I’ve been tagged by Liz Strauss in Bloggy Tag. There’s some unexpected value to participating in these types of viral activities that I’d encourage naysayers not to dismiss to quickly. This time the rule is to share seven things. The last time I was tagged I focused on endurance as a theme I can trace through my life. This time: fascination:
- Making a right handed layup: One of the earliest tasks I remember working at over and over was being able to make a right handed lay up in basketball. I’m left handed, and the hand foot coordination needed to perform this basic skill took hours and hours of dedication.
- Baseball Cards and Postcards: These two early collections feed and developed my imagination in surprising ways. On the baseball cards, not only hero’s, but statistics. On the postcards, not only the imagery of the distant corners of the world, but stamps and personal messages which I also used to relish (not unlike perusing the twitter stream).
- The Arts: Art museums and theater and dance and music and literature and poetry… In my Junior year in high school I became engrossed in all types of art, continually feeding my head in what has developed into a life time engagement.
- Mythology and Epic Poetry: In graduate school I went back and read the Epic poems from Hesiod up to Pound, and within all those pages by different authors I began to sense mythic structures. I became fascinated with the way story relates us to and supports us in the world.
- Charles Olson: The last of the epic poems I read occurred after finishing graduate school. In his Maximus Poems, Charles Olson showed me that the contents of the cultural repository are not just to be viewed as audience, but they are to be recast and woven though our lives. A extraordinary example of a liberal mind (not the political sense here, think liberal arts) Olson practice redefined what I understood to be the meaning of well-read. It was during the hundreds of hours I spent in the Olson archive that I met the work of Carl Jung. I was able to read Olson’s copies of Carl Jung, with all his annotations scribbled in the margins.
- Carl Jung: I’ve been immersed in Jung’s work since Olson introduced me to him fifteen years ago. The relationship has grown beyond his books to an engagement with the unconscious. I was able to spend six years working with Susan Moore, a gifted analyst who taught me to sit with the contents of the unconscious, to question them, and to honor them. To this day I keep a dream journal and respond to what I learn there.
- Social Media: This newest fascination ties me back to the world in a most unusual and unexpected way. I made three failed ventures into small zine publishing over the last decade. What I’m doing here brings all that experience to fruition. A new venture is growing out of the work I do here bringing together many talented folks that I work with.
So, now the fun.
I pass this challenge along to my friends:
Redirection
If you never remember your dreams
From Here To...
Lifestream Digest for September 25th