My mother forwarded me this bit of stuff (thank you thank you Mom!) in an email and my mom NEVER forwards me stuff.  It was colorful with little dancing bits, but this is the meat of it.  (as I read it I thought that Rob Brezsny must have been the original author because it has Pronoia written all over it.)

2010 Contract
After serious & cautious consideration... your contract of friendship has been renewed for the New Year 2010.

It was a very hard decision to make... so try not to screw it up!

My Wish for You in 2010
May peace break into your home and may thieves come to steal your debts.
May the pockets of your jeans become a magnet for $100 bills.
May love stick to your face like Vaseline and may laughter assault your lips.

May happiness slap you across the face and may your tears be that of joy.

May the problems you've had forget your home address!

In simple words ....

May 2010 be the best year of your life blessed with good health, peace, hope  and an abundance of laughter and love!!
Happy New Year!!

Seriously -- this is what I wish for all of you!!!! 
Happy New Year.

xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxxooxoxoxoxo!

~d

I don't know if I will live to be 179 years old.

I don't know if I will need false teeth if I do live that long, but the ones I've got now are pretty good, only one filling.

I don't know if I will learn to tango.

I don't know if I will learn an alien language (I mean off planet, not out of country.)

I don't know if I will publish a book someday.

I don't know if I will become a musician at the age of 87 and a half.

I don't know if I will ever be as good at skiing as Farland Fish.

I don't know if I will eat too much chocolate and get fat.

I don't know if I will learn to make light paintings that sing too.

I don't know if I will ever have surgery to get my nose straightened (but I'm thinking about it and telling myself that maybe I should just try to find out the good things about having a nose that points one way instead of straightahead and looks funny in pics instead of thinking it needs fixing, but I do kind of want it to be straight again - it's been crooked since I was in second grade I think). 

i don't know if I will always go, go, go and then sleep for many, many hours and then feel like go, go, going again.  (I don't seem to know how best to live in a 24 hour day.  I think I really would prefer 43 hour days, maybe.  16 of those hours or more being sleep maybe and oh I don't know.)

I don't know if my teenager is really going to come round and be friendly again. 

I don't know how much fun it is going to be to have my mom living here with us starting next week, but I'm excited to find out.

I don't know if I will dream something totally unexpected in my sleep tonight.

I don't know what book will have me mesmerized next week or which music I will be dancing to.

I do know that right now I want to listen to some music and pretend that I am an artist who dances and sings while she creates the most unexpected house/home as art and maybe later I will pretend that I am a blue 10 ft tall creature from an other planet, disguised as a human and go to see Avatar. 

stream of consciousness    i want to sleep in everyday and dream and dream and dream   i want to get up early every morning and meditate and do yoga and run and do my spanish lessons  i want to listen to fabulous music and melt into and let it saturate my night dreams as well as my day dreams I want to know where my teen ager is and if he is well and happy   i want him to have amazing adventures and follow his dreams and his heart and I want some amazing girl to love him so much and make him feel amazing and I want him to honor her love and them to live happily ever after and I want to be a teenage girl again knowing all that I know now and i never want to be a teen again and I want to have the body of a teen and the knowing of who I am now   i want to live be 157 and dance everyday between now and then and to laugh and sing in 20 different languages or more and I want to play the accordion while riding my unicycle and wearing a top hat that really fits me and i want to be able to walk in high heels and I want to write something enigmatic and clearly true and fatasmagorical   I want to see that movie Avatar and i want to live in a place so beautiful it makes my heart hurt and to defend it with my life and win and I want adam to know how much I love him  how some mornings when he's still sleeping and I'm awake my heart aches because he is so perfect and beautiful as if he were my newborn child even and I want my niece to be forever as vivacious as her 6 year old self is   how selfless and overflowing with love she is   I want to be that loving  I want the world to let her be that joyful and not hurt her ever  I want my sister to let some of that unguardedness rub off on her  I want to see my mom and my grandmother and my husband's mom let that bubbling over with trust and happiness and LOVE wear off on them  I want to make my house the most warm, welcoming, joyful, loving, comfortable, beautiful, intriguing, fantastic, organic, place to live and grow and be  I want to take a nap  I want to drink coffee I want to climb a mountain and dance on top  I want to feel the cold, cold air on my face and laugh and dance and sing like I did on the way to work the other day when I got up early and caught the earlier bus and walked 20 minutes from a further away bus stop and the stars were just giving the last sight of them before the sun came up behind the mountains and the trees were stark against the barely lightening sky and it was so cold and I was so happy and I want my son to feel that kind of unmitigated joy at just being alive and I want to grow and eat blueberries and avocados and I want to the world to find out that we don't need guns to protect what's really important, that sense of aliveness   i want to drink fresh water and eat unimaginable deserts in strange new lands (yes thank you rob breszney for making that part of my background thinking) I want to drive a car fast to the the end of the world and jump off and grab a falling star and fly across the universe in luxurious comfort and amazement and not have to write any of it down because I can transmit that feeling to someone just by looking at them I want to be able to touch each book in the library and immediately "grock" it without having even to open it.  I want someone to paint white wings on my tan back and for my long hair to fall across the wings, partially obstructing the view of them and I want to be a secret angel superhero who scatters largess and delivers little miracles and I want to feel the sun on my face when I have a cat nap in the sunbeam on the couch like the cat  and I want to be able to simply look at the most jaded and guarded and angry persons I meet and have them know how perfectly safe they are and for them to begin to know the simple joy of breathing and the deep joy of sharing something anything with someone anyone 

posting this now without rereading or editting and the photo is my uneditted coffee table 7 days ago

During the Pitkin County Holiday Party of 2009 which was held in the Library, Joe DiSalvo & ReRe Baker of the Sheriff's Office, knowing what a bookworm and library lover I am, dared me to scream at the top of my lungs and then just say, "I've always wanted to do that in a library". They said they would PAY me $175 between the two of them to do this deed. Now, being the girl that I am, I couldn't do such a noisy thing in my beloved library just for my own financial gain, so I did it for the Cambodian Children's Fund. Thank you Joe & ReRe for the crazy idea AND for paying up, thank you folks at the Pitkin County Library for hosting the party and making the library the fabulous place that it is, and thank you to the rest of my fellow County Employees for tolerating the dinner interuption. This wonderful gift will help Cambodian Children's Fund provide potable water, good food, medical care, a safe place to live, and education to children that would otherwise grow up picking garbage in the dangerous dump, where only a very small percentage of them survive at all. I'll not soon forget how alive and strange one feels after screaming at the top of one's lungs in a library and I'll not soon forget the look of delight on Joe's face that matched the look of shock on several other faces in the library that night as I stood on the balcony near the fiction section and let out my best horror movie scream.

I do not go out of my way to APPEAR to be anything.  I have found that the more authentic I am, the happier I am as a rule.  the more I make peace with myself - this multifaceted being - the happier I am.  for me this means accepting that I will sometimes be sad, angry, frustrated, irritable, or other "unpleasant" things and allowing those emotions to have my attention, to explore and see what might be the root of them.  I do go out of my way to give my body proper nutrition and exercise and good doses of sunshine and moon rays and sleep and dreaming and I do go out of my way to give my ears good music and my eyes/brains good things to read or look at, be it nature or art or the faces of those I love.  I do go out of my way to take time to be quiet and I do go out of my way to spend time with loved ones who make me think and make me laugh and allow me to just be, whatever I am.  I do go out of my way to give something back to the world that has allowed me to live and breathe.  By doing those things, I think I am allowing myself more happiness and joy and sometimes opening myself up for some sorrow--  and even being able to experience genuine joy and genuine sorrow in the same moment. 

Has anyone here read this book.....  The Bitch, the Crone, and the Harlot by Susan Schachterle?

I came over to Gaia to ask this specific question.  I was led here in a roundabout way by starting with a vow to STUDY spanish tonight-- all evening.  I want to transpose a bunch of different notebooks into one notebook, but I don't seem to be capable of doing so.  I walked in the door after work and cleared the decks (moved all the clutter off the bar where my computer sits and made a clean space for studying.).  I brought a beer (Fat Tire) and some Crostini and all my Spanish notebooks as well as Barron's 501 Spanish Verbs and some colored pencils into the space.  I fired up Pandora Radio -- asked it to make a station that plays Shakira, Rupa & the April Fishes (I want to be an April Fish -- in my mind -- a multi talented FarlandFish-like Pisces, only born in April,  & overflowing with creativity), Nelly Furtado, Juana Molina, Lhasa de Sela and the Buena Vista Social Club.  [Lynette - more suggestions for this weird lineup - to help me study spanish?  or anyone else -- suggestions??]  {I love Pandora -- It just started playing Black Eyed Peas' song "I Gotta Feelin'" -- which in my mind is not the least bit connected to the above artists, but I love, love, love this song and will.i.am   hmmm}   I convinced my email to sort out all the dictionary.com Spanish Word of the Day emails and pulled out my flash cards from previous study sessions.  I then used the search feature on Mail to search for Word of the Day emails with each vocabulary word in them.  Then I wrote out sentences with translations from the emails using the examples from the Word of the Day emails in my special new notebook - spanish words in purple, english words in orange, though now I'm thinking of switching them around.  I also wrote song titles en español y en inglés in my little notebook and then I started wondering about Shakira's story and looked her up on wikipedia and decided I wanted to buy a certain album because of how easy it was for me to understand the spanish words in a certain song so I went over to the itunes store, but then I decided I wanted to buy the actual disk of a certain song because (I hope) it might have the lyrics written out in spanish in the liner notes and it would be fun to read along while listening {I love to do that with some english songs too}.  so then I went over to amazon and found the album in question {Pies Descalzos - Barefoot?  Barefeet?  Naked feet?}, but amazon will give me free shipping if I buy at least $25 worth of STUFF and the album was only $6.99 so I remembered I wanted to buy the updated version of Pronoia and oh look!  people who liked that album of Shakira's also really liked the soundtrack to "El Amor en los Tiempos del Colera".  So I clicked to listen to a sample of the songs and by golly I do REALLY like them, so into the cart it goes and then {!por supuestro!} look - people who bought Pronoia also bought the book which led me to come over to gaia to ask...  "has anyone here read this book?"  and now it's an hour later and I realize that I much prefer to explore the spanish language than to study it.  hmmm.  I think it might take longer initially if I am trying to learn it this way and it might not get me the best grades on tests, but I think I'll have a deeper, truer understanding if I keep exploring it instead of just memorizing grammar rules and vocabulary.  plus -- my exploring way is WAY more fun.  but I want a good grade on the test so now.....

ahora voy a estudiar más español.  (I wrote than sentence without looking up any words or double checking with a translation website -- progress!!  yippee!!  - it means -- now I am going to study more Spanish.  it doesn't say -- right after I check out of my amazon shopping cart.   ¡ay diós mio- ayúdame!) 

buenas noches - los que están tan cerca de mi corazón

oh yeah -- what does this have to do with the question of the day, "what is your relationship to luxury?"  I love luxury.  I love that I gave myself the luxury of taking the time to explore and to share what I found. 

ps-- tink - at lunch I ate spicy lentil soup and tried to read the first page of "el alquimista".  I had to look up a lot of words, but it was good.  I think I could manage about a page a day at the moment, but I won't quit.  :-)

New York City knocked my socks off.  It's not the last thing that awed me.  I tend to get awed several times a day, but right now I am thinking of NYC because I have been browsing through the photographs I made when we were there, the only time I ever have been, for a week in the autumn of 2007. 

Oh and here's something that I just discovered -- Rupa & the April Fishes -- they are wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, awesome, amazing, glorious, joyful, relevant, and great for listening to while looking at photographs of a trip to New York City with a teenage Jordan and an ageless Farland. 

NYC album 1 - fragments of the perambulation

NYC album 2 - perambulation fragments

NYC album 3 - wandering not quite aimlessly

NYC album 4 - overstimulation continued - met, postcrypt, central park, museum of natural history

NYC album 5 - next stop brooklyn, then liberty


I'm awed by how much has happened since then, how time goes by, how the world and the people in it change and grow, how I change and grow, how some people die or go away and others arrive or breathe their first breath.  I'm awed by the magical and the mundane.  did I say how much I love this music??  I'm listening to este mundo right now.  I'm awed by este mundo (this world), the song, the album and indeed, this world.  :-)

Fill in the blank: "God is ________________."

God is love. 

Love, love, love.....  

(the link is Sara Bareilles, Live at the Fillmore - can't embed it here - if you want more of this click here.) 

You can see God in her.  You can hear God in her. 

"Only one good thing worth trying to be and it's LOVE."  and "Only gonna get get what you give away." 

my thoughts exactly.

as soon as I saw that fill in the blank, "God is......  "  I thought LOVE.  and as soon as I thought that, Sara's "Bottle it Up" song popped into my head and I had to share it with you all. 


but before the question, before that song popped into my head I was listening to this......  (Melody Gardot, which also will not embed, but here you have the link.  methinks this is possibly the very coolest video I have seen in a long time.  note the bubbles and the reflection of the men dancing in the bathwater-- oh swoon.) 

I must say a HUGE THANK YOU to tara for gifting me with the knowledge of Melody's music.  yum.  yum.  yum. 

I think I must think that "God is Music."  as well as "God is Love."  or maybe I mean that I can hear God in music. 

God?  Goddess?  I think what I think of as GOD is both male and female, not more one that the other and neither too. 

I just finished reading, "eat pray love" by Elizabeth Gilbert.  inside of that book are some interesting ideas about GOD that I tend to agree with.  and I've also just finished reading "The Omnivore's Dilemma" by Michael Pollen which had me thinking about where we humans fit in this "creation", this "universe"--this one song. 

and today after an hour of sitting in complete stillness with a smile and listening and then an hour and a half of bikram yoga which felt almost like a fast dance after the sitting, I sat on the edge of the bed and saw out of the corner of my eye a magazine that has been on the shelf for a very long time-- the December 2003 Yoga Journal-- and I started perusing it and found an article about the Compassionate Listening Project (here is the article on the web) and that led me here-- www.compassionatelistening.org and I've now ordered the book "Listening with the Heart" and that brought me full circle here because Laurie often reminds us to "listen with your heart". 

and that makes me realize that I think that GOD is YOU and GOD is ME and GOD is mountains and sky and rivers and streams and monkeys and bananas and oceans and fish and music and dancing and loving and breathing and laughing and tears and hearts broken and overjoyed again.  We are GOD even when we are not particularly good.  but maybe it's easier for us to recognize the GOD in ourselves when we feel good- when we feel that we are on the right path.

Now I'm going to go pretend that I'm learning how to say all this in Spanish.  I've been spending a lot of time in English - the only books I've read in Spanish are from the children's library.  Me muy gusta "Un Leon en la bibiloteca"

oh yeah --- I KNOW without a doubt that God is in the library.  ;-)
 

this (below) is what my recorded subliminal voice has been saying to myself almost daily for a little more than a year.  I'm about to order the next deeper level of Holosync and I'm trying to decide if I should rewrite/record the things my own subliminal voice says to me.  any thoughts on the matter??

The reason that I live and breathe is love. 

I am happy and grateful for this moment.  This moment is my life.

I breathe deeply and live life fully.  With each inhale I accept all gifts and with each exhale I give all that I have.

I embrace every moment of this magical life with love, imagination and gratitude. 

I am intelligent and interested in everything.  I am fascinated by people, by life, by the earth and all it's creatures, by the universe -- the multi-verses. 

I love to listen.  I love to see.  I love to taste, smell, feel and touch.  I love to sing and to dance.  I love to make people laugh and smile.  I radiate warmth and friendship to all.  I love myself and others unconditionally and I nurture myself and others in every way. My relationships are passionate, exciting, and fun, based on integrity and respect. I communicate with openness and integrity at all times. I relate easily to people in all kinds of situations. I am comfortable and confident in all my relationships. I constantly notice positive traits about my lover, my friends, my family members, my co-workers; everyone. 

My dreams are big and I follow them enthusiastically, exuberantly, and joyfully.  I have within me the imagination, intelligence, strength, patience, and passion to do anything and everything that I wish. 

I can see and feel a whole, healthy planet, in balance.  I can see and feel the whole of humanity in love with one another, working playfully, joyfully, and passionately for the good of each other and the whole planet.  I can see, feel, hear, taste and smell a heaven on earth.  It feels perfect.  I am so thankful to be alive at this time.  I am so grateful for the unlimited resources available to me and through me. 

I give and I receive.  I love and I receive love.  I listen and I am heard.  I share and the world shares with me. 

What I sow I reap and I sow love and peace and joy everyday.

I have a captivating style that is all my own. I contribute a unique magic to the world and it comes back to me a thousand fold. 

I live in my strength and lustre.  I am beautiful inside and out.  I am unlimited.  I am valuable.

I love the simple pleasures in life - the smile of a child, a laugh of delight, walking my dogs around a quiet morning or lazy evening neighborhood, cutting the grass, tending a garden, enjoying a sunset, a sunrise or a moonlit night in the presence of my love. 

I learn and teach effortlessly; languages, yoga, dance, song, science, math, history, photography, peacemaking, everything.  I am a joyful lifelong learner and generous teacher.  I teach by example.  I speak my truth and walk my talk.  I love sharing my successes with others and seeing them succeed.  I see every challenge as an opportunity. 

My body, mind and soul grow healthier and stronger each day.  My eyes see more clearly each day.  My ears hear more clearly each day.  Every cell in my body radiates perfect health.  I find time to enjoy exercise everyday;  yoga or walking, biking, hiking or dancing and, yes - of course!, sensual lovemaking.  My body loves to move and stretch and play and I love my body.  My body is strong, supple, slender, and beautiful; radiating health.  My skin glows. I am at my perfect weight, healthy in every way.  I respect my body and the resources of Mother Earth by eating only those foods that I need to maintain perfect health and vitality.  Everything that I eat is part of the whole web of life.  I am deeply grateful for the nourishment and life that I receive from each bite of food, each sip of water and each breath of air that fills my lungs.  Every cell in my body works together in perfect harmony to create perfect health just as every organism on Earth can work together in perfect harmony to create a paradise. 

I sleep just enough every night and awaken feeling wonderful and alive.  I live every day with power and passion. I feel strong and excited.  I feel tremendous confidence that I can do anything.  I contribute to the world in a meaningful way and am paid back a thousand- fold. I manage my money, time and other resources wisely.  I willingly jump at the opportunity to serve others.  It is fun and easy to take action toward my goals.  I can be, do and have everything I want.   The more I act, the more I succeed.  I am deeply grateful for the freedom to act and move toward my goals.  My capabilities and potential are unlimited.  I am expressing my potential more and more each day.  I give myself permission to have what I want.  I honor myself and others at all times.  I am open to opportunities.  I am willing to accept the best life has to offer with an attitude of gratitude.  I believe in unlimited possibilities.  All my needs, desires, and goals are met instantaneously for I am one with everything.

 

When I feel deprived of something I remember that to give is to receive.  I am always giving and always receiving.  I am always loving and always receiving love in return.  I am always teaching and always learning.  I love the adventure of learning.  I grow everyday.  I embrace change.  I overcome challenges.  I care and I dare.  I know life is beautiful.   I find joy in loving and beauty in giving. 

Everyday I explore, dream & discover. 

I am a living sign of love that can bridge all divisions and heal all wounds. 

I am so grateful that my senses are wide awake to the wild beauty and abundance of this life.................