Ramblemuse Touch Points

In her Massage and Bodywork Journal Blog, Julie Onofrio was complaining last August about ad farms that lift her content. I’ve had that happen too. A couple of months back I’d tracked down a set of interacting domains that were hijacking content and sent the information to Technorati, since they were indexing these fake blogs. There’s an in-depth article in the September Wired on these spam+blogs = splogs. Yes, it is annoying finding stray paragraphs of things I write totally out of context. It creates a lot of noise and uncertainty for those searching for the information in context.

No Comments »

In browsing around, I came across three authors, interlinked with each other, all working on processes of building community and creating change. I first ran into Juanita Brown and the World Cafés by finding her book while browsing around Amazon. The initiative literally developed after a meeting on a very rainy day in Marin, during which small tables set up in the room morphed into café tables that promted an intense process of thought and discovery.

The second author is Margaret J. Wheatley and her work with Turning to one another. This is about about listening, awareness, and connecting with others through conversations. Wheatley makes the point that this type of conversation is embedded in the way in which we evolved as social humans. She also notes that too often it is not what we are doing.

The third author, pointed out by Wheatley, is Christina Baldwin and her Peer Spirt process for building communities of reflection, adventure, and purpose. Take a look at her book Storycatcher here or here.

Margaret Wheatley’s book, ÜTurning to One Anotherݝ, is one of those in which texture, layout, shading of the pages, and interspersed poems have all been used to convey an intimate look and feel. It’s the kind of book for pondering and absorbing on a rainy day next to a warm fire with a cat close at hand. Wheatley closes the book with a story from the Aztec people of Mexico that well illustrates the spirit of her book.

It is said by our Grandparents that a long time ago there was a great fire in the forest that covered our earth. People and animals started to run, trying to escape from the fire. Our brother owl, Tecolotl, was running away also when he noticed a small bird hurrying back and forth between the nearest river and the fire. He headed toward this small bird.

He noticed that it was our brother the Quetzal bird, Quetzaltototl, running to the river, picking up small drops of water in his beak, then returning to the fire to throw that tiny bit of water on the flame. Owl approached Quetzal bird and yelled at him: “What are you doing brother? Are you stupid? You are not going to achieve anything by doing this. What are you trying to do? You must run for your life!”

Quetzal bird stopped for a moment and looked at owl, and then answered: “I am doing the best I can with what I have.”

It is remembered by our Grandparents that a long time ago the forests that covered our Earth were saved from a great fire by a small Quetzal bird, an owl, and many other animals and people who got together to put out the flames.

No Comments »

In his 30 August column in the S.F. Chronicle (Check from a scammer bounces victim into jail), David Lazarus brought to light that Bank of America neither has a reasonable policy for dealing with bogus checks nor is willing to be accountable for lack of such a policy. For those of us who frequent the Internet and blog, such scams are far from new. Even service personnel such as massage therapists receive scam emails wanting to “prearrange” service for a group tour by check. While the Supreme court can protect banks from legal liability, they can not create protection from consumer accountability.

In writing on trust for Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge Newsletter, Stever Robbins noted that “At its heart, being trustworthy means being consistent in motives and accountable for actions. … Losing trust is outrageously easy. Just let someone down once and kaboom, years of trust go down the drain.” Putting customers through what Matthew Shinnick experienced and not accepting responsibility is well on the way down such a drain. In our digital age, word spreads quickly.

As a comparative side-note, back in the early 1980’s Johnson and Johnson set the standard for corporate responsibility with their handling of the Tylenol tampering crisis. Bank of America blew it in showing customer disregard. Responsibility does not hinge on a judge’s orders but on a larger social sense.

No Comments »

In my upcoming Massage Today Column for June (as in up any day now), I was writing about embodiment and refer to the philosophical framework of Merleau-Ponty. In my starting post here, I referred to things that are liminal (neither this nor that) and of a threshold. I noticed a book chapter abstract by Gilsenan Nordin that takes these concepts into a discussion of the poetry of the Irish poet Eiléan Ní­ Chuilleanáin. By another coincidence, the Swedish site is in Dalarna, a source of a number of traditional Scandinavian dances I’ve danced over the years.

The idea of the body as a vital component of existence and an important means for the articulation of experience is the theme of Irene Gilsenan Nordin’s essay, “Betwixt and Between” The Body as Liminal Threshold in the Poetry of Eiléan Ní­ Chuilleanáin.… Drawing upon Merleau-Ponty’s ideas of embodiment, and Kristeva’s concepts of the semiotic and the symbolic, Gilsenan Nordin explores the notion of the body as a liminal threshold in Ní­ Chuilleanáin’s poetry. The essay explores the interaction between self and world and argues that in challenging unitary conceptions of space and time, Ní­ Chuilleanáin shows how the body, or “flesh,” to use Merleau-Ponty’s term, acts as a transformational site between thought and language, self and world, the subject and the unnameable other. Gilsenan Nordin argues that Ní­ Chuilleanáin in her poetry shows that the speaking- subject is an embodied subject, firmly situated at the point where the mind is inseparable from our bodily, physical nature. Thus the poetic voice gives articulation to the interconnectedness between the physical and spiritual dimensions of human existence. In giving expression to the silent forces of desire Ní­ Chuilleanáin’s work can be seen not least in an ethical sense, as giving voice to the silenced, unspoken voices of bodily experience.

My sense is that massage can play a significant role as a facilitation or support for the senses of embodiment and existence, particularly for those in who this sense has been weakened. My other sense is that this is nowhere on the radar of most of those defining massage therapy as a profession. Perhaps this is simply a reflection that we need a distinction between a profession and what might be defined as an endeavor of service that enhances the human in us.

No Comments »

For several years now, I’ve written the Massage Politics Sheet. This has been an effective means of getting news, information, and perpsectives on massage regulation out where it’s available. The MPS is a continuing effort, now joined by Ramblemuse^SM Touch Points (RmTP).

My intention with RmTP is to have a wider perspective. Since, by nature, I’am a wanderer between knowledge disciplines, RmTP gives me a place to capture thoughts and notes short of creating a new webpage. The sense of Touch Points is to capture the interfaces where my personal life space and the larger universe and social space come into contact. In a sense, the liminal and threshold places were boundaries thin. — Keith Eric Grant

No Comments »