loom of dawn

Woven together on the loom of our time, we the many dissimilar threads, which in their turn are woven by birth and life’s experience form the fabric, or tapestry, of our collective history going forward. Making the bone yard of what the next generations will stand upon. 

What will they say of us? 

Our accomplishments and failures?

If I grew to this age of seventy-two skeptical, skepticism began curling fetal beneath elementary school desks awaiting the implosion of glass windows, bricks and mortar shredding: me—school mates—the entirety of our time. Threats of extinction remain in differing forms. Most prevalent is the slander of children defined as vocational education for which we will only question at the advent of middle-age when death and boredom predominate our attention. 

Through my childhood another education was going on between two different venues: one in which material wealth was extolled. The other: a closer relationship with earthly reality was celebrated. My sense, for now, is we should try to fully inhabit our lives to the extent that what we spend, our time and resources, will grow the next generation intimate with the ground of our collective being that the world will remain the mother of us all. 

Obvious in my metaphor is equality of genders, tolerance for our manifold ways of defining good; the meaning and value of life itself. The Kingdom of The Self extends no further than one’s nose; regarding influence upon the energy that impels life forward. Yet it remains the singular Hall Mark of those whose lives were lived that we are able to choose between instant death and eternal verities. 

On the Bell Curve of mean averages, the majority live within the middle two thirds oblivious to questions I might raise. Yet for the many who sacrificed their lives that we are able to do so, should be honored in Democracy, by responsible participation.

I do not always arise from my previous rest period incandescent with inspiration. For example this morning my mind was cold mashed potatoes, or Fluffer Nutter, merely aware that I was at peace. Meaning that, retrospectively, I was in conflict with no one and nothing. For which I should, in conscious mindfulness be grateful. And I am. Yet sense a lingering resentment that noting compelled me to write until I discovered:

“Someday, maybe, there will exist a well-informed, well considered and yet fervent public conviction that the most deadly of all possible sins is the mutilation of a child’s spirit.” - Erik Erikson

Somehow eliciting a concern for the odds against tomorrow. The peace I know does not guarantee my safety but merely my fearless focus in how to deal with it. Life happens, it begins and ends suddenly. Necessity to write is prompted by my skepticism that there will be a tomorrow for me —  or you — or all of us. Life is too precious to sell/spend amused seeking pleasure. My joy is to ask that you be a real person not a slave to anyone or thing fearlessly.

06:30

Light years seem to have passed between the above and now — I did get horizontal for a time to rest. I will close with the following quotes:

"Be open to all teachers and all teachings, And listen with your heart."

"In India, when we meet and greet and we say "Namaste", which means: I honor the place in you where the entire universe resides, I honor the place in you of love, of light, of truth, of peace. I honor the place within you where if you are in that place in you and I am in that place in me, there is only one of us." - Ram Dass 

"Each of us, as we journey through life, has the opportunity to find and to give his or her unique gift.  Whether this gift is quiet or small in the eyes of the world does not matter at all—not at all; it is through the finding and the giving that we may come to know the joy that lies at the center of both the dark times and the light." 

- Helen M. Luke

130615 EDT 02:56 loom

© 2013 by Jack Spratt—All Rights Reserved

moving

Moving is a pain in the sit down and heart; a death really, while one wonders is there life afterwards? Yet it, as death, is exactly what I envisioned when first considering the idea. My current residency is within an elderly community wherein it is not uncommon to see the dumpster filled with someone else idea of precious things.

And I have moved so frequently you’d think I’d know better than to collect mementoes of the various rites of passage from one modality to another. But I have, and find myself chagrined at what was once precious; indicative of a future never inhabited. Some dearly bought still sealed in shipping tape and quite expensive by any measure.

Absolutely, I am not the things that possess me, regardless of their once-upon-a-time desirability. Not “Buyers Remorse” but simple indifference since finding the most precious thing I have is myself. About which, in recent converse with M, she annotated the entire ordeal saying, “You now love yourself and no longer are indifferent to death.”

Which curiously explains my several abandonment of all that I ever did before: clippings, awards, negatives, slides and prints. Happily so, since had I not, I would otherwise have merely committed suicide placing myself in the dumpster instead of my ‘stuff.’

It follows that I am moving to another place. Not a geographical fix, so much as a welcome to love and creation of a new present and future with another person . . . a knowing of myself in, and from, a different perspective/perception swimming free of my self-imposed solitude.

Keep It Simple Stupid: The things I will leave behind are in fact mementos, bulwarks against my otherwise self-negligence, writ large and clear, 5 X 5. In this that I do: write. Absent too much rationalization I now see that in words I can penetrate the surfaces of things invoking/eliciting other and/or all senses. Whereas I formerly would simply kneel weeping at the altar of ideal idolatry; what was versus is.

The aesthetics of life are ever changing, a kind of dance by myself or with something/someone possessed by inspiration. And I’ve never been especially conservative of myself or product. In a sense what I just wrote astonishes me. I am not by nature, nurture or choice sensual. Given to stroking surfaces for tactile pleasure. Add. I conclude, for now, that I am not so much compulsively seeking the future as being impelled towards it.

A running towards, not away. Moving to inhabit/incarnate love differently in real time versus the abstract of writing about it . . . did I just imply: practice what I preach?

Nevertheless, or either way, the same result is locked in. Inescapable.

About this galling grinding time is a covert motive to simply take Annie, several dictionaries, one of three desktop computers and steal away in the dark. Leaving my apartment furnishings to be spread amongst the poor: food, clothes, pots and pans. Realizing simultaneously that I will, in the process, for several days driving, lose this most precious time when I write and collect quotes. More, or most, humbling will be to remain diligent attending all the affairs I have procrastinated: bills of course. But piled atop is the choice between which books to leave and those to carry forward. Too well aware that the books I own are seldom read, holding them as treasure for when there is time to read. Suddenly aware that I am by choice oblivious of that which I take for granted: time.

130614 MDT 02:31

First long sleep since my return from St. Johnsbury, VT: eight hours straight. My dreams were glorious, a reprise of all that I loved in others revealed in their context and time. I had fallen into emotional exhaustion and lost, essentially, my enthusiasm for what lays ahead. The evidence, made obvious, not fear, but merely being my age and able to process only so many psychically and emotionally demanding challenges. The promise of rebirth realized.

Resurrection, Reincarnation, being born again, have prevailed in my attention. Curious what that would look/be like. It is difficult for me to imagine a clone of Jesus, but a Jesus returned many times since His crucifixion in other guises. To me, now, He was a whistleblower and an anarchist, seeking the freedom of life to live free in our common hold, the earth. And we, collectively, are no more well than the secrets we keep.

I did not ask for my name, it was given by accident of birth. Yet I well know what it is to be ridiculed and vilified. I do not endorse the descent and protest of others for their violence towards me, or the collective, in that it is similar: the protest of the powerful their secrets revealed. What can we learn from either slander or praise? What we say of others often reveals what we refuse to address within ourselves. Jesus was profoundly a scape goat for all the covert violence he protested. Was He not then a true patriot of the Universe? Add, it seems clear that what He sought was sought by many others; freedom to be ourselves defined as whole, well, loving, kind and generous.

130613 MDT 02:47 moving

© 2013 by Jack Spratt—All Rights Reserved

interjection

We are common dust, moistened into clay, become brick and mortar. Interjected into which is life. Precious? For me it is. And when I awoke this AM I sensed something happened in my sleep, a dream, so bewildering, I had no sense of it until I encountered the daily quotes: Wisdom and annotated experience of others. Interjections: both the dream and those whose words I seek to explain my experience to myself.

Perception is important. Especially if you rely exclusively upon your dominant inherent vision/version of what life is and for. Education is generally regarded as a survival modality; applied to endow security for which there is none, never was and never will be. But to educate yourself, continual, is how you see can liberate you from slavery. I can explain my thesis in manifold ways but for now will limit myself to the experience of being transported from one place to another as a thing: an object.

Made exceeding well aware of contrary opinions regarding the meaning and value of life itself. As did the dream awakening me. About which I will not comment, save to say that this little dust devil is aware of what moves it about the desert of our time. Add. Perhaps all time: the before and after of it as measured by the experience, collective, of all perceptions; personal and communal.

If I forgive the executioner, the theft of my privacy, the desire to control, manipulate me by fear—mainly—for the profit/pleasure of a few. I acknowledge what I now think Jesus meant when he said “forgive them.” And I know there is more to this than I can comprehend in this moment definitively. We are no different, the assassin and I, having choices not obvious to those who know nothing but their version of “TRUTH!”

The same mind set giving us prolonged life is the same mind set attempting to categorize our sexual proclivities and sell us things to keep the entire hot air balloon of our world economy aloft. So my sense of justice is balanced between both the material and immaterial. At the same time—privately—sensing myself (and choosing to be) a citizen of the universe: not limited/defined by race, creed or gender. In this sense I am an anarchist advocating freedom for all to be fully themselves with the usual universal caveats: The Golden Rule plus “Do no Harm.”

The cream, in the milk of life, rises to the top.

Really?

I see it otherwise. Since I sense we are all cream; but lazy, inattentive, and lulled into a fatal trust that someone is going to do well for/by us. Like my sense of God, who I sometimes variously call the interlocutor, Mikey, friend, parent, lover, etc. I cannot know completely myself any more than I can know another.

"Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman—a rope over an abyss ... What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal." - Nietzsche

Discovered this date, this place, this time. Key to unlocking the mystery of my astonishing dream.

Life is a process about, and for which, we all are participants. None more noble than another. Yet in time, history is littered with martyrs who’s witness was unconventional and inconvenient; later to be celebrated—marginally—as better than what followed . . . how can a person claim ownership to that which is freely given? The list is long though small compared to the rulers of our lives. Who, if I am forced to judge, are successful only for themselves, while preaching Public Service.

I have been informed that NSA is not the problem but the Merchant Princes, who would be Emperors, are. Greed and usury abound. While mercy, forgiveness and kindness are lost in the process. We are known objects (actually unknowable) subject to controls by people who sense everything though thought: thinking is only one way of knowing God, Good, or people. My sense here is that we are known about—but not as a value—unique. Cynically.

In a sense what, and why, I write is in protest against being object/subject—slave—to anyone or thing. Did I just answer my curiosity: why the meek shall inherit the earth? I think so. Since what I know of the interlocutor is humility. While those who rule currently are masters of instilling fear.

I will not be the same tomorrow, any more than I am the same as I was yesterday. I grow.

"Tomorrow! - Why, tomorrow I may be Myself with yesterday's sev'n thousand years." - Omar Khayyam

Be yourself, not what you are told to be, or defined by greed and usury. Together we can form a world in which love is possible and absent addiction.

“Money is human happiness in the abstract; he, then, who is no longer capable of enjoying human happiness in the concrete devotes himself utterly to money.” - Arthur Schopenhauer

"The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it." - Henry David Thoreau

130612 MDT 04:17 interjection

© 2013 by Jack Spratt—All Rights Reserved

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

happiness as joy

Love is a genius present in all life. Sometimes lost in fear, then becoming anger and aggression  Addiction to material things like defenses and avoidances.

130608 EDT 04:58 acceptance

Happiness, like pleasure passes, is fleeting, temporary. But Joy is forever and independent of anything but choice to negate or abandon it. The difference is between a word and The Word, first a lighting bug and the latter The Big Bang.

And for this I have to thank Pamela Joyce Whatever, as yet her last name to me. Since for me last evening proved that she is not merely a girl, or a woman, but The Woman, first in seventy two years. Though limp as wet spaghetti, as always I sought her pleasure before mine and was rewarded with the sense that we are like the first couple; a pair. With infinity to inhabit . . . well actually we’re there already but oblivious . . . by we, I refer to us we all, the family of life.

"Life is the childhood of our immortality." - Goethe

I am a poor recorder of all the manifestations of The Presence; external/internal. Remember, always, this that I write is annotation of, and on, a process available to all; free for the asking. I will soon return to New Mexico to gather my furnishings; limited to that which I will be able to carry forward into my new life with Pam. Annie, my companion cat, is, of course top of the list and all the rest actually very little of importance follows. To my sense of things, it is the final audition for my life as it will be upon return to St. Johnsbury, VT.

I greet each day with gratitude and will be too long away for my taste but then will long remember these halcyon days and those to come.

"Nothing that is worth knowing can be taught." - Oscar Wilde

130609 EDT 01:46 happiness as joy

© 2013 by Jack Spratt—All Rights Reserved

awakening

Arising from a death like sleep, aroused by a dream. Often a string of thoughts or words lost between the time to time of moving from horizontal to vertical. To sleep is to dream and in dreams I am informed, not so much by what the content was, but what was implied/inferred.

Regardless the sublimity of revelation, it is lost between my being an inch worm crossing galaxies of thoughts at the speed of lightning. Merely a way, not The Way. A process of finding a reason to live another day. Wondering less why those who when assassinated forgave instead of laughing humorously at the folly of their executioners. We learn nothing from destroying our adversaries.

09:36

The world, I will soon leave you, is changing rapidly and I sense myself a failure at what I would change. Or, at the very least, protest. World extinction by: _________. Yet several come to mind blazing: over population, corruption of air water, land. Obscene profits made from the labor and resources of people otherwise unable to share in the boon. And one in particular: The science of war is death. The science of life is, however, entirely another matter.

I sense, think, feel, intuit myself as a curator and anthropologist of life interactive, collaborative, and as it might be ideally given the study of love versus war. Add, I have in time come to conclude myself an anarchist as I believe Jesus was; as were all those whose words I closely follow, seeking what they sought.

In sincere honesty I can find no label for myself. At one time I was a photojournalist and currently am grieving for a friend who’s life is facing traumatic change. John Henry White, of The Chicago Sun-Times fame, and I were once roommates during an annual University of Missouri photojournalism workshop. His remarks shared across the darkened room before sleep have remained seminal to who, what, why and where I am. He and his entire department of news photographers we laid off. Made redundant by video and toy cameras in cellular telephones. It never really was about the equipment but the vision, version and mind behind directing what was recorded.

We the people of this planet are essentially what we consume, for good or ill, by way of those who now rule. The Merchant Princes who would be Emperors. Multinational corporations having destroyed any and all sense of national sovereignty.

We who dance to the fiddler’s tunes must, in some sense be willing to pay the musician a laborer’s wage. Yet the cost has become distorted to the extend and degree too high disallowing all the rest of us a life.

I have faith in the generations to come, who will discover as I have, the world owes us no livelihood. Conscious as I was while teaching photojournalism that there were not enough jobs going available for those who wanted them. So I taught my students to see what they were looking at, on multidimensional levels, as both still and motion capture. It follows that we are all captors of life via imagery. And those who “Serve and Protect” the status quo and wealthy are nervous that they in their turn will be held accountable to we the ultimate authority.

A leg and armless man lay before me with a pointing device surfing the internet above his head. A Vietnam Veteran with unit patches displayed; he remains were I left him. Yet never will he leave my consciousness whenever I see the images of bombast and pretense.

“A picture is worth a thousand/ten thousand words.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_picture_is_worth_a_thousand_wordsw Seems cynical now at my age given my knowledge of poetry and considering The Gettysburg Address. To name but a few words springing immediately to mind. That in their turn describe better the abstraction of what things are about. Then too are the numerous things too small to photograph meaningfully. The spirit moving us for example. Thinking back to my familiarity with Civil War photography and retroactively applying what Lincoln said to the meaning/value of the carnage.

When I arrived in Chicago I called John Henry White without reply. Later, on the street, speaking with other shooters, I was informed he was teaching African/American children and possibly at university level.

Love as verb, never dies. I love his silence as well as our long ago dialogs; and our art is about being witnesses to life. How wonderfully precious it is whether acknowledged as such or not.

Given that yesterday was “D-Day” and Pam’s son’s birthday I will close with a remembrance of meeting a giant of a man at the El Paso Veteran’s Clinic. I did not photograph him since he was astride a scooter and about to die from pancreatic cancer . . . and . . . yet I will long remember what he showed me of his scars, the horrors he’d seen in the Death Camps liberated, or the portrait of himself decorated by several nations . . . a handsome Mexican American even now in his nineties. A paratrooper with fifty-five jumps to his credit.

So you see John, if you ever read this, remember what you gave me. What I hope we give to those who follow. To have courage to be real and address what needs attention fearlessly. . . . Even if we must paint our prison, cave or tomb, with bloody fingers self inflicted.

130607 EDT 01:10 awakening

© 2013 by Jack Spratt—All Rights Reserved

player piano

Music in all venues and modes expresses best a soul’s longing to love and be loved. Yet pictures came second in my appreciation the depredations of men to men indiscriminate. Variously my dreams are dominated by both. But now remembering best the discovery of images, illicit and impermissible otherwise, the carnage of Nazi Germany. I was quite young and curious, the photographs, were stored in a chicken coop; I’ve never been the same since.

“The same” as what? Before my witness I had held, exclusively, a sense of being unwanted singular. Then a race chosen for the final solution. But then, at the age of ten or so, I knew nothing of race, creed, gender persecution. In prayer I pray that I will find the answer before I die: why do we do what we do?

More importantly why do we ignore the issues before us when in truth what can happen to another can happen to you or me individually or collectively. The Golden Rule’s dark sibling: “What goes around comes around.”

In profile he seemed crushed as an abandoned automobile recycled into its smallest possible remainder. Around him was the sound of a player piano accelerated to gibberish, the roll torn through him a song in mute silence hysterical. I knew the dream was important. But was confused with free associations herein attempted the distillation of. Sometimes I sense the suicide of the world as its going to hell in a grocery cart bumping down hill towards the precipice of extinction. With age came a sense of integration: the spirit of what I heard and saw in both dream and ordinary of my days. All my ambitions to analogize this have failed and that applies to even this: writing. My greatest joy is discovering the genius of others who have no sense their gifts. Apparently to them improbable since they lack the education or franchise of being intellectual or capable of anything greater than being a cog in the wheel of industry.

In point of fact I would not be alive were it not for the kindness of random strangers who by acknowledgment or affirmation lent me a sense that I should seek life instead of death. Even now I sense I own nothing, being tenant and steward of something I have yet to inhabit fully. Possibly a self difficult to fully incarnate?

At the moment I can look across the recent dialogs and events: sense, seeing, intuiting then knowing the source of what I am writing at the moment. I feel at home here. At the same time I feel at home in my mind. Reopening all the myths and metaphors I used to hold as fixed and immutable objects to which I became subject.

If nothing else my thoughts tend more directly towards not being factory farmed for the amusement, pleasure and profit of anyone or thing institutional.

Of course I remember Kurt Vonnegut’s “Player Piano” and reviewing the summary on line remember better the spirit of the author than the narrative. Which is true of all my reading, the spirit in which it was written and what was sought, at least my sense of it.

We know ourselves simply absent all the arcana and esoteric language of academia. Follow the feelings when things go bump in the night and you will find them more benign that you expect. In retrospect I think all the rest is smoke and mirrors, bells and smells, magical thinking that serves no one really well . . . a sorta kinda I/Thou, not I/Them.

Real change is possible if you stick with changing your perceptions via stone cold sober mindfulness of what makes you heart sing and what does not.

130606 EDT 02:47 player piano

© 2013 by Jack Spratt—All Rights Reserved