IGNORE THE RIDICULOUS

 

beside waterfall road

 

Earlier in the week I wrote a note to self to keep on the desk where I'd see it frequently. It says, Ignore the ridiculous. I thought it was funny writing it onto a piece of paper to hold my attention. As every day goes by, it gets less funny, until by now, the note, itself, is the comedy. I'm seeing so much that is ridiculous since writing the note, I wonder how I can ignore the ridiculous. It's not as easy as it seems. As soon as I go online, the ridiculous begins. I meant the note specifically to cover the clerk in Kentucky. She gets more ridiculous by the day, somebody's ego newly bitten by the bug of national attention. Fake news will milk her to the last drop of the ridiculous she has inside her. Something in her eyes tells me that we are far from the end of her public spectacle. Her mind is going full speed in the county jail cell where she's treated like a guest celebrity, writing her book in her mind, thinking about how she'll justify herself on the Pat Robertson Show, seeing herself in the spotlights of mega-churches across the land with blond bee-hive hair, a glittery dress to the floor and lotsa gold draped around her neck and arms. She's writing a story in her mind. I suspect she has already begun to act out the story she's composing, manipulative all the way. I even have a feeling she's liking the reprieve from her husband. He looks like one of the guys from the movie, Winter's Bone.

 

beside waterfall road

 

Then we have the ridiculous responses to her, like, she has a right to her opinion, as if more relevant to her case than a dog walking down the road. And the reactions, like, slut, bitch, again, totally irrelevant. Judges put people in jail for contempt of court. She knew what she was facing. She's been talked to at length by right wing fundraisers and lawyers promising fame and money. All the way to the Supreme Court. National headlines. It looked pretty good with five republican justices, but her Fake news  idea of religious liberty failed to take in court. Why would a Supreme Court decision matter to the ridiculous? Reason doesn't matter. Why would the law? I have not taken the Supremes seriously since the coup of double-aught set up 9/11 and the police state that followed. Like Al Gore, I have no choice but to go with it. It is history now, the real history not yet available.  Another fraud, front and center, a smokescreen to keep the proles distracted, keep them bickering amongst themselves, asleep in television and misinformation, mental conflict.

 

beside waterfall road

 

This Kentucky clerk haunts me when I see her picture and read quotations spoken from her mind. I grew up in exactly the same kind of church mind as she adopted for herself, like my mother, who adopted it for herself to take control of her situation. I don't doubt that Kim Davis is a zealot. Her hair and clothes show she's a zealot. The zealots of this kind of religion are about making other people do what they're supposed to do, watching and judging everybody around them not doing right. By this time in the life, I'm weary of people telling other people how to live their lives in the name of God. They have not caught on that the spiritual path is an interior path to the heart, to the core,  to the soul of oneself. The kingdom of heaven is within. I've been the other side of the clouds in planes. It's not there. It's not about policing and condemning the actions of others. Nor is it about the appearance of piety, nor going to church with perfect attendance, nor bragging about God before tv cameras.  I have become so free of that mind, I feel liberated. I am liberated. It was the greatest of feelings of liberation when the last of that kind of thinking left my mind.

 

beside waterfall road

 

I am drawn to the pictures of Kim Davis, memes about her, updates on her court situation. She is so close to home, the very same mind that dictated my early years and had me believing it. Alas for my poor mommy, she birthed a free-thinker. He sure did not come by it honest. It was like John Milton parenting Nietzsche. New cosmologies have thence transpired. I could not live under God the judge and punisher. I preferred no God to that God. If God amounts to a projection of human neuroses, I don't want it. It took fifteen years to erase from my mind interpretations of God according to white male control issues down through the centuries. If God is that, then God is a creation of the human mind; therefore, not God. Looking back, a lifetime later, I am grateful for the falseness that spewed me out. The years of educating my mind out of religion opened my mind to the beyond. It turned out I could not see God beyond the religion, mistook the religion for God. It didn't compute. I needed to step out from behind the filter of religion, open up and allow self simply to be, unafraid, flow with chance. The spirit came through, rationally convincing. New wine for a new bottle. Kim Davis in the headlines playing pretend piety takes me back to the years I lived in that mind, increases gratitude I was able to find the way out of a coal mine of the male ego by following my own light.

 

beside waterfall road

photos by tj worthington

 

 

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SILENCE

waterfall road rock formation

 

The woman in Kentucky dominates facebook today, eclipsing Donald Trump's narcissistic posturing. His face is like a caricature of a cloud blowing the winter wind. He illustrates an old mountain saying, a blow, somebody who is a blowhard. I see a picture of Trump and I see a blow. He looks like he's blowing wind in all the pictures, which is what he's doing, bloviating over vocal chords, rapping verbal graffiti of surrealist chance. I am awed to see Karl Rove's strategic mind has chosen surrealism for this election round. He's playing with confusion. It's not easy for a hawk to catch a bird flying in a flock. The corporate press the playing field. At the same time, we have this woman in Kentucky martyring herself to an egoic version of God's will with the promise of right wing talk circuit, a book, money and fame. She's a comic case of pointing the finger at somebody, three fingers pointing back at self. She's been getting three fingers of it, too. Rather than embarrass her, it appears to be stroking her ego, making her proud. Don't bother to pray for me, send money. She might even appear on Pat Robertson's 700 Club tv show. They will have to do something with the hair first. Two bad-hair people in the front of the news this week.

 

trees along waterfall road

 

I remember the song by Jane's Addiction, late Eighties, Idiots Rule. It is so true that it reminds me of the truth in a maxim I learned from Jr Maxwell, Stay away from important people. Why? The importance is all self-importance. It's ego. Only. Why waste my time around people who are all about themselves? I saw a video clip of the top dog in Australia talking to people on a sidewalk in NY. Most of them didn't know of him. He told them to remember him, move to Australia and vote for him. I thought, how does a man stand and talk to strangers telling them to remember him because he's important? This is something else I don't want for myself, the illusion of importance. It embarrassed me for him to see him talk about his importance, which is nothing at all but a mental script. It's what politicians do. It's why I stay away from them. When a politician comes to town, I stay home that day. I laugh at myself at election times for taking them seriously. Which of the self-important people do I choose to affirm as most self-important? When not one of them is somebody I'd want to meet. 

 

ferns beside waterfall road

 

A meme I found on facebook of a Byzantine-like painting of God with clouds all around him, a halo over his head, him looking downward with concern, saying, "Sigh. Why do I always attract the crazy ones?" Isn't it so. Several of the faces in the republican clown bus claim God told them this and that. The television fake preachers God chooses to talk to make me question their integrity. It answers the question before I ask it. I've an idea this vision of God amounts to a man's ego in spiritual drag, a wolf in sheep's clothing. This is God speaking. Not. It was during last election, this one and that one said God told them one thing and another. I can't help but see it as the ultimate in hypocrisy. It's speaking hypocritically. However, the people listening know it's hypocritical, but it makes a good story and they want to believe it. It's like children's make-believe games, little girl Vada giving her doll a drink of milk from an empty bottle.  Making a story to entertain self. Performing in her own play she makes up as it goes along, one gesture to the next. Dolls interact with other dolls, talk to each other. She knows it is make-believe. The game is the fun in it. 

 

 

rock beside waterfall road

 

It takes a willing audience to suspend disbelief far enough to go along with the God-told-me story and pay money to keep it going. Enough people want to hear such stories to give an awful lot of story tellers an abundant living. I feel like that's cool. They're in a round together, people of like mind gathered like birds of a feather, a circle of energy everybody benefits from in their own ways. I'm happy for them. They're not fooling anybody who does not believe God talked to them, which is almost everybody. The God of my experience is silent, as God could only be. To speak to us, God takes a human birth, grows up a human and speaks what he has to say when it is time. His words are kept in gospels to be twisted by interpretation until the life is squeezed out of them over centuries of filtering through the limitations of the human mind. It doesn't do any good for God to speak to us. I feel like silence is the voice of God. The spirit world has too many deceiving spirits for me to count on taking something from the spirit world for God. The ego is a trickster too. Nobody can fake silence. Silence doesn't make any money. Everyone has access to it. It's common as air and equally essential.    

 

trees beside waterfall road

 

 

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PATRIOT DIVIDED

george segal

 

I saw a picture of a cop dressed in orange, charged with sex acts with a two year old. News items tend not to get me emotionally concerned, but sometimes they do, like the Sandra Bland story. It makes me want to be the one to deliver karma in person. Unrealistic thinking.  This guy with the two year old, just seeing his face and the headline caused my whole being inside the ribcage to want to explode in rage. I thought of my baby friend, Vada, who is four now, but I loved her when she was two as well as now. It's a protective and a giving love, not a taking love. I couldn't even say something to Vada to hurt her. I see news photos of a Palestinian daddy carrying his dead baby two years old, him splattered with her blood, and I think, How can you live with this, man? To myself I say this is half way round the globe, another world, another culture, another language, another way of life, none of which I understand, leave it alone, it's not mine. Mine is here where I am, my world. My impotence to help in any way makes me sad and callouses my heart. I see myself carrying baby Vada covered in her blood, dead, age four, and I want to deliver karmic payback with my bare hands.

 

george segal

 

I remember my friend Chad, when he was fifteen, his mama's husband beat her mercilessly, Chad stood him up on his toes and told him if he ever hit his mama again, he would beat him to death with his bare hands. Chad could do it, oppressor knew it, his mama was never hit again. I respect Chad for doing what he had to do, that's a hard decision for a kid. I told him of my respect, congratulated him on having what it took to do it. I don't see Chad a lot, but when I see him, I see somebody I respect in a big way. If a smart-missile from an American military drone in this time of police state were to kill Vada, and me near enough to see it, I would lose it for the rest of my life. I would join the forces that oppose American military involvement in my homeland to become an active enemy with purpose. My life would change that instant. I would be a warrior rebel from that day onward. I imagine a large part of the purpose behind the missiles is to create new enemies and to harden old enemies to keep never-ending war going, corporate profits up, shareholders paying their bills, the politicians in the right country clubs, the stock in mood-enhancers rising steadily.

 

george segal

 

It tears me up, with Vada in my life, to see a child hurt or killed in news photographs. It's what emotional news photographs are meant to do. Nonetheless, I know several people loved that baby with all their hearts the way I love Vada. And they're the people left to bury the baby. I don't like that the government of my country is killing babies all around the globe, even at home, creating such intense misery for corporate profit. It tells me the human condition in this time is the ethics and morality of money, God is dead. Not that God can die, but the American way of life that truly worships money acts as if God were, if not dead, absent. Conscience is something to laugh at now. War is evil. It's obvious. Seems to me a country with an economy rooted in war would, itself, be evil. There is no indifference like the American so-called Christian indifference to the poor and the down and out. None of this is new. It's been like this throughout my lifetime, different faces and names in the news along the way. 
 

george segal

 

American wars are geography lessons in locating the poorest countries on earth with the least defenses, to rob their resources and destroy them further. Shameless is what it is. But it keeps the economy going, the television flickering, the smart-phone charged, the laptop open, our inebriates available, gas in the car. Now it's looking like a necessary evil. Who is going to give up a cell phone, television and computer to stop American jets from bombing more Middle-Eastern defenseless cities? In the poorest parts of the world, my country is known as death from the sky and death squads on the ground. I've not been able to find a way to look at this aspect of America with anything but shame. I can feel pride in American art since the 1950s, pride in American rock n roll, pride in American poetry since Ezra Pound, pride in American writing, in a country where none of it is honored. Maybe it's best that way. Keeps the sentiment in greeting cards and television, where it belongs. I can be nationalistically proud as one of the American people, who are an incredible people. However, our government has turned on we the people, and I can't find nationalist pride in that. This explains why Bernie Sanders appeals to me as a candidate. He appears to have the potential to be a Little David kicking Goliath's ass again. We'll see.  

 

george segal himself

 

 

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THE HEART OF THINGS INVISIBLE

 

tj worthington

 

Earlier today I was looking at how I have changed on the inside since the move into the unknown, a rural road in the Blue Ridge Mountains. I came here at the beginning of my spiritual journey that started in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart, where all ladders start. The last lines of Yeats' poem, Circus Animals' Desertion, stayed in the front of my mind as the ground I stood on to begin a new life in the unknown. "Now that my ladder's gone, I must lie down where all the ladders start." The ladders of my ambitions before, my desires before, my beliefs before, all came to an end at the chopping block moment of realizing God is. At this moment now, writing to you, I saw an array of delicate multi-colored flowers and the head of Ganesh, the elephant-headed god of beginnings, remover of obstacles, surrounded by radiant flowers. The image faded away. I used to want images that came like that to stay, and regretted them fading away. By now, I've learned to enjoy it when it happens and be grateful it happened. I keep a picture of Ganesh on the wall. A friend bought it from a vendor in the Mumbai airport for something like a dollar, the image made with dye on an 8x10 rectangle of cloth having a simple, Rouault quality about it. It is my favorite Ganesh image of all I have seen. The picture of Ganesh below is the closest  feeling I could find to the image I saw in my mind's eye, though it was only his head I saw and flowers.

 

ganesh

 

 

The moment I caught on that God, indeed, is, I could not go on living as I had lived believing God a creation of the human mind for the few to control the many. Turns out, it was religion I confused for God. I was able for the first time to see behind the mask of religion, beyond to God as God is, the Christ as the Christ is, the heart of things invisible. The same may be said of Krishna and Allah, Buddha. It was different from seeing Jesus the uber-judge, sitting on the right hand of God the Great Judge, tapping his foot for the chance to condemn me to hell on the least zero-tolerance charge. "You shook your fist at me and cussed me once for not giving you what you wanted. For standing up to the Great God of Testosterone, it's the pit of never-ending hell fire for you, to scream in agony forever." The heart of things invisible, a vision of God I can live with rather than dread I might have gone too far this time when I take a drink of good liquor. The heart of things invisible says, A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. And the dire warning from the Judge On High, You better not. I came up in a medieval interpretation of God calcified over multiple centuries, complicated by Protestantism into John Milton's judge on a throne of adamant, and wrung dry of spiritual relevance by American fundamentalism.

 

paradise lost

 

It took fifteen years to clear my head of the theology of you-better-not. It all finally gone, the heart of things invisible pulled me to itself like a fish that took the bait, pulled to the bank by the hook hidden in the bait. Reeled in against my will. Reeled in by a power that seemed to be outside myself, which turned out to be my own higher self, the heart of things invisible. I needed to live with this new realization I could not deny. It was a hundred percent convincing to mind and heart. I needed time to digest what I'd learned and learn more about it, find a way to live that honors the heart of things invisible, and go on living in the world of work, living among other people in a spirit of solitude. Not dismissing others, rather embracing others, allowing others their own spirit of solitude. I've found the spiritual path to be in the world of others, not separate from. The solitude I wanted, I found I could not live, because I needed interactions with others, simply by being a social human being, and there was no sense that I could see in denying it. I went looking for balance, time for solitude and time for others. Do both solitude and social in a spirit of detachment and it's all the same.

 

tj worthington

 

By detachment I mean something like not being driven by things I want for myself, like fixing the rust and dents on my car and having it painted a deep gun-metal blue with money I don't have. I would like to realize the beauty of its lines. But so what. It runs like a race car, has good suspension, a fabulous engine that will just about make the back end drag the ground when I push the pedal to the metal. I can't want more from a car. A car that does 200 in six seconds would land me in the hospital, the grave or jail. It would probably be stolen first by big time car thieves that leave no traces. The car I drive, I can count on no thief wanting. It's the oldest and rattiest looking car in any parking lot. Thieves like flash, not rust. My house looks so ratty, no satellite dish, thieves don't look at it twice, but as something too old-timey to have anything in it of interest, an old-man car parked by the road. And Justin spread the word years ago, "That old man is crazy. He'll shoot your ass. He don't care." My favorite people are of the class of people thieves come from, working class people squeezed out of making legitimate money. They know by my reputation I respect them and honor them. They would be my bodyguards before they'd take from me. I feel confident on my spiritual path that I have learned to honor and respect the down and out people. They're beautiful people, too, when you know their hearts. I'm grateful I am now able to see the most in the least by way of the heart of things invisible. I'm grateful to live in a community where everybody has my back and I have theirs. I've come to learn what it is about humility God loves so much, learned it from the mountain people where even the tough guys have it.

 

 tj worthington

 

 

 

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DONKEYS MY TEACHERS

one-eyed jack

Just now heard self say something I've been doing recently, a change, one that flowed in so naturally I didn't notice for awhile. An apple core was on the corner of the desk waiting to be thrown outside for birds to peck, a possum to find. I spoke to self in head, I need to throw this outside for somebody to eat. Somebody. I've been calling birds, dogs, all critters, somebody, personification, which some would call projection. This has been an entire lifetime coming. I felt this way in childhood, but not any one individual in my world got it, not a teacher in school, nobody. I did not believe I was wrong in personifying the animals, fish and bugs, so I kept it to myself, one of many things I forgot I knew. Eventually, I learned people in shamanic cultures saw the critters as persons. Horse person, crow person, groundhog person. It doesn't mean they were treated any better than they are now. As I've been drifting out of this world, less contact with the belief system of television and Western Civilization, I'm referring to the birds and donkeys as people. The Chickadee people, the Blue Jay people, the Red Squirrel people. I cannot help but sit here and see a red squirrel outside the window sitting upright, holding a sunflower seed with its fingers, nibbling on it, eyes and ears alert to surroundings, without seeing a human in a different body. I've paid attention to dogs and cats to find they think, they feel, they have emotions, they play. I could call us animals, but that freaks everybody out. I'm now calling them persons in my self-talk. It tells me a shift on the inside, something is new within---thinking of a bird as a person is one expression of it. The donkeys are clearly people on four legs with long necks and faces. They can't speak English, but they have a language of sounds, gestures, telepathy, body language, that works as well as talking, perhaps better. I automatically think of Jack and Jenny as persons. 

snow on jenny's face

It says something like I have separated myself enough from the influence of the belief systems I live among that my own belief system from my own experience has room to come forward and fill in the space. In these years I am finding the place within that I moved to the mountains to find. I thought it might take five to ten years. Now it's forty years on the path and I'm having insight into the invisible flow all around me and in me, the force that through the green fuse drives the flower. I liked them calling it the Force in the Star Wars movies, only for its refreshing quality with few associations to replace the word God that has so many associations piled on that it's buried under a mountain of trash. My inclination is not to call it anything, the nameless. I feel like I'm having occasional insights into the flowing nature of the nameless consciousness called life, God, the Force. I prefer to use the lower case, like god, except that, too, has too many associations to have meaning anymore. It's the Tao, the everything and the nothing, swirling in a circular motion like stirring a can of paint. Sometimes in the donkey meadow I feel like the air itself is the nameless consciousness the same as the life force that keeps the donkeys standing on their legs, and me. It's that same nameless something that leaves the body upon dying. And then there is the world of spirits the shamans are able to go in and out of. It requires guidance I don't have to go there, and I don't have any reason to want to go there. I understand it is too dangerous a world to go into out of curiosity alone. I'm happy here in my world of donkeys, birds, cat and friends. I don't need more than that. I'm feeling like the smaller my world, the more room I have for awareness of the spirit.

snow on jenny's back

This morning Jenny snatched a carrot from my pocket. I was giving them carrot, standing close to Jenny talking to her while she munched. I keep the carrots in my upper shirt pockets. Jenny picked one out of the pocket with her teeth as freely as with fingers. My automatic response was to break it in half for her, but knew better than to attempt taking a carrot from her mouth. She took the whole carrot in her mouth; they have long mouths on the inside. They only have front teeth. I watched her try to figure out how to deal with this whole carrot in her mouth with only front teeth. She worked it with her tongue until she was able to bite it. It was no inconvenience for her. Same morning, I carried an armload of hay out into the meadow to spread on the ground for them. The hay was packed tightly in the bale, making wafers a couple inches thick. They prefer that I break up the wafers. Otherwise, they have to start chewing at the edges. Broken up into mounds of loose hay, they pick the pieces in it they like and leave the part they don't like. Chewing on a wafer, they get the hay they don't like too. This is the leftovers from last year's hay. I wondered why they left some at end of the day. I see it is all the same hay they leave. Jack was chewing on a wafer while I was breaking some up for him. I reached to take the wafer while he was chewing it, knowing they know what I'm doing and want me to do it. Jack moved his open mouth toward my hand twice. It was his way of saying leave it alone. Caterpillar will do the same when I am grooming knots out of her fur. I pull a little too much on her fur and it hurts. She swings her head around and touches my hand very slightly with her teeth, a way of saying, "That hurt." I saw Jack was doing the same, saying, "Leave my food alone."

guru jack

I felt like Jack's gesture was the same as words. It showed me he will not bite me and he's talking to me. It was another step in our trust. I've trained the donkeys not to kick me by never hitting them or talking down to them. I regard them the Donkey people and have learned their means of communication well enough we understand each other. I've learned they read me telepathically, by body language, tone of voice, even words. We communicate now. Sometimes at hay time, I will walk around behind one or the other of them, close, almost touching, knowing they are antsy about anything behind them. Only after finding they won't kick me. I walk around behind, close as I can get without touching, to see if they have an automatic response, like a twitch in the leg before mind came in remembering our trust. Not even a ripple in a muscle. Jenny, the one I questioned most, doesn't show that she was even looking, though I know she was. They are as aware of what's behind them as in front. Jenny shows no concern having me that close to her backside. Jack is the same, no sign of apprehension. I read it a sign of trust. Jack gesturing toward my hand with his mouth told me he was saying, "If you were somebody else, I'd bite you, but it's you and I don't bite you, you've proven yourself a hundred percent over a year and a half to be my friend." I know not to attempt to take food from a donkey, but saw a test in it to see the measure of our trust, like first time I walked around behind Jack too close for his comfort. I also did it to show him he can trust me not to surprise him. It took a little longer with Jenny due to the circumstances around getting acquainted. I see now that Jack's and Jenny's understanding that I will not hurt them in any way is deeper than mind. It's gone into that place where it's automatic, no need to think about it. I couldn't sell Jack and Jenny for even an outrageous fortune. It would turn into thirty pieces of silver the moment they went out of sight.

both of them have an eye on what I'm doing with the camera

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DON'T TAKE ANYTHING SERIOUSLY

jenny

Ground cover snow fell night before last, a dry snow with enough wet to stick where it fell. Years ago I saw somewhere the Lakota language has twenty-eight, or so, words for snow, differentiating the many textures. Possibly laplanders have more. I've lived intimately with snow in the mountains, noting such a variety of snows that I no longer see it just snow. I feel like when I mention snow it requires enough description to give a sense of the kind of snow it is. The Lakota people lived far more intimately with snow than I do. Some snow is so dry, tiny ice crystals, it can be kicked like sand, doesn't stick to tree limbs. Some snow is so wet it sticks to everything, will stand an inch or two high on a wire fence, will stick to limbs and weigh so heavily the snow breaks limbs and electrical lines. Wet and dry are the parentheses all other snows fall between. Since I've learned to pay attention to the various snows, I don't recall any two the same. It happens, the variety is limited, but seldom. No two winters in my experience have been the same. Our language having one word for snow suggests civilization has been moving away from the physical world inward toward mind. For multiple thousands of years humans lived outdoors. Now we live indoors. With the age of reason, we are moving inward, emphasis shifting from body to mind. How we value body and mind shows in the pay scale. Physical work pays the least. The harder the work, the less the pay. Mental work pays more by degrees, until the highest paid work is entirely mental, accomplished in a golf cart. The snow melted through the course of the day until snow remained only in places shaded from the sun. I carried this morning's donkey hay into the meadow to a place the sun lights up first. Cold mornings I'll see the donkeys standing still at the far end of the meadow, the place they know is warmed by morning sunlight first.

jenny at the mineral block

Early humans worshiped the sun as God, life giving, sustaining, destroying. I prefer to call them early instead of primitive. Primitive means first, but popularly is taken for backward. Winter mornings the donkeys stand quietly soaking up the sun's rays in a stillness easily taken for reverence by human interpretation. It is a kind of reverence; it feels extra good. We humans exhibit reverence for whatever makes us feel good, inebriants, money, sex, on one level, and the spirit on another. People new to the mountains know nothing about mountain culture and don't want to, but mention the word, moonshine, and they're all ears, laughing and talking, "Can you get me some?" No. I avoid the word with someone new to the mountains. With hillbillies, we never use the word, moonshine. We call it "white," "shine," and several other names. I bring this up as an example of reverence. I've seen people, both men and women, wax embarrassingly foolish over the idea of moonshine. I'm reminded of a Southern Baptist in New York City without supervision. A reverence for feel-good unto foolishness, similar to a reverence for God in some religions unto foolishness. Killing somebody who shames your feel-good is the ultimate foolishness. All it got the Charlie Hebdo assassins was dead same day or next, whichever it was. They certainly had no peace of mind from the moment of the event onward until flying lead found them too. No matter how many virgins (feel-good) await them, there comes a time none of the virgins are virgin anymore. Even in their heaven, feel-good amounts to a limited time in eternity. Two months or less for seventy however many feel-goods. Honeymoon over, back to the same-o, same-o. Some of the most valuable advice of my life came from Meher Baba, "Don't take anything seriously, not even God." I take it to have something to do with being conscious about reverence. Remember reverence is about feel-good. Don't get stuck in it. The sun moves. The spot that feels good early on a cold morning will shift by midday to a spread of insulating hay someplace else to lie down on, soak up the rays and eat later.

snowbird tracks

It's a tall order to take nothing, not even God, seriously. As a remedy to quiet monkey mind, I can't think of a better way. Taking things seriously charges the mind, makes it race. The more I take seriously, the more I engage runaway mind. For someone not on the path, it doesn't matter. To open self to spirit, mind needs quieting, not swept away, but still as a lake with no wind. The Charlie Hebdo assassinations came out of taking God (Allah), by way of the Prophet, way too seriously. There, again, like freedom of speech, all things in conscious moderation. I learned early to take the candy of good liquor in moderation from the examples of people around me who did not. I wanted to be able to taste good liquor all my life, not have to quit by age 40 or die. I have some easily within reach, but haven't touched it in probably two weeks, and then only a sip for the taste. I've forgotten the last three times in town to stop at the liquor store for some Wild Turkey Rye 101. It's the only bonded liquor I've found to satisfy my palate. Haitian rum is almost equal satisfaction, but I have to go to a city to get it. I can't drink socially anymore for the need to drive home, and hangover avoidance. I like the George Thorogood song, I Drink Alone. I don't like to get out of control and let my inner stupid act out. Not many people can handle riding the bull named Stupid. I know I don't even qualify to sit on him, and him penned up. I sit in the grandstands and learn, watch other people, who thought they were up to the challenge, get trampled. Some people say, Ya gotta have some fun. Trampled by a bull is not my idea of fun. Fun involves feel-good in my dictionary. Like what kind of fun can wrecking a motorcycle be? For masculine credibility it's the ultimate feel-good. I've never been one to need every day of my life to prove I'm not a girl. Can't help but take it for obvious, what of it?

jack

It's a sight how freeing it can be to let go of serious thinking. I don't mean to imply I'm there. I've been conscious of letting go of being serious about one thing or another, especially art making, just enough to have something like a peephole experience. I've seen the good sense in it enough to check myself when taken over by serious mind, to back off and say, this isn't going anywhere, it isn't working, it's not in alignment with the flow. Here again, I see other people acting out serious and it makes me want no more to do with it. It's all about peace of mind. It's unimportant to someone who does not value peace of mind. I confess to some reservation about not taking God seriously at first. Whatever it is we call God isn't even close. If we can imagine it, it's not God. If we can name it, it's not God. Mind is not able to comprehend God. Serious has to do with mind. Mind is limited. The spirit is famous for lightness. Serious is famous for heaviness. We are well trained in the serious, especially in the realms of religion and politics. We leave God out of it, the great unknown we can't even put a handle on, even quicker to run between our fingers than water. I take it for sound counsel to avoid being serious about something I know nothing about, am unable to know about. I believe it is so, if someone were to see God as God really is, it would take one out of the body. While I'm involved with a body on earth, the best I know to do is enjoy being in God's dream. To take it seriously would be like Peter who walked on the water til he thought about it. He took it seriously and got wet. It gives me insight into Jesus mind. He was in the mind of not taking it seriously all the time, not just when he walked on water. He walked on land the same. Remembering when he saw Moses and Elijah on the mountain, I think it was Peter who wanted to build a shrine on the site, take it seriously. Jesus said to let it rest, it was for the moment only. 

sky

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LOSING MY RELIGION

vada

by cheyanne

Forty years ago I started a new life with a new vision and new purpose. I came to the mountains a year later to adjust my life, my thinking to the new vision. The vision simply amounted to: God is. Just that turned me from drifting without vision to purpose. I wanted to live quietly in the mountains to assess my new insight and tune myself to the new vision. When I say, God is, I don't mean a rule book a thousand pages long, every rule starting with Don't. I mean God without systems of dogma, without commandments. Love is what God is, and that was a tall order for me. It needed some consideration. I didn't know shit about love. The emotional climate in the home I came up in was fear and punishment. These were justifications for absence of love, in the name of love. I hit you every day because I love you. I berate your every move and word because I love you. I don't want to hear anything you have to say because I love you. It's for your own good. This version of love made me into someone who distrusted love, and had so little experience with love that I was twisted up in knots like really bad hair. I was so shy a kid, I was pathetic. Shyness was the first issue I had to address when I entered the world on my own. I conquered it, but still have a debilitating shyness within that I've learned to accept and live with. There are some parts of my nature I simply have to accept. My generation helped shape who I am. I found in mountain culture a people who accepted themselves as they were, with an attitude of fuck you if you don't like it. A liberating attitude. It was so long ago I adopted this attitude, I couldn't give it an age or a year. It may have been the moment when I left the church I'd been going to. During the time of the first Saturday night meeting I missed as a non-member, I was jamming at a concert of Siouxsie and the Banshees followed by Jane's Addiction, two of my very favorite bands, thinking there is a much better spirit here than there was there.

vada

by cheyanne

I left the church because I had grown out of my own negative mindedness and found self surrounded by negative mind such that it became suffocating. I loved the people in the church. One day an old black man fallen into dementia, whose farm surrounded the church lot, who grew up going to this church before it was sold to white people, came to the church house one Sunday morning in the middle of a meeting, dressed up in a beautiful suit for church. It's said people with dementia want to go Home, the place they grew up. I suspected old man Sabe was returning to Home in the dream mind he was living in. He sat in the same place I sat my first time in the church. Sabe was as humble a man as I've known. Sabe was a good man all the way around. And no one in the church acknowledged his existence. At hand shaking time, I went straight to Sabe. I'd have welcomed him if his mind was right. I'd come to know Sabe over several years, appreciated deeply who Sabe was. He was a simple, old, black farmer in a world of white people that all looked down on niggers. His wife had recently been taken to a nursing home. He was so addled that he soon followed. I felt like God had sent an angel to the church when I saw Sabe at the door, hat in hand, waiting for permission to enter. Preacher said, Come on in, Sabe. My heart glowed seeing Sabe was visiting his Home church in his dream state. I was glad to see him. Hand-shaking time at the end of the meeting, I shook his hand first, honored to shake Sabe's hand, my respect for him was so high. Everyone acted like he wasn't there. I went into shock. Everybody knew Sabe. Everybody liked Sabe. Or acted like they did. Everybody knew his wife was gone and could see his condition. Everybody knew Sabe gave the white people's church a piece of his land for the cemetery. Gave. 

vada

by cheyanne

On the issue of love your neighbor as yourself, it didn't take much figuring to see Sabe Choate, whose land went all the way around the church, who lived in the next house up the road, a neighbor. The light in my heart for the church went out that Sunday morning. I tried not to let it go out, but it was like willing a dead body back to life. It never came back. I was not comfortable among them anymore. Then came the morning on the way to church I put my hand on the screen door to push it open and my hand could not push. I stood with my hand on the screen door unable to move. I said to self, You don't have to go. I relaxed, closed the door and stayed home, feeling good about it. I knew the light was out and was not coming back on. I talked to myself, saying this is their culture, they are Southern Appalachian people, I am not here to change them, I am a guest in their community. Up to that time, I had allowed them who they were, as they allowed me who I was. I had a hard time accepting they could be so blatantly indifferent in their own church meeting. The difference was I saw Sabe a dark complected human being. I saw him closer to a true "Christian" than any one of the white people in the church. Afterward, I felt like Sabe was the Christ-like one and the people in the church were saying, Crucify him, he aint nothin but a nigger. As much as I was with accepting others as they are, I could not associate with people to praise God, who look so far down on the humblest and most gracious man I'd ever met. I did not want to hold them to Civil Rights laws or anything. The utter rejection of a respectable human being, respectable in more ways than staying out of prison, struck me deeper than I knew at the moment. 

grumpy old bastard and cheyanne make silly faces

by cheyanne

After the meeting, when I gathered myself together from the shock, I felt glad I had gone to Sabe first to shake his hand; everybody in the church shook the hand that touched a nigger's hand. It gave me such delight, I didn't like having such feelings about the people I'd felt so comfortable with the day before. I told myself it was not right thinking to hold them to my way of seeing. I was a guest in their culture; it was not my place to expect they think like me. I was among them to learn, not to teach. My second winter in the mountains I took a job to get through the winter working with several people from Away, like me. I'd lived intimately among mountain people by then. One of them from Raleigh told me it's good I came to the mountains educated so I can teach these ignorant mountain people something. I thought, Man, you don't even know what you're talking about. I did not waste my breath explaining I'm here to learn, not to teach. First thing I learned, I can't teach anybody of these mountains anything. I needed them to teach me. But I'm glad he said it, it articulated for me that I was, indeed, in awe of the intelligence of the mountain people. I still am after thirty-eight years, more than ever. You don't see it from the outside. You have to be inside to see it. Mountain people don't do anything for show but play fabulous music, a music inaccessible to outsiders. If you think there is nothing to playing a fiddle or banjo, try learning one. When you hear a fiddler cut loose with Chicken Reel or Forked Deer, you can be sure the one bowing the fiddle has a brilliant mind. It takes a good mind to learn a fiddle and a brilliant mind to master one. It's the same with a banjo. I came here to learn and it turned out my parachute landed me in the midst of a good education, learning by experience in a world foreign to any I'd known. I celebrate the life of Jr Maxwell first full moon of November at his grave to have a drink with him, a master who taught me the value of the people I live among and how to live my own values naturally. 

cheyanne herself

by cheyanne

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BALANCE: SUNLIGHT AND RAIN

A quiet rainy day. It started overcast, then sprinkled and steadily more until it became a full rain falling straight down. The wild violet leaves covering the ground outside the window dance, randomly touched by drops of water dripping from leaves above. The rhododendron leaves catch a falling drop and dance in their random patterns too. I hear in my head voices complaining about the rain. I thought about giving a friend a call, then revised the thought: not while it's raining--he'll complain about it raining as long as I'll listen. Everywhere I go on a rainy day, somebody is complaining about the inconvenience. I just write it off as a case of somebody who wants to be spoiled and have everything just right all the time. I find it refreshing when somebody speaks in favor of rain, its nourishing quality, its ability to keep drought away. I'm recalling someone I knew in the early 1980s who said of a hot, dry summer, God is tired of hearing tv weathermen wanting clear, sunny days. OK, you want sunny days, you got em. You want everything in your life cheery and bright, here it is. Don't forget to enjoy the drought that follows. The sun is nourishing and the rain is nourishing, each in moderation. Too much sun and life forms wither. Too much rain and life forms wither. In my first years on the spiritual path, I found from going to special spiritual places and getting into the swoon of the spirit that later at home I come down from the lofty height and drop way down into depression, minor despair for at least the same amount of time. Balance. In my early years with Meher Baba, others would say to me, You gotta go to Baba's center in India. You'll love it. It's the best feeling. You gotta. Fortunately, I never had the money to go spend a couple weeks in India. A time came when I had the money and the time, but I remembered every time I experienced a spiritual high, next thing was spiritual low for the balance. I'd rather give up the high to avoid the low that follows. I don't want a bi-polar spiritual life.

Later, after several years, I'd hear, You haven't been to India yet? You gotta go! My thought I kept to myself, if I really gotta go, it will happen. It hasn't happened yet, so I must not gotta. Then it came to the place I am now, don't want to go to India. Don't want to deal with airports and sitting strapped in a seat with a window that looks onto the wing for endless hours, the Mumbai airport and the city with throngs of bobbing heads, stepping over the dying and the dead, the scent of old urine everywhere. Massive, intense poverty, arrogant Brahmans, humble Untouchables, racism that makes our racism look casual, chaos that makes our own look like order. Americans go to India to swoon in spiritual emotion and Indians come to America to swoon in money. So I go from a country that is only interested in money to one that has so little that people are only interested in money. Why spend a couple thousand dollars to go from one form of loving money to another form of same? Hindus and Muslims hate each other murderously. Hindus slaughter Muslims and Muslims slaughter Hindus at any provocation. A neighborhood of Hindus with machetes will run through a neighborhood of Muslims slashing everybody they see. It happens the other way around too. I have a problem with the hate in the American air, so why go someplace where they hate even more vehemently? Yes, I know, ignore all that and feel the spiritual high at Baba's tomb. Maybe I could, but why? I go home by way of mechanical flight, endure airports, grow weary of reading and look out the window at the wing for hours, feeling wow I did something big. Get home, cat is depressed and mad at me for being gone so long, everything in my life is on hold, a stack of bills and trash in the mailbox, then fall into depression for six months in grief because I can't have a spiritual high all the time, poor me. I must not be very advanced. I'm a slow-witted dolt who doesn't get anything, trapped in a limited body and mind, woe, aint it awful. Months of addressing this issue in self and reasoning self out of this thinking. 

I'd rather stay home. God, the spirit, the way, creator-sustainer-destroyer, is not localized in India. It's not localized in tombs, shrines, naked men covered with ashes in long beards. I'd just as soon jump into the local waste-water treatment plant for a swim as to bathe in the Ganges. I keep an African mask on the wall that for me is an emblem of balance, a visual reminder. I prefer the waves of my flow to stay at moderate levels, not too high, not too low, a slight pendulum swing, not the full arc. A nice rainy day reminds me that rain is always something to welcome, even when it's too much and the water runs in torrents out of the creek beds. Too much wet, even unto monsoon, is better than too much dry. I've come to a place in the life where I would rather have warm, sunny days and overcast rainy days in waves of moderation that keep the green world happy, and through the green world everything else. I don't want the rush of a spiritual high. There was a time I craved the spiritual high, because I thought I was supposed to. So many people were into the high I felt like it was the real deal and I need to get it too. I don't think it's the real deal anymore. I don't think it has any real importance. Living my life has become my spiritual practice. I have come to see that at least in this phase of my inner growth, everyday life is the shrine I worship at, my home my mosque. I used to feel like I could find that woo-woo feeling in the woods among the silent trees. I can recall a few times in the past that woo-woo feeling took me over for a day and made me believe I was doing something really special. Then I crashed for a period of time. I don't like the crash. And I don't believe the high is all that important. This summer has been a good one of balanced weather. Three days to a week of sunny days, then three or so days of light rain and overcast. The temperature has mostly been in the lower 70s during the day and lower 60s, sometimes 50s at night. This is the balance I've come to like in my spiritual life. Sunlight and rain in balance, keeping my interior life lush and green sparkling with wildflowers.

I don't want to go to church to hear a self-called preacher bombast about Satan. In the course of a phone conversation with my Christian mother, she'll say Satan a dozen times and never the name of Jesus once. She warned me a couple years ago that I'm not afraid enough of Satan, "You better watch out." My thought: I'm not the one paying attention to Faux news and giving my power to people spewing hate. She's never one time said to me anything about the power of love, but multiple, multiple times stressed the power of Satan. It tells me her "Christian" church is awfully dedicated to the dark side. OK, they like the dark side. It's good for them. I grew up in that inner darkness that called  itself Christian and ran for my life. I like to go to a Primitive Baptist church from time to time, primarily for the singing, and the Primitive preachers are true to the spirit. However, when the expectations begin, I'm gone. In church, expectations start immediately. My last visit to a Primitive church a man said to me, How long's it been since we seen ye last, brother? I said about a year (actually 2). He said, You need to do a little better'n 'at. My unspoken thought: I will do much better; you'll never see me here again. In my own personal belief system, love is not about intimidating others into believing what I believe with the threat of hell if you don't see it my way. I call it arrogance, not love. The Lord told them to admonish the ones that don't walk the line. And the Lord told me to go my own way, bye-bye. I like to maintain my balance doing right by others and myself. I don't even want woo-woo spirit in my life anymore. I've come to where I see the spiritual path is right here at home in my own life among the people I live among. No need to seek enlightened masters to make me spiritual. No need to observe any ritual or belong to a group, abstain from liquor, read scripture, or anything. A brief visit with someone I see in town by chance can be as great a spiritual experience as praying at a tomb in India.          

photos by tj worthington

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IN IT NOT OF IT

winged victory

I've wondered for years what it meant to live IN the world, not OF the world. Seems like a fine, wavering line that never stays in one place. Also seems straight-forward. Upon first becoming acquainted with this distinction, I thought, Oh yeah, I get it, I understand. I set out to attempt it and became so confused about its meaning I could only say, I don't get it. First thing, I had to figure out what was meant by "the world." It's a concept I heard about in church my entire childhood, taking it for granted I knew what the world was. There is the world and there is church, its apparent opposite. However, I found church to be part of the world just like the obvious, a poker table, just more subtle to see. That seen, I had to rethink at the start, to include church, religion, as a part of the world, not its opposite or apart from it. The definition I settled on for "the world," is having to do with the human mind. It comes to that made by God, life forms, and that made by the human mind, products, ideas, beliefs. God's creations grow, whereas human creations start their entropy upon completion The only living part of a human creation is in the process of the making. A painting, for example, lives while the artist is making it, applying colors, feeling the process along. Once it's signed, the process of entropy begins. Eventually, it will return to dust, its original form, the dust being God-made, origin of all things and thoughts human-made. Everything that comes from thought is human-made, like the question, does the shadow of a flying bird move? An argument can be made that the shadow does not move. Absence of light cannot move. In like manner, from God's way of seeing, this whole world, even our own existence is illusion created by our own minds. This one is a bit hard for me to grasp, given that ants are just as subject to gravity as I am, and they don't have a human mind, though for an ant's needs, an ant has plenty adequate mind. I start being able to get it looking at atoms as the building blocks of the material world. An atom is nothing but space with one kind of electrical charge orbiting another.

 

 

eva hesse

 

My pocket knife, made of atoms, cuts my finger, made of atoms, and blood appears, made of atoms, all of it the same thing, or same non-thing, solar systems in galaxies, infinite space, what the Buddhists call nothingness. How many universes can exist in infinite nothingness? That nothingness in which we dwell on a really huge electron orbiting a much bigger proton, a star among billions of stars in a major huge galaxy, is an illusion made by my mind? How was it there before I was born, evidenced by books written about it before I was born. I'm not the only one to dream up this illusion of standing upright on earth. It's said in the East that all this creation we live in is created by a belief system believed in common. I have a hard time seeing that, or maybe I've got it wrong. I can't help but see it that if I am walking toward a barbed wire fence and tell myself it isn't there, seeing it is an illusion, a dream, I walk into it and I'll be jabbed and scratched in several places by sharp barbs and thrown backwards at the same rate of force I hit it. Getting up and looking at it, scratching my head saying, but it's an illusion, how could it knock me down and make me bleed? I can see creation in the realm of illusion in something like interpretation of experience and projection of expectation onto experience. Takes it back to attitude toward life, mentally projecting expectations, the experience itself, and interpretation follows, interpreting from the same source as the expectations. I go to London as an American tourist, come home and tell friends I learned as an American in London how it feels to be black in America. An internationally famous actor, like Liam Neeson, can go to London and be received as an honored guest in every restaurant he eats in, hotel he stays in, and the places he peruses in the course of a day. He returns saying London is friendly, gracious, couldn't be better. It was circumstances that made the two experiences different, not so much expectation or interpretation.

 

 

I can see the two experiences self-created in that studio promotions made Neeson a big star, he goes to London and everybody recognizes him, a star. My life experience made me somebody nobody outside my immediate world ever heard of. In London that makes me an American. Every cliché about Americans is stuck on me like sponsor patches on Nascar drivers. No, I don't wear Bermuda shorts; no, I don't wear Nikes; no, I don't wear Hawaiian shirts; no, I don't talk by way of interrupting, loud and endlessly. Doesn't matter, American. Or an Anglo-American girl says to a Chinese-American girl, I just love putting chopsticks in my hair. Projection of what we believe about an other, however limited or fantastic it may be, becomes reality by way of expectation and interpretation, both serving what we go into the experience believing, our attitude toward life. It's our attitude toward life that precedes us everywhere we go, that creates our experience before we get there and concludes it by the time the experience is over. My next question, was there even an experience? Attention on expectation and conclusion at once, the experience slips by, hardly noticed. In this way I can see illusion in attempting to order apparent chaos and nail it down with expectations, conclusions, names, categories, words, language, self-awareness, and then the confusion really begins. Off we go into interpreting the unknowable and calling it God. In American Anglo-centric illustrated Bibles, Moses is white. He came from south of Egypt. That's getting into Nubia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda. You don't see many white people in that region of the world before European colonialism. I'd guess none at all however many thousand years ago Moses lived. And somebody from south of Egypt, I'll venture Ethiopian, could have similar features to an Egyptian of the time, enough to pass for Pharaoh's family. Pharaohs are often portrayed white or off-white. Sculpture portraits I've seen of Pharaoh heads don't have Nordic features. White Moses is projected illusion.    

 

 

In Indian portrayals of the Buddha, he looks like he's from India. In Nepalese depictions, he looks like he's from Nepal. In Tibet, he looks Tibetan. To see a Burmese Buddha, he's from Burma. It's the same in Indonesia, Thailand, China and Japan, as well as everywhere else. In California, he'd have blond hair and a surfer's tan. Aryan Buddha. American Jesus is northern Germany white face, Irish red hair and beard, wrapped in the American flag as a red, white and blue gown. Expectation and interpretation complicating illusion further. And further until we have a whole history in Christendom of believing in a Medieval idea of hell, then a pope comes along in the beginning of the 21st Century and says hell is something a loving God would not do; hell is an invention of the human mind. Expectation and conclusion confirm the projection. Another case of the few controlling the many, operating from the human mind: the world. I attempt to separate IN the world from OF the world by looking at this idea called the world as the illusion, projection of belief, literally not fact-checked, going by what was expected from what was already believed for whatever superfluous reasons were most convincing to a given world-view, attitude toward life, in different times along our way. All the mental construct about God I take to be of the world. I'm more interested in seeing God in the flow of life, the force that through the green fuse drives the flower (Dylan Thomas), the love energy that flows through all life, through the veins in the leaves. Water evaporates into the sky and forms into clouds that rain on the earth. The cycles of life on earth have been so interrupted by heedless exploitation, of the world, there may not be much left for anything but cockroaches and bacteria. Something will evolve to eat roaches, something to eat that, on and on, until we're back to the crisis point we're facing collectively in this crucial phase of our spiritual development. I live in a world of people informed by Faux News, but I don't have to support them, go with them, oppose them, listen to them, give them any attention. At the end of the story Good Soldier Schweik, by Jaroslav Hasek, Schweik was conscripted into the army in the time of WWI. The regiment marching down a road to war takes the road to the right. Schweik sees some flowers growing up the road on the left and goes off walking by himself up the road to the flowers. Schweik was a light-hearted, guileless, comic character who was in the world not of it.  

 

 

 

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