Mindflight

I’ve heard it said that you’re only as young as you feel. There’s how you feel in your body, of course. Do you feel creaky? Limber? Pained? Strong? Since starting to exercise again, I feel younger physically than I did a year ago. Even six months ago, I felt sluggish and my back hurt most of the time. Amazing how much difference even twenty pounds can make. Even though I’m still in the obese range, my blood pressure is lower, my back doesn’t hurt as much, and I feel younger. It makes me want to lose more and become stronger. Exercise helps me shed my premature age.

Youth is a mental state as well. You can be naturally young due to age, you can freeze in time at a certain point, perhaps sixteen or twenty, and not age from there. You can be eighty and enjoy a second childhood – whether from dementia or enlightenment. I aim for a conscious maturity, though I never want to devolve into ossification. I stay active, mentally and physically. I want to be like the willow, strong and supple throughout my life.

How old do you feel?

How old do you want to feel?

How did a maple learn to fly?

Exploring Poetry

I see a maple’s sunlit dream
of flight, in early seed-hood.
Giant’s reaching roots drink deep,
but stretches yearning branches high.
Remembering that first, best spiral
when wind-swept ‘cross veiny airfoil
and landing, settled to the ground.
Who first taught a tree to fly?
What evolutionary climb
gave wings like owls, and sparrows
and Beeches, and Cessnas?
Next time I spy a maple seed
helicoptering from heights
I’ll listen closely for the whoop
of dizzy joy and pure delight!

-Rohvannyn Shaw

The Sweetness of Life

Thoughts About Life

Sometimes work, no matter how monotonous, can be enriching.

I work at a mail order pharmacy. I get my share of grumpy people, usually grumpy for very good reasons. And I hear my share of silly customer tricks. Most people are pretty nice if you treat them that way, but it’s not always easy. I work long hours and get really tired of the pinch of my headset, and of staring at a computer screen all day. It was hard to get where I am, and people in general often take me for granted or don’t respect what I do. However, I’ve found it’s all worth it in the end.

I have learned some things from my job and I have found some precious treasures that I’d like to share. I’ve taken a few moments to hear war stories from a 90 year old vet, and been glad to thank him for his service. I’ve taken secret delight in telling a grumpy patient ‘happy birthday,’ and hear them sound just a little less grumpy. I’ve seen the couple who have been together for sixty plus years, one spouse calling in orders for the other, and saying in passing “I’d be lost without her.” The sheer love I hear in that simple declaration is humbling. I can only aspire to that.

Sometimes I find someone who is really upset, and very hard to deal with. Once I find out the root cause of their frustration, and let them know I want to do anything possible to help, they almost always calm down. People, in general, aren’t that nasty on purpose, they just want to know that they are heard and also to know they aren’t powerless. That’s been a very good lesson for me. It’s enough to make me want to go the extra mile, help as much as I can, and if I can’t help, give them any other options or information available.

Among the hours of answering questions and dealing with boredom, I feel so privileged to witness certain things. So grateful to be a small help, and to touch a life, even for a moment.

I have found, most of all, that it’s good to be the person who spends time explaining a difficult concept and who is allowed to treat an elder with the respect that they so often lack. If you are reading this, smile at someone today. Offer a kind word. If you already do it, be proud!

A Dimming Mind

Exploring Poetry

My grandmother is nearly 97.

In many ways, she is a lovely person – but at the same time, she has held on to so much of her timidity and worry about life that she has little left at this point. She had to be a strong person when she was younger, and she went through hardships. Sometimes she did everything without a husband to help her, including raising eight kids.

She’s fairly deep in dementia now, and I find it sad to see how so much of her good memories have gone and how she focuses on her worries more than her joys. I think of her when I need a reason to be positive. And I write her letters, so she knows she’s not forgotten. I want to lay up such a store of positive, empowering thoughts that when I am old it will still be there to sustain me, and my twilight will be a good one. In a way, I wrote this bit of free verse for her.

lost

the ebbing mind

slips from its moorings

set adrift

without fanfare

a remnant of bitter flavor

acrid on the tongue

memories flow and ripple

through clutching mental fingers

nothing left

to satisfy that need

for steady ground on which to stand

-Rohvannyn Shaw

Success – step by step

Healthy Living, Personal Growth, Tips for Writers

It’s good to have goals. Sometimes, no matter what we do, we fail at them and don’t think we can succeed. How does a person deal with that? We try and try and never get anywhere. This can happen with weight loss, creating a business, kicking a bad habit, writing a book. I’ve found that large goals are pretty hard to achieve unless you do it the right way. I call this Incremental Success. Here’s how.

Shift your Mindset

If you are going to succeed, it’s very important that you shift your mindset. You knew that, though, right? Easier said than done. The simplest way to do that is to take extra time out to focus on the successes you have made. Get better and better at doing that and soon it will be more natural to think of solutions before roadblocks, strategies instead of why you can’t do something.

Make Small Goals

Finally, keep your goals small. Keep your efforts incremental. That way you can notice and mentally celebrate whenever you achieve a step. Also notice those little non measurable aspects of success. In weight loss, for example, how it’s easier to get up off the floor after a few days of exercise, or maybe you are less winded after your walk.

Enjoy the Process

While you are not giving up and focusing on success, there’s a way to make it fun! Get interested in the process. The journey is as important as the destination. When you encounter a roadblock, you can almost make a game of thinking of ways around it. Get creative whenever possible. Accept that you will have failures and decide you will learn from them.

Don’t Give Up

Most successful people will agree that the main key to achieving goals is not giving up. That sounds incredibly obvious, but it’s also rather easy to do. Many of us give up by default. But persistence is the one thing that the greatest people in the world, past and present, share.

To continue with the weight loss example, here is how you might follow the incremental plan under this circumstance. It’s easy to see how this could translate to any long term goal.
First, shift your mindset and decide that you can lose weight. Focus on times in the past where you have shown self control. Prove to yourself in this way that it’s possible.

Next, instead of deciding “I am going to lose ten pounds” which seems like a reasonable goal, decide “I am going to cut 100 calories a day.” Or “I am going to take a fifteen minute walk every morning.”

Then, as you do this, notice all the small ways your new habit is benefiting you. Maybe you breathe a little easier. Maybe you feel a little better. Continue with new goals and keep them small.

Don’t give up. If you have a bad day, or even a lapse of a week, get back to it. Just stop giving up. Keep on doing it.

That is how you can achieve incremental success.

“Every day you may make progress. Every step may be fruitful. Yet there will stretch out before you an ever-lengthening, ever-ascending, ever-improving path. You know you will never get to the end of the journey. But this, so far from discouraging, only adds to the joy and glory of the climb.”

Sir Winston Churchill

“It is wonderful what great strides can be made when there is a resolute purpose behind them.”

Sir Winston Churchill

Courage: Teaching myself to be brave

Art of Womanhood, Personal Growth

Courage is the price that Life exacts for granting peace.

The soul that knows it not
Knows no release from little things:
Knows not the livid loneliness of fear,
Nor mountain heights where bitter joy can hear the sound of wings.

Nor can life grant us boon of living, compensate
For dull gray ugliness and pregnant hate
Unless we dare
The soul’s dominion.
Each time we make a choice, we pay
With courage to behold the resistless day, And count it fair.

Amelia Earhart

Amelia Earhart wrote these words in her twenties, while she was still in college. She had yet to do all the amazing things she did later. This poem is a great reminder of not only what it takes to be courageous, but also why we should be brave, and what our lives are like without courage.

“Daring the soul’s dominion” means, to me, that brave act of choosing how we wish to feel and doing what we wish to do, guided by our minds, rather than surrendering to the tyranny of our emotions. It also means that we must be brave enough to make a choice and face the results, come what may.

With the final line, I think that it also can take courage to face troubles and worries and fears, and yet think that the day will be a good one. Being positive is, after all, a good choice.

I wrote this couplet when I was in flight school, in the same vein:

Each day is a good day because it’s a day not a night,

each flight is a good flight.

Make your own energy bars

Food and Cooking

Discovery — This kayaker got farther with Adventure Balls.

Tired of paying top dollar for designer energy bars? How about making Roh’s Adventure Balls? It’s easy to do and requires no baking. Basically, it’s a modular system.

Start with six packets of any flavor instant oatmeal. (Easier to chew without cooking.)

Add four scoops of your choice protein powder/shake mix. You can also add cocoa powder.

Add about a cup (200 grams roughly) of fruit, chopped nuts, seeds, or coconut.

Stir in 16 ounces (half a kilo) of your choice nut butter (peanut butter, almond butter, cashew butter, tahini, etc).

Chill dough and form into balls or logs.

Roll in sesame flour, sesame seeds, coconut, or whatever you want.

Eat and enjoy! Adventure Balls are great for hikes, if you don’t like breakfast and should eat it anyway, exercise periods, or at work. They keep for at least a couple weeks in the fridge, longer if you wrap them into something.

They can also be made diabetic friendly depending on what you use!

My favorite recipe so far:

6 packets apple cinnamon instant oatmeal

2 tablespoons cocoa powder

4 scoops chocolate flavored cocoa powder

6 oz craisins/dried cranberries

16 oz (1 jar) creamy peanut butter

1/4 cup powdered black sesame

Transgender Truth

Art of Womanhood, Healthy Living, Personal Growth, Science and Techology, Thoughts About Life

Trans folk may not be what, or who, you think they are.

If you have a trans friend, I commend you. If you have a trans family member, I commiserate with you. If you, yourself, are trans, I support you.

However, many people may never have met anyone who is transgendered. There are so many misconceptions out there, so much fear, and so many lies.

For instance, so many many people I know think being transgendered is a lifestyle choice or something you do on a whim.

Did you know it’s actually a medical condition? Researchers are beginning to see evidence that it is indeed possible to have a brain with the structure of one sex, in the body with the structure of the other sex. Because of biology and hormone balance, it is more common for male babies to be born with a female brain than vice versa. The cause seems to be hormone fluctuations that can sometimes happen during pregnancy.

The result then, is someone who feels, deep inside themselves, that they are one gender – because their brain is built that way – while their body is shaped another way. Some people who are transgendered are also intersex, where their body has both male and female sexual characteristics, but their inner sense of themselves differs from the arbitrary decision their doctor or their parents made at birth.

Bottom line: in many cases, a transgendered person has a valid and measurable medical reason behind their decision to take on a role as the opposite sex. It is a decision that only comes after much soul searching, it is not a whim or a snap decision, it is not a fetish, and it is not a lifestyle choice.

Transsexuals versus crossdressers

A crossdresser is someone who dresses as the opposite sex, for enjoyment or for many other reasons, but who still identifies as their birth sex. A transsexual is someone who was born as one sex but is changing to another. They may or may not have had surgery.

Sex versus Gender

Sex is what your body is shaped like. Gender is how you feel inside.

Problems with restroom access

Something that most people don’t know is that people who are going through gender transition are often required to be on hormones and live exclusively as their desired gender for at least a year before getting surgery.

If we think about this, it’s easy to see that forcing someone to use the bathroom of their birth sex could be quite problematic. This would require someone who is dressed as a woman, is passing quite well, and is doing everything like a woman, to use the men’s room anyway. This is a recipe for beatings and even murders. Meanwhile, if she had quietly used the women’s room, sat in the stall as she always did, By the way, she might have been doing that for months or years – without causing alarm or trouble. She doesn’t want trouble, she just wants to use the bathroom, like any woman.

Surgery is difficult, painful and expensive. Hormones are expensive and can be dangerous if mishandled. Doctors sometimes refuse to treat trans patients. So for those who say “why don’t they just get it over with and finish the process?” please consider that the person in question may want, very badly, to finish – but be unable to. It’s harder to get a job when you are trans, after all, and there are a lot of social roadblocks. Jokes about trans folk are common, there are few legal protections, and people die every day for being trans.

Because of the way she’s routinely treated, I know a trans woman who often says “we are the last niggers in America.”

Are transgendered people dangerous?

No. Nothing about having gender dysphoria makes you any more unstable than any other person. Statistically speaking, heterosexual-identified males are the most likely to predators, whether of children or otherwise. People who are trans may actually have more compassion than others because they are so frequently mistreated.

Can gender dysphoria be cured another way, such as through prayer?

No. It can’t. Gender dysphoria can be suppressed for a period of time as a person denies it and tries to meet societal expectations of who they should be. Many people try to be ultra masculine or ultra feminine in an effort to “be who they should be” before realizing that they truly are the other gender inside, and it’s not just a phase. Methods of treatment that don’t involve a transition usually result in depression at the best, suicide at the worst.
What trans people want

It’s a large subject and impossible to speak for everyone, but in general, trans folk just want the same rights everyone else has. They don’t want special rights, they just want to live normal lives. The goal of most trans women, for example, is to simply be a woman – not to be specially privileged, but deserving of the same respect everyone else gets.

What trans people are not

Trans people are NOT interested in “converting” your kids, and being trans is not contagious. They aren’t dangerous or unstable and many have incredible amounts of self knowledge. In general, they are not perverts. They are also not necessarily gay. They usually aren’t “confused” either.

How to refer to transgendered people

Individual tastes differ. You can say “a transgendered person” or “transgendered,” but never “a transgender.” Similarly, “a transie” can sometimes be an affectionate descriptor, but never “a tranny.” A tranny is a part off a car, not a person, and it’s usually very offensive. “Transsexual” is also usually appropriate.

Ways to support a trans person

First, treat them as the gender they present as. If you are confused about pronouns, just ask. Avoid asking a bunch of intrusive questions unless they have showed they are comfortable about it. Other than that, just talk – enjoy their company, treat them as a person. Most trans folk don’t want to center their life around their transition, they have other interests, skills, loves, dreams. Above all, just treat a trans person like… a person.

How you can help

I know this post has been long, and the people who need to read it probably won’t. Even if you never donate to a trans friendly charity or help a trans person directly, though, you can be educated about the subject and gently correct wrong assumptions and incorrect facts along the way. Also, parents, please teach your children that staring and making inappropriate comments is not polite and can hurt people.

I would truly appreciate it if anyone chooses to share or forward this blog entry, it may be copied and duplicated in excerpt or in part by anyone as long as the original intent of support is maintained. Thank you for caring enough to read this!

Poem: Monsoon

Exploring Poetry, Tips for Artists

A brilliant branch
cracks down,
plasma booming.
It roars, reaches,
and crashes again.

Pregnant clouds play catch
with balls of rolling thunder.
Rooster tails of water spray.
and water fills the air
till it can hold no more.

The blood-warm mist
and steam wraps my skin.
I drink the wine
of the new mown lawn,
taste the rich
mesquite-green wind.

Invictus: teaching myself to be strong

Art of Womanhood, Exploring Poetry, Personal Growth

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate;
I am the captain of my soul. -William Ernest Henley

This poem is truly inspiring to me. Though it seems a bit trite because it’s been quoted so often, it shows me a better, stronger, more enduring path to walk in life. At times I think “am I lying to myself? My head has been bowed by circumstance plenty of times, I have been an incredible coward.”

However, reading this poem and learning it is not about honesty – it’s about replacing old thoughts with new. It’s about convincing myself that the old way of doing things is wrong, that there’s a better way. It acknowledges that life is tough but I can make it. It gives me good, strong, positive thoughts to fasten on, so that when a weak, cowardly thought comes up, there’s something to stand up against it. In effect, it’s “perseverance practice.”

The only things I have done in my life that were worthwhile, happened because I didn’t give up. Invictus is a poem about not giving up. I wish I had learned this poem as a kid. I wonder if I would have been stronger?

Is there a poem or quote that you use to become a better person?