What an amazing year was 2010! So many beautiful, profound, creative events occurred for me this year. It was also a year of rattling challenges, assaults and compromises.

I was so honored to be recognized for my insights and abilities, professionally and creatively. I have been so excited to learn new things, from social networking and platform building to blogging and how to run a corporation. I have also been painfully aware at times of my own shortcomings and areas where I need even more focus, attention and hard work.

I am so incredibly grateful for the opportunity to follow my path! What a wild ride it is, this third dimensional path. Money, Music and Taxes. Relationship, Integrity, Love and Sex. Fascinating stuff. I am honored to have the opportunity to share my musings and experiences with all of you and I hope you’ll join me in 2011 for more fun and silliness, politics and profundity. It is fun to write and it is also really fun to be read.

Integrity, Wisdom and Patience are my three keystone words for 2011; my guides on the path. I look forward to my interactions with you and I want to remind you that even when we slip off or consciously leap from our paths, we’re still on it! so, might as well enjoy the ride and breathe yourself right back into alignment with what you wish to create and how you desire to feel.

May it be a profound, loving year for all of us.

Blessings!

Jeffrey

I have a confession to make:

I can’t stop crushing out on Sarah Palin. I find all sorts of things to dislike about her, her politics, ignorant comments about Muslims, the Constitution, Death Panels. Yet I still find myself longing for her like the woman at a party who is with that guy but still flirts with me. Why does she still flirt with me? Why does she make me think about her? Is it me? I know I’m not that cool, yet she smiles and winks and well, she’s just so, um, seductive…

The lilting verbiage of the GMILSNW (Grizzly Mom I’d Like to Spend a Night With) should logically repel me, launching me back towards the comforting whispers of Maureen Dowd, Arianna Huffington or of course, my wife. Yet, there I am, denouncing, lambasting, embarrassing her to the point of ridicule only to slip her my room number after the obvious rant.

What is wrong with me? I feel like Don Draper around Jimmy Barrett’s wife. Stop me, please, before I regret something. Did you see her fire that gun on the Discovery Channel? She’s just so feisty! What if she is the JFK candidate of my time?

Surely it wasn’t the cover shot in her running suit or the rifle-protruding-from-her-groin shot. It wasn’t the silly guest appearance on SNL or her saucy grins on Fox News. It couldn’t have been the proud, concerned mother shots on Dancing With the Stars…What is it that bewitches me, you alluring governess, you? How will I ever be free from those eyes and live a good, honest liberal life?

And yet, it was really your year, wasn’t it, Sarah? Well, yes, you’re right. It was our year. You couldn’t be where you are without me, the entranced onlooker. I’m the one who can’t shut your show off because you are just so interesting. Just so, Sarah…

We in the modern world of sound bytes and star crazed shallowness have a tendency to read or hear a 140 character, tweet sized encapsulation of another person’s perception of a thought, policy or persona and make our own determination of thumbs up or thumbs down in that instant.

First impressions are tough to change and in this day and age of digital dissemination, without some old fashioned “face-time” or the slow drip of getting to know someone so they “grow on us” it is even more challenging to survive the PR landslide of a bad review or commentary.

There are more than a few examples of people who are quickly condemned today by the media as nut-jobs. Take John Yettaw, the man who tried to single handedly free the Burmese leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, under house arrest by swimming to her rescue across a locked down lake. He reached her, spent the night on her couch, and led to five more years of imprisonment for her hospitality. It took a Clinton to win his release from prison.

Or Gary Faulkner, the Colorado gentleman who says he is called by God to single-handedly track down Osama bin-Laden in the mountains of Pakistan, handcuff him and bring him to the authorities as his prisoner. He has made eleven attempts thus far and has almost killed himself numerous times trying.

We have a tendency to encounter these folks on Letterman or the View and after their five minute spot, we decide whether we approve or disapprove, agree or disagree, like or dislike. Likewise, it’s hard not to watch Dateline or Paula Zahn and not have an instant “gut” determination of an accused person’s innocence or guilt.

Then again, we like to believe that the information we are being presented isn’t biased but objective, un-altered, free of spin, award-winning journalism… If Sarah Palin’s Alaska is hosted by the Learning Channel, then we’d like to think subconsciously that there is no make-up crew or massive editing, colorization and manipulation happening.

Remember the Reuters photograph a few years ago in Beirut during the Israeli attack on the city that was proven to have been digitally manipulated with enhanced color, smoke and fire? All the news that’s fit to print, but if it isn’t quite fit, we can give it a nip and tuck and we’re good to go…

Mohandas Gandhi was a British educated attorney who one day shed his three piece tailored suit for a loin cloth and a sheet. He decided it was his destiny to lead the underclass of his society against one of the mightiest superpowers of the time. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a little known black preacher who felt it was his destiny to lead the underclass of his society against the racist policies of local and national government. Lech Walesa was an un-educated Polish factory worker who felt it was his mission to lead fellow workers against the oppressive, hypocritical government in the Solidarity movement.

So, what’s the difference between “one who is called” and one who is “bat-shit crazy?”

Some people believe that Santa Claus is real. Some people believe that Jesus could walk on water and raise the dead. Some people believe that it is their mission in life to stop gay people from getting married. Some people believe that one person’s beliefs are right while another’s is wrong.

Sometimes the line between a loss of reality and a creation of reality becomes so blurred that there really is no difference.

Albert Einstein once posed a radical question especially for a scientist: “Is the universe a friendly place?”

Many of his peers were instantly outraged that a man of science would even attempt to place any type of value or judgment to the factual, concrete, linear nature of well, nature, for the question itself is as radical as anyone’s subjective answer.

There could be fewer more important questions in the world we live in to at least establish a tentative hypothesis, a working position. In fact, one’s personal response to this question is in many ways the defining point of one’s existence.

If I believe that the universe is a friendly place, conspiring in my favor, then from the time I awake in the morning to the time I close my eyes at night, my life rests in a cradle of positivity and purpose. I exist within a context of something bigger than me that supports my life. The parking ticket is a reminder that I need to be more mindful and share space with others. It is perhaps the extra moment I needed in order to delay my entrance onto the freeway before a terrible accident would have occurred.

However, if I believe that the universe is in fact not a friendly place and that forces in the field of my existence are conspiring against me, then my context is one of survival of the fittest, me against the world. I exist in a fight against the forces that would have me extinguished. The parking ticket on my car is an affirmation of a world that doesn’t love me.

What kind of universe do you live in?

For many of us, the holiday season is a time to come together, share gifts and eat sweets. It can also be a time of intensified stress, old family patterns and unseemly reactions.

Hard to believe that a little Bing Crosby, Adam Sandler or Mariah Carey couldn’t soothe our exhausted adrenal glands and anxious antlers. However, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that at a time when we are encouraged to embrace the “Christmas Spirit” we are even more challenged to respond instead of react to the triggers in our midst.

And yes, you might be my trigger. Especially after three versions of Rudolph, a few Grandmas getting run over by reindeer, and yes, I know it is a white Christmas you’re dreaming of but can you stop bringing up Sarah Palin, please, please?

My dear sibling, parent, distant cousin, family friend, this or that twice removed…you may indeed hold the trigger I had hoped would remain dormant until dessert was served, the party ended or the wrapping paper re-folded and recycled. You have the unfortunate fortune of having unearthed the shadow to my light; the ugly beast that sleeps at my feet. I had really hoped you wouldn’t, but there you went and did it. The Kraken has been released.

Now I can feel the wheels turning and the gears grinding deep within, blood rushing to my cheeks and thoughts rapidly switching from innocuous banter to angry memories, projections, resentments and some minor homicidal fantasies. It’s easy to assume at this point that small children should be removed from the line of fire and Grandma’s special china be taken back to the kitchen.

But alas, no. Instead of letting the trigger take control of the situation and unleash it’s potential to steer the world down the path of a Jerry Springer show gone awry, use it as an opportunity to grow in ways beyond the waistline. The trigger is life’s invitation to confront our shadow and choose a response to it that creates the world we want to live in; a world we fashion from our ideals, our imagination, our hopes and dreams.