Thursday, March 2, 2017

Thanks again Jon

I've *found* Jon Carroll again and his lovely voice!  How I missed his quirky, down to earth, frank musings when he left the SF Chronicle.  Of course, he's the reason I started intermittent spirituality all of those years ago.   Of course it was in some of the best parts of my passiams lodge blog.  Sometimes, amid the self-resolutions, the hate mail to myself and others , the ranty whines and polemics, I find echoes of that voice here.  Mostly, it has faded away.

I miss that me.  She's so funny and strange and weirdly even in the fact of bad things.  I think that's the thing that was the most interesting...her decidedly off-kilter but generous nature.  She existed and persevered through entire decades of awful shit.  As I sit here, now retired (PTL!) in my cold living room with the amazing sun shining through that window, I think...how much worse is this time (at least at the present moment) then times before it?  It *has* been worse.  I *have* been closer to the edge (or so I believe) in the past and I didn't succumb and devolve into such a one-note horse (there were noted exceptions of course, real milestones where I just lost it.  The Davis cemetery.  The crying jags after Uncle Paul died.  All the times I thought I was going to quit my jobs, etc.).  Is it only when I graduated to this Shangri-La that I became so neurotically focused on my navel and how it wasn't getting everything it needed?  How did I let it all get so grave when there was no real reason for alarm?

I think after the 2016 election...is this what must be done now...is this what hard times are about...to punch us out of our own pity parties and into a more expansive and luminous way of being?  Remember when you'd listen to Pacifica radio every morning before work...its infectious and dogged sense of the possible was what informed you...what kept you going every day!  Back then, buying a camera and a newspaper were the best things.   Eating your one meal out each week at the Chinese restaurant, that was the best thing.  Having a computer or more simply, a word processing machine--that was the bees knees.  Heck, you even gave back your cable TV for privilege of just writing and reading and thinking about those one or two very precious books you bought.  Why should this time be any different from that?  Why do you need more?

Truth...you do not.  You do not.

Choose wisely and do what you came here to do.