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, January 25, 2018

What's all this talk

in religious or spiritual language? I do not trust lingo that presumes in advance I agree it has meaning.

Its direction seems always to be pointing out that I should be more than I am. I suspect it is the language of people who are sure of themselves and who want something. If the only purpose of it is to lure minds into a nonexistent world of imagination and belief I am not interested. I have been there. I consider myself fortunate, blessed even, to have escaped such nonsense with my life. Perhaps the allure of all that language to a human being is a promise someday things will change and I will understand. But if it cannot deliver the goods, what then? It has been spoken and written for a very long time without those hoped for results materializing. For many the promise is all about a life after death. What about now? I am alive. I yearn. Somebody said, life has no purpose, make one up. That makes no sense. Purpose by definition, cannot be falsified. Has anybody here seen dignity? Bob?

I choose one term out of the bag of words with either no meaning or 1000 meanings, take your pick. The same. The word I choose is soul. I will look for mine. When I find it, I will say, Oh, there you are. And caress it and in that caress give myself to it where I find it and be done with all else that is not it.

I look for what in me is restless, discontent. What I find I will console and make content, or die in the attempt. I seek something or someone who has been rejected, left out, abandoned. I need some realization not some pacifier. It is not in the word soul I will find it. I seek to know me as I am where I am in the situation I find myself to be doing what I am doing with my chance called life. I want the truth of it.


In that yearning I sense what is stirring me to seek it. It is not too late. Nor is it too soon.

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