Heads Up

“Walk out of any doorway / Feel your way, feel your way like the day before / Maybe you’ll find direction / Around some corner where it’s been waiting to meet you” -Box of Rain, Grateful Dead

When the student is ready, teachers appear. Almost every day, I feel like I’m getting a valuable lesson. A fascinating fact is sinking in. You never know who you’re talking to. Everyone is their own existential composition, and knows stuff that is going to blow my mind with interest. I just don’t yet know what it is. Listen up… Whether it is a formula, an insight, wisdom, a coincidence, an answer, a question, sadness, surprise, or delight my world a listener grows with each utterance. A magnificent element of engaging with a new teacher is the dialogue. Most meaningful conversations often ensue. Discussions that are independent of some of the regurgitative repetition of propagandistic parrot speak which works to dumb down existence by media. Our personal references to independent thought and deed expose a wonder life that is most compelling. We have thought for ourselves. Every experience has not had to be explained to us by talking heads of the conformity industry. This becomes very obvious when we stick together and share our stories. Our first hand experience has merit quality that perverted journalism can’t touch. You have taught me that if I patiently allow myself the experience of having information come in from a variety of angles, the overall picture will make more sense. It has a chance of actually being coherent. News feeds are streaming incessantly. Forget mainstream journalistic integrity; it is long gone. A lot of our world’s power players have an agenda to push. Push. Push. Push all you want. Displacing our first hand connection to what matters to us can’t be done, and we’re sharing the better part of what works for us with each other. Teaching, Learning, Growing. Eat your heart out; we’re coming into our own.

Becoming informed comes with a warning in the modern world. As an example: We all know people that are current events mavens, and I do too. A thought came to mind one day about what the difference is between Ashli Babbitt and George Floyd. I asked an active current events friend of mine if he had any thoughts about what the difference might be. He responded that he didn’t know who Ashli Babbitt was. I told him who she was. In less than five minutes I got back to me with a definitive assessment that there was a difference. Floyd was unjustly murdered, and Babbitt was a collateral death of a violent riot. I pointed out that both died at the hands of law enforcement. That didn’t matter. George Floyd was an innocent victim of police brutality, and Ashli Babbitt was a hot headed whore that should not have been violently storming the capital. The superficiality of this conclusion bothered me, but it also taught me a lesson. All of us are at the mercy of a very real media machine that is purposefully framing information. Caution the leap of belief, information runs importantly deep. Ultimately stories range of hopeful and uplifting to the tragic and terrible. The ones that get the ink do so for psychological operation reasons. Caution the conclusion.

There is a lot to learn. It feels like there is a lot more than meets the eye. I am convinced that the answer to the riddle of the real begins to fill in as the patterns of lives are taught by people describing what they know, have known, and how it got that way. The objectivity of news reporting is in serious retrograde. The art of propaganda is interesting to say the least, but troubling. If I want to get it straight I had better remain teachable, keep the ears open, and the mind open too as you explain your story, your passion, pension, point of view, and truth. One lesson has sunk in. It is best to put the pride aside, consider the source, challenge beliefs, and don’t avoid meaningfully speaking with others. Our wisdom body grows with the quality of caring which comes through the sharing. Sharing visions, dreams, dialects, understandings, histories, mythologies, epiphanies, and prayers. So much for redundancy and repetitive enforcement of authoritative despondency. The dye is clearly cast. It is possible to see right through the drain, and frankly I’m tired of flushing fate and posterity down it.