Sounds so simple, as if I had been puttering about the house and was due at a friend's for dinner.  Glance at the clock: "Ah, I need 15 minutes travel time, and it's now twenty minutes before I'm due to be there.  Time to go."

I gave myself 2 hours at the party.  Two hours have passed.  Time to go.

Energetically, I detect a shift in the room, one that doesn't line up with my integrity.  Time to go.

Late for class!  Time to go!

Time to go.

So simple.

I got the letter from GTU.  I've been offered admission and have accepted.  Time to go.

Time to let go of what I've been doing, and move froward into my next guidance.  Time to release what I love, just as it is, without making it dramatic or inappropriate.  Time to feel myself all the way down to the bottom of this, so that I know my actions are based in right choosing as a response to core issues. 

Time to become.

Time to manage my chi so that I don't create sabotage structures that will aggravate transitional processes.

Time to apply my chi to the tasks at hand--tasks that must be accomplished if I am to be a good servant.

I'm done, here.  I'm done doing what I can do here.  Time to go fill my grail cup again form another fountain, so that I can bring it back to the world and share what my cup gets filled with. 

I am not done loving this place, these people, this tribe.  That I will continue.  Time to do it somewhere else, though.  May I be granted the grace of knowing my love from my attachments to what I think I love.  May I be granted clear and easy communication as I transition.  May I be granted a heart and body big enough to hold it all.

Time to go.

I get a subscription to Playboy.  Free.  I have for years, and no idea why.  I never renew, I never pay for it.  But it comes in my box every month.  I kinda assume that it's related to the books I've written, as if somehow my name got on a list of sex positive educators or something, and that gets you free Playboys.  Pure speculation on my part.

This month's issue is all about nude college 'girls' form the Big 10.  I think that if they're posing in Playboy they ought to be identified as women, but apparently the target market for Playboy prefers to think of women as girls.

Anyway. I have a ritual: I open the plastic casing my Playboy comes in, and I look for the bunny.  Always one hidden on the cover; this month it was easy to find.  Then I flip the magazine over, and get rid of all the inserts and paper bits.  There's usually subscription cards and some ads.  This month's full page, hard paper insert to playboy was this:

The pic's a little fuzzy, here, but you can go see the original on the Danbury Mint website.

It's a gold heart, with a fake diamond cross in the middle; around the outer edges are inscribed the first part of the Christian Lord's Prayer.

How's that for kinky?  Is it just me, or does this stirke you as ironic also?

We named our dog Guru on purpose.  By the time we actually got him, we knew (becuase the process of getting him was lessoning in itself) that he was going to be a great teacher.  And that's what Guru means--teacher. 

He's just about the sweetest thing ever. He's unconditionally loving, forgiving and compassionate.  He doesn't hold shit against me, nor does he try to angle me for more of what he might think he needs.  He's gentle, playful and enthusiastic.  He's a blessing in an 80 pound shaggy black dogsuit.

We were playing with him last night.  We were playing "pull your ears off," one of his favorite games.  He was bounding about, dancing and dodging, yipping a playful doggie lovesong.  He ran after an imaginary something or other, only to return for some more earplay.  As he galumphed off yet again, I said, "I love my dog--but probably not well enough."

That got me to thinking.  Do I love anything well enough?  Has there ever been a situation, person, condition in my life where I was able to love well enough?  Have I ever loved as hard as I could, as well as I could?

My saboteur tells me, "Nope."  My ego tells me, "Well, you sure have tried..."  My heart tells me that the notion of loving well enough is really weird, and might even be irrelevant depending on the standard for comparison.

Is the urge to love well enough a healthy human state in which our desires--both boon and bane--help us surge forward into more and greater ways of loving?

Or is it utterly neuro, a psychotic state in which such uncertainty and fear arise that love becomes no longer the object of living but the subject of a skitzy internal discourse--and a distraction?

My jury's still out on this one.  Until I understand what loving well enough really means, I will continue to pull my dog's ears off and listen to the Universe for the yips of a lovesong that I too can sing with all my heart.

Settling in for bed, I think about my day, see how I'm doing, check on the condition of my condition.  I think about how the day weaves into my larger creation structures--about grad school, who's going to accept me, what if no one wants me, how did today add to the pot, am I moving closer to my destination, is my will rightly aligned--those sorts of things.  I'm contemplative, and the sound of a bus enters my awareness.  I hear the bus pull up at the bottom of my drive, by the student apartment complex down the hill.  I think, "Gee, I sure am glad that I'm not getting on (or off, for that matter) a bus at 9:23 pm!"  I realized I was glad because some part of me was harboring the fear that:

I have to ride buses at night but all I want is to be home and cozy and not out doing crazy ass shit in the middle of the night like I used to even if there was once upon a time I did like riding buses at night and maybe I should like it still because I used to like it once but now I don't want to and...Oh!

Wait!

I don't HAVE to ride buses at night!

No one can make me and I can choose to create situations in which it becomes less likely that I would need to ride a bus at night (because I certainly would if that were right choosing in that moment.  It's a preference that I not ride night buses, not an insistence).
Realizing my bus-riding empowerment made me feel good, so I broadened my consciousness to see if I could find the larger pattern that was resonating, evinced by the feeling of balance and goodness that was generated by my thought patterns.  When I feel lightened by a creation, it;s generally the "right" thing for me to be engaged with.  To increase the occurrences of right-resonance, I look for a big-picture approach so that I might create more things that resonate in a similar fashion.  I've noticed it's the patterns that are important, more than the specific surface-level details or symptoms of the pattern itself.

South Park again: it's the part of the program where one of the kids says "I think we've all learned something important here today..."

My version:
Part of my anxiety about my future is the nebulous, lurking (and previously unnamed) fear that someone or something is going to forcibly drag me back into my past, with its habits, ruts and pain.  But I'm the only travel agent that can authorize that trip.  Nothing, no-one--other than me--can drag me back into my past.  it's a part of me; my biology is my biography, and every decision I've ever made, as well as its consequences, are lodged firmly in my skinsuit.  I repeat patterns when the lesson is incomplete; by paying attention, I clear the ripples of a pattern, learn, evolve, and move forward.

I never move backwards; I can't.  None of us can.  I can be afraid of going backwards, but it just can't happen, and that's one less tool my saboteur has to use against me.  I return to present moment, more aware of my fear and how it might try and stop me from dreaming, moving, creating.

I am liberated.  I can get off that bus.  Should I decide to take a night ride, I know where the bus stop is.

Do ya think that when the Republican Convention had musicians do a song called "Raising McCain" that they were aware that they're playing on a phrase, "raising Cain" which refers to Cain and Able, the two early Biblical brothers who ripped each other up?  Do ya think they caught the irony of representing their candidate for the Presidency by implying the action of brother against brother in the name of lust and greed?  Cain, a farmer (the first, since he and his bro were the first and second sons of Adam and Eve) commits the first murder in history by killing his brother, Abel (the first shepherd) because Cain didn't like that God accepted Abel's sacrifice and not his.  Sounds petty to me.  This story occurs in all 3 Abrahamic faiths: Bible: Genesis 4: 1-16; Qur'an: 5:26-32 and in the Talmud in Moishe 5:16-41.  "Raising Cain" means to get all ate up about something and then do murder to get what you want.

This disturbs me in and of itself--all the moreso as part of a political campaign,

I try to keep a level heart in these matters, and look for the threads of truth in what's being said, regardless of who's saying it.  McCain, at the end of his RNC speech said something I believe to be utterly true: the greatest source of happiness is to find something more important than you and give your life to it.  I think he actually mean that.  I heard stuff in the DNC speeches, too, that made sense--and plenty to piss me off.  But this?  "Raising McCain?"  the deep, energetic threads of resonance frighten me.  Please join me as I pray for our people, and all the citizens of Indra's Jeweled net as we face a rather large collective choice point, and create the next edition of our collective reality.  Pray for peace, for reasonable thought, for evolutionary impulses to win out over lower-chakra habits.  Visualize balance, and manifest in in your own life so that it may seep into the collective consciousness.  But above all, please join me in my fervent hope that this world we live in does not become a case of brother against brother, in a petty, jealous battle about who God likes better.

We've started doing a new thing.  Every Sunday, we open up our home (which in and of itself is a feat, given how reclusive and private we tend to be) to friends and tribe for the Sunday Fireside Chat (aka Eat, Drink & Burn).

We never know who's going to show up.  It's like pushing the 'random' button on life--a fine exercise for people who normally exert white-knuckle control over things.  Last night, 12 people wandered in, from 12 weeks old to almost 50.  We started the discussion with who taught you how to forgive, and how.  It was fascinating to talk about; we had to back all the way out into defining forgiveness.  That's when things got interesting.

One person told a fabulous story about having smelly feet on a train and how an impassioned Irish bricklayer was certain it was him; a psychologist intervened, and he had just enough time to go wash his feet before the adamant Irish came in for a whiff.  We had a story about a hitchhiker was picked up, and began telling the driver about how they'd been stabbed.  The hitcher got dropped off at a trailer park (that later, didn't exist) and totally creeped the driver out.  It was surreal, like an honest-to-campfire ghost story.  We heard a tale of mind altering substances and a trip in an elevator that, when told to go to heaven, went to the ground floor and they couldn't get back in the building.

We'd pretty much stopped directly discussing forgiveness at that point, and contented ourselves with talkstory.  But I never stopped listening for it in all the stories.

Smelly Feet was forgave the Irishman his insistence (especially since he was able to go was his pedic culprits).  Driver forgave his hitcher for scaring the crap outta him; the tale was worth the ride.  Acid in an Elevator forgave the scalper he had to buy tickets from to get back into the show he'd wandered out of on the elevator.  And all those instances of forgiveness pretty much occurred spontaneously, without any overt, deliberate effort to be forgiving.

Isn't that how it should be?  Isn't it true that our ability to forgive is directly related to the amount of ourselves that we've insisted remain connected to the original incident that caused the need for forgiveness in the first place?

Forgiveness seems inclined to happen on its own.  How's that for a novel concept?  Let's take that a step further: what if the only thing that stops forgiveness from occurring is US.  That means that we're living outside an intended state, impeding our own capacity to forgive and create compassion by our rabid insistence that we will NOT forgive, no matter what! 

Or what if forgiveness doesn't occur naturally?  That, like patience, the only thing we get when we pray for forgiveness is the opportunity to learn it via experiences?

I forgive myself for not knowing these answers.  I think myself clever for being willing to ask the questions.  I think about smelly feet on a train, the eerie dead hitchhiker, and about going down in an elevator on acid.  I am amazed and delighted by the myriad of human experiences being had outside my skinsuit, available to me if only I can forgive people for being such doofuses in general, and open my home up to people so that they can bring something to the fire--something to eat, drink, or burn.

When you pick up one end of a stick, you also retrieve the other end.

I don't remember who said that, but I'm finding it to be true.

I've been a student for a really long time.  I've also been a teacher for a really long time.  In an academic context--which is where I'm living now--I've been a student more.  In the kinky world, I've been a teacher more.  Still--it's only one stick.

There's an invisible line that separates a teacher from a student.  It has traits and characteristics; while being non-physical, it is observable through its traits.  The line doesn't separate the 2 conditions, though.  It unifies them.  And I'm straddling that line right now.  The line is that invisible in betweenness, like the space in between the curly and prickly parts of velcro, that holds the bond and it components in place.

A student without a teachers is hungry.  A teacher without students is a boring pedant with no friends.  Students and teachers are interdependent, one upon the other, for the fullness of experience on either end of the stick.

I'm not an academic student anymore.  Nor am I an academic teacher.  I'm in this in between place of being a teaching assistant.  I do some gruntwork, make the prof's job easier, do a lecture section or two, and mostly, I just show up and hold space.  I don't have homework anymore; now, I just have work to do at home related to the courses I'm helping with.  :)

This feels funny.  It's perfectly appropriate, though.  I'm in the middle of figuring out who I am now, so this seems like the ideal ground of discovery, the in-betweenness.  I love to teach.  It's one of those states of grace for me.  It isn't work.  It's sheer bliss.  I call that guidance.  But my saboteur keeps trying to tell me that I'm going to be in limbo (and the financial limbo that goes with this state of flux) forever.  It' always going to be like this, where I'm poor and working my ass off "for nothing."

My saboteur is not half as smart as it pretends to be.  It fails to be present to this moment, in which I am both student and teacher.  The payoff might not be in dollars, but the payoff is huge, and I miss it if all I'm looking for is dollar signs.  I figure that once I have a better idea of who I am in this place, the how and what of doing will unfold, and I have no doubt that the resources to move me along are right there, too.

Okay, so I might be a simp, here, but I just realized something (yes, please do picture me like a South Park character at the end of an episode; an image is provided for your convenience in so doing).  Please note: my use of the terms good and bad are for relative ease in reading; the use of the terms are not value judgments.

I'm havin a great day.  Nothing special happened, nothing spectacular or out of the ordinary.  It's a good day because I'm rightly aligned; it's a good day because I chose a good day and have the grace to see that I got what i asked for, and that makes me happy.

It's a good day.  I'm happy.

I have bad days.  Some of them are pretty effing lousy, in fact, especially when my skinsuit acts up and I end up experiencing my life as painful.  When that happens, I tell someone about it.  I let my partner, for instance, know that I don't feel well, and this that and the other.  My partner hears all about my bad days, whatever the cause might be.  .

But today's not a bad day.  Today is a good day.  I am well.

So it occurs to me: go pounce on the partner.  A hug, a smile, a kiss.  When I feel crappy, it's all about the blah blah blah crappy blah.  But when I have a good day, my apparent default setting is to keep it to myself, to not bother to mention that I'm having a good day.

How back asswards is that?

I mean, it's not like I'm going to endure my life, "suffering" in silence.  That's not who I am.  I think what's more important is to bring the expression of good, happy, contended to fore, putting those things verbally into the awareness of loved ones.

But it's deeper.  When I'm in a good place, odds are my partner has a lot to do with it.  I am the most held, bestest cared-for person I know. 

When I'm in a bad day place, my partner hears about it and assumes that it has something to do with hir.  That's simply not true.  When I'm in a bad day place, it more often than not has nothing whatsoever to do with my partner.  NOTHING.

When I'm in a good day place, it almost always has something to do with my partner.  Some kind act, or a smile, or something.  And the assumption is, because I say nothing, that partner has nothing to do with it.

Again, I ask you, how back assward is that?

New Plan.

When happy: talk about it.  Ensure that partner [insert loved one, friend, cohort or colleague here] knows that it's a good day place, and that their existence has something to do with being in a good day place.  If nothing is obvious, exert gratitude and find something less obvious.  Surprise self with even more reasons to be grateful!  Woohooo!

In the event of a bad day place, disburse information about my state as needed in order to not lay a trip on [person].  Delivery of info only; no manipulation for emotional participation in bad day place.  Remind [person] that it has nothing to do with them (because whether immediately or ultimately, it's true that no one else is responsible for our choices). 

I think it's a good plan, and will help me learn how to move forward into the world from the happy place, instead of walking around backwards wondering why I can't see where I'
m going and why I'm not happy.  :)

My dream position is Tool.  I want to be a good servant.  I want to be a good rock, drop myself in the right places at the right time, unconcerened about the ripples, focused only on being a good rock.  My dream context to do this in would be training teachers how to bring the discussion of religion back into the classroom, creating greater religious literacy in all traditions which will lead to the possibility for a truly plural culrture.  My job descrition would read something like "A good tool who helped create a more peacful world for everyone."

We have a way of getting very intensely nutted up about things that resonate with Importance.  For example, the GRE.  Technically, at least in the maya, things like GRE scores are supposed to be significant to receiving acceptance from the schools of one's choice. WE focus on the scores as the central point of the intensity, and experience the pressure of performance, the drive to do well.  Thing is, it isn't about the scores themselves; that's just the symptom.

I studied for the GRE.  I've been studying at a gradually increasing pace since late May, preparing myself for this experience.  Good scores are not a guarantee of acceptance, but it seems that they help--or can.  My top four choices are Stanford, Boston U, Harvard, and UCSB; these places are not known for their lack of selectivity.  I was thinking that I really, really need good GRE scores, because without them, they might not see me as being a good fit for their respective programs.

See the problem already?  Might not see me, as opposed to who the hell am I and how is what I'm doing a natural extension of my being?  A fine line, perhaps, but one very, very well worth noting.

I created a good bit of tension around the test.  Some of that's wise: You want to be on your toes for important hings.  But I knew something was wrong with all this.  I was too focused on the scores, not what they might mean.  Then I realized: the tension I was feeling was the approach of a choice point, a pivotal juncture.  It isn' that the scores will either secure or ban me from the high holy halls of academia.  The real deal is that when one approaches a nexus of energies created by the conglomeration of previous choices, one comes to a fork in the road--a for with, sometimes, several options leading off into several possible realities. I've been up on theses culminating choice points before, but never quite so consciously as this time.

It isn't that the scores themselves matter.  They don't.  They're just numbers based on averages, tested in ways that not all people--even the brilliant ones, do well with.  What matters is that this choice point will open some paths and close others, just because of the chemistry involved.  This point will influence the next leg of my journey: How I take the test--NOT the scores--will tell the Universe how serious I am about my statements of intent, and create opportunities to express the truth of my being, and opportunities to learn more about who I really am under all the ego crap that tries to tell me what it thinks I am.  If I approach this situation from an integral place of maximum intent and involvement, if I am rightly aligned to this experience (or any other) then the result will automatically be aligned rightly, too.  If I'm misaligned, the whole situation is still perfect and will allow all kinds of opportunities for growth--but most of them will be the hard way.  All I have to do is my authentic best.  And if I don't do my best, I still get to be willing to accept the consequences of my choices as they stand.

When I realized tha it was my relationship to the GRE as epitomized through scores and not the scores themselves that mattered, I felt instantly rightness.  I felt liberated.  I did the Snoopy dance.  I realized in that moment that I had already aced the GRE.
________________________________________________________________

I took the GRe yesterday at 9 am.  The writing above occurred the night before the test.  I did practice runs of the full test, and noted my scores.  My scores from the real test were higher than any of the practice runs I did at home.  I went into the test ready; I even got up at 5 am so I could have breakfast and go do some yoga before the test.  Believe me, yoga at 7am is not the usual fare around here.  I'm not what you'd call a morning person, really.  But it was called for, and I believe helped enormously; at the elat, it diffused the physical body tensions created by the coming together of energies at a choice point.  I'd practiced a good bit at home, so sitting down in front fo the computers in the test center was no big deal.  I kicked off my shoes, crossed my legs in the chair, and created the comfort of home as I dove in to the test.  I had a goal for the math section; I beat it by 10 points.  I did about 10 points less well on the verbal that I'd like to have, but still perfectly acceptable.  I was actually kinda surprised when I reached the end of the test, like, "Oh, that's it?  I'm done?"

The choices have been made.  I reached the highest concentration of choice point energies, moved through them, and now the landscape is different.  Sure, the scores matter, inasmuch as they're one of the fronts on paper that people ill look at ino order to decide if they want me at their school.  But regardless of where I think I want to go or what I think I want to do, the way I handled this is what matters, because now I can have no doubt in me at all that I was rightly aligned, and the results of this alignment will be what moves me forward on my adventure.  Whatever happens now, it will be the right thing; it can't be anything else.