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LifeloggingI am Apollo Lemmon and this is my lifestream. I invite you to join me in my exploration of an integral life. I am focused on discovering what it means to live a life rooted in integral consciousness and I explore spirituality, art, community, technology, fitness and other aspects of a fully engaged life. I am now living in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
I can always be reached at apollo@apollolemmon.com
It may be useful to take a look at the four noble truths again and try really, really hard to language them to apply to relationships. I'll go first. Let me know what you think.
You would certainly recognize your signature on a piece of paper, but do you know your own emotional signature? We all have one. It’s our predictable way of reacting to situations. Your friends probably recognize your emotional signature better than you do. When you get into a fight with your partner, for example, they can predict just how it will go. They know if you’re likely to slam a door, storm out of the house, or call your mother. They know if you’ll be processing the argument for days or immediately shut down and clam up. How do they know so much? They know because they’ve seen it all before. Our behavior may seem spontaneous to us, but to those who know us, we’re not too surprising. 
Podcasts are meaningful media for me; they’re the closest thing to radio I can have any passion about. Here is a selection of sexy, speculative and informative ‘casts that I have recently added to the ‘casts I enjoy enough to listen to weekly.
These ‘casts often include mature, sexual or violent content, so if you’re timid you may not want to explore the material I am about to present. If you are interested in being challenged in thinking about relationships, wish to be tantalized with otherworldly fiction and … wish to be tantalized with otherworldly fiction, read on.
Our future promises technologies that will radically extend our lives, but right now there are tested methods for living long, exciting and healthy lives, even beyond 100 years. Dan Buettner has studied the world’s best aged people and found the lifestyle features that they have in common, creating a set of guidelines for living better and longer.
In a recently released TED Talk, “How to live to be 100+“, Dan outlined how he conducted his study by visiting regions of the world with higher rates of centenarians and noting what these communities have in common. He dispelled some longevity myths at the start and then laid out some of the key features shared by each long-lived community.
National Geographic writer and explorer Dan Buettner studies the world’s longest-lived peoples, distilling their secrets into a single plan for health and long life.
~ TED: “How to live to be 100+”
I’ve selected quantified, simplified and intimate as three words to be the framework of my 2010. These words will serve as guides for my projects throughout the coming year; if an endeavor does not serve to deepen any of these words I will consider not doing it. I came upon the idea in Chris Brogan’s own 3 Words for 2010.
Quantified
At the end of 2009 I began working more actively with the ideas of Total Recall and Quantified Self to track details about my life. By the end of the year I was keeping track of my diet, exercise, sleep and meditation daily and gaining some insights into my behaviours. The word quantified is to help me remember to add new ways of measuring my progress in building a better life. A concrete example of how this allows for goal setting is my plan to add one new area of subjective or objective tracking to my lifelogging each month; for January I had added mood tracking through the website Moodlog.
Simplified
At heart I’m a minimalist, even though I’ve had a lot of clutter and stuff in my life. This year my life will become further simplified through embracing ememory to reduce my possessions to little other than what I can work with digitally. My unnecessary and clunky furniture like desks and shelves will be purged soon as well. I plan to take on commitments only if they enrich my life in an important way. I’ll be adding in more simplification projects as the year flows along and I prepare for another move.
Intimate
In the past couple years many of my relationships have not been as strong and as warm as I aspire for them to be. There are many things that contributed to this, whether it was overextending myself in other activities, purely not communicating well and often, or not cultivating new friendships. I’ve been in a new province since September and have made no friends outside of work and I definitely want to change this trend. Throughout 2010 I’ll be developing a warmer presence, deeper and stronger ties with friends and just maybe finding a new romantic partner or two.
With so much information at our fingertips, it is increasingly important to create powerful visualization tools to make it all more palatable. I Want You To Want Me does this in the world of matchmaking. The visualization project “explores the search for love and self in the world of online dating.”
Dating profiles may not seem the ripest place for important data, but there is a lot that can be learned from looking at the traits we think others will value in us and what we want to find in prospective partners. Every stumble and triumph in dating life is an opportunity to reflect on ourselves, and being able to see these pieces from others is valuable in understanding both ourselves and the societies we live in.
I Want You To Want Me chronicles the world’s long-term relationship with romance, across all ages, genders, and sexualities, gathering new data from a variety of online dating sites every few hours. The system searches these sites for certain phrases, which it then collects and stores in a database. These phrases, taken out of context, provide partial glimpses into people’s private lives. Simultaneously, the system forms an evolving zeitgeist of dating, tracking the most popular first dates, turn-ons, desires, self-descriptions and interests.
The highlights the group behind the project have shared range between inspiring and ridiculous, with a person who “will listen to your darkest demons and not fear them” for each one “looking for a guy to JUST make out with.” What this tells us about our outer and inner worlds I’m not sure, but it’s one glimpse more than we had before this project launched.
The video that follows demonstrates the visualization and shares some more about the project. more »
Today, over at Integral Options Cafe, William brought my attention to “Polyamory in the News“. As he pointed out, polyamory is often viewed as very weird. The article and many opponents of the practice of polyamory become caught in a tangle.
Polyamory (from poly=multiple + amor=love) is a tricky subject, often because of a pre/trans fallacy. There are at least two approaches that accept polyamoury, one coming from “fuck you, I’ll sleep with anyone I want” and the other “these relationships we enter into are beneficial to us all and brimming with genuine love.” The two can easily be confused if one doesn’t know how to discern the difference in intent.
I experienced the feeling of and desire for polyamory with my first romantic and sexual stirrings. My first crush was on two best friends and ever since then my affections and tenderness were always twinned. Kira and Becky, Alicia and Jenna, and on my school crushes went. When I fell in love and had relationships later, I found that any love I felt did not diminish as I moved forward with new loves. Though the context changed, I have been blessed with loving friendships in the wake of romantic relationships. I thank my polyamorous tendencies for facilitating that, in part. Having an openness toward loving has become included as a vital aspect of my personality.
I’ve never actually practiced polyamory by having two intimate relationships at once, and it becomes a more challenging prospect as my moral understanding deepens. When we are taking into account everyone’s well being, stepping into multiple perspectives, avoiding harm and ensuring benefit for everyone is incredibly challenging. I have never been in a situation where I could say with certainty that being in relationships with two women would be best for us all, and so have remained, happily, in monogamy.
The openness to that happening remains. As Gary of Integral in Seattle pointed out in “Sacred Marriage“, higher levels of relationships are facilitating transformation and growth through intimacy. If the union of two people committed to that intimate evolution is so beautiful and beneficent it leaves us shattered in awe, what of more than two? Love becomes without boundary, and that includes both span (who we love) and depth (how deeply we love). Being in service of love then becomes about being skillful in how we act from love. I can only hope to be up to the challenge of love, however it arises.