A WHOOPER SWAN'S DIARY: 05/12/20

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 12, 2020

I Am

I am an alcoholic. That actually means only that I carry within me a possibility of plague which at any time may erupt. I live with it. Was given by another such person a strategy for doing just that. You may have it too. It is not for me to say you do.

I recall a morning when seated at a coffee shop alone at a table on an outdoor balcony with a laptop in front of me being joined without any warning by a beautiful young woman who asked if she could join me at my table when the others were empty and nobody else in sight except we two at the time. More than happy was I to assent. I was tickled.

As we talked she got from me the admission, “I , myself, am an alcoholic.” She told me of an uncle who she loved very much who she said she was sure had to be one. Then she added, “I believe if my life had been a bit different I too would likely have become also an alcoholic. It is in me, she added.

Later she added, “ I have a close relationship with a God of my understanding but never do I talk to anyone else about my relationship to God so I do not know why I am speaking of it with you now, but I am. We talked there until it was time for her to leave to pick up her children.

I tell this because it is a tricky way to address what IS IMPOSSIBLE TO ADDRESS directly. I mean the plague we carry if we carry it. There is afoot a play of a sort which is divine by nature and the players are all of us and the world is a stage as someone famous said a long time ago. The play invites us to discover our selves as we are where we are and give it our full attention. A gap in time is to be found by this act. An escape, a victory if we want, is about to happen. It appears on the surface as a response to a plague and it becomes a reliable strategy for living with it bravely.

It is so difficult to accept maybe that happiness is not at all what we are programmed to believe it to be. In fact, it is not anything to be found by a search. It is not out of reach for it is in us along with the plague. In this way it is learned that evil is the same as good, death the same as life, and the two work together on behalf of the ultimate, same nature. When you think about it, you may realize they have no choice in the matter. Water always seeks the ocean by the path of least resistance. And the ocean it seeks is inside the drop of water.

Flowing may be the nature of the strategy mentioned. May you be blessed.