A WHOOPER SWAN'S DIARY: 04/27/23

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!

Thursday, April 27, 2023

WHO BUT YOU?

If you, the Reader, are young and have a full life ahead of you, you hope, and you have one or more children, born or yet unborn, and you love them deeply do you want them to enter into this world as it is? Be serious, please. You love them dearly and you know this world must change if it is to be livable. What are you going to do? You tell me you are busy planning to do exactly what you have inherited as a way of living. I believe you. And yet, I want to urge upon you the realization of what a dangerous thing it is you are about doing. People are telling you to get on with it as your parents have done and their parents did and their parents going back as far as anyone knows. They tell you in so many ways constantly that for you to do anything else is unacceptable in the eyes of God. You buy it! How can you? Tell me you are deliberately going to accept these commands from others in place of the obvious facts before your own eyes! I don’t believe you.

How would it feel to you to say, instead, I know not what I am going to do with my life from this moment out but I know what I am not going to do? Will not the love for your children be enough to make you undertake the unknown that frightens you so? Who else but you?