IN THE FLOW ON AIR BELLOWS MOUNTAIN

claude monet

Overcast sky today, threatening to rain all day and never did. The forecast was for rain. I watched the rhododendron leaves out the window from time to time for sign of raindrops. At the first sign of rain I would back the car down the hill to the barn and carry three bales to the donkey feeding station before rain. I wanted to do several things before wrestling the hay, knowing when I've brought up the three bales, packed them, carried some into the meadow for donkeys, I'd be tired. Planned to carry the hay last, then have a nap. The rain never came, I stretched out on the bed and woke up. Spent half an hour wondering why I was staying in the bed when it was obvious I was not headed for sleep. To rest. I needed to rest. To lie down for half an hour is sometimes as good a rest as a nap. Working on the farm, tired, needing a break, I would lie down on my back and watch the clouds. It worked so well and so fast I learned all I needed was to watch the clouds until I saw them move. It takes a moment looking up at the clouds to see their motion. First glance, they're still. Wait just a few seconds and they start moving, rather my eyes notice. I would lie there and watch the clouds move. Ready to get up and back to work refreshed. It was a way to take a break and not waste any time while I'm working. Had a lot to do and had to keep up with it. In less than a minute I was ready to go again. It helped keep me in tune, too. A brief meditation, a clearing of the mind. Looking at clouds helps clear my mind almost instantly. In motion, I only see the clouds still. I have to be still before I can see the clouds move. Lying on my back in the meadow watching clouds is the most relaxing thing I know. I've found the air currents of the southern part of the county watching the flow of clouds.  

claude monet

The air currents here on Air Bellows mountain run every which way. I'm in a holler between two ridges, north and south, and another ridge about three hundred yards to the east that runs perpendicular to the other two, and a ridge to the west about the same distance. Sometimes the wind whips around in this oddly shaped bowl in turbulence patterns. One moment the wind will be blowing one way and another moment the wind is swirling in a different direction. Wind blowing north and south, the ridges slope the wind up over my glen. The trees on the ridges above roar like a flying train and not a leaf down here will even be moving. The wind blowing east or west runs right through here. I like to pay attention to the wind as an aspect of flow. Water flows. Blood flows. Mind flows. A turning wheel flows. Most of the time in my holler the wind does not move very fast. The location of this house is in harmony with the surrounding landscape. Just a few hundred yards to the west around a curve runs the wind channel of Air Bellows Gap. The wind flows through there in a pattern so different from the patterns around the house it seems odd it's so close. The channel is a river of air. My holler is a still pool at the side of a mountain stream, outside the current, slowly renewed by the current, a still, quiet place. The air current through Air Bellows Gap flows around a bend and follows the channel of the creek to the waterfalls, down the creek to Whitehead, then up to Fender mountain and beyond into another current. I've been told this gap was given its name Air Bellows for the wind blowing through it both ways. I like living at three thousand feet in the Southern mountains.

claude monet

Low-flying clouds creep over the mountain, fog all day. A foggy day is beautiful every time of year. Many times I have been someplace else, like Pine Swamp, the township to the east of Whitehead, and saw my mountain in the distance covered by a cloud crawling over the long ridge the Parkway follows. I have walked the ridge from the house to Bullhead and all the way out to the far end of the mountain. Walking in these mountains is how I found home here. In the early years I walked long distances with the dog, learning the deer trails, the varieties of trees, outcroppings of rock, the creeks, the waterfalls. Two of the waterfalls in Air Bellows draw visitors, but at least four other waterfalls are tucked out of the way in wooded spaces only hunters see. There are even places that are waterfalls in a big rain and not even a creek when it's not raining. There was a time the then director of the Chamber of Commerce asked me for a waterfall photograph for the cover of one of their small tourism magazines advertising local businesses. I didn't want to make the Air Bellows falls a tourist attraction. This is not a state park and people from away never get it that people own the land they're trespassing. That's not entirely true, but enough to make it seem true. I took him a photograph of a small, beautiful waterfall with a nice rock beside it, some ferns and moss around. He loved the picture. After the magazine was done, he asked me where the waterfall was. I told him it is only a waterfall during a rain and a short time after. It doesn't exist. He didn't know what to do with that. His face fell in such a way I suspected he'd been asked how to find the waterfall in the picture. I doubt he gave such an answer to the question next time. Probably said he didn't know. He was way into promoting and advertising, selling the county. I am philosophically opposed to that mind, explaining why I turned in the picture of a waterfall that is not a waterfall.

claude monet

For several years I would take a day and go to the woods with a book, a notebook, a pen, a thermos of hot tea and an apple or two. I'd go with dog to a place along the creek, a big flat rock in the creek, a flat rock beside the creek, anyplace I wanted to sit along the creek. My favorite spot was a rock that projected into the creek from the side, covered in moss, flat on top, a nice mossy bed, rhododendron, trees, a small waterfall to the right a short distance, and the creek, Waterfalls Creek, flowing down the hill to the left toward the big waterfalls farther on. Enough room on top of the rock to sit and place my things, and room for dog to stretch out behind me as I sat facing the water. She, Sadie, would explore the woods all day, coming back to me from time to time. I would mostly sit and watch the flow of the water. I have seen some rare occurrences sitting on the rock. This was in the time native trout lived in the creek, before the Christmas tree invasion that poisoned the ground and the water of Air Bellows and all the water downstream into the Little River. The springs on this mountain are the beginning of the Little River. The trout are gone, the ecosystem along the creeks is gone, the minnows, the water snakes, gone. The water is now dead. Back in the time it was living, the rock I sat on had a small pool to the right I looked down into. After sitting still for an hour, the trout came out from hiding and swam around in the pool, living their lives. This one day I saw a female trout in a shallow place where the water ran over small rocks, a male beside her. Two males took turns. One would shimmy beside her for awhile and swim out into the pool. Another male was waiting his turn and moved in to shimmy beside her. By the time he finished, the other was ready to go again. They made the round several times. After she'd shed all her eggs, she swam back and rejoined the extended family circling in the pool. Another time a water snake gave me a show of how beautifully a snake can swim. It was a swimming dance. As beautiful a thing as I've ever seen.

claude monet himself

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GRUMPY OLD BASTARD ASSHOLE

Rain all day, sometimes big rain. Wind. Yellow leaves fly through the air on the way to the ground. This year, the trees with the yellow leaves turned first. The trees with red leaves are largely still green. We'll have an extended fall color season this year. First yellow, then orange, then red. The color change is so particular year to year, I wonder how it can be said what weekend will be the peak time or what kind of a coloration it will be. I don't recall but one prediction being accurate, the year the talking heads said it would be a poor year for color. It was a dry year. The leaves just turned brown. I pay little to no attention to predictions for what kind of winter we'll have. Already, I've seen two projected forecasts for the winter. One said it will be long and extra cold with much more snow than ever. The other said it will be the mildest winter ever. Winters are like Nascar races: impossible to predict. We've had four days and nights of dense fog accompanied by sprinkling rain, until today when it poured in torrents. It's on the verge of tiresome. Yet, no matter how muddy the ground gets, I prefer wet to ground so dry it cracks and the springs dry up. Springs are largely dried up anyway. So many exurban houses in the landscape draining the underground water. Wells have to go deeper and deeper. The society of waste comes to the mountains, drains the water, poisons the land, dismisses as ignernt hillbillies the people whose home this land is, impatient, intolerant, wanting everything now, just like on tv. I was about to compare it to white people pushing the Indians off their home continent, killing them by the millions, and say the exurbanites are all but killing us. But, they are killing us with cancer. County government doesn't care. The ones poisoning us are paying more taxes than we are, so we have no voice. 

I'm seeing an experience a few weeks ago when I was introduced to someone I already knew, though wished I didn't. She looked at me, nodded and turned away. I said in my head, Thank you. A few months ago in the coffee shop I mentioned to a woman I was talking with at the bar I watch Nascar races. The one above who nodded, who I was not talking to, said, "They just drive around and around in circles," smug, proving she's more sophisticated than I, doesn't waste her college-educated intelligence watching working class tv shows. I wanted to be vulgar, nasty vulgar, the kind of vulgar that makes an enemy for life, though condensed and softened my response to, "In the very most minimal way of looking at it, yes." Her nose shot straight up and she was gone. Again, I said in my head, Thank you. Made an enemy for life without even trying. It hurts so good. Such moments remind me that I left the city for the mountains to get away from people like her, the white middle-class suburbanites. Now they've packed in around me so tightly I am glad the Republicans are squeezing the middle-class into the working class. I actively despise how they regard and treat the mountain people. I told Selma at the beginning of the coffee shop that when the right people find this place, I'm gone. Turns out, Selma was Cuban and the right people stayed away. Now Becca has it and she's run off the wrong people, so now I go in there and all I see is the right people. I have no reason to be there. The people I used to go in there to see have been run off. Not high end. Not PC enough. The end came when a country club woman in there said to me, "I bet YOU voted for O-BA-ma." I said, "Sure did. He's a sharp stick in the Republican eye." She said, "I'm a con-SER-vative!" I thought, duh, and said, "I'm a SO-cialist!" I don't want this kind of conversation, ever, anyplace, with anybody. The coffee shop is past tense for me. Another one of those moments when I get with self and say, I didn't come here for this shit. 

The fun part in saying I'm a SO-cialist, she told within a few days everyone she knows that knows of me, he's a socialist. Hooray. Five or so people I never want to meet will see to it for me. I don't even have to think about avoiding them. They avoid me first. I'm pretty sure I have a name for being arrogant among those people. I can easily give them cause to call me much, much worse. Recalling a line from a Steven Segal film. A woman warning him about the people he's going up against, they're bad, really bad. He said, "I'm worse, much worse." And a line from Runaway Train when Voight was told he was a beast. He said, "Worse. Man!" That's how I feel in the company of people that look down their noses at the mountain people. I want them to call me arrogant. I want them to call me as bad as they can make it, inspire the people they talk to to avoid me, so when they're introduced to me they nod, turn away and think: asshole. Alas, I have some neighbors, the most openly fickle people I can think of, fake from the surface to the core, totally informed by tv, Republican, Christian, who once wanted me to be their friend. Didn't last long. Didn't get started. They really tried my ideal of loving neighbor as self. The closest I can come is to allow them who they are, recognizing we do not connect in any way. I'm old enough to know from repeated experience that attempts to go against the recognition never works, leads only to hard feelings and another cluster of enemies, their gossip circles, for life. An aunt passed to me something her husband told her when he was living, If you don't want it started, don't start it. Confucius could have said that. Often I am called to remind self of original purpose coming here, none of it social. 

Talking with my friend Jay at Chris Cox's reading at intermission, he was saying he has too much going on, too much he's involved in, it's stressing him. I said, Man, you don't need that shit. You live on a mountain. Get to know your mountain. It will be your friend. I mentioned that I've had spells of involvement in more than I was comfortable dealing with, going to meetings. Periodically, I've had to pull back to the people I care about who care about me and let the rest go. He's not of that kind of temperament. I didn't want to tell him to do as I do, because my way is not his way. I only told him how I've solved the issue for myself. Not to say do it my way. Only to illustrate how I chose for my own circumstances. He will find his way according to his own circumstances. I wouldn't want to influence him any other way. He's not as comfortable yet with being disliked as I've become. Or so I guess. It would not do for me to advise him. He has good brains. He'll figure it out. I just wanted to say he can find a solution to his satisfaction. If I were to hear myself start a sentence, you should, I would have to do penance for at least two days. First thing I'd do is retract everything said, immediately. Then I'd go inside to the place that sentence came from and educate self again that I have no right, any way I look at it, to presume to know anyone else's should, when there is no should to it. I can't name my own shoulds, sure as hell can't name somebody else's, especially when I don't even believe it is a word worth being in the language. I don't, and would not, rule the world, so I just don't use the meaningless word. When I don't use it, it's not in my world. I feel like I've found a good balance of involvement / non-involvement that keeps me engaged without stress. It has not always been this way. It comes from allowing the flow and flowing with it. Now that I think I've found my own flow, it feels really awkward when I step outside it. I have to pull back into it. As I get used to it, it becomes easier to keep in tune with and easier to jump back into when distracted out of the flow for a period of time. The flow is in my center, feels like solar plexus is where I connect with it. In my own flow is where I belong. I want for nothing else.  

photos by tj worthington

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SPONTANEOUS RANDOM ACTS OF KINDNESS

dr carpenter's chair

Awareness of flow has been in the foreground with me for several days. I'd been unconscious that flow occupied my mind as much as it did. A thought might come and go twenty times in a day, but each time it's only once and it's gone. Last week in the grocery store two registers were open and suddenly a rush of full buggies turned up. I was one. Two women were ahead of me with mounded up buggies, the one at the register taking her time unloading her objects one at a time, talking to the cashier, talking to her little girl standing beside her. I reminded emotional mind of patience. I have all day. Relax  into the flow. Somebody opened a new register behind where I was standing. I backed up and turned into the opening. A man I'd never seen before was carrying a package of a dozen rolls of paper towels and half a dozen sardine cans. I saw him moving toward the space. He stopped when he saw me swing around and went back to his line with three mounded up carts ahead of him. I called to him, "Hey," a lame thing to say, but I didn't know what else to say. I wanted to catch his attention right now. Mister? No. Dude? No. He looked about my age, somebody who would not take to being called Sir except by a kid, and even then I'd guess from his vibe he'd tell the kid he didn't have to call him Sir. I indicated with a swing of my head for him to go in front of me. The flow of his movement toward the place was in motion before I started my forward motion. I felt like I'd interrupted a flow. He took his place and thanked me. We had a brief exchange, quiet and friendly. A moment. The kind of moment that made me feel rewarded for allowing the flow by merely an open exchange. I ran my items through the line, paid and put the bags in the buggy to carry to the parking lot. I stepped into the open space beyond the register aisle and saw a Latin guy on my right pushing his buggy toward the door. He stopped when he saw me start out of my aisle. Again, I felt like I'd interrupted a flow. I stopped and indicated to him with a hand gesture to go ahead. His face lit up, he nodded gratitude and went on. 

asters

In neither case was I motivated by wanting to appear to be a nice guy. Both times I felt I had stepped into a flow that was already in motion. I stopped and honored the flow. I felt like it would be arrogant to break the flow and jump in. The first guy was about my age with a long pony tail and a straight-faced stillness that suggested he had spent some time in prison. Very much an inward individual. It was the first thing I saw in him. I regarded him with respect as I do everyone I know or meet experienced in the American penal system. Another day when I was not aware of the flow, I probably would have taken my place as my right--I'm next. I don't know. It caught my attention because I don't recall ever having such an awareness of flow. I feel it when I'm writing and feel it at home. I feel it in traffic. In both moments I saw the flow. Perhaps I had come from standing in place for awhile talking to myself about patience. Slow down. I've seen these logjams happen at the grocery store many times. I walk in the door, one or two registers are open, nobody in sight. In the aisles I see several people and others start filing in the door. I go to the register and half a dozen people are ahead of me. Right away they open two more registers and the flow moves again. I turn around, somebody is in motion toward the open aisle with just a few items. Another part of the flow is I could never step in front of somebody carrying so little without inviting them to take a place ahead of me. I could not stand there and unload my buggy with someone waiting behind me with a few items. It's an awareness of flow I'd not noticed before as such. I felt like the second one automatically deferred to white man with white hair, the sign of a hateful emeffer to an immigrant. I felt like the gratitude on his face, in his eyes, was somewhat out of proportion to my gesture, but I reminded self that white men with white hair seldom say, After you, to a Mexican. 

across the road

Another part of my flow was realizing the people from south of the border came here to work their asses off for a little bit of pay to send cash home to mama, wife and kids, who have nothing otherwise. They get treated like shit, taken advantage of, ignored as though nonexistent. They've learned how to live among white people; stay quiet and out of sight. The Latin people have that minority consciousness about them; look out for white people, learn how to live with being invisible, do your best not to become a target, be passive with law enforcement, stay in your trailer park and watch tv like white people. The tiny Latin population here lives inward, among themselves. I have a heart full of respect for these people doing the best they can to get by in a world hostile to them, good people lured by fairy tales about democracy and money seen on tv. I feel sorrow for them when I realize they are here because they can't make a living where they came from. They have no place there and they have no place here. I've seen that the people who hire them to do labor jobs often prefer their work performance to work by local boys. I can think of two, and know there are more, businesses that hire only Latinos for their work ethic and attention to detail. The best restaurants are the Latin restaurants that few Anglos go to. The big Mexican restaurant, Mis Arados, is rated by a great many the best restaurant in Sparta. The Latins are good people. I feel like they make a good addition to life here. In my association with the Alleghany Planning Committee, we visit the Head Start program in Sparta once a year. The kids are charming and the women working with them care about them with a motherly tenderness. I've noticed again and again the Latin kids had happy round faces, happy eyes, were animated and well behaved. The white kids were drawn, looked depressed, cheerless, some had dark around the eyes from crying in the night. All are kids of parents who can't afford daycare prices. The white parents were poor because they were messed up on crystal meth and whatever else was going around. What money they score at minimum wage jobs goes to their high to assuage their misery. They need help like their kids need help. 

quan yin on cloud mountain

I have seen in this lifetime the venality in the American character grow with an anti-compassionate, zero tolerance zeal that brings something to mind I heard Bill Maher say, "I'm paranoid about the cops, and I'm white." This is a relatively new social phenomenon, white people paranoid about the cops like the black people, though the black people laugh at the white paranoia. They know that nobody white knows what it's like to be paranoid about cops. The Central American man in the grocery store caught my attention with his big smile of gratitude. I wondered what it was that made him appear so spontaneously grateful. The sparkle in his eyes rang in my head the words, random acts of kindness. Such a tiny gesture on my part. Each moment received with open gratitude. For my part, I just read a flow and payed attention to it. I could call them acts of kindness, but at the moment they weren't acts of anything but letting somebody go by who was already in motion. It turned out I allowed them their flow. I doubt either one was consciously aware of the flow as I was at the moment, but they felt it unawares. My reward, a momentary spontaneous greeting from who the other person is, open, unguarded. I think of it a spiritual connection, the god in me greets the god in you. My part of it amounted to a few seconds. Those seconds stayed with me, somehow having a light around them as important moments. It makes me want to become more aware of my own flow in relation to the the flows I am sometimes involved in, sometimes passing through. Awareness of flow has to do with allowing, not projecting my own wants or expectations onto the moment. It seems like awareness of flow comes forward when ego is not demanding so much attention. When I saw two buggies ahead of me piled high, I talked to emotional self: settle down, patience, relax, you're not late for anything, and if you can't stand still for a few minutes, you need help. I turned around in a relaxed mind, able to feel the flow for not being in a hurry, and had two spiritual experiences, one after the other, solely from reading lines of flow and honoring the flow. It became two spontaneous random acts of kindness without assessing the gestures kind or any more something to notice  than walking from one spot on the floor to another. It just happened.   

woodshed

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OLD MAN RIVER

Talking with my neighbor Gary this afternoon, we were connecting a battery charger to the battery in my car, trying to figure out how to read the needle. He suggested something and said, "Wouldn't you think?" All I could say was, "I don't know what to think, ever, about anything." Everything in this world is a confusion to me anymore. I've spent my life trying to understand it and have failed. I know less now than when I started wondering. I've come to the Socrates place of saying the only thing I know is that I know nothing. Jesus affirmed Socrates by quoting him when he said, "Know thyself." In one way of looking at it, what else can we know, but ourselves? Our experience is our own, even shared experience. Self is about the most enigmatic subject there is to study. Self-awareness is the beginning of the spiritual path, the path of know thyself. Shedding false selves periodically, moving forward, moving in on the reality of the soul is how I have to characterize the path. No matter how far along the path one is, the goal continues infinitely far ahead, like Ralph Stanley's Great High Mountain. Therein lies the allure for me, even mystique. It's the road that goes ever on. I'm drawn to moving with my own flow. When I get there, when I ride the rhythm of my flow, contact with the world "out there," like bank, grocery store, gas station, can rattle my flow such that I fall down on the bed returning home and don't move for an hour. I lost touch with my flow, going with traffic, driving in parking lots looking all the way around for somebody backing up or no telling what, anything, paranoia about highway patrol--quotas have gone up appreciably in the last couple years. I see scatter-brained behavior everywhere, people with more to do than they can handle trying to keep up, multi-tasking, tweeting, stopping whatever they're doing to answer the cell phone. Conversation in America amounts to interrupting anecdotes with anecdotes. Interruption is the nature of conversation now. Cell phones interrupt with urgency. I've become so weary of interruption as expected conversational etiquette, I'd rather not talk. Now, when interrupted, I let go of everything that went before, intentionally forget it, knowing we're not coming back to it, let it go from mind because it is over. Superficially is the only way I can talk comfortably with anybody in this time. It's an unspoken code in America that when you see two people talking, you are duty bound to interrupt them. It's inescapable.  

 

 

I can't defeat a social trend so pervasive it has become the nature of the American character. And I cannot say this shortening of collective attention span down to nothing is necessarily a bad thing, because I don't know. I don't want to live in another country, so I adjust to the social context of the moment. Americans have become collectively addicted to distraction. The attention span that thirty years ago was about that of a cat is now nonexistent. There is little to no attention span left. Television has been sacred from the beginning. By now it is the holy of holies. I have not paid attention to television since 1961, but for brief spells for a car race and at other people's houses. I call it MBC, Mammon's Broadcasting Corporations. Mammon is a false god, and not a benevolent one, the ultimate trickster. The continuous broadside of sound demanding attention and flashing visuals equally demanding attention makes me crazy after a few hours. Beyond a few hours my head goes numb and I fall into a grumpy mood. I want to be home and hear the birds. A nation of people obsessed with money, where money is the only value, has its foundation in the shifting, whispering sand. Andy Warhol suggested attaching the amount of money somebody paid for one of his paintings to the wall instead of buying the painting. Anyone who sees the painting sees how much it cost. Ah, you have a Warhol!, more impressed by its dollar value than the image. The only thing the painting means on the wall is I-can-afford-it. This has a great deal to do with why I feel it refreshing when I see art on somebody's wall that is an image put there in appreciation, whatever it is. I have friends with a stunning waterfall painting on the wall, a print that came with the frame for maybe ten dollars. It has a waterfall in it that is painted in such a way it pulls the eye closer and closer. The closer you look, the more the waterfall looks like water. It's a gorgeous waterfall painting that looks almost like it's in motion. The image is loved in the home for its subjective aesthetic value instead of its dollar value. They appreciate that they got so much for so little.

Earlier, when I realized the car's battery was dead from trying to start it, I opened the door, turned in the seat with feet on the ground, looking at the bank of wildflowers across the road, thinking: dying really is a solution. One more reason to rejoice when I see it coming. I recall my fear of death falling away some years ago. I've had to watch it ever since, it's so easy to relax into accidents by any of two hundred thousand ways. Before, I had an automatic pilot that took care of self-preservation. Now I have to pay attention to self-preservation and remind self not to be frivolous with this life. It is important to be in the body until this journey is completed and the time is right to move on to what's next. I do it consciously by understanding this lifetime needs to come to its own balance before going on. I don't know when that time is. It's important not to know. It has to be important; nobody knows their time but on death row. I catch myself drifting into thinking not much matters because I don't have a lot of time left. Another mind tells me it matters right up to the last second. I even look for ways to perk myself up, give self incentive, legitimate reason, not fake reason. I think I can distinguish the fake reason as ego, thoughts about legacy. Twice I have been asked by peers what I will leave for my legacy. I answer, Nothing, not even a tombstone. But you have to leave some kind of legacy. Why? The only thing important to me in this lifetime has been my own spiritual path. I take the path for a human path, not a tightrope with hellfire for a net, but a path through a loving universe where the only problem is the human mind, the driver's seat of illusion.

I've characterized the spiritual path in my own vision something like water from a mountain spring flowing on its way to the ocean. I'd call the spring the time of self-awareness, committing to the path. It makes a fast-moving stream that rushes down waterfalls, splashes over rocks, races through rapids, churning, dramatic. The self predominant before, changing fast. Changes happen first on the inside and manifest on the outside in sometimes chaotic, seemingly out of control ways occurring so fast, simultaneously and in succession, it makes the head spin and question one's own authenticity. As a result of understandings and insights, we change first on the inside. Some of the ways of thinking that went before are not practical any longer. They don't work, don't satisfy. People we know and are close to drift away, one at a time, and we wonder what is going wrong. I thought I was becoming a better person and my friends are abandoning me. It's a lonesome period of time until waking one morning and realizing you're in a world of new friends, friends more compatible with the new self than the ones that fell away. The waterfall changes to fast moving creek into fast moving river, and slows its pace at lower elevations, widens with smooth surface, flows into the delta, twists back and forth like a serpent sunning on a rock, turning in on itself, taking its time in slow motion. Closer to the sea it stops and backs up at high tide and flows again with the lowering tide. I feel like I've been through the waterfalls, rapids period and the fast-moving river period that lasted at least 20 years. My path has characterized the second half of this lifetime. I feel like I've gone through the slow-moving river and now am flowing in the delta, slowly, slowly, twisting this way and that, direction changing continually. Meandering is the word. I feel like I've been meandering within over the last few years. I feel honored in this lifetime to have the chance to complete this cycle in the Way from a mountain spring to the sea. I don't believe this is the path of my enlightenment in one lifetime. I see it a  cycle through this lifetime in self-awareness, saying in signs I've done well not to get side-tracked, passing through opportunities for distraction, indulging some and letting them go, returning to the flow, allowing the flow, trusting the flow that just keeps rolling along.       

caterpillar

photos by tj worthington

 

 

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GRUMPY OLD BASTARD HURRYING SLOWLY

bluets

In a minor swivet today, attempting to make some progress on some art projects I have around the house in different phases of development, waiting for paint to dry that will take weeks. I like oil paint, and don't care that it takes a long time to dry. It's part of my hurry slowly ethic. I don't want to allow myself to fall into needing everything to be right now. It hasn't been many years, if it can be measured in years, that I've found my flow and fell in tune with it. The reason I never saw it before is my flow is slow. I only feel engaged with my flow when my body and mind are in slow gear. It took slowing way, way down to find it. I couldn't believe how slow it seemed. Mind in this time is set on racing speed. It was called the rat race in the Fifties. Today, it's expected. I went from being something of a fishing boat with an outboard motor to a sailboat. I like it much better. I prefer the sound of water slapping the hull to a gasoline motor spewing pollution. It was a surprise to find my flow is so slow. It was also not a surprise. I hadn't thought of the rate of the flow, how fast or slow it goes. A moment's thought tells me the flow is slow. The money flow is fast. When I separate myself from the money flow, I slow way down, slow down so much that I meet my flow like using sails instead of the internal combustion engine with the gas, the oil, the breakdowns, the noise, the unreliability, the indifference to the flow of air or water. I want to be in tune with the flow of the weather, the air, the flow of the donkeys, ants, of the trees. When my flow is slow I feel a rapport with the natural world around me, with the crows, the donkeys, the trees, the ground, the air, the ferns that are uncurled to full leaf, the water flowing over and around rocks in the creek.

woody allen

It was a day of the phone ringing over and over. Nielsen tv ratings, 800 service, mostly. And people I knew called. I don't recall a day of the phone ringing so many times. With Caller ID it's easy to just let the phone ring. It's been happening so much lately, I click TALK, then click END immediately to stop the phone from ringing. I don't care what it does at the other end. I'm thinking about picking it up next time and telling whatever college student is working a shit job for next to no pay to stop calling this number. Haven't done it yet because I doubt it will do any good. It's nothing personal at their end. It's only personal at my end. I'm on the no-call list, like it matters. I despise these invasions of my life at home so much that I look for ways to be a nuisance in return. I can't blow a whistle into the phone or cuss whoever it is at the other end. It's a sucker college student taking the last job he or she can find that pays anything. They're not my problem. Management is my problem, the decision-makers who find disturbing me in my home at meal times is good marketing. When corporate junk mail sends a return envelope pre-paid, I'll put some paper I'd otherwise throw away, junk mail from another source, back to them on their own cut-rate first class postage. I don't make them nasty because the only person who will ever see the contents is the one assigned to opening the mail from the corporation's own envelopes, somebody being paid nearly nothing. I do it to add a few cents to their operating expenses. It's nothing to the corporate accountants, but it's personal to me. The international corporations buy legislation to make it legal to trample my individual freedoms and I have no recourse. Sending junk mail back to them is my recourse. It is little in cost with negligible nuisance factor at their end, but it satisfies me, junk mail for junk mail. You trample my right to a peaceable life at home engaged in my own flow, I trample yours. A rule of thumb I live by is to never buy anything advertised on television, except by necessity. I stay out of Walmart, except for necessity, which is rare.

the restaurant at the edge of the universe

I've never felt right supporting the Death Star with my taxes. Two-thirds of what I pay in taxes goes to the Pentagon. I cannot, in conscience, have so much income I pay multiple thousands a year into the machine to kill and destroy the lives of poor people in defenseless countries and put black people in prison at home. I cannot support the war on the poor around the globe and at home. It's been my philosophy since as far back as I can remember in my working life, to live on the least income possible and pay the least into that which I am coerced against my will to support. I laugh at the teabaggers waving AKs in the air, snorting about not wanting to pay taxes. I think: Dude, you're taxed for what you want. Want less, you pay less taxes. Want nothing, you pay no taxes. You rant about being a Christian. Didn't Jesus say, render unto Caesar what is Caesar's. It doesn't take much stretch of the imagination to get it that he's talking about paying your taxes. You want peace of mind, pay your taxes. You don't want peace of mind, do what you gotta do. I wouldn't hold them to Jesus' teaching if they didn't make a public issue of supposed adherence to Southern Baptistism. They holler Bible and Constitution and don't know either one, nor American History. They embarrass themselves and everyone else in Christendom by wrapping themselves in the word Christian. Maybe ten years ago I was talking with some people from Pennsylvania, pleasantly, and then, Are you a Christian? I thought: Ruin a good conversation. My right front tire went flat, pulled me into the wall; had to get out of this conversation now. I said, Christian is a political party and I'm not a member. Of course, that's not what they meant. Was I saved? I felt even more distant from them. I could only think, It's none of your damn business. Do you have your underwear on today? All I said was yes. From then on my air was leave me alone. We didn't waste each other's time much longer. I'm too easily bored by robots and parrots to have a successful social life.

fencepost ruin

 

 

Best place for me is at home. I've become paranoid about driving on the highway. The new generation of highway patrol is zero tolerance zealous as per training. In the state of North Carolina, to see the flashing blue light in the rearview mirror costs $200 on sight. Like it costs at least a hundred dollars to step across a doctor's threshold. They're pulling people for everything now. I take the parkway and back roads, going on the highways only when necessary and five miles under the speed limit. Now I know why old people drive so slow. It's been a give-a-shit last couple days. I told Carole on the phone this morning that today I say to the universe I am ready to go, any time is ok from here on. I will not ask for a stay. I'm down to there is nothing I want but to get by. The expenses of just getting by are outrageous. Getting by isn't even fun anymore. So much anger and hate swirl about in the air between people now. Sunday in the car with Nevlim and Nitsuj, two Parsi guys visiting from Mumbai, Nitsuj driving, Nitsuj had to pull off the road in a hurry. A guy in a black pickup went by and shot him the bird. I thought: Wrong thing to do, Mr Big. You better be careful about doing that to people you don't know. Nitsuj went after him, went right up to his bumper, then turned onto the road we were to turn onto. He told me, If you and Nivlem had not been with me, I'd have run him off the road. I can do it. Easy. I don't care. I just didn't want to scare you and Nivlem. He wasn't talking big, either. Might have been a little exaggeration in there for drama, but he would have done something. One of those things I don't do that could lead to a gunfight really fast. A lot of other people would jump at the chance. I'm content to stay at home and let other people fight out their frustrations from feeling helpless in a low-bid world that honors only privilege. I want to stay home and look out the windows at donkeys, squirrels, birds, rhododendron, ferns, wild violets, jewelweed. I have my own library for reading and music. For art projects, I have given myself a control: no buying anything but the minimum necessary, like tubes of white paint. I won't use any paint I don't already have. Canvases, boards, surfaces to paint on, brushes, objects to make things from, will be found in my inventory of found things I've picked up over time; wood, rock, metal, plastic, paper. It's time to collage all the found objects I've picked up over time.

deceased black pine

 

 

*

 

THE FLOWERS OF LATE SUMMER

 

The flowers of late summer give color to the sides of the roads. It's a great time to ride around on the back roads. Goldenrod is full and lush. And all the others with names I don't know. Jewelweed is one. The colors of fall are the same as the colors of spring; yellow, purple, white. Yesterday I drove by the old Jimmy Wagoner homeplace on Glade Valley Road. He's been gone quite a number of years. The barn meadow that ran alongside the road was covered up in the yellow and purple flowers of late summer. To my eye, it was more beautiful than a formal flower garden. Weeds. My favorite flowers. Perhaps I identify with weeds for their outsider quality and their perfectly natural right to exist. We don't even have to cultivate them. They grow where God flung em. Or, to put it more empirically, where the seeds fell. These are the flowers of my home. I love them growing on the sides of roads along fence rows. They grow here despite being unwelcome weeds. Other people tend to like the mowed pastoral look and keep the sides of the roads trimmed, but not I. I let the greenery grow and flower in abundance when it's their time. I love the flowers of this time of year like I love the birds. Eye candy. Something about flowers makes us feel good, when we notice. Stepping into the woods, under a canopy of trees, calms my interior being like nothing else. Instantly. 

 

 

In what you might call an argument I had with an old-time preacher years ago, I told him I feel the spirit in the woods better than anyplace. No. The church house is the only place you feel the spirit. No. I find the spirit in the woods too. No. That's the natural world. It's of the devil. Oh. I mentioned that the devil is not a creator. That doesn't matter. He rules the natural world. It's our way as Christians to go against the natural world, an extension of the natural man, born in sin, not good, must be changed away from the natural to the unnatural, God only sees the unnatural. This back and forth between us came to nothing. It started over the word duty. I told him I don't do duty. You better. God commands duty. Uh, not really. I was hearing old Sixteenth Century Protestant absolutism, mind. John Milton. It is Milton's cosmology. I grew up in that absolutist mind. It shaped me way more than I would have liked. It took years of searching and questioning, a little bit at a time, an insight at a time, an understanding at a time, a realization at a time, to transcend that thinking. Quite simply, that was my cosmology. My initial appeal to Bob Dylan's lyrics was his dogmatic mind. I'm so happy I've changed away from that. He has too. Maybe we grew up. 

 

 

 

Have reached a place where I don't want to advise anybody, don't want to tell somebody how to do something better, don't want to say I know more than you do. Finally, I have seen that the talk everywhere is a string of commercials. You needta listen to this. You gotta see this tv show. You gotta see this boutique. You gotta see the highest grossing movie of the week. Norman Mailer's early book of essays he called Advertisements For Myself. Unconscious anecdotal advertisements for ourselves has become the American mode of conversation in this time. We're of an Age where the grandparent generation was placed in front of a tv from birth, and all generations since. Television amounts to commercials every ten minutes. Even  the coercive hype of sports announcers and people keeping up with the cutting edge latest is commercial mind. Selling a product. People without a product have to sell their services or labor.  Being television people we interrupt each other freely, like commercials. We advertise ourselves with big smiles and clean teeth. I've consciously separated myself from that thinking. If I ever talk like a commercial, I'm unaware of it. As for the unnatural world being from God, that would put the Bank at the top of the list of Godlike. I never was able to understand how a man could come to such a way of seeing. Then again, the man, himself, was the very subject of a song Groucho Marx sang in one of his movies, Whatever it is, I'm against it. We had very different visions of God; mine did not influence him and his did not influence me. I have to say, I learned a very great deal from him, mountain culture, old-time mountain religion, as well as much regarding my own humanity.

  

 

 

In times when I'd rather not listen to the news on the car radio, I have a tape of Willard Gayheart's and Bobby Patterson's Galax bluegrass band, the Highlanders, from when they both had younger voices. It's straight-forward music of superb musicianship, good arranging, good singing, good songs worth singing. It's happy music for me. I play it over so many times the words are sticking so I can go about with them playing in my head. It feels like I'm in a flow of some sort. Willie Nelson songs in my head all day. What I do runs smoothly. I don't force anything. The day with Kathryn flowed very smoothly. It had some hitches and speed bumps, but none of them knocked me off the track. They were accepted as what's happening at the moment, not a problem unless I make it a problem. Driving from one place to another I see these roadside effusions of flowers in full bloom, and gaze at the landscape, the houses passing by, the black cattle in green meadows, the trees in full leaf, the occasional deer, feeling gratitude to God for landing my parachute in this particular place to walk my spiritual path. It is my home. It's been my home more than half my life. I was going to write, "the better half," then it came everything that went before was a step along the way to here, now, my Blue Ridge Mountain home, my own personal King Solomon's Mines. Everywhere I look is my home. Home has extended beyond my residence to the Central Blue Ridge and the Southern Appalachians. All the way to Roanoke and back for the Willie show, I was at home. The audience was full of my people.

photos by tj worthington

 *

FINDING THE FLOW

 

Upon first split-second sight, seeing this cartoon I saw something like a glyph, pictures that don't need words. The words could only be predictable because the picture says everything. The figures look like a 4-letter word. It doesn't matter who they are, except that who they are adds a new dimension that makes it all the more comic. I see white man in crisis, these the faces he makes in his uncontrollable distress. The part I didn't have the foresight to anticipate is white man in crisis brings out the worst in white man. We have already seen and will go on seeing that white man does not give a shit for democracy. The corporate (white) takeover of our government came just in time for the end of white rule by democracy. Somebody studying Psychology I talked with back in college years told a finding that the craziest member of a household is the one that rules. Looks like it applies among the races as well. White man is showing himself, exposing the American tradition that a boy stops learning after the 6th grade. An entire political party has become collectively insane over being white and having guns, in lock step, parrots squawking the same words over and over.

 

 

 

The best definition of evil I've found, one that bears out, is ignorance. Every caricatured face at the table is the essence of ignorance. Photographs of these people are too. Videos of them worse. It's their ignorance they're famous for. Ignorance becomes vicious fast. The people elected to political position appear to be a pathetic lot. It being so universal, it comes through the tv. Elections now are propaganda contests, one team against the other, like tv sports. This generation of our "representatives" make Dan Quayle look like somebody who could spell. How does somebody like Bachmann, and she's not the only one, get voted into national congress? It's not because the viewing audience wants intelligence. Definitely not that. On television, paradoxically, intelligence looks like ignorance and vice versa. I'm afraid our representatives do, indeed, represent us in the popular zeal to delete democracy and carry on with police state. If you don't do anything wrong, you don't have anything to worry about. How many videos are on youTube of black men arrested for doing nothing wrong? How many black men sentenced for doing nothing wrong? Racism in America is tradition that goes all the way back, the entire country, not just the South, though the South has its own history. I grew up in Kansas City KS in racism the same as in the South. It just wasn't spoken outside your own circles.

 

 

 

Racism I've believed since childhood was retarded. It didn't make a lick of sense to the child I was. For one thing, I was a child driven inward in the same process that makes schizophrenics. But I didn't go that far, that is, so far I couldn't come back. I had a support group that I didn't realize was giving support. Much we take for granted in childhood, the time in our lives when we are taken care of by the adults, given to, instead of sold to. I just now had a mental image of the child I was, in the sea, hanging onto the arms of the adults in my childhood reaching over the side of a boat, giving me their hands and arms. It brought to mind the scene in Life of Pi when the tiger was in the water unable to get in the boat, hanging onto the ropes all night by claws. Suddenly, I want to send a thank you in spirit to every one of the hands extended when I needed them. Come to think of it, this applies all the way through our journey, hands extended to hold onto when a hand is needed. They make a difference. They keep our heads above water when the water gets too deep. They can't pull us out of our own karma, but they can give us a hand until we can get our equilibrium.

 

 

Now that I'm seeing the hands that have helped keep my sorry ass on the surface of my own sea of confusion, it's extensive, and I feel a great breadth of gratitude. I pass it on by supporting different ones in my circles who feel the fear of going under and need a hand to hold onto. I've learned I can't help in all cases, so I pay it no mind, just stay open to need that arises of its own, without looking for one or creating one. In turn, when I need a hand, one is nearby, just by the way things flow. It really is just a matter of the flow, being open to the flow, allowing the flow. The image that comes to mind is a length of red silk floating on the current of a mountain stream. Stepped off into the Tao. For me, that is the tao in a fortune cookie, relaxing into the flow, instead of swimming against it, allowing it to carry me like a red sari flowing on the current. Artist Andy Goldsworthy comes to mind. His art IS the flow. Australian Aboriginal art illustrates flow. Like the air, the flow is invisible, can't even be felt. Now I want to ask myself why I let parrot politicians, lapdogs to the rich, muddy up my flow. I let them in of my own accord. Calling them parrots implies I attribute ignorance to them. The republicans have become the party of hate, which goes with the party of stupid, one and the same. Ignorance equals evil. The cartoon at the top looks like Puritan prosecutors condemning a psychic woman. There again, ignorance and evil are one. For myself, I believe it is important to understand the world I live in, to some extent, well enough to get around in it, at least. All scriptures concern learning how to live in this world happily, living well with others. Letting go. Allowing the flow. Giving less attention to those people from the dark side. Don't worry ~ Be happy.      

 

andy goldsworthy

 

 

*

 

LANCE ARMSTRONG AND A COUNTRY PREACHER

     robert mangold


Continuing absurdity in the news is the beating Lance Armstrong into the ground with "allegations" about "doping," by somebody who has a passion to strip Armstrong of his medals and everything. It's obviously a hate vendetta, but it's not PC to say that. They're saying because Armstrong is done with being hounded and tested and tested to the point he doesn't care any more, he's guilty. Let them have it all. They want his trophies and winnings so bad, he really doesn't have a choice. Now they're claiming he's admitting guilt by throwing up his hands and saying take it all. He's been tested every race, extensively tested and extensively tested on top of that. Like he, himself, said in his own words, "They have no physical evidence." The entire log of evidence against Armstrong is all hearsay, totally hearsay. Somebody said, I seen him do it. Then it's, OMG Somebody seen him do it! Next they have the guy they put out for doping accusing Armstrong, he too seen him do it. Now they have a line of people that seen him do it, but he has been tested every day along the way and there's no evidence at all.


These allegations badgering Lance Armstrong are something like small town gossip or faculty lounge gossip. He said that she said that he had halitosis. I knew an old-time Regular Baptist preacher, Millard Pruitt, in my first 15 years in the mountains. He was a man of honor. I knew him fairly well, knew some of his brothers and sisters, his wife and daughter, the people of his world, his entire family. I knew him to be a man of integrity. His integrity was between him and God, a direct line. It's true he had a weakness for pretty young girls, appreciated them for their feminine beauty. To say he was flirtatious would have been like saying he was a child molester because he liked little kids and the kids liked him. If there was any man I'd ever known who would not get himself a little something on the side from a girl in his church who was getting a divorce, it was him. No way. I knew the woman too. But the stories that went around the county about him stuck like glue, as those stories do. One absurd woman I knew told me about it to be certain I understood that preacher wasn't what he appeared to be. "I seen em do it!" I didn't allow myself to laugh out loud. I was thinking of dogs in the grocery store parking lot. Just telling me she was there to witness the penetration told me it was a lie.


All the time I knew Millard Pruitt, I knew a man who was incapable, even at the age of 30, to have a one-time liaison in public with a young woman in his church he'd known since she was a child, in the time that she was involved in a traumatic divorce. Not even in private. He was incapable. I knew his brothers and sisters. No matter what kind of sexual typhoon took hold of his crotch, his integrity as a man of honor, leaving the called-to-preach part aside, would not allow him to even entertain the thought if it came to mind, and I'd project that it never did come to mind. I knew he bore no guilt about it before God or his wife or the woman involved with him in the story. I knew him to be the same as a monk in his relationship with his Lord. He was from his beginning. Millard Pruitt lived in the world and was not of it. When he was being called to preach, he resisted the call for a couple years, didn't want to go there. He wanted to play fiddle at dances on weekends and work like a man all week. Called to preach, he had to give up playing fiddle at dances or playing the fiddle at all in public. It had the name the Devil's instrument. He didn't believe that, but that didn't stop everybody else from believing it. The spirit of the Lord won the struggle and Millard never looked back.


Along the way several people have said to me, "You know, Millard has a woman story 'gin him." Then we share our hypotheses on the matter. Some could not see even a remote possibility, and some could make a convincing case. I tended to prefer the individuals who saw Millard as I saw him, a man of such integrity of the spirit he's not going to have a wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am moment with a young woman in his church involved in a traumatic divorce she's seeking spiritual advice over. He wasn't one to take advantage of anybody for any reason, certainly not a woman in her situation. Millard was such a personality that some people loved and some people hated. It was no in-between with Millard. The people that loved Millard paid the story no mind, while the people that hated him embraced the story and kept it going.


Millard's integrity was not self-repression. His integrity was drawn by his love for God. His integrity was open to the spirit. He lived his life in God's light. He valued that light. It was the light of day for him. By light I think I mean along the same line as what I mean when I feel reluctance to do or entertain anything that might knock me off my track, or out of my flow. When I'm in my flow I don't want interruption. My flow includes my everyday life, people I see, all that. It doesn't mean the phone ringing sets me into a state of alarm. And it doesn't mean shutting out the unexpected. I like the unexpected. Not always at the time. An interruption to my flow would be going away for a weekend, leaving Caterpillar. I can't go anyplace anymore, because I want to sleep in my own bed every night. I don't like to cross the county line anymore unless I'll be back by bedtime. When I'm in my flow, I feel like I'm in the light of God. It's best characterized visually by seeing a leaf float down a mountain stream, riding the flow around and over rocks, rollin' down the river. Slowness is the key to happiness. Sometimes I feel like I have slowed down now to a zone where I feel like I can now go slowly through the day and at the same time get a lot done. I feel like I'm sniffing the crack under the door to happiness.


In this time of the life I am able to do what I want to do. It happened by letting go of everything after a life that required me to be someplace else every day. I sat around and watched movies, read, visited friends, slept late, stayed up late, whatever. Passed the days as I felt like it. I foresaw a lengthy transition from being told what to do all the time to being allowed to do whatever I feel like doing. It feels like I'm more productive than ever, simply as a human being. Possibly more accessible in spirit. Maybe? Maybe so. I enjoy the people around me more than ever. In a big way I feel buoyed by the people around me, the people of my world. They are the cast in the play I have a role in too. I really have never cared whether Millard's "woman story" had any validity. If I believed he did, I'd have thought nothing of it. I understand matters of the groin somewhat. Enough to allow a man a lapse in a lifetime. Millard didn't have lapses. His faith didn't have lapses. Millard Pruitt was as much a monk as my monk friend Swami Yogeshananda living in a Hindu monastery in California. Millard Pruitt was a monk in the Regular Baptist branch of Christendom. I respected him as such in the time I knew him because I saw it in him. Millard was an honorable man. I believe Lance Armstrong is an honorable man too. I feel like he's all the more honorable for being able to tell them to shove it.


*  

OVER LUNCH

       constantin brancusi, blind

Stayed up late visiting with friends and watching the 1966 Japanese film, SWORD OF DOOM. A samurai slasher film in black and white. It was quite good as a film of its time, Japan coming back from the devastation of the war, filmmaking becoming a viable business long enough that a few directors were reaching into making films with something besides box office in mind, though box office still the first consideration. An early samurai film of the artful variety where everybody struck by a sword was compelled to let out a dying yell. It was mostly comic. When the big bad samurai arrived on the scene, Lucas said, "Lampshade Man." From then on, he was Lampshade Man. Big straw hat with a brim that went downward covering his face, holes in the weaving for him to see through. He looked like a floor lamp you might see in a Surrealist exhibition.



Been thinking more about friend I had lunch with yesterday. I felt like the child of a contrary man, obliged to be aware of all his buttons, what makes him explode in rage, what makes him say, "I don't approve of violence," every time the opportunity arises. He has buttons like a computer. Push this one and this happens. Push that one and that happens. I have to watch everything I say because he is a minefield of buttons. Like in the Mario Brothers computer game kids played where the guy would drop down a hole you didn't know was there. Like that. It's best to keep him talking, because then it's assured he will only hear what he wants to hear. I've heard it said by another of his friends, "he's so liberal he's conservative." That is well put. He has his own dogma as absolute as 17th Century Protestant dogma. He was talking about going to NY a few weeks ago to get with the Occupy Movement. I said, "There's one in Charlotte," where he came from, 100 miles down the interstate almost a straight line, knowing it was insufficient before I said it, just to be a bitch. No, he wanted to go where it matters. I said, "Do it."



In the course of my lifetime, I have known and lived successfully among some really blockheaded people. Men's heads tend more toward solidification than women's. Usually, when a woman is a blockhead, a man is behind it. Like the rule used to be that a man was behind every woman in prison. Women are allowed educations now and they're surpassing the men, because they don't have all the centuries of being required to fight in wars. It was the women's role to bear children, pass on the man's genes and mourn. In warrior culture, men are expected to fight. Ruling class men fight with mental strategies as in Kevin Spacey's recent film, MARGIN CALL. Middle class men fight as officers in military. Working class men shoot the guns. In our culture, men are encouraged not to be too smart. Also, women are encouraged not to be too bright. Men don't make passes as girls that wear glasses. Since Women's Liberation, the newer generations of women don't pay much attention to expectations. Women are surpassing men, because men's heads are so apt to atrophy. Take a look at Angela Merkel. Perhaps the most brilliant mind in politics today. I know that's not saying a lot, but I say, Praise the Lord, we've got one.



Every time at lunch with friend, I have to remind myself this is not the time to speak freely or of subtleties of any sort. Edit everything I say before I say it. That's easy. Parents taught me well long ago. Feels like home. I've known several old-time mountain preachers, and there's no conservative mind in this world beyond theirs, before the Reagan Era. It's been frightening over the last 30 years to see the liberation of the blockheaded man. It's a reaction to Women's Liberation. The blockheads gotta have their attention, too. Everybody has to be one way, in march step. Understanding not a factor, not allowed. Do what you're told. No deviation tolerated. War the ideal. No attention paid to collateral damage. Tough shit. I grew up trained not to care, but it never took. I can only say it's God's Grace. Thanks to God's Grace I want to be open to the flow. This is why I have such a time with friend. I have to shut down my open hatch, and consciously incorporate the experience with my flow. It's like big rocks in a mountain stream the water has to flow around. I tell myself over and over it's ok. I question myself over and over, do I have to be the only one disrespected? Answer comes back: no. Then I say something that pushes the volcano button. :D 



Strangely, I'm used to it. Half the people in the world are men and I'm one of them. Among them is as great a variety of kinds of people as among women. Male culture is the one I was trained up in. The whole coach phenomenon I never got. Gotta play football for the coach. It might have had to do with the DI at home was all I could handle. No more of same, please. My inner editor had a full-time job. He had to be awake all the time I was awake. Mother too, because she was subject to the man at home and the preacher man. I did not want to shut down the part of myself that wanted understanding. I wanted to be able to have empathy with the people around me, instead of blind judgment. I have to confess to plenty of blind judgment within. Perhaps this is why Brancusi's sculpture in the shape of a head with no features, white marble, almost an egg, called Blind, appeals to me so much. Blind is how I feel all the time. It seems like only in the moment that is Now is where I have sight. Rhododendron leaves in sunlight, shadows of leaves crossing leaves, a wind moving the leaves just enough to keep sunlight and shadows in continuous motion.



I don't know what I'm in writing this, Now or what? First thought was attention to thought as it's happening and putting it down with fingers is very much the Now. Yet, much of it, nearly all of it, if not all of it, is spent searching in memory, piecing together the world inside my head. That's not necessarily the world as it is outside my head. It's just another movie, but a bit more complex than an hour and a half story made with a camera and script. That's the fun of being a human, for me. The way we create entire worlds in our heads from memories, feelings, thoughts, imagination, reactions. The world we create in our heads is a map of the world we live in on the outside. We need to do that to get around in our lives. Everybody creates his/her own worlds. Sitting in a restaurant, the person across the table from me is in a completely different world from mine. We communicate where the circles of our interior worlds intersect.



We do our best to have the same world in all our minds, like standards for bolt making, so all turn to the right to tighten, left to loosen. It took a long time to see it, but I like that dimension of a lifetime as a human, everyone his/her own world, own culture, own belief system. It's all that and more we become acquainted with in the people who enter our lives. I love it. Language and culture the standards running through 7+ billion worlds on one planet. The world a composite of varieties. Monoculture doesn't seem to work too well among us, like it doesn't work so well in the world of plants. Like you cut a straight line ditch for water to flow through, the water will take the straight out of the ditch right away. Over years the straight line will become as crooked as any creek in the world. We humans don't flow very well in straight lines either.



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