A FEW THINGS I LOVE: green lightning…people who smile…long shadows…cool air…watering flowers…moms praising kids…silky mud…full moons…biting into an orange…colors that throb…prowling mists…old men sitting alone…lilacs in bloom…music boxes…little girls serving tea to dolls…shining eyes…true love…rustling leaves…long floating calls…limeade…dancing sunlight…tired children like tattered angels…silence at dawn…skeins of birds…droopy dogs…happy dogs…whistling…black cherry ice cream…fireflies at dusk…marauding winds…fear melting into trust…embers…cold rhubarb pie…the scent of wintergreen.

That’s the short list, each in its moment. Standing room only at the Theatre of Wonders! You want a map? I’ve got a special one for you – a Mercator map of the Imagination. Yours. But you can only read it with your eyes closed ‘cause – hey, it’s a map to your IMAGINATION! I’d share mine, but then you might not be in Kansas anymore.

Magic is always elusive until you detox from sedentary living, stagnancy, predictability, monotony and habit. Then magic can become a chain reaction, powered by the way you think. Helps to be inspired, but the stimulus varies from life to life. You won’t find inspiration on billboards, however. Doesn’t come with elaborate planning, grand vacations and tour guides. Not available in lock-step classes, scheduled groups or orchestrated events. Spontaneity, that’s the ticket to the epiphanies at your elbow. Small and sudden theater.

But what I said about detoxing, that’s important. Inspiration will fill a vacuum if you pump all the stagnant air out of your life. Eliminate the dull and insipid and you automatically upgrade to the unique and creative. Invariably comes down to communication, but if you’re short on gurus, consider your inner self for that role. Because you wouldn’t need an upgrade if there wasn’t already some unfulfilled quality control inside you, some need and capacity for awakening to higher thought, galvanizing insights and sensory interaction.

Eliminate the toxins of dullness and distraction, and you create the vacuum for communication and expression – books, nature, special people in your life…or just yourself! Good news is the world has never been so saturated with communications. That’s also the bad news. Quality keeps dropping. But there is still intelligent life out there apart from hysterical groupthink. Lift your lantern high so you can illuminate the unknown space beyond the crowd!

My granddad – a Great Lakes captain for 42 years – use to tie me in sailors’ knots to see if I could escape. The tangle that always defeated me was the one that would’ve forced me to take off my trousers to get free. I may not have solved his comical dilemma then, but the lesson took: strip down to your true self or stay trussed up in the knots with which others bind you. Say…do you feel a draft?

It doesn’t mean you can’t fit in. I like to think I’m housebroken. I can don the glad rags and sashay to the drumbeat of polite society. Lift my pinky when tipping the cup, waltz with the hostess, defer to the boss, keep my eyes open while I sleep through a committee meeting, dig foxholes and peel potatoes with the dog faces – there is no one better at conformity than a true nonconformist. That’s because you have to know all the shackles before you can fashion a master key to unlock them. So I CAN wear the uniforms that society and circumstances require of me (…really tough wearing a lapel pin in the nude). Thing is, though, an extraordinary percentage of my life is lived off the clock. Sanctuaries, partitions, retreats, inner sanctums – it’s why I moved to Minnesota.

Hope you are untying your knots. Life binds us in so many ways while we are reaching at the same time that we are trying to belong. We make our bargains, sell our souls and give away our hearts. Some of that is good. If your tether is your safety line rather than your leash, or you’re broken to the bridle and the reins in the hands of others who will guide you, or if you’ve found “the tie that binds,” then maybe you yourself have lassoed “happily ever after.” But if growth and freedom are the promises life made you, you will need to resist those strictures, else that very growth will cause the knots to cut into you.

I’m always astonished how many of the fishbowl high-profilers who are scrutinized to the nines turn out to have hidden lives. Makes me think it’s true of all of us to one degree or another. Wishing you the best of summers chasing fireflies and magic!

A few photos below:

#1 Everyone has taken this path down to the lake sometime somewhere in their summers! #2-3 The future is in good hands with a couple of local friends: math whiz Christian Heck and concert pianist Cyndi Heck. #4-5 Sunset in the Golden Field. #6 Stopped in the middle-of-the-highway to take this photo through the moonroof of my wheels, and that second set of headlights up the road turned out to be a cop. He U-turned (very dangerous…tsk, tsk) and pulled me over, but we ended up talking about deer and sunsets and parted friends, no ticket. #7 And no words for this one…the silence of awe. #8 The Swans of Eastman. #9 Movie night with Norby nation (no dinosaurs were harmed in the making of Jurassic World). #10 Elm Creek noir. #11 This was a magazine ad with yours truly climbing into an industrial dryer to demonstrate the durability of a swim-aid product called Stretch-buoys. #12  Love this one of moi stopping– OF COURSE – a shot on goal but the joke is that there’s no way anyone can put it in the net on me…‘cause there is no net! Bwahahaha!