What's this Button here For? Oops.

Dog Poet Transmitting.......

I must be pretty careful and... watched out for because I seldom have difficulties or do stupid things resulting in unfortunate consequences, still... this time the jury may be out for a few days. I had been getting a near constant series of email requests from people to be their friend on Facebook. Some of them I could identify and some I hadn’t heard of or didn’t connect with their screen names. It got to where there were several hundred of these names. Yesterday, I decided to catch up on my emails, which I had let slide over several weeks. In the course of this effort, I thought I would take care of this Facebook situation.

I had registered at Facebook a couple or few years ago; I can’t remember how long ago it was now. I couldn’t remember why I had done it and then it came to me last night in bed. A fellow I had known years ago had sent me a message through Facebook. The only way to get the message was to register in order to read it. So, I did this and answered him and then promptly and not so promptly (grin) never heard back from him. I forgot about it and went on with whatever it is that I do and... the other invitations started coming in because I was on Facebook now. It was just my name and a few bits of information such as my being 99 years old and living on Malta; which I am not and where I have never been.

I know that Facebook is some part of the Sump Pump Murdoch Empire. That doesn’t concern me overly because every one of us, every day; purchases, ingests, sits on, walks on, travels in (and so on and so on) something that came from some company that is owned by some international corporation. We can lie to ourselves about this feature and tell ourselves that we live independent of the products of the beast but a lie is what it would be. Besides this sort of thing, I occasionally hear from people who tell me what I should think, who I should worship, how I should conduct my life and what I should be saying. It’s a small minority contingent but it’s there and inescapable. This applies to all of you in the same way as it does to me and you get more or less of it depending on how much of the public you are in contact with.

I may live in an unusual mind set, engage with invisible beings and normally operate in a hermetic manner but... I connect with the world on a lot of levels and in various ways just like all of you do. Some of my olive oil finds its way into bottles bound for areas well beyond my neighborhood, even if most of it comes to me. The price of having my olives processed is a percentage of the oil for the cooperativio pool. People of all political stripes and religious persuasions hear my songs and read at these blogs even if it’s only by accident and even if it is only once (grin). We are connected to everything.

With all of this in mind, I thought it would be fine to just go ahead and let these people who wanted to call themselves my friends, call themselves my friends. In any case, I don’t have to answer to anyone but myself and my maker. People can expect things from me but my first duty is to my conscience and if I can live with it that is my business.

So I went to Facebook and attempted to bulk process the requests I had received and save myself some time. What happened was- and I find Facebook to be difficult to operate at the moment- it sent out permissions AND invitations to everyone in my Inbox which turned out to be over seven hundred people. My immediate reaction was, “Oh shit.” Most of the people in my Inbox are good people but... some of them are not people I want to communicate with; the publisher who treated me and my novel in such a shabby and demonic way, the woman who called Interpol on me because I got tired of her hallucinating ravings at Smoking Mirrors, people from the past who had become important in the world (in their minds) and wanted me to make them important (in the same way) to me also, people who were soliciting me about something and whatever the case might be.

My first reaction was, “this is a nightmare’. All evening, I had to put aside my recording project and attend to confirmations and... while I was at Facebook, people were opening chat boxes so that I had a dozen conversations going on at once. I also had to explain over and over at Gmail that it was an accident; for people who could not understand why I had invited them to Facebook and even more; what I was doing there in the first place.

Then I noticed something very strange for which I have no answer. In the process of attending to all of this, I discovered that I had been contacted by about a dozen people from the long past. Some of these people I hadn’t heard from in more than 20 years. I didn’t even know if they were still alive. In some cases I wasn’t even Les Visible then. How did this happen? They weren’t in my Inbox. Suddenly... there they were; a woman from the body-working college that I attended, a fellow I had met when I was 21, a woman I had been enamored of years ago, someone I had met during the short time I lived in Palm Springs. I’m almost afraid to go back there now because who knows who has shown up in the last ten hours? Maybe I will start hearing from some of the people I met in prison and the mental institutions (grin). “Hey Les, this is Feet’s Robinson, remember me? I’m the guy that raped and killed all those nurses? We met in the max-ward at The John Howard Pavilion at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital.”

Well... the point is... you never know what’s going to happen because you push the wrong button. I’m glad to be back in touch with some of these people. They remind me of who I was in ways I hadn’t thought about in years. I can’t see myself spending any great time at Facebook but this is certainly interesting. My daughter, Allison, got in touch with me this way. We haven’t had all that much contact, although we remain close in an invisible way. We’ve always been friends but life has placed us at great distances for years. She’s in graduate school now. Presently I’ve had a lot more contact with her than has been the case in awhile.

I’m thinking this was no accident. I don’t generally believe in accidents anyway. It’s human nature to consider things mistakes before we even know what they mean. Sometimes something happens and we identify it as a problem and it turns out to be a blessing in disguise. I even gained rapprochement with a couple of people, where there had been some kind of a misunderstanding. What this tells me is to not define or label anything on initial appearance but to watch it and see what it does. We are guided all the time but we don’t take that into consideration. Our limited faith doesn’t allow for us to accept that something greater than ourselves could love us so much and be constantly engaged in bringing us closer.

I’ve been engaging in certain spiritual practices lately. It’s a different image and a different intensity level than what I was doing before. I’ve been noticing things happening that weren’t happening before and I’ve noticed that I am much more anchored in myself and better at what I do; this may not be for me to determine but it feels like it is so.

I watch and study people when I am around them and I’ve found certain characteristics in most of them; fear of the unknown, attributing false meaning to events, atavistic superstitions and hard wired presumptions about God, Nature and the world. It seems that the hardest thing for people is to admit that they don’t know. They do not realize how ‘knowing’ traps them in the conclusions they arrive at. Children don’t know and it gives them a flexibility and learning capacity that no adult can match unless... they have returned to being like a child in this respect. When we assume command of our lives we take the reins out of the hands of God. We can hold the reins but there must be an awareness of something within and above ourselves. This is the source of conscious guidance and intuition.

The presence of the divine permeates and surrounds us at all times. We have to move with this awareness, even if we can feel nothing at all in the beginning. Surrender is an incremental thing. It can also be terrifying and exciting, like surfing or skydiving. You do have a parachute.

What I am trying to do is to live what I have been shown is true for some time now. I want to approach everything as if it was put before me to make greater understanding possible. I want to look at every highway I enter upon as some tributary to the Halls of Wisdom. I want to see it as the greatest adventure possible for us and to soar away beyond my formerly drab perceptions of this world and see it as that beautiful blue-green planet spinning in illuminated space. I want to rediscover the profound mysteries of the Sun and Moon and remind myself that they are the seats of conscious beings. I want to make them my friends but maybe not on Facebook.

I want to walk through Nature, as I do, and regard her as my wise and benevolent friend and remind myself that she is alive and conscious of me as I go. I want to remember that she is showing me things all of the time if I will only take the trouble to look and put aside my presumptions. If only I will sink into the reality of not knowing... what wonders might be revealed? This is where I find myself today and hope I find myself tomorrow.


End Transmission.......

I’ll be on the radio tomorrow night with a Visible Origami flavored broadcast. My apologies to any and all of you disturbed by the Facebook mailings; don’t take it personally because it happened without my knowing it was taking place. That will be sorted as everything is sorted... in the proper time and place.

Visible sings: ♫ All The Things That I Wanted ♫
'All The Things That I Wanted' is track no. 7 of 10 on Visible's eponymous
'Les Visible' Music Album
Lyrics (pops up)



The New Shangri-La.