sleep’s evasive
the early morning darkness
hiding raindrops
Yeah, I should be asleep,
I’d prefer to be asleep
Yet that is not
My reality.
Blog
Some Monday morning wisdom for you
I’ve been meditating on things like growth, effectiveness, and what makes a good life. Elena’s post offers some great insights into resilience, which I’ve come to believe is a central component to all of those things. One key thing, for me, is staying focused when I come against obstacles. Part of me expects “the right path” to be frictionless. If there are challenges, well, I must have chosen wrong. And, though I know that’s wrong. Really, it’s a rather foolish and damaging mindset. I’m good about keeping that at bay, but, man it raises up ugly sometimes.
So, I appreciate the reminder of what resilience is and it’s importance to a well-lived life. And I recommend going and reading her post.
Monday Morning Haiku
morning birdsong
dawn's light hidden by the clouds
and this gentle rain
Tonight’s Haiku
the sunlight fading
while the grace of spring flowers
bursts upon the trees
Starting the day
awakened by self-doubt
criticizing all I've done
so I face within
resisting these words
embracing all that I am
keep moving forward
Today’s Haiku
This is a photo I took a few weeks ago on my Google Pixel, and the post below (Instagram) inspired me to write something today:
(third photo on the carousel)
It’s funny to me how I feel compelled to justify my work, my writing, photography, poetry. Really, I’m supposed to monetize EVERYTHING! If it’s not generating income, or promoting my business, then I shouldn’t do it. However, I know, in my heart, that I need to create stuff.
I feel compelled to post daily, but I’m hamstrung by the needs above, as well as the larger issues of imposter syndrome and all that.
So, I took the photo above and added the haiku in Canva. I do enjoy that, but I think I need to explore other tools besides Canva. Heck, maybe I need to start doing these in Photoshop again. Get those skills back up.
Tonight’s Haiku
every bouquet
begins with a single stem
blessings of springtime
This morning I went for a walk in Edmonds, one of my favorite things to do. I came across these daffodils, then came up with this haiku later.
Zines!
I really enjoyed Zines back in the 90s (their heyday). If your first thought is “what’s a Zine?”, check out this article.
My blogging colleague Bernie has started creating them again (inspired by Austin Kleon’s reboot of the genre). Take a look at Bernie’s blog post.
I had friends who invested a lot of time and effort into Zines. Sadly, I’ve lost touch with all of them. I do wonder what happened to them. It was all part of my life in downtown Seattle in the 90s. An amazing time, culturally. It was challenging in a good many ways, too. That Seattle is pretty much gone, though. Pretty much all the grittier apartments, for instance, are now condos occupied by wealthy tech workers. It’s a fascinating exploration of the City’s evolution.
Anyway, did you ever create zines? Care to share?
An evening haiku
streetlight’s reflection
ripples across the puddles
windchime’s gently tones
“Be myself? I’d rather die.”
Substack has a feature where they serve up posts that I might like. Not all of them have been been hits, much less home runs (wait…why the hell am I serving up sports analogies?). But this one was good! “Be myself? I’d rather die“, a post by psychologist Adam Mastroianni, and it looks at many things, but the focus that spoke to me was on the evolutionary value of conformity.
TLDR: social norms are one way we communicate our learnings about survival. He references cassava, which is edible ONLY when prepared correctly. Otherwise, it’s potentially lethal. Makes me think of the Hebrew proscription about pork, as an other example.
It’s rather eye opening to consider that social norms are often survival mechanisms. And, thus, that feeling of “needing to obey them”, even when they don’t seem to match make much more sense.
I want to remind folks, though, that as valuable as those learnings are, it’s the people willing to push through the norms and challenge are the ones that change things. I’m sure, at one point, no one ate cassava as it’s rather problematic until “treated”. Yet someone, somewhere, said, “I think I can eat this”, and, for whatever reason, we stumbled through it and the world was changed.
I appreciate the insights, especially on why the urge to conform is so damn powerful. However, I intend to live my somewhat contrarian life. I’ve enjoyed most of it so far.