Everyday Bliss For Women In Leadership

Here is my darling kitty Anoushka (or a reasonable facsimile thereof). You can click "more" to play with her using the fishing line or feed her a can of food. She loves being skritched and will purr enchantingly if you give her a rub with the cursor. Enjoy!

adopt your own virtual pet!

A little late on the ball, but in response to biz-buddy Krishna’s tag in her post: 8 random things about me

I’ve had several emails asking "What the heck is Morris Dancing?" and thought no words better capture the thing than those of Ric Goldman from his FAQ at: 

http://rgoldman.org/morris/mayday.htm

Ric’s entire website should be perused for best understanding and knowledge of Morris and Molly sides where you live, but here is his rundown on an explanation of the art form:

What IS Morris Dancing?

Morris dancing is a living tradition of English celebratory and ritual dance with live music, with origins shrouded in mystery and the mists of time.   Shakespeare used it in his plays and it was old then.  The dancers usually wear bells at their knees and often wave hankies (to attract and welcome benevolent spring and summer spirits) or clash sticks (symbolizing the eternal battle between winter and summer), and the dances have traditionally been performed around the time of major celebration or seasonal crosspoints in the calendar.  Indeed, dances of comparable form and dancers in similar costumes are found elsewhere in Europe and around the world, and may be thought to be part of the universal urge to influence and honor the unknowable forces which govern our lives.

One of the most colourful descriptions of morris was provided in the 15th century, by Edmund, Duke of Edinburgh, the Black Adder who said, "Morris dancing is the most fatuous, tenth-rate entertainment ever devised by man.  Fourty effeminate blacksmiths waving bits of cloth they’ve just wiped their noses on.  How it’s still going on in this day and age I’ll never know."

Modern morris includes several different types of dance, all from different regions of England; Cotswold Morris from the south, Border Morris from the west, Molly Dancing from the southeast, and Northwest Morris from the northwest.  Other dance styles such as Longsword, Rapper (sword), Clog, and Garland are often included in the term "morris".

There are lots of ways to get more detail about Morris dancing, but the absolutely best way is to find a morris dancer, take them to a pub, offer them refreshment, and ask for the real story.  It’s guaranteed good luck, too!

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So as I said to Ric when consulting him on edits to the Mayday Morris video, "first pint’s on me".  Having a heavy week with the book - stay tuned this week however, when the corrected video will be posted!!

I do enjoy marking the passages of the year-wheel with other kindred spirits. A riotous bit of good fun I have a great deal of fondness for is the annual Morris Maying at the Palo Alto, California, Baylands Nature Reserve. There’s a video below, but bear with me a second, some stage setting is in order.

We meet at 5:30am when it’s pitch dark, on the southern edge of the San Francisco Bay. Teams (called "sides") of Morris men (and women) dance up the sun and general frivolity and fun ensue. This ritual goes back at least 900 years in England, to judge from the radiocarbon dating of the reindeer horns used in the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance which leads off the festivities. Alas, it is far too dark to record the dance on video, so we made do with a historical slide show segeuing into the 2007 stills.

In our family’s tradition, the women stay up through the night making rose and flower crowns (which I always wear to the event) while the men cook us a scrumptious post-midnight repast. And of course, it’s considered de riguer to make love in the out of doors in the fields if possible (though it’s generally too cold). Traditionally, the morning’s dancing capped off a night of sympathetic magic ensuring bumper crops in the fields and encouraged the sun to rise to bestow its abundance upon the people.

Here are my videos and best recollection of the dance titles and personnel from May 1st, 2007. If I have made errors, I beg your forgiveness in advance. Contact me and I will be glad to amend the titling. The song sung at intro and outro is "Hal an Tow", a traditional Maying song that echoes the poignancy of the Horn Dance in its first verse:

Take no scorn, to wear the horns
It was the crest when you were born
Your father’s father wore it then,
Your father wore it too…

Needless to say, this verse is aimed at young men who, taking up their generation’s innovations, ’scorn’ what can seem to be the quaint antiqueries of their sires. Where does such a dance come from? While none truly know and the origins have been shrouded in the mists of time, my theory is that such a dance comes from the deer cults that existed in al primitive societies. Once England was covered from coast to coast with dense, impenetrable forests where the red deer reigned. Remember the caves at Lascaux and the pictures on their walls recounting the hunt? Many pictures of deer have been found all over Europe. The stag was a revered symbol of masculinity. Deer  and elk cults existed in native America and reindeer cults in northern Europe. All three of these animals are taxonomically related and their cults are among the strongest in terms of fertility, protection of the home and as symbols of masculinity. But enough of the lecture, you want to see the video.

This day, in May, 2007, the sun came up in fine fashion, cresting the top of the Diablo mountains to much hooting and huzzah-ing. See? Without us dancing the sun up, there’d be no crops this summer. I hope you’re properly grateful…  Enjoy!

Been moving house and don’t have the brains for anything but heavy-duty slacking and yoga sessions. So have been taking quizzes online and generally being an internetiot. Found a nice one through a colleague today that may possibly be of interest to some of you out there…

Here’s my Imagini "Visual DNA" and profile. Interesting system!Check it out by clicking the link at the bottom to take your own test of "DNA".

For those without miniaturized games, cellphones or other diversion in the airport or standing in line, may we present the Advanced Rock, Paper, Scissors game which has a potential of 15.5 OCTILLION (is that even a word?) combinations. Give those Mensa-level tots a real game to play on those increasingly expensive long automobile trips.

Now, Woman can not only eat from bowl, step on cockroach, tempt man and disprove aliens, but also subdue dragon. And those D&D’ers think they have it so cool… 

Courtesy of clever Cory Doctorow over at Boing-Boing. Click pic below for fullsize poster or go here for the total scoop.

I was on a little trip today from San Jose up to Berkeley. It had been several years since I’d done this trip and by heck, the traffic was something else again! Tons worse than the last time I drove this stretch of 880. After three sudden stops necessitated by unaware drivers bulling ahead as if they were the only car on the road, I began chatting up a non-stop stream to myself about it: "Lookit that guy, willya? I mean just LOOK! What an idiot! What a moron! You’d have to be a total dipshit to do a stupid thing like that! He almost killed that whole van full of cub scouts!" ad nauseum. As I fumed I began tapping - after all, I was stuck at a dead stop in traffic. And then I remembered the Coolest Spell of All ™ - guaranteed to bust through any block you have, including the 880-580 interchange sea of idling autos.

I’ve been re-reading Wayne Dyer’s Your Sacred Self: Making the Decision To Be Free and doing meditations on the Dalai Lama’s May, 2001 talk on Bodhicitta. Both suggest that to achieve greater spiritual awareness and development, you wish the absolute best of things and a release of suffering for others, as you also wish for yourself (release of menopausal symptoms for myself and all my friends and clients, thank you Universe!). This has a round-about boomerang effect of getting you what you want and helping out the planet and its sentient life as a whole. Wish happiness for the whole world AND the jerk - oops, I mean the blessed being who just cut you off in traffic (he needs blessings more than most - so do I also, need blessings, so it is) - and happiness will be yours. The specific Buddhist saying is from a beautiful poem by Shantideva that says in part:

Enthused by compassion and wisdom Today in Buddha’s presence I generate the mind of compassion For the benefit of all sentient beings.

For as long as space remains And as long as sentient beings remain Until then may I too remain To dispel the suffering of all beings.

I wasn’t entirely sure I bought into this at first, but as I’ve meditated on it over the years, I’ve seen that it’s a powerful piece of magic that does indeed work. It’s the Karmic Law of Three: what you send out returns to you threefold. If you send out hate, distrust and bitterness, that’s what you’ll receive in return, from every possible source around you. The worse your life gets, the more you complain bitterly about it, and the worse your life gets… 

I blogged on this a few weeks ago . I made conscious a decision to start working from the mind of compassion, or at least to aspire to *have* a mind of compassion, and to use as a test-case, The Road. So instead of my usual Road Rant persona, I’m practicing blessing instead of cursing-at, and wishing the best possible outcomes for all beings - especially while on the road. I’m not perfect at it, but goodness me, what a change I’m noticing already! As per Wayne Dyer’s commentary about things which happen when you start freeing yourself, the coincidences are coming thicker and faster than ever before. One of those coincidences happened on the road to Berkeley tonight…read on if you’d like an EFT recipe that really works!

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Just because it’s the doggone hardest thing to rest when I want to be active, I sometimes give in and surf the wyrder parts of the web. Here’s something I came up with today, an interesting game to play:

“One of the more audacious attempts to explain what quantum physics means is Everett’s Many Worlds Hypothesis. In this interpretation, every measurement outcome is actually realized, spawning off a new universe for every possible outcome. Every measurement splits reality. You, and everything else, exist simultaneously in each universe, a multi-verse of parallel dimensions.

As in all interpretations of quantum mechanics, the Many Worlds view does not actually predict any new phenomenon. It isn’t a testable idea, and so is not formally actually a hypothesis. There are also significant philosophical and theological grounds for rejecting this idea. If you make every choice you are faced with, then each “you” in every universe can dodge personal responsibility for your actions. Taken seriously, the Many Worlds idea destroys any possible foundations for morality or ethics. If people behaved in this way, in the limit, it would destroy civilization, and with it, science itself.

That said, the idea is not that crazy…”

Read more at: http://www.paradigmpuzzles.com/QT3ManyWorlds.htm

My German girlfriends have a word for it: gemutlich. The state when you’re with friends, have all that you want or need with you, and are in the midst of a big warm cosy. Gemutlich. Ten friends dropped by this weekend for one of our infamous garden party barbecues, absolutely oozing gemutlich vibes. (Inga, consider them chunnelled your way - get well soon!) The talk was deep and caring, light and carefree all at the same time. We taught each other things and read tarot cards and runes for each other. We were a mixed group, Neuro-Linguistic programmers, Bay Area life coaches and neo-pagan folk. Jeff brought the wonderful present of a set of runes, and the pagans started talking about the comparison of tarot to runes and readings were given. Everyone learned how to access their own intuition and their own readings. JBear trotted out his Silicon Valley Tarot. The coaches and the NLP’ers case conferenced and traded best changework tricks and tips. Several of us decided to put out a CD together. Everyone was gently drunk on sunshine, good food, congenial companionship and (for those who gently partook) JBear’s fine Smoking Loon chardonnay, which he buys exclusively for the label but which has turned out to be quite mellow and goes well with chevre on sesame flatbread.
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