March 2012
61 posts
Day 126(C): Like Begets Like
“We get smart by being around other smart people.” — Harvard economist Edward Gleaser at TED 2012 (via Explore)
This quote came up on my Tumblr dashboard today and gave me pause for thought. It reminded me of the impact our environment has on us and how the intentional choices we make, or don’t make, about our environment play a significant role in who we are becoming.
If we want to...
Day 126(J): Listen!
Two separate conversations I had today with two different people reminded me about the power of listening. Or would it be more accurate to say, “the art of listening”?
The first conversation was via phone and the second conversation was in person. After both conversations, I felt unheard. I observed that effective communication requires a co-creative partnership. Words alone cannot connect...
February 2012
54 posts
Day 125(C): Cycles
These past two days since our daughters’ vacation ended, I have had a growing itch to start composing again. After my last composition class ended I needed a change of pace, so I’ve been focusing on my piano and it’s been a wonderfully sweet reunion. That said, I feel that this period of playing other composers’ music is beginning to ease up and a period of writing my own music again will soon...
Day 125(J): Living From The Place of Longing, Not...
In addition to writing about our longings, the participants in the women’s leadership retreat that I attended in April 2010 were asked to do another timed-writing exercise. This one was about limitations and fears. The approximately 20 women, through their pens in a stream-of-consciousness style, poured out their deepest fears and worries; the ones that were stopping the women from taking their...
Day 124(C): The Hawk and the Squirrel
Sophia and Julia went back to school today, and as if to welcome Jung and me out on our first walk together in 10 days, it was a bring sunny day today! Although it was cold enough to make my ears ache for the first half of our walk, it felt great to get out and move at our own, brisk pace. The birds were also out in full force and they got quite noisy along some of our favorite trails!
Two of the...
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Day 124(J): What Are We Educating Our Children...
The reason I care about education is because I’ve experienced what is broken in the workplace and I do not want my children to work and live the same old way. It is high time to examine what is working and what is not working in our current educational system, and do what is necessary to help our children’s generation create a better world. Not necessarily more jobs, more income, and more things...
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Day 123(C): Gifted
I’ve developed a theory about my dreams. When the events in a dream are plausible, even if they are unlikely, then I consider the dream to be a “processing dream.” My mind is working through events and thoughts while I sleep and the dream is just me observing the process. I’ve learned not to think too much about these dreams.
On the other hand, when the events are implausible or downright...
Day 123(J): Perfect Mid-Winter Break
Today was the last day of S and J’s mid-winter break. After dinner I felt something that was keenly familiar. It was similar to how I felt the day before I had to return to work after vacation.
Except this time, it is not me who is returning to work, but my daughters who are returning to school tomorrow. Thank goodness they are not yet leaving home to return to school. That day too will come,...
Day 122(J+C): Post-Sleepover Recovery
Four girls in our house For a game and sleepover. We are filled with Joy!
We are recovering from hosting a sleepover. It was a lot of fun and we plan to do it again, but not until we get a little more sleep.
Day 121(C+J): One Third of Three Hundred and Sixty...
Day 121 Haiku
Almost one third through Three hundred and sixty-five; We are so awesome!
And modest, too!
Thank you to all our readers and those who comment by email or on our Facebook page.
For those of you who have read all 121 days of posts so far, please treat yourself to a cookie or sweet of your choice! :D We will do the same!
Joyfully Yours, Charles and Jung
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Day 120(C): Co-Creation and Role-Playing Games
Occasionally when I write a post, I run it by my daughters before putting it up to make sure that what I’m saying resonates with their experience. Yesterday I read my post, “Unintended Side-Effects of Academic Pressure” to my daughters for their feedback. Then I asked them if they knew of any activity that teaches people to become “co-creators who know how to collaborate to combine...
Day 120(J): Life’s Promise
We are plentiful and bountiful. And we can’t go wrong.
These were the words I woke up with this morning. Although I couldn’t remember the details of last night’s dream, I was grateful to receive this message from the Dreammaker. In addition, for the first time in a long while, I felt physically well rested when I opened my eyes. I even felt the corners of my lips lifting up as I recited these...
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Day 119(C): Unintended Side-Effects of Academic...
Today I received an email from a parent who used to be at S and J’s school, but who took her child out of the school because they were unhappy there. She brought up an aspect of the school environment which Jung and I had not considered, but in retrospect seems so obvious to me that I can’t believe we missed it: academic competitiveness. S and J’s school prides itself on the strength of its...
Day 119(J): Heavenly Walk with My Daughter
Universe must have heard my wish to see some blue sky today. We’ve had a typical Seattle winter spreading its gray cloak over our heads for many days, and I didn’t realize how badly I needed to feel some vibrant sunlight until it peeked out from behind the drowning clouds as if to refresh my memory of the vast, open, blue sky behind all those shades of gray. Ah, what a relief!
Charles and I were...
Day 118(C): Blessed with a Curse
Today we watched Hayao Miyazaki’s 2004 animated movie, “Howl’s Moving Castle.” After seeing the trailer, S and J were unsure if they were interested in the movie or not, but Jung and I convinced them to sit down with us to watch the beginning, giving them permission to leave and go do something else if they became bored. As it turned out, they both loved it. (J claimed it was only “okay,” but...
Day 118(J): Blessed Bonding Time
When I was working outside home as a corporate attorney, my daughters loved it when I worked from home. It didn’t seem to bother them even when I spent most of those days being on email and phone conferences behind the closed door of my home office. They just wanted me to be near them even if we couldn’t be, or play, together while I had business to attend to from home.
They liked feeling my...
Day 117(C): Remembering Why
I died today. A lot.
It’s not a big deal. I was playing the computer adventure game, “Dungeons and Dragons Online” and I had bitten off more than my character could chew. Although I didn’t want to, I had to accept defeat and abandon the adventure I was in, allowing all the time and in-game resources I had spent to go to waste.
I had embarked on this particular adventure by myself...
Day 117(J): Teardrop and Owl
In my dream last night, I saw a teardrop turning into an owl. I can’t remember what kind of owl it was, but it had two huge eyes and something in my dream told me that it was an owl. At first, I thought it was odd because I haven’t had a good cry for a long while. I mean the kind of cry that cleanses you and frees you when a tight knot has lodged in your heart, and then releases you to move...
Day 116(C): Get Out of Your Own Way
To peel back the curtain on Soul Play Family for just a moment, before Jung and I put up our posts each day, we give them to each other for comments and edits. Not only has this been a great way to get a fresh eye to catch typos and clarify our language, it has led to some very interesting conversations, even though it does tend to be rather late at night!
Back on day 95 when Jung read through my...
Day 116(J): My Longings
One of the significant events that accelerated my growth in reclaiming true power was a 6-day women’s leadership retreat I attended in April 2010. I included this experience in my Day 23 post as part of my journey to awakening consciousness:
I also started my own personal journey to understand what creative women’s leadership looks like, and how women can transform themselves and their...
Day 115(C): Led by Awareness and Consciousness
After I wrote yesterday’ post, I realized that I left out an important detail. I wrote about how I no longer have high expectations which I reach for in my music, but rather I only concern myself with taking the next step in improving my performance. What I didn’t mention is that there is a big reason why this is easier for me to do now than it was back when I was studying at New...
Day 115(J): Reclaiming the Healthy Feminine
Today I finished re-reading Women Who Run With The Wolves by Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés. This book of nearly five-hundred pages is truly filled with wisdom, knowledge and power. Every time I opened the book, I felt the presence of the Wild Woman whom I consider to be our “Universal Mother” — the eternal feminine numen that is as old as the beginning of the world. Especially during the last...
Day 114(C): Lower Expectations Yield Higher...
As Jung mentioned in her post today, we have begun to decompress and process our three-week journey with S and J’s school. Today I was able to get back to practicing the piano with a clear, distraction-free mind. Both my memory and hands were weaker than normal today — evidence of my fatigue — but it felt good to get back to my music: my true calling. As I gradually re-imprinted my...
Day 114(J): Honorable Closure
My heart is brimming with peace, gratitude and joy, not unlike the feelings I experienced on Day 1 of this Soul Play Family 365 Experiment. Perhaps it is because the bullying, teasing and gossiping issue that prompted Charles and me to reassess our daughters’ school environment has finally reached satisfactory closure. We have been focusing on it intensely for three school-weeks, after the...
Day 113(C+J): Victory Haiku
Love and compassion Awareness and consciousness Gifts of the Spirit
Day 112(C): Please Don't Play "Telephone"
Today Jung and I had a very unsettling discussion with another parent at our school. It seems that “she heard through the grapevine” some things which made her very upset and defensive. We tried to give her the straight story in contrast to the gossip that she had heard, but she was already too upset to hear what we had to say and the whole conversation ended when she said, “I’m done with you.”...
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Day 112(J): Our Ending is Our Beginning
~ Continued from Day 111(J)
As Charles and I have been writing in our recent posts, we have been deliberating on what kind of educational environment we want for our children. We felt a dire need to reassess their current school environment because S and J have had to fend for themselves in recurrent circumstances where they were subject to bullying, mean girl cliques, rude and disrespectful...
Day 111(C): A Second Chance
As I mentioned yesterday, I seem to be learning music much faster than I remember being able to before, even when I was in Conservatory. In fact, when I was a Senior in college I remember my teacher assigning me a book of Bartok pieces which were easier and shorter than my usual repertoire to help me to speed up the rate at which I was learning music. He asked me to learn, polish, memorize and...
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Day 111(J): Dragon Head, Snake Tail (용두사미) (龍頭蛇尾)
When Charles and I moved to this area almost eight years ago from Boston where we had spent most of our adult lives, our daughters were pre-school age. Naturally, when we were searching for our new home, we inquired about neighborhoods with strong public elementary schools because our children’s education ranked high on our priority list.
As we were new in the area, however, it wasn’t easy to...
Day 110(C): Practicing the End
I’ve written before that one of the intentions I set when I resolved to become a more public musician was to learn a small but varied repertoire of music which I could perform at any piano at the drop of hat. In addition to some Chopin pieces which were part of my High School repertoire, I’ve decided to add Franz Schubert’s Impromptu in Eb Major, Op. 90, No. 2 to my repertoire. It’s a fun and...
Day 110(J): Knowledge is Power (to Shift...
“There is a social stigma attached to reading the food labels at our school,” said J at the breakfast table this morning.
Her comment came on the heels of our breakfast conversation about why people keep doing things to themselves that are harmful even after they learn about it. The conversation started with S who told us about how soda or pop (or any sugary, carbonated soft drink) is bad for...
109(C): It Takes All Kinds
In the beginning of the 2008 Dungeon Master’s Guide for Dungeon’s and Dragons 4th Edition (D&D), there is a three-page section entitled, “Player Motivations.” It outlines the primary motivations of D&D players as observed by the authors. They list the motivations as follows: actors, explorers, instigators, power gamers, slayers, storytellers, thinkers, and watchers. The reality is...
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Day 109(J): Blessing for Daughters
S and J played Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) with three other girls at our house this afternoon. Two of them are friends from school, and the third went to school with them until last year, but now she goes to a different school. Charles ran the game as Dungeon Master.
Last December, S and J asked for a D&D game with this same group of friends for their birthday party, and all five girls had...
108(C): Life Doesn't Come in Packages
One of the events which led up to my posts from thursday and friday was a conference Jung and I had with J and her teacher about the incident I wrote about on February 1st and she wrote about in her song, The Hypocrite. In many ways, it was a discussion between J and her teacher to which Jung and I were invited to listen. We wanted to both support J in helping her to get her story across to her...
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Day 108(J): Power of Being Sensitive
I was a sensitive child. I still remember a recurrent comment in my school report card that said: “Jung is very sensitive.” Even as a child, I sensed the negative undertone in this comment: it implied that being sensitive was somehow an undesirable quality — in the same category as being “moody, emotional, thin-skinned.” I also recall being teased by my boy cousins (all three of them) who...
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Day 107(C): Today, My Axe Would Not Fail
“Fighter” by S
What would you do If your daughter,
Who cries during movies and laughs out loud reading books, Who begins and ends every day with a hug, Who loves to dance, draw, write, sing, dance, play and read,
Who will tell stories unending to anyone she meets, Regardless of age or station,
Who, in the time it takes to walk up a flight of stairs, Can turn a stranger...
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Day 107(J): Parental Report Card
“Syndrina” by J
Since the incident that S and J had at school earlier last week, Charles and I have been deliberating on choosing the right school for our daughters. It is his and my responsibility to be responsible stewards and guardians of our children’s astonishing creativity, one-of-a-kind gifts, and wild instinct and intuition. I firmly believe that both Charles and I had these precious...
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Day 106(C): My Revolutionary
My daughters clearly have revolution in their systems by now. For many weeks they’ve been studying the American Revolution in school, and they’ve also been living with Jung and me starting our own personal revolution. Just as many Patriots were trying to live their truth during the years leading up to the American Revolution, despite a political climate which denied their freedoms and threatened...
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Day 106(J): Leaders of Our Future
Life works in mysterious ways. The incident that S and J had at their school last week pushed me and Charles to look straight into an issue that had been lurking in the back of our minds for a few months since MyCrownShift, if not longer. It is a gift — a true blessing in disguise — which we didn’t appreciate at the outset of this incident. Both Charles and I are humbled and grateful...
Day 105(C): My Passion and Purpose for Work
(For 105 days, I’ve been unsure of what to write for the “About Charles” section of the Soul Play Family website. Today, it came to me in a flash: this is what I am going to put there.)
Growing up in the small, seaside New England town of Rockport, Massachusetts I always felt pulled between my multiple interests in the arts and the sciences. It’s no wonder I attempted a double concentration in...
Day 105(J): Spiral Growth
Last night, the overcast sky obscured the full moon but tonight, the beautiful moon, a day older, shines bright and beams down on me generously. This is the fourth full moon since Charles and I started the Soul Play Family 365 Experiment and it reminds me of the natural cycle of Life/Death/Life.
Life is cyclical—it progresses in a recurring circular motion. The sun rises in the morning,...
Day 104(C): Lather, Rinse, Repeat
Compared with the repertoire I performed in the recital for my masters recital, Miles Davis’ “Four” is a walk in the park. That said, despite having declared that “I had memorized the music for ‘Four’ without realizing it” over a week ago, I’m still struggling through the last 20% to get to where I’m confident that I can sit down at the piano cold and play through “Four” without a...
Day 104(J): Full Moon Haiku
Full moon behind clouds Showing bright blurry contours Its divine light shines
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Day 103(C): HA!
Once upon a time, there was a family farm called the Peltola Farm, “where several generations raised cows and crops.” At the height of the farm, I’m sure nobody imagined that strangers would be traipsing through their land every day, jogging, walking their dogs, helping their kids ride on their bikes, picnicking, and learning about the local wildlife and the natural history of the land. It...
Day 103(J): I Choose Joy, Beauty and Love
My days have been non-stop. I couldn’t even explain to my own mother how busy Charles and I were all week last week, and it keeps going. It feels as if Life has been more demanding since I left corporate employment. One possible explanation may be that my attention and energy are going to the things that matter to me most, which often increases the level of intensity and depth of my...
Day 102(J+C): Restoration Haiku
Witch Hazel blossom Heals us and divines currents Running beneath us.
Day 101(C): Afternoon Moon
Today we got a little taste of Spring in Seattle: blue skies with wispy cirrus clouds, and a high of almost 60 degrees Fahrenheit. We took the opportunity to finally explore a few of the 230 acres of the beautiful Washington Park Arboretum on the Seattle shores of Lake Washington. We had visited the Japanese garden there years ago, but never walked in the main arboretum.
When I suggested this...
Day 101(J): Life 101
One hundred one days Being and living awake. Joyful smile spreads wide.
Looking back at the past one-hundred days, I feel full, peaceful, and grateful.
It isn’t always easy being true to myself, but with the daily practice of nurturing my friendship with my soul, I feel alive and joyful. All is well.
I’m experiencing that when I live in line with my own values, my fear of the unknown...
Day 100(C): One Hundred Days Haiku
For one hundred days We have lived true to ourselves One step at a time.
Day 100(J): Sweet One-Hundred Days
As we were walking home after school, my daughter S told me, completely unbidden, “Mom, it’s been great overall since you quit Microsoft. It’s been about three months, right?” I was tickled pink! I was also curious, so I asked her, “Great for whom?” She responded, “For you and me, and for everyone in our family.” With that, she gave me a big hug. I felt as if I received my one-hundred-day gift...
