Hey, nice rap. I hope to revisit it, when I can re-read it a little more slowly. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <turquoiseb@...> wrote :
I'm back in Leiden but still on vacation. Meaning that this time the frosty, almost (dare I say it?) spiritual Road Trip Mindset I always get while on vacation didn't go away when I stepped off the road. In a weird way, it's like experiencing hours of deep, thoughtless samadhi while meditating, and then opening your eyes and standing up and discovering that it doesn't go away. Cool. So, having awakened all happy and looking forward to the day, and having decided to celebrate that feeling in the best way I know how, I decided to venture forth to one of my favorite writing cafes and rap a bit. And therein lies the rub. After thinking "But what to write about?" for about the hundredth time, staring at a blank screen, I still had nuthin'. Two cups of good capucchino and I'm still staring at Hemingway's white bull. Nada. No inspiration whatsoever. Same happy feeling, but with no content to write about. Then an old song came on the cafe's sound system. I heard the words "I been warped by the rain, driven by the snow..." and they hit me with the subjective power of an acid flashback, carrying me back to other times I've sat listening to this same song over the years, especially during transitional periods. The song was popular during the time I first walked away from the TM movement, and I loved listening to it then because it always helped me to remember that in walking away from TM I was walking TO something else, something better. The song is called "Willin'", and I've included a link below to the cover version that played on this cafe's sound system a few minutes ago, and also to the original version, sung by the song's author, the late Lowell George. So if you want a "soundtrack" for the rap the song inspired, you've got one. :-) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJHcD0kHTGk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJHcD0kHTGk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNqv85coyTw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNqv85coyTw Anyway, here's the rap. It's short, and about the delight of realizing that all these years later, at age 68, I'm still willin'. All these years walking a spiritual path, and I'm still willin' to walk one. For that I guess I should thank Maharishi, and Rama, and all of the other people who served as teachers for me along the Way as I walked that path in the past. I may not have chosen to follow *their* path in the end, but I do appreciate their contributions to helping me walk mine. I even appreciate the bad parts of studying with them. I saw both of these supposedly badge-wearing park rangers along the spiritual path do some fairly awful shit to people who had chosen to believe in them and follow them. The kinda shit that could potentially turn me off to the very concept of "spiritual path" forever. But it didn't. I still consider myself walking a spiritual path. I took everything they threw at me -- both good and bad -- and I'm still walking. At this point I don't have any particular "goal" in mind at the supposed "end" of that path, or have any rational reasons for doing so, but I still walk one. Go figure. So what do I consider a "spiritual path," *for me*? I guess that, for me, it's the inability to shake off the delusional belief that when I wake up every morning, the day ahead of me is much more likely to be fun than it is to be a bummer. So far, life has been extremely kind to me, so on 99% of the mornings of my life that I have awakened and had this delusional thought at the start of a day, it has actually turned out to be true. I probably wouldn't have been as lucky if I'd been born, say, in a war zone, or in the squalor of some third world nation. But for whatever karmic reasons, this delusional belief has always *worked out* for me, so I'm still willin' to believe in it, and keep walkin'. That's all I had to say. This is just a cafe rap over coffee about having a good start to a day that I'm pretty sure is going to get even better. I'm probably not going to be writing many more such raps for this forum because it's grown too repetitive and boring to participate in, but I felt like writing this one, so I did. If you're one of those people whose first thought on reading it is to want to crap on it, and me...well...feel free. Chances are I'll never even read your response, so the only person whose day it will sour is yours. Your call. :-) Meanwhile, I'll still be walking my own path, and if 68 years of personal history is any indication, having a pretty good time doing so. Cool.
