A RHYTHM OF PEACE

I've fallen into a continuum of being awake, being asleep, days go by and from time to time I need to know the date. This is what calendars are for. I keep one with big numbers on the kitchen wall to consult when I suddenly need to know the date. It becomes a nuisance to look up the date and a bigger nuisance to keep up with it. It seems like there comes a place where alternating states of awake and asleep make a rhythm of their own and it's all one nameless stretch. Awake and asleep become like waves on the beach; water advances, water recedes. I like this rhythm. It feels like the rhythm of the old-time days, working on the farm, working by seasons and daylight. The calendar has its place on the wall, a document that keeps us in sync with everyone around us by way of agreed upon time. The Atomic Clock is civilization's official time keeper, gives us divisions of the earth's rotation so we can coordinate time in a way that is agreed upon all the way around the globe. The clock is the closest device we have to being able to see time, as far as I know. Like gravity, time is invisible. Gravity is measured in weights. Time is the spinning of the earth spiraling around the sun, the moon going around the earth, and the bigger transit of the sun spiraling in the Milky Way galaxy. Hence, astrology, given that cosmic arrangements of planets are in a continuum of change, never two nanoseconds the same. As in our lives where change is the nature of the continuum. Like cigarette smoke rising into spirals, the spirals in turbulence, the spirals in water flow. Another vision of as-above-so-below. 

My friend Carole and I have come into a place of living by light, dark, weather. When things are going my way and I have no appointments in town, I like the rhythm of awake awhile, asleep awhile. I sleep when I feel like it, night or day, am awake night or day as I feel like it. It's not very ambitious living. It separates me from the rhythms in everybody I know. Add to the list television that separates me conceptually from everyone around me, given exceptions. I can go with the core of the religion around me, but not the trappings. That I have to swear to believe immaculate conception, I cannot. I don't care. I don't care if Jesus was born biologically or mythologically. His life is more important to me than his death. His message of love is the only reason to know about Jesus. That he walked on both land and water is cool, but love was his only reason for being. The trappings make the followers into a herd of sheep. Love frees one from the herd and sets the seeker on one's own pilgrimage, whatever form or path it takes. Each one is unique, leaving no room for s'posed-to, and no being held back by a committee. I see a headline about Joe the Plumber saying Obama girls are promoting gangs. It doesn't annoy me anymore that ignorance is front and center. When I look at the progression of American public education and the progression of American politics, I'm surprised by no extreme degree of ignorance. Our politicians are corporate stooges. They are not put in place for any reason but their ignorance, they truly do not know right from wrong, people easily told what to do and eager to go along, fame and money, glitz and glamour, face-lifts, looking like a mummy in old age. 

My purpose leaving the world of commerce and committing to rural life on a remote road in the mountains was to find a way to live "in the world, not of it." First thing, I had to define for self what is meant by "the world," which took some years. Finding the place to draw the line between world and not-world gets subtle and at once obvious. I gradually came to The World is the world created by human mind, the not-natural world. This includes everything from architecture to music to religion to spiritualism to art to getting up in the morning. Everything. Duality. Ok, this is the world I want to live in, but not of. I can see I'm in it, the playing field. Then I had to figure out what OF meant. Attachment comes to me first. Ego. It's ego that wants to attach to things, ideas, agendas, purposes, and again, everything. I took it that letting go of attachments is a way to not be of the world. I didn't know why it was important to me, but that it is universally said to be the way, the path. I had no idea of why, except figuring there must be something to it. By now after years of mentating on the issue and allowing the super-conscious to search on its own while mind is distracted by the world of commerce, getting basic bills paid, I feel like I have some insight, a little bit. It's about inner peace. Attachments of my past have fallen away due to waning interest. Turns out attachments worry the mind. 

I used to want stuff for myself, paintings on the walls, books, music. Now I have more than I want. I want to get rid of stuff, wants of the past. Like I want to keep a copy of Pinocchio in the house, knowing I'll never read it again, but love it so much as a story I like seeing the spine of the book on the shelf. It's a reminder of the story within. I like seeing the spines of books on shelves, titles I've read and remember in a nanosecond my feeling about the content. I see the poetry of WB Yeats and feel a soft glow in the heart. Three months in London in 1972, I carried a paperback of Yeats poetry in a pocket, reading in it every day on "the tube." In that way, a book is, indeed, a friend. I want now to keep the donkeys comfortable, Caterpillar comfortable, and want the well-being of my friends, want them all to have a good life on their own terms. I have to pull back from wanting a reasonable government. That hope is over. Learning from the nature of the world to step back and let it go by, the world of treachery and me-first, I let the people that want to partake of it have at it. I see news about police brutality, killings and mayhem in general, and look out the windows at the green world, the birds, the squirrels, the donkeys, the meadow, thinking, this is peace. I see the occasional car go by on Waterfall Road out the windows, the road of peace. I tell myself none of the nonsense in DC applies here, nor do the Koch brothers, except in destructive ways that apply to the future. As long as they're not bombing Waterfall Road and a SWAT team isn't breaking down my door with guns blazing, the wrong address for a meth lab, I live in peace. Waterfall Road can exist in a condition of peace because the road, like the country Costa Rica, has nothing of value to corporate mind.  

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