Relief: Grabbing my own attention

I have waited my whole life to meet this book "The four agreements: A Toltec wisdom book".  I have been waiting to meet someone who thinks the way that I do.  Could it be that the author of this book, Don Miguel Ruiz is one of many.  The notion that this book has been read my many and they may have connected to it's content the way I have would be phenomenal.

"I am the Smoky Mirror, because I am looking at myself in all of you, but we don't recognize each other because of the smoke in-between us.  That smoke is the Dream, and the mirror is you, the dreamer." - the protagonist of humanity by Don Miguel Ruiz

"We are born with the capacity to learn how to dream, and the humans who live before us teach us how to dream the way society dreams.  The outside dream has so many rules that when a new human is born, we hook the child's attention and introduce these rules into his or her mind.  The outside dream uses Mom and Dad, the schools, and religion to teach us how to dream.

Attention is the ability we have to discriminate and to focus only on that which we want to perceive.  We can perceive millions of thing simultaneously, but using our attention, we can hold whatever we want to perceive in the foreground of our mind.  The adults around us hooked our attention and put information into our minds through repetition.  That is the way we learned everything we know.

By using our attention we learned a whole reality, a whole dream.  We learned how to behave in society: what to believe and what not to believe; what is acceptable and what is not acceptable; what is good and what is bad; what is beautiful and what is ugly; what is right and what is wrong.  It was all there already -- all that knowledge, all those rules and concepts about how to behave in the world." (Ruiz, 1997)

Respect for the honest man

Gennady Soloviev preparing trap

A couple of weeks ago I watched a documentary directed by Werner Herzog called "Happy people: A year in the taiga".  The movie documents the lives of several men who live with their families in a little village along the Yenisei river in the Siberian taiga.  The men spend most of their lives away from home trapping sable and mink; living in solitude, completely self-reliant, with their dog as their only companion.  I was captivated by something one of the men, Gennady Soloviev, said when asked about hunting innocent animals for food when he could live in the village and raise his own.  He said, "come to think of it, we are all killers or accomplices.  Even the bleeding hearts intent to pity everything.  Why? It's very simple.  A man keeps a pig but he knows in advance what he keeps it for; to kill it and to eat it and to sell it's meat.  Even he who is sorry for all  of this buys the pork from him.  The trapper is the same as that pig farmer, only he is more honest.  I used to raise cattle and I could never bring myself to slaughter them.  'It comes to you to show it affection or to give it some treat; instead he gets a bullet in the head.'  In the taiga the wild animal knows no good can come from me, from a man; he tries to escape.  Here it's about who outsmarts whom."

Breeding and feeding for consumption and profits is a filthy practice that the ideology of animal liberation speaks to.  Speciesism is a funny little word used to justify our nation's system of modern meat production.  The ultimate in outsmarting the "lower animals...whose flesh we eat" (Ball et al., 2014).  Our nation's factory farmer spew their mantra "but we're feeding the world"; it just doesn't play out when eighteen people die every minute in this world due to hunger.  Today more than half the grain produced annually in the United States is being fed to livestock.  Grains are not the natural diet of cattle, grass is.  Grains are used to fatten them up quickly and get them to market.  The resources spent on logistics from udder to slaughter lack reasonable efficacy and the costs t our biosphere are mounting.

The lifestyle of Gennady Soloviev and the lifestyle of the factory farm consumer have very little in common.  One must be shrewd in his ability to outsmart the wild animal in order to eat while the other stands at the meat counter and chooses her cut.  Of the two, I believe some animal liberationists could admire the respect the hunter has for his kill.

In My Own Voice

Am I free

To be me

From the inside out

From the outside in

Living free

Natural one

Residence

Nation state

Walls and doors hold me

Roads and signs direct

Captive one

Losing sight

Metal disks

Paper sheets

Everything has cost

Only free to breathe

Hard at work

Earn to live

Big blue sky

Big hard sun

Dreaming of my life

Not a holding force

I am free

To be me

~ Jojean Dikeman

 It has been a very long time since I posted anything on my blog.  In fact it has been so long that I forgot how to spell my blogger name and forgot my password.  

So much has happened.  I quit my job, moved to Arizona, couldn't find a new job, and am now attending college full-time.  There is so much going on in my life and so many choices have been made.  I found it important to re-enter the world of blogging because I have some things to say.  Life.  What a ride!  Tomorrow I will sit down and bleed my heart.  It's late so until then I will try to get some sleep.  Life.  I love my life but....ah yes, the proverbial but.  We will get to that tomorrow.

A Day In The Life of Me

I went on seven interviews in ten days with two different companies. I can't even believe this is my life.

 Five years ago I was finally out of a relationship. It was never a great relationship, it was more pragmatic which is good for some people but not for me. Today I won't talk about that relationship. Just know that when tried, it failed. I found out I had breast cancer and was left with no man, no home, no job, and nearly killed in the process, literally.

The initial shock of knowing that someone I'd spent every moment of my life with for nearly three years would disconnect on a sickness, was the most intense betrayal I've ever felt in my life. The details are too difficult to talk about. He was my lifeblood for.... never mind. See, this is where it gets weird. I am a lover, I believe in love. I've never told someone I loved them and didn't mean it. I learned that some people can. My life is mine and I love. Forever.

Perceived Extensions of Love

I've been consumed by thoughts of the people in my life who are going through trials and are too far away to hug.

I find it strange to think that over the years I have compartmentalized people from my past. I've put some in safe places doing safe things, and some I've put in far off lands doing imaginative things. Few people are curious enough to do the later and I've found myself wrong about many in that respect. It's sad when you find out you've put someone in the wrong compartment and the life you thought they were living has turned out to be as mundane as the next.

Here is a toast to Bambi. When I was a child I watched her from my front yard as she flitted about in her beautiful peasant skirt, flirting with her bronzed shirtless boyfriend, her long shimmering blonde hair swaying with her every move. She ran off with him one day. Bambi's parents were upset and the police showed up to take a report. Soon things quieted down and a few years later she showed up in an old Impala with a couple little blonde cherubs in tow. Bambi was still as beautiful as I had remembered. She and the children stayed a few days and then they were gone.

I never saw her again until one evening I happen to be back in my hometown for some reason or another. It was cold out, I do remember that and I was meeting a friend of mine at what used to be called The Fireside for a drink. An older woman who was quite striking came over to take our drink order. She looked a bit weathered but her piercing blue eyes drew me in. I felt I knew her and told her so. When she explained who she was I felt the thrill of anticipation. I wanted to hear her stories of running off to the west coast with her man, of wandering the streets of Haight-Ashbury, of the Summer of Love, and of birthing her beautiful little tow headed flower children.

She gave me a confused look as I rambled about the life I had imagined for her and then her look turned to one of disappointment and sadness. Her reality she said, was one of scraping by on a little farm at the outskirts of town with an alcoholic husband and too many mouths to feed. That she wished they had been courageous enough to have followed their dreams but fear had kept them close to what they knew. Now we were both sad. I for telling of my childhood dreams and she for telling of her sad reality.

Today though I have put her in a different place. I have always believed that people traverse our lives for a reason. Sometimes the miracle happens in an instant and sometimes the miracle takes a lifetime or two. The extension of a kind word can inspire a change of heart and so to a change of mind. Even though there was sadness in knowing one dream had come to an end there was also the revelation of the dream to a saddened heart and the gift of hope for a new beginning.

The Lesson

It is Sunday morning. I woke up feeling like I want to take a walk but before I do that I sat down and tried to find something relevant and inspirational in my Course:

The dreaming of the world takes many forms, because the body seeks in many ways to prove it is autonomous and real. It puts things on itself that it has bought with little metal discs or paperstrips the world proclaims as valuable and real. It works to get them, doing senseless things, and tosses them away for senseless things it does not need and does not even want. It hires other bodies, that they may protect it and collect more senseless things that it can call its own. It looks about for special bodies that can share its dream. Sometimes it drems it is a conqueror of bodies weaker than itself. But in some phases of the dream, it is the slave of bodies that would hurt and torture it.

The bodies serial adventures, from the time of birth to dying are the theme of every dream the world has ever had. The "hero" of this dream will never change, nor will its purpose. Though the dream itself takes many forms, and seems to show a great variety of places and events wherein its "hero" finds itself, the dream has but one purpose, taught in many ways. This single lesson does it try to teach again, and still again, and yet once more; that it is cause and not effect. And you are its effect, and cannot be its cause.

Thus are you not the dreamer, but the dream.

And so you wonder idly in and out of places and events that it contrives. That this is all the body does is true, for it is but a figure in a dream. But who reacts to figures in a dream unless he sees them as if they were real? The instant that he sees them as they are they have no more effects on him, because he understands he gave them their effects by causing them and making them seem real.

I will escape effects of all the dreams the world has ever had? It is my wish to let no dream appear to be the cause of what it is I do.

Only truth is true.
Herein lies the peace of God.