SERVING THE MASTER

from waterfall road

 

On the first, I was planning to visit Jr Maxwell's grave with his second cousin, Melia, to remember him at his gravesite on the anniversary of his passing. Last  year our timing got messed up and we went separately on different days. This year we just never connected. I thought about going, taking an umbrella for the rain, and it came to me, "let the dead bury the dead." Why keep this sentiment going year after year? The spirit has gone out of us for it. That's ok. We did it I think four years, while the spirit was with us. I see no reason to make a ritual of it. To force it from here on will be to ritualize it. I'll stop by the cemetery one day spontaneously and say hi. That would have spirit in it. Jr was a bluegrass banjo picker on weekends with his band The Green Mountain Boys, and during the week a welder, tractor mechanic, bulldozer operator, sawmill operator, buyer and seller of cattle. In 1956 he bought a 56 Ford. He said it was the fastest car in the county. He didn't get that  statistic from the owner's manual. He beat the then fastest car in the county in a night race.

 

 

from waterfall road

 

Jr was a wildman. I respected in Jr that he allowed his inner wildman to act out. He was a wildman on a banjo. He made music first and honored the notes. His fiddler's convention winning song was Home Sweet Home. He could twist the strings on his banjo like Earl Scruggs and the crowds loved it. He was a prankster and a jokester. When you were around Jr,  you were laughing. He was drawn to people who made him laugh and he liked to make the people around him laugh. His banjo picking was his contribution to making the world a better place. He was a philosopher who said things like, "I been through it and come out the other end." He was light-hearted and had probably suffered more than anyone I've ever known in the course of his lifetime. He chose for this lifetime the fast lane in spiritual growth, suffering. He was delivered five blows from out of the blue that had stopping power, each one would have brought a rhino to its knees. He was also the only man I'd ever known I would call wise without hesitation. He called himself a fool, made a better case for himself a fool than I could for him wise. It's not like we talked about it. He just saw himself a fool in how he handled his life. I thought of him the wise fool. How could a wise man be anything but a fool in this world?

 

waterfall road

 

Whitehead mourned the passing of Jr Maxwell. The funeral had maybe twenty people. Most of his friends were dead. He was 87. Jr sawmilled the wood in my barn, I'm guessing in the late 1930s when he was in his late teens sawmilling for John Richardson at the foot of the mountain, Air Bellows Mountain. Tom cut the tree trunks, used the branches for firewood, and hauled the logs down the old backside of Waterfall Road in a wagon drawn by big work horses. Jr sawed the logs into boards and Tom hauled them back up the mountain and built himself a barn. It is one of the last standing barns in the county. I've taken care of it. Keeping  donkey hay in it will extend its life. Jr told me what kind of wood was in it. The barn was built to last. A couple of my cats in the past sunbathed on the tin roof. Both the men involved in putting up the barn have told me their entire life stories over a period of several years apiece. Both of them men I respected as what I call true human beings. I respected their character. At Tom's funeral I lost it. Two rows of people stood up in front of where I was sitting and sang, all of them people I knew, and some I went to church with. They sang three songs Tom had requested. I forget the first two, but the last was Amazing Grace, the hymns sung the old-timey slow hillbilly style, one syllable at a time, sometimes making two syllables of one.

 

from waterfall road

 

It was more than I could maintain composure under. I wept a puddle of tears on the floor between my shoes. I did that once before at a foot-washing meeting while Millard Pruitt, Tom's brother, was in the spirit preaching. He wasn't hell fire and fear. Millard only preached love. The whole place was in tears. Millard could light you up with the spirit. I'd already mourned Jr before he left the body, taking care of him going into his dementia and fully in it. He wanted to die at home and I wanted to give him that, a man I felt was truly an honorable human being in the highest sense. I mythologized my role in my mind as serving the Master. I recalled something to the effect of, what you do for the least of these you do for me, something like that. I literally believe Tom and Jr were given to me by the Master for teachers, each one in the right time. I served Jr as if he were Meher Baba or Jesus Christ, Krishna, the Dalai Lama. In my case, Meher Baba. The nurses from Hospice were repeatedly amazed at the care I was giving Jr, allowing him to make his own decisions even when he was bedfast. I never said it, because I didn't want to explain it, that in actuality, I am serving the Master, himself, in person. I knew it was Jr, but that is still how I felt about it. I attended to him with the same degree of respect. This was my opportunity to serve the Master in person. He left the body sleeping comfortably in his own bed. 

 

waterfall road

 

 

*

 

 

 



FORTY YEARS ON A BACK ROAD

tom pruitt's house today

 

Forty years ago, this day, this minute, 9:20pm, I was driving on the Parkway in the densest fog there ever was. I understand some of the fog in the Pacific Northwest is thicker. Absolute white like inside a cave is absolute black. The fog that night was dense. I'm used to it now, though it is never easier to drive in than it was that night, my first experience. Could only use first gear and creep. Had to hang head out the open window and look down at the tire and hold it next to the double yellow line in dim light. The fog absorbed the headlights in a white-out. I think of those nights driving when it is so dark it's pitch black, the headlights seem to go only half as far as usual. Stay in the rhythm of keeping the tire next to the yellow lines. Until a place where a road came into the parkway or entrance/exit to an overlook where the yellow lines ended for a space of about thirty feet. I never knew if I'd find the yellow lines again. I wondered if loaded pickup was headed toward the ditch and down the side of a mountain. Then the yellow lines appeared, I'd been on track. Ten or more years ago the maintenance crews painted segmented lines through the open spaces, a welcome assist.

 

the goat rock from waterfall road

 

I mused at how interesting it was to enter my new life, my commitment to the unknown, to chance, passing through a dense fog the last five miles. So smitten by the symbolism of it, I embraced the fog as a passageway into a new life of I did not know what. I had committed by giving self no option. The decision was settled. Whatever hardship went with it, I'd learn as time went by. I knew it would be intense hardship. No running water in the house, and an outhouse. Took water out of the creek behind the house in buckets. That wasn't anything. The first month, the month of November, cold to somebody from coastal South Carolina, frequent snow on the ground in the mornings, Tom gave me a job with a bush axe for clearing an acre of saplings and briars that had grown up in a meadow he wanted to return to meadow. I realized later he gave me this job to see how long I'd last before turning around and going home. I used it for boot camp. I wanted to work myself into shape and find the rhythm of hard labor, my purpose in going to the mountains to be a caretaker of a farm with beef cattle, totally inexperienced. 

 

waterfall road the backside

 

Somehow I knew without knowing that the mountains would be the place I live out my life. Looking at living my life, the mountains are the place to do it. Looking at making a living, the mountains are not such a good place to be. I could have found work that rewards a college degree, but did not want to wear a tie, work in an office and tell people what to do. I wanted to commit to hard labor. I had fallen in with Meher Baba a year before, which turned my inner direction 180 degrees around. I see my life an arrow shot straight up, going away from its source full speed. Momentum wears itself out, the arrow stops, falls back, turns around and flies full speed returning to its source. The first year was the turning of the arrow's direction. Most curiously to me of all is that these mountains are my blood source, which I didn't know for the first 25 years, as well as what I call the home of my soul. And that's not symbolism. It is best I came here from outside. I could not live here after growing up here. Much as I love the culture, I would need to distance myself from its control. As it is now, I honor the culture without it having controlling interest in my life. I've let the culture be my graduate school.

beside waterfall road the backside

This house was the Air Bellows School house. I've known well a handful of people who went to school and have met and spoken with another handful. Altogether, I've known ten people who went to school here. I've met people who were saved here at revival meetings they had sometimes in schoolhouses in the old days of horses and wagons. I feel a reverence for the house considering what all has gone on that these boards experienced. I feel a reverence for the house as itself without any mental references. It was constructed by the people of the community, some of them carpenters. The simplest possible construction, so simple it is almost in the Japanese style. This spot of ground is, indeed, the home of my soul. After living here around twenty-five years, I had a feeling that seemed like it came from higher self, that I now have my PhD in mountain culture. Not an academic title from reading, rather experiential, first hand, listening to old people tell their lives, working with mountain people, drinking with them and going to church with them, learning their theology, incorporating what I assessed the best of it into my life. Leave off the male hierarchy in the churches and I'm all with their theology, though in different words from what they use. I am post-round earth, post-evolution, post-the science of psychology, post-the 20th Century renascence, the new classical age for the future. I regard that unimportant. I was with old man Tom Pruitt, it's all in the red letters. The rest of it is history.  

the goat rock from waterfall road the back side

 

 

 

*

 

 

 

BELIEVING AND LIVING

Oh good, the rain has begun. The green world is ready. A couple weeks have gone by without rain, but for a welcome shower one night. I went to Carpenter's house earlier to water a young mountain laurel I'd transplanted from the woods a couple weeks ago. They are hardy. I'm watering it every other day to keep it wet, give it a liquid diet while it grows new root hairs. The leaves are perked up and happy. The Dutch irises transplanted a couple weeks ago stand straight up like green rapiers, telling me they're happy. The large patch of wild violet leaves, out the window, flutter in random patterns, make a dance, bring to mind Philip Glass music. It's a visualization of his music, like the continuous flow lines in the films he scored, Koyaanisqatsi and the unspellable others. I heard him in a radio interview a few days ago, the occasion of his new memoir's release. I actually allowed self to spend $45 on the cd collection of Einstein On The Beach. That was when $45 was $45. Never regretted it. Haven't yet gone to amazon to see about his book. If it is under 500 pages, I may look into it. I'm still stuck in the middle of a thousand page Van Gogh biography, taking a diversion after 500 pages, like gimme a break. I feel like I'm creeping up on getting back into it, but facing 500 more pages is like, Lord have mercy. I've read six books during the respite from Van Gogh, and may yet read a few more.  

While looking within at the trails of destiny leading to today, I have a note on the desk to my right written on a piece of pocket-sized nobebook paper, "to see what you believe, see how you live." It has been here for a few weeks. I look at it fairly often, awareness it's there. I have never been able to answer the question, what do I beleive. NPR used to have people write in their stories of what they believe. Every time I'd hear them start, I'd wonder what I'd say, and couldn't put what I believed into a capsule form of one thing that makes a good story. Where do you start, and where do you end? I believe that if I cross the yellow lines in front of an oncoming car I'll have a problem. Haven't tested the hypothesis, but believe it. It's a belief I've gained by noting other people's experience. It's part of what I like about reading. I like reading someone else's story, seeing through someone else's point of view, good practice in awareness that others do, indeed, have a point of view particular to their own experience. Somebody I used to have lunch with regularly was convinced, by a belief about his point of view, that his was the only one valid---he's right, everybody else is wrong. A time came I was unable to put self through the torment again of my own volition, to take the first step toward the door. The people I know who read are comfortable with a point a view besides their own. Someone else's point of view tells me I share this world with others of very interesting points of view, if I can put my own out of the way enough to allow the other. 

How I live will tell what I believe. On the obvious level, when you walk in the door you see clutter. My workshop is the footstool to the chair I read in, watch movies in and listen to music in. A piece of plywood on the footstool is the workbench. Parts for things I'm putting together lie around in stacks, boxes filled with jars and tubes of paint, finished objects, magazines, books on shelves, books in stacks, a variety of pictures and African masks around the walls. Two of them are the real deal, three of them made for tourists. I don't care if they're all made for tourists. Some people are afraid of them. I believe they're good medicine. One has pointed teeth. It looks frightful to a Westerner. I've looked closely at the person it was modeled on in the mask itself and see a striking likeness. It's just a human face. The feeling I get from it is balance, so I think of it as balance. It is the image on the wall daily reminder of balance. I think the masks are beautiful, the purpose for having them. Pictures of Meher Baba on each wall. Asked, Don't you think you have enough pictures of Baba? I say, No. He has a great deal to do with my destiny. set me on the path to being able to find my destiny within, my path itself within. My work along the way has been to keep bills paid and basic needs taken care of. The way I'm living now is the way I wanted to live in my youth, but wasn't ready.

By here, I mean the place I see from, gazing out the window at the donkey meadow, green, the fence, a fly exploring the pane of glass looking for a hole in the invisible wall. He can see where he wants to go, but can't find a hole. I live simply. It doesn't mean self-sufficient. That's too much work, requires too much focus of attention, more than I'm willing to pay for something I can buy at the grocery store for so little. Growing it costs more than buying it. I know, better for ya, but if eating like I eat is deadly, because I didn't grow it, why am I not dead yet? I know the answer to why I'm not dead yet: science. Praise the Scientific Method! I live below the poverty line by choice. Don't have much to offer the world of money flow. The boycott of one says no to a belief system I don't share. Because I don't want to participate in the System, does not imply resistance. My form of resistance is nonparticipation. Be like water, flow around it. I believe television has wrecked American life, but can't struggle against something so big. I lose before it starts. I go around it and stay out of television, I don't like to infect my head with the mystery of the obvious, preferring a life where everyday life is not so obvious. The subliminal application of graduate-school Psychology is not guiding an ongoing effort to seduce my attention when I'm not watching tv. None of the books in the house are spun by the propaganda fear machine, nor is the music. No Tom Clancy novels. No commercials here. No pop radio. Only NPR for absence of commercials. 

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.

*

   

DON'T TAKE ANYTHING SERIOUSLY

jenny

Ground cover snow fell night before last, a dry snow with enough wet to stick where it fell. Years ago I saw somewhere the Lakota language has twenty-eight, or so, words for snow, differentiating the many textures. Possibly laplanders have more. I've lived intimately with snow in the mountains, noting such a variety of snows that I no longer see it just snow. I feel like when I mention snow it requires enough description to give a sense of the kind of snow it is. The Lakota people lived far more intimately with snow than I do. Some snow is so dry, tiny ice crystals, it can be kicked like sand, doesn't stick to tree limbs. Some snow is so wet it sticks to everything, will stand an inch or two high on a wire fence, will stick to limbs and weigh so heavily the snow breaks limbs and electrical lines. Wet and dry are the parentheses all other snows fall between. Since I've learned to pay attention to the various snows, I don't recall any two the same. It happens, the variety is limited, but seldom. No two winters in my experience have been the same. Our language having one word for snow suggests civilization has been moving away from the physical world inward toward mind. For multiple thousands of years humans lived outdoors. Now we live indoors. With the age of reason, we are moving inward, emphasis shifting from body to mind. How we value body and mind shows in the pay scale. Physical work pays the least. The harder the work, the less the pay. Mental work pays more by degrees, until the highest paid work is entirely mental, accomplished in a golf cart. The snow melted through the course of the day until snow remained only in places shaded from the sun. I carried this morning's donkey hay into the meadow to a place the sun lights up first. Cold mornings I'll see the donkeys standing still at the far end of the meadow, the place they know is warmed by morning sunlight first.

jenny at the mineral block

Early humans worshiped the sun as God, life giving, sustaining, destroying. I prefer to call them early instead of primitive. Primitive means first, but popularly is taken for backward. Winter mornings the donkeys stand quietly soaking up the sun's rays in a stillness easily taken for reverence by human interpretation. It is a kind of reverence; it feels extra good. We humans exhibit reverence for whatever makes us feel good, inebriants, money, sex, on one level, and the spirit on another. People new to the mountains know nothing about mountain culture and don't want to, but mention the word, moonshine, and they're all ears, laughing and talking, "Can you get me some?" No. I avoid the word with someone new to the mountains. With hillbillies, we never use the word, moonshine. We call it "white," "shine," and several other names. I bring this up as an example of reverence. I've seen people, both men and women, wax embarrassingly foolish over the idea of moonshine. I'm reminded of a Southern Baptist in New York City without supervision. A reverence for feel-good unto foolishness, similar to a reverence for God in some religions unto foolishness. Killing somebody who shames your feel-good is the ultimate foolishness. All it got the Charlie Hebdo assassins was dead same day or next, whichever it was. They certainly had no peace of mind from the moment of the event onward until flying lead found them too. No matter how many virgins (feel-good) await them, there comes a time none of the virgins are virgin anymore. Even in their heaven, feel-good amounts to a limited time in eternity. Two months or less for seventy however many feel-goods. Honeymoon over, back to the same-o, same-o. Some of the most valuable advice of my life came from Meher Baba, "Don't take anything seriously, not even God." I take it to have something to do with being conscious about reverence. Remember reverence is about feel-good. Don't get stuck in it. The sun moves. The spot that feels good early on a cold morning will shift by midday to a spread of insulating hay someplace else to lie down on, soak up the rays and eat later.

snowbird tracks

It's a tall order to take nothing, not even God, seriously. As a remedy to quiet monkey mind, I can't think of a better way. Taking things seriously charges the mind, makes it race. The more I take seriously, the more I engage runaway mind. For someone not on the path, it doesn't matter. To open self to spirit, mind needs quieting, not swept away, but still as a lake with no wind. The Charlie Hebdo assassinations came out of taking God (Allah), by way of the Prophet, way too seriously. There, again, like freedom of speech, all things in conscious moderation. I learned early to take the candy of good liquor in moderation from the examples of people around me who did not. I wanted to be able to taste good liquor all my life, not have to quit by age 40 or die. I have some easily within reach, but haven't touched it in probably two weeks, and then only a sip for the taste. I've forgotten the last three times in town to stop at the liquor store for some Wild Turkey Rye 101. It's the only bonded liquor I've found to satisfy my palate. Haitian rum is almost equal satisfaction, but I have to go to a city to get it. I can't drink socially anymore for the need to drive home, and hangover avoidance. I like the George Thorogood song, I Drink Alone. I don't like to get out of control and let my inner stupid act out. Not many people can handle riding the bull named Stupid. I know I don't even qualify to sit on him, and him penned up. I sit in the grandstands and learn, watch other people, who thought they were up to the challenge, get trampled. Some people say, Ya gotta have some fun. Trampled by a bull is not my idea of fun. Fun involves feel-good in my dictionary. Like what kind of fun can wrecking a motorcycle be? For masculine credibility it's the ultimate feel-good. I've never been one to need every day of my life to prove I'm not a girl. Can't help but take it for obvious, what of it?

jack

It's a sight how freeing it can be to let go of serious thinking. I don't mean to imply I'm there. I've been conscious of letting go of being serious about one thing or another, especially art making, just enough to have something like a peephole experience. I've seen the good sense in it enough to check myself when taken over by serious mind, to back off and say, this isn't going anywhere, it isn't working, it's not in alignment with the flow. Here again, I see other people acting out serious and it makes me want no more to do with it. It's all about peace of mind. It's unimportant to someone who does not value peace of mind. I confess to some reservation about not taking God seriously at first. Whatever it is we call God isn't even close. If we can imagine it, it's not God. If we can name it, it's not God. Mind is not able to comprehend God. Serious has to do with mind. Mind is limited. The spirit is famous for lightness. Serious is famous for heaviness. We are well trained in the serious, especially in the realms of religion and politics. We leave God out of it, the great unknown we can't even put a handle on, even quicker to run between our fingers than water. I take it for sound counsel to avoid being serious about something I know nothing about, am unable to know about. I believe it is so, if someone were to see God as God really is, it would take one out of the body. While I'm involved with a body on earth, the best I know to do is enjoy being in God's dream. To take it seriously would be like Peter who walked on the water til he thought about it. He took it seriously and got wet. It gives me insight into Jesus mind. He was in the mind of not taking it seriously all the time, not just when he walked on water. He walked on land the same. Remembering when he saw Moses and Elijah on the mountain, I think it was Peter who wanted to build a shrine on the site, take it seriously. Jesus said to let it rest, it was for the moment only. 

sky

*

LOVE IS ALL THERE IS

barnett newman

I want to write all night. I also want to be able to function at least by noon. I want to write to you so bad it makes me want to stay up. The clock has just passed Cinderella's curfew. That's no concern to me. I'm not waiting for a pumpkin on wheels to save me from myself. Not my story. In the time when I was young, inexperienced, stupid and lonely, I hoped to fall in love with somebody who would save me from myself. It never happened. Fell in love a few times against all signs that said: don't go there. Only found turmoil of the mind and disappointment. My pumpkin on wheels turned up empty; it wasn't really love, but fantasy. I didn't know anything about love. Finally, in 1975, Meher Baba tapped me on the shoulder to get my attention and taught me over several years how to save myself from my ignorant mind and befuddled heart. He set me in the direction of finding I don't need somebody to save me from myself. If I can't find how to get in line with myself on my own, assigning the task to someone else isn't going to work. It's only real when I can find by my own searching why I think I need saved from myself. I can't trust myself? Experience tells me my mind can make up a lot of ridiculous fantasies. It's only real when I can find in self how to transcend my ignorant self by tuning in to intuition, allowing higher self to have a say in my decisions, become acquainted with higher self that seemed dormant before I saw to rational and emotional satisfaction that God Is. That was all I needed to know. I'd always been told, but never had any conscious experience of God that I was aware of. The God I grew up with was Fear. It took Meher Baba to point to the words of Jesus, God is love. By way of intuition, I already knew it, though it had been buried under a mountain of dogma, the diamond in a coal mine. 

barnett newman

I could not have found it on my own. In my years of searching for whether or not there is God, I could not see past religion. Religions convinced me a real God would not allow religionists to do to fellow human beings and the living creatures of the earth as has been done continually in multiples, like the German Christians embracing fascism in the 1930s, like American Christians, today, embracing fascism. I've never been able to reconcile God supporting fascism. It doesn't compute. Fascism is about hate. God is not in it. I could not see, before, that God is not in religion. Religion is of the human mind, not God. I missed it before Meher Baba convinced me God Is, and God Is Love. Simple as that. The preachers start qualifying: Yes, except for...Yes, except for.... God hates the sin and loves the sinner. The only thing I can say to that is bullshit. Love does not hate. The so-called sin gets balanced by karma. It takes care of itself. God doesn't need to be concerned with it. Karma automatically keeps us in balance. As for God as judge, love does not judge. I see no reason to explain. It's simple language. Love is not about controlling. Love is about allowing. There is no except. Love allows us to find our own way, make our own mistakes, learn from our own experience. Control does not allow the individual to learn from ones own experience. It's called doubting. Doubting is a sin. God doesn't approve. Really? Love can't stand up to questioning? I found God by doubting the mountain of bullshit that had accumulated in the barn of my mind. I was led to believe the same nonsense the television hypocrite evangelists dress up God in to fit the confines of their own limited intelligence and knowledge. Like old man Tom Pruitt said of them, they're just makin a racket.

barnett newman

who's afraid of red, yellow and blue?

In my own personal vision, if it's not about love, it's not about God. What's so frightening about love? I think of abstract expressionist, Barnett Newman's painting title, Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue? Alas, it was slashed in the modern art museum, the Stedelijk, in Amsterdam, by an art reactionary. He was evidently the one afraid of red, yellow and blue. Destroyed it. I'm grateful I had a chance to see it when it was living, about three years after it was painted. My response to it was to stand back and look at it for a long time. I walked up to it on the left side and walked the length of it, almost but not touching it, feeling it, walking the length of red from the vertical blue line, feeling the expanse of red all the way to the vertical yellow line. I wasn't aware that I felt anything special, though there is a memory of experience sensing Barnett Newman, himself, in his two-dimensional environment up close to it applying the paint. His presence was the only notable feeling, presence in so intangible a feeling as to make me wonder if I felt it or thought it. I take it that feeling it made me think it. My feeling about the slasher is he could not handle such an expanse of one color being called art. It was a gesture of control. Perhaps the painting became for him a symbol of modern art being out of control; modernism, itself, was destroying art. Perhaps he felt vulnerable in the face of Newman's effrontery. Perhaps, too, among religionists the word love has a great deal of vulnerability associated with it. We can't let down our guard in this world. The devil's watching you in his cross-hairs. You needta be afraid, braced against, just braced against. I recall William Blake, Damn braces, bless relaxes. He, too, had issues with preachers who skirted around the subject of love, a word too charged with carnal associations for comfort in the control department. Control does not allow. Control is about zero tolerance. Jesus or Hell. 

barnett newman

According to my mother's preacher, I'm not afraid enough of Satan. I couldn't say anything to that one. I knew there was nothing I could do or say. I don't care if they think I should be very afraid and live in fear because God wants me to be afraid. In my way of seeing, God wants for me that I not worry, thus be happy. I can't talk with anybody who demands I believe and think their way. This mind is what spit me out of Kansas as far as land allowed. They can have their Satan all they want. I confess to concern they want Satan a little too much for my comfort. Makes me uncomfortable talking with my mother, who always brings up Satan and dwells on Satan, talking to me like a preacher wanting to convince me, for my own good, to be like them. Been there, done that, not going back. Didn't buy the tshirt. When she told me I'm not afraid enough of Satan, stressing it with, "You better think about it," all I could say was, "I'll leave Satan to you." I feel sad for her. I'm not looking to control her, so I allow her to adore a preacher who tells her to be afraid. She dragged me through that mud all the way through my school years. I'm free of it. She wants it, she's got it. I don't want it. It's why I'm a thousand miles away. On the telephone, when it gets crazy, I can say, "We're not going there." She's learned that I think independently from Fundamentalist dogma, and she will never let it rest. She bred one as relentless in not hearing it as she is relentless in needing to say it; it's her duty to keep in the front of my mind that I am wrong and headed for an eternity of hell fire. Lord have mercy, how did I get here? Remembering the coal mine of fundamentalist hymn book theology I ran for my life from. Literally ran for my life. We talk on the phone across a divide much greater than a thousand land miles. Love is never an issue, except, the great except, at the end, the duty I-love-you. We have very different meanings for love. Hers is to control; mine is to allow. I learned young never to browbeat anybody for any reason. It's just ego talking. I reject control; she rejects allowing. We're stuck. I feel sad for her that she alienated her first born, but all I know to do is allow it to be what it is. An old hillbilly saying comes to mind, it is what it is.

barnett newman

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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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BALANCE: SUNLIGHT AND RAIN

A quiet rainy day. It started overcast, then sprinkled and steadily more until it became a full rain falling straight down. The wild violet leaves covering the ground outside the window dance, randomly touched by drops of water dripping from leaves above. The rhododendron leaves catch a falling drop and dance in their random patterns too. I hear in my head voices complaining about the rain. I thought about giving a friend a call, then revised the thought: not while it's raining--he'll complain about it raining as long as I'll listen. Everywhere I go on a rainy day, somebody is complaining about the inconvenience. I just write it off as a case of somebody who wants to be spoiled and have everything just right all the time. I find it refreshing when somebody speaks in favor of rain, its nourishing quality, its ability to keep drought away. I'm recalling someone I knew in the early 1980s who said of a hot, dry summer, God is tired of hearing tv weathermen wanting clear, sunny days. OK, you want sunny days, you got em. You want everything in your life cheery and bright, here it is. Don't forget to enjoy the drought that follows. The sun is nourishing and the rain is nourishing, each in moderation. Too much sun and life forms wither. Too much rain and life forms wither. In my first years on the spiritual path, I found from going to special spiritual places and getting into the swoon of the spirit that later at home I come down from the lofty height and drop way down into depression, minor despair for at least the same amount of time. Balance. In my early years with Meher Baba, others would say to me, You gotta go to Baba's center in India. You'll love it. It's the best feeling. You gotta. Fortunately, I never had the money to go spend a couple weeks in India. A time came when I had the money and the time, but I remembered every time I experienced a spiritual high, next thing was spiritual low for the balance. I'd rather give up the high to avoid the low that follows. I don't want a bi-polar spiritual life.

Later, after several years, I'd hear, You haven't been to India yet? You gotta go! My thought I kept to myself, if I really gotta go, it will happen. It hasn't happened yet, so I must not gotta. Then it came to the place I am now, don't want to go to India. Don't want to deal with airports and sitting strapped in a seat with a window that looks onto the wing for endless hours, the Mumbai airport and the city with throngs of bobbing heads, stepping over the dying and the dead, the scent of old urine everywhere. Massive, intense poverty, arrogant Brahmans, humble Untouchables, racism that makes our racism look casual, chaos that makes our own look like order. Americans go to India to swoon in spiritual emotion and Indians come to America to swoon in money. So I go from a country that is only interested in money to one that has so little that people are only interested in money. Why spend a couple thousand dollars to go from one form of loving money to another form of same? Hindus and Muslims hate each other murderously. Hindus slaughter Muslims and Muslims slaughter Hindus at any provocation. A neighborhood of Hindus with machetes will run through a neighborhood of Muslims slashing everybody they see. It happens the other way around too. I have a problem with the hate in the American air, so why go someplace where they hate even more vehemently? Yes, I know, ignore all that and feel the spiritual high at Baba's tomb. Maybe I could, but why? I go home by way of mechanical flight, endure airports, grow weary of reading and look out the window at the wing for hours, feeling wow I did something big. Get home, cat is depressed and mad at me for being gone so long, everything in my life is on hold, a stack of bills and trash in the mailbox, then fall into depression for six months in grief because I can't have a spiritual high all the time, poor me. I must not be very advanced. I'm a slow-witted dolt who doesn't get anything, trapped in a limited body and mind, woe, aint it awful. Months of addressing this issue in self and reasoning self out of this thinking. 

I'd rather stay home. God, the spirit, the way, creator-sustainer-destroyer, is not localized in India. It's not localized in tombs, shrines, naked men covered with ashes in long beards. I'd just as soon jump into the local waste-water treatment plant for a swim as to bathe in the Ganges. I keep an African mask on the wall that for me is an emblem of balance, a visual reminder. I prefer the waves of my flow to stay at moderate levels, not too high, not too low, a slight pendulum swing, not the full arc. A nice rainy day reminds me that rain is always something to welcome, even when it's too much and the water runs in torrents out of the creek beds. Too much wet, even unto monsoon, is better than too much dry. I've come to a place in the life where I would rather have warm, sunny days and overcast rainy days in waves of moderation that keep the green world happy, and through the green world everything else. I don't want the rush of a spiritual high. There was a time I craved the spiritual high, because I thought I was supposed to. So many people were into the high I felt like it was the real deal and I need to get it too. I don't think it's the real deal anymore. I don't think it has any real importance. Living my life has become my spiritual practice. I have come to see that at least in this phase of my inner growth, everyday life is the shrine I worship at, my home my mosque. I used to feel like I could find that woo-woo feeling in the woods among the silent trees. I can recall a few times in the past that woo-woo feeling took me over for a day and made me believe I was doing something really special. Then I crashed for a period of time. I don't like the crash. And I don't believe the high is all that important. This summer has been a good one of balanced weather. Three days to a week of sunny days, then three or so days of light rain and overcast. The temperature has mostly been in the lower 70s during the day and lower 60s, sometimes 50s at night. This is the balance I've come to like in my spiritual life. Sunlight and rain in balance, keeping my interior life lush and green sparkling with wildflowers.

I don't want to go to church to hear a self-called preacher bombast about Satan. In the course of a phone conversation with my Christian mother, she'll say Satan a dozen times and never the name of Jesus once. She warned me a couple years ago that I'm not afraid enough of Satan, "You better watch out." My thought: I'm not the one paying attention to Faux news and giving my power to people spewing hate. She's never one time said to me anything about the power of love, but multiple, multiple times stressed the power of Satan. It tells me her "Christian" church is awfully dedicated to the dark side. OK, they like the dark side. It's good for them. I grew up in that inner darkness that called  itself Christian and ran for my life. I like to go to a Primitive Baptist church from time to time, primarily for the singing, and the Primitive preachers are true to the spirit. However, when the expectations begin, I'm gone. In church, expectations start immediately. My last visit to a Primitive church a man said to me, How long's it been since we seen ye last, brother? I said about a year (actually 2). He said, You need to do a little better'n 'at. My unspoken thought: I will do much better; you'll never see me here again. In my own personal belief system, love is not about intimidating others into believing what I believe with the threat of hell if you don't see it my way. I call it arrogance, not love. The Lord told them to admonish the ones that don't walk the line. And the Lord told me to go my own way, bye-bye. I like to maintain my balance doing right by others and myself. I don't even want woo-woo spirit in my life anymore. I've come to where I see the spiritual path is right here at home in my own life among the people I live among. No need to seek enlightened masters to make me spiritual. No need to observe any ritual or belong to a group, abstain from liquor, read scripture, or anything. A brief visit with someone I see in town by chance can be as great a spiritual experience as praying at a tomb in India.          

photos by tj worthington

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IN MY OPINION, BUT GRACIOUSLY

alexander calder

 

It's early Monday morning, first light. An appointment to repair a brake line in the car that has a rusted hole in it. The fluid in the left front brake holds enough to operate brakes enough to stop when necessary. I carry a quart of brake fluid for this purpose. The line broke Thursday. No problem staying at home. The appointment is for ten o'clock. I have an affliction that makes me worry about getting up on time when I have a morning appointment. I can't get to sleep the night before. The alarm system on the clock radio is so complex I've never attempted to figure it out. Went to sleep early last night to insure I'd get up early. Often when I lie down too early, I'll be awake all night. I turn the radio on down low and let it play while sleeping. I hear BBC news that is mostly African in the night, Nigeria and Kenya, the British colonies. The volume is down to where I can only hear what they're saying by listening closely. Mostly, it's just white noise. I use it when mind is racing. The white noise acts as a scrambling device for mind's ongoing activity, thoughts quit attempting to compete with BBC, mind shuts down and here comes sleep. I'm reminded of a quotation I wrote down from a utube interview with artist, Agnes Martin. She said, I don't have any ideas of my own, and I don't believe anybody else's. That leaves me with clear mind. I say, thank you, BBC, for clear mind. I've come to get used to hearing news from Africa. Like news from everyplace else, it's about killing. This bunch killed that bunch. And that bunch killed this bunch. African killing is up close, in your face with machetes and machine guns mounted on the beds of Nissan pickups, operated by hyper-stoned pre-teen boys. It's a totally different attitude toward life and death from mine. American news comes from a different attitude toward life and death from mine, as well.

 

 

alexander calder

 

That's a presumptuous saying, implying I know what my attitude toward life and death is. I ask self what I mean and get no answer. Even implying I know what their attitude is toward life and death. It's just different. Maybe the difference can help me to define my own. Like it takes darkness to define light and the other way around. Duality. Warlord mentality is medieval. Kings and castles of old Europe were warlords. China before unification was six provinces ruled by warlords. It looks like Africa is attempting to bridge the gap between the medieval and the post-modern world in a few decades. It's six decades after the civil rights laws in USA, and American racism has not diminished the least little bit. It went underground. Nothing like a black president to surface the racist submarine. American racism is out in the open where it can be dealt with out in the open. The black people are hunkering down, keeping a low profile, flying below the radar, staying out of white man's cross-hairs the best they know how. Many are not successful. Here, concerning my attitude toward life, racism never made sense to me. I came up in a racist family in a racist white baptist culture where racism was a natural law, like gravity. I learned in the Navy and from then on that regarding black people with the same respect as white people makes me a nigger-lover. Oh well. I'd rather be a nigger-lover than have a white robe in my closet for special occasions. I can't help but think the shrinking globe of our time has something to do with the clash of cultures going on all over the globe. Also, the USA has its tentacles in every country on earth, and the world is turning against us for it. Even Germany is now insulted by American arrogance. My attitude toward life does not want to dominate any country. It doesn't want to dominate anybody. I asked my friend Pat, who goes to Costa Rica for a month every year, how Costa Rica can exist without a military to protect itself at least somewhat from USA. She said Costa Rica has nothing USA wants; no oil, no minerals, no gold. They have nothing to fear.

 

alexander calder

 

One bit of sound counsel came to me from daddy in childhood. Because he barely made it through school after the sixth grade, he told me, your education is one thing nobody can take away from you. Last week I was asked why a man would want to take philosophy courses in college, you can't do nothin with it. A volcano of wind exhaled from my lungs, "For your life!" It can be very important in your life. I know a guy majored in philosophy at Chapel Hill working as a welder. He also has a fairly even temperament because he's a thinker, even reads books. He's not jumping up and down inside, waiting for the chance to fight somebody that looked at him wrong. Nor does he carry a "nine" in the back of his pants in case somebody who wants to kill him turns up. I can't help but feel like one's attitude toward life is a basic driving force. I've used my adult life to improve my own. Early on I had a fairly sour attitude toward life. Therefore, what I gave out was sour and what I got in return was sour, reinforcing what I believed about the world around me, a projection of myself. As my attitude toward life changed, the world around me changed, the people around me changed. My attitude toward life includes compassion and kindness in these years; therefore, I have plenty to draw from when needed. I've honed it down to what I call the gospel in a fortune cookie: Love God and treat others right. My next art object will have these words on it. My personal interpretation of others includes non-human others; the four-legged, the winged, the six-legged, the no-leggeds. When I treat others right, including donkeys, others tend to treat me right. I've "trained" the donkeys not to kick me by their own will, not by fear. I treat them right; they treat me right.

alexander calder

 

In the column of quotations on the right is one I hold to myself by Meher Baba as a reminder: (I paraphrase) Opinions reside in a superficial layer of the mind, having no affect on the core of personality, wherein resides one's attitude toward life. I have opinions, though I do not regard them truth. The Worthington coat of arms motto: In my opinion, but graciously. It reads like something in my horoscope. This was back when the name was in northern England, before anybody crossed the Atlantic. John Worthington, the original one to cross the water in my line, lost eight kids and his wife during and soon after the crossing. He had an inn in Philadelphia and a cattle ranch outside the city, in the same time Ben Franklin was there. He was a Quaker exiled from England for his faith. He found a second wife and raised several more kids. I didn't know any Worthingtons of the past, not grandfather, greatgrandfather, not even cousins. Of the Worthington third and fourth cousins I've met, I can see "in my opinion, but graciously." I can see it in photographs of distant relatives. It's a firmness in the face like standing on both feet, yet not aggressive. About ten years ago I met a 4th cousin at Ninemile, Tennessee. On sight, he said, "I can see the Worthington in you." I believe it is that attitude he saw in the set of the face, the eyes. I saw it in him too. For my part, but graciously amending in my opinion says I do not take my opinions for natural law. They grow out of my limited experience. I don't have a problem talking with somebody whose opinions are different from mine, though find few able to do the same in turn. It's like the old country sayin, Opinions is like assholes; everbody's got one. An attitude toward life I'm glad I entertain is that everybody has their own way of seeing by way of individual experience. No two can be alike. It's how it's meant to be. It's in the very life force itself. I feel much better about self when I fall in line with understanding we all have our own experience, our own minds, our own selves. The beauty is, like shells on the beach, no two are alike.   

 

alexander calder himself

 

 

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