LIFE-BUILT POEMS: Living Out Loud

lighted paper lanterns floating above a crowd in the night sky

FOLLOW THE GOD-THREAD (Shaping Dilemma)

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Here’s the most pretzel-brain-making question there ever was in the history of human thought: “Life is ___________” (fill in the blank). That’s the deceptively innocuous-looking problem that, given even just a little bit of space and time, can toss you smack-dab onto the back of the Chaos-Beast that takes you on a ride straight down the most convoluted and paradoxical rabbit hole a thinking being will ever encounter. Argh! I’ll tell you right now going in: That question actually has…

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tree in foreground decorated with painted dots and clocks in neighborhood with similarly decorated houses

TIME AS A SHAPING TOOL (An Overview)

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A really smart somebody or other once opined that time is what keeps everything in a story from happening all at once. Since we humans are all engaged in making up some kind of story or other, this is an important concept. I know. All kinds of people have weighed in with opinions – esoteric, scientific, and mundane – about Time. You have probably heard them all before. Basically, under all of that pretzel-brain making cascade, we are told that…

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empty highway going over a hill with sun rising

INNER PEACE AND BOTTOM LINES (IPS)

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ANOTHER IPS (Inner Peace Symptom): A growing understanding that life is all about “multiple bottom lines” and the way you balance the lot of them promotes inner peace or inner chaos. [If you start getting frazzled, you know something’s gotten out of whack and you have to go hunt it down and bonk it back into line…which doesn’t SOUND particularly peaceful, but is kinda fun.] For weeks now I’ve been mired in a bog of paradoxes of the finest kind….

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boy on a messy couch playing with a tape measure

MEASURE WHAT MATTERS (Shaper Challenge)

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Okay, listen up all you Achievement Junkies: Measurement matters! Yeah, yeah, yeah. You’ve heard it all before: “Measurement drives improvement,” it says here, and we’ve got an array of metrics that can measure just about anything…. We can measure how far, how long, how big, how high, how wide, how deep, how many and on and on and on. We can measure anything and everything and we’ve got the numbers and comparisons and indicators to prove it. Yup! Insights on…

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sculpture of two human figures (male and female) pushing on a shiny reflective metal sphere

NAME IT, GAME IT (An Un-Seeing Exercise)

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Hawaiians have a saying: “In the word, is life; in the word, is death.” As a poet and a writer, I believe in the power of words. It’s a part of the nature of the scribblers in the world, that. We believe our words make a difference. No, I lie. Real writers and poets believe we are magicians who remake the world. When all is said and done, it seems to me, all of us humans are little more than…

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display of old rifles

OTHER VOICES: Brendan Constantine

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There is a poem written by a much-respected performing poet and the author of at least five collections of original poems, Brendan Constantine, that captures an exploration of the power of language and the creation of meaning quite beautifully. The poem, “The Opposites Game,” arose out of a writing exercise for Constantine’s elementary school creative writing students at Windward School in Los Angeles, California. It is also a powerful look through the eyes of children about a perennial and perhaps…

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dandelion seed head at dawn

USE YOUR RESOURCES TO FIND YOUR WHY

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Another IPS (Inner Peace Symptom): an understanding that what you already have is the starting point for building the space where you want to be. [Gather your resources and see what you’ve got. What you choose to use and how you choose to use them breathes life and form and definition into the Why you are already living.] The Light of My Light (LOML) and I made some “What-Get Soup” again the other day. The soup is a throwback to…

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metaphor for boredom

DRAGGING YOUR FEET (Un-Seeing Exercise)

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I am reading Andrew Santella’s book, SOON: An Overdue History of Procrastination from Leonardo and Darwin to You and Me. Again. This little book is setting off all kinds of firecracker strings in my head. Santella, like me (and maybe you too?), is a self-confessed procrastinator so he’s at least well-practiced in trying to suss out the whats, the whys, and the wherefores of that almost universally censured habit, procrastination.

HAWAII ON A LARK (Memories of Flight)

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As you know, if you’ve spent some time rummaging around in this blog, I’ll ask my readers to share a self-made poem that has meaning and mana for them. I am always surprised and pleased by the work of the people who take the time to respond to this request. This latest lovely is a story-poem by fellow online entrepreneur Donna Holberg (a.k.a. “Deelilah”), a wonderfully down-to-earth storyteller who has lived a lively and adventuresome life. She has, she says,…

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illustrates multiplicity of selves

CANCEL THE SEARCH FOR THE ONE TRUE SELF

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Despite assorted life-coach advisories and dictums, I have never actually found the search for and contemplation of my own self particularly interesting. When you’re adept at making (and living) in stories and poems, searching for your one “true” self seems like a waste of time. Delphic pronouncements about the importance of “knowing thyself” are fine, but then there’s that New Age-y corollary that says you have to also embrace and love that self unconditionally or something. This last bit is…

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