UNCOVERING DESTINY

In recent weeks and months I find self assessing the past in new ways from how I saw a time when it was present. I see a pattern the details fit into, when before, I saw the details like puzzle pieces strewn on a tabletop to be gone through looking for interlocking parts. I could not see the patterns or the flow that ran through the progression to make the completed image. I don't remember a time when I wasn't curious in the back of my mind what my destiny might  be. By now, I have lived my destiny, whatever it is. To find out what it is, I can look at now. I am living it. From here, it looks like the one desire that has run through my whole life has been to live quietly and peaceably, not have somebody telling me how wrong I am, I need to make more money and live in a suburb. I look at the life I have as the life I created for myself by my own will, determination, letting go and allowing "chance." In this time of the life I have found my flow. When I allow the flow, things work out, timing works sometimes perfectly. Possibly, this has been  my destiny, to find my flow. It's been my destiny to live in a mountain holler in the Blue Ridge, the mountains I remember seeing in National Geographics, blue with orange sky. I've seen those mountains many times by now. I am in the blue mountains. When I saw pictures of the Blue Ridge in childhood, I was seeing my destiny unawares. One great motivation along the way has been to contribute the very least possible to the Military Industrial Complex, the corporate world, the belief system that money is number One. I don't know where it came from, possibly past lives, but I have never wanted to train myself to be an automaton just to have money and a country club membership. I'd rather drive off the end of the earth like Thelma and Louise.   

I suspect that basically my motivation was to get away, away from where I am. I wanted to get away from Wichita, from Kansas. The momentum stuck and there came a time I wanted to get away from Charleston and South Carolina. Came to North Carolina mountains and spent several years wanting to get away from here. Finally, I caught on that the wanting to get away momentum was about wanting to get away from parents, their ongoing passive-aggressive war with each other and overtly-aggressive war on the kid. Their example made me vow to self I will never marry, will never live like they live, will not allow myself to be a corporate pawn. I would live in a peaceable atmosphere without television. All the time living in Charleston I had a longing for the mountains with no idea of why. I wanted to write about the mountains, but had no experience. I like to read accounts of Himalayan climbers. I read about them with no desire to try it. I accept it is something I could never do this lifetime physically, and have no interest in doing mentally. I have no desire to climb to the "top of the world," mainly because it is not. There's no oxygen. I can go to a place I can't breathe in a swimming pool. The people that climb those mountains have their own motivations. My motivation has been to live quietly in peace, frugally, alone with a few pets. I came to the mountains on my spiritual path or pilgrim path, whatever. I think of it simply as my life path. By spiritual path, I mean living by the way of the spirit, the Tao, the flow, in tune with my interior life. I could not live seeing one way on the inside and conforming to another way on the outside. A lot of people can do that. It's the path to money. A lot of people cannot do it. These are the people where I find my friends. Birds of a feather, a universal law. 

I've never wanted to make my way walking over the backs of the working people. I came to the mountains with some lines from WB Yeats in my mind from his poem, Among School Children, where all ladders start, in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart. The foul rag and bone shop of the heart is where I have wanted to live my life. It is one way of looking at my destiny. It is what I have wanted for myself. Another way of saying it, I want to live close to the bone, simply, very simply. More and more simple has been my goal. By now, it's about as simple as it can get without living in a tent. My momentum in this lifetime has not been so much toward something, but away from. I went away like an arrow pulled back as far as the length of the arrow allows, and let go. It's actually somewhat difficult to live in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart. Now that we the people are in the cross hairs of police state, I'm all the more glad to be outside society. At the same time, rural America is an awfully vulnerable place to live. In economic downturns, the new tv word for Depressions, rural America goes under first and stays under. It's somewhat difficult to live with, but rurally, people take care of each other in hard times. Community comes together in hard times. So I've taken myself off the ladder to any kind of ambition or success at the start, have never stepped on the first rung. In the Navy, I never made one step in advancement. I wanted to come out the same rank I went in. It was my way of saying no to fascism, militarism. They could force my body, but not my mind. Childish? Maybe. It was serious business at the time. I was already done with authoritarian rule by threats. By the time the Navy was over, I had completed my debts to society. Got married and served my country. Got unmarried and out of the Navy, and I was done. From this moment on, I was on my own, made my own decisions, nobody telling me what I'm gonna and not-gonna do, except the boss at work. 

That weekend between the Friday of leaving the Navy and Monday of starting school on my own was the chopping block moment. All that went before, ended that weekend. All that went after, started that weekend. It's been my attitude toward work that an employer holds over me and operates with the right to fire me. He often doesn't realize I have the right to fire him. I worked for a surveyor for a time who took it to be his right to berate and talk down to me, like he did everybody who ever worked for him. I told him I took that shit when I was a kid. I don't take it now. And walked away. I didn't need his minimum wage. I could work for minimum wage someplace else. When somebody with power over me thinks it's time to give me a cussing to nail their power into place, they'd best go into it intending it be the last time they see me. That's the moment they lose the power I gave them the illusion of for minimum wage. Minimum wage does not buy a whole lot of power-over. I'm a stubborn Taurus, I'm happy to say. My stubborn ways have kept me out of a lot of entanglements I don't want for myself. My spiritual path is my everyday life. I have learned that the spiritual path is more about being a benefit to others than going to church. I mean by being a benefit to others, being spontaneously available when someone near at hand suddenly has a need I can help do something about. Mountain people are generous when it comes to helping ones in need. I take all my relationships with friends to be spiritual relationships. The people I know have a great deal of value for me. I automatically, can't help but see everyone who comes into view a soul in a body and mind. I never see their clothes as anything but a costume like a benign Halloween costume, a costume of style and rank. I interact with the person inside the costume, body and mind. Seeing the people around me so, retains them as a part of the path, weaves them into my experience of my path. It's in relation to others that we have either a good life or a rotten life. How I treat others is how they treat me. That, too, is part of my path. 

meher baba

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