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!

Sunday, May 24, 2020

1968

In the Summer of 1968 I know something happened to change me forever but I was unaware it happened or that I had changed either. I lived on until now inside that new, invisible cocoon where I was molded by loving hands to become one of these… 52 years later. While that was underway, I was aware only briefly from time to time that, “I am different somehow and I like it”.


This afternoon I looked hard into those years right up to that fateful summer. I noticed a few important happenings. In April and then June, Martin and Bobby had been assassinated. I was about to begin my third and final year of Law School. The political scene that Summer was an insane parade of wild, weird, incomprehensible freak shows. In Chicago, the Democrats led off with violent beatings and stomping and kicking and jailing of many kids my age also students who dared protest in the streets and parks. It was sickening to watch on television. People just like me being treated in such horrible ways by policemen who behave as if they hate them ferociously. That could be me. Should it have been me? The trials of those kids in Chicago who were the leaders of the protests were a complete mockery of anything resembling justice. By now, I knew it. I had learned enough to know better and had not yet stepped into a courtroom to try a case. 


And it was to be another 24 years until it was revealed to me, an honor graduate, that as early as 1830, when the nation was only about 30 itself, then President Andrew Jackson directly and without apology flaunted the United States Constitution by ordering the Trail of Tears forced march of all Indians across the Mississippi River to live on Reservations designated suitable by the white politicians in direct violation of the order of the Supreme Court which told him he could not do so legally because the Constitution, the supreme law of the land, forbids it. That is not taught in Law Schools in the United States. In my lifetime, I lived to listen to another President tell the world on television,”If the President does it, it cannot be illegal”. These guys with swollen egos never learn. In my law practice, I  saw many times the laws disregarded by courts, police, lawmakers and elected leaders. It is enough to make anybody sick. I even once wore a tiny device to record a public official tell me repeatedly, “forget the law, let them have what they want” (meaning the authorities.)

Okay, that which I turned out to be when I emerged from the cocoon?  It is a whooper swan! Have you met someone who knows who he is and is happy with it? Such a one can make peace with the world he lives in and experience that miracle while alive, regardless of what others do or do not.


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*Let me add that it was the darkness played an important role in that transformation, as important a role as the light within the cocoon. Both are with us.  Which will you feed the most? Think it over.

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