THE STORY OF JOHNNY WHOOPER SWAN We go to school trusting our parents. We meet a teacher there who stands up front with a big desk, and a pointer. She or he trains us in an authoritative manner. We attach mentally to a life long need for authority in order to live lives successfully. Right so far? In my case, at the age of 25 I was ready to enter the practice of law where I hoped for success and a happy life finally. Very shortly, very shortly, I became anxious. There was a foreboding. I was made more uncomfortable with each experience. Law work is nothing like what I was told it would be. The system is corrupt. But I still cling to my expectation that career success is necessary to my happiness as a man. Each day my grasp of what the fuck success amounts to after all becomes more clouded, murkier. I hear songs on the airwaves and at concerts which describe my life as the life of a fool. What am I becoming? I want to rip off my business suit to run naked in the street with my hair on fire! But I am too afraid. In strange, weird (weird comes from a word meaning wise), fragmented steps I go about a journey of my own believing myself to be the first man to have failed in such a total way which journey works so as to break up my career, end a marriage, and start an entirely new way of relating with my two children whom I love deeply. Almost magically I meet a woman who is a career counselor who asserts a beautiful message that I am made to be joyful in my work everyday and at all levels. This understanding sets me on a completely new course. It is no longer a world of systems to me but an undivided one of unlimited beauty. It reminds me of a painting. A true masterpiece. I am drawn from within to learn the truth about my identity and nobody else can teach me that. From this point onward I will use thinking capacity for mastering mechanical processes and follow my heart, which includes my whole nature, which includes your whole nature and that of every human being for all the rest. I’ll go by the name Johnny Whooper Swan who does not explain itself to anyone. By my fruits shall I be known. Watch me soar!

Tuesday, August 23, 2016

To Be Humans Again


The salt of the Earth. That is what a man who loved people called us. And it seems to me we have fallen so far from that role it staggers me to imagine how did it happen?

A truly dedicated man who was somehow still playing the role originally assigned to all of us, Salt, who was named Sebatsiao drew pictures of us with a light box which enabled him to see through a lens what most of us cannot or will no longer see to show us to us, that man, taught me something true. It was in watching a documentary of the life of this man and his loyal wife that it was possible. For more than twenty years I have been trying to understand what I saw in an hour or two one day in the studio of a stone carver in Austin. I realized then that the trade of stone mason arose at the time men slaved to build pyramids. But why? I asked myself, would any human being willingly spend their one life in such a way? And no answer came except, well, they did...and the do still.

I have slowly seen that even in the lives of very adventurous humans who go into the unknown regions of reality as brave and lonely explorers at the behest of some calling...or some kick in the pants from behind...which? Both. Depending on what is needed at the moment. Oh, yes, I did not make a complete sentence. So what? I'll continue as of it is perfectly as it should be. Even in those lives, the explorers lives, one finds a point where the trailblazer vanishes into the stone mason chain. Have you seen that? Yet?

The photographing holy man I spoke of earlier became so sick of what he drew with his camera that he could go on no more living at all, unless, he found something else to behold to take him away from the Hell he had displayed so boldly before us. And he did.

Know what that man...one man, who listened to his wife ask, why don't we replant the forest that once was your home and is now a barren wasteland, did? As impossible as the idea seemed to him and others who heard it, they began to replant trees, tiny little plants. In 15 short years it had become a magnificent green forest again. You can go to Brazil today and tour it. Or, search it on the internet with the aid of sat-il-light and look at pictures drawn with the light there that are meant to depict its glory.

The man was restored himself. He who gave so much he almost died lives as whole man, Salt Man. Not just the great forests can be restored, humans!
Johnny Smith,
traveler to this land
longing to be human being



p.s. And the new forest in Brazil? Why, that is no longer owned by Sebatsiao's family that is a dedicated public park.


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