TREE HUGGING PEACENIK

accidental image



In a movie a few days ago a man was talking about a blog and the other man dismissed it because, "Everybody's writing a blog." Really? Glad he told me, I hadn't noticed. I think from last time I looked there are about a dozen blogs in the county. Around 10,000 people in the county. Possibly a dozen with blogs. Everybody? What he was saying by way of this exaggeration was it's not cool any more, too many people doing it for it to be cool. I'm not one to surf blogs, but do from time to time. I see some very amazing stuff blogged. Every kind of thing. A lot of suburban parents showcasing their babies and using the blog to record the kid's early childhood. That's just one genre.



I like about the blog that it is so democratic. Democracy isn't cool any more either, so they make a good fit. Democratic in that anyone can have a blog or several with any purpose or no purpose. I love that about the blog. The name "blog" is not right, but it's too well known by now to change it. Therefore, blog is what it is. Mine is a way to make myself write something every day. If I were to do this in a notebook, it wouldn't last a week. But online with unknown people seeing it, I feel compelled to keep it going. Doing it so a few people can see something every day, whoever finds it and chooses to see it again.



The only people I know of reading the blog are a few here who have told me they see it. Somebody is seeing it several times a week from South Korea, somebody in China, somebody in Russia, Canada, Netherlands, Croatia, Slovenia, UK, Germany, Sweden, and several other places. I think that's fabulous. I don't need a big readership of several thousand. I like small numbers. The blog gets seen average 30-50 times a day. I assume several of those views are by the same people. Whatever the case, there is someone in each of several countries who resonates with what I'm writing enough to return several days a week. I've made no effort to make it eye candy. Reading is so of the past, but I and many people do it anyway. Thought I'd make a writing blog without concern if no one ever saw it. Everything doesn't have to bow to a way of doing things that will draw the attention of thousands. I prefer a few to many.



The blog's only purpose is that I write in it every day. It's about making me write something every day. The writing itself is the purpose. Each entry is not something I'm putting up for debate. I see them like prose poems, brief essays, entities unto themselves. Who would want to debate Robert Frost on his poems, like Swinger of Birches. It's an entity unto itself. It's not up for disapproval or approval. It just is what it is. This is a major reason I can't join a church. I'm not putting self up for evaluation to be approved. For such a panel of judges I'm inclined to say I drink, smoke, cuss, am somewhat contrary, laugh at race jokes, don't practice political correctness, don't believe the virgin birth, and none of that is gonna change.



When it comes to religion, I go by the red words and nothing else. In politics, I'm for We The People; therefore, a Peacenik anti-Republican, even a tree-hugger. I'm everything objectionable to militarists. I don't care if militarism has been our human way since the start, I am not of that mind, nor will I entertain it. If militarism is the most masculine activity there is, then I'm the least masculine. That's another ladder I'm at the bottom of. On a totem pole, my face is the one on the bottom with grass grown up around it that hasn't been weed-eaten. That's why I like having maybe a few dozen people reading my daily sorta journal. I try to make it interesting for my friends reading it frequently or once in awhile or almost never. Every day a surprise, sometimes not.



All that matters to me is that whoever is reading whatever it is comes away with perhaps an insight or two, or a feeling of confidence that whoever you are is ok. Maybe that's the only real message I have, if you come away from reading one of these things feeling comfortable about who you are, I'm satisfied. Since I've learned by experience what I've been told and have read since childhood that we are souls with bodies, our souls being God (heaven) within, drops from the ocean of Love. The soul in each of us is love. We all want way way down to love and to be loved. That's where I see our authentic selves in that light. The soul is who I'm communicating with through the other's hearing and sight, necessary senses for living in a physical world. I see that light within filtered through belief systems, fears, confusions, sorrows, worries until there's hardly any light left. I believe that's what Jesus meant when he said ye are gods. We have God inside us, but our minds are so preoccupied with money, status, and all the 7 deadly sins, we don't even notice.



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WATER ON THE ROCKS

Turning inward to the flow of water over rocks, I've been looking at the guiding purpose of this blog, which I've not yet let any of you readers in on. It's not that it's a secret. I wanted to get a ways into it to see if what gets done matches what I set out to do. So far it has. It seems like the writing of it has taken the lead and guides where I'm going, as I hoped it would. It appears to have a flow of its own now.

What I believe I'm getting at, what motivated this project is an inclination to make a record of the cultural changes and landscape changes in my time here, thirty plus years. Not item by item, but as we move along, the way we go through changes in ourselves. Here again the macrocosm is the microcosm. They interchange back and forth such that they are the same. They just look different from various perspectives. I dare to think of each of these daily entries as puzzle parts that together make the whole. The whole is the world I live in as I perceive it, Waterall Road. Like William Faulkner said, write what you know. Can't say I know it well, but it is the only world I know.

I've read a lot of Chinese fiction and seen dozens of mainland Chinese films the last few years. The old people dress the traditional ways and carry the beliefs from before the best they're able. The rural people continue in the old ways too. The young leave and go to the city, dye their hair green, get peircings and talk on cell phones while they dance at discos. The kids can't communicate with grandparents at all, because they're hicks. Just like here. I'm seeing a parallel between what the Chinese people are going through and what we in the mountains are going through. It has helped me clarify what I've come to see as a point in time moving through such a long transition it has become a continuum.

The old culture is swept away a day at a time, a pop song at a time, a tv show at a time, and the new Pop culture moves in. It's New. Everything about it is New. Ipods are old. Twitter is getting old. Keeping up with the latest is such a passion it surely causes ulcers in some. The traditional cultures all over the world are being swept aside the same way, by the cult of the New. The Amazon River is mud like our Mississippi. They have cell phone mania there too.

Here, you see old men in bib 'overhauls' and ballcaps with a billboard on the front advertising something to do with farm equipment. They're often scholars of the Bible. The next generation dresses according to what department stores are selling that's advertised on tv. The next generation dresses by Walmart, and then the faux hip-hop whiteboys with ballcap on backwards, pants half way down and eyes that say there aint nothin goin on in there.

The entire lifetime of every of us has been lived in this transitional time between the old ways and whatever is next. The transition is far from over. It looks like we're on a self-destruct course sometimes, yet we make it through. The pilot who landed the passenger jet in the Hudson River averted disaster the same way our blind gropings into the future that look like we're flying a plane into the side of a mountain in fog somehow make it through. It takes some serious adjustments at the last minute, but they always seem to get done.

We're moving into the new world of electricity, from which there is no going back. The Age of Electricity was characterized a century and a half ago as Prometheus Unbound. I've an idea when the transition period is over, we'll have the new world we've been striving toward. In America, it might be deomocracy that's more inclusive. Might even be in China. That appears to be the direction we're moving in. But there is no knowing. I'd like to make the world I live in as interesting to you as it is to me. It's the mystery that keeps it interesting; if we knew the future, it would be boring by the time we got there.