“I am learning all the time. The tombstone will be my diploma.” ~ Eartha Kitt

For as long as I can remember I’ve wanted to learn to play the cello. There’s something about that instrument that ravishes me every time I hear it. I feel it first in my belly as its notes swell with passion, then it traverses the length of my body as if I were being played by the master as well. Holding its curved wood and taut strings is like caressing a lover, hands and legs leading the dance of pizzicato and crescendo. It’s a sexy beast. Think of the cello’s climatic role in The Witches of Eastwick and you get the idea.

Of course learning is not mastery. I know that at my age I will not become a cello virtuoso; in fact it’s likely I will be a dismal hack. That’s not a self-deprecating appeasement. It’s just true. The older I get the more I know I don’t know and feel quite content residing on my know-nothing estate. The days of feeling like the mistress of my domain or even wanting that burden have ebbed with time so that I can barely assuage my surety of knowing anything anymore.

There’s an old adage offered up to many a fledgling author: write what you know. If I were a bee keeper compiling a book on the care and maintenance of bee hives that suggestion would get me started, but if I’m engaged in the world there’s always more to learn and more life to add to my apiculture offerings. Limiting myself to the menu of writing what I know would lead me to starvation as well any readers I may have invited to the table. Stephen King in his book, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, offers some salient wisdom concerning the art of wordsmithing and that particular axiom. What’s fair game to write about? “Anything at all…as long as you tell the truth.”

Most writers I think will say they were puzzled as to where their stories were leading them, gobsmacked at what opened up for them in the laying down of words, humbled by the thread of divinity coursing through the pages of text that added their name in the end. It was embers of truth and kindling of what they knew that ignited and stirred them, transforming them and their writing in the fires of learning.

The same goes for us all in life. To know is to exist in a closed cell, exorcised from all that life can teach us. To learn opens us up to storehouses of wealth that can enrich and deepen our human experience. Knowing is the nail in the coffin. Learning is the phoenix rising time and again. One of the reasons I admire and follow the Buddhist way is that it calls itself a practice. Not a knowing or a doctrine, but a hands-on, get your heart dirty practice. The Buddha himself said (in so many words) “Don’t take my word for it.” He encouraged his followers to learn for themselves what it means to be living in presence, experiencing each moment in exactitude and letting it all go in the next breath. How do you get to Nibbana? Practice, practice, practice.

Cello lessons await. I’m open to learn and make ear flinching mistakes. I may grow tired or frustrated with it all or I may one day share the reviews of my recital when I sat down and played something discernible and resembling music. In the interlude, enjoy my favorite cellist, Yo Yo Ma, along with some of his friends, who are all ever learning, never knowing and I’m pretty sure always practicing.

Credits

Cello Photo – Microsoft Office Images

Home Page Feature Image – Screen Cap From Video

Video: Helping Hand, from The Goat Rodeo Sessions

Quote by Eartha Kitt from ThinkExist.com

Excerpt from “On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft” by Stephen King, copyright 2000, Scribner,
a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., p. 158

Learning Life is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

Today let’s talk about not being a victim.

Have you ever felt like a victim?

Like everyone was out to get you? Yes, as a child growing up in an alcoholic family, if I was hurt, I was victimized. No doubt about it. But if I carry that mentality into adulthood, it’s now a problem that I’m carrying, and as long as I stay in that place, I’m helpless to do anything about the events in my world. As an adult, I’m responsible for doing something about being a victim. The solution may be taking action by seeking help. It may be by changing the old tapes that tell me I somehow deserve it when I get hurt. It will take a lot of hard work. But getting out of the victim mindset has been one of the most freeing things that has brought peace and joy into my life.

Have you ever felt like you were in a victim mindset?

Photo Credit

“Untitled” by Joost J. Bakker Ijmuiden @ flickr.com – Creative Commons – Some rights reserved

Dan L. Hays offers encouragement for adult children of alcoholics.
The podcasts of these episodes can be found at: Minute to Freedom

Minute to Freedom #31: Not Being A Victim is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

Today let’s talk about having fun.

Have you ever felt like you were too serious?

That it was tough to let go and just have fun? I had a friend who used to regularly ask me “What are you doing for fun?” After a while, it started to bug me when she asked, because I couldn’t come up with many examples of fun in my life. I had learned at a very early age to be a serious kid, when I was growing up in an alcoholic family, and that naturally became my adult world. I’ve had to – strange to say – learn how to have fun. First I had to start by finding out what I enjoyed, and what made me happy. What a great project, to explore fun! Yet there’s nothing more balancing than the joy of play, or having a great, deep belly laugh.

What was your most recent belly laugh about?

Photo Credit

The Microsoft Office Clip Art Collection

Dan L. Hays offers encouragement for adult children of alcoholics.
The podcasts of these episodes can be found at: Minute to Freedom

Minute to Freedom #30: What Am I Doing For Fun? is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

Today let’s talk about helping others.

 Have you ever felt like you just weren’t being useful?

That your problems were so overwhelming that they became your whole world? I have felt like that. Yet there’s a great deal of truth in that old saying, “you don’t get it until you give it away.” There’s a lot of validity in helping others. Not by neglecting myself in the process, but in helping me get the lesson. I listened to a man who was working on job sabotage issues, and as I shared with him my similar experiences, I better understood what I had been doing. When I help someone else work through an issue, maybe just by listening, I seem to understand that issue better, and get closer to solving it for myself. And sometimes my problems don’t seem so bad when I’ve heard about what someone else is going through.

Have you ever found perspective for your problems by helping others?

Photo Credit

“It’s about time to help others” by theleticiabertin @ flickr.com – Creative Commons – Some rights reserved.

Dan L. Hays offers encouragement for adult children of alcoholics.
The podcasts of these episodes can be found at: Minute to Freedom

Minute to Freedom #28: Helping Others is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

‘Sometimes in the winds of change, we find direction’ -Anonymous

Imagine that we are all ships, sailing on the high seas. We aren’t sure exactly where we are going, but every once in a while we make decisions that help make our course a bit clearer. For the most part our sailing is pretty smooth, despite the random pirate attacks, a few mutinies and the rare thunder storm. The storms especially, though rare, are dreaded because they blow the ship completely off course. Try as you might to keep your ship on course, the storm battles against you. It’s naturally stronger and you can’t win.

Thing is, you know that there is a possibility that surrendering to the winds of the storm may be better for your journey; it may help your ship avoid future difficulty and may help your crew develop. But you resist the winds anyway. You resist the winds because giving into them and allowing your ship to be steered off your original plan of direction is downright scary. By doing this you’re putting your entire ship, its crew and its battle system in jeopardy and making it vulnerable. You are scared but you have little choice but to give into the stormy winds. Battling them only makes you weaker, and chances are the new course that you are now being forced to take is much better for your sailing than your old course.

Regardless of if we like it or not, life changes drastically at times. Not all of us are open to change because too often we don’t see the need for it. Change presents itself in different ways in our lives. Sometimes it’s completely drastic to the point where you go to bed in comfort one night and wake up the next morning, look around and you feel completely and totally lost. Other times, change eases in on us and little by little, situations change and we look around us some months down the road and are surprised at how much has changed over time. We have heard it time and time again, the only thing constant in life is change. Though we can do very little about it, we still insist on resisting change.

Now, resisting change is in no way a completely foolish idea. For the most part change is scary, especially when it is drastic, as it seems like succumbing to change would mean shedding everything we knew and diving head first into a deep pool of muddy, murky water. We cannot see the bottom of the pool and though there is a possibility that we can grow and learn from diving in, it is still completely foreign, unknown territory. And so we resist and try everything in our power to stick to our original course of direction. At times, we even opt to exist in denial, somewhere between our old course (which we cannot get back) and our new course (which we are not ready to embrace). The thing is, pretty soon we realize that we have to let go of what was and move into what is.

Embracing change is extremely difficult because with it comes letting go of the old and allowing yourself to feel lost for a while. Most of us like to be in complete control of our lives. We like to know who we are, where we are and where we are going. Therefore, the idea of being lost does not sit very well with us. However, feeling  - and genuinely being – lost is not always a bad thing. Once we are completely honest with ourselves, this period of time can be one of growth. In other words, we can allow ourselves to change with the change.

While we feel lost and confused, as if we are in the middle of the Northern Range, caught between fig trees and a herd of iguanas, some serious self-reflection, discipline and serious attitude alteration can help us embrace the change and be better for it. So while it’s not easy to go with the flow of life and just change with the change that attempts to change us, battling against life’s only constant isn’t wise and it doesn’t exactly help us to grow and mature. Despite the fact that sometimes letting go of the old and embracing change makes us feel lost, at times being lost is just what we need in order to move one step closer to finding our true direction in life.

Photo Credit

Picton Castle Under Full Sail – Wikimedia Creative Commons

Guest Author Bio

Paige-Jennan Andrew
I’m way too excited about life … I can’t exist without paper, pen and God. Writing is my passion … changing my world one day at a time

I believe in making a difference and leaving your mark everywhere you go!

Don’t Complain … Don’t Compare … Don’t Worry
Live! Love!

Blog / Website: http://pgsoflife.blogspot.com/

The Winds of Change is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

Today let’s talk about willingness.

Have you ever felt like you just didn’t want to look at the problems that were plaguing your life?

I was like that for many years, and yet – it didn’t make those problems go away. It just allowed them to fester and grow. I had to learn to be willing to face up to what was wrong. When I got backed into a corner and couldn’t find a way out without facing those problems, it sure gave a boost to my willingness. I hit a bottom where whatever was wrong in my world was a life or death matter, and if I didn’t deal with it I would literally die. I became more willing, which was a great gift, because it helped me keep moving forward in working through my problems. The rewards on the other side were far greater than I could have imagined.

Photo Credit

““17/52. the season starts.” by Photography king @ flickr.com – Creative Commons – Some rights reserved.

Dan L. Hays offers encouragement for adult children of alcoholics.
The podcasts of these episodes can be found at: Minute to Freedom

Minute to Freedom #27: Willingness is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you. ~ Annie Dillard

I’ve been awash in the words of Annie Dillard these past weeks. Reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and The Writing Life have been epiphanies and deep hard lessons in the way of words. Words of all sorts and shapes and configurings. Words that speak in the juicy wet tones of poets and words that translate the foreign languages of biology, astronomy and quantum physics in ways that not only hoist me into wonder but weave me into the net of understanding this world I walk upon oh so much better than the moment just spent.

She’s also shown me how little I know about seeing through these two eyes of mine. What we view through these projectors of perception has only a fraction to do with light entering our corneas. The rest of it is our editor brain cutting and splicing from its databanks to come up with a final cut of the scenes we think we see.

In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek are fascinating stories of dozens of men and women across Europe and North America, blind since birth from cataracts, who underwent operations to regain their vision. Seeing for the first time through once blind eyes, many of the patients expressed dismay over the concepts of depth or distance; their brains could not compute a three dimensional world. One wondered why there were dark marks in photographs and paintings only to be told those were shadows. Some could only discern an object by closing their eyes and feeling or licking it to identify its place in the world. One man could not grasp the mind bending idea that a larger object (in this case a chair) could hide a smaller object (his dog) or that the dog could still exist if it was not in his line of sight. Many were alarmed to realize they had been seen by others when they were blind. Concern about dress and appearance shoved its way to the forefront of their thoughts whereas before the idea was not even conceptualized.

Everything was new. Form and space, detail and mass. Yes, the light coming through their eyes was the same light entering everyone’s eyes on the planet, yet their brains had entirely different libraries of knowing that had to be purged and repopulated once vision entered their field of awareness. For many of them the world was cataclysmically changed into a canvas of anonymous colour patches with names that didn’t match anything they knew to be true. One girl couldn’t wait to tell her blind friend that  “men do not really look like trees at all.” A boy describes a cluster of grapes as “dark, blue and shiny….It isn’t smooth, it has bumps and hollows.” Another girl steps into a garden and  “stands speechless in front of a tree, which she only names on taking hold of it, and then as ‘the tree with the lights in it.’”

Revelations. Lights in a tree. Were the lights fruits or flowers? A dusting of snow or millions of butterflies waiting for take off? Does it matter? Astonishing how little we know of something once we have labelled it in the ornery museum of our lightless sight.

So, I’ve been practicing seeing. I studied the burnished fur pelt of the tulip tree’s blossom coat lying in curled memory on the damp grass of the church near my home. A poem, Sky ashen, cove silent, indoors dark as a cave, rendered as liturgy on the bus that lifted my sacrificial heart to the gods. The freckled recesses of a shocking pink rhododendron, its blood dark stamens engorged with pollen tethering sex and life in a wistful dance. A hard coat and soft scarf of peacock blue cocooning a woman as she click click clicked down the street, preening displays of brilliant colour patches set against the hard gray mat of buildings and striated sidewalks.

There’s a lot to be said for new sight.  I’ve licked away the delicious coating of presumption, uncovering savoury bits of nuance and steaming sweet underbellies of language delicacies. It’s the added awareness of presence and impermanence that raises the ante on what I see and what I write. Consider that harlot rhododendron with her sultry stamens may not be here tomorrow or even in the next exhale of the vagrant wind. Consider your eyes dimmed with age or illness and the surety of sight abandons you to the dark wanderings of your reeled memories. Consider you’re dead and gone in an instant, like the blindness of those girls and boys.

It makes me pause. I want to see with changeling eyes a world that never existed before this millisecond in time. I want to ply words of conveyance to the moon and that street sign and to the man on the street corner with a lapsed baseball cap hinging from his fingers asking for change, change, any change. And if there’s a tree with lights in it I’m going to find it.

Good Company

Sky ashen, cove silent, indoors dark as a cave:
pull a sleeping bag outside for the afternoon.
Don’t raise your eyes to the sky, don’t feel the grey in your pores,
just listen.
First, the creek murmuring.
Second, a gull calling.
And the sounds come tumbling: flycatcher whistling,
grouse drumming, distant robin singing,
flicker hammering, silent pause waiting;
two seals breathing. Is this place so crowded?
You had assumed you were alone. A raven croaks far away;
something splashes close by.
All around you, companionable:
soundless spiders easy in their webs.

Photo Credits

Image: Ceibo tree by lrargerich, Flickr Creative Commons, some rights reserved.

“Good Company” by Christine Lowther, My Nature, ©2010, Leaf Press.

Excerpt from “Space and Sight” by Marius von Senden, quoted in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard, pages 25-29, published by HarperPerennial, copyright 1974

First posted at the author’s blog, Suhurat . . . Day’s End

Blind Ambition is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

Today let’s talk about being self critical.

 Has it ever felt like you were being too critical of yourself?

That whatever you did, it wasn’t good enough? If I got a 98 on a test, I beat myself up over the 2 I missed rather than feeling good about the high score. I did that to myself a lot, and I discovered it was something I had learned growing up in an alcoholic family. If I accomplished something worthwhile like winning a prize in a speech contest, my Dad found a way to put down what I had done. As an adult I had replaced the critical Dad – in my head – and did to myself what he once did to me. As I learned to hear that critical voice and replace it with a more appropriate and loving voice, my life became much more balanced.

Have you ever judged yourself too harshly?

Photo Credit

“Uncertain” by Kelsey_lovefusionphoto @ flickr.com – Creative Commons – Some rights reserved.

Dan L. Hays offers encouragement for adult children of alcoholics.
The podcasts of these episodes can be found at: Minute to Freedom

Minute to Freedom #26: Being Self Critical is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

Today let’s talk about intuition.

Have you ever felt like your gut is telling you something is wrong,
but others are saying “No, everything’s fine,” and you find it all very confusing?

I had that happen a lot. One of my best friends got involved with a woman, and I told him something felt very wrong about the situation. He thought everything was fine, and wouldn’t listen to anyone who said otherwise. Later, it was a very painful experience for my friend, and he admitted I had seen things he hadn’t wanted to see. Growing up in an alcoholic family I was taught to doubt my intuition. The truth is, my intuition is very reliable, and can keep me out of bad situations if I listen to it. My saying for a long time was “Honor the intuition.”

Have you ever doubted your intuition?

Photo Credit

“Unhappy Passenger” by Ding Yuin Shan @ flickr.com – Creative Commons – Some Rights Reserved

Dan L. Hays offers encouragement for adult children of alcoholics.
The podcasts of these episodes can be found at: Minute to Freedom

Minute to Freedom # 25: Honor the Intuition is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

Today let’s talk about confusing love and pity.

Have you ever thought you were in love with someone,
only to discover later that you really just felt sorry for them?

I had that happen a lot. I would find a woman who was in great turmoil, become involved with her, and think I was “in love.” Really, I was embroiled in her chaos, and feeling sorry that her life was so out of control. I had several experiences where the woman would pour her soul out about the awful guy she used to date, I would listen to her misery, and then the next week, she would be back with the same guy. I was recreating the familiar uncertainty of growing up in an alcoholic family. As I learned to separate love from pity, I began to seek healthier interactions, and not relationships based upon some dependency need.

Have you ever thought you were in love and it was just that you felt sorry for the person?

Photo Credit

“In love. Or not.” By Marcus Hansson @ flickr.com – Creative commons – Some rights reserved.

Dan L. Hays offers encouragement for adult children of alcoholics.
The podcasts of these episodes can be found at: Minute to Freedom

Minute to Freedom #24: Confusing Love and Pity is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN