ALEX NOBLE - WRITING JOURNAL-2015

You Are A World Changer! - Bill Harvey

 

Start activating change where you are now

 

From Bill Harvey's Blog At:

www.mindmagicprogram.com

What’s my evidence that you’re a world changer? You read my stuff. That’s my evidence.

I get an interesting if fuzzy picture of who reads this blog from the people who thank me for it. And from some indirect measures, such as how rarely people leave public comments, instead emailing me; what does this tell us: private types who read in this blog information that is also kind of private. It’s about the inner life. Inner, not outer, means that it isn’t something people talk about. If they’re going to talk to me about it, they don’t want to do it publicly.

Aristotle considered the inner life the most important thing to Humanity. If he saw what Acceleritis has done to shrink the inner life down to the smallest part of one’s existence, he would become depressed.

How to Write a Memoir - William Zinsser

 

 

Be yourself, speak freely, and think small

By William Zinsser

 

One of the saddest sentences I know is “I wish I had asked my mother about that.” Or my father. Or my grandmother. Or my grandfather. As every parent knows, our children are not as fascinated by our fascinating lives as we are. Only when they have children of their own—and feel the first twinges of their own advancing age—do they suddenly want to know more about their family heritage and all its accretions of anecdote and lore. “What exactly were those stories my dad used to tell about coming to America?” “Where exactly was that farm in the Midwest where my mother grew up?”

Writers are the custodians of memory, and that’s what you must become if you want to leave some kind of record of your life and of the family you were born into. That record can take many shapes. It can be a formal memoir—a careful act of literary construction. Or it can be an informal family history, written to tell your children and your grandchildren about the family they were born into. It can be the oral history that you extract by tape recorder from a parent or a grandparent too old or too sick to do any writing. Or it can be anything else you want it to be: some hybrid mixture of history and reminiscence. Whatever it is, it’s an important kind of writing. Too often memories die with their owner, and too often time surprises us by running out.

 

2012: Mayan Prophecies and Quetzalcoatl

Quetzalcoatl is Much More Than an Entertaining Mayan Story or Myth

By Sandra Musser

The Mesoamerican god Quetzalcoatl and his twin brother came into being through virgin birth to the goddess Coatlice. He represents the Morning Star. But, the real story is found hidden...between the lines.

This Mesoamerican deity has been worshiped at least since the time of the Olmecs. Kukulcan or Ququmatz were the Mayan names. Quetzalcoatl (ket-tsul'kwot-ul) was Aztec, for the deity Feathered Serpent. For simplicities sake, I'll use this name throughout, because the Aztecs left us more information.

Source:  http://www.2012-spiritual-growth-prophecies.com/

Empowering Ways to Find Peace in a World of Chaos

 

Enlightenment is Just an Inch Away! - Bill Harvey

Assignment: Before you read this inspiring article by Bill Harvey, below, take notes in your journal as to what Enlightenment means for you. Write Now!  GO!

 

The Door to Enlightenment Is Always an Inch Away

 

Excerpt:

Here’s a recap:

• If one is doing something for any outcome, one is out of Flow.
• Grading one’s own performance is one of the biggest blocks to Flow.
• A divided mind is the opposite of Flow.
• In Flow, there is no distinction between your self and the moment. It is all one piece.
• In Flow, you are not trying to figure out why you are doing this, or what techniques you are using — you are just doing what comes naturally, in the moment.

Source:  www.mindmagicprogram.com

 

Make Your Own Beautiful Book - Print on Demand!

 

A Book Published by Blurb: See Blurb Bookstore

 

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The Handless Maiden: A Story for Difficult Times

 

In Women Who Run With the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, a Jungian analyst and storyteller, retells a story about a handless maiden. It's a story that seems to me a kind of ideal story for a month in which I'm writing about ways in which a person can sometimes get stuck--hit obstacles--get bewildered. The story is one that I've found beneficial at crucial junctures in my own life, and it’s a story I have at times told in turn to patients or students when it seems that the labor that began so well—the first giddy success of creativity and vitality—has come to a grinding halt.

The story begins when a maiden loses her hands. She really does lose them—her entire hands. They’re cut off. It’s a moment of initiation. A loss of innocence. Her first serious loss. She has these stumps where she used to have hands, and she wanders, grieving, for many years.

The Web's Secret Stories - Jonathan Harris (TED Talk)

 

 

Please, please, please watch this!  It is wondrous. It will cheer you up!!!

Assignment:  Enjoy this inspiring TED Talk by Jonathan Harris, on his remarkable project, "We Feel Fine."  In your journal, write a short entry in terms of how you are feeling right at this moment.  This is a good bit of Soul Yoga to do regularly. 

The Mystery of the Singing Maya-Aztec Skulls

One of the most fascinating subjects of 21th Century archaeology concerns thirteen crystal skulls of apparently ancient source that were found in parts of Mexico, Central America and South America in the 1900′s.

 

These skulls, found near the ancient ruins of Mayan and Aztec civilizations (with some evidence linking the skulls with past civilization in Peru) apparently hold a profound mystery.  Some of the skulls are believed to be between 5,000 and 36,000 years old.  Mayan pottery and Mayan masks as well as Aztec pottery are replete with skulls.  Indeed human skulls are one of the most pictured objects dealing with religious rites of pre-Columbian cultures.  But the crystal skulls are different.  They seem to defy logic. Everything that is known about lapidary work indicates that the skulls should have been shattered fractured or fallen apart when carved.

SMASH Books - Another Way to Keep a Journal!

 

 

Check out a whole lot of SMASHBook Stories at:

 

http://www.smashstoriesblog.com/

 

Read a SMASHBook story from Charlotte in France:

 

Crop Circles: The Movie - Suzanne Taylor

Excerpt: 

What would give us the sense of being one humanity, where service to the whole would be the master game? All thoughts for the new website or otherwise are welcome.

See: www.theconversation.org

Making Sense of These Times

May we help the world see Earth as part of a greater reality!

 

*******

Coming into the New Year I’ve been looking beyond my crop circles movie for how to help the situation we are in where we need to uplevel our operating system here on Earth.

See: www.cropcirclemovie.com

Given a worldview in which we are so violent with one another and so abusive to the planet, I deal with the crop circles because they might lead to reconceptualizing ourselves. As the only higher intelligence we have nothing to compare ourselves to, or to rub against, to hone us or to challenge us to become more conscious and more compassionate. If we knew the circles were coming from other intelligence, just from sensing ourselves as one humanity in relation to “the other” we would rethink everything. That ground of being would enable us to work together, giving us our best chances to solve the challenges we face as we run out of resources and heat up this living planet.

So, what more for me now? How else can I help to bring about a change of worldview?

The Most Difficult Game on Earth - Bill Harvey

Excerpt:  Happiness cannot remain up the trail somewhere, an elusive thing we are working toward. Not good. Outdated idea. Time for the new idea. Happiness now. In every now. Now. And now. And now. Happiness all the time, internally controlled, internally generated, by an act of will. Infernally difficult but we cannot abandon this game as we possibly always have before. Now is the time to face it — fight it — and win. And keep winning. Because the game is not won once, but continuously. That’s what makes it so hard.

*******

From Bill Harvey's Blog:  www.mindmagicprogram.com

Last week we published here the Human Effectiveness Institute’s “highly incomplete checklist” of things to do each day in 2012 to define and meet your goals for the year. One could write a book on each item in that list. For starters, here’s a drill-down on one item in the list that in a way underpins all the other items on the list.

Item III.1 on the list describes why you should be enjoying the moment and provides ways to get yourself into that headspace. Ironically, this is the most difficult game on Earth.

In some version of this universe, it is natural to be in that state all the time, i.e. happy doing whatever you are doing at the moment, or not doing anything but just being there. Why not be happy? If it’s what you’re doing that is blocking happiness, do something else. Why were you doing it in the first place if it didn’t make you happy?

The ego is what gets in the way. The ego is the be-all and end-all of unhappiness. You can choose happiness or at least neutrality in any moment no matter what is being inflicted upon you against your will, to pick an extreme case. If you’re being waterboarded, okay, neutrality is probably the best you can hope for. But such an extreme case illustrates that by an act of will and focus we can indeed choose our mental emotional state. All of us can. There have been times when we’ve all had an opportunity to prove that to ourselves. Nonetheless, it’s the most difficult game on Earth.

CowBird: A Small Community of Storytellers

 

“Of all our truest hopes and desires for our work is that, what we find, we ourselves never knew. It came as a shock. It came as a surprise. It was new. We could never have known what we were going to do before we did it, and in that sense, we discover too. Here is what I’ve got to say to you: there are things in your life you will see; there are stories you will hear; if you don’t write them down, if you don’t make the picture, they won’t get seen, they won’t get told.”

Emmet Gowin

*******

What is Cowbird?

Cowbird is a small community of storytellers, focused on a deeper, longer-lasting, more personal kind of storytelling than you’re likely to find anywhere else on the Web.

Cowbird allows you to keep a beautiful audio-visual diary of your life, and to collaborate with others in documenting the overarching “sagas” that shape our world today. Sagas are themes and events that touch millions of live and shape the human story.

Our short-term goal is to pioneer a new form of participatory journalism, grounded in the simple human stories behind major news events. Our long-term goal is to build a public library of human experience, so the knowledge and wisdom we accumulate as individuals may live on as part of the the commons, available for this and future generations to look to for guidance.

What can I use Cowbird to do?

Need to Disconnect? Here's How

Logging Off: The Power of Disconnection

Martha Beck

For more wisdom, visit Martha Beck's website:

www.marthabeck.com

 

Assignment for Journaling:  Read Martha Beck's  tips for disconnecting, below, and then create your own list of ways you can create peace and healing space for yourself. GO!

 

My thesis: The great English writer E.M. Forster may have valued connection above all else, but for us 21st-century folks—with our jam-packed contact lists, e-mail from intimates and strangers, texts and phone messages left by friends, colleagues, passing acquaintances, and the occasional deranged stalker—disconnection is as necessary as connection for creating a healthy, happy life. When we force ourselves to connect against our heart’s desires, we create false, resentful relationships; when we disconnect from the people who deplete us, we set them free to find their tribes while we find ours. I planned to illustrate these thoughts with snippets of Greek philosophy, and perhaps even the poetry of Robert Frost. 

But it has just occurred to me that this refined approach is not how I actually disconnect—and I need to disconnect a lot. Overconnection is my major occupational hazard. My job is all about soulfully linking with others, and this is truly as much fun as I’ve ever had with my clothes on, but after doing this with many people for many hours, I often feel as if I’ve watched ten great movies back-to-back: dazed, frazzled, longing for silent solitude. I’m not up to gracious separation; I need quick-and-dirty ways to save my sanity, right now.

So I’ve listed some of my favorite disconnection strategies below, in the hope that you might find them useful. Please remember that this advice is not for the E.M. Forsters of the world but for those of us who are already connected up the wazoo.

Martha Beck’s Favorite Disconnection Techniques

How to Accomplish Your 2012 Goals

From Bill Harvey at:  www.mindmagicprogram.com

A highly incomplete checklist

The year has just started and already you are creatively adapting to the unexpected, steering around unexpected resistances, and still feeling cocky about taking the hill you’ve assigned yourself for this year. Good.

This cursory reminder list of methods is passed along to keep handy if and when you run up against a boulder that frustrates you, casting a dim light over achievability of the year’s target. The list can also be used proactively even during times of smooth sailing to notch the game up a bit.

I.  Creativity

1. Doodle a schematic of the situation and its players. These could be business or personal relationships that you are navigating. Engaging spatial mind centers in the right brain is a prime directive in terms of overcoming the bias of the time i.e. Acceleritis.
   1. What would be the ideal “win” for each player in the diagram? Getting down to the human motivational level immediately is a typical mensch method. This engages your own feelings, rebalancing you out of leftbrain dominance.
   2. What action might each player take in the situation, and how would other players react? “Consequence thinking” engages the prefrontal lobes. The more your brain is fully engaged the closer you get to Holosentience.
   3. Have you left anyone out of the diagram so far? Who?
   4. What would be the ideal outcome of the depicted situation from the standpoint of a hypothetical Universal Consciousness?
   5. (See more below)

How to Write an Article in 20 Minutes!

Great advice from Jim Estill at Copyblogger: 

www.copyblogger.com

I don’t really want to spend more than 20 minutes a day on writing articles. And I spent no more than 20 minutes to write this article.

I realize this is writing blasphemy. Content is king, and all of that. But when I have a daily schedule to post on and a business to run, I don’t have time to spend hours polishing every single blog post or writing 2,000-word articles.

Writing quickly doesn’t mean compromising on writing well, though. I’ve got seven tips to get you in and out of that composition box in twenty minutes – without sacrificing quality.

Hemingway's Top 5 Tips for Writing Well

 

 

Many business people faced with the task of writing for marketing purposes are quick to say:

Hey, I’m no Hemingway!

But really, who better than Hemingway to emulate? Rather than embracing the flowery prose of the literati, he chose to eschew obfuscation at every turn and write simply and clearly.

So let’s see what Ernest can teach us about effective writing.

1. Use short sentences.

Hemingway was famous for a terse minimalist style of writing that dispensed with flowery adjectives and got straight to the point. In short, Hemingway wrote with simple genius.

Perhaps his finest demonstration of short sentence prowess was when he was challenged to tell an entire story in only 6 words:

For sale: baby shoes, never used.

 

QUOTES TO INSPIRE

 

Photo: Andi Holder

 

Out of ideas?  See if any of these quotes jiggle your imagination.  They are from a delightful blog that a friend of mine, Andi Holder, writes: Dumb Blonde Adventures.  This particular entry chronicles the family's arrival in the Bahamas, "Bahamamania." If you are freezing in Minnesota or even Tucson,  it will provide you with a sense of empathy.  Andi's blog is a model of great blog writing, and illustrates what a cheer up a good travel blog can be.  And she is funny!  Enjoy!

http://www.dumbblondeadventures.blogspot.com.

 

"I wish you a very good journey to an unknown you've never seen."

Pieter V Admiraal

"Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst." Henri Cartier-Bresson

"Jealousy is all the fun you think they had." Erica Jong.

"For the execution of the voyage to the Indies, I did not make use of intelligence, mathematics or maps." Christopher Columbus.

 

 

2012 & Why the World Doesn't End - Michael Meade

 

 

Michael Meade is a Storyteller and Mythologist, and Founder

of the Mosaic Multi - Cultural Foundation

http://www.mosaicvoices.org/

 

In your journal: What is your story?  What golden thread of purpose has given meaning to your life? What new story do you need to write for yourself?  GO!

 

Michael Meade: The Growing Chaos and the New Year

January takes its name from Janus, the old Roman god of gates, doorways, and thresholds. Depictions of Janus show two faces looking in opposite directions; past and future, old and new, outer darkness and inner light. As ruler of all endings and beginnings, Janus was invoked at the onset of any change in the course of life. Janus was especially present at the end of the calendar, in the long, dark nights that give birth to each New Year.

BLOGS: Bill Harvey - Because the Universe is Conscious...

...Everything Happens for a Reason that Makes Sense to Consciousness

We suspect this is what Einstein really meant in his famous quote “God does not play dice with the Universe.”

Think about it for a minute. If you’ve been reading these posts you know what I am saying is that the universe is one infinite field of consciousness at play. The One has sent out parts of Itself to separately experience for a time — that’s us. Everything in the universe is made out of The One’s consciousness. And therefore each part itself is conscious, living The One’s experience through that part’s senses — so looking out our eyes is not who we thought was “me” but actually “ME”.

 

MINDSURFING - Utne Reader's Top Blogs for 2011

http://bit.ly/t0qF9g

(Hat Tip to New Paradigm Digest for this item)

We at Utne Reader sift through 1,500 periodicals, skim hundreds of websites and blogs, and clamber over a mountain of new books to present the best the alternative press has to offer. Unfortunately, the magazine we deliver is only about 100 pages long, so we can’t reprint all of the fresh ideas, deeply-reported journalism, and vivid portraits that we read. Thus, we blog. The following five blogs were your favorites from 2011.

5) “A New Peace Symbol” by David Schimke 

 

Sometimes, short blog posts are the best. That was the case with Editor-in-Chief David Schimke’s hat-tip to the new international symbol for human rights. An excerpt:

“Free as a Man,” created by Serbian artist Predrag Stakic, is the winner of an online competition conducted by the Human Rights Logo Initiative, which is on a mission to make the design an internationally recognized symbol for human rights.

Are You Ready to Blog?

Hola! Potential Bloggers!

If you do not already have a blog, are you ready to create a blog for your journey through 2012, with excerpts from your journal and other writing you may do?

There are some basic books you must have on your shelf if you are serious about your Blogging Practice.  There is a wealth of material, references, and sources available to help you get a sense of the scale and power of this new digital universe.  Search "Blog" and "Blogging" on Amazon and see which of the many available books speaks to you.  I recommend the latest edition of the DUMMIES book on blogging, just because this series breaks everything down into simple, easy to understand steps.

What is most exciting of all is your potential role in this vast new frontier for positive social change.  Of course, because I view both Blogging and Writing Practice as essentially spiritual disciplines, I recommend that you immediately establish a positive vision, motivating purpose and realistic goals for your work. But right now, surf, sail or fly on over to your nearest bookstore and get ready to explore the ever-expanding frontiers of the Blogosphere! cyber-camp. 

Write Now!

What will be the theme of your blog?  What title will it have?  What is your audience?  How will you make others aware of your blog?  Which blogging service will you use?  (I recommend Typepad, but there are many other good ones.)

 

Awakening: How Are You Preparing for the New Year?

As you prepare for the New Year, consider focusing on the inspiring events happening all over the world and in your own life.

Write Now!

Use the inspiring words below to make a journal entry focused on any awakening you may be experiencing, and the hopeful events that are happening all over the world, especially as you see evidence of positive  transformations happening in your own daily life.

What will you be doing in the coming week to prepare for the coming year?

(Sharing is of course optional.)

The speed at which you are progressing along the path to your awakening is accelerating as more and more people raise up the divine Light they are carrying so that others may see it and do likewise.  The momentum of humanity’s intent to awaken is now so great that, as divinely intended, awakening is inevitable and cannot be prevented or delayed.  It is your glorious destiny, and the moment at which it will occur is rapidly approaching.