I am sitting here at my sacred desk. The sun is directly in my face and I am loving it. It's May 12 and winter is almost over. You can almost feel the warmth. I am where I am supposed to be. When my ancient ass hits this chair, when I fire up the computer machine, when the sun caresses me and the words flow - I connect with the pure spirit that was born on January 1, 1954. The spirit that was, before life and everything that comes with it twisted, beat and tortured me into the helpless mass of pain I now am.
When you connect with your own essence you know it. There is a sense of peace, an ease, a beauty and spirituality that soothes you, calms you down and opens you up. Doesn't happen often, doesn't come easy and some people never experience it. The knowing comes from the inside. I know that this is what I am supposed to do. I am supposed to write. And I am supposed to get paid for it. This is how I was meant to make a living and live a life. Instead I am a part time liquor store clerk and a part time bartender in a low life bar.
The problem here is that life, parents, teachers, enemies grab a hold of you when you are helpless. When you are that pure spirit you are at the mercy of your parents. Most parents are unqualified. In fact most parents are so screwed up they damage their children irreversibly. The most shameful crime anyone can commit. To take a pure life form, an innocent spirit, and corrupt it, twist it, damage it and hurt it before it can even defend itself. Before it even has a chance to assume it's rightful and unique place in this world.
After the parents have squeezed the life and spontaneity and originality out of your spirit they send you to school. Where teachers and disciplinarians structure you and control you and punish any shred of uniqueness while encouraging and rewarding conformity. And you have to deal with all the other twisted little children who have been warped by their parents.
This beautiful, pure, unique spirit comes into the world with infinite promise and infinite potential, and it gets destroyed. Humans should grow like flowers; naturally in the sun and warmth, showering the world with their beauty. Delicately developing into precious forces of nature. Instead we get trampled on, pushed under the soil, under-watered and under-fed, neglected and abused. That is why there are so few pure humans around, people who are themselves in all their precious uniqueness. People who just are, people who don't hurt or abuse or take advantage of anyone else. People who contribute beauty to life and the world in their own special way. If you meet someone like that you are meeting one in a billion.
If you are lucky enough to get a glimpse, a feel into your true nature, if you can regress backwards to your pure spirit, like I can by sitting in this chair and touching this keyboard, you are experiencing holiness. But you have to do something with it if you are to survive. You have to fight through all the pain and misconceptions that your parents and all the others embedded in you. Like trying to suck air through two feet of molasses. You have to deal with your horrible job, your very small life, limits that suffocate you and steal your ambition and your energy and your hope.
I touch this keyboard and I soar. Then I get up and go to work and I die. Then I come home and drink whiskey and die some more. But I do soar when I sit here and that breathes enough life into my soul to get me through another day. I can see my essence; more importantly I can feel it. The real me. It is intimidating to face the truth and it is torturous because it is fleeting. "Life" throws a veil over it.
When I see a desert scene on TV, in a movie, in a documentary, when I see pictures of the desert in a book, my heart knows that that is where I am meant to be. I have an album cover hanging on the wall - Delaney and Bonnie and Friends with Eric Clapton. The picture is of a Rolls Royce parked in the middle of the desert. Someone is lying across the front seat, you see their boots hanging out the open window. I have loved this picture since the day I bought the album. Probably thirty or forty years ago. I have looked at it a million times and felt peace in my heart, the peace of connecting with that image. The peace of allowing your mind to believe that you are there. That is where I want to be; that is who I want to be.
My life as it is now will probably never allow me to get there. A piece of my very soul denied by life's circumstances. But I can touch this keyboard. I can sit in this chair. If I do the right things with this keyboard I can change my life. Change my life. Very powerful words. I am one of the very few lucky ones who has a chance to re-connect with my soul. To unbury my essence from all the garbage shoveled over it by my parents and every other ill intentioned human.
This keyboard is all I need. It sits here every day offering me the opportunity to bring peace into my life and heart and soul and spirit and essence. Such a simple thing. So intimidating. So promising.
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