Skillful Means | Life-Built Poems

turtle climbing onto a computer keyboard on a desk

YOU TOO CAN PLAY IN “EVENT TIME”

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Elon Musk is probably right. Remote work (formerly known as “telecommuting” or “working from home”) is a challenge…for corporations and other organizational entities. It can cause massive headaches for managers and human resource people trying to round up and ride herd on all the “wild” spirits who want to do their own kind of different and were given an opportunity to try it when the world got hit by a massive pandemic that made the corporate culture standards of behavior…

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doll face overlaid with clock faces

ON CLOCK-TIME: An Un-Seeing Exercise

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We humans may be the only animals on this planet that are aware of time. In fact, humans are more than a little freaky about time. We have been fascinated and even obsessed with it for a good long while now. There’s archaeological evidence that the Babylonians and Egyptians began to measure time about 5,000 years ago. That development in human thought-constructing was probably built on a long, long line of other previously thunk thoughts and concepts. Some people say…

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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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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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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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illustrates point

CHECK YOUR FILTERS: Roadmaps and Story

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The thing about living your life as a poem or a story or any other kind of art is that there’s got to be a theme to the thing. (It’s one of the rules, according to grade school English and art teachers when it comes to analyzing some bit of self-expression.) This online dictionary I am looking at tells me that a theme is “an idea that recurs or pervades a work of art or literature.” It’s how you make…

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jars of seeds

HELP SEEDS FULFILL THEIR PROMISE

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One of my favorite quotes about seeds comes from writer-filmmaker-cum-social entrepreneur Kenny Ausubel who co-founded Seeds of Change with his wife Nina Simon in 1989. The seed- growing company’s mission, “to restore ‘backyard diversity’ into the food web through marketing organic, biodiverse heirloom seeds to gardeners,” continues to this day. Around the same time that Ausubel was doing that, he was also helping to put together Bioneers, a non-profit group that holds an annual conference which, it says here, functions…

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sailing ship on choppy sea at dawn

TRANSMUTE THE ANGER TRIFECTA (Another IPS)

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Another IPS (Inner Peace Symptom): an understanding that anger energy can be used to unify rather than divide. [Anger is a wake-up call, a signal that change is needed. If you can respect other people’s ways of dancing while working towards making room to do your own dance, the anger can lead to more understanding, communication, and caring. Not easy, but doable….] Three ‘R’s make up the Anger Trifecta: Resentment, Rage, and Regret. We all know that. And almost every…

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balancing rocks illustrating the theme

OTHER VOICES: Grace Iwashita Taylor

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New Zealand’s Grace Iwashita-Taylor is a Shaper and a poet. She lives her life as a single mother, as a loving daughter trying to deal with the realities and challenges of her beloved mother’s decline into dementia and as a youth worker in a place that is one of the most expensive places to live on the planet. She is also an award-winning spoken word and published poet, playwright, and performer. The poet’s upu (words) circle around and around the…

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