• New

    Cover Reveal for ‘Dreamshaping: On Shaping Reality and Living Our Dreams’

    UPDATE: IT’S PUBLISHED!

    The eBook is up now at Amazon, with the paperback coming out very soon.

    I’ve been working on this longer than any book I will ever write. It first came to me about 18 years ago when I was sitting on a beach on Long Island. One of my goals for 2023 was to finally finish it. Almost there …

    “It’s understandable that we can react with fear to what we think our bodies are telling us. Who doesn’t assume a grave prognosis when we go to the doctor looking for answers? It’s as natural as gasping for that first breath, terrified there will not be enough air left for another, and another, and another until we take our last. But denying our body’s messages, or pretending they’re not speaking to us at all when in fact they may be shouting, is an invitation to harm and frustration.

    Begin to hear your body. Be quiet with it and let yourself learn its language. You are its first and truest friend. You are the one it longs to communicate with. And when it asks you to pay attention, let nothing be more important than understanding what it has told you. When we become the best interpreter of our body’s language, we begin to live in partnership with it, and to trust it will never lead us astray. We may not always like what it has to say, and sometimes what it tells us will be devastating, but we will listen carefully. The answers are there, and in those answers is the opportunity for peace, acceptance and change.”

    From When the Body Speaks, Listen (Chapter 15) 

    Discover this and many other ways we inhabit the dreams we call our lives, how we create them day by day, and how we can begin to experience them as the ultimate lucid dream. No supernatural assistance is required, no surrender to powers outside ourselves.

    Dreamshaping is not wishful thinking: it is wishful doing. In this simple guide, this dreamshaper’s manual, you’ll find chapter after chapter of simple insights: how the body speaks to us, how we make choices that determine our experiences, how we act, often unknowingly, as the architect, landscaper, set designer and director of our own existence.

    Keep reading, and see what simple reflection and observation can reveal about the lives we live, and the lives we create, in which we’re both the dreamer and the dream.”

     

  • New

    Mark McNease On Topic (Substack)

    My Medicare kicked in yesterday, October 1. It’s oddly exciting, and depressing at the same time. I can finally enjoy national healthcare, but I had to live 65 years to get it (okay, almost 65 years— my birthday is October 28).

    We had dinner with some friends last night who were hosting their friends from Germany. After giddily announcing I was finally on Medicare, I had to explain to them what the excitement was about. Like the rest of the developed world, they have national healthcare. Americans are unique in our effusive celebrations of a Medicare card arriving in the mail. It sorts of says, “Congratulations! You’ll be dead soon.” And boy, do I plan on using it. My first of several October doctors’ appointments is today!

  • New,  The Twist Podcast

    The Twist Podcast #241: New Pop Smart News Feature, Roller Coaster Realness, and an Interview with Deaf Action Center’s David Hylan

    Join co-hosts Mark McNease and Rick Rose as debut ‘Pop Smart,’ Rick’s entertainment and culture beat; fasten our seatbelts for America’s best roller coasters; and catch up with Deaf Action Center’s David Hylan on the occasion of his upcoming retirement.

    Enjoy The Twist on Libsyn, iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, and TheTwistPodcast.com.

    Copyright 2023 MadeMark Publishing

  • New,  The Twist Podcast

    The Twist Podcast #240: Fun Days in Philly, Food Court Faves, and an Interview with Cannabis Activist Alan Robinson

    Join co-hosts Mark McNease and Rick Rose as rundown Mark’s great two-night trip to Philly, list some favorite food court hotspots, and enjoy Rick’s interview with cannabis activist and advocate Alan Robinson.

    Enjoy The Twist on Libsyn, iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, and TheTwistPodcast.com.

    Copyright 2023 MadeMark Publishing

  • New

    9/11 Twenty-Two Years Later

    Tuesday, September 11, 2001. I’d just started working at Reuters News in Times Square. It was a beautiful, clear day with blue skies. I got my coffee and went to my desk on the 19th floor … and soon the commotion started. I called my boss who was in London and told him a small plane had hit the World Trade Center. That’s what we thought had happened. It didn’t take long to know what it really was: a passenger plane flying into one building, with another soon to come.
    We could see the towers from a corner window in the newsroom. At some point we were told to draw the blinds and turn off the lights, in case more was coming. And now it’s 22 years later.
    I don’t spend much time reminiscing, especially about such horrific events, but when I see what’s going on in the country now, how deep the chasms are, how furious and angry and on-the-verge-of-violence it all is, I can’t help thinking: they won. They turned us into a paranoid, enraged, self-hating nation of tribes that blame each other for the perceived end of it all, this imaginary America with its imaginary past and its imaginary future. We live in a perpetual “culture war” fed by fantasies of civil war, and revenge, and the satisfying smell of the defeated bodies of our enemies strewn at our feet.
    What more could they have asked for, those terrorists? How much more completely could they have destroyed us than we are destroying ourselves? We’re constantly trying to “take our country back,” without admitting that the people we fight to take it back from is us. They won. And as long as we continue down this road of destruction that appears to have no exit, they will continue winning. “To the victor go the spoils.” No one ever said the victor had to be alive.
  • LGBTSR,  New,  On the Map

    On the Map: Provincetown Paradise with a Side Trip to Wellfleet

    This slideshow requires JavaScript.

    On the Map is a feature at LGBTSr.com offering travelogues and recommendations. Narration provided by Wondervox.

    By Mark McNease

    As we come to the end of another annual trip to Provincetown, I’m reminded why we value our visits here. Frank has had a timeshare for 35 years or so, at a place called Eastwood at Provincetown. It’s like a sprawling motel complex on the far east side of town, and has been very lesbian-centric for years. Plenty of gay men, too, but a lot of women come here. This time I noticed several children with their opposite-sex parents, and I found myself hoping it’s not losing its edge. We’ll see.

  • Dreamshaping,  New

    On Dreamshaping: The Slippage of Time

    Are human beings the only animals aware of time passing? Do cats know they’re getting old? Do fish ever wish they’d swum in this direction instead of that one? Is a tree concerned at all with the number of years it has stood rooted in one spot?

    When we were children, most of us had occasion to hear those words, “When you’re older …” We were told that someday we would be able to drive a car, or go on a date, or leave home. Patience was required, tested by anticipation and desire. We waited because we had to, and each time we reached that milestone, that magical “older,” and we got our driver’s license, or we went on a first date, we looked ahead to the next thing we could experience when the time came.

  • New,  The Twist Podcast

    The Twist Podcast #237: Married 10 Years, COVID Double Whammy, and An Interview with Keto Baker Rebecca Hall

    Join co-hosts Mark McNease and Rick Rose as we congratulate Mark and Frank on 10 years of marriage, hear how awful a second bout of Covid can be, and enjoy an interview with Keto Baker Rebecca Hall.

    Enjoy The Twist on Libsyn, iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, and TheTwistPodcast.com.

    Copyright 2023 MadeMark Publishing