Jack Spratt

Integration between your self/soul and ordinary life is possible and desirable to some.

It has been an important question for the past 24 hours. I've challenged hospice to define me differently from a sacrificial slave to being a person willing to serve with integrity and rights. For them merely to recognize my gifts, freely given, as products of my love for them and not mere advertising that they can turn on or off at will. I never play anything but my A Game and always push the boundaries of what I did before; it is my nature and choice to prostitute myself for the needs of others. At that I still have limits to my acrobatic entertaining abilities and what, where, when, why or how I do it is my creation not theirs.

Before publishing the question itself I sought the council and advice of a peer. Though we have no formal declaration of his being my mentor I conclude he stepped forward and filled the roll instinctively. M was absent and hates speaking over the telephone anyway. I called Norm after the fact and he deconstructed my reasons and motivations giving his approval.

When I find myself sawing off the limb I'm resting upon high above the rocks and cliffs beneath me I seek the wisdom of friends who love and accept me as I am. Responding with insight and humor. I am blest in this way and all can be equally if you seek them. They are the people you can call at 03:33 hours in the morning before you cut your throat. 

When stuck with a question I play solitaire or wander through my vast flower garden of quotes finding, if not answers, suggestions. 

Many seeking sanity and balance have walked The Walk alone and either found peace or assertion. In what and why I write I find myself following the latter suggestion: assertion. Not for those who read me alone, but those I love, live with and for in the ordinary of my life. Actually there is no ordinary in my extraordinarily blest life now. As a teacher I am taught daily by the people I meet. 

Pause for rest 23:40 {note to myself never ever write before rest! . . . i can only be me, the best me possible or as the advertising agency said "BE ALL THAT YOU CAN BE" the lie selling the U. S. Army to youth unemployed and desperate for not just work but a life. i like all the men I've spoken with who were IN said it was worth a million dollars, the experience that is, yet added swiftly; "I wouldn't take a million to do it again" . . . implied or inferred: 'or start that part of my life over.' These are the living survivors; the dead tell no lies, say nothing but the end of war.

In my experience as influenced by/in my dreams I see things differently daily, or should I say nightly? Since I rest when tired and eat when hungry -- an admirable choice gleaned from The Buddhist . . . I steal liberally from the genius of others. Not all of whom are ever known as famous like Jesus or Buddha but many who throw away their genius sacrificially and I, greedy little pig, listen and learn at their feet. 

By experience I was taught to be forever a stranger in strange lands, an emigrant on a planet filled with emigrants. A person with out cause, religious without a religious identity. True to myself but to others, should they know me well; a chameleon & fraud Self Incoporated.

Not for myself but for another child who like me lingered in Hell too long, over done in the broiler life has become. The fact is that I awoke with an utterly transformed notion of what Jesus did 'in dying for my sins' or 'out sins.' 

Truth is; only God can know me as I know myself and at that we both are transfigurable . . . I don't know 'how' to define in the Native American Sense: Skin Walker or Shape Changer but they knew what I mean when they so named the experience of meeting one. e. g. Imagine seeing The Virgin Mary at thirteen smoking cigarettes, or crack cocaine, or from Darfur pregnant from rape, bruised inwardly and outwardly with AIDS yet as I have been taught by experience, being human, nothing now surprises me except that I now act with assertion, not aggression, in context with love. Since I love all life unreasonably and will probably die from old age in my sleep or standing up from a heart attack stroke Alzheimer's Parkinson or crushed beneath the vanity of a person indifferent to all life mine being taken away of mutilated and paraplegic to linger incapacitated hating/loving it.

Yet having equanimity I remain in peace.

I have love and have it not. Not even from M (whoops I nearly spelled it out.) She who has been so generous with me for and towards whom I have more than 'love' but gratitude endless as I do for God.

A teacher in The School of Hard Knocks I am still capable of being taught. And I will fully live vital until I can 'live' no more. Thence, like she be cremated, and if my wishes are followed -- no longer relevant to me -- I like she will be ash sprinkled upon this High Mountain Desert we both love. 

Not long ago I had a desire to address her with a question to which she replied, "let's discuss this at lunch." And I called her on it saying something to the effect that I felt rebuffed. I could have, should have, said as I thought (thinking in strings or streams of words which are for me like pearls; an invisible crown of them atop my head and/or wrapped around me like ermine) 'rejected, despised, abandoned, trashed, shat upon by "I'll let you go now" or the other "at lunch"

Where upon she explained the origin of being as she is at times a counselor with a built in timer ticking of slithering sand passing through an hour glass used to time the cooking of eggs. She is a force of nature and several orders of magnitude above and beyond the 'science' of psychiatry . . . and at times she terrifies me and I say so laughing because???? I was trained to be a fencing partner with my mother who wanted me to be the Best Man she could never be. 

I so love women that I could easily neuter myself for the privilege of entering their hearts and souls.

Sacrificial? Yes! But not THE BIG SHOW made of Jesus's murder. Yet like HIM i am not a suicide bomber of souls since I know the Author of Him and there is nothing in our job description indicative of that as anything we ever think about though we are beaten and slain. God forgive me but my sense is that You are the Judge and I am merely a witness to this time I so briefly inhabit. 

At that why would I want the love of a woman who refuses to love herself? Especially given that YOU love me shown by attention and synchronicities daily hourly minute by second?

Reader! 
Are you there? 
Read me well then. 
I play role play with God and all the attendant characters in everything I've ever read but especially the Bible which is both "Owner's Manual" and a picture puzzle myself fondling the pieces with my eyes saying this goes with that and that goes with nothing I can perceive yet with persistence and patience I eventually fit it together and the final view is of God not Jesus upon the Cross. GOD! . . . yes . . . the merry prankster him/herself. . . .

That's why I say 'never write before falling asleep' and 'don't ever read Lao Tzu' at or around the same event. But, 
but, 
but at that the list is actually endless since it also happens when I read Mary Shelly and a choir of others with different ethnicity genders gender proclivities etc. and so on and on. 

To say that God speaks through the hearts and minds of others is to publish my secret conviction. Knowing every new set of eyes, heart, mind and soul born is a new creation in time to die learning the value of life itself. Add to which, by my experience, what we kill slays us. And for me my private hell is Hitler, Inc. being held fully conscious hearing his snarky rhetoric endlessly replayed and instant replays of the consequences. Coupled with the sights, cries, grunts, and last gasps of those wholesale disappeared or merely beaten to death for the pleasure of Sadist. 

I do have an agenda like a used car sales man's ABC = 'always be closing;' I want you to know and love yourself to the extent, kind and degree, that God loves you . . . not be like me or Jesus but the unique and exquisite and precious person you are capable of becoming.

Become well and then a geyser of love. . . . in THE END, drawing nigh rapidly, the only thing we can change it the entire cosmos is ourselves. The rest is merely preamble to THE JUDGE. . . . who is by my witness and being forgiven for my sins far more merciful than even Jesus was/is.

PS The kindness you give ripples throughout the universe creatively.
“He who knows others is learned; he who knows himself is wise.” --Lao Tzu

120913 19:22 freedom is integration

© 2012 by Jack Spratt - All Rights Reserved