Category: Uncategorized (So Far)

Before we go on, read this piece from August 19, 2015. (You can ignore the first paragraph.)

One More Thing Before We Dive In

That was written over two years ago, and it expresses essentially the same things that I was writing about last week. I point it out here today because the last two paragraphs say better than I have recently been able to the thinking regarding Free Refills and what it is I’m doing and hoping to do here.

I’m not thrilled to see that I haven’t come very far with respect to this issue in the two years since I published that piece. On the other hand, it’s good to see me express succinctly what it is that I’m trying to do here, and to see that I’ve been connected to a certain vision from the very start.

Related to the cohesion (or not) of the writings on Free Refills, I’ve been playing with the word piece, in both the sense of “an item of artistic composition” as well as “part of a whole.”

My exploration of those meanings took me to the OED, and, holy crap, if you want to find yourself heading down a rabbit hole, check out the OED’s etymology of the word piece. The OED finds attestations of piece as “part of a whole” all the way back in ~1230. It dates piece meaning “an item of artistic composition” to 1542. It’s not really clear where the divergence in meaning originally came from. At some point, was there some kind of shared cultural understanding that all art flowed from some sort of Platonic-formed ur-Art, some great Whole of which every piece was a piece? The OED doesn’t appear to know.

My usage of piece rather than post goes all the way back to early May of 2015, back in season one, in response to my initial declaration that, whatever it is I was/am doing here, it sure as hell isn’t blogging.

Should I succeed in my goal of turning pieces in the first sense, above, into pieces in the second, I think my initial declaration will be vindicated.

I cannot count the number of times in which I’ve declared here on Free Refills that I need to approach the writing in a different way, that my current methods have outlived their usefulness. (Can’t count them yet, anyway; presumably I’ll know the answer once I’ve read all 700ish pieces.) The very first such declaration came during season one, so this has been going on for quite a while.

Energetics 101: If you say you need to make a change and you do nothing to bring it about, you are dealing with a block. I recently realized that a big part of the reason I don’t have time to explore my vision for the site or to find new approaches to the writing is that day by day I’m too busy getting pieces up. Every single day, I find myself butting up against my deadline. In many ways, I’m pretty much right where I was not long after starting this project, back when I first noticed that writing and publishing a piece every day was all the work I had time for.

This suggests that I’m using the work itself to be a block to the growth of the work. If that’s true, I better be figuring out right away how to change it. I cannot and will not use my writing as a treadmill to appear to move forward while actually keeping myself in the same place. Surely I am better than that. I’ll do whatever it takes to make that change.

I’ve noticed something, though: over the past few weeks, I’ve been pleased to see greater quality and depth to the work. (There were stretches this spring and summer in which I was basically doing the bare minimum to keep my writing promises, though given what was happening in my life, that’s pretty understandable.) I propose that that that ascendancy presages exactly the shift that I am seeking.

Upon reading season one of Free Refills from start to finish, I had this observation: the pieces read far, far better in chronological order than in the reverse. From the very beginning of the project, I was building my pieces on the ones that came before them. The whole eternal-present, each-piece-self-contained thing on which most blogging is predicated was never how I did things here.

You might recall that around the recent equinox, I promised that I would read all the Refills published thus far, as well as all the zero drafts behind those published pieces. Over the past couple of days, I started that process: I went back to the very beginning of the project and read all of season one. What I found there was remarkably cohesive. Most of what I wrote over the first couple of months was about process. I explored what the publishing practice felt like, talked about the zero-drafting technique behind the finished pieces, and connected the writing to the greater context of the energy work that had by that point already made such a huge difference in my life. In the third month, I wrote a lot about what I was experiencing on the Great Road Trip of 2015, while connecting those experiences with some writing about my friend Nolus, the two-year anniversary of whose death occurred during that time, and whose ghost I found traveling with me during parts of the trip.

You might also recall that I recently declared that, while the flow in my life is increasing at what feels like an exponential rate, I’ve felt that my work has been basically stagnant. I’ve been asking myself, “What is the block there?”

All the way back in the earliest days of Free Refills, I asserted that I was building something with the writing, but I never really had a firm grasp of what that might be. As time went on, I felt decreasing confidence that I’d built much besides the pieces themselves. However, the cohesion I saw in those earliest pieces suggests that I’m closer to understanding what I’ve built with my writing here than I ever realized.

Welcome, flow. I invite you in.

Here we go.

On Friday, I asked what I could offer to help us break out of our spiritual poverty and move toward abundance. Later that night, my answer came to me. There are two simple things I can and should do.

The first is to continue to bear witness to my experiences on this path. Some people won’t want to hear what I have to say–but some people will. For them, I should continue to speak.

The second is even more direct. I remembered just how easy the first step on the path can be. If you give me an hour of your time, I can teach you enough that, with a little practice, you can start to experience energy flow yourself. That’s really all it takes for you to find your way to the door.

Yesterday, I asserted that the mainstream worldview is deeply impoverished compared with what I’ve been calling the through-the-door worldview. I also said that the only way to truly see the difference is by going through the door. While I pretty much can’t shut up about my experience, I’m not eager to proselytize, and I note that in our world, trust and faith are at something of a premium. So then I wonder: Is there anything else I can offer to help us break out of our poverty and move toward abundance?

All week long in my drafting, I’ve been trying to come up with the right adjective to describe the difference between my pre-through-the-door worldview and the shift that happened very early in my work with Jerry. In my zero drafts, I kept coming back to the word truncated, which isn’t terrible, in that it articulates a lack, but isn’t very good either, in that it’s not the right metaphor at all, truncate being an active verb denoting shortening by cutting off, which implies an awareness of that which is cut off, which awareness is the core inaccuracy. Meaning there’s no awareness. You can’t see what’s actually there, in large part because you don’t believe in the thing that’s there to be seen. If there’s a word for inability to see what’s there because of a lack of belief in the thing to be seen, I haven’t figured it out. Anyway, regarding the descriptive difference in worldviews, yesterday I got to stinginess, which is better, but today I found my way to impoverished, and that has a proper denotation: lacking to the point of poverty.

What I also like about it is that it’s not an exaggeration: the difference between the through-the-door worldview and the mainstream, there-is-no-door-what-are-you-even-talking-about worldview is not the difference between having and not-having, it is the difference between abundance and utter penury. The difference is literally that dramatic. Go through the door and you’ll see.

But make sure you follow what I’m saying to its full implication. The there-is-no-door worldview is, by a vast, vast margin, the dominant worldview operating in the world today. How much do you think the suffering that surrounds us all the time has to do with that worldview?

(Hint: Pretty much all of it.)

On Monday, when I spoke of the decision to go through the door, I said, “What other choice did I have?” We all recognize “What other choice did I have?” as a figure of speech; you don’t need me to explain it to you.

But I was thinking about it earlier today, and realized that I was being a little flip with my words. If you are thinking of walking this path, understand that your previous understanding of “choice” is something you might as well throw in the garbage.

And as energy begins to flow, you will witness that the universe will put things in motion as it deems them necessary. You’ll need help with something, and the day you articulate the need is the day you meet the person who can help. You’ll ask for a specific opportunity and right away the opportunity will arrive. If you’re at all like me, you’ll be a little freaked out by how readily synchronicity arrives, and you might try to defend the stinginess of you previous world view by using words like “coincidence.” But “coincidence” is a coward’s word. The universe is moving you because it has decided to. Your “choice” in the matter is either to acknowledge that you don’t really have a choice and just go with the flow–or else fight it, and fuck it up.

Look, I totally understand: choice two is the less frightening choice. It’s always easier to stay stuck. But do I really need to articulate that it’s better to surrender to the flow than fight the current?

Just to be clear, there’s a whole lot on the other side of the door. When you walk through, the journey has just begin. From where I stand now, my passage through the door a few years past, I’m pretty sure the journey never ends.

It is a gift that I get to serve as testament that change–big, radical change–remains possible well into our lives. My own first step through the door happened a few months after my fortieth birthday, and the path of change in the years since has been sometimes exhilarating, often frightening, and consistently challenging. It wasn’t long before it developed a momentum all its own–it seems that once you sufficiently commit to the path, there’s no stepping off it.

On my good days, it’s all a shit-ton of fun, this adventure toward a better life. Yes, I have to wrestle every day with habits that go all the way back to childhood, and habits that old get deeply embedded in the body and don’t let go easily, having served us in their way for a long, long time. I bring consciousness to trying to change, and then something happens and I fall right back into my patterns. Okay, then, I’ll try again. I bring consciousness to trying to change, and then something else happens and I fall right back into my patterns. It’s kind of like a dance with my past self. For a long time, he led the dance. Now I do.