corrections to get us back on track.

The great theme of the Bible is that God loves people, and that after they are lost from him, he will do anything to get them back.

So God engages in ironic correction. We may be corrected in the same way we sinned.

At the command of the Pharaoh, the Egyptians drown the Hebrew children in the Nile, but Moses is spared and then God drowns the Egyptians in the Red sea.

Take that.

Haman, the villain in the book of Esther, builds a gallows for a good man name Mordecai, and then when Haman’s evil is exposed, he is hung on his own execution machine.

God corrects with ironic solutions, he defeats with mocking punishments, and He leads his sweet ones back to himself with wry tactics.

The Israelites whine in the desert that the manna he gave them was not enough. They demand meat from God, and so he gives them meat until it is coming out of their noses. They get so much meat it makes them sick.

Beware what you want. God might give you that, and that ironically will be your correction.

Psalm 37 reports,  “The wicked plot against the righteous, and gnash their teeth at them; but the Lord laughs … for he sees that their day [the day of the ironic lesson) is coming.”

The divine sardonic chuckle — you want to live in such a way that you don’t hear that.

Take for instance, the day I shot my older brother Steve. It was his divinely ordained correction.

I aimed the gun, squeezed the trigger, and fired.

Now what you need to know is that he  asked for it. Literally. He said: ” I wonder what it feels like to be shot with a BB gun.”

“Let’s find out,” I said. “I’ll shoot.”

So by plan, I aimed at his blue-jeaned butt. But the shot carried high, guided, I’d say, by the hand of God, and hit him square in the middle of the back — which was to me divine punishment for all the times he had hit me and tortured me.

So there you have it. The ironic wrath of God on my brother. I myself witnesses it, and then I started running.

I heard his footsteps behind me. I believe he wanted to thank me. But I was humble, and wanted no credit, and I kept running.

So,  we see God’s humor in the creation (the blob fish; we see his humor in his discipline, (my brother) and thirdly we see God’s humor in his delight in us.

Zephaniah 3:17, “He will take great delight in you … he will rejoice over you with singing.”

God laughs in a happy, appreciative, celebratory way over us.

Consider Genesis 18:10, where God informs Abraham (who is about 100 years old) and Sarah (who is about 90) that they will have a son by “this time next year.”

God must have gotten a kick out of that announcement.

And they sure did. When Sarah is told, she openly laughs. Hebrews says at this point, Abraham was “as good as dead.”

Sarah was thinking, if we do it, at this age, the old guy will probably have a heart attack, and she laughs, and God’s laughs with her, because this is ridiculous and delightful and crazy  and good.

Sex, at 100, and a baby — they all laugh and God with them.

Zephaniah 3:17. He will take great delight in you.

God is not a far off, uptight, angry, he is not a humorless tyrant. God is funny, he is clever, he is wry, he has tricks up his sleeve.

His humor draws us close to him.

How could we ever relate to a stern, humorless patrician-God who never jokes around?

But a funny God who tells his man Abraham to name his soon-to-be-born son, Isaac, or in Hebrew, Yit-zhak — because that Hebrew word means laughed, that we can relate to.

Laughter — it is divine, it is so good for us.

Poking fun, is a way of dealing with brokenness, normalizing difficulty, a way of coping.

What are you upset about? Try laughing at it.

The Bible says a merry heart is good like a medicine. Humor is the antidote of life. It is God’s survival medicine.

Ever wonder what heaven will be like? The disciples wanted to sit by Jesus, at his right hand. That would scare the heck out of me. What would I say? What if Iused the wrong fork, or language, at dinner.

Besides, sitting around the throne, listening to harp music, I prefer electric guitars. I think Jesus might too.

In heaven I think, I’ll be down at the river with the other people who barely got in, partying and telling jokes and laughing hilariously and whooping it up.

And perhaps the serious ones, around the throne, will cast an envious eye toward us, that wild bunch, down at the river and want to come down.

It is a great mystery. It is a great mystery of the OT.

We live within the mystery of a God who laughs and sings and hoots and hollers over us, and when we too laugh, this brings us closer to God.

 

Precarity

Posted: April 5, 2016 in clarity
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This morning I sat with my latte, and my shredded wheat, clover honey and almond milk and discussed plans with my black-coffee-sipping wonder-wife.

We do that, musify in the morning, about what’s ahead. We are good at the back-and-forthification — which is fun — but reality keeps getting tossed into the mix, and it doesn’t always cooperate — thus there is precarity, amidst the plenty.

We get up, the sun comes up, our plans go up, the stock market goes up, our moods go up after drinking dark, rich forms of caffeine, and then the turn. Life-stuff eventually leaks, and floats back to the floor like helium balloons the day after the party — precarity.

Thus and so, we are precarious — all of us — even the wise choosers and the impressively prescient. As the scripture says, we live move and have our being within the precariat.

Did you think it said something else?

Hatreds, hopes, happenstances; genetics, genies, jerks; accidents, illnesses, taxes — all these and more, the various and sundry vagaries and variances of any given era — these insure membership in the precariat.

Oh, life!

And yet, and yet, ah — the persistent goodness. I am struck always by the astonishing plenty and loveliness of life amidst the persistent shocking, pandemic poverties. The ghastly demons shirk at the edges of exuberant gardens full of white roses.

Last week we put up an beautiful, rod iron, arched trellis at the church. And below it, we planted a passion vine. Thus there is hope, for vine, passion, flowers, butterflies, tendrils, the reach upward, the stunning beauty, the inspired community.

I am shock-smitten but such improvements, everyday, the preciosities of nature, love, babies, brains, branches of community, of friends, finials, finitude, of God.

Thank you God that the precosities keep gobbling up the precarities.

Cinemuck

Posted: March 18, 2016 in difficulty
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“I severed its head off! Dead as a door nail,” she texted me.

I wasn’t surprised. It goes like that.

I’m a perfectionist, but I keep being faced with the fact that reality is never perfect.  My gardener friend was letting me know that she had cut the electrical cord with the electric lawn mower. That’s one disadvantage of electric lawn mowers; they tend to cut off their own umbilical cords. I know; I too have used an electric lawn mower to chop up several cords. On the other hand, the electric’s don’t belch nasty gas and oil.

Noting is perfect. I’ve been noticing lately that life isn’t perfect — cinemuck.

Last night at home my family got into a nice row over the accommodations for an upcoming family vacation. Wonderful! What is supposed to be fun suddenly wasn’t fun. And yet, no big deal. I believe that it will turn out to be a wonderful time together — with perhaps one day of it not. That’s how family vacations go. You always have one day that you just have to write off. The Greek’s might have had a penchant for aponia, much like our pharmaceutical companies and the general public, but I’m learning to be good with a bit of pain now and again. It’s normal.

This week I screwed some freshly painted master bathroom cabinet doors back on, one step in a beautiful bathroom remodel at home. But in doing so, I chipped the edge of one of the doors with the tip of my elctric drill.

There it is again — the flaw, the chip, the ding, the family spat, the cut cord. But here is the deal: I’m good with it. I’m good with not perfect. I even like it. It is equiprobable that things will go well or not. I’m not perfect, my work isn’t perfect, my family isn’t perfect and that’s okay with me.

I am finding that accepting mistakes, expecting flaws, embracing conflict, being good with not perfect — this actually makes life so much easier, and it sets me free to enjoy my imperfect self, enjoy my flawed relationships and to enjoy my sometimes sketchy efforts to make the world better.

It comes to this: Don’t look down at the floor when you are at the cinema; enjoy the movie.

2014

Posted: December 31, 2014 in thriving
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It’s the last day of the year, December 31, 2014.

This afternoon, I ate whole blueberries, dipped in dark chocolate, at home in the quiet of my living room, snoozed on the couch with the cat, bought a few song I like on iTunes and wrote several blog posts.

I luxuriated in choices, and in hand-picked inertia.

The greatest wealth, reward, benefit, gift, prize this year offered?

The most meaningful life I lived was the life I did not live in the hospital, in jail or on chemo. The life I did not live in congress, the one I did not live in entertainment magazines and the one I did not live within people’s opinions of me – this was the good life. My best life was the personal life I lived with my friends, with my staff, at work, in my church, with my daughters and wife.

To have time and space and resources to think, to brood, to study, to read, to converse, to write, to travel, to work, to worship, to futz over what I do well, to reflect – this is the good life.

This year I rejoice that I had the time and strength to make my own bed – to even have a bed — to garden, to cook soup, to do the dishes, to play with children, to talk to my loved ones, to fluff the cat, to shop, to fish in Montana with a friend, to write blog posts, to write sermons, to write my precious proverbs and my dear fables, to eat my way through San Francisco with my family, to fix stuff, to refinish stuff, to tend to my investments, to dream, to make new spaces, to refinish wood floors with friends, to lunch and coffee with people I like – this was the best life I lived this year.

We make too much of much. We should make too much of little.

To be able to choose who you are with and when, and where you will go and with whom, to choose who you will admit to your presence and why – this the good stuff, and it is not to be overlooked. Many people can’t do that.

To be safe, private, secure, social when you choose, not publicly abused, not sought after, not traumatized, not exploited, not lionized, not hated, not sick, employed but not too much, vacationed but not too much, this is good, this is more than enough to satisfy — this is to live well.

The freedom to manage ones own self, to manage ones own opinion of ones self, to be more famous to oneself that to anyone else, to live within the sunshine of ones own acceptance, to live within the limits of time and chance and luck and guidance and all this brings to us that we end up with, to affirm oneself in the same way as one is affirmed by the great Creator, the one who made all small, self-governing, self-nurturing things – this is very good.

To be free to choose to live with ones own goals, to live with morals traditional and yet freely chosen, chosen so as to not harm others, and to nurture kindness and to enjoy small treats and moments alone with God and moments together with my wife and daughters and cats and foods and drinks and friends – it does not get better than this.

Tonight, on New Years Eve, I’ll make bean soup for dinner, and drink hot tea and relax at home, and not party and not stay up late and not want more and lounge with my wife and daughter in peace, and sleep well with my cats around me.

I’m good with that — and just and only and merely and completely and amazingly and gorgeously that-this-that which is my very own personal that.

What Heals?

Posted: November 29, 2014 in family, food
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We happened on a haberdashery while walking home, just after stopping for hand-made chocolate truffles on Columbia Street.

It was an upscale hat shop in North Beach, and we stood amid a crowd of fashionistas, trying on high-quality head ware.

I looked good in the fedora, my daughter Laurel in the brown felt cloche with the light brown polkadot band.

I bought it for her for $70 — for Christmas. How could I not? She looked all 1920’s and 30’s in it — coy and gorgeous.

I could not have been more smitten.

It was that kind of day.

It began with a cafe latte, purchased by walking just down the street from our Genoa Place apartment to Cafe Trieste — and a bear claw found just around that corner at Stella’s.

Later my wife and daughters and I walked across the Golden Gate bridge, that huge orange-over-blue suspension of belief and rode the bus back to the waterfront.

For lunch I ate killer clam chowder and sour dough bread with my daughter Rosalind at the wharf. Later the family had ice creams. We walked home from there.

That night I had a slice of world class pizza taken from Tony’s, purchased two blocks for our apartment, a Firestone IPA from Trader Joes just down the hill, and some chocolate covered popcorn from a neighborhood shop.

I ate my dinner sitting in the bay window of our apartment, over looking Union Street, the city lights glowing in the big buildings, a crescent moon overhead, traffic down below.

What heals?

Love, pizza, bridges, chocolates, lattes, a wife, walking together, bread, daughters, hats and beauty — all collected within walking distance of where you sleep.

What heals me is San Francisco with the women I adore.

The Man Who Made Up His Family

Posted: September 23, 2014 in difficulty
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I had coffee with my friend Dennis today.

His life is good, and sometimes a bit tough, as life is apt to be. Dennis recently retired from a long, very successful music teaching career. He has a long successful marriage, he has a beautiful, successful, loving daughter, he has a wonderful grandson. Dennis told me that he has no bucket list. He has done so much, lived so fully. He’s good to go!

But Dennis is coping with NF2, and he is losing his hearing, slowly, which is hard for a musician, and he is enjoying life on the terms that it comes to him now — somewhat limited — the best he can.

Dennis told me today, “I’m working on being grateful.” I’m impressed!

He is also considering designing an online class on using iPads in music education.

I like that too.

There are so many ways of responding to life, of getting along with what we don’t want to get along with, of ciphering life, of doing the math, the pluses and minuses of career and health and success and family.

People are resilient! I see that all the time. And they are smart and creative and brave and wise and full of the kind of imagination that thrives in difficulty!

Thinking of this, I wrote a fable about a man, who didn’t have a family, so he made one up! I love this man!

…………

Once there was a man named Santino who didn’t have a family — so he made one up.

“Maya”, he said to his wife, “would you mind getting me a piece of the cake you made today?”

“Certainly,” she replied. He got up and got himself some cake.

“Yosef,” he said to his son, let me see your homework. Ah, you are doing a paper on the sociology of interracial intimacy. One thought is that you focus on the varying interpretations of father craft within these families.”

He pulled out his tablet and looked up several websites on the sociology of fatherhood within the bourgeois family.

“Interesting,” he said to himself, “the pervasive maternal dominance when it come to parenting.”

“Lilit,” he said to his daughter, “If you and your sister Saki would like, I will take you out this evening to get ice cream.”

That evening he went out and got himself an ice cream. He sat alone eating it.

“Saki,” he said to his youngest daughter, looking up from his ice cream. “How are you doing with that boy at school, the one who told you he liked you.”

He sat quietly for a moment. Another family sat quietly nearby.

“Well,” he said gently, “this can be quite sensitive. I wouldn’t say that to him, but it would be best to be honest. You don’t want to lead him on, give him false hope. That isn’t kind. It’s important in life to be honest, but not too honest, if you know what I mean?”

Santino looked up. The nearby family — a father, mother son and two daughters — were all staring at him.

He looked at them, and catching the father’s eye, said in a clear voice. “The fathering, it just never seems to end, does it?”

The other father, not knowing what to say, looked down.

Santino, looking around the room, smiled, and said to himself, “I just love being a father.”

……

I love Santino!

He was a father, a natural father, a good father, one capable of the acceptance of great diversity — an international father — a real father who didn’t get a chance to be a father — and there is a sadness in that for me — and yet he was indeed a father beyond ordinary fathers.

Santino was a great father to his imaginary international family!

I wonder about Santino and so many others like him. Why didn’t he get the opportunity to live out his identity? I don’t know. I made him up, and still I don’t know.

It happens all the time, the Santinos, living with their dreams deferred, their desires unfulfilled. And yet, like my friend Dennis, so many of the semi-blessed, partially blessed, and even the unblessed are doing very well. They, like Santino, are very grateful, on some very deep unfulfilled level, for who they are.

I wonder. I wonder what do we do when we don’t get to do all that we might have done, when illness, disability or circumstance don’t allow it?

This is hard, and yet, we I can see through Dennis and Santino, that we may yet thrive!

If we are grateful for what we have been given, even more profoundly, if we are grateful or who we are, and can image that, affirm that, act that out in any way possible, even when the rest of the world doesn’t see or know that, even when that doesn’t look like what we once hoped it would look like, then we are indeed blessed.

By the way, if you enjoyed the fable of Santino, you can find more of my fabulistic literature at http://www.antifables.com

Did You Think You Weren’t Supposed to Be Strong?

Posted: April 7, 2014 in thriving
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I woke up this morning with a choice. We all do —  ambivalent or focused, bifurcated or fired up for a kind of single-minded success.

I chose, just what I wanted to, and not what I didn’t. I finished the book of Proverbs along with my chai tea latte and steel cut oatmeal. Super-cool wise stuff is found in Proverbs, like, “The wise prevail through great power, and those who have knowledge muster their strength.”  Proverbs 24:4-5

Kathy Korman Frey, Harvard MBA, a kind of confidence guardian, has posited that successful women benefit from their experiences of mastery, choosing to find things they do well that build confidence to do other things well.

Tea, oats, proverbs — it’s is smart to choose to grow in power. The use of power, the mustering of  strength — this is not merely the heady stuff of tyrants and despots but also the way of the godly wise. The godly wise proceed with things that build up their strength; they move forward in ways that build up their confidence.

After my reading, I went out back to my lily pond and mucked it out. I threw my aluminum ladder across the pond, crawled out on it, lay down and began pulling the last year’s cattails out.

The long webbed, fleshy roots came out with a sucking sound. The water was cold, but the day was hot and under the gaze of a gorgeous Santa Anna wind and a cornflower blue sky I mucked and tucked and chucked out my pond. Monet-like, I gently lifted my lily pads, gave them space to thrive, flipped them back upright, left just enough cattails to grace the water with height again this spring.

Then I set on the papyrus growing at both ends, cutting back the dead brown stalks, leaving the bright green new shoots to poke out of the water like exclamation points with fireworks at the ends.

Then, there, thus — I set back and soaked in, my pond, lake, sea; my strength, my chosen yard of life, my several meters of canvass to paint, my long, limned, lovely, lined, lipped, lopped confidence.

And thus it is so that this and that and those like these will lead to more and more and more of that — power! Exploding! Like papyrus in the Nile, and lily pads in my backyard pond.

I know this about myself: it makes me strong to fix things, and it really fires me up when I create beauty — a backyard pond, a school in Southeast San Diego, a school in Tijuana, a community center in Nicaragua, a church in South Africa, a church in Brazil, a church in Chula Vista.

This afternoon I write on my iPad, under the same sun that I labored under this morning, the same sun the pharaohs built the pyramids under, the sun filtered through the shade in the window at a Starbucks near my house.

I’m here because ponds and pages and the music and the smell of coffee just do it perfectly for me. Mucking out lily ponds and jungles and schools and writing blog posts — these are my mastery experiences. So too are my sermons, and my modern proverbs, my fables and modern soliloquies too.

This is what builds up my confidence — what about you?

I suggest you do things that fill you up inside.

Go grow — in strength!

By doing things!

That build mastery!

Things that decrease ambivalence.

Things that increase confidence.

Did you think that you weren’t supposed to be strong?

 

The Real Trick is Paying Attention — and Not Worrying!

Posted: March 8, 2014 in thriving, wonders
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Just before we left the house I remembered my binoculars. “What the heck?”

That was the whole point of the thing — the swirling, milky Andromeda galaxy; the flaming red Ocotillo against the cornflower blue sky; a crisp, white quarter moon; a perfectly pink, finely needled pincushion cactus — and not thinking about my dental appointment next week.

Sometimes it is so freakin’ deliciously and precisely, so fix-brainedly, knob-focusedly, fine-tunedly all about paying attention, which means not remembering and not imagining.

Sitting around the fire that evening I assembled Dale’s telescope on my lap. It was operating-room team work.

“Mount.”

“Diagonal.”

“Finder.”

“20 mm lens — no not the 9mm — too much for the optics.”

I honored each piece of technology with nomenclature, a moments-techno-touch, a loving-looking-pause.

We know the names of what we take the time to see.

We flipped a lawn chair on its side and made a table for the telescope.

Boom — there were the mountains and craters of our mad-circling moon, in crisp, blazing white — always there, seldom wooed, never won.

And then later, after we had talked the dry dust, desert wind and gas fire into oblivion — sighting the scope off the car hood — we ogled the moons of Jupiter, glittering in a row next to the giant planet, posing there for us in a way we could take in, the size of an @ in an email address.

Gorgeous — drop-dead-come-back-alive gorgeous!

Awareness is the thing, conscious, woken-up, fix-eyed, mind-sighted, calibrated awareness, in the moment — not tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

As we sat over dinner earlier in the evening, I made a conscious decision to take in the moment — the pianist, hunched over his swirling, finger-tipped atmosphere, the mushroom crusted scallop posing on my fork, our friends all holding knives while spinning stories of the children we have named, of calving glaciers and orca whales.

We weren’t thinking about the possibility of any of us getting cancer.

The other day I noticed that when I post a set of my freshly crafted modern proverbs on my website, I do so by touching the screen of my iPad, copying them from my “notes” program with my finger tip and then springing them — again from the tip of my finger — into a new post! Bam! — my finger-wand casts word-wisdom into the waiting world.

I reach out, riding on a cloud, finger extended — and living in that moment and no other possible one — I create, my world!

This morning my wife and I sat outside our room and watched the sun come up on the mountains in the Anza Borrego desert. Bright light flooded the alluvials and tipped the peaks.

The real trick is paying attention — and not worrying.

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