The Inez House Pocket Door

When you were a baby, someone held you a looked into your eyes with love. Maybe it was your mom, or you dad. Maybe it was the nurse at the hospital. Or perhaps for you, it was someone else entirely different. They held you, knowing you were full of potential and choices. They cooed at you, telling you the mundane, or explaining the extraordinary.

This story is about one of the people in my life who looked at me with great love: my Granddad Raver.

He was born in 1912 in Nebraska. He came of age in the Great Depression and World War II. Remarking back on his childhood, he used to say, "I must've been cold and hungry at some point, I just don't remember it. Maybe that's what 11 brothers and sisters are for."

Granddad Raver was 37 when my dad was born, and 65 when I was born. One foot in the Victorian period, he did not develop a conscious interest in better communication, unconditional love, or learning to develop children's curiosity and confidence. Those were things for younger generations.

He had exactly one game he played with us as kids. I assume he made it up himself. He had a giant, black vinyl chair in the living room, positioned to see both the TV and the front door. During the commercial for Judge Wapner, he would get up from his chair.

With a twinkle in his eye, he would announce to the room, "I sure hope nobody sit in my chair while I'm gone." He would leave the room and I would dash over to his chair, climb in, and wait patiently. When he returned, he would pretend not to see me and sit on me, complaining about his lumpy chair.

I thought it was the greatest game ever!

And of course, he showed me his dentures one time. That was pretty wonderful.

We lived in Texas growing up, and he lived in Albuquerque, so we saw each other once or twice a year, at most. He lived in a house on Inez Street, walking distance to the library and the Furr's, where we would share banana splits. But that's a story for another day.

Between the street and the front door, you had to walk through a corridor of evergreens, probably juniper. I remember the strong scent.

One of the first things we did upon arrival was go to the pocket door between the kitchen and the dining room. Granddad Raver would flip open the little metal latch on the end of the door, pulling the pocket door open and revealing a paper height chart. Each grandchild would stand, back against the pocket door, and he would mark with a pencil their height, labeling the line with a name and usually a date or an age.

Even after we had been there a few days, and the newness of the pocket door had worn off, I remember flipping up the latch myself, and pulling out the pocket door. With my finger, I would trace the previous measurements of myself, the other grandkids, and even my dad, uncle, and aunt.

Happy Anniversary to Us

Keith and I are celebrating our 6th wedding anniversary today, and in October with an extended trip to Maui. Happy Anniversary, my darling!

For our first anniversary, Keith and I went to Maui.

The first day we were there, we knew something special was happening on this island. We sat on a little patch of green grass at our hotel, basking in the moonlight and watching the ocean. We breathed the deepest we'd ever breathed.

The second day, we drove the Hana Highway, a 50-mile stretch of narrow road that makes some 250 hairpin turns. We smiled a lot that day with our co-journeyers John and Julie. There were waterfalls. And taro fields. And rainbows. At one stop, Keith thought to himself, "huh, I'm a little hungry." A giant avocado immediately fell off a tree and rolled across the street, stopping at his feet. He stooped down, picked it up... and ate it.

Then, we arrived in Hana.

We had been trying to pry information out of our teachers Tom and Bobbi Best about how to prepare for the trip. How much does it rain? Are there mosquitoes? What kind of shoes should we bring? Each time we asked a question, no matter what the question, they would reply with something like, "Well, when you pull into the park, you get out of the car and stroll down to the black sand beach. [Takes a deep breath] The sun warms the rocks, which warm you. You listen to the pulse of the ocean going in.. and out.. in.. and out... The breeze blows across your face. You smile."

Whether we asked about typhoid shots or backpacking gear or anything, they gave us the same answer.

And now we know why.

Hana is so enchanting that when you arrive, you are a different person.

The place, the land itself, insists with infinite gentleness that you relax. All the details of mainland life fade away. The place itself assures you that you are completely loved and that the universe is indeed a good place to be. The land is so alive, it provides anything you'd ever really need. And when you have all the love you could ever want, somehow, the precise material that your raingear is made out of becomes a distant concern.

Steve Martin's Born Standing Up

I adore Steve Martin's work. I grew up watching his brilliantly nonsensical movies informed by classic literature and art. I revel in his physical comedy, and I had a good time watching Picasso at the Lapin Agile. Don't tell anyone, but as kids, my brother and I watched Three Amigos more than Sesame Street, and Lucky Day was our favorite.

I didn't know why until I read this book.

If you want to know more about the history of American stand up comedy and its transition from stages to screen, or Disneyland, or magic shops, or Orange County, California, there's plenty for you in this book. And there's so much more. Martin shares his journey to stardom - which turns out to be a series of peaks and valleys, gaining elevation with each iteration.

Of course, his self-deprecating humor is where it all starts: "persistence is a great substitute for talent" he tells us. And I enjoyed the stories about how he developed and tested material. The real message of the book comes through in Martin's own self-awareness. He writes about his anxiety attacks, his brilliant strategy for handling hecklers (which I will be using in a meeting tomorrow!), his rocky relationship with his father, the healing powers of Carl Reiner, and what is was like to be with each of his parents as they died.

If you only read a few pages (come on, read the whole book!), read the first and last chapters. In the first chapter, you'll hear a clearly-defined writer's voice that is recognizably Steve Martin's, distilling the details of the book into refined, compact punches of truth. In the final chapter, you'll read a little about his resolution with his parents. And if you read the chapters in between, you'll know a little more about how a person makes the journey from an isolating childhood to exchanging words of love with his father as a man.

If he's willing to share, I hope to learn more about the post-stand up years in the next book.

I couldn't put this book down. It was an easy read - I bought it yesterday morning and am writing this review tonight. I think I continue to delight in Steve Martin's work because it exemplifies something he said of Carl Reiner in the book: "He had an entrenched sense of glee."

Mary Ann Reynolds & The 12 States of Attention

NLP Practitioner Mary Ann Reynolds spoke at last Tuesday’s Austin NLP Meetup. She blogged the exercises and stories for her presentation, and the links below lead to the related entries, or websites for Tom Best and Nelson Zink.

Mary Ann Reynolds managed to succeed at the impossible task of engaging advanced NLP students and beginners, all in the same room – by using a foundation of existing NLP materials, making them her own, and expanding upon them.

And she did that with Nelson Zink’s 12 States of Attention. After hearing Tom Best read from Nelson’s book The Structure of Delight during her NLP Practitioner class, she bought the book and started playing. She took a Nightwalking class. She researched how the eye works. She started practicing peripheral vision on the Austin greenbelt. And she started experimenting with the 12 states.

Mary Ann did several things that new presenters could learn from. First, she did that thing we all know we should do but never actually do: she gave herself plenty of time to prepare – months, in fact. She also got together with an experienced speaker and talked through her ideas. Nice. She copiously wrote out each of her exercises and stories for the night. And she did a practice run, by herself, to work out timing.

Very elegantly, she started out by talking about a recent trip to West Texas, lingering upon each of the 12 states. I do love a good isomorphic story.

One of my favorite exercises was the astonishingly simple Rapidly Moving Through the 12 States. It’s an easy way to practice specific examples of each of the 12 states, and could be done in a minute or two every day.

She also did a brief hypnotic induction about, I assume, the 12 states. I really can’t remember anything except a very clear vision of myself and my friends on the beach in Hana, Maui, under the full moon, brimming with joy. That was certainly worth a little amnesia!

One of the things I adore about Mary Ann is her unapologetic demeanor. The 12 states of Attention and Nightwalking are… a little weird. Really, anything that expands the filters with which you take in the world, that literally expands your ability to perceive – could fit in the category of weird for many people. And Mary Ann simply pays it no mind. She puts on her “peripheral training device” (a baseball cap with a rod attached to the bill, suspending a glow-in-the-dark ball out in front) to show people how it works. She describes the 12 states as if she were describing car mechanics. She has you stare at your thumb nail for a full minute. And she does it all with a twinkle in her eye, knowing that you’ll discover something wonderful, too.

Her confidence and presence are certainly unusual for a first-time presenter. She even had a couple of good belly laughs during her presentation! I don’t know where this petite, poised powerhouse is headed with NLP or presenting, but I sure hope to be there for what’s next.

Winding Road to Pecos Wilderness

What happens when I write a story after reading Nelson Zink all night.

Every summer, I went camping with my granddad in the Pecos Mountains.

He was a tall man, perfectly bald, and he favored coveralls. He had work coveralls and dress coveralls. Some of his coveralls even had his name scrawled in cursive embroidery on the front pocket: Donald E.Raver.

He was a quiet man.

We would load up his suburban, a giant behemoth vehicle before SUVs were common, and haul his RV up from Albuquerque, past Santa Fe, through the tiny town of Pecos.

We would begin our ascent to the Pecos Wilderness from there, the suburban crawling up the circular mountain gravel road. The trees changed from cedars to aspens. The air got cooler. The sun was a little brighter up there.

When we arrived, we’d creak open the doors. It was quiet up there. Just birds singing. And the start of the Pecos River babbling over smooth river rocks. It’s a tiny creek at that altitude. It held so much beauty and happiness for him, that’s where he chose to pass from this world to some other place. But that’s a story for another day.

In the mornings, it was cold. Sometimes we had a fire. Sometimes, he made us warm, grilled spam sandwiches with mayonnaise. They taste good in the mountains.

If you wanted to get time alone with granddad, you had to get up early. He usually woke up around 4am and took a walk. That was the best time to be around him, because with just him around, things were very still.

Once, I ended up going camping with him by myself. Who knows why. I was a shy girl around most people, but I guess I had a lot to say on the inside. That trip, I talked and talked and talked and talked. For days. He didn’t say much. He just kept getting up at 4am, talking walks, going fishing, making spam sandwiches, and I went right along with him, spilling my every thought. He listened.

And then, after the third day, I had said everything. I had expressed every passing thought, every curiosity, every little thought I had had for years, every insightful 10-year-old observation – I had said it all.

That’s when I started to see things very clearly.

When he was done cooking breakfast in the morning, he would start to lean in towards the river, and look that way, and I knew it was time to go for a walk. Sometimes, he would turn towards his fishing pole. That meant we were going to walk over to the lake and go fishing. When he put his hand on the rock beside him, that meant we were going to sit there a while and I could sit by him if I wanted to.

I would sit by the stream, watching the water flow over the rocks, the sunlight reflecting white light off the water. Tiny fish would swim through the rocks, in the current. If we waited long enough, a bird might fly down right in front of us and grab up a fish. The aspen leaves glinted in the sunlight on the trees, like shiny coins hanging from the trees.

After we sat a while, granddad would reach into his pocket and take out a red apple and his knife. He’d wind that pocket knife around and around the apple, separating the peel from the apple in a single piece. Then, he’d hand the apple to me and let the red spiral stretch out vertically, like a spiral staircase to somewhere out there, somewhere important, some place worth going to.

Yin & Yanguage

This last weekend, I participated in Kathleen Radebaugh’s Yin and Yanguage: A Metaphorical Exploration of Creative Process.

I didn’t know what to expect, exactly. But I know Kathleen pretty well, so I knew it would be heartfelt and probably about deep change, or the beginnings of deep change.

From a selfish perspective, I also hoped it would involve her telling stories and putting me into trance. She’s great at these two things. More about that later.

The theory or history of how this class was developed is easy to describe: Kathleen is an NLP Practitioner, she’s done extensive work with Steve Gilligan and his Self Relations/ deep trance work, and she’s the third biggest fan I’ve ever met of David Grove’s Clean Language, Clean Space, and Emergent Knowledge. Add in Kathleen’s bend towards deep change and her recent explorations into her own masculine and feminine sides, and voila, you have Yin and Yanguage.

But what do you actually do in this class? That’s a little more difficult to describe.

Before we get to that, let’s talk results. The classes are purposefully small, so there were 3 of us participants. By the end of the class, I had more awareness of the balance in my own life of yin and yang (there’s not much, thanks for asking!). One participant had started to rewrite his life purpose, which has been the same for over 20 years. The other participant realized she had a limiting belief about flow and productivity being exclusive of each other, and she had started to revise that belief. None of us were thinking much about any of those things when we arrived.

These changes occurred in a 3 hour class.

Next, let’s talk metaphor and trance. I would lick the word crumbs off Kathleen’s fingers, she’s such a masterful storyteller and hypnosis guide. Kathleen is an accomplished novelist and storyteller – of both the literary and the vernacular kinds. And she’s spent years actually practicing hypnosis. The thing we all think of doing when we’re taking the NLP Practitioner series of classes – “hey, I could record my own voice and then put myself in hypnosis,” – she actually did that, over and over, enough that she achieved the outcome of those trances, within a year: she successfully sold her Florida house in the midst of a housing bust, got rid of most of her possessions, and moved to Austin.

Add those skills to her latest passion: David Grove, Penny Tompkins, and James Lawley’s work. She’s only taken a day class in these topics, and she is indeed “self taught.” But she doesn’t just sit around and read books. She uses what she learns to practice on herself and anyone else she can get an audience with who really wants personal change. She’s self taught in the way that means “she actually taught herself” instead of “she has no clue what’s going on because she’s only read books.” (As a side note, she does have immediate plans to take classes with the wonderful, talented, and informative Penny and James in England.)

So, you can tell I understand what she’s up to, mostly. Or at least I have a map of it :)

Besides understanding what she’s doing, I also happen to think it’s a very powerful class for personal change.

I’ll attempt to describe how the class actually works. Everyone arrives and mills around and says hello to each other. Kathleen welcomes folks and issues a simple set of instructions involving a box, a number, and you doing some writing/ drawing or something of that sort. You do some arranging of those items per her direction. Then, Kathleen uses her magical powers of metaphor and deep hypnosis to take you into trance while you create something -- anything. The class oscillates between creating in trance and arranging in space, creating in trance and arranging in space.

This class is not for people who prefer lengthy descriptions of why they’re doing something. But, if you want to spend a few hours with that dear friend, your right brain, knowing that any response you have is just right, this could be the class for you.

That’s a bit of a lame description, isn’t it? Let’s see….maybe something metaphorical...

Imagine yourself walking in a beautiful, verdant forest where you feel perfectly safe and fully at peace. Take a moment to look around and notice the bark on the trees, what’s beneath your feet, how the sunlight is coming through the trees. Every leaf, every bug buzzing across your path, every forest bird call, even the sunlight dappling through the forest canopy, and the sound of your own footsteps reminds you of your innate ability to create, and create you do.

When you work with your life issues, goals, dreams, and blocks in that space, so much can happen.

Home Slice Pizza and the Dangerous Food Movement

I would drive to Home Slice Pizza in Austin traffic.

In the rain.

Or hail.

On a bicycle.

Carrying a live chicken.

It’s that good.

You must go there. Order the number 6 – sausage, ricotta and roasted red peppers. Get the big one.

No matter how much you have, you will want more. So it makes sense to have some for later. And it's great cold, by the way.

It’s the kind of dish that in most restaurants, you would hope that someone had specially crafted such a combination, but you know better. Mostly, such things are just put together for menu appeal, with mediocre ingredients and an okay-ness, a passable-ness to them.

Not this time.

The tomato sauce on this pie is perfectly crafted to pack a big tomato flavor. Remember what your grandmother’s tomatoes tasted like? They’ve condensed that taste into a perfect, chunky pizza sauce.

The blobs of ricotta – who knew ricotta could have so much flavor? – hold the sauce on. The roasted red peppers are on top, soft but not too soft.

And the crust. This is not your typical thin crust. The crust is chewy, in a pleasant way, and there is no hard, inedible layer on the bottom, like what I usually get when I order in pizza. The pies come sliced big, so you have to pick up the slices and fold them to eat them.

Do not use a fork. And know that you will get something on you. Some warm, gooey, wondrous ingredient is coming for your shirt. Just relax. Food that requires protective barriers can be good.

When I finished eating one slice of this sacred food, I truly felt that I could love anyone. I thought back on all my enemies, one by one, all the people who have wronged me, and I could not imagine a single one walking through the door and me not loving them.

High on pizza endorphins, my husband and I languidly strolled through SoCo. We were nice to strangers. Dogs looked amazingly cute, every single one. Even drunk college students were quaint and entertaining to us in such an altered state of universal compassion with all humankind.

I was reminded of Liz Gilbert’s transcendent pizza experience in Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia. She even talks about how some people in Italy are blasé about politics – partly because the politicos are so out of control, partly because the food is so wonderful.

After eating Home Slice’s pizza, I can see how this could happen. We could call it the Dangerous Food Movement. You go in, you partake of food composed with such precision, such love, it is designed to make you feel good.

And you don’t just feel good in the moment, you feel good later, too. We’re not talking a bag of flavor-coated chips here, or something that distracts you from your misery. We’re talking food that actually changes your misery, that elevates it into something else. That lasts. We’re talking food that gets you to pick up the phone and call your best friend, who you haven’t talked to since last month when she forgot to pick you up and you had to ride your bike in the rain with the chicken.

But the Dangerous Food Movement just starts with one bite. You feel so good that you eat this kind of food again later that week. Maybe you try the #7 - white clams, garlic, pecorino romano. That second time, it only takes a couple of bites before you finally start to forgive your sister for moving away. Then it's the special slice of the day with spinach and garlic. Before long, you find yourself eating healing food all the time.

Soon, you’re not complaining at all. You greet people with genuine warmth, look them in the eye, and ask them about their mother, really wanting to know.

You try the #1 Margherita. The mild terror that used to be inside of you dissipates, a little each day, until it’s gone.

You start to actually care about things outside of yourself. You go through your day noticing all the wonderful things, like how your co-worker just wants to laugh a little, or how your boss’s eyes shine when he talks about learning to become a pilot. You go for the #5, the classic, pepperoni and mushrooms.

Suddenly, you’re taking actions to help people, instead of just complaining or theorizing about the people who need help.

Maybe, you’re even ready to help yourself or let yourself go for that big dream. The #2 takes you there - eggplant parmesan on a pizza. After you’ve been eating this way a while, maybe you even love yourself enough to let yourself fail at something…. And try again.

Certainly, I do see how this kind of food could make you forget about some things, and focus on others.

To paraphrase the Sufi poet Rumi:
Out beyond the ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a pizza.
I'll meet you there.