slip away

At tomorrow morning’s running tide I will slip this mooring and sail forth into uncharted waters of a new life. Reborn again. Not running away, but towards. Never intended by fate or destiny to lay anchored in snug harbor.

Surrounded by open boxes, awaiting the remains of my life for the past seven years. The essential things packed and shipped. But the precious things, special mementos of this phase, await the savage discipline of my small car for the long haul toward Had She Said Yes. Saying yes now, and more. Sharing what the process was like for her, commiserating with mine.

Awakening this next to last morning I was conscious of time before time was measured and what will be, by imagination or projection, after time is forgotten. Not merely by she or I, but us all, this many of us, going through, essentially the same process on a macro scale. Then too the immortal morality of kindness and my sense of living epochs in day; the infinity of now.

Of special concern are the mementos by/from/of M weighed—go—no go, against more pragmatic tools and artifacts. Conscious that she is within me and the greater part of my heart. For which there is no evidence save in what I pay forward from her continuing love and blessings: unconditionally, generously and kindly expressed.

I will ask the dawn to remind my beloved, both, that I am constant and upon the song of birds greeting the morning, walking forward through each remaining day with them in my heart. Essential are visions of the heart ever remaining and expanding. Possible to grow a soul in solitude but a personality only in community.

Yet about this time, swept forward by tide and lunar cycle, is a sweet sadness for what was and joy regarding what will be. Reminiscent of those who passed away in my care for whom I reassured, by behavior, their certain continuance beyond death. What more can I ask of the interlocutor than that? Who it seems has impelled this day moving forward. Affirming, variously, at each turning, the simpler choice obvious to Her/Him that which lays secret in my heart.

The vessel of my destiny and fate subtly slides down the ways of this day.

130630 MDT 03:35 slip away

© 2013 by Jack Spratt—All Rights Reserved

changes

The peace I know, comes through willingness to change; inspired by many different resources. Completely outside the ordinary institutions and established categories of any discipline: Philosophy, Science, Psychology, Aesthetics and Religion in the traditional sense. Poetry, however is a constant resource. Then quotes, emblematic of the poetry of souls who use prose to communicate.

I am startled to realize that this trust began when I sought sanctuary in libraries during frequent childhood crises. At first randomly and then reading what was specifically recommend by librarians at my inquiry. Initiating a journey towards an unknowable goal. Which, within any definition, remains unknowable yet trustworthy. And better described as kindness, empathy, mercy and love. I desire wisdom more highly than knowledge—experience as apposed to ideals.

Within the past 24 hours many questions, as prayers, unconsciously uttered as such, were answered specifically. To the degree and kind I can no longer doubt the source, for whom, or which, I remain devoted; a disciple.

Sadly, across a lifetime, until now, I have failed this invitation. Fearing that I was unworthy. Thus my thesis that no life is “too stupid to live”.

Native and inherent within all life is the potential manifestation. Albeit deeply buried within and denied as it was within me. Which is to say both, that I am not THERE yet, but willing to change, and that the process continues infinitely until face-to-face. Add: I have an unreasonably reverence for teachers, as messengers, along the way. And for myself the ideal of being like those whose random kindness aided me without conditions to be myself . . . all that I advocate for you.

Bigotry, by any definition, has no part of this. Generosity does. We can never fully know ourselves until we accept that what we incarnate and inhabit is nothing like anything that ever was before. Building a new world and life, one person at a time, creatively collaborative.

Love between two people, regardless of gender— or animals/nature/universe — or the divine, can only be defined by experience in giving and receiving. Fearlessly and unconditionally.

Well beyond the apogee of my life I am no longer alarmed to find myself Beyond The Point of No Return with Pam. Our — origin and process — will make a wonderful novella—perhaps—sometime in the future.

Superlatives and sentiments cannot begin to articulate the dialog between us. We both are stunned at what began four years ago. Renewed and accelerating from May until now the consequence. Yet very candid regarding our concerns; mediated and resolved. The intervening space between is filled with value; learning to accept and submit to an unconditional life together: what I’ve longed, a lifetime, for.

My sense, the interlocutor’s will and intention for all of us.

Be well.

130629 MDT 06:10 change

© 2013 by Jack Spratt—All Rights Reserved

growing

Growing is my list of heroes. Those upon whose shoulders I stand, reaching a little bit further up the Tree of Life. Yet there is nothing heroic in me, save my love, respect and admiration for all of life: the good and the grotesque—the all of it.

For those I have slandered in the past there is no content upon which to stand.

Simple.

I have discredited myself significantly learning the substance of humility. Add: a better sense of why God is more visible amongst the poor and meek.

Awakening from a previous engagement with friends, a goodbye party of sorts, I am too aware that the principal companion of these past five years, Annie, lays subdued in a harness awaiting our departure. I shall not tarry much further for she, my friend, tells me much about us. I have a sense she will drive me mad for a time with her caterwauling protest progressing across the twenty-five hundred miles between us and Pam. Continuing this process of threshing and winnowing, the most difficult process for which I can take personal responsibility. Gleaning my unconscious fears left from childhood and moving forward in faith that what will be, will be, by faith.

In recognition that this time, these hours alone, in the dark arisen from sleep, with or without dreams, is my selfish desire to grow more. Perhaps that is my flaw. To have a greater desire to be or do anything other that fully present in this infinity of now. No one, or thing, is merely what I, you, or we define it to be . . . could be . . . maybe maybe not; the wallpaper of eternity. My newly discovered sense being that each and all my heroes did participate by choice in their time. Forgiving their executioners. Dad was adamant about that; the principal activity of man to man is to kill, not enable, freedom and love. Our most disabling adversary is fear. In reaction to which we become more collectively insane daily.

I am learning to submit/surrender/accept the humility of my will against the Interlocutor’s intentions: To move forward with conviction and accept my destiny and fate. As we all must—being – beyond the point of No Return to what was.

06:06

I have a file full of quotes about friendship and love, exactly in that order of priority. Remembering that Annie in all previous times would accompany me to bed. She no longer does. Since the imposition of the harness. Instead she awaits in silence what is to come. Where I was concerned she’d drive me mad with her protest with noise, she does now with silent resignation. Responsibility for her welfare began upon first discovery. I had not decided upon a dog or cat and was well aware that either would keep me alive, suicide being the alternative. After walking through seven rooms of both I heard her calling to me and searched her out loving her at first sight.

The nature, kind and degree of my concern is based upon our friendship, nearly equal of that between M and myself. Both have held me until I could hold myself aloft from despondency. As have those I am saying goodbye to; never to be forgotten nor ignored. Love being of a lesser order of magnitude than friendship.

130628 MDT 02:02

About this time is a sweet sadness for my dumbness to the love between myself and friends who, pre-departure, are touching me with their values. Not just what they say about me but my memory of them carried forward as they were and have become since my arrival here seven years ago. Without friends, or being friends in love, material or spiritual, who would we be or become?

It is dangerous to sleep as I do, when tired, then awakening from dreams that no longer beguile me. Instead dovetail into the incidents of the day before or issues vaguely noted and long neglected stemming back to the origins of me. I mention this only for the surprising acceleration of “hits” as noted on my Google & Opera venues; growing by ones and twos in countries far flung. Then at Culture Book a special someone, who has commented several times, affirmed what I essentially keep covert: my sense of the divine.

Not theoretical but experiential.

I may be offline for a time consequent to travel.

I awoke this time with an image of the hide of a mustang stretched and presented like a Robert Motherwell painting. Within the dream I surmised it emblematic resolving the Native American mythology, theology and symbols that have more than five times over mystified me.

But it is not my myths and metaphors, or runes and ruins of my heart, that concern me. It is to encourage you to seek that within your own life. That is your responsibility, stewardship of your Self/Soul. It is the real story of your life. And the greatest wealth we can know while living.

The peace I know has been midwifed by several, yet most notably M. Who, in, of and by herself, is a force of nature staggering—huge. It is not she, or myself, I would memorialize, but the process of kindness freely/unconditionally given that we, the family of all life, learn to tolerate one another to the end that love is possible instead of extinction.

If I know the ill that destroys us. It is known by my own former ambitions, fear, greed and lusts. Nothing extraordinary. Since it describes the process of becoming authentic and unashamed of any part of myself as I sense inherently possible for all of us. Can I say, and we agree, The Science of Love?

As in the Science of love is life, versus the Science of War is death?

PS One of the books I look forward to reading: An Old Man and a cat/dog? aboard a Cat Boat, or something like that. Remembering my voyages with Tinkler several hundred miles off shore aboard the Paradox. Annie, my companion cat and dear friend, is now wandering about the apartment restored to curiosity about my activities. She will, of course, accompany me to Vermont and Pam. For both I would do all required, including my life, to protect.

130627 MDT 02:16 growing

© 2013 by Jack Spratt—All Rights Reserved

life

As far as it goes, so far, life is indecipherable. Common as air, or the dust from which we came and stand upon. Knowable only in the sense we define it for ourselves as either good or ill. Suffering is inevitable but from it we grow. Awakening from agony making gold of common lead.

Of myths, portents and omens I’ve had many. Ever vigilant towards the chaos of my parents behaviors, I became a journalist. At first merely recording the surface events of collective and personal history. A helpless witness to the time we inhabit. It was not until now that I began to understand that the journal I keep of my transmutation from victim to what?

The rest period behind me was annotated with a quiet sense of these closing days, then hours within the shelter I once considered home; the only ‘home’ that was mine, first and last. But my true home is myself, obviously moving forward toward a synthesis apparent, rendered clear by every sense within me, save the fears that I wring out hourly. Well past the apogee of my lifetime swiftly descending towards the abyss I am learning to fly.

While fabricating the above paragraph I remembered a swimming hole over which I train once passed, the tracks and bridge long gone. The buttress remained from which I, once-in-a-while, would leap, naked into a pool filled with youth of a range and gender astonishing to me now. Laughing they taunted me into it, now glad they did.

“All learning has an emotional base.” - Plato

“Familiarity breeds contempt”

. . . save in this instance, it is my familiarity with my life as it had been and now expected going forward. To stay would be to die. To go forward will be to die to my stasis . . . There was, for a time, a sense between us, Pam and I, that I might stop writing. Disproved during my two weeks with her in Vermont by the continuity of my manic cyclic sleep. Up shortly after midnight and writing for a time, collecting quotes as well; cross pollination of a sort coupled with affirmation of dream content. I sense change in what I write and how; more deeply personal, sincere and less didactic.

07:03

Exhausted I return to bed humming with concerns over what is next: items and artifacts, go—no go. Alarmed that I may have missed an important Annie Dillard book. Unable to sleep. I lay semi conscious and then arise to flog the keyboard again. Realizing the effort, writing, has become a life ring in the chaos of my life. This time is traumatic and unexpected. But then I realize had it not happened, sooner or later, I would be found dead before my computer.

During the night an ambulance raced into and up the complex; a frequent occurrence. My neighbors seem, by gossip, to celebrate that I am going, not to the hospital, undertaker, or assisted living; but to a new life. My age seems to have crept up on me announced in many small and large ways. Significant, difficult, but not impossible, yet.

130625 MDT 06:28

I am oddly aware that when Pam says she loves me it’s the real-deal. In so many times past the love others gave seemed conditional and I would distrust their statements. Not the source but the listener, since I had no clue what it is like to love one’s self; until this morning. The trauma of this move, one amongst too many, has wrung out my fears. Latent from childhood and now I will go forward fearless, clean, newly reborn, defined and confident.

130624 MDT 01:03 life

© 2013 by Jack Spratt—All Rights Reserved

between

Between us there lays a hard bitten reality, by root, stem and growth, witness and experience, of life and death enacted suddenly. The smoke and mirrors of wishful thinking evaporated. Dead meat, preceded by regret for the loss, of life, limb and lovers.

We both have been in triage, and parse the value of seconds against which the odds are life and death . . . not so much at hospice but before, now and forward.

Upon first sight there was an internal resonance, not bells, but a hum that said yes. And yes I gave up my desire and/or ambition to be more than friend many times over. “Had She Said Yes” did finally and I wonder why I tarry? By all outward signs I should be frantic, but am patience with my coveted writing time within which she equally resides . . . a sort of triangulation between Brother Sun and Sister Moon. Cycling. This love is something unexpected, overwhelming and unimaginable, for it changes constantly expanding and contracting as a heart beat yet endless.

I cringe at the thought of countless hours, heaped upon multitudes before, traveling. Bereft of this, these hours in darkness singing my songs. Learned as her psalms already shared in substance. And yet there is between us, at the least, my sense of it, that we are the, or like, an original pair. Love in any time is astonishing, at any season, or phase of life’s journey, yet oddly we seem better advised through experience that there is an end on the physical plane. There being, my experience, a continuity begun upon first sight of her. Organic, whole, perfectly formed, elements as two crystals grown. Patience being a quality grown from the helplessness of intervention in the lives of others. Kindness being a last resort. Generously given.

Oddly I sense, given my age and experience, each post is my last. Wanting not so much memory of me but to remind you of the choice between grasping and giving.

Laughter!

She asked that I somersault through burning hoops; in audition before our covenant. For which I will forever, in jest, remind her . . . but am I not equally guilty? I mean these prolonged days sustained by her affirmations and confidence. The peace I know is as much of her as myself in anticipation of what will become of us once together in residence actually.

Then too it is this long journey into radical transformation from solitude to oneness with another. Wringing out my equivocations, faltering over Annie’s response to what lays ahead. It is at this point that our shared experience of transitions between what was and will be comes to my aid.

What will be, will be . . . experienced through endless love for it all . . . it becomes simpler.

“To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.” - Henri Bergson

“If ever two were one, then surely we. If ever man were loved by wife, then thee.” - Anne Bradstreet

The trail of quotes discovered/rediscovered gets deeper. It is only my sense that so few pay attention to synchronicity, chance, coincidence that I will cease here.

Save to share the astonishing reply to my previous post “birth” wherein Pam suggested that I have not yet fully inhabited my life as yet. I know I will not be the same tomorrow as I am now and I welcome that alive or dead. Not that I am indifferent to either she or myself, but am simply a realist able to argue any point of reference regarding perceptions. And under this fulsome moon extraordinary I am aware the tide within flooding generosity. . . .

If you would rather live outside the culture of war and carnage, read, throw the television out the window and learn what you really feel and think. Becoming your idea not the victim of others ideals.

"Death accompanies us at every step and enables us to use those moments when life smiles at us to feel more deeply the sweetness of life. The more certain the end, the more tempting the minute." - Theodore Fontane

130623 MDT 02:29 between

© 2013 by Jack Spratt—All Rights Reserved

dreams conflicting

Since my return from St. Johnsbury VT, typically, I am down by eight or so, awakening by dreams, some four or so hours afterwards. I then either write them down and/or weave back and forth between quotes and the dreams; often finding affirmations/definitions of the dreams content.

This time/date I forestalled recording the dream. It was serial, about the Southwestern Desert lands concerned with Native American funereal symbols representative of various people and their past lives in a museum setting. Disconcerted to discover several new and some missing from previous dream visits. It has been and remains a mystery to me and part of my attraction to New Mexico, for me, a place of significant spiritual power specifically.

Where normally I would work through to dawn, I felt sleepy and returned to bed, where I dreamed another sequence. Actually two: one for the second time and the other a third. Both equally disturbing. The first I am employed scraping gunk from peoples lungs—emblematic of myself since I continue to smoke cigarettes. In the second I am late for an appointment startled to realize it was a test given by a superior; a scolding man who bowed to my indifference, which in reality is my terror of being proven an idiot and unworthy of life. Humiliated I folded my arms refusing to comply.

Apparently I am undergoing traumatic change, struggling to adapt and move forward towards a surprising, actually astonishing new life, formerly unimaginable to me. Possible or probably only in the literary sense of a created ideal scenario. Add that my method and memory reminds me there were, throughout yesterday, numerous omens and portents that I considered briefly. Which it now seems primed the pump of my dreams, which seem now more significant than my brief summarizes would indicate.

Throughout history there have been people inspired to record their dreams; acting between ordinary and extraordinary time on the cusp of creation.

“Out of sleeping a waking, Out of waking a sleep.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson . . . indicative of my sense of integration between a chaos of indifference and sanity . . . or should I say joy and equanimity? I often think of my heroes and their experiences and conclusions. What they gave that we, you and I, or the all of us, might fully live, versus merely exist.

My greatest joy in the ordinary of life has been to discover the talent/genius of others and nurture it, if only by affirmation . . . sometimes merely the attention I give in silent awe. Rapt and reverent. In this process have discovered a desire to follow no one, individual or system of their consequence in history. but seeking and finding, I believe, what they sought.

I could record/annotate the flurry of quotes affirming my sense of purpose, but will not bore you with them. For I remember too well my confused abandonment of their potential meaning being too conscious of my fear that I was unworthy of what they implied. Yet now see potent within all, even those who persecute and assassinate what is inconvenient to their truths. For which, I at one time, would have been equally guilty.

In gratitude for these thoughts, I sense myself obligated, for what was freely given, to pass forward the possibility implied. Fully aware that where I go will be better, different in kind and degree, influenced by the affirmations of she toward whom I return.

I am incomplete and in order to grow I must move forward, leaving behind much of what I once thought would complete the process. The process itself seems to indicate that it is well, what I do. And to whom I go. Wringing out all the fears I knew nothing about previously. To fail this is to fail my essential self.

I own nothing, save myself, finding it unremarkable, this that writes, attempting a self-exorcism. Aware better now, better tomorrow, the energy or personality listening to me is available to all; the Thou, as in I/Thou.

130622 MDT 05:13 conflicting dreams

© 2013 by Jack Spratt—All Rights Reserved

rebirth

Significant women in my life, those I came to know well, were at birth delivered/attended by some difficulty similar to my own. Revealed by mom, whether in anger or in response to my curiosity, I cannot now remember. But the birth was difficult for her: fifty-eight hours of dry labor alone.

For me, this birthing process, leaving one mode of life for another, is reminiscent of those times I wish I'd never been born. Difficult, principally for encountering my vanities, the much and many articles of things annotating passages from indifference to self care, if not love of self.

For the second night in a row I have awoken beset with a frenzy to capture quotes made by women I’d never heard of and cannot, obviously, know. But then I have an unusual and unreasonable fondness and reverence for women generally. By which I have, after a long time, begun to know the difference is not merely physical, but profoundly psychological in their attitudes towards life itself  Great stamina, long term strength, devotion and dedication to the on going of all life.

Of the men I’ve known well, but never so well as women, they were without exception reverent to a woman as equals. Refusing to inhabit a half-world wherein women are secondary, victims or slaves.

Significantly, as part of my daily methodology, I weave, back-and-forth between writing and collecting quotes. In the process I discovered Pam had sent me an email, once more, lifting my head above the despondency of sorting through my vanities. What I had hoped to leave at the time of my death to others. Who in their turn would merely dispose of things I must considered to carry forward or abandon meticulously. There is very little that I identify with in terms of articles or furnishings. Yet buried beneath piles of neglect are things of actual value; the remains of what I failed to destroy or abandon in the past.

130621 MDT 06:05

Wringing my peace is dawn this longest day of the year. Fears that I seldom addressed, possibly the last? Hopefully! The love I know and anticipate is beset with concern that I will, as I was in childhood, be a ‘bad person’. Annie, my companion, a cat, is one of many pets beginning in infancy, to accompany me through life. Their lives truncated by accident, disease and disappearance . . . or disappeared from my keeping, as first was later discovered in the keeping and companionship of my mothers uncle John. Mozart lived twenty years and prior to my discovery I never knew where my crib mate went.

Of the women I have loved, desiring companionship with, unreasonably, both are fond, no, more like, love animals unreasonably; at that, all animals. Mother, however was not one. Since as a child she brought home stray kittens and her mother drowned them in front of my mother; poverty being a stern teacher. That said, whenever a cat or dog escaped from her keeping it was always my fault for which I was beaten both physically and emotionally savagely. In retrospect I have begun to conclude all lives given into our care and concern have their own agenda, fate and destiny over which it is not totally incumbent upon us to die bereaved at their loss. Then too there is the simple realization that the animals did flee the ‘home’ mother provided them being in essence house pets. As with pets so with me until now the last fears wrung from me. Stasis has caused me anguish beyond my endurance daily in process progressing towards the inevitable move. An unknowable, until now, expectation of grief beyond endurance should Annie run away, be accidentally killed or terrified beyond my ability to reassure her that she will be well in our new home and family; Pam has two dogs, both of whom have lived with cats before.

Animals seem to have an instinct for what we are personally, benign or fearful. In fact many characteristics I might once attribute to myself as intuition have apparently evolved into and ability to assess potential friends leading me to trust both M & P emphatically.

In recent converse with M I said; “It’s all your fault, you did after all suggest I volunteer for hospice service!” In significant ways they are clones. Lending me an organic sense of our relationships as divinely given and ineluctable/ineludible [archaic]/inescapable/unavoidable. A fate and destiny towards I go. Albeit, until recently, haltingly. Giving away possessions possessing me appropriately to others who will make good use of them. Annie, however, is entirely another matter for she is a friend since our joining one another five years ago.

Startled to realize that time frame roughly describes the current tenure of my friendship with M . . . a love that will extend beyond the distance between us and/or life. Convicting me that we are, all one family in life, stemming from Mozart, both the cat and composer, who slept with me in my crib through my long lonely life. Until now that is.

Did I just say “long lonely life”? Yes. Until recent time I have considered myself poison, a bad person, unwilling to be completely real to anyone including myself. What began with M will go on, a process of becoming a whole person. Better and better—day by day.

130620 MDT 03:00 birth

© 2013 by Jack Spratt—All Rights Reserved