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About Us
The Day After/ Alanis / Outward Boundaries
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I didn't write anything yesterday because, as you probably know, when you go away from your stuff for a day or two or longer, you come back to twice as much stuff as you would have dealt with, had you stayed home.
I am delighted to tell you that Alanis Morissette is extremely centered and focused. She's not in the past and she's not in the future, she's in the moment. This is probably one of the reasons that she is able to pull such truths about her life from the moment of her inspiration. She is also a kind person who cares about the person she is talking to – when she’s with you, she’s with you. This is the essence of spirituality and bravery, in my humble opinion.
I strongly recommend Alanis Morissette’s thoughtful, brilliant music, as if her gargantuan record sales numbers indicated that her music needs to be recommended in my little blog. I’m currently addicted to listening to “Thank U” again and again as I finish writing “The Truth Fairy,” our forthcoming (Fall 2004!) pendulum divination system for Thorsons/Element, a division of Harper Collins UK. I am in awe of Alanis’ ability to honestly explore universal truths of human existence and do it so clearly and simply, yet with poetry and an arranged lyrical delivery that is musical before a note is sung or played. Can you tell I’m a fan? Well, I’m usually hard to impress but she’s a true musical artist. True artists like her and Amy are still too rare in this crazy world, that’s why we prefer to live in our Enchanted World where we are all here to spend time actualizing our individual artistic gifts. That is one of the reason that we have created this website and all of our artistic creations – to celebrate the glory of the human striving for artistic fulfillment. And helping people improve their love life while finding out about the future isn't such a bad reason for doing it, either! ;-)
I know I say this a lot, but I am so thankful that Amy and I found each other back in 1974 and were smart enough to realize how valuable our relationship is. Amy and I are together as much as we can – life is too short to spend time apart when you’ve found your soul mate. Usually, we are working away on ten or twenty projects at the same time from our home, what we laughingly refer to as our “factory with bedrooms.” We love our house and our studios and our garden and "The Fur Prince," Mr. Zane, and of course our human friends, too, but it's always fun to get away, whether it's to read Alanis Morissette's tarot cards surrounded by four TV cameras and forty grinning people or to walk onto the beach or into the trees and be totally alone. But when you find yourself in the orbit of someone so very talented – my daily experience with Amy - and, more to the point, something that is making a lot of money for some people, you have to keep your spiritual center or you are going to get swept up in the seductiveness of all of that focused energy and forget to focus your energy on your own situation.
Amy and I are really good at staying focused and setting our boundaries. You know "Outward Bound," the organization that takes people into dangerous situations and pushes them past their limits as a way of making them realize how strong they are? Well, Amy and I could start a course called "Outward Boundaries" because we don't let anyone or anything interfere with our relationship and our mission, which is to share what successful techniques we've learned and formulated for living lives of quality and meaning. Not letting people mess around with your boundaries is a big one. That includes family, friends, business associates (most of which we count as friends).
As Butch “Funky Foot” Walker, a fellow street-wise native New Yorker and the drummer when I played bass guitar in Curtis’ Knight’s band – Curtis had “discovered” Jimi Hendrix - explained to a gang of supposed tough guys looking to beat up "queers," having made the almost fatal (for them) mistake of taking our “different” early 70’s performance clothing for signs of what they thought would be our effeminate anti-violence attitudes, “Git out of my face! I’m not out here on the street to be f**ked with by the likes of you a**holes!”
I took in the truth of his words and these punks did, too. They slowly took a few steps back.
I'm sure Butch's philosophy stood him in good stead over they years as he went on to tour with the likes of Wilson Pickett, Tino Gonzales, the Temptations and the Four Tops. I am glad to say that I cannot remember having another such a passion-high run in with fellow humans after that time; it must have been graduation day for me.
I am not usually afraid of anything or anyone because of my compassion for everyone and everything I meet, which is different than feeling sorry for them. If you maintain a good spiritual attitude toward all you meet, being with them as best you can, you usually don’t have to worry about much. However, sometimes you may find yourself in the presence of a disturbed person or animal and then the danger is real.
Not showing fear is a good idea when dealing with dangerous animals and people who are trying to prove that humans are the most dangerous animals. Animals only go after what is afraid of them, a great way for them to know what they can eat. When they see something show no fear, most often they’ll go to another lunch counter – unless they’re sick or starving or driven mad with pain.
This gang may have been all three, but their stupid aggression had put the two of us beyond caring for the grieving friends and relatives they were about to leave behind thanks to our efforts - Butch and I were more focused on getting ready to defend ourselves as best we could then on compassionately analyzing what traumas of childhood had brought things to this regrettable karmic intersection.
Realizing that we weren’t kidding and, even though we were wearing colorful clothes, were both broad shouldered guys well over six feet tall and not at all scared of the six of them, they took off running as we laughed at their retreating backs, grateful that we had not had to resort to our individual bags of all too often practiced tricks of defensive violence from our misspent youths that these Greenwich Village gay-bashing cruisers almost dragged out of us on a warm spring evening in 1974, just a few months after I had met Amy on a rooftop party at 9th Avenue and 22nd street (9 and 22 being my lucky numbers) only a mile or so below the rooftop garden of The China Club in New York City where we got to meet and read Alanis Morissette’s tarot cards and astrology charts.
See you soon and thanks for reading. It really means a lot to me. |
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