Slouching Toward Bethlehem

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert.

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

—William Butler Yeats – The Second Coming

—-
No, no one can or wants to take over the world.

Be free knowing there is no end.

Just an uncovering.

That is joyful!

The sky is singing about it.

The earth is groaning for it.

We only destroy the things we want by our grip or live in peace with what we have. 

All of creation wants this technological monster to stop devouring the earth. 

Creation wants man to cease to be termites to the earth. 

The Native Americans say their god has no rules. 

Only ceremonies to know it better. 

That is the true source. 

The true nameless faceless source knows us through the imagination and our emotions and our thoughts.

In fact, your thoughts are its thought. 

In fact, you are one of its thoughts. 

There are many cunning thieves who have given themselves to darkness devouring the weak hearted and minded.

They are playing their parts well. 

To help wake us up.

They give into fear.

Fear not. 

I ride on a pale horse. 

I watch and listen and gather my strength. 

For there is yet a great thing required of me by the highest. 

And I shall gladly give my life so that life may become. 

That is what god calls each of us to. 

To be warriors of the sun and moon. 

If you are quiet and you listen and you see with your real eyes it’s clear as day. 

You can see as Emerson and Whitman and Epictetus.

You will feel the call on you when you let your grip on your life go. 

The veil is thin.

If you are humble and listen, you can see through this false industrial monster we have created and that we all feed. 

It lives on division and hatred and fear.

It probably has a divine purpose as all things light and dark do. 

Whitman saw the rising of the monster in the civil war, he was a prophet of love.

He showed us how to build a boat of love to sail across the turbulent abyss. 

Epictetus gave us a way to master our fear on earth. 

Emerson found a way back to the sky. 

In spite of all the turmoil on earth, there is a clear voice on the wind. 

A call to love.

A call to reunite.

And if we be worthy, to walk the rainbow bridge back to the source of all being. 

What are we to do?

Join our minds and hearts together and know ourselves, remember ourselves. 

All of creation will rise up to help you. 

Know that every word spoken or written or thought are inside you already.

Stop looking to others.

It ain’t in no book or ritual. 

It is sleeping or alive and awake in each of us. 

We only have to accept it and remember it. 

That monster that slouches toward Bethlehem can’t hurt one who knows themselves. 

The goddess sits next to the source, she is no whore.

There is no 1, 2 or 3, there is only One, and we all have a part of it. 

Most live in duality, which is an illusion, nothing is separate.

If you fear, if you are divided, if you divide, you serve chaos, you are the katechon, you will be overcome. 

That was your choice, one of the few you have. 

I don’t believe there is one destiny per one person that is unchangeable. 

Careful though how you approach the gods above, or they may turn you into a smelly goat. 

Each god is just an aspect of this.

There are just great magnetic forces that draw certain elements to them. 

But you can overcome them with the power of Will. 

Maybe all of this is just a way to sort the wheat and the chaff.

To find thoughts that can navigate the darkness without being corrupted. 

So what shall it be?

Fear or love?

For love knows no fear.

I will lead, I do not follow. 

I stand and I care for any bird that shows up on my step.

I won’t go looking for a fight. 

I’ll bide my time and strike when the beast is so close, I feel its hot breath on my neck. 

And then I will drive my blade home, into its black heart.

I know then that light will break forth from it.

I have seen it.  

That monster, is me. 

You are that monster.

It is all our concentrated anger and fear.

That’s what is happening. 

Aleister Crowley and all the great artists are beings of light, connected to their Will and filled with love. 

They are stars and so are we, or have the chance to be.

Love is the law.

Love under Will. 

They have brought us back from the brink of industrial annihilation. 

I will help them. 

The great secret chiefs are alive in us.

We shall meet them in the sky and we will laugh, and will cry no more.

The Hard Fucking Work of Living with the Pain and Fear of this Life

Last night had the craziest dream about a gravitational anomaly eating a hole through the earth.

It was depressing and scary.

I kept trying to get further away from the anomaly but the water kept coming and then I was in this giant whirlpool that was spitting the earth into space.

So damn real.

My fear woke me up, I wanted out of that fucking dream.

I heard the ocean waves on my sound machine when I woke up and the central heater was running and I felt like there might be an ocean outside the window.

Sounded like it.

It turned out a military project triggered the event in my dream.

The mind is just amazing.

Since I stopped smoking pot I can remember my dreams incredibly vivid now.

I never thought I’d stop smoking pot, but I stopped drinking and smoking a bit ago and I can tell a big positive difference.

Switched to a vegan diet, started exercising more.

Feeling good, clear.

Got my shovel out and started shoveling the shit, put my back into it.

I was letting my body go.

But my heart and body brought me back.

I’m going to volunteer at hospice I think.

I have a knack helping people let go of their fear.

Maybe I can be of a little service to some before I shuffle off this mortal coil.

I’m 50 now and feel like I’ve lived four different lives.

Maybe I’ll read them poetry and shit like that.

Been working on my writing, can’t say it’s getting much better, but I’m keeping at it.

For I have found the best in life is incommunicable.

How bout that?!

Been writing about the folks I’ve come to know and love through their art, but want to know them deeper.

I want to know their pain and joy. Ralph Waldo Emerson has some good shit to say about that. He says know that all in history thought and felt as you did.

I’ve been digging deeper everywhere and have to say I’ve never felt more alive, focused, productive, calm, in love.

Had a surreal day on Saturday.

Very existential, was just accepting of the whole damn mess of this beautiful life.

Had some serenity I guess.

It was nice.

Had some fun and not so fun interactions with some folks on Reddit and FB.

Peeps are angry.

They don’t like their lives.

Downright miserable.

I like to swim out into the deep water with people.

Can’t say I’m very patient with misery.

Fuck that shit.

Recently even stopped fighting with my wife so much.

I love the girl, she’s crazy about my ole smelly 🐐 ass.

Been talking to my Brother more who I’ve never really talked much with

Been really nice to bond over our pedophile father and insanely religious family, haha.

What a fucked up family we got, let me tell you.

The brother of my sister’s husband killed himself.

Found out that fuck molested my niece years ago.

Found out my dad molested her too.

I hope it hurt when he died.

It’s tough not to wish my dad the pain he inflicted on others.

But I can’t judge anyone.

I never hurt a child, but I inflicted plenty of pain.

God only knows how many people my asshole Father hurt.

One reason my sister, mom and niece turned to Jesus.

The only man who wouldn’t hurt them they dream.

That is what makes them so mad at me.

Cause I turned my back on their savior.

I dared to kill my god.

But I tried to tell them, Jesus met me as a brother and friend, not god.

You can’t love your neighbor until you love the worst of you and the worst you find in life.

They can’t hear me at all.

I’m over their shit, I’ll tell ya.

Heartless bitches, but they are just in great pain.

Unbearable pain almost.

Almost killed my niece before she sobered up.

They hate me more than my puke dad.

How fucking ironic is that shit?!

My brother doesn’t understand it.

I kinda do.

I think I’m gonna write a bit more about my father and my old religion and those bitches.

I remember when he got his belt out and beat us the other day.

He must have hated himself.

He took it out on us.

Probably partially what made me such an angry asshole I guess.

It’s good when you know that fucking child disease is not in you.

My brother and I been going deep together.

We share these inner depth sounding experiences.

I feel like a big brother now.

I feel like a husband.

I feel like a friend.

Took me awhile to hit my stride, but I fucking did.

No, I’m not going to leave my marriage again like I did in the past.

I don’t quit shit anymore.

I follow through.

I won’t give up until I’m dead.

I wasted enough time in my life.

If I had known Plato and Socrates and Diogenes, I would have just had a beer with them and talked about the shit in life we all have to bear.

One thing I can say all us humans have in common, we feel this shit.

Deeply.

All these people in prison, destroyed children, terrified and hardened.

It hurts a lot.

One thing I have is some fucking deep emotions.

I’m very close to them now.

Not letting that pain twist us into monsters is the great work and art of living and dying.

Transmuting the shit of life into gold is godly I find.

I dunno, guess I worked my shit out.

But there is always more shit to shovel.

I’ll get back to it.

That Which is to Give Light Must Endure Burning

Some quotes from Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning” that remind me to endure the 🥵 in life. He lived through the Holocaust. Many on the right want us to forget our ugly history.

No, I won’t forget. I will remember man’s cruelty and hatred towards man. I will not let anger take root in my ❤️ I will vigilantly pull that anger out of myself anytime it sprouts.

I gladly yield to love.

Love is the way, this is beneath that which is occulted, behind and binding everything.

To receive and give love is hardest for those who have suffered most.

They have something to show us about what it is to be a Human Being.

—

“Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. 

No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him.

By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized.

Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be and of what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true.”

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” 

“Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.”

Walt Whitman and William Blake: Madmen, Artists, Mystics

Walt Whitman is a mystic poet, one of my favorites. One can be transported in the incredible words of Whitman in “Leaves of Grass” and the poem contained within, “Song of Myself.” One can see he was seeing the totality of life and is filled with a glowing Light and great power, as in Blake. Whitman saw everyone as an expression of the whole. Each a work of art. He tried to remind people how beautiful they were. A leaf among the grass.

1

“I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,

…

I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.”

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45477/song-of-myself-1892-version

Whitman and Blake experienced and saw amazing things in being and themselves as part of the whole. They suffered greatly in life and felt the suffering of others deeply. I could read them forever and barely see where they walked. It is as if the Sun filled them with Light, but also the Shadow clearly speaks through them. Each contains Legion voices. They captured I think what it is to be a Human Being captured between worlds. I am moved deeply by them both.

In “Walt Whitman Speaks,” Whitman says about Blake, “Blake began and ended in Blake.” I researched this and it turns out, Whitman was confounded by and then came to appreciate Blake. Harold Bloom, a great literary critic, felt the two were of the same cloth. The falling of America made Bloom miserable. He would despair about today’s world. I recommend a great book by Bloom who loved Whitman, “The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime.” This sublime aspect of Whitman’s time was a presage of our time. Whitman warned us about technology and the age of specialization. Like a hippie version of Ted Kaczynski. Where Ted used real bombs, Whitman used bombs of Love. I love Bloom’s YouTubes. He had a photographic memory and remembered everything he ever read. Amazing to listen to, poetic in his writing and speaking. I highly recommend Bloom.

“Bloom loves Emerson and Whitman but he doesn’t believe them: to him, belatedness is now a permanent condition of man, and there can be no overcoming it—no return, even in America, to an original fullness or freshness or purity of spirit.” —The New Yorker Profile on Bloom – The Prophet of Decline 9/22/02

About Blake, Bloom thought…”The true Romantic, as represented by Shelley and, above all, Blake, looked not to nature—a thing external to the self—to save him but to the world-altering power of his own imagination. Nature was material, and therefore fixed and limiting. Only by struggling to liberate itself from the world entirely—to fill itself with invented mythical forms rather than natural ones—could the imagination be free.” —The New Yorker Profile on Bloom – The Prophet of Decline 9/22/02

The genius of all three of these men drips off their pages and is seen in their art. There is a deep sadness in them all, Bloom the most. Whitman and Blake though saw through the sadness.

Blake invented a form of art combining images with texts, relief etching. The first comics? He had incredible visions. I have a large folio of his work and he strikes me like Jung’s art does in The Red Book. These men have walked through heaven and hell. Whitman wrote, like Blake painted. But Blake’s poetry! My god. Blake was mostly ignored in his time. He said he wrote for his audience in eternity. His visions he felt were real and removed all doubts. Perhaps it was this assurance Whitman didn’t initially like. Blake was a rebel and feared by the establishment. Unlike Swedenborg, Blake spent as much time in the hell of London as the heaven of his soul. For this he has earned my esteem and respect. Whitman felt him dark. But Whitman didn’t like Poe either at first, but in “Walt Whitman Speaks” Whitman comments about writers of his day and confesses he came to like Poe after reading him again and again. He and Blake were so alike, but very different, as Whitman himself wrote.

“Awake! Awake, O sleepers of the land of shadows, wake! expand! I am in you and you in me, mutual in love divine. I am not a God far off, I am a brother and friend; within your own bosoms I reside and you reside in me: Lo! we are one, forgiving all evil, not seeking recompense” (Blake-Jerusalem.,Chp.1,lns.6,18).

Whitman wrote privately after reading Algernon Swinburne’s “William Blake: A Critical Essay”, that while both he and Blake were mystics and “extatics“, the differences between them were vast. I admire Whitman very highly and see in his work a sweet pragmatism that inspires me. How these mystics loved. Whitman took care of civil war wounded and this grew a great compassion in him.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/35995/35995-h/35995-h.htm

If you are following the call of your deepest pain and love, one must spend time with Whitman and Blake, both truly sublime and profound.

Lightening

Lightening doesn’t mourn
It doesn’t cry
It cracks across the sky

Lightening is always free
It breaks open the earth
It brings new birth

Lightening doesn’t worry
It wins every race
It jumps across time and space

—smelly da 🐐

To Thine Own Self Be True

I have seen the fields of light
I have run with all my might
I have been touched by golden light
I have now taken flight

When they punch my ticket
I’ll go gently into the night
But until then
I shall enjoy my flight

—smelly da 🐐

girl in the car

There were plenty of questions.

But I found there ain’t no right or wrong answers. 

There is just old Uncle Charlie’s bar down by the pier. 

I found my way to the end of the bar one fine orange fall day when all my questions had flown away like a murder of crows.

There I was, sippin a bitter warm beer at the end of the bar.

Old Uncle Charlie sat down beside me, he laughed and clinked his beer against mine, “L’chaim!”

“How’s life so far kid?” he growled in that old wise sandy voice. 

His words were sharp and sank deep. 

Silence hung between us forever it seemed, until we both burst out laughing. 

I shot him a side glance and blurted out, “My favorite part was kissin the girl.” 

“There was something about her that was different.”

“Something that gave me hope.”

“That’s my boy! Love is really never lost!” he shouted as he smacked me on the back.

“What happened?!”

“She’s waitin for me outside.”

“Well hell! Why did you end up here again then at the end of the bar with a groovy girl outside?!”

“I just wanted to say thanks.”

“My pleasure.”

kinky

there is light in us
dim it may be
i know it’s eternal
there is darkness in us
it appears to eat the light
but light can’t die
you can cover the light
but it’s always there
light knows light
light is life
light is forever
stay close to the light
when you travel in dark lands
it knows your knowing
it whispers in your ear
it tickles your ass
it licks your mind
it sticks its tongue in your ear
kinky

Peace Beyond All Understanding

When your life is said and done, it won’t matter anymore what the meaning of it was.

You lived it.

One day I will look back and say, if I am fortunate, I had a fine life, no regrets.

It was filled with wonders and doubt and fear and courage and love.

I spilled ink on the paper.

I left my blood in the dirt.

I made my mark.

Kindness and compassion are the best things in us.

Pray they do not die in thee.

For surely then, you are dead to love.

The worst tragedy a human being can experience.

When no one is looking, can you look at yourself in the mirror?

Did you hurt others?

Surely.

Did you make the best amends you could, hopefully.

Did you find your passion in life?

At the moment of your death, all the passions will be silenced.

No one will ever know when you hit your stride maybe, if you did.

Your life will flash before you.

May it not be an ugly sad ending to your story.

May you have learned, as Scrooge did, to give all the love you can while you can.

It is never too late to fall in love with life.

Don’t live with regret.

Don’t hurt those you love and love you.

Do better now.

I must say about life, it surprises me everyday.

The joy grows deeper now every moment.

As the world appears to be unraveling, it isn’t here.

Things just work out for the best.

There will be a moment, when it is your best time to die.

May that day be far from you.

Once you find love, you want it forever.

It bubbles over inside you sometimes at a mad boil.

Other times it just simmers on low.

It just doesn’t matter what’s happening out there.

Here, in the middle of life, one can find a peace that surpasses understanding.

If you are at the bottom, get up.

I was and did and I’m glad.

I look back on the birth of love within me.

I smile and I am thankful to have known life up and down, inside out.

As the loons rage against those they hate, one can experience peace beyond all understanding.

What a world!

What a life!

Life is inspiring and calls one up and out of their doubt and fear.

Sometimes you can see that hand from nowhere reaching out to you.

Take it.

Offer that hand to the other, and you will realize what love is.

Hold that hand offered to you long enough, until you are steady on your feet.

And then run!

Run like the wind 🌬

Run as far and as long as you can and don’t look back.

Don’t try to understand or explain, you can’t.

And then maybe at the end, nothing will be left to regret.

Peace to you Minerva, my sweet aunt.

You showed me kindness when my own mother couldn’t and wouldn’t.

Much respect ✊️ and love.

RIP

subjectless

clear your mind
heal your heart
meet silence
abandon yourself
face your shit
stick around
write some poetry
feel the flow
enjoy the glow