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Disrupt your personal systems to articulate and plan your next dream
For the first time, the Personal Systems Disruption retreat is being offered in a 6-week format. Starting April 5, we'll meet from 6-8pm central until May 10. It's going to be an extraordinary experience; I hope you'll join us!
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Daily Dose is one, and there’s so much to celebrate!
If we went back and analyzed all the episodes of this last year, I'd bet "shame" is the most used word. I want Daily Dose to grow its reach because shame is such an awful place to live. Dr Marry and I were both residents there for many years, and we know exactly how damaging that address is. The interesting thing about Shameville is that it's not just for addicts and their families.
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Now I gotta cut loose, footloose…
I didn't do anything particularly incredible yesterday, minus start to articulate my performance art piece to Laura—that is going to be incredible, but more on that as it develops. Yesterday wasn't for dong anything incredible. Yesterday was for stopping to mark the transition between a life of "have to" to "get to." It was a day for reflecting on where I was 25 years, 6 months and 27 days ago and where I am now.
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Lilly lessons
And at 3pm yesterday afternoon, we slowly and sadly walked back to the vet's office, our girl doing her best to walk straight, never much of a strength of hers (we often called her Seabiscuit), and sat on the floor of the vet's office while she slowly and peacefully slipped away.
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Lifting the rocks off my chest
Despite the fact that Heart was wailing out "How Do I Get You Alone?" to the lunch crowd and servers were chatting loudly right outside the door while entering with tabs and returned credit cards, the audience was rapt. This small group of mostly men, who initially felt to me like they were not necessarily going to find this talk valuable, stayed with me for 26 minutes.
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Standing on the rocks of others
And then to really test you, as all **brilliant ideas do, someone in your life invited you, under the guise of prestigious and highly selective, to something that would subject you to ridicule, belittlement, dismissal and disdain. And like all trials, there was an advocate for you, and like a real trial, it was a real lawyer. But back to the situation: it so assaulted your home state and thus you, because you were synonymous, that you could hardly stand at all, much less on a rock. And that had to be. That experience caused you to think so hard about it all that you finally came to where you…
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What’s weighing you down?
Farmers, then and now, have an interesting and repetitive spring task: they pick rocks. Every year, regardless the number of years a field has been worked, farmers must pick the rocks that have risen to the surface over the winter.
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Lucky 13
On a Monday or Wednesday in mid-March, 2008, Dr Marry and I were walking our pup Lilly. He had recently found out he had been hired for a tenure-track position at MSUM, so we had a measure of stability that we'd never had before, since his positions had all been temporary, first as a post Doc and then as a fixed-term professor. I know exactly where we were on the walk when a feeling of absolute certainty spread over me, and I said, "You know, if you asked me to marry you again, I would have a different answer." (The first proposal is a story for a different day.)
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Springtime despair
In many ways, I regret the surge of frantic energy around work, as if we have to make up for the past 15 months right now. RIGHT NOW! There is no making up for it. It was both a lost and a blessed period of time. I want to hold on to the gentle, quiet pace. My safe little bubble, where I joyfully lived for these past many months, is being forced open. I'm watching my hopes and dreams, routines and patterns dissipate out the open doors and windows, and try as I might, I'm afraid I'll never catch them and bring them back close to me again.
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The ouch zone of spring
Springtime is Mother Nature getting into her ouch zone. She's breaking away from what is known and trying out fantastical new ideas. She's throwing color, scents, sounds and tastes at us at an almost dizzying speed. Sometimes she moves too quickly and tender buds are frozen in an early spring snowstorm. Other times, she puts it all on the line, and the entire lush bounty arrives, survives and thrives weeks early.
