D.M. Kenyon's Blog

It was 9 degrees in Battle Creek on Christmas Eve and my parents’ farm house had been without power for three days. We were making do with a fireplace and a small generator to pump water. At four in the afternoon, I noticed that a car had pulled to the side of the road along side a bean field my father owns and I drove my truck down to see if everything was alright. In the car was a young man from Consumers Power who was out “spotting” downed power lines. He had found two in that bean field and was required by protocol to stay near them to “guard” them even though they had been down for several days.

Three hours later he was still there sitting in his car alone on that desolate and icy road. Christmas Eve was in full swing at my parents’ house and the oil lamps and candles actually added something that we had not expected. I returned to the man’s car with hot coffee and cake. He told me that he had a wife and two small children at home in Grand Rapids and was waiting for a truck with a crew from Illinois to show up to work on the downed wires. After six hours he was still there and still no sign of the truck when I brought him a plate from our Christmas Eve dinner and we began to chat on the side of the road continuing our conversation about his family and his job.

He is a typical Michigander who has seen more than his fair share of downsizing, lay-offs, economic decay and other calamities heaped upon him by a global economy that is utterly indifferent to the well being of the Pleasant Peninsula or the people who live there. Ordinarily, he was a meter reader, but told me that his job was being done away with because of “smart meters”, that, by the way, do not sound all that smart to me.

I told him that there were worse ways a man could spend his Christmas Eve and that putting himself in the service of others was perhaps the best way to honor the one whose day was to follow. I told him that we had been without power for three days and that my entire family was grateful to him and the other members of the emergency crews that were working through the Christmas holiday to restore power to over 400,000 households across the state. When I came back to check on him just before midnight, a utility truck had finally arrived and a tall young man was suiting up to climb into the cherry picker. He was cheerful, though his sixteen hour shift was starting to wear on him. He told me that he was happy to be working, happy to be helpful and had had enough Mountain Dew to keep him up for days. I stood there in the snow and watched these men work. The young fellow I had first met walked over to hand me the thermos that I had brought him hours earlier in the evening. He thanked me for my concern and said “God bless you”. I smiled at him and said, “he already has”. By the time I returned to the house, the lights were on and all was well, at least on Walnut Hill Farm.

The Mantra of My Love for You

I shall fear no broken heart

For my heart shall not be broken

Not by separation

Or destruction

Least not darkest death

I shall fear no broken heart

For my heart shall not be broken

Not by sickness

Or disaster

Or the light that calls your name

I shall fill my heart with love for you

Until it bursts wide overflowing

And shall not blink

Nor turn my eyes

Your witness, come what may

I shall die with you

As much as my own life allows

And we shall fear no broken hearts

For our hearts shall not be broken.

D.M. Kenyon, 2012

Like many Americans, the election of 2012 has left me exhausted.  The constant ideological pounding by both parties has assaulted my consciousness like a continual mantra of trouble, hate and blame.   In my home state, it remained to be seen, until last night, if a man so bereft of common sense, a man who honestly believes that God prevents women from getting pregnant in the case of “legitimate rape”, would actually represent me and my family in the United States Senate.  As my wife and I arrived at Claire McCaskill’s election-watch party, something that we have never done before, I could not shake the feeling that what I was really doing was letting the world know that we had chosen sides and we were not backing down.  This was serious.  There was going to be a fight over this.  Win, lose or draw, we had taken a stand.  This brings me to the first lesson learned from this election cycle:

Some fights just cannot be avoided.   Some points of view must be confronted.  Hate wins if the peaceful become indifferent.

Just two weeks before the election, my wife and I had to attend a meeting in North Carolina and make a couple of customer calls in Tennessee for our small business.  We had heard that the fall colors in the Smoky Mountains were nearly at their peak and that they truly are a natural wonder.  We decided to drive to these meetings hauling our old, yet newly refurbished, camper trailer to a series of campgrounds along the road to North Carolina.  It had been a tough summer.  Our business continued to struggle to stay alive.  My new business was not making much money.  We had had a record heat wave and drought in Missouri.  Short of the skies opening up and raining frogs, the mood in our household had become one of dull despair.   The endless babble of politicians ranting and raving felt like salt in a wound.  I had long stopped watching television and now switched off the radio for fear that the anxiety that it instilled in me would give me an aneurysm.

As we made our way through Kentucky, Tennessee and North Carolina, the scenery was indeed beautiful, though pock-marked by billboards of the most hateful variety.  Many had latent and not-so-latent, racist undertones suggesting that our troubles had been caused by the fact that we had a black president.  It was hard to believe that we were travelling through the United States in the twenty-first century.  At a gas station in North Carolina, a man pulled up to the fuel pump next to the one I was using.  He was driving an enormous and very expensive bus-style RV that when parked next to my busted up Dodge dually towing a thirty year old camper trailer created a socio-economic contrast that seemed quite stark.  He started to blame the president for fuel prices which were oddly much higher in North Carolina than in its neighboring states leading me to wonder out loud if the state legislature had played with either fuel taxes or supply to infuriate voters during the election cycle.  He railed against the president and when I tried to take a conciliar tone in an effort to put the conversation in some frame of peacefulness, he noticed the Obama sticker on my truck and said, “there has been too much politeness and it has wrecked this country; I intend to fight anyone who thinks otherwise – even you.”

My thoughts almost immediately wandered off to a historical account I once read describing how American revolutionaries raided Tory households, burned them and took all of their goods and livestock.  I wondered what the French revolutionaries would have thought about a massive RV and a cranky old guy who spent hundreds of dollars on fuel just to cross his own state and was highly indifferent to anyone other than himself.   As this man’s tone became increasingly hostile, I thought of Mao Tse-Tung’s statement that all true political power comes out of the barrel of a gun.

I am the founder of a small, edgy, new capitalism company that is based on the belief that business conducted with conscience can solve many of the world’s problems.  We engage in high social impact hiring favoring job candidates, like veterans and others, who have been chronically unemployed.  Three of our fifteen employees were hired right out of prison halfway houses.  We hire people over the age of sixty-five.  We hire homosexuals and racial minorities.  At our little company, the managers engage in a tradition of preparing lunch for our workers every Friday.  They take turns doing this.  They pay for the food out of their own pockets after our investors objected to the company paying for the lunches.  At our little company, we thank our people with deeds.  We eat in community.  We live in a diverse tribe that we most happily call “us”.

Incidentally, we have no absenteeism at our company to speak of.  We have no interpersonal disputes.   When one of our employees recently fell off the wagon into drug addiction, the entire company intervened and took a stand for his wellbeing.  He pulled out of it because we would not let him fall.  At our little company, we pursue wellbeing for the planet (we make energy-saving, heat rejecting window shades), for the people (including our local community and our state) and for profit.   This is referred to in the new economy as “the triple bottom line” and at our little company, it is our religion.

Over the past two years I have heard a perpetual and shocking political rhetoric shouted by people who are afraid of loss and afraid of change.  I have watched a very large segment of our national population openly attack gays, immigrants and minorities blaming them for our recent hard times.  I have been astounded by this, given that it is very well known that banks and the greed of oligarchs created the most recent global economic disaster.   I could not help but notice, however, the parallels to other points in history wherein large masses of people responded to loss and fear with hate.  The gay bashing that occurred during the election of 2012 reminded me of the racial battles in the Deep South in the 1950s and 60s.  The battle over gay marriage looked sadly similar to the signs that once hung over drinking fountains reading “whites only”.

Conservative media barraged the public with an endless stream of hateful mantras.   There seemed to be in the public conversation during this election cycle an enormous amount of blatant lying that we have not seen in the past.  This reminded me of the famous public relations premise asserted by Hitler’s propaganda minster, Joseph Goebbels,  that if you tell a lie frequently enough it becomes accepted by the masses as the truth.   The spin doctors were not trying to win our hearts and minds through inspiration and the promise of fresh possibility.  They were trying to program us to hate and fear.  This brings me to the second lesson of this election:

Hate is always the wrong side of history.

Over the course of this election cycle, I had developed a considerable disdain for the absence of critical thinking that seems to pervade national debates on policy.  I have come to appreciate that elections and the suffocating messaging that we, the people, receive during the course of them distort our view of what is really happening in our government.   An example of this distortion is the conservative media assault on the president following the Libyan consulate attack this summer.  Conservatives derided the president for not responding to the Muslim world with hostility.  As the leader of a nation, the president had to manage the safety of thousands of embassy and consulate workers at risk in the Muslim world without the luxury of grandstanding in response to the attack.  There was a very real risk that hostility was spreading through Islam, fanned by Al Qaeda and other hostile organizations, and that a misstep could put at risk a very large number of our people in the field.

The manner in which the president was attacked on this point exposes a tear in the fabric of our society.  There is nothing new in politics about exploiting a complex situation for political gain.  There is nothing new about a mob of people, fanned by anger and devoid of factual information and critical thinking, rising up in misguided rage.  In fact, the furor that was intentionally fabricated by conservative media over the Libya attack was an attempt to do to Americans what Muslim agitators did to the people who actually attacked the consulate.  In other words, this type of rabble-rousing is designed to make people angry and take irrational action, rather than critically think through complex issues.

For this very reason, Benjamin Franklin himself was very concerned about overly democratizing the country that he helped create.  The public will believe anything if spoken into their own emotional prejudices.  He ought to know, he published anonymously, attacked his opponents with half-lies and stretched truths and knew first hand that the common man is a gullible and volatile creature.  This is why the United States is a republic and not a pure democracy.  This is why we have an electoral college instead of a direct popular vote.  Mobs, especially regionally centered mobs, can be inflamed to act irrationally and our nation cannot allow itself to be governed by blind fury.

When you look at map of the 2012 election results across the United States, you see a sea of red.   Looking at the map as a territorial description of political ideology, it would lead one to believe that the vast majority of the United States is conservative dotted by tiny enclaves of liberalism.  This would be the truth if dirt could vote.  That votes do not come from square feet of territory, they come from people and people are more densely clustered in urban areas. This reality of the American political landscape is quite clear: the denser the population becomes in any given area, be it in Massachusetts or Louisiana, the population becomes increasingly tolerant, progressive and liberal.  In short, the battle between liberal and conservative points of view can be described almost entirely in terms of population density.  This brings us to our final lesson from the election of 2012:

The more closely you live with people that are different than yourself, the more likely you are to have empathy for them and the more likely you are to be willing to engage with their problems as your own.

Simply put, there is a direct correlation between the inevitable diversity of dense populations and the likelihood of tolerance that arises as an inclusive sense of “we”.  White-flight suburbs and rural areas have considerably less empathy for minorities such as people of color or gays because these groups are not prominent stake holders in those communities.   When you live among a predominately white Christian population, you are not compelled by your Jewish, Muslim, black or Hispanic neighbors to make room for a more inclusive point of view.  Diversity can become irrelevant to you in a highly homogenous community.   People who are not like you do not directly impact your community experience.  They are “other”.  They are outside of your concern.  They can be easily targeted as the enemy in the public dialogue.

The American debate has divided itself down largely cultural lines.  Nearly half of all Americans dream of living in a community wherein everyone looks like they look, prays like they pray and thinks like they think.  Frequently, this desire for homogeneity is based on a fear of the other and the yearning to live in a dream of narrowly defined by self-identification and chauvinistic justification.  It is the myth of America as a Norman Rockwell painting where everyone is white and everyone lives in the comfort of a small town stereotype.  Conformity is a direct response to the fear of the unknown.

The other half of the nation takes stock in diversity.  They are not threatened by different skin color, cultural values or gender orientation.  These people largely prefer the variety of mixed communities and through sheer experience have come to accept that people can be different and still function as a community.   When you live in a city, you become used to colorful people.  You become used to the traditions of religions that may not be yours, but are familiar to you.  You make friends with all manner of people because there is no place to hide from them.  It is not courage or idealism that motivates this mutual awareness and tolerance, it is merely the repeated opportunity to encounter and cope with a broader spectrum of the human race.

Stated conversely, the more isolated you are from people of color, gays, immigrants – the more singular your cultural surroundings – the more intolerant you will become because you are simply not a stake holder in the lives of people different than you nor are they stake holders in your life.   You do not develop the coping skills that allow you to adapt to life with people who live differently from you.   It is easy to be afraid of people you see on television, but with whom you have no personal experience.  It is easy to be jaded when there is only one church in your town.

America is growing more diverse, not less so.  America is becoming browner, not whiter.  America is becoming a true melting pot in the cities, but not so much so in suburbs or in rural areas and this will only increase the cultural divide.  White isolationism is doomed.   This is a good thing.  I like tacos and sushi.  I like music from Africa and South America.  My gay friends have the same problems in their relationships as I have in mine.  I feel whole with them.  I live only blocks from gang bangers and they do not scare me.  It is not serendipitous in the center of St. Louis where I live, but it is comfortable and interesting.

A few years ago, I remember having a white employee and a black employee who had considerable difficulty working together.  It was clear that they were both racist.  I made them share one of their breaks together each day and required that they spend those breaks sharing with each other details about their childhood and their families.  Over a period of months, I noticed that they started to exchange jokes and became quite productive when working together.  They never became great friends, per se, but they did learn to live peacefully with each other.   A lot can be learned from sharing a meal and dancing with those who scare us.

I am on the verge of giving up my Facebook page because I keep finding posts with strands of commentary that are simultaneously ignorant and hateful.  It reminds me of the 1960s.  I barely remember George Wallace blocking the door to black students at the University of Alabama – but I do remember it.  I remember the day my mother broke into tears at the news over the radio that someone had shot Martin Luther King.  Last week, a white supremist walked into a temple and open fired on innocent Sikhs because they were a little bit darker and non-Christian – both crimes against insanity.

I am witness to the fear growing in our nation.  Fear of losing our big screen televisions.  Fear that homosexuals might destroy heterosexual marriage if they marry too.  I have watched the ignorant peasants of our society, slaves to a corporate oligarchy that they have willingly created like the Tory colonists still loyal to their king as they were removed from their land by the authority of the very same crown.  Their masters have sent their jobs to Malaysia or Timbuktu, somewhere where the people do not have the power to fight the rich for their dignity.

These anxious haters of anything that goes “bump” in the night are not new to our society nor to our nation.  Only fifty years ago a Senator from Wisconsin named McCarthy had these weak-kneed cowards seeing Communist ghosts under every bed.  He told them that little old ladies were really operatives of a great social evil and were going to take away their Bibles and make them work in collectives.  Lives were ruined.  Careers were made.  Such is the usefulness of gullibility in politics.

This is how it starts, with mass hysteria.  Those who can barely comprehend the complexity of their own checking accounts begin to thump their pitchforks over Grecian debt repayments or public spending not realizing that the very people that they support, the fear mongers who lead them, have robbed the global economy of trillions of dollars and not one of them has gone to jail.  Bankers playing dice with the retirement accounts of millions lost their high-risk bets to foolishness and greed and went out to supper on their yachts while common ruined people struggled to buy a can of beans.  And yet these very people who have suffered so have never once asked for retribution, restitution or even an explanation.  It matters not.  The average American would not understand it anyway.  It is easier to write it off as the will of God.  If God wanted Goldman-Sachs to pay for the devastation it wrought upon the common people, he would have sent a thunder bolt, or perhaps an airplane, through the window of their offices and struck them dead in their comfy chairs.

They blame the government who has actually made money on the stimulus plan, money that now helps us recover from two unnecessary wars that we funded with borrowed Chinese money.  None of these fair peasants with their flaming torches, wrapped in the flag and thumping their holy books is even aware of the true cost of these wars.  They were never recorded in federal budget.

Oh! It must be the poor and the sick who are ruining our country.  It must be them!  When fear comes to into our houses disguised as nightly news, when the entertainers masked as newscasters stir the pot of tragedy and lead us to believe that we have been insulted so that we will by a new luxury car or some laundry detergent from their sponsors — we forget all compassion.  Perhaps not all compassion.   We are still spellbound by the trials and tribulations of a pudgy drunk woman from New Jersey who behaves like an ape for our twisted viewing pleasure.

I have wondered about times like these.  I have wondered how it came to pass that my 9th great grandmother, Susannah “Goodie” Martin, was seized by the townspeople of Salem in 1692.  I have wondered how a community could have become so fearful that they would engage in collective and bizarre fantasies leading them to believe that an elderly widow woman was somehow a supernatural monster simply because she was opinionated and had scolded the wrong man’s daughter.  On the word of a fifteen year old girl, my ancestor was taken out of town in a cart and hung until she was dead.  Her body was thrown in an iron crag.  No grave.  No dignity.  The greater tragedy is that the death of Goodie Martin did not ease the fear of the hysterical, well-meaning Christian community.  Twenty were executed and as many as thirteen died in jail.  The mayhem did not come to an end until one of the hysterical town’s people suggested that the Governor of the colony was perhaps a witch and he, exercising the superior power of his office, swiftly brought the matter to a close.  It was just like magic.

Fear and complexity makes an evil brew.  It is the real witchcraft that turns ordinary people into screaming lunatics.  When the average villager does not know why events are unfolding as they are, she turns to superstition for answers rather than seeking the truth through scholarship or verifiable information.  It only takes a young girl’s voice to cry “witch!” and ordinarily rational people will tear through their own communities like sharks in a blood frenzy.

The lives of people like Goodie Martin, or the Sikhs in the temple last week, are the price we pay.  Ignorance, and only ignorance, is the cause.

We live in complicated times made doubly confusing by technology that is expanding in leaps and bounds.  Blink and everything changes leaving many of us bewildered and afraid.  When we cannot find the answers we need in facts and through critical thinking, many of us turn to fantastical explanations — the equivalent of ontological thumb-sucking.  This would be harmless enough if it were left to the privacy of one’s own thoughts or confined within one’s own home.  But when fear drives the herd to hysteria, we get jihad and crusades and other unholy conflicts.  The villagers rage and tear at their neighbors in the name of a God who hasn’t the slightest idea what the hell they are screaming about.  Perhaps that is why he does not answer their prayers for apocalypse and rapture.  His jaw is on the floor in shock and awe of their insanity.

Today’s announcement by the scientists at CERN that they have discovered a subatomic particle that my very well be the fabled Higgs boson will rate a few headlines that, for the average citizen, will amount to a sound bite no more remarkable than the one that tells us what Snookie had for lunch.   The reaction to this news by the population at large is an apt metaphor of our times.  Most of us are far too unknowledgeable to distinguish the significance of the truly remarkable from idle entertainment.

In the history of human science, however, this discovery is by far the greatest discovery in the history of mankind.  It eclipses the invention of the wheel, the harnessing of fire, the discovery of the New World, the discovery that there is no such thing as gravitational force, the moon landing or the discovery of DNA.   At the highest levels of human intelligence, this knowledge has the potential to change everything.  It changes our entire understanding of existence itself and yet, most of us will know more about Mitt Romney’s vacation plans than we will the fact that there is no such thing as empty space, at least  in the traditional sense, that matter is most likely ten dimensional and that existence is not really a solid physical system of things, but merely the manifestation of energy in a sea of great cosmic nothing.  In short, we have discovered that physical reality is much more akin to the experience of a digital character in a software program than the antiquated and now obsolete notion of cold hard substantial stuff.

And yet, here we are, in the Twenty-first Century entrenched in a battle for democracy against people who believe in angels and that dinosaurs never really existed.

We live in an age where the truth is so complex and difficult for ordinary people to understand that myth has become a simply far more convenient and appealing reality.  We are all witnesses to one of the many instances in history when human technology has gotten away from ordinary human comprehension, a cultural condition that may very well lead us to disastrous effect.  One of the possible consequences that arises when technology eclipses the ability of the ordinary man to understand it, is that the scientists who have developed what seems like magic to the ignorant will be burned at stakes by terrified and ignorant masses.   Huge leaps of technology have always been the cultural triggers of dark ages.

In the Ninth Century, a Viking sailor, probably having learned a thing or two from Arab sailors, came to know a very useful thing.  He learned how to shape a sail on a boat in such a way that he could sail up into the wind.   Sailors nowadays call this “tacking”.  It is a matter of routine and every modern sailor knows how to do it.  Instead of being heralded as a genius that had liberated his people from the constraints that forced them to sail only in the direction of the wind, this innovative Viking sailor was not considered a hero of any kind, but rather was burned as a witch.  His skill was considered magic because the idiots around him could not understand it, grew afraid and lashed out against the object of their fear.

Similarly, when the Roman Empire began to implode under the weight of its own territorial overexpansion, most of the citizens of Rome had no idea what it took to build and maintain such a vast and technologically advanced culture.  They had become lazy and ignorant having been seduced by the affluence that was afforded by technology and empire.  As the poet Juvenal said in the First Century:

… Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.

This self-imposed comprehension differential, this inability to understand the complex, lead Romans to burn down their own empire in favor of a simple dogmatic culture that launched a dark age that lasted a thousand years.  Dogmatic mythology has a singular benefit, especially to the ignorant.  Everyone can understand it and, therefore, an entire culture can be brought into alignment around a single set of principles based on faith rather than knowledge.  In other words, order becomes more important that truth.  Ignorance is the opening through which the tyranny of fear seizes control of a society.  It usually enters a culture waving a patriotic flag and thumping an easy to understand doctrine that reduces human life to a didactic checklist of right and wrong.  Because the purpose of such a doctrine is order and not understanding, doctrine becomes a tool to calm fear and not the advancement of human inspiration.  It works, for a while, so long as alignment is the only goal.  In the process, human imagination is burnt at the stake to keep the ignorant, made nervous by their blindness, feeling safe from the power of knowledge.  The fear is that those who know too much will take advantage and even enslave the ignorant.  Violent might, the trump card of the desperate and the ignorant becomes justified under a false claim of preserving freedom.  Fools enslave themselves by false claims that forced order is somehow freedom.  This brand of paranoia is the exclusive province the ignorant or the manipulative seeking to control the ignorant.  Those with knowledge know as fact what is and is not a threat.

So while the natives or our nation gyrate in their charismatic ecstasies and roll on the floors of churches speaking in tongues; while the wealthy, who have always preyed upon the ignorance and superstitious tendencies of the ignorant, entice these well-meaning fools into peasant armies of devotion to their betters, a violent storm is brewing.  It will be perceived as a clash of iron and flesh driven by notions of spiritual truth propelled by ignorance.  But in reality, it will simply be the high drama of energies in a field of Higgs boson particles full of sound and fury and signifying nothing.   We will only suffer in consciousness for want of any real physicality to shed even a drop of substantial matter that we might otherwise call blood.  A millennium from now, when these nervous monkeys have had enough of their fear and murderous lashings out against imaginary demons conjured by their own superstitious minds, they will rediscover the Higgs boson recalling that it was known a thousand years before and rendered less terrifying in comparison to the wake of their own violent fearfulness.

Silly monkey of light and shadows, when will you find the calm inside your own mind to face the unfolding of the secrets of this existence with something other than bared teeth?

Karmic Muscle Group: Committed Action
Today’s Exercise: The Virtue Of Resoluteness

[Author's Note: I founded a company with a friend in 2008.  As I developed the business plan, I put a great deal of thought into what a business organization should aspire to cause in its culture.  I have had a lot of training in practical organizational behavior and had founded organizations in the past that, at least for a number of years, flourished into exceptional, thoughtful and fulfilling cultures.  When I started organizing my company, I wrote a document called The Seven Virtues Of Habitata. I have since posted this document as The Book Of Seven Virtues  on this site.  The main concept of these operating virtues is that work life, home life and community life should be ethically harmonious and designed to empower each other.  If it does not support the life of employees, then a company should not be asking them to do it.  This is not just because it is unethical to ask employees to harm themselves, it is bad for business when a company creates harm.  Managers many not understand the hidden costs of harmful conduct, but it is there in every case.  We run organizations understand this.  The fact of the matter is that a person, a family and an organization each have only one life and it should be focused on fulfillment and the creation of benefit for all.  Producing profit without this integrity is lazy, short-sided and will ultimately costly.

What I found is that what is good for life generally is good for business specifically.  The employees of my company are extraordinary.  We have a very diverse group of people that collaborate as a fierce and passionate family.  We have some unusual practices at Habitata.  Our employees make the final hiring decisions from a pool of qualified candidates based on who they are willing to be responsible for bringing into the family.  The selection must be unanimous.  If they are not willing to fight for the person in the beginning, then we will not have the type of employee we are looking for.  They must be worth taking a stand for.

Our managers cook lunch every Friday for our workers and after lunch the entire company discusses one of the Seven Virtues.  We practice high social impact hiring, meaning that we give preference to the chronically unemployed, veterans, felons and others who really need a job.  We hire people in their 60's and 70's because we believe that experience is the most valuable trait in an employee.  In 2011, after already having to lay off  15% of our employees, we had to make another cut.  This time, we cut me, the company's CEO instead of cutting to other employees.  Our management does not believe that it is appropriate to allow workers to be treated as "disposable" people and so we made sure that the pain was felt at every level of the company and not just at the bottom.  Our employees are so well trained that they can practically run the company without a CEO.

The outcome of these practices is a diverse family of people who believe in what they do and believe in each other.  Absenteeism is nearly non-existent.  It is not unusual to see employees hanging out hours after their shift is over.  We invite all our employees to company networking events and proudly have them explain our company to corporate CEOs and political dignitaries.   They frequently leave mayors, congressmen and senators in shock over how our company not only works, but has survived against impossible odds.  As we say at Habitata: "the impossible we do right away, miracles take a little longer."

For the next seven workout sessions, I am going to offer the Seven Virtues, one by one, in TLB's traditional exercise format.  I hope that you will take them to heart and apply them to your own life.  The Virtues are not only the key to right living and fulfillment, they are good business practices that cause truly great, profitable companies to stand out in a cynical world.

You may want to print out the post about the Virtue of Resoluteness and keep it with you during this exercise.  It is best to get started on this exercise in the morning.]

Find a quiet place to read and contemplate.  Turn off your cellphone.  (Come on, actually turn it off.  No vibrate, no hoping that it won’t ring. Turn it off as an act to create solitude.)
Establish meditative breathing for 3 minutes.  Take long inhales and long exhales of equal length.  Relax and clear you mind. It is important to eliminate distraction by creating focus on breath.
Take a moment to read about the seventh virtue, resoluteness, out of  The Book of Seven Virtues  post (see link above) or you can read just about resoluteness by clicking here.
After you have read about the Virtue of Resoluteness, take 3 minutes to think about how you are going to practice this virtue all day.  This will require that you pay attention to what you are actually doing and thinking all day.  This will be much harder than you think.  Resoluteness requires choosing a course of action and casting aside all doubt.  Once a choice is made, all that remains is resolute action.
Make a list of resolutions that you will carryout today.  If you are a smoker resolve that today you will not smoke.  If  you keep a diet, resolve that today you will not cheat.  Today is the day that your choices and your word shall have absolute power.  Whenever doubt or temptation arise in your mind, let pass like a floating cloud or chase it away, if necessary, like you might shoo away a pesky cat.  Once you have chosen, the issue is closed.

 

Training Note:
Human beings rarely choose anything.  They usually goad themselves with reasons or rationalizations.  We almost never live in the space of “because I said so”.  We are so used to servicing our temptations and going with the flow that the mental muscles that give us the power of resolution are usually quite small in most of us.

It helps to know what resoluteness is.  It is not the outcome of an internal debate.  In fact, you do not need to even consider a matter before resolving how you will relate to it.  You can merely choose and take a stand.  This kind of resolution is the ultimate personal power.  To have your word be so powerful that simply speaking of an outcome is a virtual guarantee that it will happen, gives one access to becoming a creative force in the real world.  Most us try to figure out if a plan or an intention is “likely” before we take a stand.  A practitioner of the virtue of resoluteness chooses based on what he or she says will be in the world.  Likelihood, probability or calculated risk do not enter into the process.   The matter gets resolved and the mind casts off doubt like a samurai throwing away her saya (scabbard) because the battle will be the end all, be all of her existence.

Resoluteness is pure, focused, intention.

Resoluteness is the seventh virtue because it is the great leap into reality.  Without resoluteness, none of the other virtues can find expression in the real world and remain useless thoughts in a hypothetical fantasy.   Resoluteness, therefore, is where the rubber literally meets the road.
 
Karmic Benefits:

Stop Hedging Your Bet, You Are Going To Die Anyway:  we think that keeping our options open gives us greater possibility.  This is a myth.  A person who stands at the crossroads is stuck and, while making no mistakes, makes no progress.   Some people live their entire lives without taking a stand on anything.  They become like jellyfish in the ocean and are swept away with the currents of circumstances.  Human beings have the power of choice, but choice alone does nothing without action.  Choosing powerfully requires resolution.  What are you waiting for?  You will be dead soon enough.  Resolution is the act of committed living.
If The Voices In Your Head Are Allowed To Debate, Nothing Gets Done:  certainly it benefits us to think things through.  It is one thing to consider the facts and circumstances to find a path to effective action.  It is another thing to be paralyzed by indecision.   Doubt has many ways to weaken us.  Sometimes we doubt because we do not know what is going on or because we were not paying attention.  Sometimes we doubt because do not have a clear vision as to who we are or what we stand for.  Sometimes we have to take the next step prepared only with whatever we have.  After considering the best information available, we must choose and resolve that this is how it is going to be.  If new information arises as we progress, we can choose again, changing a choice on new information is a different from not making a choice at all.  At any given moment, all there is to do is give it our best shot, come what may.  If you have done your best and find yourself mistaken, you are now at least clear how not to do it.
Nobility Arises From A Life By Design And Resolution Converts A Design Into A Reality:  there is an old saying: “no plan, no progress”.   This is true enough.  Human life always follows a design, even if that design is an accidental haphazard bungle.  Everything that happens arises out of the events and actions that came before.  Human intention can influence these events, but no choice and no action is still an outcome.  Even a deer frozen in the headlights of an oncoming truck is following a design, the design of no action, even though it is probably not a very effective one.  When you consider how you can live your life and when you make choices based on operating principles, all there is to do is to resolve in your mind that the matter is settled.  This does not mean that you cannot resolve something else later.  You can always change your mind, but only after you have made up your mind in the first place.  No choice is an outcome that enslaves one to his circumstances.

 

It May Be Fiction, But It Is One Heck Of A Karmic Workout.

 

Read The Lotus Blossom, D. M. Kenyon’s fictional account of a teenage girl who turns off her cellphone and enters the very real, but mystical world of Budo warriors.  Humorous, irreverent and heart-wrenching, The Lotus Blossom is an unforgettable tale of a Midwestern teenage girl’s transformation into a budo warrior in the midst of the turmoil of the Information Age.  Available in all digital formats, paperback and soon to be released in hardcover.

Available at :    Amazon.com    Smashwords.com    Barnes & Noble  

 Share Your Experience:

Leave a comment when you have completed the exercise.

Enter your email address to subscribe to TLB’s Daily Karmic Workout:


Delivered by FeedBurner

Seven:  Resoluteness. 

It used to be said among the samurai culture in ancient Japan that in order to be an enlightened warrior one had to have “a resolute acceptance of death”.  What was meant by this is that one cannot be effective in battle if he seeks to protect his own life.  Hence, by accepting that death is imminent  and welcomed, one could stay focused on the second-by-second action of the fight without being distracted by fear or the thought of pending doom.  This is a fundamental element of the ability, or skill, of creating focus.  In battle, it is far more important to be present to the reality of the moment than a hypothetical outcome.

It is often difficult to “stay in the moment”, especially under stress.  Emotions leap into our consciousness like partridges under foot.  Thoughts of failure so completely fill our mind with foreboding when we are afraid that we cannot be present to what is actually happening.  Often our anxiety makes our problems much bigger than they really are.  This is a very poor way to undertake any kind of challenge.

The principle enemy of resoluteness is doubt.  In other words, “resolution” means that all of the preliminary issues are resolved, hence the name.  When we are sure that our actions are as good as we can make them and we believe that we are absolutely doing our best, we tend not to falter.  This is because our mind stays on target without distraction or doubt.   It is when we stop and worry that perhaps we are not doing the right thing or that our target is too much for us that we take our eyes off of what is happening to enter the confusion of re-evaluation and doubt.  It is usually these types of distractions that cause mistakes and errors in judgment.

Resoluteness requires that we have thought the entire matter through and have chosen an action or made a decision that we intend to stand behind come hell or high water.  Doubt weakens our resolve because it represents issues that we have not completely worked through.  Many people make some of their biggest life decisions without thorough consideration.  They get weighed down by “pro versus con” evaluations that in many cases cannot be fully resolved because of the subjective nature of the issue.

Sometimes we have to take resolute action without knowing all of the facts or everything about how something works because of the natural limitations of our situation.   Harry Truman said two simple things about decision making that demonstrate resoluteness well.  First, he said,  “[a]ll my life, whenever it comes time to make a decision, I make it and forget about it.”  In other words, once a decision is made the door is closed to doubt and waffling re-evaluation.  The second thing he said was “[w]henever I make a bum decision, I go out and make another one.”  This is an important observation about resolution.  Being resolved does not mean that you are pig-headed or blind.  It simply means that you have decided on a course of action.  In your best assessment is not effective then it is time to make a new decision.  The point is that resolution is the act of generating focused intentionality in the form of precise choices and targets without allowing your mind to be weakened by doubt and on-going consideration.   It may very well turn out that you were wrong, but intentional action will get to that realization much quicker than a mind divided by a variety of unresolved considerations.  Better to proceed directly to failure than waffle in the mire of no progress at all.  Failure is progress.  It clearly tells you how not to do it.

Thoroughness is an essential element of resolution.  Taking into account the facts and the needs that must be accommodated in a decision starts by taking an mindful  inventory of the landscape that will become the context of the resolute action.  But equally important is knowing how you want the matter to turn out.  Too often, we allow the “pros and cons” and our feeble, half-informed assessment of them to determine the outcome.  This is not resoluteness, this is resignation at best and confusion at worst.

In every challenge, no matter how big or small, one must be clear about what it is he is creating.  A team that goes into a game fearful of its opponent and hoping to avoid a humiliating defeat may keep the score reasonably close, but will never win because it does not have victory as its goal.  Resoluteness is the act of taking a committed stand for a specific outcome.   It is a mental line in the sand, so to speak.  It is to say that the struggle will turn out either with a specific result or failure and nothing in between.  What is resolved is the goal, the absolute effort that will be made and the absence of any other alternative.  It is a state of mind that can be described as pure intentionality.  Resoluteness is not about success or failure.  Until victory of failure is born, it is a purely hypothetical concern.   Therefore, one cannot plan for victory, one can only plan for the struggle.  A person acting resolutely has already decided that she is stepping into the moment with only the intention to undertake certain things.  The outcome will depend on how skillfully the intention was executed.  Therefore, it is better to focus on building a solid bridge nail by nail, board by board rather than daydreaming about what it will be like to cross over it.  If you put integrity in the parts, the whole will take care of itself.

The reason that resoluteness can be so valuable is because it is a very efficient way of thinking.  It is by definition focused.  It is, in fact, the very act of eliminating all of the mental barriers that stands in the way of a choice and the result.  It should never be confused with fanaticism or zealousness.  While these may be highly intentional mental states, they are based on belief and not fact.

A person acting resolutely states what she is going to cause and then looks at every moment for the opportunities and resources to cause that result.   This, too, is part of the focus that comes from this particular state of mind.  The mind is not distracted by the unknown outcome, it focused on the task immediately knowable and in front of you.  You could say that resolute action is biased in favor of the outcome and that would be correct, but it is absolutely objective in its assessment of where one stands in relationship to the present situation and is always working from what is available to be worked into a path to the result.

Resoluteness does not require consideration of all of the alternatives, it merely needs those things that can be innovated into the result within the ethical and efficiency limitations of the moment.  In other words, resolution can seem to start from the end and work backwards.  One picks a goal and then builds the bridge to it using the resources available or those resources that can be repurposed or innovated into an element of the solution.   Because a resolute decision is not trying to do everything, but is only trying to do one thing, it does not need a million ways to get there, it only needs one – preferably the most effective way – but only one way just the same.

A nobility-based organization is a high-performance environment.  That means that we expect our teams to accomplish exceptional results under difficult circumstances, when necessary.  It also means that we expect outstanding failures from time to time.

A person acting resolutely gives her all.  There is no trying.  There is only doing.   Team members assess, decide and act.  If their assessments or actions do not produce the results, then they re-assess, decide and act again.  What they do not do is wallow in indecision – they are always moving toward a goal.

A person who gives their all is absolutely blameless.  They either succeed or fail.  Both success and failure are paths to effectiveness.  Success shows you what works.  Failure shows you what does not work.  When you are aware of both you can move quickly toward the result you wish to produce.

No company has only success.  Both success and failure are equally acceptable results provided that there was total effort.  In such a case, there is nothing to be said about one’s effort because it was maximum — regardless of the outcome.   It is our custom to examine the outcome to see what we can learn from it.  Sometimes we notice skillfulness and acknowledge it and pass it on to our teammates.  Sometimes we notice failure and we study it to identify what we did not know and use this knowledge to create success.  Either way it is just what is so and what there is to manage.

Because we practice mindfulness, there is no hope of looking good or concealing those things that we did not accomplish because we quit or did not keep our word.  Everyone will see through the circumstances to the truth of the matter.  Because we practice compassion and fairness no one will be humiliated, even if they quit or ignored their promise, but because we are resolute, we will not let it slide either.   In short, we are devoted to what is so, whether it benefits us or not.  We are devoted to giving our best effort even if that leads to absolute failure.  We are devoted to graciously coming to the aid of our teammates to cause what we said shall be and we will stand together whether we are successful or get wiped off the face of the earth.

These are not merely the tenets of a company culture, but an entire way of life that we bring not only to the domain of a noble business organization but into our communities, families and circles of friends.  It is what the world can count on from us and what we can count on from each other.   It is only hokey and cynical if we say it is and utterly magnificent if we allow ourselves to transcend our doubt and commit ourselves to it.

We are self-made, self-determined and the first, last and only ones accountable for creating this enterprise, our families and ourselves — because we say so.

Hence, all things rest, in the end, on our resoluteness, our ability to remove doubt and cynicism from our minds, to do what we said we would do in face of a universe that is most indifferent to our cause. 

In the end there is only one guiding principle to a nobility-based organizational design:  life and businesses both need to be tailored to the human spirit because it is the human spirit that powers them.

Karmic Muscle Group: Awareness and Effectiveness
Today’s Exercise: The Virtue Of Fairness

[Author's Note: I founded a company with a friend in 2008.  As I developed the business plan, I put a great deal of thought into what a business organization should aspire to cause in its culture.  I have had a lot of training in practical organizational behavior and had founded organizations in the past that, at least for a number of years, flourished into exceptional, thoughtful and fulfilling cultures.  When I started organizing my company, I wrote a document called The Seven Virtues Of Habitata. I have since posted this document as The Book Of Seven Virtues  on this site.  The main concept of these operating virtues is that work life, home life and community life should be ethically harmonious and designed to empower each other.  If it does not support the life of employees, then a company should not be asking them to do it.  This is not just because it is unethical to ask employees to harm themselves, it is bad for business when a company creates harm.  Managers many not understand the hidden costs of harmful conduct, but it is there in every case.  We run organizations understand this.  The fact of the matter is that a person, a family and an organization each have only one life and it should be focused on fulfillment and the creation of benefit for all.  Producing profit without this integrity is lazy, short-sided and will ultimately costly.

What I found is that what is good for life generally is good for business specifically.  The employees of my company are extraordinary.  We have a very diverse group of people that collaborate as a fierce and passionate family.  We have some unusual practices at Habitata.  Our employees make the final hiring decisions from a pool of qualified candidates based on who they are willing to be responsible for bringing into the family.  The selection must be unanimous.  If they are not willing to fight for the person in the beginning, then we will not have the type of employee we are looking for.  They must be worth taking a stand for.

Our managers cook lunch every Friday for our workers and after lunch the entire company discusses one of the Seven Virtues.  We practice high social impact hiring, meaning that we give preference to the chronically unemployed, veterans, felons and others who really need a job.  We hire people in their 60's and 70's because we believe that experience is the most valuable trait in an employee.  In 2011, after already having to lay off  15% of our employees, we had to make another cut.  This time, we cut me, the company's CEO instead of cutting to other employees.  Our management does not believe that it is appropriate to allow workers to be treated as "disposable" people and so we made sure that the pain was felt at every level of the company and not just at the bottom.  Our employees are so well trained that they can practically run the company without a CEO.

The outcome of these practices is a diverse family of people who believe in what they do and believe in each other.  Absenteeism is nearly non-existent.  It is not unusual to see employees hanging out hours after their shift is over.  We invite all our employees to company networking events and proudly have them explain our company to corporate CEOs and political dignitaries.   They frequently leave mayors, congressmen and senators in shock over how our company not only works, but has survived against impossible odds.  As we say at Habitata: "the impossible we do right away, miracles take a little longer."

For the next seven workout sessions, I am going to offer the Seven Virtues, one by one, in TLB's traditional exercise format.  I hope that you will take them to heart and apply them to your own life.  The Virtues are not only the key to right living and fulfillment, they are good business practices that cause truly great, profitable companies to stand out in a cynical world.

You may want to print out the post about the Virtue of Fairness and keep it with you during this exercise.  It is best to get started on this exercise in the morning.]

Find a quiet place to read and contemplate.  Turn off your cellphone.  (Come on, actually turn it off.  No vibrate, no hoping that it won’t ring. Turn it off as an act to create solitude.)
Establish meditative breathing for 3 minutes.  Take long inhales and long exhales of equal length.  Relax and clear you mind. It is important to eliminate distraction by creating focus on breath.
Take a moment to read about the sixth virtue, fairness, out of  The Book of Seven Virtues  post (see link above) or you can read just about compassion by clicking here.
After you have read about the Virtue of Fairness, take 3 minutes to think about how you are going to practice this virtue all day.  This will require that you pay attention to what you are actually doing and thinking all day.  This will be much harder than you think.  Because we are creatures prone to self-justification, we have a particularly difficult time when we try to treat others with concern equal to our concern of self.
For the rest of the day, we want to focus our attention our relative position in the sharing of power and benefit with others.  We want to encourage our minds to be as concerned about how others make out as much as we are concerned about ourselves.   As a practical rule of thumb, we want to loose our “me” consciousness in favor of an “us” consciousness.

 

Training Note:
Fairness is a word that everyone thinks they know and everyone thinks applies to them and yet, in truth, most of us are lying to ourselves.  The human instinct to survive and seek her own well-being places us in a position of counter-intuition to fairness much of the time.  We rarely hold others in the same space of concern as we do ourselves.  Our gyroscope is set to an orbit around “me” and this is a very hard habit to break.

Fairness is the art of treating everyone with consideration equal to the consideration we give ourselves.  It is an essential foundation of organizational integrity.  It is impossible to maintain a lasting relationship with anyone, let alone manage a group of people, if there are inequities in those relationships.  People will only tolerate injustice for a while and when they reach their limit, unity disintegrates quickly.  A person who believes that they are being treated unfairly may smile at you, but their thoughts begin to embrace negativity and this negativity is targeted at the source of the injustice.  When people become resentful over how they are being treated, enmity begins to breed destruction throughout the matrix of human interconnection.  No relationship, no family and no society can hold together when injustice is unchallenged by a demand for fairness.
 
Karmic Benefits:

Fairness To You May Be Oppression To Another:  a relationship is only fair when both parties agree that it is fair.  That is the whole point of fairness.  Fairness is a creature of agreement.  It is the source of harmony of agreement in a relationship created out of mutual choice.  Because every person is naturally biased, it is impossible for only one side to say that fairness exists.  When two parties cannot agree on what is fair, they can agree to seek out a neutral third party to arbitrate the matter.  When trying to find fairness, it is important that there is agreement as to what the ethical considerations of fairness are and then apply the facts of the case to these principles. In every case, fairness is always a contest against ego, blindness and ignorance.
Fairness Is The Application Of Mutually Accepted Operating Principles: by nature fairness is an abstraction.  It is based on principles that have been applied to a specific set of real-life circumstances.  If there is no agreement on the principles, or if two principles appear to compete, it can become difficult to apply these principles to produce a fair outcome.  It becomes important to be clear about what the accepted principles are trying to accomplish.  At the end of the day, principles are the the architecture of human relationship that map out how we hope to interrelate to each other.  What we are really trying to do is discover the design inside of the confusion of conflict or competing interests.
Nobility Is A Life By Design And Principles Are Its Structural Elements:  the purpose of justice is to keep the spontaneity of human activity aligned with an intentional design for relationship and human organization.   Organizations and even simple relationships work most effectively when they follow a well-articulated design.  Operating principles as complex as a business plan or as simple as marriage vows, define the “law” of relationships.  Follow the design and justice arises, deviate from the design and injustice arises.  Members of a relationship have a right to expect that the mutually accepted principles of the relationship will be served.  Wars have broken out when they are not.

 

It May Be Fiction, But It Is One Heck Of A Karmic Workout.

 

Read The Lotus Blossom, D. M. Kenyon’s fictional account of a teenage girl who turns off her cellphone and enters the very real, but mystical world of Budo warriors.  Humorous, irreverent and heart-wrenching, The Lotus Blossom is an unforgettable tale of a Midwestern teenage girl’s transformation into a budo warrior in the midst of the turmoil of the Information Age.  Available in all digital formats, paperback and soon to be released in hardcover.

Available at :    Amazon.com    Smashwords.com    Barnes & Noble  

 Share Your Experience:

Leave a comment when you have completed the exercise.

Enter your email address to subscribe to TLB’s Daily Karmic Workout:

Delivered by FeedBurner

Karmic Muscle Group: Intentionality
Today’s Exercise: The Virtue Of Grace

[Author's Note: I founded a company with a friend in 2008.  As I developed the business plan, I put a great deal of thought into what a business organization should aspire to cause in its culture.  I have had a lot of training in practical organizational behavior and had founded organizations in the past that, at least for a number of years, flourished into exceptional, thoughtful and fulfilling cultures.  When I started organizing my company, I wrote a document called The Seven Virtues Of Habitata. I have since posted this document as The Book Of Seven Virtues  on this site.  The main concept of these operating virtues is that work life, home life and community life should be ethically harmonious and designed to empower each other.  If it does not support the life of employees, then a company should not be asking them to do it.  This is not just because it is unethical to ask employees to harm themselves, it is bad for business when a company creates harm.  Managers many not understand the hidden costs of harmful conduct, but it is there in every case.  We run organizations understand this.  The fact of the matter is that a person, a family and an organization each have only one life and it should be focused on fulfillment and the creation of benefit for all.  Producing profit without this integrity is lazy, short-sided and will ultimately costly.

What I found is that what is good for life generally is good for business specifically.  The employees of my company are extraordinary.  We have a very diverse group of people that collaborate as a fierce and passionate family.  We have some unusual practices at Habitata.  Our employees make the final hiring decisions from a pool of qualified candidates based on who they are willing to be responsible for bringing into the family.  The selection must be unanimous.  If they are not willing to fight for the person in the beginning, then we will not have the type of employee we are looking for.  They must be worth taking a stand for.

Our managers cook lunch every Friday for our workers and after lunch the entire company discusses one of the Seven Virtues.  We practice high social impact hiring, meaning that we give preference to the chronically unemployed, veterans, felons and others who really need a job.  We hire people in their 60's and 70's because we believe that experience is the most valuable trait in an employee.  In 2011, after already having to lay off  15% of our employees, we had to make another cut.  This time, we cut me, the company's CEO instead of cutting to other employees.  Our management does not believe that it is appropriate to allow workers to be treated as "disposable" people and so we made sure that the pain was felt at every level of the company and not just at the bottom.  Our employees are so well trained that they can practically run the company without a CEO.

The outcome of these practices is a diverse family of people who believe in what they do and believe in each other.  Absenteeism is nearly non-existent.  It is not unusual to see employees hanging out hours after their shift is over.  We invite all our employees to company networking events and proudly have them explain our company to corporate CEOs and political dignitaries.   They frequently leave mayors, congressmen and senators in shock over how our company not only works, but has survived against impossible odds.  As we say at Habitata: "the impossible we do right away, miracles take a little longer."

For the next seven workout sessions, I am going to offer the Seven Virtues, one by one, in TLB's traditional exercise format.  I hope that you will take them to heart and apply them to your own life.  The Virtues are not only the key to right living and fulfillment, they are good business practices that cause truly great, profitable companies to stand out in a cynical world.

You may want to print out the post about the Virtue of Grace and keep it with you during this exercise.  It is best to get started on this exercise in the morning.]

Find a quiet place to read and contemplate.  Turn off your cellphone.  (Come on, actually turn it off.  No vibrate, no hoping that it won’t ring. Turn it off as an act to create solitude.)
Establish meditative breathing for 3 minutes.  Take long inhales and long exhales of equal length.  Relax and clear you mind. It is important to eliminate distraction by creating focus on breath.
Take a moment to read about the fifth virtue, grace, out of The Book of Seven Virtues post (see link above) or you can read just about compassion by clicking here.
After you have read about the Virtue of Grace, take 3 minutes to think about how you are going to practice this virtue all day.  This will require that you pay attention to what you are actually doing and thinking all day.  This will be much harder than you think.  We spend a considerable portion of our day steeped in self-concern, but worse, most of our actions are propelled by reasons why.  Grace is the great karmic interrupter – it is an expression of pure intention disconnected from reasons why.  It is kindness purely for the sake of kindness and does not require preconditions.
For the rest of the day, we want to focus our attention on what can be contributed to people around us for no reason whatsoever.   Unlike compassion, we are not looking to respond to the condition to others, but rather simply contribute for contribution’s sake.  Do not wander off.  The focus here is on what difference you can make regardless of a reason or a motive.  This is pure creation.

 

Training Note:
Grace is a word that has all but disappeared from our language except to describe elegant movement.   It’s origins are in the Latin grātia meaning “favor, kindness, esteem” and is a derivative of grātus meaning “pleasing”.  In many European languages, grace is the root concept for saying “thank you” such as gratzi in Italian or gracias in Spanish.  The notion of grace is to please someone and show them that you hold them in high regard.  Grace is the art of making people feel valued for no reason whatsoever.  You do not earn an act of grace.  Grace is bestowed out of pure generosity and intention and does not respond to conditions.

Grace also means “mercy, clemency or pardon”, again, notions of generosity that is not required by the circumstances.  It is the disconnection for cause and effect that makes grace a particularly powerful virtue.  Because it is born out of pure intention and not concocted from rational reaction to conditions, it has the power to disrupt destructive chains of events.   Grace has stopped wars.  When used powerfully, it can interrupt the domino effect of events can cause peace simply because there was the presence of mind to impose grace.

 When used in conjunction of the other virtues, especially skillfulness, grace can be a force of incredible effectiveness in an organization.  It strikes at the heart of harmony like a lightening bolt and can disrupt destructive exchanges and arguments.   Grace is the foundation of truly liberated thinking because it depend on nothing but the will to express grace itself.
 
Karmic Benefits:

Stepping Out Of The Stream:   most of the time, we are being swept away by the circumstances of our lives.  We live mostly as a reaction to conditions, rather than a cause.  When someone is rude to us, we are justified in an indignant response, but when we choose to show kindness, manners and good breeding, we destroy the animosity that was unleashed by the thoughtlessness of others.  This is a nearly magical power in a world where most people are barely aware of impact of what they do or say.  This is why grace  is key to true nobility.
The Creative Foundation Of Nobility: if nobility is the art of living a life on principle, grace becomes one of the  most power tools of the art.  It is born of pure intention and creativity and can be imposed in any circumstances, though skillfulness would have us use grace when it is most likely to be recognized by others and, hence, most effective.  Grace is generosity simply because “I said so” and for this reason is often attributed to divine behavior in many cultures.
Providing What Is Needed When It Is Needed Most:  it is easy to be swept away in torrent of circumstances, especially when emotions are agitated.  Grace can be a meditation on being that has the mind resist the temptation to be reactionary and maintain a presence of mind to spot the opportunity for unconditioned generosity.  Sometimes, all the world needs is a single act of grace to derail a freight train of destructive thinking and put life back on the more wholesome tracks.

 

It May Be Fiction, But It Is One Heck Of A Karmic Workout.

 

Read The Lotus Blossom, D. M. Kenyon’s fictional account of a teenage girl who turns off her cellphone and enters the very real, but mystical world of Budo warriors.  Humorous, irreverent and heart-wrenching, The Lotus Blossom is an unforgettable tale of a Midwestern teenage girl’s transformation into a budo warrior in the midst of the turmoil of the Information Age.  Available in all digital formats, paperback and soon to be released in hardcover.

Available at :    Amazon.com    Smashwords.com    Barnes & Noble  

 
Share Your Experience:

Leave a comment when you have completed the exercise.

Enter your email address to subscribe to TLB’s Daily Karmic Workout:



Delivered by FeedBurner

By D. M. Kenyon

I live with my wife in old house under a canopy of trees in the center of an old French city on the banks of the Mississippi River.  The streets in my neighborhood are curved which adds a certain effervescence to an evening walk.  Your eye do not spot objects on the horizon that grow ever larger upon your approach, but rather the scenery pops out newly in front of you as you stroll along to rediscover what is just around the bend.

I am the least famous writer who has lived in this neighborhood.  Howard Nemerov lived here.  He won the National Book Award for poetry and the Pulitzer Prize.  He wrote a poem called Walking Down Westgate In The Fall.  When I sit on my front porch in the evening, I look out over that street.  It is lovely in the fall.  Stanley Elkin lived here too.  He won the National Book Critics Circle Award, not once, but twice and was a finalist for the National Book award in 1991. That bit about the curved street was inspired by something he once said about our neighborhood.  It is shamelessly arrogant of me to even mention either of these writers in a sentence wherein I call myself a writer “too”.

We are, here in Parkview, hidden away under oaks and sycamores and cast iron street lamps of a style not seen in a century.  We are three blocks from Forest Park, second in size only, at least in the United States, to Central Park in New York City.  There are gorillas and cheetahs that live there in the zoo and paintings of Monet and Rembrandt in the museum next door.   A bronze statue of Saint Louis on horseback sits atop Art Hill overlooking a reflecting pool with fountains that look more germane to Paris than the American Midwest.

At the back our house is small yard with gardens that my wife tends to on the weekend as therapy to relieve the stresses of our entrepreneurial ventures.  There is a tiny pond under a stand of bamboo that is uninhabited because the raccoons have eaten all the koi.  My dog, Diego, gets his morning exercise by dashing out of the back door to scare the hell of out of the many rabbits that feed in our back yard.  They seem to recover from the daily dose of canine shock and awe because they come back every morning.  I have seen wild turkeys here strutting across my neighbors’ lawn on more than one occasion.  It has been a tough year for the squirrels in Parkview.  Normally, they are as plentiful as children in a school yard, but this year, I have only seen two all spring.  This can only mean one of two things – hawks or owls.

We have a great many types of birds here that one would not expect.  Downtown, Peregrine falcons nest on the tops of our largest office buildings swooping down to snatch pigeons and keeping the city free of rats and mice.  Up the river just a few miles, countless Bald Eagles nest upon the rocks of the bluffs overlooking the Mississippi and can be seen diving into the river to snatch fish.   Perhaps the oddest of our ornithological wonders are the pelicans.  They came up the river during the flood of 1993 when the Mississippi could have been reasonably confused for the ocean from the air.  They float in great pods now on Alton Pool where the river spreads out just downriver from the confluence of the Illinois River and upstream from the confluence of the Missouri.

At the back of my house is an old deck that desperately needs to be replaced.  A couple of years ago, my wife and I planted a wisteria tree that has since crawled all over the railings.  Last year, we suspended clothes line from an overhead rail to the base of our sleeping porch and began to weave the wisteria brambles into a canopy for shade.  We a have since put up strings of small round lights that gives our natural roof a magical glow at night.  It gets awfully hot in Missouri in the summer, so to make our little haven comfortable, we have added a fan that makes the table under the blanket of wisteria tolerable on most summer nights.  I have taken a liking to working at the metal mesh patio table at night.  Our urban woods come alive after dark and I often am distracted by all manner of natural wonders.  Last night, an inch worm landed on the screen of laptop and I watched it for half an hour marveling at how such small creature could manage such spritely animation with so small a brain.

A few weeks ago, as I was sitting under the canopy sipping on a glass of ice tea with a dash of mint freshly picked from the garden, I heard a chirp from inside a particularly think cloud of wisteria  in the canopy and looked up to see through the leaves a robin feeding chicks not five feet away.  This nest was so well hidden that I had not noticed it until a hungry chick had made a plea for food.  On closer inspection, I noticed that there were not one, but two chicks and I was struck by a moment of foreboding.  Robins make nests big enough for a single chick at maturity, but lay multiple eggs.  It is part of the plan that the strongest chick will survive and the weaker ones will fall out of the nest and perish.  The nest, is by design, a natural device by which to select the strong and intentionally cast out the weak.  But me, being homo sapien sapien, a creature that by the merit of his second sapien possesses the ability to be aware that I am aware; a creature that speculates and thinks abstractly with utter disregard for the confines of nature and so I resolved that I would keep watch for a falling chick and do what I could to save it.

Yesterday morning, as I let Diego out to wreak havoc on the rabbits, walked along the edge of the deck and discovered that nature had thwarted my rational plan to cheat death.  There on the lawn, dead for hours, was the weaker chick.  Nature had made its choice in the night.  Gently, I looked through the leaves of the wisteria and was surprised to see how large the surviving check had become.  It had lost most of its down in favor of fully developed feathers in just a few weeks and was flapping its wings to make them strong enough for flight.  Her breast feathers were speckled indicating her gender.  Males have breast feathers of pumpkin orange.  The dead chick had also been a female.  Sisters.

Last night, while I pecked at my laptop under the strands of lights threaded into the canopy of vines and leaves, I heard a small thump on the deck and looked down to see that the robin chick had fallen out of bed.  I quickly went inside for a pair of gloves, remembering something from my childhood that if you touched a baby bird with your bare hands that the lingering human scent would cause the parents to ignore it, and, therefore, covered my hands as I lifted the chick back into the nest.  Flustered, it flapped and squawked and within a few seconds fell out of the nest again.  Once more, I lifted the chick back into the nest trying, in my inept human way, to encourage it to settle down.  I would have sang it to sleep if I had have thought for one minute that this would have worked.  It only occasionally worked with my own agitated children years ago.  My efforts were of no avail. Not even a minute later the chick flopped to the deck having been quite mistaken about her ability to fly.

I went to the basement and retrieved a milk crate and a handful of clean rags.  I quickly fashioned a nest in the crate and returned to the deck to find that the chick had now fallen underneath the steps.  It has been years since I crawled through the dirt.  I seem to recall that at one time this was great fun, but my memory of the amusement of it has grown quite faint.  After some struggle, I retrieved the chick and lowered her into her new accommodations and went out to the garden with a flash light and a shovel to find food.

Within a few minutes, I returned to find the chick nestled in the hollow that I had formed in the pile of rags and was resting peacefully.  Placed a few worms in the crate and returned to my laptop to continue my work and keep an eye out for predators, as if I could see into the night.   An hour or so later, I looked in upon my newly adopted daughter and found that she had eaten two of the worms.  This encouraged me greatly.  In the first place, it meant that she could eat whole worms, an indication that she was getting close to being able to survive in the wild.  In the second place, it meant that she would build the strength to possibly overcome the trauma of the evening’s events.   As I returned to my computer, I found myself giving her a name, “Henrietta”, only to sit in wonder about why human beings, children of the second sapien, must give everything a name so that we can understand it inside the abstract awareness of our own thinking.  I was suddenly appalled by how far removed from this wild thing I really was.  I had named it like a child, thought of it as child, and done my damnedest to keep it safe and apart from the nature from which she came.   As I sat there under my sculpted wisteria adorned with artificial lights, I pondered how my second sapien monkey brain, reduced everything to thoughts about instead of relationship with the nature of living beings.

I debated for an hour whether I should bring the crate with my newly beloved Henrietta into the house for the night.  It was chilly last night in St. Louis.  I would have made my own children put on a jacket.  I decided that my anthropomorphizing of robin chick was threatening the bounds of sanity and resolved that she would stay outside in the crate nestled in her nest of rags.  I dug for more worms and left them in the crate for an early morning snack.  I placed the crate high up off the deck to keep the chick safe from ground predators and placed a second crate on top to keep her safe from owls.

I woke up late this morning largely due to my late night on the deck.  When I came downstairs and went out to dig for more worms, Henrietta was laying upside down in the crate.  She had died during the night, from what I cannot say.  I am sure a wildlife expert would find many faults in my effort to save her.  Despite my second sapien, I was not able to cheat nature.   Chicks that fall from their nest die.  That is how life works.  Only a creature of the second sapien lives in denial of death.  Perhaps this is because our awareness of awareness causes us to see death as loss.  To the parents of these two dead chicks, it is simply how it turned out and they move on, never ceasing to be robins and never needing therapy to adjust their second sapien.  It is only we humans that find death to a problem.  Robins lay two eggs, but build their nests for one chick.  They participate in the sorting of the weak from the strong presumably without bearing the self-evaluation of what it is to be weak or strong, dead or alive.   It is their way.  Only creatures born with the curse of abstract thinking, the second sapien, can find fault with the cycle of life that has existed for millions of years.  Only we murder.  Only we destroy our planet in the name of convenient transportation and cheap tennis shoes.    All the while, we marvel at how smart we are.  We extol the virtues of being clever enough to fabricate a self.  And yet, at the end of the day, we are just as dead as Henrietta – though we can lay claim to the delusion that we understand it.  Perhaps what there is to do is shut up and live and shut up and die.

Perhaps our second sapien merely fouls our ability to just be.   Perhaps we are the ignorant ones, the confused ones, the deluded ones.  And yet, I have never seen a robin come to the aid of any other living species.

“I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself.

A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough

without ever having felt sorry for itself.”

D. H. Lawrence