Clearing out my old Facebook Notes (5)

The Sea Again

A long time ago, I decided to cut a separate swath. It was not an error of modest declination, but a back azimuth to the paved road I had always traveled. I thought I would feel some measure of gratitude or satisfaction. Some feeling of success, but instead there is a relative unease with each new tree. I've really lost touch with a lot of things. I feel "half-awake", someone wandering forward with hidden steps.

I don't know. Thoughts no longer come easy, and my world is un-hinged.

I am watching a River Runs through It for the first time. Kind of backwards I guess, since I plan to read the book... but oh well.

I didn't watch it years ago because one of the many evangelical Christian publications my parents subscribed to slaughtered it... I still remember part of the Review... paraphrasing, "A vaguely metaphysical meandering movie mixed with fly-fishing fails to inspire only to remain insipidly unsatisfying in its religious conviction." So I never saw it, although at the time I secretly wanted to.

Years later, unbound from the bonds of conservative belief, and everyone else gone to bed a long time ago, I sit here watching. I found out today my biological grandfather who I never knew loved the book, so in absence of the written page, I succumbed to audio-visual. Not a perfect movie, but a good one. I liked it. "Life is not a work of art" just to quote real time, sitting here next to the Christmas tree, 5 days from the rolling over of another year, the crashing and tumbling of gears as the creaking clock moves forward. No, life is not a work of art, although art should be a work of life. That's probably why the really good art is hidden and often unpopular until a future generation far removed hears the message.

Every family, every life is different. Some are fascinating, some are profoundly mundane and utterly uneventful. Yet, there is a sacredness that is often only seen in retrospect. Its not even the beauty of something that we can miss. At times, the very reality of a thing is not captured until we are remembering it thoughtfully, years later, in a darkened room or watching the flames of a fire.

I can't hold onto this life, anymore I can hold onto the people around me. They walk and move and breathe. You can't hold onto people and things without suffocating reality or even worse, carving it into something it is not. Simply let it all ride. Flow.

If you hold on, you kill things.

I stopped taking as many pictures of special events precisely because of this. I wanted to make sure I made a really good memory, not worry if the battery light would come on. Seriously, how many of us really watch that hour long, jerky camcorder video of the dreadfully stretched out school sing along?

I do not want to remember my life through the lens of a viewfinder, mechanical or spiritual.

In the movie I just watched, the boys are told by their father that if they listened, they could hear the voice of God in the waters. The last thoughts of one of the boys, as the old man, is that he is "haunted by the waters". I think God, the beauty of this universe and reality, gets through to our heart by way of a random music. A gurgle brought home through fluid form that collides with solid rocks and swaying reeds. Driven by wind and the force of the transubstantiation of mountain snow, the water sings because there is no measured meter. There is no careful art. It is a wild song that comes from a heart rich with blood and earth and sadness and joy. The words of God are the random acts of brownian motion, collisions of light photons with a maelstrom of water droplets creating a brilliant rainbow. It is in the unplanned and biological exuberance of a natural rhythm that God speaks.

A certain trollish critic told me a week ago he thought my poetry was tiresome in its predictability, and proceeded to list a series of proper poetic forms I should experiment with. I don't think I am going to listen to him, because when I write, I pour out from a battered canteen cup, etched with symbols of my soul's campaigns, the contents of my heart. I suppose I could build a factory in my soul, and create in accordance with linear measurement, but I think I will dip my cup in the water that laps against the rim of that homo sapien that is called Mike.

I do miss certain things. The close bond I used to have with my sister. My children are no longer young. My childhood. A certain clarity of purpose.

As Masefield wrote in Sea Fever: I must go down to the Sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky, And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by...

I memorized that in my room on a bright Texas afternoon, reciting it standing in the center of my blue carpet, the sun warming my face, while I watching the Ash tree swaying outside my windows. Later that night, my wet hair combed carefully to one side, I carefully recited in a family talent show after a "fancy meal", the Sea Fever poem. My mom and dad clapped, and I was proud of myself.

I always liked that poem. It captured something that was just not in my heart, but also resonated something of the human condition. It melancholy longing was reassuring because I knew that someone else had felt the way I did, standing in that synthetic island of blue, repeating a poem, rolling the words around, hearing the sound of the bombers that flew over the government housing I grew up in. The sea was a distant memory of trips to Hawaii. I had never been on a boat, but I knew instinctively what Masefield was getting at. Here was a dose of his reality, and I could make it mine.

So screw that critic. I took his critique seriously until it began to damage the connection I had to the real. My real.

So I guess I've come full circle. I spent a year waking up in Iraq. Then I spent a year trying to hold onto that recovery. Now I am learning that a man must keep part of himself awake, but sometimes, it is good to sleep. Sometimes we plop in milk and sugar, sometimes we drink the coffee black. The key is never to run out of coffee.

Its a little sad, but I was reading some of Rainer Marie Rilke tonight. Here is a poem I can understand:

You playmates of mine in the scattered parks of the city,
small friends from a childhood long ago:
how we found and liked one another, hesitantly,
and, like the lamb with the talking scroll,

spoke with our silence. When we were filled with joy
it belonged to no one: it was simply there.
And how it dissolved among all the adults who passed by
and in the fears of the endless year.

Wheels rolled past us, we stood and stared at the carriages;
houses surrounded us, solid but untrue- and none
of them ever knew us. WHAT in that world was real?

Nothing. Only the balls. Their magnificent arches.
Not even the children . . . but sometimes one,
oh a vanishing one, stepped under the plummeting ball.

Goodnight!

Clearing out my old Facebook Notes (4)

I am about to go bed and had this interesting thought... Catholic theology professes the reality that an an intermediary place called purgatory exists immediately after death to purify the soul for entry into heaven by way of "widening gyre" like Dante's circles of purgatorio and heaven, people through painful awareness and suffering get rid of imperfections until they are pure enough to enter into the heavenly realm of perfect love and goodness... Many Eastern religions profess that for people to attain enlightenment, they must migrate from the wheel of Samsara "the long night of fractured identity" by way of multiple reincarnations to purge the self of the multiple layers of carnality into the Nirvana of the uniting with the complimentary paradox of all and nothing... suspending all rules of belief, if both were right, there is a possibility that we died a long time in a "real life" when we truly knew ourselves and our true identity but somehow fell into darkness, and this existence is a purgatorio of trying to find understand ourselves through the direct experience of many facets of ourselves and of the universal human experience across a spectrum of many lives. We could wrestle the angel of our discontent until we received our blessing of peace and rest in the infinity of a unified self. When you consider your life, and how short it is, and how you seem to change along life's road but deep down inside remain the same, seventy years in this space time continuum seems too short a time to truly experience life. And truly, how do we know that when we sleep, that our dreams are not another life that we live. That when we lie down in that other world, we wake here with fragile remnants of another place. I don't know. I believe there is a "somewhere else", another reality other than this one. I don't think though that the afterlife is merely"a depositary of souls". No religion, belief, faith, or lack of faith has a monopoly on the truth. A human being, let alone the world is much too beautiful and complex for a simple explanation, whether the coldly scientific or traditionally dogmatic religious. If you could catch someone without "intellectual clothes" on, they would probably say they just want to be happy, that they want to be truly who they were born to be. We are all searching for our original face, the one we had before we were even physically created. Rumi says it best: "Love is the religion, the universe its book." I think most of us live like we are putting together a piece of furniture without instructions. I think we are better than that, that we were born to "break the sound barrier, to kick ass and take names" so to speak. My whole "42" moment here, (douglas adams, I salute you), is not I guess about an interesting thought wandering through my tired mind at the end of the day. It is the attempted articulation that life is not a short sprint, a PT test over in an hour. This can't be all there is... people are too amazing to come prepackaged with the standard instructional DVD manual. Purgatorio, reincarnation, ecstasy or annihilation, I believe that Heisenberg was onto something with his quantum mechanical uncertainty principle: certain pairs of physical properties, like position and momentum, cannot both be known to arbitrary precision. That is, the more precisely one property is known, the less precisely the other can be known."

Ultimately, I hope we all leave the door open and the window unbarred. Our fingers will be cold and the wind will swirl the papers off our desk, but the sunrise will be brilliant and light up our room. I'd rather stare at the sun for an hour and live with the memory of light than live in perpetual darkness stumbling over shadows.

Clearing out my old Facebook Notes (3)

Okay, the movie Synecdoche is not an easy movie to watch, it is surreal, disturbing, the worst of Freudian-Jungian dream sequences, everyone is acting in a play in life where everyone is acting and directing their life which is a play ad infinitum yet exists all in one guys mind who is slowly dying. (someone shoot me, the invicibility of the prime of my youth was just punctured in the last hour) There is one speech that says it like it needs to be said:

Minister: Everything is more complicated than you think. You only see a tenth of what is true. There are a million little strings attached to every choice you make; you can destroy your life every time you choose. But maybe you won't know for twenty years. And you'll never ever trace it to its source. And you only get one chance to play it out. Just try and figure out your own divorce. And they say there is no fate, but there is: it's what you create. Even though the world goes on for eons and eons, you are here for a fraction of a fraction of a second. Most of your time is spent being dead or not yet born. But while alive, you wait in vain, wasting years, for a phone call or a letter or a look from someone or something to make it all right. And it never comes or it seems to but doesn't really. And so you spend your time in vague regret or vaguer hope for something good to come along. Something to make you feel connected, to make you feel whole, to make you feel loved. And the truth is I'm so angry and the truth is I'm so fucking sad, and the truth is I've been so fucking hurt for so fucking long and for just as long have been pretending I'm OK, just to get along, just for, I don't know why, maybe because no one wants to hear about my misery, because they have their own, and their own is too overwhelming to allow them to listen to or care about mine. Well, fuck everybody. Amen.


I attack the idea every day on my Myspace Blog that all's NOT right with the world, and that if you are happy, its b/c you are asleep, or you have convince yourself, desperately, that you are happy. The folks who preach, they think they know everything, and they like to hear themselves, and people who expect them to know the answer like to hear what will make them comfortable. The other people who are quiet? Well, you don't hear them because they don't say anything, because once you have experienced failure and suffering, you know it as a reality, not a hypothetical postulate or possibility that you can google a solution to. When you really know, you don't talk, because talk like that is cheap. And true answers are never cheap.

You also know that no one will listen because there is no one in this world who can truly understand you, even if they wanted to.

Of course, the minister in his impassioned speech, he definitely shows the universal hurt that all of us have at 1 AM on that rare moment when we watch credits play across the screen after the movie, when you sit on the couch listening to the quiet house thinking about your life. We all have that, and if you think you don't then you need to pause a little more often and get to know yourself.

Sometimes, life just seems like walking down a long hotel hallway when everyone's asleep.

Maybe I feel a connection to this b/c I've made a lot of mistakes, and I would give an amen to a visceral prayer like that.

Welcome to the human condition.

The answer is we all need each other, but ultimately we are those proverbial islands and there ain't no bridge between us.

Sorry, I usually save the angst/philosophy for Myspace, but that movie shook me up, even though I watched it from my emotional peripheral vision. Damn.

(would someone tell me where that guy preaches? He's real enough for me.)

Gingko Biloba of the Heart

I haven't blogged in awhile, and usually I keep that on Myspace, but I liked what I had to say here, and the fact I'm up taking care of sick people... poor barf monkeys... Part of it is that I get super busy, my brain gets stressed, and then I just can't think straight. Creativity seems to come and go in cycles for me. Sometimes my strength is full, sometimes it is empty. Julia Cameron, the author of the Artist Way, writes that the morning pages, a set of three pages written daily, without fail, are the key to keep "flow" going.

I agree that the morning pages are fundamental to creativity. Stagnation is never an option. I think many of us feel that our lives are a piece of art that must be Michaelangelo-slaved over, a monolithic sculpture that must be tweaked and hammered and carved into perfection. The picture HAS to be perfect. Maybe I'm just venting my own Freudian issues here, but there is something to be said about trying to achieve the "American Dream", that proverbial "Perfect Scenario" described in Fight Club. I quote as I have quoted this part before:

Narrator: Like so many others I had become a slave to the IKEA nesting instinct...I'd flip through catalogues and wonder, "What kind of dining set defines me as a person."

Narrator: I don't know. It's just when you buy furniture you tell yourself, "That's it. That's the last sofa I'm gonna need. Whatever else happens, I've got that sofa problem handled." I had it all. I had a stereo that was very decent, a wardrobe that was getting very respectable. I was close to being complete.

Tyler: Shit man, now it's all gone.

Narrator: All gone.

Tyler: All gone...Do you know what a duvet is?

Narrator: A comforter...

Tyler: It's a blanket. Just a blanket. Now why do guys like you and me know what a duvet is? Is this essential to our survival, in the hunter-gatherer sense of the word? No. What are we then?

Narrator: ...Consumers?

Tyler: Right. We are consumers. We're the byproducts of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don't concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy's name on my underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra.

Narrator: Martha Stewart.

Tyler: F' Martha Stewart. Martha's polishing the brass on the Titanic. It's all going down, man. So f' off with your sofa units and Strinne green stripe patterns. I say never be complete. I say stop being perfect. I say let's evolve, let the chips fall where they may. But that's me, and I could be wrong, maybe it's a terrible tragedy.

Narrator: Nah, it's just stuff...My insurance is probably gonna cover it, so...What?

Tyler: The things you own end up owning you.

Even as I read this, checking the context of how what I am quoting fits into the point I am making, I realize the truth (barring the slam on IKEA- I will always support Scandinavian Imports, esp. IKEA). The truth is, the cause of my stagnation, my stress, my high blood pressure, my pacing back and forth in my mind, my little hamster scratching and running in circles while maintaining the smiling professional face- the cause is my slow cooking in a pot of the false paradigm of the world. I act like this is all there is, all that matters, all that will ever be. Whether I make it to Colonel or Manager or Professor, someone, someday will say, time to take down those old dusty pictures of guys in outmoded glasses and ancient ties and store them in the archives. All this stuff every day we worry about, yes, we must live in this world, but we must not reject that part of us that is extraordinary. Someone a long time ago, pulled a fast one over on the human race and told a lot of us this is all there is, and this arena is all that matters. It's just dust man, just dust (as some beatnick poet probably said). Just as Religion is a Paradigm that needs to be undone (Prisons are built with stones of Law. Brothels with the bricks of religion. William Blake), so also does the Paradigm of the world.

(Really, any paradigm is bad- I recently visited the Gingko Biloba Petrified Forest in WA State, close to Yakima, a barren desert region of WA. It is the only place in the world where there are petrified Gingko Biloba trees, fossilized thousands and thousands of years ago. Gingko Biloba's effect on humans is increased mental ability and alertness, and the sign said, aside from careful cultivation by Chinese Monks in monasteries, the Gingko would have become extinct. There are no natural Gingkos left in the world except those carefully nurtured by people. I stood there on that hill, surrounded by broken huge trunks of stone, and I looked at three Gingko trees that were a gift from a monastery as their leaves rustled in the wind off the Columbia river. The thought hit me that while the petrified wood was amazing, impressive, and overwhelmingly solid in its permanence- these ruins were just rock, representations of the three fragile trees I saw in front of me. I would trade those three trees now than all the petrified perfection of the forest that once was thousands of years ago. Likewise, in our life, would we rather not live a day in total reality without pretense, then decades of distracted diversion, pursuing some goal of petrification of a moment of perfection in our life? Anyway, I digress, although that is a good digression.)

My point is, we are all traveling this path. It's just that some of us are sleepwalking and others are fighting to stay awake- so while we are traveling on our way, there will be ups and downs, good scenery and bad scenery, good companions and bullies, but what MATTERS is our STATE of BEING. We CHOOSE our state of being. Sometimes the choice comes easy, when the light is just right and the wind is coming off the hill through the beech trees bringing the smell of the river, anyone can write poetry. But when we are trudging in the cold rain or in the hot sun with nothing to drink, that is when our STATE of BEING going down the proverbial toilet.

I think that my creativity is strongest when I am experiencing suffering in my life. It helps me get through my issues, and I reach deep into the well of life to articulate my hope and the way to my next mountain top. When I stop suffering, or I finally, "Get things right", that's when my stress, my hamster treadmill starts up and bam! there goes my creativity. Buddhism, Sufis, and many other simple belief systems are clear in teaching that within the ordinary, mundane life is where you find the mystical, the magical and the sacred- the jewel hidden in flower of the heart. That is the true reality- not some earthshaking fire on a mountain, although every once and awhile that happens too.

What happens is the false Paradigm of the World overwhelms us with bureaucratic minutae that suck our bandwidth like vampires, kill us slowly in a death by a thousand mundane cuts. It makes us believe that the MUNDANE IS ALL THERE IS. That there is no magic in finding three living gingko biloba trees living in a forest of shattered petrified trees off the dusty road to crass and common Yakima Training Center. It is the paradigm that makes us go into movies for "a fix" to our starved subconscious/unconscious, and upon exit shake off the ideas that percolated, dismissing it all as fantasy and fiction. It is the paradigm that announces that all the miracles have already occured, that the divine spirit has said everything it wants to say, and if you want to hear from God its contained in quotation marks followed by a numerical marker and the name of an ancient scribe.

I challenge the paradigm and all paradigms. Life is is alive; its not a statue but an organism. This life is not a asphalt road engineered for smooth driving but a flowing river that cuts through the hardest granite. I believe that if the Creator stops speaking, if every archangel and seraphim did not whisper over every blade of grass, every atom, nerve, and fiber: "live, move, act!" all reality would wink out- so I think its the height of silliness to argue its all there complete in a book. The bottomline up front is that we have a life to live, and we can't fetter it by ideas or actions other than we could limit the sky.

I'm not saying we need to walk around in Never never land, but we have to live like folks unplugged from the Matrix. Reality isn't pretty, but the world is still an exciting place, and you have to wrestle it to the ground like an angel if you want the real thing. Our mission is to show kindness to others and to the things around us, and to set others free. It's really pretty simple.

Suffering is key though, and really, there is no suffering when you actually choose to go through it. And the suffering doesn't have to be an incredible ordeal- the process of everyday life can be bad enough when it goes on interminably without significant changes or evolution. Once we accept the suffering, the process still occurs, but our acceptance and transcendence pushes us through. It becomes a verb instead of a noun, and it causes us to grow, and more than survive, it teaches us to evolve. Otherwise, the immersion in everyday life without a constant tether to the other world leads to a slow drowning of the soul. In Fight Club, Tyler makes himself face reality:

Tyler: Stay with the pain, don't shut this out...Without pain, without sacrifice we would have nothing...Stop it, this is your pain, it's right here...What you're feeling is pre-mature enlightenment...This is the greatest moment of your life man and you're off somewhere missing it...First you have to give up, first you have to know, not fear, know that someday you're gonna die. It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything.

We need an umbilical cord to the beautiful and the extraordinary, and like a grub morphing into a dragonfly, we need to experience the death of our paradigm of the world before we can wake to the Real one.

I feel like I've been babbling a little, but, like I said, I haven't blogged in awhile so I'm out of practice. While nothing can be sustained indefinitely (On a long enough timeline, everyone's survival rate drops to Zero F.C.), with a little dedication and effort and sometimes a little help, a lot of things can endure, like the Gingko Biloba tree. Sometimes its a matter of cutting through our own crap and just making things happen. Case in point, a good friend of mine, Matt Birch, asked me to write a poem for his friends' anniversary. I've been trying for 6 months to come up with the perfect poem, that I haven't written a poem at all. I think I'll just write it, and however it turns out, it'll be okay. At least It'll be written.

Energy is an eternal delight, and he who desires, but acts not, breeds pestilence.
William Blake

Clearing out my old Facebook Notes (1)

I used to joke around about the strength of the Ludicrous, but I don't think I quite expressed my terminology right. I think what I was trying to say was, The Strength of the Significant Ludicrous. I would say significantly ludicrous, but that could be misconstrued to mean something was EXTREMELY ridiculous. Something that is significant and ludicrous at the same time. A paradox.

The example I would use to illustrate my eclectic word expostulation would be the "La Machine - La Princesse", a huge mechanical hydraulic spider as big as a house that costs millions of dollars and is operated by 9 men sitting inside a framework attached to the lifelike creature that is enormous and walks with spindly metal legs. When I first saw the "La Machine", it was being covered in a news story. The spider was walking down a street in liverpool England and caught everyone unawares. It was a piece of in situ art, or better said, in loco art (art in motion). The folks behind the whole plot sprang the spider on the city that day, and had a story line where the spider escaped, fireworks were flashed at it to try and corrall it, and finally it was calmed to sleep by a snowstorm (artificially generated).


All this aside, my initial raw memory was that of a huge metal spider, piloted delicately by 9 men (looking exactly like Apollo 11 mission controllers in their short sleeve dress shirts and glasses) perched on top of and embedded within the machine, bravely piloting a metal daddy long legs through a raging snowstorm. A rude pragmatist might sneer that it was an incredible exercise of futility and wasted effort that served no purpose, but I looked at it and was mystified and awed by the fantastic vision and visceral commitment to make that a reality. It was somehow thrilling to see intelligent and scientific men embarked on such task worthy of a scene from "The Never Ending Story". The poetry of ludicrous feats enacted as if they were significant, in some interesting way succeeds in making the ludicrous significant.

Now, that does not mean a show like Jackass could become significant merely because its actors are consistent in their devotion to nihilistic anarchy and defamation of all mores. Far from it. Bacchanalian revels worthy of True Blood's Maenaed Mary Anne are not expressions of art. They are simply overt demonstrations of excess that draw the curiosity of the majority who still stay within the boundaries of propriety but love to be be titillated and live vicariously through the flagrancies of the few.

What I am fascinated by is the feeling of liberation when we dare to do something beautiful, different, and unique, sometimes even rebellious. It is like the heroic quote from Salvador Dali:
“If I’m going to be any more than average, if anyone is going to remember me, then I need to go further in everything- in art, in life. And everything they think is real: morality, immorality, good, bad- ...I… we… we have to smash that to pieces, and we have to go beyond that. We have to be brave. No limits.”
It's what you find preached in Fight Club, hit bottom with a vengeance, punch through the pain into deeper meaning, never be complete! Its found in the Matrix, "There is no spoon", the mundane, predictable world out there of Starbucks coffee menus and subway time lines and being sequestered in our little office cubicle is not the only world unless we let that be the only world. We have been taught that we are organic creatures with a finite amount of life who must use that finite life in a very finite manner. What is wrong with being extravagant with this amazing gift? Why should any one of us even feel close to ending our lives where there is so much to get out of living? Whether beautiful or tragic, we are playing roles in a production of Shakespearean proportion that is occurring every day in real time. Therefore, we should at least play our roles, and if we can, play them well.

Our movies are filled with magic and mystery penetrating ordinary reality. From Vampires to Harry Potter, there is this dichotomy of the muggle world contending with dreamtime, and it seems, at least in art, that dreamtime is winning over the prosaic.

My point is that while it would be wonderful if more giant mechanical spiders were to walk down our streets in fake snowstorms for the pure hell of it, what is most important is that we all begin to think the way those people thought when they came up with these significant and ludicrous acts. We don't have to pilot a spider down mainstreet, but instead of acting like a stuffy adult with a pragmatic stick up our butt, we could appreciate it the way a kid would. I was running with someone the other day, and out of the blue, he did a random cartwheel and I thought it was coolest thing. If I acted the complete adult, the proper response would have been, what the hell is a matter with him? But, the kid in me recognized another kid, because ultimately, our bodies are the only things that age, and our personalities develop, but who we intrinsically are as children remains the same deep down. In fact, isn't that what someone a lot of people agree is the Creator of the Universe said, "that to enter the kingdom of heaven one must become like one of these, a child?".

Antoine de Saint Exupery knew this when he spoke of those tiresome adults to whom children have to explain everything to because they just don't get it. We all need to be like the little prince and where some folks see a shapeless hat, we see an elephant swallowed by a boa constrictor.



Or an amazing spider navigating through a snowstorm.

La Princesse - la machine

What do you see... an old hat? or....

a boa constrictor swallowing an elephant?

We always have our inner child. The question is, are they awake?

Then, after thinking about a little more after two days...

The World is Cloudy with Patches of Light

I wrote recently of the strength of the ludicrous when linked to the significant. I STILL had my terminology wrong... although I wasn't too off the mark. I should have said: the strength of the ludicrous when linked to the infinite.

Okay, I am beating the dead horse? Did I grind this into the ground so that my original meaning is rendered shapeless by myopic introspection?

No... it just takes time and and a couple of mental steps to sort stuff out sometimes. Maybe a good idea takes a couple minutes, maybe even a couple of days.

What I want to express, COMPLETELY, is that only when there is a radical but cooperative paradox is the incredible possible. Yet, when you really approach the "incredible", when you slow everything to single beats of a hummingbird wing, incredible things become very simple and ordinary things that are different only by their different/increased perspective.

So, to find the extraordinary in life, you must find a paradox. This paradox can be found only in the ordinary, the mundane. It will be "hidden" in plain sight. Search for the jewel, the elusive pearl across the Gobi Desert and the Black Sea, but ultimately it will be underneath your very mundane, poured concrete garden step stone, placed there by the Fort Lewis Equity Lawn Service.

We have seen this before in thousands of stories and myths, but familiarity has bred contempt. We think of Moses, Charlton Heston in a bible robe with a big white beard climbing impossible cliffs in the desert only to see the perfect olive tree framed in a perfect National Geographic Still natural rock formation that has a glowing saintly flame in the center; appropriate background music plays as a bass profundo voice booms King James at him. In reality, Moses was a America's most wanted contender fleeding a murder charge, and is working a temp job on a lawn crew, he has a stutter, and is weed eating the baseball field when a blackberry bush with a strobe light speaks to him. There's more than one story like that, whether Alice and Wonderland or the Russian movie I just watched, Dark Watch, and I just happened to choose one from the bible but they have all become part of our everyday metaphors and have lost their power. The other ironic thing is, the most amazing people in history were not that amazing when they were alive. Julius Caesar was short and bald. Abraham Lincoln had a high pitched nasally voice. We don't realize how ordinary and mundane they were, and that it was due to their persistent confidence and the few people who became radically devoted to them that their ideas eventually took hold. The great battles, the great heroes, if we really saw a true count of the battlefield or the size of the lizard, they'd probably have to redo Braveheart and Beowulf (we could diverge into a whole sub-argument saying that the original story gets eclipsed in myth, petrified into tradition, and locked into a safe dogmatism that breeds the whole evil cycle again (samsara), but I won't go there).

So I guess the endstate would be we seek the extraordinary in the ordinary, but do not mystify the ordinary into the extraordinary because then the extraordinary disappears and you are truly left with the ordinary without the magic. A matter a million times true as the ancient Egyptians say.

If you ever drive at twilight, or in a convoy before the days of night vision, you know you need to deliberately see with your peripheral vision. In the gloom you can't look at things head on or else you just can't make them out. The textbook version is to see with your rods and cones. You can't see this vision of the otherworld straight on, you must see it out of the corner of your eye, but see it deliberately. Almost anyone can catch a glimpse, but it takes dedication to remain self-aware.
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So, once you find the paradox of the ordinary shell hiding the hidden pearl, the second layer of discovery criteria is a unique blend of the ridiculous and the infinite. There must be laughter, there must be a child's heart, and there must be a sense of play; yet in of this, a sense of almost tragic, almost deadly sincerity and seriousness. There is no flippancy in this, but a blend of joy and sorrow.

Ultimately it is a personal and visceral choice to truly accept ourselves and the world as it is and not as we have it to be that frees us to see the beauty and simple magic in regular life.

We must seek the paradox as something valuable, not merely as an inane oddity.

Animals experience coincidence; true humans live in synchronicity.

Intelligent Design

Intelligent design. Right away, for some, they already know what I'm about to say. I'm pegged in my square hole with a dab of super glue. A cross marks the spot, and the obligatory quotation marks that precede the listing of a divine text.

No.

You would be mistaken.

No Bible.

No seven days.

No exegesis on: "A thousand years are as a day, and a day is as a thousand years to the Lord".

No, no, NO! 

My baseline for creation is not Judaeo-Christian. It is, I believe, realistically grounded by common sense. A very sensible belief based on combined human reason and the intuitive feeling in the heart. It is certainly in accord to the PRINCIPLES outlined in the creation myth found in the Bible, but it is not bound only by Biblical context. Although you could say the Genesis account might be bound to the Sumerian/Babylonian creation myths that same way a son is bound to a father.

I came from Catholic-Christian stock. Early on, I sat at the feet of parents, priests, and educators. I learned the Bible stories by heart, listened to audio tapes, SUPER SCOPE Storytellers at their finest with sound effects galore; I watched the teacher place bible cutout figures on a green felt board, studied my little scripture verse on a curling strip of colored paper. Believe me, I knew the progression from chaos into order as I painted dried salt-dough tree ornaments for each day of creation. 

I was also a homeschooler who grew up in the middle of the Texas Bible-belt. My best friend was a devout Primitive Baptist, well versed in Calvinism and the literal truth of the Holy Bible. We would roam home school book fairs where tables were heavy laden with books entitled, "The Case against Evolution", "In Defense of Creationism", "Why Darwin was Wrong". Trust me, I know about all sides of the Christian stand point.

Yet, I also had a strong love of archeology and ancient history. My parents loved National Geographic. We had stacks of the yellow bordered magazines stacked on the floor of closets. National Geographics had a strange, singular smell. An almost pungent, biting whiff of something strange imbued them with a mystery of lands of faraway, so reading was an experience in itself. Not to mention the occasional topless aborigine that my Mom had neglected to clothe in a black "sharpie" bikini. 

Also, just as some Dads have stacks of hidden Playboys that boys discover on a quiet summer afternoon, my Dad ordered massive hard-back tomes of the history of man and archeology and Space. I'm sure they were some special centenary editions for National Geographic, and my Mom and Dad thought they would be nice on the coffee table. They were, the "Big Books". Yet, they had too many bare-breasted primitive women in them, so they lived in the bottom drawer of the large cabinet from Ethan Allen. With appropriate permission, I took them out and pored over lineage charts that started from crouched primates until way down the ruler at about 14 inches the spine uncurled into an upright homosapien. I traced the relationships between the earth and the moon, the solar system within the galaxy, the galaxy within the its local cluster, and so on. I saw that the world is unbound and to borrow Annie Dillard's phrase, the Universe is un-hinged. While truth lay between the leather bound pages worn smooth by reverent fingertips, the meaning of the world and the universe could not be contained textually. Dogma might clear its throat, but it lacked jurisdiction. 

No atheist preached to me at the supper table. No earth-shattering disappointment hit me in the face. I was a kid raised not to believe in Santa Claus. I read and studied. Without a television, a child can read and study a lot. From bones and strata and artifacts, I formed my own conclusions. 

First.

The Universe was here a SUPER long time. Millions, billions of years.

Second.

Life had existed on earth a very long time. Sure, not quite as long as the Universe (of course!), but it was certainly not the date derived from Archbishop Usher, which was somewhere in the neighborhood of six thousand years. 

Third.

There was definitely some type of hierarchy within the twisted tree of life. I wasn't sure if my great ancient ancestor was an ape, but there was definitely some form of progressive hierarchy, as well as common traits.

I read Charles Darwin's Origin of the Species at age 14. It was interesting, a little dense, but I was impressed by it. The man was intelligent. I also sensed a disparity between the virulence of the well-spoken Christian men around me and the careful words of a thoughtful scientist.

Later on, I grew to love Science Fiction. From H.G. Wells to Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clark and Isaac Asimov, ideas percolated in a stew of fact, fiction, and fantasy. Science Fiction worked on my consciousness subtlety, and upon entrancing my defenses, sent swift arrows into my subconscious like smart missiles that ripped apart Iraqi bunkers. As I read their work, I danced to the music of their minds, and I saw their world in their perspective. I did not forsake my faith, but a conflict slowly churned within me. 

In the days before deep-space exploring satellites, some astronomers postulated the red storm on Jupiter could be caused by a tall mountain on the giant planet, that the friction of wind against an obstruction could manifest as an atmospheric disturbance visible from space. I don't know if a mountain causes Jupiter's red spot, but I know the conflict between my faith and reason definitely caused a spot that festered within my soul. I saw the hard facts, I witnessed solid science make its substantial claim. 

However, Krishnamurti says there cannot be conflict between two truths, or even just one truth and a falsehood. There is only conflict between two falsehoods. Once the truth is revealed, the conflict erodes suddenly into dust that is taken by the wind.

Later, I discovered a difference between Religion and the Spirit. 

When I suffered hurt from Religion, I recognized similar sympathetic reactions.

After shredding my conditioning, I realized both parties were adversely arrayed and guilty of a paradoxical opposition.

I have now discovered, upon shedding my personal discrimination against non-Christians, that while anti-Christian and often anti-spiritual paradigms do seem to dominate the Academic community, there are many scientists who maintain spiritual beliefs, especially among the quantum physicists.

Just as I decry many organized religions, so also do I shake my head at the organized sciences and much academia.

I will spare you the details of this cycle that ensued for at least a decade, a tidal war of the soul and spirit.

I will explain my final and currently standing conclusions.

Here is how I see it:

There is incredible synchronism and cooperation within multiple systems in the universe, ranging from microscopic scale to the macroscopic. This inherent sympathetic similarity is holistic. While demonstrated by the material, it is evident in all quadrants of creation. Physical Life, Psychological, Spiritual, even Mechanical, there is a constant refrain that echoes from the smallest of cells to the greatest of galaxies. There is no way I can understand the origin of life different than myself, such as God or non-earthly entities, but I do see a definite intelligent designer (s) responsible for life on earth. It is a non-issue to me if my creator was a finite but more advanced creature. That would not deny the existence of an eternal and all powerful being. In fact, the structure of the galaxy and larger universe still needs an explanation. But as for myself and the earth system, there was intelligent design. I don't believe all of this could happen by chance- there are too many non-variables and interdependent systems such as pollination and complex eco-systems. Also, I believe that there is no spontaneous evolution. There can be the perception of spontaneous evolution, but it would have been a carefully planned event with a cascading geometric propagation logic. If there is a principle of Evolution that drives organisms to evolve into complexity, then I think it must be animate, intelligent. Darwin's original idea of survival of the fittest works practically the way Newton's does for planetary motion, but when you get into the details and the spaces between, there are holes in the logic. A bacteria or spore can survive a rugged environment better than a complex organism. Why complicate a system by multiplying points of failure? If survival is key, than a microbial broth would make the most sense. I believe we were intelligently designed. That is at least a starting point of common acknowledgement that must be accepted by all dual parties. The debate of our creator (s)' origin is a mystery. It is unproven, and untenable to state that we truly know the face of our creator (s). Yet, to look at this garden planet, our creator or creators were visionary artists, incredible architects without parallel who could design such a complex system. I only wish we could find them. 

Reincarnation

First, the supposition: If something is even slightly possible, it must be considered.

Second, once considered, even if on the fringe, if that consideration is the simplest and "fits" best, than the validity of that consideration must be listed as viable.

Reincarnation blunts the trauma of the situation of an evil world, an all powerful god- as long as the creatures possess free-will, both during physical life and in the after-life.

If each human creature "chooses" its life freely, possessing foreknowledge of the circumstances, then god is not cruel but just.

The cruelty would be in the loss of memory upon birth, although there might be reasons why this is the case, especially when past memories before physical life would inhibit the creature learning a lesson it volunteered to learn, I.E. knowing the answers to the test, opening the cocoon for the caterpillar, etc.

If physical life is a temporary condition, chosen by the creature, then despite suffering and evil acts, first, the suffering is chosen beforehand, second, the suffering is temporary, third, if all souls have chosen their life-path, then all of the actions are synchronized and mutually beneficial and chosen.

This also might involve a temporal distortion, in that while on the earth plane, creatures are here for what seems like a long time, but is actually very short. There is only an illusion of temporal longevity- the earthly life is short, eternity is long, actually timeless.

Also, on the earth plane, the material mindset dominates, while spiritually, the material is inconsequential as a final reality but necessary to as a containment field to fix whatever cosmic original sin is plaguing mankind. It is a paradox.

Statement of Belief

Before intelligent design, here is a basic statement of belief written a year ago:

My belief is something only I can tell.
It is not theology.
I was not in Auschwitz, but if I was, it would not be theology that would keep my hope alive.


I believe what I believe because I believe it; my faith is not based solely on experience, but I have experienced much, and my experience has influenced my belief.

I do not believe what I believe because other people told me what I should believe. I do believe when what others have told me and shown me matches up. 
I believe in the absence of no hope of the truth.
I guess that could be redefined as a non-didactic faith.

I believe in the beautiful light.
I believe in good and simple actions that make the world and specific other people better.

I believe self sacrifice, humble service, and a forgiving heart to be the strongest weapons against evil and ignorance.

I believe God is like a parent, the perfect combination of Father and Mother.
I think God would be pissed if we wasted time arguing about God's gender.
I think God gets pissed when we argue about things at all.
Arguing and proving anything is bad energy.
Praying is good energy, even if you call it "good thoughts or intent", I think it is praying.
God wants us to pray.
If we pray every day, everything else will fall into place.
All people should pray,
Even if they are not "prayerful".
I think God would rather people pray, than be "prayerful".


I don't think we can understand all of the universe, but we can understand a lot of it.
I think religion is complicated, but the spiritual world is simple.
I don't think religion is good, but I don't think all religious people are bad.

I believe Jesus was who he said he was, we just don't always understand who he truly was.
I believe the world is a lot old than we think, and that God has been working with humans and all
creatures for a very long time. 

That said, we shouldn't throw away everything from the past just because during the last one hundred years we developed material centric and technologically advanced society.

I think that paradox is often the gateway to the truth.

I belief the truth must be believed, but often impossible to define.

I believed in the unknown variable of the known equation.

I believe in the sublime mixed with the ludicrous.

I think truth does not hold membership in denominations or carry a membership card.

I have explored many religions, and I have found the same problems in each.


I think we should stay away from religions and get closer to the Creator.

I believe we should seek after the creator and show the creator our love, and I believe we should love others and ourselves the way we love the creator.

A Decent Starting Point: An Old Hat or an Elephant Swallowing a Boa Constrictor?

There are several ways to start this series of online essays. But before I pull the starter handle and crank this motor into life, I might as well solidify the ultimate end-state. In my series of one page essays, I intend to try and capture the truths I have learned on my journey of my life's journey. These truths are not mere faith regurgitations, but ideas, proper forms that I have carved out the hardened concrete of conditioned paradigms. They are ideas that I have deliberately "CHOSEN". I emphasize this because this is not a polemical work designed to defend inherited beliefs.

No, this is my unique journey though 32 years of life and the unique stones and gems I have picked up along the path. While this has been a spiritual journey, I will not apply the adjective Religious.

Sufi riddles aside, I will state this plainly. I have strong SPIRITUAL beliefs. I despise RELIGION as a killer of the soul. So, yes, I believe in the spiritual, but separate it from religion.

Spiritual denotes "another world". Spirit does not need humanity, but in my opinion, humans are more complete with spirit.
Religion is a man-made structure, whether physical or mental or theological. But it is NOT spiritual. Religion needs humans, and humans are dependent on Religion.

I plan to write until I am spent.
When I am spent, I will collate these essays into a book.
So I guess these essays entail a journal of sorts. I will endeavor to write one page a day, on whatever topic seems particularly cogent at the time. Perhaps, as I write, an outline will loom out of the mists of my personal Ginnungagap. I suspect one thought will follow another until the writing is done.

And so, what about my first post's title?

If you are familiar with one of my favorite human beings, the French writer and aviator from the early part of the 20th century, Antoine de Saint Exupery, you will have an immediate reference point. In his seminal and ever-popular work, The Little Prince, he opens the book with a sufic disclaimer of sorts. He remarks that his first work of art as a child was that of a boa constrictor swallowing an elephant. When he showed adults his artwork, they only saw an old hat. So he reproduced the drawing, only in the second attempt, he gave an X-ray view of the snake so adults could understand his drawing.

"

The adults responded by telling him to cease drawing foolish pictures of Boa Constrictors and focus on more important things. Thus marked the premature end of an artistic career. However, he does say that he kept the drawings, and when he met new people, he would show them the first picture and ask what they saw. If it was a hat, then he would "get down on their level" and speak of only practical, economic, and material realities. However, if they saw an elephant swallowed by a boa constrictor, he would sit back and have a REAL conversation about the beauty of a sunset or whether a distant star was alive.

The story is enjoyable in an anecdotal way, but it has a deeper meaning. Simply, that if you are an adult of the "muggle" variety (an adult whose inner child is imprisoned by the iron suit of the archetypal "Grown-up"), then you will only see what you have been conditioned to see. Your eyes are closed, and you are asleep. If you see the elephant in the constrictor, the hidden truth, then you are awake. You will understand. There is a chance for you. Either way, like a sufi fable, depending on the health of your inner child, you will either see just the superficial story, or if you have eyes to see, the greater truth carried inside like a letter in an envelope.

So.

In my following posts, there will be many boa constrictors with elephants rampaging inside. If a lot of my stuff seems to be just "old hat" or simply inscrutable, then you should probably hit the "next blog" button.

Please be patient.
I have a lot to say, because a lot has happened in my life.
I hope by breaking it all down into short essays, blog entries, it will sort itself into something coherent.

Here's hoping.

Cheers!

Tomorrow's Projection: Intelligent Design