To my three best friends from high school daze,
Thank you for your help in my making a liberating decision: To quit all attempts at trying to combine my desire to make enough money to feed, house, clothe, educate and keep healthy my family with an effort to explain my "life’s work".
(Life's work?! "Oh Gawd", says the self-deprecating self ....fyi, she thinks she is the fun part of my writer's voice...)
This blog is from now on (…as far as one can trust NOW in combination with a pledge of any kind…knowing from experience that oaths, pledges and the like are meant for ETERNITY and not useful in the NOW) will be the place for me to speak from my heartmind and NOT the place to sell my wares.
(...and then there's these know-it-all hippy dippy Left Coast voices too who show up.)
Oh the Liberation is sweet. (See?)
So, these marketing materials I created that I really liked, except for a tiny handful of snaggy issues I could not resolve…. I give them up! I let them go, I worked so hard and pffffttt thank you, you may go. Oh sweet surrender. (Uh huh)
A new plan is in its place…one that will not depend on my (that would be “the little my”) ability to express an offering of ideas that will not be boxed in in order to package them for anyone’s consumption.
And so, this letter to you, (Do I sound a little defensive? So sorry for the sarcasm, I acutally don't do it well, it just sounds hostile when I do it....this why I live in a small town in California, and not in NY anymore...here, where people generally begin to get me once they know I was once from New York)
It was so good to see you and here is one small moment I’d like to go back to and redo.
Remember when I asked you what you thought of Occupy Wall Street?
And there was some discussion about the ridiculousness of it?
Well. I stood there and listened, my daughter had her arms around me, hugging me from the side, knowing that I did not agree. I was calm and non-responsive. And, some defensiveness slowly showing up in the zones of inner armor.
I just want to say now, laying down my shield, calmly (no one's going to get hurt here). “I don’t agree.”
I could have said it then, but I was listening instead, not thinking of what to say next. Even when I tried, my mind was blank. As it often is.
Now my reply has come:
(BTW, part of my defensiveness was probably because I had rehearsed in my mind our getting together again a few times (not on purpose rehearsing, just a visit from Lady'sGonnaSavetheWorld while I was planning and then packing for my trip), and in it I was very eloquent and persuasvie.) I’m so glad you didn’t ask what I was up to because it would have come out so lamely (and it still might but now I don’t care (Thank Gawd!), so thank you Spirit for holding my tongue for me) and now I can tell you.
I don’t agree that Occupy Wall Street was full of people who just needed a bath and were pathetically ignorant of how the real world works.* Or that markets are the foundation of our entire economy.**
*I guess that is true actually. Being "full of something" doesn't necessarily that's the only thing there. So - many people most likely need bathing and were "patheticaly ignornant"... an epithet that could be applied to most people I think, given the strange world we find ourselves in. God must think we are pathetically ignorant from time to time, but that's only if God thinks at all.
**I don't agree with that actually. Reminds me of what Ursula LeGuin said about capitalsim and the rights of kings. One oughn't be sure that a thing (which is relatively not that old, though its made a giant splash on the world stage (sometime in the 13th-16th century) is so basic that it can't be made obsolete once it is clearly outmoded by something better. (Especially something whose flaws you'd have to be, well, pathetically ignorant not to notice, right?!) (Nothing better has shown up, right? Not yet. Or Maybe it has. Lots of people were alive when the Wright Brothers made the first airplane and they died without ever knowing about it.)
Had I said something, I really think there would have been a short pause and maybe an invitation to speak (ok, Erica, so what do you think?) and there’s every chance there would have been some laughter and even – I’m quite sure of it – some deeply expressed agreements about some of my utopian ideals (copiosis.com), laced with “Good f*ing luck with that, sweetheart!” And no doubt I/we do deserve and need the good f*ing luck. I know you would have embraced me, my ideas, my thinking – maybe not agreed with them – but that you respect me in all the important ways. It was a really fun night for me. (I want to say healing, but I just can't get it out of my mouth.)
I said nothing because I knew that in your seeming oppositeness of what I think I was about to get some real inner clarity, ...and it did come… several hours later, as I doggedly attempted to make my new marketing materials flawless and couldn’t.
So for now, since this venue here is no longer up for sale! -- this blogenue which is foremost for the me, the my, the I who needs to hear the voices from within roll off her tongue into the tips of her fingers – I can speak my mind in freedom.
So again, here is my reply.
I do not agree.
For me, Occupy was a cry, a desperate plea for sanity, the sounding of a great alarm, a stirring of the hearts of men, of women, of all the souls in between all the spaces and all the stories, including the occupieds, the so called 1%ers and their many assistants, who know somewhere inside that won’t shut up, that won’t be still or quiet, that human beings are being called to transformations heretofore unknown. I believe they know, and I defer to the title of the Charles Eisenstein book, that there exists in our minds where everything begins, “The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible.”
Thanks to this moment in our reunion, I’ve let go of my desire to create a business which merges all that I do: Nurtured Heart, Bookkeeping, and Copiosis. I’ve been trying and trying and then some more trying to make it all work together. And somewhere that creation exists, but it’s not in this here or now.
In this here and now and I can say whatever I want about that because this is not the place where I am or ever will (oh Erica be careful with those evers and nevers), attempt to sell you (reader?) anything.
That feels freaking fantastic.
I’m letting my inner spaces of utter confusion, white noise of huh? just be. “Where your inner and outer wealth meet.” That’s one of my former tag lines, still on my Home page. “Healthy Families + Healthy Finances = A Stab at Sanity.” That’s another one. And then there’s “Get Your Charlesworth” …. I can just let them all swirl and dance and argue and fuss in my insides, up to the throat, in my hot flashin’ brain …. I can , I do, I welcome all that unknowing.
-----PAUSE----
This week I’m attending my 2nd training for NHA for one week in Sacramento. This is going to take what I do from good enough to much better and then to great. (That's what their marketing material says.) And I signed up for another training for the MVelopes program which will allow me to learn this AMAZING personal finance software which does what I have been trying to make QuickBooks do for me and others for almost ten years. (In between making three meals a day for Madame and going on walks.)
I’m clear for the first time in my life in a way that is INTEGRATED, WHOLE, and very deeply satisfying.
And so, for the great honor of your presence here, I want to thank you, and the academy, my mother and father, brother and sister, former husbands, my two children, my friends and neighbors, a host of lovers (one in particular) and my dear and treasured friends from high school.
Thank you for your help in my making a liberating decision: To quit all attempts at trying to combine my desire to make enough money to feed, house, clothe, educate and keep healthy my family with an effort to explain my "life’s work".
(Life's work?! "Oh Gawd", says the self-deprecating self ....fyi, she thinks she is the fun part of my writer's voice...)
This blog is from now on (…as far as one can trust NOW in combination with a pledge of any kind…knowing from experience that oaths, pledges and the like are meant for ETERNITY and not useful in the NOW) will be the place for me to speak from my heartmind and NOT the place to sell my wares.
(...and then there's these know-it-all hippy dippy Left Coast voices too who show up.)
Oh the Liberation is sweet. (See?)
So, these marketing materials I created that I really liked, except for a tiny handful of snaggy issues I could not resolve…. I give them up! I let them go, I worked so hard and pffffttt thank you, you may go. Oh sweet surrender. (Uh huh)
A new plan is in its place…one that will not depend on my (that would be “the little my”) ability to express an offering of ideas that will not be boxed in in order to package them for anyone’s consumption.
And so, this letter to you, (Do I sound a little defensive? So sorry for the sarcasm, I acutally don't do it well, it just sounds hostile when I do it....this why I live in a small town in California, and not in NY anymore...here, where people generally begin to get me once they know I was once from New York)
It was so good to see you and here is one small moment I’d like to go back to and redo.
Remember when I asked you what you thought of Occupy Wall Street?
And there was some discussion about the ridiculousness of it?
Well. I stood there and listened, my daughter had her arms around me, hugging me from the side, knowing that I did not agree. I was calm and non-responsive. And, some defensiveness slowly showing up in the zones of inner armor.
I just want to say now, laying down my shield, calmly (no one's going to get hurt here). “I don’t agree.”
I could have said it then, but I was listening instead, not thinking of what to say next. Even when I tried, my mind was blank. As it often is.
Now my reply has come:
(BTW, part of my defensiveness was probably because I had rehearsed in my mind our getting together again a few times (not on purpose rehearsing, just a visit from Lady'sGonnaSavetheWorld while I was planning and then packing for my trip), and in it I was very eloquent and persuasvie.) I’m so glad you didn’t ask what I was up to because it would have come out so lamely (and it still might but now I don’t care (Thank Gawd!), so thank you Spirit for holding my tongue for me) and now I can tell you.
I don’t agree that Occupy Wall Street was full of people who just needed a bath and were pathetically ignorant of how the real world works.* Or that markets are the foundation of our entire economy.**
*I guess that is true actually. Being "full of something" doesn't necessarily that's the only thing there. So - many people most likely need bathing and were "patheticaly ignornant"... an epithet that could be applied to most people I think, given the strange world we find ourselves in. God must think we are pathetically ignorant from time to time, but that's only if God thinks at all.
**I don't agree with that actually. Reminds me of what Ursula LeGuin said about capitalsim and the rights of kings. One oughn't be sure that a thing (which is relatively not that old, though its made a giant splash on the world stage (sometime in the 13th-16th century) is so basic that it can't be made obsolete once it is clearly outmoded by something better. (Especially something whose flaws you'd have to be, well, pathetically ignorant not to notice, right?!) (Nothing better has shown up, right? Not yet. Or Maybe it has. Lots of people were alive when the Wright Brothers made the first airplane and they died without ever knowing about it.)
Had I said something, I really think there would have been a short pause and maybe an invitation to speak (ok, Erica, so what do you think?) and there’s every chance there would have been some laughter and even – I’m quite sure of it – some deeply expressed agreements about some of my utopian ideals (copiosis.com), laced with “Good f*ing luck with that, sweetheart!” And no doubt I/we do deserve and need the good f*ing luck. I know you would have embraced me, my ideas, my thinking – maybe not agreed with them – but that you respect me in all the important ways. It was a really fun night for me. (I want to say healing, but I just can't get it out of my mouth.)
I said nothing because I knew that in your seeming oppositeness of what I think I was about to get some real inner clarity, ...and it did come… several hours later, as I doggedly attempted to make my new marketing materials flawless and couldn’t.
So for now, since this venue here is no longer up for sale! -- this blogenue which is foremost for the me, the my, the I who needs to hear the voices from within roll off her tongue into the tips of her fingers – I can speak my mind in freedom.
So again, here is my reply.
I do not agree.
For me, Occupy was a cry, a desperate plea for sanity, the sounding of a great alarm, a stirring of the hearts of men, of women, of all the souls in between all the spaces and all the stories, including the occupieds, the so called 1%ers and their many assistants, who know somewhere inside that won’t shut up, that won’t be still or quiet, that human beings are being called to transformations heretofore unknown. I believe they know, and I defer to the title of the Charles Eisenstein book, that there exists in our minds where everything begins, “The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible.”
Thanks to this moment in our reunion, I’ve let go of my desire to create a business which merges all that I do: Nurtured Heart, Bookkeeping, and Copiosis. I’ve been trying and trying and then some more trying to make it all work together. And somewhere that creation exists, but it’s not in this here or now.
In this here and now and I can say whatever I want about that because this is not the place where I am or ever will (oh Erica be careful with those evers and nevers), attempt to sell you (reader?) anything.
That feels freaking fantastic.
I’m letting my inner spaces of utter confusion, white noise of huh? just be. “Where your inner and outer wealth meet.” That’s one of my former tag lines, still on my Home page. “Healthy Families + Healthy Finances = A Stab at Sanity.” That’s another one. And then there’s “Get Your Charlesworth” …. I can just let them all swirl and dance and argue and fuss in my insides, up to the throat, in my hot flashin’ brain …. I can , I do, I welcome all that unknowing.
-----PAUSE----
This week I’m attending my 2nd training for NHA for one week in Sacramento. This is going to take what I do from good enough to much better and then to great. (That's what their marketing material says.) And I signed up for another training for the MVelopes program which will allow me to learn this AMAZING personal finance software which does what I have been trying to make QuickBooks do for me and others for almost ten years. (In between making three meals a day for Madame and going on walks.)
I’m clear for the first time in my life in a way that is INTEGRATED, WHOLE, and very deeply satisfying.
And so, for the great honor of your presence here, I want to thank you, and the academy, my mother and father, brother and sister, former husbands, my two children, my friends and neighbors, a host of lovers (one in particular) and my dear and treasured friends from high school.
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