The way you think it all most certainly is

The way that everything you know and feel tells you it ought to be

The way you are so proud to say that you have been taught

is nothing
And
Never reliable

You are wrong to act as if it were

It is truly the vast multitudes of way[s] of IS that IS that are the way

*The moral of this jumble of contradiction which you might or may call my story:  Never exclude anyone

Body gasp bone grasp
on sighting a snake!

Recoil like this is the memories
Though some are more elaborate
Played out like a fantasy scenario
Meant to tease out terror
Reaction

These such are my remembrances
Of means of death in lives past

I remember them in vivid reaction
Because they are my very last memories
Of times of lives of yore
Vivid thus
Long held, unknown, in my memory store
Utterly obscure from the vague before

I was born and raised in a small community. This community took a lot of pride in its smallness.  Pride and perpetuation were expected from all, however unspoken this expectation lived inert and unquestioned.  From all, for all, by all, above all.  Else.  (Or else).

It was strange too, the way the smallness kept to the straight and narrow.  It is too soon in the discussion to introduce this but I’ve seen (observed) smallness and narrowness magnified and concentrated by the odd circumstance and curious peculiar institution of assumed — (known) — invisible halving of this community.  By this I mean that virtually if not literally half the community were understood (never formally, of course) to be non-existent.  [I’m referring to racism, of course].  There were a physical pair of parallel train tracks with a buffer-zone between that demarked the seen from the unseen.  This served as an effective border.  There were exceptions, of course.  The border was not hard and fixed.  Invisibleness not acknowledged.  Some border incursion in the form of housing spilled over at the end of town near the airport.  People did often complain which must have implied a certain degree of visibility and gnosis of awareness.  No one was ever bothered to reconcile any differences.  What is inferior, I conclude or presume to conclude, is better left as unseen and as unacknowledged as possible.   That, I’m sure, is a key way (and means) of the small way.

An impact, of course, of the invisibility and the unsaid, unacknowledged confederacy of the not knowing is the growth space this accommodates and affords to fear:  fear of the unknown, specifically.

Matter of fact, it seems clear to me that fear avoidance of the unknown and a particular perpetuated smallness have a symbiotic relationship, breathing and thriving in the oxygen of conformity.

In any case, I was born and raised in a small [racist] community.  Smallness by way of conformity was expected at all levels.  It needn’t be spoken.  It was a matter of pride. [And if you spoke to any denizens of that community, my accusation of racism is the most untrue and radical thing I could say: they would swear to God in Heaven that they are not racist at all. It is “them” who are always *playing the race card*].

I was never asked to conform.  I was never told to ‘fall into line’ (well not too many times and not too directly and not in so many words).  I was made to feel secure, protected, contained, and somehow quite complete in the smallness.

The thing is that the very smallness was always taken for universality.  And it was more than this!  Much more than just this!  Smallness was always understood by all to be taken as “normal”.

I don’t know how this was done or accomplished, but abnormality was something understood wordlessly to be quite completely unacceptable.  I don’t know how it was accomplished or pulled off but somehow I was grown up to believe without question that smallness was completeness and that being or becoming abnormal was something to fear as badly and as deeply as the fear of the unknown or of the invisibility of inferiority itself.

And thus, while I never for a moment felt I belonged in such confined smallness, I was not impelled to rebel:  I acted small, I accepted normality, I grew to fit in, I let myself feel smart, knowing better, but I obsessed with what people were thinking and I danced within the confines of expectations in big ways and small.  It all remained so unsaid.

I gradually confirmed a spiritual non-smallness from within and from the world about, from books and from the power of music, from observations and from experiences, from the friends I made, strange non-conformist friends who came to me attracted strong like magnet-pulled shavings and shrapnel to accumulate into gradually something big.

Much of the time, all the while, during this and every other life process, I came to be aware of the not belonging feeling.  It has always lived there in my smallness.  For the longest time I wanted to work on that.  I wanted balance and reconciliation.  I began to see that the smallness is not universal and it is certainly not normal.  I attributed education and worldly perspective as agents of change, universal goodies that might bring everyone out of such a dream.  But no.  I see the smallness live on dogged and determined in others who have been exposed to much more of the world than me, to those who do read, to those with sophistications and assurances and assumptions that a little working class hero like me were never privy to.  Despite this, though, I see them all value and treasure the smallness, even more set in the belief that smallness is universal, moreover, normal too.

Yet I am totally different now.  I am so beyond small!

So, beyond education (three or four separate iterations), and above and beyond branching out, and beyond  having developed a world perspective, and above and beyond my having lived in another (somewhat exotic) place as a minority for a long while, beyond even my balancing peace experience of martial arts training,  I’ve found myself having found bigger things, having lived bigger.  Yet I find there is no talisman of knowledge nor experience that will have such an effect.  I used to believe firmly and fundamentally that there was, that this was it.

I find that I was wrong.  I’ve seen many a manifest example of others who should know better who should have experienced better yet who are more steadfastly stubborn about smallness than ever before.  They are Trumpist intolerant ‘patriots’ now.  They love to blame most everything on the invisible for making themselves increasingly seen and heard.

So it is not education, refinement, development of perspective.  It is a thing of spirit. 

My place of upbringing is frighteningly religious — [they would say it’s the utmost frightening not to be] — but in a small and narrow way even on either side of the supposedly incompatible binomial choice offerings of the one true narrow faith practice:  one popish the other strictly anti-popish, and all that implies.  Yet that small religious “way” (or binomial ‘ways’) is very devoid of spiritual.  That I always knew instinctively.

So, it’s awakening to the spiritual, it seems, that can break the grip of the smallness upbringing.  This is not something that just came to me of a sudden, though it did somehow when I went to the vast within, when I asked, when the Nām awareness awakened! (Through the discipline of meditation practice).  That is all true, but it has been there eternally.  I am poked, staked to the earth like us all in a physical human form, and that little man played the small game so well.  Yet, eternally I was always out there floating somewhere amorphously all the while, knowing, knowing, knowing.  I have ever been transcending the smallness, feeling appropriately misfit, feeling imbalanced and out of place in the little man role.  It’s all so petty now.  But being awakened to energy and vast, vast, incomprehensible bigness of it all, is all and everything.  We can all be truly not small no matter what we have been told. 

Furthermore, we can function well in this physical world, unafraid of being with bigger smallness busting perspective, abnormal as hell, not going along.  There is nothing to fear on earth.  There is no half to make invisible.  There is absolutely no one inferior.  (There is no white supremacy).  But all this doesn’t matter for much anyway because there is a spiritual within that is now that is not applicable to this physicality these limitations this “breaking away” from the smallness.  The smallness is indeed smaller than you think.  But it is not universal.  It is not normal.  At all.  There is no unknown to fear.

I’m not expecting any of this to make any sense.  I’m not advocating a way. I’m certainly not soliciting in a proselytizing way.  I’m not addressing a right or wrong issue.  I know that there is a human smallness living on in me that is quite capable of seeing “them” (the small advocating and believing) as wrong. My human form is quite capable of being petty and small in trying to “call [the small] out”.  I no longer say or mean to imply anything like that now.  I don’t even rule out devotion to established religion.  You can know completely that it helps.  Knock yourself out.  I was just talking, just saying.  I don’t even know where to end so I’ll end abruptly.

If you want to entertain your mind every once and a while with romance, I think you can! You should be free to entertain your mind so, I say. I think that I should too.  At least I think that way.  In all freedom I think I freely do. For it is the mind’s freedom that is truly the basic human right that no tyrant can in any wise trample into conformity.

We all should free our mind instead as the Beatle once in melody said. That seems quite healthy to me.

The challenge, though, I think, perhaps, is in being watchful over that mind/body connection.

For, of course, a goodly part of the entertainment value is that exquisite pleasure that rings wavelike through the body’s sensors and tickles them into such a fine frenzy fancy afore receding so sweetly into the quietude of serene aftermath, sweet sharing of the intimacy. At least that is to some integral part the romance of it.  What otherwise would be the point of romance?

Fine then.  We should entertain our minds, and we should enjoy the healthy pleasure of such entertainment from time to time.  We will get it anyways.  Just otherwise it’ll be confined to our dreams, sooner or later to manifest as psychic forms of imbalance and mental disturbance, damn the damming dam.

If it can flow through the mind as entertainment and be taken and appreciated as entertainment of the mind, there should be no harm in that.  Especially if we can just let it go.  Nothing to dam up, I think. Nothing to retain. Nothing to get damned about. It is significant and not merely mere illusion, though, to let physical ‘romance’ get stuck in the very physical body, even in the physical part of the mind.  All of this is worldly delusion. (The literal physical world, that is.  Maya, it is so-called).

I think, too, it is good advice that you not fall for the (Maya) delusion of possession.  In either form.  That is, don’t get attached to the bodily sensations (even of the bodily form of the mind) to go on to think of possessing that which makes you feel that way.  Romance gives way to delusion of ownership then. It gives way to some delusional game of kidnap and ransom, tradability, market value, property rights, & and anon, i.e., all other forms of Maya delusion of things of this world.  And don’t forget that second form of possession, the idea that you have sinned, that you are possessed by some second-physical phantom demon who controls your desires and your wants and who taints any relief or outlet you might get from this damnable damming of dams.  Don’t be a worldly-bound Maya delusional damsel of distress.  Don’t damn yourself into fear of Maya delusional world-bound cause and effect because you’ll fear yourself right into the tyrant’s con game:  you’ll be controlled by the tyrant and you’ll not be free.  There is no pleasure nor romance in that.

Or so I think and so I think I said.  So might I advise?  No!  Think for yourself.

I am in no hurry.


It will come.



In the meantime within these mean times, I gift freely & with an adept flair.

I was musing on the subject of people squandering love as I was walking about on the dew-slicked and fog-slicked pavements of the Spanish Creole architectured [sic] (architextured?) [sic] French Quarter end-using unexpected free time on my hands on an unexpected office holiday which felt and still feels unearned , , ,

 . . . Thinking I was, as I said, musing, timeless, masked and distant in the dregs of the third wave of a global pandemic that no one in the red-state surrounding this blue oasis seems to have taken seriously.  It has seemed dragged on timeless, lending more time to time that seems to hang out of time and tocks onward uninterrupted and unsteady, slick with condensation.  All because not taken seriously, in or out of time.  Help is coming all too late, one day late.

My walking was like my syntax above.  Free from constraint, not caught up in time.  Nothing to get hung about.

I recalled how I (and I assume we) have withheld love from one who hasn’t shown the proper or proportionate love or respect in return.  I (and I assume we) have grown only to resent that I (and I assume we) have been put in such a position of not loving what I so desired (and felt deserved) to love.

Funny how misunderstanding is so fundamental and integral to the human condition.  Not ha ha funny either.  Not ha ha funny at all.

But, then I thought, suddenly, Grinch-like, maybe love means a little bit more.  Maybe love is something that is improper to withhold.  Maybe love, like perception of the universe, is different to each individual that deals with it.

And it is true!  Because love is not something physical at all.  Love is a spiritual thing.  It doesn’t have human form and isn’t held to human conditionality.  It cannot be contained or exchanged or earned or won or lost or gained or lost.  It truly cannot have anything to do with exchange value.  It is not insurance.  It is not a bargain.  It is not a steal.  It is not a good deal.  It is not even a treasure.  It is not a possession.  It is not a prize.  Certainly it is not a trophy nor a mark of achievement of any kind.  It’s hard, I know, not to think of love as something physical.  For one thing it stimulates all of our physical and physically related impulse points and feelings – even the ones we deem the higher ones:  the comfort, the security, the general feeling of well-being, of belonging, of – dare I say it? – being real, in the sense of the Velveteen Rabbit, of course, is how I meant it this time. 

Unreal!  You and me are telling me.  This is absurd.  Of course love is physical and real.  Absolutely everything in this physical universe is all there is.  It is all real.  Don’t let some new-age spiritual (not religious) kook convince you otherwise. 

Except that it isn’t.  Real is spiritual.  Real is eternal.  Real is unseeable, unknowable.  You don’t even have to agree with me or believe me to make it so.  You are entirely free to exist for real in your real physical world in your free country which enjoys all its freedom — (courtesy of past, present, and future military service) — within the real world of the real physical universe.  Be a realist.  Go ahead.  And go ahead and be convinced that the physical delight of love is a manifestation of reality of love.  It’s somehow sacred too in its marital form, as opposed to the very dirty, very selfish, very anti-God version it might otherwise be “expressed” in out of marital (or out of heterosexual, God forbid!) state.

And it’s kind of tempting to agree when real experience is all we seem to know.  It’s very tempting to the point of manifest total inability to resist thinking, seeing, knowing and believing that the physical world is all there is, finite and limited and won or lost, comically  or tragically, depending upon one’s tendency to disposition or upon one’s circumstantial occasion of experience.  It is all limited by time, all one-shot, all death-ended and terminal.  All we can do is fear the consequences and/or position ourselves to be saved (not, technically, by our “works” or by our doing at all, to be sure).

But what if it’s not?  I say it’s not.  And it doesn’t matter what you or I say.  It is what it is and it’s not what it’s not.  All is eternal energy of creation in ever now motion.  We can all wait for you and your appointed and/or anointed descendants to prove it wrong. Knock yourself out.

So love, I am sure, is a spiritual phenomena belonging to the real eternity and it is as a purpose of creation.  It is manifest in the Kingdom of Heaven which is now and which no one can disprove nor prove and which is regardless of any organized or individualized belief system or thought control.

As pleasing as it is to rub off another’s physical body according to sexual preference and susceptibility to seduction and beauty and power-tripping and all manner of physiological psychological warp, wax, twist, and wane, love is not physical.  It is not necessarily physically expressed, no matter how convinced we are to justify the ways of God to man, woman, person, camera, tv.  It is not a thing that can really be withheld or squandered.  We have no business holding memories or grudges or frustrations, resentments, or even pleasing masturbatory recollections of any way, shape, or form of  À la recherche du temps perdu.

So forget all of that musing in the fog.  What I do is to love unconditionally and to be more and more of a loving being moment by moment and making the most of everything by sharing love in the non-physical form that it truly is.  It does help make it so much easier that I have also grown very old and have been sufficiently physically satisfied in my day to the point where I don’t feel any need or urge to rub myself off on another’s physical body for fleeting pleasure which I then attempt to treasure by means fair and foul.

Meditation and spiritual development have helped in this or have rendered me obsolete and unphysically loving, perhaps.  Convince me otherwise, then . . .

The Holy Nām, The Light of Creation, Eternity . . .

I don’t want to test it or prove it or tease it out

I just want to appreciate it and to live it out in continual moments of now

I never thought that I’d turn out to be as happy as I’m seeing that I am.

And it is not what you’d think: I’m not happy with being successful, or with having achieved such and such, having attained such and such, having won acclaim or love or anything else from any one else.

No, it is a deeper, quieter happiness, akin to my earliest memories.

In my earliest memories I was a spiritual being. I was as is. I glowed with being and I remember indigo light.

I am.

Very . . .

. . . happy to be so into being!

When you look within and see

A space as vast as that without

A beyond imagination expanse of universe

And galaxies uncountable points of light a’swirl

In endless timeless movement, mysterious as the night sky above

You sit in the sound current of peace and experience ever now

Within is without and all is shared and the harmonies of peace are one

If what you are devoted to is not of or in true spirit being your devotion is misplaced.  If your devotion is in any way split between the seen and the unseen, compromised in any way, contingent at all, or by any ways or means clinging to the physical, it’s errant.  If your devotion is of, about, and/or in the physical world, i.e. if it is an “object,” it is an idol.  False too.  Plain and simple.  It is no matter of any significance how much prestige your object of devotion affords you.  The value to you of your object of devotion is of no consequence or worth.  It matters not how esteemed your object of devotion might make you feel.  Nor how rich and powerful.  In the true eternal time-obliterate scale of the spiritual Realm of Wisdom it is temporal, fleeting.  Misplaced as well. 

Keep your devotion square in the center of serene eternity.  That is real treasure laid in worth.  Unseen as it might be for the literal moment, no matter how long such a literal moment seems to drag into approaching infinity, it is not eternal. Keep your devotion where it is kept forever! Keep the course! Keep in good spirits! Play for keeps! In worth, it is truly worth; truly eternal.