On Being Great: A Dream about the Donald

Donald Trump is in love with me.

I know. It’s awful.  But here’s why it’s true, here’s what is (sometimes) inside my head:

Make me great.  Make me richer and more beautiful. Make me do well at whatever I attempt. Give me stamina. I don’t want to be sick or weak or get pneumonia. I don’t want this hearing loss—it’s embarrassing. Fix the skin that hangs from under my chin. Heal the capsulitis on the ball of my foot. Make me smarter, more able-bodied and minded. Make my mind quick again—I never used to lose a word or name when I needed it. Help me build a wall to keep out all distractions, symptoms, critical voices and vulnerable feelings. Make me better than others; make me the best. Dear god, I used to be so tough and strong—please make me great again.

And with this inner attitude, I help elect Trump. That’s why he loves me, in my dream. 

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Leveling the playing field in relationship

Power is a huge source of conflict in the world. Intimate relationships have great potential to play a strong part in leveling playing fields.

Romantic love relationships between men and women reproduce sexism and gender inequality. Romantic love between black and white Americans reproduces racism and brings up the trauma of slavery. Romantic love between Jews and Christians of German descent or between American and Japanese people reproduce agonies from WW2. Because of the intimate context, these cross-cultural relationships provide fertile ground for the disruption of historical wounds.

 

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On Working with Isms (Within)

Why is it difficult for a justice-seeking, well-intentioned white person (me) to dig down and investigate the dehumanizing effects of racism (or any other ism) on myself? Or to challenge others within my own group to do the same? Why is it easier to focus on issues out there, instead of inside?

There are many possible answers, and so much complexity and nuance when addressing issues of privilege and oppression. Social problems need to be tackled from many angles, including the psychological.

 

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On Theatre as Worldwork: Hands Up and the August Wilson Red Door Project

To demolish racism you have to dismantle the system. You have to dismantle the parts—the beliefs, the attitudes, the values and the behaviors. ... We have to dismantle the culture of white utopia.  Kevin Jones (on OPB’s State of Wonder, April 16, 2016)

 

Most people I talk to feel very unsettled. As it should be. Things are heating up.

I go to sleep worrying. I wake up pressured to act, to somehow be helpful. Mostly I don’t know how or what to do. So when I experience something that feels transformative, that I believe does make a difference, I want to shout it out.

Last week, in the midst of everything bad, I witnessed the power of art, specifically theatre, to create a situation that almost forcedpeople to empathize.  I've written before about this special power of art. Sarah Lewis calls it aesthetic force. Not force by gunfire. Not force that maims or leaves us lifeless. But force that leaves us “changed—stunned, dazzled and knocked out.”  

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On Practicing in Relationship

Apparently, falling in love is easy—even in a laboratory setting. A social psychology researcher named Dr Arthur Aron, who studies the science of intimacy, developed 36 questions that call for increasing self-revelation and honesty. Share your answers to these questions with a relative stranger and there’s a good chance the two of you will fall in love. Writer Mandy Len Catron became a minor celebrity after she published a story in the Modern Love column of the New York Times about how she fell in love with her current partner using Dr Aron’s method. 

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On Orlando: Some Feeling-Thoughts

On Orlando: Some Feeling-Thoughts

Last Thursday night, four days after the deadly massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, I attended a vigil at the Q Center in Portland Oregon. Like many people, I had been moving through the week in a daze of grief, anger, fear and hopelessness, trying to wrap my brain around the complexity of the intersecting, colliding and exploding issues that ended in the horrific rampage.  Over 100 shot and 49 killed, mostly LGBTQ, mostly under age 30, the worst massacre ever perpetrated by an armed US citizen with a legally purchased assault rifle designed to destroy as many people as possible in as short a time as possible. 

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On "Failed" Relationships

“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes.  Art is knowing which ones to keep.” Scott Adams 

In the creative fields and in entrepreneurship, it is vogue to fail and iterate.  Design thinking luminaries like IDEO founders Tom and David Kelly urge us to embrace our failures, to own them and to use the learning on our path to doing great and original things. But failing in relationship is not generally held in quite so high esteem; rather the contrary, even today in the US where divorce rates hover somewhere between 40– 50%, people who have more than two or three long term relationships or marriages under their belts by mid life are looked at sideways.  We cluck our tongues, call them unlucky in love; we label their deeply personal experiences failed relationships

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On Being Relevant

Someone I love dearly no longer feels relevant. This saddens me.  I tell her how important she is—to me, to many people close to her, to the readers of the newspaper column she’s been writing since her retirement twenty years ago.  I tell her that she doesn’t need to interrupt or assert, that she is in fact central, especially because of her kindness, her helpfulness and her fierce love that didn’t used to shine with quite the same intensity. But she is of an age considered old in consensual time and has not adjusted easily to the brutality of ageism. For reasons unexplained, she gets the not delivered message, despite the fact her texts are indeed received. A technical (cultural) glitch confirming she isn’t being heard. This makes her frantic. 

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The Gift of Taking

Sometimes we do things we don’t feel great about. Well, perhaps I should speak for myself.

It started with sneaking out a few pens and some travel-sized toiletries—toothpaste, mouthwash, mini dental flosses. The habit ramped up and five years down the road, when there was no way I could get caught, I was slipping unopened 5 packs of notepads, sturdy paperclips that they just don’t make anymore and a box or two of zip lock bags— into my bag. Hey, it's not like I went rifling through her bedroom drawers while she was sleeping; these items were all out and obvious.

 

 

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Logo Design with 361ArtWorks

Confronted with the challenge of creating a logo for my website, I was plagued by too many choices, ideas and fonts. So, I turned to 361ArtWorks for help. I asked my co-conspirator, Randee Levine, to lead me through a type of experience that we had used successfully with other artists, doers, and makers, in order to help me clarify my brand. I wanted more than just an attractive symbol; I was looking for something that had resonance with my deepest self and communicated the essence of what I bring to the world.

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Some Notes on Privilege and Oppression

Picture this: Week 3 of a five-week Intensive Course. About forty people—from different (and warring) countries, cultures, religions, races, genders and socio-economic backgrounds—are in attendance. The students have different levels of education, health, physical abilities, English language capacity and range in age from twenties to seventies. 

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Relationship Turmoil

For most of my adult life I experienced a lot of relationship turbulence. And I don’t mean just internal churn, though there was plenty of that.  I’m talking drama: arguing and fighting (punctuated by shoving, throwing stuff and occasionally destroying property), yelling (name calling), tears, snot and piles of wadded up toilet paper, closed doors, sleeping apart, silences that lasted for days and nights. My twenties were the worst. (Attention, young people—it does eventually get easier—and believe it or not, the sex might actually get better.) 

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True Grit

Someone I know has been sober for nearly fifteen years.  When he realized scotch had become a destination, the reason to get through the day, the carrot on the stick, he found his self-respect and gave it up.  He swears that once he hits his eighties, he’ll start to booze again.  After all, why would it matter then?  That’s what he thinks today, in middle age.

My mother just turned eighty. She admits to being confused by the mandate to live each day of her life as if it were her last. If today were the last, she told me, I would eat a giant piece of chocolate cake. And another. And if I did that every day, I’d blow up like a house. And my last day would be soon! Now why would I want to do that?

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Carrying Stuff

Lately I’ve been carrying a lot. The world is in a mess. So much bad and scary stuff is happening. My clients are crying; they enter my office, hearts ravaged by life and love.  I feel it all, even when I’m supposed to be off. Even though my personal world is filled with privilege and goodness.

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Patti Smith: An Early Hero

“If you inspire people to do their own thing, I think that’s the greatest thing. One always hopes for that…”  Patti Smith

It’s the 40th anniversary of the release of Patti Smith’s revolutionary album Horses, an album that changed my life and launched my short-lived career as a punk rock star.

So much inspired me about this album, from Robert Maplethorpe’s iconic photograph on the cover, featuring Patti in gender bending church-boy attire sourced from (my then favorite store) Salvation Army (the record producers wanted to pretty her up but she wouldn’t have it), to the shocking and irreverent beat poetry in her lyrics—Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine. Above all else, I loved that she couldn’t sing very well—not in the standard sense, and she did it anyway. She didn’t look or act like a female was supposed to and she stayed true to herself. This was beautiful to me.

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Medicine for the Expert

Expertise can act like a drug.  It puffs us up, puts us on top of the world—especially when we’ve paid our dues and earned the role through years of hard work. But like most drugs, it has a side effect. Stoned on expertise, we forget what it’s like to be a beginner. This cognitive bias is known as the curse of knowledge. And it is most noticeable in highly specialized fields that require a lot of study or experience to master.

 

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