A WEEK OF LIGHT HEARTED FEELING

all paintings by donald roller wilson

This week I dove whole heartedly into the world of my mountain friends. It's been a good week. It brings to mind in feeling the week I spent delivering a cd I'd made of all Jr Maxwell's known recordings and took copies around to everyone I knew who knew him. It was my gift to them for receiving me into their lives as one of them, with that kind of trust. I had printed 100 copies of the cd and spent the week giving them individually by hand to each one. It was a beautiful week full of love. This has been such a week. Told that I was wasting my time with the mountain people as they are of no consequence, I'd benefit myself better sucking up to the middle class. I've been laughing all week over the presumption that the white suburban middle class has something to offer of interest to me. I've been of at least two minds on the matter, contempt for a meddler's belief that my business is hers and gratitude that the meddler put me into a week so far of review of my mountain friends and neighbors, people I value, people I look up to, the people of my heart. When somebody cuts down my people from ignorance, I stand up for my people as they would stand up for me. If I started going to beach music dances with the white middle class, my friends at home would be asking what got into me. I'd be asking myself the same thing. Who put lsd in my coffee?

 

This week has brought forward my love for the people of these mountains. I can't say I like them all, but I can say I love them all. I feel like a dog adopted after being lost and abandoned. I love the family that adopted me as though they were my birth family. It just happened that my soul found a body originally in southern California, then was transferred to Kansas City, Kansas, American wasteland. I felt out of place all the way around. Didn't know why at the time. My mind was having a difficult time in those years beset by the head rooster in the chicken house, who happened to be undiagnosed insane. That was very difficult to live with, especially when the insane one rules everybody in the house. It was a case of self-centered unto insanity. It was one of those situations like our present Congress. I can't change it, but I don't have to subject myself to it. We never bonded as father and son. I can see from pictures of myself at age 2 with knotted brow and a frown, and I know what it was about. First, drawn to the South to get as far away as possible, to the coast, then to the Southern Appalachians, the Blue Ridge. During my first summer in the mountains, on a Saturday I was in Van Pruitt's car, him driving. We passed a field full of flowering black-eyed susans. I felt that I had passed the point of no return in that moment.

This subject has been in the front of my mind all week long. I have spent the week celebrating the mountain people I know, in my heart and person-to-person. As I visit with each one I note what it is I like and love about them. So they haven't had the educational opportunities of the middle class and the ruling class. The middle class is now getting a taste of being shut out by the ruling class the way the middle class has shut out the working class. What goes around comes around, bay-bee. I don't like the way the ruling class treats the rest of us, so I don't participate. I've learned over time that fickle behavior goes with money. The more money, the more fickle. The middle class has been hysterically upwardly mobile until Reagan (Mammon) they worshipped set them on a downward spiral into the working (peasant) class. I taught myself years ago never to trust anyone of the ruling class or anyone of the middle class. I don't like fickle in people I associate with. Somebody plays fickle on me the first time and I'm gone. Then you have people in the working class longing to get into the middle class. They're fickle too. I like to stay in the bottom ranks of the working class. Don't have much money, but I have true friends. The people I associate with are true. I'm glad the middle class looks down at me. Climbers tend to ignore me as a staircase to nowhere.

During my school years I did like I was told, aspire to money and more money, money only. I don't know where I got it from, but as far back as memory goes I've wanted to live an authentic life, devoid of hypocrisy. I can't say I've made it, because other people could answer better my hypocrisy quotient than I can. Too subjective on my part. I doubt, however, hypocrisy is a word that has meaning in my behavior. I don't try not to be hypocritical. I just deal honestly with everyone I encounter. If my honesty is a problem for somebody, then go find somebody else. I don't do dishonest, but I can be misleading when somebody attempts to make my business theirs. We all have our rights. When somebody crosses that line, they're on their own. It happens rarely unto almost never. But when it does happen, I'll say whatever I feel like saying. If Miss Priss had stuck around for conversation after telling me what her gossip set believed I needed to hear, I'd have fed her a line of shit a mile long. But she got her mission accomplished and was gone. Once, I told a middle class invasive personality that Justin was my grandson and I turned him on to pot when he was 12. My way of saying I'm a crazy emeffer, leave me alone. Like my grandmother used to say, They's more'n one way to skin a cat.

Driving home from the coffee shop in town I was thinking about this wave of joyous feeling that has been with me all week, wondering if an equal spell of feeling down and out, depressed for balance would follow. A spell of joyous feeling in the past has been followed by a spell of depression. I don't see it happening this time. I've approached this time of "good" feeling without attachment, without thinking I'd like this to last forever, without even wanting it. Just happy to accept. Thus, I don't anticipate a spell of doldrums to follow, because when it's gone I won't have the feeling I lost something. It feels like this wave of affirmation that came to me this week happened of its own without ego. Maybe when ego is in it, then the balance needs to occur. I don't know. Will wait and see. I don't recall a period of doldrums after the wave of joyous feeling during the week I took Jr's cd around to his friends. The joyous feeling in that time o'er took me by surprise. I didn't set out to do a good deed. It was a thank you gesture to the people of Jr Maxwell's life for receiving me as one of their own. It's looking like I came into a place where I don't anticipate or expect anymore, but allow whatever happens to be, without criticism or complaint or making a big deal of it. I observe and assess, but try to keep it at that. I look, I listen, I learn.  

 

 

 

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MY HILLBILLY HOME

The last few days have me walking on air within. I feel happy inside all day every day, a heart swelling with love, often tears dripping from joyous feeling, a time when mountain music chokes me up. And it chokes me up to talk with my friend Carole about my hillbilly friends and neighbors. I drove down the mountain to Whitehead to see some of my hillbilly friends and spend some time with people during my process of reviewing my love for them. I know this rush of overwhelming love for the people I think of as my neighbors is not permanent. It's like being a surfer and setting out on a wave. It won't last forever. It's a temporary run. That's what it's about. A review. I want to be with my hillbilly friends right now while I'm in full appreciation. It's like celebration time. In this time I want to see my hillbilly friends and spend some time appreciating them, who they are, as souls having an Earth experience, like me. We're in it together type thing. One thing I can tell you unequivocally, you need help of any kind, a hillbilly will help you out. In this county, if something happens to your car, you're stopped at the side of the road, the first pickup that passes will stop and ask if you need help. If you need to go into town for a can of gas, get in, you're on your way. If it's a mechanical problem, pull the hood latch.

I heard it told how (we'll call him) A went to a kindergarten graduation for one of his kids and saw sitting not far away a guy he has a bead on, has been looking for him, aiming to give him a wallerin (tr: wollowing) about the head with fists or whatever it took. He means for B to hit the ground and not get up. "I'll grab his throat with my left hand and beat his brains out!" His mission is to nail the guy first time he sees him, no matter the circumstances, no hesitation. He sat among his peers, neighbors, relatives, and a lot of people he didn't know, attempting to convince himself he really did not want to mess up his baby's big day, but he almost wanted to. He sat through the performance with one thing in mind: stomping a mud-hole in the emeff's ass and walking it dry, seeing the video in his mind's eye. In the same circumstances, I would be ashamed of myself if I failed to execute the karmic return myself, first moment on sight. A is somebody who would crawl a mile on hot Georgia asphalt to help somebody in real need. He's stout as a tree too, and firm on his feet. He has truly brilliant kids who do well in school. They're good natured and they love their daddy in such a big way it has no name. The kids know they're safe with daddy. His wife lives with the confidence that she is protected by a man who cannot be dominated, and especially that she is loved by her man she's proud of. She looks around the room of parents, looks at her man and says to herself, I got the best one in here. I'm happy for them both and their kids, because I see the love between them is alive in action.

I like the company of the people I know who truly and openly love each other. I'd rather be around people I have a relationship of trust and respect with. Not respect for driving a more expensive car than mine or living in a bigger house on a bigger spot of land. Everybody's car is more expensive than mine. Everybody's house has more value than mine. Keeps me out of the competition. Nobody is going to steal my car. Nobody is going to break into my house for guns, liquor or money. Nobody is going to suck up to me for status or the illusion of money. I have nothing for anyone to envy and nothing for anyone to be jealous of, unless it would be my indifference to money and influence. But I can't imagine who that might be in America. Besides, it's easy to acquire. It keeps me clear on who my real friends are. When social climbing is not a part of the picture, nothing fake is going on. It's only when climbing is the prime consideration or seeking something for self gain. I believe this is what puts the middle class in a state of denial, climbing. The climb is the norm, it's expected, wanting to look like on tv, make a good first impression, talk like on tv, be careful about who you know, because somebody might not have enough status to deserve to be seen with you.

Hillbillies are especially funny when they come into too much money too fast. That's when the Beverly Hillbillies within get shut in the basement by denial. Oh, do they become haughty. Nose in the air. Cadillac pickups. Gold, gold and lotsa gold. The problem is they didn't grow up learning how to be fake. Denial is new to them, so haughty behavior is acting natural. And hillbillies love the hillbilly slapstick shows like Andy Griffith, Beverly Hillbillies, Hee Haw, Dukes of Hazard. It is true hillbilly humor. Early on I thought these shows disrespectful of mountain people, until I found that mountain people like them more than anybody else. It's comedy of their own culture, of what they know, their world. A true hillbilly is not ashamed of it. The ones who shrink from being identified hillbilly, I shrink from. The climb, wanting to be seen owning a Cadillac, sets one to learning how to act out a fake lifestyle. As my only real interest is art, I don't have many people in the working class to talk with about art. It is the very same in the middle class. Except for every once in awhile one meets somebody who majored or minored in art at school, but haven't paid any attention to it since, no money in it. And that's not the kind of art that interests me. I learned when in childhood to keep my art interests to myself. In college, I was drawn to people I could talk art matters with, then after college we all go different directions like birds leaving a nest. Two went to New York, one to Atlanta, one stayed in place and I came to the mountains.

I learned some years later that people I knew before the mountains resented me for not staying in touch with them, never seeing them again. It was a chopping block experience for me, moving to the mountains. I went native right away. I discovered the mountain people and loved them as true human beings. In city life I stayed in search of people who were true (in my subjective way of seeing), not on the climb, not regarding college as job training, not worshipping money and tv. Found several and they became my circle of friends. We left in different directions. I fell so deeply into the mountains after the first years of getting acquainted with people and culture through the people I knew, the world off the mountain became another country. It might have the same name, but it's a different world. Mountain culture became the focus of my study and gradually it flowed into and through me. By now it is my culture, the culture I'm comfortable in. I'm not giving up my mountain friends for fake acquaintances with people who don't want anything to do with hillbillies. That already tells me all I need to know of them. I know I'm not expected to give up my hillbilly friends, but time spent with people I care nothing about, who care nothing about me, keeps me from my hillbilly friends. The last few days I've felt so full of light in my heart for the people of my world I'm grateful for the meddler's advice telling me I'm wasting my time with the wrong people.

 

 

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