Epiphanies come and go, in the sense that each is a rebirth; the death of one epoch and virgin birth of another.

My spool of yarn plays out growing both smaller and larger in consequence. Fond of bread crumbs myself, I am aware, that for most, the crumbs are eaten by predators who contort and control our time, culture and history.

Healing is sold in terms of magic bullets -- one time solutions. And pain is an overwhelming issue, or master, that impels us to move from now to somewhere else; a new perception?

Self knowledge is for me something that I fear losing; becoming apostate to my self. Impossible now and I wonder why? Faith and fearless confidence is my conscious choice.

Wander, wonder, curiosity are apt descriptions of my consciousness. The season of Advent is darkness for me, once confessed and shared with other adults, randomly, I am surprised that many share my feelings of impending doom. December, it seems, is the month of death and suicide. Survival of which implies another year of life. Such knowledge lends little tolerance given my experiences. Of course it helps to write this out yet in doing so I am aware that for others, significant to me, no, more beloved; I am a terror to their mood of conviviality. So I burrow into the season in an attempt to understand and prevail. The effort is not to own but wrestle my life into some form of meaning, organic and whole.

It was once an ideal to suffer with a mate. Yet never able was I to trust that they would not betray me, or my sense of self, as something other and unwanted. Astonished that I still live and live well a life alone since I can turn off the noise of commerce selling me alternative feelings. Small wonder some go berserk running amok killing anything within view, attempting, or so I sense, to establish a normative truth for themselves. (Laughter!)

Writing is obviously less lethal and rewarding in the sense that it gives me something to do instead of playing  with myself seeking intimacy. I profoundly miss having the hospice staff ask how was my Christmas; then telling them, “Well it’s over, isn't it?”

Intimate with death I discover reasons to go on living and prize the experience.

121208 12:44

Naked, alone, in darkness, face down upon the glacier of indifference this world become; life sold as commodities, in the pit of covetous selfishness; burned alive, not frozen, before the Judge. I ask that I be given the courage to forgive what has become of our lives and the ability to forgive my anger.

Black Friday, aptly named, thirty six years ago, I stood handing my son Randy an early Christmas gift; knowing he would not live until the day. He asked why? I was speechless; in reply he said; “Oh.” We left the milling throng of consumers behind to finish the six year long journey into the night: 7pm December 10th when he drown in his own blood a victim; of Leukemia begun when he was four.

Ten years old. He was and remains, the best of what I wanted of life. Destroyed by doctors and nurses who, before his birth, knew nothing of the cumulative effect of radiation via x ray in his mothers womb.

During the intervening time, until recently, realizing the cause, I presumed it was I, not the doctors who killed him. The only reason I did not run amok was that it is not my nature but the thought remains lending empathy to those who do.

 - Noam Chomsky
"It is easy to be carried away by the sheer horror of what the daily press reveals and to lose sight of the fact that this is merely the brutal exterior of a deeper crime, of commitment to a social order that guarantees endless suffering and humiliation and denial of elementary human rights.”

"Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it."

Having many questions is my only value to myself. The answers I have discovered are my only wealth; mine exclusively.

Life, short or long, is a death sentence; sell it dearly. I wish for you to be precious to yourself. Not as defined by those who purport to lead but by your own definitions moderated by doing no harm.

Be well.

121209 10:44

Parts of me remain mired in grief regarding the deaths of my children. Manifest at times and defined as sadness, anger and, at worst, emphatic rage. Indiscriminate--against everything indifferent to experience, truth and individual freedom to feel, think and be as we, separately, need to be or become for the love of life itself. By sincere honesty I confess that God is included yet moderated in time by the realization that God asks, or seems to ask, that we do for others what God refuses to do in ordinary time. The apogee being imbalance between indifference and love demonstrated by selfishness or generosity. Simply stated: those who take and those who give. Henry Ford’s; “Don’t find fault, find a solution.”

It is easy to throw stones; finding fault. A cheap intellectual exercise without consciousness of why. Avoiding or our responsible effort to understand our perception and it’s source and nature. Fraught with addiction to status quo. Such wisdom, as I might aspire to, has been gleaned from monumental failures. As demonstrated by my foolish attacks; irking the ire of those who would slay me as easily as they do and have done with most, if not all, who provide an inconvenience to them.

In person I am neutral, balanced, at time humorous, possibly glib; yet sincere in my concern for the difficulties of all I meet. If appropriate, or possible, I attempt to lend a hand, or a saving/salvific word. A touch upon what I perceive to be the brokenness to retard the headlong rush to self destruction or the indiscriminate mayhem towards anyone or thing handy in the moment of rage.

If you know yourself it is possible to ride the dragon more often than be eaten by it.

- Horace
"He who postpones the hour of living rightly is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out before he crosses."

"Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents, which, in prosperous circumstances, would have lain dormant."


"Think to yourself that every day is your last; the hour to which you do not look forward will come as a welcome surprise."

121208 04:03 self-determination
© 2012 by Jack Spratt - All Rights Reserved

Burlesque of Governance

Tho i make jest, the burlesque of governance, it is a deadly business bankrupting the world’s economy with self-congratulatory rewards for doing so. I would rather call them murders than thieves; but they are in fact both and unworthy the mouse droppings it would cost to obscure their ashes in death.

Everything I might say regarding what is good, fine and beyond, moth and rust, has been said before; better and by far wiser than I can aspire to be. Immortality is not an issue of acclaim, celebrity or guaranteed afterlife. Yet it is true and exists in all life; nothing is lost in infinity save that which is prostituted for material gain in the present.

Why do I write and about what? It is for those I have known; and now know well in poverty; of the wealth of living fearlessly in a time of chaos. The abortion of all moral and ethical values.

True, many have passed beyond my reach in death, yet are remembered and best reflected in/to not those about to die or their bereaved. But. Perhaps better in the avoidance of reality: our time, culture and institutional exploitation. The a fore named fleas who feast upon we the dog populous and the host upon which mutually ride.

This format is strictly a personal journal of all candor and transparency. Foolish? Perhaps yet in fact life and keeping a journal is not the goal; the journey is. Process. What we see is not what we get. We are not our bodies or minds but something far grander than one can imagine alone. Love and the discovery of love, real, actual, is a task for all life self-defined. Our time colludes to obscure reality from us by entertainment for profit in the process perverting self-knowledge while milking us as if we were factory animal farm ciphers.

121205 07:50

I write now with a significantly different intention; no longer frantic with inspiration, but aware the after effect. That small drop of water on the surface of still pond ripples beyond the shores containing it.

Ask and you will receive from a source unimaginable outside all the orthodoxy of history. In wondering “why” and “what for” I have come to a perception that is not exclusively mine from a source beyond understanding. God? Lover! Both. Names imply having what cannot be had or had by.

With extreme prejudice I was accused of incest with my sister, who I now believe had, at age six, no idea of what was going on. Nor did I at that point, 12 years old, but now many decades latter it becomes clear the contortions imposed in what I now consider castration. For which I am grateful since it informs my motives to write now for others who are similarly decapitated by the authority of parent, tribe, nation.

No.

More nearly burned alive at the stake of conservancy.

Such an unjust death is inevitable yet when seen in context it is less traumatic. To be touched by this energy, the power, wisdom is impossible for me to describe: what informs me that I must act instead of be a victim. And at that lends me no sense of what happens in transition from “life” to “death” or the afterwards. If I have any genius, whatever that means, it is the will to accept the unknowing, or the unknown speaking to all life above the din.

Loving, comedic, compassionate and empathetic . . . why do I weep? It was clearly stated by Paul once called Saul: Corinthians 1:13. To gaze into the dark glass and see what sees me looking is astonishing. Nothing changes except perception.

I am utterly different from day to day, yet I seem, to others, the same. Without intercourse with the real world around me I would otherwise remain oblivious to the unfolding of a consciousness in time; an arbitrary construct.

What is real love is immaterial; leaving no monument or trace in context of receiving but giving. Confused from birth until now I recognize the healing as a process begun from then and ongoing. The gem of consciousness is organic, gestating with new facets; unfolding mindfulness. A Buddhist term for self healing which, I sense, can only be inseminated by suffering. Given birth through becoming nothing--no thing--definable. Kindness by way of a simile, recognition, merger with reality.

121206 23:17

It is true of me that I live to work; versus work to live. This realization is after a lifetime of prostituting myself to other ideals and/or persons idealized. This is the oddest Advent Season of my memory, stunning in the realization that I love and am loved by someone uncertain of seeing again in this or any other lifetime imaginable. In this sincere knowledge it follows that were I as brutally honest with you as I am with myself, I’d tell you that birth is a sacrificial event. We all die and thus, as with myself, to you I’d say every moment it precious for in the next minute we die. At the same time I would advise all to educate yourselves as if you will never die.

When Jesus answered Nicodemus with “born again” it forms my sense of actual virgin birth, death, resurrection and/or reincarnation. In a sense to live light years in a moment.

Yet in fact I am not exclusively; Christian at least insofar as I am able to discern by others who proclaim or profess being so. Instead I consider myself a citizen of all creation; conscious of at all times the number of AIDS orphans and the Tibetan Buddhist burning themselves alive in protest. When I express my gratitude for the meal, silently to myself, I remember those residing under Interstate bridges. Knowing them of greater dignity than any other I can think of.

For an overweight lower middle-class white boy from Greenwich Connecticut; this astonishes me. Looking back at my high school years, remembering a trip to Greenwich Village with one of my two favorite art teachers, being told it would take me a lifetime to get over being middle-class I now realize it was a self-fulfilling prophesy. As indicated by Twain, Einstein and several others: it is not so much what we have learned but what we must unlearn to find the truth of our individual self; our greatest creation.

My son died on December 10th, a date I memorialize; remembering that my maternal grandfather also died that date, eleven days before winter solstice. M’s birthday is the next longest day: the 22nd. Only one astonishing facet of she who saved me from ending my life.

Love, for, or from me, never tells another who they are. Possibly incomprehensible to them and thus a burden instead of a gift. My only exception being to remind them that they can be fearlessly precious to themselves.

Be well. Be the wealth you are for others.

121204 0844 burlesque

© 2012 by Jack Spratt - All Rights Reserved

Shameless to admit; in both good and bad times, I have set the outermost limits: seeing mankind as vermin and divine; both. To choice between the two polarities is our greatest, at least for me -- for now -- the best expression of free will communicable.

A little of Annie Dillard, a lot of Franz Kafka and a smattering of manifold authors throughout time helps a great deal. Their conjecture defining the parameters of consciousness and conscience. Of course, it is impossible to leave out the wisdom books. To which I add all and not exclusively The Bible.

121201 02:45 Swiftly submerging into nadir of life, the longest night, I do add: to me the world is a dog and upon it ride, for free, fleas who rule by theft. That, in the main, is the body. The tail however is wagged by lunatic zealots or fanatics; fundamentalist who in large measure treasure the past over the present.

Happily bereft of anything other than a companion cat; I am able to no longer need television to hold my private thoughts immune from housemates accusations that I am insane. It follows that upon entering, thrice weekly, the men’s locker room, I witness the excretory functions of celebrity “tits and ass” plus a few Chiclets toothed men in Armani suits being flatulent through the obverse orifice. The burlesque is enhanced by a braying politician.

Molested from infancy until recently; so near death. In a sense learning to traverse life as if in a dark room covered in marbles; chaos and chance being my middle name actually. I find myself no longer resentful of those who stole my inheritance and now promise to censure the World Wide Web.

Odd, the education I’ve received, paid to witness the supercilious pretending importance. More bizarre; is the ability to bless my executioners knowing their divinity indifferent to them. To suffer the fools I have.

- Demosthenes

“A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true.”

“It is not possible to found a lasting power upon injustice, perjury, and treachery.

“What we wish, that we readily believe.”

121130 05:12 The absence of fear

© 2012 by Jack Spratt - All Rights Reserved

Orthodoxy

Orthodoxy can not stand against the available information via the World Wide Web. Fight for the freedom of information, do no harm, but protest and boycott the rich for whom we are their food and future.

"Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats. We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee.… You ask for votes for women. What good can votes do when ten-elevenths of the land of Great Britain belongs to 200,000 and only one-eleventh to the rest of the 40,000,000? Have your men with their millions of votes freed themselves from this injustice?" -Letter published in the Manchester Advertiser (3 March 1911), quoted in A People's History of the United States (1980) page 345 -Helen Keller

"When we love properly, we expand our love for a few to compassion for all. This love can help all beings to live with happiness and freedom, and it is anything but small and powerless--it is the reason for our existence!" - Buddhist Master

Censorship is the weapon of those who seek to keep the status quo. Manifest principally in education designating those who wish to live well in pre assigned roles of slavery. My sense is that they are the economic terrorist who control everything we do and will to become. Follow the money, the coin of power and see where it goes and who it defends. Discovering in the process who pays living and dying in prostitution to ideals impractical to real life; in flesh and blood terms--as lived.

Obvious to you and to myself, through the reliance, in this instance, upon quotes, is a discovery that from the beginning to end of all history by communication there are threads of revolutionary protest indicating a higher consciousness of what it means to be a person inconvenient to those who administrate our lives.

What I advocate is not revolution but consciousness of who wins and who loses; merely justice as defined by history . . . 121129 02:38 I stopped at this point unsure; disheartened by a seasonal report on the commercialization of what is intrinsically meaningful to me. Our values change as we grow in understanding of what issues are valuable and lacking in any meaning other than greed. Real kindness instead of hype and millions upon billions stolen from us to convince we, the consumers that they, the corporations and institutions are benign instead of malevolent.

We are at a turning point in history and have an opportunity to participate in what we want from life; something greater, kinder and more loving than what is on offer for the sweat of our brow. Institutions: governmental, religious or business lie all the time. Beware. We must agree together and not be lead by those who profit.

121128 03:56 orthodoxy
© 2012 by Jack Spratt - All Rights Reserved

aesthetics--mine

Beauty or grotesque is poetic or photographic; yet knowing not how but why I do either; both will serve for now.

Seeing the divine within all is problematic and my vision/version no longer subject to critics who seek what they wish. What and why I do as I do is for my souvenirs; not others. It is said that this attitude, or perception, is finding “a voice.” Personal and explicit--possibly insane--so be it.

True, of and for me; all events: random chance, felicitous or synchroneity. Perilous to those who volunteer to be recorded by either: memory fixed and removable as in digital photography--or this memory that writes. At least for now. No longer fearing the dribbling of it out my nose in Alzheimer or crushed beneath, burned alive or merely voiceless never to sing the songs sung to me and all.

Chortling.

Still.

The tale and price of an original Beethoven manuscript sold for an obscene amount. And wondering if Jesus reappeared that He, before speech could be uttered, would be eaten alive; toe nails and all. What is whole and holy being had but nothing of the spirit.

For, against, about which can I save? Certainly alone nothing but these moments of epiphany. Envisioning myself laughing/crying the sight, or recording . . . for what and why? The language and hearing soon disappeared; of dust dancing devilish in desert succumbing to dust again.

The act of creation is, in-and-of-itself, a reprise of all that began the bang--The Big One.

The All and the Why!

And i, a mud wasp making a nest, no better or less, than any who change the world but for a moment experiential. In prayer I would dance as the stars; but as I am: I call myself Lurch.

Not a faux Frankenstein but the creator of him, made one her self; by life itself. Of course it was by the material seeking/loving world not the divine. . . .souls being more than akin to angels: gender doesn’t matter.
121124 10:08 aesthetic
© 2012 by Jack Spratt - All Rights Reserved

all are: the nucleus of infinity

Over run with innocence or the obverse: consciousness -- all are both created and evolved. The desire -- no -- longing to be something, anything, worthy of life is the nexus around which all life revolves.

Difficult, impossible actually, to define the why, who and what I seek combing the cosmos; I still find it in miniature within all life common/extraordinary. Loath to tear one from the other part; and disabled to call one evil another divine. Knowing from my own trials the ultimate good is more merciful than I am to myself. . . . or by my own lights, be to another save being saved from my self shredding.

Gloria Steinem was the first of many, before and since, women I thought of bedding; not so much her mind/body but her soul. Curious to know her as entire not simple pleasure. Now I wonder what the yin and yang are about? Light and Darkness? Good and evil? Or, more over, a light greater than that which ignites my desire.

What is our ignition point; when we, dry kindle or moist mold, burst into flame? Not a war between love and hate, but both against indifference and complacency. Ignorance of self and all else.

To know the Creator is a trial worth all that I was and will be for it is my bliss; responsibly--more so now for life itself. Noble?

No!

Since it seems that which is within all life: it’s reason for being.

And at that, and all, this day, my encounter with the man curious about poetry of which I know the spirit but not the how. Making my second cuppa coffee, a sin against my bladder; addiction? Possibly! Who cares? Not me. I stood watching the water suffuse the grounds and said, simply, “collector.” From those few who respond in derision or praise I know those nearest me read me not. In word or person save those rare times from emerald gaze I know love as real . . . a gift newly defined moment by moment never ending. Expanding not limiting.

So.

No.

I have no fear of gain or loss. Being a teacher is reward enough; to see the conflagration torched within another. Each of us is on our own path; the redemption/reconciliation or loss which only the Author can know; not we. Or us.

Save singly; alone in the light and dark of our lives tumult or peace.

It could well be that we are both, divine and cancer, upon this soon to be impotent ball. It takes time beyond imagining to grow a worm or rose in stone. Can we, for now, for the time remaining, call women equal in quality, to we little boys, never growing up?

Love is all. And sex mere reproduction; or a facet of the whole. Listen to your heart, not the snoring throng.

121124 08:37 all are: the nucleus of infinity
© 2012 by Jack Spratt - All Rights Reserved

To live or die for our family of mankind is bliss

“Rest when tired” is a luxury never allowed to mothers; of father’s seldom. Perhaps this is why Eric Hoffer was so able to define the enemy as us. We the people defining ourselves by specific moral and ethical standards rigid; so immutable as to be intransigent; traitors and betrayers of all that is good and potential in life, love and liberty in and of ourselves as well as the world at large.

Axioms, slogans, koans and parables; all talismanic to consider in the ordinary of our wasted lives. To be or not to be, noble or ignoble, in the common of life is not the issue so much as to what are we, individually, to ourselves? What remains as the stone of time rolls moss less to the end of it’s trajectory: death?

Children love repetition while becoming angry, agitated, aggrieved at innovation. Rather I should say merely change. For me, Henry Ford’s; "Don't find fault, find a remedy." Is nearly as important as Jesus’; “Love your enemy.” Each imperative is consciously to fall face first into a box of broken razor blades writhe discovering one’s self rend from earlobe to nerve ending, and, at the moment why I am vertical instead of resting.

Some seek oblivion in sleep while I, it seems more often than not, find myself wrestling, if not with “God,” at the very least with myself--yet a higher consciousness than I alone am capable of. At that I find it no longer curious: an ability to seek and find the source of my disquiet--not disease.

The who, what and why of “God” is answered in all religions, philosophies and governance. Yet partially. And espoused by those who would profit not those whose love of consciousness is not a game but a vital reality. Generally considered prophecy using inconvenient truths as argument against entropy. All are born equal in opportunity to seek yet are the most part those happy with toys dependent upon the esteem of others gurgling blissful in playpens: local or global.

Without guidance or inspiration the difficulty of conflict resolution is to intervene between the aggrieved; one child beating another to death with the conflicted prize. Our ability to extinguish conflict is obvious yet slipping from our grasp. Thankfully so since the exercise of resolution means the extinction of all life now. Where is Solomon when we need him most?

And of “God,” or the highest consciousness possible, where is the resolution? Creation remains silent while we the created are hell bent for election, the privilege to decide; stewardship or exploitation?  Collaboration has become a political sin laughably so. The wannabe, like the was, Emperor naked in greed; an addiction to power psychotic

My disquiet, the conclusions awakening me, is personal and become irrelevant to this stream of thought. At issue is negotiation, dialog; an attempt to resolve with reason not destruction. Which is protagonist and who is antagonist; what is the nature of their motivation, intentions and objectives?

Following an intuition I sought answers in what has become the most highly read post of all: from Eric Hoffer. Followed by fourteen hours of mediation integrated with the ordinary of my extraordinary life--not mine alone but all life is extraordinary--once we consciously integrate death as it’s reasonable conclusion--every moment becomes precious. If I leave a breadcrumb trail behind me, it is for those who follow that they learn this simple lesson. Life, whether by accident, creation or evolution cannot be mutually exclusive to those who consider it so. Consider yourself in dollars and cents: one dollar. Ninety cents of your consumption is health by choice; the remaining ten cents is immutable and due to the simple arithmetic of genetics.

Life, Love and Liberty are not for sale by individual choice; choose to be a commodity or a self, never a slave. Violent input, violent output; the drug of the fearful and weak.

More on this in the latter future. Only if there is one.

121119 02:52 adversary

Predation is what we represent to the world at large. This has been true of all colonial powers throughout time from prehistory. In a sense it should be less surprising than the discovery that 99.9 percent of all people masturbate. There is a linkage here I have been attempting to mindfully discover since witnessing a papa bear masturbating in a cage, lolled back in boredom in his captivity. Oddly, at the time, alone with my very young children--unique in itself since my forever wife Susan seldom trusted me alone with them individually or together. I had not to pretend to shelter them or their curiosity.

With cause? I know many of my family who think me insane . . . perhaps better to cross the void on thin air.

When you are rejected and despised by your parents, it is difficult to find a reason to live. Suicide becomes a relief valve daily revisited. Political and religious figures assume the role of a parent without the obvious sacrificial aspect of good parents. Or, as it was before history became marzipan, a sweet lie, a confection to bury the masses in, It was the nature of kingship to be sacrificed in the right season for the King/Queen to have his/her heart torn out to fecundate the fields next time; possibly the origin of Thanksgiving that most of us are unaware of. Regardless of how much I love Buddha and Lao Tzu returning to the root of me I discovered Jesus again and again anew.

Yet this is not what I wanted to talk about essentially. It was awakening with an overwhelming gratitude for my life. Without denigration, I presume it ending soon, yet suspended in a desire to know more of all the wonderful people for whom I have endless gratitude including the Creator. Death is a small price to pay for the glory of life. Explicit: integration means change from what we were to what we can become free of greed and ego.

Odd to say but sometimes I wish I were blind and unable to see what I don’t want to see--but what is. When viewing photographs of those currently “In Shame” I see hard bodies, admirable. Whose mating seems reasonable as typical of all brothers at arms in harms way. I became aware of this when interviewing police, first responders, nurses and many same sex or different sexed relationships: love is inevitable in ways that the formal contractual marriage seldom is.One’s self seen differently, no longer a convenience or wall paper. Trust--Active.

Moral and ethical rectitude have no meaning here. The relationship is above and beyond law yet accountable to it: law. At first I saw the young woman as a predator and the wife aggrieved. Knowing from first hand choice not to participate in or with people who collect success as a trophy. With time I have begun not to write so much from inspiration but what happens afterwards; attempting to integrate the ideal with reality. And at that it is only for those of us who know ourselves somehow outside the norm; confessional, if only to ourselves and God, or to those who become aware of the nature of chaos and failure--we learn nothing from success but to repeat what seems obvious and by that become bored to tears.

No one can, or would want to, pay the price of my tuition. About which I’ve said enough, not to want a rehearsal of, the price paid; misunderstood by me for decades and only apparent and apprehended around middle age. That is not why I write--that is if you can call it writing--I tend not to take myself seriously; laughter being my nature. Joy, actually! At my expense.

Life is an experience only you can validate and redeem. Knowing how difficult it is to love and have compassion for one’s self is. I give it preemptively via silence and/or action and speech. What was it Willy Shakes said (William Shakespeare) in Macbeth? “Come home on your shield or impaled upon your sword.” True honor is not cheap. Obviously I find preemptive destruction dishonorable aka “Shock and Awe.”

Time and tide awaits no one, perhaps, except God, and then only on special occasions.

The nature of my gratitude is best described in what M has done for me. For her there is nothing I can give in reply or gratuity. Obviously, as with all true generosity, none is required.

If I speak in terms of healing, about which I once thought myself unique, at least to her. But later discerned it something she said to all her clients. Nonetheless let me be so bold as to annotate the ministry of Our Lord on earth: the miracles healing one after another seldom met with gratitude; He resorted to parables. Something akin to: Give a person a fish, they eat for a day. Give a person a parable, koan, axiom, quote and the person will live eternally. In a sense it is the words that eat our conceits and confections, that will humble us into loving ourselves.

This for me is the true nature of God:
I/Thou.
One-on-one. . . .too good to be true but truth demonstrated if only you answer the invitation to dance. Choose your adversaries. Most are unworthy of your soul. Do no harm. Tell no one, simply walk away. How many, we’ll never know, did He, Jesus offer and walk away from? Lest you be as innocent as an infant, with or without the cunning as unto a cobra, you cannot know yourself.

The dignity of the self decapitated is only apparent to the poor who see God more clearly and rejoice in every breath.

"Man cannot make a worm, yet he will make gods by the dozen." - Michel de Montaigne

Perhaps I can give nothing to M except my hungry self to celebrate her annual event: Thanksgiving, her birthday and Christmas combined. Nothing, that is, enabling her another breath, heartbeat, moment or day of life here on earth. But I will join those so privileged to have known her at all in all our humblest gratitude.

Happily, a stray, I will join to the extent possible her menagerie of great and small furry animals astonished at my good fortune not to be alone ever again. Tho she be for now ten miles distant and in time light years away. Such love transcends all definition.

Be well beloved and aware this season of becoming gratitude.

- Marc Estrin
“Kindness trumps greed: it asks for sharing. Kindness trumps fear: it calls forth gratefulness and love. Kindness trumps even stupidity, for with sharing and love, one learns.”

121120 19:17 MST To close . . . l have been wrestling with my sense of injustice and discovered a need to not enter the heart of darkness--the only proclivity I take seriously about and within my Self.

So instead of advocating, in fiction or fact, open season on bankers and/or the general--nothing new here--rule of thieves I will mark my losses as tuition in the school of terrorism: Reality. Preparing another pot of pinto beans with small bits of Bologna, some corn and diced tomatoes: Two deaths never make one whole life. The longest story, love, never rots nor decays but grows. From forgiveness.

121120 04:44 Predation
© 2012 by Jack Spratt - All Rights Reserved