I think this is my all time forever favorite song.  I’ve loved it since I was a boy.  I did not understand then.  It just moved me somehow.  I think I am beginning to understand now.  Not something to do in your spare time.   It is so rich and layered with meaning.  Don’t ever wish to be an artist or you may learn why Vincent cut his ear off.  Don McLean was a Bard.  Beautiful were his words. There was truth is his music.  Be Groovy.

Listen to this.  Empty Chairs

Crossroads

Babylon

And of course American Pie

 

What say ye, cap’ain? | Impromptu Promptlings.

This is a friend of mine though we have never met in the flesh.  She is wise and sensitive and and is a worker of miracles though she may not acknowledge them.  Read this beginning of her story and encourage her to finish it.  It is a thing that if she does not do will never be done.

I include this song cause I thought of it when I read her work and because it reminded me of the skating rink a long time ago and how even then my little heart was a romantic one.

I should draw better than I do by now.  But as I look at this, my art, I smile.  It is teaching me something.  It taps into a part of my soul that has been left unattended for too long.  I remember him.  He was a sweet shy thing, curious and loving.  They called him cute and he would cover his shyness with a wide toothy grin and bright shining brown eyes.  Where this crooked smile I wear now came from I don’t know.  I much prefer the other.  I thought of him the other day when one of my new friends made a gracious comment about something I had written here.  Out of nowhere and most unexpected, I found myself grinning like he used to.  No self-consciousness just beaming bright, turned on.  I used to draw pictures in my mother’s kitchen.  I would sit on the floor with my paper making marks with crayons.   And she would pick out the best and attach it to her refrigerator with a magnet.  I liked that a lot.

I came to this blogging thing with some hope that I might have something to say or that maybe I should be a writer or something.  Or that, if nothing else it would be a place to put the scattered thoughts and ideas and feelings that were given little attention for decades. Was not thought out.  I had no business plan.  No serious psychological or philosophical underpinning to guide my way.   It was an instinctual impulse arising out of desperation. I still don’t even know how to do most of what is required to have a “serious” or important blog.   But here I am.

You see, I had become quite competent and clever and serious about life and managing the many roles I was playing.  Doing OK, playing the game, successful (whatever that means).  But there was always this thing in the back of my soul that would well up from time to time.  It seemed to whisper to me, I guess trying to get my attention.  It was never really clear just an ill-defined longing, some deeply felt dissatisfaction, a sweet grief that has been with me through these five+  decades.  I had an answer for it that stayed just out of conscious reach.  It was something like “When I get all this other done then maybe I can do what I want to do, or at least find out what the hell that might be.”  And it would pass amid all the outside important business that called for my attention.  Well, let me suggest to you that was not a good policy. 🙂   Apparently if one does not listen to their soul’s whispering to them, She will get louder and louder and finally She’s gonna start breaking shit.  At least that is what happened in my case.  The message I am getting from Her lately is to ” sit my young ass down and start coloring again, and be quiet while you are doing it.”  She can be a little bitchy when I am being stupid.  She has my attention now.  She has put her foot down.  Scary huh?  I bet you would draw too.

I have been thinking about my writing and my art or, whatever word might work.  And I have come to the conclusion that I need to keep that picture in my mind when I create.  No $500 fountain pens or Moleskin journals for me.  I only want typing paper and crayons (not printer paper).  That’s my speed, and my medium.   I have decided now that I do not want to be a writer.  But I will write.  I will bite my tongue as I concentrate and try real, real hard to form the letters of the words I am trying to say.   I will write with my crayons and offer them up to you.  If you like you can put some of it on your refrigerator.   And when you do know that I will feel a little shy and will cover it with a sweet wide grin and there will be a bright light shining from my eyes.  Be Groovy! 🙂

What is it that motivates some to become dissatisfied with the “good” and go off seeking the sublime?  At times risking all, destroying self, bringing on suffering, grief, and poverty of the Soul?  It is called by many names.  Longing, soul ache, wanderlust, calling, pilgrimage, the “pearl of great price,”  I’ve heard it spoken of in many ways.  The energy of the thing motivates the great epic romances and whatever the latest Hollywood thing is.  It is over and against the impulse that suggests one should be realistic and indulge the notion only from time to time at the Theater, or Church, or Nature.  They are all temples of a sort and theaters of the soul.  It is safe and contained in those places.   The rituals, the holy ones, the participants, and the observers, temper the fierce untamed thing and keep it in check.  Here we can sigh longingly, smile or cry as needed, feel the effect of its elixir, then seal up that place again before returning to the real world.

But there seems to be an experience of “Oughtness” which manifests in glimpses of experience and thought and emotion that temps, and teases, and intoxicates, and can become so powerful that  the “good” the “real world” begins to feel mundane, barren, distasteful, and abhorrent.   It may truly be insane, unless of course the “real world” is fashioned on a lie.

There is a sense of insanity in that reason or morality, in the common usage of the word, has  little sway on the process and outcomes.  There are natural laws of existence which provide rough boundaries and consequences.  But its like rocks and sand and surf that cut and grind a swimmer caught up in currents too powerful to manage.  The swimmer has some say in direction and survival manages enough air to keep him alive.  But in the end at best he only avoids one rock to cash into another.  He will be ground down into the sand.  His flailing only changes the when and where to some small degree.  He will eventually, inevitably be washed up on a shore because that is the nature of the place where the water and the dry land meets.

Morality, I think, is not an external force or law like gravity.  It is rather that which manifests itself in the wake of strong, elemental, righteous, true, desire.  Morality can not be a set of rules, or instructions, or a recipe for living.  If it were my cake would have already been baked.  I think rather it is thought and action and emotion which is viable in terms of manifesting that which the heart most desires.  The Pearl of Great Price.

The “insanity” I experience is in my Soul’s stubborn insistence that being reasonable and realistic won’t do.  She will not allow me the comfort of what has been done before even though much of it was admirable even “good.”  She longs for a resounding Yes!  An affirmative from some particular vaguely defined source.  Now it is as if all, but a very few familiar things and people,  repel and drain life from me.  Survival dictates some minimal action to push into the pain, to search out some heretofore unknown pathway.  But I think that like with the rocks and the surf the process will take me to its own end and all my agitation only delay its completion.

With that being said it is still as if I watch while the most tender, sweet, and honest parts of me (the few left)  are given to someone else on a whim.  My protests are irrelevant and laughable.  My mind knows the equation is unbalanced and that  I am the equation.  I have always been the one working the problem and it seems I have been using a math that was not intended for me or is beyond my capability.

I have created love relationships with people and things and ideas that I could not retain.   I poured myself into their leaky container and was spilled out onto the ground.  I mistook cleverness for wisdom and studied the ways of men in order to join their games.  I sought to master and be provided for and sustained by the external.  But all that I built eventually crumbled leaving me desolate and impoverished.  As above, so below.  The external is a mirror of the internal.

These three remain:

Faith – (a verb) To act in accordance with one’s hope.

Hope – The ability to imagine that  It must be so!

Love – Saying Yes to reality, to what is.  Acceptance of the duality beginning with my own.

Edison it is said found 9999 ways not to make a light bulb.  I hope I can beat his record.

No the other way. 🙂

Be Groovy!