GRUMPY OLD BASTARD WAKES UP

romare bearden

This morning waking around 7, I turned over to go back to sleep. Lying there waiting for unconsciousness to take me away, my mind went to grumbling. I'd switch channels, think about something else, the grumbling continued. The gripe that ran from one concern to the next was seeing so much hate boiling throughout the country. Remembering in childhood what we used to call American individualism, gone now, given over to you're right or you're wrong. We've gone from individualism to a rage for sameness, from attempting to understand to zero-tolerance. It used to be important to "let your conscience be your guide." In today's world going by one's conscience is a direct line to prison. Cops used to just kill poor black people and say, he had a gun. Now they're killing poor white people too. "You're wrong," is something spoken freely now like it's good grammar. It wasn't long ago that saying, "you're wrong," was rudeness its very self, though it's how we talk now, meaning my opinion is valid, yours is not. I can't give over to it. I'm still locked down in individualism, rights of the individual to be cool or a geek, following conscience and allowing others their individual rights. It's like everyday life has become a true-and-false test. You're either right or wrong. Too, sameness has been every bit as much an American passion as individualism, two sides of the same coin. The time of individualism was in what I call the Acoustic Age, before electricity. In this time when all traditions are breaking down, evidently American individualism and reverence for conscience had to go as well. Historians will have a ball deciphering this time when, as usual, the politicians can only be counted on to lie to us, and the press is corporate-controlled propaganda telling us even bigger lies than the politicians.

 

 

I'd turn again, switching channels, telling self I pay too much attention to a world I have absolutely no say in; what I think and feel is of zero consequence. Vote? The Supreme Court put an end to belief in the validity of voting. The general falseness in human society, civilization, pulled me into resentment, wanting to do something about it. What? Cry? Growing up being taught in school and believing the individual is an important entity, it's hard to see the individual reduced to a marketing target and a product in one. I tell myself over and over, let it go. Some months ago I turned my back to news about politicians and started paying attention to the news among people. Killings. I see fascist-minded teabaggers strutting about, AKs slung over their shoulders, making noise about Constitutional rights, confronting cops and intimidating people around them. If they'd been black, the news would have been about the cops killing them, not just one or two cops, but an army of cops. When it's white boys: Zup bro? Seeing the hate in racism that has been hunkering down out of sight come to the surface, it's like seeing a volcano spewing steam just before it blows. This is the part that concerns me most. As for the people involved, I say let them do what they gotta do. They're the guys I avoided in school, bullies and the jerks that hung around with bullies. Morons is what I thought of them then, and I was not an A student. Didn't take much to see it. I don't like to use the word anymore, like idiot or stupid. When it comes to invalid sweeping generalizations, it's the apex of egoism to say such of another. Other people use the words, I don't care. The restriction is only for myself by way of my own reasonings that are not necessarily somebody else's.

 

 

I lay in the bed thinking, What are you doing to yourself? Paying attention to the swirling shit in a wastewater treatment plant. I was seeing my mind occupied with what's wrong, injustices, hate, killing, racism, and in one word, the false. From channel to channel I found resentments, judgments, dislikes aplenty. I started to see it was my own resentments and judgments that drew me to these pie slices of the news. I was drawing these details into my mind the way iron filings fly to a magnet. The theme went on relentlessly until I started getting it that I am bringing myself down. That somebody killed somebody in a Waffle House is over and done. Me thinking about it isn't going to do anything but mess up my mind with details so not relevant to my life they're only distraction. I hate it for a suburban American college student pepper-sprayed in the face by a cop for wanting a better world where this doesn't happen. But it's something every day. I find that caring for all the mournful causes around the globe and people being mean to each other takes me into my own dark side and holds me there in resentments, aggravation, disgust, suppressed rage: drama for drama's sake, something to do when there's nothing to do. I see movies and read to entertain my light side, and pay attention to news to entertain my dark side. I can call that balance, but it's out of balance. It appears the static of the distractions rules in my mind. I think of listening to the Charlotte FM station, 90.7, driving on the Parkway. When I pass a wall of mountain on the south side of the road, the Charlotte station is gone and a station from Blacksburg, Virginia, comes in with static. When the south side of the road opens again, the Charlotte station comes back, sometimes with the Blacksburg station in the static background. Both stations carry the whole range of static along the stretch north of here for several miles. I saw my mind this morning divided between two stations, neither one coming in well.

 

 

I turned over again wanting to stop that thinking and it wouldn't end. I thought, meditate or something, focus on empty mind, see one thing  and stay with it. I saw Jenny and Jack and the meadow glowing in sunlight. I felt love well up from heart into mind and flush it clean. Tears of joy welled up in my eyes. I let the donkeys stay in my mind for awhile and felt my heart glowing with a feeling similar to how it felt seeing Mongolian landscape and the people. It was love. I caught on that my innermost self has a love for Mongolia I was not consciously aware of, except for a deep longing when I see or hear of Mongolia. Eighties band Devo comes to mind: Mongoloid, he was a Mongoloid. Seeing Jenny's face draped over the fence chewing carrot got me going. I said, It's time to get up. I'm not going to lay here and cry over donkeys. Get up and go see them, rub their ears, enjoy them. I stepped into my shoes, went to the kitchen, filled a couple of cups with bird seed, took four carrots from the refrigerator and went out the door. The donkeys were standing at the gate looking at me. I said, "Hey, Donkey Jen. Hey, Donkey Jack." They watched me go to the two birdfeeders. When I started toward them, both went to squealing like they do going into a bray, Jenny with her head over the fence and Jack pacing back and forth with his head down. My heart welled up and I felt a wave of tremendous happiness handing each one a chunk of carrot. I talked to them like usual. Jack likes for me to call him friend. Jenny likes it when I call her beautiful donkey. They understand. I told myself if I can turn down the electro-magnetic attraction to the false, to that which has no bearing on my life in any way except to wreck my mind, it would really be to my benefit. Don't have to do it all at once. Just turn it down and keep on turning it down. Withdraw further from that mind. What's left when it goes? Love, a meadow in sunlight.

 

jack and jenny

 

 

*

 

HORSES AND MONGOLIA

cave drawing of mongolian horse

Saw a movie earlier today, The Horse Boy, nonfiction documentary; camera follows a couple and their autistic boy 4 years old. They had sought and found help, but nothing worked until the child discovered a horse. They found he liked horses and any other animal. The boy's father, Rupert Isaacson, had lived among the Kalahari of the western South African desert and Namibia. His book, The Healing Land, is a study of their shamanic healing. Later, with the boy, he learned about shamans in Mongolia having to do with horses. He took a plane with wife and child to Ulaanbaatar, surprised to find the city in post-Soviet depression. They found the man who would take them into the grasslands and the mountains. The first shaman they encountered helped the boy and sent him to another shaman among the Reindeer People of northern Mongolia, one known around as the shaman with the most power. They made it to the shaman after a two-day horseback ride over rugged mountain trails. The child had already begun socializing with other kids. He'd never played with other kids. The man who must have been their hired guide had a son the same age who went with them because the autistic boy had been healed by the first shaman of his inability to function with other kids and, for the first time, found a playmate. The shaman of the Reindeer People brought the child around. The film was a hand-held camera quest to Mongolia into the remote regions where shamans continue to dwell. The story was good, the people interesting, but it was Mongolian faces and landscape that held my interest foremost, the horses with tails almost to the ground, horses about the size of a donkey. I felt drawn to Mongolia. I watched the landscapes as if I were in them. Every time I see pictures of Mongolia, I look deeply into them imagining myself there, wanting to see all the way around, wanting to be riding a Mongolian horse, speaking the Mongol language with the people around me. In short, I want to be there.

 

mongolian steppe

 

Tibet might be the only other place I feel drawn into when I see pictures or films of Tibetan life. I look at Tibetan landscape with a similar longing to be there. Movies and documentaries of Tibet pull me into them like this film today, wanting to be there to see and smell the way of life, be a part of it. Probably the b&w movie, Lost Horizon, I saw on tv in childhood kicked off my interest in Tibet. Reading Lobsang Rampa's The Third Eye soon after high school took me there. Interest in Mongolia came about by way of a stamp collection made from packages of stamps advertised on the backs of comic books for fifty cents. My favorites were the Mongolian stamps. I think they used Mongol stamps for filler because so few people wanted them, but I loved them. I would sit in my room studying the stamps and wonder about Mongolia. I knew where both Mongolia and Tibet were on my tin spinning globe. I'd lie in bed at night before sleep imagining Tibet about as far from Kansas City as could be, completely on the other side of the globe. That was where I wanted to be, someplace as far away as possible and remote, days to get there by donkey or on foot. The only problem I had with running away to a Tibetan monastery was intuitive knowing that I had much ahead I wanted to participate in that didn't include meditating all the time. I wanted to live my life, not bury myself at the beginning. I had an intuitive feeling in the early years that the spiritual path is best lived in the world of everyday life, whatever one's circumstances. I wanted to live my life spiritually, but we didn't know that word in the 1950s. Then, it was religion. Religion let me down; so I said, Screw it all, and set about trying to figure out how to live in this world. There came a time that what I got of it I did not want. I came to the mountains to try to figure out how to live in the world but not of the world. Not for religious reasons by any means, but matters of the spirit. Most likely it was my karma to be born into a religious system that could give me a good biblical foundation, then spit me out.

 

mongolian horsemen

 

I was feeling my heart pull me into the Mongolian landscape and the Mongol people, beautiful faces. I like their quiet. I feel more at home there, it seemed like, than I feel here. I noticed myself drawn to the people as my people, the people I longed to be among this lifetime and it didn't happen. The horses pulled me to them like horses never do. I think horses are beautiful, would rather ride a horse than a car, though care nothing about riding one in this civilization where having a horse is like having a boat, a hole in the water you throw money in. I have no longing feeling toward horses. I have a feeling when I look out the window and see the donkeys similar to seeing the Mongol horses, a feeling in the heart, wanting to jump on one's back and ride. I watched the horses closely. They are small horses, powerful horses. They're like donkeys with horse heads and long horse tails. The culture of the people interests me watching them interact in the film. I wonder what they are like to know individually. They favor somewhat the Eskimo of the Arctic. It was people from that part of the world that crossed the Bering Strait 15,000 years ago. A few years ago, reading Jiang Rong's Wolf Totem took me into Mongolia. Jiang Rong was a Chinese college student who was sent to work in Mongolia when he graduated. It engaged me from first page to last. It was rough living and I wanted to be there. Later, I found a biography of Genghis Khan that is another of my favorite reads. He is the Founding Father of the country Mongolia. Before, it was bands of warlords perpetually at war with each other. Genghis Khan brought them together as a nation and gave them a set of laws. We tend to think of his name synonymous with genocidal warlord. Like King David. If King David was God's favorite, then Genghis Khan must have been another of God's favorites. He was truly a great man. Coleridge's Kubla Khan was his grandson. Genghis was a serious challenge as a warrior, too. I've seen two films of his life; one, a Japanese production in Japanese medieval outfits and speaking in Japanese. It was a good film. Something like doing Shakespeare in modern dress. The other was called MONGOL, a German production using Mongols in the cast, attempting to be as true to the place and time as possible, a close biographical rendering and a beautifully made film.

 

genghis khan in the film mongol 

 

In a dream I took for a past-life experience, I was a hunter and warrior, sent with a friend, another hunter and warrior, to slip across the border into China and appeal for peace to some high official. We did not return. In a regression I saw self in a Mongol lifetime on horseback, a time of severe famine. I am satisfied that I've had several lifetimes in Mongolia. The feeling that was pulling my heart today, seeing the landscapes, the horses, the people, it feels like my soul, most innermost self, is partial to my Mongol lifetimes. It was a feeling of home. I lived the experience with the father of the boy in his interactions with the country people who rode horses and kept herds of radiantly beautiful Mongolian horses. It was noted in the film that the Mongols were the first people on earth to ride horses. Their culture all the way along, as far back as the beginnings of Western Europe, has been in relation to horses. I believe they have absorbed by such close association some equine behavior into their own. It's like Mongolian culture is, or used to be, one with the horse. Something like American Plains Indians, the Lakota, Cheyenne, Comanche, and the others along buffalo grazing grounds. I do feel like my soul has a longing for Mongolia. I've read a bit about its history and every time I see a picture of Mongolian landscape and people I dive into it. It's a frustrated longing for something that is not to be this time. This time I came to America in its moment as Champion of the World to see it squander its great good fortune throughout my lifetime, the Age of TV, and watch it split down the middle into civil war intolerance driven by a popular venality from the dark side hypocritically calling itself Christian. The steppes of Mongolia and the poverty of a post-Soviet economy look like Shangri-La from here.  

 

kubla khan on the black horse

 

*

 

DONKEY JENNY'S HANDS-ON DAY

 

zola and daisy (jenny)

 

Today was Jenny's reunion with her human friend before me, Zola Weatherman, from below the mountain around Traphill. I'd been wanting to get in touch with her for several months. Jenny has been with me seven months. Her grief passed after six months, just like in a human. I saw Jenny's sorrow the first several months was deep. As soon as Jenny's grief passed, after six months of living with Donkey Jack, she fell in love and gave Jack her Alpha status. I did not see that coming. Only because I don't know donkeys well enough yet. It was Justin who contacted Zola by cell phone from an internet ad selling a Bethlehem Cross donkey. I never thought to get name and address when we picked up the donkey. I tend not to think about the future. It never entered my mind. A time came I wanted to get in touch with Zola to tell her Jenny is happy in her new home, assuming she wanted to know, because I would. I asked Justin if he still had the number in his cell phone. He looked and couldn't find it. No. Time went by and Jenny fell in love with Jack. I've wanted to tell Zola about Jenny especially after she fell in love. Talked to Justin Saturday morning and asked him if he remembered how to find the house. No. However, he found the number in his cell phone under DONKEY. I called the number and left my number on an answering machine. Zola called back in just a few minutes. We talked for two animated hours about one donkey, Jenny, known to Zola as Daisy. Zola was a little shy of calling her Daisy after learning I'd named her Jenny. I told Zola to call her Daisy. That's how they know each other. I'll call her Jenny and Zola can call her Daisy. It doesn't confuse donkey at all.

 

zola's husband billy with zola and daisy (jenny) 

It was another good learning day for me in my quest to understand donkey nature. I saw Jenny in my mind's eye happy out of her mind to see Zola, kicking Jack to stay away, squealing and melting. This tells you I do not know donkey. I took Zola and Billy through the gate into the meadow. Donkeys saw us and came walking to see the day's visitors at TJ's petting zoo. Carrots and pictures taken, touching and sweet-talk. I took camera out of my pocket thinking I might want to make video of Jenny's antics when she discovers it is Zola. Zola spoke to her, calling her Daisy, touched her neck, Jenny smelled her and turned her head away from Zola. Zola said, She's mad at me. Jenny would not look at her for a while until Zola stayed with her talking, scratching her in the places she likes on the neck, forehead, down the center of her back. Zola noted to me they can't reach their spine with their teeth when they have an itch there. Jenny settled into her spine being rubbed, but still acted like she didn't know Zola. Zola said, This is the poutinest donkey. She can pout. Billy said, She'll sulk up on you and you can't do nothin with her. Jenny continued to act like she didn't want to look at Zola. Zola showed me the spots where Jenny especially likes to be scratched. Jenny relaxed into Daisy with Zola staying with her, talking to her, petting her, scratching her. Zola won her over. Jenny stopped pouting and gave herself to enjoying the scratching. Her lips would quiver. She'd lower her head and wobble it back and forth. I felt in the beginning that Jenny remembered the pain of loss and was saying to Zola, You abandoned me. We were friends. I loved you. You told me you loved me. I thought I'd never see you again. Zola knew that's what she was saying too. It was a bit of a sad moment for us, seeing how deeply Jenny had been hurt. I recalled a time I was talking with Jenny and said, I'm glad I bought you. A gloom came over her like a dark cloud passing above. It was one of the many times I've seen the donkeys know the meanings in my words. I realized she knew what had transpired. Our words make pictures in our minds and the telepathic animals read the pictures. They think in pictures too.

 

jenny says, I'm mad at you

 

 

Gradually, Jenny responded to Zola like she was her friend. The picture at the top was made after Zola broke through with her. I saw a sorrow in Jenny's eye when her affection rose to the surface. She spent six months in grief over losing Zola. I told Zola I stayed out of the meadow the first month she was here. Jenny would start a kicking match whenever Jack came too close to her. When I'm in the meadow, they both come to me, one on either side. In Jenny's first six months I stayed out from between them. I'd step over to a tree when they started kicking. I had intended to keep Jack distracted and away from Jenny so Jenny could focus her attention on Zola. Jack had to be nearby. He knew something was going on that had Jenny feeling ill at ease. He sniffed Zola's shoes and Billy's shoes. Goat scent from their herd of miniature goats. Jenny sniffed at Zola's shoes. We wondered if she remembered the goat scent from her life with the miniature goats. Of course she did. For Jack, it would have been a new scent, unless he knew goats before he came to live in the meadow. Jack and I had bonded by the time Jenny arrived in the meadow. Jack didn't have time for me. He had a one-track mind and it was not my track. Jack and I renewed our friendship after a few months when Jenny settled down and he had learned his limits with her. She was a fierce fighter. It took him six months to learn to bring her down at will. It seemed like she fell in love when he conquered her. It was the time her grief had passed. By now, a month after their vows, I have bonded with Jenny. I can't tell if it was good for Jenny to bring up her friend who was, in effect, dead and buried in the ground. To bring Zola back to life for Jenny after she had grieved Zola in grief's full term, after she'd bonded with a new friend, did not seem like it was to Jenny's benefit. Nonetheless, some affection was renewed before the end of the visit.

 

zola reminds jenny of her back rubs

 

 

It was a bittersweet feeling I had for Jenny. It brought up so much sorrow for her that she'd already dealt with and was in her past, I felt sad for her having to go through such an emotional upheaval. Yet, Zola kept her hands on Jenny, talked to her lovingly. She responded to Zola's hands a little bit more as time went by, until Zola had relaxed her with memories of Zola's hands. Though I felt sorrow for Jenny, I don't regret bringing Zola back into her life. Zola will return. She wants to bring her two granddaughters Jenny loved and misses. The granddaughters explain why Jenny takes to young girls so readily. Zola explains why Jenny is so partial to women who visit her. Jenny is not so drawn to men or boys. It may have something to do with the men muscling her into the trailer to bring her up the mountain and put her in a fenced-in field with a serial rapist to be his concubine like in old China. Jenny said, Hell no, I aint nobody's whore, least of all for this little runt of a jackass that keeps climbing on my back. She was slow to take to me. I was in no hurry. I know the path of gentleness in training animals takes longer than hitting and threatening. By knowing animals fairly well, I knew that showing them they could trust me to where it becomes the rule without exception, slowly they would learn to trust me. Trust takes time, both ways. I give them sweet grain sometimes and carrots every day. I'm the ice cream man. They trust me. I have learned to trust them. I was happy to see today that both Billy and Zola were safe standing directly behind either one of the donkeys. They can be trusted so close to absolutely I have full trust neither one will kick me. I've believed training them that I can be trusted and the people I bring to the meadow to visit them can be trusted has eased away their feelings of defensiveness around humans they don't know. I tell everybody I take into the meadow I don't believe they'll be kicked, but am not one hundred percent certain. The donkeys have never even shown the first impulse to kick anyone I've taken into the meadow. This did not come about by hitting and threatening them. It came about by loving them. I love them: they love me. Friends I take to see the donkeys send them love vibrations and the donkeys return the vibration. I tell anyone I think might be inclined to hit one that you start a fight with a donkey, you lose. I like walking freely among them in the meadow without any apprehension of danger. At the end of today's visit, Zola told Jenny it was time for her to go, that she would be back to see her. Jenny walked back to the meadow, Jack not far behind.

 

jenny walks back to the meadow

 

jack not far behind

 

 

*

.  

INNER RESOURCES

All week I've been pursuing a prompt of my own concerning inner resources. Every day this week I've set out to write with exploring inner resources in mind, but every time it seemed like I was writing an introduction. Four introductions in a row. Never made it all the way into exploring what I mean by inner resources. I most notice the value of inner resources when I see people who have none. The people with none are the people I think of as shallow, no depth, no curiosity, people that do what they're supposed to do because they're supposed to. I saw the race on tv today and a golf tournament. Commercials, moments of sophisticated mind-control. Instead of taking care of the mentally ill, a century and a half of the study of psychology has brought us to mind-control by corporate mind and government. This is why I don't watch tv but for the race. I watch the race to visit with friends on a Sunday afternoon. It's the friends I value more than the race. I came away with a frazzled head full of images of stringy cheese pizza, cars I couldn't even buy a license tag for, Testosterone Man with 4wheel drive pickup and a horse trailer needs Viagra, just like his truck that's stuck in the mud. Horses to the rescue: Viagra. Investments. It takes me back to when I left parents, said good-bye to tv too. It was some serious withdrawal. I remember images in my head all the time from tv, jingles from Fifties commercials, wondering what was going to happen next week on a sitcom, wondering what happened when I missed it. Two years on Navy bases and ships helped the withdrawal from tv. By the time I was free of Navy and started in school, I never had another tv. Tomorrow I'll still have images in my head from today's tv. The races get less interesting as the production makes the drivers into rock stars. My only interest is the race itself. Who wins doesn't matter. I just like to watch a race. I like to see a car make a good pass. I like it best when you can see them pushing with everything they've got, pedal to the metal, trying to push it through the floorboard to make the car go 3rpm faster. I can relate to driving as a sport. It's something I do almost every day.

When I think of inner resources, television comes to mind only where absence of inner resources are concerned. Taking an interest in something, anything, is the beginning. The people I know who I would say have inner resources are many. What characterizes them is they take an interest. Some pursue an interest in playing a guitar. Some pursue restoring or customizing an old car. Reading, when it's not fluff, contributes to one's inner resources. One's faith is an inner resource. Experience is an inner resource. I remember old man Tom Pruitt's emphasis on experience. He was an experiential learner who believed experience the best teacher.  He said funny things from time to time, like, "Get me a bigger hammer." The one I loved the best, "I know all about it. I got experience." Out of context it seems a haughty thing to say. Hearing it from Tom Pruitt as he meant it subjectively, he was simply saying he knew what he was saying. He was not one to boast. He meant it quite simply. His experience was a footnote to his knowledge. Tom's knowledge was considerable, too. It wouldn't seem like much to an outsider, but his knowledge was specific to the experiences of his life as a farmer working with cattle, a carpenter, a philosopher. He was no Plato, but he thought philosophically. He kept a New Testament and only read the red letter passages. He had no use for Paul or any of the rest of the Bible. Only the words of Jesus mattered to him. The rest of it was just a story. What makes him a philosopher is that he came to his own way of seeing it by his own philosophical reasonings. His philosophical mind was not educated outside the Bible, though he found enough there to keep his mind occupied. He would sit all winter long by the wood-stove spitting backer into a Maxwell House instant coffee jar he kept on the floor beside his wooden chair. Tom, though literate, was not very literate, but literacy had nothing to do with his philosophical mind.

 

 

 

A farmer can work all day alone because he has inner resources, something to think about that helps him make sense of things. Church and the Bible might be the extent of his input, but his philosophical mind takes it and applies it to his life in whatever ways he sees a fit. Part of the appeal of physical labor is freedom for the mind to follow its own meanderings. I don't mean to say their philosophy is right or wrong. It just is what it is. I did not know Tom's inner workings, his mind, so I can't say anything about his way of thinking except that it served him well. He sat in his room looking at the wall every day, all day, spitting in his cup or into the old fireplace with no fire in it, or onto the door of the wood-stove to see it bounce and hiss. He talked running words together and muttering with a heavy mountain accent, almost dialect. I understood him clearly from the first time we met. Later, as time went by and I came to know Tom better, I saw he had tremendous inner resources. It was among his inner resources that he lived. He sat at home like a monk. He watched tv for baseball games and the weather. Nothing else interested him. He'd rather watch the wall. He liked baseball because he had experience during recess in school where he went through the 7th grade. He did not understand football and basketball for having no experience.  It was his inner resources that occupied his mind while he stared at the wall for years. All the years I knew him, his last 14, I knew him to spend entire winters looking at the wall, rainy days and all the time he was not outside working. He needed no music, no distractions. He was dwelling in his inner resources. He was not somebody who would die on a Monday morning soon after retirement.

 

 

 

Every art form is an inner resource. Artists I've known have been people with inner resources. Perhaps I mean by inner resources the quality that makes time to oneself satisfying, makes golfing alone on foot a happy day; practicing a skill, walking and ruminating. People with inner resources tend to ruminate. This word's other meaning is a cow chewing its cud. Ruminating is pulling up some thoughts, a conundrum, something to mull over, a bone to gnaw on. Ruminators need time to themselves in varying degrees from one to another. I noticed in my first years in the mountain that country people were an awful lot like artists. Country people are largely people with abundant inner resources. Country people tend not to fool themselves too much. Artists, too, tend not to fool themselves too much. By fooling self I mean acting arrogant like you have status when you don't. Or even when you do. One example of millions possible. First one to come to mind. I'm thinking I've lived my life more about educating my inner resources without regard for the practical world of money and position. I've worked at low paying jobs because they did not require I give the job my mind. I worked a farm for seven years, then painted houses alone for ten years. I only painted with brushes; no sprayers, no rollers. Walls I painted by brush, outside and inside. Working by myself, I could ruminate. If I'd hired a crew, the work the crew was doing in my name would be on my mind all the time. Working alone with a brush, the more exacting the better I liked it. Trim around windows and doors was my favorite. It took close focus of attention. I thought of it a kind of mediation at the time, clearing the mind with focus on painting a straight line. It became important to me to paint windows without needing to go behind myself with a razor blade to clean the glass. Toward the end of the ten years I could do that. It takes half the time. My art spirit was gestating in those years. I've valued my own inner resources above all else, as an artist. It was not an obsession. It was priorities, what comes first. Reading has developed my own inner resources. People I have valued contributed a great deal to my inner resources. Possibly the seat of my particular set of inner resources is in my curiosity. I wonder how much of a role appreciation plays. It would include everything, a lifetime of input.   

 

 

 

*