PREFERENCES

I don’t suppose I’ll ever love a maggot as much as a sunset, but I do work on ridding myself of prejudice. To get out of the web of prejudice I call preferences and really want to hear what folks are saying, where they’re coming from, who they are, despite their reminding me of the flavor of a past totally irrelevant to the present, is all too rare for me. I think more women are beautiful now than when I was out looking for a trophy mate as a young man, through the experience of many versions and degrees of beautiful facades hiding despicable people and beautiful people with warty noses and bad habits. People are easier to meet now, but then I rarely leave the land so most strangers come in small number and are usually friends of friends, still the best kind (unless one doesn’t really know all the friends in one’s collection). Although it is still a ranking system, my preferences in friends tend to be based on the frequency and voltage of the energy rev I feel when just thinking about them when they’re nowhere around me in the garden with a silly grin on my face or a tear in my eye. I can barely behold the immensity of the contradiction I am; willingly exiling myself to this little quarter acre eden to misanthropically avoid the mob, its mentality, expense and pollution only to begin this blog as if it were a seed buried in the ground putting out feelers for fertile feedback in a seemingly inert dirt.

I don’t suppose I’ll ever love a car ride as much as walking, but I did once upon a time. More even. So, while changing preferences may may feel better and seem like growth, it is little more than reweaving the filter through which the future must qualify for my attention. The trick is to leave out some of the threads during the new rewoven version of priorities. Cars haven’t been a thread since I crawled under my last one with a saw to cut trunks of young trees that had grown up through the floorboard to the light of the convertible day, just so the guy I sold it to could haul it away. Cars are innocent. They were inside a mountain one day and the next they’re a piston! They’d all become quaint flower pots like my MG if billions of seemingly cripple people didn’t get borne from their air conditioned homes to their air conditioned job or shopping mall by cranking up their air conditioned car. Ah, ha, air conditioned bus stops at the end of everyone's drive way. That’ll work. Yeah, right! This civilization is headed the way of Rome due to decadence of lazy, debilitating convenience and greedy competition for the most toys. About one day of every week’s check is gobbled up by one’s car unless you’ve really snagged that fast track to excess where fortunes are spun of the same promissory silk as the emperor’s new clothes.

I don’t suppose I’ll ever love a building more than the natural environment it replaced, but the only house I ever built I designed to have an atrium alcove with a stand of young oaks in its center only to find, upon getting off my promissory silk level job at twilight, that the foundation people had pivoted the entire house and cut out the oaks! Great lesson in responsibility of ownership for me. I’ve rented homes built at least fifty years earlier than that ever since. Later I did contribute further to the Austin version of the sprawl as a rock layer until one day, while topping a chimney, I looked out across this valley and beheld its virginal woodland pierced by several other of my chimneys great gobbles of land apart. I don’t think I finished laying those last few rocks. The pond outside here is the first concrete and rock I’ve worked with since and the life of the plants, fish and tadpoles more than outweighs any possible regrets I had before seeing it find a healthy ecological balance on its own through the first years cycle.

Having to refer to my preferences, my catalogue of prejudices to help guide my next action requires the energy of remembering what they are and wastes another opportunity to experience life as it is while I compare it to what I want it to be or, worse, think it’s supposed to be. I don’t think humanity is supposed to exterminate itself and the rest of planetary life but, given the natural karma of its antagonism to mother nature in raping her for what she gently, gladly gives, such extinction is only natural. By the same reasoning, becoming more consciously symbiotic with mother nature may just be the karmic step mankind has yet to take to resume an evolution put on hold for 16,000 years by fascination with illusions of parasitic stewardship dreamt up by an evolving intelligence. Individuals can see that much clearer than committees, if they don’t depend on the committees for direction. Set yourself and your chickens free.