With all the excitement about The Dip, I haven’t posted anything else about the weekend!

The class was amazing. This was the final weekend — there is one more evening session, in January — for a 10 month long course designed to bring fun, play, and ease into your life. I have to say, I think it worked.

This weekend, we looked at how we each envision the eternal and our relationship with or access to it. In particular, we looked at art (in the broadest, Greek sense, including science, mathmatics, music, etc), spirituality, and participation in community and the physical world as being three different — and each alone, incomplete — models for thinking about and being in some form of communication or understanding with the eternal.

Heady, intellectual stuff! In the best, most fun, sense of the word.

For me, the Talent/No Talent Show was about participating in the community of the class, being physically engaged in the world, and about expressing myself in a way that is outside of my comfort zone. As I put it the next day in the class, "I can’t sing. At least not by the traditional rules of singing, like carrying a tune."

What was amazing about it for me was just fully committing to the performance, without letting any concern about how I looked or sounded getting in the way of my enthusiasm.

So even though I know my singing is bad, I sang with enthusiasm. And I stuck with it when I flubbed a line, or noticed that my voice was shaking and not as loud as it had been. And I even did the "Ernestine" snort in the song, which has to be the least sexy moment in the whole thing. I did it loud and proud.

And it was great! It was so much fun, and the audience laughed and laughed.

The other amazing thing we did was an exercise in acknowledging and appreciating people. In groups of 6, each person told each other person in the group what they appreciated and wanted to acknowledge the person for. Some of us knew each other pretty well; others were strangers. But it was surprisingly easy to pick up things about the people we didn’t know, and the acknowledgement was still wonderful.

I was acknowledged for being:

• beautiful
• brave
• compassionate
• smart
• fun
• charismatic
• a leader
• someone who lights up a room
• feminine, and
• an amazing mother-to-be

And, my overall grade for the class was an A.

Two of the other people in the Atlanta class were doing the weekend out of town with me. We decided to create a community of people committed to pursuing our dreams and supporting each other in pursuing their dreams. We aren’t sure exactly what that’s going to look like yet, but ideas in play right now are:

• An open blog to share ideas and track progress
• Getting together once a month to talk about what we’re up to and how it’s going
• Email/listserv creation with other people interested in the same things
• Brainstorming for more ideas

I’ll link to the blog and post more about it when it launches later this week.

I’m especially excited because for the last 2 years, Jill and I have created "next year" around this time of year, and both times, the results have been amazing.

We created 2004 as the year of Unprecedented Results. In that time, Jill had her professional theater debut, started her flexible-theater-supporting-day-job, and I got a big promotion at the old job and then recruited for the new job here in Atlanta. Our household income increased by approximately 50%!

Then we created 2005 as the year that was All About The Boolings. (Our family word for children.) Obviously, that worked extremely well, although technically we won’t get the result we created until early 2006. (Or so we hope!) Plus tons of the people in our lives also either had babies or got pregnant this year, so we’re sharing the wealth. We found out about another couple of friends being pregnant this weekend!!! (They aren’t telling people yet, so I can’t identify them.)

I’m not sure what we’re going to create for 2006. But I think it will be cool and fun and even more powerful to create it with a whole group of people.

Fruit & Veg Count, 11/14: ~1, maybe 1 1/4 cup carrots.