fake bliss trumpet

okay, i faked this smile. can you tell? i was walking down the road at faerie camp and decided to try to take a happy looking picture. this was about the fifth try. i think it still lacks sincerity but overall i like the picture. it reminds me of pharmaceutical ads promising vitality of some sort. i do this kind of self-observation of fake states probably more than most people. when i was doing lots of radio i used to record myself a lot, edit, re-record, until i'd get something so overproduced and slick that it had almost no personality, i suppose rococo in a way, overproduced, over-ornate, intricate but soulless. maybe it's my love of the banal that drives this.

about half a year ago i bought a trumpet. i started to try playing it a couple days ago. i never realized how much a trumpeter can influence pitch with the lips. even though i played trumpet four years in elementary and junior high school, i don't think anyone ever mentioned intonation. in fact, no one ever mentioned a thing about theory or what exactly we were doing playing all those notes.

so, tying all this together, perhaps this is my first trumpet album cover.

giving

i've just returned from a long weekend of work and companionship at the camp i'm working at for the summer. i'm volunteering a lot of hours to complete a new building there, teaching people construction and timber framing. it's a lot of hard work but i'm slowly discovering the deep power of giving, and more specifically selfless giving, a practice that's mentioned a lot in yoga and buddhism, as well as western religion.

selfless giving isn't something that comes naturally to me. my behavior twenty years ago was decidedly selfish and self centered. i wouldn't call myself bad, but i was doing for myself and no one else. i worked really hard to prove myself to others, not in order to give to them. my self esteem, self image and self worth were intimately linked to how well i conquered tasks and people, and not to how well i felt or how honest i was being or how others felt. i even voted for ronald reagan the first time riding high on his "greed is okay" platform, which seemed just the ticket back then, and seems to have permeated the baby boomer generation of which i am on the trailing cusp.

but over the years, through my various projects, i've discovered that i feel most joyous when my personal gain is small to nil. i feel best when engaged in helping others with their lives and projects. i'm now seeing my role as a builder and architect as a healing role, in which i am a part of a dream, often a communal dream or someone else's dream. my interest is in eliminating my interest in favor of a greater interest. figuring out what that greater interest is is fascinating to me. the reward for approaching things this way has been that all of the energy i put into a project comes back to me in various interesting ways and usually multiplied. so, it's more profitable, in a sense, than pursuing selfish goals.