IN AND OUT OF MIND

a moment in waterfalls creek

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

 

small waterfall beside a place I like to sit

 

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

 

my barn where the winter's hay is kept

 

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

 

jenny tells jack to get back

 

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

  

side of the barn

 

 

*

 

MY GENERATION: FLAT TOP CATS AND DUNGAREE DOLLS

 

 

 

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

 

bob dylan

 

 

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

 

 

 

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

 

pete townsend

 

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

 

 

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

the roan mountain hilltoppers

 

 

 

*

THE WORLD

 

       robert motherwell

Today's NPR broadcasting was almost entirely the shooting of the kids. Big questions being asked, which I have a hard time taking seriously. Do something about guns? No. Do something about the mental health disaster in the country? No. A lot of people talking about the complex web of what is behind guys taking guns and blowing away several people, then, most often, themselves. Nothing substantial is going to change about guns. A bone will be thrown to the people making the most noise; magazine clips, or whatever they are, may be outlawed. NRA taking a Time Out to figure how they'll face this one. So many people calling for ACTION where gun restrictions are concerned that have already been necessary several decades. They'll come out with a "Plan B" like Boner that will be nothing more than a punch line to guarantee a laugh. They'll talk it to death and never get an understanding of what they're talking about. A committee will draw a few conclusions, announce their conclusions and it will be over, after they're paid several million as consultants.

The Oklahoma City bombing didn't change anything. Our politicians are afraid of the NRA. The American people seem now to be addressing the politicians at their most inept time in the history of the country demanding they stand up to the NRA, which they're not going to do. Why is it after more than a century of the science of psychology, the only social benefit to come from it is manipulation of the masses by politicians, corporations and military? Commercials on tv are the most practical application of what has been learned from over a century of study. We have psycho-pharmacology for mood-enhancers to put smiles for no reason at all on faces. Behind closed doors, "What're we gonna do, fellers? The natives are restless. We gotta give em somethin. Who we gonna sacrifice?" Every kind of game is being played somewhere on the globe. I'm glad I'm not involved. I'm happy for the sound wisdom I've been informed by, to be in the world not of it. It's one of those sayings that never gives us a reason why. We have to try it to find out why. I've never thought of it as a means to an end, but it has guided me, something I have chosen for myself without a notion of it having a benefit other than being disconnected from the urban maelstrom.

Living in the country is as much in the world as in the city. The world is a belief system. I've come to see it as the climb up the ladder of assets, seeing self in relation to others, ambition, status, position, importance. Even believing I can make a difference, however small. I take being in the world like everyday life making a living, living one's life without longing to be rich or important. Living one's life in relation to the context of being surrounded by people who believe in the Climb, believe it is getting them somewhere with more money, higher status, higher notion of self-worth. And then you die. That's what it is about the world. Like when you get to the top of the ladder of success, like Joseph Campbell said, you discover you climbed the wrong ladder. In a recent Bob Dylan song, he says, 'You find when you're at the top that you're really on the bottom.' If ambition is for the top, then it amounts to ambition for the bottom. Tiger Woods, for example. He worked his way to the top and the media took him to the bottom. Lance Armstrong, too. Too much in this world is fickle for it to appeal to me. I've found as a rule of thumb for myself that the higher up the money ladder you look, the more fickle people become. I've seen that to where I take it for a truth. I stay away from people whose self-worth is their assets.

That's how I interpret, of the world. Of means connected to by attachments. Belief systems can be attachments. We look at some people who don't believe what we believe, and they're wrong. And from their side, we're wrong. No two ways about it. Both wrong. I'm wondering if it can be said that anything that can be divided into one right, one wrong, turns out to be both wrong. Probably not. The World, the actual world itself, is within. It's attachment. It's the need to be connected to something, not to be alone. Desire is a connection, a strong connection, the mother of attachment. In desire, in wanting is a hook in Of the world. It gets subtle. It gets so subtle, I don't see any need to go that far. I use it as a rule of thumb, not an exact science. I live in the world just fine, knowing good people I enjoy knowing, seeing movies I enjoy, reading books, painting, writing, driving a 93 Buick that runs as good as new. That's my In the world. And Caterpillar my friend. Being Of the world is being invested in it, having something to gain or lose. Being In the world is no investment. It's living day to day having a good time. No worries about losing or gaining.

* 

 

WORLD

the world

I've studied this word world for some time. Earth is the planet. World is the creation of the human mind, civilization, culture. The way of the mind is my brief way of looking at it. How I know the difference is God's creation is made of curves. Mind's creation is made of straight lines, like architecture, pixels. Mind's creation of straight lines begins the process of entropy upon creation. In God's creation the curved lines grow and keep on growing. They leave seeds to spread over the ground; they keep going.

There are subtle distinctions to be found. I can't help but see "the world" as the part having to do with money, for one thing. The god Mammon is the god of money. He's not a benevolent god. He couldn't care less about us, individually, except as conduits of money. It's a useful thing, a kind of energy, and handled consciously it's not a problem. Handled unconsciously, the way most of us handle it, it's a problem. As something to have a passion about, I never got it. One of the major reasons I let go of watching television was that it is entirely about money and money only. It's about corporate money. Corporate, like Mammon, thinks of us only as conduits of money. Money determines our class system.

It seems like the poor and the rich are both slaves to money. The poor have to stay where they were born because they can't afford to go anyplace else. The rich can't afford to leave where they're born, because they often have to live near the source of their wealth. In the middle, we're free to move around, climb or whatever. The poor and the rich have money in the front of their minds all the time. I like to think about something else sometimes. I don't even like keeping up with a check book and credit cards. One of the benefits of wealth: having an accountant to fuss over the money.

The way I've lived my life has shown a terrible indifference to money. I wonder how much of that has to do with not watching television? I'm missing the continuum of being informed I don't have enough money to buy all the stuff I want. I think the indifference for money and television came from the same place, not one from the other. It has to go back to church 5 times a week since age 6 when a preacher sat me down and explained salvation briefly, told me about Jesus saving sins, asked if I believed. I said, yeah. He said, You're saved. I said, ok. I didn't believe there was anything to it then, and don't believe there was now. It's the same as sprinkling a baby. Nothing but a ceremony that says, I belong. A kid 6 years old isn't going to get it. But at the same time probably gets it as good as a great many adults. Whether it took or not, I don't know.

When I got away from church upon finding my first apartment, I wanted nothing more to do with it. Excess church had turned me against it. I wanted with a great deal of might to learn about the world, jump in and run like a dog that's been let off a chain, run and run and run. The world, the world, the world. I looked up to worldly people. Tried to learn how to become one. It never took. I never wanted money bad enough to afford the stuff I thought I wanted, like an obnoxiously expensive car.

In Daytona, I think 1988, I saw in the paper where a young woman who worked in a nursing home won the big multi-million dollar lottery. Her answer when asked what she was going to do with the money was, buy me a corvette. That's the same kind of sense I'd have with it. Buy me a different colored Mercedes convertible for every day of the week. Livin big. Lotsa bling. A heart-shaped swimming pool. A servant to keep it and the cars clean. A new house. Then have to sell house and cars to pay taxes on them. Then end up in debt that lottery jackpot amount. That's where bridge jumping comes in. Leave the debts to the heirs.

I'm thinking, too, that the world can apply to the me-first attitude that's as American as Budweiser. The notion that I have to be the center of attention, have to be numbero uno, the one with the answers, the big dog, is the world. Knowing exactly where I stand on the ladder in relation to my peers by income and assets is too boring. I'm on the bottom, where I want to be. Out of the running. When it gets right down to the core of the matter, the world is in the heart. Attachment to non-living creations of the human mind is the same as attachment to the body. Attachment to self is the beginning of other attachments.

Getting down to the heart of the matter, attachment to self creates all these other bindings with class, appearance, surrounding oneself with mirrors. It's me. It's me. It's me. It's my opinion, it's my belief, it's my conclusion, it's my idea, it's my own. Mine. Me. I. Right there, I believe, is the bulls eye. Self. The world is in myself. The world in myself draws the world outside myself to it. They sit together and talk, brag about any old thing, whatever comes up. The world is no more with me, so to speak, driving down Main St or sitting at home reading.

I'm thinking this in-the-world-not-of- it exercise has to do with attachment in myself. Nothing to do with what's outside myself, like money or a new car or being on stage at the Hillbilly Show. It all has to do with my heart's attachments to this or that or position or being looked up to, being thought a lot of, those kinds of attachments. That's the world. The belief that my self is more special than another self is the way of the world. The belief that my self is the least of the others is the way of God. Attachments are difficult to let go of when it comes time to leave the body. I'm getting a better understanding of what Jr meant when he told me some years ago he saw everyone better than him. The measure of his humility. I think he was saying he was not attached to self in different words. As I knew him, I can say he was not attached to self. Now I don't worry over what the world is out there, because in here is where it is and I have control if I want it.