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, May 26, 2020

I will discuss a moment something very beautiful and very important that everyone knows but almost nobody remembers. It is this-nobody can embarrass an infant. It is impossible. You were once such a creature…beyond an embarrassing experience. The world had to first build up inside your head an image which it could embarrass before it would accept you as one of “us”. It gave you a name and then drilled that name into your consciousness to the point it one day embarrassed the named kid…not you, by the way, but the named kid you had become. Now you had a feature the world could send to school and later to war.  It had control of you. You were a citizen now. Not happy, sad, actually. There is beauty in an otherwise sad story, though, and the beauty is that you were never made to give up entirely on the baby who could not be embarrassed, the amazing creature who never once gave a thought to its appearance in the eyes of anybody else. It lives on inside you.  It , I call, the heart, so courageous, so bold, so full of passion, so intelligent, so wise, so devastatingly fascinating to observe. It’s free. It’s you! Given a chance, it will show you and everybody else it is as kind and generous and and tolerant as it is courageous and bold and free. How divine!


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