Nov 29 2008

12-02-08 page number two (08-11-29.odt)

     It was riding my bicycle through the miles of up & down urban maze of Mill Valley (CA, early fifties) that helped bleed off this energy within me that had evolved in my hereditary-maleness, inherited from my male ancestors, for ten thousand years to urge my horse or horses, or camels, cows, etc. one way and another. Two horses (or mules, oxen) plow more effectively than one. Instead—and growing up in not hardly barely rural at all Mill Valley; except for the higher hills and ('my') mountain; and where I so-freely roamed and wandered throughout all parts of them in my highly-unsupervised boyhood youth living high in the foothills. All of that nearly unpopulated and not 'developed' (yet) space uphill a short climb from both of my boyhood homes was just such a literal natural that I 'cruise' my 'territory,' as it were, to grow, as it did within me, a familiarity with it that delivers a significant sense of a secureness in my being where I was and ended up 'operating' within for the first forty-three years of my life. No matter what all manner of traumatic events in my life there, the positive ones balanced the ones that some might deem the  negative ones, so: I can't complain. After bicycling to school and back on the better weather days from age 12 to 16, that bled those old horse-management energies off. Then it found release in musical expression as a performer/entertainer, plus becoming automobilized, prompted my energy outlays reserves (from horsedrawn era) to substitue this MOOD and ENERGETIC URGE FOCUS onto keeping the musical performances regularly occurring, my car staying fueled and usable, and shortly thereafter: my girlfriend; and then kids; and then boats “LOVED” and cared for and about. My decade residence, now, on The Ranch has pointed out so-o-oh much to me to do with the ways of my old time rural ancestors' family chores and their community sense. Taught me much by this country's smatters of naturalness still existing hereabouts. But further along on this train-of-thought, and more specifically-causitive: It was the still-enough-intact natural nature-driven daily ambiances and its wild and semi-wild teachers' interrelationships and ways-of-relating to their natural, in their natural; and the plant life's lists of dos and don'ts – or else!--that helped to spur thoughts more along their always-seeming more sensible lines-of-(?)reasoning. This lengthy exposure now has had its 'way' with me and captured my fancy, or some such. Somehow installed a sense akin to enraptured reverie, or sublime peacefulness of spirit and soul, state-of-grace, or some other rather stupid-sounding lame attempt to describe such stuff as is often mostly beyond or should I say predates language and writing it down. I think it has pretty much left me useless to function as some kind of 21rst century helper, anymore. My skills, be they real or imagined, are so profoundly of the Agrarian plus Industrial Age, that I can write helpless here without it sounding in too derogatory of a sense; at least as it pertains to you of the Electronic and Information Age.  This simple realization was never really thought through in this dinosaur's pea-brain until hitting my mid-to-late sixties! The Yiddish expression: Too soon old; too late smart insists its insertion here. So cliché, yet so very disappointingly correct. But I still find pleasurable enjoyments and challenging projects to keep expending energies I that know to still be raging within my being's “breast” that I feel  is more-correctly defined as my soul & spirit, spirit of my soul, or soul of the spirit I am born with. Some of that rage is residual from when life was horse-drawn; and others of that rage stem more from a societal complaint.