seven things you don't know about me

Kario tagged me to share seven things you don't know about me. Here goes.

1. I'm (mostly) ambidextrous. I can only write with my left. I can only use sissors with my right. Most other things I can do with either/both.

2. I was the kid who ate glue.

3. I tried to hold myself back a grade to repeat fifth grade. My parents started me a year early. All my friends were a grade behind me. The summer between fifth and sixth my school merged with two others. I figured, with so many new kids, I could repeat a grade without many people noticing. No stigma. A week before school started the principal called me to a meeting where he convinced me to start sixth grade and "if you're unhappy, then you can go back to fifth." Yeah, right. Like no-one would notice that. And, you know what. I was right. Would have been way better off in my right grade.

4. I can pick up things with my toes.

5. I can wink my left eye, but not my right.

6. As a kid I had such an intense phobia of anything related to death, I had to close my eyes when we drove past a cemetery.

7. I wanted to go out for the football team in 7th grade, but my parents wouldn't let me.

i ching, therefore i am

About synchronicity. The more I think about it, the more I see it’s just what I see. The way things will happen as they happen and synchronicity is all interpretation. The story we tell ourselves. The way the same cloud is a dragon to one person and bouquet of feathers to another. The way we don’t see what is actually there, because what is there shape shifts to fit our narrative. What’s meaningful rises to the top. How when we know ourselves, our directions, our paths, we see affirmation everywhere. Hear our stories from every wind song blown.

I play I Ching with books – Women Who Run With The Wolves, Black Elk Speaks, Charlotte’s Web and sometimes whatever I pull from the shelf. I play the same way every time – hold the book in my right hand flat beneath it. Run my left thumb bottom to top up the pages on the lower right corner. One, two, three times. On the third pass I cut the book like cards, slide my thumb in, open and read the paragraph it lands on.

And, Oh yeah, first I ask my question. Ask and play.

It works like this.

Question: What am I doing with my marriage, what do I need to know.
Book: Women Who Run With the Wolves.
Answer: Page 257, Third full graf:
You see, there is something on the wild soul that will not let us subsist forever of piecemeal intake. Because, in actuality it is impossible for the woman who strives for consciousness to sneak little sniffs of good air and then to be content with no more. …. Though you might try to get by on just a little air or no air at all, some big fist bellows takes over, something fierce and demanding that makes you eventually shovel the air in as fast as you can. You gulp it, bite it down until you are breathing fully again.

Question: What do I need to know about writing, right now?
Book: Women who run with the wolves.
Answer: Page 155, second full graf:
If it is love we are making, even though we are apprehensive or frightened, we are willing to untangle the bones of the Death nature. We are willing to see how it all goes together. We are willing to touch the not-beautiful in another, and in ourselves. Behind this challenge is a cunning test from the Self. It is found even more clearly in tales where the beautiful appears ugly in order to test someone’s character.

Question: What do I most need to learn from this book?
Book: Creating Money
Answer: Chapter Nine, Title Page.
Chapter Title: Coming out of Survival. (enough said)

Question (asked in March): What do I need to know about writing, right now. How do I find direction?
Book: Writer’s I-Ching (me flipping through it in a book store)
Answer: Chapter Title (don’t remember the Chapter number)
Chapter Title: Write Dangerously
*note – next day, cleaning out my brief case, I open an old reporter’s notebook. There’s a Post It stuck to the back inside cover. Haven’t seen that note in five months. That note, it’s just a couple lines, it says: Dangerous Writers. Below that: Tom Spanbauer. Below that his phone number.

See, see what I mean? That Universe, it just has no subtlety.