Jack Spratt

2015-01-25T09:36:00.002-08:00

"It is said that for money you can have everything, but you cannot. You can buy food, but not appetite; medicine, but not health; knowledge, but not wisdom; glitter, but not beauty; fun, but not joy; acquaintances, but not friends; servants, but not faithfulness; leisure, but not peace. You can have the husk of everything, but not the kernel." - Arne Garborg

culture is like gravity

2015-01-05T22:03:00.000-08:00

I ain't no turnip, least ways not yet.

I know of what I speak having served people demented and/or with Alzheimers. Or should I call them patients, friends or clients? None of them to the same degree/extent walking from the beginning to the end as I did, in my own half-assed fashion (or do I mean equivocally) as with my son. From diagnosis to death? Lest I forget my daughter at a different time and cause but same result.

For some of us hospice is THE WORK. Not simply a work like just a job. But that was what I'd still be doing were it not for being punished for doing it with love versus a pay check. Without fail in community I get trashed. Doesn’t matter Church or State.

So I awoke this A.M. thinking: “I am a writer in exactly the same sense my companion is a “rescue cat.” There is something of equivalent urgency: THIS IS YOUR LIFE about to end. I don't expect to wake up each time I fall asleep. Not to worry. It is only that I am surprised when I do. If I don't write, I dream about it, imagine it while reading others. Deconstructing the constipation of rage I find myself, unbidden, floating in space with fragments of 'civilization' twirling past.

I sense that culture is like gravity. That we are living in a museum with artifacts and truths; what to value and what to dismiss. And for me it is simply that I soar away in real time at peace in eternity with all the trivial evaporated. All the detritus returned to sender. Everything is recycled. The beginning and what will remain no history of our species possible. Save in my experience of love, that quiet small voice singing to me day-by-day otherwise we're just a cancer upon the earth.

Everything I might say has been said before. My museum is within books. While music, painting, drawing, sculpture and photography have lent me, briefly, a sense of ecstasy. It is words, as battered abused and bastardized, the symbols they are, remain singing and when I, as I am, writing it is the best high and greatest joy I've ever known.

Binge reading of individuals is my guilty pleasure. Running my fingers through an author's mind. Who in making sense of their chaos render a sense of what it is to be fully human and alive. Validation. Affirmation. Confirmation. We are not alone in our quest for meaning, value and truth.

After reading “redeployed”, the first virgin book I've purchased in years and years. I took a notion to pass it along to the Public Library, sure that the author and publisher would rather they bought another copy. I followed my impulse and upon placing it on the return desk, commenting that it was a donation, was astonished when the librarian hugged it to her chest in a semi-swoon. Saying “I was just about to order a copy!” My abiding sense: she was attempting to find funds to make the purchase.

Beneficiary of many small kindnesses, a lifetimes worth, it is surprising . . . no actually astonishing to see cause, effect and gratitude. It is said that the kindness we give may be the only kindness a person experiences in their lifetime.

The point I would make is that I remember words and music better than paintings and photographs. It might be different were it not for the fact that I'm hanging ten on the cusp of my death; disposal already paid for. Nothing eminent, just being real. My biological clock is ticking and there are so many people, regardless of statutes to the contrary, ready willing and able to render me either dead or paraplegic and being “sorry!” don't count for shit. Playing with electronic devices while driving a motor car is comparable to being intoxicated or buzzed. Which is always potential every time I get out and about. Which is maybe, maybe not, why I no long bump my flabby fanny miles and miles just to make medical insurance payments.

The Zen of driving is just driving with your full attention to that alone.

Public libraries and librarians (just the feminine ones) have been, since childhood, a refuge, succor, solace and source of education for which I didn't have to perform. True then. True now. Laughing at myself: I was reviewing photography books for the Providence Journal while writing a photo column way-back-when. I dutifully moved some nine hundred books through too many changes of address to remember until I finally donated the lot to Columbia College in Chicago. But it was a fellow journalist in Providence who turned me on to writing and sharing many of the new books (without pictures) received for review. In fact it was she who procured the column gig, teaching at the University of Rhode Island and a love affair with Americana demonstrated in New Journalism et al.

I am disappointed that Opera decided to discontinue their blog venue. I miss the community. Which was, in my experience, world wide. An arena for all ages, genders, proclivities etc. It was also integrated in a way I have yet to find elsewhere. My intention is to publish the volunteer portraits, my last hurrah photographically . . . maybe, maybe not. I'm still growing into this new environment in Snow Globe Vermont, seeking what's next.

Despite being trashed for it the project remains the single most significant project for a career that died with my son's diagnosis and subsequent death. I love people. It's crowds that I can't abide. The request was made that I photograph individually the one hundred and twenty or so of us who volunteered for hospice service. The camera never was a shield but a scalpel. But at that, in retrospect, inadequate to express my love any where near to what I can write of it or them.

"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho

150105 0316 Mad Dog

and both

2013-08-15T08:37:00.001-07:00

Across the hours, down the days, eating miles between my former home and now, I became lost in silent contemplation of my gratitude for it all. The friends left behind and those to be discovered ahead. Wondering how it came to be that I left one for another at such an advanced age. . . .sensing myself as wed to M as to Pam in a love elastic beyond distance and time.

Loss has a way of doing that, eliciting the reevaluation of meanings, values and priorities. Revealing important, formerly hidden, truths and choices made on any basis. To hold or fold, gambling on the potential imagined or intuited that may be consequent in choices made.

Finally conscious that when I claim, men never really grow up but merely old then die, I recognized myself as a flirt seeking from women what I was unable to receive from my mother. Who remained, essentially, immune from my attempts to glean her attention, joy or laughter. Which, obviously, I personalized as my problem not hers. A problem I too easily assuaged with wishful thinking in all other relationships save for with M. Whose suggestion that I volunteer for hospice service was the origin of my current geographical location. . . .

130807 EDT 05:17

In an attempt to distill my dream, from which I have just awakened, I began to recognize a collective communal corporation of love for life.; made obvious through my daily research. And discovered within the long silence begun at the moment of my departure; moving, not to Vermont, but to Pamela.

Central to my conflict is the simple sense of losing M. Or choosing Pam over her. But within my dream I sense a union of both and an incarnation of M’s gifts to me manifest in community. A choice made for what remains of my physical life; the long or short of it. What has been forged within me by M is unbreakable. Add. If it happened to me it can happen to anyone since all are capable of loving life; the all of it: rising up and going down.

130811 04:08

Within my dream I stood suspended in stasis. No way forward, unwilling to backup, leaping from the shear cliff face traversed I knew I could never reach the rock spire of what seemed safety distant ahead. Falling I discovered there was no bottom. No sudden death from either terror or collision with the distant valley floor. Awake standing in the dark with my first cigarette I saw a shooting star and thought there are no boundaries to God, or good, or whatever had brought me to this moment in life; for the source is both extrinsic and intrinsic within all and each of us equally.

My current sense is that dreams analogize experience into a comprehensive direction for what is next in life. Which, given my current state of continual transition from the past to future, indicates a need to more fully inhabit the present. To more specifically focus on the human condition versus cause and effect. And, in a sense, I feel that I am being drawn back into photography of people in isolation and transition in this failure of free market capitalism the new religion and creed of America. . . not my problem but ours. The ideal of liberty for all has been sold to the highest bidders; those who take pleasure in hoarding the labors of our forefathers and our selves . . . the consequent death of our future and the victims of greed.

Regardless of duration, life seems more precious to me here and now. Resident in the second least populous state of America; wall-to-wall green mountains. The people of all ages are the subject of our evolving tapestry about which I refuse to attempt prophecy but can record and annotate the remarkable trashing of what was once the “American Dream.”

130731 EDT 06:27 and both

arrival

2013-07-11T12:56:00.000-07:00

We, Annie and I, arrived July 7^th 17:15. She was the first to be offloaded. Then into an upstairs bedroom with attic attached quarantine for her gradual introduction to the resident pets: two dogs. One male, smaller than herself. The other female weighing about forty pounds. So far I’ve more often slept with Annie, than Pam, as it has been our custom for the past five years.

I am surprised by my dreams here., being very concerned from the beginning that Annie fit in. Recently I awoke remembering John Steinbeck’s novella Red Pony. While refreshing my memory, I was younger than ten when mom read it to me, I was staggered to realize now why she wept so hard while reading it to me. And why I still suffer grief for my children and Rags (a cat I had to put down for ‘out-of-box’ behavior) who had lived with me since he was a kitten.

Between ideal and real are light years of separation. I am reminded, again, of how little I can protect those I love from harm, or the simple vicissitudes of life. We each in our lives, seem to be a vessel, into which events occur or happen that we are incapable of preparing for. Each does the best we can with what we have and then must let the devil take the hindmost. Or do I mean destiny, fate or God?

130710 07:07

There I stopped, stunned to realize it was the anniversary of a friend’s husband who died eleven years ago. As she says of him now; “Leaving me behind . . . “And it is she who I love similarly to Pam, and she who made Pam a realization. Each of us, the three of us, has had events that irrevocably changed our lives—usually by suffering and/or loss—that we then attempt to reconcile and redeem in the ordinary of such, or what, life is left to us afterwards.

Traveling I could brook no distractions: radio or audio books. Instead my thoughts were of the three I mention M, Pam and myself. Accompanied by with gratitude for those who made the move possible. And celebrated it for the promise of a new life upon my arrival.

Having arrived, I now sense there is a seamless continuity, an organic wholeness, inherent and obvious to me manifest in these past two months. For which many played a part; yet the effort required by the transition nearly killed me. I had sincerely expected to die leaving the task to others completely. Instead I was compelled to examine each memento and choose to either dispose of or carry forward the evidence of my now former life.

130711 EDT 15:45

Closing thoughts. Annie adventured down stairs this morning and seems to feel at home. I now sense I will be able to fully unload the car and settle in. In the coming days I anticipate her curling up with with the two dogs, Pam and I, upon the bed of an evening, one happy and fully integrated family home at last.

Be well.

130709 EDT St Johnsbury VT 13:33 new home

midway

2013-07-06T05:52:00.000-07:00

At times, especially around the fourth hour of driving, I sense myself in limbo and longing to get out the car for any reason imaginable. There really is no room to nap since the car is packed with Annie beside me. The drive took Pam four days with another driver, it will take me six days alone with Annie.

I awoke after eight hours of sleep feeling tired. In some sense it is the prospect of two more days driving. Yet I remain concerned since I fell asleep at the wheel yesterday shocked aware by the rumble strips along side the highway.

My dreams have been fantastic, entertaining, informative and best, affirmative of what lays ahead . . . if and when I get there. If all goes well, and I pray so, I will overnight in New York State this evening before the last drive to Pam.

I awoke with a profound sense that the love I experience is from the interlocutor and available for all. Immense, kind, patient, forgiving. Possible for me to acknowledge the experience during this epic transit of America alone with Annie. Humbling, these stops when we become people not just rude aggressors competing for space on the highway. Lending a new sense of: “What you see is what you get.” Add, there were several instances of unusual kindness yesterday reminding me that I too was once young and impatient. Aggressive and in a hurry, but now I realize the grave will be soon enough.

I will long remember these days for the closeness between Annie and myself. And this, new to me, discovery of the nature of love. Experiential. Not theoretical. Not chapter and verse but if you want love you must be loving and abandon all fear.

130706 EDT Johnson City, New York 06:14

When I refer to ‘morning’ I mean the first minutes after midnight. Up since around 03:00 I am now finished with my usual practice of collecting quotes. Relevant only for the affirmations I usually receive on Wikiquotes, first and foremost.

I awakened with a sincere sense of gratitude for our safe, so far, passage across America:: two thousand two hundred miles.

My thanksgiving is for not only our safety but our companionship between Annie and I, then Pam for her continual affirmations and empathy for the experience of exhaustion and frustration with fellow travelers. The few who seem hell bent for election to disposes any in their way on the road at break-neck speed. Of and for those few I have learned to forgive having been once, not that long ago, similarly rude. I ain’t no saint merely wanting to see love possible instead of vengeance.

BE HERE NOW means exactly that, live: fully in each and every moment. And I have. Sometimes exhausted falling into occasional wonder; just what in the name of all good am I doing? With each eaten mile behind me fully conscious of those who I left behind; never to be forgotten. An entirely other level of gratitude experienced this morning.

Then more so when renewed with consciousness of Pam and our life ahead.

Should I become a traffic statistic remember I am having and have had the best years and days of my life. No longer a wage slave I have time to be patient.

Be well.

130705 EDT Zanesville, Ohio 0541 midway

on the road

2013-07-04T05:11:00.001-07:00

Scarcely able to control myself, much less the world, add a cat on the road and I have had a bag full of surprises. Most I consulted implied a host of alternative methods for the experience. A carrier, of course, but then leash and halter; neither have worked very well. Annie was largely silent until I put her in the car. Then the caterwauling began in earnest for an hour finally silence. Her protest renewed at each stop.

At the first overnight stop I attached her to a chair with the leash. Leaving her alone for an hour wile going on errands. Upon my return discovering her leash taut disappearing beneath the bed and a bed side lamp wrapped in it, bulb shattered, shade and cat no where to be seen.

Soon afterward, having moved the attachment point, I returned to discover she had slipped off harness and leash, either hiding or escaped from our temporary home. This being the first day of my new life, Annie being a friend and companion for the past five years, I panicked and called Pam. Who advocated that I leave Annie in peace until the morning. When I awoke Annie was snuggled beside me upon the bed as per usual. During the entire time of our relationship Annie has seemed not place, but person, centric. More like a dog than a cat.

I will attempt to place her in the carrier sans leash and harness awaiting the next stop to see what will happen during this, the second day, of my new life.

130704 CDT Effingham, Illinois 06:06

I think I have arrived at the epicenter of my life, this 4^th of July and third day on the road towards Pamela Joyce. Discovering myself as “litter mate” to Annie who for the second time is free and roaming about our motel room happily free of her carrier, halter and leash.

Coincidentally, I am about to cross Ohio towards my next destination and overnight at Zanesville. Tempted but will not go through the remains of my father’s family and/or to visit mine in Maysville, KY. That was then, this is now, the infinite within my awareness; as in BE HERE NOW.I remember being transfixed at first sight of the book as the same title in Wakefield, RI. Many decades ago and what it means to me now.

Having traveled around the globe so many times the prospect of travel bores me—the getting there—not being there. The difference in me is astonishing. Not so much because I am in love, loved by both Pam & Annie and confident of where I will be upon arrival. But also the process of consciously choosing to love my fellow travelers. Accepting their unconscionably rude driving as do I with my being in their way. Overloaded and observing the speed limits to save fuel and tires. Not to say a word about Annie and myself.

There is a vision I hold, recently discovered, of America being once a common land mass singular with all others—a one continent world so to speak. My sense being: we are one family of life including those who grasp and those who give. Add. Pam and I have a mutually affirmed sense of when everything goes south, by accident or consequence of age and disease.

Annie travels beside me in her carrier and in good consciousness I refuse to prolong her captivity by another day for me to revisit my childhood summers in Ohio and Kentucky. This now is our new life heading for Vermont. I pray for, think about, and ponder my friends left behind more than what I was in childhood; longing for love. What I give not what I received.

My paternal grandfather played third base for the Zanesville Mud Hens. Perhaps I will discover another Spratt or two while I overnight there.

slip away

2013-06-30T08:26:00.000-07:00

At tomorrow morning’s running tide I will slip this mooring and sail forth into uncharted waters of a new life. Reborn again. Not running away, but towards. Never intended by fate or destiny to lay anchored in snug harbor.

Surrounded by open boxes, awaiting the remains of my life for the past seven years. The essential things packed and shipped. But the precious things, special mementos of this phase, await the savage discipline of my small car for the long haul toward Had She Said Yes. Saying yes now, and more. Sharing what the process was like for her, commiserating with mine.

Awakening this next to last morning I was conscious of time before time was measured and what will be, by imagination or projection, after time is forgotten. Not merely by she or I, but us all, this many of us, going through, essentially the same process on a macro scale. Then too the immortal morality of kindness and my sense of living epochs in day; the infinity of now.

Of special concern are the mementos by/from/of M weighed—go—no go, against more pragmatic tools and artifacts. Conscious that she is within me and the greater part of my heart. For which there is no evidence save in what I pay forward from her continuing love and blessings: unconditionally, generously and kindly expressed.

I will ask the dawn to remind my beloved, both, that I am constant and upon the song of birds greeting the morning, walking forward through each remaining day with them in my heart. Essential are visions of the heart ever remaining and expanding. Possible to grow a soul in solitude but a personality only in community.

Yet about this time, swept forward by tide and lunar cycle, is a sweet sadness for what was and joy regarding what will be. Reminiscent of those who passed away in my care for whom I reassured, by behavior, their certain continuance beyond death. What more can I ask of the interlocutor than that? Who it seems has impelled this day moving forward. Affirming, variously, at each turning, the simpler choice obvious to Her/Him that which lays secret in my heart.

The vessel of my destiny and fate subtly slides down the ways of this day.

130630 MDT 03:35 slip away

changes

2013-06-29T09:59:00.000-07:00

The peace I know, comes through willingness to change; inspired by many different resources. Completely outside the ordinary institutions and established categories of any discipline: Philosophy, Science, Psychology, Aesthetics and Religion in the traditional sense. Poetry, however is a constant resource. Then quotes, emblematic of the poetry of souls who use prose to communicate.

I am startled to realize that this trust began when I sought sanctuary in libraries during frequent childhood crises. At first randomly and then reading what was specifically recommend by librarians at my inquiry. Initiating a journey towards an unknowable goal. Which, within any definition, remains unknowable yet trustworthy. And better described as kindness, empathy, mercy and love. I desire wisdom more highly than knowledge—experience as apposed to ideals.

Within the past 24 hours many questions, as prayers, unconsciously uttered as such, were answered specifically. To the degree and kind I can no longer doubt the source, for whom, or which, I remain devoted; a disciple.

Sadly, across a lifetime, until now, I have failed this invitation. Fearing that I was unworthy. Thus my thesis that no life is “too stupid to live”.

Native and inherent within all life is the potential manifestation. Albeit deeply buried within and denied as it was within me. Which is to say both, that I am not THERE yet, but willing to change, and that the process continues infinitely until face-to-face. Add: I have an unreasonably reverence for teachers, as messengers, along the way. And for myself the ideal of being like those whose random kindness aided me without conditions to be myself . . . all that I advocate for you.

Bigotry, by any definition, has no part of this. Generosity does. We can never fully know ourselves until we accept that what we incarnate and inhabit is nothing like anything that ever was before. Building a new world and life, one person at a time, creatively collaborative.

Love between two people, regardless of gender— or animals/nature/universe — or the divine, can only be defined by experience in giving and receiving. Fearlessly and unconditionally.

Well beyond the apogee of my life I am no longer alarmed to find myself Beyond The Point of No Return with Pam. Our — origin and process — will make a wonderful novella—perhaps—sometime in the future.

Superlatives and sentiments cannot begin to articulate the dialog between us. We both are stunned at what began four years ago. Renewed and accelerating from May until now the consequence. Yet very candid regarding our concerns; mediated and resolved. The intervening space between is filled with value; learning to accept and submit to an unconditional life together: what I’ve longed, a lifetime, for.

My sense, the interlocutor’s will and intention for all of us.

Be well.

130629 MDT 06:10 change

growing

2013-06-28T04:50:00.000-07:00

Growing is my list of heroes. Those upon whose shoulders I stand, reaching a little bit further up the Tree of Life. Yet there is nothing heroic in me, save my love, respect and admiration for all of life: the good and the grotesque—the all of it.

For those I have slandered in the past there is no content upon which to stand.

Simple.

I have discredited myself significantly learning the substance of humility. Add: a better sense of why God is more visible amongst the poor and meek.

Awakening from a previous engagement with friends, a goodbye party of sorts, I am too aware that the principal companion of these past five years, Annie, lays subdued in a harness awaiting our departure. I shall not tarry much further for she, my friend, tells me much about us. I have a sense she will drive me mad for a time with her caterwauling protest progressing across the twenty-five hundred miles between us and Pam. Continuing this process of threshing and winnowing, the most difficult process for which I can take personal responsibility. Gleaning my unconscious fears left from childhood and moving forward in faith that what will be, will be, by faith.

In recognition that this time, these hours alone, in the dark arisen from sleep, with or without dreams, is my selfish desire to grow more. Perhaps that is my flaw. To have a greater desire to be or do anything other that fully present in this infinity of now. No one, or thing, is merely what I, you, or we define it to be . . . could be . . . maybe maybe not; the wallpaper of eternity. My newly discovered sense being that each and all my heroes did participate by choice in their time. Forgiving their executioners. Dad was adamant about that; the principal activity of man to man is to kill, not enable, freedom and love. Our most disabling adversary is fear. In reaction to which we become more collectively insane daily.

I am learning to submit/surrender/accept the humility of my will against the Interlocutor’s intentions: To move forward with conviction and accept my destiny and fate. As we all must—being – beyond the point of No Return to what was.

06:06

I have a file full of quotes about friendship and love, exactly in that order of priority. Remembering that Annie in all previous times would accompany me to bed. She no longer does. Since the imposition of the harness. Instead she awaits in silence what is to come. Where I was concerned she’d drive me mad with her protest with noise, she does now with silent resignation. Responsibility for her welfare began upon first discovery. I had not decided upon a dog or cat and was well aware that either would keep me alive, suicide being the alternative. After walking through seven rooms of both I heard her calling to me and searched her out loving her at first sight.

The nature, kind and degree of my concern is based upon our friendship, nearly equal of that between M and myself. Both have held me until I could hold myself aloft from despondency. As have those I am saying goodbye to; never to be forgotten nor ignored. Love being of a lesser order of magnitude than friendship.

130628 MDT 02:02

About this time is a sweet sadness for my dumbness to the love between myself and friends who, pre-departure, are touching me with their values. Not just what they say about me but my memory of them carried forward as they were and have become since my arrival here seven years ago. Without friends, or being friends in love, material or spiritual, who would we be or become?

It is dangerous to sleep as I do, when tired, then awakening from dreams that no longer beguile me. Instead dovetail into the incidents of the day before or issues vaguely noted and long neglected stemming back to the origins of me. I mention this only for the surprising acceleration of “hits” as noted on my Google & Opera venues; growing by ones and twos in countries far flung. Then at Culture Book a special someone, who has commented several times, affirmed what I essentially keep covert: my sense of the divine.

Not theoretical but experiential.

I may be offline for a time consequent to travel.

I awoke this time with an image of the hide of a mustang stretched and presented like a Robert Motherwell painting. Within the dream I surmised it emblematic resolving the Native American mythology, theology and symbols that have more than five times over mystified me.

But it is not my myths and metaphors, or runes and ruins of my heart, that concern me. It is to encourage you to seek that within your own life. That is your responsibility, stewardship of your Self/Soul. It is the real story of your life. And the greatest wealth we can know while living.

The peace I know has been midwifed by several, yet most notably M. Who, in, of and by herself, is a force of nature staggering—huge. It is not she, or myself, I would memorialize, but the process of kindness freely/unconditionally given that we, the family of all life, learn to tolerate one another to the end that love is possible instead of extinction.

If I know the ill that destroys us. It is known by my own former ambitions, fear, greed and lusts. Nothing extraordinary. Since it describes the process of becoming authentic and unashamed of any part of myself as I sense inherently possible for all of us. Can I say, and we agree, The Science of Love?

As in the Science of love is life, versus the Science of War is death?

PS One of the books I look forward to reading: An Old Man and a cat/dog? aboard a Cat Boat, or something like that. Remembering my voyages with Tinkler several hundred miles off shore aboard the Paradox. Annie, my companion cat and dear friend, is now wandering about the apartment restored to curiosity about my activities. She will, of course, accompany me to Vermont and Pam. For both I would do all required, including my life, to protect.

130627 MDT 02:16 growing

life

2013-06-25T07:48:00.000-07:00

As far as it goes, so far, life is indecipherable. Common as air, or the dust from which we came and stand upon. Knowable only in the sense we define it for ourselves as either good or ill. Suffering is inevitable but from it we grow. Awakening from agony making gold of common lead.

Of myths, portents and omens I’ve had many. Ever vigilant towards the chaos of my parents behaviors, I became a journalist. At first merely recording the surface events of collective and personal history. A helpless witness to the time we inhabit. It was not until now that I began to understand that the journal I keep of my transmutation from victim to what?

The rest period behind me was annotated with a quiet sense of these closing days, then hours within the shelter I once considered home; the only ‘home’ that was mine, first and last. But my true home is myself, obviously moving forward toward a synthesis apparent, rendered clear by every sense within me, save the fears that I wring out hourly. Well past the apogee of my lifetime swiftly descending towards the abyss I am learning to fly.

While fabricating the above paragraph I remembered a swimming hole over which I train once passed, the tracks and bridge long gone. The buttress remained from which I, once-in-a-while, would leap, naked into a pool filled with youth of a range and gender astonishing to me now. Laughing they taunted me into it, now glad they did.

“All learning has an emotional base.” - Plato

“Familiarity breeds contempt”

. . . save in this instance, it is my familiarity with my life as it had been and now expected going forward. To stay would be to die. To go forward will be to die to my stasis . . . There was, for a time, a sense between us, Pam and I, that I might stop writing. Disproved during my two weeks with her in Vermont by the continuity of my manic cyclic sleep. Up shortly after midnight and writing for a time, collecting quotes as well; cross pollination of a sort coupled with affirmation of dream content. I sense change in what I write and how; more deeply personal, sincere and less didactic.

07:03

Exhausted I return to bed humming with concerns over what is next: items and artifacts, go—no go. Alarmed that I may have missed an important Annie Dillard book. Unable to sleep. I lay semi conscious and then arise to flog the keyboard again. Realizing the effort, writing, has become a life ring in the chaos of my life. This time is traumatic and unexpected. But then I realize had it not happened, sooner or later, I would be found dead before my computer.

During the night an ambulance raced into and up the complex; a frequent occurrence. My neighbors seem, by gossip, to celebrate that I am going, not to the hospital, undertaker, or assisted living; but to a new life. My age seems to have crept up on me announced in many small and large ways. Significant, difficult, but not impossible, yet.

130625 MDT 06:28

I am oddly aware that when Pam says she loves me it’s the real-deal. In so many times past the love others gave seemed conditional and I would distrust their statements. Not the source but the listener, since I had no clue what it is like to love one’s self; until this morning. The trauma of this move, one amongst too many, has wrung out my fears. Latent from childhood and now I will go forward fearless, clean, newly reborn, defined and confident.

130624 MDT 01:03 life

between

2013-06-23T03:57:00.002-07:00

Between us there lays a hard bitten reality, by root, stem and growth, witness and experience, of life and death enacted suddenly. The smoke and mirrors of wishful thinking evaporated. Dead meat, preceded by regret for the loss, of life, limb and lovers.

We both have been in triage, and parse the value of seconds against which the odds are life and death . . . not so much at hospice but before, now and forward.

Upon first sight there was an internal resonance, not bells, but a hum that said yes. And yes I gave up my desire and/or ambition to be more than friend many times over. “Had She Said Yes” did finally and I wonder why I tarry? By all outward signs I should be frantic, but am patience with my coveted writing time within which she equally resides . . . a sort of triangulation between Brother Sun and Sister Moon. Cycling. This love is something unexpected, overwhelming and unimaginable, for it changes constantly expanding and contracting as a heart beat yet endless.

I cringe at the thought of countless hours, heaped upon multitudes before, traveling. Bereft of this, these hours in darkness singing my songs. Learned as her psalms already shared in substance. And yet there is between us, at the least, my sense of it, that we are the, or like, an original pair. Love in any time is astonishing, at any season, or phase of life’s journey, yet oddly we seem better advised through experience that there is an end on the physical plane. There being, my experience, a continuity begun upon first sight of her. Organic, whole, perfectly formed, elements as two crystals grown. Patience being a quality grown from the helplessness of intervention in the lives of others. Kindness being a last resort. Generously given.

Oddly I sense, given my age and experience, each post is my last. Wanting not so much memory of me but to remind you of the choice between grasping and giving.

Laughter!

She asked that I somersault through burning hoops; in audition before our covenant. For which I will forever, in jest, remind her . . . but am I not equally guilty? I mean these prolonged days sustained by her affirmations and confidence. The peace I know is as much of her as myself in anticipation of what will become of us once together in residence actually.

Then too it is this long journey into radical transformation from solitude to oneness with another. Wringing out my equivocations, faltering over Annie’s response to what lays ahead. It is at this point that our shared experience of transitions between what was and will be comes to my aid.

What will be, will be . . . experienced through endless love for it all . . . it becomes simpler.

“To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.” - Henri Bergson

“If ever two were one, then surely we. If ever man were loved by wife, then thee.” - Anne Bradstreet

The trail of quotes discovered/rediscovered gets deeper. It is only my sense that so few pay attention to synchronicity, chance, coincidence that I will cease here.

Save to share the astonishing reply to my previous post “birth” wherein Pam suggested that I have not yet fully inhabited my life as yet. I know I will not be the same tomorrow as I am now and I welcome that alive or dead. Not that I am indifferent to either she or myself, but am simply a realist able to argue any point of reference regarding perceptions. And under this fulsome moon extraordinary I am aware the tide within flooding generosity. . . .

If you would rather live outside the culture of war and carnage, read, throw the television out the window and learn what you really feel and think. Becoming your idea not the victim of others ideals.

"Death accompanies us at every step and enables us to use those moments when life smiles at us to feel more deeply the sweetness of life. The more certain the end, the more tempting the minute." - Theodore Fontane

130623 MDT 02:29 between

dreams conflicting

2013-06-22T07:33:00.000-07:00

Since my return from St. Johnsbury VT, typically, I am down by eight or so, awakening by dreams, some four or so hours afterwards. I then either write them down and/or weave back and forth between quotes and the dreams; often finding affirmations/definitions of the dreams content.

This time/date I forestalled recording the dream. It was serial, about the Southwestern Desert lands concerned with Native American funereal symbols representative of various people and their past lives in a museum setting. Disconcerted to discover several new and some missing from previous dream visits. It has been and remains a mystery to me and part of my attraction to New Mexico, for me, a place of significant spiritual power specifically.

Where normally I would work through to dawn, I felt sleepy and returned to bed, where I dreamed another sequence. Actually two: one for the second time and the other a third. Both equally disturbing. The first I am employed scraping gunk from peoples lungs—emblematic of myself since I continue to smoke cigarettes. In the second I am late for an appointment startled to realize it was a test given by a superior; a scolding man who bowed to my indifference, which in reality is my terror of being proven an idiot and unworthy of life. Humiliated I folded my arms refusing to comply.

Apparently I am undergoing traumatic change, struggling to adapt and move forward towards a surprising, actually astonishing new life, formerly unimaginable to me. Possible or probably only in the literary sense of a created ideal scenario. Add that my method and memory reminds me there were, throughout yesterday, numerous omens and portents that I considered briefly. Which it now seems primed the pump of my dreams, which seem now more significant than my brief summarizes would indicate.

Throughout history there have been people inspired to record their dreams; acting between ordinary and extraordinary time on the cusp of creation.

“Out of sleeping a waking, Out of waking a sleep.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson . . . indicative of my sense of integration between a chaos of indifference and sanity . . . or should I say joy and equanimity? I often think of my heroes and their experiences and conclusions. What they gave that we, you and I, or the all of us, might fully live, versus merely exist.

My greatest joy in the ordinary of life has been to discover the talent/genius of others and nurture it, if only by affirmation . . . sometimes merely the attention I give in silent awe. Rapt and reverent. In this process have discovered a desire to follow no one, individual or system of their consequence in history. but seeking and finding, I believe, what they sought.

I could record/annotate the flurry of quotes affirming my sense of purpose, but will not bore you with them. For I remember too well my confused abandonment of their potential meaning being too conscious of my fear that I was unworthy of what they implied. Yet now see potent within all, even those who persecute and assassinate what is inconvenient to their truths. For which, I at one time, would have been equally guilty.

In gratitude for these thoughts, I sense myself obligated, for what was freely given, to pass forward the possibility implied. Fully aware that where I go will be better, different in kind and degree, influenced by the affirmations of she toward whom I return.

I am incomplete and in order to grow I must move forward, leaving behind much of what I once thought would complete the process. The process itself seems to indicate that it is well, what I do. And to whom I go. Wringing out all the fears I knew nothing about previously. To fail this is to fail my essential self.

I own nothing, save myself, finding it unremarkable, this that writes, attempting a self-exorcism. Aware better now, better tomorrow, the energy or personality listening to me is available to all; the Thou, as in I/Thou.

130622 MDT 05:13 conflicting dreams

rebirth

2013-06-21T10:35:00.001-07:00

Significant women in my life, those I came to know well, were at birth delivered/attended by some difficulty similar to my own. Revealed by mom, whether in anger or in response to my curiosity, I cannot now remember. But the birth was difficult for her: fifty-eight hours of dry labor alone.

For me, this birthing process, leaving one mode of life for another, is reminiscent of those times I wish I'd never been born. Difficult, principally for encountering my vanities, the much and many articles of things annotating passages from indifference to self care, if not love of self.

For the second night in a row I have awoken beset with a frenzy to capture quotes made by women I’d never heard of and cannot, obviously, know. But then I have an unusual and unreasonable fondness and reverence for women generally. By which I have, after a long time, begun to know the difference is not merely physical, but profoundly psychological in their attitudes towards life itself Great stamina, long term strength, devotion and dedication to the on going of all life.

Of the men I’ve known well, but never so well as women, they were without exception reverent to a woman as equals. Refusing to inhabit a half-world wherein women are secondary, victims or slaves.

Significantly, as part of my daily methodology, I weave, back-and-forth between writing and collecting quotes. In the process I discovered Pam had sent me an email, once more, lifting my head above the despondency of sorting through my vanities. What I had hoped to leave at the time of my death to others. Who in their turn would merely dispose of things I must considered to carry forward or abandon meticulously. There is very little that I identify with in terms of articles or furnishings. Yet buried beneath piles of neglect are things of actual value; the remains of what I failed to destroy or abandon in the past.

130621 MDT 06:05

Wringing my peace is dawn this longest day of the year. Fears that I seldom addressed, possibly the last? Hopefully! The love I know and anticipate is beset with concern that I will, as I was in childhood, be a ‘bad person’. Annie, my companion, a cat, is one of many pets beginning in infancy, to accompany me through life. Their lives truncated by accident, disease and disappearance . . . or disappeared from my keeping, as first was later discovered in the keeping and companionship of my mothers uncle John. Mozart lived twenty years and prior to my discovery I never knew where my crib mate went.

Of the women I have loved, desiring companionship with, unreasonably, both are fond, no, more like, love animals unreasonably; at that, all animals. Mother, however was not one. Since as a child she brought home stray kittens and her mother drowned them in front of my mother; poverty being a stern teacher. That said, whenever a cat or dog escaped from her keeping it was always my fault for which I was beaten both physically and emotionally savagely. In retrospect I have begun to conclude all lives given into our care and concern have their own agenda, fate and destiny over which it is not totally incumbent upon us to die bereaved at their loss. Then too there is the simple realization that the animals did flee the ‘home’ mother provided them being in essence house pets. As with pets so with me until now the last fears wrung from me. Stasis has caused me anguish beyond my endurance daily in process progressing towards the inevitable move. An unknowable, until now, expectation of grief beyond endurance should Annie run away, be accidentally killed or terrified beyond my ability to reassure her that she will be well in our new home and family; Pam has two dogs, both of whom have lived with cats before.

Animals seem to have an instinct for what we are personally, benign or fearful. In fact many characteristics I might once attribute to myself as intuition have apparently evolved into and ability to assess potential friends leading me to trust both M & P emphatically.

In recent converse with M I said; “It’s all your fault, you did after all suggest I volunteer for hospice service!” In significant ways they are clones. Lending me an organic sense of our relationships as divinely given and ineluctable/ineludible [archaic]/inescapable/unavoidable. A fate and destiny towards I go. Albeit, until recently, haltingly. Giving away possessions possessing me appropriately to others who will make good use of them. Annie, however, is entirely another matter for she is a friend since our joining one another five years ago.

Startled to realize that time frame roughly describes the current tenure of my friendship with M . . . a love that will extend beyond the distance between us and/or life. Convicting me that we are, all one family in life, stemming from Mozart, both the cat and composer, who slept with me in my crib through my long lonely life. Until now that is.

Did I just say “long lonely life”? Yes. Until recent time I have considered myself poison, a bad person, unwilling to be completely real to anyone including myself. What began with M will go on, a process of becoming a whole person. Better and better—day by day.

130620 MDT 03:00 birth

tolerance

2013-06-18T15:38:00.002-07:00

The peace I know upon awakening within the cyclonic change, surfing rogue waves, somewhat akin to awakening before execution at dawn is: Attributable to my merciless engagement with vanity, my own.

Stripping my sense of self naked to enter a new land, indicated by intuition born four years ago. The actual sight of which, myself naked, is to me merely a road map of experience; but otherwise the body of a boy become an old man laughing at him self.

Less able, or willing, to conceptualize The Author of All Things as either male or female, but something, utterly, else. By whom all are called to be lovers of life. . . .For all living. Of the few who answer, some remain more notable than others; annotated by their martyrdom for inconvenience to the prevailing ideals; thereafter become idols for a few who remain the general average mass. My sense here is that both love and greed are treated as cults; blindly followed without thought or regard to the consequences. With the greater force and power demonstrated for the choice of greed. For which an enormous number of people are martyred to ‘prove’ the ‘truth’.

My version/vision of Jesus is a balanced person of equal energy within both the feminine and masculine, incorporating a balanced use of all sensing functions: thought, feeling, intuition and sense . . . being inherently both lion and lamb. My inconvenient, even to myself, concept is resulting broadcast over a wider population defined differently as by their professions, yet moved by the same inspiration of kindness and generosity.

I seek no consistency save for God as experienced daily. My sole ambition is that you become aware of your relationship in equal measure defined by you.

Returning to my original intention: ‘the peace I know.’ I am beset with poverty; yet book poor. Then humiliated to realize that as a child I asked God to be real to me. And within all the books I have or have read, there is most nothing but talk about, but not the experience I have surrendered/submitted to . . . happily so. Obviously grace implies no exclusivity nor guarantee of oblivion. I will move forward horn of my bulwarks against all former denial that grace can touch me in my child like innocence. With faith that hitherto has brought me to fearless peace.

In these closing hours in Las Cruces there is a immutable sadness. While I thought of the books given away and those retained, my sadness was for my misconception of what poetry is. Yet ever more so for the friends I leave behind. There being nothing better than being face-to-face . . . I have life for now knowing it will end sooner or later; as with all loves there is a beginning middle and end. Who loves us is unending and in that conviction I rest as person or dust.

"In hatred as in love, we grow like the thing we brood upon.

What we loathe, we graft into our very soul."- Mary

Renault

130618 01:58 yes Virginia

Yes Virginia—or John—or whatever your name is, absolute good exists by whatever name applied. Personal, specific, knowable and wonderful . . . and knowable if only your know yourself . . . exactly and more than 1 Corinthians 13.

In converse with Pam last evening I confessed this process of moving towards her is killing me. Not certain I implied or stated that death seemed too often a quick release. But then Annie would drawn near and rub her head against my leg and I knew if nothing else I must move on. I love her nearly as much as Pam, M, and the Interlocutor; she is as much me as she.

I am candid to the point of being obnoxious and will let stand what preceded this entry. The point I would make is not convenient to what I understand as literary convention: to edit oneself into the simplest and most elegant form for clarity.

My convention is operable for me and continues to prove a better methodology than anything I have yet discovered to supplant it. In my alteration between this writing and collecting quotes, especially on Wikiquote, I am clubbed senseless to discover that the real issue behind my current distress is: Not that I will loose those mementoes I collected in manic enthusiasm, but that I have not only, not read them, but more tellingly would never read them in this or any lifetime were I to have ten thousand lives. This is humiliating to me for I advocate that you read instead of seeking truth though all other metaphors for it; truth that is.

I am eclectic in the extreme drawing information from a vast array of sources. And, to myself, able to be moved towards greater truths via the virus of an idea — bored with apology or exposition — in myself or the author to reconcile the idea within the context of current culture.

Truth is where you find it and must be tested as something you are willing to die for; proving nothing but your sincerity.

08:52

Bobbing mid-way upon the face / or back / or atop it / rouge wave / we two cling to one another for survival colliding mid-sea stunned.

The shelter I have inhabited for the past seven years is a maze of open cardboard boxes. The only one sealed and ready to go is Annie’s more-or-less permanent sleeping place unless otherwise in bed with me until I go; a reminder that regardless of consequence she will accompany me. Pam loves all animals, especially cats, and this old Tom.

Be well

130617 MDT 01:44 tolerance

pruning

2013-06-16T08:16:00.000-07:00

Falling, mortally wounded by exhaustion, both physical and psychological, to sleep, I dream and in the dreams are dialogs. And this one was a massive endless conversation about love. In reference of which I now envision pruning the tree of myself. The less productive parts away that the tree not merely survive but grow stronger and taller . . . and it hurts!

About her is the promise of a Promised Land, what I’ve sought for a lifetime. And for which and what I am dying for. Yet my courage flags, fails, slumps like a wrung out dish towel quavering. Her courage is equal, if not greater, to mine and proven over four years organically. Love sweet and savage tending to those about to die with kindness and compassion; a love that transcends gender expression. For to see us is nothing special just two people in love inwardly blazing a conflagration.

Fiction in order to be coherent must be probable but, reality is improbable; our love affair, by any definition, is a rouge wave http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/rogue+waveupon we, for now, are surfing not submerged. I could but refuse to detail the analysis or the winds that move me about life. My sole intention being to vivify your soul into being the primary motive of living. Love, after all, is the greatest force and power, of greater value than any measure of success I know of.

If, at times, I flag and quail, it is more so this moment, in recognition of what is drawing us together. Drawn up from the ground of my being, I still think myself a “bad person” incapable of surviving the storm of love. Add to date the events, momentous in themselves, would be sufficient for an eternity absent the next moment, day, year or what might be a lifetime together; no matter how long or brief.

I think, at times, The Author of me, of us, we all, has a sense of humor terrifying; and so I know what it is to “fear the Lord” in ways both pleasurable and painful. For me this move is a kind of death bereft of any promised success. Annie, my companion cat, is of course, a part of my most serious concern: my principal reason for returning to Las Cruces. Anything else is, by descending order of importance, all that I care to take forward with me.

“Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?” - Nietzsche

By free and random associations quotes have become the grape shot ventilating my imagination and synchronicity. Then too, add, the various interactions between broadcast news, NPR, and various conversations and encounters. Add the mixture into the stone soup of my mind an out comes what I write; a synthesis.

“Cats are angels with fur.” - Sark

It’s the ‘smells and bells’ of my worshipful life . . . though, sometimes, as now, spindled and mutilated by exhaustion, I am impelled forward. To say I love The Author and she to whom I go towards is to say little for the experience in vast. I am a person who makes things happen, not a viewer nor a wonderer about what happened. For those I love and know well I am savage in that. . . .am I willing to sacrifice myself and Annie? I wonder! Pray for me.

Worth mentioning: Collecting quotes is for me not dissimilar to Bible Bingo; randomly opening the Bible and meditating upon what I find. Begun long ago when a minister suggested it was possible to write one self into sanity by keeping a journal. The result is a marvelous disrespect and reverence for everyone and everything. Not a slayer of the powerful so much as a jester.

To pray is not merely to lay face down upon cathedral flags saying, “Here am I send me.” It is to engage life upon the hoof entering the cyclone.

Where I go is more important than what I take with me; this simple fact makes the entire move simpler. Lighter. My concerns irrelevant. This process, begun long ago, proves itself repeatedly. Providing me with a wondrous array of options to write about. Here I am tempted to post additional clues, so stunning, even to me, that I refuse to eclipse the process in yourself; the Author’s dialog with you.

08:12

My unremitting ignorance has led me to slander those who purport public service. Thus discrediting myself wholesale. Yet following the above mentioned methodology I am gleaning an education and sense, in the near future, an ability to communicate some small insights to those like me, lifelong victims of the rich, powerful and forceful. Having forgiven my parents I now include those I once slandered. Intending to make peace possible in our time before all time ends. Conscious that no one ideology can suffice, it is we who must participate responsibly in the struggle against ignorance of how we make choices . . . did I just reinforce “Love your enemy”?

That said, I cannot love: intolerance, hate, violence, war, ignorance, fanaticism, bigotry or zealotry.

No one institution or person is my enemy since I see what is not obvious to either myself or they I address. Nothing is what it seems. It is that I was taught I was too stupid to live that has brought me thus far and too well aware of how much further there is to go. Instead of being crushed I am vivified by the challenge.

130616 MDT 03:11 pruning

loom of dawn

2013-06-15T05:43:00.003-07:00

Woven together on the loom of our time, we the many dissimilar threads, which in their turn are woven by birth and life’s experience form the fabric, or tapestry, of our collective history going forward. Making the bone yard of what the next generations will stand upon.

What will they say of us?

Our accomplishments and failures?

If I grew to this age of seventy-two skeptical, skepticism began curling fetal beneath elementary school desks awaiting the implosion of glass windows, bricks and mortar shredding: me—school mates—the entirety of our time. Threats of extinction remain in differing forms. Most prevalent is the slander of children defined as vocational education for which we will only question at the advent of middle-age when death and boredom predominate our attention.

Through my childhood another education was going on between two different venues: one in which material wealth was extolled. The other: a closer relationship with earthly reality was celebrated. My sense, for now, is we should try to fully inhabit our lives to the extent that what we spend, our time and resources, will grow the next generation intimate with the ground of our collective being that the world will remain the mother of us all.

Obvious in my metaphor is equality of genders, tolerance for our manifold ways of defining good; the meaning and value of life itself. The Kingdom of The Self extends no further than one’s nose; regarding influence upon the energy that impels life forward. Yet it remains the singular Hall Mark of those whose lives were lived that we are able to choose between instant death and eternal verities.

On the Bell Curve of mean averages, the majority live within the middle two thirds oblivious to questions I might raise. Yet for the many who sacrificed their lives that we are able to do so, should be honored in Democracy, by responsible participation.

I do not always arise from my previous rest period incandescent with inspiration. For example this morning my mind was cold mashed potatoes, or Fluffer Nutter, merely aware that I was at peace. Meaning that, retrospectively, I was in conflict with no one and nothing. For which I should, in conscious mindfulness be grateful. And I am. Yet sense a lingering resentment that noting compelled me to write until I discovered:

“Someday, maybe, there will exist a well-informed, well considered and yet fervent public conviction that the most deadly of all possible sins is the mutilation of a child’s spirit.” - Erik Erikson

Somehow eliciting a concern for the odds against tomorrow. The peace I know does not guarantee my safety but merely my fearless focus in how to deal with it. Life happens, it begins and ends suddenly. Necessity to write is prompted by my skepticism that there will be a tomorrow for me — or you — or all of us. Life is too precious to sell/spend amused seeking pleasure. My joy is to ask that you be a real person not a slave to anyone or thing fearlessly.

06:30

Light years seem to have passed between the above and now — I did get horizontal for a time to rest. I will close with the following quotes:

"Be open to all teachers and all teachings, And listen with your heart."

"In India, when we meet and greet and we say "Namaste", which means: I honor the place in you where the entire universe resides, I honor the place in you of love, of light, of truth, of peace. I honor the place within you where if you are in that place in you and I am in that place in me, there is only one of us." - Ram Dass

"Each of us, as we journey through life, has the opportunity to find and to give his or her unique gift. Whether this gift is quiet or small in the eyes of the world does not matter at all—not at all; it is through the finding and the giving that we may come to know the joy that lies at the center of both the dark times and the light."

- Helen M. Luke

130615 EDT 02:56 loom

moving

2013-06-14T05:37:00.000-07:00

Moving is a pain in the sit down and heart; a death really, while one wonders is there life afterwards? Yet it, as death, is exactly what I envisioned when first considering the idea. My current residency is within an elderly community wherein it is not uncommon to see the dumpster filled with someone else idea of precious things.

And I have moved so frequently you’d think I’d know better than to collect mementoes of the various rites of passage from one modality to another. But I have, and find myself chagrined at what was once precious; indicative of a future never inhabited. Some dearly bought still sealed in shipping tape and quite expensive by any measure.

Absolutely, I am not the things that possess me, regardless of their once-upon-a-time desirability. Not “Buyers Remorse” but simple indifference since finding the most precious thing I have is myself. About which, in recent converse with M, she annotated the entire ordeal saying, “You now love yourself and no longer are indifferent to death.”

Which curiously explains my several abandonment of all that I ever did before: clippings, awards, negatives, slides and prints. Happily so, since had I not, I would otherwise have merely committed suicide placing myself in the dumpster instead of my ‘stuff.’

It follows that I am moving to another place. Not a geographical fix, so much as a welcome to love and creation of a new present and future with another person . . . a knowing of myself in, and from, a different perspective/perception swimming free of my self-imposed solitude.

Keep It Simple Stupid: The things I will leave behind are in fact mementos, bulwarks against my otherwise self-negligence, writ large and clear, 5 X 5. In this that I do: write. Absent too much rationalization I now see that in words I can penetrate the surfaces of things invoking/eliciting other and/or all senses. Whereas I formerly would simply kneel weeping at the altar of ideal idolatry; what was versus is.

The aesthetics of life are ever changing, a kind of dance by myself or with something/someone possessed by inspiration. And I’ve never been especially conservative of myself or product. In a sense what I just wrote astonishes me. I am not by nature, nurture or choice sensual. Given to stroking surfaces for tactile pleasure. Add. I conclude, for now, that I am not so much compulsively seeking the future as being impelled towards it.

A running towards, not away. Moving to inhabit/incarnate love differently in real time versus the abstract of writing about it . . . did I just imply: practice what I preach?

Nevertheless, or either way, the same result is locked in. Inescapable.

About this galling grinding time is a covert motive to simply take Annie, several dictionaries, one of three desktop computers and steal away in the dark. Leaving my apartment furnishings to be spread amongst the poor: food, clothes, pots and pans. Realizing simultaneously that I will, in the process, for several days driving, lose this most precious time when I write and collect quotes. More, or most, humbling will be to remain diligent attending all the affairs I have procrastinated: bills of course. But piled atop is the choice between which books to leave and those to carry forward. Too well aware that the books I own are seldom read, holding them as treasure for when there is time to read. Suddenly aware that I am by choice oblivious of that which I take for granted: time.

130614 MDT 02:31

First long sleep since my return from St. Johnsbury, VT: eight hours straight. My dreams were glorious, a reprise of all that I loved in others revealed in their context and time. I had fallen into emotional exhaustion and lost, essentially, my enthusiasm for what lays ahead. The evidence, made obvious, not fear, but merely being my age and able to process only so many psychically and emotionally demanding challenges. The promise of rebirth realized.

Resurrection, Reincarnation, being born again, have prevailed in my attention. Curious what that would look/be like. It is difficult for me to imagine a clone of Jesus, but a Jesus returned many times since His crucifixion in other guises. To me, now, He was a whistleblower and an anarchist, seeking the freedom of life to live free in our common hold, the earth. And we, collectively, are no more well than the secrets we keep.

I did not ask for my name, it was given by accident of birth. Yet I well know what it is to be ridiculed and vilified. I do not endorse the descent and protest of others for their violence towards me, or the collective, in that it is similar: the protest of the powerful their secrets revealed. What can we learn from either slander or praise? What we say of others often reveals what we refuse to address within ourselves. Jesus was profoundly a scape goat for all the covert violence he protested. Was He not then a true patriot of the Universe? Add, it seems clear that what He sought was sought by many others; freedom to be ourselves defined as whole, well, loving, kind and generous.

130613 MDT 02:47 moving

interjection

2013-06-12T11:33:00.000-07:00

We are common dust, moistened into clay, become brick and mortar. Interjected into which is life. Precious? For me it is. And when I awoke this AM I sensed something happened in my sleep, a dream, so bewildering, I had no sense of it until I encountered the daily quotes: Wisdom and annotated experience of others. Interjections: both the dream and those whose words I seek to explain my experience to myself.

Perception is important. Especially if you rely exclusively upon your dominant inherent vision/version of what life is and for. Education is generally regarded as a survival modality; applied to endow security for which there is none, never was and never will be. But to educate yourself, continual, is how you see can liberate you from slavery. I can explain my thesis in manifold ways but for now will limit myself to the experience of being transported from one place to another as a thing: an object.

Made exceeding well aware of contrary opinions regarding the meaning and value of life itself. As did the dream awakening me. About which I will not comment, save to say that this little dust devil is aware of what moves it about the desert of our time. Add. Perhaps all time: the before and after of it as measured by the experience, collective, of all perceptions; personal and communal.

If I forgive the executioner, the theft of my privacy, the desire to control, manipulate me by fear—mainly—for the profit/pleasure of a few. I acknowledge what I now think Jesus meant when he said “forgive them.” And I know there is more to this than I can comprehend in this moment definitively. We are no different, the assassin and I, having choices not obvious to those who know nothing but their version of “TRUTH!”

The same mind set giving us prolonged life is the same mind set attempting to categorize our sexual proclivities and sell us things to keep the entire hot air balloon of our world economy aloft. So my sense of justice is balanced between both the material and immaterial. At the same time—privately—sensing myself (and choosing to be) a citizen of the universe: not limited/defined by race, creed or gender. In this sense I am an anarchist advocating freedom for all to be fully themselves with the usual universal caveats: The Golden Rule plus “Do no Harm.”

The cream, in the milk of life, rises to the top.

Really?

I see it otherwise. Since I sense we are all cream; but lazy, inattentive, and lulled into a fatal trust that someone is going to do well for/by us. Like my sense of God, who I sometimes variously call the interlocutor, Mikey, friend, parent, lover, etc. I cannot know completely myself any more than I can know another.

"Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman—a rope over an abyss ... What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal." - Nietzsche

Discovered this date, this place, this time. Key to unlocking the mystery of my astonishing dream.

Life is a process about, and for which, we all are participants. None more noble than another. Yet in time, history is littered with martyrs who’s witness was unconventional and inconvenient; later to be celebrated—marginally—as better than what followed . . . how can a person claim ownership to that which is freely given? The list is long though small compared to the rulers of our lives. Who, if I am forced to judge, are successful only for themselves, while preaching Public Service.

I have been informed that NSA is not the problem but the Merchant Princes, who would be Emperors, are. Greed and usury abound. While mercy, forgiveness and kindness are lost in the process. We are known objects (actually unknowable) subject to controls by people who sense everything though thought: thinking is only one way of knowing God, Good, or people. My sense here is that we are known about—but not as a value—unique. Cynically.

In a sense what, and why, I write is in protest against being object/subject—slave—to anyone or thing. Did I just answer my curiosity: why the meek shall inherit the earth? I think so. Since what I know of the interlocutor is humility. While those who rule currently are masters of instilling fear.

I will not be the same tomorrow, any more than I am the same as I was yesterday. I grow.

"Tomorrow! - Why, tomorrow I may be Myself with yesterday's sev'n thousand years." - Omar Khayyam

Be yourself, not what you are told to be, or defined by greed and usury. Together we can form a world in which love is possible and absent addiction.

“Money is human happiness in the abstract; he, then, who is no longer capable of enjoying human happiness in the concrete devotes himself utterly to money.” - Arthur Schopenhauer

"The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it." - Henry David Thoreau

130612 MDT 04:17 interjection

snow globe

2013-06-11T00:43:00.000-07:00

If you’re very quiet, listening close, you can hear the snow fall sounding like the stroking of a cat’s fur. Then a purring like sound coming up out of your soul. For me it was either that or going completely mad with ennui. Instead I’d turn to the right or left and talk to the fellow travelers to the internment camps selected for death or slave labor where it stops. The snow finding new groves, slides, drifts and piles.

Somewhere back, long ago, I thought I had to special but from the get go was told otherwise: I was “just a grain of sand upon a beach” extending continent wide, a desert. But then I’ve found, if you look real close, grains of sand are like snow flakes all different singing different songs and psalms. Seems like to me that I seek what is unique in others, those who are naked of ear buds faces turned in worship to empty picture frames. The many who now seem lost attempting to escape reality.

And of those who respond I never forget their being what they are; alive. On the conveyer belt from birth to death crossing eternity with me. Doesn’t matter: check out lines, wait staff, bus stops, train or plane stations. Some know they’re there and going somewhere while others while away their lives listening to Big Brother Speak. . . .Rats eating their eyes first, then their minds.

So. No. I didn’t go berserk — postal or rampage this time, but I always wonder why I don’t afterward. There seems to me a food chain issue implied sheep, cattle, turkeys, people all the same led to slaughter for The Man’s Ideal Bottom Line: profit or pleasure.

Oddly the issues become clearer, more sharply defined, day-by-day, no matter where I go. Realizing it is possible, albeit difficult, but not impossible to grow your soul in our times. Alone is okay, but in community it makes a difference to those who otherwise remain oblivious to themselves. Their being unique, special, precious, simply okay as they are either way.

It seems the flow continues here as well at there. The concerns are met with answers, absent confusion; priorities apparent, clean and clear sans regrets. Standing perfectly still the process continues with those friends, lovers and strangers all more boldly embossed upon the prayer wheel of my mind.

The most amusing aspect of the process is my perceptions being eroded, peeled, worn away. A Bonfire of the Vanities so to say. Leaving no smoke, or mirrors, no bells and smells; just truth drilling into my consciousness and all is well becoming better day-by-day; clearer, cleaner, more nearly/dearly.

Always curious why a person — myself for example — would call a halt to it all taking my life; ending it?

I am not these thoughts, those feelings, the items of my life’s furnishings. Nor the tools I may give away, or merely walk away from, for it is this consciousness that I retain knowing it will never end. Why? Because it is not mine alone. It belongs to the source, The Presence, the one who talks to me in my dreams and waking hours ordinary every day.

What is heaven if not present? Able to grow, expand, embrace, incorporate and lend to those lost in ownership while being merely tenant upon/within this time and place. First and last things are twins twined in real time. One thing closes another opens and there is wonder absent conditional/magical thinking life.

Typical of me: I check to see what the fleece of Gideon has to say via quotes; the collective wisdom of many passed down, well worn, through history. Then clubbed senseless, momentarily, to realize this post is about growing a personality in the flow of time and humanity.

I have always been inherently a clown attempting to make others laugh; beginning with mom. To lend a smile, or at the least a twinkle in her eyes. Sadly what I once saw as anger was actually terror; thinly veiled anxiety — that she would never measure up to her genius and be acknowledged for it. In my sense of her, finely resolved, it was not that she took herself seriously but was endlessly seeking affirmation of her inherent wealth. Immeasurable. Actually. But only in retrospect acknowledged and applauded.

At that, she was a great fencing master, a teacher of great import. I don’t know what saved me at the various times when death was near by coincidence or choice. And for now I realize that courage is to live despite all the suffering I’ve known for this now joy everlasting . . . and heaven is: a place of farther learning not, idle oblivion. To know yourself is to know heaven now.

Lacking any formal education, I prize everything I can learn. And it is my childish, simpleton’s way of asking the presence to be real, absent all the formal institutional definitions available to me, you, or us.

I will close here with a reminder that we cannot expect Mikey to do it for us. Nor can we elect or blindly follow any pretend Mikeys to be the solution. My sense is that if we allow the ‘powers’ that be to do that exclusive of our attention we will find ourselves in cattle cars going to Auschwitz: death in the showers, buried alive in slavery.

Either participate in your life or be a victim of your indifference.

130610 MDT 22:15 snow globe
© 2013 by Jack Spratt—All Rights Reserved

happiness as joy

2013-06-09T05:36:00.000-07:00

Love is a genius present in all life. Sometimes lost in fear, then becoming anger and aggression Addiction to material things like defenses and avoidances.

130608 EDT 04:58 acceptance

Happiness, like pleasure passes, is fleeting, temporary. But Joy is forever and independent of anything but choice to negate or abandon it. The difference is between a word and The Word, first a lighting bug and the latter The Big Bang.

And for this I have to thank Pamela Joyce Whatever, as yet her last name to me. Since for me last evening proved that she is not merely a girl, or a woman, but The Woman, first in seventy two years. Though limp as wet spaghetti, as always I sought her pleasure before mine and was rewarded with the sense that we are like the first couple; a pair. With infinity to inhabit . . . well actually we’re there already but oblivious . . . by we, I refer to us we all, the family of life.

"Life is the childhood of our immortality." - Goethe

I am a poor recorder of all the manifestations of The Presence; external/internal. Remember, always, this that I write is annotation of, and on, a process available to all; free for the asking. I will soon return to New Mexico to gather my furnishings; limited to that which I will be able to carry forward into my new life with Pam. Annie, my companion cat, is, of course top of the list and all the rest actually very little of importance follows. To my sense of things, it is the final audition for my life as it will be upon return to St. Johnsbury, VT.

I greet each day with gratitude and will be too long away for my taste but then will long remember these halcyon days and those to come.

"Nothing that is worth knowing can be taught." - Oscar Wilde

130609 EDT 01:46 happiness as joy

awakening

2013-06-07T10:36:00.000-07:00

Arising from a death like sleep, aroused by a dream. Often a string of thoughts or words lost between the time to time of moving from horizontal to vertical. To sleep is to dream and in dreams I am informed, not so much by what the content was, but what was implied/inferred.

Regardless the sublimity of revelation, it is lost between my being an inch worm crossing galaxies of thoughts at the speed of lightning. Merely a way, not The Way. A process of finding a reason to live another day. Wondering less why those who when assassinated forgave instead of laughing humorously at the folly of their executioners. We learn nothing from destroying our adversaries.

09:36

The world, I will soon leave you, is changing rapidly and I sense myself a failure at what I would change. Or, at the very least, protest. World extinction by: _________. Yet several come to mind blazing: over population, corruption of air water, land. Obscene profits made from the labor and resources of people otherwise unable to share in the boon. And one in particular: The science of war is death. The science of life is, however, entirely another matter.

I sense, think, feel, intuit myself as a curator and anthropologist of life interactive, collaborative, and as it might be ideally given the study of love versus war. Add, I have in time come to conclude myself an anarchist as I believe Jesus was; as were all those whose words I closely follow, seeking what they sought.

In sincere honesty I can find no label for myself. At one time I was a photojournalist and currently am grieving for a friend who’s life is facing traumatic change. John Henry White, of The Chicago Sun-Times fame, and I were once roommates during an annual University of Missouri photojournalism workshop. His remarks shared across the darkened room before sleep have remained seminal to who, what, why and where I am. He and his entire department of news photographers we laid off. Made redundant by video and toy cameras in cellular telephones. It never really was about the equipment but the vision, version and mind behind directing what was recorded.

We the people of this planet are essentially what we consume, for good or ill, by way of those who now rule. The Merchant Princes who would be Emperors. Multinational corporations having destroyed any and all sense of national sovereignty.

We who dance to the fiddler’s tunes must, in some sense be willing to pay the musician a laborer’s wage. Yet the cost has become distorted to the extend and degree too high disallowing all the rest of us a life.

I have faith in the generations to come, who will discover as I have, the world owes us no livelihood. Conscious as I was while teaching photojournalism that there were not enough jobs going available for those who wanted them. So I taught my students to see what they were looking at, on multidimensional levels, as both still and motion capture. It follows that we are all captors of life via imagery. And those who “Serve and Protect” the status quo and wealthy are nervous that they in their turn will be held accountable to we the ultimate authority.

A leg and armless man lay before me with a pointing device surfing the internet above his head. A Vietnam Veteran with unit patches displayed; he remains were I left him. Yet never will he leave my consciousness whenever I see the images of bombast and pretense.

“A picture is worth a thousand/ten thousand words.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_picture_is_worth_a_thousand_wordsw Seems cynical now at my age given my knowledge of poetry and considering The Gettysburg Address. To name but a few words springing immediately to mind. That in their turn describe better the abstraction of what things are about. Then too are the numerous things too small to photograph meaningfully. The spirit moving us for example. Thinking back to my familiarity with Civil War photography and retroactively applying what Lincoln said to the meaning/value of the carnage.

When I arrived in Chicago I called John Henry White without reply. Later, on the street, speaking with other shooters, I was informed he was teaching African/American children and possibly at university level.

Love as verb, never dies. I love his silence as well as our long ago dialogs; and our art is about being witnesses to life. How wonderfully precious it is whether acknowledged as such or not.

Given that yesterday was “D-Day” and Pam’s son’s birthday I will close with a remembrance of meeting a giant of a man at the El Paso Veteran’s Clinic. I did not photograph him since he was astride a scooter and about to die from pancreatic cancer . . . and . . . yet I will long remember what he showed me of his scars, the horrors he’d seen in the Death Camps liberated, or the portrait of himself decorated by several nations . . . a handsome Mexican American even now in his nineties. A paratrooper with fifty-five jumps to his credit.

So you see John, if you ever read this, remember what you gave me. What I hope we give to those who follow. To have courage to be real and address what needs attention fearlessly. . . . Even if we must paint our prison, cave or tomb, with bloody fingers self inflicted.

130607 EDT 01:10 awakening

player piano

2013-06-06T03:15:00.000-07:00

Music in all venues and modes expresses best a soul’s longing to love and be loved. Yet pictures came second in my appreciation the depredations of men to men indiscriminate. Variously my dreams are dominated by both. But now remembering best the discovery of images, illicit and impermissible otherwise, the carnage of Nazi Germany. I was quite young and curious, the photographs, were stored in a chicken coop; I’ve never been the same since.

“The same” as what? Before my witness I had held, exclusively, a sense of being unwanted singular. Then a race chosen for the final solution. But then, at the age of ten or so, I knew nothing of race, creed, gender persecution. In prayer I pray that I will find the answer before I die: why do we do what we do?

More importantly why do we ignore the issues before us when in truth what can happen to another can happen to you or me individually or collectively. The Golden Rule’s dark sibling: “What goes around comes around.”

In profile he seemed crushed as an abandoned automobile recycled into its smallest possible remainder. Around him was the sound of a player piano accelerated to gibberish, the roll torn through him a song in mute silence hysterical. I knew the dream was important. But was confused with free associations herein attempted the distillation of. Sometimes I sense the suicide of the world as its going to hell in a grocery cart bumping down hill towards the precipice of extinction. With age came a sense of integration: the spirit of what I heard and saw in both dream and ordinary of my days. All my ambitions to analogize this have failed and that applies to even this: writing. My greatest joy is discovering the genius of others who have no sense their gifts. Apparently to them improbable since they lack the education or franchise of being intellectual or capable of anything greater than being a cog in the wheel of industry.

In point of fact I would not be alive were it not for the kindness of random strangers who by acknowledgment or affirmation lent me a sense that I should seek life instead of death. Even now I sense I own nothing, being tenant and steward of something I have yet to inhabit fully. Possibly a self difficult to fully incarnate?

At the moment I can look across the recent dialogs and events: sense, seeing, intuiting then knowing the source of what I am writing at the moment. I feel at home here. At the same time I feel at home in my mind. Reopening all the myths and metaphors I used to hold as fixed and immutable objects to which I became subject.

If nothing else my thoughts tend more directly towards not being factory farmed for the amusement, pleasure and profit of anyone or thing institutional.

Of course I remember Kurt Vonnegut’s “Player Piano” and reviewing the summary on line remember better the spirit of the author than the narrative. Which is true of all my reading, the spirit in which it was written and what was sought, at least my sense of it.

We know ourselves simply absent all the arcana and esoteric language of academia. Follow the feelings when things go bump in the night and you will find them more benign that you expect. In retrospect I think all the rest is smoke and mirrors, bells and smells, magical thinking that serves no one really well . . . a sorta kinda I/Thou, not I/Them.

Real change is possible if you stick with changing your perceptions via stone cold sober mindfulness of what makes you heart sing and what does not.

130606 EDT 02:47 player piano

loves rewards

2013-06-05T14:26:00.000-07:00

Love’s reward is itself. Not what we receive but what we give. C. G. Jung suggested that we must “constellate” grief. A statement taking me years to understand in my own way. Remaining until these past few days of love realized as life renewed. Drawn kicking and screaming from the tomb of my solitary cell into whatever comes next.

I think grief, as expressed in love, has and end. Discovering the gift of what was is sufficient. The departed, were they now able to speak, would lovingly ask that we get on with our lives. I write consciously: that we grieve differently and for different things. Speaking for myself, exclusively, I remember the child who grieved not being loved. At least in a way comprehensible. Then remembering dad calling the time he died to say goodbye. In a sincere and profound sense, realized now, he healed my self-enslavement to his business ambitions. For which nothing but his last words could heal.

Do I redeem myself or them? Absolution is rendered by God alone. What remains of and within me is a rock steady confidence that they gave what they had to give, giving no more, nor less, to themselves. Add. To blame another is to disable knowing yourself: the talent/genius, resilience, will to live and love infinitely now.

Futile I suppose but I do ask would I do it all over again? Yes! All the dings, bents, scars, wattles and warts are who I am now. Within them—all combined—I find myself at peace and joy able to love again despite the vicissitudes and darts potential. My wrinkles more now are from smiles rather than age.

Death is no failure since in life there are options otherwise intolerable.

But then one must of needs spend one’s life well, preferably by one’s own measurement of values independent of those whose lives are led by slogans — who practice nothing of what they preach/teach. Think of life as one dollar, then think how much of that one dollar you are willing to spend that love, life, liberty continue farther beyond your one singular self. Think quality not quantity.

The problem with wealth is there is no end, never enough, maniacal in its dictates. Becoming amoral unethical enslaving all else to its desire. Think addiction.

"Great occasions do not make heroes or cowards; they simply unveil them to the eyes of men. Silently and imperceptibly, as we wake or sleep, we grow strong or weak; and at last some crisis shows what we have become."

“What we can do for another is the test of powers; what we can suffer is the test of love.”

- Brooke Foss Westcott

I do not write to be memorable. But that you remember yourself, as precious. Regardless of all judgments against that value; until you meet the Judge. Cognizant that I can change nothing but myself; the only paradigm available to me. My perceptions and concerns have in significant extent been answered and my process is what faith can be, at the least to me: vast. The remaining concerns are more sharply drawn, revealed in greater contrast, begun with the scars upon my heart. Deeply incised into the body of it.

What I am, is, as I was, merely biodegradable first to last, yet in this time I’ve come to know and love all of life. And of you beloved be beloved of yourself.

In parting this time, need I remind you, to do no harm?

130605 EDT 04:44 loves rewards

gratitude

2013-06-04T11:09:00.001-07:00

Certain, sure, apprehended gratitude suffuses these moments, two galaxies merged with arctic clarity. The near frost of a Hudson Bay cold front rendering the night sky so close it seems to swim around me limpid and wet; a river of stars. They say there are times of Northern Lights about, and for, which I eagerly look forward. Returned from my former newer mountains of the Organ to the Green knowing with surety ship my service. All my life’s chores reconciled into a new purpose.

All my auditions passed by guile, stealth, accomplishment or panache. What remains, perhaps, the most difficult, will be to sort and load that which I will carry forward minus all my dear friends left behind. Annie will be first then following: the books without which I might otherwise not wish to live. Various cooking items, Pam either has or mine are better. Finally how to put it upon wheels and move it twenty-five-hundred miles. And about this, I confess, myself in something of a dither. Nothing for it but to do it.

Yet again I am reluctant to leave Pam for even a brief time. And St. Johnsbury is such a wonder to me. Reminiscent of my sense of America, the before not the afterward.

To close: I have a sense born of silence and awe, what I offer is what you already possess: yourself. Yet unexplored yourself becomes merely subsistence. Or existence as lively as a stone. My ignorance outdistances my grasp yet by experience rendering each day the ordinary of my life, extraordinary.

Affirmations abound when seeking what we are consciously within in the context of life; difficult but not impossible. In a sense you and you alone can define yourself. Keep It Simple Stupid, it is not about you but us, all of we: the family of life. Each has a role or part to play, a way to be useful and fulfilling to the process of our collective process.

Be well and pray for me, I need all the help I can get to accomplish this next audition.

130604 EDT 01:04 gratitude

past midnight love is

2013-06-03T13:52:00.002-07:00

Heaven I know, within, is manifest outwardly by animals who seek my comfort in their distress. Ginger of “Gingersnap” sought me sleeping in a chair—climbing into my lap. Then hearing distant thunder I knew she needed me a bulwark against her fear.

Animals, small and great, know their instinct for love better than we who use them as companions against that which goes bump in the night, friend or foe. I remember each avidly from cradle to my nearness now to the grave for their adornment greater than any jewel can bestow.

I had fallen asleep early last evening aware I wanted to share the sense I have, especially here in St. Johnsbury, VT of being caressed by gentle cooling breezes while wondering in prayer what and where those animals and humans passed are. And I know God more real than myself and all is well; exceedingly so.

130603 EDT 01:02

Tintinnabulate suffused with joyous love we are bonded with infinity.

What will soon have been my opening days to both love and St. Johnsbury, VT I will remember best several things: the riot of spring best ever yet, the slow steady dance towards one another of lovers who have finally surrendered to life, and this night I saw a modest flashing across the dark as I spoke of a man I once loved and worked with.

He was younger than I having a magnificent tenor voice frequently singing forth the solos of Handel's “Messiah” four floors above the ground where we were roofing new construction together. And I miss and weep for his loss, his passing from my life slain by love; well actually suicide since he loved a woman who used and abused him for what he might accomplish as a building contractor.

For me love seems impossible when I attempt to hold it to a standard or value instead of for itself as expressed; given freely without expectation of gratitude. And I knew this too well having fallen in love with his wife’s best friend who also left me for points and reasons unknown/unknowable.

Each woman in their turn was at that impossible apogee of beauty fecund yet mature having several children yet promising more. But it is not they or women in general I might slander but he whom I would extol.

Age is relevant only on death certificates since in reality we generally achieve something like nineteen and stop while our bodies march onward. And some of us look like death while dancing at that certain age within. A Sea bee veteran of Vietnam he taught me the ultimate futility of a monkey attempting carnal knowledge of a greased football kicked before his feet chasing it.

Among other things discussed were issues of: a broken down bus carrying several people to a prayer meeting. Did in fact God make the bus break or did it simply fall apart? Add, I loved playing his straight man, when Jim Harrington would do the Andy Williams skit with a bear—milk and cookies. I would shuffle about nodding and begging for the cookies while he would quiz me. Rare were the milk and cookies bestowed and I fawning fainting in gratitude. Yet he was the first to share with me the experience of having friend’s bodily effluents and parts smeared across his face; or merely the simple terrors of war first hand. And then add the experience of returning from the defense of democracy to be spat upon or, worse ignored. For what did friend and foe die? And what meaning the savage indifference the veterans received?

This time and place is not special in any way, save, perhaps, my heart grows nominally large to acknowledge and receive the love coincident with it. Manifest in flashing lights illumining the night of my sadness for the loss of Jim. If nothing else prayer has changed me who remains astonished awestruck and reverent the response.

16:27

Time to time, I think out of my mind, the silence swallowing all that I saw and what was done to me finding a home and a reason to live another — day or more. Finally. The words alone weren’t enough, I needed an echo and now I’ve got one 5 by 5. Who would think that I’d be here at home and in love as I am finally. The threads of consciousness drawn together into a new cord/chord.

130602 EDT 05:21 past midnight love is