Fairfield, IA
by Loran
genre:
Biographies & Memoirs
description:
Nothings which time passes.
chapters
chapter 1:
July, 2007
July, 2007
chapter 1
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updated 02/07/08
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4324 characters
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0 people liked it
made for some amusing scenes. In a breakfast stop at Revelations, a popular cafe in Fairfield [and where yours truly happens to be right now, copying this paragraph:], a couple of farmhands sipped black coffee and discussed plans to repair a broken tractor. At the next table, two women debated whether reiki therapy might deepen their meditation experience."
Gary Lee, The Washington Post, November 12, 2006
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Yuppers... that's a common clash in this town and I have many such anecdotes of my own.
I sat down and copied out this excerpt thinking once i had it down, a bunch of related ideas would spill out over the keyboard and make for some light, amusing reading. Apparently not, though...
wait! wait... I think I got something... no, it's gone..
I've been struggling to explain the last few months to myself... not even just so I could use it for blog fodder, either, which, according to my latest comment board, has dwindled to a readership of one (1)... and while there were up until yesterday perhaps a thousand details that might have been discussed at length here in order to describe my late experience of being a rising sidha and subsequently and morose cockroach, scratching at the walls of my moldy basement apartment, well, never mind those details. That's the nature not only of the experience of TM, but of my life, as well, when I'm living it correctly.
I've had to contend with the notion that I must really cease to encase the words and experiences of others in my own experiential terms and just allow these alternate versions of reality to exist as they will... minding one piece of knowledge I had gained in a back-handed way and which won't give up on my mind: Refuse the bad noise. But you can see, after an idea like that, how hopeless and impractical it has suddenly become for me to exert too much effort in translating the TM culture side of my mind to the Loran-Uniter-of-Tongues side of my mind, which is still a bit retarded anyway...
This made me understand something that I would not have thought I was prepared to understand: Surrender. A friend in Canada writes:
"Surrender renders personal challenges effortless (to
the degree we surrender) and melts suffering into
sweetness."
And she's absolutely right. And I have become what I was terrified of becoming: someone who can be found at a cafe in Iowa debating whether reiki will deepen my meditation experience (NO! It bloody-well will not!). I don't have the time or energy to suspend myself between two worlds of analysis; between two stratospheres of exuberance; thrust of will and imagination; between the comfortable/probable of old and the plush/certain of from-now-on.
To all of you who had to listen to me whining last month about disconnects of ideology and my disgust at signs of worship and my abhorrence and fear of tight-knit collections of people with eclectic persuasions— thank you for listening, but you won't hear that rabble out of my mouth anymore... because surrender to the self-sustaining aspects of life is the easiest, most powerful movement on earth... it's like letting go of the edge of a boat in the Dead Sea to find that you practically float above the water (but without the terrible burning sensation in the genitals a few minutes later).
I was wrong about life. I was wrong about truth and logic and about the life of the mind and about artistic temperament and I was wrong about Nietzsche, too. You see that new default pic? See that smile? That smile didn't exist three months ago. It's not brand new, either, it just hasn't seen the light of day since I was a boy. It's back now. This is what I started several years ago in my mother's kitchen, rolling tortillas and marking in my mind the foundations of love that will carry me through to death and sustain me in my desire to be full like an ocean... it took me through the wooded nightmares of my teens and early twenties... but never mind that now. Now I am re-learning what I forgot as I got older: Everything is intimately connected to everything else and the network of that is full; whole; and it is you and me and it is radiant and abundant and beautiful and good.
back to top
Gary Lee, The Washington Post, November 12, 2006
--
Yuppers... that's a common clash in this town and I have many such anecdotes of my own.
I sat down and copied out this excerpt thinking once i had it down, a bunch of related ideas would spill out over the keyboard and make for some light, amusing reading. Apparently not, though...
wait! wait... I think I got something... no, it's gone..
I've been struggling to explain the last few months to myself... not even just so I could use it for blog fodder, either, which, according to my latest comment board, has dwindled to a readership of one (1)... and while there were up until yesterday perhaps a thousand details that might have been discussed at length here in order to describe my late experience of being a rising sidha and subsequently and morose cockroach, scratching at the walls of my moldy basement apartment, well, never mind those details. That's the nature not only of the experience of TM, but of my life, as well, when I'm living it correctly.
I've had to contend with the notion that I must really cease to encase the words and experiences of others in my own experiential terms and just allow these alternate versions of reality to exist as they will... minding one piece of knowledge I had gained in a back-handed way and which won't give up on my mind: Refuse the bad noise. But you can see, after an idea like that, how hopeless and impractical it has suddenly become for me to exert too much effort in translating the TM culture side of my mind to the Loran-Uniter-of-Tongues side of my mind, which is still a bit retarded anyway...
This made me understand something that I would not have thought I was prepared to understand: Surrender. A friend in Canada writes:
"Surrender renders personal challenges effortless (to
the degree we surrender) and melts suffering into
sweetness."
And she's absolutely right. And I have become what I was terrified of becoming: someone who can be found at a cafe in Iowa debating whether reiki will deepen my meditation experience (NO! It bloody-well will not!). I don't have the time or energy to suspend myself between two worlds of analysis; between two stratospheres of exuberance; thrust of will and imagination; between the comfortable/probable of old and the plush/certain of from-now-on.
To all of you who had to listen to me whining last month about disconnects of ideology and my disgust at signs of worship and my abhorrence and fear of tight-knit collections of people with eclectic persuasions— thank you for listening, but you won't hear that rabble out of my mouth anymore... because surrender to the self-sustaining aspects of life is the easiest, most powerful movement on earth... it's like letting go of the edge of a boat in the Dead Sea to find that you practically float above the water (but without the terrible burning sensation in the genitals a few minutes later).
I was wrong about life. I was wrong about truth and logic and about the life of the mind and about artistic temperament and I was wrong about Nietzsche, too. You see that new default pic? See that smile? That smile didn't exist three months ago. It's not brand new, either, it just hasn't seen the light of day since I was a boy. It's back now. This is what I started several years ago in my mother's kitchen, rolling tortillas and marking in my mind the foundations of love that will carry me through to death and sustain me in my desire to be full like an ocean... it took me through the wooded nightmares of my teens and early twenties... but never mind that now. Now I am re-learning what I forgot as I got older: Everything is intimately connected to everything else and the network of that is full; whole; and it is you and me and it is radiant and abundant and beautiful and good.
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