I'm Confused???????? So is the Blog Edit (Running paragraphs together)

Didn't we see George Bush on an aircraft carrier a couple years ago saying that the conflict in Iraq was over? Didn't I see a headline on Yahoo yesterday saying that military leaders are projecting four more years in Iraq? Haven't I not heard any admission of a mistake by the Bush Mob? .........and on and on and on. One lie and after another after another after another..........and on and on and on.

"Are we all crazy or is it just Me?

I'm going to share this from "The Miracle of Change - The Path to Self Discovery and Spiritual Growth" by Dennis Wholey. I have been using this book as a tool while going through this period of giving up everything in my life as it was and opening up to discovering who the hell am I anyway and what is my purpose here? As a result I am focusing on my creativity, developing the skills and tools to allow me to use my strengths and the wisdom I have gained from this wild and crazy journey called 57 years of life on planet Earth.

"The books by psychotherapist Thomas Moore have consistently been on the best-seller lists for the past several years. His writings have touched people who are seeking human and spiritual guidance. He gives us a unique perspective on courage in daily life:"

DIVINE FOOLISHNESS

MY LIFE HAS BEEN ONE OF ALMOST CONSTANT CHANGE, from the time I left home at thirteen to enter a Catholic seminary to watching my daughter being born in my fifty-first year. I've been chastised by teachers for not following a straight career path and I feel remorse and some embarrassment over crooks and twists in my personal life. Yet in the midst of these changes I have never felt particularly courageous, but rather profoundly and inescapably foolish.

For me, it takes courage to rise up from mistakes, to be ignorant and uncertain about the right moves to make in life, and to risk falling on my face. As I look at my past, it appears that each time I've done a dumb thing or acted from naivete, I've entered one small notch further into the paradoxical wisdom of the fool. I see nobility in a certain kind of foolishness, the kind depicted in the many wonderful traditional stories of the Holy Fool, the one who forsakes worldly prudence for a different, humbler kind of truth.

These days we are all expected to be knowing and clever. We have experts telling us how to eat, drink, sleep, love, work and relate, but all this expertise is in some measure a defense against the possibility of doing something foolish.

As a therapist who has worked with many people, I know very well that most of us are not as smart about daily living as we pretend to be, and I think we suffer from carrying the burden of appearing clever and capable. Yet I believe there is liberation and lightness in letting the fool have his place. We don't always have to understand ourselves, know the world in which we live, or relate to each other properly and effectively. We don't have to be growing all the time. The Holy Fool portrays the deep mystery by which ineffectiveness and cloudy ignorance are prerequisites for a full, if not terribly intelligent life.

The courage I prefer, then, is the kind that allows me to live in divine foolishness---to fail, to misunderstand, to say the wrong thing, to make the same mistakes over and over. I realize I could be misinterpreted, because there is a fine line between masochistic wallowing in one's weaknesses and finding liberation in the full reception of one's incapacity. I'm not advocating wallowing, but rather an active, courageous owning of one's foolishness, speaking from it and for it, avoiding the temptation to cover it over with a false face of confidence. I'm not glorifying human stupidity, but rather seeking a deep form of unknowing.

Many things look like courage that are not the genuine article. Real courage doesn't puff up the ego, save face, or even give the sensation of accomplishment. At best, courage stems from the allowance of a will beyond our own and an acquiescence to fate and necessity. People who are forced to face serious illness and yet can affirm the beauty and joy of life, even after the disease has step by step made them feel foolish in their incapacities, know courage. Those who have been abandoned by a lover or a spouse and who resist the temptation to chase away the feeling of being made a fool know courage. Anyone whose motives and actions spring from the heart rather than from the face knows what it is to be initiated into holy foolishness, and therefore is acquainted with deep courage.

I expect a future in my life of more radical and serious foolishness. I hope I can get to the point where I can convert passing notions of awareness and intelligence into deepest possible ignorance and incapacitation. Then I know my life will have been fabricated by forces beyond my mere intentions and finite understanding, and I will have found the brand of courage that is small but life-shaping, empty of bravado, but full of heart.

----Thomas Moore

It was such a miracle of timing to come across this reading when I did. I was in a place of confusion and fear, trying to understand what I was doing or what should I be doing. I had no answer, I was just confused and hyper-emotional. Then I realized after reading this, that of course I don't know. I was the fool who stepped off the cliff of any kind of security to pursue my dream, my calling. I am in the midst of the ultimate creative process called life, and I am at the chaos place where the forces are churning, inspiration is threatening, but little form or vision of it is here. So I'll keep blowing into this blog and we'll see what music will come out. At the moment it sounds much like Sun Ra, only I think he had a vision while he created that apparent cacophony and chaotic sound.

Peace, Alan