IN AND OUT OF MIND

a moment in waterfalls creek

I wondered for a great part of my life what the difference was between the earth and the world. I have an idea the preacher in the church I grew up in believed they were the same. I automatically believed they were the same until I gave it some observation. Carried it in the back of the mind where it floated in a storage room, picked up periodically, looked at and returned to its quiet subconscious search. A gray squirrel is scavenging just outside the window in front of the desk, sitting on a rock, scampering about with huge bushy tail behind. I came to see what scriptures mean when they say the world, it is the world created by the human mind. The scriptures are full of recommendations to avoid being seduced by the world. Mainly for practical purposes. Disappointment follows. The sorrows I carry for the my dog friends, my cat friends, my human friends, would have been avoided if I'd stayed away from a need of the human mind and heart for friends both two-legged and four-legged. But it was worth the pain of losing them to experience the joy of knowing an other for however many years. I came to see what scriptures were talking about as the world is the creations of the human mind. The world lives on the planet, the earth, and consumes the earth's resources. The earth is the source of all the world's resources unless we're getting some from space. The oil division of our corporate government has been suppressing solar energy over the last 40 years. Solar energy was spreading fast against resistance until 1980 when the Reagan Junta took power. Immediately, solar energy and research toward electric cars were finished. Solar energy is creeping back gradually by necessity, still with corporate government opposition. Politics is the world, the money game is the world, art is the world, desires are the world, ego is the world. Get down to body and it's the earth.

 

small waterfall beside a place I like to sit

 

My question upon defining the distinction to my own satisfaction was how do I live in the world and not of it? How do I drive a pickup, have a job, have money concerns in the front of the mind all the time, want a bigger flat-screen, want a better shelter for the donkeys? How do I interact so pervasively with worldly things, belief systems, traditions all day every day and not be of them? I never learned how. Yet, a short number of years ago it feels like a gear slipped into place. I came to see there was not anything I wanted anymore. I don't want any of what I used to need to have. Sure, I'd like to have Robert Bly's new selected poems, Stealing Sugar From The Castle, but not like in the past. Then, I'd have bought it as soon as I started wanting it. Now, I wait. A time will come of a petite rush of extra money, and then I'll get it. No hurry. No hurry. It will happen or it won't. I recall feeling the urgency of necessity when I wanted something new. By now, I have so much more than I want, I want to get rid of stuff and don't know how to start. It amounts to stuff. This is the world I created for myself, a box full of stuff I wanted, piece by piece, until I got it. That's when it became stuff. I live in a box full of things I once wanted, stacked, on shelves, in drawers. It's totally absurd. If I had any brains I'd leave the house, turn it over to an auctioneer and say, empty it. Come back into the house next day, scrub and wax the floor, give the walls a good scrubbing and start again with the simplest of everything. Then comes the day I want to read some poems by Robert Lowell; Oh no, I sold all my books. No more poetry of Tu Fu and WB Yeats, no Elizabeth Bishop to pick off the shelf to sit with and read a few poems. no John Berryman and May Swenson, no Henry Miller to pick up at will, no Wallace Stevens. I don't think it's a good idea to get rid of my stuff. Attachment? I have my own library of books and music. Walls are loaded with images I like seeing every day. I live in a closet of my stuff. It's my own personal nest. C'est moi. My rind. My mind.  

 

my barn where the winter's hay is kept

 

I've come to assess the world the manifestations of the mind. Mind. The world is the human mind. The way of the spirit is guided by the heart. It doesn't work in this world to be all heart, same as it doesn't work to be all mind. We live a weave of both. Living in the world not of it suggests to me living everyday life, taking care of business, using mind for a very interesting tool without attaching identity to stuff and justifying impractical desires. Self control. It means what my grandmother used to tell me, "You don't need everything you see." Ultimately, I suspect it is about balance of heart and mind. What we call nature is where I find heart. In nature is where I see the flow, hear the flow, join the flow. Today and yesterday I am hearing new birds returning for summer or passing through on their way north, seeing new birds at the feeders. It is the time of year snowbirds leave for wherever they go, fewer daily at the feeders. I feel like it is about accepting our humanity, not suppressing it, allowing self to feel honestly, allowing heart, the feminine, the subjective its place in the world of reason, logic, the objective, numbers. Left brain / right brain. The balance. I live so much in my mind, I feel I need the natural world, the woods, a mountain creek, donkeys to know, people without forebrain mind, the mind we're still learning to live with.  The donkeys have thought and feeling, but not the forebrain we call mind. They are still in that place we were before the forebrain when we slept in the trees because the ground was dangerous at night. This evening after the donkeys had a full day of grazing, I saw Jack raising his tail, Jenny stood directly behind him watching, and Jack let go some droppings in a little pile. Jenny stood just a few feet from him. Jacked stepped away, Jenny stepped up and sniffed the pile and walked straight through it with head high in a haughty air looking straight ahead while Jack watched. She walked away in a straight line not even looking back. It charged Jack. He about danced. He fell down onto a place where hay they'd eaten had been, rolled on his back, rolled over and rolled back. Up on his feet, he took off after Jenny in a gallop, ears up like a rabbit, out of sight of the window.

 

jenny tells jack to get back

 

Pre-human behavior fascinates me. It shows how deep some of our human behavior goes. What I saw Jenny do today was down and dirty. It was donkey talk I don't understand. I'm wondering if she's going into heat. I've already thought she was pregnant. I looked up donkey gestation, it said she has to be three years old to go into heat. Jenny is young and so is Jack. But I don't know their histories. I hope she is not pregnant yet. If she conceived when I thought she might have, that would put the baby due in the coldest part of the winter. I also wonder if it could be Alpha Donkey behavior. The days Jenny's ankle hurt, Jack took the role of Alpha, stayed alert watching the fences and protecting Jenny with his Alpha power. I saw Jolene in the distance, neighbor's black and white dog, walking up the road toward home. Jolene left the road, went sniffing over the ground the other side of the donkey fence. I saw her look like she was considering a shortcut across the corner of the donkey meadow, looked to see where the donkeys were. Jack was looking at her with jackrabbit ears up from the middle of the meadow. Jolene walked around the fence to the road. By this morning Jenny had taken the Alpha role back. I don't know what is going on between them. They are both sexually charged. Jack is jumping out of his skin to have a chance with Jenny and she keeps her ears back, dives at him with her teeth when he comes near, kicks at him, snorts and growls at him. I went into the meadow this morning to spend some time with them, see them up close. I've been staying out of the meadow, they've been acting so frisky. I stood still and let Jenny smell me all over, front and back, arms, hands, head. She ran her nostril all over my clothes like a vacuum cleaner. She took the bottom of my shirt in her teeth, just to feel its texture and let it go. How pre-human is that? I'm glad we know each other well enough now for her to be comfortable giving me the deluxe sniff, or even trusting me to be still long enough for her satisfaction. Today I was still for her, gave her the time she wanted. Jack was occupied munching grass. She's well acquainted with my scent now. This is what I mean by nature as much as listening to water splash over rocks and the trill of a screech owl as night consumes the last ripples of daylight.

  

side of the barn

 

 

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OUT OF THIS WORLD

 

 

It's a week of JFK review every time I turn on the radio. I don't listen to it. Fifty years later, we're getting the official mythology. That part is interesting, but it's the samo-samo. It's interesting to see the official version told like in school where we don't question, we take notes toward the test. I found the emphasis on Oswald curious. The temperament of the South in that time was incendiary about Kennedy for the same reasons the republican ku kluxers are openly wanting to pop a cap in Obama. American racism is a powerful force. Then, it was a dynamic force. It is not something you go up against lightly. Obama has corporate cover. Kennedy did not. My sorrow for my country regarding the coup that killed Kennedy is that I mark the date the last day of democracy in America. I see it the beginning point of the corporate police state that rules us now. I've not heard anything about the Warren Report Part 2 that was held in time capsule for fifty years. It's fifty years. We already know it has nothing new. Or if it does, it will go through censorship before it is published in book form for the libraries all over the land and the paperback racks in grocery stores and drug stores. It has about as much chance of spilling the beans as the official 9/11 report. The difference is, then, they didn't know democracy was over. Now, we're well into police state, television the ring in our noses. When propaganda central becomes reality itself after more than half a century, the false becomes true and ignorance becomes knowledge. More and more I hear talk and see articles about the downhill run on greased skis in the dumbing down of America process that is going faster than ever now. I never hear anything about television hypnosis, violent attitudes, intolerance of the other, whoever the other may be, casual attitudes about killing.

 

 

 

This is the America I have seen come about in my lifetime. I got in on the tail end of democracy. I got in on the end of the Old South, and the tail end of mountain culture. Even saw the tail end of the big band era. USA has become something set on self-destruction. It's a skyscraper made of imaginary playing cards and everybody wants to watch it fall on tv. I'm grateful my intuition throughout this lifetime has kept me out of political involvement. The world of politics is every bit as vain, fickle and self-important as Hollywood. Both are about money only. I don't believe anything I hear anymore. Again, I'm reminded that the people near and dear to my heart deserve more attention than the world of lies. It makes me want to go outside and work on the donkey den, enjoy that the donkeys are unaware of the collective mental construct that occupies the human mind with nonsense the humans take for reality. Donkeys are free of that thinking. Right and wrong doesn't concern them. They live in the present moment. No fear of the future, no regret of the past. They have memory, they are conscious, they have mind to think with. I've learned this from dogs and cats I have known. I see the same consciousness in donkeys. I look into an eye when I talk to one of the donkeys and see right away they get what I said. Yesterday, I was talking to Jack. I told him I'd love to have the experience of riding him. He listened like he was in agreement--he'd like me to ride him too. I said, but I don't want to hurt your back with my weight. Jack snorted and bobbed his head. It felt like he was saying, thanks for the consideration.

 

 

 

I feel so much better in the meadow with the donkeys than I do hearing the daily soap opera called the news. Every day updates the collective mental construct. I have a friend who went into a monastery in the 1950s and came out in the late 1980s. He was lost. He left the world in the Age of I Love Lucy and returned in the Age of Beavis and Butthead. He was a long time adjusting. It was a different culture. By the time he understood it enough to be more or less comfortable in it, he went back to the monastery, happy to be back. I have chosen for my path close involvement in what we call the world. The spiritual path is about living in the world of humanity. Like the Dalai Lama said, we live so close together we have to get along. Seems to me the spiritual path is about living at peace among other people who are not necessarily at peace in themselves. We represent every level of consciousness, every level of intelligence, every degree of emotion. Of course it's difficult for us to get along well together considering how radically different from each other we are. Like in a herd of zebras, if they can't get along with each other, they can't function as a herd, their defense, their security. We function in herds, too, for security. There is really no way to live among countless other humans, each of different experiences, different belief systems, different musical tastes, different educational levels, different degrees of compassion, different levels of tolerance. Scriptures from every religion give sound counsel on living in a world of other humans; honesty, humility, forgiving, generosity, unconditional love.

 

 

 

Then the scriptures get hardened into rules and regulations by the human mind. Punishment and killing become justified by scripture. American whiteman genocide of the native Americans was justified by scripture the same as slavery was justified by scripture. I look for the path of being in the world, not of the world. I'm fine with being in it. I know a lot of enjoyable people, have some good friends, good memories, good music, art, good reading. I have friends in the world of the four-leggeds as much of the heart as with two-legged friends. Of the world, I think of as climbing the money and influence ladder, serving self-interest, ego. It leads to an old man in a roadside diner asking people at a nearby table what they think of Obamacare. It leads to a lifetime of acting out a false persona. Of the world takes me down, down, down. In the world takes me up. I read a play by Harold Pinter and feel elevated inside experiencing art in a pure form, not produced by corporate formula for box office. If the world around me is satisfied with television for intellectual and spiritual input, I'm of a mind to be free to regard it what they want for themselves. They allow me what I want for myself. This is how I live in the world, not of it, by allowing others to follow their own light, and allowing myself to follow my own light. Not wanting money has been a great assist for not getting hooked by the world of wanting more. I'm enjoying wanting less in this time of the life. I'm thinking that wanting is the greatest hook of all. Not wanting, I truly feel a degree of peace of mind.

 

 

 

 

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MY GENERATION: FLAT TOP CATS AND DUNGAREE DOLLS

 

 

 

As I look at my generation with a cold eye, I don't see anything worth crowing about except rock n roll. I remember in high school believing my generation was going to be "awesome," really believing it, even feeling a pride in my generation. We were the first white people to use the word "cool" outside jazz circles. There were so many black people in the early years of rock n roll from the rhythm n blues angle that I believed this was the end of racism. Then came the time of civil rights protesting that had an air of righteousness about it. The emergence of Bob Dylan in the early Sixties was even more evidence that my generation was extraordinary. We who listened to Bob Dylan in his early years became convinced right away that he stood somewhere beyond the others. Dylan has been the pop star of my lifetime like Frank Sinatra was for my parents' generation. I've seen both in concert. Sinatra was dynamic in his style and Dylan was dynamic in his style. Sinatra sang. Dylan sang, wrote the lyrics, composed the music, played guitar, hand-picked his band, tours with the band every year. Sinatra was an artist as a performer and actor, Dylan an artist all the way around. Dylan blew my mind then, he blows my mind now. Mr Tambourine Man never gets old, nor does Sinatra singing Watertown.

 

bob dylan

 

 

My generation, like the musicians of the Sixties "classic rock," then "underground," meaning you couldn't hear it anywhere on the radio, and the musicians of Punk, that also was not played on the radio except college stations, they went Pfitzzzz, shooting stars taken down by heroin. As was the case with the Be-bop jazz musicians the generation before, where the white kids picked up the word cool. I did jr hi and high school through the late Fifties. The music was my connection with the world outside home, school and church. Bill Haley convinced me my generation was cool, We're gonna rock around the clock tonight, we're gonna rock, rock, rock til the broad daylight, we're gonna rock, gonna rock around the clock tonight. The poetry of my youth. Well I saw uncle John with bald-headed Sally, he saw aunt Mary comin and he duck back in the alley. I didn't get it til many years later that Long Tall Sally was about masturbation. Long Tall Sally was uncle John's wiener. Busted. I knew Edie Sedgwick was the "you" in Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone a long time before I got it about Long Tall Sally. That was the time in my life when I knew all the words to all Little Richard's songs, Chuck Berry songs, Bill Haley's and Buddy Holly's, esp Rave On. They are still with me. Can't leave out Ronnie Hawkins' Mary Lou, perhaps my favorite song of the whole period. I can pull up the words of any of those songs at will, as well as many others, like Heartbreak Hotel. Fifties lyrics are the poetry in my head.  

 

 

 

The music of that time was so great to a teenage kid coming up on radio music parents listened to, none of it resonating with me, though some of it I liked. Peggy Lee was pretty cool. When rock n roll happened, I found my heartbeat. The music was rebellious, just the way I felt, though had to internalize it, which I did with the songs in my head and listening to stations on the radio that played the new music. Bought 45s and had the next thing to a tin can to listen to them on. Didn't matter. We didn't know about CDs and Bose then. Anything was better than nothing. My generation has made great leaps in sciences, fields we know nothing about, because interest in the field rarely extends beyond participants. The same applies to poetry, theater, fiction, film making. The greatest rock n roll band in the world is my generation, the Rolling Stones. Then, of course, there is the Who's My Generation, Peter Townshend who pointed a finger toward Meher Baba with the Who's album, Tommy. Perhaps the greatest discovery of my generation is recreational drugs right there alongside rock n roll. The drugs have taken their toll on my generation, though most survived, all the wiser for having been through something really dangerous and come out the other end. My generation has also been one of embarrassing conformity. We grew up believing television propaganda, like all generations since.

 

pete townsend

 

In college, nobody wanted to grow up and be like their parents. Thirty years later I went to a reunion and thought I was back then in a big room full of everybody's parents. It was disheartening, but I already knew it. I was surrounded by people who bought the package I rejected. I meant it when I said I didn't want to be like my parents. The laugh for me after thirty years of living outside group-think by intent and many of those years living with hillbillies, adopting their vision, it was disconcerting to find myself in the midst of lawyers, doctors, judges, and their dolled-up wives, putting on the dog for each other in suits that cost more than the pickup I was driving, suburbanites good at cocktail party chatter. Some winters before, I had carried a newborn calf through sixteen inches of snow to the barn to put it on some hay. Mother would not follow. I carried calf back to mother to let her smell it, carried it back to the barn, mother didn't follow. I took some hay bales to the spot on the snow the calf was born and made a nest for it, carried the calf back from the barn to place it on the only spot mother recognized it. Sixteen inches of snow. I didn't feel less than any of the judges around me and didn't feel better. We had very different experiences behind us and very different ideas of how we want to live our lives. They paid people to mow their lawns more money than I made.

 

 

My goal over the last thirty-eight years has been to live in the world, not of the world. It took several years to figure out what "the world" meant to my satisfaction. What I've come to is that the human mind is "the world." Creations of the mind constitute the world. Conformity is living of the world. Anti-conformity is living of the world. I'm not the only one of my generation who has stepped outside living of the world. We ask more of ourselves along the way through life than what channel is playing Cheers reruns. Maybe. That's a little high-sounding. Let's just say my generation has an awful lot of us who go our own way for our own reasons, checked out of the System consciously, however we individually interpret the System, uninterested in playing the climbing game, the status game, the money game. We leave that merry-go-round so we can have another ride of our preference, Ferris wheel, rollercoaster. In my case, I've rarely made over minimum wage, never wanted more, did not want to need to be an accountant just to live my life. I never wanted to live in a suburb where the houses are slight variations of each other and the mailbox out by the road needs to be housed in a brick structure because of kids bashing mailboxes on Saturday nights. I'd rather listen to the call of the crows, the tweet of the towhee, the buzzing sound chickadees make, the tree frogs, fiddle and banjo music, and conversation with my friends at the coffee shop in Sparta. Am in a place now where I want my life in first person instead of third person.   

the roan mountain hilltoppers

 

 

 

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