I have always been a rebel. Osho says society can’t tolerate the Rebel. That’s probably at least part of the source of my problems!
You might enjoy listening to a short story I wrote about the source of our myths that evolved into Mother Mary, and The Goddess in many of her forms. This was humanity’s first major attempt to avoid the worst of the vagaries of nature.
You kindof have to be a bit rebellious to think that, as an outsider, you understand something that all the specialists missed.
I am a bit disappointed that no ancient historians have ever contacted me about The Convolution of Knomo Choicius, a sci-fi novel whose protagonist is a history professor. How many such novels can there be?
Nothing to flaunt at the playground. I will flaunt this rainbow, although it is not too bright in the photo!
I didn’t know what to write for flaunt as a prompt, so clicked on “Try Another,” and was taken back to 2015… with “Ode to a Playground.”
Boy did that bring back memories…of my elementary school playground. There was a small group of us, girls and boys from a mixed first and second grade class, before the boys started going into the their girl hating phase, who met, every recess, in a small “boat” made from concrete blocks. It was the outline of a big row-boat, and we sat on the block “edges” of the “boat” and pretended to be going somewhere. When we got bored, we went over to a big tree stump, that was just starting to rot in the middle. We’d put in acorns and dead leaves and pretend to be making soup. The hole got bigger and bigger, and when I went back to it in high school, the stump was almost completely hollowed out.
A far cry from the electronic games that seems to be the only thing that holds kids’ attention these days, I doubt any of them would be impressed if I tried to flaunt the fun times we had on the concrete boat near the dead tree stump.
Camille Pissarro (French, 1830 – 1903 ), Self-Portrait (Camille Pissarro, par lui-meme), c. 1890, etching (zinc), Rosenwald Collection 1953.6.115
It’s a monotone sketch. Dark background and he wears a dark coat, clinging to his shoulders, with the neck opening hidden by a fleecy beard. Said to be a key figure in the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art movements, his dark eyes look out of his medium toned face. The eyes don’t stare, and maybe don’t even gaze, over the tops of the reading glasses perched fairly high on the bridge of his nose. The eyes look, his right eyelid a little lower, his left iris looking up, while the right perhaps focuses inward. Wearing an almost triangular hat, again light colored to balance the beard, Pissarro keeps his lips closed, the mustache hiding the slit between the partially exposed pair of lips.
The light must be coming from the lower left of the image, shining toward the subject-object of the work. Not at all photographic, he was afterall, an Imressionist artist. The glint of the light brightens the left side of the glasses, left as seen by the viewer, while the lack of light bouncing back at us from the right side of the glasses allows us to see through to the artist’s lower eyelashes.
Only now, I notice the hair, protruding from under the semi-triangular cap. The cap and face together form a bright capital T in a sea of darkness.
https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/observe
Another piece of writing from our writing group prompt today…
Querencia
Having never learned Spanish, this word sounds like it means something totally different from what it is said to mean by sources purporting to be truthful, or at least accurate.
Que usually indicates the root in Sanscrit referring to what. This root is used to make the word aqua. In other languages derived from Sanscrit, including English, there is also a relationship between what and water. In German it’s was and wasser. In Hebrew, ma and mayim, which is supposedly not related to Sanskrit. Anyway, my Hebrew teacher said it was because an untasted source of water was always a mystery. Always a question. That was my introduction to the name of the science of philology, which I had long loved without knowing her name.
So querencia sounds like what and hacienda kindof merged. What House? What home? The fantasy home that we can only have in our dreams. The home where there are always fresh flowers in the windows during the day, and a light at night. The home where someone awaits our arrival with open arms, a glass of wine, and a plate of cheese and crackers. The home where the sound drowns us not, but laps pleasantly around our feet, rising in gentle waves to bathe us.
Or is querencia a type of question? Yes, it brings us back to what, the exemplar question word. Like query and hence querant, the person coming to the Tarot reader. The one who wants to know. Kennen. Connaitre. Know. See. See what? See the eye. The eye is what sees what there is to see. Window is the eye for the wind. The wind carries spirit. Spirit knows all. What? What? Querencia. My final querencia is not the fantasy house. But the question. What? What lies where I can not see? What? The querant must query.
Almost always been a grouch. Since the age of four, according to my mother.
I think it is because I was very sick that year, perhaps had a near death experience. That’s my after-the-fact explanation, anyway.
Decades later, I learned the word curmudgeon. One of my mentors was known as “the curmudgeon’s curmudgeon.” He had a heart of gold, and he became a good friend. Never had to paste a fake cheerfulness on my face when I was with him. Yet, he called me “Sunshine.” Haha. I really felt that was funny. This was still during the multiple decades when my first thought every morning was “Fuck. I’m still alive.”
Things are significantly better now. I have even had some stretches of months where my first thought was “at least I can understand waking up and thanking the Great Spirit for bringing me back to life.” But I always sink back into my curmudgeonly ways. It’s not that I’m ungrateful for the comforts I experience. I simply can’t overlook the enormity of the suffering caused by obstinate adherence to outdated moral codes. That is the biggest thing holding most of humanity in bondage, and however blessed I find my person, I wish the Great Spirit would give up its attraction to horror movies.
The March 18, 2018 Ionia Sentinel-Standard ran an opinion piece which had a comparison of the USA today and the impending doom of the Roman Empire, way back when.
The writer noted that another writer had commented on the “Breakdown of the nuclear family…. [which had provided] a common set of norms and values and in turn drives the moral compass of a nation.”
The problem isn’t that parallels are not visible. The problem is that the Romans did not have a nuclear family structure, which could have broken down.
The Romans, like most ancient peoples, had other family arrangements, more extended than nuclear. And women and the young had little or no rights. Maybe it’s a good thing the Roman family structure broke down, and maybe ours will eventually get some needed improvements in this same manner.
I have somedays felt that faceless is the preferable condition. Lay low.
But I read all of C.S. Lewis’ ‘Til We Have Faces” without figuring out what the title means, or meant. A fantastic story about the struggle to know what the gods want from us. The ancient chthonic dieties didn’t have faces. We moderns are aware that in normal human interactions, the words may carry as little as 7% of the meaning. The rest is conveyed by our tones, expression, even what we wear!
The faceless deities of course were not human. And thus also not from any particular racial group of humans. A faceless stone shaped in the female (round) or male (elongated) version, no wonder people had trouble knowing what these deities wanted from them. All we got was words through multiple layers of priest’s interpretations.
But we have faces, don’t we?
C.S. Lewis wrote this book late in life. He had a Jewish girlfriend, and maybe was softening his ideas that Christianity was the only true way. To me, even his Narnia books imply that.
Is Lewis struggling with the fact that the truest religion can only emerge when humans all see each other the way that the most spiritually enlightened Hindus do.
Which is also what Mother Teresa found to be the most important teaching in Christianity.
Learn to see the Divine in every face you encounter.
It’s important to remember that the point of admiration is inspiration. That’s inspiration, not imitation. It’s difficult to discern the difference. Humans are primates and primates have a system of mirror neurons. Mirror neurons are part of the system we have evolved to help us understand other people’s experiences. Mirror neurons provoke emotions in the viewer. When the system is working properly, the provoked emotions are like the emotions of the viewed. Thus, mirror neurons are the biological foundation of empathy.
This is a necessary and useful part of the system we have developed to maintain social structures. Even those of us who feel like hermits couldn’t survive if we’ve never been conditioned by society. Humans have too many degrees of freedom for that. Too many options to respond to the impingements from the world. We need to imitate before we can become inspired, thus lighting the candle of others’ inspiration.
The way to distinguish imitation from inspiration must be a function of the emotions. If the imitation provokes upliftment, joy, bliss, peace, it becomes inspiration, and then admiration follows.
In order to flourish, we must have a clearly functioning ability to distinguish pleasure from pain.
That is the rock from which the more difficult discernment between good and evil may be constructed.
The thoughtful are surely capable of understanding that pain and pleasure are micro versions, in duration, size and significance, of evil and good.
Thus, it is imperative to the optimal functioning of higher beings, to whose family we claim to belong, that culture minimize, or even attempt to eliminate, using verbal reinforcement, while necessarily protecting the immature from pleasurable danger.
Perhaps this is the ultimate end of culture.
In so doing, the fields of true compassion are tilled.
“You might as well call me Omar. It’s my name. So when you get here, ask for Omar.”
The line then went dead. Of course it wasn’t a line anymore. The sound went through the air as electromagnetic waves for most of its journey. Furthermore, the air itself was irrelevant to the electromagnetic waves. That wasn’t the case as they exited the speaker of the phone handset. The air had to be present to convey the sounds to my ear, and the air had to be there to maintain my body in a condition to be able to receive the sound waves.
Any thoughts, I now realized, were able to distract me from my task. The truth was I didn’t want to ask for Omar. The bigger truth was I didn’t want to do what asking for Omar was going to enable. The more eternal truth was that I knew this was a moment where I could continue my karmic circling, or I could try to escape from it.
But maybe Omar was caught in the same loop. I didn’t know Omar. At least, as far as I recalled, Omar and I had never come in contact with each other in the bodies we were currently inhabiting. Somehow, I felt a warning this time, that I am pretty sure I had never gotten before. But the warning was late. I was already far down the path of decision. Pulling out now would inevitably disappoint, irritate, anger and infuriate at least a dozen people.
I folded the flip phone, put it in my pocket, and headed off to the subway station, intermittently sipping my coffee.
Halfway through the journey on the Red Line, I noticed a sign.
“Mind the Gap!”
It kept flashing. First in bright red letters, then black. I figured that was for the benefit of any color-blind people. Red doesn’t stand out to some of them like it does for the rest of us. I caught myself drifting from my upcoming decision. “Focus” I whispered to myself. “Focus.”
And then I saw it. Between the red and black versions of the Mind the Gap warning were smaller letters, which lasted an extremely short time. A nearly subliminal message. It took me at least a dozen flash sequences to make it out.
Merwegon Says: The purpose of all spiritual work is to extinguish your habits, thereby allowing yourself the chance to respond, rather than react.
www.merwegonsays.org
Hmm. Was Omar acting out of habit? Was I? Was this a clue? Was this the information I needed to end my slow dance with karmic determinism? Was it?
