Life's on Base Percentages

Dog Poet Transmitting........

May your noses always be cold and wet.

I seem to be caught between two worlds and I am guessing that is the case with most of you. The two worlds are The World of the Last Gasp and The Morning of the World. The first world is a world of apprehension and pending loss of all the things never fully enjoyed or understood and the second world is a world of all things new and neither yet enjoyed or in a position to be understood. It's pretty much how I feel like I have experienced my life up to this point, with one foot in the world we all appear to be moving around in and one foot in a world unseen, or possibly one foot in the profane and one foot in the sacred, which I think is the situation for any poet whose poetry commences in one place and then appears in the other. There are any number of poetic types running around though I wouldn't consider most of them to be poets, according to my definition. I see poetry as a gift of the presence of a particular muse who chooses her residence according to certain mysterious criteria and who comes and goes according to the presence or departure of the same.

I harken back to the ancient Greek understandings of these things and the analogies, metaphors and myths of this tradition suit me just fine. When I was very young, I remember reading Edith Hamilton's, Mythology and Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes. She was a very interesting woman with the perfect early environment and a first class education. Around this time, I was also reading Richard Halliburton’s, Book of Marvels. I guess I was about 12 years old. My reading was over a pretty wide range, including many biographies of noted early Americans and then a lot of escapist literature like Tom Swift and the books of Twain and Poe as well as most of the classical novelists of previous centuries. I had the complete collection of Classics Illustrated comics so I read a great many novels that way and don't feel like I missed much. It was sort of an early Cliff Notes introduction to great literature and it gave me primers for what I would later read in the full format.

My childhood was a pretty brutal affair so I escaped into books and sports. Upon reflection I have to say that being captive in such a terrible and relentless state of being, in a world of applied abuse, had its benefits and has paid off in time in many ways. I would have given most anything to trade my life for something more harmonious and human but I don't see it that way now. Once I had gotten away and on my own I met a lot of people who had wonderful parents and nearly all of them lacked spine, focus and endurance. There's a lot to consider concerning this and I'll leave it to the reader to see where their thoughts and speculations take them. None of these people have accomplished very much since, though there are one or two exceptions.

It's my considered opinion, based on experience and observation that those who have an easy time of it early in life have a hard time later on and the reverse also seems to be true. Of course, much of this rests on one's faith in the invisible and a proper relationship with and understanding of it. It's true that we can't comprehend it but it is possible to comprehend ourselves according to it. We hear a lot of things but real meaning is a personal affair and I sometimes think that one is most perfectly adjusted and related to everything based on ones full awareness that they don't know anything.

One of the biggest drawbacks to a more successful integration with life is to have some idea of your own level in respect of everything. Some number of us want to walk out of the world and live in some kind of Hermetic bubble and then again, don't even know what 'outside the world' actually means. I think it's fine to long for it and leave the details to the ineffable, as it guides us toward our particular destiny. Some of us want to succeed in the world and don't know what success is, so we make arrangements with our minds to bullshit ourselves into a workable rationale for what we do. This means rationalizing all kinds of things and possibly winding up like one of those new age fools who parrot whatever for expediency and profit and wind up with neither, insofar as real expediency and profit are to be understood.

People generally do not understand the perils and burdens of things like fame, wealth, personal power and all the things that seem so attractive and especially so in Kali Yuga which is designed to cause these states to be very difficult and not worth the effort because of where the effort leaves you in the context of the times. Some of us are meant to have more and some less and that doesn't mean you are necessarily being rewarded and valued more than others, because every state of being is attended by lessons having to do with being in that state. The best condition of possession and ownership is that of stewardship. It's there for awhile or longer but it never really belongs to you. It's there to see what you do with it.

As I have said over and over, life and the situations and circumstances caused in the existence of each and every one of us is only for the purpose of demonstration. No one wants to wind up an example of things done wrong and very few of us goes into anything with an awareness of this. We discover it on the backend, where we are also gifted with 20-20 hindsight. We are all competent Monday morning quarterbacks and experts after the fact. You can read these words and intuit that they are implicitly true but still not register the reality of it. We travel along knowing that this is so but continue to behave as if it were not. This is something we should think about and not on the backend when we could well wind up thinking of nothing else.

I do dumb things on a regular basis. The good news is that I do them with a lot less frequency. It's good to keep in mind that even our best intentions are useless if the ineffable makes us screw up for it's own purposes and this does happen. It's why the qualities of surrender, faith and compassion are so important. We get put through things for a very good reason and we are compelled to act wrongly on occasion for no other reason than to show us the meaning of our actions and to spare us a more critical and unfortunate demonstration further up the road.

People have a concept of God that is all about rigid right and wrong and inaccessible morality that we can't achieve or maintain. We seldom think of God the comedian; God the trickster, God the snare setter, God the uptown player or so many of the roles and dimensions of that which exists beyond our comprehension but we go right on putting limits on it and succeed in limiting what it can perform in our lives. We encounter misfortune and so label it when it isn't misfortune. We encounter good fortune and so label it when it isn't good fortune. This is why knowing that you don't know is so very important. We imagine that God is only looking at us some of the time because we are only thinking about God some of the time and God is looking at us and aware of us to a degree far beyond what we are able to be aware of all of the time. God is intimately present in our lives all of the time and realizing that is a key to some incredible possibilities. We are pretty much dumb shits all of the time but hardly see that even a little of the time.

The ordinary humans relationship with the divine is anthropomorphic. Basically what it is is you turn God into a big idiot. It is something to keep in mind that you are working with a mirroring situation and that should tell you a lot more than it usually tells people who hear it but don't get it, ignore it but can't avoid it and who nod their heads and don't digest it. It's also good to keep in mind what happens when you leave a mirror out in the open and after awhile it becomes covered with dust so that you can't see into it. Five hundred tons of dust lands on the Earth every day. It's something to think about but we just go on moving through time and circumstances and environments, without registering them and certainly not registering what exists behind the appearance of them.

My life just gets easier and easier and I find that difficult to accept while I'm looking at one shoe on the floor and wondering where the other one is (grin). Lately the synchronicity, coincidence and surprise factor have been off the charts. That implies I'm also not operating in any mapped out areas. Certain longstanding limitations and shortcomings attend me but since I now know they are in place for a reason, a good reason and there for the purpose of demonstration, I'm not overly discomfited. I can sense the resonance of atavistic paranoia and the general apprehension that comes with all of the too good to be true moments in life but... once again, it's all for a very good reason and I don't have to know what that is, like I would in any case.

One thing for sure, we have to keep our eye on the ball or we're not going to be successful in the game and it is a game. It's also a joke, given the eternal contradictions and it's a movie where not effectively playing your part, which is another way of keeping your eye on the ball, results in imperfect results and a possible strikeout as well. You have to get on base if you want to make it home. You could hit a home run and you wouldn't need collaboration or the assistance of team mates but often enough, we have to rely on each other to accomplish our ends and that's not such a bad thing for more reasons than I need to go into.


End Transmission.......

Visible sings: ♫ Just Like a River ♫
'Just Like a River' is track no. 9 of 11 on Visible's 2001 album 'God in Country'
Lyrics (pops up)