Tag: wellbeing

Topics on feeling alive, healthy, real, and good.

It’s a Pop Song

Up a gravelly trail on North Mountain, headed toward an elevation rise and a muscle challenge suited to me. My breath and footfall are a cadence, and just below it, the sound of the gritty sand.

It is like an instrument. A razz to a tambourine or a rainstick, alongside reliable percussion. The beat and brawn of my own song under my shoes.

I now know that I write in peculiar places. Moments in nature offer up melody or meaning that inspire me. A happy scaffolding to perch my words and practice a tune.

After a blissful first week at a new job, my imagination went wild on the possibilities ahead. In a land of ancient regenerative power, we would find our way again. This time, it was mine to lead a little.

Slide sets, yawn. Conference talk, not you. Story hour, quite a drag these days. I had been invited to an improv night, and to serve as a guest judge at a Western art show. Both met my creative criteria. I had dreams of being alive in the bureaucracy; of living my artful life even (especially!) in a largely administrative role.

Vistas opened in every direction as I slowly climbed. A simple set of lyrics arose.

It’s a pop song, and we all get along…

It went like that for the miles ahead, timing my heartbeat and breathing to the timbres in my limbs. Moving my arms and torso inside the emotion of words; building out gestures and lyrical phrases on the sandy path, suddenly a dance, too.

The invitation into the moment is unmistakable. Could I write a global jingle to save our sacred center right here on a desert path? The joy answered for me. Am doing, already.

You know how strategy tingles? I listen, look, linger, learn. I live with the insufferable ambiguities of not knowing. Eventually, I see a pattern. A story emerges, or a sensed opportunity. I call it catnip, a mild intoxicant that makes you purr, roll around, and count your lives left.

I wrote the lyric and lost the job. Two years later, still no replacement, and I can karaoke. Many more hills ahead. Music (not money) is the maker of memories. Mine are fine for me, and harmony is for us to embody. There is a root song and we can all sing our own.

[Lyrics just as they came out on the mountain]

A new way to read dance, walk it out, talk it out here. Angela is right, we all need to move more.

Yes the metaphor is meta-verse, but let’s still fight about form and first at the junction, the new menu for Senem, and then this, this is what we have in common.

It’s our bond, our problems. Give us this grace for grounding, give us some pace for founding a new nation every day in every way and in every matter make it be.

Infinite possibility charges uphill, picks her way down, ginger toed, knowing woes and occasional wonder like thunder out here, that smell.

Then fuck yeah, there’s a pop song, and we do get along. And we. And we sing as we-we mourn.

Yeah, then there’s a pop song. And we find a way home. And we all get along. Cause that’s a pop song it’s a pop song.

I took it to heart and I took it on a walk. I say Creative Aging like I’m not up, Ha, keep your heads kids, we gotta get lit, worry hurry cause you’ll have a bit. Cause is a pop song.


Walk ahead, wind in my face and over my shoulder, rolling the boulders like I swear and I told you. Table Mesa to my left, pin turn to the right. I can do this all night, and it ain’t even noon.

Kankō, salt lake sightseeing, you call me. Nick back on Highland, imma let you be. TicTac you in my life so far and so forward.

Someone called and I returned it, I took the book hell, yes, I burned, now I’m here and I def earned it, so maybe Valleys are for us to look up.

Yes friends, we all make the net ends that all-us live in, and at least one of us can can-can.

Remember us together through Heathers, and really fucking shitty weather. Whatever, I’m in to cause a pop song, so we all get along.

How to Be Incomplete

Cultural leaders are a funny bunch.

We self-select for special as a personality characteristic, an experience quality, a social value, an aptitude, and later — after training and many more experiences — a competent set of skills and frameworks.

The first lesson of leadership is listen.

For, management it’s messy.

Planning… things don’t go to plan.

Coaching and consulting is cyclical and circuitous, borne of curiosity less than certainty.

For balance, a phrase is emerging. Something like, bend and break, both.

Each loop I go into my own subjectivity (and out of ignorant bias) takes me to this insight that not one of us arrives at leadership complete.

Confident and clever, yes.

Right and righteous, yes.

But never complete.

Sunlight sharpens the shape of shadow. We already/always/also comprise a self, and a far more definite sense of what we are not.

Descartes… oh honey, dessert!

Normality is Nonsense

I’m reading about elephant blood this morning. Such a large animal needs a unique diet. Tiny creatures do, too. Several research studies discuss the differentials between East Asian elephant species, but this one compares elephants who do different jobs. If you’re a circus animal, these findings are statistically significant.

Not all circus elephants are low in magnesium (Mg) and phosphorus (P) – only middle-aged females. These two trace minerals are required for healthy protein absorption in red blood cells. The study finds some basic equivalencies between circus elephants and their wild-roaming peers. They all eat bananas, as it turns out, and potassium levels are about the same for all the elephants in the study. But as the circus females age, they lose Mg and P at higher rates than circus males. Females in the wild don’t have this problem.

The study concludes that data from wild animals is best to establish the normal dietary bases for trace minerals in males and females. Circus females are treated as an anomaly. Very few studies investigate the right nutrient compound for circus elephants, especially the ladies.

Makes sense, until it doesn’t. The notion that their nutritional needs compare to wild animals is poppycock. Further, it may be bunk to search for the solution in science

What is normal and who measures? 

The question itself may be the place where the sciences and arts are cleaved. Our inquiry methods are so similar, but they were pulled apart. Before industrialization, disassembling human bodies (and dissembling about it) was as covert and fashionable as Shakespeare. Activities after nightfall at a time when the circus came of age.

The Enlightenment – a potent combination of power, patriarchy, and patronage – brought scientific thought into the daylight and left the other logics in the bordello. Science began to pull apart humane knowledge, dissecting it into knowable parts, never quite acknowledging that something was there a priori, nascent and naive as it seemed. Like, how to care for working elephants – a system of knowing that could only arise in a specific place and time at the adaptive hands of those in the muck. Looking at the lanky limbs of those leathery ladies and thinking, wtf?

Now, centuries later, the elephants suffer, scientific questions are banal, and we are unearthing a bitter root. We are psychologically and emotionally dissociated from life itself, having nurtured in our time only the lived experiences that can be documented and explained scientifically.

Look at the great ruse going on in healthcare right now. We are crowing about the scientific proof for creative practice, and quietly shadowing the mystery of it. We have pulled apart each of the senses in neuroscience, and are late to acknowledge the absurd faith it takes to care for human beings. These are practices that also require adherence, cultivation, and transmission to be successful over time.

That’s why so many of my huddles are in the kitchen. The work-from-home transition during the COVID crisis was an unusual moment of feminist home-court advantage. Suddenly, pets and children existed in the minds of managers. Our authentic selves appeared on screen and in the background. Science having the shits was fascinating to watch. Especially from the studio where we lose our shorts all the time.

For me, it was rough to be seen on screen so quickly. But, as I lost the daily dress up, I gained a greater sense of myself a priori. Before I knew to be this person in a suit, I was myself someone else. In my opinion, Foucauldian logic is extremist and fetishistic. Of course, we are something before we know. Self origins go back generations and are not the product of analysis. 

In other words, circus elephants came from the wild and are going to die in captivity whether we do the research or not. Their a priori existence matters, but it was untended all those years and still is quite muted. What could science do about it now? Even the evidence is gone. And, what hubris would ask?

The analytical error appears again. What if our search is not for the trackable? What if their needs are ephemeral or can’t be described in words? Like humans, maybe circus elephants need the amibguities of society – novelty, surprise, and delight – right alongside some genetic traces of the past. Maybe they are pale and lanky, of sorrow and boredom. Other scientific evidence shows that middle-aged American females (like me) need ground minerals, too. 

Knowing my own circus past – and the loop of such circular logics – I aim to study crocodile tears next.