the dyi of quitting a bad habit - part 1

Listen, I know my own dodges.  I wasted an awful lot of time, which just about amounts to a lot of my life, chasing myself round the globe.  But here I am and I mean to stay now.  Dodges and all.  Knowing them doesn’t mean that they’ll disappear but they can’t always get the best of me now.  Now, I have a fighting chance.  Know what I mean?  You see, we learn to play so many tricks to get on in the world that we soon slip into the mode and get caught in our own webs.  For instance: say you had a job to do that you really didn’t want to do.  Someone was depending on you for it though.  There wasn’t anything in it for you so you avoided the work.  We’ve all been there.  Eventually, you either do the deed or some poor bastard is going around until his dying day calling you a schmuck.  Bad karma but you can live with it.  It wouldn’t be so cool though if you had to run into him down the road.  You own up, make some sorry-assed excuse that neither of you believe and it’s over.  Obligation and obscuration.  If you did the same thing to yourself it’s only different because it all takes place within your body.  When people say, “Stop fooling yourself,” they know what they’re talking about.  If you keep promising to quit smoking or stop this or do that and never do, sooner or later even you realize that you’re full of it.  It’s kind of funny how we go about deceiving ourselves.  Some people can even cause exterior objects to fall on their heads just so they won’t have to go see their relatives.  Others attempt to do something like quitting smoking by first chewing gum, then chomping down toothpicks, while continuing to smoke.  All along you tell yourself that you’re waiting for the urge for the gum or the toothpicks to kick in, before you drop the smoking.  Now you got yourself a triple habit.  You have so many things going in and out of your mouth that you hardly have time to lie about what you’re attempting to do here.  I’ve done that one.  You see, I know my own dodges.

            I’ve known about my dodges for a long time now.  I suppose some dodges can get you out of trouble.  Whether it’s moving away from a punch or avoiding a fight.  But I say that I know my own dodges because it just came to me that I do and much as I can go half way around the world pretending that I’m unaware that I’m avoiding something, I can’t really.  I do know what I’m doing all the time.  And when I please ignorance it’s a way to save face.  Sometimes I lose sight of whose face I’m saving.  For instance, my mind played a dozen tricks on me after I quit smoking.  Sometimes I bought into them.  Like the idea of “just one puff.”  I caught myself before succumbing.  But what grabbed my attention was that I had an entire storehouse of dodges all designed to trick me.  As if I were the enemy.  I was Troy and the Trojan horse all wrapped up in one sweet, contorted deal.  Well that kind of stuff can make you crazy.  So I can’t plead innocence anymore.  All right, I’m not innocent.  This isn’t any sort of sandwich sign proclamation.  I am not making any categorical statements.  Only that I can fool myself if I choose to but if I believe that I’m really fooling myself then it’s fooling myself to believe that. 

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The wild blue - a conversation about grief and the road back into living

The wild blue                                    by freda karpf     http://amzn.to/15QB7rO

The difficult terrain that is grief and the road back that is resilience - this is what the wild blues is about.  Healing from the loss of a loved one’s dying, or from the loss of your home, or a job you identified with or reeling from the loss of a landscape that was changed by a storm or from being forced to relocate – the central idea behind all of these big changes one can experience is loss. … there is a common road many of us will go down before we feel like we’re back in the swing of things again. The trick I’d like to share in the wild blue is really simple, life never left us; nature has always been a part of us, all of us really, and our losses are intricately bound up with all the life on this planet.

Quitting nicotine and finding yourself

With humor as a backdrop, the “memoir” style narrative will feel familiar to those that have read contemporary writers in search of self and soul. What we leave behind in the dark of our minds and histories can boomerang back through our psyches. All you need is a catalyst.. That’s what happened when the narrator quit smoking and the persona Nic was born.

That was the start of these conversations, a serio-comic and spirited journey that has Nic chasing the narrator throughout the tale. Once she turns the chase around a full passion for life and creative expression blossoms. The desire that pulls the narrator forward through the land of withdrawal addressed her entire being. She discovered a strong identification with Odysseus, the original journey man. And she also learns to appreciate the role that his wife Penelope had in his world.

Forced on a journey through the virtual and subjective realms that she had only given marginal validity in the past, this move also put Nic on notice. She was no longer fighting him head on, but using all the tricks in the book to counter his wicked, insidious ways. This included comic monologues and giving voice to the “Goddamned right I am” woman who had something to say about the entire mythical history of the western world.


Check out the Kindle version of Conversations with Nic at

http://amzn.to/14jUNUs

20 years of wandering

An odyssey is a long series of wanderings. Twenty years is a very long time. Even when I was a kid I thought, “What a long trip” the O man took. To give it some perspective, going with the family for a Saturday afternoon drive, eating dinner out and coming home at night felt like a very long day. I couldn’t imagine twenty years. He could have skipped through the islands till he found his homeland, in a few days, weeks at most. Penelope, his faithful wife, was waiting for his return when everyone else assumed he was dead. Penelope was waiting, weaving and unraveling. Thinking she was a widow and available, her suitors were anxious for her to choose a new husband. She told them that when her weaving was done she’d choose. But at night, she renewed her connection to the O man by unraveling her work. They never had a chance.

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How to grok time

The Robin Hood of time, Hermes returns time back to the poor; those people that have been robbed of their place in the cycles of sun and moon. The ones that have had time stolen from them and are left with only the thin time. You can hardly make a soup out of this kind. He’s a philanthropist thief. The worst of them are the ones that rob us of the fullness of our existence. So many values are tied into the idea of time that we sometimes cannot even survive our own way of reckoning. What a shame. What a damn shame.


I sometimes think of Hermes, that quicksilver being, as someone that has eluded the whole issue. The time he steals allows us to close the gap between our true but divided selves. With his help we can understand the multiple worlds we live in and bring them together in the context of our being, the interlocking triangles of our skin. It’s almost as if when we listen to the many voices of our divided selves we can also elude time. Eluding time is not living as an alien or reject on the outside. It’s belonging in a non-linear way.

Time is one of the catalyst wounds evoking what we know as sacredness from within. Sometimes we receive this like a vaccination to make living in the world possible. But it prevents the deepening of our experience as much as it blocks the disease it tries to save us from, time the destroyer.

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Tree hollow

We need to sleep in the hollow of a tree or find a warm place in the sun and lie on the beach. When we’re sleeping we travel in the fluid realm of images. Is this our living gone underground like trees reaching deep? We can’t so easily reach with our roots.
They aren’t always there in the pictures of grandma and grandfather. Our families stories aren’t the only ones that speak to us in our time of need. Maybe they don’t even speak to us at all. We may have to go deeper still. We may have to burrow into a good book, a hero’s journey or get lost in the stream of consciousness.
All of these things are ways to incubate what it is to become your self in the world again. We need sleep. Not the numbness that I longed for. We need to incubate our lives in the cauldron of our own heat.

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Another dream just got kindled

Conversations with Nic is out there, up there, on there, out loud and available to read. It’s been on this website in bits and weaves but the whole weave is now available on Kindle and I hope you’ll check it out and share the good news with your friends. Here’s the link: 

http://amzn.to/14jUNUs.

There’s more to come. Including a book version of The Wild blue. But what I wanted to share is the news that isn’t old but maybe a good reminder to you. When the voice that is quiet is given sound, the world changes. My world just changed and this time I’m owning it and taking all the responsibility. If you want to see what I’m talking about, please do and remember, in my neck of the woods, there’s the mudflats and wetlands, there’s the wild blues and the daily neurotic. So wear your marsh boots and bring along a snack and something hot to drink in a thermos. You’re about to go off the web and on a journey.
If you dare to dream a dream of achieving a goal, take good notes as you move along the road to your accomplishment. It is true, everything they say about the journey. The journey is the thing to enjoy. You might reach your summit, Katahdin if you’re on the A Trail from south to north or some other summit not listed on anyone’s maps. I say go for it and don’t think about winning or losing or even making it or stopping on account of something. Just go for it. Experience that initial push and push on. Why the heck not?
It’s spring and the host of proven winners have blossomed. The question that came to me was: dare I dream? I did. I’m still dreaming. With Nic up on Kindle there’s another quest in the offing. Getting it out in hard copy or on other platforms. But if it seems like work to me I’m going to stop. I’ll stop until the spirit moves me and shows me the road with joy. This work is a choice. Some days even the choice can smart you but I want to remember, that it’s a great good privilege to walk the dream into reality.
The great privilege would be to share the journey with others. It is my profoundest wish that Conversations with Nic will have something for you, something that echoes your heart song or confirms your suspicions – that yes, you’re on the right trail because another synch hole just opened up for you and your heart’s desire is being confirmed by the wildest and wooliest coincidences that could only come from an interconnected world; a world where spirit matters and matter is spirited.
I believe the winds are your allies and that your road is going to take you places your soul needs to go. Bring your spirit along for the journey. This go round it was time to turn the voice that held my dreams to audible.
You may not be used to dancing your dance, singing your song or embracing your spirit and moving on. There are many around you that might flat out state it or quietly insinuate that you should stop. But the thing is, there’s one life spinning in you that can’t. It’s weaving your dream into every fabric of your being. There’s always something spinning in you and if you don’t let it out it will knot up and you’ll have a heck of a time unraveling that ball of yarn. The weaver wants the work to be seen. It’s time to dress up, step out and move beyond the dream into the living you want and deserve to be doing. This is the time for the validation of the out loud. That’s come round just in time when everyone that needed a voice or visual connection to the outside world could find it if they had access to the World Wide Web. The web of communications that has become the life of the conversations we’re all having a heck of time keeping up with. The web has spun you into being. Live the dream and dare to be what you wanted to become.
When the voice that is quiet is given sound, the world changes. Thanks for sharing this dream with me. It is a fun one.