risk of palin becoming president is 1:6 or 1:7

mentioned in a column in today's NY Times, Bob Rice of Tangent Capital pointed out that the actuarial risk, based on mortality tables, of Palin becoming president if the Republican ticket wins the election is about 1 in 6 or 7.

roger cohen, the columnist, points out that's the same odds that your birthday will fall on a wednesday.

are we ready for that?

poem: Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches?

please enjoy this amazing poem by mary oliver. click the title of this post to see the picture and hear the music that accompany these words on panhala.com.


Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches?

Have you ever tried to enter the long black branches
of other lives --
tried to imagine what the crisp fringes, full of honey,
hanging
from the branches of the young locust trees, in early morning,
feel like?

Do you think this world was only an entertainment for you?

Never to enter the sea and notice how the water divides
with perfect courtesy, to let you in!
Never to lie down on the grass, as though you were the grass!
Never to leap to the air as you open your wings over
the dark acorn of your heart!

No wonder we hear, in your mournful voice, the complaint
that something is missing from your life!


Who can open the door who does not reach for the latch?
Who can travel the miles who does not put one foot
in front of the other, all attentive to what presents itself
continually?
Who will behold the inner chamber who has not observed
with admiration, even with rapture, the outer stone?


Well, there is time left --
fields everywhere invite you into them.

And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away
from wherever you are, to look for your soul?

Quickly, then, get up, put on your coat, leave your desk!


To put one's foot into the door of the grass, which is
the mystery, which is death as well as life, and
not be afraid!

To set one's foot in the door of death, and be overcome
with amazement!

To sit down in front of the weeds, and imagine
god the ten-fingered, sailing out of his house of straw,
nodding this way and that way, to the flowers of the
present hour,
to the song falling out of the mockingbird's pink mouth,
to the tippets of the honeysuckle, that have opened

in the night

To sit down, like a weed among weeds, and rustle in the wind!


Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?

While the soul, after all, is only a window,

and the opening of the window no more difficult
than the wakening from a little sleep.


Only last week I went out among the thorns and said
to the wild roses:
deny me not,
but suffer my devotion.
Then, all afternoon, I sat among them. Maybe

I even heard a curl or tow of music, damp and rouge red,
hurrying from their stubby buds, from their delicate watery bodies.

For how long will you continue to listen to those dark shouters,
caution and prudence?
Fall in! Fall in!


A woman standing in the weeds.
A small boat flounders in the deep waves, and what's coming next
is coming with its own heave and grace.



Meanwhile, once in a while, I have chanced, among the quick things,
upon the immutable.
What more could one ask?

And I would touch the faces of the daises,
and I would bow down
to think about it.

That was then, which hasn't ended yet.

Now the sun begins to swing down. Under the peach-light,
I cross the fields and the dunes, I follow the ocean's edge.

I climb, I backtrack.
I float.
I ramble my way home.

~ Mary Oliver ~


(West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems)

why i like barack obama

he picks good people. he's had the same campaign staff from the get go. mccain is on his third set of advisers. not to mention what's become painfully obvious--joe biden is much more qualified to be a heartbeat away from the presidency than sarah palin is. obama picked someone substantive.

given the intricacies of understanding what is going on in the financial sector, i want someone who's smart and finds good people to come up with good plans and solutions.

i also like how obama listens to others. i don't think we need a "maverick" president. we need someone with the temperament and skills to hire and seek counsel from smart people, listen to what they have to say, think his way through it, and make good decisions.

with the $700 billion bailout request for wall street from bush, i keep remembering a pickup i often saw parked on south congress for several years, earlier in the bush administration. it had painted on its tailgate the following:

bush & cheney = pigs at the trough

more to come...

perspective on financial crisis

kathleen writes: It's helpful to me to see our own financial crisis in the light of this one. We are a long way from this, I believe, with far more resources to deal with our problems than these people have. I believe we will recover short of this close to absolute bottom.

click the title of this post to read the story to which she refers.

speaking truth to (and about) power

thanks to keith fail for sending me this link. this is an interview by bill moyers of col. andrew j. bacevich, who has written a book called "the limits of power" about what's wrong in america and who's to blame. it's not just politicians, folks. he also talks about what needs to change.

bacevich is a conservative, yet i found myself agreeing with a lot of what he sees as the root causes of how this country got into the mess we're in now.

click the title of this post to go to the video and transcript.

a british take on the US economic crisis

"a shattering moment in america's fall from power... the end of american dominance is over."

john gray is a british political philosopher. according to wikipedia, he currently sees the left/right divide as unviable, tends toward "green thought," drawing on lovelock's gaia theory.

well worth reading for a learned and global point of view. click the title of this post to read the article.

fall gardening

yesterday i wore a sore into the palm of my left hand, digging with a hand spade in my garden in an effort to reach the "nuts" of nutgrass and eradicate it. alas, i might have gotten a third of the nuts. those nuts are strung together underground like a web connected by thin roots, and it's virtually impossible to get them all.

anyway, i planted green onions, scarlet nantes carrots, chioggia beets (can't wait--cut one open and it has red and white stripes, and they are allegedly so sweet they taste like candy), and red-stemmed chard in the bed where the nutgrass was/will come back.

that bed already had cauliflower, cabbage, sorrel, fennel, tulsi (holy basil), society garlic, and lots of regular garlic.

i still had packages of seeds left to plant, so i extended my original circular plot with a couple of bags of compost and planted spinach and a speckled romaine. need to get another bag and plant the lollorossa lettuce, a red beauty.

planting technique: make a furrow in the compost, dust with bone and feather meal, plant seeds, cover with perlite, water. perlite keeps the seeds damp so that more will sprout sooner, and once they sprout, the fertilizer will give them a running start. that's the presupposition--will report back on results.

the no-dig bed of broccoli, collards, mustard, and kale is doing well. the bed is starting to settle, and one area has developed a tilt to the west as the layers of compost, hay, and straw surrender to gravity and time. the little temporary fence of chicken wire should keep it from collapsing.

made tomato soup last night with basil and oregano from the garden. yum~!

follow-up on kidney stones

my beloved and magical acupuncturist/rolfer/yoga coach/nutritional coach (unnamed because she isn't taking any new clients) recommended taking a supplement called "stone free" after having had a kidney stone.

apparently the chances are, if you have one, you'll have more. i certainly did NOT enjoy the experience! it was very painful. i visualize them dissolving.

you can get stone free at whole foods and other stores with good supplements like people's pharmacy.

patrice also recommended eating kidney, aduki, and black beans, ume paste and vinegar, and lots of greens. shiitake mushrooms, black fungus (wood ear mushrooms), and "all the healing shrooms" (in patrice's words) are also kidney strengtheners. and did i say lots of greens? lots of greens!

review of 12 states presentation

my friend and fellow NLPer katie raver attended the meetup at which i finally gave my presentation on the 12 states of attention on tuesday, september 23, and she blogged about it.

click the title of this post to read what she wrote, or read below:

Thursday, September 25, 2008
Mary Ann Reynolds & The 12 States of Attention
NLP Practitioner Mary Ann Reynolds spoke at last Tuesday’s Austin NLP Meetup. She blogged the exercises and stories for her presentation, and the links below lead to the related entries, or websites for Tom Best and Nelson Zink.

Mary Ann Reynolds managed to succeed at the impossible task of engaging advanced NLP students and beginners, all in the same room – by using a foundation of existing NLP materials, making them her own, and expanding upon them.

And she did that with Nelson Zink’s 12 States of Attention. After hearing Tom Best read from Nelson’s book The Structure of Delight during her NLP Practitioner class, she bought the book and started playing. She took a Nightwalking class. She researched how the eye works. She started practicing peripheral vision on the Austin greenbelt. And she started experimenting with the 12 states.

Mary Ann did several things that new presenters could learn from. First, she did that thing we all know we should do but never actually do: she gave herself plenty of time to prepare – months, in fact. She also got together with an experienced speaker and talked through her ideas. Nice. She copiously wrote out each of her exercises and stories for the night. And she did a practice run, by herself, to work out timing.

Very elegantly, she started out by talking about a recent trip to West Texas, lingering upon each of the 12 states. I do love a good isomorphic story.

One of my favorite exercises was the astonishingly simple Rapidly Moving Through the 12 States. It’s an easy way to practice specific examples of each of the 12 states, and could be done in a minute or two every day.

She also did a brief hypnotic induction about, I assume, the 12 states. I really can’t remember anything except a very clear vision of myself and my friends on the beach in Hana, Maui, under the full moon, brimming with joy. That was certainly worth a little amnesia!

One of the things I adore about Mary Ann is her unapologetic demeanor. The 12 states of Attention and Nightwalking are… a little weird. Really, anything that expands the filters with which you take in the world, that literally expands your ability to perceive – could fit in the category of weird for many people. And Mary Ann simply pays it no mind. She puts on her “peripheral training device” (a baseball cap with a rod attached to the bill, suspending a glow-in-the-dark ball out in front) to show people how it works. She describes the 12 states as if she were describing car mechanics. She has you stare at your thumb nail for a full minute. And she does it all with a twinkle in her eye, knowing that you’ll discover something wonderful, too.

Her confidence and presence are certainly unusual for a first-time presenter. She even had a couple of good belly laughs during her presentation! I don’t know where this petite, poised powerhouse is headed with NLP or presenting, but I sure hope to be there for what’s next.

12 states of attention: multiple states at once

Can you experience more than one state at a time? Wanna try it? We'll start with three states at a time.


VAKEB—see everything in front of you, hear all sounds, feel your skin

VAKEN—see one object, hear one sound, feel one part of your body

VAKIB—imagine a sunset, the sound of crickets, feeling peaceful

VAKIN—imagine threading a needle, hearing a bell, and feeling warmth in your chest


Here’s another way to combine three states:


VEB and VEN—see the room in front of you and notice one thing

AEB and AEN—hear all the sounds in the environment and focus on one particular sound

KEB and KEN—feel all of your skin while feeling your butt on the chair

VIB and VIN—imagine a giant tic-tac-toe board superimposed on the space in front of you and place an O in the middle square

AIB and AIN—imagine the sound of applause while hearing a fanfare

KIB and KIN—imagine feeling excited while taking longer inhalations


Now let’s practice 4 states at a time:


VEB/VEN/VIB/VIN--see this space in front of you and simultaneously notice one thing while imagining a giant tic-tac-toe board superimposed on the space in front of you and placing an O in the middle square

AEB/AEN/AIB/AIN--hear all the sounds in this environment and focus on one particular sound at the same time you imagine the sound of applause and a fanfare

KEB/KEN/KIB/KIN-- feel all of your skin while feeling your butt on the chair and imagine feeling excited while inhaling


How about trying 6 states at once?


VAKEB/VAKEN--see everything in front of you, hear all sounds, feel your skin, see one object, hear one sound, feel your butt on the chair

VAKIB/VAKIN--imagine a sunset, the sound of crickets, feeling excited, while imagining yourself threading a needle, hearing a bell, and feeling warmth inside your chest


for the really brave, here are all 12 states at once (or as close as i could get):


Look externally into the room. Look broadly and at the same time, at one object right in front of you.

Superimpose a giant tic-tac-toe grid in front of you. You’re going to fill this grid with Xs, except for the middle square.

Now imagine an X appearing on the grid. As it appears, make a little sound to yourself (eep) and simultaneously clap your hands.

Now imagine another X appearing, hearing the internal sound and clapping. Hear everyone making claps.

Feel excitement building about being able to do this as you notice your breath.

Continue doing all of this until you’ve filled all but the center square.

Now see the entire grid in front of you. Stand up, raise your arms, and as you put an O in the center square, dance with your whole body, including your index fingers, and say TA DA! at the same time you hear a fanfare.