It’s the Fourth of July and for the past three days the eager locals have been making loud test explosions to make sure that tonight their fireworks will detonate properly.

Pop Pop Pop whiiiiine  BLAM.  Now that it’s finally getting dark on the actual holiday, all young at heart are lighting their incendiary devices.  Already I have heard two fire engine sirens…

My dog used to freak out on the Fourth, but she’s 14 and deaf now, so it’s of little interest any more. I hate to think what it would be like for someone with PTSD.

The last time we bought fireworks was probably ten years ago - still with a teenage boy at home. I couldn’t believe how much the coolest ones cost.  I think we spent about a hundred bucks.

My ex spent it; I never would have…  I remember watching fireworks being made when I visited China in 1981.  Families sat on the floor in their huts assembling the sticks and explosive materials, wrapping them in colorful papers.  KIds as young as six or seven helping out.  That pretty much cured me.

Last night I watched “Transformation: the Life and Legacy of Werner Erhard.” The film included scenes of the est training in San Francisco from the early 1970s and recent interviews with Werner, as well as with former well-known participants, observers and critics.

I “did the training” in early 1972 when Werner was still leading most of it. I also took several graduate seminars, the six-day course and a seminar leaders training program with him, so the film was very much déjà vu – and it brought home to me the enormity of Werner’s impact not only on my life and the lives of hundreds of thousands of others, but on the fabric of our culture today.

Although the training was brutal, in the sense that we were expected to stay in the room, fully alert and attentive to the proceedings for excruciatingly long hours without food or bathroom breaks, I found it riveting. Werner was the sharpest, most observant and articulate person I’d ever met. His (what I would call) dharma talks and his interactions with individual participants took my breath away.

Particularly his interactions with participants who complained or challenged him. His bullshit detector was acute and he’d drill down to the person’s main issue (or “racket”) in a matter of minutes, sometimes seconds. And then he’d bear down one-on-one until suddenly you could see the light bulb come on and an astonished smile creep across the person’s face.

Busted. And everyone in the room could tell that something major had shifted.

For every individual he worked with, fifty or a hundred or three hundred more of us could insert our own version of racket and get a similar shift. Light bulbs popping all over the room.

My sense was that Werner never got into one of these tussles without being totally clear that the other person was capable of moving through it to the other side, where joy and freedom waited. Where someone else saw impasse, he saw possibility.

He wanted us to get out of our thinking mind and into direct experience so we would get that what is is, and what isn’t isn’t. (est in Latin means “it is”). Not until we accept what is (as opposed to what we wished it were or thought it should be) do we have the power of choice about our response.

What is isn’t good or bad, it just is.  It’s a Taoist or Buddhist perspective translated for the westerner.

I’m not always there, but since this shift in perspective I’ve been able to weather life with much greater equanimity, greater tolerance, and greater respect for the unique gifts of others.

It’s not like I’ve achieved Samadhi… but most of the time I experience life with open arms. Again, thank you Werner.

prolific: adj. producing abundant works, results, or offspring

prolix: adj. wordy and tedious

Since I began this blog April 6 of this year, I have created 81 posts. Whether I’ve been prolific or prolix is up to you to decide. I’m having fun and (almost) don’t care what you think.

My purpose in having a blog was/is to practice, practice, practice the art of writing. For years I’d been saying that writing was a priority, but I wasn’t doing it, so mission accomplishing.

Am I saner as a result of such prolific posting? Probably not. But evidently some people are.

Last week Newsweek reported that some mental health experts believe that the confessional blog has therapeutic power, and are incorporating it into their treatment plans.

They say that blogs are a step up from plain old diaries, chiefly because of the built-in audience. We feel someone is listening. Someone who sympathizes. Because of the anonymity, “It’s high intimacy with low vulnerability.”

This blog is definitely a step up from diarying for me. My diary is where I whine or process material not fit for human consumption. In fact, the other day as part of my paring down process I opened a box of old journals and came darned close to tossing out the lot of them. Such drivel.

Why do you blog?

Pellucid: admitting the maximum amount of light; transparent, translucent

It’s been HOT and sunny here for several days. The sun has been rare in the Pacific Northwest in recent months, so I hadn’t noticed how filthy my windows were.

I was blind, but now I see. Sort of. Pellucid they ain’t.

Feng shui doesn’t like dirty windows.

“Somebody has GOT to wash those windows,” I said to my staff, standing very close by.

“Yes, boss,” I replied, saluting smartly. “As soon as you pay me for fifty years of back wages.”

I love Toyotas. I had a 1988 Camry station wagon for ten years till I bought my current Toyota, a 1998 Sienna MINIvan. Except it’s not so mini. In terms of gazzling (my new word for gas-guzzling), it’s MAXI - 19 mpg. A tankful will probably cost me $80 this week. Last tank was $70. (I’m trying to use it as little as possible…).

My friends who have Priuses love them. They got theirs when they weren’t quite so scarce and when trading in their SUVs for them was a viable option. One of these years I hope to be able to afford one. Meanwhile, I need to learn to drive differently.

For starters, I need to leave for my destination BEFORE I’m due there… Well before. Novel idea.

An article in today’s NY Times describes other options: how to “Be a Prius:“

In Europe, where gas prices are often more than twice what they are here, eco-driving has become mandatory in the driving curriculums in Germany, Sweden and, most recently, Britain. Beginning drivers are taught to avoid idling, unnecessary braking and jackrabbit starts at traffic lights, among other lessons that can bring fuel savings to as high as 25 percent.

Other fuel-saving tips include carefully timing one’s approach to slowing traffic or red signals and not accelerating toward a “stale green,” that is, a signal that’s about to change…..

Consider also driving less aggressively. An Australian study found that an “aggressively” driven vehicle saved a mere five minutes over a 94-minute course compared with a “smoothly” driven vehicle — but the smooth car used 30 percent less fuel.

He also suggests policy changes, like replacing stops with roundabouts, requiring drivers take a driving efficiency course, and encouraging less driving thru tax credits for miles not driven or miles on public transit.

I loved this recent New Yorker cover by the French cartoonist Jean-Jacques Sempé. The woman emerges from her country home with clippers in hand to snip an armload of posies. Someone has been there ahead of her to water and otherwise tend the garden, so all she has to do is cut and arrange the flowers.

Not a bad life.

Once a year I have an ecstatic experience like this - the day after my garden helper and I have hacked back a truckload of overgrown shrubs and he has spread dark compost over the bare patches where weeds once thrived.

This morning was the morning when I was able to emerge from the house, clippers in hand, with no task before me but to snip posies for a big bouquet. Oh happy day.

Tomorrow I’ll be back to hauling hoses, deadheading, weeding, fussing.

OK. I am cheating. I couldn’t think of any appropriate P-word to describe Bill Gates’ departure from the helm of Microsoft.

I’ve been following him and his company since the early 1980s. I bought my first computer in 1980, a Vector Graphics with 1 floppy drive (48k!) and 48k RAM. Yes. kilobytes. This puppy ran the CP/M operating system and did all sorts of amazing things with very little.

Then Mr. Gates bought CP/M and transmogrified it into MS-DOS, which we CP/M users thought was a trainwreck. Some still feel that the numbers of cars in the trainwreck just increase with each new release of Windows, but that’s a topic for another day.

Gates made jillions of dollars, and I for one am glad that I bought a little stock in the 80s. It’s kept me off the streets.

Over the years, he has softened (Melinda’s influence? lower testosterone levels? simple maturity?) and is now the most powerful and generous philanthropist known.

He also seems to have developed a sense of humor about himself. This is the farewell video, which I think is totally hilarious.

I dwell in Possibility -
A fairer House than Prose -
More numerous of Windows -
Superior - for Doors

Of Chambers as the Cedars -
Impregnable of Eye -
And for an Everlasting Roof -
The Gambrels of the Sky -

Of Visitors - the fairest-
For Occupation - This -
The spreading wide my narrow Hands -
To gather Paradise -

Emily Dickinson’s poem opens Benjamin and Rosamund Zander’s book, The Art of Possibility:Transforming Professional and Personal Life. He’s a conductor and she’s a therapist. The book is published by the Harvard Business School Press - indicating this is no ordinary self-help or creativity book.

I read th Art of Possibility when it came out in 2002. LOVED it. Even gave it as gifts to a few people.

Then yesterday the video of Ben Zander’s talk at the TED conference (3/200 was finally uploaded to the TED site so non-attendees could watch it. I was so moved and inspired that I hauled the book off the shelf and have been re-reading it.

First. You. Must. Watch. The Video of his talk. The subject is ostensibly about getting everyone to recognize that they love classical music. And he achieves that goal with his Chopin demo.

But more than that his talk is about possibility - and how the vision of possibility can transform your life. His own transformation came in the 80’s when he realized that the conductor doesn’t make a sound. For his power, he depends on his ability to make other people powerful. It’s like chiseling away the marble to reveal the statue of David within.

My job was to awaken possibility in other people. How do you know you’re doing it? You look at their eyes. If their eyes are shining, you know you’re doing it. If they’re not shining, ask yourself, who am I being that their eyes are not shining?? As a parent you can ask yourself the same question if your children’s eyes arent’ shining.

When you can see possibility and believe in it passionately, you can move mountains:

The mark of a leader is that he not doubt for one moment the capacity of the people he’s leading to realize whatever he’s dreaming. Imagine if Martin Luther King had said, “I have a dream…. but on second thought, I’m not sure if they’re up to it…”

Lucky for me, the Art of Possibility is littered (alitered?) with a plethora of plummy p-words: perfect, perception, perspective, peril, prejudice, pattern, posture, profits, population, pain…. (for starters), so I shall be touching on some of their pointers in the coming couple of weeks.

Second. Read. The. Book. Let’s talk about it.

Pedestrian: a person traveling on foot; a walker, esp. on city streets. Undistinguished, ordinary, dull.

The two main definitions of “pedestrian” are at odds with each other, in my experience. Sure, the most ordinary way human beings move through space is on foot, walking. We walk from here to there all day long, not even thinking about it.

But walking is hardly dull. How better to move through a neighborhood than on foot? You see and hear and smell things you miss at a faster pace. You meet other people face to face, maybe even have a little chat.

Compared to a car, biking is more experiential too, but you move pretty fast and need to keep your eye on the road.

Portland is designed for walking. Most neighborhoods have a central area with shops that provide basic services within easy walking distance. You feel safer on the sidewalks because they’re nicely separated from the street by planter strips - often with trees.

Perhaps because Vancouver, WA (where I live) was primarily rural until quite recently, sidewalks are rare except for downtown. On some of our lovely country roads cars may be occasional, but they go fast and a pedestrian often has to dive for the ditch to stay alive.

For years developers ruled in Clark County. They didn’t want no stinkin’ sidewalks because it added expense they couldn’t easily recapture. Furthermore, cars rule in rural and suburban America - only fools and poor people walk.

Now the county planners are wising up and requiring new developments to incluede sidewalks, but the result  is still a mishmash. You’ll have 100 feet of sidewalk along the roadway, then 1/4 mile without, then another couple hundred feet with sidewalk, etc etc. Maybe ten years from now it will be continuous, but meanwhile these pathetic little strips only emphasize our lack of foresight.

On Monday The Oregonian ran a front page story on the Sunday-Parkways car-free streets event. Interestingly the photo was of a mob of assorted human powered wheeled contraptions - mostly bikes, but also strollers and tricycles. My pedestrian friend and I started early enough that we weren’t run over. But for that couple of hours, this pedestrian loved being king of the road.

Visitors to Portland with the teeniest smidge of intellectual curiosity must make a pilgrimage to Powells Books - a behemoth store that takes up a full city block but feels like a rabbit warren of intimate spaces instead of the vast space it really is.

Aside from being able to find almost any book on almost any subject, they also BUY books. What a great service to the community (and a profit center for them, most decidedly).

So I loaded up my car with FIVE boxes of books culled from the eight bookcases in my house and hauled them in to sell this afternoon. They took half of them and gave me $120 cash (could have had more if I’d taken store credit…). As far as I am concerned it’s a win-win situation.

Now I’ve got to go over the remainders to see which to try to sell on Half.com and which to donate to Friends of the Library for their annual sale.