A WHOOPER SWAN'S DIARY: 02/22/23

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, February 22, 2023

I am reading a small book by Larry McMurtry entitled Crazy Horse. Only about 150 pages it seems to me the author accomplished what I would have thought impossible by presenting a reader with a biographical work which makes the characters not to be read as worthy or unworthy performers in an historical account but to be met up with as the real people each must have been. It leads me to say that we, all people, are like droplets in a body of water flowing and no drop is more or less important in the description of how the river flows. It flows as it does. McMurtry’s book shows the human race of people go as the composition of its droplets, taken together, move it along. People treat each other very badly. Attempting to explain who are the important players (droplets) is as ridiculous an undertaking as the ranking of droplets in a body of water. It’s a whole body of humans. Those few droplets of human consciousness who are the stuff of myths are inevitably the very ones about whom almost nothing is known, the mysterious ones, who honor something unspoken which reminds me that anonymity is a powerful reality.

I was tickled to learn that when complete, if ever it is, the statue of Crazy Horse in the Black Hills of South Dakota will be the largest sculpture ever made on Earth thus far. McMurtry writes that for all such as Crazy Horse “fact withers in the heat of myth”. And that short sentence is the vitality of “myth” itself. A history book of “fact” is always untrue. Crazy Horse, unlike Sitting Bull, did not escape into Canada when it looked inevitable that whatever they have to do the White Men will do to take all of their homeland: and with it the right to exist. Jesus did not escape his arrest and execution. Billy the Kid did not run from New Mexico to save his life. Perhaps they just did not want to leave home. Therein is a taste of what is meant by

“there lies something before us and in us unseen that transcends thought”

Could it be the reality of one, indivisible human consciousness? Until that is grasped we humans remain but a conflicted, confused, lost and selfish lot separate and unnaturally lonely in the river of life, killing our own. How can one learn what the water is like? Only by jumping in!