A WHOOPER SWAN'S DIARY: 06/16/21

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, June 16, 2021

A time came…

When I suddenly found myself saying, “I want to know who I am more than I want the approval of another human being. Who am I really? That was my question and so strong was it there was no room for another question inside of me.

The other day I heard a talk on the subject of loyalty. The speaker came to say, as humans we should all be loyal to humanity. I shuddered at the term “should be”. It got me to thinking that I have been confronted with that term from the time other people had made me into a creature who could begin to comprehend their words…”should be”. By now, I am deeply experienced in the way of trying to be what I should be. It began at home. Then there was the radio. Then there was television. And schools. A spouse. And bosses. And groups I said I belonged to. Exercises. Diets. Religions. Politics. Art. Music. Books. And I had failed many times to be what I should be. I began to notice more and more that, wait a minute, for every thought I have of what I should be there is the opposite thought. I have been brought slyly into a great war inside of me by all this confusion. And I call it “My Life”. I considered an attempt to end it. Then the thought came instead to risk it all and find out who I really am loyal to if anybody. Immediately the term “Loyalty” came to have new meaning. I wanted to know who I am loyal to naturally absent any effort to be loyal. I thought of my cat. She was a one-man kitty naturally. I had no doubt about that. My cat was not striving for approval at all. In fact, she was teaching me how it can be so for a living thing to just be. I was seeing it as a strong sort of stubbornness that I had to admire greatly, so foreign was it to me. I wondered whether I might have that kind of stubbornness in me when it clicked that my single question was coming from such a place.

And gradually I am aware more and more that the truth is that the moment a named virtue is cultivated it loses all sense of being virtuous for it loses the soul in its meaning which is what my cat had all along. She was what she was and asked not to be congratulated.

I want to add that a willingness to stop shopping for meaning is the same as turning a valve in me that floods me with just enough stubborn to be a real human being.

NOBODY has written this before.