Wake Up?

What happens when you wake up an old fart? Well, I asked myself the question - quietly, so as not to wake myself or anybody else up. You gotta be careful about waking people up! You get a bunch of these "up woke" people running around - you got no way of knowing what might happen. Why, we might even find ourselves in a worse fix than the one were in now!

Lay Down, My Weary Spirit

Well, there I was, wild eyed in the wilderness, and yet, at the same time, in my living room with two Moroni Missionaries sitting across from me on my sofa - they noticed my little octave guitar and suddenly I was playing it and singing a melody, well maybe more of a caterwauling.

Over the years [since 1973], it developed into the song you hear here - a series of rhyming couplets plus a chorus:

There's a glory in the morning 'cause the earth turns 'round
and a promise in the evening when the sun goes down!
Lay down, lay down, lay down my weary spirit, rest you now
No, don't weep - just sleep!

There's an anger in the ocean, such an awful roaring sound,
but these troubled, darkened waters - they shall lay down!
Lay down....

There's a power in the growing of a tree from its seed,
and a lonesome, helpless feeling when you see how life bleeds!
Lay down....

There's a sadness in our joy when we meet old friends,
and a sweetness in our sorrow when we part once again!
Lay down...

There's a glory in the morning, such a precious sight to see,
and a promise in the evening that looks like eternity!
Lay down....

Scribbles on a Train #2

[a thick tablet of paper with scribbles between the thin blue lines fell out of a box while I moving some stuff around - I recognized it as notes I wrote during the spring of 2005 while commuting to and from work. They will be posted off and on as I find time to type them up - Elmer Eggplant ]

Our texts state: God created Man in Gods' Image - male and female created them.

First of all, then, man is not Man alone, for man is also Woman - the two are one, that is: the human.

Similarly, God is not He, nor She, nor It, but all of these, separately and together, infinitely more and none of them.

As soon as the human comes to exist, in a sense, God ceases to exist - in the world, so to speak, it is the human who "creates" God in the human image.

As soon as the human is, the world is there. It is the human who, through human being, determines which aspects of the eternal which will be revealed in the temporal, that is, the world.

This is why I am forced to say [although it is not correct in the absolute sense] that God is not Other - in truth, God is not "up there" telling is what to do, God does not have a "Plan" to impose on us which we must follow, or else. We might say that God, so to speak, has a "portfolio" of plans.

In our common humanity, we determine which "plans" may unfold - by our greed or our compassion, by our love or our hate manifested in the world, we determine the "face" of God to be revealed.

Tickling the Dragon's Tail

Not long after my fourth birthday, in order to refine the ability to make weapons of mass death ever more effective, experiments were done to determine more exactly parameters for the critical mass of the metal of death, plutonium. There was this fellow in the laboratory who’s job was to slowly bring together two halves of a hemisphere of death metal - as they came closer, the increase in radiation was recorded as the setup approached critical mass.

There was a safety mechanism to separate the silvery-white pieces should they come too close. The fellow doing the experiment found this an impediment which prevented him from getting really close as he “tickled the dragon’s tail” - so he disabled the fail-safe device. One afternoon, as he was doing the experiment he had done so many times before, sweat dripped from his nose as the two pieces came closer - observers watched in tense silence. Suddenly, his hand slipped - the two halves came together and touched, a blue light filled the room.

Without a second thought he accepted the death sentence and separated the two pieces of death metal, saving the others in the room. After six weeks of increasingly hopeless agony, Lois Slotin died - his tragedy burned an image in my young pre-teen mind when I first read about it.

It seems to me the image is a symbol of how our common cultural insanity can be seen as a form of “Tickling the Dragon’s Tail” - listen to the night winds wail!

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Deep Water - Diamond Body

The images of the ocean and that of the river descending, that is the River Jordan, the road, that of the mountain and other - they are revolve around and reflect very similar insights into a deep spiritual understanding. If you cannot lose all, you cannot win anything - nothing of value and certainly not freedom.

When I sang this song this afternoon I found myself telling a story about a fellow who won himself a diamond body and ended up losing it in favor of freedom

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Scribbles on a Train #1

[a thick tablet of paper with scribbles between the thin blue lines fell out of a box while I moving some stuff around - I recognized it as notes I wrote during the spring of 2005 while commuting to and from work. They will be posted off and on as I find time to type them up - Elmer Eggplant ]

With the twentieth century behind us, the century we thought was the worst in terms of human misery caused by human interactions, not disease and natural disaster, with the click of an arbitrary calendar date, we hoped or assumed that a better day would dawn in the 21st century.

However, seeing the storm clouds gathering and knowing what has already been perpetrated in this first decade, it seems that the 21st century may very well prove to be a David to the 20th century's Saul.

How simple it would be be if one could believe that all our troubles were the work of rapacious shape-shifting lizards who have infiltrated and taken over control of our poor world.

Ah, but it is all too obvious that it is the work of all of us people and nothing and no one else - what we see is the sum total of what we are are and what we are choosing to become: humans being or rat-like lemmings dashing to the sea.