A Roll in the Universe

In my ongoing journey to figure myself and life and all that stuff out, I’m now trying to learn about non-attachment. Attachment = expectation. In “The Shack”, they suggest you ditch the noun and go for the verb: Expecting. That is making more and more sense to me. Expectation sets you up for failure; expecting opens you up. I have noticed lately that unopened messages produce their own kind of stress in me. I have been feeling overwhelmed so am back on 50% sick leave (had tried to reduce to 30%). It just doesn't take much to get me worked up, and it doesn't feel like excitement or anticipation. It feels like dread. So not good. The thing is, it's just the mind playing tricks. Because every single message or email I opened was harmless. Utterly harmless. Nothing overwhelming or negative or difficult. Just a message. There are a variety of techniques for dealing with stuff, some physical (like taking deep breaths), some more mental (like saying you're safe as long ...

So I got my own domain something like four years ago, and the stuff I have here is still in limbo. It's like moving house: Taking everything I have in the old home, and trying to make it fit and function in the new one. Some things look fine, some don't fit, some have no purpose in the new place. And some things end up in new configurations that bring new joy and discovery. I'm hoping very much for that last. I have this website/blog*, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and now Flickr (because I discovered I'd better have an extra back-up of my photos). In trying to post something everywhere, I'm feeling scattered. I like short tweets. I like instantly posting a photo. But I also like having complete control over my own stuff and waxing on about it, offering far more than 140 characters at a time and why not a handful photos, too? The one thing that bugs me the most is Facebook. It's like a bar that you hate, but all your friends love it so that's where you...

Pluto. Pluto in Virgo. Pluto in Virgo conjunct the North Node. That's what I have to offer in November. Not a novel—navel-gazing. An old hobby is being rekindled. Astrology is a life-long love, and just when I thought I could live without it, it shows back up and shows me how good it is at unraveling mysteries in my life. You think you know yourself, but there's always something new to discover. The astrological equivalent of cleaning out a closet I stuffed back when I first moved into my apartment. "Oh, I forgot I had that!" Mostly, I forgot where I put it. And so it is with Pluto. It may be "just" a planetoid, but astrologically it still packs a punch. So there is a transformative energy (Pluto) in the sign of "Let's file this alphabetically" (Virgo) standing next to "Karma's a Bitch but Also a Fun Gal" (North Node). In other words: My pathway to ultimate happiness in this lifetime is through organization and routine. Do...

Interests keep changing. Or rather, focus does. I obviously still enjoy taking photographs, because I kept my camera busy during my vacation. But even photography requires inspiration—and weather that won't ruin a camera. And so I let Wordless Wednesdays slide. I stopped forcing myself and let my blog rest, too. The nice thing about long days on the autobahns of Germany, is that it is very relaxing. Nothing to do but watch one field after another blur by, sometimes spotting a bird or a cow or a house. But sometimes even that loses its charm and I ducked into my Kindle, finishing three books during my trip. But that—plus discussions about blog resuscitation with my good friend Alice —has given me inspiration. I know now where I want to take this blog next, and I even have ideas for a visual make-over. I don't think blogs are dying. They are too useful to do that. Blogs may no longer lead the pack in social networking on the internet, but they definitely supplement it ...

Wordless Wednesday Back when it was Astroblog.

I think the most frustrating experience with the internet is TL;DR—too long, didn't read. I have a long list of longer articles that I know interest me and that I want to read but the energy just isn't there. Or the focus isn't. Or the time. How annoying! All this knowledge literally in my lap (or at least near it), and still so out of reach! I was reading about how productivity may be killing creativity over at Lifehacker , an article about how we distract ourselves by staying online rather than allowing ourselves to go offline and "'do' less and 'think' more". There was this long quote from "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" that, at the time, was TL;DR. But I knew I wanted to. I knew it was about my hunger for something more than status updates, for information that feels deep and significant and not like another piece of trivia. Once again, I find myself wanting to write . To rekindle my existence on my blog, because, h...

This is a test for my friend Alice , for whom Blogger is not working. You may ignore this post completely, but if you've read this far, you haven't so ignore what I said.

OK, yesterday's post came out of the blue. For you. For me, it was the result of a Friday at work full of carbs: Bread, fruit juice and two kinds of cake. And that was breakfast at work. Still under the influence of all the carbs, I let myself take some leftovers home with me. I had tasted the carrot cake and it was yummy, and chocolate cake has always gone down well, too. But this, my dear reader, is what has changed and why I wrote yesterday : I have absolutely no desire for the leftover cake. I find myself having to talk myself into eating it so that I don't have to throw it out. I woke up this morning laying out strategies for how to get to a point where I would want cake. My current plan is to have my two pieces in lieu of dinner; dinner itself will be eaten mid-afternoonish. I was never a carbaholic, but I used to buy donuts, Danish, carrot cake, chocolate cake, brownies, etc., on a regular basis (i.e. 1–2 times a week). I would happily buy some cake to have at hom...

So over at Chez Alice's, Alice herself posted about the dearth of postings on her blog. Specifically, postings that feature writing, rather than photography. I recognize and sympathize with Alice's sense of lack since my own blog has the same dearth. The amount of time has not changed. The interest in the world around me has not tapered off. Yet all my time at the computer no longer produces creative output. Repeatedly, my creativity is spent on a comment or three on someone's Facebook status or on someone's blog. Short bursts of opinion weigh in after writing, editing, and more editing - at someone else's place. And it baffles me. Where is my initiative to polish and publish something on my own dear blog (which has been with me for 8 years and 11 months today)? Why does my creativity remind me more of junk food grabbed on the run than a proper home-cooked meal eaten where it was made? And how do I reverse this? Alice and I have challenged each other to a ...

A scene from work: My boss comes over to talk to me, and I am typing something, and continue to do so as I look up at him to answer him. He stares in horrified fascination at my fingers accurately producing words on the screen without me looking, and finally can't stand it any more and orders, "Look down! Look down!" It became a running gag between us. Me, I can't remember when last I saw another person typing with all ten fingers. Touch typing. I see a lot of typing, but it's all done with two or four fingers, evenly distributed between two hands. I did have another boss who typed with four fingers and he was as fast as me with my ten (nine, actually. I don't use my left thumb.). I know how to touch type because my family advised me to take typing classes in school. I discovered I sucked at typing itself—never getting beyond 30 words per minute if I wanted to avoid mistakes—but I was very good at the non-typing stuff: Adjusting margins, changing ri...

New Year's Eve. The day when people are either scrambling to get food and champagne for the evening's festivities or are contemplating what resolutions to make for the coming year - or both. For me, 2011 is the start of the next half century of my life. I was 50 in December. It was actually a wonderful way to end the year. 2010 was turbulent at work and in my stomach. At work, the knowledge that our department and in-house printing was going to cease to exist by summer was something we all had in the back of our minds. We were, however, all so old (I was the youngest at 49) to get worked up about it. Instead, the strategy was to do our jobs and behave in such a way as to make management realize they had some great people working for them; we did not complain and we did not sic our union on anybody (though they were apprised of the situation). Our representative from HR was impressed by our good cheer. She said it motivated HR to do everything in their power to help us sta...

So, if you scroll down a bit, there's a list of stuff I read. I have a lot of this on RSS-feeds but decided to share here. Under the category "READ" are blogs and sites that are mostly for reading but may contain photos. Here be some good writing by friends - not necessarily opinions or language you'd agree with, but good writing - a couple of health blogs, a blog for web designers and design junkies, and the official Getting Things Done blog. Under the category "VIEW" are blogs and sites that mostly for looking at or watching. In the first four are three friends of mine who photograph, and do so very well. Don't miss! The Periodic Table of Videos and Sixty Symbols offer videos that explain chemistry and physics, respectively. I would have aced my high school chemistry class and maybe gone into physics if I'd had these videos! Ugly Overload and Walk the Wilderness are about critters: One has the intent of finding things humans deem unappealing, ...

I'm consolidating a bit. My other blog, Budding Yogini, will cease to exist soon, but all posts are transferred here and tagged "spirit" and "budding yogini". I no longer feel the need to keep my spiritual musings separate from other musings. I'm still a budding yogini, though.

This brilliant film is making the rounds. I found mine over at A Pacific View . Here's the comment I left there after seeing this video: Absolutely stunning video! Finally one that clearly gave me an idea of scale. Especially going back home. If any aliens are visiting us, it must be purely by accident, because finding us is like finding a needle in a haystack. Or more like finding a partial needle in a 1000 haystacks. Thanks for posting this, Tom! So if you aren't impressed with the story of three wise men following a star, this journey through the stars ought to give you a nice sense of awe (play the HD version at full screen for best effect!):

…because at 5 am I had all kinds of great ideas for a blog post today, and had several paragraphs ready in my head. Can't remember a thing - not even what the topic was. What's the point of waking up way too early if you can't use it for something good? I need to take my MacBook to bed with me from now on. If I'm going to keep waking up way before the alarm clock goes off, I may as well make good use of the time. Watch this space. It'll either be brilliant (ha!) - or jus ajkfjiebu aehf zzzzzzzzzzz…

I have noticed that with things like Twitter and Facebook, getting something off one's chest can be done in a few short sentences, and the immediacy and convenience (and lack of expectation of more than a paragraph) mean that more people "tweet" or post to Facebook rather than blog now. I was hunting for some old information on my blog, when I found myself rereading some of my old posts. And I found that I missed writing. I missed blogging. I missed my voice. So I am trying to get back to posting more frequently (preferably daily), only to find a Paul Simon lyric running through my brain: "[…]why am I short of attention / Got a short little span of attention…" Instead of a thought morphing into an exploration of an idea or experience over several paragraphs, it gets "tweeted" and left there, lost in a million other tweets or just on my page alone, dozens, quickly pushed out at the bottom and forgotten even by its author. As delightful and as use...

Wordless Wednesday - see also Saturday's post

I'm back on Twitter . And Facebook . I'm kafox9 on Twitter and kafox on Facebook. There. I am no longer a dinosaur. I am no longer hitting myself in the face with a hammer. I have decided I can't beat them so I join them. And I owe it to these two ladies . Speaking of two ladies, here's a pair I want to be like when I grow up and here's why . I love people who call a shovel a shovel.

(This is an English translation of a Norwegian original .) Today I came across a well-written essay from a Swedish teenager . She was scared to death about her generation. She is worried about what will become of them. They seem to be so self-destructive. They are still embarrassed in the school locker room, while being happily posing in minimal clothes on the web. The Swedish teenager wants to know where we, who were kids in the 60's, are as parents. Why do we not look in on our kids? Why do we not read their Myspace or blog pages? Why do we not insist on making them come home at a decent hour? She touched a nerve in me, and I left the longest comment I've ever written on the Norwegian site that first pointed me to the Swedish girl's entry. This is my translation of that comment : To the Swedish youth who wrote that she was scared to death: I'm sorry. I am a 48-year-old woman, born as the 1960's started. I don't have children of my own, but I do have pow...

I dag kom jeg over et godt skrevet innlegg fra en svensk jente via Aftenposten . Den svenske jenten er livredd for sin generasjon. Hun opplever generasjonen sin som selvdestruktiv; de er sjenerte i fellesdusjen, men publiserer nakenbilder på nettet. Hun savner at foreldrene bryr seg, og henvender seg til oss som født på 60-tallet. Det hun sa fikk meg til å skrive det lengste kommentaren noensinne, og jeg gjengir den her. Til den svenske ungdommen som skrev at hun er livredd: Jeg beklager. Jeg er en kvinne på 48, født idet 60-tallet begynte. Jeg har ikke barn selv, men jeg har observasjonsevne. Jeg har ofte sagt at vi som var barn på 60-tallet var den siste generasjonen som hadde voksne rundt oss - kjente og ukjente - som passet på oss, kjeftet på oss, veiledet oss, _så oss_. Vi hadde grunn til å respektere voksne og regler. Så skjedde en voldsom oppmyking og endatil opphør av både regler og respekt i samfunnet. Det gikk ikke til helvete, men å bøye seg ydmyk for autoriteter var ...