Here i sit, once again - staring at a blank page · delicate flower that i am, that blank page almost feels violent. Age, however, precludes that easy assumption and i realize at some level i am simply staring at my own emptiness. When younger and full with ego, i might have seen a rich future of recognition and understanding of my valiant effort to help mankind, help herself. Now it is just one more opportunity to honor the privilege of breathing at a time in human history when so many are being robbed of that simple pleasure. I say robbed, because i am certain this plague is manageable and has only risen to a threat due to incompetence and greed, again by that same August Body of “leaders” who are no doubt clustering in highly sanitized bunkers and possibly too frightened to count their money, much less take a vanguard position to save others. We, all of us already know in our hearts how little the “powerful” in this struggling world of ours esteem our wellbeing and safety, for if it is not war that gets us, then it will be: poverty, gratuitous destruction of the eco-system; arrogant technical manipulation of the agency of free people, racist division of the species in service of war from that same technical manipulation; or just plain old fucking fatigue.
Last night, i spent the better part of the night in a twilight zone of a semi-conscious state, not from excessive substance abuse, but from a conscious decision to pray as best i know how by chanting my homegrown mantra believing more and more with each breath that we are powerful in what we think, and what we hope for - a power that is magnified a gazillion times when it is on behalf of people we know, and a googol times more powerful when we pray on behalf of people we don’t know. Don’t believe me, i’m crazy, but i’m happy. When i woke finally after having given myself permission to sleep my fill, it was not with the weight of the world that had kept me semi-conscious throughout the night, but with the joy of having tried to help, however stupid my effort may have sounded at the time to my rational indoctrination. Peace of heart is important, don’t believe me, ask the Dalai Lama, but more importantly ask yourself if you have ever gained an inch from strife.
My young family life was fraught with the conceit of the time - later to be described by the Neo-Liberals as exceptionalism · what a crock of shit, John Kennedy was shot dead by a cabal of petrol nazis and there was nary a peep from the “Sargent of Arms” as though Bob Dylan was more than a minstrel but an actual agent of the great beyond trying to warn us against our own hubris. My family is comprised of decent people to a fault, parents and progeny. We lived next door to a family who were soon to become Mormons and who to this day i hold dear to my heart, though young T____dy in our few exchanges after 4o years, soon deteriorated into a vituperative rant of such violent and indiscernible nature i yanked the plug within hours. His namesake father was a kind gentle man, though daughters within the home suffered from physical violence i only understood 30 years after the fact. My family’s violence was more genteel and of an insidious nature that is now described as “gaslighting.”
We are awash in violence, and to keep one’s head above water is a continual challenge - while the greater challenge is to not return fire. This is hard for me, for i had no example but the streets and the bare knuckle vernacular that allows wounded people worldwide to love in a violent world. For the longest time i wanted to believe the repartee i had learned in the streets was received in the same vein i had delivered it - tongue in cheek · that violent dishonesty is my own covert violence toward myself and personal shame for a softness i protected without really knowing why. I am slowly understanding better that the insults that came so quick to my tongue were defensive in nature for a fiction i had constructed about the nature of a world i experienced, and continue to experience as cruel and unfeeling. What i discounted was the force of my own orientation and responsibility for wounding people who were not even aware of their unkindness, much less in a position to defend themselves against fantasies that were in large part created out of my own fears.
Now i am going to die, if not tomorrow or the next day, much sooner than my date of birth. When i was very young i tried to conceive of what the word heaven used by adults meant. At the time there was much writing that got filtered down, even to the young about cosmology and what the expanse of the universe might be; this may have even predated the “big bang” theory of spontaneous expansion and certainly was before any “string theory,” but there was enough vague references about the enormity of our universe to capture my young imagination. Just like all thinking, i had difficulty embracing any thought that did not include my family constellation, much less the concept of death - but i tried, because that is how my family rolled, at that time. Later such visions of family became much more self-centered and narrow from renegotiation and betrayal, which is the inherent process of all learning. Today, i don’t know; which is the single most valuable lesson i have taken from my upbringing. Sometimes that ignorance is so overwhelming i am fraught with fear, but due to the focus on curiosity from my parents it always gives way to the same feeling i might have had on an early summer morning wondering what new adventures i could find in that long coming day in front of me.
jts 13/08/2020
http://stoanartst.blogspot.com
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
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