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, February 19, 2018

And another thing

Go to a lecture at ivy-covered Harvard University (there you will see a living pyramid of ass-kissing action). You'll not hear anything so wise and powerful as time spent alone with a tree. Einstein received Theory of Relativity from a beam of light he watched bouncing around free. And, he was a misfit, an outsider, a daydreamer who wrote to his family, saying, it would have been better had I never been born. Said he wanted to understand how God thinks. Do you and I want that? What better way than to listen to God's own symphony? Indeed, what other way is there? A pyramid? That accursed management tool?

That was a fool's attempt to outwit death. Many workers struggled in service to that monstrosity and not one Pharaoh has come back to collect his treasure (still in the pyramid, stolen, or in a museum) or to give out advice about cheating death. What is known popularly as science operates in a cloudy, murky closet directed from the top down in the image of a pyramid. Same is true of politics and religion and education and business and all facets of the art and speech worlds. All of these are dollar driven. The same figure is displayed on the dollar bill and that's as unstable as a three-legged table. Man, talk about failing to learn from experience!

Life thinks. Anything that comes between man and the way life thinks retards brilliance. Because of the long endured tyranny of pyramid regimentation, which is the opposite of how life thinks, it has always had to come from the fugitive, the misfit, the daydreamer who reaches somehow beyond the weight of suffering loneliness to call attention to truth. Now, more than ever before, do we lack the genius of brilliance. Never did it have to be rare. It need be rare no longer.

If we only will listen, Yours, Oh Sweet Giver of Brilliance, is our deliverance!



Sunday, February 18, 2018

The Way I Am


It is established in understanding now that water by its nature flows along the path of least resistance on its way to join the oceans. How convenient. Is there a similar dynamic available to an ordinary human being like me which will help me find an ocean of peace in my life? It happens there is such a friendly dynamic awaiting my discovery. It works like this: when I follow the path of least resistance I find a friendly power that leads me gradually to take on the attributes of an ocean of peace that I am a part of by my nature. Conveniently, I absorb the exact type of qualities in the correct amount I am going to need as I flow along my way. I am fortunate after all.

Thursday, February 15, 2018


I'd Rather Sit this One Out


We are all fools who attempt to tell the meaning of things absent the slightest understanding of what it is we mean nor what could even be meant by someone or something. Very superficial are we.

I just did that. I cannot help doing it, it seems.

As humans is it our only pastime? Or is it just the source of everything we think, say, write and do?

We see tracks of a bear in the woods. We think, this means a bear has been here no longer ago than it has been since the last rain. We start to reason.

Someone asks my religion. I could name a few, but really, it is Texas Tech sports, with an emphasis on football.

I send everything through that filter first. We are a tough team who take on opponents manned by superior athletes who are much better funded, equipped, supported, recruited, and publicized. And we hope to overcome all that with a lot of stubborn grit. It began I believe in the minds of early pioneers to the High Plains of West Texas who settled in with not enough water, frequent winds, tornados, and dust who more or less willed a college from the treasury of the Texas Legislature to be built where none was more unlikely. Today there is a law school and a medical school on that campus.

Now we know my religion we can wonder whether it could be possible to escape it. The question is: can one live knowing a language without following it? Might we see the same animal tracks referred to above and without a name know instantly what is shown? Might it be we would actually know much more from sighting the tracks that way than by the reasoning process? Can one live a satisfying life with no attempt to derive meaning from it? Whatever that means? I am reminded the answer is, no.

Suppose one could see that meaning has no meaning? Even for a second see it? It was education that trained me to think that intelligence is meaning derived from a process, reasoning. That is not what great artists tell us, nor scientific geniuses nor is it what anyone else who is seen as superior has experienced on the way to greatness. All seem to tell it that reasoning has to be transcended to enter a zone where they do their thing. And my own somewhat limited experience bears that out. I never learned anything well by thinking it through. Trained to do it, I begin there each time, like a religious person will begin at the earliest teachings of his or her religion. Filters. Like Tech football. Such filters are not beneficial but actually blind us. To get to excellence in a field of endeavor one has to transcend limits of reason. Some have described it as looking with one's entire being. Reason has been a big handicap for mankind. And, it has caused much unnecessary suffering to all living things on Earth. Reason is equally grounded in good and bad, success and failure, good and evil, etc. So, it is just as likely to shit on you as to pull you out of shit. But there is a field out beyond right doing and wrong doing. We meet there in songs of rejoicing. There greatness bends rules. Ignores them. Plays with them. Fulfills them. If I cannot dance with you in that field, I'd rather sit this one out.

Ahhh. There you have it! It is in learning we can sit this one out we find freedom from language. Language should serve us, not the other way around. It feels like, live and let live.



Friday, February 9, 2018

Ineffables

One Sun,
not two,
not a male and a female Sun, one Sun,
and the Earth, and all life on it, were raised up by the One Sun
and brought out of the Earth like fruit comes forth from a tree
and all energy is that of
Our Father, the Sun.

What is back of the Sun?
The bang?

What was before the bang?

How old is the oldest religion of Earth? It all tastes to me like self-serving nonsense. All I need to know is-

One Sun,
not two,
not a male and a female Sun, one Sun,
and the Earth, and all life on it, were raised up by the One Sun
and brought out of the Earth like fruit comes forth from a tree
and all energy is that of
Our Father, the Sun.

What is back of the Sun?
The bang?

What was before the bang?

Nothing?

Silence?

A Void?

Believe I'll research the list of apparent ineffables before attempting any further efforts to behave as a human being. Where to begin? Where is there available for examination by one such as I nothing other than a void silence? Ummm.


Wednesday, February 7, 2018


*WIND

Of late, have I spent months in almost constant wind. Strong wind, most of it, without noticing until just this moment that the wind itself is silent. It is the effect of it on things, such as trees, that make the sounds I associate with wind. Now, I hear a kind of music being made by relationship of many tall trees and wind, roof and wind, siding and wind, grasses and wind. There is more to it than I thought. Also, there is a story.
Something silent is back of it. A feeling is back of that. I am alert now.
I can easily develop ideas, they pop up, around which the wind is causing me unnecessary irritation, upsetting me, threatening me, and that should not be the case. What are my thoughts they should want me to take it personally? For me, Wind should stop? Hmmm. For months, I have been asking myself, How long must I endure this constant pounding in my brain? But instead, just now, I prefer to take another route. I am in relationship to what is happening between silent, invisible force, an energy, and all things in the vicinity of where I stand. Not separate. Not isolated from it.
I am dominated suddenly with a feeling. The feeling that I am out of my element in judging the wind, the silent energy that is moving all around me. I want to escape somehow from arrogance to still myself, not the wind. Pay attention! Pay attention, full attention to a symphony that is playing wildly to see it for what it is, not abstractly, in ideas, but actually. I am here. I am actual, not an abstract idea, or a bundle of them, as I was until a few moments ago, I am present within the play of life, not my life, life!
I looked up as tress were being tossed back and forth, helpless instruments yielding to the strain, asked to endure relentless poundings from a player who has something important to say! And it is as if I am one of those trees! I resound! My heart leaps out of my body! I have no fear of the wind, no urge to run away from it, am not apart from it, and all of a wild happening thrills to be included. I dig it!
I don't even want to say what it is I learned, only that I did. If we made this journey together there was no leader and no follower on a happy inquiry together. 

Tuesday, February 6, 2018

God is innate.
Love is innate.
Peace is innate.
Freedom is innate.
Happiness is innate.
Fulfillment is innate.
Contentment is innate.

God is innate.
Love is innate.
Peace is innate.
Freedom is innate.
Happiness is innate.
Fulfillment is innate.
Contentment is innate.


There has been living an ordinary human just like you who thinks precisely the same when he is constructing a poem as when he is talking to any human or group of humans formally or informally in any environment under any circumstance.  

Sunday, February 4, 2018

-Let Them Fill The Air-

Bob Dylan was interviewed in the 60's. The journalists asked repeatedly, “What thoughts do you have on why you are so famous?” They kept on asking even though Bob kept on repeating, “I don't know.” That did not stop the question.

It's enough to make you sick. But, there is a revelation worthy of attention. In the culture mass produced here what is of interest is not how do you create such profound art. It is how does one become very popular. The presumption behind the question asked of Mister Dylan is that what people here want is to be famous. Not to do something worthwhile. If so, it is sad. If not so, it is darn irresponsible to foster the notion that we are that way.

I am led to consider that the field of journalism has always really been a science of how to spread the disease of wanting fame. All news is how to get famous. It shows one can do so by doing something grand or by doing something terrible or by doing something weird. It proves that fame is false. Only bored, dull minds want to be false. I have a feeling Da Vinci and Dylan wanted to be left alone, quite confident, satisfied they have been being busy being born.

It is apparent to most readers that news is predominantly bad news or weird news. Man bites dog. In fact, a report that someone did a grand thing is really a report of the obvious. A grand thing is going to be obvious to its recipients. No report is going to add to its grandeur. By golly, we flat do not trust ourselves to be alert. What is called news is gossip for dull, bored minds. I have gone many months without any to find that within a day I can catch up.


Better it would be to have more of us being busy being born. Let the music be there. Let them fill the air.