ALLOWING THE FLOW

It's been several months that the word, or rather the spirit of the word, allowing, has stuck with me and grown into a word as powerful in my own personal lexicon as understanding, another word for love. I'm seeing allowing as a word for love. It seems to have the spirit of love about it. I think what got me looking at this word was seeing that when I accept somebody for who that individual is, I allow him and her their own characteristics as human beings, their belief systems, their ways of doing anything, the tv shows they watch, their political opinions, their status, everything. When I allow, expectation is silent, unasked-for advice not even a consideration, control never an issue, acceptance is complete. This word, allowing, came up from wondering how love can be shown authentically, such that to speak it is redundant. One of the characteristics of the college educated middle class from the suburbs is to unconsciously start sentences, You know what you should/ oughta/ needta/ better, gotta do? Or, You would really love (fill in the blank). This one always stops me, because it is never something I would really love, and I know it before it's spoken. Consistently the one directing what will suit my taste to-a-T has no idea. I was told in Walmart by a friend I see once every few years that I would really love the videos of the Tolkien trilogy movies displayed in a big bin at $5 apiece. It's like throwing darts, missing every time, never giving up.

I've come to see that after half a century and a few decades, I wonder if civilization can survive a full century of television. Americans watch television like it's reality, and how I see this manifesting in our collective behavior is scatter-brained empty-headedness based in unconsciousness. Kinda like our parrot representatives of the lock-step republican party. GOP means no more than gop anymore. In the corporate media, Mac-journalist verbiage pretending to search for motivations behind the surprise American Surrealist killers engaged daily in terrorist civil war, television is again the off-limits word nobody dares use. If you do use it, you are dismissed. You're told you don't know what you're talking about, told with the arrogance of a junkie. I don't see civilization making it to a full century with television. The same madness is all over the country. The republicans have been stirring up hate for the last 30+ years until by now the divisive hatred has us in a condition of terrorist civil war that corporate media buries not even in the back pages. I see praises of the internet as the metaphorical barbed wire fence between democracy and fascism they make me laugh. When the corporate "deciders" turn the key, internet will be controlled. Chinese internet will look "free" compared to ours. Democracy is over, meaning I see myself squirming inside, having a difficult time letting even lower-case democracy go, knowing I have absolutely no say in the matter, whatsoever, never have and never will. If I push it, they have places where people that push it vanish. It's not even a game anymore.

We've become commercials. Our chit-chat conversations, the kind that dare not have any meaning, have become in my lifetime commercials. Oh you MUST SEE the latest whatever it is, somebody's new house, civic edification, a world of people advertising whatever they're talking about. It's so bad that every now and then I hear somebody apologizing to somebody for not seeing something the same way. I think: what? In my mind's eye I see a Coca-Cola bottling machine moving the red cans along in big robotic sweeps of several at a time getting filled and moving on with the next one moving in, a dozen every few seconds. I'm not fit for this earth anymore. Maybe it's because I quit trying so long ago I forgot the motivation. Maybe I quit trying because I never found the motivation. Who knows? It doesn't matter. Visuals from Pink Floyd's film The Wall dance in my head as examples of what I see television creating. Even the people who know what it is doing are going with it because it's all wrapped up in mind control creating a world that does not exist for all the people to believe. And LO! They do. It's entertaining. Who can live without it? So many channels. "We only watch nature channels." Lions ripping the guts out of zebras and eating them in the living room, all the bedrooms, the kitchen, bathrooms when they're big enough. Don' wanna miss nothin. The world might end and we'll miss it if....

I've been wondering why Obana has been so inert delivering on the promise he holds up in JFK type quips that sound big and mean little, except JFK's seem to have a veneer of meaning that Obama's don't have for me. Maybe they have meaning for the twitter and ipad or whatever those things are called, and cell phones. It's kind of getting for me like *Stop the world I want to get off* except it was a terrible movie and I wouldn't want to do anything to remind myself of it. And I really don't want to get off. Like the old man Lorne Campbell said, "It's time to move higher up the mountain." I want to move higher up the mountain in my own way. I can't interpret what he meant, because we thought very differently from two lifetimes of radically different experiences in different places. That's how I feel with everybody I know. Each one of us is a lifetime of radically different experiences from any others, like fingerprints. Some years ago I moved higher up the mountain. By now what I left to go up the mountain is following me. Summer homes and four wheel drives. Retire here and die watching tv with a sunset in your picture window. They're just more houses in the landscapes than there were in the recent past. I am concerning myself with allowing. I'm kind of blocked up, it seems like, over not allowing democracy to go away when I know it is already gone, so gone I wonder if we ever had it.

I am seeing, now that I'm looking, that in regions of the life where I do the "allowing," all flows smoothly without any rough edges. In places where I don't allow, like watching the systematic dismantling of American democracy gobbled up by corporate takeover, I brace within. It's looking like Obama is stepping aside and making slogans, twitter quips, sound bites, clever speech phrases that say nothing, following orders, making it look good. It's very spooky looking. It's another step in the process of the dismantling of constitutional law by popular (NRA) demand. Lord have mercy. Corporate lobby is pushing we the people out of our government into a peasant class, something like in China, but it won't be so benevolent. This is the stuff where I get blocked up, where I don't want to allow. But I must. It is a done deal. It is over. I need to get on with it, allow what is to happen. It's going to anyway. Holding back my allowing just makes a dam inside me where I block up. No telling what it does to me psychically to be blocked all the time not allowing the flow of what is going to happen anyway. Like worry. Worry doesn't allow. I will look further into allowing and see what turns up. It feels like scratching the surface of something with interesting reverberations. Maybe it's an insight into the flow.


  

Martinsville 2013

 

*