I've spoiled Caterpillar. Since she's the only one of my four-legged friends left, I treat her like a mother who lost all her kids but one. I want to give her all the attention she wants. This is becoming a bit of a problem. First, Caterpillar is a Maine Coon, meaning she has more automatic behavior than other cats. I spoil her. She wants me to hold her, I put aside what I'm doing and hold her. Whatever she wants, I'm there to serve. I don't mean she's become an ongoing pest. TarBaby used to lie on the desk between my arms when I was at the computer. Caterpillar wants me to hold her when I'm at the computer like I did TarBaby. TarBaby relaxed into it. Caterpillar has spasms when I touch her back toward her tail. So when I pick her up and my hand is on the back half of her back, she squirms like it hurts and has a minor spasm. I'm on the verge of taking her to the vet to see why that is. It's always been that way. I used to think it was fleas, but she hasn't had fleas in quite a long while. I picked her up and put her on my bed, a place that quiets her down immediately. I was getting somewhat annoyed, against my will. She's become so demanding when I sit at the computer the only way I can find to be reasonable about it is to hold her for awhile, until she starts getting finicky, which doesn't take very long, then I put her on the bed and return to the computer.
Watching a Steven Seagal movie last night the 4th time, ON DEADLY GROUND, Alaska oil refinery and Eskimos. In a time when he was recovering from a serious injury an old Eskimo woman told him in a vision she is constantly sad over the human condition, the indifference to life on earth. In books I read, occasionally someone appears who is in sorrow over the way things are--don't ask me to make a list of reasons, there's not enough room in my computer. Yesterday I heard a man talking on I think Diane Rehm show, saying we humans are conditioned from thousands of years of evolution, reading what is wrong occupies us more than reading what is right. After about 20 years of love/hate relationship with living in the mountains, looking at what's wrong, one day I decided to look at what's right. About broke into tears. Didn't take but a few seconds, less than 10, to see there is so much that is right the immensity of it overwhelmed me. I realized I'd been looking at the world I live in the not so beneficial way, not beneficial for me or those around me. That one moment made a major difference in my life.
Now I face the Big Picture, international politics, national politics, economy, all that stuff I know nothing about, except basic human nature that shows in our politicians like it shows in Shakespeare characters, except the politicians are the least interesting half of the equation. I find I tend to read these national politicians on a human scale, when that doesn't apply any more. Our American politicians have left the human scale, like a jet plane has left the human scale. As far as I can tell, a bicycle is the farthest extent of a mode of transportation being within the human scale, like horses. On the human scale between individuals, I think of basic human respect between people as the best way to get along, which everyone else does too. It's what we all do. Those that do not are sooner or later shut out in one way or another. Then you have the world of politicians that is a world of prosecutors and defenders. Lawyers. There is no respect going around except for hierarchical positions and wealth. The rule book they go by is in no relation to the rule book we go by living our everyday lives. I mean the unwritten rule book everyone knows by heart, some more thoroughly than others.
The people making the world we occupy are the rich and the politicians, who legislate for the rich and the rich only. The rich being mega-corporations. The only consideration where we consumers are concerned is control by manipulation. It gives me great sorrow to see my country, the one I pledged allegiance to M-F, K-6, the one I was taught to value because it's of the people, by the people, for the people, becoming a factory of lies to manipulate the people. Our government now only communicates with us lying. It gives me sorrow to know we the people do not apply. Probably didn't apply then, either, when I was pledging allegiance. I tell myself to stop looking at what's wrong and look at what's right. To find what's right I have to bring my attention back out of that kind of thinking to home where my friends are, the people who don't lie to me, the people who actually even care about me as I care about them. It's only when I focus my attention entirely inside Alleghany County and see American people are like the people I'm close to, that I feel no sorrow. There is plenty of sorrow here too, but here, it's on the human scale. Somebody I care about dies or comes down with cancer or any kind of thing---but it's real, it's true, it's not a lie that takes years to see through. The sorrow is for a given period of time and in relation to someone close. It's not an ongoing, life-long underlying sorrow like that of living in a world bent on self-destruction by way of greed, and there's nothing I can do about it but live on the periphery. I don't like the culture greed makes. I prefer to live among the working poor where greed is not a factor, except for thieves and we know who they are in a community. They prey on the people passing through.
What's happening inside me is I'm feeling the sorrow for all of my species on the planet that is our home. It's the kind of sorrow I believe Jesus felt/feels. He wanted to say, "Hey, ya'll, listen up. Take it easy on each other. It's not all that serious." All the way from father lying to child to business execs lying to consumers to presidents lying to the people, like Khadafy does, like Saddam Hussein did, for a few examples. I see this world of manipulation and want no part of it. It makes me an outsider. So that's how it is. It's like being black. It's what/who I am and there's nothing I can do about it. It's not just the bull in me, because one twelfth of us are Taurus, and not all Tauruses see as I see. Not by a long shot. Maybe Taurus has something to do with it, but I won't put it there, because it's more complex than a subtle wave running through the subconscious. It was created by a lifetime of experience. Perhaps more accurately, I might say a lifetime of experience as myself, as my own thinking created my own experience. This is why I don't think the same way you do. You've experienced the world through a lifetime of your own attitude toward life created by your own interpretation of your own experience. This is why I prefer the company of people who can tolerate talking with someone they don't necessarily agree with all the way. I think of people who can allow somebody to disagree with their way of seeing as independent thinkers, real Americans. The ones who must agree all the time are conforming to an extremely complex code of what it's ok to think. They're real Americans too.
What's going on with me right now I think has to do with the quotation from Meher Baba in the column to the right where he mentions attitude toward life down deep below the superficial level. I've been exploring in the back of my mind my own attitude toward life, to see what it is. This has something to do with why I write here every day, writing down my attitude toward life in this way of looking at it, that way of looking at it, examining and exploring it. What I find is a great deal of sorrow for the human condition. Like Ralph Stanley's song, "I've seen trouble all my days." Doesn't mean I've been in fights and prison. It means I've been awake enough to see how we humans generally regard each other, the need for God to take human form to speak our language to help guide us to living a good life. But it gets written down as laws, police, jail, outlaws, heretics, religion, stoning, burning, drowning in the name of God, shooting, stabbing, beating, torturing with God on our side.
Every day of my childhood I was in trouble, so much that my deepest most elemental psyche anticipates continually that I'm in trouble for one reason or another. I'm not and know I'm not. Then I hear about somebody mad because I didn't say what I was expected to say or do what I was expected to do. I can't care about that shit. When getting right down to it, it's me with God, my cat, my friends. I'm in no trouble from any of these relationships. Anything else, I don't care. Yet a feeling that tugs at my soul saying, you're in trouble, is there all the time. It's training we learn early on as a constant and it continues when the trainer is long, long gone. When I'm not paying attention, that kind of attention can fool me and make be believe I am in trouble, until I can't find why, except I don't do as expected by expectations that are not my own. That can be the cause of a lot of trouble if I let it.
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