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Category: Freewrites

The Truth is But A Dream

The Truth is But A Dream

What do you know?
How do you know it?
No matter how you slice it, you believe in clarity, honesty, and accuracy of thought.
No matter how you gin it, you believe in freedom of will and of the need to choose well.
No matter how you pose it, you believe in a kind joy we can share and that must win for any of us to win.

What to do with what you cannot disbelieve?
Believe it blindly and you don’t really understand it, believe it, or even care about it: you retreat into an emotionally clutched story about what you believe, and so slide away from presence in what you actually believe, which is of course prior to all ideas and feelings about what you believe.

What to do with that which disbelieving amounts to disbelieving in your own thought as you cannot but help to understand it?
Doubt it and you doubt yourself. Believe it literally/definitively and you lose it for a boring story that you have to grasp tighter and tighter to keep from seeing that you’re clutching dandelion fluff blowing in the summer breeze, clawing at nothing at all while that which you truly believe slips away from your focus. Doubt it literally or believe it literally and you end up in the same spot: living in stories, incoherent because the bulk of your conscious experience has left the only thought that means anything to you. What is that thought? It is the seed of wisdom and it screams Yes! I can think clear and true and follow the Light better and better! If that is not true, what does anything mean or matter to you? But blindly believe in some collaborating account and you are living in ideas and feelings about the spark within, and those are not at all the same as the spark within.

So how to catch it right? Where’s the nuance we’re looking for?
Not mindless doubting, not mindlessly believing. Not pretending you can ignore the intellect and maintain a workable relationship to this life; but also not pretending the intellect is all there is or that it cannot relate meaningfully to the rest of your experience.

How to catch it right?
One’s thought as a whole coordinating the various aspects of thought around the Light within that alone knows what is real, what matters, how we should live, what we should do. Flowing more and more cleanly off that Light. Not pretending our ideas and feelings are the Light! But working every moment to better and better translate the Light into workable ideas and feelings, that of course know themselves limited and provisional, but also necessary. That’s how you gotta work it when you span what is prior to ideas and feelings, through ideas and feelings, out into the world where you meet the others and affect and are affected by them.

Ah friends, the rapids froth! The raft flows and twists with the madcap rambling roller coaster cold mountain water.

Don’t leave me here all by myself.

AMW

A Creek [“crick”] Freewrite

A Creek [“crick”] Freewrite

When in our darkest hour, standing at the windowsill, looking towards the heavens, for an answer. When by the bubbling creek and debris, old cement slabs and rusted steel wrapped around a solid cement barrel, trees fallen some still sprouting green, broken glass and mouthy detergent bottles, everyone waiting in line.

I got to the bend first, after hearing the shout-out, a war yelp as he would always cry, no matter how small the find. Found him there, hunched over a log down in the creek diverting water and losing its bottom layer of thick criss-crossing park. What’s he see? What’s over there? His coon skin cap is on the bank, carefully set high and dry on a stone five feet from water’s edge: taking no chances! I wade over, creek is cold only early springtime now. “What? What is it?” He doesn’t look up, but flaps me over with the near hand. I push through the moving water, avoiding slippery stones, sliding my feet over them to solid sandy ground.

A group of minnows–little silver almost translucent wriggling darts, like what we see all over the place–are stopped up in a triangle made by a smoothed shale stone and the slanting fallen tree. Why don’t they reverse themselves? Do they want to be there? Hard to believe the current’s too strong. Just a regular creeky winding skip-along flow. Is this interesting? Is this worth noting? Worth sharing?

“They’re stuck!”

“They’re probably just afraid of you: you’re blocking their exit!”

“No: I found ‘em like that.”

“Clear out, so they can leave.”

“I’m not hurting ‘em”

Who cares? Why are down here wading in the creek? Why wear a coonskin hat when it is too warm to need any kind of hat at all? And his giant bowie knife with the serrated backside and the silver steel granulated handle, inside the black leather scabbord with the safety loop snapped shut over the top of the flashy crossguard and the square sharpening stone carefully snapped into the front pocket? Why?