On Connection, Collaboration, and Conversation

A short personal update plus a video with Thumbnail Green

My childhood friend always told me I was born with a lucky horseshoe stuck up my rump. And I do consider myself quite lucky. Even whilst going through some pretty unfortunate happenings and drawn out drudgeries of life, I seem to carry a kind of savant naïveté that everything, in fact, is going per plan and that Providence will produce the life net necessary to catch me at the end of my fall.

That isn’t to say that one sits around waiting for luck to just appear. You can plant luck seeds by being of service and watering those that sprout. And just maybe, they’ll grow and bear fruit. All this might seem obvious. But the key to it is to let go of any expectation of the fruit-bearing part. Have zero attachment to the outcome. Luck seeds can find nourishment in desolate terrains or can never see daylight in the most luscious of terrains. Not your job to know which ones will take hold because would you then go around planting them just any old where?

This might seem like a strange way to start a post. It really has little to do with what I actually want to tell you about which is how I finally met some of my fellow Substackers and collaborators with whom I had never been in the same room, breathing the same air; and about conversations and synchronicities; and I wanted to show you another remote collaboration with an Aussie musician… but today is my first refeeding day after completing another 21 day water only fast and frankly, my brain being starved of fats is producing all kinds of signals that might be misfiring. But I’ll attempt to get this post out anyway. Maybe because it’s a bit fun to do so while feeling a bit…high? disoriented? imperfect? Less crafted and more off the cuff, or off the neurological chopping block?

Let me start off by saying that I received a very generous offer to be flown to Reno and stay at an unbelievably beautiful house for a week where after a few years of pandemic and conspiracy research and collaborations, I got to finally meet Mathew Crawford, his awesome wife, and other like-minded thinkers. If this wasn’t incredible enough, looking up the drivable distance between Reno and the residence of Margaret Anna Alice, we decided on a road trip to go see her in person as well. When I say, I’m lucky, this is precisely what I mean. We couldn’t be there for the day of Margaret’s precious Michael’s funeral, but hopefully, it was a helpful and supportive respite in other ways.

After the exhaustion of treatments, and work and parental responsibilities, this was the paradise I needed to recharge. Since I’m getting my big girl scans in October, and a lot of my holistic treatments are coming to a close or turning into a minimized version of themselves, I thought I’d book-end this chapter of my life with another prolonged fast. I timed it so the second week would be when I was traveling and that would alleviate not only the financial burden of not eating at home but even more importantly, not having my weird dietary limitations imposed on any of the group meals. The second week of a water-only fast, however, tends to start draining the energy levels of the body and I, regretfully, was probably not the best at conversations. Mathew and company are gracious and compassionate people. I was always considered for activities even though, by the end, I had to spend a lot of time relaxing and resting. This allowed me to work on four different projects (one of which I will link to at the bottom of this post) and that’s probably more creative work done in one week than I would have been able to accomplish in months at home while juggling the city dwelling working parent responsibilities. But even just being a fly on the wall and hearing smart people connecting dots in real time gives me thrilling hope for the future. Now imagine all the nodes of information gatherers out there who are doing the same. No leader. No hierarchical structure. No way to shut down the proliferation of knowledge and the silent revolution happening among us.

When Sunday rolled around, we set off to pick up the rental at 5a and drive through some winding road to meet the sweet, tender, and intelligent Margaret Anna Alice, her emotions quickly stirring mine, on a beautiful end-of-summer day. She wore her inimitable Mistakes Were NOT Made shirt, and after lunch (I must come back to that place and try the food next time, it looked so goooooood) we took a stroll through the park. Don’t know exactly which words caught the ears of a couple passing by, but they turned to say “We agree 100% with what you say,” then after noticing Margaret’s shirt added, “And what that shirt says too.” I believe she was about to tell us she knew who wrote the poem that the words are coined after when she saw Margaret’s face or maybe Mathew exclaimed “That’s the author!”, but needlessly to say, we spent some time getting acquainted. Pronoia doing its thing again! And since I received one of those shirts as a gift from Margaret, you can bet I proudly wore it at the airport.

Margaret told us about her life, and her kitties, and about Michael and their totem animals (an owl for Michael and a fox for Margaret) and it was honestly hard to leave as time flew too fast. But as an extra godwink from the Universe, after Mathew’s wife and her ninja-like reflexes saved us from dying in the thick fog by quickly averting hitting a deer standing in the middle of the road, we pulled into a remote rest station, where standing there, waiting to be fed by kind-hearted travelers stood… a fox. Margaret’s totem animal. A sweet and beautiful adult fox who has learned that if it just chilled, someone will throw it road trip snacks.

I could go on about the personal impact of meeting Margaret and Mathew and the rest of the gang in Reno, but there are things better left simply experienced and not shared. It’s part of life’s adventure. And sheesh, I really really love adventuring. Can you tell? It’s only a part of my Substack handle.

Cutting this short before it becomes a series of non sequiturs. Unlike my last fast, this one didn’t have much stored fats to feast on so I had some very strange experiences that resembled seizures the last few days, which I only recently discovered were called vasovagal syncopes and were pretty benign although I didn’t know that at the time when I opened the door for the internet tech and apparently (and according to the nasty bruise on my back) scared the crap out of him. I have zero memory of the incident but I vaguely remember finding myself in a similar situation once in the middle of the night going on a bathroom break. So, don’t get up too quickly from a lying down position if you’re fasting, fam. I’ll have my last (hopefully!) cancer-can-can update next month. Here’s to hoping my holistic treatment gamble paid off.

And now, and I am grateful if you have made it to the end of this post, I would like to link up to a music video I collaborated on with Thumbnail Green. It was one of those songs that spoke to me. Aren’t we all proud to be on a government watchlist together somewhere? After experiencing some strange censorship lately, it’s even more pertinent to have many of us disseminating information with small platforms rather than have one person with a large megaphone who can be shut down or compromised. As a fellow artist, I am grateful to anyone supporting some fun and passion in the world. Thank you for taking a gander:

Watch List Video

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