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!

Monday, June 6, 2022

 A Memory, Or

Once I was chasing a tiger in the forest 



When I was a Kid riding with pals in a Chevrolet convertible on the Drag seated on the back of the back seat my ass out on the trunk with my feet inside the car and a beer in my hand on a beautiful Spring day in Austin came on the radio blasting fully “Like A Rolling Stone" by Bob Dylan and what I remember most of it was the line "You got nothing to conceal”. It followed the chorus line "How does it feel” and by then I was ready to allow the line to reach my deepest heart to show me for a moment there the feeling of being without a thing to hide from anyone…not even God Almighty. Like everybody who has heard it for the first time my response was “I never heard a song like that on the radio” and “they don’t play music like that from a commercial radio station” and what I really meant was “I never been affected thataway by a song before”. Thataway is when a song is so personal it is your song singing itself to free you up from an inescapable prison of bad ideas. When that happens one knows by actual experience, if only for a brief moment, what is meant by the term “paradise” and all its synonyms. And one will never be the same after that. And that is so even if it will take around two more decades for you to be ready to go for the feeling and find out for yourself whether it is real. 

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