TURNING FROM OUT THERE TO IN HERE

nancy graves

Again, I feel lonesome on the day after an election. Lonesome because the ones I vote for win very seldom, and lonesome because I've seen ignorance used successfully for political marketing. This could be a transition time from appealing to our intelligence to appealing to our ignorance. It's been a long transition time, thirty-four years, that the master propagandists have appealed to below average intelligence. Easy targets. White Man is in crisis in democracy when Others have begun to outnumber White. This is where police state comes in. The South gives historical evidence that White Man outnumbered by Others will retain power by force and throw away democracy for racial control. All over the nation in this time White Man is facing the threat of being outnumbered by Others, emphasis on black Others. I was alarmed when I learned white people hate black people so much, to the point they're official targets to kill or imprison. A black president has threatened White Man more than population statistics are able. The white John Birch Society billionaires are saying, Aint no GDN gonna tell me what to do. It seemed ridiculous to me today that I made the decision to participate in the great American delusion, pretend democracy, again. Historically, police states are predictably popular in the early years. The more resistance grows, the more the black people are targeted, to keep the police popular, just like on tv. I see police brutality videos on facebook and mourn to see the videos as cop commercials saying to White Man, We got em under control. It makes great corporate tv and keeps the news exciting, hopeful. 

nancy graves

It makes me turn further inward, turn away from the world Out There. I feel like the range of mountains where the Blue Ridge Parkway runs along the ridge is my Great Wall of Air Bellows, a half mile from home, beyond which is Out There, This side of that line people live with space between each other and enough forest to allow habitat to some wildlife. It seems like there is some balance this side of that great wall between me and the world of the false. Going inward to dream images of Home Sweet Home, like guided imagery. I have yet to do something I learned some years ago, though have only done it once. Put on some kind of music you resonate with, emphasis on relaxing music, classical, whatever. Sit quietly and imagine the most peaceful spot on earth you'd like to be. Start there, self in that place. I chose what I call the donkey meadow beside the house, when in that time the donkey shed was a chicken house. I feel good energy in that meadow. Now the meadow has donkey love energy added to it. This meadow is the place I would go to again, if I ever do a guided imagery again. The purpose is to allow the music to be the movie soundtrack to visuals that occur in the mind's eye, follow them as a story and see where it goes, follow it to the end of the music. Then write down the experience as something like a dream, which it is. If I remember correctly, it's supposed to have some woo-woo connected with it, like manifesting what you really want, something like that. I wasn't interested in it as something to do toward wanting. I was curious to see what it was. I found it gave me a beautiful story to follow, and by the time the music ended, I felt good about the story my subconscious mind made up spontaneously. I came away from it feeling like my interior self, the subconscious, or another way of naming it, the super-conscious, was in good balance and beaming with light. Perhaps my super-conscious mind would visualize a very different story if I'd put on the Murderdolls. 

nancy graves

I feel so inward, I want to sleep. I want to close my eyes and flow with some music. Just happen to have a cd in the player by Malian guitar picker and singer, Carcar, accompanied by Ali Farka Toure. Yes, beautiful music is what my super-conscious wants. This is good music to flow with. The vocals flow beautifully. I closed my eyes and followed the music. I saw the musicians, saw their fingers picking their acoustic guitar strings, heard the vocals like sinuous colored silk flowing upward into the air above the trees into the sky, dancing to a subtle rhythm. A good change of mental imagery after seeing the Babylon the rest of the world wants to see fall, breaking down. I tell myself to listen to more music. In the classical realm, in this time of the life, I want to hear quartets of Brahms and Schubert, and quartets of Dvorak by the Alban Berg Quartet. I will listen to more music, keep in the cd player something I'm wanting to hear, like this one by Carcar of northern Africa. Want to hear the news, turn on the cd player and let it play. Turn all the more inward. I've taken to driving the back roads when I go anyplace. They have few other cars on them. They are the roads people live on, not the traffic roads. The veins, not the arteries. The back roads have better scenery. I have found that the world the way I like it is all around me, the reason I settled in my Blue Ridge Mountain home for the duration. I have the world as I am happy with it all around, this side of the great wall. Why look Out There at the horror show when I can look In Here at a community of people who think something of one another? The changes from generation to generation are happening here as they are happening there, all guided by television, 

nancy graves

I must teach myself not to hope against the flow of history. Must allow historical destiny to run its course; first, because I have no choice. Next, it will run its course no matter what I think about it. Any wishing I could do something about it goes only toward making me a grumpy old bastard. I like my life this side of the wall. So why do I pay attention to the deception coming in from Out There. I have control. I can turn it off as easily as turn it on. Before the corporate takeover of our government, I believed it important to keep up with current events to stay educated in a democracy, bogus then as bogus now. I don't have a need to stay educated anymore. Indifference is setting in. The indifference that follows disappointment. I hear in my head Perry Ferrell of Jane's Addiction wail, Idiots Rule. The song had meaning then, even more meaning now. I will read more and listen to news less. I will listen to more music. I will focus on art projects more. The hard part is realizing that Out There is also In Here. It's all In Here. It only exists for me in my head. I have a choice about what goes into my head. I don't need to hear about Ebola til the next big Fear comes in to replace it. I like being out of touch with the corporate pop world in this time of the life. I like staying at home all the more. I could give the donkeys more attention. I could give the people of my world, my friends, more attention. Caterpillar would like more attention. I could have more naps. The best part will be less of that energy in my mind. In Here is the squirrels at the bird feeders, the donkeys, Caterpillar, good music, writing in this blog journal, which has turned out to be a meditation, even a prayer. It has become a mediation I want to do daily, zooming the mind in on whatever comes forward. 

nancy graves herself

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INTERESTING TIMES

australian aboriginal paintings

Thought I'd hear some Brahms this evening. Alban Berg Quartet again. It's such subtle music it makes me want to sit back, lights out, and hear every nuance. But I don't feel like it right now. I may have to turn the music off, because it takes me over, whatever it is. I can't use music for white noise, unless it's so repulsive I'd rather have silence, which I'd rather have anyway. This is not flowing with me like Dvorak did yesterday. Possibly Dvorak flows with my temperament. Had to turn off Brahms. I like it, but it wasn't the groove I thought I needed. It was going loud and quiet, loud and quiet, like an American movie where it's predictable that when they go to whispering in a scene, an explosion follows. I often use subtitles with American movies because I don't want to be turning the volume up to hear it when they're whispering, then have to turn it down in a hurry when the explosion occurs. With subtitles I can keep the volume even, read the whispers, and not have to turn the volume down for explosions. Just now in my head I've been listening to Brahms and to Dvorak to find the difference. The word institutional comes to mind for Brahms. With Dvorak I hear dance rhythms. There it is. That's when I call it music, when it makes me dance inside. This may be the foundation of my affection for Dvorak's music.

The temperature today is in the forties. A happy relief after days below thirty and nights below twenty. Last winter by this time we were wondering where the cold weather went. The cold did not hit until late. This year, it's starting off with cold. Every winter is uniquely itself. I used to try to find patterns in the weather, but never did. The only patterns I've seen are spring, summer, fall and winter. I heard a couple of meteorologists talking on NPR yesterday about how far off the weather predictions were for hurricane season this year. I think there were 2 minor hurricanes. The forecasters made out like it was going to be a bad year for hurricanes. I was interested that the man talking said they have learned a great deal from a year that went against the predictions. Isn't that what weather does? But this year was way off. This time of year I start thinking about pretending I'm living in Scandinavia where a day like today is on the verge of summer, pretending I'm acclimatized and a day when the rhododendron leaves never uncurl even in sunlight is mild weather. This way I don't get so impatient with feet being cold all the time. Found a little skullcap thing hunters wear under their hats to keep head warm. Warm sox and shoes and the top of the head warm makes a difference all the way in between. They say heat goes out of the body through the top of the head, so I'll wear this skullcap to help retain my own heat.

A documentary I saw a few days ago, JOURNEY OF MAN, has stayed with me and will for always. Spencer Wells, a biologist who studies DNA, found he can trace backwards through DNA in blood to find the original humans and where they came from. It turns out the first people on earth were the Bushmen of southern Africa. Their territory was the Kalahari of Namibia, Botswana and South Africa. Wells traces a band of maybe twenty or so people who left the region where they were living near the coast. They walked up the length of Africa, crossed at Suez, followed the coast around Saudi Arabia, the Middle East, around the coastal edge of India, into southeastern Asia where they evidently made rafts or boats of some sort and crossed to Australia. It was in the time of Ice Age over 50,000 years ago. Wells suggests that the ice accumulating at the poles brought the water level down quite a lot. The band of people that took off on "walkabout," must have changed as time went by, some dying, some being born. Some of them stayed behind in India, and thousands of years later branched out toward Europe and toward Siberia, where some crossed the Bering Strait 15,000 years ago when it was a stretch of land between Siberia and Alaska. Evidently they set out to find what is now Australia. Wells said the waterway between Australia and mainland was quite a lot narrower than it is now. The people who crossed the water had about fifty miles, less than from Cuba to Miami today. They became the Australian Aborigines. A book I'd read about them some years ago, VOICES OF THE FIRST DAY, by Robert Lawlor, said the Aborigines say they go back 50,000 years. Wells' DNA research confirms them.

A film made by a Dutch director using Aboriginal non-actors, TEN CANOES, 2009, shows the Aborigine way of life from their beginning to the time of the European invasion that put an end to their culture. It is a beautifully made film very well researched and as true to the Aboriginal way as the process of making a film can show it. They had a shamanic tradition all the way along. It looks to me like this migration to Australia was directed by vision. The walk was the most sensible of possible routes to walk from almost the southern tip of Africa all the way around to Australia. If they were guided by shamanic vision, by spirit, they were more than likely advised where and how to cross the water. They surely had to cross several wide rivers along their way. By the time they reached the southeastern Asian archipelago, they knew how to cross expanses of moving water. Following the coast, or even near the coast, they crossed rivers probably half a mile as a rule, at least, deltas with multiple rivers. I believe crossing that stretch to Australia amounted to another body of water to cross. The Aborigines made things as they needed them and discarded them when finished, buried them leaving no traces. I've an idea the very earliest people live by the spirit in such a way we can't imagine, we're so far from the spirit by now. The first thing I thought entertaining shamanic guidance to an island continent, Why Australia? I saw in my mind's eye Uluru, cave paintings, the Aboriginal paintings of energy lines in the earth.

I can't help but be convinced those early people on walkabout were guided by spirit in whatever ways they understood the ways of the spirit. They saw themselves as players in the world of spirit. By now, we are so far from spirit we don't even know what that means. So far from spirit that the Tao Te Ching is obscure unto opaque. The same can be said for the New Testament. Wondering why they were guided to Australia, all I can guess is uninterrupted isolation from the eventual covering of the earth by the spread of civilizations. Maybe, too, for the Aboriginal understanding, the continent is covered with what they call holy places in the spirit that are now tourist spots, a floating continent with some kind of energy they needed. Maybe they pray for the rest of us. I wonder if it was a way to isolate and preserve that original connection with spirit the earliest people had. Keeping it, something like an eternal flame among the Zoroastrians. I even suspect the earliest people were so one with the spirit that to us they look spiritually advanced. A big shift for humanity is in process right now. I'm guessing that our collective momentum away from spirit, our direction from the beginning, developing our new brain with experience, being self-focused unto the Age of Narcissism we're in now, is ready to reverse direction like an arrow shot straight up, the turning point. From that point onward, we'll be moving toward the spirit instead of away from it all through the millennia.

Maybe the places like Australia and Tibet are no longer needed to keep the rest of us in ongoing prayer. When we are turned to face the light collectively, it will unleash a tsunami of the heart. We will look at what's going on that's making us crazy and say: Cut it Out !!!  We'll say that to ourselves, individually, and, like Abercrombie and Fitch tshirts went away overnight, a cosmic twinkling of an eye, we'll cut it out. It seems like a shame to see these cultures go away at the same time all around the earth. They, too, are part of all that went before. I've watched a lot of contemporary foreign films from all over the earth, a theme that runs through them is the changes from the old people whose foundations were in a culture that went away. It's the same in China as in North Carolina. A few more generations will make a great deal of difference. The secrets of their cultures will die with them, as they already have. I can't help but find it curious that all the cultures of the world are being replaced by television culture. It surely is an interim culture needed to sever us from all that went before, a culture unto itself, out of which new cultures will emerge like branches on a sapling. The healing of the earth will begin. The healing of humanity will begin. Has begun. When things change on the outside, they've already changed on the inside.

 

 

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FUNERAL RITES

alban berg quartet

I put on some Dvorak quartet music by the Alban Berg Quartet. I heard the ABQ driving home from town yesterday. They were coming on with a 30 minute piece just as I was driving up to park at home. In the house, I turned the radio on right away, and ABQ played for almost an hour. I have several ABQ cds, the ones I love most are the Dvorak quartets. While they were playing String Quartet in E flat, Op 51, I was sitting here just a few minutes ago thinking I'd like this to be played at my funeral. This and nothing else. If it plays out, play it again. No preacher. No singing. No announcements. My Bose sitting atop the closed cardboard casket on two sawhorses playing Dvorak by ABQ. Have a seat. Sit as long as you like. This is music I never tire of hearing. Dvorak by ABQ is some of the only music besides mountain music that can make me shed tears for the beauty of it. The song that made me weep the first time I heard it was Jascha Heifitz playing violin in Max Bruch's Scottish Fantasy. It threw me down onto the couch weeping. Only time that has ever happened. It's beauty wrung me out. Dvorak quartets bring tears of joy to my eyes. Especially with Alban Berg Quartet's crisp, clean edge. Back in the years discovering some classical music after high school, I found I was drawn to quartets way more than orchestras. A big bombast orchestra makes me want to go home. I like hearing the individual instruments, in ABQ's case, two violins, a viola and cello. Don't you love it when you buy a cd and the liner notes are in English, German and French.

 

alban berg quartet

 

I'm laughing at myself. Earlier, when the thought came about Dvorak at the funeral, I told myself with grandmotherly counsel, don't write about that. Then I did. The teenager that's going to do what he wants to do anyway. Arrested development. I don't have any problem thinking about such a thing as my own funeral. It's not important and it is important. It's not important to me unto totally nothing. I don't even think past my last day, because I don't want to entertain illusory notions that I can control circumstances after I'm gone. I don't want to control any circumstances but my own while living. Can't imagine wanting to control anything after I've left the body. The funeral is a ceremony in a quiet way over somebody who left the body. I don't worry over the cold grave or the crematory fire. Best to get rid of that old mortal frame before it gets nasty. I know for genealogists of the future a gravestone makes their research easier. But I'm thinking I'll let the death record in the courthouse be my tombstone. I'd like cremation and the remains thrown on the ground in the woods. Be done with it all. I do not agree with our Egyptian way of mummifying a corpse and keeping it in an underground vault. I always remember the time at the table with Jr Maxwell and Jean Phillips. Jean was making her case for why she wanted to be buried. I made my case for cremation with brevity, I want to be fertilizer. Jr said, Y'already are. How could I not miss somebody who could tell me that and not make me mad, but make me bend over laughing? I miss both of them every day.

 

lights

 

I don't like to make Thanksgiving pronouncements of what I'm thankful for. It's like asking me what my favorite song is. All I can say is, What? Like New Years resolutions. I quit that a long time ago. It's a fun thing to think about when you're young, and then you find out there is nothing to it. You can't keep a resolution a week. And so what? If I want to make a resolution, it will be any time of the year. New Years is probably the worst time to make a resolution, because it comes from outside self instead of inside self. Or it could go all the way back to Neolithic. I saw several different people on facebook told briefly what they were thankful for. I'm grateful, thankful, that the fires associated with global warming have not started in these mountains yet. Nobody wants to hear that sitting around the table at grandma's house when everybody is supposed to be happy and you're supposed to act like you're on tv and in church at the same time, only say happy things. Wha'd'ya gonna do? Watch football on tv. What else? I did all that with my friends. We didn't talk about global warming or boycotting Walmart. Justin had killed the black coyote. It hit the ground dead. He showed it to me in the back of his pickup. First coyote I've seen up close. A female. What a beautiful dog, was all I could say. We agreed we'd both like to have a dog that looked just like that coyote. We remarked at how they look like a cross between a fox and a wolf. I said a prayer for its soul inwardly. Whether anybody else thinks that's important, I don't care. I do. I was the one there. So the coyote got it's soul prayed for. It had such a beautiful face I wanted a dog with that face. Maybe in Gloryland she will be one of my pets.    

 

blue jays in the snow

 

I'm remembering Jr living up to his last day believing he was going to get better, recover and be ready to go again. To talk about dying was of no interest to him. I didn't do any of the hospice counseling about dying, nor any of the religious thing about God and hereafter. I knew Jr was in touch with God. He was like me in that he didn't like to talk about it, because there wasn't anything to talk about. Like me, he saw it in living your life every day. I didn't have to talk to him about making him see God the same way I do. He had his own vision. I don't recall that we ever had a conversation about him dying. He didn't feel like there was anything to say. I didn't either. He had his will in order and that was the only thing important. One time he said to me he didn't know if he was going to heaven or hell. I said, Hell wouldn't have ye. He looked at me for a moment with an eye that was looking to see if I was being smart with him, and he saw it. A smile came over his face. I meant he has too much light in him. I told him he'd bounce offa hell like spit off a hot skillet. I didn't feel like Jr needed any counseling on dying and everlasting life and making a drama of it. He wanted to slip on out and that was what I wanted for him. It's what I want for myself. I don't want a preacher asking me if I've received the Lord as my personal savior. I'd be laying there on my bed thinking, What the hell's it to you? Get out of my face. Let me be in peace. Very first thing upon Jr's soul vacating the body, I was asked by the ones who had come to the house if he was saved. I told them he was  baptized where the bridge is now in Whitehead by where the old mill once stood. Women on the phone. The one who kept the church record found the date he was baptized. All knew you had to be saved before you can be baptized. All were relieved for Jr. Everyone relaxed, the big question answered.

 

seen over alleghany county

 

 

 

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