Last xmas i spent the holy day in a hotel room in San Francisco; last night i enjoyed a wonderful meal in the home of a loving family doing their best to remain a loving family. This morning when i arrived at my volunteer station, i spent minutes searching my backpack for my computer that was sitting on the desk in front of me; and found the charger for the broken computer i had given as a gift the night before; then opened my laptop to find the email saying i would be early to the volunteer position - unposted. Confusion is our friend, but only if you can enjoy it. I do wonder how at this time in our planet’s history how we could have let simple generosity be hijacked by a handful of parasites? (a not terribly generous remark in itself - much less xmas day). Nor do i have answers for how to effectively organize against organized hatred, yet it occurs to me my own need to be organized might very well be residue from the same socialization that leaves me in dread at the prospect of not having given something to all i love, while at the same time, has me wielding gifts like the hammer of justice - bestowing the best to favorites and lumps of cool to others. It’s odd how the dissonance of this particular day mimics my own conflicts. Are we so well trained that one day of the year is understood as a “day of generosity” while all other days we tolerate supposed leaders looting the commonwealth in the name of fiscal responsibility, to provide generosity to the already rich¿ I am not always comfortable with confusion, but am getting more comfortable with asking confusing questions. For example, how do you stop violence without fighting fire with fire. I know for myself when i feel insulted, i retreat to a distance where i begin to feel fortified - a very aggressive burden when one is struggling to remain open and loving. Just as all roads lead to Rome, so too the path seems to keep returning to self - one cannot be loving and open with others until one is willing to be so with oneself. What thwn is the role of honoring one’s reservations/fantasies about others, or the role of rectitude as regards frank and candid exchanges? I don’t know, but i mean to find out - come hell or high water - both of which seem not too far off.
If happiness can be described as the absence of “greed, hatred and delusion” what is it to scour one’s soul of these ever present attributes¿ I’d be lying through my teeth to suggest that the specter of suspicion was not my go-to partner when my computer was not where i first looked, with greed and hatred hot on it’s heels. His holiness the Dalai Lama says the mind is a remarkably pliant and powerful asset when tended to by correct hygiene - what Thich Nhat Han describes as “mindfulness,” and i’m beginning to believe them both. Of all the things i could be doing, trying to aid a fellow artist in multiplexing his business/work hours is a privilege while simultaneously searching for ways to unite with the handful of humans (according to the highly suspect statistics of googol inc.) who read my gibberish, and because it is loving, does not make it less gibberisish. I read a comment this morning about our current chief executive, Mr. M.T. Suit which in effect said we have never before had a human who was less cogent and clear in his thinking, so perhaps there is hope for me yet. I mean if you can get elected to the highest office in the land, what’s to say i cannot express my opposition to an insane world without losing my life? So what is it to have a hapy xmas? I remember one year riding a skateboard that i had desperately wanted - talk about your pleasures of life, yet another year i was presented a girl’s bike - never mind that it had brand now butterfly handlebars and the oh-so-important banana seat - i was crestfallen. My parents were very ahead of their time and immune to the petulant disappointments of youth - perhaps the best gift i’ve ever received. However, this lesson in no way resembles the current sacking of the ship of state by stooges of the corporate state. My parents loved me and demonstrated nobly what it is to do your best with little, while the only apt description of today’s leadership is bald faced greed grown from a root of hatred buried deep in a soil of fear.
I understand fear, it is not my friend, yet the only way to stifle its incessant wail is a warm embrace. And while love certainly can soothe its whimper, its hunger is bottomless - consuming all and wanting more. My dumb luck is having owned a girl’s bike once in my life has taught me some compassion, which with the right perspective is as insatiable as any appetite i’ve ever witnessed in my hungry life. It’s like fun - once you’ve tasted fun, everything else is just bland. It is these paradoxes of life i believe will be our salvation, for there will come a time when the barriers and restraints used to maintain a pliant population will no longer suffice for control and the natural pace of the human heart will undertake the challenge of living and loving rather than Leonard Cohen’s cautionary “having and getting” that defines ambition for so much of our world. When people open their eyes with love and compassion to the overwhelming grief of the ruling class and its vacuous avarice, and rather than emulate the trappings of power begin to fashion a lifestyles based on generosity and openness we will once again unite in sister and brotherhood. There is no overcoming something that is without power, be that pain, or hate or loneliness. Once the light of interest takes fire in one’s heart, it will illuminate and its energy source will last forever. However if that interest is in the service of domination, it will be exhausted by the first free heart it encounters, one can imprison a body but never control a heart. So the ruling class is going after your appetite, believing you to be as empty and vain as they. What they do not understand is from your suffering you have learned things about life they have no equations for. Just like programming a computer to create art, the only way for AI to create is to emulate what it is shown, there is no formula for original thinking - it is a uniquely living quality. The reason seeds are able to evolve is from their suffering, what doesn’t work will wither and die, while what is successful will thrive and multiply - even be hapy. Show me a hapy computer companion and i’ll show you a fake-as-fuck programmer who was given a lot of money to satisfy a sad-as-fuck financier.
Money and gifts are not what will nurture human kind; we are the result of generations of struggle - not built of the soft life the ruling class is attempting to con us into buying. From this struggle we have codified in our genes the capacity to distinguish the real from the unreal, it is why delusion is one of the 3 chains of suffering, without clarity in your heart you will be fooled by the first huckster, tiger, snake, dark night that comes down the pike. Yet once you have embraced the real fact that you are a temporary aberration of a permanent flux it only makes sense to enjoy yourself by helping others to find happiness. Can you imagine the tangled logic used by doctors to make people sick so they will buy drugs that make those same rich doctors richer¿ How many layers of denial have gone into the fantasy that you can win a war, or that the object of any education is to find an answer¿ Talk about your dead-ends, it only stands to reason any system which uses questions to reduce the number of questions generated is self-defeating. What about a holiday that is based on giving presents that only deflect the pain of not having enough love in your heart to believe that someone would love you without receiving a gift from you. We have convinced ourselves that it is possible to buy happiness - that is sad, but only if you believe it. I do, but i’m unlearning it as quickly as i can type. If it can’t be bought, what then. I cooked turkey thighs in ceramic pots and scared myself half to death in the process, only to be exacerbated by the flames that erupted from sputtering grease. Yet the look of confused pleasure on the face of hungry people eating the results was for me almost as hapy as writing this now to the ghost reader googol hides from me, or me from them. It does not matter, for i do not express myself for googol’s magic metrics, but for my own growth and understanding.
It is the same for art that i create. Last night i spoke with a dear old man recovering from a surgical wound that i have had personal experience with. What he said troubled me such that i dreamt of an avatar from my past. When i asked the kindly old man “what do you want to do?” he replied “i don’t have to do anything, why do something that someone pays me to do and then criticizes what i do¿” - a point i well understand, but the hurdle i could not get past or through to, depending on one’s orientation “what do you want to do¿” It was almost inconceivable to this otherwise very sage man that he was the root of his own power. That it was enough to search his own heart for an occupation, and that a worthy objective of his own design was more valuable than reaching a state of disuse. Truly, it may very well be my own myopic task-oriented indoctrination speaking and that his own canny sense of peace is my lesson to learn rather than some arrogant supposition of cultural superiority on my part. But he will have to go some ways to convince me that hacking my way out of confusion using words as my only weapon could be surpassed by any bought-and-paid-for pasture of high clover. Still, i need to learn more about the words he gave to me, otherwise why converse if it is not to better understand another¿ Am i any happier than last xmas in San Francisco¿ I don’t know that i live to be hapy or that hapy circumstance animates my choices? I do know that i take a great deal more pleasure in finding ways to help others find happiness than focusing on my own. There has been more than enough Peggy Lee’s “is that all there is” in my life to accept happiness when it arrives and to not despair when it is called elsewhere, rather to enjoy the more consistent conviction that if i can relive one person’s suffering that is a worthy objective of my precious moments left alive.
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not hapy xmas - the sonnet
Has there ever been a not sad xmas?
For g_d’s sake t’was the birth of a doomed man
for which the richest church on earth says mass
but for any respite, the poor they ban.
Does a gift celebrate nobility¿
or just enable the money lenders?
Would a doomed man be hapy now or flee¿
he fled once, leaving only his tears.
What if he’s still here waiting for our love
to grow worthy of his noble ideas?
Might he object the slaughter of his dove
by yanking the plug of their medias¿
too soon to know if he might’ve succeeded,
but we all know how his love’s been treated
jts 12/25/2017
http://stoneartist.com
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
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