IGNORE THE RIDICULOUS

 

beside waterfall road

 

Earlier in the week I wrote a note to self to keep on the desk where I'd see it frequently. It says, Ignore the ridiculous. I thought it was funny writing it onto a piece of paper to hold my attention. As every day goes by, it gets less funny, until by now, the note, itself, is the comedy. I'm seeing so much that is ridiculous since writing the note, I wonder how I can ignore the ridiculous. It's not as easy as it seems. As soon as I go online, the ridiculous begins. I meant the note specifically to cover the clerk in Kentucky. She gets more ridiculous by the day, somebody's ego newly bitten by the bug of national attention. Fake news will milk her to the last drop of the ridiculous she has inside her. Something in her eyes tells me that we are far from the end of her public spectacle. Her mind is going full speed in the county jail cell where she's treated like a guest celebrity, writing her book in her mind, thinking about how she'll justify herself on the Pat Robertson Show, seeing herself in the spotlights of mega-churches across the land with blond bee-hive hair, a glittery dress to the floor and lotsa gold draped around her neck and arms. She's writing a story in her mind. I suspect she has already begun to act out the story she's composing, manipulative all the way. I even have a feeling she's liking the reprieve from her husband. He looks like one of the guys from the movie, Winter's Bone.

 

beside waterfall road

 

Then we have the ridiculous responses to her, like, she has a right to her opinion, as if more relevant to her case than a dog walking down the road. And the reactions, like, slut, bitch, again, totally irrelevant. Judges put people in jail for contempt of court. She knew what she was facing. She's been talked to at length by right wing fundraisers and lawyers promising fame and money. All the way to the Supreme Court. National headlines. It looked pretty good with five republican justices, but her Fake news  idea of religious liberty failed to take in court. Why would a Supreme Court decision matter to the ridiculous? Reason doesn't matter. Why would the law? I have not taken the Supremes seriously since the coup of double-aught set up 9/11 and the police state that followed. Like Al Gore, I have no choice but to go with it. It is history now, the real history not yet available.  Another fraud, front and center, a smokescreen to keep the proles distracted, keep them bickering amongst themselves, asleep in television and misinformation, mental conflict.

 

beside waterfall road

 

This Kentucky clerk haunts me when I see her picture and read quotations spoken from her mind. I grew up in exactly the same kind of church mind as she adopted for herself, like my mother, who adopted it for herself to take control of her situation. I don't doubt that Kim Davis is a zealot. Her hair and clothes show she's a zealot. The zealots of this kind of religion are about making other people do what they're supposed to do, watching and judging everybody around them not doing right. By this time in the life, I'm weary of people telling other people how to live their lives in the name of God. They have not caught on that the spiritual path is an interior path to the heart, to the core,  to the soul of oneself. The kingdom of heaven is within. I've been the other side of the clouds in planes. It's not there. It's not about policing and condemning the actions of others. Nor is it about the appearance of piety, nor going to church with perfect attendance, nor bragging about God before tv cameras.  I have become so free of that mind, I feel liberated. I am liberated. It was the greatest of feelings of liberation when the last of that kind of thinking left my mind.

 

beside waterfall road

 

I am drawn to the pictures of Kim Davis, memes about her, updates on her court situation. She is so close to home, the very same mind that dictated my early years and had me believing it. Alas for my poor mommy, she birthed a free-thinker. He sure did not come by it honest. It was like John Milton parenting Nietzsche. New cosmologies have thence transpired. I could not live under God the judge and punisher. I preferred no God to that God. If God amounts to a projection of human neuroses, I don't want it. It took fifteen years to erase from my mind interpretations of God according to white male control issues down through the centuries. If God is that, then God is a creation of the human mind; therefore, not God. Looking back, a lifetime later, I am grateful for the falseness that spewed me out. The years of educating my mind out of religion opened my mind to the beyond. It turned out I could not see God beyond the religion, mistook the religion for God. It didn't compute. I needed to step out from behind the filter of religion, open up and allow self simply to be, unafraid, flow with chance. The spirit came through, rationally convincing. New wine for a new bottle. Kim Davis in the headlines playing pretend piety takes me back to the years I lived in that mind, increases gratitude I was able to find the way out of a coal mine of the male ego by following my own light.

 

beside waterfall road

photos by tj worthington

 

 

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SILENCE

waterfall road rock formation

 

The woman in Kentucky dominates facebook today, eclipsing Donald Trump's narcissistic posturing. His face is like a caricature of a cloud blowing the winter wind. He illustrates an old mountain saying, a blow, somebody who is a blowhard. I see a picture of Trump and I see a blow. He looks like he's blowing wind in all the pictures, which is what he's doing, bloviating over vocal chords, rapping verbal graffiti of surrealist chance. I am awed to see Karl Rove's strategic mind has chosen surrealism for this election round. He's playing with confusion. It's not easy for a hawk to catch a bird flying in a flock. The corporate press the playing field. At the same time, we have this woman in Kentucky martyring herself to an egoic version of God's will with the promise of right wing talk circuit, a book, money and fame. She's a comic case of pointing the finger at somebody, three fingers pointing back at self. She's been getting three fingers of it, too. Rather than embarrass her, it appears to be stroking her ego, making her proud. Don't bother to pray for me, send money. She might even appear on Pat Robertson's 700 Club tv show. They will have to do something with the hair first. Two bad-hair people in the front of the news this week.

 

trees along waterfall road

 

I remember the song by Jane's Addiction, late Eighties, Idiots Rule. It is so true that it reminds me of the truth in a maxim I learned from Jr Maxwell, Stay away from important people. Why? The importance is all self-importance. It's ego. Only. Why waste my time around people who are all about themselves? I saw a video clip of the top dog in Australia talking to people on a sidewalk in NY. Most of them didn't know of him. He told them to remember him, move to Australia and vote for him. I thought, how does a man stand and talk to strangers telling them to remember him because he's important? This is something else I don't want for myself, the illusion of importance. It embarrassed me for him to see him talk about his importance, which is nothing at all but a mental script. It's what politicians do. It's why I stay away from them. When a politician comes to town, I stay home that day. I laugh at myself at election times for taking them seriously. Which of the self-important people do I choose to affirm as most self-important? When not one of them is somebody I'd want to meet. 

 

ferns beside waterfall road

 

A meme I found on facebook of a Byzantine-like painting of God with clouds all around him, a halo over his head, him looking downward with concern, saying, "Sigh. Why do I always attract the crazy ones?" Isn't it so. Several of the faces in the republican clown bus claim God told them this and that. The television fake preachers God chooses to talk to make me question their integrity. It answers the question before I ask it. I've an idea this vision of God amounts to a man's ego in spiritual drag, a wolf in sheep's clothing. This is God speaking. Not. It was during last election, this one and that one said God told them one thing and another. I can't help but see it as the ultimate in hypocrisy. It's speaking hypocritically. However, the people listening know it's hypocritical, but it makes a good story and they want to believe it. It's like children's make-believe games, little girl Vada giving her doll a drink of milk from an empty bottle.  Making a story to entertain self. Performing in her own play she makes up as it goes along, one gesture to the next. Dolls interact with other dolls, talk to each other. She knows it is make-believe. The game is the fun in it. 

 

 

rock beside waterfall road

 

It takes a willing audience to suspend disbelief far enough to go along with the God-told-me story and pay money to keep it going. Enough people want to hear such stories to give an awful lot of story tellers an abundant living. I feel like that's cool. They're in a round together, people of like mind gathered like birds of a feather, a circle of energy everybody benefits from in their own ways. I'm happy for them. They're not fooling anybody who does not believe God talked to them, which is almost everybody. The God of my experience is silent, as God could only be. To speak to us, God takes a human birth, grows up a human and speaks what he has to say when it is time. His words are kept in gospels to be twisted by interpretation until the life is squeezed out of them over centuries of filtering through the limitations of the human mind. It doesn't do any good for God to speak to us. I feel like silence is the voice of God. The spirit world has too many deceiving spirits for me to count on taking something from the spirit world for God. The ego is a trickster too. Nobody can fake silence. Silence doesn't make any money. Everyone has access to it. It's common as air and equally essential.    

 

trees beside waterfall road

 

 

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