Create an abundance of abundance

Poverty takes a year to begin to recover from.

I first noticed this with time-poverty. My first year off, after 17 years of software overwork, I was frantic. It took a week... a month... three months... twelve months... to soak up the time. I was still uncoiling. I remember sitting on Lisa Dawes' back porch under a flowering cherry, drinking tea on a Tuesday morning, the whole week empty before us, discussing the play I was writing & she was directing -- unable to comprehend the wealth in which I found myself. I kept inhaling the soft air, sneaking peeks at the cherry blossoms. It felt unreal, stolen.

When I returned to software after dangerous financial poverty, it took a month... two months... six months... twelve months of regular infusions of money, to regain wholeness. Three months before new glasses; six months before I cut my hair. I was still learning to release the tension.

It's like dry earth baked to hardness. Water runs off. At that level of deprivation, it's a matter of mist, of dew. You have to seep a little in... then seep a little more... for the earth to become receptive.

This weekend is the first unclenching since starting work six weeks ago.

On a deeper level, it is I who have been manifesting poverty even within abundance. My alignment is Self-Care; I am starting to see how much of the poverty was self-created.



Self-care is a recursive bootstrapping mechanism; a golden key that unlocks everything.

To create abundance, create abundance. Create an abundance of abundance. Enough time AND enough money AND enough space AND enough rehearsal AND enough prayer AND enough love AND enough time in the forest AND enough physical sweat AND enough downtime AND enough doing what you were put on this earth to do.

Eventually, a good pianist needs a full-length concert grand piano -- because nothing else can answer & evoke. But they only need one. The right one.



I love Mickey Hart's book, Drumming On The Edge of Magic, because it answers, "What do you do when you have enough of everything?" The answer is, "Go get what you're missing," and "Follow your impulses." His impulses led to tracking the history of percussion in little index cards that covered the whole inside of the Grateful Dead's barn. It looked like those fantastic magazine collages (which I crave to create) the Beautiful Mind guy made.

Go deep enough into any one thing
And it will take you everywhere.

Czikszentmihalyi, the Flow guy, says one of the characteristics of Flow is that the activity becomes autotelic -- pleasurable in and of itself.



I am in Flow when I blog at home or at Kinko's. It's not blogging that is leading me everywhere, though; it's theatre -- born (as they say of horses) out of software, by teamworx.

Everyone finds their own path to the Odin.