Dishwasher to the Prickly Tickly
Veterans Day, 2010: Mark your calendars — this is the day the Portland starts wearing longjohns 24/7 — Whizzing has just gotten astronomically more difficult.
Veterans Day, a holiday. I celebrate with a walk over to Pier Park to enjoy a sweet steam breath PNW morning. The big evergreens are having discussions high above: you don’t think they talk to each other with their trunks do you? No, Their lofty discussions are echoed in bird calls and rustling branches. They keep their discussions on a high level.
Down on the ground some of the playground stuff puzzles me: are these bowls for puking after spinning in the swings? Some sort of high tech tin-can telephone? Some sort of chair?
Take your babies to the park. Maybe they can figure out those wierd cuppy things. I won’t, it’s too much fun letting my imagination run wild.
But as I walk through the neighborhoods, I see the threadbare trees with prickly tickly tops. And my thoughts shift to the babies of the Kings.
We all have babies of one sort or another. They all require care to grow strong and worthy. Real babies, yes, but also your goals, enterprises and dreams. Even Throntle has the dream of getting off the needle. At present, it’s a miscarriage, but we can always hope.
Bringing a dream to life in November is hard: not like Thanksgiving day. It’s more like the prickly tickly events and reactions we share with the prickly tickly trees.
The Kings of Lombard have their shop-kingdom babies in various stages of life: TheJames John Cafe is mature and well cared for. Same forSlim’s. The Hope for Health may be a senile old business, but it is a well deserved senility.
Some shops are truly babies, showing lots of growing pains instead of giggles and smiles. How can I tell? Here’s my secret: I wash dishes.
Like Southwick, my first job was dishwasher in a chinese restaurant. As long as people prefer to eat off of ceramic, it will be a hard job to outsource.
Friend, Southwick gave me his stake-out report from his dish washing concession at the food carts. It seems there is a new Storage biz there (Very profitable – hey, you gotta store the crud you get at themall, especially after you getevicted.) Southwick saw Tommy renting storage for hordes of amoeba! He’s stockpiling them, Southwick says. We will see.
Southwick also tells me that when he visits friends he will often volunteer as dishwasher. He gets into a flow. Turns on his worker energy. It’s humble, but your hands are always getting clean and warm. That’s important on a PNW evening at a friend’s place.
There is a bit of fun for the careful observer, too. From simple stuff like “Hmm. people aren’t eating the horse hoof salad tonight” to “Hmmm. ‘Suzy heart Joe’ finger painted in gravy.” After a while the hints can build up and you know thatFriendis reading this right now, also why Mothra and Godzilla are fighting again, when outwardly they seem A-OK. — You find out a lot by cleaning trash up.
So when the personal interactions seem like the Gulf Oil Spill of emotions, a cleaning is in order. While we are not exactly washing ceramic plates, you get the idea. Kind of like cleaning a horse. Start at the top. Work down.
With a single person, you start with the very big values, the ones that trip the highest ThanksgivingBlissstates and work back down from there.
With people on a team, you simply start at the top with the highest commonly shared Thanksgiving goals of the team. Things they all agree about. Then you work down to details carefully and slowly honoring all participants.
It works best when the emotions are clean and clear, but you do what you can. Cloudy emotions are not bad, just inefficient as they make our vision of goals and roles less clear and less obtainable. If you want to obtain success, you may want to take out the mental trash. It’s not just forspirituality— it’s simply practical. That’s why I call thisCelarienstuff “Practical Spirituality.” Personally, I’m into the NLP for my own spiritual quest: That’s the Old Testament Prophet stuff, in case you were wondering. But that’s not all NLP does well.
It’s like washing dishes. Some of it cleans up easily, and some of it requires a bit of time to soak before you get to the squeaky clean of better judgement. And, like a shower, you may want to do it more than once.