Rules Of Engagement

Hello, Cadre. I'm hoping you can hear the music. I decided this week, yes, I will have Walk On Music. This is called All God's Children by Bruce Springsteen. It's on one of the seven new albums he put out at the end of June. It's from the soundtrack to a movie that never got made that he was commissioned for called Faithless. It's my favorite album of the seven, I can tell you that much. And. Computer, stop. You just get a taste of it. Apparently, the rumor is that there is a book called Saint Agnes Stand, which I have back here, which I bought, that Martin Scorsese optioned to make a film out of.

And it's rumored that that is the film. A spiritual western. Good morning. Speak Wonder. Good morning, Amar. Good night. Good morning, Rose. Good morning, Nikki. That. That's the film. So I'm just gonna read the book anyway. I love the music so much. I would give a lot of money to see the movie that that music goes to that Bruce wrote. But I'm gonna make that movie in my head, and I'm gonna read the book, I think. So I have a funny confession to make. This live stream, I call it Rules of Engagement.

Good morning, updates. This live stream is called Rules of Engagement because as we all know, I have these rules of engagement and guidelines that I actually have written down and live by and I add to occasionally and someday. Well, I don't know what I'm going to do with them in addition to live by them, but I think I'm going to find a way to share them in addition to this. The book is called Saint Agnes Stand. Hang on now. We know for a fact. We know for. By Eidson E I D S O N I had to buy mine on ebay.

It's out of print. We know for a fact that Scorsese optioned this book and had a screenplay made out of it. We know that for a fact. It is not a fact that this is the book that Bruce was commissioned. This was the screenplay that Bruce was commissioned to write the music for. But when you read the description of this, it sounds very much. It's based on this guy's actually his family history. Deep in the desert, an injured outlaw heading for freedom in California. Right. And there's a song about getting to the water.

Stumbles across the trapped survivors of an Apache ambush. Three nuns and seven orphaned children. 6. Sister St. Agnes is convinced that Nat Swanson has been sent by God to rescue them. So I could go on, but it kind of fits with the music. That we hear. So. And Bruce said there was a book and a screenplay. Rules of engagement is a first line of a haiku. I can, you know, I am an award winning haiku person. I have written award winning haiku. How'd that happen, you might ask yourself. Well, when you're mayor, you get to do lots of things.

And if you're from Minnesota, you are aware that hot dish is a thing. And northeast Minneapolis neighborhoods have a hot dish competition. And then people, I mean, it's great. And you get to eat all this hot. I got to be a judge one year, but they also, they also, excuse me. This year at least they had a haiku competition. And it was haiku about hot dish. Haiku in general. Haiku about northeast Minneapolis, I think. And I can write haiku at the drop of a hat. I'm not saying they're good, but I can do 5, 7, 5 very easily.

I used to do it to bug my security director when we were in the car. I would write spontaneous haiku about him in the car. It just irritated the h*** out of him, which made me laugh. So I won. I won a book of poetry of some kind. It's in the other room. So I'm a award winning haiku artist. Thank you so much, Nikki. And I saw that you want a poster? Someday I will put them in a form that I can share with people. At the very least, my brother would like that as well. But it just keeps growing and changing, which is what I'm going to talk about today because I realized something.

Hot dish haiku. Yes. What about a Hemingway story? I'm not sure that made me think of a somewhat. It's not blue. I think there are a lot of women here. Dennis Miller, before he was super conservative, you know, was on Saturday Night Live and great comedian. And I memorized his Off White album. And he once referred to somebody having more periods than a Hemingway novel. And that's all the women in the commercials have more periods than a Hemingway novel, which made me laugh because they're all, you know, he has short sentences.

So what's a haiku? What's haiku dish? Well, hot dish was the idea casserole that they call it everywhere else in the world. But hot dish, you know, I don't know, noodles and tater tots and soup and meat and sauce and stuff. Oh, Hemingway story is this. Oh, a Hemingway story with six words as Nikki just put in the chat. I see baby shoes. Never. Baby shoes for sale. Never worn. Yes. Okay. That was a better reference than me Just referencing Dennis Miller's not safe for work humor, I guess. Well, safe for work.

I don't know why it wouldn't be Tater Tot Hot Dishes Superior. I agree. So I love this intro and this chat. And yes, writing workshops are fun and you could do a what are your own rules of engagement workshop. Actually, we could do have everybody write their own rules of engagement. I'm happy to offer mine as tribute, but mine has grown and changed over time. I started with Gretchen Rubens and then made them my own. Here's the thing. So the theme on Cadre for August is Savor. And this week is Savor the Ordinary.

And I was looking at all my rules of engagement and all my guidelines, and I didn't have anything that quite fit the topic, which is very on brand for me. Very on brand for me. I don't like. It's not that I don't like. I don't vibe with the concept of mindfulness. I find it irritating and that is a terrible thing to admit because it's very popular and it's supposed to be very good for me. But savoring the ordinary is not the same thing as mindfulness. Right. It's just really appreciating the ordinary.

And I'm very, very good at that. I've been thinking about that lately because I've realized I struggle with the sit still meditation. I do writing meditations, which are great, but I often do what I call adventure walks. I'm going to turn on a fan here. I often do adventure walks, and an adventure walk is just walking around my neighborhood, seeing what I can see. And I am guessing that that falls into the category of savoring the ordinary. I will just guess that that falls into the category of savoring my ordinary.

I look at the way the light comes through the trees. Trees are one of my favorite things on earth, literally. And it's very fun to I shut the door and I'm getting all glowy because it's just really hot in here. I forgot to turn on the air conditioning, so now I have a fan right on me. I look at the dogs because I love dogs. I look at details on buildings. Sometimes I'll stare at the sky, see what the sky is doing. I'll just wander around doing that. I call it an adventure walk. I'll do them as a reset in the late afternoon often.

And I have a feeling that smacks of mindfulness. I have a feeling that that smacks of savoring the ordinary. But I have never bothered to write it down. I've never bothered to say, oh, that's one of my rules of engagement. So I'm going to start thinking about what rule of engagement do I have around that? Because for me, the rules of engagement sometimes are ones I would like to adopt, but sometimes they are noticing what I've already adopted. Some of the rules of engagement are just. I've been noticing.

I do that and clearly it guides my life. Like, love what you love or celebrate the victory in hand. I just do that. And I wrote it down to remember to do that in case I was tempted to forget. But this thing about savoring, savor the ordinary. I really like it. I like it much better than somebody telling me to practice mindfulness, which is just. Can you see, like, the hesitation and irritation I have just of the concept, which is so terrifying because some of the leaders of mindfulness I admire a great deal and things they have to say about it, I appreciate.

But it just pushes some button I have that people tell me to be mindful. But here is the closest thing that I can think of that it occurred to me. I don't have either a guideline or a rule of engagement around. I have the. I have the. I have the guideline, help helps. Help helps. Getting help helps. It helps me get out of my solo functioning. Here's another one I discovered, and I've talked about fun a lot here, because fun is. Well, this is what I was going to say. Fun is fun. That is one of my guidelines for life.

Maybe it's a rule of engagement is to pursue fun, but the guideline is fun is fun. Now, in 2022, I chose fun as my word of the year. And I came up with an entire list of fun stuff to do that year. And I started going gung ho to do them because fun is fun. And that's how I discovered, excuse me, that my nervous system, my body responded at the time to feeling good, as though it were a threat. Which is why I read the Body Keeps the score three pages at a time, throwing it at the wall when I was done and swearing at Bessel Van der Kolk for writing it.

Fun is fun. But. And that's. That's started me on a journey. I got a whole new therapist, right? I started doing brain spotting. It was emdr. Since I have a history of seizures, EMDR isn't actually counterindicated for that, but some people worry that it is. So my EMDR person was like, let's just do brain spotting. And I had a great experience with brain spotting. I have to say, it really, really helped me integrate a lot of myself, things that had been disassembled as a young person. I went through a great deal of significant trauma as a young person, was reassembled in ways that even I could tell, you know?

And I have been more present ever since. And I did a lot of work. I just. I did not know that my year of fun was going to be my year of healing from trauma or last five years, three years, four years, but it really was. And I refused to stop having fun. I checked off my list that year, and I've done a list every year since. Maybe someday we could talk about what my 25 and 25 fun list is and how much I have left to go. But fun is fun, and I've talked about what's fun for me may not be fun for you.

And one of the markers of advancing in my life is just really owning what I think is fun, regardless of what other people think about it, Right? And, like, I really want to go to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, because I love the Gettysburg Address. I'm not a big Civil War historian, but there's something about the Gettysburg Address that I find very, very powerful. And I think it's. I'm gonna let it suck me into being more of a Civil War historian just for fun. I am very interested. Good morning. Yes.

Year of fun. Do it. Chester A. Arthur, 21st President of the United States. Random president to have be my niche president, but he totally is. And there's about to be a miniseries, I think it's going to come out this fall on Netflix. It's already been filmed about the assassination of James Garfield, which is how Chester Arthur became president. And so it's happening, and I'm very excited. Nick Offerman is playing Chester Arthur, and I have a friend who is also into Chester Arthur. We were friends for 10 years before we found this out.

And so we're doing a little podcast. So stay tuned, stay tuned. But Fun is Fun is the closest thing I think I have to a guideline about savoring the ordinary, because these adventure walks that I do are very fun for me, but they are not out of the ordinary. Is my neighborhood, right? I moved recently, so doing adventure walks in this neighborhood is very different than doing them five years in to my old neighborhood. But it's still fun, right? There's an Acorn Park. There's a giant gazebo with an acorn top a half a block away from where I live right now.

And I walk by it a lot. And when I say I love trees. I can see it from here. When we look from our balcony and out the window, there's an apartment complex that, that has a. It's built like a horseshoe. And in the middle of that horseshoe there's a very tall tree. Like it's a notably tall tree on the horizon. And so one day I just went for a walk to find that tree and I said, I stood with my back to the tree and I took a whole bunch of pictures and said, hello, I love trees. Again, love what you love.

Fun is fun. That was fun for me. Like someday I'll go back and say hi to the tree again. It's a little tricky to find and from where I am just because I don't have a great sense of direction. But I found that tree. It was very clear what the tree was. So, yes, go on adventure walks. I used to do them with a niece and nephew. Like we'd all be bored at Thanksgiving, you know, when they were like 10 and 7 or something. I'd be like, let's go for an adventure walk. And we'd just walk around my parents neighborhood and we'd point out things that we could see.

So. So this is my confession. I am gonna, you know, savor. I. I love to savor things. I'm actually not bad at it. But I have a feeling I don't have a lot of rules of engagement about really being present in my life and loving it a lot, which is very on brand for me, I have to say. And so we will learn together this month of August, talking about savoring things, I guess. So one last thing I'll say is I am doing, on Wednesday night, I'm doing a pilot for white women about how to use our voices in this time.

And it's just a pilot. It's going to be small. I don't think it'll be more than eight. I could go up to 10, but I don't think it'll be more than eight. And I'm nervous and excited about it and because I'm just finding ways to offer what I can to the world. So if you're interested in that, if you're a white woman and you're interested in that, find me on the app or somewhere, let me know, we can talk about it. But I'll probably be offering one again in September, maybe October. So that's what I got for this week.

Savor the ordinary. Or even notice that it's worth doing. Start from there. Let's see, I bought a big oversized children's book titled the Last Tree. Ooh, that sounds great. That sounds like something I would like. I'm really. I love trees. I'm thinking about putting together a travel itinerary for myself to see. See famous trees, just like to know where they are. Like, I saw baobab trees in Tanzania, and it was huge for me. I mean, seeing giraffes was number one thing, but I didn't realize seeing the baobab, like, in person, putting my back against one, I just.

I like to put my whole back against a tree was amazing. And I want to go to Joshua Tree because it's got tree in the name and I've never been. And there are other famous trees all around the world, and I would like to go see them. Them or. And when I travel, maybe I could look up. Like, I just was in Albuquerque. I could have looked up if there were famous trees in Albuquerque, but I didn't. I used to live there. So anyway, that's what I got for you this week. Love what you love. I love Chester Arthur and trees among a whole host of other things.

And savor the ordinary, whatever that means for you. And if it doesn't mean anything to you, which it really didn't until. Until I was invited to think about it today. Today. Let's find out what it means and tell me how it goes. I am sure I would love that book, too. Speak Wonder so I may look it up. All right, everybody. It is my husband's birthday today, so if you see him or talk to him, let him know. And I hope you have a great week and enjoy that primal screen therapy.