WHADDYA KNOW?
6 January, 2012
NOTE: We are aware that the last post entered the mailboxes of some of you with many of the words squished together. We have no idea why! If this happens to this post please click on the title and it will come up in the right format as a web page. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Also, if you’re wondering where Joel has been lately, he’s been editing 2 books at once: the photos for our Provence book, and his 2-volume Retrospective, all of which will be out in September. But Joel will be back on this site much sooner!
To hold a pen
Is to be at war.
Voltaire.
Maybe that’s why I haven’t held a pen this week. Haven’t really wanted to go to war. Whose side would I be on? Who am I?
I’ve spent these first few days of 2012…and isn’t this year just whizzing by?...reading and walking, shopping for food, cooking it and eating it. But mainly, reading. I’ve been reading the kind of books I’d like to write i.e., disturbing. And I am energized and excited and amused by the absurdity of what I call my “consciousness” and my “honesty”. It’s not that I haven’t become more “awake” during the course of my life, it’s that I still choose to spend some of my waking time asleep. Asleep to the truth of who I am. So, there goes the honesty thing.
If all this seems a bit cryptic, I apologize…and you're right, it is a bit cryptic. But I always did love a good puzzle, so here I am, once again, looking for some stray pieces to fit into my puzzle so I can look at its complete and perfect image. And that’s what these books have been opening my eyes to: that I am, like 99.9% of humanity, invested in the image of my false self. What a riot!
The author of these books suggests that in order to “wake-up” one must first ask, “What do you know.” I’m afraid I flunked that question. I answered: I am here. Yet even as I was writing the word ‘here’ I knew there no way I could possible “know” what ‘here’ is. See what I mean about holding a pen and going to war? The actual answer is “I am.” I added ‘here’ because I didn’t want to deal with the aloneness of “I am.” If I had said “I am alone” that would have qualified as a correct answer. But who wants to “know” that? Not me, evidently.
The other thing we all know but don’t want to, is that we’re going to die. And what I realized today is that the times when I’m most afraid of death are the times that I’m most removed from life. When I “know” I’m not fully awake to living my potential then I’m bloody terrified of death and feel the possibility of it everywhere.
This author also suggests that the reader write down one thing they “know” to be true and then prove it. Whoa! I’m putting off that assignment. That sounds like one of those trick questions that if you really answer leaves you stripped of everything you’ve ever believed.
Would that be so bad?
A word this author believes in and encourages is “Further.” Meaning that for those of us who are willing to wake up, there is always further to go.
And so I leave you with a dream.
Last night I dreamed I was alone and trying to go home. In this case home was Ormskirk, a small town I lived in, in reality, for 3 years from the age of 13 to16, when I left it and my parents, forever.
In the dream I ask some strangers where is Ormskirk and how far is it? They point and tell me it’s just a couple of miles. I start walking, but something doesn’t feel right. I feel like I’m headed in the wrong direction. I ask another stranger the way and he points to a signpost. Sure enough Ormskirk is in the opposite direction and much further away…20 miles, in fact.
The stranger says it’s too far to walk and gives me an old bike. I walk the bike down a narrow path leading toward the road to Ormskirk. Suddenly the handlebars come off. Shit. I ditch the bike and start walking. Then I think, jeez, 20 miles? Surely I could fix the handlebars? I start walking back to the bike, but quickly realize it’s potentially suicidal. I can’t fix the handlebars. But for a moment I’d pretended I could in order to stay in the illusion that I could save myself a long walk.
You could say I woke up in the dream, because suddenly I realize that if I ride that bike the handlebars are gonna come off again and then I’m road-kill.
And that’s when I realize I’d been in Ormskirk all along. Suddenly I felt the freedom of truth and started walking down the road, walking “further” away from “home.”
And then I woke up to today. And all day long I’ve been interested by this dream. I see it as a metaphor for how I’ve lived my life, overall. When I left home at 16 it was because I had to. My life depended on it. And it was a hard thing to do. Sure it was a high, but at the first sign of difficulty I would always want to collapse into the comfort of home. Not the one I left as a teenager, but the one I thought existed somewhere out there in the world: the illusion of home.
Who doesn’t want comfort? Nothing wrong with it. The problem is in believing there’s any place where one can be forever comfortable. It’s the belief in this non-existent reality, it would appear, that keeps us all busy building on this illusion until it becomes a fortress.
I’m hoping to travel further down the road to Truth this year. I’m sure there will be wayside inns I can call home for a night. But I don’t really “know” that.
Maggie's photo