Long have I wondered how and why I should be other than I am as told: White, Middle-Class, Male, American. A gift from St. Patty this morn; though I am Orange and by root going back to the Old Sod, that lovely green isle, Newton-Stewart, not distant from The Troubles in Belfast. But this branch of Spratts, dying with me, left there in 1812. . . .Where, come to think of it, God is in the land and sea, sky and heavens; not in the definitions between who wears the Green, or not, this day.
Nevertheless I owe much to The Holy Roman Catholic Church teaching me to be myself. And become that odd thing born of abrasion, so admired in other Catholics, I have known, loved and admired throughout my life, from beginning to end, so I’ll say of myself I’m catholic = universal, small ‘c’.
Well as that may be I was impelled to write this moment by St. Patrick’s confession and intentions; lovely, loving and only good will he had and so much a part of me now for all life not those who claim to be Christian or Catholic. Whatever that means to them I know what it means to me.
To achieve escape velocity from what I was. I had to lose most all things I loved. Mendicant, beggared, unwanted and seemingly, not despised, but abandoned by accidental birth.
Life with my parents taught me to survive, no mean accomplishment, especially in these times or any and all time. Not to mention the time before time was measured by the likes of us and what will silently remain, no evidence we ever existed: the lot of us.
Yet now all things taste, feel, touch, smell and are heard differently. Better. And I have a model of perfection in Jesus: equally balanced between male/female, thought, feeling intuition and sense. Add, in my poverty, I am humiliatingly arrogant in that I am wealthy beyond any means, measures or standards I am able to find to gainsay that. At least insofar as I am willing to accept, reverence or submit to.
What remains, that which I would convey, communicate or publish, is a simple sense that dad’s funeral shroud tightly woven about my perceptions wasn’t his in the first place. But a ‘gift’ from the materialist who seemed, in his time and mine, to desire that we be enslaved to them. The author’s of the Great Depression, now euphemistically refereed/referred to as the Great Recession. Statistically dissimilar yet experientially similar.
I former terms I’d say of my death, ‘soon enough will I be worm shit,’ at least insofar as this biodegradable body is concerned. Now, even now, and forever more, will I say what I leave behind will be days I would not have wanted to live through. If I weep for my lost children, and I do now healed of my grief, I weep more for the children born and those to follow them in this shrinking opportunity to live free of exploitation by the rich and privileged, High-and-Mighty, those who seek to own everything. Then too their puppets the politicians who in their greed for acclaim, power and a false sense of accomplishment prostitute our future for their paltry gain.
Perhaps we need a plague in Congress and Wall Street?
I advocate no violence towards those who do violence to me. In that I wonder about the potential of injustice serving a greater cause or crime towards a greater end. Even here in the ordinary of my life under the fascist rule of J. L. Gray Management I have learned to be more attentive to spinning about this abode; a broom in my ass, with dusters in both ears, twirling about their property; my life dedicated to its maintenance; a Stepford Betty Crocker in high heels.
So what else is new? Our privacy raped, as with the economy. The future bleak if nonexistent. The earth itself prematurely scorched beyond habitability.
Same--Same authority gone riot.
Immoral. Top to bottom, all who presume to lead.
Feed a person, they live for a day. Teach a person fish, and they will live for a lifetime. But what if they, the teachers, take away the sea? Befoul the sky, make of life: slavery?
“No man is free who is not master of himself.” - Epictetus
Oh Epictetus, where are you now we need you so? The difference between my father’s generation and mine/myself is that I listen to that quiet, small voice, speaking in my sleep and waking; annotated by the likes of Epictetus, to name only one of a growing, hourly, list of those who sought truth not political fame. . . .The cynics who know the price of everything but the value of nothing. (Paraphrase of - Oscar Wilde)
I am who, what, where and as I am; free of chains and the stripes turned to scars, thanks to the follies of others and my own. But, still I ask; what of the children to come and those who remain homeless, hopeless. . . .Taught vocations for which there is none for them to occupy. Never taught to think for themselves. Conformist to a system that is no longer in decay but dead.
“If evil be spoken of you and it be true, correct yourself, if it be a lie, laugh at it.”
- Epictetus
“The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.”
- Mahatma Gandhi
“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.” - Anatole France
. . . wisdom and truth are not exclusive to any one definition, or another, of it
130317 01:26 Rogue
© 2013 by Jack Spratt - All Rights Reserved
