Flow With Your Go | Life-Built Poems

STEP BACK FROM THE URGENCY (Another IPS)

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Urgency, the repeated hammering on the direness of some situation or other that absolutely requires your personal immediate attention (or else), has become the go-to stance for so many of the professional and amateur persuaders in our lives these days. They tell us that urgency is different than panic. Panic is a freak-out. You run around like a chicken without a head, not knowing where you are going, bumping into things and falling down a lot. The proper response to…

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A MASTER’S JOURNEY: Jim Olson

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The process-oriented mindset is one of several styles of moving to the beat of your own passion. Another name for it is “mastery.” One of the best breakdowns of the requirements and outcomes of pursuing “mastery” is the one the celebrated art curator Sarah Lewis delineates in her book, THE RISE: Creativity, the Gift of Failure and the Search for Mastery. This 2014 book is a fascinating exploration of the constant pursuit of excellence that is pretty much what distinguishes…

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TRAIN YOURSELF TO CLIMB OUT OF THAT BOX

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Who has NOT heard it? If you want to be creative, the ubiquitous They tell us, you have to “think outside of the box.” The only problem is, it takes a different mindset to get out of that other-people-imposed box than our more usual ones. It makes sense that you do need to train yourself to climb or crawl out of that box in the same way that you train yourself to do some sort of physical discipline or other…

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YES-BOOK VS NO-BOOK (Un-Seeing Exercise)

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Poets give each other weird gifts. About ten or so years ago, a friend of mine gifted me with a chewy metaphor that I’ve gnawed on for a while now. He said he thought that, at birth, every person got issued two infinitely expandable notebooks. He said one of the books was a YES-book and the other was a NO-book. I imagined them to be like the kind I use for making my journals but with automatic pages or something…

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STALKING THE WILD QUESTION (Another IPS)

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One of the more intriguing bits in Nilofer Merchant’s book about the care and feeding of wild ideas that can dent the world, THE POWER OF ONLYNESS, is the one about taking a closer and more considered look at “the question that you can’t answer but can’t stop thinking about.” That annoying question is like a bedraggled, adorable con-artist mutt that follows you around and accepts occasional handouts from you but warily stays out of reach. It hangs around.

BUILD YOUR FRAMEWORK WELL

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It is a truly amazing thing to witness what people who own their passions can build on a legacy dream that has a solid foundation grounded in taking joy in the fervor, fire and zeal that comes with a devoted pursuit of an appreciation for the power of the creative human spirit. On the island of Maui, Hawaii USA, there is a community-supported radio station that describes itself as a “non-commercial secular FM broadcast station.” Its official call letters are…

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PUT SOME SOUL IN YOUR GAME

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When you’re a poet, words and phrases can have a powerful effect on you. Words are more than simple vehicles for communication. Certain words and combinations of words really “speak” to you. They can grab you by the throat and drag you down strange alleys. They can tangle up your feet and make you fall. They can lift you up and help you fly. Getting enchanted and be-spelled by words is probably one of the biggest hazards of the ancient…

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JOURNALING 201 (Mind-Mining)

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Journal-keeping and diary writing – tracking daily events and happenings in some sort of record book – has been going on for centuries. Except for wanna-be smarty-pants and wise guys (i.e., the “intelligentsia”), poets and writers and Creatives of every stripe, and young girls teetering on the brink of woman-ness, the keepers of these journals mostly recorded daily events and happenings with an exterior point of view. People with a visual orientation did sketchbooks. Most everyday journalers used their ledgers,…

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CHOOSE YOUR OWN GOOD FIGHT

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Does it seem to you, as it does to me, that every human in the world has at least one thing in common: We, all of us, struggle. No matter who we are, struggle seems to be a fact of life. Some of us have great obstacles to overcome and some of us have more massive ambitions than others do, but, every one of us does have some sort of difficulty making it from where we are now to where…

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GO OUT AND PLAY (An Un-Seeing Exercise)

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I just stumbled over a quote from the amazing Maya Angelou that resonates with me enormously, especially during this time of lockdowns and disconnection: “Life is pure adventure, and the sooner we realize that, the quicker we will be able to treat life as art.” The lady knew. To become fully human, we have to go out and play. Then we need to come back inside and tell each other our stories.