Russian River Memories

This morning I was listening to the incomparable Amadou et Mariam who I was turned on to by one Mr. Patrick Dooley, old friend, artistic director of Shotgun Players and generally awesome dad, Red Sox fan and troublemaker. Whenever I listen to them I have many nostalgic memories of a week we spent at the Russian River with the Dooley clan (Patrick, Kimberly and at that time, their only daughter) Penelope (and Josephine in Kimmy's belly) as well as the Frassinellis, Katie, Michael and their twins Bobby and Libby.

It was a really special time in the summer of 2006. Michael and Katie had moved eastward some years ago and this was the first time we had spent a chunk of time with them and the Dooleys in what seemed like years. Michael was in town to work on masks and other things for Ragnarok and they made a family trip out of it. Somehow Patrick could get away for a spell (though the boys did run down to the East Bay a couple of times to work on the show).

It was great to hang with everyone, the kids had a ball together, and I took a bunch of pictures. I loved that weekend and have so many fond memories about it I thought I'd post about it. Top memories are definitely dancing in the living room to Amadou et Mariam, laughing, dessert, swimming with the kids, throwing rocks at buoys, and barbecuing bacon for breakfast.

My Practice

Since my incredible experience in The Seminar in Denver last week a few people have asked about my daily practice. I thought it would be a good topic for a post, so here's what that currently looks like. Brief explanations of some of the terms I use are below the list. Further explanations of practices will be the topics of subsequent posts:

1. I wake up around 6:30. I do 5 minutes of a practice called the Prayerful Breath and then 5-10 minutes of silent sitting meditation. I then write a to-do today list for the day and spend 10-15 minutes writing REs and journaling. In my silent meditation I typically find my prayer and intention for the day.
   
2. I carry an RE pad with me all day. When I have thoughts, I write them down. I keep my to-do today list in that same pad so when I get things done I can cross them off.
3. I meditate between 30 and 60 minutes daily. Usually I use a 45 minute playlist unless I'm up very late and need rest. Then I'll do 30 or listen to a talk before bed.
4. During the course of my day I maintain an awareness of where I can take conversations deeper. Where I can talk about God, love, spirituality, connection, the illusion of separation, etc. If I haven't had a conversation like this with someone I don't know already I try to have one with Mary, or someone in my community of friends.
5. To the best of my ability I situate myself in true care for everyone I meet.
6. I write a letter to my spiritual teacher once a week.
   
7. Once a month I get together with my spiritual teacher to discuss my movement. Sometimes this meeting is on the phone.
8. Once a week I attend a longer meditation. If I can't make it to the Center I do an extended meditation (90 minutes or so) at home.
9. I attend breakthrough meditation once a month, again, if I can't make it I do an extended meditation at home a few times.
10. I attend the God's Love is for Everyone monthly meeting either by phone or in person.
11. Sundays is my day of rest, and I don't do anything related to the program unless I need to release emotions, or I am supporting someone who's having a hard time. My phone is on and I receive txts and messages though I typically don't answer it.

• The Prayerful Breath is a practice of focusing your mind in prayer that combines an awareness of the breath and a simple movement done with your hands.
• Writing REs is a practice of capturing thoughts and actions on a pad and a system for organizing them so that these thoughts aren't bouncing around in my head and distracting me from whatever task is in front of me.
• To Do Today lists are a way of looking at my time in a day, what I plan to do at what time, and what items from my to-dos I can accomplish reasonably in the course of that day.
• I keep both of the above in a Field Notes pad which is with me all the time.
• The God's Love is for Everyone Program is a program for Seminar graduates I participate in with people from The Center in San Francisco. I have a "coach" who I write to and supports me in my daily practice and the various challenges life presents.

I write this out in the hopes that it will help others find their own daily practice. It is simply what I do which supports my continued spiritual movement. It changes all the time. Some days I don't get to it all. Other days I need to do only one of the things over and over. And my meditations are always different. Sometimes it's a lot of crying. Others it's a dance and I'm focused on pulling on the love and light of God. Other times it's pure rage followed by calming and deep thinking. The most important thing I've learned is to stay open to what it needs to be today.

More on my experience in The Seminar when I have time to sit down and write it out.Comments are welcome. Hope this helps and/or inspires any of you.

Fresh on Flickr

Posted a new FLickr set titled 'Recent' with some of the more, well, recent images from our life here in Boulder. I'll try to keep it fresh. Check it out here.

The Story of Boulder

This is the text of a letter we wrote to our friends about moving to Boulder and our path which led us in this direction. Republishing it here as I originally intended it to be a blog post and never got around to it, plus, wasn't ready to share the blog as publicly yet. Funny how things change that way...It's now been annotated with some Flickr links at the bottom.

**August 2010 Update with More Flickr Images of our New Home**

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Dear family & friends,

As some of you may know, for several years our family has been in a discussion about the kind of lifestyle we want. As much as we love northern California, we've felt for some time that there were some things missing for us. In no particular order, they include a desire to live somewhere Fiona can go outside without us worrying or having to accompany her, slower pace, more rural, more peaceful, seasonal, less expensive, and a real estate market where we can eventually own a home again. Now this needed to be a pretty special place, since in addition to the above laundry list, we also had a few requirements like a good Waldorf school, spiritual community for both Mary and Ben, work for Ben, political leaning not too disparate from our own, and ideally music, theatre, art and cycling scenes we are interested in being part of.

Over time we had been looking at a variety of destinations around California, and though we had some really exciting ideas, in CA they mostly fell short on the cost. Then, we opened our minds to go beyond our beloved CA and started looking at other places in the country. During that search we happened upon Boulder, CO. On paper, or rather the internets as it were, Boulder looked incredible. It literally had everything on our list. Both lists really. So after some looking around online, and giving it some serious thought, we decided it was worth a visit to see for ourselves.

Our time in CO was miraculous, and I use the word very specifically. From almost the moment we arrived, it felt as though this was the right next step for our family. Then the miracles started.

We had been told by some friends of a couple we should look up who are parents at the Waldorf School we were interested in. We thought we'd call them if we had time. Our first night there we had a nice supper at a lovely restaurant in downtown Boulder. The waiter, who was so friendly, was giving us all sorts of tips, and so we asked him where to go for tea and pastry before our appointment at Shining Mountain. Oh, you're going to Shining Mountain? I'll see you there, my wife teaches in the kindergarten and I am helping out with the summer camp. Lo and behold, he's the dad of the couple our friends had recommended we call.

The next morning we go to the school, it's lovely, fall in love with the campus, and then meet the teacher who Fiona immediately fell in love with (and who loved Fiona). At the end of our visit the teacher invited us to join her class if we were going to move.

That night we decide to look around online for a place since everything had been going so well, and so we could get a sense of the rents. We found a few houses for rent in the neighborhood near what would become Fiona's school, and sent a few emails. One got back to us the next morning and invited us to come by in the afternoon. When we arrived, once again, it felt like we were getting home. It was a family, who was looking to replace themselves with another family. We were the first ones to respond to their post and they'd received a bunch of email since. The little 3 bedroom, 2 and a half bath house we were looking at was perfect. Yard, garage, basement for a home office, bedrooms for us and Fiona, and a small guest room (a necessity given how many people we want to have come visit us), and all of this on a lovely little cul-de-sac in a neighborhood full of families, with a small park at one end and walking distance from school to boot. Did we mention the neighbors, a family with a 7 year old girl on one side (we haven't met yet) and her grandparents on the other side (we did meet, very sweet)? The couple said if we wanted to fill out an application they'd recommend us to the landlord and not respond to any of the other emails.

That night we send the landlord a letter explaining who we are, why we like the house, and explaining our situation. We fill out the application and go to take it back to the couple the next day. The landlord calls us when we pull into the driveway and says "Wow, you guys sound great, if your check doesn't bounce, you've got the house if you want it." She hasn't even seen our application.

By this time we decided that in the final hour and a half of our trip, Ben should probably look for a job, given how everything else was going. Kidding here, though it did cross our minds. So, the end of this long story is, on August 21st the movers will come, put all of our belongings into a truck and drive away. The following day Fiona, Mary and Ben will start a three day drive to Boulder, CO where we will make our new home. The miracles that fell into place to make this all possible have also allowed us to focus on the part we will miss the most. Our dear friends. It is you who it's hard to leave, you who tug at our heartstrings, you who we will miss so dearly. And yet, we are following our hearts to Boulder. We hope you will come to visit, and share in the joy of our adventure.

We're including our new details below, and of course our email, Facebook, Twitter and Flickr handles all remain the same. All of a sudden, our social networks are going to come in much handier. Thanks internets!

Ben, Mary & Fiona
4176 Amber Place
Boulder CO 80304
303 449 0749

With so much love and gratitude for each and every one of you. And a prayer we'll be together soon.

Ben, Mary & Fiona

P.S. Now there's some evidence on my Flickr, here's a link to some of the images I've been taking since we arrived:

Recent shots from our life in Boulder
Fiona's new school
What would become our house
And the house we ended up buying!

Yes, a Blog

Most of you probably didn't even know I had a blog, and to say that I do is almost a stretch since I haven't been posting here very much. I'm wanting to change that, so that's part of sharing this more widely. I hope you enjoy or at least get something out of what I share here, and please comment. I want to know people are reading and reacting to what I'm putting out. My aim is for this to be a place I can share my personal spiritual journey, my art and personal creative output, and my thoughts on relationships, fatherhood, life and love.

The Seminar

It's been a year and a half since I first did The Seminar. Only a year and a half? I can hardly believe it. Seems like much longer ago than that. In any case, rather unexpectedly I am now reviewing The Seminar in Denver this coming Wednesday. I'm grateful to be able to attend and both nervous and excited to dive into the work.

I had been scheduled to staff The Seminar with my community in San Francisco. Then Mary's mom had a fall in Maine where she lives and Mary needed to go there to help her get home and get settled. Turned out she was being released the day The Seminar began in SF and Mary wouldn't be home until the afternoon of the second to last day. This basically hosed my staffing plans. I rescheduled my flights for early December, trusted in God's plan for me and hunkered down with Fiona.

We were having a ball. Then one night I get a txt to get on a conference call with Maha (the leader of the Denver community and a group I belong to called the Second Generation), my spiritual master Kalindi and the rest of the Second Generation group. On the call Maha tells us that Kalindi wants as many of us as possible to review The Seminar that's about to happen in Denver. I immediately have resistance, and go into all the reasons I *can't* do it. At a certain point on the call two things happened. Thing the first, before asking us to respond, Maha says something to the effect of "This is your spiritual master calling for you to come to the Seminar, who of you will come". Which is pretty heavy, and I think started off a minor panic attack for me. Thing the second, I tell Maha I can staff as much as possible, and she responds "Kalindi wants to know why you aren't going to review". Now what happened next is what has been very interesting for me to observe and become aware of. I panicked. I could feel the part of me that wanted to say "I will". Except I didn't. I went into a bunch of explanation about caring for Fiona and not being able to take the time. Some of which was accurate, because the truth is I won't make commitments like that without setting it up with Mary first. And I could have said that. And I didn't.

Well it ate away at me. And by the end of the next day I knew I needed to do whatever was necessary to see if I could actually do it. At the very least I had to follow my desire to review. I set about handling the logistics of registering and got in touch with Mary and we started our own process with it. For us, the whole process has been very deep, sometimes painful, and again an opportunity for us to reveal more and get more exposed with one another, which has led to our being more related. Not necessarily more comfortable, definitely more related. More on that in subsequent posts.

What this process has had me really looking at is my relationship with Kalindi. How much am I ready to give over my will? How willing am I to follow her guidance? When she makes a request like this one, because she knows something special needs to happen, and will happen in this Seminar, am I willing to do what she asks? I am already on a Path on which I have agreed to follow her basic guidance, which I do to the best of my ability. And with this experience I am seeing my devotion is deeper than that.

What that will mean for me going forward I do not know. I am still a devoted husband and father, and how I balance my time with Mary and Fiona and on this Path will continue to be my work. I know if I could make a living for my family doing this work and contributing in the ways I can to the Mission I would. However, that's not possible currently, so I continue to love my work outside of the Mission. The work/spiritual balance is definitely another post topic so again, more on that later. For now, I will continue to go deeper into myself, and get myself out of my own way, so more pure love can come through me and flow to those I love and care for.

I wanted to close with a few words about what I want in this Seminar. More post topics surfacing, so I'll touch on the key points, all of which will likely become posts in and of themselves. I have a lot of of blogging to do... I have become aware recently of how I hold myself back in certain areas because of a fear I have of being perceived as arrogant or egotistical. I want to stop. I can now see how it's my ego that's stopping me, and my desire is to walk away from those limits. My other main focus is this notion of 'doing it right'. I can get caught very easily in a pattern of trying to do things right. This is a trap, and keeps me from focusing on actually doing whatever it is I'm trying to do right. A friend said to me the other day, "It's not about doing it right, it's about doing the work". She didn't know how perfect a statement that was for me. And she was so right.

In filling out my application and doing the looking at what I want in this Seminar I became aware of something. When I did my first Seminar, I thought I had taken leaps and bounds, and the feeling I have now is that those were baby steps. Now I'm ready to run.

Tees Tease

I started a new project on Flickr. Here's the description I wrote for it:

New project for November 2009. Part of my looking at the ego has me observing how I think my clothes say something about who I am. Since a lot of my tee shirts actually do say something (on them) I thought it might be interesting to document every tee shirt I wear in November. At the end I will get rid of every shirt I didn't wear and probably a few of the ones I did. If you happen to be reading this and have an opinion, vote for shirts I should get rid of, keep, or give to you. This'll be fun.

Take a look at the growing set here.