Journal of Non-Marketable Skills

I'm musing on the positive and negative energy each of us emits, and how to shift the ions in the room when I'm feeling depleted or restless with the onslaught of negativity from an otherwise much loved friend--or mildly tolerated acquaintance. I realize an internal shift is coming and am paying attention to the process.

I'm a big one for pity parties myself, and often feel internally slimed when I've indulged in potty-mouthing a displeasing person or situation. In other words, the Amazons haven't faxed me an application to join their leagues. Yet I've travelled galaxies from where I was a few short years ago.And I am so lucky that when I am ready for a big breakthrough the universe shares a glimpse of what is possible, and often seats that example right next to me at the dinner table.

Topo Chico

Hotel san jose gardens

 

As an artist, impresaria, intellectual, and technology interpreter, Honoria has many fabulous marketable skills, including teaching art online, which is unfathomable to me. One of the coolest things about Honoria is that her listening skills include an in-the-moment artistic rendition of the topic or person to whom she is paying attention. She calls this illuminated note-taking. According to Honoria:

I must say that making watercolored meeting notes is rather a
non-marketable skill. I don't even know if it's a skill, it may be an
affliction. Can you tell I'm reading Dickens? And I'm not sure that I
really couldn't market the notes with the right marketing program. But
as it is, the illuminated meeting note compulsion is a hobby, a habit,
a spin off from my love of art, a nervous tick, a doodle in
paint...etc., however, I can read them back, so they work as regular
old notes.

Everyone claims to admire my illuminated notes but they are mere
non-income generating trifles in the information age, wetware
distillations from a nondigital time, they are not serious like
blogs:-) which is also a form of free labor. So I digitize my
illuminations and post them on my blog.

*Along with my amazing Goddess friends, Pema Chodron, the Dalai Lama, and Jack Sparrow [Johnny Depp] provide the philosophical underpinnings for my life lessons of late.*

Musings on Moms:

We've accumulated these amazing skills as adults, and yet our own families rarely appreciate our genius. Some people are lucky enough to have had supportive families whose company is a pleasure. Others of us look at a family weekend or emergency interaction as a guaranteed dead battery for our vital energy. Often, our family dynamics whether we choose to play or not, depress the spark of us, so that when we are in their company, we feel as if we are striking damp, spongy flint if and when we need a creativity boost. Our blood relations suck the life force out of us, and we are reduced to tantrum-throwing 13-year-olds in our darkest moments. Aging parents are sometimes as fearful as they are wise, and every bit as manipulative as they were in their glory days. Our mothers pull our strings and more often than not our own resentment reflexively slaps us in the face until we find a way to let their conductor's imperious flourishes move through us, or, as in Honoria's lesson, roll over us:

I realized that my tai chi teacher has told me more about rolling with
the enemy energy and described his teacher whose young daughter would
try to climb on his back and he'd use this chen style technique to
roll her off.  So in this case it was a rolling off of energy that
wasn't based on an enemy but on a loved one.  I think I have been
using this rolling off technique with Mom all along and used it again
today. 

I tell her that she can stay here, go live with Hoppy [Honoria's brother], or liquidate what she has and move into assisted living.  All those roll off her assumption that I must come here to live until the end.

That's my tai chi roll.

I'm  thinking of my flight out tomorrow and the silence of the clouds with great anticipation.

That's what a ship is, you know. It's not just a keel and a hull and a
deck and sails, that's what a ship needs but what a ship is... what
the Black Pearl really is... is freedom.

Sketch of the inspiration behind the Black Pearl

Learning to accept your parent or loved one as they are, even in the face of a life threatening illness, increasing confusion, deteriorating behavior, and increasing fearfulness about major lifestyle changes, without having to "fix" things [unless asked, of course] is a major growth point for us. Honoria has a tai chi roll. Susan B is trying to let the circumstances move through her, as if she is permeable in both directions. I'm still mastering the reflexive slapping part.

I am grateful that my own mother hasn't requested that I uproot all and return to a place that I associate with bleakness and failure to see to her care. However, her few friends are still there, my younger brother's grave is nearby, and it is no wonder that a move to my part of the world holds little appeal. How to break such a stalemate? Admittedly, the thought of moving a reclusive person from her home of 35 years, one that has never been adequately maintained and is filled with residual sorrow and crumbling books is overwhelming to me. I envision myself in a HazMat suit to complete the task so that the toxic sadness doesn't seep in to attach itself.

How can any of us know the dimensions of another's sense of freedom? I'm coming to see that it is important to ask the questions of our elders and wait for the answers. Maybe their freedom and their comfort zone is much more important than many of the other niceties we associate with healthy living. The generation before us had a very different way of showing up in the world, just as our ways seem foreign and inexplicable to the generation behind us. Honoring the boundaries of another's sense of freedom. This is a true, compassionate, nonmarketable skill.

Our greatest gifts often come naturally, and for many years we don't realize that other people we know aren't able to function as effortlessly within the beams of our particular spotlights.

I've long been known for the ability to precognitively acquire garments or accessories and "bank" them, sometimes for years, awaiting the day when the harmonic convergence of top, shoes, earrings, and eyeliner come together in the most amazing and natural of all possible combinations. Since a lot of my ability and style has been honed in America's second-hand stores and quaint craft shows, this is more amazing. Amazing to those who don't have the gift of accessorizing, that is. And who don't have the patience or storage space to sift through the increasing piles of American discards, or pick through the expanding amount of fabric and costuming materiel on offer in our marketplaces.

I wasn't aware of this ability as anything remarkable until a year after I moved away from Austin in the late '80s when a friend sent a pair of papier mache watermelon earrings with a note that said my pals back home had a bet going that I already had an outfit to match. Of course I did. I might be living in one of the poorest counties in the Appalachian south, going to grad school and married to a park ranger, which made us eligible for food stamps, but of course I'd found the best local second-hand sources for adornment. Then the post man delivered the tomato earrings a few months later. A different friend, same bet. And yes, I'd found the "produce" shirt earlier in the summer and was just waiting for the right earrings to come along. I knew my Texas pals were egging me on, and thankfully we didn't get into dairy products.

I soon bored of the easy pre-cognitive work. It happened naturally, and it was such a simple matter to take what was offered in challenge and work some magic combination with what I had on hand. When I returned to Austin from my Appalachian purgatory, I later worked with a remarkably observant young man possessed of a literary bent. I started accessorizing or dressing with a particular theme in mind. It might be a famous quotation, a movie title, or aphorism. Eric would study me when I arrived and cogitate on the answer. He ALWAYS got it. Even the subtle things. For example, I'd found the dangling earrings made from watch faces and parts several years earlier. When I found the silk blouse overprinted with antique watches I wore them together with a subtle Eastern Airlines pilot's wings pin, almost hidden in the bold print. "TIME FLIES" he crowed. Well, that wasn't so hard. A few months later when we both realized it was time for me to leave the dysfunctional work environment where we toiled together, I wore the outfit sans pilot pin and with a different pair of slacks. At noon he sidled up to me and whispered sadly, "Time for a change?" Yes, regretfully, it was.

After I left Eric behind, that particular game was no fun without a clever audience though I continued to play out of habit. And then things fell apart and very little mattered for a long time. Enmeshed in ferreting out the true gifts emerging from the ashes when multiple frames of references were shattered, the "game" was carried out in the background, something conducted with an automaton's glee, with a computer's emotional connection. I still found treasures, but forgot and squirreled them away, only to find them a year or so later, by which time I had found the perfect sweater or scarf in that same indescribably obscure hue with which to combine.

My friend Susan recently inquired, "How do you always match your unusual earrings and your remarkable clothes?" [or something close]. On that day I sported the hard plastic deep aqua flower bead earrings my friend Gina bought be as a spontaneous birthday gift at a trendy SoCo boutique, my aqua Wolkies, and the paisley and flower printed sweater tunic I'd found in a thrift store in Florida a few years previously, that which I had just excavated from under a pile of books in a back closet that morning. The shape and hue of the earrings was a perfect match for the flowers on the sweater. I looked at Susan blankly for a moment. Then I remembered.

This is one of my non-marketable skills. So cost-ineffective, not because I spend enormous amounts, but because of the time looking for unusual pieces and tuning into the urge to acquire this paisley and NOT that plaid, and then just knowing to hang onto that which seems to be ill-suited for my current life. This skill cannot be taught. But it CAN be appreciated by those who pay attention, those who have a sense of humor and take the time to slow down, create spaciousness in their lives, and lean toward an impish approach to the unfolding of their own lives.

I also find it remarkable that my friend Honoria, who has a different and extraordinary adornment sense, and a more dramatic ability to emerge reborn from her adventures with second hand--yet entirely new--clothes, precognitively addressed my abilities with non native-American turquoise hues, not knowing of the example I had in mind from my precognitive thrift shopping statement of the first post, yet somehow knowing...

Have you ever had a dream that came true? 
Submitted by rescout.

Yes. I have this happen regularly in life-altering ways. As many of you know, sometimes the dreams aren't what you thought they would be. Most of the time, however, it is a good experience.

About 18 months ago I was driving to the post office during a lunch break when I received a call that was the answer to many dilemmas. I was in what should have been a great little job, but the work environment was deteriorating rapidly. Dysfunctional boss, toxic setting, etc. I was fairly miserable and too exhausted from battling through each day to look for a different position. I had been writing on the side and wanted to turn that solitary pleasure into more full time work.

The call was from someone who offered me a dream job, assisting with writing a few books. The call was so out of the blue that I almost crashed into someone. I stopped in a Starbucks a few minutes later and mentioned that I was just offered a dream job. I took the job, and like many dreams, it ended up very different from what I thought it would be, but I still love it. The Starbucks barristas still ask me how my dream job is going when I occasionally stop in for a cuppa. This always gives me the opportunity to express my gratitude for the blessings of the universe.

I hope everyone is answering in the affirmative!

If we become more of who we are as we age, I am virtually surrounded by vintage personalities who POP!! Through trial and error, many of the divas and maestros within my extended pod of personalities have found that such platitudes as "Do what you love, the money will follow" don't really have a place in our reality. Yeah, if you LOVE book-keeping, faux wood shutters or mini-storage unit farms, perhaps you can make a living. What if your most amazing skill is pre-cognitive thrift shopping, erotic horse massage, or calling in the angels to help with internal spiritual discord? What if polka dots are your passion, or you really want to be a pirate? The galleon-sailing kind, not a corporate raider. What if your greatest blessing is the ability to juggle on a unicycle and the circus does not appeal? Do you have the amazing ability to always find the perfect container for that which cries out to be contained? Or the more subtle ability to intuitively recommend the perfect cantina out of a universe of hundreds to satisfy the mole cravings of one of your more finicky supper club companions?

How do we honor these gifts in a world that continues to place a dollar value on those pursuits that are truly worthwhile? Conversely, how do we package these skills to pursue, at least part-time, a muse that oozes through the seams of a tidy box? How many post-Truman era Renaissance souls are out there secretly wishing for recognition and celebration of the very qualities that make them incredibly special and are an integral, inalienable part of what makes them creative humans? I invite you to share the gifts, talents, and stories of these people. If you want to share something about yourself, even better! We all shimmer in the right lighting.