A WHOOPER SWAN'S DIARY: 12/22/16

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!

Thursday, December 22, 2016

LOST ALREADY

What is the forgotten language Thomas Wolfe sought to find again, in order truly to go home again? Do you ever feel you have left something important behind in your rush to join into some celebration contrived by others before you to get you on their side of things? To get you speaking their language, thinking their thoughts, doing their waltz on promises never quite delivered? Sort of like an editor at a great publishing house using tricks to shape your beloved work into what can be sold for a profit measured by dollars? He lies to you about being a person dedicated to good books while castrating your wild newborn so it will never reproduce its particular line of sensational driftwood. Who has the figures to know what has been lost already?

Feel for one brief moment breathing in and out with beating heart look inward from a third eye opened by the gentlest touch of an index finger placed at a shallow groove just above the brow directly over the nose. Tap gently there ever so lightly keeping the other two eyes closed. The shadow within is the friend you have forgotten. The one with you in the crib who never left. Next, closing up the ears with the fat part of the thumbs, listen to an ocean that lies inside the protective skull from which a body is strung like an instrument for playing music to the bottom of the feet. If you have already named one, observe that you are a sort of tree with four branches that walks upon rather than being fastened within the earth. Observe it that you are a worm, if you have named one of those, with arms and legs. When you realize you are no big deal, notice how so many demons fall silent. When that has happened how do you feel now?