Magic Beans

Last Spring, I planted some scarlet runner beans in my mother in law's garden. Pink and black splotches akin to an abstract painting and very mysterious looking. She was amazed at the voracity as Lo and behold, these beauteous beans took off and saved some pods from her harvest and sent them to me over in Colorado in a box for Christmas. I brought them back East and even though I got here late to start anything from seed, planted them hopefully in my sandy, poor soil. I talked to them. I told them to sprout and grow and be magical a la Jack. Here, where I live, it is a miracle to be thriving in spite of the salt air, silt & sand, weeds, ravenous evil deer, stubborn poison ivy,...
Yes, I may be a crazy plant lady...
So they have sprouted, and are growing by the day, it is amazing.
This week in my motivation class we are discussing the power of manifestation. I am also thinking about potential lately, this idea that our thoughts themselves are physical, taking up space and literally pushing intentions out as the universe moves to accommodate them like water, liquifying in the path of our desires. Makes me feel molten!
We watched a video by Will Smith ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QT9u89IpFVw .) detailing his simple, eloquent approach to attaining your goals and success.
It is passionate, even violently so and I find myself taken in by the idea. What we want it ours for the taking, we must pounce on our wants, claim them with confidence and ownership.
He quotes Confucious, "He who says he can and he who says he cannot are usually both right", and I find myself wondering, is it really this simple? He says we are bogged down in the quest for complexity when what we really need to be doing is simplifying, focusing our energy on the things we really think are the most important in the pursuit of happiness. My question is, of course, how to get that focus, how to put on those horse blinders and keep on one linear path towards light and attainment?
When asked what you are afraid of, what do you answer? I usually answer that I am scared of mediocrity, bad things happening to people I love that are out of my control, and the like. However, according to Will, in some guru like sense, these things are under my control and he attests (very knight in shining armor fighting the ferocious dragon) that his fear is fear itself. That one must attack fears, one by one, break them down, and lay them bare to sun to bleach the bones. He says we must first know ourselves, then work damn hard at getting to where we want to be and not letting anything or anyone tell us we are not going to get there. This fear, this lack of belief is getting in the way of my beanstalk of dreams.
He instructs us to bend, command, and then demand what we want for our lives from the universe. I just need to decide now where to focus my lighthouse beam of energy and thought...
until then I will delight in the new leaves unfurling daily on my seedlings, give them bamboo stakes to support their ambitions and think about narrowing my own scope of desire to specifics.
I think I have been watering the entire garden, even the weeds, and I need to put my thumb in the stream of the hose and pinpoint the areas of growth I truly desire.

Feline fancy

Isis, who is at this moment curled up before me, is a tremendously eccentric small stripey cat. She once killed a raccoon, and goes for beach walks with me, so she is an atypical feline, thus deserving of analysis. She adores heights, and a bird's eye view, so anything with a branch or a beam is very very attractive. Driftwood is her preferred substrate. She is also quite ferocious, motivated, not by a hunger to devour, but rather by the desire to capture prey, to engage her bestial little carnivorous self. Isis travels well in all modes of transportation (she has been on planes, trains, trucks, and boats) without complaint so I'd like to think she is motivated by both the need to please and the quest for variety. Since she accompanies me, my husband, and our dog on walks I must assume she is also motivated by the need to belong, to be part of a pack, or perhaps some acceptance by Dune (the dog) and also the desire to explore and venture out. When we open a container of vanilla yogurt, even if she is asleep, her hearing becomes instantly supersonic and she makes her way towards the source, so I suppose she is also motivated by Dairy. I largely attribute this to the somewhat unsettling habit my husband has of "giving" her the top of the container. Isis is also motivated by warm, pillowy places which are well suited to napping, which she spends an inordinate amount of time doing. I'd like to imagine she has some epic dreams involving hummingbirds and trees that never end but I can only guess...And, of course, far too important to disregard, she is motivated by the pursuit of love, which to her involves a strange combination of heartbeats, old cashmere sweaters, and raw fish.

lost connections

For all my self proclaimed luddite-ness, I am absurdly angry that in my nomadic wanderings I have misplaced my USB connections. Meaning, I have an ipod that I cannot charge, I have digital cameras chock full of fresh photographs but no way to "upload". This irony amuses and befuddles me to no end. Herein the relevance to motivation. Do I continue taking photos if I can never share them? Are the images really for me alone or do I thrive on sharing my views, my kaleidoscopic perspective, with the rest of the world? And as to the music, can I subsist on crashing surf, seagulls gulling and the occasional plane streaking and rumbling above. Yes, but I crave more than subsistence, I always order dessert. My father enabled this indulgence. I want to post photographs, not just adjectives...grrr. Hence my growl. Silly little cords all tangled up in a tiny drawer and none of them fit. Like an angry puzzle.
We are supposed to reflect on technology in the classroom, well I haven't used it as much as I would like, quite honestly, but I don't feel that it is as important in the primary years as it would be for older kids. I want younger kids to be playing in dirt, looking at spiders and leaves and running around getting out of breath. I also want them to use regular old pencils to learn handwriting skills, and think about the beauty of words and spelling patterns before a life of spell checking where they can check out their brains and word applications will even auto correct for them.
If I were teaching older kids however, especially high school, I know I will need to get tech savvy, and quick, to engage them in their own realm.
I am intrigued by the usage of "smartboards" and streaming to watch scientists making live discoveries or interacting with kids in another country via webcam. I also love the idea of incorporating blogging into a creative writing class, as I think students would find it fresh and relevant to their own lives.
I have a lot to learn about technological tools, and am eager to find out ways to use them in the classroom, but I will remain committed to hands on physical learning as well. Mud pies and grassy knees, bugs in jars and pictures in the clouds.

the shiny hook and fickle fish

Apparently, as with most things I jumped in too fast, landed with a belly flop and the air knocked out of my lungs and didn't read all the instructions. This blog is an assignment for a class on Motivation, so I suppose I am supposed to wax poetic or academic about motivation. Hmm...it is not going to be easy for me to do these on-line classes since post surgery sitting is pretty much the worst position ever. I live on the golden beach. Computers have a terrible glaring habit which prevents me from doing all of this on my little porch. I'd rather ride my red bike around looking for dissonance and beauty, swim in the clear but now cold Atlantic, examine seashells, watercolor...etc.
So, my very motivation is slippery, fickle. A glittering fish that doesn't want to be hooked unless the lure is extremely tempting and delectable. Also, something lasting, something dynamic.
In the clouds today, a witch. Bing cherries and their succulent meaty ripeness. Tenderly weeding tiny grasses that invade my garden like infant soldiers. I like to get them by the roots, I must be careful of the way I bend lately, like a woman so modest she is wearing a miniskirt in a ghetto and has dropped a lipstick. This is not easy for me.
You see, I am a very distracted human.
Motivation is a tremendous obstacle in my life, I have such a vast array of interests and passions but to date have explored very few in any discernible depth. I dabble, I splash around, I move on to a novel shallow puddle of interest. I intend for this to change. Perhaps this class can teach me more about how to effectively and sustainably motivate myself. Instead of being very proficient in Spanish I would like to be fluent, conjugating verbs and tenses with ease and confident with my accent. Instead of being really "into" yoga I would like to take a teacher training course and have that evolve into a self practice.
So many venues for exploration...and yet whimsy beckons with a hinting green glance over a perfectly sculpted shoulder. The shaded path is more inviting, the cool languor and lassitude of leaves and darkness, nature and silence.
Right now I should be researching Freud, who I do find quite the provocateur, as he says that "dreams are the royal road to the knowledge of the unconscious", but I am going to shower in my wondrously simple outdoor shower, put on a dress that requires little thought/straps/discomfort, and walk to a dinner party involving fresh bivalves, smoked land mammals, and exotic cheeses. Perhaps after a few glasses of wine and drinking in a molten sunset that this isla is famous for (some say this is due to the proximity of Manhattan's toxic atmosphere, but the point is moot compared to the palette) I will return to my shed-teaux and dabble in a little Freudian philosophy. Sex and death , repression, childhood trauma, fixations and dreams? Combined with one of my most beloved eras, the Victorian age...Quite the tempting lure. But will it snag?

Suburbia Neopolitan

Since my surgery I am supposed to walk. The incision glares blue black, I suppose that red is only for the carnival moment of blood dancing with oxygen. I have stitches that they say will dissolve. How I wonder? Like cotton candy on the tongue? Like rain falling through the canopy towards hunger below? So, armed with a geeky red pedometer out I venture. Proud robins and fat bunnies hop around in the perfectly manicured grass. All of the homes are of a palette that makes me crave expensive Italian desserts. My ipod dies and I sing, "You've got to pick your Afro Daddy" loudly and off cadence and the old papery man washing his Cadillac looks at me as I have just smudged his car with my off pitch voice. I walk around and around the streets, in dizzying loops named for wild places that are far from these plains. I would like to live in a place with daring street names like Duel, Octopi, Gypsy, Nebula, Dryad. Actually I would like to live in a place where there is only one road and that is the one I live on.
The tiny swimming pool is crammed full of tiny kids in various floatable devices. Noodles, swimmies, ducks and whales all destined to deflate in landfills ever so colorfully. The mothers read chick lit and comment on their children's exceptional abilities. The fathers swim with their kids, I like them immensely more. Mostly, I look at people's gardens. They are, for the most part predictable. Although roses are irresistable regardless of their cliche history. I see lupine, lithe and regal. Irises that look like tiny palaces for Thumbelina with their furred golden mouths. Tiny pansies so insipid, so fragile I want to eat them. The poppies are my favorite, furred pods so primal alien, foliage like weeds and yet when they bloom they sway and bob like drunken countesses misbehaving in their indolent garish dresses. It is so hot that the blacktop smushes under my feet like cookie batter. The clouds oh so cumulus today, I see food chains, big fish eating littler ones. 5,304 steps today. Two days until I can walk along the beach.