the universe is conspiring for you

Went to a Rob Brezny reading last night, and man that guy is wacky good. The whole thing was basically one long poem/performance art piece. He is fun! I bought his new book, Pronoia Is The Antidote For Paranoia. It's full to the brim with different ways to wake yourself up and those around you. After the reading, I totally wanted to say, "Hey, I think my housemate is dating your sister." Which is true, but I thought that might seem kinda creepy so I kept my mouth shut. He asked us to write down what pained us on a piece of white paper and drop it in this big cauldron. He said he would go to the beach at a later time and burn them all. Then he asked us to write down on a yellow piece of paper how we might practice pronoia and then pin the pieces of paper to his lab coat! It was a funny sight. He wears the lab coat because he has this whole thing about being in the "Beauty and Truth Lab." He loves to dream up new ways of bringing positivity to people. But always with humor. One thing I loved is that he said that no one is immune to fundamentalism, including religious zealots AND hippies. This caused a bit of a stir in a room full of people wearing hemp headscarves and casually talking about their chakras. I so loved that! Not that I consider myself one of them, but we've got to be able to look and laugh at ourselves.

Just some things I noted from last night:

Do you realize you can actually listen a person's soul into existence? The teacher Richard Moss says, "The greatest gift you can give another is the purity of your attention."

"If something is not beautiful, it can't be true." - John Keats

"Until you have loved, you cannot become yourself." - Emily Dickinson

There is a sour, puckered mass hallucination that is mistakenly called reality.

Beautiful truths are suspect; ugly truths are readily believed.

Write a love letter to the person you will be in one year. Outline in detail three great things you will accomplish in that time.

I'm not afraid of running out of love

You are your own guru, you hear your own pain. You save your own life, you are your own wife.

Just lots of happy-feel-good stuff. And why not? We don't celebrate enough. We don't point our fingers at the folly of this world and burst out laughing enough.

Another thing he touched on is something I've been thinking a lot about. In storytelling, we seem to think that devastation and corruption are the most interesting. So many of our dramas are based on that. It's true that conflict is what moves a story along, but conflict simply means confrontation, and that doesn't have to be a bad thing. Storytelling can be more interesting if we dig deeper and look at the growth that can come from conflict. I don't think that any of the plays I've written thus far are good enough to be produced, and it may be because I haven't delved into these aspects of conflict enough. My stories could be richer if I allow my characters to see both the light and dark sides of conflict, whether or not it includes resolution, and whether the confrontation is happening with the self, with loved ones, or with people they don't know.

Well, just some thoughts for today.