Using Your Energy Credits Wisely

Date: Feb. 2, 2005
From: MJS

Caroline Myss on her audiotape “Spirituality and Power” gives this image, which I think is very useful. She says that each day we get 100 units of energy to spend any way we wish. If you are encouraging in yourself rehearsals of past offences by others, as from your family, friends or co-workers, then you probably spend 60 credits on that alone. Then you might spend 20 credits being angry over the slights of clerks and other drivers on the road. You may chronically spend energy feeling guilty over past events, long out of the minds of others, or worrying about what others think. Then you might spend some more on your spouse or children, just in being upset about today’s events. Whatever is left then, (maybe 10 credits?) that is available to spend on creativity and love. So her main counsel is to forgive. Forgive everyone everything, including yourself. Just let it go, not for their sakes, but for your own sake. This is the teaching of Jesus too. “Forgive us as we forgive others.”

I think she is right. But this is not as easy to do as it sounds. I still remember being slighted by a friend when we were sixteen, among other offences. How do you “let go” of really terrible things, like marital infidelity, misuse of family funds, or deceitful children into drug cultures or other addictions?




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Coyotes Singing

Date: Feb. 16, 2005
From: MJS

Coyotes were singing around us at 4 a.m. this morning. I am always happy to hear them in the night, once I am safely in my bed.

In daylight I find a fluff of feathers strewn outside my door, in my path, near where I was feeding the Gambol’s quail and doves that gather here, searching constantly. Life must eat life to live itself. Joseph Campbell reminds us of that. I am sure that I am not a vegetarian myself. But I am sorry for the demise of these gentle birds, even if the predator paid with a song.




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Stephen King's Criteria for Writing Fiction

Date: February 16, 2005
From: MJS

On Writing by Sephen King was enlightening to me about the writing process. He tells a good story on himself, and in the course of that, points out that “good story” is the first requirement for writing, and after that the writer may develop characters, add description, and ought to eliminate nearly all the adverbs. In a later draft, the writer can look for and strengthen theme and symbol. I have great respect for King’s writing abilities. I think his advice is very sound.

I went on to read The Sunday Philosophy Club by Alexander McCall Smith (also author of the #1 Detective Agency series) and The Murder Room by PD James. Both authors are British, given to lots of description. The stories are somewhat interesting but not compelling, reminding me of Pride and Prejudice and other “novels of manners” of another era.

The story is really everything, as King says.

Have you read any fiction lately? Would you rate it first on story, then on characters, then on descriptions, and lastly on theme and symbols, as King does? What do you look for in fiction?




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Chalkboard Project Response

Helping Public Schools to Improve Output

A lot is right with our schools and staffs, who are dedicated educators for the most part. They are caught in the crossfire of so many agendas of others (Feds, State, School Boards, vocal small factions, fundamentalists, disgruntled or apathetic parents) so that they cannot possible succeed, and hardly ever do they get the credit they deserve for the difficult job of working with children or young adults daily.

What influences the output of our education system?

• Good Genetics: Reading ability can be predicted by age 18 months. Every high school should have a daycare center on its grounds, so parenting high school students will finish school, and the others will get education in parenting, for the sake of the next generation.
• Good Home life and support: Home provides the motivation and correction, takes up the slack. Recreate smaller K-8 schools in the communities. Uniforms for K-7 students would be helpful to parents.
• System support for families themselves: Homeless, itinerant and underemployed families affect school attendance, and require special programs and separate reporting.
• Good Nutrition and daily Physical Education: The time is here to eject advertising, fast food, and coke machines from the campus. Limit sports to intramurals. Every child should have daily PE, which teachers could and should teach.
• Extracurricular experiences/opportunities: Field trips, outdoor school and enrichment of life is extremely valuable, tying school life to adult life expectations.
• Broad curriculum: Basic subjects and the arts, life skills and cultural information as well as sex and family life education. Students will need to choose a track in HS.
• Demands for and opportunities for excellence: Promotion system based on demonstrated ability or interest in special fields at high school level, tracking systems at elementary level that allow for summer school, skipping grades, more flexible assignment to levels, awards, as well as credits. Put more emphasis on student responsibility for learning at all levels.
• Funding Balance for general population and special needs students is needed, not reliant on gambling revenues or other erratic revenues. We should all pay for education of our next generation.
• Daily Schedules: Older students should arrive and depart on more flexible schedules, not driven by the Sports Department. Young children’s hours in school are also often too early. Although 90% of educators work best in the early morning, that is not true of the general population. Testing outcomes would improve if all testing were done after 10 a.m.
• Annual schedules: The summer break is too long for younger students. Six weeks in summer for vacation, with the remaining 6 weeks distributed around Labor Day, Winter Holiday and Spring Holiday would help tremendously. Resistance to changing the school year comes largely from the Sports Departments and Parents of Jocks, so major sports need to be assigned to one or another quarter state-wide, with attention to ending the school year in May or June to accommodate to those who continue in college or other systems.


How you will measure the “output” determines which parts of the “input” will get further attention. Reliance on national testing scores is useful at the group level only, not for many parent/teacher level decisions. National testing tends to simplify and homogenize the curriculum to the detriment of creativity and character. Uniqueness is decried. Don’t let national tests drive public education.

• National tests
• State tests
• Records of student involvement in specific programs
• Displays
• Programs, plays, demonstration, science and art and literary fairs
• Record of graduates at work

My Pet Peeve: If we REALLY want family support of schools, which is fundamental, we must return to the community based elementary school, K-8. Life used to center on that local school: holidays, celebrations, fundraising, discipline, and community life. People knew each other and watched over each other’s children. Busing wasn’t necessary. Parents knew the school staff, and the staff knew the families well. In our current mode, children must move from school to school at least three times, more if their home is moved. If enrollment changes, the district will redraw school boundaries, ripping up parental webs of community life without a thought to that effect. It would be better to move some buildings. Junior highs have not produced promised results, but instead they have gathered up the most insecure group of students, separated them further from their families and from the lower school where they could have given some service and felt better about it. The academically gifted can be challenged in other ways. Jr. Hi students are NOT ready for intimate extensive social life, no matter how much they beg for dances and parties. They are thus drawn into the teen scene too early, with disastrous results. It is no wonder than our public schools have lost the support of families. Parents are frustrated and angry. They don’t go to PTA meetings, show up at school for much, vote for the funds needed, or help with studies at home where their life is so hectic anyway.

RE-CREATE COMMUNITY CENTERED K THROUGH 8 SCHOOLS. A Factory system will not produce the educated human being we want. An integrated family based system will.







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Blessed Be My Life

A Blessing
(to be spoken aloud)



No more waiting.
This is it.
This is my life.
Nothing to wait for.
Nowhere else to go.
No one to make it all different.
This is it.
What a relief to have finally landed.
Here…now.
Blessed be my life!





From I Promise Myself, by Patricia Lynn Reilly. Conari Press, 2000





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"Flakey" Daughter Speaks

Date: Feb. 2, 2005
From: CS

I will be going to India and Tibet next, possibly to Nepal and Thailand, supervising students. The interviewer for the job I have now commented that I seemed rather “flakey”. He wondered, since I moved about so much, what grounded me? There are two things that keep me steady, really, which I explained to him.

One is that I still meditate each morning for a few minutes. That puts me in touch with myself, with how my body feels and where I am emotionally, what I have to do that day and so on. Then I can take corrective action for the sake of my health or mental stance. I credit my Vipassana Meditation Retreat with helping me develop that personal skill, which I think is invaluable. It was very challenging at the time to meditate for ten days straight, but definitely worth learning. I feel “at home” wherever I am.

The other contributor to my interior stability is my family. They live a traditional life, and they’re right there, at “home”, whenever I need to stop for a while and recuperate. I always know that. I am very grateful for them, as individuals and as a group. In a very real way they make it more possible for me to pursue this spiritual journey that takes me all over the world.

Date: Feb. 3, 2005-02-02
From: MJS

Joseph Campbell was asked in The Power of Myth interviews what the human community could do that would take us towards peace and understanding.
“Everyone should travel,” he said. “I don’t know any other way.”

I think we should each learn to meditate, whether we travel or not.




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