snow globe

If you’re very quiet, listening close, you can hear the snow fall sounding like the stroking of a cat’s fur. Then a purring like sound coming up out of your soul. For me it was either that or going completely mad with ennui. Instead I’d turn to the right or left and talk to the fellow travelers to the internment camps selected for death or slave labor where it stops. The snow finding new groves, slides, drifts and piles. 

Somewhere back, long ago, I thought I had to special but from the get go was told otherwise: I was “just a grain of sand upon a beach” extending continent wide, a desert. But then I’ve found, if you look real close, grains of sand are like snow flakes all different singing different songs and psalms. Seems like to me that I seek what is unique in others, those who are naked of ear buds faces turned in worship to empty picture frames. The many who now seem lost attempting to escape reality.

And of those who respond I never forget their being what they are; alive. On the conveyer belt from birth to death crossing eternity with me. Doesn’t matter: check out lines, wait staff, bus stops, train or plane stations. Some know they’re there and going somewhere while others while away their lives listening to Big Brother Speak. . . .Rats eating their eyes first, then their minds. 

So. No. I didn’t go berserk — postal or rampage this time, but I always wonder why I don’t afterward. There seems to me a food chain issue implied sheep, cattle, turkeys, people all the same led to slaughter for The Man’s Ideal Bottom Line: profit or pleasure.

Oddly the issues become clearer, more sharply defined, day-by-day, no matter where I go. Realizing it is possible, albeit difficult, but not impossible to grow your soul in our times. Alone is okay, but in community it makes a difference to those who otherwise remain oblivious to themselves. Their being unique, special, precious, simply okay as they are either way. 

It seems the flow continues here as well at there. The concerns are met with answers, absent confusion; priorities apparent, clean and clear sans regrets. Standing perfectly still the process continues with those friends, lovers and strangers all more boldly embossed upon the prayer wheel of my mind.

The most amusing aspect of the process is my perceptions being eroded, peeled, worn away. A Bonfire of the Vanities so to say. Leaving no smoke, or mirrors, no bells and smells; just truth drilling into my consciousness and all is well becoming better day-by-day; clearer, cleaner, more nearly/dearly. 

Always curious why a person — myself for example — would call a halt to it all taking my life; ending it?

I am not these thoughts, those feelings, the items of my life’s furnishings. Nor the tools I may give away, or merely walk away from, for it is this consciousness that I retain knowing it will never end. Why? Because it is not mine alone. It belongs to the source, The Presence, the one who talks to me in my dreams and waking hours ordinary every day. 

What is heaven if not present? Able to grow, expand, embrace, incorporate and lend to those lost in ownership while being merely tenant upon/within this time and place. First and last things are twins twined in real time. One thing closes another opens and there is wonder absent conditional/magical thinking life. 

Typical of me: I check to see what the fleece of Gideon has to say via quotes; the collective wisdom of many passed down, well worn, through history. Then clubbed senseless, momentarily, to realize this post is about growing a personality in the flow of time and humanity.

I have always been inherently a clown attempting to make others laugh; beginning with mom. To lend a smile, or at the least a twinkle in her eyes. Sadly what I once saw as anger was actually terror; thinly veiled anxiety — that she would never measure up to her genius and be acknowledged for it. In my sense of her, finely resolved, it was not that she took herself seriously but was endlessly seeking affirmation of her inherent wealth. Immeasurable. Actually. But only in retrospect acknowledged and applauded. 

At that, she was a great fencing master, a teacher of great import. I don’t know what saved me at the various times when death was near by coincidence or choice. And for now I realize that courage is to live despite all the suffering I’ve known for this now joy everlasting . . . and heaven is: a place of farther learning not, idle oblivion. To know yourself is to know heaven now.

Lacking any formal education, I prize everything I can learn. And it is my childish, simpleton’s way of asking the presence to be real, absent all the formal institutional definitions available to me, you, or us. 

I will close here with a reminder that we cannot expect Mikey to do it for us. Nor can we elect or blindly follow any pretend Mikeys to be the solution. My sense is that if we allow the ‘powers’ that be to do that exclusive of our attention we will find ourselves in cattle cars going to Auschwitz: death in the showers, buried alive in slavery. 

Either participate in your life or be a victim of your indifference.

130610 MDT 22:15 snow globe
© 2013 by Jack Spratt—All Rights Reserved