To Be Human

Garden of the Gods Hike

May 13, 2017 by fpdorchak

Garden of the Gods Park, Colorado Springs, CO (© F. P. Dorchak 2017)

I took a beautiful hike through Garden of the Gods (GoG) park yesterday evening, after my gym workout. I was going to stay and do my cardio at the gym, by my wife, whom I met at the gym, suggested I take a break from all my gnarly shit and just enjoy the evening–and I’m glad I did (sometimes I need her to tell me to take a goddamned break…). I took my Nikon with me and got some really cool shots! I spent about an hour-and-a-half hiking through it, and it was great—fewer people. Better shots without people in them—though one woman, admittedly, would have made an incredible shot, but the moment passed as soon as it’d presented itself. She had been wearing an incredibly bright, radiant blue one-piece tube-skirt (or whatever they’re called) and was walking toward me in the middle of a narrow section of red rocks, her blonde head down. It was so incongruous! Contrasting! It would have made a fantastic shot! But, I couldn’t get the camera up quick enough, and the moment had passed. You couldn’t see her face, which made it even better.

Anyway, I took my favorite hike, which is around the west side of the park, on the single track. It traverses all kinds of rocky terrain and goes up and down. I love it. Love the rocks, love the squirreliness of the trail. The view. Saw a Scrub Jay (I think they’re called), a rabbit, and a whole herd of some 11 or 12 deer. I’ll try to post some of the images where I can, but I’m using new software (Adobe Lightroom) and there’s a bit of a learning curve. I may just try to upload a few onto Facebook. That’s probably the easiest thing to do. We’ll see. I’m really behind on my short story work, so….

25th Anniversary Pikes Peak Writers Conference

April 28, 2017 by fpdorchak

I am attending the 25th anniversary of the Pikes Peak Writers Conference, held in Colorado Springs, CO, April 28 – 30th, 2017. The Colorado Springs Marriott, at 5580 Tech Center Drive, Colorado Springs, Colorado 80919, is hosting it. The Marriott’s phone: (719) 260-1800.

I think I’ve missed six conferences, but I started out with the very first on back in 1992, when Jimmie Butler, a retired Air Force colonel, created the PPWC and a local critique group, of which I was a part. He was a huge influence in the region. I don’t keep in contact with him as much as I used to, but I do run into him at the occasional author event or two I attend. I’d write more about both Jimmie and the conference but I have really gotten behind the power curve on getting this post created and getting ready to hit the conference today. Life has been a wee bit overwhelming for me lately, but read Jimmie’s books—I’ve read a couple of them—and he’s a great writer. I recommend A Certain Brotherhood (which the critique group he’d created had helped him refine—and I’m glad to say that I was a part of that!), and The Iskra Incident. Jimmie will be making an appearance at this Sunday’s luncheon.

Well, gotta run! I’ll be mainly hitting social media and marketing sessions, but am also moderating two sessions, but with Kevin Ikenberry (R&C Author and BookBub: A Post-Mortem), another terrific person and also a writer friend of mine. Check out his Sleeper Protocol. Kevin’s never without an outstretched hand for a handshake and that charismatic smile across that face of his….

Hope to see you there!

#PPWC2017

Transferring Over

April 20, 2017 by fpdorchak

Welcome!

This is my first new blog post on my new platform for fpdorchak.com! I hope you like the new look…I’m really happy with the outcome, though the process has been a veritable slog.

I won’t go into all the details, but let’s just say it was not as easy as everything made it to appear. One of my remaining issues is the inability to import over all my Running Off At The Mouth (ROATM) blog posts from WordPress.com. You see, I’m now “on” WordPress.org (called by “registrar”). And my old fpdorchak.com was moved from Homestead to Blue Host (my hosting site for fpdorchak.com). I’m using StudioPress “themes” (how my stuff appears on-screen and is “worked” through SEOs, etc). And it turns out with the past two or so weeks I’ve been working all this, that since I have several years of blog posts, it’s not an easy thing to do. At all. My Reality Check blog posts moved over easy because I don’t have as many, but since I have so many ROATM posts, I need to fork out an additional sum of $129 to get ye old “Happiness Engineers” at WP.com to do the deed. And there is no way around this…unless you have coding background (which I do not have) to get this done.

But…no worries to readers! This will be done without interruption (I’m told). In fact you can still view all my blog posts as they currently exist…but once the transfer has been made, you will automatically be redirected to this location.

So my “Evil Plan” is nearly complete!

Please stay tuned and continue to check back. I still need to add a newsletter, and I also plan on creating a new site for my burgeoning amateur photography. And have to clean up loose ends like having default crap from the demo templates in my stuff. But for now…I’m kind mentally spent on this whole “Evil Plan” transition thing. I’m not cut out to do evil plans, I guess. There is SO much more than meets the eye in today’s website creation/transfers than when I last did it, and none of the “easy” procedures theoretically “spelled out” across WP.org, WP.com, and StudioPress are easy. They list stuff piecemeal, but not by function, like “To add books, you need to do all of the following.” They instead show you how to “add books,” but not how to arrange them on the page, and do all you need to do to make them presentable in one easy procedure. They are all listed a la carte, so you have to know what else to do and search out and stitch them together on your own. Or so was my experience. I created many trouble tickets—and to be fair, the SP Help folk were quick in responding.

BUT.

Give them screen shots when you contact them, because otherwise you’ll be running round and round with them as they initially and continually tell you to just “follow the instructions.”

I’m exhausted just thinking about all this again. But happy with the end result.

Later.

Merry Christmas To All!

December 24, 2016 by fpdorchak

Merry Christmas! (© F. P. Dorchak, December 22, 2016)

This year has been head-spinning in many ways…many good ways! But, man, has it just flown by! Time is…fleeting, as The Rocky Horror Picture Show says. The past (in certain terms) is behind us and the future (in certain terms) before us. So where does that leave us?

In the present moment. All we really have is the present. So is it really any wonder that Christmas packages are called presents?

I enjoyed as much of the present moment as possible throughout this year, and I hope the rest of you did, too!

And I know there are other holidays out there. I wish you all the peace and love and joy you also celebrate.

I thank all of you who—in your own, sometimes most personal ways—for helping create a better world for yourselves and everyone else. Many of you perhaps don’t even realize this. Doing so can be as easy as keeping good and positive thoughts in your head…as well as doing the more public acts. The point is, doing good in the world is as easy as doing good for yourself and your immediate circle of influence, because everything affects everything else.

I thank my wife, Laura, for her love and in being the kind and gracious person she is. For staying with me…and for continuing to put up with me and all my weirdness. Es.

I thank my family—both near and far, nuclear and extended—for being themselves and continuing to put up with me and all my weirdness. Es.

I thank all my friends—both close and acquaintance—for being themselves and continuing to put up with me and all my weirdness. Es.

I thank all of you who invited me to all the literary events I went to this year. I am ever humbled by your invites! Thank you!

I thank Lon Kirschner for his incredible cover art! Thanks, Lon!

I thank Mandy Pratt for all her efforts and dedication (which continues!) on editing and proofing my short stories. Thank you!

I thank all my writing friends for being who you are, for writing your wonderful blogs, for writing stories that are important to you. For being open and supportive to the rest of us who are not at your levels-of-success (i.e., thanks for not being snooty). Thank you!

Any group or individual I may have missed, it was not intentional. I thank you, too!

To those of us who require a little extra work in various aspects of our lives…I wish us all the very best at becoming and being the best person we can be throughout the rest of our lives!

So, I send out massive amounts of love and peace and joy to all on this day that many of us celebrate for many reasons, not all of them religious.

Peace.

Love.

Joy!

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Float Number 7

December 11, 2016 by fpdorchak

The Luna Dreamwave Pod. (Image by F. P. Dorchak, December 09, 2016)

This past Friday, December 9, 2016, I did my seventh float (for an hour; 90 minutes is a bit long for me, I find). As was the case with my previous float, it, too, was a subtle one. Before I’d arrived I’d been feeling lots of [what I call] “internal movement.” Where I actually do feel a sense of “movement” inside me. It’s not vertigo or anything like that, but a psychic, metaphysical movement. Perhaps it’s a bit hard to describe, but that’s what it feels like: movement inside my body. Like parts of my insides are shifting around….

In contrast to the above, once inside the pod, I immediately felt “centered”…in the water, I mean. As opposed to the last float where I had difficulty centering in the water and kept floating around and bumping into the interior pod walls. I felt immediately centered—“solid as a rock” in terms of stability and not bouncing off the pod walls (my mind keeps going to 2001: A Space Odyssey’s: “Open the podbay doors, please, HAL”…).

Here’s what I experienced this time around:

This was interesting: a “friend” had stopped by to say “Hello” and left…out a “door” off to my right. I couldn’t see who this “friend” was, but I saw her (I seem to have a lot of female energy in my life!) leave through an actual door off to my right. She was literally out the door, when I realized what had just happened. I saw a “body” leave, but didn’t see anything about that body—clothes or the identity of the person leaving. But I had the feeling of a female energy. Thanks for stopping by, whoever you were!
I saw someone talking to another and there was something about a calendar or schedule. This and several other scenes I have since forgotten, but they’d felt so real—like I was really there—I was actually surprised when I “returned” to the pod!
As I’ve previously mentioned, I sometimes have experiences where I’m really “there” (wherever “there” is)…it’s quite real and stark at the time…but when I return I lose it…forget it. Or by the end of the float I just can’t remember it. There’s just too much going on for me to remember every little event that I become a part of…that if I try too hard to remember everything that happens, I’ll miss out on other experiences as they try to unfold, but I’m too focused on what I’d just left….

This was a very subtle float. Again, it wasn’t as intense as most of the other ones I’ve had…but the couple above experiences were pretty intense. As I’ve previously mentioned, I seem to slam-bam! between multiple experiences…but this one was not so. They were “soft,” even gradual at times. “Subtle” keeps popping up.

My wife and I were talking about all my floating the other day, and she was wondering why I did it. Was it in search for a sense of peacefulness or “calm” in my life? No…I don’t do it for that…though I do love the pure meditative benefits. I do it to better help in consciously manipulating and reaching my inner self (consciousness)…for (as I call it) “bringing the inside, outside” in a more direct manner. Now, that is already done every moment on an organic level, but I’m just trying to better manually reach my inner consciousness….to manually manipulate my consciousness and consciously control where I go and what I do and experience. So far I just seem to go where my inner self takes me with no [apparent] control. But it’s exciting and fascinating. Or maybe there is a “method to the madness” of what happens to me—and I’m sure there is—but I’m just not getting it…and that’s okay. I love the floating experiences…love what happens “in there”…and all the little “weirdnesses” that happen. It give me food for thought! Expands my consciousness in ways I only seem to get from floating (short of dreaming). In fact, it’s very much like dreaming, though in dreams I have been able to consciously change and manipulate dream experiences!

So, until next time…try to bring the inside outside into your lives!

Contact information:

Website: www.lunafloatspa.com/

Phone: 719/309-6776

E-mail: Contact@LunaFloatSpa.com

Luna Float Spa First Blog Post

Address:

Luna Float Spa
202 E. Cheyenne Mtn. Blvd., Suite R,
Colorado Springs, CO 80906

Hours: 10 a.m. – 8 p.m., Mountain Time

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lunafloatspa

Twitter: https://twitter.com/lunafloatspa

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Float Number 6

November 13, 2016 by fpdorchak

The Luna Dreamwave Pod. (Image by F. P. Dorchak, November 12, 2016)

Yesterday (Saturday, November 12, 2016), I did my sixth float. This was a more subtle float. And by “subtle,” I mean it wasn’t like most of my floats where I’m flying back and forth between all kinds of “vignettes” and such (brief out-of-body experiences?), but that yes, I had many of my normal experiences, but they were not jarring and as intense. It does seem that every float can be different, just like mediation, working out, whatever. We don’t know all that is going on inside us, and even when we do think we have a good handle on things, we never really know just what is actually going on inside us metaphysically. I was ready and excited to do this float, like I usually am, but the whiz-bang internal fireworks I normally experience just weren’t there…but it was still a great float!

Just…subtle….

One of the things I’d experienced in my last float was a feeling of a cool breeze of air that had shot across my face, so this time in I looked for that. Nothing. There really is no “cool breeze” that blows across you, so that was an interesting experience last time.

Prior to this session, I’d also gotten a free shiatsu Inada Dreamwave massage chair session. The last time I’d used this chair was after my very first float, in February of this year (2016).

The Living, Breathing Inada Dreamwave Massage Chair! (Image by Luna Float Spa)

From that first float post, the Dreamwave chair:

“I used the shiatsu massage Inada Dreamwave chair after the pod experience, but I’d recommend using it prior to it. This chair...it has 100 air cells, while your typical, commercially available chairs have 30 – 40 cells, Ana-Alycia tells me. And it has 106 body types programmed into it. Anyway, it’s simply amazing. It’s like six different people working on you at once. And I kid about the “life of its own” part, but as it works away on you, you can hear the air cells sighing upon exhaling (inflating and deflating—see, I still refer to it as if it is ALIVE…) and the material creaking and scrunching all around you as it works you.

“Yeah, it’s alive.”

As I said, this time I used it before the float. I don’t know if that made any difference for me in this float. But it’s freakin fun!

Here is what I experienced during yesterday’s float:

A person—I think a lady?—walking a German Shepard. S/he pet the left-side of the snout of the dog with the first two fingers of his/her hand. I saw from a distance of perhaps 10 feet.
I saw a somewhat abstract image of a horse face full-on that came right up to my face. At this point I think the abstract image turned into a “real” horse face. You’d think I’d know one way or the other if the face went “real” versus abstract. You’d think….
From a slightly elevated perspective (i.e., hovering), and from many yards away, I observed Naval officers in their “whites” in formation atop a ship’s deck, with another officer in charge of them, walking back and forth and addressing them, doing his thing. Behind them all were naval guns. The officer-in-charge walked back and forth once or twice. Interestingly, as I observed (and this went on for several moments), I was hit with the feeling of so much “white and gold.” “White” would be their dress uniforms, and “gold” all their insignia and emblems on their sleeves and caps.
Felt there was a lot of things going on in the background. Sometimes literally, like behind and around me as I went on my subtle journeys in this session, but also in the grand scheme of things.
I did seem to flit in and out of ” a couple of conversations,” as I usually do, but these were so subtle, I didn’t always realize I’d just been in one until after I left it. And I would instantly not remember it (now, those last three words are important: I was going to write “forget it,” but that didn’t feel right; the more correct term is not that I “forgot” them…but that I “did not remember” them…).
From a bit (pardon the pun) of a distance, I saw a horse running on a track.
I saw abstract eyes. These I saw with my eyes closed and opened. See my last float for an explanation.
Toward the end of my float, I very briefly saw, “in the upper left quadrant” of my field of view, a ribbon of red. Like that Christmas ribbon candy, but it was red only.
Interestingly, I had a hard time keeping stable in this session! I kept pinging off the walls! Now, not a forceful “bump,” but I kept drifting into the sides of the pod. I don’t usually have difficulty maintaining center stability in there, but this time I did.

After the float I entered the common area, where Morgan (one of the owners) and a young woman were talking about the woman’s experience, and sat quietly half-listening to their discussion, while recounting my own to write them down for this post. At one point Morgan brought me into the conversation. Later in the conversation, the woman asked me what I think all these images and “vignettes” were and if they were important. I told her I feel everything is important…we may not understand why or where all these experiences come from, but I don’t consider any of them dismissively coincidental or unimportant. I feel these images and events and experiences come from multiple sources. I think they could be peeking in on alternate/probably existences…lives. Could be events that are somehow tied to whatever energy we’re involved in at the moment. Could be other people’s stepping in on us. Could be those on “the other side” saying “Hi” or just making themselves known. The woman also asked if I ever enter a float with intent, and I told her, yes, I have—in fact I did so with this session, but it didn’t exactly pan out as expected, to which Morgan chuckled a good one (as I did)! Things don’t always go as planned, for me, I told her. That I’m not one of those who consciously works out answers in dreams…now, I do believe problems do work themselves out in dreams, among other “venues,” let’s just say, but consciously, I’d only had that happen once in my life…and today was no different in my float session. But…the over-arcing goal is always to just allow myself to experience whatever it is my Self wants to show me.

Afterward I noted the animal imagery interesting. I mentally noted that a friend of mine had just purchased a new horse. Also after the session, someone I was talking to mentioned something about race horses. So that thread is curious. I’m not a “horse person,” but have nothing against them; I love all animals—I am “an animal person”!—but the horse thread is interesting! And a friend of mine is currently performing some in-depth military history research, so this was also quite curious! Maybe what I witnessed were some of those who were a part of the historical events my friend is researching? I’m not clear on the period of these officers. It makes no sense to me otherwise—I’m not Navy (though my dad is, but he was a submariner, not a “skimmer,” and this definitely seemed like the deck of a surface ship).

Also, Morgan had mention that he was going to do some increased promotion and asked if he could use my blogs in their promotion! I thought, dang, that is so cool! I gave him my permission to do so. Thanks, Morgan and Ana-Alycia, for thinking of my work! I hope I can help give others a better understanding of what they can expect and it helps grow your business! It’s such a cool, bettering-of-life business, and even if others don’t get nearly what some of us get out it, it’s the intent that matters! The intent of trying to make one’s life better, which expands outward into life in general. When we better our own lives, we better life in general. And even you only get an incredible physical relaxation out of it, that’s fine, too! It all helps. If you’d like to get more metaphysical experiences, then begin by meditating at home. I’ve been doing so since I was a kid…admittedly, I don’t do it as much or as frequently as I used to, but that is where to start if you want to gain similar metaphysical experiences with the added isolation of the physical environment. And also have the intent that that is what you’d like to do!

But, everyone is different. I’m not some yogi, not a guru. Don’t want to be. I’m sure many have more intense, sustained out-of-body experiences than me, but that’s not the point: the point is that we all intend to better understand ourselves in the ways that our selves will do so. There’s no “race,” here (again, the horse imagery!). Enjoy the journey and better discover who you are!