FOLLOWING MIND

          kurt schwitters

The summer of music entertainment is closing in on its end with Galax Fiddlers Convention coming up. I've missed all the fiddlers conventions. Intended to go to MtAiry and Sparta. Didn't go to either. Didn't have the money to get in at Sparta, the last half of the month. When it comes time to go out the door, I see the drive, the parking lot, walking, walking, finding a place to sit. Then sit there. I appreciate a fiddlers convention, but I don't care to enter a big crowd of people. I like simple. I'd rather go to Woodlawn on Friday nights not knowing who will be playing that night than anywhere else. Rex Theater is Friday nights too, but I'd so much rather go to Willard's shop in Woodlawn. The music there is consistently to my satisfaction. I feel like Willard, Scott and Edwin are my friends, and I enjoy hearing my friends make music. I'd rather hear them than anybody. They play music of the human dimension, music that fits my dimension, doesn't pull me outside myself, but reinforces self. Like jazz, old-time and bluegrass emphasize musicianship, emphasize music.


During the first half of my life in cities, I was accustomed to crowds and believed that entertainment was always someplace I was not, someplace I had to go to and pay for. Movies are about it for the American city's entertainment possibilities, and rock concerts. Cities have museums and a variety of entertainments. When I came to the country in the late fall, I had stressful times of wanting entertainment, needing some, anything, enough to drive to Winston-Salem to see Coal Miner's Daughter, then race back up the mountain to get out of that traffic mayhem and back home where it was quiet. /Gradually, very gradually, I began to catch on to self-entertainment. Reading gets old when it's all there is for a long period of time. I took up drawing and painting and that took care of a lot of self-entertainment. Writing this blog is a form of self-entertainment. It's a game of following mind, seeing where it will go. I start with the first sentence and watch to see what happens. I wanted to discipline myself to write something every day that makes good reading. I can't guarantee "good" every day, but sometimes it happens.


I like to hold to the original purpose, to write something every day worth reading. "Worth reading" is as relative as "good," but I'm not going to worry over the relativity of it. I just want to write something somebody can read all the way through and come away with satisfaction it was worth reading. That's my highest goal. I don't aim beyond that. I don't want to teach or preach, though I do both, because I want to allow the freedom to go wherever my thoughts flow and see what happens. Some people take a kayak over a waterfall to see what happens. I sit at home and write to see what happens. It suits my temperament much more than kayaking. I don't even want to sit in a kayak. Maybe in another lifetime, not this one. I've become so habituated at entertaining myself that Woodlawn on Friday nights is all the external entertainment I need. And it's just right. The music at Woodlawn on Friday nights is every week satisfying, whoever is playing. What more do I need? No more. In retirement, I'm able to do what I want to do, able to follow my own feelings and thoughts, find my flow and go with it. I've actually become jealous of my flow. I don't want to lose my flow. It takes a little while to get it back when I've been knocked off the track.


I like that it is not necessary to be productive. Enough people are doing productive. A lot of people want to be productive. I have wanted it too. Still do. But I like to relax from it from time to time and not be productive at all, with intent. It's like resting on the seventh day. For myself, I need to take time-out from being productive. Like taking a nap. It's good for the mental health. Today's nap was only a half hour, but I woke from it refreshed. Like with the painting, I paint a bit, sit with it for some days and work on another aspect of it, look at it for several days, apply some more paint, gradually putting puzzle pieces in place. Looking at it almost all the time I'm in the house, I see ideas I can act out with paint that I would not see running through it in one day. I find that I can see a lot more this way than I could when I was wanting to be productive. I take so long with them, that by the time one is finished and out of the house, I miss it like I would a kitten I kept for four months. That's about how long it takes to paint one. I have come to believe that hours spent looking at it must at least equal hours spent applying pigment. I look for a kind of living presence in the figures, and this is how I find it, taking my time. I'm not a factory.


I feel like it's a fairly good balance I have in the department of self-entertainment. In the company of baby Vada, 1 year old, I am entertained every minute of watching her. It's easy for me to keep an eye on her, because I like to see the development of her mind, her feet, her fingers, blowing bubbles out her nose, imitating words and sounds, discovering everything new, needing to feel it as well as see it, feeling it for confirmation of sight. It's comic that a baby has come into my life as I'm looking at the later years. The leaves are falling off my inner trees. I see in the baby myself in however many years, crawling on somebody's floor, learning to walk. My best intertainment is the people who are my friends. They are the people I want to be around. I want to be with Vada and see her develop into the neat little kid I know she will be. I love watching someone come into this world from out of the blue, seeing this person in a baby's body unable to communicate or understand, an experienced soul in a new body that needs to learn a great deal before she can set out on her own in the world.


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BABY VADA SAYS HELLO

       hello

       mama's in the bathroom


As one who takes everything for subjective, I see objective being a condition created by the human mind to help understand the subjective, taking it apart, naming the parts, dividing the seamless infinite, the continuum of Now into millenia, centuries, decades, years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds, tenths of a second, hundredths of a second, thousandths of a second, the nanosecond (a billionth of a second). Terms that everyone can agree on, the definition of reality, essentially meaningless. Is reality, thus, meaningless? I think so. Yesterday I saw Vada, 1 yr, standing by the edge of the coffee table, using the edge with her right hand for balance. She saw Justin's Marlboro gold pack box. She picked it up with her left hand like a cell phone, held it to her ear and said, "Hello," leaving out the l's, something like Heh-ho.


I held her up to see the mounted deer head on the wall; she'd pointed to it while we were going around looking at pictures on the walls. She looked at the deer face-to-face and said, "kit-kit," her word for cat, kitty. I got it that she saw its face covered with hair, a different kind of face from ours with ears that stick up, and big round eyes, like kit-kit. She's differentiating "reality" out of the seamless continuum, one image, one word at a time. I'm seeing her learn this "reality" by every experience in the course of a day. She feels sleepy, she wants to hold her blanket. It was the first time I'd noticed her make associations, the cigarette pack for a cell phone. Same shape, same size. I believe she knows it was not a cell phone, but saw the association and played with it, a toy. She saw the deer head with hair on its face and associated kit-kit. It seems like she's walking, one step at a time, out of the seamless void where there is no depth of field, something like seeing the forest, not the trees. They would be there only like in a dream that sees everything inside the eye's frame, as "unreal" as a movie, light on a screen. Each thing she pulls out of the seamless vision is differentiated into its form, given a name and understood as real. This table that helps you stand up is real. It has a name. It is solid and heavy; you cannot walk through it. It must be walked around.


She has to learn in this new body that sharp corners on tables hurt, that you can't walk through a table. She's learning to separate objects from the continuum one at a time by name as she learns them, and I see going on in her eyes immense curiosity about everything she sees. I blew bubbles for her outside on the deck. She said, "Buh-buh." She imitates sounds so well, no matter whether it is a sound like clicking the inside of one's cheek or a word, I can't help but see her as a translator at the UN so fast she can translate simultaneously with the original. Sounds are so interesting to her, she reminds me of a musician finding new notes, new chords, new runs. She's connecting sound and object. Learning the names to things, she is also learning which sounds have no meaning beyond the sound itself. We, the adults, are teaching her to differentiate "reality" from the seamless continuum as we were taught it, one thing, one word at a time, as we collectively believe it in agreement with everyone else. I think it's called enculturation, a Margaret Mead word. Then, in another language everything has a different sound. Like gato and kit-kit.


Yesterday I had several hours with Vada, watching her, seeing her have a new experience every second, delighted discovering reality at so fast a pace. It's like the world she's new in is opening, revealing depth of field to her, separation of what she sees into particular shapes that have names. She sees a bird fly over. Mama says, "Bird," and points. Vada looks up and bird is gone. She does see them, though, and knows mama means those things that flicker in a straight line across that big expanse of sky. It fascinates me to watch her about like it would sitting in a class with Noam Chomsky the professor, which I've never done, but imagine it would blow my mind every class. Baby the professor teaches me by experience, blows my mind every time I'm around her. I see her watch the bubbles hop on the breeze and drift down to the table, pop-pop-pop. She would watch until the last one went out. It took me back to my own disappointment seeing bubbles pop when I wanted them to last on and on, delicate crystal balls floating like dandelion parachutes surfing the breeze.


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THERE IS NO DEATH

roller rover, by william wegman, 1986

Over the last year I've been watching a baby come into awareness, a day at a time, everything new, drawn to the familiar, mystified by everything, curious, uncertain about everything, directed through the day by diaper changes, getting picked up, fed, put to sleep, played with. At Vada's birthday party, it was a time when she was discovering standing on her feet. She wanted to stand on her feet like everybody else. With 20 or so adults there, every time she managed to get on her feet, somebody would pick her up afraid she'd fall. The look on her face every time she was picked up was a kind of frantic PUT ME DOWN, she was standing up. All day long she spent her time by herself climbing a chair leg to stand up, then somebody picked her up. I'm so fascinated by her, I sit and watch every move she makes, enchanted to see somebody coming into a body with no mind, seeing the mind develop through experience. Yesterday I noticed that she is privately interested in the sky. She was sitting on the deck playing, rolling a ball, and every once in awhile she'd take a break and look at the sky like she's trying to figure out what it is. It's blue sometimes, white sometimes, gray sometimes, bright, dark, different about every time she sees it.


Three years ago I was taking care of a friend and watched dementia come in and take over, saw mind gradually slip away. Finally, in one week I saw his mind go away like a bathtub that takes a week to drain. It just went away. At the end of that week he had no mind. One day, a couple weeks into the state of no mind, he said, "I've got to go to the doctor!" I asked what was the problem. "Something's wrong with my mind!" At the end of the sentence, he forgot it. At the same time that I hated to see my friend fade away without mind, and return to the state of a baby needing diaper changes, needing every kind of care from feeding to cleaning and watching closely, because he'd lost his defenses with his mind. He had become dependent as a baby. Nothing was familiar anymore. All was new. One time he fell out of the bed. He said he had parked his car on the roof, stepped out of the car and fell through the roof. He was worried about the car on the roof, that it might fall through. No, your car is in its parking space where it belongs. That was the end of it. For him, the car on the roof was as real as the car in the parking space was for me.


Almost 3 years after losing him, Jr remains most affectionately in my mind during his last months as mind and self-sufficiency were slipping away. Though his mind was gone, I could still communicate with him. I knew the soul was there, the subconscious was there. I came to see the subconscious as something like a basketball, for a model. Around the surface of the basketball electrical chargers dance everywhere. The electrical charges are mind. When the dance of mind is done, the subconscious is still there, the soul is still there. Only surface mind is missing. I saw that most clearly one day when he was down to just a few days to go, 3 of his friends had stopped by to visit at the same time. We were all in the bedroom looking at him in the bed, just barely awake. He didn't recognize any of them. I started telling them about how he was doing and he spoke up with rational mind. He'd been hearing what I'd said and corrected me. That hit me powerfully. I never talked about him in front of him again. I realized he is aware on some level. Though I couldn't see the awareness, I knew it was there and honored it as if I were seeing it.


It's the same with baby Vada. I believe she understands what is being said to her. Her mother and daddy believe she does too, from their experience. I've found that my cats and dogs understood what I was saying when I spoke to them in sentences and paragraphs. They knew exactly what I was saying. I know because their behavior afterward indicated clear understanding. Vada's behavior after being told something in sentences suggests she understood. Pre-language, I've an idea babies and our pets read us telepathically, to whatever degree I can't guess. Probably a different degree per individual. In the baby is a subconscious, the basketball; and the soul, possibly the air in the basketball. The soul carries experience from the previous lifetime and the other lifetimes past, it carries experience from one individual to the next. It can just about be assumed that some of the inexplicable things we know have come from a previous lifetime. It's from the zone where everything is seamless and can't be categorized, elusive to put a finger on, like mercury. Like if somebody in this lifetime is afraid of driving a car and refuses to learn to drive, it leads me to suspect that individual may have died last time in a car he was driving that wrecked. That's not a certainty, but a suggestion. It has happened to a lot of people all the way around the globe.


My friend Sandy Hayes, who lives at Boone, had a pain in the left side of her upper back all her life. Not a sharp pain, but it was always there, for no apparent reason. In a past-life regression she found that she had been at the Sandy Ridge massacre conducted by General Custer, a Cheyenne (if my feeble memory serves well enough) woman, running from the mayhem, carrying her baby, was shot from behind in that spot of her back, and died. She found the connection in her name too. That moment of being killed trying to save her baby was evidently very powerful for her, she still carried it. I've learned how important it is to a given lifetime how we leave the body, from a little bit of experience in that seamless place where it's difficult to interpret, and from reading about it. In Jr's time of leaving the body I was aware of the importance of how one leaves the body. I wanted Jr's soul memory to carry a peaceful, quiet passage in his own home, in his own bed with no worries.


It was important to me to be able to give him that. I was communicating with his soul in the later weeks, like a mother communicates with a baby's soul in the early weeks. My own reason for not wanting him in a nursing home, was that I wanted him taken care of by somebody who understood him and cared. It was important to me that I regard him and everything I do with complete integrity of spirit, because he was still there, despite no mind. The hospice nurses complimented me over and over on the quality of my care. It was because the man I respected to the sky was still there, completely there, just missing those little electrical charges we call mind, and I was there to help him in his time of leaving the body to have it as comfortably as possible, taken care of by someone who cares. Same as coming in, we need to have someone who cares. I believe going out requires caring too, for it to be best. I could not tolerate leaving him to poorly paid people who work in shifts. There, he was the same as a small load of lumber. I thought of nursing homes the lumberyard for the dying. I could not allow Jr to be regarded indifferently in his important time.


My feeling around baby Vada is that I want her passage into this lifetime comfortable and happy, laughing instead of crying. I am aware she is bringing with her several lifetimes of experience. It's a strong suspicion I have that Vada was born a happy baby, because she found the two souls her soul already loves to the max. When I'm with the three of them, it feels to me that they have all three found each other, and they're all happy. I'm glad for Vada that her entry into this lifetime is a happy one with people who care as deeply for her as she cares for them. That's what we want for all babies, though some don't get it. I'd love to watch her grow up, but am satisfied to see she is in loving hands that will always take good care of her. It has been and still is a learning for me that I can't help but see having divine guidance. First, I watch someone I care about fade away mentally and die. Second, I see someone born (not literally) and watch this new person develop mind from that seamless no place into differentiation of shapes, objects, words. I see her gaze around at all these strange colors and shapes and movements in curiosity. I've noticed her recently looking at the sky trying to figure out what it is, often. I've seen fade-out and fade-in. Death, where is thy sting? appears right now to be a facet of my learning from the experience. Go to sleep there, wake up here. There is no death.


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BABY VADA'S BIRTHDAY PARTY

         cocacola 600 charlotte

Baby Vada's first birthday party Sunday, a party of 20 or so all day. Baby was looking at different people, like whoever might be holding her at the time, who are you? have I ever seen you? She was comfortable when somebody put a camera in her face. That's like home with mommy who takes pictures of her almost every day. When daddy held her and when mommy held her, she relaxed, was in the arms of the familiar. My mind went to the time with friend Jr Maxwell when his mind went away. People would come to the house to see him, he would look at them and try to figure out who it was while they talked to him. When they or I told him who it was he pretended to get it. As soon as they were out the door he'd ask me who it was. I'd explain to his friends before they saw him that he may not, probably will not recognize them, and if he seems to it's because he's pretending. Nonetheless, his subconscious, the whole of who he is, is still there. Though his conscious mind isn't working any more, he recognizes you anyway, and attention felt good to him, it helped his spirit.


I experienced the joy of motherhood again, after my three kittens born on mother's day 1997 and given to me two weeks later, the day their eyes opened, by their mother by running under a car. That was my first experience as mother. I knew they needed mother love to live, so I went within and turned on mother love. It was mother love that helped me taking care of Jr, the diapers, feeding, cleaning, changing clothes, dealing with a baby that has no mind. Learning to communicate with the subconscious mind when the conscious mind was gone was not much different from communicating with a cat or a dog or a horse. They can't talk but they are good at communicating with each other. Learn how they do that and I can communicate with them. I've always lived with dogs and cats, so I'm well versed in communication without language, without the forebrain. I read these opportunities to activate the mother within as gifts from goddess. They tell me she's with me and that gives my spirit comfort.


I've been allowed into Justin and Crystal's hearts as family. I've seen Baby Vada since the very beginning and known of her since conception. Before she was born Crystal knew she liked bluegrass. After she was born she lights up hearing bluegrass. Reggae too. This is somebody with a brilliant mind. Justin was telling me she pays attention and responds. Like if she's crawling toward something she needs to stay away from, he said just the merest command she responds to immediately. I see two people I believe actually need each other and I'm happy for them. I'm happy for them all the time I'm around them and when I'm not around them. I can't help but see their relationship somewhat mystical, because so much love is involved and it grows. The house, itself, has a powerful love spirit in it, which surely complements the love between everyone in the house. Crystal's love energy is radiant. And Justin is the beneficiary. She brings the love energy in him to the surface. I'm happy that Baby Vada is to grow up in the light of parents with a very real love energy going between them. I'm happy for all concerned.


This evening Justin and I watched the CocaCola 600 until around midnight. Toward the end of the race Crystal, who had been sleeping with Baby V, came walking through on the way to the kitchen for something. She said, "You guys are retarded." There really wasn't anything to say to that, so we just heard it. He'd wanted to do some fishing during the time the race was on. His tv is set to record the race every week. I drove over there to watch the race when he was ready. Since the parkway opened, it takes 10 minutes less to get there. The closest to a wreck in this race was Tony Steward pulling in to pit stop, getting bumped and turned around in the pit road. It was a good clean run round and round the freshly painted track that had a beautiful yellow line around it that looked good above the slate gray track and the green of the infield grass below, cars on the track running 195. Sometimes I think I like the visuals at least as much as the race itself.


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