BABY DOLL AND THE BULLDOG

vada, 3

Went to Vada's house Sunday to see the race on tv. I had not seen her in four weeks, maybe five. They returned day before yesterday from a week at Myrtle Beach, Vada looking like the Coppertone girl. Crystal said Vada spoke to everybody on the beach. Crystal's attention drifted and she found Vada talking with some people nearby, eating a cookie they'd given her. Everyone told Crystal Vada was the cutest thing there ever was. I said, "She is. They recognized it." Vada is a spirited child; life energy beams from her laughing or crying and every emotion in between. She cried several times today, not getting her way. She's pushing the envelope, stepping over boundaries, asserting herself. I picked up Baby Doll and said I wanted to play with Baby Doll. Vada snatched Baby Doll away and said, No! Another time I said I wanted to play with Baby Doll. No! A little later, I told her again I wanted to play with Baby Doll. OK. Dadu and I bent over in our chairs cracking up. This child has a natural-born charm. When she misbehaves and is spoken to about it, she can charm you into getting over it. I don't mean to imply other babies are not so cute. This is the baby I know in this time of my life. I walked in the front door upon arrival. Vada was standing beside the coffee table, looked at me in puzzlement, staring like she didn't quite know what to do. At the moment I didn't get it, but see it now that my hair has grown out and my chin has a goat beard since she saw me last. She's only known me with short hair looking like a retired cop. She stared like she was stuck in place. Dadu said, Aren't you going to say Hi to TJ? Vada ran to me, I picked her up and we hugged. I told her I love her. She held the hug for a long time, relaxed into it and I held her until she wanted down. It was an endearing moment, one of many with my real live baby doll.    

 

vada examines baby doll's toes

 

 Jeff Gordon won the race straight up and smoked a few thousand dollars of Goodyear tire rubber spinning black circles on the track. He made a lot of noise arousing the crowd to ecstatic cheers as loud as his roaring pipes. We watched golf awhile. Justin is a golfer. He is studying while he watches the pros hit the ball. I'd brought Melvin with me. He lives nearby in Whitehead, his truck isn't working well at the moment, inside a week he'll have a replacement. I went by and picked him up on the way to see the race. Vada loves Melvin like she loves me. I said to her when I put her down, Melvin's here. She ran to him, he picked her up and held her for a long time. He is round and roly-poly. He's a big teddy bear that hugs her in turn. Melvin's wife, Ellen, works at a daycare place. Melvin said when he picks her up after work, he goes early, sits on the floor and plays with the kids. The kids love him. Melvin is free enough inside himself to adore kids and they adore him back. I saw his other daughter, Hailey, 13, same age as Beth, before we left the house. She was wearing a tshirt that said, LIVE YOUR LIFE. I thought: the gospel in a fortune cookie. Later, when I took Melvin home, his girl, Beth, came running out the door as soon as he stepped out of the car. She jumped on him, gave him a big hug. She'd been away with a Girl Scout adventure for a week at the coast and returned while he was gone. She's a charming girl with fire red hair. He calls her Pumpkin. Melvin is somebody who becomes more interesting for me the more I know him. I've seen along the way there are people who seem interesting at first, but as you know them they diminish down to nothing. Others, who sometimes don't give any appearance that something is going on inside besides tv, turn out to be more and more interesting as time goes by. Every time I'm around Melvin I learn something new about him that blows my mind. He comes on like somebody who is neither here nor there, doesn't seek attention, comfortable in the back seat.

 

vada's little mermaid sunglasses from the beach

Justin, Melvin and I go to the basement to smoke cigarettes, or outside on the porch, to keep the house free of cigarette smell. Crystal would prefer her house not smell of cigarette. We respect her. Crystal, who does wedding photography, had a shoot on Sunday, which she often does, leaving Vada with Dadu, her baby name for daddy. Vada would play with Baby Doll nearby, sit on the laps of each one of us, attracted to our circle of attention, us sitting in the mancave corner laughing at funny stories we'd take turns telling. In a time when Justin took Vada upstairs and was gone for a spell, Melvin and I talked. High school came up and he said he had a good time all through high school. He said, "I was the mascot," explaining why he had privileges in school. I asked what he meant by mascot. My first thought was something like the San Diego chicken. He said, "I lettered five years in cheerleading." That one really took me by surprise. The team was the Bulldogs. He dressed up in a bulldog costume as part of the cheering squad. I did not see it coming. I lit up, wanted to hear more. Melvin is short and stocky; it wouldn't take much to make him into a bulldog. He said the other kids, the teachers, administration, the jocks, all thought he was the coolest guy in school. He said, "I didn't have any enemies." He had privileges such as freedom to skip class if he didn't want to go. His name those five years was Bulldog. Even the teachers called him Bulldog. Everybody called him Bulldog. He said he had a Nissan station wagon with big speakers in the back seat area, "You could hear me comin." The car had a foot-wide stripe of primer paint along both sides. A friend painted "Bulldog" in the primer stripe on the fender. He said, "My car was Bulldog too." 

 

vada's tongue

 

Melvin wears tshirts in this time of his life announcing he's proud to be a redneck, keeps a calendar on the kitchen wall of the tv show Duck Dynasty. Middle class people like to look down on the Duck Dynasty characters as obnoxious pigs, but in the working class they're comedy, like Larry the Cable Guy, Rodney Carrington and the other blue collar comics, who are really funny when you understand the culture's humor they appeal to. Many times in our mancave retreats Justin has put on Rodney Carrington cds for us to bend over laughing at. Not many of my middle class (more or less educated) friends could sit through more than two of Carrington's stories. I can watch Duck Dynasty with Justin and Melvin and laugh like crazy. To one part of my mind they're upper middle class actors making a lot of money from a successful gig, celebrities in a society that honors only celebrities. It worked for them. The other part of my mind thinks they're hilarious in a redneck humor way. I applaud them. I don't share redneck political mind, but it doesn't stop me from allowing them their own minds. Their show is a present day I Love Lucy, but funnier. They're playing bulldog for the rednecks. Middle class tends to look down on rednecks, finding them disgusting. I have redneck creds to some degree, in that I appreciate the people, their lives, their culture, their humor, their absence of pretentions especially. It's the rarity of pretention in the working class that appeals to me in a big way, makes me prefer the company of the working class. Some of it is a bit beyond my reach, like there is a criminal element, as in every culture of people living in poverty or on the borderline. I'm not particularly attracted to the criminal aspect. It puts a lot of them in prison, makes them angry people who lose faith in the society they live in, making them all the angrier. Lots of anger issues in the working class. I feel it, I live it, I understand it. I appreciate them. I have learned to regard people I know who have been in prison with the highest respect. Few I know believe I respect them, because nobody else does. For that, I respect them all the more.

 

vada's defiance

 

 

*

 

 

MY LIFE IN TWO WORLDS

sol lewitt

Two rainy days. It's a light sprinkle at this moment. It comes and goes. An hour or so ago, I heard big thunder. I don't know that I've ever heard thunder in January. If I recall correctly, in the old way, you mark the date on the calendar when it thunders in February, and it will be the day in May of the last frost. We're not even half way into January yet, and it's thundering. My guess is that would indicate warm weather coming on sooner than usual. However, the weather patterns have changed so much over the last half century the old ways of weather prediction have changed. Fogs in August used to tell when it would snow in the winter. The woolyworm as prediction of winter I'm fairly certain came from outsiders. It is too uncertain and it is so obviously not a reliable prediction device that mountain people would never have gone by woolyworms. I asked old man Tom Pruitt about it when he was up in his 70s. He said, "Aint nothin to it." Even though I doubt significance now of thunders in February, it still got my attention hearing thunder in January, even before the middle of January. That is way off from the old pattern. I will happily welcome an early summer, though it bothers me to some extent imagining a long hot summer. When forest fires start, then it gets your attention. Since I've been in the mountains, the summer forest fires have been mostly localized the other side of the Parkway in national forest land. Helicopters carry big tarps full of water they pick up at farm lakes to dump on the fire. My apprehension is that as summers grow hotter, which they have steadily done throughout my time here, the fires will be crossing the Parkway. My house would burn to the ground before fire trucks arrived. The house is all wood sawmilled in the 1920s.

 

sol lewitt

 

Too many people around me hesitate to mention anything about global warming, because republicans deny it. I don't care what they deny. That's their problem. I see it is an obvious fact from year to year. I understand the process of science well enough to tell the difference between somebody who knows what he's talking about and a politician whose allegiance is to oil corporations and the Bank, only. I don't care if they see financial advantage for themselves and deny the obvious for the sake of their own bank accounts. They can think whatever they think, which they do. I don't have to hold myself back from seeing the obvious, because the people in our government who hate the American people want us to believe what only half the population is dumb enough to believe, remembering half the people are below average, the bell curve. Because somebody tells me I'm not afraid enough of Satan, doesn't mean my knees will tremble when I hear the name Christendom has given the ego. I'm not afraid of ego. Ego is our ballast. It keeps us afloat. It needs controlling and training, requires attention, but not fear. We go from saying MINE to learning to share, to eventually learning altruism in some cases. The spiritual path amounts to awareness of the ego, learning to control it, which happens in varying degrees from individual to individual. Up to age 30 is the time of ego development, which is essential to living in this world. From there on, it's a matter of controlling and gradual diminishment of ego, by life experience if nothing else. We learn that my I and somebody else's I are both centers of the universe. We have 7 billion plus centers of the universe on earth. What does that do to me as center of the universe? Makes me one of many, and ultimately makes us all one.

 

sol lewitt

 

I can't help it that some people believe so much in television they restrict themselves to language permissible on tv. Political correctness is nothing but censoring oneself and others by the television standard. It has nothing to do with decency or morality. PC amounts to boutique activism, a pretense, like being an actor. I don't provoke people who talk correctness, believing they mean well and aren't able to see themselves objectively. I observe PC in the coffee shop for the convenience of keeping the priestesses of television-speak out of my face. I don't need that badly to prove I'm a liberal. Sounding like television is not liberal. It's another form of parrotry. I figure if somebody believes they have the right to correct my speech according to television, I have the right to speak as I please. I grew up in "the land of the free" where "freedom of speech" was sacred. It's a hard adjustment to live in a world where adults want to be as conformist as in high school and want me to give up my freedom of speech to conform to their idea of being television. Like with global warming, my attitude is go ahead and restrict your own speech and everybody else's you're able to, but leave me out of it. That's when I drop the N-bomb, the F-bomb, the MF-bomb, and/or the GD-bomb as announcement that I am I, not a reflection of television. The very most vast majority of American population believes in television first. I live in a world of people who believe television. I don't. I don't want to correct them and don't want to be corrected. When I find somebody is committed to PC, they fade away before my eyes due to disappointment. Still, I don't really hold it against them, because this is television world I live in, and they're just doing what they believe they're supposed to do. I believe it is television that led us by the nose into police state and I am not denying my American freedom of speech for somebody who believes television is sacred. If you don't believe tv is sacred, stop watching it for a month.

 

 

sol lewitt

 

PC is never an issue in the working class. In fact, it has become a department of working class (redneck) humor to break all the PC rules. In the company of my redneck friends much of my laughter when we're laughing at a particular incorrectness is about the cultural divide between working class and middle (management) class. Their management status when they move to the mountains is behind the middle-class belief they have to tell working class people how to act right. The attitude in the working class is you don't tell me what to do unless you're paying. Management class takes it for insolence. I have learned here that the middle class looks down on the working class the same as they look down on black people. They talk PC, but they don't act it out. I've told my friend Justin when he was regretting not having the chance to go to college that this is not a time for college. As economy gets worse, the middle class people here who don't know how to do anything but tell other people what to do will need your help. You know how to do things, like plumbing, electrical work, carpentry, roofing, cutting firewood, hunting. Everything he does, he does well. I tell him that he will be ok when times are tough, because he's good at doing practical things middle class people know nothing about. Like Justin knows everything that happens to the water when it goes down the drain in the kitchen sink. For a large number of the middle class people, the drain is the end of it. A problem I have with the working class is the disdain for education. A problem I have with middle class is the disdain for common sense. I believe both are essential. I realized when I finished college I'd lost my common sense. A large part of my motivation to live rurally by manual labor was to get my common sense back. To live with one foot in one world and one foot in the other can be incredibly confusing at times, but I couldn't live any other way. I like shifting back and forth from culture to culture. It provides a great deal of understanding of what it means to be a true human being. I don't know that I'm there yet, but like Pinocchio, I keep on a-keepin on.  

 

sol lewitt himself

 

 

*

 

WHITE TAIL HUNTER

sequatchie valley, tennessee, music

I've been gently driven to defensive feeling for my friends, my neighbors, my people over the last few days. Simultaneously, the defensive feeling turns to offensive feeling, a shoot the bird kind of feeling. Since I was told the white middle class is more to my benefit than the white working class, I still laugh at that. All day every day I laugh at it. It has provided cheery, happy feelings. I want to embrace all my hillbilly / redneck friends, because the last couple days have brought them to the front of my mind where I see how deeply and how broadly I appreciate them in my heart. Last night I went to the Blue Ridge Music Center to hear music of eastern and central Tennessee. It served as I hoped it would. I dove into the music and let it flow into my heart, the place where mountain music is heard. My ancestors are of the Sequatchie Valley at Ninemile, sixty or so miles north of Chattanooga. A musician played from the Sequatchie Valley, Joseph Decosimo (above, fiddle). I have an ongoing interest in finding old-time music of that region. Hearing the style of fiddling and songs from the region of my people, from grandfather to great-great-great-great, pulled me further into the music than usual. I was with my white middle class friends from Atlanta giving them a mountain music experience, and one particular to what I think of as my homeplace. Air Bellows is the home of my soul. Ninemile is the homeplace of my heritage. The music resonated way down deep.

 

janet birchfield

The music brought to my heart why I love the working people of these mountains. I spent the entire day today with my friends, Justin and his kids, Landon 5, Vada 2. He wanted to talk to somebody about a bow he was wanting to look at with buying in mind. I went along for the ride. Justin is the same as my brother and the kids are the same as my brother's kids. I love them like crazy and they love me the same. I have the same loving grandpa relationship with Justin's kids as I had with Justin when he was a kid. These are the people of my heart. The kids were fun to ride with. I kept them entertained merely by paying attention to them, including them. When I walk in the door and see Landon at 5, I see Justin at 5. Malissie Pruitt, wife of Elder Millard Pruitt, told me in her kitchen in the early 1980s in conversation, Be good to a child and you'll have a friend for life. It was country wisdom, hillbilly wisdom. I cared deeply for Justin, who he is, as a child, as a teenager, during his wild-thang spell, and am happy to the soul that he found the woman put on this earth for him, and he for her. I feel like I can die satisfied that Justin has a good life. He will have a good life even when the bottom drops out of the economy, because he knows how to get things done. Crystal, too, is able to get things done. Both are workers. They are resourceful unto an easy transition to self-sufficient if it comes to that. When the bottom falls out, they'll be helping the people that can't handle it.

caught fish

Back at the house, one of Justin's hunting / fishing / archery friends came by for what reason I don't remember. When they talk buying and selling back and forth I don't pay attention. The radio was on the 70s-80s rock station; I sat and grooved to Van Halen with David Lee Roth singing Dancing In The Streets. He made that song his own. Golden Earring, Radar Love, Led Zeppelin, I forget the title. Jimmy Page tearing up his guitar, John Bonham going off into orbit with his drums. I'd seen Golden Earring and Van Halen in concert, and Led Zeppelin in a concert film on the big screen and on video. Each song brought back concert moments. I didn't need any attention. I was in place. They went outside to shoot a new bow to feel its pull-back and look through the site. I said, y'all have a ball, on their way out the door. I stayed put and listened to this kinda serendipitous flow of music like it was specifically for me at this moment. Selections from the records I had from that time and concerts seen. Back inside, they sat down to have a cigarette and talk. We were in the basement, the man-cave corner among the table saws, mitre saws, planer, work tables, tool shelves, two dart boards, two deer heads with a robin-hooded arrow lying horizontal across each rack. Both these guys can shoot arrows like that. When they hunt, they don't want the deer to run off and die. They want it to drop straight down. One of their friends had won a new bow in a tournament earlier in the day.

 

 

thunder road

I enjoy hearing them talk about the tournaments. I enjoy hearing them talk about hunting experiences. When the deer runs off, the hunter tracks it down. Next, you drag it to your truck. This is where 4-wheelers are handy. You may not be able to get all the way to where the deer is, but you can get closer than with the truck. It involves dragging the corpse (they're heavy) through the woods, where the ground is never level except as one of 90 degrees of constantly changing possibility. For me, they are able to do things I never learned when young and never wanted to learn later. I have my own reasons in my own particular relationship with my higher self, the part of mind that tells the lower part that when a coon darts in front of me on the road, it's the same as a child in my way of seeing. A deer standing beside the road at night, I will stop for, because they don't know what to do. I know what to do, slow down to a stop when necessary. For me, it's a matter of touching the brake pedal. For the deer it is bewildering and often they think they can dart across in time when it's too late. I don't want to hurt a deer that has no health care when I have control of the situation by moving my foot from one pedal to the other. No more than that. I regard the deer with the same loving regard I have for the children I know.

mother and child

Sometimes it is difficult for me to hear my hunting friends talk about the really nasty shit of cutting off their heads, throwing the testicals to the dog. They talk about their kills with much interest. They talk about things important to them, something that involves hyper skill. These guys are good at everything they do like that. They all have dozens of antlers hanging up somewhere in and around their houses. Hanging under the deck is a good place. A place where mice can't get to them. I listen to these guys with the same awe as if they were published academics talking about water imagery in Joyce's Ulysses. These guys have knowledge that is continually growing. The music of hunting. I believe hunting is the way of what we call the natural world. It's how things go on earth. I believe hunting is a respectable practice, even spiritual. They are artists with their skill, same, in my way of seeing, as a musician. Every release of the bow string tunes them in one step closer. They study their bows, very particular about their bows. I've watched them practice, standing back behind where they are shooting, not to be in the way, nor a distraction. Though the only way you could be in their way would be to step into the invisible laser beam line of fire the arrow travels. The arrows their bows release are gravity defying. They go straight to the target like a bullet, so fast I can't see them. I hear the thunk on the target and see the fletching of the arrow in the center of the target. Every one of them tears up the center of  a new target.

the fast track

They don't like to tear up their arrows, because they're particular about the arrows too. A good arrow is several dollars. To a working man, that's something you're aware of. Each one of them has robin-hooded arrows resting in antlers on the walls at home. It's not just that they have done it so often, they can do it when they want to. It's not chance. They don't even keep the robin-hooded arrows anymore. I like to watch the hunting channel with them. I like watching NASCAR races with them. I like going to races with them and especially like that they are living human beings who know each other by their character, not by their status, position or show of money. They know each other too well to try to impress each other. They get excited telling about a fish caught. These are people so full of the living spirit, without being religious, they keep my mind and spirit refreshed. They love their wives and kids deeply unto would die for, go to prison for, whatever it takes. They have really neat kids too. The boys will grow up like their daddies wearing cammo tshirts that say White Tail Hunter, and be good men of true human character. Their kids grow up loving their daddies and mamas unto would die for, too. I feel best among people unafraid to be straight-on honest who they are without the 20-second delay for bleeps. These guys are the present generation of their hillbilly heritage. They carry many of the qualities of their great grandparents. I am happy in the soul to have lived the second half of my life among people of the Appalachian Mountains. I can see in hindsight I was set down here in a schoolhouse to spend the rest of my life learning how to live in the light among people who are already there.

shit happens

 

 

 

*

REDNECKS IN AMERICA

kyle busch after winning bristol


The M&M car won the Bristol race yesterday. It was a good run Kyle Busch made. He stayed up front most of the race and missed the multiple wrecks that happened behind him. Busch ran against Jimmy Johnson and Carl Edwards. The three of them  raced all-out the last 30+ laps. It was a 500 lap race. It was a good race from start to finish. Not many wrecks, and they weren't bad, just inconveniences good for pit stops. I found the above picture at a website, taken after Kyle Busch had made a show of smoking his tires for the crowd, smoking them good, a major cloud of pollution. If anybody politically correct ever went to one of these races, he'd be in continuous shock. The stadium becomes a bowl that holds the exhaust and rubber molecules from the tires. You can see it like an upside down bowl, like the bowl of night, visible pollution that is a bit noxious to breathe. But that's part of it. Rebellion. By God, you wanna see some pollution, I'll show it to ya. The roar is pure rock and roll, maybe even louder than an Aerosmith concert.



Outdoor activities are cranking up, like the car races. Not that sitting in a big stadium is an activity. But walking to it from where you have to park and walking back to the pickup is a major activity. Good exercise. I have been to one of the races, the CocaCola 500 outside Charlotte. The experience sitting in one of those bowls is similar to a rock concert. The sound is so loud it is thrilling. On the tv now the announcers pause for a minute or so and let you turn the volume up to hear the sound of the track. That is thrilling too. Women don't think much of it, but the guys love it. The car races are about as redneck a thing as you're going to find on tv. I've been griping along the way about television paying no mind to the working people. One day last week I sat before Country Music Television, CMT, 4 hours. Saw 2 redneck weddings and one redneck family reuniting--a daughter in a big working class family had got a high opinion of herself, married UP, drove a Cadillac SUV and admitted openly she felt like she was better than them. She was sentenced to I think 4 days and nights camping with the whole family. By the end of the experience, she broke through her stuck-up shell and became one of them again.



The weddings were berserk. These were casual documentaries an hour long apiece, of the preparations for the wedding, one with a fleet of tractors, obviously let to CMT by Farmall, them all being brand new tractors, and nobody in the cast able to afford even one. For the advertising. Both the wedding films were hilarious. Everybody proud to be a redneck. I had no idea such as that was going on. I think of the reactions of middle class people concerning the documentary, The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia, like the Whites are the exception out there all by themselves. They were rednecks and rednecks are everywhere. They are the working class people, the people who quit school or barely made it through and didn't go to college. Secretly, they're people without hope. They're not bad people. A lot of them go to prison, but in America you don't got to prison any more for being bad. You go to prison for trying to make a living by hook or by crook when you're shut out from a respectable job that pays a wage you can live on. The poor go to prison. Unless you're like Bernie Madoff and pist everybody off.



I like my redneck friends the same as my non-redneck friends, who happen to be college educated, as it's college that is the line where redneck stops. Of rednecks I've known, I haven't found but a few that are what you'd call dumb. Just because somebody couldn't afford circumstances to go to college doesn't say anything about their minds. I don't know anybody who hasn't been to college who couldn't make it if they grew up middle class wearing Harvard sweatshirts when they were 10. I was looking at results of archery competitions in SW Virginia on a website a little bit ago. There are an awful lot of names of people who did some really good shooting. I doubt any of them went to college. A quotation I found last week of Oscar Wilde: Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.  Rednecks I know have a great deal of knowledge of that which cannot be taught.



This is where I've come to draw the line between the working class culture and middle class culture, where even gossip circles don't intersect, that the knowledge in the working class is that which cannot be taught. The middle class is characterized by knowledge that can be taught. I appreciate both ways of knowing. When I start to say I prefer one to the other, it comes to mind immediately that it is not so. I don't. It is two different ways of thinking. I think both ways. I appreciate both such that I see them halves of a whole. Rednecks are rough and rowdy because the work they do doesn't afford them a BMW sportscar and a Hummer for the old lady, unless they're dealing drugs on the side, or maybe I should say working on the side. Rednecks only get to work at country clubs. Sometimes the exception happens and it's Beverly Hillbillies redux. What I'm getting at is we're all just people born into every kind of circumstance there is from the slums around the Mexico City dump to the Houston Country Club. The whole rainbow of possibilities in between.



By this time in my life I'm seeing that somebody with a brilliant mind can be born into any social circumstance, the same as with a block of wood for a mind can be born to any circumstance. Whatever our social circumstance we came up in, it's up to us individually to determine the nature of our lives in whatever pool we're swimming in. Too many people who had nothing going for them have come along and made a productive life. Too many people have started out priveleged and let it all drift away. We get for ourselves what we want, even when we live in a slum. It's the inner part that lives our real lives among the people we live among, whoever they are. It doesn't matter if they're rich and decadent or work hard for very little. Who we are is the person inside who sees through our eyes, hears through the ears, thinks by our accumulated experience.



What good or ill comes to us will be the same as the good or ill we act out individually. Our lives are a singular experience in place and time. It's not about how comfortable is the ride, but how we feel about ourselves down in that little cell in the heart where we keep our true self safe from attacks from the outside. The only way to expand out of the tiny cell is to allow vulnerability. Tough decision. I'd just as soon hang on to not being too vulnerable. I've come to believe that to really be able to walk along one's spiritual path guided by the Master, we have to let ourselves be vulnerable sometimes, and that's not so easy for anybody. I remember when I was beginning to allow my vulnerabilities out of the box, there weren't any consequesnces. None of them got hurt. And I felt relaxed about my own soft spots. Eventually it comes to where it's no big deal at all. I'm not there yet and don't know that I know anybody who is. We're all wherever we are along our individual spiritual paths, even when we're not aware that we're on a path. Like in the old mountain hymn, some paths lead to destruction, and some to the pearly gates. I think the pearly gates is clarity within, our little self set free from the cell, free and out in the light above the trees. Free bird.



*