Thoughts on Life
Perry Dale
April 28th, 2003
God is the slate on which our lives are written.
God is Love, God made the Earth in Love
and a desire to create Man in His image.
God is the Earth.
Love the Earth.
* Enjoy yourselves.
Work hard, play hard, and rest often.
There is all the time in the world, for everything.
* Hurry when you need to,
but go slowly when there’s no urgency.
Prioritize.
* Balance is everything.
In the middle is moderation;
live there, and save privation and excess
for when they’re called for.
* Live in the Now.
You learned for, and about today, yesterday,
and you plan for tomorrow today.
Live in the present, it’s all you have.
In the NOW lives all of time.
* In conversation, divide words and silences evenly.
We learn and we teach by both talking to others
and listening to them.
In communication
we drive the engine of creation.
Communication is education.
* Our whole lives seem to be a search for some middle ground,
but the middle has a habit of moving every few minutes,
so be temporarily satisfied
with where you are
and how far you’ve progressed
toward that middle ground.
* When driving long distances, treat the trip
as if it was a job you enjoy,
and only work overtime if you’re not tired.
10 hours behind the wheel is plenty,
combined with rest stops
where there are trees.
* God cares for us.
That’s why He made dirt mainly soft
and put a carpet of vegetation on most of it,
so that when we fall to the ground,
by accident or on purpose,
9 times out of 10 it doesn’t hurt at all.
26 December 1995
* It is not in the owning of something,
but in the single encounter,
perhaps to be repeated,
but always to be remembered,
that we may possess something
precious.
* If we have but one visionary experience in life,
so may we carry such with us beyond life to that
which awaits us on the other side.
* We seek to know, to touch, to understand;
there are some things which can only be felt,
can only be believed -
from such thing Faith begins,
by such things Faith is nourished.
* There will come a day, quite soon I think,
when the interconnectedness of all things
will be understood by all that which comprises Mind.
28 December 1995
* Families sit in circles;
other groups or gatherings imitate
but rarely come close
to the same intimacy.
7 January 1996
* The walk of Faith is constant.
While sitting or resting on this walk,
in prayer and meditation,
one must be mindful of the necessity to rise quickly
and resume this walk,
lest one’s seat become too comfortable.
* In need, one has only to ask.
In pure desire, in the Love of God, staying alive is a given.
Only being alive presents difficulties.
For help, one need only ask, in Faith.
* Money’s not essential to a good life.
We play with money, like a toy.
Hate harboured in the heart is worthless,
while a smile can bring untold riches.
The exchange of money is a moronic sophistication of the barter system,
a perversion of the exchange of sustenance in all forms -
the give and take of that which enables life.
Money sucks.
15 January 1996
* As we approach the millennium, that all important, all inclusive date
on all our calendars, worldwide spiritual awareness grows steadily.
It is with this special awareness that the revolutionary system
of Mind Barter begins in earnest.
We must share what we know
in order to be ready when the final choice is presented us -
the dropping of the curtain or
the lifting of the veil.
* Be aware.
Lose all fears, and be aware.
We who sense the coming crisis, ultimate and seemingly all-powerful,
must come together as an army of awareness,
linking minds and bodies and becoming invulnerable
in complete communal sharing.
1 January 1996
* In the witness of another’s awakening to a special level of awareness,
this awakening dubbed “spiritual”
by those presumably operating from a state considered “wisdom”,
one’s own awakening is strengthened, shaken or stirred
from a state of rest.
So commences, and continues,
the process of Mind Barter,
the ultimate metaphysical exchange.
17 January 1996
* In this new life I have found in recovery,
there is no such thing as “importance”
in the exchange of information in conversation.
What is trivial to one can be earth-shaking to another.
The point is to converse, to share, such things
that seem pertinent;
in such a way, through such actions,
do we initiate contact and maintain
Mind Barter.
26 January 1996
* Those of us who,
more often than not,
find life a hard go
may occasionally find ourselves remembering
a time in our childhood when we were at peace;
we may be overcome by a strong desire
to return to that time,
or at least the circumstances that special time found us in.
There can be great comfort, great relief,
in the inner re-experience
of the conditions and surrounding associated with this childhood peace.
A return to innocence can at least remind us
of our very real capacity to be happy -
can assure us that we may yet be happy again.
8 February 1996
(from journal)
...constant, unconscious desire.
A drive, again today, to pull something from nothing;
to dip into a small wavelet from the seas
of that place where though comes from.
Something from nothing,
that creation we have been given the ability to engage in.
We create only because we live in
a miracle of creation.
We take for granted what we are surrounded by,
visible and invisible.
We feed on the invisible,
and most of us are never aware...
Thanks, God, for nothing.
Thanks for providing so much of it.
18 February 1996
* Mania, like depression, is a thing of the heart,
at least as much as a result of chemical imbalances of the brain.
Love affects our hearts long before our brains are aware
anything is going on.
It is the heart that demands that
the brain do something about the excesses of joy, of sadness.
The brain is most often surprised at this demand,
and in so many of us, overreacts.
Thus mania, thus depression.
And so we go on.
So we live.
18 March 1996
* Suicide
is the ultimate expression of those engaged in
habitual, casual obscenity.
22 March 1996
* It’s the mornings woken to grey skies,
and not blue,
that prove the mettle of a person.
To smile at grey skies is a guarantee
of easy joy under blue skies.
25 March 1996
* Prayer comes to mind at any time. While my night-time prayers can be long conversations between my God and me, often spoken aloud, day-time prayer can at times appear fully formed in thought, transferred quickly and easily to my heart, and released, sent on its way to whomever it is intended for, God or man. God hears, and knows, and carries these messages from my heart to the souls of those I love. I am free to do this whenever I wish. I have come to recognize prayer and its healing quality, and my responsibility to remember God’s constant readiness to listen and deliver my heart to my fellow man. In prayer, I can touch anyone at any time, from any distance. Soul to soul, as we all are, God’s enormous gift to all of mankind, our small taste of Eternity here on Earth.
* If I love God more than anything, if I can know a love that strong, and have no fear of being hurt, then it becomes easier to love others. And the fear of intimacy, of truly revealing myself to others fades away. On such premises are true friendships formed; in such awareness is love let loose, because hurt is impossible, or at least handleable, in my ultimate love for my Higher Power.
* Contact with my Higher Power is precious to me. Loss of this inexplicable contact is depression, and the loss of it in mania is grandiosity. Loss of contact, if this separation is of sufficient duration, allows alcoholic thinking back into my life, the discounting of the countless rewards of sobriety, of recovery. All around me I see friends get drunk after working so hard to “get the program”. I see me in all of them, me if I lose precious contact. We simply forget. I have forgotten, and come back to God’s Grace. Some don’t come back. They forget. They get lost, and stay lost.
God loves us all. We must try as hard as we can not to forget. Don’t get lost - it is so very hard to find your way back. Love yourselves, and always remember:
Precious Contact.
29 March 1996
* The more the songs I hear become poetry in my mind, the more my poetry resembles song, the closer I come to freeing my inner artist, the closer I come to participatory creation. The Great Creator calls to me to come out and play, and though still housebound, I find myself listening, waiting to hear the call of the greatest Artist of all. I tune in like a radio receiver, surprised to find that merry-go-round voice has always been there while my antenna has been down for long repair.
Poetry to song. Song to poetry.
Imagine that.
3 April 1996
* Some mornings I dance.
Grey skies, blue skies, it doesn’t matter, some mornings are for dancing.
This morning
I danced to the sight of early Spring snowfall
and a lone robin hopping around the yard,
poking its beak through the snow to the ground below.
I celebrated life, and diversity, and the lack of meteorological guarantees.
This morning, I danced.
- excerpts from journals -
25 April 1996
... I seem to spend so much time in grief. There seems so much to grieve for, so much to regret. So much loss and sorrow.
But all around me, about and inside me, is Beauty, and Love.
And we all balance as best we can. We cry and we laugh. We grieve and we rejoice. And if we’re lucky, we remember to thank God for it all. Everything. Everyone.
Creation. Duality...
... and the ultimate miracle of our power simply to perceive it all. And to participate, all in our own way, in Creation. What is happening all around us every day is infinity unfolding. Time exists only in the now, in this moment. I’ve lived an infinite number of moments. And an infinite number of moments await me.
I’ve lived a long, long time. And an infinite number of moments from Now, I will stop.
13 May 1996
... Thank you, my Treese, and be careful. Walk with God, as He has always walked with you. Hang on to Love, my baby, always remember Love. And remember, there is no one, no one, here on Earth who loves you more than I do.
I promise.
21 May 1996
... And out my window, there is finally green again. Gaea and Her time schedule - we need only be patient.
So, after this long, long winter, I hope to begin again. As things start growing again in the earth, so might I begin as new once more, somehow get back to that magical time-box where not only each day, but each moment, is the only one I have. Existing in time as I know it, hand in hand with the Great Creator. My participatory moment-to-moment existence. Sometime in there I may find my poetry again, sometime in there I may start feeling good about myself once again. My hand in Yours, God, I only have that one wish. A return to innocence, living paradoxically able to instantly spot deceit. God, make me as wise, and as innocent, as I can be. Let me participate and therefore touch all about me, gently, to embrace or reject as Your wisdom and Your presence dictate. I am Yours, my will and my life, moment to moment. I have always been Yours.
27 March 1995
... I live eclectically. All things balanced in the constant awareness of duality, the essential dichotomy of life. Evangelists and Satanists, holes and humps. Heaven’s a toilet bowl and Jesus is working the flush. Universal balance is gridlock constipation and Satan’s selling Ex-Lax. Think I’ll go hug a tree.
28 October 1995
... have to get up every 20 minutes and turn the record over. Ah, just touching the vinyl brings back the old days, 10 grams of needle tearing through the groove of some poor overplayed record, Black Sabbath’s Paranoid or Led Zeppelin’s “The Lemon Song”. Lying back with some girl, eyes closed and waiting for the lead break, not minding or not noticing the scratches and pops, the absence of pretty well all treble and bass in favour of the midrange that was all that most record players could manage to produce from those tortured grooves. Acid-bridge in the middle of “Whole Lotta Love” with Jimmy Page sneaking up with that crash and burn guitar that could and would take the top of your head off if you were on the right stuff... amazing then, doubly amazing now.
... I had to kick myself in the ass so many times before I finally realized I was doing it all wrong. Not kicks, but strokes. Not banging my head against some tree, but hugging it. Not instant revelation but quiet summation. Lots of garbage out there, sure, but surrounded by, spoiled by, that one ultimate singularity, beauty. Pessimism and vitriol covered finally by a blanket with a message stitched in reading simply Goodness, Kindness. New virtue and integrity winning the battle, for now at least, over addiction and despair. Tears that release instead of gather, eyes that look outward rather than inward. Oh, oh my, a heart that beats to soothe rather than hurt...
14 October 1996
... Love is timeless. True love has no borders in space and time, but lives in the heart, or in the soul, which is eternal.
I remember my first love as if she just said “so long” and walked out the door. I remember a tiny woman I loved two decades ago, and remember with absolute clarity how badly I treated her in my misery. I’m so sorry, tiny girl Linda. You deserved better, and you found better eventually.
Love lives in the heart. Love is everywhere, in everything. Some love we’re born with, and becomes part of our lives as we grow - children, nature, the ever-present stars in the sky. But the love that is “found”, that, if given time, becomes as much a part of our minds and bodies as that which we’re born with, is the most special of loves. Love outside our families, this love discovered or found outside the boundaries of that which we take as our natural possession and starts or ends in trust, in joy or pain, in faith, is so very strong. Perhaps the one love that transcends the boundaries of “innate” and “discovered” is the love of God, so all-encompassing when its presence is finally felt and humbly acknowledged.
But I talk of love that seems to appear out of nowhere, but can become as strong and bonding as that love I feel for my children, my parents, the sky and God. The love of a woman, the love that can become as unconditional as familial love. A love that doesn’t appear full-blown, but has to be practised until one finds himself “in love” and as accepting of that love an any other love has ever been accepted.
... Love is eternal. Love, not science, is what made the Universe, and is what hides its mysteries from our questing minds, hides the “beginning” and the “end” and even the size. How big or small can eternity be?
Love itself doesn’t hide. Thank God it doesn’t. But mystery is so necessary, else we’d never fall in love.
Imagine that.
18 October 1996
... If I perceive time to be composed of an infinite number of moments, then the amount of time it takes me to write this sentence is unutterably long; if time were somehow concrete and made up of tangible units, I would be astounded at the very “size” of the time taken to write this, and dumbfounded at the “size” of time I have lived until this very moment. God alone knows the true nature of time, but I learn to gather my moments about me and look on them all as precious and rare, beautiful and singularly unique. So very much has gone before, and so very, very much lies before me - the order of time forming from the ever-moving, ever-changing universe.
