LESS COFFEE, MORE TEA

 

cy twombly

Ran into my only pet peeve I do not tolerate a second time. Years ago I was talking with someone who asked me a question. I started answering and he walked away. First time it ever happened to me. Hadn't been in Sparta long by then. Next time it happened, I said I'll give a second chance. Next time around same character, same thing. That day I learned they do it once, they do it a second and third time. After that one, nobody gets a second chance. Somebody talking with me of their own volition, and while I'm speaking walks away, no second chance. I do not tolerate it. It's about the only thing I can think of, besides an assault, that I don't tolerate. It happened today. I've learned it is a certain kind of person that does it, and I don't want such people in my life. At all. I've been in the mountains too long to pass off in-your-face disrespect. Disrespect gets my hillbilly back up. And I can't find any reasons for it not to. It's a matter of boundaries, personal boundaries. You disrespect me, I disrespect you. It tells me the one who does it has no respect for me, so I withdraw my respect for such individual. And I don't mean big-deal respect, but the basic human respect of presence. And when I withdraw my respect, nothing fills the void, like pulling your hand out of a bucket of water, no trace left that a hand had ever been there.

 

cy twombly

 

I went to meet somebody at the coffee shop at lunch time. I don't like going in there anymore, feel alien. When Selma had it, the air was friendly, lively, awake, fun. She passed it on to somebody who sapped the friendly, lively, awake, fun out of the place in one sweep. First thing, it was made undeniably clear to all the local people who went in there, the people I went in there to visit with, they were no longer welcome. I asked one why he never went there anymore. "She doesn't like me." Asked another, "She doesn't like me." Come in the door from Roaring Gap or High Meadows country clubs and the service is close and personal, like in the movies, doesn't get better. Just a little bit of classism going on under the pretense of liberal. I'd told Selma in the beginning, when the right people found the place, I was gone. Because she was Cuban, the right people stayed away. With present management, all the wrong people have been run off, and I see nothing in there anymore but the right people.

 

cy twombly

 

I walk the political correctness coffee house line, don't say words like nigger, fuck and shit, much, obey disapproval to everyone's heart content but my own. Disapproval in a coffee shop is worse than disapproval in church. Disapproval is the reason I stay out of church. The pretend liberal is such that it makes me not want to call myself liberal anymore. All I see liberal means in the decades of political correctness is membership in the club of the cool people quick to disapprove of words forbidden on tv. Not my set. In this time of the life, I don't have time for, or interest in, self-editing to tippie-toe around somebody's, anybody's PC disapproval. Told they don't approve of something said, I'm awfully inclined to say something like, I don't give a shit. You don't approve of it, you don't say it. I'm not responsible to your approval. Pisses them off. A time in the coffee shop I mentioned I like to watch the race and caught a smarty-pants classist remark, "That's just cars running around in a circle!" I replied, "Yes, in the most minimal way you can look at it." In French it would be her bourgeois nose shot straight up and she was out the door. I laughed on the inside until I about cried, and on the outside pretended not to notice.  

 

cy twombly

 

I have fallen into a pattern there. I take a seat at the bar, pick up the paper and occupy self with something while I wait for anyone who works there to notice somebody came in the door, and sat down. They're too busy to notice. Walk by and don't look, back and forth. Eventually someone notices. I get the coffee. Want to speak to one, forget it. And if permitted a moment of wasted time, it's with an attitude, I don't have time for this (bleep). It feels like in a state or federal government office. At any time I want the attention of anyone working there, I have to arrest their attention, make them look up annoyed, what do you want? I tell myself it's the New Sparta, get used to it, get over it or get out of it. I've got used to it, got over it, am on my way out of it. I want to do my part to support the shop, as I believe Sparta benefits with such a place, but since my friends have been run off, and I'm a working class redneck too, why am I the privileged acceptable one? Today they were mocking and laughing about an old local boy, someone I respect so high up I'd stand up  for him before anybody. I withdrew my attention, thinking, I really don't belong in this place.

 

cy twombly himself

 

 

 

*

 



GRANDMOTHER VISITS IN THUNDER SHOWER

The rain, as we say around here, is just getting it, though the way it's spoken, is jist a-gittin it, sounds better, has momentum, iambic emphases. If it were "just getting it," it would not be a sayin' used by 'bout ever-body for its flat tone. "Jist a-gittin it" means it is raining hard, lightning, thunder, a thunder shower, not a thunder storm. I associate storms with wind. This is a straight down rain, lightning and loud thunder. Lightning rumbles in the distance as the cloud passes through. I felt no danger from the lightning, traced it by sound moving from west to east a few miles north of the house. It sounded like it was following the air flow over Wilkes Gap that follows highway 18. The rain has ended now. It is a day of clouds in motion. Rain fell earlier, cleared up and sun came out. Sun may be back after this rain. I like this kind of rain. Fewer people use the old expressions every year. Younger generations grew up on school grammar and television. The old-time grammar don't sound right no more. My grandmother spoke the old way. I was discouraged from saying aint, and them for those, by mother who did not want her kid sounding like a hick, especially her mother-in-law. She, in her family, was the first generation not to grow up on a farm. First generation city girl growing up in the Twenties and Thirties. Home influence and school influence had me believing city life was the only valid existence, until I learned I'd jist-a-soon go with the country people.  

I thought of grandmother, Christina (Tina) Marie, the sanest one in the family. I don't think anybody liked her, except me. She was head-strong, opinionated, gossipy, had a way of talking about people I had to train out of self when I went on to live in the world. It truly is an unbecoming trait. Having purged self of such talk, it sounds awkward and odd when I hear someone talking down about others. I expect she got it from her mother. It's a kind of smugness about self from a higher station than others. Ego. I learned after growing up, my mother didn't like her at all. She probably rued her mother-in-law's influence on the kid. The last time I saw mother, I said once in conversation my grandmother "was the most important person in my life." I don't know what she made of it. She didn't volunteer an opinion, nor did I ask. It was something I realized after living in the mountains most of my adult life, grandmother's influence on who I am is extensive. She was philosophically minded, which she passed to me and I appreciate. She taught me practical, everyday life morality. Church and home morality amounted to, no, don't, and you-better-not. No explanation of why, just punishment. The preacher sez. Grandmother taught me the why behind moral behavior. She was a great teacher for a lonely kid whose destiny was to go into the wilderness in search of the way of the spirit. 

Her family had moved to Kansas about forty years before she was born. She had several brothers and sisters grown and gone before she was born, and she had a younger sister, Aunt Ciller. Two of her brothers were fiddlers and one of them is said to have traded horses with Sitting Bull. She was the one to tell me, so I trust it. Her parents went to Kansas from eastern Kentucky, Pulaski County. They grew up in mountain culture, carried it with them in their home. I can tell, because their girl grew up a hillbilly. I visited some fourth cousins in Perry, Kansas, where she lived before getting married and moving to the city. Perry was always home. I was told very cautiously by one of the cousins that nobody liked her. It was ok. I assured him I anticipated it. None of her kids liked her, either. They only tolerated her. Evidently, she was a mean mother, ill-natured with a wicked tongue. I told them my experience with her was grandmother. She knew I wasn't getting any training at home, and I believe she took it upon herself to train this child, teach it a thing or two, like no rubber-necking in church and how to take care of birds, including chickens. Taught me how to transplant an iris, day lily, anything, and it live. She taught me appreciation for the plant world. We worked puzzles together. I listened to Grand Ole Opry with her. 

When my role is called up yonder, she's the first one I want to meet. I want to say to her, "I finally got it." Meaning, I finally got the music she liked, old-time fiddle & banjo music and the Carter Family. I watched Kate Smith with grandmother, who was shaped something like Kate Smith. We both loved to hear her sing, When the moon comes over the mountain. I loved the song as much as grandmother did. Watched Lawrence Welk with her on her seven inch tv and thought it wonderful, him with his exotic foreign accent and accordion, guests that sang so good. And the kid discovered rock n roll. There was the time the kid was nutty over Teresa Brewer's new song, Jambalaya, or something like that. I showed grandmother a picture of Teresa Brewer. She said, "Her face looks like a cat's ass." I didn't agree, but never saw the picture again without seeing a cat's ass. She let me see Elvis on the Ed Sullivan show on her tiny tv. It was better than nothing. I could get up close, wouldn't be in her way. The kid was deeply grateful she let me watch Elvis on her tv. I've wondered who she is now, have we met? I've never felt it. She may have chosen to be one of her great-grandkids I've never met, or not. I've enjoyed this visit with grandmother, remembering her so closely. I thank the rain shower for bringing her.  

photos by tj worthington

*

UNTYING INTERIOR KNOTS

donkey jen at breakfast

Every day I see notice of somebody else who believes the planet is six thousand years old, like it matters. I know people who believe the earth is flat, people who went to school. I'd venture that most fundamentalists believe the earth is six thousand years old. It's fundamentalist popular theology. I have no problem with them believing they're right and everybody else is wrong, as long as they leave me out of it. In the 1950s, the time of Joe McCarthy and red scare propaganda, I sat in church hearing the preacher talk about wanting a fundamentalist theocracy, force everybody to walk the line, the very same republican talk of today. I would think while he was talking that if you want the church to go out in the world and join politics with the intent of taking over, it's the end of your church. I've seen the progression of that line of thinking unto the place now that the Congress and Senate are planted largely with "Christian" intolerance, bought cheap. They see things in black and white, missing the entire rainbow in between the poles where we live our lives. Pat Robertson is now the chief fundamentalist evangelist after Billy Graham sat on the throne half a century. I heard it said Graham was the greatest man of the 20th Century, and I thought: In what category? Slap-stick? I grew up in the choir of Billy Graham praise. 

jenny

Graham was too gross for me. He was a performer like Bob Hope or Red Skelton. Like them, he was in it for the money and attention. His performance of the appearance of piety worked for him. Though I disliked intensely that world to grow up in, seeing in the news the fundamentalist takeover of government, I have insight into where they are coming from. And now I see it every day. I saw then the only outcome will be the destruction of fundamentalism. I thought they would embarrass themselves out of existence. They embarrass themselves dreadfully and don't get it. Michelle Bachmann, for example. They don't get it because they're so popular. The billionaires club bought them a tv channel to manipulate them to work against their own interest and think they're doing something big. It worked. I've put their way of thinking so far in my past, I'm grateful for the review to articulate from memory the motivation that set me running for my life like the guy in Munch's The Scream. I don't know why it failed to take with me and not the other kids in the church. My childhood reading level got "God is love," memorized verses that said the kingdom of heaven is in the heart. Why didn't I ever hear this in church as something practical to live by? Why didn't I ever hear about compassion as a way to live? Hate the communists and justify hating outsiders. God prefers white people. The God in the church was the god of Fear, before whom we shudder, tied up in knots of guilt. Only the preacher was going to heaven for sure. The rest of us were guilty as all hell. It had me twisted up with guilt for any and everything. 

jack

Later, I had a friend in college who was Catholic and just as burned out by bogus theology as I was. Later had a Jewish friend burned out the same as I was. We found the religions we came up in empty shells found on the beach. Pretty. You can hear the ocean in them. There's something ancient and timeless about them. But the spirit is gone. It's off somewhere else with the living. My spirit was suffocated by the emphasis on fear, guilt, punishment. I found the people of my life whose intelligence I respected were the teachers at school. I wanted to be like them. They were somewhat rational, didn't live entirely in the emotional realm. I wanted out of the vacuum of an official belief system. First thing I did, like the dog let off a chain the first time, was run blindly in all directions unaware of dangers, unaware of the world outside that belief system. I wanted to sin, sin, sin. I wanted to indulge in everything I was told not to do because God didn't like it. God doesn't like anything else either. When everything is a sin, I'm free, I can do anything. It's all a sin. Guilt supreme. Control. A belief system built by the needs of the few to control the many. Then one day I came face to face, in the spirit, with Meher Baba and he told me what I already knew, God is love. This was the reward for the fifteen years dismantling, brick by brick, the construction in my head of Kansas fundamentalist theology. God is love is fun. The misinterpretation of God as fear is not fun. God is love allows me to see my donkeys with love in their hearts, embodied spirits, like humans. Under God is fear, I see the donkeys brute beasts devoid of consciousness or mind or heart. I'm able to enjoy the whole personality of my donkey friends, aware of their consciousness, mind and heart. They are aware of same in me, because I'm able to see it in them. One small example of how God is love enhances my life.

*

   

A DEAD BATTERY AND HILLBILLY PREACHING

joel shapiro

The car is driving me wild. Dead battery again. I'm thinking I've found the source of the drain on the battery. I have thought it was the gps plugged into the lighter hole. But it was there for a long time not draining the battery. A few days ago I pulled a fuse thinking it might help the door latch that was locked up to operate; the door locks and interior lights work on this one fuse. The door latch started working again after the temperature rose above freezing. The battery was fine. I put the fuse back into its slot when the door latch started working. Dead battery. Whatever is draining the battery, I suspect, is in the realm of that one fuse. I can get along without interior lights and without door locks. The door locks annoy me anyway. The doors lock automatically when I take the transmission out of Park. I don't like that. If I need out of the car in a hurry, I don't want to be fooling around trying to get it unlocked first. I carry a small flashlight in a pocket. Around here, there is no need to lock a car, unless it's near Christmas and the car is full of boxes and bags in a parking lot at night. There is an old country saying that locks keep an honest man honest. They don't stop thieves with intent. I never keep anything in my car to tempt somebody walking by. When I leave camera in car, I bury it under papers, trash, a jacket, a hat. I pulled the fuse again today, this time to stay out, at least long enough to see if the battery will keep a charge without it. First thing I checked this morning was the water level in the battery. It was fine. Tomorrow morning, neighbor Allen will drive over and let me jump my car from his battery. Come to think of it, that won't work. He's borrowed an old Studebaker pickup from a friend for hauling in some firewood. His car is not here. So much for that. The Studebaker battery is probably a 6 volt, and mine is 12. I'll figure something out. The battery can't get any deader. Late afternoon, my friends Lucas and Judy will be arriving for a few days. Their car's battery will accord with mine.  

joel shapiro

If all my neighbors were country people, I could stop any car driving by. My neighbors are city people, Republican exurbanites. They don't like to be bothered. And I don't like to bother them. I'll work it out. The county changed after 1980 when the farms went away. The old people who kept their farms died out and the heirs divided the farm into lots, making subdivisions and a lot of money. Some sold the farms to Christmas tree growers. Much as I regretted the Bush-Cheney economy, it put a stop to suburbanites getting away from the enwords. They watch so much tv they think the enwords are lurking in every shadow to rob and kill them. They can't sell their houses in the city to pay for their mountain houses, and they can't sell a mountain house. Several of them have gone back to the city. It's rough on the contractors and carpenters and the town merchants who had begun to count on people coming in here from Away. They stopped coming and the town is now languishing, just short of plywood on the windows. It's not mine to wish it was one way or another. It's mine to go on about my life and let the world around me change as it will. It's mine to do, because that's how things are. I like it or don't like it is neither here nor there. What matters is that I have peace in my heart. I don't have a great deal of time left and am glad of it. My house is one of the last original houses in Air Bellows. Allen, my next door neighbor, lives in a little old farm house he's restored. Old man Tom Pruitt's house has been let go down since he died. The owner won't sell it and won't fix it up. It was twenty-four years ago he died. The house has been empty ever since with a poacher staying in it during hunting season until he stopped hunting. He hunted anywhere he pleased, on anybody's land, on Parkway land. The law knew about him, but never caught up with him. The beautiful old house, built a year or two after 1900, made of oak, now looks like a haunted house and is past restoration. 

joel shapiro

Yesterday, riding with Melvin on the way home from watching tv football at Justin's, we passed Laurel Glenn church, where I went regularly fourteen years and left twenty-three years ago. They locked the door and turned off the electricity twenty years ago. It was one of the beautiful mountain churches of an architecture so simple it had Japanese style. No steeple, no cross, a plain white wooden building with a silver tin roof. It had an outhouse among the trees out back. Seeing it go by in the foggy night, white in the darkness, I felt again my fondness for the building itself and what I know went on inside. I stopped one day to look in the windows. Everything was lined up like when it was living, covered in a film of dust. I loved that place in a deep heart-felt way. Much love energy flowed inside those walls and beautiful hillbilly singing. Originally, it was the church in the Glade Valley region the black farmers of the area went to. It was the black people, the Choates, who built the church in the 1920s. Their cemetery was the other side of what was then a dirt road. The door faced the cemetery, south, where it could be seen from the pulpit at the opposite wall. In the 1950s, white Regular Baptists bought it after the black population thinned out so much they had to shut the church door. Most white kids leave here after school. All black kids leave, with rare exceptions, the exceptions that prove the rule. And some kill themselves. The white people changed the door to a wall facing east where they put their own cemetery the other side of another dirt road. They built a pulpit area on the opposite wall and covered the old walls with wood paneling. The floors were pine with so many knots I sometimes thought of it as the night sky with stars. It never failed to amuse me when I thought about the little church with the most vehemently racist man I've ever known preaching in what used to be a nigger church. 

joel shapiro

In the old Regular Baptist way, the preacher was just a man like everybody else. No collection plate. He worked, had his own ways, beliefs, temperament. He did not have to be educated, not even able to read. The old-time preaching way works best with the least education. It's a matter of opening up to be "a vessel" for the Holy Spirit to flow through, a voice for the spirit to talk with. I found in all the different preachers I heard that education past sixth or seventh grade inhibited the freedom to open up and allow the spirit. Millard Pruitt, the preacher, grew up in old-man Tom's house up Waterfall road. He was Tom's youngest brother. I felt like they were each other's favorite brother. They were the last two to die out. Millard was a man braced against everything and everybody. He'd make me think of William Blake's line, Damn braces, bless relaxes. He was all about condemning, punishment, overseeing with the most judgmental eye I've known. And an ego that was outta sight. He had a loving heart, told me hundreds of stories from his life, stories of the people that lived in Air Bellows, Whitehead, the county. He was adamantine in every part of his mind, unyielding. It even embarrassed his wife how much he hated niggers. It bothered me for quite awhile until one day I realized I am not here to change him. I appreciated him as an intelligent man in many ways, a brilliant mind in a Sixteenth Century theology that goes back to medieval and perhaps neolithic. Would not entertain any notion that the earth was round. The Bible says it has four corners. I had never known anyone like Millard. I found him fascinating all the years I knew him. I respected his theology as John Milton's. I wasn't there to judge, but to learn what the old-time religion was like, to see what was there for my own spiritual path. He gave me the best education I could ask for. In the pulpit, Millard had a facility for receiving the spirit that made other preachers jealous. When the spirit o'ertook him, only love flowed on his voice. The only subject I ever heard him preach was love. This was my evidence that what was coming through had no part of his mind in it. It was such beautiful preaching I never allowed myself to make a tape of it. It was too spontaneous for the moment, for the moment only. 

joel shapiro

*

LOSING MY RELIGION

vada

by cheyanne

Forty years ago I started a new life with a new vision and new purpose. I came to the mountains a year later to adjust my life, my thinking to the new vision. The vision simply amounted to: God is. Just that turned me from drifting without vision to purpose. I wanted to live quietly in the mountains to assess my new insight and tune myself to the new vision. When I say, God is, I don't mean a rule book a thousand pages long, every rule starting with Don't. I mean God without systems of dogma, without commandments. Love is what God is, and that was a tall order for me. It needed some consideration. I didn't know shit about love. The emotional climate in the home I came up in was fear and punishment. These were justifications for absence of love, in the name of love. I hit you every day because I love you. I berate your every move and word because I love you. I don't want to hear anything you have to say because I love you. It's for your own good. This version of love made me into someone who distrusted love, and had so little experience with love that I was twisted up in knots like really bad hair. I was so shy a kid, I was pathetic. Shyness was the first issue I had to address when I entered the world on my own. I conquered it, but still have a debilitating shyness within that I've learned to accept and live with. There are some parts of my nature I simply have to accept. My generation helped shape who I am. I found in mountain culture a people who accepted themselves as they were, with an attitude of fuck you if you don't like it. A liberating attitude. It was so long ago I adopted this attitude, I couldn't give it an age or a year. It may have been the moment when I left the church I'd been going to. During the time of the first Saturday night meeting I missed as a non-member, I was jamming at a concert of Siouxsie and the Banshees followed by Jane's Addiction, two of my very favorite bands, thinking there is a much better spirit here than there was there.

vada

by cheyanne

I left the church because I had grown out of my own negative mindedness and found self surrounded by negative mind such that it became suffocating. I loved the people in the church. One day an old black man fallen into dementia, whose farm surrounded the church lot, who grew up going to this church before it was sold to white people, came to the church house one Sunday morning in the middle of a meeting, dressed up in a beautiful suit for church. It's said people with dementia want to go Home, the place they grew up. I suspected old man Sabe was returning to Home in the dream mind he was living in. He sat in the same place I sat my first time in the church. Sabe was as humble a man as I've known. Sabe was a good man all the way around. And no one in the church acknowledged his existence. At hand shaking time, I went straight to Sabe. I'd have welcomed him if his mind was right. I'd come to know Sabe over several years, appreciated deeply who Sabe was. He was a simple, old, black farmer in a world of white people that all looked down on niggers. His wife had recently been taken to a nursing home. He was so addled that he soon followed. I felt like God had sent an angel to the church when I saw Sabe at the door, hat in hand, waiting for permission to enter. Preacher said, Come on in, Sabe. My heart glowed seeing Sabe was visiting his Home church in his dream state. I was glad to see him. Hand-shaking time at the end of the meeting, I shook his hand first, honored to shake Sabe's hand, my respect for him was so high. Everyone acted like he wasn't there. I went into shock. Everybody knew Sabe. Everybody liked Sabe. Or acted like they did. Everybody knew his wife was gone and could see his condition. Everybody knew Sabe gave the white people's church a piece of his land for the cemetery. Gave. 

vada

by cheyanne

On the issue of love your neighbor as yourself, it didn't take much figuring to see Sabe Choate, whose land went all the way around the church, who lived in the next house up the road, a neighbor. The light in my heart for the church went out that Sunday morning. I tried not to let it go out, but it was like willing a dead body back to life. It never came back. I was not comfortable among them anymore. Then came the morning on the way to church I put my hand on the screen door to push it open and my hand could not push. I stood with my hand on the screen door unable to move. I said to self, You don't have to go. I relaxed, closed the door and stayed home, feeling good about it. I knew the light was out and was not coming back on. I talked to myself, saying this is their culture, they are Southern Appalachian people, I am not here to change them, I am a guest in their community. Up to that time, I had allowed them who they were, as they allowed me who I was. I had a hard time accepting they could be so blatantly indifferent in their own church meeting. The difference was I saw Sabe a dark complected human being. I saw him closer to a true "Christian" than any one of the white people in the church. Afterward, I felt like Sabe was the Christ-like one and the people in the church were saying, Crucify him, he aint nothin but a nigger. As much as I was with accepting others as they are, I could not associate with people to praise God, who look so far down on the humblest and most gracious man I'd ever met. I did not want to hold them to Civil Rights laws or anything. The utter rejection of a respectable human being, respectable in more ways than staying out of prison, struck me deeper than I knew at the moment. 

grumpy old bastard and cheyanne make silly faces

by cheyanne

After the meeting, when I gathered myself together from the shock, I felt glad I had gone to Sabe first to shake his hand; everybody in the church shook the hand that touched a nigger's hand. It gave me such delight, I didn't like having such feelings about the people I'd felt so comfortable with the day before. I told myself it was not right thinking to hold them to my way of seeing. I was a guest in their culture; it was not my place to expect they think like me. I was among them to learn, not to teach. My second winter in the mountains I took a job to get through the winter working with several people from Away, like me. I'd lived intimately among mountain people by then. One of them from Raleigh told me it's good I came to the mountains educated so I can teach these ignorant mountain people something. I thought, Man, you don't even know what you're talking about. I did not waste my breath explaining I'm here to learn, not to teach. First thing I learned, I can't teach anybody of these mountains anything. I needed them to teach me. But I'm glad he said it, it articulated for me that I was, indeed, in awe of the intelligence of the mountain people. I still am after thirty-eight years, more than ever. You don't see it from the outside. You have to be inside to see it. Mountain people don't do anything for show but play fabulous music, a music inaccessible to outsiders. If you think there is nothing to playing a fiddle or banjo, try learning one. When you hear a fiddler cut loose with Chicken Reel or Forked Deer, you can be sure the one bowing the fiddle has a brilliant mind. It takes a good mind to learn a fiddle and a brilliant mind to master one. It's the same with a banjo. I came here to learn and it turned out my parachute landed me in the midst of a good education, learning by experience in a world foreign to any I'd known. I celebrate the life of Jr Maxwell first full moon of November at his grave to have a drink with him, a master who taught me the value of the people I live among and how to live my own values naturally. 

cheyanne herself

by cheyanne

*

NO TO HERD-THINK

meher baba

I heard a man talking on a Charlotte NC interview radio talk show with NPR about a religious demographic of people he calls the NONES. These are the people who have a spiritual life, see themselves on the spiritual path, who are not affiliated with a church, religion, by choice. For religion they have none. He has made a church for the people disaffected by religion. I listened to him long enough to find out what he was about. Even continued to listen after I knew he was no interest to me. It got worse until I just turned it off. By worse, I mean not allowing that an individual on one's own path can be valid. I've been told countless times by religionists in my life that I cannot go it alone, I need the support of a church. Support? Like my friend Melvin says, When I want to be judged, I'll go to church. I cannot give the opinions of an ego-maniacal man power-over my decision making. A preacher whose solution to the troubles in the world is nuke-em cannot advise me about anything. He has nothing to teach me. Faux news on the television gives him evidence he's right. A man whose racism is never spoken, because it's understood, has nothing to tell me. Even a preacher who is not racist or sexist and believes religion is the way, still has nothing to say of interest to me. I know a preacher who lives nearby with a church of beautiful loving energy bubbling among the members. I've seen his flock become truly caring, conscious people of integrity. Still, it's for people who need groups. I, personally, do not thrive in groups. In a group, I start looking right away for my own place on the periphery. Every herd has one that stays off to itself. I am that one in the herds I've been associated with. At a cocktail party I'm the lone penguin with drink in hand wandering between the groups of penguins chattering.  

ganesh

I forget the book, chapter and verse, but I've heard a zillion sermons on it's the narrow way, not the broad highway. The preacher meant by "narrow" the straight-and-narrow, the tightrope preachers use to control their flock with guilt, a misinterpretation of strait, a narrow passage to a harbor, which even a child could see. I mentioned the difference to two different preachers, one in childhood, one as an adult, that strait has a very different meaning from straight. No it didn't. Dismissed. A doubter. In hindsight, I am grateful I had such a twisted religious beginning. It was so obviously not what it claimed of itself, it spit me out like the human cannonball, made me a None, a contraction of no one, nobody. The preacher mentioned above starts out with Nobody his name for the people not associated with religion. He likes to have "conversation" with a None over pitchers of beer in a bar where he makes salient points to prove to the other, you're wrong, you're nobody. I think of Odysseus telling the Cyclops his name was Nobody, thinking ahead to the Cyclops screaming in pain with a beam stuck in his eye; the other Cyclopes called to him asking who was doing this to him and he answered, Nobody. They went back to sleep and Odysseus slipped away. The guy talking on the radio was slick, fast with a rebuttal to any point of view. Winning them over, convincing them he's right and they're wrong. Now he has a church of nobodies believing they're somebodies in association with him. Listening to his slick, evangelistic talk was enough in itself to put me off. I'd say he won over the ones looking for what's "right" with his I'm-right-you're-wrong explications. He talked like he was an insurance salesman, your good buddy with your interest at heart. And a little more money in the collection plate helps. The ones looking for what's real are the ones he fails to snare with his slick tongue. He'll never figure out why. The need to be right is the mother of countless atrocities. 

shirdi sai baba

By the time I turned the radio off, I was almost mad at him. The temperature was rising in my boiler and I assessed no need to follow this unto steam blowing out the ears. There came the time I was hearing him a smug Jerry Falwell, who, of the fallen televangelists, actually fell well. The guy on the radio wasn't saying a purple "teletubby" with a triangle on its head in a children's tv show was gay. At least the guy talking on the radio wasn't showing the stupid side of egomaniacism. He was showing the cold, calculating side with a smile of pretend caring in the reassuring voice of an undertaker, thank you very much for the free money you worked your ass off for. Nationwide is on your side. State Farm is there. He has a church of people he has convinced they're nobodies outside his herd; he knows what's right. His presumption got on my nerves to the point I almost started talking back to him, but realized I wanted no kind of conversation with him, not even in my head. For me, he was another voice calling to me to enter a herd, a Siren saying, Join, Be a Member, Belong, No more Lonely Boy, We're there for You. And my immediate response: No you're not. He brings to mind a phenomenon that when you prove somebody's belief about something to be wrong, it hardens them further in their own belief. This is what the Somebody who convinces Nobodies they're wrong did to me. He made me all the more determined in my own way. I believe he has the same right to gather Nobodies unto himself that I have not to accept the name Nobody just because he, for whom being right is important, says so. Pat Robertson is right, too. So was Joe McCarthy. All the great rogues of history were right. I cannot turn my thinking over to any form of rightness. 

sadguru upasni maharaj

Life on earth, everyday life, is too complex, change the only constant, illusion the foundation, for me to nail myself to one thing or another that calls itself or himself or herself right. What's right in one context is not right in another. This way of looking at it takes into consideration something only the individual can see for self. The spiritual path is a path, not a road, not an interstate, not a passenger jet, not a cruise ship. It is individual. Walking in a line on a path gets old fast. In line, the one in front is perky with energy, going onward, charged. The ones behind are overtaken with lethargy such that it becomes a labor to walk. Some of them lag behind and run to catch up. When it is just two, the one behind gets tired first. It doesn't work. Or anyway, it doesn't work well enough to suit me. All arrive at their destination, but only one experienced the path, the way. The others were going along. I feel like Jon Voight in Runaway Train telling Eric Roberts, who wanted to go with him when he escaped from the prison, to keep up; he is not slowing down for him. Roberts had a rough time keeping up. He was following. Voight had a goal, an end, a destiny to chase, while Roberts' motivation was following. Runaway Train is a great film. Clue: Akira Kurosawa wrote the screenplay. The film is a metaphor for the spiritual path on a kundalini fast-track run from locked in a cage to standing on a train engine running full speed, his arms out like a bird, leaning into the wind. He did what he had to do. Some of it was good. Some of it was bad. It didn't matter. He had a trip to make. Let go of stragglers, work through opposition at emergency speed, and get on with it. I liked about this story's characterization of the spiritual path the absence of judgment of anything. It was all bad and it was all good. He did what he had to do, call it good or call it bad. Neither pole mattered. Thus his path. My path meanders like a stream bed with the flow I have chosen for myself, rather the flow that flows best with my temperament. I like to think I'm in the meandering delta of my life. Many, many streams in the delta. This one mine.      

*

UP FROM THE MIRE

sophie taeuber-arp

I have a feeling I've found a core issue in how I "believe" now in relation to how I was brought up to believe in the Kansas version of American Fundamentalism. The adults in my world throughout childhood, even unto adulthood, then peers, believe going to church and believing in Jesus you'll go to heaven when you die. I never found in my child's investigative mind any confidence that anything was worth a "reward" after I die. Only after dying is important to my mother's way of thinking, taught repeatedly, relentlessly, that it's all going to be gold and angels when we die. No more sorrows, no more pain. Going up to heaven to be with Jesus when I die. Well, maybe so. What about from now until I die? I have a life to live. I abandoned scriptures as soon as I escaped parents' church that taught the words of Jesus as commandments: you better not or you'll go to hell, Jesus sez. I asked preacher about love your neighbor. Love, he said, has a spiritual meaning. It's about life in heaven, not here on earth. My questions I didn't bother to ask after a certain point when I learned the answer to all my questions was it has a spiritual meaning that we're not meant to understand. Everything to do with love had a spiritual meaning that we're not to understand til we get to heaven where we'll live in idle luxury at #1 Gold Brick Rd, evidently an apartment complex. There, I can love my neighbor, because my neighbor is with Jesus too. Fear is all I ever heard about God and Jesus. God is meant to be worshipped in fear, fear the Lord thy God, forever on alert to be afraid of God. He'll come like a thief in the night, so you better look out. He's gonna getcha and you won't even see it coming. He'll catch you in a sin and condemn you to hell, eternal damnation, so dramatic, burning up in fire for eternity, Eeeek. And it's not even certain I'd go to heaven though I did get saved under duress at age 7. Say no and you go to hell when you die. Ok.  Just say yes that you believe that Jesus is the son of God. Ok. Yes. You're saved. At the time, I felt it awfully hollow. Just say I believe something I don't know anything about and I go to heaven. Logic wasn't really accessible to the 7 year old. It didn't seem to inhibit the preacher, either.

sophie taeuber-arp

And there was God the judge who kept track of every sin I ever thought, let alone did. There was no living without ongoing guilt. God sez NO. Mommy sez You better NOT. Preacher sez You'll go to HELL. All of them saying, You'll be SORRY. Through the time in that belief system, I believed it because adults told me to. It really didn't add up at school. The kids from my church always carried their bible on top of their books they carried between classes. Ever to be alert to win a soul to the Lord. I refused. At school was where I had my life as myself. I was a shy, inward kid, living in total uncertainty about everything. I always had to figure everything out for myself. I'd catch on by watching the other kids. About my senior year I started catching on a little bit. I took up reading novels. Actually read Dr Zhivago senior year on my own; it was new in paperback. I don't think I retained any of it, but got through it. Read Ben Hur senior year on my own after seeing the Charlton Heston movie. Oh I thought it such a great movie. Big Hollywood spectacle with cool chariot race. In the late 1980s I met a granddaughter of Lew Wallace, who had lived her life in the family wealth provided by Ben Hur royalties. She was a wonderful human being. She had a severely retarded son she raised herself, never institutionalized him. He came along very well with a sense of self as valid. In school I saw that most of the other kids were not as repressed by churches. I had a cousin who went to a Congregationalist church and wondered what was wrong with my parents for going to that nutcase cinderblock box church with folding chairs and honky tonk piano and a dramatic preacher. I never figured it out either. I was envious of cousin for getting to go to a sane church. The luck of the draw. When I started reading, my horizon grew until in 1988 I saw the curve of the earth from a plane at sunrise over Germany. It's no big deal visually, the same as a photograph in a book, but mentally it's a gigantic deal. Reading opened up history to me. School history was dates of wars and names of generals. I wanted to find out what happened, how the people lived in those times. I cared nothing for the military mind as history. 

sophie taeuber-arp

The deal about winning souls for the Lord is it will go better for you in heaven, something like the Mary K Cadillac. That's for if you're really zealous and win souls one after the other and never slack. It really broke for me when I discovered the beatniks and Alan Watts. The beatniks were a thumb to the nose at religion and politics. Henry Miller planted seeds and set saplings asprout. It wasn't the sex part about Miller that appealed to me---there is plenty of sex writing to go around---but his attitude toward life. He taught me that the people of my everyday life are every bit as important as celebrities and the famous, even more important. He taught me to pay attention to the people around me and to value them as themselves. This was wholly new to me. The only thing that mattered about somebody else from the church perspective was what kinds of sins they're committing, how best they can be judged. Punishment was the thing. Couldn't let anybody get away with anything without being punished. The French Existentialists gave me a philosophy I resonated with as my own. By the time I started college, five years after high school, I was well educated in Existentialism. There was a time I'd longed to go someplace like Chapel Hill where I could take courses in Existentialism. The existentialist writers got me through my life under martial law by duress, took my mind to another world where it seemed like sane people lived. I learned a great deal about the French Underground during German occupation. I learned about several European writers I read then and later. Those two years I have come to think of as pre-school where I taught myself how to read and thereby how to start thinking for myself. Reading opened me to a world of sanity, knowledge, intelligence, living without fear of God's damnation. I'd been fed so much nonsense about God, especially the guilt, it took fifteen years, two seven-year cycles, attempting to find out what's really the case where God was concerned. I already knew that what I came from was not it. That was the starting point of my search for what really is the case. Something new happened when I discovered writings from the East, Buddhism the most attractive for its clear explanations of matters of the inner self. 

sophie taeuber-arp

Learning to conform to a Japanese, for example, school of Buddhism, it seemed like the religion and the culture were so interwoven that the religion outside the culture would be pretentious. It's the same with Western culture and Christendom, interwoven unto inseparable. I don't mean disciple of Christ Christendom, but religion. It still bothered me that Buddhism was a religion. I thought meditation might be an interesting path, but didn't know how. Thought it had to be taught. There wasn't even a yoga class in Charleston in the 1960s. It was in the Charleston years that I pondered away the nonsense I'd been taught in the earlier years. It was in those years I chopped off all that went before. It was my own inner Dada period, where I chopped off the past and began at a new starting place that had never been attempted before. Looking back from now I can see the Divine hand was with me in that time, putting self in touch with several people who became major influences, not as teachers. The influence of their integrity as intelligent, compassionate human beings without religion freed me even further from religion I knew by then to be a shell found on the beach, the life long gone from it. I came to see that living in this world is what the scriptures are about. The scriptures all around the world, all down through time. They're about living with inner peace in this world. It's done by regarding everyone we come in contact with in the course of a day with an open compassionate heart, a child the same as one's own, a man the same as a brother, a woman the same as a sister. Respect for the self in others. I overlook things I do that aren't quite right and things I don't do that I say I will. I feel like allowing others by overlooking expectation, just allowing the other to be self, is all it's about. Allowing. When I found the self in others, it became automatic for me to feel compassion and understanding. The day I finally broke through to love that had been high hurdle for me came from reading in Meher Baba's discourses that understanding is the same as love. I said, Lo! I can do that. I did have a spirit of understanding. Then love was easy. The simplest thing Jesus said, no parables to mull over, but a straight-forward simple sentence, God is love. 

sophie taeuber-arp herself, 1889-1943

*

OLD TIMES / NEW TIMES

jessica stockholder

I'm back from a couple hours with my friend Debi I've not seen in a few years. She's been through it and came out the other end. I've known Debi since she was sixteen, worked with her dad and her uncle on the farm putting up hay in the summers. Debi was a fire-haired hillbilly girl then, and now the fire has gone from her hair, but she's still a hillbilly and wouldn't be anything else. It's odd to see her aging. I see her taking on the look of about all her relatives past a certain age. I could have put several names to the face I saw this evening, all of them her cousins, aunts or uncles. She's a Pruitt and a Crouse by birth. Pruitts are special people to me. They are the first people I knew, the ones who taught me mountain ways and my way around. Debi is one of the last of the Pruitts I know, as the generations I have known are largely dead. The younger ones went to cities for work. She has become my thread that keeps me connected to her kin. And similarly, I am her thread to her relatives that are gone. I'd been in the hills about six months when I decided to check out a nearby church. I went a couple times. The third time, I was talking with two men out front before the meeting. One came over and one of the ones I was talking with asked him, "What was that shootin goin on up at your place yesterday?" Answer, "Aw, It was them Pruitt boys." He looked at me, turned and walked away. My thought at the moment: Anybody too good for a Pruitt is too good for me. I have carried this maxim the whole way along and it has served me well. The Pruitt boys were rowdy and I rode around with them on weekends. They were the best education I could have had for introduction to mountain culture. I worked with two of them during the week and on weekends we ran the back roads throwing beer cans out the car windows. I kept my empty cans in a paper bag on the floor. They thought that was funny. I could not toss a beer can out the window. It wasn't possible. Even if my mind wanted to do it, my arm would not allow it. A .22 rifle was always with us. Sometimes we shot at the cans I saved. Never went back to the church.

 

neil jenney

 

We did not talk about these people who have a place in my heart and a place in her heart too. They are initially our bond. For her, I'm a witness to the wonderful people they were. The Pruitts are one of the mountain families that has a reputation for being either preachers or drunks. Such families tend to have at least one bootlegger in their near past, like daddy, grandpa and greatgrandpa. Liquor makers tend to be drinkers and many of them drink all the time. Heavy drinkers tend to be terrible husbands and parents, keep dysfunctional households and raise dysfunctional kids. The boys aligned with daddy tend to be rowdy and the boys aligned with mama tend to make preachers who condemn drinking. This becomes a social dynamic. A couple of generations down the line, one will have kids that stay in trouble, and another will have kids that go to church. When I run through the names of the families known for preachers and drunks, they tend to come from bootleggers just a few generations back. Throw in good and evil and the judgment begins. It has nothing to do with good and evil except a belief system that allows only one or the other. We don't call it good and evil anymore. It is black and white now. I hear it called gray in between. It is colors in between. In pigment, all colors mixed together make black. In light, all colors make white. It is colors between black and white, not gray. Duality is the nature of this world of experience. Duality makes the colors. We meander in the color zone, not at the poles. On the earth, nobody lives at the north or south poles. We live between the poles. Who is to say a handful of brothers and buddies are evil because they like to free their minds of their frustrations periodically? And who is to say a preacher who looks down his nose at drunks is good? In the culture we have the divide, drinkers and non-drinkers. The drinkers are bad and the non-drinkers are good. I go with the company of the bad, because I have experienced the hypocrisy of the good.

 

ai wei wei

 

An old-time square-dance tune is playing in my head, Have a drink on me / Have a drink on me / Aw Lord / Have another drink on me. It's a funny song. One of the aspects of traveling my own path that I especially like is seeing how limiting either/or thinking can be, caught up in the poles, ignoring everything in between. A walk to the waterfalls for me is the whole trip there and the whole trip back, the falls the turn around point. I love being under a canopy of trees. In conversation with my old deceased preacher friend, Millard Pruitt, Debi's uncle, I said I can worship God the same in the  woods among trees as well as in the church. No you can't. I'm glad my mind is not locked down in yes and no, right and wrong, good and evil. I don't even think about good and bad anymore. I'm happy to note that kind of thinking is gone from my head. I find that I personally prefer the company of lovers of God, but they're only a part of the whole. I know and like some people whose names make about anybody around here shudder. One in particular comes to the front of my mind, whose name I'll not mention to protect the innocent. Everybody shudders when they hear her name. I don't. I like her. I'm not going to push her buttons or piss her off, which can have a way of being lethal. Pushing other people's buttons is not my style, so I'm in no danger around her. In fact, I feel safe around her. When she's not giving herself a bad name, she has a great sense of humor, and is a no bullshit kinda woman. I respect her. I respect everybody who has been to prison. I respect her for what she's been through and I respect her character. Where trust is concerned, I would trust her and not most others. Debi too. I'd trust Debi to the grave. I want to be somebody Debi can trust. If need ever arises, I pray that I have what it takes to be there for Debi. This is how I feel with the people I call my friends.

 

the chakras

 

A month or so ago, Debi had an experience with the Holy Spirit. She told me the experience and I believe her interpretation of it. It brought to mind a day I remember several years ago, a day when I was in the spirit from the moment I woke in the morning unto night. Memorable day. I listened to Debi's experience happy for her. She needed an upliftment. Like I say, she's been through it and came out the other end. This must have been the quasar at the other end of her interior black hole. She said she's happy for the first time in her life. I saw it. It was in everything about her, her movement, her attitude. She wasn't new in that it changed her away from being Debi, but took her closer to Debi. She had the misfortune of being born with an incredibly fast, retentive mind in a social situation that had no place for such a mind. She had to dumb herself way down. The dumbing down took her with it. She brings to mind a Van Halen song, "Ya know I been to the edge. There I stood and looked down." Debi would say, Amen, to that. She came home to take care of her mother unto dying, then made her way for a few years taking care of an old woman with dementia, the shit on the walls variety. Since the year 2000, if you don't have a job in Sparta, you're out. The mechanics are having a minor boom since fewer people are buying new cars. She has dental issues, Social Services issues, poverty issues. She's getting by without a car, which is mighty troublesome. She's at the bottom where poverty is concerned, yet in her heart she's the best she's ever been in her life. She has a good dog, got rid of a loser man, is losing weight by cutting out soft drinks. She's had her hard times and she's had her good times. I asked her what church she was going to. I was gladdened to hear she was not going to church. She has the real thing, I was thinking, don't spoil it. Live it, enjoy your new perspective. I don't like to advise, but took a moment when she was talking about different interpretations of the Bible, to say, The red letters is the only part that's important, the rest of it is a history book, don't worry about interpretations. If I could leave anything of value with her, I felt like that was the best value I had to offer at the beginning of her path. I allowed myself to say it because it arose spontaneously, flowed from the moment.          

 

 

sol lewitt

 

 

 

*

 

 

THANK YOU FOR THIS DAY

 

raoul dufy

Day 4 of blogathon, the prompt is lists of future artistic goals over the next five years. First thing to mind was McKenzie Wren's opening to Day 2, the chorus from David Bowie's song from the early 1970s, "We've got five years." The other association that popped into mind almost simultaneously was the Soviet Five Year Plans. Through the 1950s and 60s, American propaganda was fixed on evil Communist Russia such that it became reality: Communism = Evil, Five Year Plans are stupid. It's what Communists do. You have to be of a certain age to remember that time, like in my generation you had to be of a certain age to remember the Depression. Nobody bothered to notice what the Soviets were doing was not Communism, but that was neither here nor there. Actuality has no role in propaganda. Calling orange juice ketchup doesn't make it anything but orange juice. This is where a five year plan takes my head. It doesn't mean I agree that five year plans are stupid or Communism is evil, only these are my associations. The language of propaganda. It's not that I mean it really is, only that it's my historical association. It's a bundle of personal and historical associations that makes it an unreality for me to say I want to make the world a better place or I want to spread joy or I want to be an ambassador for good, whatever that is. It doesn't even mean I disagree with people who see the good as something laudable. This is illusion, good is not always "good." Uplifting is not always elevating. I'm getting into splitting hairs territory; it's time to abandon that line of thinking. It leads ultimately to the brain is a universe of atoms floating in spirals through nothingness, which leads to looking out the window at the snowbirds hopping about in the snow the other side of the glass picking up their daily seeds. Caterpillar just now appealed to me for attention, Mao. Took a moment to rub the top of her head and her neck, tell her I love her from the heart. I took the moment to bring my own head back to the world of perception where seeing is believing, leaving off that believing doesn't have much to do with reality, and reality is different from individual to individual. I mean the reality we collectively agree upon, like gravity keeps footprints off the ceiling.

 

raoul dufy

 

My entire childhood was spent in a church where I was told several times a week that I might not be alive tomorrow. Any moment may be my last. It stuck. I've never been able to imagine a future for myself. I've seen too many variables flying about every situation and have lived long enough to see that even Noam Chomsky doesn't know the future. One unforeseeable moment can change everything. Like the assassination of Archduke (?) Franz Ferdinand with an improvised explosive device set Europe into a "World War."  The rings that go out from this one splash in time will continue to the horizon. I have a really strong feeling such an unforeseeable moment is around a nearby corner. 911 was not it, because it was foreseeable and seen coming. "We didn't have any intelligence." Duh. A child raised believing the Truth in the likelihood of not waking up in the morning, plus we might get nuked any day, I've lived with "no hope of tomorrow" as evidence of the importance of living my life today. I've also lived long enough to notice that it aint necessarily so. I woke up a lot of mornings. The last thing I had to say to that argument was to an old preacher's wife, one of the really old-fashioned kind, of which we have many today, a haughty old thing pretending humility, the worst gossip in the church and kept a smokescreen of piety about herself obscuring the inner bitch, the self her husband and kids knew well. She was on the verge of feeble when, going out the church-house door, I assisted her descent of the four steps. She thanked me. I said, "See you next time." She said, "We have no guarantee of that." I thought, Lord have mercy, don't I know it,  and said, "I'll pretend I do, and if I don't it won't matter." She didn't even give my clever young frivolity an harrumph. It was the last time I saw her. She wasn't able to leave home soon after, then hospital and nursing home. She was steeped in a lifetime of old Calvinist, Puritan mind of post-medieval northern Europe and Britain, like her husband and her daddy, believed anything fun was the devil himself, the kind of thinking that pushed me toward atheism. The moment with her on the church-house steps was after my awakening. I don't mean awakening here to mean enlightenment, only the kick-start of awareness. The awakening turned me away from heavy serious thinking to a more light-hearted attitude toward experience. I don't mean Boca Raton Barbie, nor do I mean System Of A Down.

 

raoul dufy

 

In the past I attempted to make some plans, but didn't believe them. In late-Twenties I bought a two-volume set of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, to save it for old age. It was something I wanted to read in my later years. I have two sets of the two volumes. I've never opened any of them. They are preserved on my bookshelf. In the mid-1980s I discovered Australian writer, Patrick White and read him, one after the other. Came a day I did not want to read everything yet and be done with him. I wanted to save the rest for my later years for something I know I will enjoy to the max. Neither White nor Proust appeal to me now as something I want to read. I want to finish a couple books by Chris Hedges I'd begun at the same time. I want to finish a history of China that calls to me. I want to find a good history of the Persian Empire. I'd also like to find a history of Kazakhstan before it was broken up into the -stans. I have a wonderful history of the Ottoman Empire that I want to read again. I'd like to reread Diana Eck's beautiful book, Banaras City of Light. And there are so many I want to read again. I want to read more poems by John Berryman. I want to finish the four volumes of Andre Gide's Journals. I want to read more in the discourses of Upasni Maharaj. I want to reread some plays by Harold Pinter. I don't have time for Proust. He's too far down the list. There's no way this body will hold out that long. A few days ago I was thinking I want to take Julio Cortazar's novel, 62: A Model Kit, off the shelf, not to read all of it, unless I choose to, but to read a few pages at a time randomly. The novel itself is in 62 sections or chapters to be read in any order the reader chooses. Thought I might read a few, I love his writing, for the joy of reading his sentences. I went to the shelf and took it down. It's nice to see it again. Too many years have gone by without reading him. It may end up in a stack on the floor, but it was a good feeling to touch its cover and flip the pages. I don't dare say I will indeed read in it. Tomorrow I may say tomorrow. And I may take it as soon as I'm finished writing to the reading chair, put on the reading glasses, have a cup of hot chocolate, feet up off the floor, and read for an hour in bliss with sunlight to read by.

 

raoul dufy

 

As you have accurately guessed by now, this mind doesn't do well with goals. I could plan a goal today and next week it will be something that was important a week ago. For appointments I write in black or red on a wall calendar with inch and a half by inch and three quarters rectangles for each number. If an appointment doesn't get written there, it's forgotten. I've never taken to goals, goals being a sort of plan, the carrot on the stick to keep the donkey going. I can't even conceive imagining one goal, certainly not five, and then five more goals for this year, in addition. It makes my psychic bodies explode. Goals are motivated by desire for success. I'm recalling in ninth grade running around the football field track at a tournament chasing the guy running in front of me I had to beat to win. I never liked that feeling, having to beat somebody to win. It didn't feel right then, doesn't feel right now. It's the winning I have no desire for. I don't want to win a lottery because I don't want the trauma of overnight unlimited wealth and every snake on earth having a bead on me. I like my life on Waterfall Road where I have a hard time finding the money every year to pay property taxes you'd laugh at in awe for being so little. I never wanted to climb the ladder of success. Soon after high school I tried to go against that thinking by reading Atlas Shrugged and Think and Growä Rich. It all made me gag. What do I give a shit about a bunch of rich people needing to live underground because they hate everybody else. I'd rather read Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums. At least reading Dharma Bums made me feel cool. Think and Grow Rich made me feel poor and worthless. I could not give my mind to continuous meditation on money and/or success. Robert Lowell was an uber-successful American poet with plenty of money, his name in perpetuity on his chair in the inner sanctum of American Poetry, and he went *pop* that's it cat shit. It evidently didn't mean all that much to him. John Berryman too. Randall Jarrell jumped in front of a car on the interstate at night. They had caught the carrots on the stick they started out wanting, fame, to be well thought of, and in some cases money. Like, Wow. I don't want to find my life so regrettable I need to bail out and see if I can finish saying Geronimo. I'll just take it a day at a time and play like I'm doing something spiritual.   

 

raoul dufy

 

 

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