IGNORE THE RIDICULOUS

 

beside waterfall road

 

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

 

beside waterfall road

 

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

 

beside waterfall road

 

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

 

beside waterfall road

 

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

 

beside waterfall road

photos by tj worthington

 

 

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GRANDMOTHER VISITS IN THUNDER SHOWER

The rain, as we say around here, is just getting it, though the way it's spoken, is jist a-gittin it, sounds better, has momentum, iambic emphases. If it were "just getting it," it would not be a sayin' used by 'bout ever-body for its flat tone. "Jist a-gittin it" means it is raining hard, lightning, thunder, a thunder shower, not a thunder storm. I associate storms with wind. This is a straight down rain, lightning and loud thunder. Lightning rumbles in the distance as the cloud passes through. I felt no danger from the lightning, traced it by sound moving from west to east a few miles north of the house. It sounded like it was following the air flow over Wilkes Gap that follows highway 18. The rain has ended now. It is a day of clouds in motion. Rain fell earlier, cleared up and sun came out. Sun may be back after this rain. I like this kind of rain. Fewer people use the old expressions every year. Younger generations grew up on school grammar and television. The old-time grammar don't sound right no more. My grandmother spoke the old way. I was discouraged from saying aint, and them for those, by mother who did not want her kid sounding like a hick, especially her mother-in-law. She, in her family, was the first generation not to grow up on a farm. First generation city girl growing up in the Twenties and Thirties. Home influence and school influence had me believing city life was the only valid existence, until I learned I'd jist-a-soon go with the country people.  

I thought of grandmother, Christina (Tina) Marie, the sanest one in the family. I don't think anybody liked her, except me. She was head-strong, opinionated, gossipy, had a way of talking about people I had to train out of self when I went on to live in the world. It truly is an unbecoming trait. Having purged self of such talk, it sounds awkward and odd when I hear someone talking down about others. I expect she got it from her mother. It's a kind of smugness about self from a higher station than others. Ego. I learned after growing up, my mother didn't like her at all. She probably rued her mother-in-law's influence on the kid. The last time I saw mother, I said once in conversation my grandmother "was the most important person in my life." I don't know what she made of it. She didn't volunteer an opinion, nor did I ask. It was something I realized after living in the mountains most of my adult life, grandmother's influence on who I am is extensive. She was philosophically minded, which she passed to me and I appreciate. She taught me practical, everyday life morality. Church and home morality amounted to, no, don't, and you-better-not. No explanation of why, just punishment. The preacher sez. Grandmother taught me the why behind moral behavior. She was a great teacher for a lonely kid whose destiny was to go into the wilderness in search of the way of the spirit. 

Her family had moved to Kansas about forty years before she was born. She had several brothers and sisters grown and gone before she was born, and she had a younger sister, Aunt Ciller. Two of her brothers were fiddlers and one of them is said to have traded horses with Sitting Bull. She was the one to tell me, so I trust it. Her parents went to Kansas from eastern Kentucky, Pulaski County. They grew up in mountain culture, carried it with them in their home. I can tell, because their girl grew up a hillbilly. I visited some fourth cousins in Perry, Kansas, where she lived before getting married and moving to the city. Perry was always home. I was told very cautiously by one of the cousins that nobody liked her. It was ok. I assured him I anticipated it. None of her kids liked her, either. They only tolerated her. Evidently, she was a mean mother, ill-natured with a wicked tongue. I told them my experience with her was grandmother. She knew I wasn't getting any training at home, and I believe she took it upon herself to train this child, teach it a thing or two, like no rubber-necking in church and how to take care of birds, including chickens. Taught me how to transplant an iris, day lily, anything, and it live. She taught me appreciation for the plant world. We worked puzzles together. I listened to Grand Ole Opry with her. 

When my role is called up yonder, she's the first one I want to meet. I want to say to her, "I finally got it." Meaning, I finally got the music she liked, old-time fiddle & banjo music and the Carter Family. I watched Kate Smith with grandmother, who was shaped something like Kate Smith. We both loved to hear her sing, When the moon comes over the mountain. I loved the song as much as grandmother did. Watched Lawrence Welk with her on her seven inch tv and thought it wonderful, him with his exotic foreign accent and accordion, guests that sang so good. And the kid discovered rock n roll. There was the time the kid was nutty over Teresa Brewer's new song, Jambalaya, or something like that. I showed grandmother a picture of Teresa Brewer. She said, "Her face looks like a cat's ass." I didn't agree, but never saw the picture again without seeing a cat's ass. She let me see Elvis on the Ed Sullivan show on her tiny tv. It was better than nothing. I could get up close, wouldn't be in her way. The kid was deeply grateful she let me watch Elvis on her tv. I've wondered who she is now, have we met? I've never felt it. She may have chosen to be one of her great-grandkids I've never met, or not. I've enjoyed this visit with grandmother, remembering her so closely. I thank the rain shower for bringing her.  

photos by tj worthington

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DECIPHERING DESTINY

karl horst hodicke

Looking back at how and why I came to where I am, living in solitude in Blue Ridge Mountains, specifically the central Blue Ridge, it looks like divine destiny from forty years after. Yet, at the time, I only knew place as rural. It felt more like stepping into the unknown than some high sounding word like destiny, like I know what destiny means. Bob Dylan defined destiny as, briefly, what one already knows about oneself. Whatever that means. I feel like it gives me something to go by, a place to start looking. From my own point of view it was arbitrary as spinning a quarter on a tabletop and betting on which side turns up. I knew woods were plentiful and the people were old-timey. Purpose, manual labor on a farm as caretaker, somebody who had never cut down a tree or driven a tractor. I learned fast. Every fall I had to cut firewood for four houses through the winter. That's a lot of wood. I only cut dead trees, of which there are plenty. We seldom think about trees growing old and dying, but they do. Fallen tree trunks lie everywhere in the forest in varied phases of decay. Some will stand for decades before they fall. I have actually witnessed two locust trees fall over. Each one I just happened to glance at movement that caught my eye in the near distance and it turned out to be a locust tree on its way down. I say, "actually," for it being so rare a thing to see, like witnessing a deer give birth, which I've seen once.

karl horst hodicke

The top of the list of the unforeseen is that I choose to stay here unto my last day. To have been told any time during the first ten years that I'd be here for life, I'd have felt like it was a prison sentence. Right away, it felt like home, familiar in ways I could not make out why. The first familiar was everyone talked like my grandmother Worthington, who grew up in Kansas. I wrote it off to a universally American rural accent. That was as far as I could get making out how it was familiar. The people I met along the way were natured like my grandmother, philosophically minded. I don't mean philosophical like resignation, but thought about questions they had, worked things out reasonably and morally in their minds. My friend Justin is a good example of the old-time mountain way of thinking. He has a conundrum, he goes fishing, works it out in his mind. Last year he had such a conundrum he asked Crystal to allow him to be off to himself a couple of days. He slept in his sleeping bag in the deer blind, stayed to himself, went fishing. By the third day, decision made, he was fresh and ready to go, the burden that had grown onto his back fallen away. Justin's practical sense of morality blows my mind the times I've seen it in action. In this I see him carrying the heart of the mountain way of life as it's fading fast by generations. It was not intimidated into him by church, but worked out in practical everyday life with a philosophical mind. I've seen the same reasoning in the people gone now of the old culture, Jr Maxwell in particular. They had active philosophical minds. I don't mean they read Kant and Heidegger. Their reading amounted to the Bible, philosophy from front to back. 

karl horst hodicke

I got my philosophical-minded ways from grandmother. By the time of my parents' generation, the Bible was reduced to a book of rules you dare not question. My generation of people brought up by religionists value questioning. Many of us questioned our ways out of religion. I reached a place where I saw religion is fake, though was unable to see beyond religion, a projection of the human mind, associating religion with God. I had to let go of God. Soon after, I found that God indeed is, but not much like I got from religion, besides verses the preacher never interpreted to my satisfaction, like, God is love. In the church I came up in, God hated an awful lot and was the Supreme Judge. Of course, the white people were God's chosen, specifically American with English names. For many years I disliked my name because it was too much like a name on an office door. I had a problem with that until one day I realized my name does not make me, I make my name. My name means who I am. To some it means an arrogant asshole, to some it means a jackass whisperer, to some somewhat likable, to some a friend. The name appears to be destined for an office door, but not necessarily. I never had an inner need for my name on a door. What I wanted for myself, without knowing it, was to be where I am now. In childhood, my grandmother was my comfort. Also, with extensive woods nearby, the canopy of trees were my other comfort. With her and in the woods were the places I could be who I am.

karl horst hodicke

My relationships with adults amounted to obedience. With grandmother, it mattered that I was a sentient being who thought about things and wanted to learn. In the woods, I felt the closeness of the world of nature. I knew the renewing quality of a canopy of trees. I learned after about thirty years in the mountains that my grandmother's parents moved to Kansas from Pulaski County, Kentucky, southeastern Kentucky, explaining her accent and her philosophical mind. Even before realizing she was a transplanted hillbilly, I had referred to these mountains as grandmother's arms. The woods, the trees, I need like a bird needs feathers. This is my destiny, the place my parachute landed me, in a little empty house on a back road, a place I can walk among trees all day long and never be far from home. In my early years, people from Away would want me to drive a couple hours to someplace to go hiking in the mountains. I only went once out of curiosity and found the same as I have here someplace else. Never felt the need to go hiking. I step out the door, cross the road and I'm on a path in the woods beside a mountain stream. I've walked all over the woods of Air Bellows and some beyond with the dog of my life, Sadie. She came to me already named or I would have called her Louise. So she was Sadie Louise. My destiny turned out to be the places of my childhood I felt safe, the places I felt were real in an unreal world. How I found the place that is just right for who I am by a seeming throw of the die is beyond my ability to see.

karl horst hodicke

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