Intellectual Seriousness, Part II: Patience and Ideas in America
In my last post, I talked about intellectual seriousness, and as a follow up, let’s add intellectual patience to the list.
We’ve all heard about the “town halls”, with the anger, misinformation, fear, and antagonism that many of us hoped and expected the last presidential election would put behind us.
The hopes, fears, and illusions around health care have proved that intellectual patience in the United States is in as short supply as ever, even with (or in spite of?) a public intellectual who can speak the people’s language as President.
I suppose the problem with the cult of the personality that surrounds presidential politics today is that so much hope and fear surrounds candidates, and Barack Obama is the largest repository of hope and fear imaginable. He appeared and still appears to personify so much possibility or so much danger, depending on your point of view, that people forget about their own responsibility as citizens to think, read, and talk to their representatives. After all, representatives make laws. The President only enforces them, or, that’s what’s supposed to happen. But we left that constitutional viewpoint in the rearview mirror a long time ago.
Unfortunately, Barack Obama appears to be a “strict constructionalist” or Constitutional literalist in that regard. He hoped to be a facilitator in this regard, but people expect him to lead, put out his own plan, and let the individuals of Congress pick it to pieces. After all, that, too, is a representative’s job. The Founders wanted, above all, a decentralization of power, or “checks and balances”, if you will.
But I digress. Intellectual seriousness…
Right.
Intellectual patience.
Right.
I have often thought that in this most impatient of societies that two issues around which people do show intellectual patience around is the Constitution, with its complexity, and baseball. I find it remarkable that such an impetuous populace as the American one can consider baseball, the game of the lazy days of summer, with its lack of a time limit, its endless nuance, its amazing and bewildering serious of required decisions and possibilities, as the National Pastime.
But the health care debate has brought out the constituents into the streets, the Talk Show hosts, with their aging and passionate storm troopers, vs. the equally hard-charging partisans on the left, such as Moveon.org.
Lost in the discussion about health care, is the discussion of cost and health insurance, the yelling about which has drowned out the word “care” in any meaningful sense.
(By the way, I urge people to read two wonderful articles on health care, emphasizing the word care, attempting to divorce care from insurance, because the partisans on both sides are missing the boat, and enforcing a dialogue of the deaf that will necessitate that real reform from a CARE point of view will not happen.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/06/01/090601fa_fact_gawande
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200909/health-care
These two authors talk in the sort of depth and complexity that we all need to in order to fix health CARE, as well as health INSURANCE. They’re not the same thing, and only intellectual patience will get us to understand that.)
After all the shouting stops, we will have no one to blame but ourselves for what we get.
Keep thinking and grappling, people. Avoid easy answers, and get out of your comfort zone, including and particularly your intellectual and political one.
Stay tuned.
Saturday, September 5, 2009
Soul Satisfaction
Well, it’s been almost two months since I’ve contributed a post, and one kind reader (I seem to have one or two) suggested it might be time for another, so here goes.
My themes have loosely followed 1) speech, particularly political speech; 2) my intellectual evolution and how I see thought/reality/consciousness; and finally 3)simply how to express yourself.
Where do I go from here?
Well, let me start by admitting why my posts have lagged at late. I certainly do enjoy writing them for the few of you who read them, and I like to think they add some value to the world of thought and communication, but at the moment, my posts aren’t tethered to the rest of my business in any substantial way.
Maybe it's time to somehow change that.
I started Ideas That Speak to contribute to both speechwriting as well as help non-profits with their fund-raising copy. No one has asked me to write speeches for them, but a couple of clients and prospective clients, have asked me to write fund-raising material. Both these entities have come from the niche I want to help the most, theatre companies.
Why? Because I enjoy writing plays.
Since I was a kid, I found that the idea of intellectual seriousness provoked my deepest interest, and I reserved my strongest disagreement with those who were and are intellectually superficial, contemptuous of ideas and implications (NOTICE, I DO NOT SPEAK ABOUT INTELLIGENCE) from professors to business people to George Bush the younger. My great challenge is to sustain intellectual seriousness, to grapple with important issues of politics, history, the “humanities” as a whole, ethics, religion, and more in every way I can, through reading, speech, thought, writing, and, especially creative writing.
Here’s a list of things I don’t like.
I don’t like it when people say that disagreements simply come down to “semantics”. Well, semantics are words. If we can’t express disagreements clearly in words, we get desperate and resort to a lack of respect and violence, so we can’t simply think that labeling disagreements as “semantic” differences is a good thing.
I dislike “easy answers”, people resorting to “usual sources” when it comes to expressing opinions that come from their “comfort zone”.
I dislike laziness and a lack of curiosity.
How do I push back positively against these negatives? Well, I write plays that incorporate playfulness and idea exploration. My latest play performed (thanks to the Vermont Playwrights Circle’s Tenfest) was The Aspirants.
In Aspirants, a chartered flight is full of people who ostensibly do one things, but would rather do the other. The only passenger, who, it turns out, has boarded the plane by mistake, who isn’t an “aspirant”, ironically, is an actress.
I won’t tell you what happens, since I hope that it will get performed again, and you might see it. Much that happens on the surface is silly, but the play’s seriousness lies in the individual’s perpetual search for not just vocational satisfaction, but soul satisfaction.
I want to write non-profit copy because so many causes out there need someone to champion language on their behalf, and I am just the person to do it; these groups bring hope and joy to the world, especially theatre companies, and we ought to help and support them any way we can.
You might say that I aspire to help them and bring deepest contentment to my soul in the process.
Stay tuned.
My themes have loosely followed 1) speech, particularly political speech; 2) my intellectual evolution and how I see thought/reality/consciousness; and finally 3)simply how to express yourself.
Where do I go from here?
Well, let me start by admitting why my posts have lagged at late. I certainly do enjoy writing them for the few of you who read them, and I like to think they add some value to the world of thought and communication, but at the moment, my posts aren’t tethered to the rest of my business in any substantial way.
Maybe it's time to somehow change that.
I started Ideas That Speak to contribute to both speechwriting as well as help non-profits with their fund-raising copy. No one has asked me to write speeches for them, but a couple of clients and prospective clients, have asked me to write fund-raising material. Both these entities have come from the niche I want to help the most, theatre companies.
Why? Because I enjoy writing plays.
Since I was a kid, I found that the idea of intellectual seriousness provoked my deepest interest, and I reserved my strongest disagreement with those who were and are intellectually superficial, contemptuous of ideas and implications (NOTICE, I DO NOT SPEAK ABOUT INTELLIGENCE) from professors to business people to George Bush the younger. My great challenge is to sustain intellectual seriousness, to grapple with important issues of politics, history, the “humanities” as a whole, ethics, religion, and more in every way I can, through reading, speech, thought, writing, and, especially creative writing.
Here’s a list of things I don’t like.
I don’t like it when people say that disagreements simply come down to “semantics”. Well, semantics are words. If we can’t express disagreements clearly in words, we get desperate and resort to a lack of respect and violence, so we can’t simply think that labeling disagreements as “semantic” differences is a good thing.
I dislike “easy answers”, people resorting to “usual sources” when it comes to expressing opinions that come from their “comfort zone”.
I dislike laziness and a lack of curiosity.
How do I push back positively against these negatives? Well, I write plays that incorporate playfulness and idea exploration. My latest play performed (thanks to the Vermont Playwrights Circle’s Tenfest) was The Aspirants.
In Aspirants, a chartered flight is full of people who ostensibly do one things, but would rather do the other. The only passenger, who, it turns out, has boarded the plane by mistake, who isn’t an “aspirant”, ironically, is an actress.
I won’t tell you what happens, since I hope that it will get performed again, and you might see it. Much that happens on the surface is silly, but the play’s seriousness lies in the individual’s perpetual search for not just vocational satisfaction, but soul satisfaction.
I want to write non-profit copy because so many causes out there need someone to champion language on their behalf, and I am just the person to do it; these groups bring hope and joy to the world, especially theatre companies, and we ought to help and support them any way we can.
You might say that I aspire to help them and bring deepest contentment to my soul in the process.
Stay tuned.
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Words Within
I had the good fortune a couple of months ago to travel to Italy for the first time.
While I could tell you about the wonders of the places I visited, I am related to people who can and have written of these regions with more skill and evocative prose than I ever could.
But, I did make an interesting discovery, or should I say rediscovery.
Ten years ago, when I was last in Europe, I was in Denmark for around a week. While I discovered, for one of the few times in my life, that I was surrounded (or immersed, as language programs like to term it) by a language other than English.
As a result, just as when I am similarly immersed in quality music, I tended to focus on my mind and its language. Instead of thinking, in “automatic pilot” fashion, in English, my mind became untethered, looking, looking to "come out to play", searching creatively for any other language it knew, in my case, German.
I spoke in German to my relatives from time to time, rather than take advantage of their excellent English.
(By the way, people have often told me that they expected my German would help me learn Danish. Believe me, it was no advantage. German tends to be much far forward in pronunciation, Danish is swallowed. In fact, if anything, Danish shares more sounds with Old English, ie, Anglo-Saxon.)
Well, at any rate, in Italy, the same thing happened. While people spoke English to us without difficulty or objection, when they could, the immersion of all surrounding textual sounds forced me inward to pay attention, and suddenly, slow down and stop the sort of “tape loop” and automatic feeding of often mindless English through my consciousness.
Why does this happen?
Well, I am neither linguist, nor neurologist, but I do meditate, and, my guess is that the mind’s sudden realization of an alien textual context gave the mind something it’s supposed to have, a task worthy of reason and paying appropriate attention.
Once that happened, that unanchored mind, instead of meandering, undifferentiated, unthinking, and unconscious, among others conversations and my own, was forced back, by a wall of ignorance, into itself.
By the way, when I finally got to engage someone in German, a charming college student from Hamburg, she was very kind, particularly as my initial attempts to get back to that second language were fumbling, indeed. But, I got better quickly, and I was proud of myself for taking that chance.
So, be bold, learn another language. If you take up that challenge with the right attitude, you’ll be on stage, an actor in the theater of speech, and you’ll appreciate your mother tongue all the more.
Stay tuned.
While I could tell you about the wonders of the places I visited, I am related to people who can and have written of these regions with more skill and evocative prose than I ever could.
But, I did make an interesting discovery, or should I say rediscovery.
Ten years ago, when I was last in Europe, I was in Denmark for around a week. While I discovered, for one of the few times in my life, that I was surrounded (or immersed, as language programs like to term it) by a language other than English.
As a result, just as when I am similarly immersed in quality music, I tended to focus on my mind and its language. Instead of thinking, in “automatic pilot” fashion, in English, my mind became untethered, looking, looking to "come out to play", searching creatively for any other language it knew, in my case, German.
I spoke in German to my relatives from time to time, rather than take advantage of their excellent English.
(By the way, people have often told me that they expected my German would help me learn Danish. Believe me, it was no advantage. German tends to be much far forward in pronunciation, Danish is swallowed. In fact, if anything, Danish shares more sounds with Old English, ie, Anglo-Saxon.)
Well, at any rate, in Italy, the same thing happened. While people spoke English to us without difficulty or objection, when they could, the immersion of all surrounding textual sounds forced me inward to pay attention, and suddenly, slow down and stop the sort of “tape loop” and automatic feeding of often mindless English through my consciousness.
Why does this happen?
Well, I am neither linguist, nor neurologist, but I do meditate, and, my guess is that the mind’s sudden realization of an alien textual context gave the mind something it’s supposed to have, a task worthy of reason and paying appropriate attention.
Once that happened, that unanchored mind, instead of meandering, undifferentiated, unthinking, and unconscious, among others conversations and my own, was forced back, by a wall of ignorance, into itself.
By the way, when I finally got to engage someone in German, a charming college student from Hamburg, she was very kind, particularly as my initial attempts to get back to that second language were fumbling, indeed. But, I got better quickly, and I was proud of myself for taking that chance.
So, be bold, learn another language. If you take up that challenge with the right attitude, you’ll be on stage, an actor in the theater of speech, and you’ll appreciate your mother tongue all the more.
Stay tuned.
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Ripping Off the Bandage
This post is the one that resembles both dabbing at the wound with disinfectant as well as ripping off the bandage.
Neither process is pleasant, but both are necessary.
When you are ready to finalize your written or formal verbal communication, you need someone who is equal parts ruthless and blunt, even if not always a help in the most global sense.
Yes, that fearsome, loud, and uninhibited voice inside you, is, dear reader(s)(I am always hopeful that more than one of you is reading these posts) is YOUR EDITOR.
Don’t cover your ears, even though last time, I negatively characterized the logical part of your writing mind; I said, “that editor’s a killer”.
How do you use that challenging voice inside you? Allow him or her (remember, editing knows no sex) to do what it does best, by doing for the editor what you do for your listeners and readers: putting the editor in a position to do what it does best, what it is meant to do.
What is the process your internal editor is best equipped to do?
Your internal editor does its best work when ELIMINATING THINGS YOU DON’T NEED.
What does that reality mean for your writing process? It means that you put off editing until the very end, when you are absolutely certain that you have EVERY IDEA somehow expressed in your words, and the only thing left to do is make sure you have expressed those ideas as clearly as you can.
Think of your editor as someone helping you move from one home to another. But, remember, this packer is always someone who took a dim view of all your belongings; as a result of this packer’s contempt for your possessions, you invite him or her in at the very last minute, when you are sure what you are bringing, but you are not sure how to fit all those things into whatever vehicle you are using for transport. Your editor is vigorous, energetic, and always sure of things, so put him or her in charge of putting stuff into the vehicle.
Where does elmination come in? Well, for example, you want to “fit an idea” into a sentence. You know you need the idea, but you call it “very unique”. Items are “unique”, because they are one of a kind. If you add the word “very” to “unique”, you are attempting to add a degree of “uniqueness” that doesn’t help explain anything to your listener or reader.
Or, to put my point in blunt editorial terms: the word “very” doesn’t add value in this case.
The notion of “adding value” is the bottom line any time your editor forces you to question the inclusion of something. That bias on the part of the editor reinforces my point that you have to make your process of “inclusion” a final act, because you don’t want the criterion of adding value utilized to judge an idea’s inclusion, just a word or phrase’s inclusion.
As I said in an earlier post, you also utilize the editor best when you limit each “pass” or “review” of a speech or document to eliminate something, such as unnecessary words; noun verb disagreements (using a plural verb with a singular noun); using inconsistent tenses; getting rid of curt sentences that hurt flow or excessively long ones (where a subject stated in the first part of the sentence might be lost; and eliminating the passive voice (unless, as I’ve stated in a previous post, you don’t want to show clearly who is responsible or was responsible for a particular action).
Remember one last thing: as you do each edit pass, read aloud. You would be amazed at what items the ear catches, but the eye does not.
If you try to do too many things in a particular view, you are empowering the editor to now become that mover who is telling you to throw things out and not move them rather than how best to pack them in the moving vehicle. We don’t want that, do we? Of course not! When we move into our new home, we are the best judge of what we need there. We just may not know how to get it there in one trip.
Stay tuned.
Neither process is pleasant, but both are necessary.
When you are ready to finalize your written or formal verbal communication, you need someone who is equal parts ruthless and blunt, even if not always a help in the most global sense.
Yes, that fearsome, loud, and uninhibited voice inside you, is, dear reader(s)(I am always hopeful that more than one of you is reading these posts) is YOUR EDITOR.
Don’t cover your ears, even though last time, I negatively characterized the logical part of your writing mind; I said, “that editor’s a killer”.
How do you use that challenging voice inside you? Allow him or her (remember, editing knows no sex) to do what it does best, by doing for the editor what you do for your listeners and readers: putting the editor in a position to do what it does best, what it is meant to do.
What is the process your internal editor is best equipped to do?
Your internal editor does its best work when ELIMINATING THINGS YOU DON’T NEED.
What does that reality mean for your writing process? It means that you put off editing until the very end, when you are absolutely certain that you have EVERY IDEA somehow expressed in your words, and the only thing left to do is make sure you have expressed those ideas as clearly as you can.
Think of your editor as someone helping you move from one home to another. But, remember, this packer is always someone who took a dim view of all your belongings; as a result of this packer’s contempt for your possessions, you invite him or her in at the very last minute, when you are sure what you are bringing, but you are not sure how to fit all those things into whatever vehicle you are using for transport. Your editor is vigorous, energetic, and always sure of things, so put him or her in charge of putting stuff into the vehicle.
Where does elmination come in? Well, for example, you want to “fit an idea” into a sentence. You know you need the idea, but you call it “very unique”. Items are “unique”, because they are one of a kind. If you add the word “very” to “unique”, you are attempting to add a degree of “uniqueness” that doesn’t help explain anything to your listener or reader.
Or, to put my point in blunt editorial terms: the word “very” doesn’t add value in this case.
The notion of “adding value” is the bottom line any time your editor forces you to question the inclusion of something. That bias on the part of the editor reinforces my point that you have to make your process of “inclusion” a final act, because you don’t want the criterion of adding value utilized to judge an idea’s inclusion, just a word or phrase’s inclusion.
As I said in an earlier post, you also utilize the editor best when you limit each “pass” or “review” of a speech or document to eliminate something, such as unnecessary words; noun verb disagreements (using a plural verb with a singular noun); using inconsistent tenses; getting rid of curt sentences that hurt flow or excessively long ones (where a subject stated in the first part of the sentence might be lost; and eliminating the passive voice (unless, as I’ve stated in a previous post, you don’t want to show clearly who is responsible or was responsible for a particular action).
Remember one last thing: as you do each edit pass, read aloud. You would be amazed at what items the ear catches, but the eye does not.
If you try to do too many things in a particular view, you are empowering the editor to now become that mover who is telling you to throw things out and not move them rather than how best to pack them in the moving vehicle. We don’t want that, do we? Of course not! When we move into our new home, we are the best judge of what we need there. We just may not know how to get it there in one trip.
Stay tuned.
Saturday, May 2, 2009
HUMOR ME
I just realized that I may have left some of you behind when writing these last posts on “composing”, following the time-tested and sweet symbolism of Vermont sugaring.
What did I leave out?
Well, despite the huge numbers of bloggers out there and people with things to say of all kinds, in all kinds of forums, other aspirants lead lives of quiet desperation in terms of self-expression, because they either believe they are not “creative”, or “they have nothing to say”.
If you blog, obviously, you’ve gotten past such obstacles. If you don’t blog, and/or you haven’t moved past these significant misgivings about yourself, in other words, if you don’t think you have artistic ability, creativity, and talent in self-expression (related challenging inhibitions involve carrying a tune), then you are going to cheat yourself out of manifesting your best potential when reading or writing.
Just humor me when I tell you that you may have more imagination as an “imagist” than you think.
Okay, now try this…imagine that you are trying to compose some ideas about writing. Write down the word “pencil”. Quick, don’t think, just write down the next association that comes into your mind.
Here’s what I wrote: pencil…drama…kerchief…melody.
Wait, turn off that left brain editor, I can hear he or she (inhibition knows no sex) saying, “Stop…those connections are illogical!”; when it comes to setting out sheer creative raw material, that editor’s a killer.
When the pencil writes,
Drama and a melody
Can weave a kerchief.
Nice little haiku, just a small, subtle, but significant clue as to how ready (and probably underutilized) your right brain, your creative part, is.
I won’t argue with your needlessly vague but self-denigrating preconception that you aren’t creative; all I’ll do is tell you that you and everyone else can free-associate.
Try it, you’ll like it, and you’ll find images you didn’t know you had.
Stay tuned.
What did I leave out?
Well, despite the huge numbers of bloggers out there and people with things to say of all kinds, in all kinds of forums, other aspirants lead lives of quiet desperation in terms of self-expression, because they either believe they are not “creative”, or “they have nothing to say”.
If you blog, obviously, you’ve gotten past such obstacles. If you don’t blog, and/or you haven’t moved past these significant misgivings about yourself, in other words, if you don’t think you have artistic ability, creativity, and talent in self-expression (related challenging inhibitions involve carrying a tune), then you are going to cheat yourself out of manifesting your best potential when reading or writing.
Just humor me when I tell you that you may have more imagination as an “imagist” than you think.
Okay, now try this…imagine that you are trying to compose some ideas about writing. Write down the word “pencil”. Quick, don’t think, just write down the next association that comes into your mind.
Here’s what I wrote: pencil…drama…kerchief…melody.
Wait, turn off that left brain editor, I can hear he or she (inhibition knows no sex) saying, “Stop…those connections are illogical!”; when it comes to setting out sheer creative raw material, that editor’s a killer.
When the pencil writes,
Drama and a melody
Can weave a kerchief.
Nice little haiku, just a small, subtle, but significant clue as to how ready (and probably underutilized) your right brain, your creative part, is.
I won’t argue with your needlessly vague but self-denigrating preconception that you aren’t creative; all I’ll do is tell you that you and everyone else can free-associate.
Try it, you’ll like it, and you’ll find images you didn’t know you had.
Stay tuned.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Boiling It Down
Okay…tapping’s done.
Syrup, the tasty finished product, is next…or is it?
Yeah, you’re right…we have to boil first, or in textual terms, edit.
I know, it’s a drag, the boring stuff, but, if you have the great raw material, lots of it, and you need an accordingly sweet, best-grade finished product, you have to edit.
Remember, before, I talked about tapping into a vein somewhere out there that exists, independently of you, some creative underground stream of sorts?
Well editing is about editing the aural…don’t I mean the oral? No, I mean the aural, the product of the ear.
If you hear what’s coming out of that stream you’ve found in the universe, unfortunately, you can’t simply ‘download’ it and utilize it. It’s a staging area, like the maple tree. You take some raw material from it, you boil it down, and then you have your finished product.
If you don’t make the effort to finish it, you just have sap.
Well, how do you connect to that stream out there? You hear it: as a result, the discovery is aural.
You edit the aural. How?
You remove things that you don’t need.
You make connections among sections as clear as you can for the reader or listener.
You add things that you need, but only things that “add value”. Don’t add anything unless you need to.
Read it out loud.
Then review the whole thing all over again, removing, connecting, adding judiciously, reading out loud.
Each time you do a “round” of editing, you’re looking for something different, word choice, consistency, verb tenses, length, etc….if you require too much from a single edit, the final sweetness won’t be as good as it could be.
I know, when you saw the word edit, you gulped, and your eyes glazed over, but that wasn’t so bad, was it?
Remember, no boiling, no syrup.
Now, go find a tree, and start tapping.
Stay tuned.
Syrup, the tasty finished product, is next…or is it?
Yeah, you’re right…we have to boil first, or in textual terms, edit.
I know, it’s a drag, the boring stuff, but, if you have the great raw material, lots of it, and you need an accordingly sweet, best-grade finished product, you have to edit.
Remember, before, I talked about tapping into a vein somewhere out there that exists, independently of you, some creative underground stream of sorts?
Well editing is about editing the aural…don’t I mean the oral? No, I mean the aural, the product of the ear.
If you hear what’s coming out of that stream you’ve found in the universe, unfortunately, you can’t simply ‘download’ it and utilize it. It’s a staging area, like the maple tree. You take some raw material from it, you boil it down, and then you have your finished product.
If you don’t make the effort to finish it, you just have sap.
Well, how do you connect to that stream out there? You hear it: as a result, the discovery is aural.
You edit the aural. How?
You remove things that you don’t need.
You make connections among sections as clear as you can for the reader or listener.
You add things that you need, but only things that “add value”. Don’t add anything unless you need to.
Read it out loud.
Then review the whole thing all over again, removing, connecting, adding judiciously, reading out loud.
Each time you do a “round” of editing, you’re looking for something different, word choice, consistency, verb tenses, length, etc….if you require too much from a single edit, the final sweetness won’t be as good as it could be.
I know, when you saw the word edit, you gulped, and your eyes glazed over, but that wasn’t so bad, was it?
Remember, no boiling, no syrup.
Now, go find a tree, and start tapping.
Stay tuned.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Tapping
It’s the time of the year when the maple trees yield the sap that produces that superb gift, maple syrup.
Just the right combination of warm days and cold nights, spring’s advancing and retreating, result in maple syrup…and what is it, 30 gallons, 40 gallons that make for maybe a quart of maple syrup?
Well, the right words come forth that way, and sometimes you need that much textual “sap” to yield an appropriate message. The trick is to get warm enough days in your mind to make the sap flow.
How?
Get your right brain involved…free associate with a word, or a series of words, fill up a page or two of associations, without thinking, feel the shift and suddenly, you’ve connected perhaps the dullest word to the ripest, most startling image out there.
When you make that shift, you’ve hit a “vein”, the kind of word flow that’s always going on in the universe, just waiting for you to find a way into it.
But you have to share.
What do I mean? Well, in the old days, in college campuses, wisdom was “received”. Only when you’d read sufficient secondary works or cribbed notes from some exalted scholar did the powers that be permit you to push out some minimal, timid opinion.
But if you’re willing to make that shift to right brain associations to launch you on to that flood of words that you can then edit and shape, you’re already your own authority. You don’t need any tyrant to tell you how to describe what you want to describe to people in essays, fiction, poetry, or speeches.
Offer the same freedom to others. Be open to the vein that you’ve tapped into, share those images, and then be open in turn to the folks out there as you pass on the universe's wisdom.
Stay tuned.
Just the right combination of warm days and cold nights, spring’s advancing and retreating, result in maple syrup…and what is it, 30 gallons, 40 gallons that make for maybe a quart of maple syrup?
Well, the right words come forth that way, and sometimes you need that much textual “sap” to yield an appropriate message. The trick is to get warm enough days in your mind to make the sap flow.
How?
Get your right brain involved…free associate with a word, or a series of words, fill up a page or two of associations, without thinking, feel the shift and suddenly, you’ve connected perhaps the dullest word to the ripest, most startling image out there.
When you make that shift, you’ve hit a “vein”, the kind of word flow that’s always going on in the universe, just waiting for you to find a way into it.
But you have to share.
What do I mean? Well, in the old days, in college campuses, wisdom was “received”. Only when you’d read sufficient secondary works or cribbed notes from some exalted scholar did the powers that be permit you to push out some minimal, timid opinion.
But if you’re willing to make that shift to right brain associations to launch you on to that flood of words that you can then edit and shape, you’re already your own authority. You don’t need any tyrant to tell you how to describe what you want to describe to people in essays, fiction, poetry, or speeches.
Offer the same freedom to others. Be open to the vein that you’ve tapped into, share those images, and then be open in turn to the folks out there as you pass on the universe's wisdom.
Stay tuned.
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