The Fool

I took this picture yesterday morning, out front, after I picked up 8,624,557 magnolia leaves.  Magnolia leaves, for those unfamiliar with life in Dixie, fall in the spring when almost everything else is in full bloom.  I only have two magnolia trees out front, but, they will drop enough big rubbery leaves to fill about 4 garbage cans (packed tight) a week well into summer.  Then they will stop.  Then they will flower and cover themselves with white blossoms as big as your head right on till summer ends.  They will blanket the air with fragrance.  It will smell like a whore house around here for months.  On the one hand they are a real pain in the ass.  On the other they are just too beautiful to be without if you love flowers as I do.  It’s a two-edged sword.  There is a bit of the old Yin & Yang going on.  Opposites are clearly in play.

Opposites are in play in the picture also.  The blue flowers are Baptisia known affectionately as “Redneck Loupines”.  The orange & red ones are Cytisus scoparius, or, as they are known to the layman, “Scotch Broom”.  Structurally they look nothing alike, yet, they are both members of the legume family.  They fix nitrogen.  Bet you didn’t even know it was broken.

The Fool, the Joker and the Sly-Man all know that opposites, flowers and all the things we call “social institutions” are nothing but games.  The Fool knows and exists to remind us all that nothing has a point, nothing is to be taken too seriously.  When the Fool sees you taking yourself too seriously he gets the giggles.  When he sees you lost in the seriousness of any game, under the cover of your own ego, he farts.  He makes a funny face.  He breaks the spell.

There is no purpose.  There is no point to flowers, music, or, us.  There is only “unfolding”.

Those who do not understand this are unnerved and irritated by your non-participation.  They must stifle decent because they are not sure they are right.

You don’t have to be conscious of the workings of your own brain.  The white is as important as the black and the other way around.  If you really think carefully about it you will understand that the annihilation of consciousness can never be an experience.

The trembling of laughter is the trembling of anxiety…

…. Just, from a different point of view.

Imagination

Do you see what is going on here?

This handsome young man, who just so happens to be one of my remarkable grandchildren, is using a faculty that is entirely and exclusively human.  When he crawled around the corner, at first, I didn’t get what was going on.  Do you get it?

This is the UP-SIDE.

On many occasions I end up writing about the many facets of the DOWN-SIDE of what it means, or, can mean to be human.  How our innate neurological demand to find patterns in life and nature often play us dirty.  How our propensity to create false realities, psychic umbrellas, to protect ourselves from the shit storm the universe holds in store for us all costs us our sanity.  How we have no choice but to go crazy, and do, to keep from going truly insane.

Not today.

No dead babies.  No religiously motivated wars or genital mutilations.  No imaginary afterlife, sinners or saints today.

Today only the raw, unrefined, untainted or twisted imagination that comes, pre programmed, as part of the original software package.

See it and enjoy it as it flows in a path of its own making in a direction yet to be determined.

Don’t dam it, divert it, direct it or inhibit its free flow.

Just enjoy it.