A WHOOPER SWAN'S DIARY: 02/07/18

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!

Wednesday, February 7, 2018

*WIND

Of late, have I spent months in almost constant wind. Strong wind, most of it, without noticing until just this moment that the wind itself is silent. It is the effect of it on things, such as trees, that make the sounds I associate with wind. Now, I hear a kind of music being made by relationship of many tall trees and wind, roof and wind, siding and wind, grasses and wind. There is more to it than I thought. Also, there is a story.
Something silent is back of it. A feeling is back of that. I am alert now.
I can easily develop ideas, they pop up, around which the wind is causing me unnecessary irritation, upsetting me, threatening me, and that should not be the case. What are my thoughts they should want me to take it personally? For me, Wind should stop? Hmmm. For months, I have been asking myself, How long must I endure this constant pounding in my brain? But instead, just now, I prefer to take another route. I am in relationship to what is happening between silent, invisible force, an energy, and all things in the vicinity of where I stand. Not separate. Not isolated from it.
I am dominated suddenly with a feeling. The feeling that I am out of my element in judging the wind, the silent energy that is moving all around me. I want to escape somehow from arrogance to still myself, not the wind. Pay attention! Pay attention, full attention to a symphony that is playing wildly to see it for what it is, not abstractly, in ideas, but actually. I am here. I am actual, not an abstract idea, or a bundle of them, as I was until a few moments ago, I am present within the play of life, not my life, life!
I looked up as tress were being tossed back and forth, helpless instruments yielding to the strain, asked to endure relentless poundings from a player who has something important to say! And it is as if I am one of those trees! I resound! My heart leaps out of my body! I have no fear of the wind, no urge to run away from it, am not apart from it, and all of a wild happening thrills to be included. I dig it!
I don't even want to say what it is I learned, only that I did. If we made this journey together there was no leader and no follower on a happy inquiry together.