Working Without A Net

I have a hard time ending relationships even when I know its time.  It isn't easy for me to admit when things are over.  I tend to choose the path of least resistance in the hopes that if I just fade away, step back, go into hiding, the problems will resolve themselves.  They don't! This strategy always fails miserably.  A stalemate usually ensures until someone blinks; either the other person or myself has to muster up the courage to admit that it's done.

I haven't had to end personal relationships per se, though I have had to shift my relationships with a few people.  The relationships I have been ending have been with aspects of my life that no longer work for me.  It's been a hard thing for me to acknowledge that some beliefs I've held for a long time about this or that, are no longer true for me.  A few commitments I use to hold as valuable have felt more constraining than affirming.  Old passions have become tiring and blase.  The person I am becoming no longer identifies with the person that I have been.

I am grateful that I have had some really supportive people show up in my life that get the changes I am making.  I have unintentionally alientated a few that don't get it.  It has never been my intention to hurt anyone, but I can't bare the responsibility of another's feelings  around the choices I need to make for me.  I tend to think of things in terms of vibration.  People and situations tend to align as long as they are in vibration.  When the vibration shits, either becoming more rapid or slower, some of those same people and situaitons tend to shift out of alignment.  My sense is that ach of us eventually aligns with someone or something else.  It may be that the journey itself is one long process of continual re-alignment.  I don't know.

I have never been exactly an easy go lucky guy.  I am a bit complicated, definitely moody, but at heart well meaning.  Quite a few friends and family members say I'm weird, but I trust they mean that lovingly.  There is a line from the Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson song, Mamas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys with which I resonate: "Them that don't know him won't like him, and them that do won't sometimes know how to take him.  He aint wrong, he's just different, but his pride won't let him do things to make you think he's right."  While not a cowboy by any stretch of the imagination, I am a wanderer of sorts.  I am searching for something, i.e. a musical note only I can hear, a particular painting only I can see, but until it reveals itself, I have to keep going.  Otherwise, I would feel like I am dying inside.

While uneasy and a little difficult I am in a good place.  I am scared because the changes that I am making are leading me in a direction I never thought I would be going.  I am grieving because I have given up certain things and backed away from other situations.  These changes while not monumental were things with which I indentified.  I've been thinking a lot about the archetype of the Hindu goddess, Kali.  Out of her great compassion, she is uncompromising in slaying the ego.  In spiritual circles, there is a sense where the ego is a bad thing.  Closer to the truth, the ego may be those things with which we use to build an identity.  I am this because I do or have or belong to that.  When those certitudes give way, it can be potentially overwhelming.

 Again, using the image of Kali, whatever she takes away, in its place she puts in its place what we really need.  At this point, I am working without out net.  I am trusting that I won't fall.  And if I do, I am trusting that I will get back up.  When it comes down to it, despite all the angst, I am rather optimstic about it all.

In other words, I am opting to stay breezy!

A Yogi Vegan Feeling Good

After years of bad eating habits, fluctuating weight gain, and indifference to exercise, I have decided to become a vegan. I have joined a yoga studio. I have begun losing weight. I am making the earnest effort for the first time in years to become healthy.

I didn't arrive at this decision lightly. I have been rather vigilant for the last several years in ignoring the "gloom and doom" forecasts of my personal physician if I didn't make serious changes to my life style. I allowed myself to turn a strident deaf ear to the oddly rude remarks people have made regarding my weight. I rationalized my lack of effort at improving my health to be a consequence of the advancing march toward my middle years. I thought it was silly for me to expect to hold onto that younger self that use to run six miles a day and lift weights.

In a nutshell, I have been a hot mess for a long time. I don't beat myself up over it; I am just being real. Rarely do people make long lasting positive change from negative criticisms. Perhaps, that needs to be emphasized: people do not make long lasting positive change from negative criticisms. Calling overweight people names or making obnoxious jokes is cruel. Telling an over weight person they eat too much or need to exercise is like pointing out that water is wet or snow is cold. That's obvious.

Yes, I am admitting that I have abused my relationship with food. I ate too much to deal with emotional stress. I used food to fill an emotional void with physical sensations. All the insight and talking in the world were not equipping me to handle certain emotions I did not want to feel or believe I could handle. Like most people, I knew my choices were self-defeating. I just didn't know if making better choices would equip me to handle the feelings I was avoiding.

Contrary to the popular advice that it takes a person to hit rock bottom to change, people can change if the experience of the new behaviors makes them feel better than the bad behaviors. When feeling better and learning to cope with the new behaviors outweigh (no pun intended) the destructive behaviors, people change.

What happened to me, what made me want to change, was what I presumed to be a rather incidental decision: I went through a 21 day physical cleanse. Joining with some friends that were going to do the program themselves (none of which I think have problems with food), we abstained from sugar, gluten, refined carbohydrates in favor of a strict healthy regiment of vegetables, fruits, simple carbohydrates and lean protein. We had plenty to eat though I personally had to struggle with learning to be satisfied over and against being full. In a few days, my body went through detox like a heroin addict going off the stuff. I was moody, irritable, and had strong physical cravings.

Within a week, the moodiness was gone, the cravings subsided, and I felt an abundance of energy. Along with a yoga class for weight loss I have joined, I literally felt better. Feeling better, I wanted to do better. I am in the process of learning how to make better choices with regard to food and exercise. I am choosing to become vegan because of a greater commitment to my health, and to the health of the planet.

Yet, it's my choice. I'm not advocating veganism, as a choice for others. What I am advocating is that with some loving support, a new outlook, and a plan with how to get there, I am losing weight, becoming more active, and I am feeling I can handle the emotions that I was using food to suppress.

Life is Speaking

It's been far too long since I have worked on this blog. It began as an initial outlet to modify the effects of my self-diagnosed depressive affect a couple years ago. Now it may be evolving into the launch pad to document a whole new phase of my life. I told myself that my initial foray into blogging was an attempt recapture my original passion, as a writer. In hindsight, I was fighting for the soul. I was trying to get back the self I sacrificed for an inauthentic image of something that had failed me miserably. The image of being someone that others wanted me to be.

Under the guise of a self-projected certainty to others, I was otherwise lost. (I imagined my self-projected certainty was experienced by many, as the arrogance of an angry, brooding person.) My lack of direction was an artifact of making far too many reactive decisions to the angst I didn't want to experience. I went to graduate school, because I was bored, lonely, and not sure what to do with my self. I trained for a couple of professions that seemed like a good idea, so I didn't have to deal with the agony of not knowing how to live life. I was in dating relationships with people than were less than what I needed rather than wrestle with my lack of self-esteem and undervalued self-worth.

I'm starting to think that, in some cases, depression is an often under appreciated catalyst by the psyche to capture our attention that something has gone wrong. Perhaps, depression is the soul's version of heartache that comes with longing for something more authentic. Consequently in those cases, what may be required is not medication, but the willingness to hear one's true self calling itself home.

I truly have come to appreciate the wisdom of the 12 Steps used in addictions recovery. The first step being to admit there is a problem. Given my predication toward crude language, I tend to re-order the language of first step that sometimes a person has to admit that shit is fucked up! It really doesn't matter who fucked it up, but that we take responsibility for putting it back together again.

The real questioned was how was I going to use everything that I had ever experienced in my life to claim the life I wanted. To paraphrase the writer Parker Palmer, how was I going to let my life speak to me? Likewise, how was I going to listen?

Since the summer, I've been listening to my life, as it spoke to me in a country town in Brazil while spending time with a Portuguese spiritual healer. I've been paying attention to its murmur while in a crowded auditorium in Detroit with an Indian guru. I've been engaging with my life's speak while poundings drums and plucking bass strings. I've heard what it had to say while taking photographs of nude female models for gallery art shows.

Life is always speaking. It's just a matter of my being attentive to what it has to say. Particularly, when life makes it pronouncements around places I thought I would never go, along with people I didn't intend to to meet. Life has a better sense of humor than most comedians. Admittedly, I'm not sure if I want to listen to life suggests that I go hang out in India for a while. Ah, who knows, but I'm still learning.

A Fondness For Her

I am sitting in a hotel room in Rolla, a city an hour west of St. Louis, Missouri. Rather than think about the topic of the talk I am giving tomorrow at an area church, I am preoccupied. I am tempted to watch the Matrix trilogy on television for the umpteenth time. I have a whirl pool in the room that I can't wait to try out. I am disappointed that the sign on the wall of the tub prohibits the use of a bubble bath.

I am staring at a picture that a friend and I took together in the airport of Brasilia (the capitol of Brazil) a couple of months ago. A physically and incredibly attractive woman, she is even more so in her spirit and soul. Falling into cliches that abound when a man has a certain fondness for a particular woman, she is the most beautiful woman I have ever met. There has not been a day since I met her that I don't think about her.

We were part of a larger group that traveled to Abandiana to visit the Casa de Dom Inacio of the Portuguese healer John of God. A life changing experience, I am returning again in a few weeks with a different set of travel companions. I am embarrassed to admit that I am partially hesitant about my intended trip, because my friend won't be there. I am rather fortunate to be returning as soon as I am. However, I suppose it isn't very spiritual of me to be preoccupied with thoughts about a woman instead of concerns about more conventional sacred things.

I attended a service last night by my friend. He is a Hindu priest, a devotee of Krishna and a part of the Rasik tradition. He led a healing service invoking sacred energy along with a transmission of the Divine Mother. It was absolutely powerful and engaging. I am glad I attended. Still, for a significant part of the evening, I found myself thinking about the friend I met in Brazil. In some ways, she felt as tangibly present to my mind, as the people in the room with me for the healing service. Honestly, I always find positive thoughts about women to be somewhat spiritual. According to Hindu tradition, even Lord Krishna had a consort name Radha. One may thus hypothesize that even the Divine desires a woman!

In the Woody Allen film, "VickyCristinaBarcelona," the narrator of the film makes an observation regarding one of the character's, the artist Juan Antonio. Within weeks of meeting an attractive American graduate student, he asks her to move in with him. The narrator remarks that like many creative men, Juan Antonio needed to live with a woman. The narrator suggests that it is the passion of the relationship that fuels his creative inspiration. My temperament is such that I am not sure if I could handle a live in companion. Nevertheless, I am more than aware that I am at my most creative when I have a woman in my life.

Like most Woody Allen films, the characters are complex, ambivalent and defy a certain level of conformity. For instance, Juan Antonio's father, a gifted poet, will not share his romantic poems with others. He is punishing the world, because it does not know how to love. In a different but related vein, Juan Antonio's ex-wife, a painter, suggests that for love to remain romantic, it cannot be realized. Juan Antonio concludes that life is boring and meaningless. At best, we can strive to have fun. It may be that Allen's film suggests that for all of the complexities of love, if not live itself, renders them deeply unsatisfying, because of the transitory nature of love and life.

Whatever connection my own ramblings might yield, given the random associations of avoiding my responsibility to devise a theme for my talk, reminiscing around various spiritual experiences, and discussions around a Woody Allen film, I am certain of only a few things. I met an incredibly woman some time ago that is very important to me. I treasure her friendship. Since we live in different parts of the country, and cannot see each other often, I miss her a great deal. I cannot dismiss my feelings for her as unsatisfactory, because we are not together. I believe that the greater affection that I have for her punctuates the loneliness I feel without her. While maybe desiring more, for now my memories of her are sufficient!

Mother's Day

My mother and I have an ongoing disagreement. When it comes to Mother's Day, her birthday, and/or any significant holiday, she does not want a gift. She says she knows I love her. She then suggests a simple luncheon or an afternoon watching a dvd. She encourages me to save my money. She knows that as a single man, I am responsible for the entirety of my expenses. I tend to ignore her wishes in that regard.

I like to make a big production out of any of the significant days where I have a chance to honor my mother. My rationale, though she seems incline to diminish it, is that she is the only mother I have. I remind her of how much she has done for my sister and I over the years. I willingly admit that she has unconditionally supported every one of my crazy endeavors since I could walk. She claims that is what any mother would do for her children.

I am aware that part of the fuss I make over my mother is that I remember when she was a struggling divorcee balancing a full-time job, her college studies, and two kids. She was the sole head of our household. At times, she was understandably pre-occupied, if not tense, during those years. More times than not, though, she was funny, emotionally available and all to willing to give even more of herself to a fault. As the oldest daughter in her family of origin, she is the matriarch of our extended family. All to often, she would chide me when opting for selfishness over sharing with others that "it's right to do right."

Without assistance from anyone, she was (and is) an example of someone that made it through sheer will and determination. As most kids do, I did not fully appreciate the sacrifices she made for my sister and me. We never went without anything that we needed. More than just the necessities, she provided ample opportunity for me to play soccer, participate in the scouts, spend every summer at camp, etc.

My mother was the one that bandage my knee when I scraped it. She told me I could be someone when teachers implied I was less than capable. She was the one that wiped my tears when my father failed yet again to deliver on a promise to spend time with me. My mom remembers those days, as her not being able to give us more. I cannot imagine her doing any less than she did.

One of my favorite memories, as young adult, is the day I received my undergraduate degree from college. That same day, she received her graduate degree. A decade later, she was present when I received my second graduate degree. Just a few weeks prior, she had been hospitalized, and almost lost her. She promised me should be present. That day, my sister, my mom and I took a picture that this past Christmas I gave back to her, as an oil painting.

My point is quite simply: I love my mother. She has given me her all, as a son. She is an example to me of selfless giving. She demonstrated her love by always being there when I needed her. Also, she was there to celebrate and appreciate the good times, as well. Because of her, I am the person that I am today.

Thus, any chance I get to honor the woman that has stood by me unconditionally, I will do so. For that matter, I appreciate every woman that is a mother. Being a mother is an amazing achievement that deserves the utmost respect from every man. So to all women everywhere, Happy Mother's Day!

A Glimpse into the Soul of a Woman

The poem below was originally written for an artist and friend in response to a gallery showing of her work. Her paintings were dedicated to the feminine form. Her aesthetic use of color and form demonstrated both a sensual, yet vulnerable vision of female sexuality that was exciting and provocative. At least, that was my interpretation of her work. In response, my poem was an attempt to capture the sentiment that I experienced from her paintings.

Ironically, my friend hated this poem. I think she thought what I wrote was about her the artist, as opposed to the art itself. Besides, I suspect that my poem was a bit to close for comfort in that she could express her sexuality through art, but was not prepared to look at it from the perspective of another. It was then that I learned that even artists could be unaware of the complexity of their own work. More so, that even artists could not hold the definitive interpretation to their work. Interpretation is a de facto reality given any one's right to make an opinion, even if from the perspective of the artist, it is ill-informed.

This poem is still dedicated to the friend that hated it. She served as early inspiration for me in reclaiming my own creative sense of vision and purpose. I am grateful for the passion she ignited in me to capture the feminine form in my own art and poetry.


A Glimpse into the Soul of a Woman
@ copyright John Blair

As you allow me
to watch you
give birth
to the self
you discover
through the love you offer yourself

What joy do you awaken
as you touch yourself
into release

Evoking
calling forth
summoning
the ecstasy of sensation


Amidst the vulnerability
that you disclose
through the caressing
of the space between your legs

The delicate
if not fragile
way that you embrace
your self

Displays a tenderness
like two lovers
who cling to each other
when the physicality of their
passion has subsided

So there you stand
unashamed to be yourself
supported in the stance you assume
by the development of your
well proportion thighs

You hold your shapely breasts
like a secret you will never tell
massage away the insecurities
fondle pass the doubts

Reclaim your voice
your mind
and spirit
they all belong by right to you

No words I imagine
can give voice to the whispers of
your sighs and moans
so preciously uttered
in the sanctuary of your body

Even god
could not have conceived
the elegance and beauty
exuded by the multiplicity
of your orgasms

That just by your touch
the flesh and the spirit
are united

By soft
gentle weeping
does your body and soul
affect its climax
achieving its completion

Still Writing Against The Advice of Many

WARNING: There is absolutely no rhyme or reason to the following blog. It is self-indulgent bordering on narcissistic that advances no contribution to the betterment of society as a whole.


It has been months since I have actively kept up this blog. Intended to be an outlet for my personal writings, I became ambivalent about what I was writing. Add to my ambivalence a touch of seasonal affective depression, along with the ending of a largely passionate relationship with a former girlfriend, and a plaguing sense of doubt that my artistic life had become redundant, I was running on empty. Rather than write, I chose the path of lease resistance opting to lose myself in bad television re-runs and stacks of books that went unread. I am the cliche epitome of the tortured writer and painter.

The advent of spring has re-invigorated me, even if a couple of days into it the new season, the weather is cold, damp and gray. I attribute my new surge in energy to the liberal use of Ginseng with which I lace my herbal tea, as well as the raw apple cider I drink three times a day. Then again, it could be months of associating with alternative treatment specialist like a chiropractor and an acupuncturist trying to stimulate my psycho-physical energy back breaks and needles. I am not sure if this is modern day quackery but I feel better just the same.

I have identified that my desire to create is usually connected to whatever particular woman is in my life and has 3/4ths of my attention. Women are my primary source of inspiration. I like everything about women. A woman's movement is like dance; her speech like poetry; her figure living artistry. Even when she is wrong, a woman is right. If perfection had a name, it would be woman. This exclusive focus on women may explain why I have so few male friends.

The range of a woman's emotional inner life leaves me perplexed and unbalanced. I make no claims to understand the women I have loved, but I have been intrigued and enamored by every one. I play my part in whatever role I am consigned to play in the unfolding, ritual drama that the woman I desire creates for us. That is written as a compliment to the imaginative play of the women in my life. In the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, the term for an enlightened woman is a dakini, a female yogini that literally translates to a sky dancer. It is an indication that a woman cannot be constrained by the bonds of this world.

Speaking of Buddhism, or Christianity or Hinduism for that matter, I am clearly agnostic in its original usage and meaning. I don't know but I am ever searching for the Truth. As part of my deliberations over the last several weeks, I am still committed to the whole spiritual thang. I pray and meditate, but am not sure why. I have no interest in sectarian dogmas, doctrine or creeds. I'm not bright enough to follow most of the metaphysical arguments expounded about either this or that. Like ripples in a pond, I believe the boundaries between most religious traditions are more fluid than rigid. I'm not sure I identify with any one tradition any more, so much as I can see the point most of the groups are making.

In closing, I hope to focus more on my blog, and make contributions worth reading for only the marginal few. Without a preference for any particular political, religious, or societal posture of the day, there is not much of a stance I can make. I lean towards an all inclusive general stance that all people have a right to food, shelter, medical resources. Other than that, I don't know if President Obama's health care plan is feasible. I trust that the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are no less feasible from a fiscal budgeting perspective, but the conflict is still being engaged. Why not devote a third of those resources to making sure people are healthy.

Anyway, the point of it all...I'm still here, still unfocused, still rambling without any ability to make a meaningful contribution towards anything worthwhile or serious.