I’m not a Luddite, but come on. It’s kinda scary what AI can do, especially as it relates to writing text on the internet. It’s also kinda cool.
If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, let me explain. These days a writer can pop a question like, “How can yoga help to calm your nervous system?” into a text generator on the internet and have AI pop out a ready-made text that you can use for whatever you want, like writing an article, newsletter, or blog post. At the very least, it can help you create a base for your text after which you can go back and clean it up and make it sound a little less like a Speak and Spell and little more like a human wrote it.
I mean, who needs to learn to write well if AI can do it for you, right?
Have you heard of this or are you already using AI to help you write online?
True, putting relevant information out there about your subject might be helpful, and if we are writing just to add to the seemingly limitless information about your subject, chances are that AI is already doing it faster and better.
But only using AI to write sidesteps an enormous opportunity.
Our great opportunity with our writing is not just to share information with the world but rather to share ourselves with the world through our words.
Plus, AI will never be able to tell YOUR story.
AI doesn’t know your history. It can’t constellate the different events of your life and weave them together into a greater and more beautiful tapestry of meaning. It can’t mold this meaning into a heart-felt story that you can share with the world to make relatability, connections, and relationships.
Today, I wanted to share an example of connecting the dots of what could be meaningless facts and exploring questions around those facts in an effort to choose or invent a greater meaning to those facts.
Public Service Announcement: YOU GET TO CHOOSE THE MEANING OF THE EVENTS IN YOUR LIFE. In part, this is how we are co-creating our reality.
“The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order, a timetable not necessarily—perhaps not possibly—chronological. The time as we know it subjectively is often the chronology that stories and novels follow: it is the continuous thread of revelation.”
I wrote this story today and yesterday and I’ve purposely chosen to write a very personal story precisely because it is heart-felt and not something AI could do. My intention is both to show you my thought process of creating a story and also to demonstrate that through the writing process, I discover more about myself and make meaning to my personal history. I also hope to connect with you, heart to heart with something that maybe you can relate to as well.
Speak and Spell, eat your heart out.
Here’s the story …
Dogs and Hogs
My older sister, Charity, was easy to love.
She loved many things but above all, she loved dogs and hogs.
Charity owned a litany of Golden Retrievers, each one legendary.
First there was Sadie, mild and docile, until she saw a cat then she was positively possessed. Plus, Sadie had bad doggie breath, god bless her.
Then there was Shadow, an unruly male with fire in his eyes. It was a full-body workout just to walk him around the block—a lot of shoulders, triceps, and core work.
Then there was Chase, cool (and as round) as a cucumber, a total rockstar amongst the kids in my sister’s neighborhood who would come to her house and ask if they could play with her dog so they could dress him up in costumes, ride him like a pony, or lay on him like a pillow. As long as he was getting a pet and people were involved, he was into it.
Finally, to break up the long dynasty of Golden Retrievers, Charity owned a little white Cantonese named Suri, a happy lap dog who weighed 10 lbs soaking wet.
Forever, my sister’s dogs were her kids and my other siblings and parents all treated her dogs like our nieces, nephews, and granddogs.
Charity also loved Harleys.
She loved the spirit of freedom and ruggedness of Harleys. A rebel at heart, Charity loved how Harleys slightly leaned toward lawlessness. The spirit she appreciated in Harleys, Charity also appreciated in men. The nickname for Harleys is hogs, an adjective also attributable to many of the men she dated.
This lawlessness of motorcyclists isn’t unique to Americans. Oh, no. Now, this is completely my opinion, here, but one thing that I’ve noticed living in France, and my French friends largely agree with me on this, is that the attitudes of French motorists in general, but specifically motorcyclists, whether driving a Harley Road King or a Honda Trail 90, also exhibit a level of blatant lawlessness. Clearly the legacy of French car races like the Grand Prix is in their blood causing everyone on the road to emulate a Road Warrior persona, driving too fast and too aggressive, pedestrians be damned. If it means that I sound like a curmudgeon just because I get annoyed by dodging cars and motorcycles that are driving on the sidewalk or have to sprint with my family through a crosswalk (mon Dieu) just because Road Warrior can’t be bothered to slow down to less than Autobahn speeds, than so be it.
I know, I know, I don’t need to have an opinion about it ….
Somehow, I feel that Charity would more than likely snigger at and condone this moto-mayhem.
Charity always did everything her way and no way was Charity going to ride on the back of someone else’s motorcycle. Being a fiercely independent woman, a self-learner, and because many of the men she dated were often even less reliable than their bikes, she bought and learned to ride her own Harley-Davidson—a silver Deluxe Softail with Screamin’ Eagle pipes and whitewall tires.
She adored that motorcycle.
Every year she would load up her hog on a trailer, attach it to an RV, and haul it from Salt Lake City, Utah to Sturgis, South Dakota to attend one of the biggest motorcycle rallies in the world.
But one year while at Sturgis, her love for motorcycles died after witnessing a horrifying accident that killed another woman rider. Seeing this accident shook her hard and she resolved to park her bike on the trailer and sell it as soon as she got back to Salt Lake.
For a year or two, her Harley sat in the garage gathering dust under her Cowboys on Motorcycles calendar.
Then one day, one of her less-than-reliable ex-boyfriends rolled by to say hi. He suggested they dust off her hog and go for a short spin. On this occasion she uncharacteristically rode on the back and uncharacteristically rode without a helmet.
Not speeding, but taking a turn too sharply, a foot peg caught the pavement and flipped the bike, throwing her headlong into a large boulder on the side of the road, killing her almost instantly. Her ex-boyfriend sustained injuries but survived.
Charity’s sudden and violent death was a massive shock to our family as well as her enormous wake of friends. We just weren’t prepared to lose her.
Over many weeks and months, we gathered as a family and wrapped up her affairs including finding a home for her surviving dogs, Chase and Suri, who were generously adopted by some of Charity’s best friends.
I love Charity immensely but unexplainably, I felt numb about her death for about 18 months or so. I felt guilty about not feeling more than a little grief. I think that I just couldn’t wrap my mind and heart around it.
But eventually, in my own time, I opened up and was able to properly grieve her death, which no doubt was the result of the healing work I’ve done with my personal meditation and Yoga Nidra practice. Oh, and a great therapist. That and I can’t forget the help of a shaman and a healthy dose of ayahuasca in the jungles of South America.
It took a while but through all of this I came to realize that my relationship with Charity didn’t end. My friend, Tiffany Burns, is a fellow Yoga Nidra teacher, a River Writing facilitator, and the founder of Continuing Connections. It’s a business that uses Yoga Nidra and writing to help people who have lost loved ones to maintain and even improve their relationships with their past loved ones. In exploring how to use Yoga Nidra to deepen her work with her clients, she opened my eyes to understand that you’re not meant to “get over” someone who has passed. Rather, you get to create continuing connections with them in an ongoing dialogue of symbols, memories, and meaning making.
I suppose that is what this story is all about.
I loved Charity’s dogs but I didn’t feel like I was the dog-owning type. I mean, growing up, our family had a few dogs but the first one ran away and the second was hit by a car in front of our house. Both of these instances broke my heart and frankly traumatized me. So, not wishing to relive that all over again, I was quite content having doggie nephews and nieces and leaving the actual owning of the dog to others.
Plus, there’s a metric shit-ton of dog doo to pick up. No thanks.
My attitude changed after many months of convincing by Sen and Ellie. So, in December of 2022, our family adopted a beautiful and loving Australian Cobberdog. We named him Cosmo because the name came to Sen in a dream and if your wife gets a revelation that you’re supposed to name your dog Cosmo, you name your dog Cosmo.
Cosmo at 4 months, his adoption day.
Cosmo at 7 months.
We fell instantly in love with Cosmo and in the 4 months that we’ve owned him, we’ve had so many bonding experiences, whether it’s sitting with us at cafes, snuggling on the couch reading Elio bedtime stories, or spending time training him. One of Cosmo’s favorite things to do is to wake Elio up in the morning by going into his room and licking his face. As he is doing it, Cosmo’s so happy, his tail wagging so much, that you’d think it might fall off. He's undeniably a messenger of joy and happiness, so much so that I don’t even mind picking up the dog doo.
Now here’s the scary part …
About two months ago, when Cosmo was only 5 months old and totally puppy-brained, we were on a walk with him en route to one of our favorite cafes here in Nice when, walking on the sidewalk next to a busy intersection, we encountered another dog on a walk with his owner. The dogs greeted each other like long-lost friends (brothers from another mother) and instantly began playing, hopping around, and pawing at each other. Immediately, the leashes of the two dogs became impossibly tangled.
I was holding Cosmo’s leash but when the dogs started to tangle their leashes, Seneca who was opposite of me in the foray of ecstatic dogs, reached for the leash to help untangle them. In poor judgment, I let go of the leash thinking that she had it but she didn’t. Suddenly, without anyone holding his leash, Cosmo’s leash slipped from the knot. Feeling his leash untethered, Cosmo burst away from the cluster, drunk with freedom, several feet from where I could grab it.
In his euphoria, he bolted blindly and at a dead sprint toward the busy street with oncoming traffic. We were horrified to see that a huge delivery truck was tearing down the street, fast and furious. Lawless. It was clear that Cosmo was in a trajectory to be hit by this huge truck.
In the space of only one or two seconds, this nightmare was unfolding before our eyes and there was no way to grab his leash in time—we were completely helpless.
The oncoming delivery truck couldn’t see Cosmo because he was driving too damn fast and because his vision was blocked by a motorcycle that was parked (lawlessly) on the sidewalk perpendicular to the street, totally blocking any view of pedestrian traffic. I mean, who parks like that? Oh, yeah. The French do.
But thank you, Angel of Lawlessness, because in a fraction of a second and by pure cosmic intervention, our dog’s untethered and flapping leash somehow wedged itself under the rear tire of the illegally parked motorcycle and within only a few inches before Cosmo met Road Warrior’s front wheels, the leash caught, yanking Cosmo to a dead stop, landing him flat on his back, dazed and confused. Road Warrior whizzed by down the street, completely unaware that he’d come within inches of plowing into our sweet dog.
It was an unmitigated miracle.
My hands shook as I removed Cosmo’s leash from under the tire of the parked motorcycle and picked up my trembling dog from off the ground. I held him tightly against my chest and could feel our two hearts pounding from fear.
Elio and Sen gathered around and we all loved on him and pet him reassuringly as we passed wide-eyed glances to each other sharing our wordless gratitude for our dog who was just miraculously saved from an untimely doggie demise.
In the days following this event, Elio and I chatted during our walks to school, processing and making sense of the events of that terrifying moment. We decided together that clearly Cosmo must have a guardian angel. We decided that if it’s heaven’s law that you’re not supposed to meddle in the lives of the living, there must have been a rebellious angel up there who took things into her own hands to save our sweet dog. We decided that this angel could be none other than Charity because what other rebellious angel loves both dogs and hogs?
One motorcycle took a life and another motorcycle saved a life.
Thank you, sweet Charity.
What a great writing practice! Writing this has helped me profoundly to add depth and narrative to both my sister’s death and the near death of my dog. Again, the “history” is made in the interpretation of the events. That’s what’s true and real, or at least what really matters.
Ok, so in Saturday’s workshop, I’ll show you how I fleshed out some pretty straight forward and neutral facts, then made some long-chain connections, and wove it all together to make a story with heart and meaning so that you can do this with your own stories.
This online writing workshop is perfect for all levels of writers. It’s going to be empowering and fun as we explore the power and play of writing in a way that AI can’t. I’m going to give you templates for writing for your website, including your About Me page, impact statement, opt-in (valuable free offer) and how to write to establish yourself as an expert in your field. I’ll also give you tools to help you write simple, clear, and cogent blog posts and newsletters that speak directly to your clients’ needs.
You can join live and/or watch the replay. I’ve also priced this to be very affordable so you have no excuse to put your ideas and stories out into the world.
Remember that more than just adding information to the internet, your opportunity through writing is to share your story with the world. Learning to connect these dots between your life’s events and your ideas will add beautiful meaning to your life and connect your heart with your clients, students, and the world.
