Tag: Presence

Living in Presence

There is an Abundance of Self-Worth Available for Us to Offer Ourselves, But First We Must Feel Worthy Enough to Accept the Offer

Grand Providentia United

Fresh Perspectives Harvested ~ Post 1 – Introduction

If you are one who has never wrestled with low self-esteem, and if you’ve never felt unworthy or even felt a little less worthy than others, the topic of discussion in the following blog entry may seem trivial, and quite possibly, utterly meaningless. As such, it may be frustrating to read this in its tediousness. If it annoys you or you simply cannot relate to it, then it must mean that it isn’t time for you to read it, or at least not in this moment it isn’t. You are always free to surf away to another site, as I’m sure you are aware. The freedom of expression that I enjoy as being the sole author on this site is, in my own estimation, earned by being honest with myself and you all. So, this journal entry is where I intend to earn some of that freedom.

There were two separate occurrences that arose during the past week and each of them pointed directly to my continuing struggles with self-worth. I’ll only be discussing one of the two situations in detail on this blog, because the other one involves personal family matters, and therefore, private relationships. The peculiar thing is, that the family issue that happened later in the week, pointed to how far I’ve come on the journey toward healthy self-esteem and the other one, at the beginning of the week, showed me how far I have yet to go. Due, in part, to my history of painful experiences in dealing with self-worth issues, I’ve apparently adopted the automatic expectation that the events should have transpired the other way around. In other words, first would come the uplifting circumstance, and after that would come a lesson in humility to knock me down a couple of notches. Put me in my rightful place, so to speak. I’m beginning to understand that humility and self-esteem are not mutually exclusive, though. A person can have a high and healthy self-esteem, while also being humble in spirit, thus feeling no better and no worse than anyone else.

I chose this photo and the one at the top of the page because I felt as though they were representative of times when I was feeling good about myself and thinking that I had overcome all the problems concerned with low self-esteem. Read on, if you want to know my true feelings about these particular photographs.

Let’s back up to early last week. I started a new job last Monday as a second shift employee in a local warehouse. I arrived on time at 3:30 PM, because I’ve been conditioned to believe that promptness demonstrates overall integrity and an upstanding work ethic. Being prompt is also a courtesy that I asked for from the people that I employed at Moore Art Expressions. More often than not, I didn’t have to say anything about being on time though, because we had so much fun being there and being creative, that most employees preferred to come in early and leave late. At least, that’s the way I remember it. And yes, I am allowing myself that short digression. Now, back to last Monday. I was having some serious misgivings about accepting the warehouse job during the hours and days before I walked into the building, but I chalked that up to dreading the actual labor and fearing that I was too old to handle such a strenuous job. I am about to be fifty-nine years young, after all. In the past several months, I’ve remained focused on eating well and stretching and exercising daily, and as a result I’ve been feeling better physically than I have in the last decade. As I am writing this down tonight, I can see where my dread and fear were not only well founded, but more precisely they were intuitively realistic. The job description online didn’t attempt to gloss over any of the gory details of the work, so I knew reasonably well what to expect. I would be unloading boxes by hand from overseas containers, some in excess of 50-75 lbs., and loading them on to a conveyor belt in a non-climate-controlled environment. Many of you may be wondering whether I’ve lost my mind. Wondering why I would accept a menial labor job like this, especially considering the expertise I’ve attained in the molding and sculpture casting industry. As it often seems to be, the answer to that question is complicated, so I’ll come back around to it after describing what happened next.

Photo: Chris, Morderchai and Fred worked tirelessly in scorching Florida heat with me to cast 100 of these life-sized dog sculptures. It was a difficult learning curve to master the process, but we each became extremely skillful at performing our individual tasks as part of a unified team. In retrospect, I must conclude that each of us personally enjoyed certain aspects of working on the project and we each considered other aspects of it, well, not so enjoyable.

Monday, my first night working at the warehouse, went fairly well, all things considered. The air inside the shipping containers was much hotter and more humid than I expected. The hot sun of the Savannah daytime hours had really settled in on the interior of the steel box, and the seawater that had seeped its way inside and saturated many of the cardboard boxes had no place to evaporate to, so as soon as I started moving, I started sweating. I kept moving. I was trying to pace myself, but I was also trying to prove myself. The conveyor belt was demanding to be fed and I kept feeding it. I unloaded 1,400 boxes to empty the first 40-foot container in about three hours. There were many times during the first load that I needed to cool my body and hydrate, so I walked outside the box and just inside the warehouse to take 30 second breathers. It was still very hot inside the warehouse, but rather than 110 degrees Fahrenheit it was more like 90. I finished off the shift on Monday moving from one container to the next, sometimes with help from coworkers when the boxes were oversized or heavy, and sometimes moving them on my own, until at last, the midnight hour arrived. I drove home for some highly anticipated sleep.

Photo: Another contract that I truly appreciated for seven enjoyable years during the Moore Art Expressions days, involved the restoration and upkeep of patinas on 24 monumental bronze sculptures for Raymond James Financial in Saint Petersburg, FL. The bronze sculpture photographed here is titled “Invocation” by the sculptor Buck McCain.

I returned on Tuesday afternoon, a little bit tired but still determined to prove my physical abilities to the team. As I got busy moving boxes, I had to keep reminding myself of the lessons I’ve learned over the course of thirty years in the blue-collar workforce. Lessons learned about keeping a reasonable pace no matter how fast others appear to be moving; about not comparing myself to others around me, they have their strengths and shortcomings just as I do; about not needing to prove myself to anyone other than myself; and most important of all, about taking breaks as often as you need to when you’re performing strenuous work in extreme temperatures. All of these thoughts were running through my mind, but my body seemed to have a different strategy it was running with regardless of my mind’s considerations. My body continued to lift and release boxes onto the conveyor belt. As many of you may have already surmised, I was soon overcome by heat exhaustion. My head was spinning, and I nearly passed out a number of times before they rang the bell for lunch break. I ate a little bit of food, but it tasted like poison, so I stopped eating and lay down on the picnic table bench for the remainder of the break. When my thirty minutes were up, I went right back to unloading the container where I had left off. Looking back on this it seems like complete foolishness. I was already having all of the symptoms of heat exhaustion and the potential of dying from heatstroke was growing more likely by the moment. I would like to report that I informed the warehouse managers of my condition and then I went home for the rest of the evening, but I did not. I would also like to tell you that I didn’t understand what was happening to me; that I did not know about heat exhaustion or the type of symptoms one might experience when they’re suffering from it. I would be lying to you all, if I made those false claims. Having worked in southwest Florida in extreme heat conditions for over a decade, I am fully aware of the symptoms and potential health risks that come along with heat exhaustion. Even having all this first-hand knowledge, I continued working hard until midnight and went home to get some rest.

I suppose this is a good place to end the narrative for today. Tomorrow, I’ll finish the story and explain why this incident and the other one involving my family were not only interrelated, but they seemed to be fully entwined, and together they rang out a resounding wakeup call to my body, mind and spirit.

My current feelings about the top two images – The top one was taken during the peak of our successful times at Moore Art Expressions. I had nine team members working with me to help raise us to that level, so I always felt a bit uneasy about being the public spokesperson when the media asked for an interview. As for the second photo – I swear to you, it was the photographer’s idea! I would have never agreed to it if he didn’t suggest that I might become endowed with superpowers following the shoot! In all seriousness though, I look back on those times with sincere gratitude and appreciation for all the good times we experienced together in the MAE studio!

Below is a link for those who would like to see more photos and videos of the work we did at Moore Art Expressions. The business website was taken down when I closed the business, but this Facebook page will give you an overview of the art we made there.

https://www.facebook.com/grandprovidentiaunited/

Living in Presence

There is an Abundance of Self-Worth Available for Us to Offer Ourselves, But First We Must Feel Worthy Enough to Accept the Offer

Grand Providentia United

Fresh Perspectives Harvested ~ Part 3 – In Conclusion

I rely on my intuition to guide me in matters of introspection and personal reflection. When my body, mind and spirit are in agreement concerning any new learning experience I’ve gone through, my intuition informs me that it is time to reflect holistically on that particular experience. Subsequently, I’ll often journal those reflections while remaining focused on any changes of perspective, and any new behaviors or actions I’ve initiated as a result of those changes in perspective. Some experiences take more time than others to process internally. The experience of working my body to the point of heat exhaustion for minimal reward, has been one of those experiences. My intuition will often need to remind me that it takes as long as it takes to work my way through an issue or experience. Through personal growth, I’ve learned not to rush the internal processes, nor try to force my body, mind or spirit to give up the proverbial goods before all three have achieved a harmonious balance. The common misstep of rushing to conclusions usually leaves me dissatisfied and displeased with my own performance in moving beyond the experience, and eventually, I imagine it could deprive me of food for the soul to the point of spiritual starvation. When any one of us sends out our intentions and then follows through with the actions required to bring them to fruition, we are not only influencing the direction of our own life trajectory, but we are also bringing change to the lives of those within our sphere of conscious influence. Intuition has informed me that it is currently time to finalize the internal processes and bring to an end the self-discussion of my experience with heat exhaustion in the here and now.

Work Before Play (1984)

In the first journal entry on this subject, I implied that the reasoning behind the acceptance of this menial labor job was complicated, and in fact, maybe it did appear to be complicated then. Now that I’ve processed the experience, I know that my reasoning was quite simple and easy to describe, but I was merely evading the self-worth issues involved, by attempting to dismiss them as complications. The problem with that strategy is that it affords very little potential for positive growth. With my intentions now set on laying this whole thing to rest, I’ll start with the simple reasons that I applied for this job.

I physically moved from Allentown to Savannah less than two months ago, but I had been searching for, and applying to, a number of jobs in this area since early June. For whatever reasons, the companies I’ve applied to were not responding to my applications. My ego kept trying to sell me on the idea that I was too old to be of use as an employee and that these companies were passing me by in search of younger bodies. While it is true that age discrimination exists, I prefer to live happily in the self-delusion that it does not apply to me. I like to imagine that I know my physical capabilities well enough that employers will be compelled to perceive my strengths simply by reading the confidence expressed in the cover letter I’ve attached to the resume. I know, laugh out loud, right? The other, more likely scenario, and this one has actually been brought up during recent interviews, is that I am overqualified for the positions I’m applying to. I’m inclined to believe that this is the issue that I’ve been up against, and if it has been, I had not previously been able to achieve clarity on what strategy to take in order to circumvent it. During the past fifteen years I’ve worked in an extremely specialized industry, namely the fine art sculpture casting industry. I’ve reached a high level of expertise in sculpting, molding, casting and finishing fine art sculpture. During the planning stages of making the move from PA to GA, I conducted a number of searches for sculpture production facilities in or near Savannah. Those searches were unsuccessful. So, while many of the skillsets involved in sculpture production are directly transferable to a wide range of design and manufacturing positions, they are so specific to the industry, that they are also a mystery to the majority of employers who are considering my employment. One way that I’ve attempted to resolve this issue is to pursue job positions that I perceive to be related to the skillsets and level of expertise that I’ve acquired, while also requiring that I upgrade my skills to include the specific range of expertise for the new position. To many, this may seem like a reasonable solution to my dilemma, but it falls short when I include the purpose of my moving to Savannah in the first place. I came here with the specific intention to attend a graduate program at the Savannah College of Art and Design starting in the fall of next year. It would be entirely deceitful for me to approach an employer under the premise that I am interested in learning the specific skills of their trade, with intentions to become a valuable employee, when I know from the start that I would not be there long enough for their training investment to pay off. There was a time in my life when I was willfully dishonest, but thankfully those days are far behind me. My moral compass is now set on a course toward progressive growth and healthy choices. I will continue to experience setbacks, I’m sure, but each time I recover from a setback I’ll expect to attain a clearer vision of the pathway ahead.

Myrtle Beach 2011

When I made the decision to apply to this warehouse job through a staffing agency, I did so with a few simple principles in mind. First, I concluded that a temp agency was the way to go because I was only committing short term. That, after all, is the nature of a temporary work assignment. Second, I wanted a position that was primarily dependent on my physical body with very little thought involved. I reasoned that I could use the bulk of my intellectual energies towards journaling every day, continuing my creative pursuits in growing the Alt Unity, and in making manifest the Grand Providentia Projection. And the last consideration, one that was primarily subconscious, but also of equal importance, was that I wanted to remain completely available and able to cut ties quickly in the event that one of the preferred employers that I had applied to earlier were to call on me to commit. Here is where synchronicity stepped in to validate my reasoning. Last Thursday, during my second week at the warehouse, I was contacted by the Savannah College of Art and Design, regarding an application I had submitted back in June. Following an initial phone interview with a staff recruiter from the college, I am feeling quite confident that this position would be ideal for forward movement on all fronts. I’ve not heard back from the college yet, but I know through experience that if it is meant to be, it will be. When I hung up the phone at the end of the interview, I immediately began to prepare for the possibility that SCAD would offer me the position. My first thoughts were concerned with my current residential location with regards to its proximity to the college. The SCAD campus is spread throughout the beautiful Historic District of Savannah, housed in a number of significant historic buildings in that area. It was my first choice to find a room to rent in the district, but I was unable to find a suitable room that was affordable within my budget. Right now, I’m located about twenty minutes away from the Savannah Historic District, so I am hopeful that an offer from the college might open the door to opportunity, making it possible for me to live in that vicinity. Between the time I finished the interview on Thursday afternoon and Saturday morning, I was putting out intentions based on my desire to live in the Historic District. And on Saturday morning the Universe cooperated again! My current roommate approached me with the offer to move out and follow her to another apartment complex that was about ten miles further away from the site of the college. She told me that she was dissatisfied with the apartment we were living in, and she wanted to move back to the complex where she had previously resided. Two aspects of her offer were problematic for me, and I knew by the time she finished her pitch that I would not be able to accept. Being aware and present in the moment that she was asking me, was key to my seeing the two issues so clearly. I could not imagine relocating further away from the place that I had intended to move toward, and I also couldn’t go along with her intentions to go back to a place where she had previously been. So now, I’ve begun the search for a new home closer to my heart’s desire!

For those of you who took the time, and had the patience, to read through this trilogy of entries based on my experiences during the past two weeks, I am sincerely grateful for your presence! Hopefully, now that I’m recovered from the self-inflicted illness, I’ll be able to get back to a steadier routine of writing on this site. Thank you for reading here!

Film Journey & The Alt Unity

Unity at Birth

Grand Providentia United

Accept It or Not, You Are Part of the Human Community

Whenever I make an honest appraisal of my earliest memories from childhood, one theme that always emerges is a powerful desire to belong. That single desire has remained at the forefront of my earthly persona until this present moment. I have always felt a compelling desire to belong to something that is more than just me. And it isn’t only a desire for connection with other people, although that makes up the bulk of it, it is also a desire for a failproof connection with the Source of Life itself. As you might expect, I had an instinctual need for human connection when I was a baby, and I’ll assume that is a natural and common need for most human children, but I hadn’t even begun to understand my desire for meaningful connections with others. And beyond that, I had no understanding, or even a clue, about having a desire for connection with Source. I’ll assume that is also a commonality we humans share. The focus of this discussion, and I’m hoping it will become a Bonafide discussion, one where readers add commentary, is our desire for connection (unity) with each other. Why do we create communities?

From the moment we’re born we make contact with other human beings. Our physical interaction with others begins at the moment we emerge from the womb. Even if it is only our mother who is present at our birth, we are inevitably touched by human hands. For some of us, those hands are warm and nurturing, while others are greeted by uncaring hands, and in the worst-case scenario, they are the hands of cruelty. Whatever the circumstances of our birth, we are physically reliant on help from others if we are to survive past infancy. It seems as though our instinctual drive to belong to a group of others is an evolutionary feature of being human. It’s part of our genetic makeup that recognizes our physical vulnerabilities and addresses them by giving us the inborn instinct to belong. The desire to belong comes from an entirely different place; It comes from a place of individual preferences. It is the sum-total biases of every interaction we’ve had with others until this present moment. If we’ve learned that we can’t trust other people, then it is likely that we won’t have a desire to connect with them. If we’ve come to the conclusion that human beings are compassionate and willing to lend us a helping hand, then we are more likely to desire their company. Whatever interactions we’ve had with others, and however those various interactions may have colored our preferences in terms of wanting to belong or not, we can still learn to rely on our intuition when it comes to allowing or disallowing other people’s access to our personal lives. In effect, we can choose our own tribe.

At Moore Art Expressions we shared an unspoken understanding that we were all working together to create a successful commercial art business. And we had a whole lot of fun, even when we were dismembering the bodies of sculptural humans to prepare them for molding.

Thank you for stopping in to read! I’ll continue to explore the theme of unity for the rest of this week. Please feel free to comment with your thoughts on this subject, or any other, for that matter!

Below is a link to the Moore Art Expressions FB page. I closed the business in 2019 in search of greener (more profitable) creative pastures. I cherish the memories of S.M.art Castings & Sculpture Services, LLC and Moore Art Expressions but I still believe that I made the right decision when I chose to leave the business of commercial sculpture.

https://www.facebook.com/grandprovidentiaunited/

A True Story, as Yet Unfolding..., Film Journey

Winding the Way to Grand Providentia

Grand Providentia United

Scene 1

Harmony is crouched, fingers clenched tightly to the cold metallic rim of the observation port. She is completely transfixed by what she’s seeing. She snatches a passing thought, ‘What is happening right now is not as simple as seeing, this is more akin to witnessing.’ And what she’s witnessing, is so far outside the realm of her previous experience, that she can only relate to it as being too far out there, way beyond the border of any run of the mill spiritual revelation. Harmony’s eyes are most certainly sending signals to her brain, but her brain seems to be rejecting those signals, one after the other, and without exception. She feels as though her mind is stuttering. Her brain is refusing to generate a coherent description of the visual information as it is being received. Her mind feels overwhelmed, overtaxed, overheated. Harmony fires out a desperate prayer that she won’t pass out. And then… She does.

Total blackness, and then, two pinpoints of light. They’re polychromatic and they appear to be at arm’s length. Or they could be miles away, like automobile headlights on a dark horizon. The lights don’t seem to be getting closer though, instead they are spreading outward, and fast. The pinpoints become dots and the dots become disks, the disks expand until they collide, integrate, and wash over her field of vision. And all at once, as if she had never lost consciousness, Harmony finds herself crouched, in the same position she had been, her white-knuckled hands, aching, her wide-open eyes still mesmerized by the dazzling light show before her. The waves of spectral color seem to be infiltrating, melding with, and extricating themselves from the molecular matter of the ceramic-clad surface on the inside of the energy containment tank. Almost as if the entire inner lining of the tank is one enormous cuttlefish. Harmony has looked through the viewport on this tank thousands of times over the past five years, always hoping to see some sign of success; some indication of stored energy. She suddenly realizes that she might have given up hope for success long ago, just as many of her friends, and most of her family, had given up on her. What she was now witnessing was so much more than redemption, so much more than success. This was indisputably miraculous!

Author’s note: As an integral part of the “True Story, as Yet Unfolding…”, the previous scene should be considered fictional creative writing. It is but one element of the continuous documentary we will be producing through the Alt Unity. While we should consider it fiction for now, I have an uncanny feeling that it may migrate to the factual side once the Grand Providentia Projection is underway.

To hear a podcast version of this story – https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-joseph-moore/episodes/Winding-the-Way-to-Grand-Providentia-e1nk14n

Film Journey & The Alt Unity

Welcome to Our Now!

Grand Providentia United

Gathering Awareness – Entry #1

I am sincerely grateful for your presence in this moment! I’m even more grateful that you’ve chosen to spend a moment of our time reading this blog. Thank you!

Now is our time. It is our only time, so I’ll make this as brief and painless as possible. Please attempt to put aside the worries of the world in this moment. I know it’s difficult, because it’s something that I need to practice from one moment to the next, and the next, and the next. To be IN this moment, I believe it’s necessary to consciously decide to be OUT of other moments. Moments that have already past and moments that are yet to arise are irrelevant in this moment. Please choose to let go of the past and future for just a moment. It may mean that you’ll need to quiet the voice in your head, momentarily. That voice (your ego) will immediately try to distract you with regrets about the past or fond memories from the past that you might hope to relive. Ego will warn you that fearful things might happen to you in future moments, if you get distracted by the moment we are in right now. The ego feels threatened when you are present and aware, because ego insists on absolute control. When you are present in this moment, past and future moments are inconsequential, until you return your conscious focus on them, and in effect, you become unconscious and unaware once more. And when you choose to return to unconsciousness, aware only of your past and future, the ego regains control of your thoughts and reinforces the idea that the present moment is insignificant, while all the past and future moments are the only ones you should be concerned with. Your ego deceives you into thinking that past moments you’ve experienced sum up your life story until now. And furthermore, your ego wants you to believe that your future is dictated by those past moments, which, by the way, were undeniably present moments when you experienced them! So, if you can call out the ego and expose its mind games for what they are, you’ll be well on your way to experiencing the unlimited potential of this current moment. Welcome to our now!