120813 11:12 faction
Next time I'd like to be a female nurse or a man with a body like Mikhail Baryshnikov. Otherwise no meatball; just me with a memory a bit less erased than this time around.

And I'd like to live again in a time when the greatest minority had parity with men. Maybe a virginal Sister Religious Buddhist or Catholic doesn't matter much to me now or then.

"A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything."
"Art is essentially the affirmation, the blessing, and the deification of existence."
"Art is the proper task of life."
"Art is the right hand of Nature. The latter has only given us being, the former has made us men."
"Artists have a vested interest in our believing in the flash of revelation, the so-called inspiration… shining down from heavens as a ray of grace. In reality, the imagination of the good artist or thinker produces continuously good, mediocre or bad things, but his judgment, trained and sharpened to a fine point, rejects, selects, connects… All great artists and thinkers are great workers, indefatigable not only in inventing, but also in rejecting, sifting, transforming, ordering." --1878 book, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits + vision
"But thus do I counsel you, my friends: distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful!"
" Everyone who has ever built anywhere a "new heaven" first found the power thereto in his own hell. "
"For believe me: the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and greatest enjoyment is - to live dangerously."
**" That which does not kill us makes us stronger. "
"There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths." 
"To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering."
**"What does not kill me, makes me stronger."
"We must remain as close to the flowers, the grass, and the butterflies as the child is who is not yet so much taller than they are.  We adults, on the other hand, have outgrown them and have to lower ourselves to stoop down to them.  It seems to me that the grass hates us when we confess our love for it.  Whoever would partake of all good things must understand how to be small at times."
"What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself. What is bad? All that is born of weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome."
"What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil."
"You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star."
--Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

I never had a chance to exercise my imagination on photo assignments. It was mostly intuition and reflexes; what the old dudes on the street taught me was f8 and be there.

Then some time ago I began to realize that I'd been put to pasture, not a stud farm, just a place to wait until I died. It was than I began to ask for something to do besides wait for the end and gee golly wiz look at me on my tricycle moving at light speed fantastic no hands laughing out loud.

I can see it their eyes, those like me lost forever, and with a few gentle questions we're into the daddy raped me rag. The the two step and finally Bojangels, tambourine and pet dancing on sidewalks just' a smiling at the applause. . . . and me striding on.

© 2012 by Jack Spratt All Rights Reserved

120813 07:50 ptsd is
In reply to God's gifts to me and through me to you, who read me, I have a renewed sense of purpose explicitly based upon my recent brush with death. 

Hospice service gave meaning to death as an abstract and a reason to live more fervently; a truth seen differently. My illness, perhaps healed or not, remains actual, a truth unavoidable by reason or prayer. 

So in view of personal and corporate/commonwealth conditions I will now amp up my sharing of the wisdom of others as I discover them for the benefit of all who sense not All is well in "River City" = The World, this life and time we live in. Though I will not be here to see it I wish you all the best of good fortune which it is now obvious we must participate in or suffer the consequence of our indifference.

PTSD IS:

--Oprah Winfrey
Breathe. Let go. And remind yourself that this very moment is the only one you know you have for sure.

I don't believe in failure. It is not failure if you enjoyed the process.

The greatest discovery of all time is that a person can change his future by merely changing his attitude.

The more you praise and celebrate your life, the more there is in life to celebrate.

I trust that everything happens for a reason, even when we're not wise enough to see it.

Turn your wounds into wisdom.

When you don't know what to do, get still. The answer will come.

120813 02:34 power

“Faith” is experience
“Belief” is rote
In my definition of faith I find no fixed and immutable uniform posture or conclusion. Not situational ethics or morality but a mindful attitude towards how does any opportunity work in terms of life. Not my life alone but all life having a right to be what it is of equal or greater value than mine.

This luxury was absent for most of the recorded history of ‘life’ we as humans lived and encountered reality expressed in extremely simplistic terms: kill or be killed. As we grew in proportion to our territory and sphere of influence, what we needed to survive, in process we became, in essence, the greatest predator in recorded history.

The idea of God, the actual absence of which would suggest the idea should or would be invented, is a power to judge whether we or our adversary will die in order that what we know as life continues. The primitive mind always opted to survive at any cost thus reflexively choosing to kill the adversary. In a very simplistic sense it was then that fear began to rule human consciousness and trust in our ability and/or right to judge any confrontation out of the norm to be either good or bad.

To be honest I tend to seek the lowest common denominator in cause and effect; the turning point in each event. I have an abiding sense of God as uniform from beginning to end: both capable of wrath and of forgiveness/mercy. My concept of humanity, drawn from my own experience, is that we tend to make complex very simple issues.

Common to all human consciousness are two events. The first is God, or the idea of God, the second is The Flood. The latter, using Galbraith’s adjustment theory, was an opportunity to start all over again. A sort of reversal of the creation theory/myth/fact. I see no difference between religion or science since I always ask what was the cause and effect?

“There is no God higher than Truth.”
“You/We must become the change you/we want to see in the world.”
--Mahatma (Mohandas K.) Gandhi

My source of truth is neither Jesus or Gandhi but from God. That said. What I say is about us not them since they embody the highest consciousness published and incarnate of Love in their time.

God is love for the greatest part and devolving down in a scale of consequence from all the prophets of love to you/me/us in this time of chaos we are called to be part of the solution not the problem.

Change is not the problem, we are.

Change is the only absolute true factor in life. We, as a species, are in the ‘old age’ of life and should simply accept that death is part of the process. But then we must ask what about the children; those who inherit this nest of ours this planet exploited to exhaustion? Do we make babies for fun or purpose? Pleasure and joy always have consequence, in that neither Nature or God do revisions in reality.

Well acquainted with my personal death I accept it fearlessly knowing that in love I need not fear of what will come beyond all my knowing. This defines my faith and why I ignore beliefs.

Think back to your childhood dependence upon mother and father who to you then were in fact “god” and what you are now as you read this.

You/we/I are in one stage of consciousness seeking a better understanding of the why of everything. And if like me you find all previous constructs inadequate -- in a sense pushing round pegs through square holes -- then we seek opportunity instead of fate.

No one is perfect. Here I have in mind the two people I most closely follow, Jesus and St. Francis, both of whom I sense committed suicide in despair of ever being, either The Solution or part thereof. A great factor in truth is your and my willingness to ask what is the nature of vision and version.

The starting point of my truth came from curiosity and satisfaction. I am ignorant of the ways of the world by record but wise in the ways of the world by demonstration.

Reading across all definitions of truth/god/love I find no philosophy, religion, governance adequate to contain the God I know and love. The Who I would forever follow, seek, know, love more dearly day-by-day. And for Whom I would be, within the parameters of free will, willing to be do or become anything to nurture and succor. In this statement I describe not merely God but all of us as well since we all bear God within: dimly or clearly.

Returning to the Flood as fact or myth; are we not in a flood of unknowing which way to go forward? And is God as myth or fact not the author of consciousness based upon free will or karma?

I vote for love and if love is impossible then give me death for I detest slavery to anyone or anything. I will not be a slave to God since knowing God is to know not pleasure but joy surpassing all understanding and life unending: growth.

. . . let this be so for you and all of us before we destroy ourselves in boring repetition the fulfillment of those who think but do not know truth’s reality or value. I am bored with prophecy and profit since it is our choice to live or die for What?

All life is at its origin/basis divine. Nothing is for naught and no one measurable by any standard of value except what they/you/I/all of us are willing to live and die for. I refuse to give you what you already have yet know that I could use you for my pleasure were I to view life as what is good is to take instead of give. Take my truth for your amusement or cause to find your own.

Be well but also expect to be better.

“I doubt, therefore I think; I think therefore I am" - Discourse on the Method (1637)
--Rene Descartes

© 2012 by Jack Spratt All Rights Reserved