LEAVE IT TO KARMA

karel appel

I just now saw a picture of somebody who hates my guts so severely that every time I see him, he looks like he wishes his eyes were loaded shotgun barrels and his finger was on the trigger. I laugh within. I reach out and shake his hand, say, "How you doin? Good to see ya," and watch him boil. Just now, when I saw the picture, it put a smile on my face that grew bigger at a steady rate until I let loose an audible laugh. A lawyer said to me several years ago, "We are distinguished by the people that hate us as we are by the ones that like us." I'd never noticed that before, but the moment it was spoken, I saw it. We're raised in school, home, church to want people to like us, not for any rational purpose, just because, the every-parent answer to the question, why? I don't believe anybody really knows why. I came up that way, as did everyone I grew up with all the way along. In America, it is vitally important to be liked. Only a few are popular, though everyone wants to be, with exceptions that prove the rule. I came up with it too. The face in the picture mentioned above is someone I don't want liking me. Hence, I do not worry over being disliked by him, don't even want to know why. We're distinguished by the ones that don't like us, and I like being distinguished by this character. 

karel appel

I've found a sure way to find out who does not like you. Go through the people you know that you don't like. They're the ones that don't like you. It runs both ways. Want to see who likes you, go over the people in your mind you like. They're the ones that like you. It just works that way. I think it has to do with subconsciously reading eyes and body language, tone of voice, seeing those things we don't admit to ourselves we see, feelings. I used to have a friend of several years who moved away. Wanted me to come visit three hundred miles away. I don't go anyplace anymore, certainly not that far. I got a phone call one day of nothing but cussing me, calling me an emeffer over and over. When I put down the phone, that individual fell into the wastebasket of the past. He was drinking, but it's been my experience in self and others that we get away with saying things drunk we don't say sober. To me, drunk or sober, it is the same person, same mind, same intent. It's not the first time I let somebody go for cussing me while drinking. I don't put out disrespect, and don't receive it. Another time was a woman who had a lot more money than I have and thought she was, therefore, in charge of me. I disappoint everybody that takes to such a notion. 

karel appel

I have a friend who used to worry herself until whatever illness took her over to get her mind onto something else. I've talked with her several times over the years, saying things like, "You don't want her to like you. She's toxic. If she likes you, you're really sunk." And, "If you really want her to like you, start liking her." Eventually, she got over the most intense part of her fear of being disliked. Lord have mercy, I've said, be pure sugar sweetness and somebody is not going to like sweet. I either indoctrinated her or gave her enough food for thought she eventually came down out of that mind and doesn't suffer so much from it. I look at self in the past and hang my head in shame over wanting to be liked. Still have it. I don't go about provoking others, intentionally pissing people off. I know some that do. It's a stiff-arm that keeps others from getting too close. I have a few friends of this characteristic. They have a rough life. But they're doing all right, people stay away from them, leave them alone, and they're glad, they already dislike everybody else first. I was told once, "I hate everybody but you." I said, "Only because you don't know me. You'd hate me most of all if you knew me."

karel appel

Inside myself, in this time of the life, I feel like I've come to a fair balance in this regard. I don't feel a need to impress anybody into liking me. Feel like I have a fair understanding of the dynamic, thus can work with it rationally rather than emotionally. I don't have many people I dislike anymore. The ones I do dislike, it's over an issue of character I've experienced and witnessed that I want nothing to do with. Forgiveness is something I've never learned. I've done it once, actually twice. Both times I was rewarded with good friends unto best of friends. The forgiveness opened a metaphorical door, soul to soul. It takes much to get me there. I've seen so many Hong Kong men-with-guns movies that revenge sometimes becomes appealing to think about. They're all based in revenge. I tend to think about what comes next, which stops me from making the first move that will call a counter move, which will call a counter-move, until one ends up dead and the other in prison. I've learned to let karma be my revenge. A few years ago somebody Justin knew pulled some shit on me. Justin asked what I was going to do about it. I said I'd wait and watch and see what comes back to him. I won't have any fingerprints involved, no involvement in it, and I'll get a good laugh. Karma settles scores better than I could ever think of. A return I could think up would be either too much or too little. Karma takes care of it just right. 

karel appel himself

*

   

TO WALK THE RED ROAD

I feel more every day like I'm understanding the time Herman Melville was in before and while writing Moby Dick. He saw the nation dividing into factions that fell into hating each other unto wanting to kill the other by way of war. Corporate propagandists today have divided us into factions that hate each other. I can't tell if it is getting more intense daily or if I'm just recently aware of it. The division has always been there. It has never been a problem before, under the American belief that each man and woman has a right to their own way of seeing. We have been consciously divided by way of propaganda since 1980, a step at a time. Expressions of racism today have a hard edge of hate out in the open, arrogance. Before, the racism was the same, it was kept to oneself and one's circles. Much as I dislike seeing such vehement hatred out in the open and increasing, I also see that these dark shadows in a culture are the same as dark shadows in individuals--to be dealt with, we need to bring them to the surface to assess how to deal with them. Hatred surfaces, works itself up and needs to be burnt off by way of a fight or a war. War amounts to, essentially, burning off hate. The hate the right-wing media pumps into their audiences appears to me without conscience. Political ideologies don't do conscience. Neither do belief systems, nor corporate coups. I read Moby Dick made aware by Melville himself that hate was swirling in the political air of his time and he saw the American experiment, democracy, in peril. The white whale, white supremacy, broke and sank the ship of state, a democracy of people from all over the world, Captain Ahab dead and tied to the whale's side by harpoon ropes, Ahab a teabagger of the day without compromise.

I tried to read Moby Dick again a few years ago and could not get with it. I found John Huston's 1957 film of Moby Dick with Gregory Peck playing Ahab. It was a remarkable American film. Orson Wells delivered the sermon in the seaman's chapel. It was old-time New England Primitive Baptist style. I felt throughout Melville's story a civil war on its way. I feel the direction American politics has taken in this time is toward civil war. Again, the justification is immigrants of color. I have the division in myself. Last summer I came face to face, not by my choice, with Reaganista Supreme Parrot, the Congress person of my district in NC, who does not represent me in any way, Virginia Foxx. I felt like hell opened up and this presence emerged before my eyes. I backed away automatically. She put out her hand to shake and I could not touch her. I would have had to go straight home and soak my hand in kerosene to exterminate the cooties. I acted like I didn't recognize her, I, a demographic profile of a Fake tv viewer and Limbaugh listener. This angry old white man was angry with her. I could not speak. I froze inside. It was awkward and she handled it well, distracted herself with someone else. The next one paid no attention to the news, cared nothing about politics, had no idea who she was and did not care. She handed me a business card fancy with gold print, which I dropped in the trash soon after. Then took it back out of the trash, thinking it would go good with my collection of things it's really weird for me to have. 

Earlier in the day I was on the phone with my friend Lee, who lives in New Mexico. We talked some about how we both love this period of our lives the best of any other. We both like to stay at home, like being at home, prefer and enjoy the solitary life. In both our cases, we've become comfortable enough with ourselves we don't need to go looking for distraction. I stopped in at the grocery store for some coffee filters I forgot to buy two days before. At the register, from behind, a familiar voice, Hi. We spoke and hugged. She said, "What are you doing?" I would not let self say, Standing in line at the grocery store. Too redundant. I said, "Staying at home." She showed a long face like to say, Bummer. I said, "There is nothing sad about it." She said, "Really?" I said, "There's no place I'd rather be than home." She just accepted it, already knew I was weird. Glad our conversation was cut short by the momentum at the register, I said, Bye, and proceeded on my way. Somebody from the past, from a chapter that ended long ago, a few cycles back. Six years ago I trimmed down the people I see to the people I care about who care about me. In this time of the life, I know who those people are. I've done my time having superficial associations. I don't do it anymore, and don't care who it pisses off. I'm flowing with this cycle, happy with it, staying at home. I don't even like to cross the county line, except knowing I'll be back to sleep in my own bed. I have my purpose for coming to the mountains, which I am still living, and will go on living. This is the place I walk my spiritual path. It is the only reason I'm here. I don't mix socially, never have. Got the name arrogant on account of it, not my concern. 

I did a lot of spiritual reading for a lot of years and came to what all the masters had said, reading is not it. It is in experience. Paying attention to experience, living in the world as it is, allowing others to be themselves, allowing same with self. My spiritual reading in this time of the life has trimmed down to the Tao te Ching. It's all there in beautiful verse form. It's about honoring the god in others. It's about allowing God, not expecting of God. It's about allowing the flow, going with the flow, using the flow to find a tranquil life. And finding a tranquil life, allowing it. I never enter a lottery for fear of winning. I do not want money messing up my life. I'm able to meet expenses and have a little bit of fun too, quiet, at home fun like movies, reading, music, art projects, donkeys, and Caterpillar. The car runs good and all is well. I trouble my mind with news less and less, though continue to be traumatized when I give it any attention, disturbed every day at the rate American cops are killing black people, man, woman or child. It's shameful and shameless. I'm one of few people I know who think anything of it. And what can I do about it? Send a twitter? Leave a comment? I remind myself it's not my world out there on the news. It's not mine until the swat team breaks down my door and blows me away, saying, Whoops, wrong address. Shit happens. As long as my door is still on its hinges, I'll go on staying at home being a detached viewer.         

*

     

THE SOUTH AND RACISM

mary hourihan lynch

Went and watched the race today, not in a good mood. Not in a bad mood either, just dissatisfied. I need a break from television every Sunday afternoon and evening. Arrived as the race started and left soon after it was over. March Madness, saw Wichita State beat Kansas State, so glad those places are no longer in my life. The only way I can figure my soul found its way to Kansas this time was maybe I saw the movie The Wizard of Oz in last lifetime while having a miserable time of it, dreaming of Judy Garland in Kansas with red shoes, there's no place like home. All my life I've wondered what kind of karmic activity in my past landed me in Kansas and a fundamentalist church to complicate it further. Could I have been drawn to the landscape from lifetimes riding a horse and wearing feathers on the plains following the buffalo? I recall a powerful moment in childhood, some time not long after learning about the Indians from my grandmother, who had an older brother who was said to have traded horses with Sitting Bull. I felt like the Indians were my real people. I got mixed up and born into white skin this time. I remember thinking in childhood, maybe seven or eight, my people will never recognize me. I am the enemy and they can never see me any other way. It was a lonesome feeling, something like lost in space. In childhood play, I only identified with the Indians. In movies and tv westerns, I only pulled for the Indians, knowing they'd lose, but they were my people. I have never felt comfortable white, especially seeing how arrogant white people act toward people of any other pigmentation. I have never felt comfortable with people of other colors, because I can't help it I'm white. I know a lot of other white people who feel the same way. We don't make headlines. We just get called nigger lovers. 

mary hourihan lynch

And that's ok. If it wasn't that, it would be something else. This is human existence. I can't change it anyplace but in myself. Racists I know don't go about hurting black people, as far as I know. Their racism is their concern, not mine. The same as I don't want racists to have a problem with me for not being a racist, I don't have a problem with racists. It's their business. I regret that the corporate takeover of our government is so vehemently racist. It's in the nature of fascism, however, you gotta have a focus for hate. Hate is the wave fascism rides. I find it interesting, not ironic, the people who call them selves Christian cling to fascism and wallow in hate. Ask any Jew who survived the Thirties and Forties in Europe. It was Christians all over Europe killing Jews, not just the German Christians. Again, my only concern is that I do no harm to Jews, black people, Latin American people, even white people. Here, too, applies being in the world not of it. I live in a multi-cultural world. I'm ok with it being multi-cultural. I like that it is multi-cultural. I am in a given race, but I do not have to partake of the arrogance of whiteness. Racism has a place, for sure, in Southern culture, but Southern culture is not entirely racist. Look at the great Southern writers. Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers. They were not racist. Though the politicians and evangelists largely are. It's about the same mix all over the country since the rise of fascist propaganda. Here again, it's the world I live in, but I don't have to be of it, don't have to do what somebody else does. And they don't have to do what I do. My racist friends know where I stand and I know where they stand. No big deal. 

mary hourihan lynch

This is an aspect of the South the people outside the South don't get. Southerners I know tend to be tolerant of people they don't approve of or don't like. Southerners want peace among one another. I don't mean there is no fighting or hate going on, but I have found on the whole Southerners to be peaceable people in their everyday lives. I appreciate Southern culture so much, one aspect that might be objectionable does not diminish the whole. Yankees don't do well in the South, only because of their arrogance toward Southerners. Condescension is obvious from the receiving end. I recall a woman several years ago, here from Connecticut, dissatisfied after a couple years. She was wanting to kick up a fuss over how some man kept his dog. She called herself an animal rescuer. She wanted to force him to take better care of his dog by some kind of idea of justice. She'd got herself into a fix that frightened her. I told her let it rest. You're in the South. You don't tell a man in the South what to do with his property, and to some a dog is property. She couldn't let it rest, it wasn't right. I attempted to explain right has nothing to do with it. I reminded her that in the South she is a foreigner, she has no backup. I recommended she let the dog issue rest. She couldn't do it. It wasn't right. She pursued it, got herself into a heap of trouble by way of threats, freaked out and left the county. She loved it here, but it wasn't enough like where she came from. She could not accept the people around her as themselves. She wanted them to be different. She was so caught up in being right, my talk about letting it go was, itself, not right. She wanted to be right. Ok. Be right. Have a good time.

mary hourihan lynch

I don't have to be every aspect of Southern culture to live happily in the South. For example, I'm not interested in college football games or barbecue. But I do like the Allman Brothers, George Thorogood and the Dirty South Revolutionaries. The South has many sub-cultures, all of them Southern. All have that something special that is Southern. It's an identity with the South, not an ideology or political belief system, nor a religion. The South has Catholic churches and synagogues aplenty, as well as temples of all the religions. There is a Tibetan monastery in Georgia.  We live in peace as Southerners. The greatest characteristic I know of the South is the readiness to allow others to be who they are. Though certain aspects of the belief systems don't necessarily accord with what they claim to believe, it's tradition and that's the end of it. Some years ago a Yankee friend told me it is my responsibility to teach one of my racist friends not to be a racist. I said it is not my responsibility. He believed it was. I maintained it was not. I still believe it is not my responsibility to set out to change anybody's pattern of thinking, not even my right. I woke this morning with the incident in my mind, talking with self about allowing others the autonomy of their own minds. I don't know of another way to live in peace with the people in my world, wherever I live, all the way to rural Thailand. I allow them their own understandings, they allow me mine. I don't like Jehovah's Witnesses coming to my door telling me they're right and I'm wrong. It seems to me basic human decency to allow others their own autonomy. If I expect to be allowed my own, then I allow others their own. For me to tell somebody else their way of thinking is unacceptable and must change, I'm giving somebody down the line permission to do the same to me.  
  

janice lynch schuster and her mother mary hourihan lynch

*

NO PROBLEMS, ONLY SOLUTIONS

the large glass

marcel duchamp

 

 

The picture book of the works of Marcel Duchamp is finished. I found it an informative read. Thought I might turn to Brancusi next, but instead went to the bookshelf for a book of two long essays on Duchamp by Mexican poet, Octavio Paz, a paperback I've had since late 1970s, Marcel Duchamp, the title. It has a few markings of mine in the early pages. Didn't get far in it the first time around. At the time, I did not understand Duchamp enough to be able to read the Paz book with comprehension. Paz was over my head, around my head, bypassed my head, in that I simply did not get what he was writing about. Many years have passed since then, I've read a few articles and seen everything Duchamp has done multiple times. The Pierre Cabanne picture book gave me the best understanding of Duchamp I've had. I went to the Paz a little reluctantly, sat down with it and flowed right into it, read several pages delighted. I was with him all the way. In fact, this time it is an easy read. A good measure of my inner growth as a reader. It wasn't Paz's writing as much as it was Duchamp being opaque for me at the time. I'd bought the Paz book around the same time as the big book of Duchamp's complete works by Arturo Schwartz. It is too big to enjoy sitting with for any length of time. It's something you look at on a table. I see at amazon it is out of print and has some value now. I may put it up for sale and pay some bills with it. It is so big and heavy, the shipping would be a lot. I'm glad to be getting some understanding of what Duchamp was doing. I felt I had some sort of understanding, but not much. Cabanne filled in my blanks that needed filling in. I don't feel like I have solved a mystery, but Duchamp is no longer the enigma he once was. I think Duchamp is noted for a saying, "There are no problems, only solutions."

 

bicycle wheel

marcel duchamp

 

It is good to be coming to an understanding of Duchamp in my advanced years. Better than not at all. I feel a satisfaction that I seem to get Duchamp a little bit. It's not all that's happening in my old age. A few minutes ago I sneezed. It took a bounty towel to wipe the front of my sweater. It is outside the usual to be at the summing up time of one's life and find self in a summing up mind. Most curiously, I'm finding I don't have concern for what is said about me or thought about me after I'm gone. A few times peers have brought up the subject of legacy. I say, "I don't care about legacy." I don't think I'll be remembered as the asshole of the year or just plain chickenshit. Some will say that for sure. They say it now. I don't think about it, don't care, can't care. Some will mourn the loss, most will not. We know who will mourn us and who will not, allowing for surprises. Friend Jr Maxwell did not want to leave this lifetime with anyone having hard feelings about him. Interjecting my own point of view, I said, "It doesn't matter." He said, emphatically, "Yes it does." He was a whole lot friendlier a person than I am. He didn't want anybody disliking him. I see it inevitable and don't worry myself over being disliked. I found in one of Meher Baba's discourses his reasoning for why it is not so bad to be hated. It turns out it's such a good thing, I have to watch myself for encouraging it. The deal is, when somebody hates you, they are a bar of soap washing you clean of what it is about you they hate. The hate energy draws the objectionable quality in self out of self and onto the one doing the hating. I am not above being hated, and can name at least three, without even thinking, who I know for certain hate me, want me dead. I laugh inside like crazy when I see them. I know they never see me with a sour face, because I light up with mirth when I see them. It cracks me up to see who it is and know what they're pulling to themselves. I think, Here, let me give you something else to hate me for, and break out laughing. 

 

dalai lama

 

Aware of the magnetic power of hate, I consciously choose not to hate. I recall a time a decade ago when I wished I could allow myself to plot a murder to get away with it. I wanted to hate, but couldn't allow it. Didn't want what I knew it would draw to me. I just let it go and projected to other party: hate me with all your might. Gimme the best you got. I have to say I appreciate the liberation from concern about being hated. It's a similar feeling to discovering my fear of dying is gone and the other side looks so interesting, and I'm so curious about it, I have to be mindful not to slip into an accident that would take me to the other side. I tell myself I am the same consciousness on this side and the other side. One side or the other, it is the same as long as I have some inner peace on this side. I find I do have peace within. Didn't know what all that Bible talk about peace meant. Didn't have enough experience with inner peace since maybe one week old to even intuit what it was. Like imagining no mind. It takes mind to imagine no mind. I noticed I'd come into inner peace quite a long time after it came over me. Like I was saying yesterday about favorite color changing. Both times it changed, it was years before I noticed. One of my keys to inner peace is Don't worry ~ Be happy. At first, it felt frivolous. I can't be that irresponsible. Then it turns easy. It gets so easy it becomes automatic. Perhaps the greatest liberation of all I received from Meher Baba was the sage counsel, "Don't take anything seriously, not even God." Immediately, I intuited the truth in this. Ever since seeing it the first time, I have felt remarkably free of worrisome burdens. Not even God. I love that. Especially not God. The worst crimes against humanity were done taking God seriously. Worry is only good for the bank accounts of heart surgeons. I listen to cement-heads like that guy from Westboro Baptist in Topeka, Kansas, spewing hate everywhere he went, I think of what he pulled to himself over the bridges of his hateful projections onto others, and I understand his conflicted face in the photographs. I'm glad I don't have his mind. I was raised with the same influences, easily could have. Ego would have loved it. My mother would not have been so disappointed in me if I'd turned out more like him.

 

 

Like the Hank Williams song, Mama Tried. "I turned 21 in prison, doing life without parole." Mama tried. Alas for my mama, she does not have what it takes to make her boy subservient to  Kansas fundamentalism. It spit her boy out like the human cannonball. It went boom. I saw the film, Black Swan, yesterday and enjoyed it much more than anticipated. The reviews of it when it was new I felt were misleading. It was a brilliantly made film. It made me aware of director Darren Aronofsky, wanting to see whatever else he made. It brought to mind Carlos Saura's, Carmen, Spanish, an unforgettable film. Both are stories of dancers taking on a powerful role and the role seeping into and taking over their lives. The dancer's story brought my mother to mind, who wanted to be a ballerina when she was a little girl, and when she couldn't, she projected the dream onto her little boy it never stuck to. The dancer was stiff as a marionette from being so uptight wanting to be perfect. There again, mommy wanting to be perfect so much she squeezes life out of herself and goes about stiff as if made of wood. Often I felt I was watching my mother's story in symbolism. She needed the black swan for balance, could not let go enough to relax into the sensuous. Daddy was noted for saying, "She don't have angel wings." Seeing the woman in the film torment herself unto agony wanting to be perfect, I have a strong feeling my mother was something like a Buddhist nun or monk in a recent lifetime. This time around she's a Fundamentalist nun. I took her to the Nelson Art Museum in Kansas City about 20 years ago. She was drawn to the Chinese room. I found that curious. I followed her, seeing her drawn to the people and interiors in different paintings. A life-sized carved head of a Chinese Buddha on a pedestal. Mother's hand automatically reached out to it. An inch or so from its face, she drew her hand back, "I'm not supposed to touch it." This moment taught me something that helped understand mother's need for perfection. Possibly a carry-over from a lifetime seeking perfection through meditation. I don't hold perfection for a goal. I think of perfection as nonexistence. Nonexistence is coming my way, anyway. I don't need to meditate toward it.    

 

 

 

*

 

FALLING IN WITH MEHER BABA

yayoi kusama

A little bit ago I found and played a video of Mr Rogers in a remixed collage of him speaking the words in the song from different shows, "Did you ever grow something in the garden of your mind?You can grow ideas in the garden of your mind. It is good to be curious about many things. You can think about things and make believe. All you have to do is think, and they'll grow." I was too old for Mr Rogers when he appeared on tv, was one of the people that laughed at dumb Mr Rogers. Then one day I was sitting with a neighbor's kids and Mr Rogers was on the tv. The kids engaged. I sat watching him and them, listening to him, hearing his humility, his deep caring that came through for little kids. I sat there with tears running down my face for the loving attention he gave the kids and the charisma he had in their eyes. A man that doesn't speak down to kids, but talks to them the way every kid wants daddy to talk to them. I've found that no matter the company I'm talking with, the times I have brought up Mr Rogers with an adult I get laughed at in joking ways like the times I've requested Willard Gayheart to sing Little Red Wagon, a beautiful western swing love song. It pisses off the redneck in me and I want to say something hateful. I choose to say nothing and go on like I'm a good sport and can take it. I remind myself empathy is not an American characteristic, to stay home more often and let the people that don't value what Mr Rogers is doing congregate among themselves and leave me out of it. It was like sitting in church hearing about righteousness and we're such good Christians because we go to church, and wondering why the people in the church had no use for their neighbors or each other. The idea of loving one another was suspect of sexuality, like dancing, sin, repugnant. Not the kind of people I wanted to live all my life subject to. 

 

 

isamu noguchi

 

Evidently, this is what Mr Rogers brings up for me. A few times I have watched Mr Rogers on purpose, to give that vibe to my inner child, who doesn't get a lot of my attention. The video of Mr Rogers remix made my inner child dance. It woke up the kid within. I've preferred not to look back into childhood because it throws me into frustrated anger; hence, depression. But just now, my activated inner child reminded me there was much I enjoyed in that time. Why not take a look at the good times, because there were many. Like both my grandmothers, and mommy until daddy came home from the war. The neighbors up and down the street, parents didn't like any of them. We were the righteous ones. Lord have mercy. I know better than to dive back into that dark swamp. If I keep it up, I'll be cussing a streak in a very short time. The past. Let it go. As history, the past can be somewhat informative. However, recalling that part of my history puts me into a mood. It was WW2 PTSD on somebody whose screws were loose anyway. Fear to such an extreme something snapped within. He had no idea how close he came to being a victim of patricide. I reminded myself every night in bed crying into the pillow he was not worth a lifetime in prison. My sentence in his prison would run out eventually. I'd bear with it, go to school, see grandparents for affection, because a kid has no recourse; let them feed me in payment for the hitting and berating I couldn't defend myself from. He died to me and then started wanting my respect. Give me a break. Whatever. I'd think, though dared never say: I respect you like I respect dog shit--I step around it. I meant it. I learned pretty good avoidance skills from avoiding him in earnest. I went to the coast, as far as land allowed, seething inside. The hate took a lot of years to get over. Never did get over it, just turned it off like flipping a light switch. That didn't end it immediately, but it began the dimming process that took a few years, a seven-year cycle, and the next seven-year cycle working off the anger side effect at manual labor and going to an old-time religion church I loved.

 

australian aborigine

 

At this time of the life, looking back over the whole I see patterns unnoticed while involved in them. The most dynamic thing I found recently was seeing the first half of my life characterized by hate within, the second half characterized by love. I've come to see the balance. I've come to see the first half like drawing the bow string back so far that arm muscles are about to explode, holding it there until the aim is just right and letting go. The let go moment happened at age 33 when I fell in with Meher Baba. I say fell in with as a shorthand. The experience at the time I likened to a fish swimming along, saw something good to eat, bit, it had a hook, the hook pulled me through the water against my will and I ended up in Meher Baba's boat. I had no interest in rock star gurus. Peter Townsend of the Who made an album of his contribution to Baba gospel. I hated it. Never wanted to hear it again. I ended up at the Meher Spiritual Center between Myrtle Beach and North Myrtle Beach, between Hwy 17 and the ocean. Went there as a place to get out of my life for a few days or however long it took to think about things. Somebody I'd met at a party when I was so wasted I could hardly sit up straight started playing with my cosmic mind saying things like "Everything is nothing. Don't worry, be happy." My super-conscious mind that observes the conscious mind was thinking: Does this guy know what he is saying? A week or so later I ran into him at the apartment of a woman I knew from Knoxville, he had brought a kitten she wanted. I engaged him in conversation like I was talking with somebody I needed to know at the moment. I told him some things that were going on daily, signs, I'd been getting of the number 10 every day. And a spread of about a dozen postcards of Myrtle Beach, an Indian coin found on a small square of gold carpet sitting on some boxes put out for trash pickup. I picked up the coin. It said, 10.

 

 

meher baba / jesus

 

I told him I'd been thinking about getting on a bus and going to some small town in South Carolina, check into a cheap motel and stay there until whatever I needed to know came through. I knew it was something life foundation basic with no idea what. He told me about a place at Myrtle Beach, 500 acres of virgin forest, cabins in the woods, didn't cost much, had to supply my own groceries, that was it. It was a spiritual retreat for Meher Baba. I really wasn't interested in doing the guru thing. By this time I was a convinced atheist. I'd brought my own books, but found first day some copies of discourses and excerpts from discourses lying about and picked up the discourses, opened the book randomly and my eyes fell upon the direct answer to a question I had in the front of my mind. Opened it randomly again and eyes fell on a paragraph that answered another question in the front of my mind. It turned into a fun game for me playing with chance like the I-Ching, but this one was like rigged chance, like a consciousness was involved in selecting what I opened the book to. Two days of reading in the discourses like that, and some biographical the same way, all my big questions were answered. Third day, I was in the act of sitting in a chair on a screen porch to read some more and my elbow knocked over a glass of iced tea, the glass fell to the floor and broke. It was two feet away. It told me I'm not right. I realized I was a bundle of nerves and needed to settle down. Took a nap, woke wide awake refreshed, went to the meditation cabin and said, You've done it, you've convinced me. Now that I know God is, I gratefully accept the offer to guide my chariot through the rest of my life adventures. Love was the only path he allowed. I wanted the path of knowledge, not love. Later for that. I went with the path of love like a fish flopping in a net. Toward the end of the second half of my life, the hillbilly half, I can listen to Mr Rogers sing to little kids about the garden of our minds and tears bounce off my cheeks. It took several years to open the closed vault I'd locked my heart in for protection. I have enjoyed the second half so much, I'm grateful to the first half for getting me here. It's like the bowstring was drawn back so far it sent the arrow on a flight it could not have made otherwise.    

 

marcel duchamp

 

 

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MOSQUITO COAST: YOU BECOME WHAT YOU HATE

Last night I saw the Harrison Ford, Helen Mirren, River Phoenix, Andre Gregory movie, Mosquito Coast, the second time. It was made from a novel by Paul Theroux. I'd seen it several years ago, took it for a simplistic Hollywood allegory and dismissed it. Seeing it last night was by chance more than choice. From the very first scenes it caught my attention, had me thinking I totally missed it first time around. It is self that has changed, not the film. I got the allegory first time, but missed the subtleties that fleshed out the allegory. Ford's character was an American man, a liberal democrat in the time of the novel's writing, in our time today a Teabagger republican. They're both the same at the off-the-deep-end Xtreme. Ever-thang's wrong, aint nothin right. Ford's character had a brilliant mind; he was an obsessive inventor with a passion for fixing things. At the time of the story, he had become obsessive over all that doesn't work in America. He saw dark clouds on the political horizon. He decided to leave the country where nothing works very well anymore, where tv has zombified the population, unable to accept or allow circumstances and others to be what they are. He wanted to be in control, because he knew the right way. His wife, Helen Mirren, became an enabler standing by her man, bearing with his never-ending projects. River Phoenix, his boy, looked up to his dad and became his partner in the projects. The whole family went with him when he decided to leave the country and start over someplace else where he could do it his way.

river phoenix and harrison ford

Their boat took them to the Atlantic coast of Central America, presumably following the chance of water currents to guide them. They found a river and went upriver. It's tropical jungle. The film's theme is going upriver. Ford's character is a thinking man, who, alas, thinks too much. Throughout the story, the hearts of wife and kids want to let go and flow downstream to the ocean and go back home to northern Georgia. He wants to be going upstream. He is a man operating a bulldozer instead of a canoe. His life is an ongoing struggle, which the people around him suffer from, because he never lets up. He is the kind of character who gets in your face when he talks, attempting to convince you he knows more than you do. He sees everything that's wrong with the world. When he left America, he became America. I thought of a spiritual truth I'd learned many years ago, you become what you hate. He left America, hating it, went out to the unimproved world and became America. He called the black people there savages. He wore his family out, and everybody around him. Then the real world of Central American rebels appeared, and from there on his creation self-destructed. He set fire to Andre Gregory's church, and Andre Gregory shot him down, allowing wife and kids to enter the flow and go with it downstream to the sea and to home.

the kids

I saw myself in the story and several particular people I know. Theroux caught the American mind using the fingers of both hands. He caught it like one of those great pass receptions we see about once a year on tv football where the runner leaps into the air as high as he can go, arms extended all the way, hands snatch the ball out of the air. In the microcosm of one man, Ford acted out American history in allegory, thus became America created by his particularly American self-unaware temperament with control issues. An unselfconscious ego and a brilliant mind with little room for heart gives a pretty good description of the American personality in the world of nations. It's testosterone mind that has ruled our government and culture from the beginning that evolved to the War on Drugs (war on the American people), excess border patrol, Faux news and police state. According to Theroux's vision, the self-centered domination of all around Ford's character, by this time America itself, constructs a skyscraper of cards. A breeze of popular rebellion blows through; the attempt to shut down the rebellion sets off a chain-reaction imploding the skyscraper of cards, and shutting down that old testosterone domination, the patriarchy. Wife and kids, the people who live by heart, the greater portion of the population, can now go with their flow and return home to Georgia.

harrison ford, river phoenix, helen mirren

I hear Ray Charles singing "Georgia on my mind." Georgia, the place in the heart they left and returned to, patriarchal ego mind lost along the journey, defeated by itself. He was so obsessed with what was wrong that by the end what was wrong in himself brought him down, setting everybody around him free to return to living by the heart after a bad experience with mind in control. Theroux showed the progression from thought to action, from hating to becoming what you hate. I am glad I learned about becoming what I hate. That shut down hate in me. I used to laugh inside when I'd hear somebody truly racist on a rant, picturing him a black baby in a black teenage girl's arms living with her mama, had to quit school. I don't want to hate a right-wing Teabagger republican, despite seeing what they're doing to my country, because I don't want to be like them. I don't want to hate Rush Limbaugh's mind, because I don't want to become like his mind. I can't hate somebody for being a snitch emeffer, because I don't want to become a snitch emeffer. I don't want to hate Ted Nugent because I don't want to be Ted Nugent, for the same reasons I can't hate Dick Cheney, W Bush, Reagan, because I don't want to be like them. I don't want that mind, so I don't hate it. I can't hate somebody I know to be a low down slime ball. I can't hate somebody who has sex with a child. I don't want any of that kind of thinking for myself. Because I can't hate a racist, for example, the feeling changes to sorrow for the person with a particular affliction I don't want. I figure they don't want it either, but it's stuck to them and they can't help it. I don't want that, so I don't hate it. Accept and allow seems to be the way to go with the flow and not worry about the mind stuff.

river phoenix and Martha Plimpton

 

 

 

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HATE IS A BAR OF SOAP

a r penck

Every day I see some in-yer-face current event that's heinous with text calling for change. Some want more police state, some want less. I laugh when it says to "tell" Boner, Cheney, other republicans, something or other that makes sense, something that reason applies to. Somebody like me doesn't tell a republican what to do. It's like speaking to a parrot, telling it what to do. The parrot bobs its head up and down. Get too close, it will bite. I remember what a gift it is when somebody who despises me stays away, won't go where I go, leaves when I turn up. I think, thank you, and smile big. I find it a truth that somebody I don't like for whatever is behind it, that person doesn't like me either. I've got to where I can just about tell what somebody is thinking about me by what I'm thinking about them. Dislike tends to be mutual, same as like. We're taught all through school it is necessary to be liked by everybody. No reason why, just necessary to be popular. I fell for that until it just fell away from me for being assessed not worthy of attention. Recently a friend was moaning because she'd found out someone we both knew did not like her. I said, Do you like him? Answer: no. There it is, I said, what does it matter if he likes you or not? Better that he doesn't like you so he'll stay away and you won't have to bother to stay away from him. I just heard myself say that, said it without forethought. It spoke itself. I heard it and made a mental notation for myself to pay attention. I added, you don't want everybody liking you.

a r penck

I found some good spiritual counsel about hating and being hated. That's some powerful energy to have coursing through your blood. Hate is close to love when it comes to power of the energy.  Somewhere, and I don't remember where, in reading Meher Baba's discourses and sayings, he said that the karmic danger in hating someone is that I pull to myself whatever it is I hate in the other. Hate is a bar of soap. When somebody hates me for something about my character that he or she doesn't like, the hate pulls the reprehensible characteristic that I may not like having myself, pulls it to the individual doing the hating, taking it off of me onto themselves. It taught me to keep an eye on my own active hating. As far as I know I have no hates. I know of some who hate me, and I'm ok with that. I think of them as my friends scrubbing me good with soap, taking my trash to themselves. I say thank you. This one character I cannot name, though the name is so common there must be multiple hundreds of thousands of them, hates me so bad that when I come into view he starts shaking and finds a way to exit himself immediately. It cracks me up. I always speak to him, Hey, how you doin? And I'm laughing inside. I don't even care why he hates me. I just thank him for taking whatever it is from me to himself. It makes me laugh. I'm grateful in a big way that he avoids me first. It's just easier that way.

a r penck

Since learning about hate as a bar of soap, I welcome it anymore, almost flippantly. I tell myself to watch that part. It's like curiosity about the other side, over yonder, glory land, makes me almost flippant with danger. Sometimes I have to keep myself reminded. Not that I have a suicide problem. It's more a relaxed attitude about dying that makes it something I'm not afraid of, but look forward to. It's relaxing into accidents that concerns me. Like letting something happen because I'm not afraid. I have to remind self that I'm in the body because I'm meant to be in the body, so don't be frivolous with it. Don't take it too seriously, but don't take it too lightly either. I think of it as a form of being responsible. An awful lot of hate is in the air in this time, but there has always been hate in the air. Hate in the air is where wars come form. I've seen in people new to the county, mostly republicans who moved to the mountains to get away from the N word in the cities, intolerant toward any political opinion other than their own. I can't say how pervasive this is. Going only by my limited experience. One old boy quit going to the coffee shop because not enough cement-heads went there. One day talking with a woman who was retired Army, brilliant woman I enjoyed talking with, there came a time I realized she would be intolerant of me if she knew she was not talking to another teabagger. So I dropped the bomb that I'm a liberal. She turned her back to me and had no more to do with me. I thought: thanks, and had to contain my inner laughter so it wouldn't show.

a r penck

I see in a lot of younger people (to me, everybody is younger) an intolerance unspoken, unacknowledged. It is a common belief that if you don't agree with somebody on whatever level, you can't know each other. I find it not all the time, but frequently among people under my age. It's a shock for me, because I've known so many mountain people older than me for so many years and adopted their culture as my own. It was never a consideration among mountain people to dislike somebody because he has a differing opinion. The mountain way is the same as the old American way, that a man's politics is his own and a man's religion is his own. Democrats and republicans could sit around a wood stove in a country store spitting "backer" into tin cans, somebody telling about finding a bee hive in a white pine, "aint never seen narry bee hive in no white pine." The old people knew who was a democrat and who was a republican, same as they knew what church everybody went to. It was ok for a Regular Baptist to know a Primitive Baptist or even a Methodist. In the present day, I don't mean the attitude is unanimous to stay away from people with a different checklist of likes and preferences. However, I see enough of it to catch my attention after years and years of living among people who accepted others for who they were, not according to a checklist of tastes.

a r penck

 

I'm in no place to make any assessments of generations younger than mine. Up front, I confess I do not understand younger generations. American pop culture changes so fast, there is indeed a culture gap between generations, has been since ww2. The general culture that is American culture has been very much the same since ww2. It's time for another big change, a change like from before ww1 to after ww1. The before and after of both great wars was drastic. Another big war is brooding in the air. By the time it is over, the world as we know it will be a very different place. Twitter will be so far in the past it will be ancient, like books now. USA will continue to decline under systematic republican treason and the 21st Century will belong to Asia. America had its moment of greatness at the end of ww2, then squandered it right away. 9/11 had the whole world sympathetic with the Paper Tiger, the Great Satan, and that was squandered immediately. Racism holds American social progress back like the dumbest kids in class hold the class back. Racism is tattooed onto the American consciousness. It will change. The racists are mostly above a certain age. Whey they are all dead in a few generations, racism will have died with them. Maybe. That's kind of simplistic for such a complex matter, to think an end of racism is in sight. A surprising number of adults in USA believe the earth is flat. Let's just learn to live with racism and keep it under control. There are so many other human impulses we control to live peaceably in a world of others, racism can be controlled too. Many control it in themselves. It's possible.

 

a r penck

 

 

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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

 

 

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EVERYTHING WORKS OUT

 

     the home of my soul

I see signs at drug store, grocery store, around town about getting flu shots. Like everybody needs a flu shot. For several years, my adult life I'd not had flu shots. Flu came along every once in awhile. After several years of no flu, doctor tells me to get a flu shot or I'll get the flu. I wasn't so sure. I had the shot anyway. Paid for it. A few weeks later I was assaulted by the worst flu I'd ever had. It cost a great deal in medications to get over it. Next year I was told if I don't get the shot, I'll get the flu. Paid for a shot, then a few weeks later paid over $100 for medications to get over a horrible flu. I told the doctor the shot gives me the flu. He told me it does not do that. Next couple years I did not get the shot and did not get the flu. As far as I'm concerned, my experience constitutes a scientific study, an empirical examination, reasoned and rational. Last year a nurse congratulated me for not getting one. She said, "Hang in there." A few days ago I saw in news that 8 nurses at a medical university hospital in Nashville were fired for refusing to have the shot. Some gave religious reasons. My reasons are entirely practical. I don't want the flu. I wouldn't work for a place that required I have the shot. When it came to being told what to paint by a gallery owner, my response was I'd rather paint houses, the houses themselves. And did. Money is not a ring in my nose.

As far as I'm concerned, I know a flu shot will give me the flu the same as I know with less certainty I will not get the flu without the shot; it's maybe so / maybe not. With the shot it's a certainty, in my experience. Figure the odds. I like not having the flu and I like not having to pay $130 during lean winter months to be given the flu and then to get over it. When I don't get the flu, I don't have to spend my grocery money on financing some pharmaceutical CEO's Cayman Islands yacht. I object to that. I made a determination for myself years ago to be the change I want to see in the world. Be what I believe. When I came to realize that God indeed is, then I had to live accordingly. That does not mean go to church, wear polyester and never drink again. It means practicing love for the people around me, my "neighbors," the people in my life, the people I see in the course of a day, the people I think about. The best I can. It doesn't mean winning souls to the Lord, having a perfect Sunday school record, or never making a mistake. It means an intent in the heart, a guiding light. Mistakes are naturally made in a world of illusion. I trust church and preachers for spiritual guidance like I trust Ann Coulter to teach me history.

In the last months I've been looking at my life in a way I had never seen it before. It could not have been seen before. One, the first half of my life was lived in the Flatland, in city-mind, all my learning to then in city-mind interests. Half my life ago, I kind of bottomed out in that I saw I was going nowhere, had no forward momentum, no desire to join the world of career. I kind of went flat inside, like there was nothing to get up about. I'd been in the company of some pretty superficial people for a few years and that was nowhere. Like the Buddhist thing, nobody going nowhere. Then, in brief, I saw that God indeed is, convinced entirely to both my heart and mind. It was going to take me some time to get an understanding of love and get it opened in my heart. Love was shut down in me by age 10, thereabouts, if not several years before. It was several years in the making. Then at 10, shut down. Love wasn't a consideration in our house. We didn't do that. We went to church Sunday morning, Sunday night, Tuesday night Missionary Meeting, Wednesday night Prayer Meeting, Friday night Bible Study, and sometimes I'd have to go to Youth For Christ on Saturday nights. I hated it. No way around it. Get in the car and sit still.

Kids have no recourse. This is one reason I dread being a child again. Kids have no recourse. They learn to take what they get and that's all there is to it. I hated that time of life for having no recourse. Couldn't go to the police, to psychiatrists, to teachers, to anybody who would listen. Nobody would listen because it's a kid talking. Kids don't know what they're saying. And the grownups don't want to get involved with the parents, who are the problem, and they know it. But what can they do? Nothing. I wanted to be put into a foster home; it would feel like paradise. Probably it would not be paradise, but it was in my dream. What I'm looking at is the first half of my life had spots of love in it, but they went away as time went by and it never took up as a pattern in my life, didn't even know what it felt like. I learned what falling in heat felt like which eventually led to that place called nowhere. It really was a life that came to a dead end devoid of love inside. I had love coming to me from outside self that I didn't notice, because I didn't have it inside. It really can be described as darkness living without love. I don't mean without a love partner or a love interest. I mean without love inside oneself, love in one's own heart. I never learned that in all those years of church five times a week.

What I learned was, No, Don't, and You-Better-Not. I came to a stasis that kind of teaching leads to, like paralyzed from neck down. All I had of my own was my mind, which was utilized mostly in rebellion, resentment, hate, clinging jealously to my private self that nobody could have or take from me. I don't want to live like that again. I won't. It was the enactment of a particular horoscope. I think it had something to do with Saturn and Uranus conjunct my Sun in Taurus. I felt like they choked down my life spirit with a religious belief system that had no life in it. Kansas fundamentalism. There is no judgment in this world like fundamentalist judgment. This is why I find it amusing to see the fundamentalists taking to right wing politics, showing their hand out in the open, their hand of judgment, hate, intolerance, where it is seen for what it is instead of disguised inside the confines of the religion as the Word of God Sez. Since I found the spirit of God is love, I came out of the stasis in my life, wanted to work outdoors and live remotely. The opportunity came to live on a remote dirt road in the Blue Ridge Mountains of NC and work on a farm with some real life hillbillies, the real deal. The most beautiful people I'd ever known.

This was where the salt ran through the waist of the hour glass, the flow of my energy from a static belief system that formed my inner stasis and led me to dead end, to all the salt on the love side of the hourglass. I have found the home of my soul, the people of my soul, the mountains of my soul, and feel love inside myself in abundance. It directs my interractions with others and myself. I'm satisfied. If it took going through Kansas fundamentalism and rejecting it to get here, I'm all for it. Like becoming an alcoholic or junkie is the first step of the spiritual path for them that choose the path. Eventually, one must get over the addiction, which requires stepping onto the spiritual path. It's all to the good. Like yesterday, I repeated a phrase to myself reminding myself, Everything works out. I was a bit anxious, worrying. Then I took hold of my mind and said, Everything works out. I repeated that phrase to myself through much of the day, reminding mind the worry is agitation for no reason. I suppose when it gets down to what's real of what I have learned in this life time, this is it. I continue to live because things have worked out all along the way. To think that suddenly one day things are not going to work out is simply not practical.


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