Labor Day

Yesterday I attended the SF Labor Day Festival. We arrived just in time to hear Holly Near sing and speak and I haven't felt so pleased in awhile. I have always felt that art for art sake isn't enough, that in the times we live, artists need to take a stand. To me, a true artist does just that. Now it needen't be a spoken stand, the intent behind the creativity is the key. In Holly Near's case, she definitely has it all out loud, and I really appreciate her for that.

The crowd was mostly older folks, way past the 50 year mark, mostly 60-80ish and more it seemed. It was a good crowd and a great gathering and I only wish it happened more often.

Question of the day: what do you organize your life around?

Think of it like this: there's a person who might not hear as well as she could. She may be a lot of things, may be able to identify as many things, a singer, a writer, a painter, a computer programmer...out of all those things, she may focus on the hearing issue and identify with that such that she organizes herself around the hard hearing, rather than say, being a singer. And so people respond and anticipate her relative to the hard of hearingness.

Given that we get what we focus on, what do you organize your life around?

I got to this question yesterday when I was reading my Seth book 2 of the Deleted Sessions. There was a session for a woman who had organized her life around a disability. Her life was then narrowing towards revolving soley around this, and she less and less often identified herself as the other healthy, creative aspects available. So, since I am in the process of focusing my energy and life more to do MORE of what I want to do, I was considering what do I want to organize my life around? What identity? So I'm in the process of writing that down, and seeing how my life begins to shift naturally to accommodate and support that identification.

This is very similar to how I shifted my focus of Antonia. When I stopped organizing my perceptions around her drinking, and focused them on the other positive, creative ways of being, our life changed. Very fascinating.