HAVE A LITTLE DRINK ON ME

Just now have diagnosed an odd feeling I've been in the last several weeks, or months. It's like riding in the passenger seat instead of driving the vehicle that is the body. I was about to say things happen to me, I don't initiate action. But that's not it. I go back over and over in my mind to the mosh pit likeness. I'm floating, kept upright by momentum, bouncing from one experience to another, each bump shoving me into a new direction every time, reeling inside, relaxed, in the body, though very lightly so, as in a dream. It's even like being a character in a novel I'm reading. I don't know if it could be called detached, but it's like experiences flow by like air, fluid. It's been a goal for many years to let go of attachment, allow all others their individual autonomy, let go of judgments, receive the spirit of others. I can't tell if it's laziness, weariness, boredom, or if it's something a little higher sounding, like finally finding self living in the spirit of detachment. It feels like that has something to do with it, and feels, at the same time, like simple sorriness. I'm recalling as my friend Jr Maxwell was in his last days, fading, I was a nervous wreck wanting him comfortable for the occasion of the spirit leaving the body. I felt like a coin flipping in the air, one side joy, the other side sorrow. The coin spun so fast the joy and sorrow blurred into one feeling. This best defines what I feel now, constant joy and sorrow blurred as one feeling. I think of a photograph on the wall of Meher Baba. His eyes are full of sorrow while his face smiles. My spirit is vibrant and happy while the body is weary and worn out, would rather sleep than participate in just about anything.

I can't tell if I'm getting more egoic or less. Most often, I think more. I stopped trying to do spiritual stuff, like meditate, read scriptures, go to retreats, read books about Tibetan Buddhism or the Hindu, Ramakrishna. It's all there on the shelves, it's beautiful reading, but I'm not interested any more. I've found my spiritual path in everyday life. I tend not to differentiate good and bad anymore. I am comfortable being seen go into the liquor store. I've known so many men who go to another county for the liquor store, don't want anybody they know to see them, it is funny. I think it's called living a double life. The only reason I'm not drinking right now is I'm out. Will get some more soon. Of the bonded liquor my preference is Wild Turkey Rye 101. Yummy. Don't even want to mess it up with ice. I may stop at the liquor store next time in town. My barber in the early years had his shop across the street from the liquor store. He saw everybody that went in and out. He said to me, I saw Tom Pruitt go in the liquor store the other day, like he was telling on Tom, telling me something I didn't know about this old boy I looked up to, bring him down a notch or two, caught him in a sin. I said, Yeah, he drinks Wild Turkey. It's small town mind, making drama of other people's sins. Sure, I have a spiritual life. And I drink liquor when I feel like it. I'd rather have an inch of good liquor in an orange juice glass than a beer or wine any day of the year. Somebody thinks it's a sin. That's ok. Old Jr Maxwell taught me how to drink. One sips really good liquor. That's all I'll drink anymore. I'm happy to pay ten dollars more for something I like. If the liquor store kept Haitian rum, I'd keep a bottle in the house at all times. I'm not justifying when I say I drink very little. I like the taste of good liquor better at this time of the life than about any other taste. 

I like to keep a dram nearby sometimes for a sip. The inch in the orange juice glass will last an hour. I used to stop at Jr's house on the way home from work and sit with him for two hours. He was old and lonesome and his spirit was depressed. There wasn't anything I could do to help him with his troubles, but I could visit him regularly so he'd have at least one friend drop by in the course of a day. We sat at the kitchen table with our drams of the best liquor ever made on earth, two drinks a night over two hours. Over five years sitting at the table every evening, he told me his life. We talked and sipped. After his spirit left the body, I asked for the orange juice glass he drank from. It was all I wanted for memory. He had been drinking daily since age 14. Age 86 the doctor told him he was in excellent condition. His blood pressure was always right. What he died of the doctor called a "slow fade." He drove a "bull noser" several years, took two six packs of beer when he went out in the morning. The working class people around him thought him a drunk. Yet by the standard of the middle class or the ruling class, he drank very little. I'd heard for years that Jr was a drunk. He wasn't anywhere near a drunk. As a bluegrass musician in the old days and the old ways, he liked to get drunk on weekends. Playing bluegrass banjo at a dance, he kept a quart jar nearby or in his car for intermission. He said, the more you drink, the better you play, to a point. At that point you stop drinking. Beyond that point everything falls apart, you're getting sloppy, eventually stupid and have to be carried to the car. He kept himself at that point when he reached it and played the fire out of his banjo. His favorite fiddler to make music with most often drank beyond that point. 

Every Friday and Saturday night I'd visit Jr, he would continue drinking after I left and get himself shit-faced. He told me, "I like to work like hell all week and get drunk on the weekend." It was the rhythm of his life. I don't like to get drunk anymore, don't like it at all. He didn't care if he fell on the floor and went to sleep. It's his home. He couldn't fall off the floor. I wasn't there to control him or change him, only to give him company. In that time we had become friends. Near the end, in his last weeks, lying in the bed, me giving him a little sponge on a stick dipped in water to keep his mouth wet, we were talking. I sat in his wheelchair beside the bed when we talked in the mornings. He said, "I wish I could pay you for what you've done for me." I said, "You paid in advance. Five years of sharing with me the best liquor made on earth is worth something. To me, it's worth a whole lot." I had never thought of it like that. It was said without thinking. I heard myself say it and was glad. I could not have said better thinking about it. I did not want to be paid. One of his friends offered to pay me. I said, "If you pay me, then I'm working for you. I'm here for Jr, not for money, and I want to keep it that way." He comes to mind, remembering his last months of mind going away and and gone. It went away in one week. It was like a bathtub draining. I accepted it that his conscious mind was shutting down. He retained his subconscious. I knew him well enough that we could communicate. I see him in the middle of the night, all the lights on, wheeling in the wheelchair all over the house looking for something in his dream mind. I didn't stop him. I sat in my chair with a book and stayed aware of him, not interfering. What he was doing was important to him. What I'm feeling now takes me back to this time with Jr when his mind was fading and went out. I've come to a place where there is nothing I want. The mind doesn't run non-stop like it used to do. Now, I can stop it easily. I've fallen into a don't worry / be happy place. It's the joy I feel all the time, possibly a happy spirit, mixed with the sorrow that goes with physical existence. I feel content as a donkey in a meadow nearly all the time.  

photos by tj worthington

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MOON IN VIRGO

baja rock

A couple of questions I've carried in my head most of the days of my life don't obsess me, but they stay with me. First, if God is love and wants us to be kind and considerate, why does everything living on earth need to kill to live? We can only live eating the living. A bird needs living bugs or living grain. Dog food out of a can is a cow / horse / whatever that's been killed. Lunch meat is a cow that was killed at a stockyard. We humans eat everything, even possum. Everything has to be killed to be eaten, though in Korea a small live octopus is a delicacy to eat alive, though I suppose stomach acids kill it, and no more oxygen. Then there are the people who only eat vegetables because some of them don't want to be a part of the killing cycle. Because God sez. We have God on the one hand telling us not to kill, while setting up a creation where everything has to kill to live. The only way I can make sense of it is to put aside my own thinking and start over.



The other question is why does reproduction go to the young? Young kids, late teens - early twenties, don't know much about children. They're at a time in their lives when their own egos are the primary interest. I remember as a child kids whose parents were older seemed to me happier kids. Or so it seemed from the outside. The answer to the question is, of course, biological is the purpose. Healthy stock. From conversations with Sparta lawyer Donna Shumate, she calls the get married, have babies way of living Biological. She never wanted to live entirely by biology. She wanted to use her mind. She's made for herself a good balance. She lives by her mind as well as biologically. She had 2 kids by intent. She's an intelligent woman with two kids she raises consciously. This doesn't mean nobody else does. Plenty of people do. She's just an example.



Outside what we call civilization, people lived in tribal structures where the whole tribe raised the kids. The tribal system is an awfully good one, seems to me. In the modern world we like our individual status, and a lot of people don't like being too close to others. In a tribal system you have no secrets. Everybody knows what everybody else is doing at all times. The importance of family has transferred from the tribal way to the more individual way of civilization. Small communities seem a fair balance between the two ways of life. I suppose one answer to my question is that variety keeps things going, like the almost infinite varieties of apples in the mountains of Kazakhstan. An apple's pod of seeds has a different kind of apple for each seed. Grafting is the only way to get the same kind of apple from tree to tree. Then you get a monoculture going, weak, susceptible to disease and parasite bugs.



I can't help but think that death is nothing in God's eye. Nothing at all. Like Caterpillar sees me one day wearing brown shirt and green pants, another day wearing tan shirt and blue pants. She watches me sit on the side of the bed and change colors. I sometimes wonder what she thinks of the giant's ability to take off and put on colors. I doubt she's jealous, because she has beautiful cat fur that doesn't need changing. She used to hunt mice day and night, go out in the meadow or into the woods and sit for hours waiting for something to move. She's not sinning because she's killing. She's getting a midday snack, candy bar with the flavor of blood instead of chocolate. I continue to grieve the loss of TarBaby, my friend for 12 years, though I know from God's way of seeing, TarBaby is fine, don't worry, be happy.



Pets have to die. Friends have to die. I believe in every scripture we're told that our relationship with God is with the one friend who does not die. I've heard a lot of people talk about never wanting to die, wishing we could live forever. My solution to that question, is live for 200 years and then decide if you want millions of more years. After 100 you're in a wheelchair if you can get out of bed. 110? 120? 130? They say, "You're so lucky to live so long." LOL Old age is a curse in just about all cases. An old-old saying says the good die young / the blessed die young. There came a time for me about when I entered the 60s that it started getting tiresome keeping this body upright. And for people with complicated lives, kids and grandkids, inlaws, other people expecting of you, other people telling you what to do (for their interest, not yours), and work expectations, so much that it's hard to find oneself in all that mixup. These are the things we take seriously and think of dying as the very most ultimate worst that can ever happen. They say to a guy who lost both legs in a motorcycle wreck, "You're so lucky to be alive." I'm thinking, Heaven is worse than living on earth with no legs?



I don't know anything about the other side, but what the people have told us who know the secrets of life and death, our consciousness continues. I have no idea. But when God says, Don't worry, be happy, I have to give that thought. It can go both ways; be happy, don't worry. Absence of worry is happiness. When you're happy, you don't worry. Worries are the barbed wire fence between unhappy and happy. The closest to an answer I've come to with why creation is set up that we have to kill to live, is simply to keep it going. If death is nothing but maybe a nap between changings of clothes, a gazelle scared into sleep by a lion wakes up a baby giraffe. Why so much death? The only answer I can find is, Get used to it. Death and life are two sides of the same coin that's flipping in the air. The scriptures are God's way of getting the secrets of life and death to us, to help us understand our lives better, but we turn them into rule books, Robert's Rules of Order, God's Rules of You Better Not. Then they become a ball and chain, and the tradition built up around centuries of collective belief in God as Judge has to be broken down so the truth of Don't Worry Be Happy can live again.



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GOLDENROD TIME

The goldenrod of autumn is replacing the Queen Anne's lace of summer. The colors of the flowers of autumn are largely yellow and purple, the same as the colors of spring. The leaves on the locust trees are curled up and brown. Leaves of quite a number of trees are turning yellow. The oaks continue their fullness of dark green. The fields are turning brown, a good Stanley Brothers song. Earlier today I saw somebody with a pickup load of split firewood pulling a trailer load. A pickup behind him with another full load. I thought: Them boys been a-workin. No two ways about it.



Many years I've spent the fall cutting firewood for two houses of the Sterns who liked a fireplace, for Tom Pruitt, who burnt his wood in a wood stove, and myself last. I was usually so tired of the chainsaw and woodsplitting by the time I got to mine, I'd get enough to last until February when the winter eased off for a few weeks, apple tree pruning time in the old days. That letup in the winter during February has changed as all the weather has changed. Those old sayings about the weather, like the date of thunders in February foretells the date of a frost in May for gardeners. That doesn't work any more. Neither does the saying of fogs in August telling snows in the winter.



People went by these and other weather forecast devices that worked for a very long time, and now with weather patterns changing, those old sayings have become meaningless. Now the people that never believed these methods of prediction (without testing any) can be satisfied it's all bunk. It's strange how a fading culture, like old time mountain culture, becomes something to be ashamed of. Parents don't want their kids talking the old country way. Grandma and grandpa are from another world. And they really are. They're odd and funny. None of the young people coming along think the old timey jokes are funny, take no interest in the old time ways that are old fashioned.



When the culture is completely gone, the people look back at it full of praise, start calling it a culture, wasn't it great, couldn't have been better, the good old days, the golden age, a time when people helped each other out, simple living. Only it wasn't all that simple, because you're not going to find anyone now, except a renegade or 2 doing it for a hobby, farming with horses and plows, mowing hay with a scythe, living like the Amish. It's hard work. It isn't simple. Women always pregnant and working in the garden, cooking, washing clothes, taking care of kids and a man.



Since nobody is going to go back before the age of recliners and tv, we have celebrations of heritage, that just a few years before was something to be ashamed of. It brings to mind a time in the hospital in Winston-Salem, a woman doctor looking over the pages of charts of the pacemaker device. I felt mountain in her. I asked where she was from. She said Winston-Salem. I said, before that. She got a little anxious like she didn't want to be in this conversation.



The name on her tag was a name in this county, so I persisted. She said a little place in the mountains I never heard of, like she was anticipating being taken for a hick or hillbilly again. I asked where. Just down the road. I told her I live near Sparta and it turns out she had kin in Alleghany. Then she settled down and was easy to talk with. I wanted to say to her, there is no shame in being from the mountains. But that's getting too missionary or something. Besides, there's no telling how much teasing and getting looked down on she'd been through in the medical school world for being from the mountains. She'd have hated it if I'd told her she stood out in the city as a country girl. I'd be saying it in praise, but she wouldn't be receiving it that way.



I don't like to tell people I'm from Kansas, but when I meet someone from there too, it's like meeting a friend with a common bond. The worst part is, it was a Yankee state. Just barely, but it was Yankee. I have a feeling my greatgrandparents from Pulaski County, KY, took their kids by wagon to the new Kansas territory a few months before the Civil War was over to get away from the South. I have a feeling greatgrandpa was a Yankee sympathizer. A lot of people from these mountains went to Kansas in that time. All kinds of religious bunches from Russia, Germany and other old-world locations like Sweden, every kind of hard core fundamentalist religion there ever was settled in Kansas in that time.



I grew up in Kansas style fundamentalism. Never took to it. I was the church's black sheep among the kids. The one that did not carry his Bible at school all the time, or ever. Then the kid that listened to rock and roll, worst of all that screaming Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis, when the other kids were listening to the Lennon Sisters and liking it. My mother made an appeal to the preacher for me to get one of those perfect attendance medals that holds a chain of them year after year. She knew I went all the time, because I went every time she went and she went all the time. So I got my perfect attendance medal. The preacher knew I really didn't want to be there. He was reluctant, I didn't want it, mother insisted.

DON'T WORRY - BE HAPPY

A warm, sunny day, 76 degrees, fluffy white clouds drift so slowly they're barely perceptible. Multiple shades of green everywhere I look outside. The green world, these mountains, taking stale air, making fresh air, our air filters beautiful to look at, good to burn in winter for heat, good for building our houses and everything else made of wood. Also good for keeping the water table up. As the deciduous trees that lose their leaves in the fall go away, so does our water.

We're not going to stop cutting down trees, so we're piping water to town from the river. In the back of my head I continually wonder what it is that's so blinding about the obvious. Like the problem with disoriented bees unable to find the hive that was thought to be cell phone signals. It didn't take long to get it that if the cell phones were, in fact, responsible for the demise of the honey bee, good-bye bees. End of subject. We never did get any more findings, one way or the other, on that subject. Nobody cared, or not enough cared to matter.

In this time of my life I've let go of concern over what other people do or don't do, what our government does or doesn't do. If it weren't for this, if it weren't for that, if only, if only. I've come to see, in myself anyway, that

grieving over the extinction of the polar bear doesn't do me any good and it sure doesn't do the polar bear any good. How do I accept it and say, Oh well, and retain access to compassion? I can't help but mourn the loss of the polar bear, and undoubtedly the penguin at the same time. But if I'm going to mourn everything that goes extinct, I'd never have a minute out of mourning. So where's the sense in mourning?

I can't change the forces that are heedlessly taking all of us with them. I find a certain satisfaction, however, that the architect who designed the Titanic sank with it. In the land where Mammon is holier than God, we end up with mountains of trash. They used to put it underground in massive pits, now they make mountains of trash with bulldozers. Hard times come, up go the yard sale tables full of stuff we wasted money on.

And the ocean, the world's sewer where barges of trash and ships offload their waste. All the nastiest rivers in the world flow into it. In films I see the Amazon River is now as muddy as the Mississippi. The Yellow River in China is mud. This is recent too. Last night I saw a Chinese film made in the 'social realism' period, 1950s, and the water in the river was clear. You never see clear water in a river in China now. Just like here. Just like Russia. Just like Europe, Africa, South America, Australia. Even though the New River is clear after it's not been raining awhile, it's loaded with nastiness too.

I used to believe it was men in charge of everything, men separated from the rest of the world by country club boundaries, men devoid of aesthetic senses, occupied with numbers every minute of every day. Then women started jumping into the arena. They're just like the men. No difference at all except for dresses and hairdos. So I tell myself I must adjust my own thinking if I'm not going to be aggravated all the time by collective willful refusal to see we're collectively in crisis. The Amazon is every day coming one giant step closer to the Sahara and they're putting more chainsaws in than they're taking out. It may already be irreversible.

Oceans are rising, most of our population lives on the coast. It won't rise in one tsunami and sweep everybody out to sea. It will creep up and then hurricanes will destroy cities and everybody will head for the hills. We think we've got a real estate crisis now, we're going to need all the water we can get, and our water is going away. Maybe in that time they'll do like Bermuda and paint the roofs with white lime and collect water in rain barrels, their only source of water.

I tell myself it must be in the me-first-others-last state of mind that is the mind of the western world. Yet in the east where the rule is others-first-me-last, it's the same. I haven't been able to find any one approach that would make a difference in the direction of poverty and death around the globe, the indifference of nearly everyone toward any people below themselves on the status ladder, unless we had a collective attitude change that happened everywhere at once. I think they would call that the Lord coming again. It would have to be something of at least that magnitude.

It looks like the next generation of people will be facing some serious dilemmas. But, you know what, we always are. Every day we're facing a serious dilemma, making money to pay expenses. Every time has its particular needs. Over the last not many years we needed to train an enormous number of computer technicians. It seems like everybody under 30 is a computer geek now. As the need arises so do the people to make the next thing work. We're changing all the time, we just don't know it very well until one's retirement ceases because the company went under. Then we notice.

What is it? Every day has its own evil? I don't have any business making assessments of what is bad or good where something like 3 billion people are concerned. I don't even have control over myself. I ask myself how I arrogantly assume if I figured it all out I could make it all right? Then what is right? I don't have a clue. In fact, I don't know what I'm talking about. When I reach this point is where I break out laughing at myself for putting so much energy into illusions. I'm not here to experience someone's life in Palestine. I've got all I can handle at Air Bellows, just me and three cats, and the cats are the least of it.

What can we do, but just do as we do, just keep on keepin on? Don't worry, be happy, is where I always come to when my mind starts trying to

make sense out of three billion dots, every one the center of the universe and all of them in motion.