MY HEROES

The following is a dedication I made to the heroes who set the example to which I aspire. I collected them in a calendar which I produced for 1997 as my first self-produced venture. I post it here, not from lack of ideas in the present, but for the inspiration I got from reviewing the calendar again tonight. Between the authors of my potent quotes section and these characters you'll find all the reference to the past my present is informed and encouraged by.

The people pictured on this calendar are incarnations of an universal spirit to which my inner ear resonates, with which my innate voice harmonizes and from which a pattern of understanding arises to obviate our genetic and environmental conditions as various decorations on the same cake. They're teachers by example, leaders by inspiration and so varied as to identify and ground the center from which all our growth occurs. By recognizing the ocean within no matter what sort of cup, their curiosity has led mine beyond even their own conclusions, their levity has dissolved all fear and regret about some future or past imagined in this benign, eternal present and their excellence of expression reminds my own words that they are in vain if not voicing an observation by an eye of the universe to one of its ears – all else is Babel.

Each one of my here celebrated gurus has made obvious the plight of our higher, inmost essence to remain the standard of our values and the voice of our conscience when all of society demands we sacrifice such cognizance for the “sake of the masses,” sells us convenience and expedience in denial of our intrinsic abilities and the fiction of time, and promises a superior competitive edge in the running of the human race, if we’ll just choose sides against nature to help build a paranoid Utopia out of the rain forests of Eden by turning our better judgment over to the church, nation, business, team, clique. I’ve already got a belly button, what else am I s'posed to join? Yahoo!

Taken as a whole, these avatars demonstrate a body of work that is greater than the sum of its parts, rather than the lowest common denominator as represented by the motherflocking masses, extolled by the shepherd and aspired to by the newborn lamb whose fledgling voice is drowned out by the bleating of the toady flock, and whose cosmic curiosity is bored to distraction by the prospect of eternally artificial pastures.