The Music of the Source

 

 

 

Will someone please come dance with me to the music of the Source?
For I am one with spirit, heart and soul,
And I am one with the music of the Source.

 

Will you please come dance with me to the music of the Source?
For you are one with spirit, heart and soul,

And you are one with the music of the Source.

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Will you please come dance with me to the music of the Source?

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We love to dance, round and round, to the music of the Source.
For we are one with spirit, heart and soul,
And we are one with the music of the Source.

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Suite No. 4, Seventh Movement:

Entangled, Part Seven

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   One evening, Simon imagined the Princess dancing with him. He imagined her joking and laughing, completely herself once again. He stood up and waltzed around the room, and, unbeknownst to Simon, the princess joined him. He couldn’t see her or feel her, but he just kept dancing, and he imagined so clearly that she was dancing with him that for a moment he believed that he had planted a thought within the Universal Mind of her wholeness and happiness, but when the dance ended, the thought seemed like only an illusion.
  As I stood by Katie’s bed one evening, I imagined dancing with her, both of us in perfect health, both of us happy and smiling. I couldn’t dance, of course, because the room was small, filled with a large hospital bed and machines, but I felt her soul was with me for a few moments, and we were both happy and whole again as we waltzed around the room. Then a nurse tapped me on the shoulder and asked me to step out so she could change Katie’s diaper.

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Cattle Chute near The Kings River

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   I changed Katie's diapers numerous times when she was an infant. I was a member of a generation of liberated men who actually shared child-rearing responsibilities even though many men still derided that unconventional role as unmanly. I discovered that even women in a relationship with a man who shared equal household responsibilities would sometimes eventually criticize the male for not being more financially successful.
  I would like to believe that if I were in the hospital with a life-threatening illness, my father, despite his many manly responsibilities, would also have spent every day for a couple of months by my hospital bed. I'm not sure, however, because my father always seemed to be at work, except when we went camping, usually at the Kirch Flat Campground along the Kings River. I have to admit that until the recent health, economic, and political crises, my father's core attitudes and beliefs remained inexplicable.
  A cattle chute always for some reason catches my attention as I zoom by it on my way to the the Kings River, perhaps because it resembles a doorway to some ruin or a portal to a fantastic realm. I might have witnessed its last use fifty years ago on a trip to the Kirch Flat Campground when I was eleven or twelve—now, if it is a doorway, it is only a doorway to a few nearly forgotten childhood memories. Even fifty years ago the chute looked like it would collapse if a cow weighed a little too much or stomped a little too hard.
  Last weekend, I finally stopped the car by the side of the road and ambled over to see if it would fall over if I mercifully gave it a little push. Even though the posts are slanting and slowly rotting, and humus and moss have gathered on top of the ramp, I was surprised to find that the chute didn’t wobble at all when I tried to shake it. The chute, which no doubt was built decades before I was born, would, in all likelihood, outlast me even though it long ago outlasted its own purpose.
  For me, the chute weirdly hints at freedom. It resembles a door frame without a door with a ramp that leads away from the road into the natural world where nothing has ever been expected of me, where I can remember a time when I sometimes felt free of the expectations of others. The ramp provides a way into a world where I don’t have to fit in, where I am forever free of shame, a route to freedom from all but my most basic needs.
  I could fashion a story about how the cattle chute is a mysterious portal to some fantastic realm, I suppose, but I would have to ignore that it was used in the process of rounding up cattle for slaughter. I think, somewhere in the back of my mind, the chute reminds me of those nightmares I had as a child of dying in a jungle during some inscrutable global conflict. Like my father and his brothers, I was no doubt meant to fight in some distant war, but for some reason, American wars in distant lands remained “covert” and there was no draft when my turn came to serve, so unlike the cattle and my father's generation and the Baby Boom Generation, I avoided the slaughter.
  I was not fully conscious as a child, while my brother and I were scrambling up and down the hills near the river, that our parents had expectations of us. Their expectations of us remained nebulous, but as I grew older, I realized that they imagined us succeeding in some significant way. In truth, I don’t think my father wanted anything spectacular from us, but he showed by example that he at least hoped that both of us would be upwardly mobile, by hook or by crook, getting a better job and moving into a better house every few years. More and more as I grew older, I felt that my mother tacitly demanded something spectacular of us, such as making piles of money, dying heroically for our country, or demonstrating some kind of remarkable genius. By the time I became a teenager, I knew that I would need to make Herculean efforts and huge sacrifices to succeed gloriously in some noteworthy way. I knew even then that I would never be able to live up to her expectations because of a chronic illness that she never acknowledged.

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Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

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   In terms of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, my father focused on needs one and two and indulged in three whenever possible. After growing up during the Great Depression and fighting in the great war and struggling for years to make a living, my father knew that satisfying biological and safety needs was about all you can realistically ask of a person. A person who satisfies needs one and two might be lucky enough to satisfy need number three now and then. He did his best in his own way to teach me this lesson.
  Of course, my parents were messed up by their parents, and certainly in a capitalistic society with a perpetually weak social safety net, not fitting in can end up being a serious matter.
  My inability to fit in has given me a unique perspective. I am not claiming to be an expert or even totally right. (At this point I believe that any insistence on being totally right is dangerous.)
  As my father knew, and as most of us soon realize, people are motivated to a large extent by the fear that they will not be able to satisfy basic physiological and safety needs. In order to fit in, we need to think and act like those in power. This applies as much to a young cowboy who must learn to round up cattle and take them to the slaughterhouse, a guard at a concentration camp, a politician, a corporate manager, or even a teacher. The kind of groupthink orthodoxy that my father had to accept during his lifetime in order to survive and succeed, which he tried to pass on to me by example and through impromptu lectures, went something like this:

 

 

* White men are superior to men and women of color.

* White men are superior to white women.

* Gay white men are an abomination and vastly inferior to all heterosexual white men, even the most venal.

* White men with power, property and money are superior to anyone without power, property and money.

* A white man has a chance to succeed in a capitalistic society. Anyone who doesn’t believe in capitalism is a threat to society and white men in general.

* A white man can succeed in a Christian society. Anyone who doesn’t believe in Christianity is potentially a threat to a system of white privilege blessed by God.

* Hippies, artists, psychics, and philosophers are wacko and are like anyone above who questions the supremacy of capitalism, Christianity or white men with property.

 

 

   My father, to teach me and my brother these rules, some of which echo beliefs enshrined in the US constitution, lectured us on several occasions. According to my father, blacks and Native Americans are not fully human; they are instead “mud people.” Communists, socialists, and anarchists are always trying to destroy the American way of life and have to be fought and defeated on every front. Women should stay home and take care of children and never get involved in politics. People who cannot make a decent living are weak or lazy, even if they experience debilitating physical problems.
  I developed a love for art at an early age. At age twelve, I started painting pictures with acrylics and watercolors. One time, when I was sixteen, my father brought out several of my paintings to show the neighbors. Several of the paintings were nudes and the rest were surreal. All the neighbors had a good laugh. When he was done, my father gave me the dirtiest look I’ve ever experienced, before or since. In retrospect, I understand that he was only trying to help me fit in so that I would succeed in satisfying needs one, two, and possibly even three. As the world becomes more dangerous, I am beginning to understand why he adopted such abhorrent beliefs, and I don't condemn him now because I have seen the same behavior over and over in all sorts of groups, on the left and the right.
  After working as a supply sergeant during World War Two, my father supported the family as a used car salesman, a foreman at a chemical plant, and finally as an investigator for the ATF. My father succeeded by finding his niche, by following the unwritten rules of his group. Even though he was only a high school graduate, he climbed the ladder of success until he was able to buy a good car and a house in the suburbs and provide a comfortable life for himself and his wife and two children. Since I now know how soul-numbing it can be to succeed in this society, I respect that. Unfortunately, I hardly ever saw him as I was growing up. He died at age fifty-five from a heart attack, about a month after I turned seventeen.
  Many social movements have become popular during the course of my lifetime, and I have discovered that groupthink is pretty much the same whether a person is a Democrat, a Republican, a Green, a feminist, a capitalist, a socialist, a communist, an anarchist, a neo-Nazi, a white supremacist, a Christian, a Muslim, a Druid, or a Religious Scientist. In order to succeed in a group, you must accept the core beliefs. If you question the beliefs or the practices or tell an unwelcome truth about a revered leader of the group, you are a potential threat, whether or not the others in the group complain about you to your face or in public. In general, kissing up to those with power and kicking down those who compete with you for money and status is the name of the game.
  The inability to fit in affects whether or not you are able to satisfy basic needs. My father, no matter how you feel about his beliefs, was trying to help me by revealing the unwritten rules so that I would be able to compete with others and succeed in what he repeatedly called a "dog-eat-dog world."
  But the possibility of not fitting in can make a person do horrible things on behalf of a group or a society, such as killing people for their religious beliefs, their political associations, their culture, their skin color—or any number of other reasons. A need to succeed or simply fit in can make a person tell the vilest lies about you or secretly target you for characteristics you possess or don’t possess.
  I have never attempted to condition Katie to believe anything about how to succeed in a dog-eat-dog capitalistic society. I have always wanted her to be free enough to find her own path and to feel compassion for all people, no matter their skin color or their job or their status in society.
  If I were to write a story about the cattle chute, I would make it a doorway to a world without social stigmas or the fear of not fitting in. It would be a door to the natural world, where all types of energy and consciousness are divinely connected and one thing is not worse or better than any other--and where I sometimes know the underlying unity of all consciousness and feel a peace beyond understanding. No matter the circumstances.