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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TO WALK THE RED ROAD

I feel more every day like I'm understanding the time Herman Melville was in before and while writing Moby Dick. He saw the nation dividing into factions that fell into hating each other unto wanting to kill the other by way of war. Corporate propagandists today have divided us into factions that hate each other. I can't tell if it is getting more intense daily or if I'm just recently aware of it. The division has always been there. It has never been a problem before, under the American belief that each man and woman has a right to their own way of seeing. We have been consciously divided by way of propaganda since 1980, a step at a time. Expressions of racism today have a hard edge of hate out in the open, arrogance. Before, the racism was the same, it was kept to oneself and one's circles. Much as I dislike seeing such vehement hatred out in the open and increasing, I also see that these dark shadows in a culture are the same as dark shadows in individuals--to be dealt with, we need to bring them to the surface to assess how to deal with them. Hatred surfaces, works itself up and needs to be burnt off by way of a fight or a war. War amounts to, essentially, burning off hate. The hate the right-wing media pumps into their audiences appears to me without conscience. Political ideologies don't do conscience. Neither do belief systems, nor corporate coups. I read Moby Dick made aware by Melville himself that hate was swirling in the political air of his time and he saw the American experiment, democracy, in peril. The white whale, white supremacy, broke and sank the ship of state, a democracy of people from all over the world, Captain Ahab dead and tied to the whale's side by harpoon ropes, Ahab a teabagger of the day without compromise.

I tried to read Moby Dick again a few years ago and could not get with it. I found John Huston's 1957 film of Moby Dick with Gregory Peck playing Ahab. It was a remarkable American film. Orson Wells delivered the sermon in the seaman's chapel. It was old-time New England Primitive Baptist style. I felt throughout Melville's story a civil war on its way. I feel the direction American politics has taken in this time is toward civil war. Again, the justification is immigrants of color. I have the division in myself. Last summer I came face to face, not by my choice, with Reaganista Supreme Parrot, the Congress person of my district in NC, who does not represent me in any way, Virginia Foxx. I felt like hell opened up and this presence emerged before my eyes. I backed away automatically. She put out her hand to shake and I could not touch her. I would have had to go straight home and soak my hand in kerosene to exterminate the cooties. I acted like I didn't recognize her, I, a demographic profile of a Fake tv viewer and Limbaugh listener. This angry old white man was angry with her. I could not speak. I froze inside. It was awkward and she handled it well, distracted herself with someone else. The next one paid no attention to the news, cared nothing about politics, had no idea who she was and did not care. She handed me a business card fancy with gold print, which I dropped in the trash soon after. Then took it back out of the trash, thinking it would go good with my collection of things it's really weird for me to have. 

Earlier in the day I was on the phone with my friend Lee, who lives in New Mexico. We talked some about how we both love this period of our lives the best of any other. We both like to stay at home, like being at home, prefer and enjoy the solitary life. In both our cases, we've become comfortable enough with ourselves we don't need to go looking for distraction. I stopped in at the grocery store for some coffee filters I forgot to buy two days before. At the register, from behind, a familiar voice, Hi. We spoke and hugged. She said, "What are you doing?" I would not let self say, Standing in line at the grocery store. Too redundant. I said, "Staying at home." She showed a long face like to say, Bummer. I said, "There is nothing sad about it." She said, "Really?" I said, "There's no place I'd rather be than home." She just accepted it, already knew I was weird. Glad our conversation was cut short by the momentum at the register, I said, Bye, and proceeded on my way. Somebody from the past, from a chapter that ended long ago, a few cycles back. Six years ago I trimmed down the people I see to the people I care about who care about me. In this time of the life, I know who those people are. I've done my time having superficial associations. I don't do it anymore, and don't care who it pisses off. I'm flowing with this cycle, happy with it, staying at home. I don't even like to cross the county line, except knowing I'll be back to sleep in my own bed. I have my purpose for coming to the mountains, which I am still living, and will go on living. This is the place I walk my spiritual path. It is the only reason I'm here. I don't mix socially, never have. Got the name arrogant on account of it, not my concern. 

I did a lot of spiritual reading for a lot of years and came to what all the masters had said, reading is not it. It is in experience. Paying attention to experience, living in the world as it is, allowing others to be themselves, allowing same with self. My spiritual reading in this time of the life has trimmed down to the Tao te Ching. It's all there in beautiful verse form. It's about honoring the god in others. It's about allowing God, not expecting of God. It's about allowing the flow, going with the flow, using the flow to find a tranquil life. And finding a tranquil life, allowing it. I never enter a lottery for fear of winning. I do not want money messing up my life. I'm able to meet expenses and have a little bit of fun too, quiet, at home fun like movies, reading, music, art projects, donkeys, and Caterpillar. The car runs good and all is well. I trouble my mind with news less and less, though continue to be traumatized when I give it any attention, disturbed every day at the rate American cops are killing black people, man, woman or child. It's shameful and shameless. I'm one of few people I know who think anything of it. And what can I do about it? Send a twitter? Leave a comment? I remind myself it's not my world out there on the news. It's not mine until the swat team breaks down my door and blows me away, saying, Whoops, wrong address. Shit happens. As long as my door is still on its hinges, I'll go on staying at home being a detached viewer.         

*

     

UNCOVERING DESTINY

In recent weeks and months I find self assessing the past in new ways from how I saw a time when it was present. I see a pattern the details fit into, when before, I saw the details like puzzle pieces strewn on a tabletop to be gone through looking for interlocking parts. I could not see the patterns or the flow that ran through the progression to make the completed image. I don't remember a time when I wasn't curious in the back of my mind what my destiny might  be. By now, I have lived my destiny, whatever it is. To find out what it is, I can look at now. I am living it. From here, it looks like the one desire that has run through my whole life has been to live quietly and peaceably, not have somebody telling me how wrong I am, I need to make more money and live in a suburb. I look at the life I have as the life I created for myself by my own will, determination, letting go and allowing "chance." In this time of the life I have found my flow. When I allow the flow, things work out, timing works sometimes perfectly. Possibly, this has been  my destiny, to find my flow. It's been my destiny to live in a mountain holler in the Blue Ridge, the mountains I remember seeing in National Geographics, blue with orange sky. I've seen those mountains many times by now. I am in the blue mountains. When I saw pictures of the Blue Ridge in childhood, I was seeing my destiny unawares. One great motivation along the way has been to contribute the very least possible to the Military Industrial Complex, the corporate world, the belief system that money is number One. I don't know where it came from, possibly past lives, but I have never wanted to train myself to be an automaton just to have money and a country club membership. I'd rather drive off the end of the earth like Thelma and Louise.   

I suspect that basically my motivation was to get away, away from where I am. I wanted to get away from Wichita, from Kansas. The momentum stuck and there came a time I wanted to get away from Charleston and South Carolina. Came to North Carolina mountains and spent several years wanting to get away from here. Finally, I caught on that the wanting to get away momentum was about wanting to get away from parents, their ongoing passive-aggressive war with each other and overtly-aggressive war on the kid. Their example made me vow to self I will never marry, will never live like they live, will not allow myself to be a corporate pawn. I would live in a peaceable atmosphere without television. All the time living in Charleston I had a longing for the mountains with no idea of why. I wanted to write about the mountains, but had no experience. I like to read accounts of Himalayan climbers. I read about them with no desire to try it. I accept it is something I could never do this lifetime physically, and have no interest in doing mentally. I have no desire to climb to the "top of the world," mainly because it is not. There's no oxygen. I can go to a place I can't breathe in a swimming pool. The people that climb those mountains have their own motivations. My motivation has been to live quietly in peace, frugally, alone with a few pets. I came to the mountains on my spiritual path or pilgrim path, whatever. I think of it simply as my life path. By spiritual path, I mean living by the way of the spirit, the Tao, the flow, in tune with my interior life. I could not live seeing one way on the inside and conforming to another way on the outside. A lot of people can do that. It's the path to money. A lot of people cannot do it. These are the people where I find my friends. Birds of a feather, a universal law. 

I've never wanted to make my way walking over the backs of the working people. I came to the mountains with some lines from WB Yeats in my mind from his poem, Among School Children, where all ladders start, in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart. The foul rag and bone shop of the heart is where I have wanted to live my life. It is one way of looking at my destiny. It is what I have wanted for myself. Another way of saying it, I want to live close to the bone, simply, very simply. More and more simple has been my goal. By now, it's about as simple as it can get without living in a tent. My momentum in this lifetime has not been so much toward something, but away from. I went away like an arrow pulled back as far as the length of the arrow allows, and let go. It's actually somewhat difficult to live in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart. Now that we the people are in the cross hairs of police state, I'm all the more glad to be outside society. At the same time, rural America is an awfully vulnerable place to live. In economic downturns, the new tv word for Depressions, rural America goes under first and stays under. It's somewhat difficult to live with, but rurally, people take care of each other in hard times. Community comes together in hard times. So I've taken myself off the ladder to any kind of ambition or success at the start, have never stepped on the first rung. In the Navy, I never made one step in advancement. I wanted to come out the same rank I went in. It was my way of saying no to fascism, militarism. They could force my body, but not my mind. Childish? Maybe. It was serious business at the time. I was already done with authoritarian rule by threats. By the time the Navy was over, I had completed my debts to society. Got married and served my country. Got unmarried and out of the Navy, and I was done. From this moment on, I was on my own, made my own decisions, nobody telling me what I'm gonna and not-gonna do, except the boss at work. 

That weekend between the Friday of leaving the Navy and Monday of starting school on my own was the chopping block moment. All that went before, ended that weekend. All that went after, started that weekend. It's been my attitude toward work that an employer holds over me and operates with the right to fire me. He often doesn't realize I have the right to fire him. I worked for a surveyor for a time who took it to be his right to berate and talk down to me, like he did everybody who ever worked for him. I told him I took that shit when I was a kid. I don't take it now. And walked away. I didn't need his minimum wage. I could work for minimum wage someplace else. When somebody with power over me thinks it's time to give me a cussing to nail their power into place, they'd best go into it intending it be the last time they see me. That's the moment they lose the power I gave them the illusion of for minimum wage. Minimum wage does not buy a whole lot of power-over. I'm a stubborn Taurus, I'm happy to say. My stubborn ways have kept me out of a lot of entanglements I don't want for myself. My spiritual path is my everyday life. I have learned that the spiritual path is more about being a benefit to others than going to church. I mean by being a benefit to others, being spontaneously available when someone near at hand suddenly has a need I can help do something about. Mountain people are generous when it comes to helping ones in need. I take all my relationships with friends to be spiritual relationships. The people I know have a great deal of value for me. I automatically, can't help but see everyone who comes into view a soul in a body and mind. I never see their clothes as anything but a costume like a benign Halloween costume, a costume of style and rank. I interact with the person inside the costume, body and mind. Seeing the people around me so, retains them as a part of the path, weaves them into my experience of my path. It's in relation to others that we have either a good life or a rotten life. How I treat others is how they treat me. That, too, is part of my path. 

meher baba

*

NO TO HERD-THINK

meher baba

I heard a man talking on a Charlotte NC interview radio talk show with NPR about a religious demographic of people he calls the NONES. These are the people who have a spiritual life, see themselves on the spiritual path, who are not affiliated with a church, religion, by choice. For religion they have none. He has made a church for the people disaffected by religion. I listened to him long enough to find out what he was about. Even continued to listen after I knew he was no interest to me. It got worse until I just turned it off. By worse, I mean not allowing that an individual on one's own path can be valid. I've been told countless times by religionists in my life that I cannot go it alone, I need the support of a church. Support? Like my friend Melvin says, When I want to be judged, I'll go to church. I cannot give the opinions of an ego-maniacal man power-over my decision making. A preacher whose solution to the troubles in the world is nuke-em cannot advise me about anything. He has nothing to teach me. Faux news on the television gives him evidence he's right. A man whose racism is never spoken, because it's understood, has nothing to tell me. Even a preacher who is not racist or sexist and believes religion is the way, still has nothing to say of interest to me. I know a preacher who lives nearby with a church of beautiful loving energy bubbling among the members. I've seen his flock become truly caring, conscious people of integrity. Still, it's for people who need groups. I, personally, do not thrive in groups. In a group, I start looking right away for my own place on the periphery. Every herd has one that stays off to itself. I am that one in the herds I've been associated with. At a cocktail party I'm the lone penguin with drink in hand wandering between the groups of penguins chattering.  

ganesh

I forget the book, chapter and verse, but I've heard a zillion sermons on it's the narrow way, not the broad highway. The preacher meant by "narrow" the straight-and-narrow, the tightrope preachers use to control their flock with guilt, a misinterpretation of strait, a narrow passage to a harbor, which even a child could see. I mentioned the difference to two different preachers, one in childhood, one as an adult, that strait has a very different meaning from straight. No it didn't. Dismissed. A doubter. In hindsight, I am grateful I had such a twisted religious beginning. It was so obviously not what it claimed of itself, it spit me out like the human cannonball, made me a None, a contraction of no one, nobody. The preacher mentioned above starts out with Nobody his name for the people not associated with religion. He likes to have "conversation" with a None over pitchers of beer in a bar where he makes salient points to prove to the other, you're wrong, you're nobody. I think of Odysseus telling the Cyclops his name was Nobody, thinking ahead to the Cyclops screaming in pain with a beam stuck in his eye; the other Cyclopes called to him asking who was doing this to him and he answered, Nobody. They went back to sleep and Odysseus slipped away. The guy talking on the radio was slick, fast with a rebuttal to any point of view. Winning them over, convincing them he's right and they're wrong. Now he has a church of nobodies believing they're somebodies in association with him. Listening to his slick, evangelistic talk was enough in itself to put me off. I'd say he won over the ones looking for what's "right" with his I'm-right-you're-wrong explications. He talked like he was an insurance salesman, your good buddy with your interest at heart. And a little more money in the collection plate helps. The ones looking for what's real are the ones he fails to snare with his slick tongue. He'll never figure out why. The need to be right is the mother of countless atrocities. 

shirdi sai baba

By the time I turned the radio off, I was almost mad at him. The temperature was rising in my boiler and I assessed no need to follow this unto steam blowing out the ears. There came the time I was hearing him a smug Jerry Falwell, who, of the fallen televangelists, actually fell well. The guy on the radio wasn't saying a purple "teletubby" with a triangle on its head in a children's tv show was gay. At least the guy talking on the radio wasn't showing the stupid side of egomaniacism. He was showing the cold, calculating side with a smile of pretend caring in the reassuring voice of an undertaker, thank you very much for the free money you worked your ass off for. Nationwide is on your side. State Farm is there. He has a church of people he has convinced they're nobodies outside his herd; he knows what's right. His presumption got on my nerves to the point I almost started talking back to him, but realized I wanted no kind of conversation with him, not even in my head. For me, he was another voice calling to me to enter a herd, a Siren saying, Join, Be a Member, Belong, No more Lonely Boy, We're there for You. And my immediate response: No you're not. He brings to mind a phenomenon that when you prove somebody's belief about something to be wrong, it hardens them further in their own belief. This is what the Somebody who convinces Nobodies they're wrong did to me. He made me all the more determined in my own way. I believe he has the same right to gather Nobodies unto himself that I have not to accept the name Nobody just because he, for whom being right is important, says so. Pat Robertson is right, too. So was Joe McCarthy. All the great rogues of history were right. I cannot turn my thinking over to any form of rightness. 

sadguru upasni maharaj

Life on earth, everyday life, is too complex, change the only constant, illusion the foundation, for me to nail myself to one thing or another that calls itself or himself or herself right. What's right in one context is not right in another. This way of looking at it takes into consideration something only the individual can see for self. The spiritual path is a path, not a road, not an interstate, not a passenger jet, not a cruise ship. It is individual. Walking in a line on a path gets old fast. In line, the one in front is perky with energy, going onward, charged. The ones behind are overtaken with lethargy such that it becomes a labor to walk. Some of them lag behind and run to catch up. When it is just two, the one behind gets tired first. It doesn't work. Or anyway, it doesn't work well enough to suit me. All arrive at their destination, but only one experienced the path, the way. The others were going along. I feel like Jon Voight in Runaway Train telling Eric Roberts, who wanted to go with him when he escaped from the prison, to keep up; he is not slowing down for him. Roberts had a rough time keeping up. He was following. Voight had a goal, an end, a destiny to chase, while Roberts' motivation was following. Runaway Train is a great film. Clue: Akira Kurosawa wrote the screenplay. The film is a metaphor for the spiritual path on a kundalini fast-track run from locked in a cage to standing on a train engine running full speed, his arms out like a bird, leaning into the wind. He did what he had to do. Some of it was good. Some of it was bad. It didn't matter. He had a trip to make. Let go of stragglers, work through opposition at emergency speed, and get on with it. I liked about this story's characterization of the spiritual path the absence of judgment of anything. It was all bad and it was all good. He did what he had to do, call it good or call it bad. Neither pole mattered. Thus his path. My path meanders like a stream bed with the flow I have chosen for myself, rather the flow that flows best with my temperament. I like to think I'm in the meandering delta of my life. Many, many streams in the delta. This one mine.      

*

OLD MAN RIVER

Talking with my neighbor Gary this afternoon, we were connecting a battery charger to the battery in my car, trying to figure out how to read the needle. He suggested something and said, "Wouldn't you think?" All I could say was, "I don't know what to think, ever, about anything." Everything in this world is a confusion to me anymore. I've spent my life trying to understand it and have failed. I know less now than when I started wondering. I've come to the Socrates place of saying the only thing I know is that I know nothing. Jesus affirmed Socrates by quoting him when he said, "Know thyself." In one way of looking at it, what else can we know, but ourselves? Our experience is our own, even shared experience. Self is about the most enigmatic subject there is to study. Self-awareness is the beginning of the spiritual path, the path of know thyself. Shedding false selves periodically, moving forward, moving in on the reality of the soul is how I have to characterize the path. No matter how far along the path one is, the goal continues infinitely far ahead, like Ralph Stanley's Great High Mountain. Therein lies the allure for me, even mystique. It's the road that goes ever on. I'm drawn to moving with my own flow. When I get there, when I ride the rhythm of my flow, contact with the world "out there," like bank, grocery store, gas station, can rattle my flow such that I fall down on the bed returning home and don't move for an hour. I lost touch with my flow, going with traffic, driving in parking lots looking all the way around for somebody backing up or no telling what, anything, paranoia about highway patrol--quotas have gone up appreciably in the last couple years. I see scatter-brained behavior everywhere, people with more to do than they can handle trying to keep up, multi-tasking, tweeting, stopping whatever they're doing to answer the cell phone. Conversation in America amounts to interrupting anecdotes with anecdotes. Interruption is the nature of conversation now. Cell phones interrupt with urgency. I've become so weary of interruption as expected conversational etiquette, I'd rather not talk. Now, when interrupted, I let go of everything that went before, intentionally forget it, knowing we're not coming back to it, let it go from mind because it is over. Superficially is the only way I can talk comfortably with anybody in this time. It's an unspoken code in America that when you see two people talking, you are duty bound to interrupt them. It's inescapable.  

 

 

I can't defeat a social trend so pervasive it has become the nature of the American character. And I cannot say this shortening of collective attention span down to nothing is necessarily a bad thing, because I don't know. I don't want to live in another country, so I adjust to the social context of the moment. Americans have become collectively addicted to distraction. The attention span that thirty years ago was about that of a cat is now nonexistent. There is little to no attention span left. Television has been sacred from the beginning. By now it is the holy of holies. I have not paid attention to television since 1961, but for brief spells for a car race and at other people's houses. I call it MBC, Mammon's Broadcasting Corporations. Mammon is a false god, and not a benevolent one, the ultimate trickster. The continuous broadside of sound demanding attention and flashing visuals equally demanding attention makes me crazy after a few hours. Beyond a few hours my head goes numb and I fall into a grumpy mood. I want to be home and hear the birds. A nation of people obsessed with money, where money is the only value, has its foundation in the shifting, whispering sand. Andy Warhol suggested attaching the amount of money somebody paid for one of his paintings to the wall instead of buying the painting. Anyone who sees the painting sees how much it cost. Ah, you have a Warhol!, more impressed by its dollar value than the image. The only thing the painting means on the wall is I-can-afford-it. This has a great deal to do with why I feel it refreshing when I see art on somebody's wall that is an image put there in appreciation, whatever it is. I have friends with a stunning waterfall painting on the wall, a print that came with the frame for maybe ten dollars. It has a waterfall in it that is painted in such a way it pulls the eye closer and closer. The closer you look, the more the waterfall looks like water. It's a gorgeous waterfall painting that looks almost like it's in motion. The image is loved in the home for its subjective aesthetic value instead of its dollar value. They appreciate that they got so much for so little.

Earlier, when I realized the car's battery was dead from trying to start it, I opened the door, turned in the seat with feet on the ground, looking at the bank of wildflowers across the road, thinking: dying really is a solution. One more reason to rejoice when I see it coming. I recall my fear of death falling away some years ago. I've had to watch it ever since, it's so easy to relax into accidents by any of two hundred thousand ways. Before, I had an automatic pilot that took care of self-preservation. Now I have to pay attention to self-preservation and remind self not to be frivolous with this life. It is important to be in the body until this journey is completed and the time is right to move on to what's next. I do it consciously by understanding this lifetime needs to come to its own balance before going on. I don't know when that time is. It's important not to know. It has to be important; nobody knows their time but on death row. I catch myself drifting into thinking not much matters because I don't have a lot of time left. Another mind tells me it matters right up to the last second. I even look for ways to perk myself up, give self incentive, legitimate reason, not fake reason. I think I can distinguish the fake reason as ego, thoughts about legacy. Twice I have been asked by peers what I will leave for my legacy. I answer, Nothing, not even a tombstone. But you have to leave some kind of legacy. Why? The only thing important to me in this lifetime has been my own spiritual path. I take the path for a human path, not a tightrope with hellfire for a net, but a path through a loving universe where the only problem is the human mind, the driver's seat of illusion.

I've characterized the spiritual path in my own vision something like water from a mountain spring flowing on its way to the ocean. I'd call the spring the time of self-awareness, committing to the path. It makes a fast-moving stream that rushes down waterfalls, splashes over rocks, races through rapids, churning, dramatic. The self predominant before, changing fast. Changes happen first on the inside and manifest on the outside in sometimes chaotic, seemingly out of control ways occurring so fast, simultaneously and in succession, it makes the head spin and question one's own authenticity. As a result of understandings and insights, we change first on the inside. Some of the ways of thinking that went before are not practical any longer. They don't work, don't satisfy. People we know and are close to drift away, one at a time, and we wonder what is going wrong. I thought I was becoming a better person and my friends are abandoning me. It's a lonesome period of time until waking one morning and realizing you're in a world of new friends, friends more compatible with the new self than the ones that fell away. The waterfall changes to fast moving creek into fast moving river, and slows its pace at lower elevations, widens with smooth surface, flows into the delta, twists back and forth like a serpent sunning on a rock, turning in on itself, taking its time in slow motion. Closer to the sea it stops and backs up at high tide and flows again with the lowering tide. I feel like I've been through the waterfalls, rapids period and the fast-moving river period that lasted at least 20 years. My path has characterized the second half of this lifetime. I feel like I've gone through the slow-moving river and now am flowing in the delta, slowly, slowly, twisting this way and that, direction changing continually. Meandering is the word. I feel like I've been meandering within over the last few years. I feel honored in this lifetime to have the chance to complete this cycle in the Way from a mountain spring to the sea. I don't believe this is the path of my enlightenment in one lifetime. I see it a  cycle through this lifetime in self-awareness, saying in signs I've done well not to get side-tracked, passing through opportunities for distraction, indulging some and letting them go, returning to the flow, allowing the flow, trusting the flow that just keeps rolling along.       

caterpillar

photos by tj worthington

 

 

*

 

 

 

NOBODY'S BUSINESS BUT MY OWN

      the little dog laughed to see such sport    

     and the cow jumped over the moon

Sometimes I wish I had been as casual with my earlier life as I am now. Earlier, it was about making money to get by with. The money to pay bills was my only motivation. On one job, the employer asked me why I was working there. My answer, the money. Response, then why don't you just leave. And so I did. I didn't understand that I was supposed to have some other reason to have a job. This is America. We don't care about anything but money. If I didn't need the money, you can be sure I'd have never had the job. I would get a lot done, but it wouldn't be production. I don't know how to live in a world that requires I think only in terms of money and pretend not to. It's the pretend part I have the problem with. The early part of my life was in the world of pretend. A few weeks ago it came to me for the first time that the first half of my life was in darkness and the second half in light, like two sides of a coin---the same coin, one side the opposite of the other side. It's been that way. I see looking back that it was coming to the mountains that switched my life to the other side of the coin, the side that before was unknown. Until I settled in the Blue Ridge I could easily say my mind was in confusion that could be called blindness. I didn't feel at home in myself.

The only momentum I had was wherever I was, I wanted to be somewhere else. It surely came from habit thinking living with parents wishing to be somewhere else, anywhere else. Then I get out where it's possible to make my own decisions and I want to be somewhere else all the time. I didn't know it then, but it was a habit pattern. It also could have been a knowing. In Charleston, I knew I did not want to live out my life there, always thinking about moving on, getting on to the next place, not knowing where it was. Falling in with Meher Baba was the turning point in my life, 1975, the 180 degree turning point. I saw it something like shooting an arrow straight up. Before, I was racing away from the source, my true self full speed, evolution, development of the ego. Eventually, the arrow's momentum slowed to a stop; it made a 180 degree turn and started the process of involution, returning to the source. I'm seeing the first half of this lifetime racing away from the source, inner self, development of ego, and the second half returning to the inner self, the true Self, shedding ego along the way. First half looking away from the Source and second half looking to the Source.

Anyplace I would go through this would have to be "in the world." I came to a much more conformist world in the mountains than the world I left in Charleston. I learned it is much easier to go your own way in a big city than in the country. Naturally, I would pick the hardest road for myself. Primarily, I picked the road of manual labor, living alone on a rural road. A monk's life. A pilgrim. Every time I meet somebody new they take it I'm lonely and need a companion. That never works out. I don't need a companion. That's not what I'm here about. I'm here doing "inner work" and not social climbing. I don't want to be in with any set. I know people from different sets and am welcome in a few, but that's not what I'm here for. I've reminded myself, "that's not what I'm here for," so many times I know it pretty good by now. I want to read a lot in a world of people that don't read. I want no television in a world of people that want television. That's wherever I am USA. It means years of turning a lot of people down, distancing myself from social games and sexual games. Distancing self from games. I like games like throwing darts at a dartboard. But not games like I-know-more-than-you-do and Come-here-I-love-you-get-back-I-hate-you.

The fact is, I bit off a bigger chunk than I could chew, as Confucious might have said. I started to say I bore down on it, but I also did not. In the long term, I did. In the short term, did not. That is to say, I just let it flow. The Tao explains it for me the best of all scriptures. If I had thought of it earlier, it would have been a good exercise to memorize verses of the Tao Te Ching until I had them all in my head. But the duty of memorizing Bible verses as a kid put me off of memorizing verses. I have copies near at hand to pick up whenever I want to touch in to it. I'm here on my own quest. Today I was questioned in the store about why I don't socialize. I tire easily of answering that question. My reasons are never comprehensible to anyone else. So I get caught up with you gotta, you oughta, you needta, you should, and I say, No I don't. Then somebody gets mad. And I say to myself, Shit happens. I've been suspected of everything from devil-worshipper to white-witch to I don't even want to know what else. I have some African masks on my walls that scare the shit out of a lot of people that come in here. It's nothing but fear of the unknown.

I try not to traumatize the people around me too much by talking about such things as reincarnation or the evolution of the soul. I'm thinking of a song I know by Taj Mahal, "ain't nobody's business but my own." I believe that's an important way to look at one's own spiritual life. I'd like for the Jehovah's Witnesses to catch onto that. We're a missionary culture, first off following a perverted form of Christendom that focuses on telling other people what to do instead of getting with self. And living with commercial interruptions on tv all the time telling us we're inadequate has become our collective belief system. I am not a commercial, nor will I think like one. I do not need Taco Bell. I do not need Burger King. I have no need for a car I can't afford, that I couldn't even afford a new set of tires for. I like to watch the videos of a new Cadillac driving on a highway in China carved out in rock cliff. Lexus commercials are pretty good videos. The high end ad agencies are making some fairly spectacular commercials now. I see them and I see myself in a culture of shopping experiences. I have it too. Not pointing fingers. I'm just looking at self and the world I live in from afar, looking at what I've learned in my quest to learn how to live in this world.


* 

INDEPENDENT

My head has been infected again by my mother's belief system. She sent a Fw: email that looked to me like she appealed to her church for prayer that I'd get right with Satan; I'm not afraid enough of the the dark side to suit her. She wouldn't think of it as the dark side. Her terms are hell and Satan. I don't even feel right writing those words, just because naming gives power. One of the church parrots sent her a Fw: email to forward on to somebody they don't even know, something to convince the infidel that if I'm not sufficiently afraid of the dark side, here's something that will put the fear of the devil in ye. Too boring, too long, and I'm not interested in reading a silly fiction about Satan's power, especially the fundamentalist version. It was to the affect that on my Judgment Day, the Trial will be overseen not just by God, but Satan too. Ho hum. This is from fundamentalists. Kansas Baptists. Creationists. I couldn't read the thing. Skimmed it and about puked. If I didn't understand that she's on automatic pilot and can't help herself, I'd be pist off at the affront to basic intelligence. She's a missionary at heart. It's her duty to browbeat.


My experience in the fundamentalist Baptist religion went from 1949 to 1960, ages 7 to 18. Even then, I was wary of too much emphasis on the dark side. I've seen since then the political stirring up of cement-head religionists by the Reaganista dark cabal increasing emphasis on the dark side among the Baptists. I maintain that when an entire religious sect approves a guy shooting a doctor through his kitchen window with a high-powered rifle because he performs abortions, that religious sect is quite obviously influenced by the dark side. And I believe that comes from so much emphasis given to Satan. I don't recall any emphasis on compassion when I was in the church back then. I wondered why all the emphasis was on YOU BETTER NOT, rules and regulations. I found a place where Jesus said to forget about dotting the i's and crossing the t's. It's not about punishment and walking the tightrope of misinterpretation of a basic English word that's in every dictionary, strait. It aint straight. Jesus talked about love and forgiving, the spiritual path. The Baptists I grew up among were about punishment, guilt, you-better-not-or-else, control, emphasis on fear, and browbeating others. Love was a four-letter word, best spoken in quotation marks.


It's fear mommy is afraid I don't have enough of. Her church made an atheist of me. What more can I say? Flushing all that mess out of my head over a period of 15 years, I saw religion was about the few controlling the many, the way of the "World." That secularizes it for me. After the great inner flush I was clear enough to be able to recognize that I had never dismissed Jesus as the Christ. So I wasn't an atheist. It turned out to be the starting point of my spiritual path independent of religion when I had an experience that made it clear to me that God indeed Is. Once I saw that, there's nothing to do but live what I know. It doesn't mean go to church. This is not between me and the produce manager at the grocery store who called himself to preach; it's between me and God, if the word between applies. I'm on my own spiritual path, which is not about the mission field. In my belief system, words are cheap to meaningless. I trust my actions to tell who I am and what I'm about.


I've learned by this time in my life only to hear someone's explanation of self, defining of self in a getting-to-know-you situation like at a cocktail party or first day on a new job, without giving it much importance. Getting to know new people, I pay attention to them, allow them to be themselves, be it pristine or awkward. I tend not to ask questions, except I commonly ask people where they live or where they are from. I'm of the belief that I really only want to know about a given individual what I see and what the individual wants to tell me. I don't want to know other people's secrets or even the gossip about them. I tend to give the benefit of the doubt until taught not to. My approach to others is allowing, not controlling. In reply to mother's email, I noted that I don't need the devil in my life, she can keep him to herself. That is my meaning in the fewest possible words. I'm not interested in empowering the dark side with my attention, especially fear. My way is my own spiritual path, which is within, like the kingdom of heaven.


* 

DOUBTING IS SEARCHING

emil nolde, autumn sea

I'm glad to say the issue with mother is the same as over. Email from sister last night told me mother wanted her and other sister to come to her apartment and see what TJ wrote, Rollin Down The River, after the party around the grill and a few fireworks to make the kids marvel. Through the course of the day, mother forgot. Sister didn't remind her. It's as good as over. We'll never get anywhere talking about it. I don't hold with her doctrine, baptist dogma, and I'm hell bound, no two ways about it. There's ONLY ONE WAY. Her way. She has the Truth. Her preacher is the purveyor of that truth. It's the mind of colonialism; convert the natives and put them in bluejeans, tshirts and flip-flops, teach them that everything they know is wrong, everything natural is of the devil. I can't challenge the mind of my mother's religion, because nothing is rational there. It would be like arguing with Rush Limbaugh. Ignorance trumps intelligence every time. This has been the nature of the Reagan Revolution, trumping intelligence with ignorance. It's Gingrich's and Karl Rove's method. It's why Rove is successful at orchestrating Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, W Bush, and republican strategy. He loves that trump card, Ignorance. It works every time.


It gets down to the only real difference between my belief and my mother's belief is she believes her belief system is absolute, the one and only reality. My belief system that allows others their own points of view is tired of fundamentalism that has no place for allowing, the way of love. They're all for control, which is the way of (whoops) the dark side. No, no, no. Absolute truth is absolute truth -- no two ways about it. Jesus died on the cross for your sins. You can't challenge that truth. I can challenge that a friend of mine, a conscientious baptist, was put out of his church recently because he got a divorce. It hurt him awfully bad. It was a knee in the gut by Anderson Silva. The way I see it, they set him out on his own to find what is real for him, because evidently they are not it. He'd been spending his time among bullshitters-in-the-name-of-Jesus. Plenty of that goes around.


All my time in the Baptist religion, it was absolutely against the rules to doubt or question anything about the Bible or what a preacher says. I dared not ever act like I might have a question or would dare to see something my own way. For example, from childhood I saw that in the verse about the "straight and narrow" way (the tightrope), the word straight was spelled strait, a word with a very different meaning. A strait is a narrow passage for a ship between two points of land. It's the passage from rough open sea to the harbor where the water is smooth, tranquility, peace, Jesus's theme. I was told I'm listening to the devil whenever I brought up to an adult that I'd noticed something new, have a question. Doubt. It's a sin to doubt. There'd be no way I could get it across I'm not doubting, just that I noticed a definition of a word.


What it really means is like the preacher said it was. Who do I think I am to contradict a preacher? Maybe I oughta be up there preaching since I know more than the preacher. Another moment of remembering I'd been born among the willfully illiterate. Of all the preachers over the years I've mentioned the distinction of the spelling s-t-r-a-i-t  to, and the people I've mentioned my observation to, not one has even entertained a possibility that a dictionary definition has anything to do with anything. All have told me I'm wrong to question the Bible. It wouldn't do any good to say, "I'm questioning your interpretation abilities, not the Bible. When you can't interpret correctly a simple word that's perfectly clear in the dictionary, you're illiterate. Why would I trust interpretations of scripture from people who don't know how to read?" Of course, they get it from the spirit of God. How could I have such a lapse and forget that?


In my time of discovering Meher Baba, one of his most appealing aspects for me was when he recommended doubt, recommended questioning, testing his principles, made it clear that doubt and questioning are the right approaches to the spiritual life. Find your own truth. Find what works. Doubted, questioned and tested, the words of Meher Baba bear out, become convincing. Questioned and tested, much of Baptist dogma does not bear out, much of Baptist interpretation doesn't work out. Questioning, I found no emphasis on love, the only thing Jesus was about, only emphasis on "works," which Jesus are not where it's at. Do this, don't do that, be very afraid of God and even more afraid of the devil. Live in fear that God might change his mind about you going to heaven because you embezzled in your role as church treasurer and never got caught.

One day in a law office I was working in, I saw two men who were obvious shyster preachers. They were waiting for their appointment. I noticed out the window that both drove red cars, a Mustang and a Camaro. After they left, I said to the lawyer, "Those guys were either preachers or mobile home salesmen." She said, "Which do you think?" I said, "Preachers." She said, "Right." We had a good laugh. One of us brought up the PT Barnum saying, "You can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time." A few years later, I saw the one with the Mustang in a convenience store sniffing up on the woman at the register. He was in front of me in line. He made me think of a rooster courting a hen, scooting sideways, one wing dragging the ground, one foot scratching the ground, his apparent trance telling the hen he's ready to pounce. It was funny anyway, but it being a preacher made his stand-up routine all the funnier, his waxed red Mustang glistening in sunlight beside the pump, saying, come on baby light my fire. For the record, these preachers were not from this county, but they weren't far from home.


The spiritual path, or honest living, requires doubting, questioning, searching, feeling for resonance. The farther I get along my own Way, the farther away I get from being raised to believe the spiritual path is a tightrope, deviate either way and you fall into hell, the better my life gets. It's like when I look at trees they open to me and welcome me as their friend, instead of telling me I'm a sinner fallen from grace who needs the Lord Jesus Christ to save me from eternal damnation. This is why I prefer the woods to church. It doesn't matter to me if they want to believe that one day the skeletons of the saved will pop out of the ground and float into outer space to be with Jesus, where you're bacon rind on one side and ice on the other. I don't care if they believe the spiritual path is a tightrope. Jimmy Swaggart couldn't walk it. Oral Roberts couldn't walk it. Jim Bakker couldn't walk it. Jerry Fallwell couldn't walk it. It's a straight line of YOU BETTER NOT. Any distraction to right or left: You Better Not. Every step is You Better Not. I can't spend my life in anxiety over walking in a straight line. I'm not drunk and God is not a cop. I cannot live with God the drill instructor, the judge, the executioner, the one who hates any deviance from the tightrope. That's not the God I found when I slipped from under the baptist shroud to have a look around and make some assessments for myself. I found that God is love, not punishment. I'm not going back.


*

ROLLIN DOWN THE RIVER

     oh

Hearing myself talk over the last couple days I hear old-time preacher Millard Pruitt in the pulpit. He lived in a place where he could die any day over several years, and kept on going, heart attack after heart attack; his doctor's medications kept him going. In the pulpit, he could set everybody in the house to crying when he talked about himself dying. He'd start talking, the people in their regular seats looking at him, waiting for the spirit to hit him, he talks about dying and tears run down everybody's faces. Then he had us where he wanted us, paying attention, and he went on with his preaching. I don't talk about dying in a way that makes people around me cry, or to get attention. Somebody asks how I'm doing, with meaning, and I give a brief outline of where I'm at in that regard. l don't pull tears or dwell on it. Yet, it's my theme of conversation in these days. I don't like to talk about it, because it's such a wierd thing to contemplate, passing of the ego with the body, all the physical and psychological and ego gone, self-identity goes poof, left with innermost spirit, the true self, the soul. I am curious to see how my innermost self operates in spirit form without ego. Will I recognize myself? Will I even be aware of self? About to take a look into the unknown some day, some time, whenever, I can't help but be curious. It's like getting ready to go to a party, imagining what it will be like, who will be there, assessing it beforehand. Get there and find out it is entirely different from anything I imagained.


I'm glad I don't see dying the way I was taught it in the Baptist religion. You don't know if you're going to heaven or hell, even if you're saved, aint got no assurance of nothing. You don't even know if God likes you. God the Judge on the throne slamming down the gavel: GUILTY! GUILTY! GUILTY! God the guilt provider. Better watch out, because God sees everything you do and is judging you as you go along, every detail, even your thoughts. There's no place to hide from God. Then there is the devil, worshipped by Baptists as a force right up there with God. Millard Pruitt, preacher above, told me that the devil created briars. I said, The devil is not a creator. That doesn't matter. He created briars. I hear baptists I know and they want to talk about the devil, the devil's power, the devil's influence. American Baptists are so focused on the devil in this time, I believe they're giving "him" power by focusing so much in that direction. Baptists are taking on the ways of the devil, approving shooting a doctor through his kitchen window because he performed abortions. Baptists believe that's right behavior. The devil believes it's right behavior, too.


I will not let a preacher or a belief system or anyone of any authority put guilt on me. Used to. Used to all the time. Then I learned better. It makes people mad who believe they have some sort of authority over me. They believe we need guilt to keep us from sin. I don't believe that at all. I believe guilt is used by the few to control the many. It's used by parents and teachers to control children and by preachers to control sheep. I believe it's a sin to attempt to make someone feel guilty over anything. I've been told by someone who embraces guilt for self and controlling others that we need guilt. It's good for us. Whatever. Going by the law of karma, everything we do comes back to us, the good, the bad, the indifferent. We almost never recognize when something comes back to us. For example, my doctor talks down to me, which automatically, without me even aware of it, makes me attempt to speak with authority in my voice to sound like I know what I'm talking about, to counter his projected belief that I do not. What came to him from talking down to me was me speaking up for myself. When somebody hurts you, what's your first thought? What you're going to do back. Can't stand to wait too long, so the return manifests fairly soon, if not immediately.


We get the payback right away from our expressions. We don't notice that the "debt" is paid in full, most often in just a few minutes, or a day or two. We go about feeling guilty over a debt already paid. Some people carry a lot of guilt and will carry it to the grave. Who, then is our judge? Not God. We judge ourselves, we punish ourselves, we demean ourselves in guilt, and for no reason. If you want to call the law of karma God, that's ok, put it all on God. God doesn't mind. But I have found an understanding of the law of karma, everything comes back, that for the first time I've learned what the word "sin" really means. Church told me a sin is "missing the mark," kind of like shooting an arrow at a target and missing. Rather vague, subject to interpretation. Taking away an objective way of looking at this theme, which is entirely subjective, I see that when the return is to our liking we call it good, good luck, good fortune. When it is not to our liking we call it bad; "If it wasn't for bad luck I wouldn't have any luck at all." There's no "luck" about it.


For duality sake, Christendom made "hell fire" the opposite of heaven. The Chinese saw the duality as heaven and earth. I'm more in line with that one, spirit and physical. Hell is an invention of the human mind. I can hear the baptist reaction; I better watch out, cause the devil already got his hooks in me for questioning authority. Baaa, baaa, black sheep! This is where I have the hardest time around Baptists, who like to keep me reminded of the devil. Yet, at the same time I know the Baptist religion well enough to see that it really does have a spiritual dimension available. I'm not able or willing to do the straight and narrow tightrope for any preacher. When I go to the liquor store, I park in front. I've also seen a lot of self-calling in the Baptist religion. Originally, in the Baptist way, God chose who would be a preacher. Since that old way is gone, now preachers call themselves and lay it on God. Self-called preachers I don't trust at all. That's not entirely true. Some have "it," the spirit, and some don't. I get it before very long getting acquainted with one. I have to say of the Baptist religion as I would say of the Catholic religion, or any other, it has it and doesn't have it, both. Just like me or any other human; has it and doesn't have it. Duality in action.


I don't believe in the "straight and narrow" way. I go with the meandering way, the way of water in a delta. The closer water in a river gets to its transcendence, the ocean, the land is flat and water meanders here and there into several small rivers to the sea. I don't know where I am in my flow from springs in the mountains, over waterfalls, through rivers, some places fast water, some places slow water, rough water, smooth water, then in the deltas it moves slowly and meanders this way and that, seeming to be without direction. Sometimes a delta is even a kind of labyrinth for the water flow. But the water flows and keeps on moving. This image pictures my own spiritual path a great deal better than a tightrope. Walking a tightrope is a clever trick, but it doesn't allow for the flow of the spirit as a metaphor. For me, the way of the spirit is something to relax into, not to intend into or will into or force into. It's about relaxing into the flow of the spirit (the Tao) like a leaf on the water in a mountain stream. And, like along a creek or a river, a tree has fallen into the river from one of the banks. Debris floating down the river gets caught in these places that stagnate and get nowhere, until a storm comes and unties the knots of stasis, setting everything free to continue on their journey. Maybe sometimes our emotional turmoils untie some of our interior knots.


That's my interpretation. A Baptist preacher would likely say I'm listening to the devil, which makes it all the better for me. "The devil," of course, is anything not Baptist doctrine. Though I throw off on the Baptists, it's like talking about family. It's from the inside, so it's ok. Nothing has ever struck me like some old-time Regular Baptist church meetings and Primitive Baptist, as well. They're the same, except Regular Baptists have notes in their song books and hold by doctrine predestination (Primitive) or free will (Regular). I've heard convincing arguments for each one, and just as convincing an argument for not-both. I do see "predestination" in my life, karma, and I do see free will. I have the power to do what I want to do. With free will we learn to control what we want to do until it's safe to self and others. In predestination, God picked me, I didn't pick God. That's how it worked out for me. I do both. I also don't worry over it. It's splitting hairs and it's getting too serious. I don't see that the spiritual path is about serious. I am seeing more as I get older that the spirit is light-hearted like a chickadee and flows like a kayak in a river with consciousness guiding it around and over rocks, making decisions along the course of the river, avoiding hang-up places and walking around waterfalls. I can't see it any way other than both. I can't join either one of the churches, because I cannot lock down to the doctrine. I don't believe the virgin birth either; another doctrine. Therefore, I stay on my own with my Master to guide my kayak, rolling on down the river's meandering course to the sea of love, transcendence, piercing the veil.


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GRANDMOTHER'S MERRY-GO-ROUND

      pedal to the metal



Today's adventure was new brakes for the 93 Buick. The rotors were scored way past the legal limit and the pad on the right front brake was worn down to the metal. It was a mess. Chuck lets me hang out in the garage area and watch him. I stay out of his way and don't try to talk to him when he's working. He has WPAQ AM out of MtAiry playing on a laptop computer with small speakers on top of a cabinet. It was gospel music hour and some preaching. I heard a singing quartet, the Chestnut Grove Quartet. Never heard them, never heard of them before today. I liked their singing a lot. They played two songs. I listened to several gospel songs that had me on the verge of in the spirit. A preacher from Walkertown, Louisiana, was talking word for word the very same preaching I heard as a kid in Kansas City and in Wichita. My bone to pick with Christendom is there is never any progress along a spiritual path. The deal is, you get saved and you're all right. From then on, you go to church. All I see coming out of Christendom in this time is the same old thing: you better get saved or you're gonna go to hell. What kind of inspiration is that? Fear. Not inspirational at all. Stay outta the street or I'll give you a switching. You better, or else. That mind repelled me more than it attracted me. Didn't attract me at all.


What spirit I was getting into with the good country singing of the good old hymns, the preacher talked out of me, talking about he knows this and that, because he's experienced it, so bad a talker I had to interpret his meaning by knowing already what he meant, though he had a tough time getting there. That's not being kind to him. He was well meaning. But still, he never talked anything beyond you better or you're gonna. All the time he talked, he told me he didn't have any grasp of the scripture other than what he's supposed to have. Another preacher running his mouth on and on, dancing around the only subject of the New Testament: Love. Still involved in what Jesus specifically said to put aside; crossing the t's and dotting the i's of rules and regulations that grow to endless. To avoid the subject of love and the sermon on the mount, we get overwhelmed with a list of rules to go by that aren't even written down, that include EVERYTHING anybody might or could do. You're born guilty and, by God, you're not going to forget guilt. Personally, I refuse to go along with any of it. I don't give in to guilt trips. Love is what it's about, and churches I know of don't seem to get it, so I go my own way. Be in the world, not of the world. Church is as much the world as Exxon.


Whenever I'm called upon to define the nature of my path in a few words, I say everyday life is my path. It's everyday life "spirituality" is about. It's not about saying Om until you have some mystical experience. I see more as I have more experience that mystical stuff amounts to a merry-go-round, a ferris wheel, a roller coaster. My grandmother said to me when I was little about a merry-go-round, you get on it, go round and round, when you get off it, where you been? It didn't take the fun out of those things, but it clarified for me that sideshow sorts of things, rock concerts, bluegrass concerts, films, a lot of entertainments, are no more than entertainments, and reasonably ought not to be taken for more than what they are. We clicked. I felt like I understood her when she told me such things. She wasn't trying to dampen my spirit, but to give me some understanding, some self-awareness, something to think about. It was something of a riddle, which she took to mean a foolish waste of time, and wanted me to think about it. I don't think I ever rode a merry-go-round again. Mainly, because after the age of 5 they're boring.


Early on my spiritual path I wanted some mystical experiences, but as time went by, perhaps I matured spiritually enough that I don't think about mystical things any more. It was quite a number of years I wanted to do nifty things like be psychic, channel, do neat things that make other people marvel. I've grown out of that to where I don't even want it now and am glad it never came to me. I don't go about hugging everybody I see and saying peace, love or making expressions of love, because it gets taken so very wrongly so predictably. I've found for myself the best expression of love I can give with everyone I come face to face with is to allow them who they are, hear them when they speak, and treat everyone with basic human respect. In this world, that's a lot. I am so not a missionary, I'm possibly an anti-missionary. The church of my childhood was all wound up with missionaries in the mission field, like Africa and South America, sending them money. The Peter Matthiessen novel, At Play In The Fields Of The Lord, is a grand allegory for what the missionary mind creates. In the case of his story, the missionaries brought the flu that wiped out the people of the region.


I've seen so much harm come of innocent good intentions in spiritual expressions, and they never get it because the intentions were for the Lord. Like when the Sparta Revitalization Committee cut down the century old holly tree on the courthouse lawn, the reason they gave was "the ever present problem of prickly leaves." And they planted 7 hollies. Kinda belies the smoke screen. I don't like to operate by intentions any more. I do, but don't like to. Intentions imply an agenda, and I've come to a place I don't want agendas, and I suspect other people's agendas. I'm in a place I want to just settle down and enjoy every day in its passing and not concern myself with issues I have no voice in, which is everything beyond the reach of my hands. I know people in Whitehead whose minds don't go past Whitehead, my friend Jr Maxwell was one of them, and I almost envy that way of thinking. I feel like they have a more realistic view of living their lives than I do. I hear somebody say family is the only important thing in this world. I've seen that so much in Chinese film and contemporary fiction. I never understood why family is so important until I've lived over 50 years without family as the focus of my life. I don't mean to imply that I want it.


In the nature of such beliefs is the maxim, exceptions prove the rule. Exceptions would be a family with one or both of the parents the kind of people that alienate their kids and keep everybody in the house at odds with each other. As a rule, family is the answer. But not always. I believe the spirit is practical and doesn't want us to have to live in demeaning circumstances. Too often efforts to do good end up as ego trips. There is the question, how to do good without it being an ego trip? That's where I allow spontenaiety. Ego is right there in setting out to do good. That's ego only. How to do "good" without having it as an agenda, an intention; that is the thin line of narrow lines. It comes down to an attitude toward life, the attitude itself. Then you get down to what "good" means in doing good. The Tao te Ching recommends doing nothing. That is my own inclination, to live my life by my own attitude toward life, which I know is not accurate, and is changing all the time. It will never be accurate, because accurate is not possible, but I like it to be practical, which I'd say balances inaccuracy of interpretation. Practical I think of as awareness of context. That's good enough.


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