JUST A LITTLE WHILE AGO…

Me and Mabe and Homer were sitting around Mabe’s front porch enjoying the changing angle of the shadows of the early morning Earth turn, sipping coffee and passing the pipe.

The dogs were either lying around calmly soaking up rays, scratching their back with their feet up in the air or sparring with each other in celebration of such a beautiful dawning day.

A hen announces her proud accomplishment from her nest while her sisters devour some crumbled corn tortillas at our feet gossiping in quiet purring clucks only they understand.

Small birds nervously drop down to the chicken feed cast in the yard, relying on their fellows in the trees to warn them of the cat. The cat, in his new, improved, tail-down stealth stalk, approaches from the direction with the tallest grass, still unaware of the lookouts above. Although I keep his bowl full and he has yet to even get close to catching a bird, his instincts demand he try just for the sport of it all. A grackle joins the game by flying directly at him a mere three inches higher than the crouching cat’s vertical, claw extended paws outstretched explosion a good six feet straight up.

The chickens, cat and small dogs run for cover when the giant red hawk’s shadow stains their open play ground while the big dogs chase the dark spot in hopes the hawk will come down close enough to pluck out of the air as they have several panicked chickens and a peacock.

Sparky, the bass player in his and Homer's band, the Cramdens, let’s himself in through the gate across the road to here and is greeted by all the dogs. As he strolls through the dappled light beneath the trees, a thought of Kurt Vonnegut’s uncle’s mentioning paradise whenever he recognizes he’s in it let’s itself into my consciousness of now and is greeted by Homer, saying, “You know? There’s a lotta people in this world that would commit suicide if they had to live like we've learned to.”

It was the first time I ever laughed at one of Homer’s jokes.

I still am

•

Addendum: There seems to be some question as to this description of a day on the porch having any application to reaching the summit. Other than actually climbing a mountain, all summits to be reached are ideals in metaphor. Pisces Iscariot got it so well he suggested using "un-learned" for the striving to reach the summit I speak of, since he knows, as I do, that it is our introductory education into the spectacle and faith in the authority of its mythology that must be questioned to reach a life more symbiotic with the nature of the planet whose dependent cells we all are by realizing how belief in man's ownership of it all increases our destructive usury every day. The invisible prison is insidious.

Where do you grab a naked man? — Awestun, Tejas circa 1978, UT Campus

I sometimes feel like this fellow who lost it in public trying to get through the walls to let the civilized world know what beauty is being destroyed outside by it. Added 6/8/10

WHERE ELSE COULD I BE?

The too sweet odor of rotting fruit littering the ground beneath the loquat and chinaberry trees is tempered by the just right piquancy of jasmine and honeysuckle blooms. As I turn the compost pile, the fecund excretion of its microbial denizens exudes earthy wafts promising well fed food in the garden and my bowl. The balm of the hen’s poop cushioned on the hay straw lining their coop mixes with the doughy aroma of their feed’s crumble chunks of meal soaked by last night’s sprinkles from the sky. Priest hops into my lap for another head scratching mutual affection session and once again I am amazed at how clean he smells as I rub my face in his long fur.

Grackles and jays squawk at the other end of the scale from the tiny turtledoves’ dulcet cooing, while the chickens run the gamut from gentle stuttered purring to ear splitting announcements of new oval ova arrivals. More mature, two legged or four wheeled arrivals are announced by the thirteen member canine choir’s cacophonic greeting at the gate across Fetchit Drive. The distant clanging of Johnny’s hammering heated iron in his blacksmith’s shop reverberates off the porch wall in competition with the merry gurgle of the fountain fresh pond water in its return cycle down the falls. Muffled now by spring foliage growth, but still too audible, tire treads and combustion cycles move noisy air down the hill from the too close highway. Brazen completely unmuffled roars that make seasoned veterans stop talking and cover their ears pass overhead whenever dragons approach or leave their international nest too close to our east.

Muscles cramp in my calves as I stretch awake in the silken lining of my Christmas gift sleeping bag after a nap demanded by the fatigue of trudging the several miles it takes to supplement my garden’s limited selection at the grocery store. I barely notice my failing hip joint in my normal perusal of my stomping ground as morning dew on long grass dampens shin hairs, zephyrs chill them and the sun heats and dries them in turn, each step of the way, but a shopping trip or climbing to the top of the stairway up the bank from the river reminds me of it all too well. My perception of the contrast in textures and times maximizes as I brush sand from the smooth skin of young Finn’s plump feet with the calloused gnarl of my desiccated, septuagenarian hands.

I can never distinguish imagination from reality in the ill defined realm allotted to the sense of taste both because it is so connected to the savory olfactory and because my prepared meals have been enjoyed from the first pangs of hunger, through the imagining what would be most beneficially pleasing, the smelling of each ingredient before and after its inclusion in the concoction, the determination of its readiness on to the actual eating of them. The cross over continues as I judge the efficacy of the meal’s benefits by the aroma of my farts, as sure an indicator as asparagus in urine.

Opening my eyes, the question is answered. My sixth sense, my mind, is functioning and well satisfied. Seeing is believing. I am here, now.

And now. Amazing.

More creative, for Amy. ;•D

LIVE LIKE THERE'S NO TOMORROW

Alone on Preikestolen

Whenever someone advises me to, “live like there’s no tomorrow,” they might as well say, “Walk like you were born unable to fly.” Both are true, neither are choices; there IS no tomorrow and I CAN'T fly

Though we may speak of making big plans for future events, and as often as the idea may occur to us in different states of change during its development, the event itself is merely another such state happening in the same here and now from which the plan arose and within which memories will recall its having occurred. Experience can be had only here now. Time is an invention by which we speak of things not now, mañana, but we can only speak of and experience thinking about the concept in the eternal here and now.

We all live within a culture that practices the creation of artifacts representing our perceptions and conceptions of reality, and promptly forgets such symbols aren’t what they represent; worshipping golden idols. The only reality to such creations are the experiences of conception and manifestation on the part of the maker and of perception and belief by witnesses. It is fairly simple to perceive that a painting of a flower is not the flower in the vase sitting next to it, while it is literally impossible for believers to distinguish between religious dogma and wishful thinking — especially tenacious where scriptures are full of contradictions to one’s actual experience of the natural environment and prohibitions of one’s own natural behavior. It is as if culture pushes the idea that the more one must deny reality to live in accordance with the conceived artifacts, the purer the merit for reward in a fantasy afterlife. “If you want to get ahead, you gotta stick it out. My country, right or wrong.”

I fly with ease in my dreams. It is so enjoyable that I am a bit fearful of heights without a handhold when I’m awake. The concept of my flying is so temptingly real I can envision feeling that special organic intuition that signals my ability to levitate in my dreams, walking off into space to finally break through my own shreds of disbelief and fly away. I know the difference between reality and dream fantasy, I fell thirty feet from a trapeze when I was thirteen — straight down, no gliding. I am just as acutely aware of the difference between experiencing reality directly and experiencing the mere second hand information, at best, to be found in symbols created by other’s perceptions.

I have always walked like I couldn’t fly. I’m in the process of learning the benefits of living like there’s no tomorrow, in the here and now, and discovering the debilitation of living like there is some other when or where experience can be had by sacrificing awareness of being here now.

•

Tangential to the forgoing essay is the matter of gaining enough life experience of the conflicts between one’s direct experience of nature and civilization’s antagonistic exploitation of it to begin questioning the authority under whose aegis one’s own nature is trained to obey and whose favor one’s reputation is designed to curry. Without such doubt in external authority’s righteousness in defining proprietary behavior, one must abandon any reliance on the intrinsic value of oneself to consider one’s own existence valid. Such people can never be alone because they cease to exist.

A real horror story would be to be unable to love myself unless I felt loved by another; as scary as meeting city folk who have never walked on the grass or were unaware Big Macs come from cows. Civilization breeds such zombies more or less successfully.

BETWEEN THE SHEETS

She found it while leafing through her leather bound edition of Leaves of Grass. It was a shade leaf of cannabis indicus the size of her palm. She’d placed it there at a different time in a different world.

Looking up from the page on her pagan promontory perch, the vast expanse of the sea to the western horizon became dearly desiccated by the visceral, visual recollection of overlooking a desert; so endlessly featureless from afar, so constantly alive wherever one looked down at one’s feet. A sort of reverse twist on “the grass is always greener.”

They were camping on the east rim anticipating a lunar eclipse soon after sundown, which announced its advance by gradually saturating the entire vista in the golden orange hues of grain, pebble, rock, boulder pixel remnant shards of this shedding mountain perch with the prism of the western atmosphere casting a glow around their elongating silhouette creeping eastward into the illuminated scene.

He passed her the freshly rolled joint she’d awaited since he’d proposed this entire weekend a month ago. She’d always been curious about the stuff but found no reason compelling enough to risk jail just for kicks. She found Zeke to be more than enough. She knew a lot of people who abandoned the club during music breaks to “get high” out back with the band while she stayed behind and worried for them. She knew Zeke went out with them most of the time, but she didn’t know him until the night he picked up her empty glass on his return, went to the bar and brought her a fresh one.

“Nothin’ like another cool one after goin’ out there with those folks and dryin’ your whistle,” he said, standing there watching the band get reorganized.

"I don’t go out there, but thanks for the drink anyway. I haven’t wet mine enough yet.” She immediately tried to inhale the variety of possible nuances those words conveyed and didn’t exhale until she realized none of them were wrong; she’d long admired him from afar and was loath to pass up a chance for friendlier proximity now.

When her kissed her at her doorstep and left she realized a friendlier approximation was far from adequate. The next time she saw him the mutual beam connecting them was visible to anyone who cared. Like love struck zombies they got their drinks, moved to the back and sat together at an empty table without looking at anything but each other.

Although she’d always taken rejection as “their loss”, she couldn’t help but clarify something that had bothered her for the two weeks since he’d walked her home. “You were welcome to stay the night, you know?’

“Yeah, I got it that might be the case, but I have to get an overt invitation to begin assuming anything. I am too familiar with the influence of alcohol to make me perceive everything going my way until my face hits the floor and the morning after trying to recall from whence come vague memories of something too intimate to be so forgotten.”

“I’ve never made the first move, men seem to begin the groping and I either grope back or back off. I was out of my element with you. Would you get me high far away from police so I can enjoy it?”

His face lit up. “Oh, wow! This is perfect. I am going to harvest the first buds of this year’s yield next month and was planning to take some to the wilderness to celebrate the lunar eclipse. Would you come with me?”

She watched him separate the glistening purple-green bundles from their stem and expertly gather them between the sheets of zig-zag paper into the perfect cylinder he licked, sealed and declared to be the lunar fatty. He lit her first toke with much pagan fanfare but said not a word thereafter, just watched.

Their slowblime lovemaking fell in pace with the nature of their surroundings as the sun disappeared leaving the glow of the roach the only light for light years until half the eastern horizon became engulfed in the maw of a gigantic moon reflecting the sun in silver light upon them snuggled between the sheets. As the fullness of the moon grew perfect the earth interrupted the sun with a shadow on a further desert as it began to eat the moon in turn. The wolves, who’d been harmonizing to the lunar tune as their pitch rose with it, slowly became a random cacophony as it disappeared and revealed stars once obscured by its brilliance. Their shared orgasm occurred at the peak of the howling at the dark of the moon in the middle of the milky way and they remained in afterglow until the moon and vulpine harmony returned in full.

She returned the leaf to its place between the sheets of onion skin vellum pages, closed the book, scrambled off her perch, grabbed her cane he'd carved for her from the stalk and made her way home to the ferryman’s house.

HOUNDED

When I was very young I thought I went on forever. Bumping my head on the crib seemed no different than sticking my finger in my eye; it was all me. The same part of me that offered a breast to suck later shoveled spoonfuls of prechewed food into my sucker. Having learned where my sucker was I became very adept at tasting every part of me I could manage to bring to it.

It was long about then that I became aware of a mischievous part of me that would make various other parts angry with me. I became very uncomfortable because I didn’t know how to make all of me feel good again. The more I seemed to disturb those parts the more they seemed to withdraw from me and I came to see that the misbehaver and those he ruffled were not really me. He became my naughty companion, Drill, and the parts he annoyed turned out to be my parents. The only reason I even recall having what they called my imaginary friend is my parents recalling my bringing him home to share it when I was called to lunch.

Drill was my favorite playmate for adventures in the deep ravine behind our house and might have continued to be if he hadn’t talked me into eating that strange smelling skunk cabbage we found one spring. My stern grandfather who always wore a vest was visiting when I came in with some leaves for everyone to enjoy. He made me drink several glasses of soapy water to make me expel that evil poison and when I puked he said it was the cure working. The combination of the traumatic physical sensation of transiting from groovy found flavor to soapy induced vomit and the mental confusion of such skewed logic from such an authority figure made Drill disappear forever. He didn’t go far, just out of sight.

His cantankerous mischief would show up whenever I began to wonder why the big people like my parents always got their way whether I liked it or not. Like talking me into eating poison, Drill would make me stomp my feet, slam doors, throw things and find a place to hide to get away from such tyranny. Instead of such behavior helping me feel good again it always brought the wrath of the big people down on me all the more. Just like my breath after eating skunk cabbage had offended them they said my bad behavior was due to my “unruly instinks”, so I figured we all knew it must have been Drill making me do it.

For many years Drill hounded me from behind the scenes whenever I would bump into authority imposing corrections to or limits on whatever I happened to be doing. School seemed like a gauntlet determined to rid me of Drill’s disruptive influence with discipline so counterproductive it only got his back up to the degree that I dropped out of high school with several hundred detention hours remaining to be served. Determined to shake my nemesis and become a good boy who could pass any test authority could put me to, I volunteered for membership in the institution I was convinced offered the most effective discipline available in the process of making one a real man.

Four years later, when my enlistment was up and he felt it was safe to come out of hiding, Drill’s persnickety ways prevented my remaining by dangling an opportunity to go to college where people got their own authority to run things. Somewhere during the course of my courses in college and promotions in the lucrative job it landed me I began to understand that Drill was far from being my antagonistic nemesis; he is the instinctual being I had been taught all my life was a nature to be dominated; he is the me as I was born and cannot help but be.

The person Drill hounded throughout his life was the person culture convinced must obediently seek its approval to be valid; the person for whom instincts were counterproductive to the purpose of becoming civilized. My experience of attempting to create and maintain that exemplary personality at the expense of the rich council of my genetic memory has stood me well in recovering my early intuition that my connection to the world goes on forever.

Now feral, it is culture by which I feel hounded, but only when I let it in through the doggy door of the intertubes.

BEGUILED BY NIGHT

This is part of a larger video about the pond, but it's here because I've always been beguiled by night

Fascinated by sunrise, I sit my seat in the garden shed well before false dawn creeps across the land where I live. As Earth rotates Priest and I inexorably east, the materiality of the atmosphere’s rare air high enough to see over the now silhouetted shadows catches glimpses of the radiant energy source and transmits them down to us as a gradual approach to full daylight.

Well after it is bright enough for me to write these words, Sol himself appears in piercing shafts of light, unabsorbed by the hungry leaves that recently grace the filigree of winter’s black branches with clothing of spring foliage, to strike our eyes with shocking directness despite the gentle announcement of its coming. These rays of pure white energy from that fiery orange ball are parsed into the daily spectacle of their sparkling spectrum as they strike the shiny slime trails of slugs’ overnight devouring the remnant meal of chicken feed and the spherical Pink Floyd prisms of dewdrops condensed upon the leaves of the garden vegetables.

Bemused by noon hour when shadows are their shortest, my flute and I respond to the spontaneous symphony of nature’s voices in a harmony unrehearsed, though variations of nature's theme are repeated every day. In a response learned in early chickhood, my fowl family returns from scattered scratch, scratch, peck, pecking for the resurging burgeon of insect life to be found over their eight acre hunting grounds, to enjoy the tattered tortilla’s I strew for their midday snack and a headcount by the mother hen I've become.

Intrigued by dusk, my seat in the shed transports me into the turbulence formed by the heated air of the day being cooled and driven upward by the cooler darkness of earth’s shadow overtaking us at the insensible pace of a thousand miles an hour as the light wanes as it had waxed in the morning. As if by precision meters, the girls return at a time varying with the length of day to roost for darkness’ duration.

Beguiled by night, my imagination is unleashed to create realities of invisibility to posit materiality behind the reflections of man’s puny lights off of beings found during the day by their shadows. Toads gather in the pond for bufo orgy time, filling our ears with roars belying their tiny size as they procreate polliwogs in a plethora of ova contained in ribbons wrapped around the stems of papyrus recovering from recent frostbite depletion them selves. The scent of a skunk, approaching with a curiosity equally beguiled by night, grows from my nostalgic fondness for its freshness to an odor threatening my gag reflex and fades again as she passes on. Priest is sensed more than seen as his paler shade of dark brushes my shins and hops into my lap for the umpteenth mutual appreciation moment of the day.

SHOT IN THE DARK

He died of lead poisoning. He was an avid hunter. He died with his faithful black Labrador, Fetch, at his bedside. No one ever expected to see Gus “Butch” Wayhemming leave this life in anything less violent than combat, capture or taming of some species of animal much larger or wild than himself.

Butch was famous world wide for his daring-do, whether it was wrestling gnu-swallowing crocodiles, hog tying a two ton water buffalo whose heart he cut out and took a bite of while it was still beating, milking the venom from an Anaconda he’d bred from Anaconda and Black Momba parents just to up the hazard of the feat, bagging and stuffing the last remaining mating pairs of fifteen endangered species, or the world’s largest collection of mounted heads in his huge trophy room including three women from PETA. He’d climbed Everest naked, swum the English Channel towing the boat carrying the press, flown over the Sahara desert in a pedal powered flying craft and defeated the Greenbay Packers by himself wearing only a jock strap. There was nothing he couldn’t have accomplished — if he’d conquered death.

His best friend, doctor, masseuse, tattoo artist and publicist, “Smiling” Jack Kelly, was the only person who knew the cause of his death. Although the lead poisoning was public knowledge, no one knew the source beyond the rumor Jack allowed to circulate of his biting the casings off depleted uranium ammunition because that’s what Butch and his vicarious fans would have preferred than the ignominious truth of the matter. Fetch knew too.

He’d retrieved the mallard Butch shot during his daily wake up routine, right after repelling down from his cliffside sleeping sling and just before his ten mile jaunt over the glacier. At the end of that fateful day, Butch was so ravenous he tore into his evening meal with an abandon that ignored the swallowing of a few pellets embedded in the poor duck’s thigh muscles. So stuffed was his esophagus that the pellets reembedded themselves in his flesh.

Yes, Smiling Jack was the only one who knew that Gus, “Butch” Wayhemming was brought down by his own shot in the dark meat of a harmless duck.

CLARITY THROUGH CINNAMON MIST

Click picture to enlarge

This post is the second thing to pop into my mind upon reading Jeff's theme for the next session for 10th Daughter of Memory, Clarity Through a Cinnamon Mist. Since he posted twice last time I said why not? This graphic is the background artwork I did for a band called the Esquires ten years ago, with the clarity that has come through the cinnamon mist of this meditator's mountain retreat over that period.

"Finally a yodood post I can understand!!"

I shall let Cinnamon’s comment quoted above be testimony that I have found the “clarity through a Cinnamon mist” after months of bumping into boulders of obscurity in comments like, “Oh dear friend, I am going to have to take a course in logical thinking to 'get' you! My brain is aching with the gymnastics required to understand your concepts….,” and “…not sure my little brain could cope with knowing that I know nothing,” and “Well I might get credit for commenting, but won't get credit for understanding, 'cause I got lost halfway through..”

On first reading of the theme I saw Clarity, though Cinnamon missed in regard to her missing deadlines for the last couple of sessions. Must be the Mummer cacophony. ;p

"DIRTY"

… was one of those words that never entered his vocabulary for the same reason “fabulous”, “incredible” and “awesome” dropped out. Words that were, or had fashionably become, so ubiquitous as to cease modifying the nouns or verbs with which they were linked in any meaningful way, became mirrors of the speaker by their opaqueness.

“Dirty” was one of his first introductions to how a freeborn boy could be wrong around people who had traded their freedom to choose for lip service allegiance to pop righteousness. The poop in his pants, the soil on his knees and the words he heard daddy say couldn’t all be dirty. People that found dirt always smelled like soap. So how come mother called aunt Donna, who took more baths than anyone in the world, a dirty minded woman?

These questions and observations led him to see that using the word dirty was a kind of unconscious code with which the righteous could recognize each other as allies in finding wrong with actions outside what one must assume they consider their unnaturally sanitary soap box. It no longer mattered whether the modified noun was excrement, soil, reputation, sanitation, sex, ethics, money, job, habit, thought or language in comparison to how clearly it defined the accusing speakers, who were, ironically enough, always describing other than them selves. Imagine that.

His own meaning for “dirty” formulated when he began to feel dirty himself. Finding himself attending class with students who bragged on the obituaries of murdered residents of Carver Village and powerless to find anyone to believe it, or if they knew, to join him in opposing it, he dropped out of his new Mississippi high school and joined the Marines, both to get away and to learn to be more effective in opposing such lynchings. But he felt dirty, leaving such a mess.

Experience over four years of direct contact with and obedience to the military code of justice did nothing to expiate this stain of helpless cowardice he felt. Indeed, it only showed him the immensity of institutionalized enactment of the same kinds of atrocities against people of color in neighborhoods called nations. He talked to veterans returning from the Korean conflict who were just as shot loose from consensus reality as returnees from any of the admitted wars his country wages. If they were fit enough to retain in the service they were often recognizable by fresh material in the shape of rank chevrons removed from otherwise salty uniform sleeves. Chevrons awarded for ferocity in combat granted on the spot in the field. Chevrons taken away for inability to fold up their prize winning talents like the weapons they used by courts-marshal at home. He felt even more helpless to reconcile the increasing examples of other such duplicity dressed in the same flag. Dirty war is a term used by his country to describe resistance to its clean ones.

Over the fifty years since he left the service he tried joining only one more group he thought actually wanted to make the world better. When the company finally announced the product he’d helped engineer to fruition over nine years, he expected he’d begin work on a new project. Instead he was given the task of taking the material, design and performance capacity of his reliable new product to the point that it would break down as soon after warranty as possible to reduce the cost of making something for which the price remained the same, need expensive repairs earlier and increase product turnover. The duplicitous facade was everywhere.

He made a choice between wallowing in the dirty for dominating profit, like oil refinery towns love that smell of money in the air, or feeling the healthy remove from the trough of filthy lucre in the wilderness where the dirtiest he gets forking compost, cleaning chicken roosts and planting seeds feels like the epitome of clean. The word dirty never comes to mind.

2009 in Review: END OF AN ERROR

The sanity defined by civilization seemed to find ways to reinterpret my maybe musings about the human condition to be personal attacks in most imaginative ways throughout the year. I was all too often lured into personal responses, as if their demonizing party line stereotypes or quoting the bible represented willingness, much less the ability of the offended to carry on a rational discussion

Coupled with my having stumbled onto the 10^th Daughter of Memory writing exercise, the foregoing dilemma suggested I change the direction of this blog from philosophical ponderings about my observations of the living universe, so easily taken offense to by faith’s delicate certainties, to one of strictly fiction based on such observations. I am beginning to see the rationale for originating fables and fiction throughout the ages as a way to get a message across indirectly to those able to apply Mary’s Little Lamb’s problems to their own life, thereby avoiding the more direct identification with the real population referred to as mindless, faithful sheep.

•

For those more willing and able to discuss opposing views with the understanding that the essence of the duality is the win-win objective rather than a lose-lose contest of righteousness, I have moved my ponderings to a new blog available to all who find it in plain sight. You are welcome until offended — at which juncture I would hope you’d be so kind as to throw yourself out into the street. Watch out for cars … headed for the cliff.

I came across three new examples of folks who get the whole idea of a living universe: Sandy Krolic’s The Recovery of Ecstasy: Notebooks from Siberia, Richard Grossinger’s, Embryos, Galaxies and Sentient Beings: How the Universe Makes Life and James Cameron’s Avatar. It is gratifying to find others describing the same ongoing event so well as to bridge the differences of viewpoint while enhancing the scope of all.

This year found me a keeper of chickens and an eater of their delicious free-range eggs to supplement my less than desirable progress in growing my food in the garden through Texas summers. This year was a disaster, with only Serrano peppers coming back after the drought — watering every day cannot beat 100°+ for several months — trees began shedding leaves in mid June!

Having a quasi roomie and companion for stimulating conversation through six months of the worst heat was a more than compensatory distraction from discomfort though it left me missing her quite more than I expected and a never before indulged chocolate addiction – acne at seventy-one?

The UN climate summit succeeded in only resolving that people in suits consider people otherwise dressed or from below the equator to be unworthy of protecting from the ecological disaster by supplying them money to achieve the same standard of living that is causing it in the first place. Rather than dragging people out of the rain forest and selling them an air conditioner we should be planting trees and naturally ventilating our houses in their shade with the fresh air they regenerate symbiotically. Don’tcha jus’ love politics?

As 9/11/01 fades, 12/21/12 looms … “ these are the times” … "this is a record of the times" … “we’re all going down” … “together.”

Stragedy plots a way to side step inevitability.

Only carbon based life could generate so much irony.

FEAR IN SHATTERED COLOR

Maybe if dad hadn’t gotten laid off in October he might have gotten to open the usual present before bed time that always took the edge off the season long anticipation of the wonderful rewards for his good behavior Santa put under the tree while he slept through the night that felt like eternity.

Maybe if mother and dad hadn’t been such good hosts, they might have done their little helper chores sooner and been in bed sooner.

Maybe if children understood all the words grownups use to cover the holes in their fabrications they would be less skeptical of the words they did understand.

Maybe if a frog had wings he wouldn’t bump his ass. He doesn’t so he does. Dad was, mother and dad didn’t, children don’t so they are and he couldn’t sleep for worrying that something besides the leering face in the glowing stars on his ceiling was afoot. By the time he got to the stairs he knew no one was afraid of being caught being naughty by Santa or his helpers. For each step crept his skepticism bloomed until he could see the whole lurid scene.

The implications were so vast he could only beat a hasty retreat back up the stairs before his discovery was discovered. In turning to go he snagged the garlands decorating the banister and loosed a hanging purple ball from the fir frond upon which it depended. Lunging for it he missed, deflecting it into the path of the paper loop chain, which caught its hook and stopped its surely shattering on the hardwood living room floor.

Maybe if the Christmas decoration had completed its journey on the winds of gravity his parents would have realized the jig was up and would have welcomed him into the fold of the first stage of adulthood like anyone who announces their discovery.

Maybe if the fear of being found out during the tedious chore of hauling the delicate pendulum of ball and chain back to safety hadn’t shocked him into a unique realm of realization for a five year old, he might have been one of those that spitefully announces his discovery to all those who are still fooled by the fable or still telling it.

Maybe if he’d blabbed his secret insight he’d have never learned to spot prevarication whenever it belies his own experience of nature or the body language of the teller of tales.

Maybe if science actually knew what it was talking about they could calculate that bumblebees can, in fact, fly. But they don’t so they can’t. The ball didn’t so he wasn’t, the fear did so he wasn’t, and he didn’t so he has never burdened anyone with his trust, belief, faith or himself with the bruises for which they’re always cruising. Maybe

MESSAGE FROM THE FULCRUM

Silence.

Knock!

Awakening

“Was that a sound?”

Silence.

Knock!

The dream is over

“Is something happening?”

Silence.

Knock!

The dualities resume

“There it is again!”

The duality of silence and sound are the clothing with which the mind adorns experience as its best gesture to suggest one’s ineffable insights into an existence too everywhere to be pointed at. At the balance point of each and of all, that which can be dressed in expression fitting the fashion must neglect the rest of the ongoing reality to tell a snap shot story of the enormous variety of dualities contained in any instant, inspirational glimpse of the eternal present. Seeing the dynamic of dualities as a dance or a war seems to depend on the centeredness of one’s fulcrum.

If the essence of the living universe were not the fulcrum about which constant change occurs, we could not be aware of our existence in it. Duality, simultaneously recognized difference, is the trigger to our awareness and the limit to the range of our ability to describe the truth at the fulcrum upon which the instant of the present balances. Like a tight rope walker stabilizes herself by spreading her apparent physical presence over imaginary ground on either side of the rope with a balance bar, our memories and expectations stabilize our awareness of the reality of the only time or place we or anything else ever has or will walk, now.

My version of the yin yang symbol for duality above demonstrates how the variations produced by the living universe mix into the definitive duality of two complimentary, opposite colors which, rather than obscuring the polarity, show the dynamic mix of two elements whose existence depends on each other in the often ignored threshold between them, now.

Though I used a tight rope, now and the line dividing the yin yang as examples of this universal threshold just now, a deeper examination is needed of the ramifications of ignoring such a critical transition by allowing the distraction of the more stark contrast of stereotypical extremes by indolent minds insistent on viewing the world in black and white righteousness. For the civilized mind such examination is possible only by withdrawal from all cultural influence, found most purposefully in deep meditation or prayer and inadvertently in epiphanies called anything from religious to psychedelic experiences of the true connectedness of the living universe. During any such personal insight into the eternity of the present, one’s purpose for being there dissolves in significance when one realizes that the resolution of all dualities is this source from which we attempt to single out, follow and favor any number of its myriad variations over the rest.

Lao Tsu speaks of the threshold not as something to be limited by or crossed, but as a path to be wandered as the way of everything, the path of unattached balance. Upon such a path, habitual temptations and aversions acquired and indulged, in excess of the necessities of a healthy life, may be seen as so much baggage and examined for their push/pull connectedness across the threshold of pernicious preferences frustrating the already well off, like trying to use a long balance pole while walking along the flat ground in a row of a cornfield.

This turned out to be a bigger chunk of the constant ramble unwinding from this view from the fulcrum than I intended. Maybe.