leilaland

2010-02-15T14:14:00.001-08:00

2009-10-10T07:45:00.001-07:00

A Tyranny Against the Wind

2009-05-15T19:50:00.001-07:00

A Defense of Romanticism

I would begin to unwind if I could just find a reason. Ahh, my heart is so very put upon by delusions of the perfectly romantic. My heart is put upon by the absence of love. I do love myself, but that is only so much masturbation. I need to share my love with another, but not just any other. My beloved must be able to requite and in so many ways. To be saved from this put uponness, yes, I need to share my love with another. What great selfishness and cruelty is it that says we must love simply ourselves for happiness, and to need another to love is unhealthy??!! That is the sentiment of the impotent to love.

I would begin to unwind into some perfect tapestry if I could love you. Now, I am all knotted up in balls of despair over your absence, dear love of mine. And love has the singular right to possess. My love. It is the solitary privilege of the beloved, to be loved solely.
And I say to you bastards of love, those of you who no longer know what it is to sing to the night hopelessly, because you love so much, and those of you who condemn us “hopeless romantics” because we “love too much”; and to all the insensitive fucks who have written me off, to you, I say goodbye and good luck. Go live your petty lives of liking and caring, revel in your hatred. That would be good. No, you could not even do that; you lack the passion to hate. Hate, a preference to dislike for the true lovers and dreamers of true love. You feeble minded mockers of the romantic soul are like a pestering wind beating against my bedroom window at night when I try to sleep and dream of love. You feckless idlers who cannot decide, cannot commit to anything, you, the wind that blows away all of my romantic fibers and twists them into knots. I can joyfully say that I hate the wind of indecision, of middle-paths, and frozen minds, fickle hearts.
Ah, but at least the fickle hearts have some inclination to love….

And I would lay down and bask, in the silent passion of the lover’s night, I ask, who doesn’t want to find completion with another being? Who wants to die alone, let alone live that way?
I lay down and I ask. I lay down on the earth’s heaven ground and croon to the sky; at least you accept my love. Still, the hopeless romantic spirit in me waits countless eternities for you to croon back, “I love you, too.” And even if I didn’t hear these words, I would give myself to you to save you from suffering, and take away all your bad habits, strip away all your bullshit, chip away your porcelain veil…and free you. And in your letting me love you, I would begin to unwind.

But still, I suffer endless and tiresome retreats into the lonely passages of love. I am strung out on a romantic buzz with no one to share it with. I do ask, I do beg and plea, I do pray and wonder, desperately, like a naked beggar in city streets. Where, who, when, and how, love? I have standards that breach the heavens and this is why, I am certain, I suffer this despair. No one is equal to my capacity to love, when I do. And in this great feat, I am abandoned to life, loveless. So I cry and I moan, I write unyielding words, feverishly, as if to conjure the one true One –for one is all there is, in romantic love. I dance stunning solos for the setting sun and all hope of requition. Then I lay down and die a thousand deaths; I crawl into silent corners and retreat. I wonder who is there that is like this, out there, in the world. I dream. Ah, dream is the salvation of lovers. It offers a momentary relief from the cutthroat necessity to shed the brightest loving light onto the beloved, however unimbued with the ability or desire to reciprocate the feelings the beloved is.

Ah, the hopeless romantic rants. The hopeless romantic chants this tirade in hope of an answer from her love, whoever, wherever he may be. And in the twilight, finds her final repose. At least the sun loves the west, unwaveringly. And, watching the sun sink toward the body of the earth at the horizon, she finds some subtle relief in this, the singular salve of night: a glimmer of hope, even if only symbolic.
And hope is the mana of the hopeless romantic, hope, the worst thing to come out of Pandora’s Box. The hopeless romantic thrives on hope like air to a normal human being, and this is why the hopeless romantic is hopeless, or at least always almost to the point of running out, but a true and total junkie. The hopeless romantic is singularly astonishing in resourcefulness. Only the hopeless romantic can always find a glimmer of hope somewhere, somehow, someway. The hopeless romantic is a master rationalist, adroit at finding evidence for loving, of maintaining hope. Maybe, the hopeless romantic is more full of hope than any other, and thus, the most sublime, for hope represents belief in the possibility of a finer reality, attained.

But as for the search for “ideal” love, the “perfect”, it teaches hope.

The Spell

2009-05-15T19:39:00.001-07:00

Crimson deeper speeding over the darkness
Crashing into oneness
Someone witness this
I can’t stand the idea that I’m here alone
Project my experience on the silver screen

I haven’t got time to feel like shit
Can’t you see I don’t like it
Kill myself a thousand times
And wonder why everyone wants me alive

God dam it

Who the fuck is anyone?

I would take something from anyone
I would take your shoes
And fall in love with your bleeding feet as you walk across the razor blade beam
If I knew it meant
Heaven
Nirvana
Salvation
Enlightenment
Peace
For all

One
Or
The many

Why don’t you know the truth
It isn’t something you have to prove
It’s just the way you feel
And what you think see breathe
And everything about the way that you wanna be

I can’t tell you anything
About the future
So what am I?

Never saying anything about the realities that you experience
It’s just a fucking waste
Of something
That could be true

Why do you say
Nothing

It’s a pathetic fucking god dam waste of energy

Kill yourself and do the world a favor

Because if you are not in touch with what’s real
Then you are wasting a life
Die
Reincarnate
Come back as something better
Like a rain cloud or a daffodil or a cat
Or some kind of Buddha

Otherwise
GO TO HELL

I thought you had a connection to the truth
I thought you had a connection to the truth

Everyone was saying something
I can’t hear anything
No one is saying what they mean
No one is aware of how they are

It’s scary and lonely and fucking weird

Is this happening
Right now?
Where are we?
Do you know?
Does anyone?
What have they all said?
After you are dead you realize all this shit was just an illusion
And finally
You are free

But the passion of the body
Keeps us here

Pleasure induces

Pain repells

The taste of you reminds me that there is something deeper in me
That wants to heal

I could rejoice at the thought of us on the wild beach at night
stars crashing down
Our naked bodies melting
together in the heat of the burning stars’ flame
Perfect death

There is but only this:
You and the spell

THIS

2009-05-15T18:17:00.000-07:00

i don't want the center of the stage
i don't want to be right or care about punctuation and grammar
i rave in the darkness with the rain
i dance naked in the fire and die inside this rampant madness
disintegrated wholly yet resurrected in desire

i can't see any reason not to be
splayed out with this intensity
i lay down on the road and beg you to run over me
i stand up and make a single motion
signaling this as the thing that matters:
drowning with the fervent certainty of hell
in our delicious ocean

the plants need watering and everything is cut down
i want the overgrowth and wildness and flooding mystery of passion
i'm blind and lost in this great season
open my eyes like a child at dawn
my heart is wild among the lush blooms
i follow the footsteps through the garden
strung out on treason

i can't even lay down or sit still or begin to think about anything
i want to thrash on the keyboard and bang drums with my bare hands
i want to roll in the mud and get dirty
i want to break everything and scream YES!
and go running in the sands that came from the degeneration of great mountains

until it all means something
and everything is nothing again

A Hole at the Center of the Galaxy

2008-12-19T12:01:00.000-08:00

This morning, I opened up the latest issue of Time magazine and read that a team of German Astronomers has confirmed the existence of a giant black hole at the center of the Milky Way.

"How interesting, how cool, how.. scary!" I thought.

I immediately thought of all the reading I've been doing about the Mayan and Incan time prophecies for 2012. These prophesies suggest that the Earth will be at the center of the galaxy in 2012 and that there will be huge and life changing shifts on planet Earth at that time.

So, then, I thought... if the black hole is at the center of the galaxy, and Earth will be at the center of the galaxy in 2012, does that mean Earth will be in the black hole in 2012? What will happen if Earth is in a black hole? Will we live? Will we be conscious? What kinds of changes can we expect?

This is very stimulating information that I wish to explore and meditate upon.
The first thoughts and feelings that come to me about the prospect of Earth being at the center of the Galaxy with the Black Hole is of peace and joy, of glorious movement and deep transformation. I feel good about this. It feels like a wonderful thing!

So, over tea, while looking out at snow covered land, I pondered this. I stared at the sky, a pale blue in the dawn's light. My sight traced the lines of snow along the douglas fir branches across the way as my internal sight envisioned the galaxy, a gorgeous swatch of stars and dust and light and movement, with US, all the beings on Earth, dancing in the center of it in a climactic celebration of all that is.

My tea cup empty and my back stiff, I got up to heat more water and stretch. Then I made my way up to my office, an alcove with a nice western view of the fir trees and sky. I opened my gmail to see who might be communicating to me this day. And there, a letter from Alberto Villoldo, a shaman in the Incan tradition and founder of the Healing the Light Body School. Every month I receive a newsletter from him, and I always find the information he shares to be relevant and timely.
What a giant smile grew widely across my being as I saw the title of his newsletter:

THE HOLE AT THE CENTER OF THE GALAXY

So I read....
And I'd like to share it with you.
Here it is, in entirety, from his website at http://thefourwinds.com/newsletter/DEC2008/hole-alberto.html :

"The Hole at the Center of the Galaxy

Xibalba is the Mayan underworld, the "place of fear." The prophets and day-keepers of the Yucatan described this as the dark rift in the Milky Way. This is the place of our beginning and of our return. An according to lore, the gates of Xibalba would open before the great planetary alignment that would occur on December 21, 2012.

Recently I read an article entitled "Milky Way's Giant Black Hole Awoke from Slumber 300 Years Ago" authored by scientists Robert Naeye and Rob Gutro of the Goddard Space Flight Center. It seems that the gigantic black hole at the center of our galaxy, with a mass that is more than 4 million times that of our sun, has awakened from a long sleep, and begun to emit huge outbursts of radiation.

Black holes in space are so dense that not even light can escape from them, as they gobble up anything and everything in their path. But it appears that they also play an important role in the birth and formation of galaxies, and seem to be at the center of many of our nearby constellations. How did ancient astronomers know that this was the source of beginnings and endings? And why did they refer to it as the "place of fear"?

One of the meditation practices of shamans-in-training consists of finding your "star". To do this, you scan the night sky and find a distant sun that calls to you in some way. Then you sit quietly and gaze at the point of light, following instructions to direct your awareness along that beam of starlight back to its source. Even though it took millions of years for that light to reach the earth, the seers of old believed that the mind could travel instantaneously. Just like in dreams when we are able to journey to distant lands, or even visit relatives and friends from the past, the shaman's discipline allowed them to ride a beam of starlight to its source. Once you found your star, it would protect you and guide you throughout the rest of your days.

The lore of the shamans say that even as you can travel along a beam of light, then you can also travel along a beam of darkness, of the invisible starlight. We know that the black hole at the center of the galaxy has woken up from its long slumber and started to emit invisible radiation, massive outbursts of X-rays. Could the seers of old have made this fantastic journey to the center of the Milky Way, to the "place of fear"? As I was musing about this, I asked myself if even consciousness would be trapped in the immense gravitational pull of a black hole. How close could you come to the edge of infinity?

The galactic center is 26,000 light years away. On December 21, 2012, our solar system will come into perfect alignment with the center of the galaxy, an event that occurs only every 26,000 years, and that the Maya and other indigenous peoples of the Americas prophesied would be a time of tremendous upheaval, the end of one way of life and the birth of a new one. They foresaw the journey back through Xibalba and through the time of fear that many are experiencing today. And they left us a message of hope.

This is a time of birth, of beginnings, a moment in history fraught with opportunity. It is a time for courage, for purity, for integrity, and for holding forth our highest dreams and hopes. A time of the dawn of a new day.

Have a joyous holiday season, and join us on December 21, 2008 for a meditation, in ceremony or around a fire – a candle, a bonfire, or by your fireplace, to give thanks to Mother Earth for her bounty and to the Great Spirit, and to dream a new world into being.

In Peace, Alberto Villoldo PhD"

I hope you enjoyed this!
What do you think about the Earth being in the center of the galaxy in 2012 with the black hole that lives there?

In harmonic love and delighted joy,
Leila

Now we connect online... and it's socially acceptable behavior

2008-12-18T10:37:00.000-08:00

But, I remember a time, years ago (sometime in the late 90s), when people in my life thought there was something wrong with me for talking to people online.

Now, communicating with people online is ubiquitous.
It's happening everywhere, all the time.
It is how businesses are run, it's how many people socialize and keep abreast of current events.
It's a way people share and commune and express and even create.

The way people can react with such fear and paranoia, with judgment and de-valuation is an interesting phenomenon that seems so common to the history of humanity.

Perhaps when we are ignorant of something, when we don't understand it, and it is strange and new, it can seem scary and threatening, so we react in fear.

I suppose this is why my roommates, family, boyfriend, and others thought that I had a problem, that the people I spoke to online were "not real". Yes, I kid you not, that is a term that was often used regarding the people I interacted with online. They were fake or imaginary.
Are you imaginary? I think you are very real.

This is why it struck me as so bizarre that the people in my life could not imagine another human being sitting at their computer typing back to me. They could not grok that we were talking, interacting, sharing, socializing, and being together through cyberspace.

There was a time when people thought that chatting at work was counterproductive, or "goofing off on the job", and now, how ironic that chat is actually conducive to greater work productivity when people can make a few taps with their fingers and accomplish incredible efficiency in their work. Instead of walking across the department, or flying to another area of the world for a meeting, instant chat is right here, waiting for us to leap into the acceleration of space and time with immediate information and energy exchange.

It's amazing!

I've longed appreciated the paradigmatic change that online socializing represents.
It brings people together who normally would never have met or had anything to do with one another. It's how I met my husband.

It helps bridge barriers to social connections, in that it allows people to overcome or completely bypass any fears based on insecurity about appearance.

Communicating online circumvents any inconvenience based on travel cost and time.

And isn't there something totally disarming and empowering (yes, I use those words together for effect) about sitting at home, free to say and express and share whatever you dare, whatever you deign, whatever you can muster that you might not normally achieve in an in person social setting.

Yes, I think that talking, interacting, and socializing online can help to encourage us to say what we think and feel and mean, to take the time to explore that, and to reach out to people in ways we might not if there were no internet.

And have you noticed that you can sense another person's vibe, mood, quality of being, way of being, personality, energy, essence, while interacting with them online? It's not just dry words on a screen. It's THAT person, and you can feel and experience them as them, and not as filtered through some cold, impersonal mechanism that I hear so many luddites labeling the internet as.

Indeed, I think there is something profoundly "spiritual" about online socializing because it takes away a lot of the physicality and even psychological reference points and allows you to connect, in perhaps a more pure and refined way, with others. Even though you are sitting "alone" at your keyboard and monitor, you are in reality "WITH" the person on the other end of your online interaction, sharing a social engagement that is just as real as meeting for a movie or coffee or a drink.

....

Giving Thanks and Being Grateful

2008-11-26T12:17:00.000-08:00

I am thankful for so many things.

Often times I forget this.

Isn't that weird?

Often times, I notice that I notice what I'm not thankful for.

Why do we send so much negative energy out into the world? Just the mere act of thinking about something we don't like, of judging and place a valuation on a thing that exists is a damnation, a blasphemy of existence, yes, a sin.

I've been studying the Science of Mind with Amy Aspell and two other amazing women. In this workshop, I'm re-learning about the fact that our thoughts create reality.

It's true.

Long ago, while sitting on the rocky shores of Baker Beach in San Francisco, alone, in the fog and wind and cold mists, as I spied the tips of the Golden Gate Bridge, peaking out from the moody depths of grey, I scrawled in the sand with some driftwood:

THE POWER OF THOUGHT
THINK IT - MAKE IT
THINK IT - BREAK IT
THE POWER OF THOUGHT
CONCENTRATE - CREATE

I was 17 at the time that I wrote this.
I hadn't read it anywhere.
I was staring at nature's majesty and heard this message come in with the crashing waves.
It felt so powerful. It was so novel to me, that I had to write it in the sand.
I then sat there and watched as the tide slowly came in and the water rushed up and washed away my message.
But I never forgot the words.
What I forgot, and remember, and forget, and remember is the truth of them...
We do have the power to create reality with our thoughts... And time and time again I hear affirmations and reminders of this all around me...

In this workshop I'm reminded about the power of the Law of Attraction, which has been popularized in the book, The Secret, by Rhonda Byrne.

The most important message that I am receiving in my life at this time is that I have the power to create my own experience of life.
This makes me think of Aristotle's line that you can judge the character of a person, not by what happens to the person, but by how the person deal with what happens to him or her...
I've always been struck by this. I first read that line long ago while studying Philosophy at Berkeley and other universities around the world. I read the Nicomachean Ethics and Aristotle's ideas about happiness and the meaning of life.
I had a fantastic professor who advised that anyone interested in this should read Heidegger, who is "a long series of footnotes on Aristotle."

I highly recommend reading Heidegger's Being and Time and Aristotles Nicomachean Ethics.. It's good bedtime reading.. something to chomp off and digest in your subconscious while sleeping...

But now... as we are experiencing a Holiday in the United States that seems to have been founded on genocide and acculturation, I find that I'm keenly aware of experiencing gratitude.

I'm thankful for the fact that I'm not living in a war zone, that I don't have AIDS, that I'm able to hear Beethoven's illustrious 9th Symphony and watch movies and sunsets and crashing waves on jagged shorelines.

I'm thankful that I have a loving husband who is gentle and funny and oh so kind.

I'm thankful that I have a roof over my head, a warm bed, a computer with internet connection and fingers to type with.

I'm thankful that Jesus Christ died for my sins... that he came to show us the secret of RESURRECTION and eternal life....

I'm thankful for all the mystics and sages who have pulled back the curtain on life's secrets to help us all become more conscious.

I'm thankful for all the people in the world who are doing what they can do end suffering, raise consciousness, and create a better reality for all of us.

May we be part of this good.
May we be inspired to recognize the beauty in the world and reflect that beauty in all we do.
May we act from wisdom and compassion, like the great Bodhisatvas.
May we align ourselves with Right Action, Right Mind, Right Thought, Right Feeling.
May we be peaceful, kind, loving, and aware.

At this time, may we all realize how connected we are to one another. May we all participate together in dreaming the most amazingly beautiful and peaceful reality into being.
At this time, may we all join in prayer for the GOOD OF ALL.

I am grateful for you reading this.
I am grateful for this.
I am grateful.
I AM.

I've been Facebooking

2008-11-26T12:13:00.000-08:00

I've been very active on Facebook lately. Check me out, there. It's a nice way and place to interact with others in a non-linear time-frame.
You can post information about yourself, what you are doing, share thoughts, notes, photos and check out what people you know are up to without needing to interact at the same time.

Facebook represents a new paradigm of communicating and sharing and being in community.

Check it out, sign up, it's free.... and fun!

Be Vigilant and Attentive!!!

2008-10-28T14:52:00.000-07:00

"We must be vigilant and attentive without engaging the world with drama. Now is the time to heal ourselves and our culture, to reevaluate and reexamine all belief structures, to cull what needs to be shifted and to allow ourselves to be renewed and reborn..." -Alberto Villoldo

become conscious of how we direct the power of our spirit...

2008-10-25T15:53:00.000-07:00

I'm very introspective these days. I've spent the week alone, reading spiritual texts, meditating, praying, writing, and doing yoga and belly dancing.
It's been nice to be alone a lot, and spend quiet days tending to my spirit.

I have also listened to the complete Sacred Contracts audio course by Caroline Myss.
Wow! I love her background as a Catholic, a nun, and a psychologist who studied archetypes and schizophrenia for her Masters.
Years ago I listened to her seminal work, Anatomy of the Spirit, while driving the back roads of western Marin County, while searching for a way out of my unhappiness.

I love her direct, no nonsense, somewhat smartass way of talking. She's cool. She's powerful. She's articulate, and she's paved the groundwork for very concise language about the human spirit.... Caroline Myss teaches us everything we didn't learn in Kindergarten through graduate school and didn't know to ask.

If the free people of the world, and by free I mean not in torture chambers and war zones and poverty and disease stricken gagged, bound, and raped masses in the third world... I mean the free bourgeois of the first world nations who sit in front of TV sets and computer monitors fretting over stock indexes and broken fingernails...
I mean us.
It's these free people who have the power to change the world for the better, for if they (we) could all understand that the source of our own pain and our own happiness is within ourselves and starts right in our own mind, our way of seeing and thinking and being, this world would transform, dramatically, for the better.

In this spirit, I'd like to share a bit from Caroline's latest newsletter here:
"Ideally, our task is to become conscious of how we direct the power of our spirit into acts of creation during the course of our life. More or less, that sums it up. An illuminated soul is one who is on to the game, who really understands what Buddha meant by seeing clearly through the world of physical illusion and not being controlled by that world. Jesus would say, 'Be in the world but not of the world.' Same truth, different words. What we are meant to become conscious of is how well we live in accordance to these high cosmic truths while in physical form....

This is what your inner work is all about: learning to discern what is truth from illusion – at all times, in all places.."

Barbara Hand Clow and The Mayan Code

2008-10-14T18:07:00.000-07:00

I listened to a 2005 talk with Mayan Calendar and 2012 scholar, Barbara Hand Clow, in which she predicted that there would be a major economic crash in the fall of 2008 surrounding the housing market.
She was right.
This made me check out her website and wow! Check it out!
She's on to something.
The most important things she says is to be aware of how quickly you create reality with your thoughts now, due to time acceleration. She says monitor your thoughts and be careful about what you create. Focus, pray, and be clear with your intentions to create and experience beauty.

She discusses the transfiguration of the human species and more!

From her site, I copy this text:
"

We are in the midst of an evolutionary critical leap that inspires us to heal our bodies, transmute our emotional blocks, clarify our minds, and discover our souls, and Barbara and Gerry assist students with this growth. Barbara is well known for her work as an astrologer, especially for her groundbreaking study of Chiron. In light of the building galactic alignment, she has written The Mayan Code: Time Acceleration and Awakening the World Mind based on Carl Calleman's Mayan Calendar hypothesis and her own study of Earth's alignment with the Galactic Center in 1998, which intensified time during the Galactic Underworld-1999-2011. "

The Categorical Imperative and Conscientiousness

2008-10-14T09:35:00.000-07:00

The categorical imperative operates on the principle that one should act according to how one desires everyone else to act. Deontological in its application, the categorical imperative is a moral philosophy, but also a tenet of optimism and hope, for it sees the best in everyone and hopes for that to be a reality.
Treating people as though they are valuable in themselves and not as a means to some end (like getting that position on the Board or using your neighbor's hot tub) is both the goal and the process of this ethical standard.

The widely acknowledged achilles heel of the categorical imperative is its a' priori assumption that all agents (us thinking, feeling, acting sentients) operate rationally and use logic to guide our actions. Naive at best, preposterous at worst, I still love the notion of the categorical imperative and have since the days of my youth sitting in halls at the University of California at Berkeley, and now I talk about why herein.

What is so wrong with wanting to treat others the way you want to be treated?

People scoff at the notion. Pollyannaism. Foolish idealist fantasy-landalism.
People judge and scowl and scorn and dismiss.
People are scared and fearful and easily miss the fact that acting in loving, caring, kind, compassionate, conscientious, and thoughtful ways can make them feel safer, more fulfilled, happier, more powerful, cooler, neater, sexier, stronger, and better.

It's true.
What you think about before you do can greatly impact your overall experience of reality.

I often do this when I interact with people. Before I talk or make an action I analyze it and feel out the appropriateness of it. I ask myself if this is the best way to say what I mean and the best way to deliver this information to the recipient of said communication. Often, I'll find that I reword it before speaking or writing. I fine tune the message content to match the situation, my intention, and the recipient's overall personality, demeanor, and my interpretation of their needs at the time of communication.

For instance, a friend might be talking about how her job isn't what she really wants. She talks about it all the time and seems to run a tape when she talks about it, so that I hear the same words every time this is the subject of her talking.
Instead of saying, well, gee, you always talk about how much you hate your job but you aren't doing anything to change it, so shut the heck up because I'm tired of hearing it.

No. Instead, I breathe in and think of my friend in a compassionate way. I delve within myself to find what she most needs from me at that given moment. What she needs is understanding, compassion, moral support, and a friend. She does not need me to fix her. Nothing needs fixed, as my friend Barbara likes to say.

So in my moment of conscientiousness about my friend and her job issue, I stop and think what would I want to hear from my friend if this were a challenging issue for me, if I had an unhappy job experience that I desperately needed to shift?

I know what I'd need. I'd need to feel that the person I was speaking to about the issue heard me,really heard what I was saying. So, I mirror back to my friend what she says. I repeat some of her words, and I paraphrase and ask if I'm understanding what she's saying. She breathes in deeply and smiles. Thank you for understanding this, she says. I smile. Yes, of course, I do. Because I put myself in her shoes, and grew a heart for her. In my moment of conscientious compassion, I mirrored her pain in articulated description so that she no longer felt alone and burdened by this stress. At least for the moment.

And that's all we can do: be present for the moment. The moment is always happening, it's eternal. It is always right now. So, showing up in the moment to be there for my friend in compassion and understanding is the best thing I can do. It's better than telling her to shut the f up and stop complaining or do something about it.
Perhaps in reality she will greatly benefit from acting on her job issue rather than complaining about it.
But clearly, the complaining is her attempt to change the situation.
And a compassionate friend who acts on the categorical imperative that if I act the way I want people to treat me and I act for the good, then I add good to the world, and in so doing, I increase the quantity of goodness and help ease human suffering. Ah, pollyanna sounding again!

If I told her to shut up then I'm projecting that as an appropriate way to act and am validating that it's okay for people to talk to me that way. And, it's not.
It's not okay for people to treat me with disrespect.
I want to be understood, honored, respected, valued, and grokked.
And to that extent I must strive to understand, honor, respect, value, and grok others.

That is how the principle of the categorical imperative is at work in my life.

While talking with my friend, I don't just mirror her words and paraphrase her statements to show her that I grok where she's coming from.

I also seek to sense what it is she's needing from her situation. Does she need to quit her job? Does she merely need to communicate something to someone so that she can keep her job and resolve the issue that's causing her suffering? Can she simply shift her perspective and feel happier with her job? Must drastic measures be taken or is there some easy quick solution?

Once I assess this information, via compassionate questions and listening to my friend, I will offer a suggestion or two. Gentle suggestions, phrased the way I'd want someone to speak to me and stated in ways that the human psyche can receive.

I might say something like, it sounds like you don't really like banking and would prefer to go back to teaching. I wait and listen to her reply or reaction to that statement. She might say, oh god, no I don't know if I can teach again, my mortgage is too high for that, and with Dan being laid off and the kids in private school, I need to keep the banking job. To that, I must react with understanding, mirroring her, paraphrasing, validating. I see, yes, teachers don't make what bankers do do they?

No. I hear her sigh.

Then, I try to address the specific issue at her job, which is, her boss never lets her finish a sentence, and she feels that she's always interrupted and not heard. This includes making suggestions for improving her performance, but then her boss interrupts and takes credit for the idea and even treats my friend as if she is incompetent. So, I suggest, if Janice does not allow you to complete sentences then perhaps what you need to do is have a one on one talk with her. Let her know that you really respect her and love working with her. Tell her that you enjoy being on her team and you are available to assist her for anything. Tell her she can count on you.

My friend hears this as if she's having a revelation.
I told her this because that's what I'd want someone to tell me. Something wise and insightful that could help me address my situation in ways I hadn't thought of...
My friend reports to me the following month that she had exactly that kind of meeting with her boss and then they went out for lunch several times since then and all the interrupting had stopped.

I'm not sure if this is making my point, but in putting myself in my friends shoes' in acting conscientiously, that is, in thinking about how I'd want to be treated, and in thinking about what would most benefit my friend in terms of what i was able to provide while she was talking/complaining to me about her job, in acting on the Categorical Imperative I helped her change her attitude and her situation so that the suffering she had earlier described disappeared!

And maybe, maybe my friend comes back a month later with the same story, complaining about her job situation and I ask her if she had a meeting with her boss and she says no. The, I go from there, I find out what is going on in her head. Why didn't she meet with her boss, and offer the most compassionate support I can.

It can often be our reaction to a complaining friend to secretly roll our eyes to ourselves while smiling and nodding or frowning if that's the seeming appropriate face to make.
But I don't think this helps our friend. If you pause and look within, look at what you would want from a friend in a situation in which you were complaining and suffering.. although you might not see it that way. To you it might be that you are describing an unfair or bad situation. Would you want your friend to just nod and go uh-huh, I see, oh really, oh that's too bad, etc..?

I don't think I would.
So I operate on the principle that what I need deep inside is my guide. And what I need deep inside is a feeling of authentic connection, of compassion, of deep trust and care, and not only a feeling of being honored, respected, and valued, but also of being deeply understood and seen. So, I strive to give this to others. I strive to give what I want to the world.

If I hear a friend complain I offer compassionate listening and authentic care, and I also actively strive to suggest a friendly, non-judgmental solution, as that is what I want. I want my friends to help me see a different perspective on my problem.I want them to hear where I'm coming from and understand all the nuances and really grok my personal suffering. And in this connection I feel more connected, more at peace, more whole.

I do think this is a matter of acting in ways that you think it's okay for everyone else to act. It's about acting conscientiously, for the good of others. It's about saying, would I want someone to do or say this to me? If not, don't do it. Rethink your approach, and strive to live a more conscientious life.

The Categorical Imperative was championed by Immanuel Kant. For more information about its history and origins, reference Kant, and other philosophers and movements, including Plato, Sartre, and Christiandom.

Thank you.
Leila

A time for turning within

2008-10-10T08:50:00.000-07:00

Ah, Fall comes, and I feel a deep turning within.

There is something about the air, the cool, crispness of it, that makes me consciously take more deep breaths than I do during the dry, hot Summers or warm and wet Springs.

There is something about the sky, the way the colors start to skew down into the Maxfield Parrish realm, as the Earth tilts away from the Sun, that makes me calm down and notice more.
I find I can just sit and stare. I can just be here and see the beauty that surrounds me.

October is my favorite month, leaning.

Fall is here and the leaves are falling off the trees outside my office window. I stop and stare at that miraculous moment of simplicity.
"It's true," I tell myself, I am that leave, turned deep brown and falling off the tree to merge with the earth.
I have been high and hanging out and blowing in the wind and clinging and now I am free!

It's true. That leaf is me.
And now I'm happily laying on the ground under a giant maple with sprawling craggy branches.

I'm going deep within. Now is the time for turning within.
I'll rest here for the fall until I decompose and transform again.
I'll break down all my components and morph once more into the heart of the earth and creep up to the core of the tree I once fell from.

And one day the essence that is me will flow, nutrient rich, up through the tree, and I'll sprout out there on that farthest branch. That one there, hanging out over the sea.

And I'll hang out there, listening, until it's time to fall again, and contemplate the Eternal Return.

October is my favorite month, leaving.

It's Fall again.
Amen.

A Situation in Which

2008-10-05T20:38:00.000-07:00

A situation is an occurance, a happening, an event.
It's a setting of sorts, but not a locale.
It's not a "where".

This past year I've been acutely aware of how often I hear the phrase:
"A situation where..."

I cringe.

I hear this from NPR djs and interviewees, noted authorities on various subjects, CNN news anchors, talk show hosts, politicians, and, of course, those I'm personally in contact with in my daily life: friends, family, colleagues, acquaintences.

The fact is, the phrase, "A situation where", is ubiquitous!

Why? Perhaps because the fine art of grammatical instruction has fallen by the wayside. I shudder to think that perhaps we all learn this horrid way of speaking in our classrooms. I give credit to teachers everywhere in the hope that they work in earnest to help us develop more than adequate communication skills, including the ability to construct a proper sentence, both in writing and speaking.

Perhaps, it's in the home and the school hallway, the social gatherings and even (now) online conversations that induce and allow us to make a muck of our fine language,and thus, make very little sense.

I've always thought that the beauty of a language is in the moment that it gives reality a definition. The way words, syntactically structured into groupings of linguistic meaning, have the ability to connect subjective (and perhaps objective, as in female, or day, or wood) meaning to the perceived world of experience through symbol, sound, and thought.

Language influences perception.

And, to that extent, when I hear the utterance, "A situation where", I feel seriously worried about the level of consciousness of the speaker. It makes me feel alienated. I suppose because I'm in a state of judgment. But, perhaps, it is because in the misuse of the English language, I discern a certain careless unconsciousness about what we are all doing here and why.

Yes, at some level I'm offended by the grammatical error. But at a deeper level I'm knocked into some state of existential despair as to the meaning of it all. And hearing someone say something like "a situation where" dismantles some delicate part of me that depends on the belief, or perhaps dire hope, that design, symmetry, and purpose hold us all together.
And grammatical structures, and the rules which hold them together, help me feel a sense of control and power over my experience of reality.

Who knows...

I just know that I wish I could hear, just once, on NPR, or out of Barak Obama's mouth, "A situation in which", rather than, "a situation where".

That would be a situation in which I am a happy Leila!

Barbara Ehrenreich on Capitalism in the U.S. 2008 and Marx

2008-10-02T08:58:00.000-07:00

Read her pertinent article, published today in The Nation, and copied, with permission, here:

The Communist Manifesto Turns 160
By Barbara Ehrenreich
October 1, 2008

This year marks the 160th anniversary of The Communist Manifesto and capitalism--a k a "free enterprise"--seems willing to observe the occasion by dropping dead. On Monday night, some pundits were warning that the ATMs might run dry and hinting that the only safe investment left is canned beans. Apocalypse or extortion? No one seems to know, though the populist part of the populace has been leaning toward the latter. An e-mail whipping around the web this morning has the subject line "Sign on Wall Street yesterday," and shows a hand-lettered cardboard sign saying, "JUMP! You Fuckers!"

The Manifesto makes for quaint reading today. All that talk about "production," for example: Did they actually make things in those days? Did the proletariat really slave away in factories instead of call centers? But on one point Marx and Engels proved right: within capitalist societies, or at least the kind of wildly unregulated capitalism America has had, the rich got richer, the workers got poorer, and the erstwhile middle class has been sliding toward ruin. The last two outcomes are what Marx called "immiseration," which, in translation, is the process you're undergoing when you have cancer and no health insurance or a mortgage payment due and no paycheck coming in.

Marx predicted that capitalism would fall in a spirited, proactive, fashion: the workers, fed up with immiseration, would revolt, seize the "means of production" and insist on running the show themselves, that being the original, pre-Soviet, notion of socialism. The revolution didn't happen, of course, at least not here. For the past several years, American workers have sweetly acquiesced to declining wages, rising prices, speed-ups at work, disappearing pensions and increasingly threadbare health insurance. While CEO pay escalated to the eight-figure range and above, so-called ordinary Americans took on second jobs and crowded into multi-generational households with uncomfortably long waits for the bathroom.

But all this immiseration--combined with fabulous enrichment at the top--did end up destabilizing the capitalist system, if only because , in the last few years, America's substitute for decent wages has been easy credit. Until about a year ago, we got almost daily messages, by telemarketer and by mail, urging us to consolidate our debts, refinance our homes, transfer our debts from credit card to another and try tasty new mortgages that didn't even require a down payment. All too often, we bit. It sounded so reasonable, for example, not to let our assets just "sit" in our houses but to start spending that money now.

At the other, Learjet, end of the economic spectrum, there was the problem of what to do with too much money. Yes, this can be a problem. Some of the super-rich have to hire consultants to help them spend their money: Where do you get a $20,000 bottle of wine or find a Picasso for the bathroom wall? More seriously, there was the problem of what to invest in. As Chuck Collins of the Working Group on Extreme Inequality has pointed out, huge concentrations of wealth can function like rogue waves, smashing around recklessly in their search for ever higher returns. A lot of these money waves flowed, directly or indirectly, into the dodgy credit schemes that were engulfing the un-rich majority, leaving even the fat cats imperiled by the toxic debts of the subprime class.

Marx's argument was that the coexistence of great wealth for the few and growing poverty for the many is not only morally objectionable, it's also inherently unstable. He may have been wrong about the reasons for the instability, but no one can any longer deny it's there. When the greed of the rich collided with the needs of the poor--for a home, for example--the result was a global credit meltdown.

Obviously, the way to address the crisis is to deal with the poverty and inequality that led to it: bail out people facing foreclosures, increase food stamp allotments, extend unemployment insurance and make a massive job-generating, public investment in infrastructure--and, since medical debts are the number-one cause of personal bankruptcy, enact universal health insurance immediately. But not even Obama, whose lawn sign I still proudly display, seems to have the stomach for such a "trickle upwards" approach. He has announced that he won't bother taking the bailout as an opportunity to change the bankruptcy law so that people facing foreclosure can renegotiate their mortgages.

So happy birthday, Communist Manifesto--although I'm hoping that capitalism survives this one, if only because there's no alternative ready at hand. At the very least, we should get some regulation and serious oversight out of any bailout deal, meaning that, yes, the economy will look a little less like "free enterprise." But one thing we should have learned in the last week, if not the last year, is that, when applied to enterprise, "freedom" can be just another word for someone else's pain.

About Barbara Ehrenreich
Barbara Ehrenreich, the author of Nickel and Dimed (Owl), is the winner of the 2004 Puffin/Nation Prize. more...

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness

2008-09-30T17:35:00.000-07:00

When the government obstructs the people's ability and right to pursue these ends, and when the government taxes the people without representing them, it's not a democracy.

1000 Journals

2008-09-29T14:13:00.000-07:00

I went to the Port Townsend Film Festival this weekend.
Set on the northeastern tip of the Olympic Peninsula, in Washington State, this hip waterfront town boasts views of the Cascade Mountains and the Puget Sound. It's pretty cool there. I loved it and want to go back.

While there, I saw a movie called 1000 Journals. It's a documentary about a dude in San Francisco, who goes by the title "Someguy". He has this idea that he has to send out 1000 blank journals into the world to see if they ever come back to him. He buys several journals at a time and puts his stamp inside them, and numbers each journal.

Andrea Kreuzhage, the movie's editor, director, creator, contacted Someguy and tracked down several of the journals and the people who had them in possession, all over the world...
The documentary follows the life of some of the journals and interviews the journal(ists?) /journal(ers?) about their experiences.

As a journaler of 20 plus years I found this to be an awesome, intriguing, inspiring story. I respect Someguy for starting this.
Now, with a book about it, a documentary, and an upcoming SFMoma interactive exhibit, Someguy has made quite a name for himself.. but.. what is his name?

If you see any movie this year, see 1000 Journals!!! Get the 1000 Journals book! Check out the 1000 Journals website! And.. be part of the new project, 1001 journals...
Or just write in and create your own.

I love that people have the need to express their experiences of reality. I love that we can share each others' expressions, and in that moment of being alone in our perceptions and expressions we can reach out and bridge some tangible gap between me and you, I and thou, self and other, us and them...

Capitalism Caves in on Itself

2008-09-16T10:37:00.001-07:00

I love this essay.
I think what's happening right now in the market is exactly what Karl Marx predicted 150 years ago in his seminal work, Das Kapital.

America, please, snap out of it...

2008-09-08T07:51:00.001-07:00

"We, at our own peril underestimate the incredibly strong streak of mega delusional running through our collective experiment known as America... Complicity with being conned."

Visionary Activist, Caroline Casey, always informing the structure of reality for the good of everyone, on the Presidential Elections.

She likens Sarah Palin to a sorceress with odd energies at work, and states that what's bad about Palin is "...not who she is but what’s animating her."

Listen to Casey's awesome, refreshingly sharp September 4th talk on the Presidential Campaign shenanigans at KPFA.org. Every week at 2pm on Thursdays, and streaming for your convenience in archives.

"Let's invite irony, but not sarcasm...
May everyone be surrounded by a fiery wall of their own better nature...
Empire going down.. collaborative ingenuity coming up...." Caroline Casey

And what I want to know is, why is Sarah Palin so anti-wolf? She votes again and again to have them killed and wiped out. And she votes again and again to have the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge drilled.

Don't vote for the drilling and killing ticket...

Chrome Comic about the future of Internet Browsers

2008-09-02T11:56:00.000-07:00

Okay, everyone. Here you are, on the internet. Yes, it's a place. It's Cyberspace!
And here we are, in the Brave New World of instant communication and information exchange!
Don't get lost and overwhelmed by all the information that is now so readily available to you.
Ease your way into a relationship with the internet that allows you to define what you wish to experience and protect your boundaries.

Now that you're here, I want to share with you a cool, layman speak, informative comic about this internet that you use, and about the cutting edge of technology that is poised to drop into our laps for free (thanks to Google's new open source browser, Chrome).

Take some time to study this 30+ page educational comic about the internet and Chrome.

Noble Truth

2008-08-29T17:03:00.001-07:00

I can't just sit here.
There are storms raging and worlds coming into being inside of me.
While you sit there all calm and stare.
Are you quiet in a wandering repose of saline peace or does your silence emit from a void?

I'm all wrought with this vital noise that's blaring in my head.
I'm sure you can hear it. Perhaps your vacant gaze is ignorance. Perhaps it's the sage in you who knows all too well that my fervent rantings render naught.

But can't they do something?
Can't they claw at the night in a rabid madended seeking?
Can't they grope toward meaning like the lepers to Christ.
See me. Touch me. Heal me. Make me whole! Give my life meaning and let me live again.

I know what soft promises the cowards and the liars make to themselves in the dark when I'm laying in a pool of blood
sinking into the truth of I AM.

I see gentle lucid souls shining vibrantly and it makes me want to die to something more intense and powerful.

Each second is raindrop of perfection. I know.
I caught the stare from God when I slammed my jaw on the pavement that July and felt teeth and bone and tearing open tongue and throngs of this red life stuff gushed down my chin and down my neck. My breasts were all red.
Very pretty.
Very pretty in all red.

At last I know it's true that after all this fecklessness, there is me.

And in the core of my body is a noble truth. In the core of my body is a noble truth.

It's All About Communication!

2008-08-29T08:55:00.000-07:00

After spending some time with family this summer, I realized that the thing I trip over in our familial interactions is mis-communication.

Ah, yes, that again. It seems that most of my grievances regarding social interactions revolve around communication problems. Why? Because people simply do not say what they mean or tell people what they are thinking and planning and feeling and doing and experiencing. It results in a maddening guessing game of half truths and running around bushes and hide and seek and all that other B.S. that wastes our life energy and time.

I notice that so many of us do not say what we think, want, feel, or mean. We hide. We beat around the bush. We second guess. We self edit. We censor. We lie.

We're afraid to tell people the truth. We're lying to each other and ourselves. We're avoiding who we really are. We're not being authentic. We're not being real.
And I think this is the one true sin.

Sanity must truly be the ability to communicate your experience of reality to others, and to that extent we are mostly crazy, because we don't.

To Thine Own Self Be True! Heralds the poet and prophet and saint.
Communicate your experience of reality! urges the shaman, healer, and sage.

What have you got to lose if you don't tell the truth? If you don't say what you mean? If you avoid, hide, obfuscate, and pussyfoot? EVERYTHING! Yourself! Reality!

Schools, churches, parents, and our media DO NOT TEACH CLEAR COMMUNICATION.
This much is clear to me.
We must change this! And we can. Each of us. Right now! Starting with ourselves...
Tell the truth. Say what you mean.

How did I come to the observation that so many of us are plagued with the inbability to communicate?

I think it's rooted in my upbringing. With no television, living out in the country, surrounded by books and public radio, I grew a literate, curious, and communicative mind.

I was always ahead in my classes in school in reading and comprehension because of all the reading I did at home. Between the ages of 8 and 12 I read Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, Carlos Castaneda, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, the entire King James Bible (several times), the Oxford English Dictionary, and the plays of Sophocles, Euripedes, and the Platonic Dialouges. Then, I cracked into Shakespeare, Nietzsche, Rilke, Kerouac, and the New York Times in my early teens.

I lived with a small American Heritage in my backpack, bag, and bedside table at all times.

And I wrote. I wrote every day, in journals, and notebooks, on crisp white pages in an old Remington, and later on keyboards in Word Perfect, and finally MS Word.

I was always thinking, wondering, asking, reading, writing, and wanting to know the nature of reality and being. I wanted to know why people were the way they were and what we were all here for and how we knew anything. You know, the eternal human questions...

I think that having had an almost completely self-taught and totally self-earned classical education throughout my childhood and teens, via reading all the classics in philosophy and history and literature, and then going to the world's most famous university for Classics Studies, yielded a very precise and discerning mind that seeks, desires, and functions with clear communication.

And I'm not talking about grammar and spelling and punctuation and knowing facts. I'm talking about that curious, open, and honest thirst for knowledge and understanding, the deep drive that spurns one to read and gobble everything in its quest to KNOW, in its quest for knowledge... The Faustian equation... But I didn't sell my soul to the devil for it. Did I? No. I always thought, for sure, it was the business majors and people who seemed only to care about money and how they looked that sold their souls. I remember days in undergraduate school urging people to take up studies in the humanities and give up their material pursuits... Naive and silly, perhaps. But authentic, nevertheless. And that is what counts, right? Authenticity. being real and true to who you are, no matter what.

Ah, clear communication marks this missive from the denizen of literary misfits and intelligentsia.
How can we entreat others to state what they mean, with courage, verve, and resolve?
I ask you all, my fellow human beings, my brothers and sisters, and co-habitators of the planet Earth, to please communicate clearly, say what you mean, and have no fear to be forthright in communication your experience of reality to others. For, in essence, your experience of reality is the only thing you really have. Isn't it?
So give it boldly, proudly, and effusively!

If life is about anything it's about being here and experiencing what there is, and what's the point if you're unable to share that with others, to experience it with others, to describe your experience, to share your reality, and bridge, and connect! It must surely be through this sharing of our experience of reality that we can attain some form of eternality and immortality.
If not to carve an imperishable legend through magnificent deeds, then at least to share in this grand experience.

And how can you share if you don't communicate your experience of reality with others, be it through words, art, gestures, music, architecture, painting, moviemaking or some form or method of communication that allows you to open up to the world and say, "this is me, this is my experience, hello you there, this is me here Hurrah!"?!?!

So, do it.
Please, if you care about anything, care about this. Care that you are important and valid and real, and that you have every right, and thus, responsibility to honor what and who and that you are by sharing and affirming it through communication, the way we go from solipsistic isolation to glorious and expansive meaning making with others.

If you aren't real with others about who you are, how do you expect to ever experience anything truly real with them? Let them know the real you. Open up and give that. Give that one, true, diamond-gem that you possess wholly and truly and always: YOU.
How can expect to ever get, find, be, experience, or do what you really want to in this life and in this world if you don't have the integrity and audacity and responsibility to BE YOURSELF!?!?
And being yourself means expressing yourself and sharing yourself and you do this through clear and honest and open and upfront and raw and naked true communication.

CAPICHE?
Understand?
Got it?
Grok?

Good.

----
This is a couple days after this post and I just got an email from the Course on Miracles with this quote:

"In order to truly communicate, we must take responsibility for the heart space that exists between us and another. It is that heart space, or the absence of it, which will determine whether communication is miraculous or fearful.
—Excerpted from A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of A Course in Miracles"

Perfect!

We Can Solve It

2008-08-28T13:37:00.000-07:00

We can.
I like this idea. I like the vibe. It's positive! It's affirming! It's more than hope, it's a plan to ACT!

We Can Solve It is an organization spearheaded by Al Gore to help the world shift into a new way of thinking about energy usage and natural resources.
It's a way to change the world.
It's indicative of the paradigm shift that is happening on this planet right now.
Be a part of it!

Check out their latest video! It's so scary and true.
What I like about WE is that they show you the scary truth, and then they show you how you can get involved in solutions.
YES!

The Dark Knight Review

2008-07-19T09:21:00.000-07:00

Heath Ledger as THE JOKER. Photo Courtesy of Warner Brothers
I don’t know what to think, exactly, about The Dark Knight.
My first impression is that Heath Ledger was amazing and this movie should have been called The Joker.

My second impression is that the editing felt jolted, often ill-timed, and left me feeling frustrated. It turned me off. There was a moment when Batman comes into a fundraiser that he, as Bruce Wayne, arranged, for Harvey Dent. The Joker has crashed the party and now he’s got Rachael Daws at knife point. Batman interrupts him with his low grumble, “Then love me”, and he goes in for the attack to save his beloved. This scene doesn’t work because the editing confuses the dialogue and the focus of the scene. I wanted to rewind it to figure out what the director’s intent was. It felt like a gaff. There were several instances of this odd, ill-timed editing throughout the movie and I felt really irked by it. It reminded me of what was wrong with a near brilliant piece of movie art: Gangs of New York (the editing).

My third impression was that the pacing of the movie was chaotic, dysfunctional, off. It didn’t build and it didn’t ease off. There were no contrasts. It was all jump, action, jump, confrontation, jump, blow things up, jump confrontation, jump, action, etc.. You get the picture… And the thing is, none of these action scenes were fresh or new. None of them had the artistic vision I'd expect from a director like Nolan.

I felt that many of the dialogue driven scenes were cut short and I was not given enough time to sink into the mood or find an overall theme in them. I wanted to meditate on the ideas and the words and be with the characters, but every time I started to get into a scene it would cut to something entirely different, not thematically or visually related. Again, it felt jolted, patched together, unpolished. Perhaps Nolan will have a director’s cut? I hope so.

I’m not sure if the lack of continuity and narrative is in the script or the editing, but it stands out like a pink elephant in a dining room.
Even Christian Bale, who I always look forward to seeing in movies, and who never fails to deliver mesmerizing performances, doesn’t get a chance to shine in The Dark Knight. The movie doesn’t give him enough screen time or a developed character arc. And this is highly frustrating, because, as a viewer, I want to watch the transformation of Batman into The Dark Knight, and the only real hint of it I get is at the end when Batman tells Lieutenant James Gordon, sensitively played by Gary Oldman, that he is not the hero that Gotham needs right now. Thus, he has to go into hiding and let Gordon “chase him”. This is all dialogue and it’s fast and short at the end of the movie and feels confusing and cheap.

I wanted this movie to be better. I wanted it to be as tight and complete as Batman Begins, a true work of movie art.

As much as I respect Christopher Nolan and love his movies, with The Dark Knight I feel disappointed, confused, and upset. Perhaps I feel disappointed because the contrast with Batman Begins leaves this movie lacking, and definitely as this is Heath Ledger’s last film performance (unless Terry Giliam manages to include some footage of Heath in his new film). I wanted the movie to be perfect and amazing. Ledger’s performance is, and for now, I will see this movie as an homage to his unique gift as an actor, and not as a tour de force by Nolan.

After writing the above, I have found some other, more established and well-known, movie critics voicing similar sentiments about The Dark Knight, as follows:

MTV's Kurt Loder's review, The Dark Knight: Ledgerdemain

David Edelstein's 2 parter: Bat Out of Hell in which the reviewer states that "Even its most wondrous vision...can’t keep the movie airborne", and The Dark Knight of My Soul in which he says, "the plotting is herky-jerky, the psychology perplexing, the action scenes incoherent".

Fox News' Four Reasons to Skip The Dark Knight in which the reviewer says "the film borders on pastiche" and asks "is it too much to ask that a Batman movie be about.. Batman?"

Visionary Activism in Summer 2008

2008-06-27T11:30:00.001-07:00

Who do we know who will go to hell and back to get us out of mortal trouble?
It must be you! It must be me! It must be everyone!

In this amazing and inspirational speech that has its pulse on exactly what we should be thinking about right now, Visionary Activist extraordinaire Caroline Casey offers some ingenious and must-have tools to put in our magic backpacks in her Summer Solstice Talk.

Caroline speaks in language flavored by myth and metaphor as she offers ways to deal with global warming, war, politics, conflict, and "being agents of cool, not caught up in reaction".

This talk is hosted by KPFA.org, a Pacifica radio station based in Berkeley, California. I have been listening to this radio station since I was a teenager and feel it is a vital connection to movers and shakers, dreamers and makers on our planet. Check it out!

I have known and been listening to Caroline Casey's wise and transformational words for over 10 years and find her to be my weekly mentor and muse. Pay heed to her words. You won't regret it.

Caroline's radio show, Visionary Activist, is on KPFA.org every Thursday at 2pm PST. Tune in live, or tune in later for a recording that is available via download or streaming audio media.

You can find out more about Caroline on her website, Coyote Network News.

The Four Winds

2008-06-20T17:12:00.000-07:00

I wish to share this inspiring message from Alberto Villoldo of The Four Winds Society.
In it, he speaks of a time of changing consciousness, the summer solstice this year, and gearing up toward changes as we approach 2012, a year marked by a lot of energy!

Civilization's Last Chance

2008-05-16T21:37:00.000-07:00

It is with earnest consciousness about the state of our environment, and thus, our planet, and the human species and all other species on this planet, that I honor the following words by Bill McKibben of the Los Angeles Times article published on May 11, 2008, entitled, Civilizations Last Chance. The words he wrote follow. Please consider them with utmost solemnity.
And I ask you to consider this recent scientific finding that can possibly change our fate and our world: single-cell algae readily consume carbon dioxide and other power plant emissions and emit oxygen during photosynthesis.

---------------------------------------------------
Civilization's Last Chance
The planet is nearing a tipping point on climate change, and it gets much worse, fast.
By Bill McKibben
May 11, 2008 Los Angeles Times

Even for Americans -- who are constitutionally convinced that there will always be a second act, and a third, and a do-over after that, and, if necessary, a little public repentance and forgiveness and a Brand New Start -- even for us, the world looks a little terminal right now.

It's not just the economy: We've gone through swoons before. It's that gas at $4 a gallon means we're running out, at least of the cheap stuff that built our sprawling society. It's that when we try to turn corn into gas, it helps send the price of a loaf of bread shooting upward and helps ignite food riots on three continents. It's that everything is so tied together. It's that, all of a sudden, those grim Club of Rome types who, way back in the 1970s, went on and on about the "limits to growth" suddenly seem ... how best to put it, right.

* DUST-UP:
The new scarcity
* BLOWBACK:
Where are the salmon?

All of a sudden it isn't morning in America, it's dusk on planet Earth.

There's a number -- a new number -- that makes this point most powerfully. It may now be the most important number on Earth: 350. As in parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

A few weeks ago, NASA's chief climatologist, James Hansen, submitted a paper to Science magazine with several coauthors. The abstract attached to it argued -- and I have never read stronger language in a scientific paper -- that "if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm."

Hansen cites six irreversible tipping points -- massive sea level rise and huge changes in rainfall patterns, among them -- that we'll pass if we don't get back down to 350 soon; and the first of them, judging by last summer's insane melt of Arctic ice, may already be behind us.

So it's a tough diagnosis. It's like the doctor telling you that your cholesterol is way too high and, if you don't bring it down right away, you're going to have a stroke. So you take the pill, you swear off the cheese, and, if you're lucky, you get back into the safety zone before the coronary. It's like watching the tachometer edge into the red zone and knowing that you need to take your foot off the gas before you hear that clunk up front.

In this case, though, it's worse than that because we're not taking the pill and we are stomping on the gas -- hard. Instead of slowing down, we're pouring on the coal, quite literally. Two weeks ago came the news that atmospheric carbon dioxide had jumped 2.4 parts per million last year -- two decades ago, it was going up barely half that fast.

And suddenly the news arrives that the amount of methane, another potent greenhouse gas accumulating in the atmosphere, has unexpectedly begun to soar as well. It appears that we've managed to warm the far north enough to start melting huge patches of permafrost, and massive quantities of methane trapped beneath it have begun to bubble forth.

And don't forget: China is building more power plants; India is pioneering the $2,500 car; and Americans are buying TVs the size of windshields, which suck juice ever faster.

Here's the thing. Hansen didn't just say that if we didn't act, there was trouble coming. He didn't just say that if we didn't yet know what was best for us, we'd certainly be better off below 350 ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

His phrase was: "if we wish to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed." A planet with billions of people living near those oh-so-floodable coastlines. A planet with ever-more vulnerable forests. (A beetle, encouraged by warmer temperatures, has already managed to kill 10 times more trees than in any previous infestation across the northern reaches of Canada this year. This means far more carbon heading for the atmosphere and apparently dooms Canada's efforts to comply with the Kyoto protocol, which was already in doubt because of its decision to start producing oil for the U.S. from Alberta's tar sands.)

We're the ones who kicked the warming off; now the planet is starting to take over the job. Melt all that Arctic ice, for instance, and suddenly the nice white shield that reflected 80% of incoming solar radiation back into space has turned to blue water that absorbs 80% of the sun's heat. Such feedbacks are beyond history, though not in the sense that Francis Fukuyama had in mind.

And we have, at best, a few years to short-circuit them -- to reverse course. Here's the Indian scientist and economist Rajendra Pachauri, who accepted the Nobel Prize on behalf of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last year (and, by the way, got his job when the Bush administration, at the behest of Exxon Mobil, forced out his predecessor): "If there's no action before 2012, that's too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment."

In the next two or three years, the nations of the world are supposed to be negotiating a successor treaty to the Kyoto accord (which, for the record, has never been approved by the United States -- the only industrial nation that has failed to do so). When December 2009 rolls around, heads of state are supposed to converge on Copenhagen to sign a treaty -- a treaty that would go into effect at the last plausible moment to heed the most basic and crucial of limits on atmospheric CO2.

If we did everything right, Hansen says, we could see carbon emissions start to fall fairly rapidly and the oceans begin to pull some of that CO2 out of the atmosphere. Before the century was out, we might even be on track back to 350. We might stop just short of some of those tipping points, like the Road Runner screeching to a halt at the very edge of the cliff.

More likely, though, we're the coyote -- because "doing everything right" means that political systems around the world would have to take enormous and painful steps right away. It means no more new coal-fired power plants anywhere, and plans to quickly close the ones already in operation. (Coal-fired power plants operating the way they're supposed to are, in global warming terms, as dangerous as nuclear plants melting down.) It means making car factories turn out efficient hybrids next year, just the way U.S. automakers made them turn out tanks in six months at the start of World War II. It means making trains an absolute priority and planes a taboo.

It means making every decision wisely because we have so little time and so little money, at least relative to the task at hand. And hardest of all, it means the rich countries of the world sharing resources and technology freely with the poorest ones so that they can develop dignified lives without burning their cheap coal.

It's possible. The United States launched a Marshall Plan once, and could do it again, this time in relation to carbon. But at a time when the president has, once more, urged drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, it seems unlikely. At a time when the alluring phrase "gas tax holiday" -- which would actually encourage more driving and more energy consumption -- has danced into our vocabulary, it's hard to see. And if it's hard to imagine sacrifice here, imagine China, where people produce a quarter as much carbon apiece as Americans do.

Still, as long as it's not impossible, we've got a duty to try to push those post-Kyoto negotiations in the direction of reality. In fact, it's about the most obvious duty humans have ever faced.

After all, those talks are our last chance; you just can't do this one lightbulb at a time.

We do have one thing going for us -- the Web -- which at least allows you to imagine something like a grass-roots global effort. If the Internet was built for anything, it was built for sharing this number, for making people understand that "350" stands for a kind of safety, a kind of possibility, a kind of future.

Hansen's words were well-chosen: "a planet similar to that on which civilization developed." People will doubtless survive on a non-350 planet, but those who do will be so preoccupied, coping with the endless unintended consequences of an overheated planet, that civilization may not.

Civilization is what grows up in the margins of leisure and security provided by a workable relationship with the natural world. That margin won't exist, at least not for long, as long as we remain on the wrong side of 350. That's the limit we face.

Bill McKibben, a scholar in residence at Middlebury College and the author, most recently, of "The Bill McKibben Reader," is the co-founder of Project 350 ( www.350.org), devoted to reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million. A longer version of this article appears at Tomdispatch.com.

World Wide Telescope

2008-05-14T08:27:00.000-07:00

For all you stargazers out there, check out this really amazing thing that a friend showed me!

It's a telescope that you can access online!

http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/

Also, you can gaze at the stars through google, at http://www.google.com/sky/

NEATO!

HAIL THE INTERNET

2008-04-24T14:49:00.000-07:00

Associated Content has published another article that I've penned.
You can read it here.

The article shares my musings on growing up a teenager without the internet and functioning as an adult fully dependent on it.

Leilakin

2008-04-10T09:33:00.000-07:00

I've started a new site at http://leilakin.wordpress.com/

It's an experiment that I'm working with to organize my many ideas and writings.

Tune in, subscribe to it, if you like, and check it out.

It's a work in progress and evolving, like all of us!

A New Earth

2008-04-09T10:37:00.000-07:00

This online course, based on Eckhart Tolle's book, A New Earth, sponsored and hosted by Oprah Winfrey and her website, Oprah.com, is a must!

Please take some time out of your week to view any or all of the first 6 A New Earth classes, available via streaming video, downloadable video, audio, or transcript.

It is at once powerful, engaging, interesting, entertaining, and transformative.

Check it out!

U.S. MILITARY CONSENTS TO RAPE WOMEN

2008-04-08T09:00:00.000-07:00

Today's Democracy Now with Amy Goodman features a report of rapes committed by colleagues of the U.S. Military in Iraq, specifically defense contractor KBR.

This report is based on an article in The Nation magazine by Karen Houppert, published on April 3rd, 2008.

Two women have come forward and stated that they were drugged and gang raped by their colleagues. One of the perpetrators was a U.S. soldier, and one is a U.S. contractor, and both are U.S. citizens.

There is an insidious degree of CONSENT to such ugly and heinous acts.
Often, the victims of rape are intimidated and threatened to prevent them from speaking out and reporting what happened to them.

One of the women was the only medic at her station, and could not leave or report the fact that her coworkers at her station drugged and gang raped her. She chose to stay there and treat the wounded and waited to come out with this horrendous crime until she could get transfered. She had to stay there and work with the men who raped here for 7 weeks before her transfer went through.

HOW CAN THIS BE HAPPENING?
WHY ARE HUMANS SO BARBARIC?

Please take the time to listen to this and say a prayer for ending this brutality.

I feel so upset and inspired to take further action to rally an outcry against this atrocity.

I'm not sure how to do this yet, but I need to be a voice against this sort of thing.

We have to raise our consciousness about the fact of how ubiquitous rape is, even in the United States, even in the United States Military...

Did you know that 1 in 3 women in the world will be or have been raped?
Why is this?
Why do we seem to have a culture that consents to this sort of treatment of women?
Why are women shamed for being raped?

WE MUST STOP THIS!

WE MUST CHANGE THE PUBLIC'S VIEW OF SEXUAL ASSAULT. THERE IS TOO MUCH CONSENT.

Amnesty International, of which I've been a member since 1986, when a representative for this vital human rights watchdog group approached me on the San Francisco City College Campus, urges us to contact the U.S. Congress to demand that they do something about the rapes going on in Iraq.

You can see what they have to say and use your power to stop this violence, here, on the Amnesty International website.

Please also go to UNIFEM and add your voice to the SAY NO TO VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN campaign, headed up by Nicole Kidman.

2008-04-02T09:44:00.000-07:00

I'm writing a script in 30 days as part of the April Script Frenzy!
My screenplay is comedy about a group of people who play online games. I'm calling it OMG WTF!

Check out more about Script Frenzying!

The Principles of Right Action

2008-03-23T06:57:00.000-07:00

While reading a description of the "meaning of the March 12st, 2008 full moon", I came upon a web page for Lisa Brown Miller, in which she writes about the idea of bringing our attention to living in alignment with "Right Action".

She reminds us that "it is important to fully experience how your actions affect the people in your life."

She then describes the PRINCIPLES of RIGHT ACTION as:

1. Seek justice with fairness and balance.

2. Embrace your differences without being attached to them.

3. Work to understand viewpoints other than your own.

4. Remember “the truth” is relative and based upon one’s perception.

5. Initiate compromise, the basic building block of all solutions.

6. When we give a little we get a lot. When we give a lot, we get more than we
canimagine.

7. Negotiation can always be the first and last response to conflict.

8. Violence is not a viable way to bring peace. Violence only begets more violence.

9. Insist on peace and non-violence.

10. When you cause pain and suffering to others, you destroy yourself in equal measure.

11. Say and do everything with love, compassion and respect is the only way to win.

I invite you to meditate on these principles of Right Action and incorporate them into your daily consciousness and practice them!

YAY!
Leila

Do Something Green

2008-03-21T12:46:00.000-07:00

I want to tell you about the Rain Forest Action Network (RAN)

I quote from their website to describe them, "Rainforest Action Network (RAN) is made up of 43 staff members in San Francisco, CA and in Tokyo, Japan, plus thousands of volunteer scientists, teachers, parents, students and other concerned citizens around the world. We believe that a sustainable world can be created in our lifetime, and that aggressive action must be taken immediately to leave a safe and secure world for our children."

I subscribe to RAN's newsletter, and receive weekly reports of activities going on around the world that affect our environment, our home, Earth.

RAN provides easy ways for me to take action and use my voice, my signature, my name, my power to stand up for caring for our planet.

RAN informs me of bills being passed and other legislation
RAN educates me about companies that are helping to protect our planet
RAN alerts me to companies that are polluting

As we stand here on the planet today, the first full day of Spring and the Full Moon, I feel it is our duty to wake up and heed the call to dedicate ourselves even further toward the cause of protecting and championing our HOME, PLANET EARTH.

Please, join The Rainforest Action Network today, and get involved in saving our planet. It's free and it's worth it.

You can also join with Planet Earth Champion, Al Gore, by joining The Alliance for Climate Protection.
Joining this organization helps support the cause for greening the planet and stopping pollution and changing our lives for the good.

Align yourself with the right side, and help to save the planet!

2008-03-19T16:49:00.001-07:00

"Security is mostly superstition.
It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of humans as a whole experience it.
Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure.
Life is either a daring adventure or nothing." ~ Helen Keller ~

"One must have chaos in one's self in order to give birth to a dancing star."
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844-1900 German philosopher ~

"Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart ...
Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens."
~ Carl Jung ~

A Prayer for Spring Renewal

2008-03-17T13:56:00.000-07:00

As Spring approaches I am in touch with a "vibe" of new beginnings, fresh starts, renewal, and the potential for actualization of new realities.

At this time, I call on the importance of holding a consciousness of the things going on in the world that are not nice.

People are being tortured by their governments, by their neighbors, by other countries' governments, by their own families, husbands, friends...
People are dying from preventable diseases.
People are starving to death.

Why is there so much violence and sickness and evil in the world?
How can we change it? How can we stop it? How can we transform it?

I ask that you please make a wish, visualize, and/or say a prayer that these things evolve and shift and transform into healing and healthy and positive situations.

May the needless suffering come to an end.

May the coming spring bring about the power and the actualization of positive change around the world for the good of all.

Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth

2008-03-03T08:36:00.000-08:00

I'm reading Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose. The book isn't that new, but it's Oprah's book of the month, and today a free online course starts through her website to share about the experience of reading the book.
Well, the book is very powerful.

It has a lot of words that, just by reading them, transform your consciousness. How? By pointing to some deep and powerful truths about how the human mind, ego, and emotional body works. Just in seeing someone explain why we have negative thoughts and emotions and how they form and function allows the reader to go POOF to their own negativity. It's really cool and I've been feeling amazing as a result of reading it so far, and I'm not even done!

Today is the first day of the course, and there is a workbook online for each participant of the course (over 1 million people are signed up!). That's one million people helping to change the planet for the better..... One million people who are working on freeing themselves of their own negativity (which we all have deny it or not).... pretty powerful stuff!

So, I wanted to share the first set of workbook questions for you to consider. Also, at the end, I included my answers to the first set of workbook questions.

Chapter 1: The Flowering of Human Consciousness

As you read this chapter, work with the questions below and use your personal space to record important notes. Then, print a copy to keep by your side during class because you will not be able to access your workbook during the live webcast. You can always come back to change or add to your answers or write down anything from class that confused, moved or surprised you.

1. Why did you decide to read this book?

2. Are there specific areas of your life that you think will benefit from the lessons of A New Earth? How can you incorporate the book's teachings in your life today?

3. Think about Eckhart's question on page 5: "Can human beings lose the density of their conditioned mind structures and become like crystals or precious stones... transparent to the light of consciousness?" What makes you feel more alive and open, less dense, less bogged down by heavy thoughts and feelings? Could this be the beginnings of what A New Earth is pointing toward?

4. Spend some time in the presence of something you consider beautiful—a flower, a gem, a piece of artwork, etc. As you look at the object, try to see it without naming it mentally. When we appreciate beauty in this manner, a window opens into the formless, and into a state of gratitude. See if you can experience that. Write your experiences here.

5. Do you consider yourself a religious person? What about a spiritual person? Is there a difference between the two?

6. "Humanity is now faced with a stark choice: Evolve or die. … If the structures of the human mind remain unchanged, we will always end up re-creating the same world, the same evils, the same dysfunction" (p. 21–22). Are you aware of this dysfunction? Where is it most apparent in your own life and in the world? Do you think humanity is ready for a transformation of consciousness?

------
Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Leila's answers to the workbook questions:

1. Ah, the eternal question, why?
It's two fold:
1. Oprah recommended it, and I highly value her suggestions and
2. I seek to always improve myself, to grow, to learn more about being, the way we as humans function and how to overcome our flaws and become the best selves that we can.
What is my purpose in life is a question that inspires me, it moves me to observe how I am and to aspire to change that which I can about myself so that I can actualize my potential.
This book's title, both A NEW EARTHand AWAKENING TO YOUR LIFE'S PURPOSE are like a loud ringing bell inviting me to wake up and be who I really am for the good of the whole.
I love the idea of awakening to my life's purpose, instead of simply finding it!
And I love the idea of helping to be a part of creating a New Earth that is characterized by more awake, aware, conscious people who do not engage in dysfunctional patterns of behavior and are conscious!

2. There are specific areas of my life that I think will benefit from the lessons of A New Earth.
Having suffered sexual assault and abuse multiple times, and although I've seen several therapists to help deal with the aftermath of such an experience, I still feel that I continue to feel reactionary pain, anger, and grief about those experiences. The story of my past, told in thoughts and words, rekindles the emotional feelings, and puts me in a state that is often as if I was just assaulted, even though it's been years. It's as if a broken record is playing inside of me and the song it's playing is not good.

I feel that there are teachings in A New Earth that can help me learn to be present, and let go of the painful story telling about what happened and stop feeding my pain body with emotions about the painful experience.
I have already found solace and peace, a sense of ease and relief and happiness, in just reading A New Earth, in just grasping a hint of being able to let go of thoughts and emotions that cause me and those around me pain, through the retelling and re-feeling of traumatic events in my life.

In a nutshell, A New Earth gives me the hope that I can evolve, grow, and transform by understanding how my ego, thoughts, and emotions function.

3. I feel more alive and open and less bogged down by heavy thoughts and emotions when I focus on my breathing and stop myself in my tracks when I'm thinking negative thoughts or feeling icky emotions.
Just being in the moment, being present, really helps me to not get caught up in my drama, my stories, my personal history of pain and suffering.

I think about the people who are starving to death, being tortured, living with war and famine in their homes and communities. That is not my life. I am thankful for that. Knowing that so many others suffer so much also helps me to realize that I don't have the time and energy to wallow in my own personal story of pain. Knowing that others are in need calls me to wake up out of my unconscious suffering and find ways to help make the world a better place and free others from their suffering.
I think that when people become aware of themselves and of how they suffer and why, something happens within them that makes them want to help others become free of their suffering, and this chain reaction can be the beginning of A New Earth.

4. I look at the ocean. Deep calming shades of blue. The moving water ebbing and flowing, caressing the earth.
I feel my eyes widen, my breath deepening.
I feel expansiveness, freedom, space... the possibility of realizing my dreams and goals.
I feel rejuvenation, inspiration, hope.
I feel relaxed.
I notice that I breathe with the waves' movements. Crashing water corresponds with forceful and long exhales that feel cleansing.
The cool air on my eyes makes them feel clear, keen, lucid...
Everything is okay.
Everything is perfect.

5. I believe that I am spiritual in the sense that I consider human life to be a magical gift in which we have the opportunity to explore and experience the miracle of being.
I believe that we are not merely biologic process that has become aware of itself and anthropomorphized creation/existence/the universe...
There is something greater, larger, more than our little minds can explain and know, but it ties us together and instills our lives with something always above and beyond any single thought or emotion.
There is definitely a difference between religion and spirituality, as religion is usually a system of thoughts and ideas based on a person or persons and the sacred texts based on their lives, written by, or dedicated to them. Religions tend to be institutionalized and come with rules and sects and deontologic instructions for how to live, how to be spiritual.
Spirituality does not require a book, a church, rules, or leaders. It is a sense, an awareness, that comes from within each person, in the light of their own consciousness.

6. I have thought, since I was a teenager, that the human species is doomed to perish unless it transforms its current way of being.

I perceive a dysfunction in the way individuals, communities, associations, and nations interact that is poised to jeopardize the existence of human beings on planet Earth.

Where is this most apparent in my own life is with my interpersonal relationships in which I tend to be defensive and angry (based on past pain that I haven't let go of or evolved past), and this anger and defensiveness drives people away and destroys my personal and professional relationships. Luckily, I have a loving and wise husband who sees past my story to the deeper, truer, authentic me, so I haven't driven everyone away, nor do I want to!

The dysfunction is apparent in the world around me in which I see ego and emotional pain driving most interactions. Individuals and groups often tend to make decisions that are ego driven, and they react to situations based on the assumption that they're being attacked on some level, so they operate out of their pain bodies, out of fear, the most basic survival mechanism (fight or flight).

Not only do I think humanity is ready for a huge transformation of consciousness, I think it has to change NOW.
With global warming, climate changing, the degradation of our life support (Earth's environment), non-stop wars worldwide, the tyranny of governments killing and imprisoning their people, torture, unaddressed and needless famine (there IS enough food to feed everyone in the world), unchecked disease (the spread of aids and the endemic of cancer), physical, mental, and emotional abuse in our homes, and all the countless other threats to human survival we must change or we will go extinct.
It's as if the human species is suicidal...
We need a reason to not kill ourselves, as a species, we need to feel that we can move past our dysfunctional modes of being, wake up, and transcend this mess.
Will we?
Can we?

--------------------
That's that folks.
I hope you read the book, participate in the free online course at http://www.oprah.com/obc_classic/webcast/oprah_anewearth_main.jsp

Love,
Leila

End Violence Against Women

2008-02-06T12:56:00.001-08:00

"One in three. That stark figure sums up the crisis confronting women throughout
the world. Of three young girls sitting in a classroom, learning to read and write, one will suffer
violence directed at her simply because she is female. Of three women sitting in a market,
selling their crops, one will be attacked — most likely by her intimate partner — and hurt so
severely she may no longer be able to provide for her family. Throughout the world, this violence
will be repeated: globally, one in three women will be raped, beaten, coerced into sex or
otherwise abused in her lifetime. Violence against women has become as much a pandemic as
HIV/AIDS or malaria. But it is still generally downplayed by the public at large and by policymakers
who fail to create and fund programmes to eradicate it."
--Noeleen Hayzer, Executive Director, UNIFEM, in the report, Not a Minute More, Ending Violence Against Women.

I just added a link to UNIFEM in my Helpful People section.

UNIFEM is the United Nations organization that has been designed to help stop violence against women, worldwide.

UNIFEM states that it targets the following issues regarding women:
(1) reducing feminized poverty
(2) ending violence against women
(3) reversing the spread of HIV/AIDS among women and girls, and
(4) achieving gender equality in democratic governance in times of peace as well as war.

Did you know that 1 in 3 women in the entire world are or will be victims of some kind of abuse?

Please take some time to find out how you can get involved in helping to stop this epidemic of terrorism against women.

Thank you.
Leila Kincaid

Rethinking Meat

2008-02-06T12:48:00.000-08:00

Associated Content published an article that I wrote about the decision to become a Vegetarian.

Read it in full here.

Please, Make the Right Choice

2008-02-04T07:46:00.000-08:00

VOTE FOR HILLARY CLINTON

What's In A Number?

2008-01-22T15:59:00.000-08:00

Well, here we are in 2008.
Arbitrary number used to designate a point in time.
January 22nd, 2008.
In one month I will be 40.Arbitrary number used to designate the duration of my existence thus far.
And today marks the end of the duration of Heath Ledger's life, a short 28 years.
I really valued him as an actor. I looked forward to each movie featuring his amazing talent. How odd that he isn't around now to see the outcome of his turn as The Joker in Christopher Nolan's much anticipated Batman installment,The Dark Knight.
I found his roles in both Casanova and Brokeback Mountain not only powerful, moving, and deep, but entirely unique. No one else could have or would have played those characters with that level of sensitivity,nuance,and attention.
Heath Ledger had something inexplicably unique in his onscreen presence: an odd combination of vulnerability and assuredness that stood out so strongly in all of his roles.
What he might have gone on to achieve as an actor is now left to our imaginations,but I'm sure he'd have been one of the best actors in the history of the craft.
I wonder what Terry Gilliam's movie, Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus,starring Heath Ledger, will be like, after the final cut.
I haven't seen I'm Not There, yet, as I'm not interested in Bob Dylan,and never have been. But now, now that Heath has passed, I must see it, as he is in it.

Heath Ledger.
Amazing Actor.
Born in Australia in 1979. Died in 2008.
Why?
They say he was found dead in his New York City apartment,with pills, supposedly over the counter sleeping pills, spilled out around him.
Why?
Why did he take enough to kill himself? Was it an accident?
Did he take his own life on purpose?
What were his last thoughts?
Did he intend to die? If so, why?
If not, how can we make sense of such a horrible overdose accident?
Shouldn't the pharmaceutical companies responsible for manufacturing, marketing,and distributing these lethal drugs be reigned in and forced to make safer drugs? Is there such a thing as safer drugs?
How can someone go buy over the counter sleeping pills, take too many, and die, without some sort of outcry?
It shouldn't be that easy to overdose on them.
Did Heath Ledger have other drugs in his system?

It's so difficult to understand and accept his death.
I kept looking at the announcement, that I first saw at 2:10 pm PST on justjared.com at http://justjared.buzznet.com/tags/heath-ledger

I kept staring at the words, Heath Ledger dead at 28. What does that mean? I thought,is this a joke!? Is this part of his Joker role? I refreshed the page, expecting the news to change.
No.
And then, my Variety.com page updated, displaying the words on the front page:
"Heath Ledger Dead at 28."

Why does it just say dead at 28.
That's so... odd and disorienting.

How about "Amazingly gifted actor, Heath Ledger, tragically dies of possible drug overdose".

Yeah. Like that.

So, he lived for twenty eight years, and apparently all the news services think that is the most important information to display in the announcement of his death.

He was an amazing actor.
I wanted to see him in more roles. I was looking forward to see how his career would unfold.
Like River Phoenix, Heath Ledger's death is a horrible, inexplicible tragedy. It's so sad.
I'm sorry for his friends and family.
I'm sorry for his daughter that won't know her father.
I'm sorry for the art that he won't make.
I'm sorry that his potential won't be realized.
What a waste
Why?

Why did Heath Ledger die?

I'll be 40 in a month.
It's 2008, a time when I thought that major changes would occur in the world. Why have I always felt 2008 signified something for this world? What does turning 40 mean? Why did Heath Ledger only live 28 years?

What does it all mean?

The Story of Stuff

2007-12-13T10:11:00.000-08:00

Hello!
I want to share this very interesting website with you.

It's about stuff. Yeah, stuff. Stuff we buy, stuff we use, stuff we consume, stuff we throw away.

What are you doing with all of your stuff?
Do you need all that stuff?

Next time you start to stuff yourself, stop and remember this video!

It's the Story of Stuff!

The heart of the story is that:

Our enormously productive economy...
demands
that we make consumption our way of life
that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals
that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption...
We need things consumed, burned up, replaced, and discarded at an ever accelerating rate.

Scary stuff, huh?

Please share this with your friends. It's in little ways like this that we can help save our home, Planet Earth, by raising our consciousness to an eco-consciousness.

Ciao for now!
LEILA

Al Gore's Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech

2007-12-11T10:43:00.001-08:00

Thank you for spending time at Leilaland!AL GORE: I have a purpose here today. It is a purpose I have tried to serve for many years. I have prayed that God would show me a way to accomplish it.
Sometimes, without warning, the future knocks on our door with a precious and painful vision of what might be. 119 years ago, a wealthy inventor read his own obituary, mistakenly published years before his death. Wrongly believing the inventor had just died, a newspaper printed a harsh judgment of his life’s work, unfairly labeling him the “Merchant of Death" because of his invention—dynamite. Shaken by this condemnation, the inventor made a fateful choice to serve the cause of peace. Seven years later, Alfred Nobel created this prize and the others that bear his name.
Seven years ago tomorrow, I read my own political obituary in a judgment that seemed to me harsh and mistaken, if not premature. But that unwelcome verdict also brought a precious, if painful, gift: an opportunity to search for fresh new ways to serve my purpose. Unexpectedly, that quest has brought me here.
Even though I fear my words cannot match this moment, I pray that what I’m feeling in my heart will be communicated clearly enough that those who hear me will say, “We must act.”
The distinguished scientists with whom it is the greatest honor of my life to share this award have laid before us a choice between two different futures, a choice that, to my ears, echoes the words of an ancient prophet: “Life or death, blessings or curses. Therefore, choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.”
We, the human species, are confronting a planetary emergency, a threat to the survival of our civilization that is gathering ominous and destructive potential even as we gather here. But there is hopeful news, as well: we have the ability to solve this crisis and avoid the worst—though not all—of its consequences, if we act boldly, decisively and quickly.
However, despite a growing number of honorable exceptions, too many of the world’s leaders are still best described in the words Winston Churchill applied to those who ignored Adolf Hitler’s threat—and I quote—“They go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent.”
So, today, we dumped another seventy million tons of global-warming pollution into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding our planet, as if it were an open sewer. And tomorrow, we will dump a slightly larger amount, with the cumulative concentrations now trapping more and more heat from the sun.
As a result, the earth has a fever. And the fever is rising. The experts have told us it is not a passing affliction that will heal by itself. We asked for a second opinion. And a third. And a fourth. And the consistent conclusion, restated with increasing distress, is that something basic is wrong.
We are what is wrong, and we must make it right.
Last September 21st, as the Northern Hemisphere tilted away from the sun, scientists reported with unprecedented alarm that the North Polar ice cap is, in their words, “falling off a cliff.” One study estimated that it could be completely gone during summer in less than twenty-two years. Another new study, to be presented by U.S. Navy researchers later this week, warns it could happen in as little as seven years. Seven years from now.
In the last few months, it has been harder and harder to misinterpret the signs that our world is spinning out of kilter. Major cities in North and South America, Asia and Australia are nearly out of water due to massive droughts and melting glaciers. Desperate farmers are losing their livelihoods. Peoples in the frozen Arctic and on low-lying Pacific islands are planning evacuations of places they have long called home. Unprecedented wildfires have forced a half-a-million people from their homes in one country and caused a national emergency that almost brought down the government in another. Climate refugees have migrated into areas already inhabited by people with different cultures, religions and traditions, increasing the potential for conflict. Stronger storms in the Atlantic and the Pacific have threatened whole cities. Millions have been displaced by massive flooding in South Asia, Mexico and eighteen countries in Africa. As temperature extremes have increased, tens of thousands have lost their lives. We are recklessly burning and clearing our forests and driving more and more species into extinction. The very web of life on which we depend is being ripped and frayed.
We never intended to cause all this destruction, just as Alfred Nobel never intended that dynamite be used for waging war. He had hoped his invention would promote human progress. We shared that same worthy goal when we began burning massive quantities of coal, then oil and natural gas.
Even in Nobel’s time, there were a few warnings of the likely consequences. One of the very first winners of the prize in chemistry worried that, in his words, “We are evaporating our coal mines into the air.” After performing 10,000 equations by hand, Svante Arrhenius calculated that the earth’s average temperature would increase by many degrees if we doubled the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Seventy years later, my teacher, Roger Revelle, and his colleague, Dave Keeling, began to precisely document the increasing CO2 levels day by day.
But unlike most other forms of pollution, CO2 is invisible, tasteless and odorless, which has helped keep the truth about what it is doing to our climate out of sight and out of mind. Moreover, the catastrophe now threatening us is unprecedented, and we often confuse the unprecedented with the improbable.
We also find it hard to imagine making the massive changes that are now necessary to solve the crisis. And when large truths are genuinely inconvenient, whole societies can, at least for a time, ignore them. Yet, as George Orwell reminds us, “Sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”

In the years since this prize was first awarded, the entire relationship between humankind and the earth has been radically transformed. And still, we have remained largely oblivious to the impact of our cumulative actions. Indeed, without realizing it, we have begun to wage war on the earth itself. Now, we and the earth’s climate are locked in a relationship familiar to war planners: “Mutually assured destruction.”
More than two decades ago, scientists calculated that nuclear war could throw so much debris and smoke into the air it would block life-giving sunlight from our atmosphere, causing a “nuclear winter.” Their eloquent warnings here in Oslo helped galvanize the world’s resolve to halt the nuclear arms race.
Now, science is warning us that if we do not quickly reduce the global warming pollution that is trapping so much of the heat our planet normally radiates back out of the atmosphere, we are in danger of creating a permanent “carbon summer.”
As the American poet Robert Frost wrote, “Some say the world will end in fire; some say in ice.” Either, he notes, “would suffice.” But neither need be our fate. It is time to make peace with the planet.
We must quickly mobilize our civilization with the urgency and resolve that has previously been seen only when nations mobilized for war. These prior struggles for survival were won when leaders found words at the eleventh hour that released a mighty surge of courage, hope and readiness to sacrifice for a protracted and mortal struggle.
These were not comforting and misleading assurances that the threat was not real, not imminent; that it would affect others but not ourselves; that ordinary life might be lived, even in the presence of extraordinary threat; that Providence could be trusted to do for us what we would not do for ourselves. No, these were calls to come to the defense of the common future. They were calls upon the courage, generosity and strength of entire peoples, citizens of every class and condition who were ready to stand against the threat, once asked to do so. Our enemies in those times calculated that free people would not rise to the challenge; they were, of course, catastrophically wrong.
Now comes the threat of climate crisis, a threat that is real, rising, imminent and universal. Once again, it is the eleventh hour. The penalties for ignoring this challenge are immense and growing and at some near point would be unsustainable and unrecoverable. For now, we still have the power to choose our fate, and the remaining question is only this: Have we the will to act vigorously and in time, or will we remain imprisoned by a dangerous illusion?
Mahatma Gandhi awakened the largest democracy on earth and forged a shared resolve with what he called “Satyagraha,” or “truth force.” In every land, the truth, once known, has the power to set us free. Truth also has the power to unite us and bridge the distance between “me” and “we,” creating the basis for common effort and shared responsibility.
There is an African proverb that says, “If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” We need to go far, quickly. We must abandon the conceit that individual, isolated, private actions are the answer. They can and do help. But they will not take us far enough without collective action. At the same time, we must ensure that in mobilizing globally, we do not invite the establishment of ideological conformity and a new lockstep “ism.” That means adopting principles, values, laws and treaties that release creativity and initiative at every level of society in multifold responses originating concurrently and spontaneously.
This new consciousness requires expanding the possibilities inherent in all humanity. The innovators who will devise a new way to harness the sun’s energy for pennies or invent an engine that’s carbon negative may live in Lagos or Mumbai or Montevideo. We must ensure that entrepreneurs and inventors everywhere on the globe have the chance to change the world.
When we unite for a moral purpose that is manifestly good and true, the spiritual energy unleashed can transform us. The generation that defeated fascism throughout the world in the 1940s found, in rising to meet their awesome challenge, that they had gained the moral authority and long-term vision to launch the Marshall Plan, the United Nations and a new level of global cooperation and foresight that unified Europe and facilitated the emergence of democracy in Japan, Germany, Italy and much of the world. One of their visionary leaders said, “It is time we steered by the stars and not by the lights of every passing ship.”
In the last year of that war, you gave the Peace Prize to a man from my hometown of 2,000 people: Carthage, Tennessee in the U.S.A. Cordell Hull was described by Franklin Roosevelt as the “Father of the United Nations.” He was an inspiration and hero to my own father, who followed Hull in the Congress and the U.S. Senate and in his commitment to world peace and global cooperation. My parents spoke often of Hull, always in tones of reverence and admiration. Eight weeks ago, when you announced this prize, the deepest emotion I felt was when I saw the headline in my hometown paper that simply noted I had won the same prize that Cordell Hull had won. In that moment, I knew what my father and mother would have felt, were they alive.
Just as Hull’s generation found moral authority in rising to solve the world crisis caused by fascism, so can we find our greatest opportunity in rising to solve the climate crisis. In the Kanji characters used in both Chinese and Japanese, “crisis” is written with two symbols, the first meaning “danger,” the second, “opportunity.” By facing and removing the danger of the climate crisis, we have the opportunity to gain the moral authority and vision to vastly increase our own capacity to solve other crises that have been too long ignored. We must understand the connections between the climate crisis and the afflictions of poverty, hunger, HIV/AIDS and other pandemics. As these problems are linked, so too must be their solutions. We must begin by making the common rescue of the global environment the central organizing principle of the world community.
Fifteen years ago, I made that case at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. Ten years ago, I presented it in Kyoto. This week, I will urge the delegates in Bali to adopt a bold mandate for a treaty that establishes a universal global cap on emissions and uses the market in emissions trading to efficiently allocate resources to the most effective opportunities for speedy reductions. This treaty should be ratified and brought into effect everywhere in the world by the beginning of 2010, two years sooner than presently contemplated. The pace of our response must be accelerated to match the accelerating pace of the crisis itself. Heads of state should meet early next year to review what was accomplished in Bali and take personal responsibility for addressing this crisis. It is not unreasonable to ask, given the gravity of our circumstances, that these heads of state meet every three months until this treaty is completed.
We also need a moratorium on the construction of any new generating facility that burns coal without the capacity to safely trap and store carbon dioxide.
And most important of all, we need to put a price on carbon, with a CO2 tax that is then rebated back to the people, progressively, according to the laws of each nation, in ways that shift the burden of taxation from employment to pollution. This is by far the most effective and simplest way to accelerate solutions to this crisis.
The world now needs an alliance, especially of those nations that weigh heaviest in the scales where earth is in the balance. I salute Europe and Japan for the steps they’ve taken in recent years to meet the challenge, and the new government in Australia, which has made solving the climate crisis its first priority. But the outcome will be decisively influenced by two nations that are now failing to do enough: the United States and China. While India is also growing fast in importance, it should be absolutely clear that it is the two largest CO2 emitters—and most of all, my own country—that will need to make the boldest moves or stand accountable before history for their failure to act. Both countries should stop using the other’s behavior as an excuse for stalemate and instead develop an agenda for mutual survival in a shared global environment.
These are the last few years of decision, but they can be the first years of a bright and hopeful future if we do what we must. No one should believe a solution will be found without effort, without cost, without change. Let us acknowledge that if we wish to redeem squandered time and speak again with moral authority, then these are the hard truths.
The way ahead is difficult. The outer boundary of what we currently believe to be feasible is still far short of what we actually must do. Moreover, between here and there, across the unknown, falls the shadow. That is just another way of saying that we have to expand the boundaries of what is possible. In the words of the Spanish poet, Antonio Machado, “Pathwalker, there is no path. You must make the path as you walk.” We are standing at the most fateful fork in that path. So I want to end as I began, with a vision of two futures, each a palpable possibility, and with a prayer that we will see with vivid clarity the necessity of choosing between those two futures, and the urgency of making the right choice now.
The great Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen wrote, “One of these days, the younger generation will come knocking at my door.” The future is knocking at our door right now. Make no mistake, the next generation will ask us one of two questions. Either they will ask, “What were you thinking? Why didn’t you act?” or they will ask instead, “How did you find the moral courage to rise and successfully resolve a crisis that so many said was impossible to solve?”
We have everything we need to get started, save perhaps political will, but political will is a renewable resource. So let us renew it, and let us say together: “We have a purpose. We are many. For this purpose we will rise, and we will act.”

Copied, with permission, from democracynow.org Democracy Now with Amy Goodman

You can also watch/listen to Al Gore's Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech through Moveon.org, with permission, here.

2007-12-10T10:54:00.001-08:00

Photobucket Album

I Won NaNoWriMo!!!

2007-11-30T11:49:00.000-08:00

I did it I did it I did it I did It!!!

I wrote a novel in a month!
It's a jumble of ideas and characters! It's a big gorgeous mess of words and events!
But it's mine and I wrote it and it's alive and out there!

Now, I get to read what I wrote! Now, I get to revise and revisit. Now, I get to have people read it!!!

YAY!

The following is the message from NaNoWriMo to me:

You Won!

So it's official.

Our word-counting robots have analyzed your November novel, and they've delivered their final, binding assessment: Winner.

You did it! You did it! You did it!

This was, without a doubt, one of the hardest years on record for NaNoWriMo participants. At some point in the literary marathon, most of your fellow writers fell by the wayside. They lost their books to work, to family, to school, and to the hundreds of other distractions and interruptions that tend to shutter creative undertakings like NaNoWriMo.

But not you. Not this year.

This November, you set out with the ridiculously ambitious goal of bringing an entire world into existence in just 30 days. When the going got tough, you got writing. Now you're one of the few souls who can look back on 2007 as the year you were brave enough to enter the world's largest writing contest, and disciplined enough to emerge a winner.

We salute your imagination and perseverance. The question we ask you now is this: If you were able to write a not-horrible novel in 30 days, what else can you do? The book you wrote this month is just the beginning.

From here on out, the sky's the limit.

We wish you well on your many upcoming adventures, and hope to see you for Script Frenzy in April, and again for NaNoWriMo next November.

Before you go, though, we have some NaNoWriMo Winner gifts for you.

The first are a couple of winner's icons, meant to be posted on a website or blog.
Winner Icon Winner Icon

Please do not link directly to this image on the nanowrimo.org site. Please download copies of these images and place it on your webserver for your own use. Most web browsers have a Save Image or Save Picture feature: PC users can right-click on the image to bring up a menu, and Mac users can just hold down the mouse button over the image.

Since your achievement should be proclaimed far beyond the internet realm, we've also created a special Winners Certificate for you to print out and hang anywhere novelist groupies tend to gather. After downloading from our site and printing it out, you'll just need to grab your favorite calligraphy pen or re-run it through your printer to customize it with your name and the title of your new novel.

If you haven't made a donation to NaNoWriMo already, please visit our Donation Station and add your name to the list of wonderful folks who believe in NaNoWriMo and our Young Writers Program enough to support us. Even $10 does a world of good!

On behalf of everyone here at NaNoWriMo headquarters, I offer you my congratulations.

Warm regards,

Chris Baty
Program Director, NaNoWriMo
---------------------------------
YES!
Leila

Giving Green

2007-11-29T09:28:00.000-08:00

This season, show your love and appreciation for others by giving green.

Consider how gifts that you give impact the planet and its inhabitants (us).

-Buy or make recycled, reusable, carbon neutral gifts.

-Give the gift of compact flourescent light bulbs or a reusable grocery bag.

-Encourage others to be eco-conscious by getting them books or other items that teach them how to be green.

The World Wildlife Fund has a helpful list of tips for being green, as follows:

You can help stop global warming by taking these 10 steps to cut your yearly emissions of carbon dioxide by thousands of pounds.

1. Next time, buy a car that gets at least 30 miles per gallon (reduces carbon dioxide 2,500 pounds a year over a car that gets 10 mpg less.).
2. Where you can, choose an electric utility company that does not produce power from polluting sources such as fossil fuels and nuclear fission. (Enormous potential reductions in carbon dioxide emissions.)
3. Replace standard light bulbs with energy-efficient fluorescents. (Reduces emissions by 500 pounds per year light bulb.)
4. Replace worn-out home appliances with energy efficient models. (Reduces emissions by up to 3,000 pounds per year.)
5. Choose the best energy-saving models when you replace windows. (Reduces emissions up to 10,000 pounds per year.)
6. Wrap your water heater in an insulating jacket. (Reduces emissions up to 1,000 pounds per year.)
7. Install low-flow showerheads that use less water. (Reduces emissions up to 300 pounds per year.)
8. Ask your utility company for a home energy audit to pinpoint the biggest energy-wasters. (Potential reduction of thousands of pounds per year.)
9. Whenever possible, walk, bike, carpool or use mass transit. (Reduces emissions by 20 pounds for every gallon of gasoline used.)
10. Insulate walls and ceilings and save about 25% of home heating bills. (And reduce emissions by up to 2,000 pounds per year.)

"

-You can ask your power company to buy green energy for the energy you consume. This is a nice gift to give your home, household, and family.

Whatever gifts you do buy, please consider how they will affect our world, our planet, and the person you give them to.

Thank you!
Greenifying,
Leila

Jolie calls for serious moral action...

2007-11-15T11:07:00.000-08:00

in an article she articulately penned, entitled, A Year for Accountability.

It appears in today's issue of The Economist in which she rightly and matter of factly states that,

"accountability is perhaps the only force powerful enough to break the cycle of violence and retribution that marks so many conflicts."

Please take 5 minutes of your time to read this thoughtful and intelligent article, written by United Nations Human Rights Ambassador and Council on Foreign Relations member, Angelina Jolie.

And, if you are so moved, please contact your representatives and do what you can to communicate that we cannot sit idly by while millions suffer and die.

Thank you.

Carpe Diem

2007-11-13T10:02:00.000-08:00

This week I went to the 80th Birthday for my grandmother in law and the memorial service for a 26 year old friend.

It made me more conscious than ever about the fact of our mortality, here on Earth, as humans.

Life is fleeting, life is short... we hear this a lot. But so what? What do we do about it? What is the point of such truisms?
Isn't it to get us to wake up and be more thankful for the life we have, to strive to make the most of the time that we have and fully live!?

The octogenarian birthday celebration and the passing of a young man were odd contrasts to one another. An 80 year old, if lucky, will live another 5 years, perhaps 10, and if unusual, another 20 and beyond. May the latter be so for Grandmother Hayes. She is, for all intents and purposes, at the last stage of her life. A long, well-lived, joyous and useful life it has been. But a life near its end nevertheless. And this is for what we pray: to live a long, healthy, happy, useful life. This is a blessing, as opposed to the tragedy of youth stopped short by the ravages of untimely death. What does one think when a 26 year old passes away? What was their short life about? Why did they die?

And this is the question: why do people die before they grow old?

We know the practical, causal answer: a fatal disease, a car crash, gun shot, suicide, overdose, etc... All unnatural deaths.
Isn't the only natural death one eased into through sleep in old age? Anything else, a stroke, heart attack, or long and lingering degenerative and painful disease seems unnatural. But these are the ways most of our elders die. They do not drift off into that sweet and final slumber, their spirits gracefully floating up to heaven. Most of them, most of us, pass on to the great unknown and beyond from almost anything but the Thanatos doze. No, he's not a friend of Morpheus, and tends to yank us with him in other ways. The treacherous stalker waits.

Have you noticed the cruelty of young death? The violence of it? The seeming injustice and unfairness. The indicative lack of reason and sense. Inside I scream for it all. Annihilated in the thoughts of countless murdered babes for what? Glory, power, money... I cry in the face of the imbalance in the world between the haves and have nots, the starving millions, the impoverished human beings we share the planet with. And what am I doing? What should I do? What can I do? What will I do? What about you?
I can hardly paint my fingernails without choking at the grotesque bourgeiousness of it. The sin of the leisure class is that the world is suffering as we sit by with our home made pies and Sunday football and consumer consciousness/coma while children pick up guns and kill their mothers because of drug crazed war lords in the thick of it.

I vacillate between a morose awareness of the ills in the world and a consuming helplessness and devastating awe at the horror and the inane pleasure of escaping into digital entertainment, movies, gaming, scanning catalouges of goods that I think will make me feel good, goods made at the expense of others... I wallow in the marsh of hazy days spent planning and scheming for ways to make the world a better place, yet how?

I can lift more than a finger. And a finger is not for pointing, unless it's back at Self, at Source, at Cause, and summons and draws up solutions.

And in all my planning, intending, and striving to do what I can to make the world a better place, I'm left with a big yawning, gaping, widening awareness that death lingers near us at every given moment. Any breath can be our last. Any step can end our path, here, on Earth. In a sudden blink of the eye we can fly away to a new way, leaving behind grieving loved ones, tear stained faces and memories of our existence.

But what of our existence? What about right now, while we are still alive?
What are we to make of our lives? How can we live and what can we do to make it all make sense, to make it full of meaning?

I want to live usefully.
I want to be on purpose and for a reason and of benefit and help and service.
Don't you?

I mean if I were to die tomorrow, what would my life have been for?
That's what I want to know. What is my life for? I want to focus on this and become more fiercely dedicated to living my life on purpose, for something. Those of you who know me know I'm already on this path, and it's just this, the incessant call to wake up and live consciously and with meaning and for something that drives me.

I'm filled with the awareness of time pulsing through my wrists, but at the same time I have God in my blood.
I'm mortal and this body will die and return to the Earth, my Mother.
I'm immortal and this soul will transcend and return to the Divine Source, God, my Father.

While I'm gifted, blessed, charged with the miracle of life, I must and I do and I shall remain faithful to the actualization of my potential and the fulfillment of my mission here on Earth in this lifetime. What about you?

Carpe Diem
Leila

Writing a Novel

2007-11-04T12:23:00.000-08:00

Writing away on my novel, When the Warrior Comes Home.

It flows so naturally and easily. I'm very caught up in the story. It's really fun to tell! It's better than watching a movie or reading a book or playing a game. Right now, writing this is all I want to do!

Check out my work so far in some excerpts, here, at my NaNoWriMo page, the National Novel Writing Month website fantasmania designed to encourage and support novel writers in the month of November as they strive to write 1667 words a day for 30 days.

I'm so happy that Barbara Ann O'Leary told me about it, and I'm so happy with the people who created it.

Write On!

Writing to help others

2007-11-01T10:40:00.000-07:00

This morning I woke up and wrote the first 1986 words of my new novel, When the Warrior Comes Home.

It felt really easy and fun. Novel writing is so much more creative and active than screenwriting, which can be very meticulously technical and slow going.
The writing on my novel today was so fast and absorbingly fun that the only thing that stopped me from continuing were outside intrusions.

I must create an environment for myself when I write in which I am not disturbed. More boundaries are healthy and helpful in this sense. When I get chats, email notifications, phone calls, and knocks at the door of my consciousness, I get pulled off course, and it's my fault. It's easy to turn the phone off, close the email application and log out of chat!!!

How wonderful that we are free to create the reality we want in this simple way!
Ah, the bourgeois life...

How aware I am of people who are not free to create their realities, as they are victims of torture, abuse, oppression, poverty, famine, disease, and nastiness.

I hope that my writing in some way, at some level, helps to ease the suffering of others,
as others' writings have helped me through my hard times and eased mine.

It's true that things that I have read, truths and messages that others have poured out into the world through their own blood and experiences, from their cup of life, have aided, guided, inspired, and given me hope.

Now, I will thank some of the writers and people whose words have helped me through my dark times, which is what my novel is about. It's about going to hell and back.

Thanks to:
Friedrich Nietzsche, Oprah Winfrey, Guatama Buddha, Jesus Christ and all his chroniclers, Socrates and Plato, Rumi, Ranier Maria Rilke, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Alice Walker, Woody Allen, Ghandi, Caroline Myss, Carolyn Casey, Ram Das, Alan Watts, Jaqueline Lowe, The Bhagavad Gita, T.S. Eliot, Dr. Eric Gruever, Barbara Hitchen, Josefa Heifitz, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Gene Roddenbery and the creators and writers of Star Trek: The Next Generation, The Bard, Hunter S. Thompson and many more.

There are others. There are many others. But these are the writers and people whose words affected and helped me at a specific time, up to a specific point, in my life. Others came later. And their help will be chronicled and honored in future ways.

I think I will take some time, later, to post about what and how and why all of these writers have helped me.

What writers have inspired and helped you?

Things We Lost in the Fire

2007-10-31T14:13:00.001-07:00

Is not about things we lost in the fire. But that's okay, because it's AN AMAZING MOVIE.

I always wonder where movie titles come from, and feel a certain pleased satisfaction, often accompanied by a genuine smile, upon gleaning the point of a movie's title. This occurred for me at the end of The Departed, which is always an interesting way to punctuate a movie. it happened at the mid point of Shallow Grave, and usually happens at the beginning of a film, which isn't so original, like. Do you know why Glen Gary Glen Ross is thus named? It's a clever trend for a character to speak the name of the title in a line of dialouge. I like that sometimes, if it's not contrived or obvious. Then there are movies like Pulp Fiction. Non-sequitor names.

I can talk a lot about names of movies, but this post is about the incredible masterpiece of moviemaking, Things We Lost in the Fire, written by Allan Loeb, directed by Susanne Bier, and thoughtfully, tenderly shot by Tom Stern.

The reason I saw this movie is because I was forced to consider all the award contenders for the season. This is not a good reason to see a movie. However, the effect of such a compulsion is that I had zero expectations, and therefore, saw the movie with an open mind!

What I liked about it was:
--The way the camera held pensively, quietly upon an image, often in close-up to extreme close-up, sometimes off centered, skewed.
--The subtle montages worked into the movie's narrative
--Benicio Del Toro's facial expressions and the way he changed his energy and persona so drastically and believably between addict and clean. His performance was mesmerizing, touching, TOP NOTCH stuff!
--Halle Berry's portrayal of a shocked, freaked out, grieving widow in search of her self.
--The perfect writing by Allan Loab
--The expert direction by Susanne Bier
--The subtle, nuanced score.
--Precision editing.

This movie felt like a complete story of transformation and redemption.
Making sense out of a tragedy.
Taking chances to make life better.
Accepting the good...

The end has stuck with me. The decision to end that way, with the repetition of the words delivered by Del Toro was master craft. Was that in the script? Did the director decide that? Was that a Del Toro moment? Or a combination thereof?
Ah, the magic of movies!

I need to see it again. Then I can post a more reasoned review with examples.

I Just Saw Michael Clayton

2007-10-24T10:53:00.000-07:00

I just finished watching Michael Clayton, George Clooney's latest movie as an actor and executive director. Tony Gilmore has his directorial debut in this pensive drama that he also penned.
What struck me about the movie were a few things.

1. The Writing: Superb! This movie should garner Gilmore a best screenplay nod. I found that I kept following the dialouge like I was witnessing a David Mamet concoction of brilliance. This writing is poetic, intense, and honest. It's interesting that "who are you" and "I am Shiva the God of Death" were repeated in dialog. While the story is clearly about the corruption of law firms and agribusiness, the overriding theme is one of identity - who are we, who are you, who am I, who is Michael Clayton?

2. The Acting: Watching Tilda Swinton prepare her speeches while getting dressed, seeing her face change and torque as she tried to deal with what she was involved with. Tom Wilkinson deftly embodying the annihilation of a life's career in a moment of moral clarity. I think that Clooney was good, as usual. He's a fantastic actor. I just wonder if this performance could have been brought up a notch.

3. The Direction: The decision to shoot everything close up, so close that you felt drawn in and part of the story and intercut scenes, especially with Tilda preparing for speeches while getting dressed.

Leila on Movies and Robert Redford

2007-10-23T18:21:00.000-07:00

THIS IS MY BRAIN ON MOVIES

I'm a movie fanatic! I Love them!!! They are so magical and powerful! They speak to me and I know they speak to you. Not all movies, but many, or at least some have impacted my life, and yours, and the vast majority of first world people on the planet.

I've often thought about why I feel entitled to call myself an expert about movies, why I think I'm someone who has the right to critique them, analyze them, and someone who thinks she knows how to make them (stay tuned for my movies on Oscar night a'la 2010 or later).

Perhaps it's because my mother dragged me to the theatres on campus in Bloomington, Indiana, where she went to undergraduate school as a theatre and drama major. The campus run films were often foreign, second run, and pre-indies (they were low budget, low profile films before this term was coined).

How many nights she'd drop me off at the auditorium that played the movie while she sat in one of her classes down the hall.

I think that I got a movie education (notice I do not say "film".) TANGENT ALERT!
I do not say "film" because I see movies as motion or moving pictures.. aka MOVIES.
And, now it's even more appropriate to call them movies than film, as many movies are not shot on film, so that calling movies "films" is now quickly becoming an anachronistic misnomer.

Okay, I think that I got a movie education from birth, as my mother, a certified movie freak, made sure that I not only saw every movie showing in town, but that I saw them more than once. Why? Well, as a working, single mother in school, she found that it was easy in that town and time (Bloomington, Indiana 1970s) to use movie theaters as babysitters. If she had to work or go to class, I most often got dropped off in care of some friend or other of hers who worked the box office and concession stands, with the agreement that they'd make sure I was "looked after".
Well, her classes or work shifts were obviously longer than 2 hours, the result of which was that I'd watch the same movie two, sometimes three times in a row.

This caused me to become very curious about them, very observant of them, astute in the craft of moviemaking, even. And at such a young age! I sat for hours, days, weeks, months, through my formative years listening to Gene Hackman in Copola's The Conversation, witnessing the decline of American values in The Godfather, became a feminist from The Marathon Man and Annie Hall. Memorized every line of every Woody Allen movie from 1974 to 1992, from the gloriously whacky Sleeper to the much underrated Shadows and Fog.

The great thing about this movie theatre babysitter was not only that I slipped away into a more interesting, usually more intelligent, creative, and consciousness raising world that was the movies, but that I also got to eat chocolate covered raisins, popcorn, and rootbeer- things my mother would NEVER let me touch, unless it was Christmas or my birthday. I'm really glad, now, that she did not raise me on white bread, twinkies, and Kool-Aid, but at the time I considered it serious neglect. I can't remember the names of the people who'd "babysit" me at the movies, but I know they'd always slip me my box of popcorn, my rootbeer, and my raisinettes back when raisinettes had real chocolate and were YUMSIE!

As if that wasn't enough to make a young single digit aged girl happy, there was a really small, hole-in-the-wall candy shoppe (that's how they spelled it) right next store to this one theatre that I loved, The Indiana Theatre (now known as the Buskirk Chumley, which still runs indies and art films and also hosts festivals and live stage performances - cool!
The odd thing is that a Mongolian family owned it, and they served the most amazing egg rolls, like the size of burritos! To this day it's the best egg roll I've ever had and I'm real bummed I can't find or figure out how to make some like them.

Okay, so there I am in the theater, either being "babysat" or with my mom, when she dragged me to things like The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, The Exorcist and The Shining, oh my! How many hours did I take in the antics of Felini and follow the long narratives of Bergman's masterpieces,how many times I had to endure Smokey and the Bandit and Freaky Friday...

All in all, this crazy hippy, so 1970's flower child way to be babysat had a good impact on me. I think I learned a lot, not only about movies, but about humanity, about the world, about being alive, about people in particular and in general, about stereotypes, history, politics, and famous figures.

To this day, I really see movie watching as a very special and important activity that calls my attention to it in a most serious and reverent way.

Over the years I started noticing all the things that go into making a movie. I'd notice and call out continuity errors, cock my eyebrow when I noticed a flat line delivery or odd edit/cut.
I came to deeply care about the writing, just about more than anything. Of course, I admire and respect and hail The Director. I usually feel most happy and appreciative when a movie is written and directed by the same person or a team that often or always works together.

This is when I realized that, as a writer, yes over the years I became a writer. I realized that is what I am. I merged my love of movies with my passion for writing and started penning screenplays and writing up production schedules and logisticizing over shots, locations, editing and directing my movies.

And I learned about the importance of craft, on all levels, from all the people involved in the making of a movie.
I have the most amazing excited respect and love for the people who make it all happen and come together. I realized that I abosolutely have to be a part of it!

So, that big tangent leads me to discuss Robert Redford's new movie, Lambs for Lions.
Over the years, I've always felt rather neutral toward Robert Redford. I mean, yeah Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Way We Were, The Great Gatsby, All the President's Men, I KNOW I KNOW he's GOOD!
But for me, something clicked and I really grew to respect and appreciate him with Sundance and his support of Independents and global causes.

It is with excitement, curiosity, and hope that I look forward to his new film, Lions for Lambs.

I feel that it holds the promise of something transcendental in moviemaking.
I feel that it promises to shift the consciousness of the viewers.
And THIS is the magic of movies that I'm talkin'...

Changing consciousness.

That's what it's all about.

Voila!

Descendants on the Rise

2007-10-22T17:31:00.000-07:00

Check out some new information coming in about Descendants.

LeilaWrites

2007-10-19T13:37:00.000-07:00

I've started a new project through The Hub, for writers.
It seems very cool!

The idea of it is that you create a hub for a particular line of thought, a specific topic or theme, and publish it as a hub. One writer can have many hubs. Instead of one blog type space with multiple listings, you get to have tons of hubs that are kind of stand alone blog type entities.

I'll be publishing some of my writing through there, so stay tuned and please subscribe if you can.
Thank you!

Writing in Leilaland,
Leila

Technorati

2007-10-18T11:25:00.000-07:00

I really like the sound of that word, so I am going to be a part of it.
Check it my
Technorati Profile

Associated Content

2007-10-18T11:08:00.001-07:00

Check out my recently published content on AC:

Hillary Clinton for President - Why We Need a Change

Completing Projects and RAIN

2007-10-16T10:30:00.000-07:00

This week I'm focusing on completing some projects that need to go out the door and into the world.

I'm in a phase of tying up loose ends, putting bows on things, and clearing up space and energy.

It's raining; a soft, steady coming down friend in love with watering the earth.
Gentle. Delicate. Serene.

What is it about the rain that makes me settle down and feel my fingers on the keyboard?
What is it about the rain that makes me feel present and alive?

I love the rain.

There is a song by Tones on Tail, formerly Bauhaus, then Love and Rockets, called Rain.
How funny that someone synced it to a scene in Dario Argento's Suspiria, John Carpenter's favorite movie.
Take a listen.

I'm called back to The Cult's Rain song as well! What memories! They played this live and it was so fun to witness. I LOVE THE RAIN!

Oooh oooh and Shirley Ann Manson in Garbage singing I'm only happy when it rains! LOVE THAT SONG! Although I don't know what she means by pour your misery down. I find it to be quite a pleasure.
Check out the vid. Remember that? Cool!

And the scene from Gus Van Sant's movie featuring a breakout role for Nicole Kidman,To Die For, in which Nicole Kidman dances in the rain for Joaquin Phoenix, while he oogles from the car, agape.
Funny, I just remembered that the song for that scene is Shirley Ann Manson, from Garbage, singing Queer.

Chew on that. Chew chew!

Got any good rain songs, thoughts, or scenes to share?

AL GORE WINS NOBEL PEACE PRIZE

2007-10-12T08:22:00.000-07:00

Congratulations to Al Gore for winning the Nobel Peace Prize for his important work in raising consciousness about global climate change.

Pangea Day

2007-10-11T10:15:00.000-07:00

As a moviemaker, a person who has visions and ideas to share with the world, in visual, motion picture format, I'm happy to find out about Pangea Day, the global movie project.

I just dug out my camera and equipment, and I'm thinking about the subject and theme for my 5 minute entry to this really cool global event.

Check it out. Watch some of the sample films. I'm struck, impressed, and inspired by what I see there.

Stay tuned.

NaNoWriMo!!!

2007-10-10T08:43:00.000-07:00

YES!
This is a writing time for me. Autumn is my favorite season, and it really symbolizes a time to go within, to turn inside, and delve into the interior world of self and being. This is exactly the type of feeling I need to focus intensely on my writing. I plan to be very prolific this season.

On the note, I just signed up for NaNoWriMo! What is that? It sounds really weird, like some nanobot weirdo convention thingy.

Well, in an odd way, it's not that really, but maybe kinda like that...

NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. It kicks off November 1st and is sponsored by an non-profit organization of writers who think it's cool to rally writers together to commit to writing a novel in a month.
They have a cool website that allows you, as a registered (free) writer, to post your writings, meet other participating writers (online), contribute to and read forums, chat, and share your presence as a WRITER.

It's a convention of writers, sharing their writing in the digital cyber realm of NaNoWriMo.org... so it is a kind of nanobot weirdo tech geek thing, in a way...

My awesome, fiercly articulate, and incredible writer friend, Barbara Ann O'Leary, told me about it and encouraged me to join. I've heard her talking about it since I met her at the Bloomington Women's Writing Center in 2005. She wore a button that said I write novels. And I thought that was totally cool.

So, I'm signed up, registered, I have a commitment, and I'm going to write 1666 words a day, every day in in the month of November.

I already have my novel title, When the Warrior Comes Home. The character, Sidra, is a heroine I've worked with in my writings in the past, and this time, she has a lot to learn about internal transformation and challenging her limiting beliefs.
I think you'll like it! I can't wait to share it.
I can't wait to write it!

WRITE ON!

You can keep track of my progress, starting on Novemeber 1st, by going to my NaNoWriMo page.

If you are feeling bold and inspired and want to try it out, go to the NaNoWriMo website and register to commit to writing a novel in November!

The idea of the event is that you are WRITING. Not editing, planning, reviewing, plotting, organizing, or even thinking about what you are writing. It's just to get it all written. Anything that comes out, no matter what. The point is, like Natalie Goldberg encourages, in her Writing Down the Bones, to get it down, do the Down Draft. Then, later, in December, or later next year in 2008, you can fix it up, do the Up Draft.

Are you ready?
DO IT!

XoXo
Leila

Hillary Clinton for USA President

2007-09-27T08:55:00.000-07:00

Okay, I'm doing it. I've been thinking about it for a few months now, and I'm getting on the bandwagon to support Hillary Clinton for President of the United States of America.

I have a lot of reasons why, and I ask you to please consider the importance of having someone in office who has a lot of experience with our government, who has been in the White House for 8 years, who is articulate, bold, and has integrity, and, yes, who is a woman.

I think one of the most important things to consider is that half of the people in this country are female.

That is a much more important minority to represent than any other group, in my opinion, if not based solely on the utilitarian argument (the greater good for the greatest number, etc..).

I think that there are symbolic, psychological, spiritual, energetic, legal, and practical reasons for wanting a female president.

Symbolically, Hillary stands for the voice of reason, experience, and wisdom. She also is a sort of Athena archetype, a natural leader, even a warrior, but not the warring, invading countries for oil kind. She stands for the inherent intuitive, instinctual, nurturing and guiding wisdom of the female archetype; something this country has never had, and desperately needs.

Psychologically, Hilary represents a reuniting with the mother, the nurturer, the healer for our collective psyche that has too long been whipped and prodded under the austere hand of the patriarchal meme.

Spiritually, supporting and electing a qualified woman for President is a strong movement to merge the lost mother of creation. There is an insidious driving force in the background of the United States of America's designs and functions that are imbalanced toward the heavy yang expression of force, dominance, control, power over, and materialism.

With our Home, Planet Earth, falling out of balance in its ability to sustain us, as we continue to live in ways that are not sustainable, the female GAIA, Mother Earth, cries out for healing, protection, and restoration.

Aligning a female crusader to champion the cause of saving our HOME is a vital shift and commitment that we should take now.
When we affirm that a human female should lead us at this time of great crisis and change, the female spirit is recognized, represented, and honored.

Deciding to talk about, take action for, and commit consciously to electing Hilary Clinton for President of the USA, signifies an energetic shift in the collective consciousness of the entire country. As we allow ourselves to see that great healing and change is needed, we can recognize that opting for a different kind of leader is vital to this change.

The legal ramifications of a female president are such that great, necessary, and long overdue modifications to laws and policies about how females are treated, with regard to their rights, bodies, finances, and more.

The practical reasons for supporting and electing Hillary Clinton are that she brings to the presidency a new way of being that no president has ever had: that is, being a female.

While I'm all for electing a female for President, I do not want a female for President for the sake of having a female President.

The reason that I want Hillary Clinton to be our President is that she is extremely intelligent, well-spoken in her ability to construct a clear and logical argument when she speaks, articulate, eloquent, and astute. She picks up on what people are saying, she follows lines of reasoning, she takes it all in and seems to be processing, orienting, thinking. THINKING! A president that demonstrates thinking!? How about that for an idea!?

Hillary Clinton has the qualities of a true leader. She is not too proud, yet can be firm and aggressive, as needed.

And, very importantly, Hillary Clinton has the unique experience, differentiating herself from all other Presidential candidates in this election campaign, of having been IN THE WHITE HOUSE FOR EIGHT YEARS. That is perhaps her single largest qualification. In this she has everyone else beat.
Think about all that she learned in those eight years, all she observed, witnessed, saw, and gained insight from.

Think about the strength of having a prior United States of America President as her confidant and moral support and guide, as she navigates the incredible duty and role as U.S. President!
This puts her in a very important position. The knowledge, wisdom, and experience she has about the Presidency is greater, deeper, and more tangible than any other person running.

With our country mired in economic crisis, tangled in bizarre and confusing military engagements in the Middle East, and facing the species greatest threat ever-GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE - now more than ever, we need a strong, qualified, and NEW type of President, who can help steer us on course, and get us back on our feet, strong, and solid, and heading in the right direction.

Please give this some serious consideration.
Thank you.
Leila Kincaid Hayes

GO SOLAR

2007-09-26T22:32:00.000-07:00

Time to change how we live or we will die. As in species extinction.

How about changing the way we consume energy by using the SUN instead of coal and gas and poisonous, toxic, polluting substances?

I'm researching building and installing my own passive solar batch hot water heater. Read about it and do it, too. Please do!

Start thinking about the way you gift people and get gifts. Ask people to GO GREEN for your birthday or holiday gifts and do the same for them. Help them build a hot water heater or replace their light bulbs to compact flourescant.

Switch to using cloth napkins and bring your own shopping bags to the grocery store.

Try to buy things locally, instead of having them shipped in.

Organize to get your neighborhood, community, city to GO SOLAR. Arrange weekend projects to install solar panels that will feed your house and help your friends, family, and neighbors do so.

Let's think about this.

Thank you for considering changing your life for the good of all.

Signed,
Earthkeeper Leila

Bibliomancing

2007-09-11T09:02:00.000-07:00

What is Bibliomancing? Why do I do it? Who should care?

I offer this passage that I've copied from the dictionary.com site:

bib·li·o·man·cy /ˈbɪblioʊˌmænsi/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[bib-lee-oh-man-see] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation
–noun
divination by means of a book, esp. the Bible, opened at random to some verse or passage, which is then interpreted.
[Origin: 1745–55; biblio- + -mancy]
Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1)
Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2006.
American Heritage Dictionary - Cite This Source
bib·li·o·man·cy (bĭb'lē-ə-mān'sē) Pronunciation Key
n. pl. bib·li·o·man·cies
Divination by interpretation of a passage chosen at random from a book, especially the Bible.

(Download Now or Buy the Book)
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Copyright © 2006 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
Online Etymology Dictionary - Cite This Source
bibliomancy
1753, "divination by opening a book (especially the Bible) at random," the first verse presenting itself being taken as a prognostication of future events, from Gk. biblion (see Bible) + manteia "divination." Before the Bible, in pagan times, Homer (sortes Homericæ) and Virgil (sortes Virgilianæ) were similarly used.

Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2001 Douglas Harper

For years, as long as I can remember in fact, I have loved books. Part of that is due to the fact that my mother raised me as a reader, always giving me books, reading to me, and with me. We did not have a television, so I spent a lot of my time reading. I pretty much read anything I could get my hands on: cookbooks, phone books, dictionaries, bibles, philosophy, trash romance, mysteries, mythology, fiction, non-fiction, poetry, the classics, psychology, anthropology, history, critiuque and analysis, anything, you name it!

I have always had books in m y house, everywhere, all over it, in various states of being read by me. I like to read many many books at the same time, because my mind likes to digest and think about and meditate on and consider many many ideas and go to many worlds. Books are like places I can go, experiences I can have. I meet people there, do things, learn things, grow. The writers are my friends. I have always considered them so.

Many of my frames of reference to my experiences of reality are to books, to ideas and things and people and events and places in books I've read.
How I've longed for a literate social circle, well-read companions who can nod at my sometimes apparent obscure references and remarks. How I love that moment of recognition when someone knows what I'm talking about!

Often, over the years, my bed mates have been books. One full side is dappled with books opened to pages, bookmarked, tucked under the pillow next to me, on the pillow, under sheets, on top of the covers, whatever. The books are there and they make me happy. I feel I can trust them. They can't change their minds, or go back on what they said, or try to change reality from anything than it already is within the covers. They are reliable. They have opinions and consciousness and are interesting and thought provoking. They are maddening, reassuring, hilarious, terrifying, and sad.
They are beautiful and silly, courageous, and plain. They do what they do and that's that. And you can always go back to them and there they are, exactly like before, only different, because of you. I love reading books again and again and seeing how they are different because I have changed. Nothing about the book has.
Books are such a steady frame of reference for things.

So, when I have tons and tons of books, on shelves, in the bathroom, the car, on the floor and in my kitchen, in my purse, and on my desk, I find that it's fun to randomly turn to pages in them and simply read whatever my eyes first lay upon.
I've been doing this as long as I can remember. When I was a young girl and got books for Christmas or my birthday (always my favorite gifts) I would lay with them all spread out before me on the floor and open each one to a page and read for a bit, and so on with each book.
I'd often say things to myself like, "the next thing I read will tell me what I should consider during this day" or "whatever it says on this page is what I'm supposed to know at this time." Things like that...
And I still do that.
To this day...

And I've learned, over the years, that what I'm doing is bibliomancing.
And it's SO FUN!
Try it!

Go get a book or two or three from wherever you have books.

Now, randomly open one, and read the first thing you see. It can be just a word, if that feels like enough, or a sentence, if you want a little more, or a paragraph, or
even an entire chapter or section, if that compels you at this time.

And after you read it. Think about it. What does it have to do with you and your life? What is in it that you can somehow interpret as meaningful and significant to you? What does it make you think and feel?

Now, do it again, with another book, and so on, with as many books as you like.
And try it now and then, over the years, throughout your life. Maybe every week, once a month, every day. Whatever compels you!

Today, I share that I bibliomanced the Dalai Lama,from his book, The Art of Happiness. The page I turned to and the spot my thumb hit had this sentence: "Understand the background of people."

I'll sit with this now.
Thank you for considering this!

The Next United States President

2007-09-11T07:21:00.000-07:00

I'm thinking a lot about the next United States Presidency.
I'm thinking about who I'd like to be the President and why.

It would be nice if the next president changed the path that the U.S. is heading down, and reversed many bad energies that have been gushing forth like a demon out of hell.

It would be nice if the next President made taking care of our home, our planet, Earth, a priority, instead of invading and occupying other countries and spending all our taxes on dubious military developments.

I'd like to see an environmental campaign platform; one based on the ideas that we need to change the way we live in order to save ourselves.
Who is doing this right now? No one.
Why?

Where is Al Gore?
Why isn't Hilary Clinton emphasizing this and running around defensively arguing against her attackers?

I'd like for half the United States' population to be represented in the White House, for the first time in 200+ years! I mean women.

I'd like a president who has experience and knows what it's like to be in the White House.

I'd like a president who demonstrates a more than fair amount of leadership, in qualities such as:

--clear and rational thinking
--sound decision making
--articulate and eloquent spokesmanship
--moral and ethical principle upholding

Who is this person?
Does Hilary Clinton possess this leadership?

What will happen to us?

We can help decide and influence the outcome.
What will it be?
What will we do?

Will we sit by, quietly, popping our pills, zoning out on TV, and pretending that we don't control our destiny and that we have no control or influence over what happens to us?

I don't know.

Getting off the Continent

2007-09-11T07:12:00.000-07:00

For years, I've thought that I had to be off the continent proper of the United States, and here I am, moving to Bainbridge Island, Washington, in a few short days.
Yes!

At first glance, this notion that I'd be off the continent indicated that I'd be in another country. But, I realized that, Bainbridge being an island, in a real sense, I am going to be living off the continent, on an island. And I felt a huge wave of relief, as if my inner compass has lead me home, to the right place. And all is well!

I look forward to being away from the smog, the noise, the lights, the concrete, the buildings, the constant moving around of consumers and development.

It will be a welcome reprieve to dwell near water again, amidst trees, and to experience clean air and silence, real silence.

I sense a gathering, there. I feel it's a time that I will recollect myself and refocus on my projects. There will be a lot of writing and coming together. Healing and taking aim at that which is most important.

It is good to feel aligned with what I want, with what I feel is right and good.

Yes, this is good.

Summer Time

2007-06-20T08:56:00.000-07:00

Today is June 20th. In two months I will be Mrs. Hayes. I wonder about that. About my name.
Will I change it? Should I change it? What's in a name? ... again I ask.... alas....

I do not know. I do know that I am deeply fulfilled by the idea of the marriage to Justin. This is a wonderful time in my life to kneel down, bow to, pray and be thankful for. It's also a time to relish in and celebrate! YAY! :D This is happy Leila, be her a Hayes or Kincaid or both and AMEN!

Tomorrow is the first day of summer. I love that. I love summer when I'm on the Northwest coast and it's a cool 60 and breezy with clear skies that reveal Mount Ranier peeking across our lawn to my window here.

How disparte from this were the days, weeks, months I spent in Indiana last summer, baking in the sweltering suffocation of humid 90+ degree weather with the air conditioner on full blast. The biting mosquitos, the crazy making heat. It made me think of the main character, Meursault, in Albert Camus' seminal work, The Stranger, as he was driven to murder in the insanity driving heat of a hot Afraican summer day on a beach.

Dead man on the beach...
I'm alive. I'm dead. I'm a stranger, killing an arab.
Staring at the sea, staring at the sand, staring in the eye that reflected down the barrel...

The Cure turned that scene in the book into a song that echoes through my head when I'm too hot and feel aggrevation, intoleration from too hot weather...

And I also think of the Siouxsie and the Banshees song, 92 degrees. She sings Not 91 or 93 but 92 hot farenheit degrees. At 92 people get irritable! I love that song...

And yes, here, in Bellevue, Washington, USA, it's a cool, clear, breezy 60 and yes, I'm thankful to be here now.

Yay for Summer Solstice! I find it to be a time of tuning my awareness to all the things that have come to be and open my eyes as wide as I can while breathing in deeply through my nose. Mmmmmmm.... Fresh air! Life! Creation! :)

Summer Reading
I just finished a huge writing project that ate up tons of my time, and, thankful to have some free time now that the project is over, I bought some new books to read this summer. I added some of them to my reading list in the right nav, but here is the complete list:

The Assault on Reason, by Al Gore

Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand

Catching the Big Fish, by David Lynch (yes, the moviemaker)

Aristotle's Poetics for Screenwriters, by Michael Tierno (you have to read Aristotle's Poetics before this work, in order to capture the full essence)

Bambi vs. Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose, and Practice of the Movie Business, by David Mamet

Notes From My Travels, by Angelina Jolie

Another Day in Paradise: International Humanitarian Workers Tell Their Stories, compiled and edited by Carol Bergman

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, by Ishmael Beah

The Devil's Guide to Hollywood: The Screenwriter as God, by Joe Eszterhas

A Mighty Heart: The Brave Life and Death of my Husband, Danny Pearl, by Marianne Pearl

2007 Writer's Market, Robert Lee Brewer, Writer's Digest Books

I hope you get a chance to read some of these titles.

I'm done reading a couple, am in the process of reading a few, and plan to read all of them throughout the summer.

HAPPY READING!

I'm off to do that now.

Ciao ciao :)

and the summer is easy....

2007-06-15T15:35:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking a lot lately about time.

I keep having this feeling of being rushed through it. And I want to put on the breaks because everything is happening so quickly.

I feel like I don't have time to slow down and relax and read and write and be.

I feel like this centralization of thoughts and feelings and intentions and goals and dreams and perceptions and experiences. And this it out of time, away from time, timeless even. This is me.

Then there is the me that goes wait, what day is it? June 15th, 2007 at 3:40pm PST?
What does that arbitrary number mean? How is it different from June 15th, 1997, or June 15th 2017 or any other time and date?

And it feels like I'm slipping through time, and it's going faster and faster and faster and....

I can't catch my breath. I want it to slow down.

At least, today marks the birth of new things. The new moon and Lost Coast Media.

Alas alas for the things that come to pass.

Apocalypse in England

2007-05-25T12:24:00.000-07:00

I saw three movies this past weekend. All of them, I realized, are set in England and about strange things going on there.

Here's what I saw:

28 Weeks Later - a British take on what happens when a military drug designed to make viscious soldiers gets loosed upon the population and everyone goes insane with rage and kills each other. Interestingly, the film doesn't focus on the gory savagery, but the psychological experience of a family that is torn apart by this catastrophe. It's a taut thriller with many cutting insights and metaphors about our times.

Hot Fuzz - Don't let the name fool you; this movie is not porn. It's a British comedy by the same team of guys who did the fantastic Shaun of the Dead (a spoof on the George Romero zombie classics, Dawn of the Dead, Night of the Living Dead, and the recent and amazing Land of the Dead). Hot fuzz is a whacky, slap-stick oriented silly spoofy comedy about a small cozy town miles away from London that wins "best town of England" award every year. A snappy police officer who is the best in London, gets canned and sent to the small town because he's "so good he makes the entire police department in London look bad". What he discovers when he gets to his new post (the small town that wins best town of the year every year) is that while there are no "crimes" there is an alarming rate of fatal accidents. He discovers that these accidents are murders perpetrated by a group of gray hairs who want to keep winning the award. Prat falls and puns, zaniness and goofiness abound in this odd comedy.

Children of Men - Another movie about bad things happening on the British Isle. This one is ten notches above Hot Fuzz and 28 Weeks Later, due to many qualities of a superb movie: the poetic and poignant screenplay that has no frills or excess, the bold and precise direction that doesn't add sentimentality or skew the perspective, the unflinchingly personal and sweepingly majestic cinematography (a striking contrast), and the surprisingly intense and authentic characterization brought to the main character by the actor, Clive Owen.
Children of Men is a dystopic meditation on what would happen if women could no longer get pregnant and mankind faced extinction. It's an "end-of-the-world" sci-fi flick with dark and scarily realistic tone. The movie is rife with images and scenes that reflect events going on in the world today, and many times during the movie I did not feel I was watching science fiction - I felt like I was watching a documentary. One of the best moments of the movie for me was a long single take at the movie's climax (I won't give it away, but watch for the amazing uncut sequence).
I just found out that this movie has been rated in the top ten best sci-fi movies of all time, and I agree...

It's funny, because I did not plan to or even realize I was seeing three movies set in England about epidemics causing death and major change. One was a horror movie, one a comedy, and one a drama. Interesting!

Cannes Film Festival

2007-05-15T17:38:00.000-07:00

Okay, I have a new goal. Well, it's not new. I've wanted this to be a reality for a long time. Namely, to attend the Cannes Film Festival.
Of course I would like to go as a moviemaker, someone who has written, directed, and acted in a movie that is premiering at Cannes. I'd be happy with any of these credits, all or one.

If I do not have any movie associations with the movies at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, I would still like to go. I would attend as a member of the press and as a moviemaker. Mostly, I want to go as a witness and celebratory guest who honors the caliber of moviemaking that Cannes acknowledges and that recognizes important moviemakers of our time.

And now, a comment about my use of "moviemaker" as opposed to "filmmaker". In the modern day (2007) film is not the only medium by which movies are made. A lot of them are being shot and edited digitally with DV and HD technologies. So, while movies imply moving pictures, and film implies a medium that is quickly becoming too expensive and outdated to use, I will say movies, and moviemaking, and moviemakers instead of films, filmmaking, and filmmakers.

So, I hope to see you at Cannes in 2008. And at the very least, I hope you see me there.

Perhaps I should start learning to speak French...another lifelong goal I've had but not acted on.

Alas, now is the time to act on goal manifestation!

Names

2007-04-30T13:07:00.000-07:00

JULIET:
'Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What's Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,
And for that name which is no part of thee
Take all myself.

Leila’s Musings on Names

In response to a discussion and question posted by Barbara Ann O'Leary, who founded her online Evoking Authenticity community forum, I have journeyed into the question: What is a Name?

What is a Name?
When musing on this question, I think of the Bard’s famous lines, quoted above. Are they true? Is it perhaps, that a rose by any other name is not the same?

I feel that there is something vital, something essential (as in of the essence), something true and authentic about our Name.
I capitalize Name because it seems to command a certain respect. Name. In the beginning was the NAME. And the name contained the energy of the named.

Certainly we exist before we are named. It’s not that naming is preter-phenomenal to our existence, but it seems that naming is a distinctive moment in our existence. As if, that thing there, this thing here is hereby this essence named this!

So, I existed as something, some form of energy before my mother said you are Leila. But in the naming moment, something clicks, and voila! There is Leilaness about me and all other Leilas , just as there is Janiceness about youJanices, and Barbaraness about all Barbaras, and Adamness about all Adams.

I see it as something similar to being born under a star sign. I mean, come on, there are only 12 sun signs, but there are 6 billion or more of us on the planet right now! So, there is something Piscean about me, that is true for all Pisces, naturally, as with each of the 12 signs. There is something essential in the energy pattern that is associated with a name, a sign. It seems that a lot more energy has gone into researching and cataloging the various characteristics of astrological signs than names. While there are many resources for the meaning and origin and historical use (etymology) of names, I think there is something that we, as the Named, have personal experience that can speak to what it is to be with the names we acknowledge.

I really don’t see Names as labels. Leila is not a label for me. Writer or dancer or poet are labels/roles. But, I find that my Name does not feel like a label.

What’s in a Name? The Power of Naming
It seems that a Name can contain Secrets to patterns that our being takes, tends to take, can take.. potentials (dormant or active), a flavor of being, a title, an identifier, an identity (but not always).

It’s interesting that there is so much energy put into naming, the act of giving a Name, of naming something… that energy goes somewhere.. into the named, into the subject, who now embodies something, some force, some essence, some part of the energy of that naming, of the Name.

I like the idea of considering that name is a verb and a noun. I Name myself the Name, Leila.
And thus, contain some essence of that which is Leila-ish.

When I looked up “name” at http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Name
I was fascinated with the synonyms, and the thesaurus references. Words I saw there, that struck me as interesting, include: Appellation, Moniker, Title, Designation, Sign, Character, Distinction , Reputation (like, the name you’ve made for yourself…)
Name as verbal or symbolic representation really stood out to me. I like the symbolic aspect. For years I’ve researched the meaning, origin, history, and occurrence of my birth name, Leila. It’s meant a tremendous amount to me to have a relationship with my name, to feel my acceptance and recognition of it is intentional and authentic, true to me, and who I feel I am.

You see, I’m 100 % certain that I would be very different if I were not given the name and lived with the name and identified with the name, Leila. Over the years, I have learned that my name, Leila, means many things in many languages, but some of the common themes are dark purple, the dark of night, the play of the cosmos, and soulful love.
I've given these meanings a lot of thought, meditation, and attention. I've explored what it means to be or feel, express and embody those things. In some ways, the meaning of my name has guided me, informed me, and inspired me.
What can I learn from the meaning of my name, I've asked. How am I embodying the qualities of my name that I aspire to? Am I truly Leila? How can I be more Leila? Am I .. Authentically Leila?
And in a lot of this exploration I discovered that my signature changed. I have signed my signature like this since I was a teenager:

It's like a giant, spiraling adventure and question with a lot of exclamation and distinction. It seems very much like me! And it looks like it's dancing and transforming.

It was interesting to play with what I found in the etymology and history of names.
I found Shakti Gawain’s explanation of her name in her book, Living in the Light. She talks about how it was a process, an adventure, and that over the years she started being called Shakti, and it stuck, until one day she realized she identified herself and thought of herself as Shakti, and had her name legally changed.

Whatever naming is and names are, what our names mean and the energy they carry definitely affects us.
One thing is for sure: there is a distinct power in naming, claiming, and recognizing a Name.

Do you know what your name means? What is your relationship to your name? How do you claim it, be it, identify with it? Have you changed your name? If you were to change your name, what would it be?

Can you experience yourself beneath your name?
Absolutely! That’s just it! I do not think that I am only my name, Leila. I am not just that. It, Leilaness, is part of me. But there is more me, all of me, that is not just Leila.
I live day to day with the awareness of the being here, this being here that experiences this here like this right now that is not just Leila but is also Leila.

Usually, for me, Leila is a subject that is experiencing things. The Leila part of me is the character in the adventure, the protangonist in my life story, the heroine on her journey.

There is definitely a God here, a Divine presence, a spirit and conglomeration of benevolent, compassionate, and wise beingness in me, that I do not attribute to the unique flavor of Leila. But, as Leila, I can describe the experience, communicate about it, share with you about it, express it, and cherish it.

And there is nothing inauthentic about being Leila and noticing the notLeila. In the end, I really feel it’s all one. All one. And I just look at reality through this peephole most the time.

I feel this is authentically delivered in the spirit of musing on a subject I’ve always been fascinated by: Names!
By the Named, Leila and all the unnamed beingness herein!

Life is happening now!

2007-04-16T14:54:00.000-07:00

If you are alive and reading this take heed!

CARPE DIEM!!!

LIVE YOUR LIFE TO ITS FULLEST!

GIVE THANKS FOR WHAT YOU HAVE AND DON"T HAVE!

There is so much happening in the world, and life changes from day to day, and right now I ask you to stop and be aware of the awesome dance of it all.

2007-04-11T10:27:00.000-07:00

As I lay in the bath this morning, with my lavendar and rose oils bubbling in the hot steam around me, I read the Author's Introduction to Shakti Gawain's Living in the Light.

In it, she describes how she started her journey, and says that at some point, early in her adult life, she became aware of "this consciousness thing" and "knew that it was the only thing that mattered".

I, too, believe that it is important to become conscious of ourselves, to know ourselves, as I've always thought of it. One of my first impressions that this was an important endeavor in life was when I read Plato's Apology, in which Socrates suggests that the key to happiness lies in knowledge of the self.
He argues, convincingly, that knowledge of one's self can lead to knowledge of how to fulfill one's deepest desires, which is, ultimately, the true and authentic expression of one's soul, and that it is this that will truly make a person happy - not material wealth or status.

This sage's famous line, based on the inscription at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, "Know Thyself, the unexamined life is not worth living" has been a guide, a chord, that I have lived by since I first read this in undergraduate school at age 18.
Thank you Dr. Eric Gruever, for introducing me to this sage, and for encouraging my path of getting to know myself.

Gnothi Seauton is the greek translation of Know Thyself, and I've always loved to say it. It's pronounced: No-thee' sat-on.

To the extent that knowing one's Self is part of becoming conscious, how does one embark on such a journey?
I feel that it starts with wanting to understand the Self more, with wanting to know one's Self.

So, I invite you to embark on further journeys into your Self, and engage in your own form of Gnothi Seauton!

Freedom and Moral Responsibility

2007-04-09T08:21:00.000-07:00

Today, I woke up feeling very fresh and clear.
Two thoughts came to me immediately:
1. There are starving people in the world, and food is spilling out of my kitchen.
2. Planet Earth is hovering on a dangerous precipice. We must act now to save her, to save human life, for the good of all.

These two deep feelings came to me this morning and I'm sitting with them now.

As I stood in the kitchen making tea, I saw the leftover food from dinner still sitting out on the counter. Cringing as I tossed it into the compost, I felt that it was food that could save a life, that my waste was in relation to another's dire need.
It made me recall times in which my own dire need was marked by a consciousness that others' excess could save me and others who had needs.

It made me think of the odd imbalance of resource availability, wealth, and opportunity that exists in the human realm. Images of starving, abused, oppressed people contrast with those of conspicuous consumption, privilege, and unfocused freedom. They toss around in my head like a storm.

The fact is that there are more people in the world who exist in a state of dire need, for the provision of their basic subsistence needs, than there are people who have more than they need.

And the people who have their subsistence needs met are more advantaged in that they have the freedom to develop their psycho, socio, mental, and spiritual abilities, while the starving and oppressed merely struggle to survive.

It seems to me that the people who do have this freedom to develop themselves, to "grow" as human beings, to become "better" people, and maximize their potential, usually DON'T. That's simply it. That's the tragedy.
It's not that there are starving, oppressed people. It's that THERE ARE FREE PEOPLES DOING NOTHING ABOUT IT.
They are too busy numbing out in front of their Desparate Housewives, Sopranos, Football Games, and Reality TV bonanzas of grotesque decadence and excess; too busy to wake up and realize a world is happening and that they are alive and should act to make their life meaningful and worthwhile.

If you are not doing something to help a problem you are contributing to the problem. Period.

Yet, the people who have more than they need do not live by the principle of charity and generosity, and very few of these "Haves" are even conscious of this gigantic mis-proportion of wealth and resources, and even fewer view their position in life as a moral imperative.

What happened to the classical education most of us "Haves" should have gotten, the education that teaches morality and ethical behavior like the one that sparked the desire in me to live a moral, just, and altruistic life, in which the freedom recognized in modern first-world nations is accompanied by a healthy dose of responsibility to create harmony, health, and well-being for all?

And this is just one side of the dilemma. How to live as a free person in the first world: morally, responsibly, consciously.
The other side of the dilemma is the fact that we are destroying our home. Our waters, air, and soil are poisoned. Our forests are clear-cut and burning. Our atmosphere is thinning. Our climate is going out of whack. Our home, our life-line, Earth, is in jeopardy.

My own personal despair is the fact that it does not seem that enough people care, notice, believe, or are conscious of this. My despair, and it should be yours, and it sparks me to want to act, and it should spark you, is that we each have to do something now. We each need to wake up now. We need to snap out of the neo-bourgois, luxury class, amoral daze we've fallen into as "free" people. Ungrateful, unmindful, dullards of free people who act like idiots, not taking care of the starving, sick, oppressed, and poor of the world, and idly sitting back while the planet is destroyed.

Perhaps we are a suicidal species.
I once thought that, when I first learned about nuclear bombs in high-school. I couldn't sleep for months. I woke up nearly every night with nightmares of mushroom clouds, and seriously questioned not only the meaning of my life, but the meaning of human life on this planet, as a result of learning about this weapon that we, human beings, created, that could annihilate our own existence.

Heavy thoughts over Monday morning tea.

I had to get it out, and it is just a tiny bit of what's inside me, but I feel we must act now to live consciously, lovingly, authentically, and do what we can to help make the world a better place to live, in whatever way we can.

So, today, please, find one way that you can do to honor your freedom, by acting responsibly, and do something to make a positive change in the world.

Amen.

2007-04-05T14:22:00.000-07:00

Hello friend,
Thank you for visiting Leilaland!
I smell banana bread in the oven, and wish I had a way to share it with you! When will they develop the scratch and sniff function for the internet!

Please take some time to visit my site here and read the Earthkeeper Rites message directly below!

In love and peace,
Leila

Earthkeeper Rite

2007-03-22T08:59:00.000-07:00

Dear friends and stewards of Earth,

I just saw Al Gore speaking before a Senate Committee asking them to please do something to protect the environment. After seeing An Inconvenient Truth twice, and experiencing profound respect for this Academy Award Winner for Best Documentary 2006, I felt intrigued by what he had to say to the Senate.
As I listened to his eloquent and sincere speech I was proud of him and relieved he was doing it.
But I was absolutely sickened and shocked when the response from U.S. SENATORS to him was "there are meteorologists, scientists, physicists, biologists, oceanographers, and experts around the world who all disagree with you".

This upset me so much, to think that our government representatives are so ignorant or driven by corporate interests (albeit investing in alternative energy is financially advised for its viability and profitability) as to not see the value and import of acting now to protect the environment.
How can they not act to make changes in our laws to help cut back on green house gas emissions and clean up and protect our environment??!?!?!!!
It's absolutely immoral.

This brings me to the whole idea of ethics/morality and the environment.
When I was 20 I achieved honor status from 3 semesters of undergraduate studies at various California Community Colleges (considered to be as good as or better than most state colleges around the country).

Having lived in California for years, I was absolutely in love with the majestic redwood forests, the pristine and dramatic coast lines and marine life, and the clean fresh air of Mendocino, Marin, and Sonoma counties. When I’d drive across the Golden Gate Bridge from a day of hiking around Mount Tamalpais in Marin County, I’d look across to the East Bay and see a thin layer of dingy sky. Is that fog, I asked myself, squinting to see it better, gulping as I noticed it was brown, not fog-like grey.

It was then and there, at age 18 that I realized human beings are polluting our environment through the way they live. It was right then that I felt I had to do something to help change this!
Influenced by the gorgeous natural environments in the North Bay, and the shock of seeing the browning sky over the East Bay, I studied philosophy, marine biology, dance, and comparative mythology and religion.

At first, when told I had to declare a major, I chose Marine Biology, and took many oceanography courses (being in coastal California made it easy to take a variety of classes on this topic).
My thoughts were that, in 1988, the signs of our planetary pollution were already clear to me. I saw ahead and envisioned a day when we could not breathe the air or drink our water without being poisoned or toxified.
I felt the answer would be in saving the ocean, and I felt it was a moral imperative to act to take care of the environment.

As a result, I took many philosophy classes and read and thought a lot about morality. I also headed up the first Earth Day committee in a California Community College System and arranged a huge Earth Day celebration that helped Orange County, CA get a recycling program.

That year, I was poised to graduate with an AA degree and had to decide where I wanted to apply for the next level of my education.
I applied to UC Berkeley, because I love the Bay Area and heard a lot about the university's Philosophy and Environmental studies programs. I felt absolutely focused and positive that I'd help impact thoughts on pollution and the environment through these studies.
So, I wrote my required 10 page application essay, the thesis of which was Environmental Protection as Moral Imperative, and linked the cause of protecting the environment to the human species survivability, and our obligation to protect our habitat.
I immediately got accepted and granted a scholarship for my first semester at UC Berkeley (locally called "Cal"), in 1990.

What happened to my goals then never changed. I've always felt passionate and concerned about environmentalism, conservation of species and natural habitats, and worried about global pollution and climate change. (I've been a member of the World Wildlife Fund, Sierra Club, and Natural Resources Defense Council since the late 1980's).
I've felt the dire need for Americans to change their lifestyles to protect their habitats.

I got involved in the first environmental club at UC Berkeley and hosted a 1992 Earth Day Festival on campus that spring, inciting many to pledge to recycle and conserve energy in their homes.

Throughout the early 90’s I involved myself with activities that represented my concern for our environment. I started a “Green” cleaning service and procured many clients in the Bay Area who were happy that I vowed to clean their houses with non-toxic substances (lemon, vinegar, baking soda, Simple-Green), and to recycle their household goods (where neighborhood recycling programs were not yet implemented).
I did this for many years, and supported myself financially through this green housecleaning and grants from school.

I also worked for the Sierra Club, Green Peace, and Clean Water Action to raise public awareness of environmental issues. I helped to raise money to protect habitats and species, implement initiatives, and educate the public. Through my campaign I helped to register thousands of new memberships in these environmental organizations and many others.

In the late 90’s, I stumbled on some hard times and unfortunate circumstances in my life, and my path to be an environmental activist became a bit obscured, but now I am back!

For several years I wanted to start a local, community based and run, renewable power company. I thought that people could band together and purchase and develop a solar powered power plant (a huge photo-voltaic array) that would provide power for the community. I believed that people would do this and that it could be done and that it was revolutionary in our use of energy.

I tried to gather supporters of this idea when I lived in Occidental (a very green and progressive community in Sonoma County, CA), but there were so many nay-sayers and doubters that it fell apart very quickly.
In essence, I simply lacked the capital to buy and set up the photovoltaic array and start the solar power company myself.
I had tons of data from the Real Goods Solar Institute in Hopland, CA about how easy it is to set up an array and provide solar power as an alternative to fossil fuel burning or nuclear generated energy. I was convinced that local people in my community would see the logic of setting this up and switching to be “off the grid and independently supported”.
Alas, financial greed reigned supreme over our own health and well-being.

When I moved to Oregon, for a short time in 2005, I got a job as a web-developer and campaigner for Green Mountain Energy, a renewable power company that has succeeded in providing wind, solar, and geo-thermal power to Oregon residents through the Oregon power company, PGE (not to be mistaken with the illustrious California PG&E, who recently invested a ton in the solar powering of the SF Giants ball park!).

I found out, through my work for Green Mountain, that the state of Oregon (government officials) legislated that PGE or any power company in the state had to provide at least 30% of the power provided to customers from renewable resources.

This was absolutely amazing to me! I was so happy to learn this! I was convinced this was just the beginning of a wave of environmental legislation that would sweep the country and change our lifestyles for the GOOD of all.
Alas, that was 3 years ago and no other states have followed suit. But they can!
We need to influence our representatives to do so!

We can make local power companies and do it ourselves! Get together with your friends and neighbors and raise the money to put in a photo-voltaic array and hook up your energy supply to it! Get off the grid! Stop using poisonous gasses for your light switch, your TV, your computer, your dishwasher, your garage door opener, your refrigerator, your hot water heater, your lifestyle!

I know this sounds pollyanna and hopeful, but it’s reality, it’s doable, it’s real, and it’s vitally important to start thinking this way.

Research and look into ways that you can conserve energy and change your life to help protect our environment.
I prefer to say “our” environment, rather than “the” environment, because it makes it more personal, more intimate, and more accurate. It’s not some dry, obscure, impersonal “the”. No, it’s OURS, our home, our world, our habitat, our life-support system! We need to claim environmental concerns as the most dire and deep ethical matter to act upon and take seriously RIGHT NOW.

When I lived in Bloomington, Indiana, from October 14th, 2005 to February 28th, 2007, I had the opportunity to meet Barbara Ann O’Leary, who introduced me to the Incan Munay Ki Rites, a series of initiations for personal psycho-spiritual growth.
When I first read the pamphlet that Barbara put together about the rites, my eyes scanned down the list and nearly popped out of my head when I saw the words, “Earthkeeper Rites”. I knew then and there that I had to get these rites. That having the Earthkeeper Rite felt inspiring and empowering, as though by taking this rite, I was claiming my commitment, once and for all, to act to protect our planet, Earth, our home, our habitat, our life-support. I’m very thankful to Barbara and the Incans for allowing me to become part of this lineage.

Now, having heard Al Gore speak before the Senate today, and having seen the disgusting, reprehensible, immoral response to him by members of the U.S. Senate, I feel mandated by my commitment to help protect our environment by writing every single congressperson (House Representatives and Senators) to ask them to act on legislation to protect our environment.

So far, I’ve written and sent 12 letters. And now, I ask that you please do the same.
Each of us has an obligation to protect our home, to preserve our survivability, to act and live in accordance with moral principles that will allow us and future generations and other species to thrive and survive.

So, please, take some time to find your own relationship and commitment to protecting our environment, and visit the Congressional list of emails and contact information and send an urgent request to research and act on protecting our environment NOW.

--The list of contact information for U.S. Senators.

--The list of contact information for the U.S. House of Representatives

Here is a sample letter that you can send or message you can leave for them:

Hello,

I am writing to all the Congresspersons in our country (the United States of America) to beg you to please research and act upon legislation and initiatives that will help reduce green house gas emissions and mandate the use of renewable resources for energy.

I want you to act to stop global climate change that will threaten the survivability of the human species on planet Earth.

I beg you to consult your conscience about the moral obligation you have as a congressperson to influence legislation to protect the environment.

Thank you,
Leila Kincaid
USA Citizen and Voter

--

THANK YOU for taking the time to read and seriously consider this post.
Obliged,
Leila Kincaid
Writer, Earthkeeper, Visionary
425.749.8996
leilakincaid@gmail.com

When asked: "How has being a goodwill ambassador for UNHCR changed your life? "
Angelina Jolie replied "It has given me a life filled with purpose. Who are we if we are not useful to others?"

May her hard work and dedication to helping the impoverished in our world be an inspiration to you to find how you are useful to others and live that.

Intetions and creating reality

2007-03-19T14:27:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about how much what I intend and what I focus on are often NOT the same thing. I might intend to create the reality of being in shape, but then I do not focus on exercise; the result of which is the thing I intend does not manifest.

Therefore, it makes sense that your intentions and your focus should be in accord.
Your focus can belie your intentions.... Your focus is where you spend energy and eventually act upon.

How can we align our intentions and focus and actions so that we are actualizing our potential and creating the realities we really want?

I've often been intrigued by people who speak to this.

The first person in my life who really introduced me to this concept was Shakti Gawain.
I was 18 years old, living in San Francisco, and had a weekly habit of spending hours and dollars in City Lights Books, a famous bookstore and literary haven in the Bay Area.
I've seen and heard many famous writers read their works there and give talks and hold open q&a sessions there. Fascinating.

One night, while I was checking out the scene, an interesting woman with perhaps an even more interesting name, Shakti Gawain, was sitting on the floor, in the middle of a circle of people, talking about creating the reality you want.
My ears perked up, I moved into the closest spot I could find, and listened.
It sounded simple: think about the reality you want, and it helps make it so.
"Could it really be that easy", I thought.

She said something that really affected me, and I want to look it up to quote it exactly, but for now, I'll paraphrase:
in order to be happy you have to think happy thoughts. If you feel sad, smile, and it will tell your brain a message of feeling happy. Look at the trees and the sky and be thankful. Tell yourself, I'm thankful for the tree. The sky is beautiful, I feel happy! Repeat it over and over and it will change how you feel!

I bought her book, Creative Visualization, that day, read it, and summarily bought everyone I knew at the time a copy for xmas, telling them, "you must read this book".

Through the years, her Creative Visualization book was like a bible to me. I noticed that when I followed it, I created happy and wonderful things in my life that I thought I wanted. When I didn't follow the guidelines in the book, I noticed my intentions and focus became sloppy and my life manifested things I didn't really enjoy.
Time and again my suffering would remind me to get on track and focus on the reality I wanted to create.

Often, when I was unhappy, I'd repeat the mantra, "notice what you do like, notice what you do like", because I think I often tend to fall to the default position of noticing what I don't like.

This past year, I discovered the book, The Secret. A magical friend, Linda Gates, told me about it, wide-eyed and enthusiastic.
"Do you know The Secret?", she asked, smiling her mystic magic at me.
"Yes, I know the secret.", I answered, smiling back, my heart racing, because I knew she was going to tell me something I might not already know.
"But do you know THE Secret?", she said, winking.
She reached to the bookshelf in her new agey store, and handed me a book, entitled, The Secret!

I snatched it up and read it that night.
Then, I bought the DVD the next day, and have been telling everyone I know about it, because it contains the wisdom that Shakti Gawain shared 25 years ago in her book, Creative Visualization, and it combines her wisdom with other mystics, sages, scholars, and magicians who see that the secret for creating the reality we want is in our hands!

Today, I sit here, reflecting on this, because I have employed these wisdom practices, of creative visualization, focusing on my intentions to make them realities, and I am pausing now, here, today, as I stare out over the rain covered and wind blown garden, to reflect and be thankful.

I am thankful that the reality I now experience today is one that I have built and worked toward, prayed for, visualized, intended, focused upon, and wished for and wanted.

And it is this blessing that makes me feel inspired and ambitious to thrive forth in forging the next realm of reality I wish to dwell in.

What realm of reality do you wish to exist in?
What is your heart's desire?
What do you intend to be your experience in life, and what focus are you giving that?

I leave you with this thought, posted by some friends for inspiration.

Wishing you the best,
Leila

299 Skulls

2007-03-13T13:43:00.000-07:00

Any movie that starts out with a shot of a skull or skulls makes me feel instantly interested in it.
This is how 300 started out: pile of skulls... YAY

And pile of skulls is what it turned out to be.

The only thing I really liked about the movie was the 17 minute battle in which 300 Spartan soldiers faught waves and waves of persian militia (some seemed demonic or at least disfigured monstrosity).

I don't have much to say right now!

Heroines and Role Models

2007-03-08T13:30:00.000-08:00

It's International Woman's Day!

I'd like to pause and reflect on what it is to be a woman.... (and that is an entire library of exegesis...), but for now, I'd like to declare public appreciation for some women who have influenced my life.
I often think of women in my life who I've been encouraged and inspired by.
There have been times in my life when just the thought of any of these woman gave me the strength and will to move through my suffering. They have all instilled a profound sense of hope and courage in me. Thank you!

Charlene Meives has often represented a strong woman with class and culture. I have looked up to her since I can remember. As a teacher, world traveler, scholar of cultures, and philanthropist, I've found her to be encouraging and inspiring. Thank you, Char!

Barbra Streisand is one of the most enjoyable personalities I've ever known of. Her persona and energy on the screen is absolutely light making, and I"ve come to appreciate her online activism. As an actress, singer, and director, I have been inspired by her. As an activist, I've been emboldened. Thank you, Barbra!

Oprah Winfrey has gotten me through some very dark times. Sadly, there was a time in my life when The Oprah Winfrey Show was what I looked forward to and took refuge in each day. And her shows got me through some bad times. Shows about how to pull yourself up by the bootstraps, shows about how to reach out for help, shows about how to communicate, shows about how to create the life you want, shows about how to realize your dreams. And I took them all to heart. She has positively changed millions of peoples' lives and deserves a Nobel Peace Prize! Thank you, Oprah!

Angelina Jolie has powerfully helped to encourage me to act on what I believe in, be myself, and to volunteer! Her profound influence on the lives of countless refugees around the world is very humbling and beautiful to me, and it far surpasses her beauty or stardom. I like how she uses her celebrity to bring attention to important global issues, is an Ambassador to the United Nations Council for Refugees, has adopted two children from third world countries (and is about to adopt a third), and chooses many roles that portray strong, bold, independent woman who take chances and stand up for what they feel is right. Awesome role model! She's rad!

Barbara Ann O'Leary is another rad woman who is definitely living her truth. She's bold, authentic, and powerful. She has helped me find and tune to my own sources of bold, authentic power, and it's really changed my life! When I think of ways I want to be and woman who inspire me, she instantly comes to mind!

______________________________________________________________
Later, I will add more, and even post about my male role models....
But for now, I invite you to reflect on who has influenced you in your life as a hero, role model, or encouraging/inspiring player in your life!

Rachael and me!

2007-03-08T13:24:00.000-08:00

2007-03-06T10:34:00.000-08:00

Writing Rites

March 6, 2007

I meet periodically with my friend Barbara Ann O'Leary to write. We do this in person and online. Today, since we are a few thousand miles apart, physically, we are writing together online.

I like calling our meeting times Writing Rites, as it feels empowering to claim my right as a writer, my place as a writer, my identity as a writer, and to ritualize and sacredize (as a writer I take liberty to invent words) writing through rites!

Today when I sit down to write I think of the beauty in the world that I have witnessed.

I mean simple, real beauties, like roses in bloom, sunsets, crashing waves, deep laughter, a flame on a candle, and so so so much more.

I think if I allow myself to slow down and just breathe and notice how that feels, the slow and nourishing in and out, that makes me feel so calm and appreciative of what I have in my life.

I like to feel my feet on the ground, my head reaching for the sky, my eyes relaxed and happy.

Right now, as I stare out the dining room window to the north, I see blue sky peeking through the trees that surround the border of the property. Daffodil and rhododendron are beginning to bloom. Bluish purple morning glories creep their way across the garden floor in the dappled shade and sun of the morning.

It’s only March 6^th but it feels like late April. It’s 64 degrees today, sunny, a perfect experience to behold for its beauty and serenity.

Beauty and serenity, things I crave and revere and need.

As I sit here and let my eyes go out of focus and just meditatively stare out the picture window onto the garden I feel a much needed calm sweep over me.

Everything’s okay.

This is the base, the foundation, the arena in which upon with from which I can continue to grow and actualize myself.

This peace and security, this beauty and calm provide me the environment I need to focus on my writing… writing for life.

Which brings me to....

Leila’s 2007 Manifesto

(public declaration of intentions, opinions, objectives, or motives)

This year I aim to:

a. Send a copy to Sharon Madden

b. Send a copy to Leo DiCaprio (or his agent)

c. Send a copy to Angelina Jolie (or her agent)

3. Engage in community with green activities, energy conservation, and eco-consciousness.

a. Research and learn about getting off the grid

b. Investing in solar, wind, and tidal energy

c. Develop or involve myself with a green power company

4. Marry Justin Hayes on July 22^nd, 2007 on the Washington Coast

a. Make Invitation list

b. Send out invitations

c. Choose and Reserve location for wedding and reception

d. Select a Minister

e. Create vows

f. Arrange travel and accommodations for guests

g. Get wedding dress

5. Travel to Costa Rica with Justin

a. Research property investment opportunities

b. Volunteer at Corcovado National Park

c. Visit Earth University

d. Kayak on the southwestern coast

b. Advertise in Bellevue Paper and on Craigslist Bellevue to hold Writing for Life Workshops at my house

7. Host a Writing Workshop/Retreat for Barbara Ann O’Leary’s Evoking Authenticity Tour

a. Arrange/reserve location – Washington Coast beach house

b. Arrange travel

c. Stock food at beach house

8. Take Yoga, Pilates, Tai Chi, and Belly Dance classes – take care of my physical body by getting in shape

9. Invest in property on the Washington Coast near the Olympic Rainforest

a. Travel to the Olympic Rainforest

b. Design a house that will be made of all natural and recycled materials, that is energy efficient and self sustaining (off the grid), powered by one or all of the following: hydro, geo-thermal, solar, and aero energy.

10. Get my Munay Ki Creator Rite

a. Meet with Barbara Ann O’Leary to do this, as I want her to be the one to grant it to me first.

11. Find a good spiritual community near my house (church, prayer group, sacred fire meetings, munay ki practices, etc…)

12. Nurture my writing, exercising my writing rights, engaging my writing rites, and writing.

My list will probably grow and evolve, but right now, I feel very good and aligned with the things listed above.

Barbara Ann O'Leary helped encourage me to come up with a list of intentions for 2007 through her online community, Evoking Authenticity. She is a powerful shaman-healer-sage full of wisdom wit and potency. I invite you to meet Barbara!

I also invite you to make your list of intentions, your manifesto, for 2007. Make them grand, outrageous, simple, easy, seemingly unobtainable, obnoxious, graceful, ridiculous, hopeful, realistic, or anything and nothing at all! But make them! Do it do it! Thought creates reality.

To see more about this idea, watch The Secret.

On my path and wishing you the best,

Leila

Munay Ki Group

2007-03-05T12:53:00.000-08:00

I have had the delightful experience of meeting and studying with Barbara Ann O'Leary, who you can learn more about through her multifaceted online presence.

She has lead me to the Munay Ki Rites and it has been a wonderful journey!
Thank you, Barbara!

I look forward to working with her more.

This picture was taken at the Munay Ki workshop that was held at Barbara's Authenticity space on Thursday, February 22nd, 2007.

Mom!

2007-03-05T12:29:00.000-08:00

This picture of my mother and I just makes me feel happy!

There is a thing about us that feels so fun and playful and this picture captures that spirit.
Thanks for taking it, Rachael!

NAME NAME What is a NAME?

2007-03-05T11:30:00.000-08:00

JULIET:
'Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What's Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,
And for that name which is no part of thee
Take all myself.

Leila’s Musings on Names
In response to a discussion and question posted by Barbara Ann O'Leary, who founded her online Evoking Authenticity community forum, I have journeyed into the question: What is a Name?

What is a Name?
When musing on this question, I think of the Bard’s famous line…. “A rose by any other name is not the same… “ and I feel that there is something vital, something essential (as in of the essence), something true and authentic about our Name.
I capitalize Name because it seems to command a certain respect. Name. In the beginning was the NAME. And the name contained the energy of the named.

Certainly we exist before we are named. It’s not that naming is preter-phenomenal to our existence, but it seems that naming is a distinctive moment in our existence. As if, that thing there, this thing here is hereby this essence named this!

So, I existed as something, some form of energy before my mother said you are Leila. But in the naming moment, something clicks, and voila! There is Leilaness about me and all other Leilas , just as there is Janiceness about youJanices, and Barbaraness about all Barbaras, and Adamness about all Adams.

I see it as something similar to being born under a star sign. I mean, come on, there are only 12 sun signs, but there are 6 billion or more of us on the planet right now! So, there is something Piscean about me, that is true for all Pisces, naturally, as with each of the 12 signs. There is something essential in the energy pattern that is associated with a name, a sign. It seems that a lot more energy has gone into researching and cataloging the various characteristics of astrological signs than names. While there are many resources for the meaning and origin and historical use (etymology) of names, I think there is something that we, as the Named, have personal experience that can speak to what it is to be with the names we acknowledge.

I really don’t see Names as labels. Leila is not a label for me. Writer or dancer or poet are labels/roles. But, I find that my Name does not feel like a label.

What’s in a Name? The Power of Naming
It seems that a Name can contain Secrets to patterns that our being takes, tends to take, can take.. potentials (dormant or active), a flavor of being, a title, an identifier, an identity (but not always).

It’s interesting that there is so much energy put into naming, the act of giving a Name, of naming something… that energy goes somewhere.. into the named, into the subject, who now embodies something, some force, some essence, some part of the energy of that naming, of the Name.

I like the idea of considering that name is a verb and a noun. I Name myself the Name, Leila.
And thus, contain some essence of that which is Leila-ish.

When I looked up “name” at http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Name
I was fascinated with the synonyms, and the thesaurus references. Words I saw there, that struck me as interesting, include: Appellation, Moniker, Title, Designation, Sign, Character, Distinction , Reputation (like, the name you’ve made for yourself…)
Name as verbal or symbolic representation really stood out to me. I like the symbolic aspect. For years I’ve researched the meaning, origin, history, and occurrence of my birth name, Leila. It’s meant a tremendous amount to me to have a relationship with my name, to feel my acceptance and recognition of it is intentional and authentic, true to me, and who I feel I am.

You see, I’m 100 % certain that I would be very different if I were not given the name and lived with the name and identified with the name, Leila.

It was interesting to play with what I found in the etymology and history of names.
I found Shakti Gawain’s explanation of her name in her book, Living in the Light. She talks about how it was a process, an adventure, and that over the years she started being called Shakti, and it stuck, until one day she realized she identified herself and thought of herself as Shakti, and had her name legally changed.

Whatever naming is and names are, what our names mean and the energy they carry definitely affects us.
One thing is for sure: there is a distinct power in naming, claiming, and recognizing a Name.

Do you know what your name means? What is your relationship to your name? How do you claim it, be it, identify with it? Have you changed your name? If you were to change your name, what would it be?

Can you experience yourself beneath your name?
Absolutely! That’s just it! I do not think that I am only my name, Leila. I am not just that. It, Leilaness, is part of me. But there is more me, all of me, that is not just Leila.
I live day to day with the awareness of the being here, this being here that experiences this here like this right now that is not just Leila but is also Leila.

Usually, for me, Leila is a subject that is experiencing things. The Leila part of me is the character in the adventure, the protangonist in my life story, the heroine on her journey.

There is definitely a God here, a Divine presence, a spirit and conglomeration of benevolent, compassionate, and wise beingness in me, that I do not attribute to the unique flavor of Leila. But, as Leila, I can describe the experience, communicate about it, share with you about it, express it, and cherish it.

And there is nothing inauthentic about being Leila and noticing the notLeila. In the end, I really feel it’s all one. All one. And I just look at reality through this peephole most the time.

I feel this is authentically delivered in the spirit of musing on a subject I’ve always been fascinated by: Names!
By the Named, Leila and all the unnamed beingness herein!