harold_maude's journal

Today, being saturday, is filled to over flowing with details of things that are screaming at me to be done.
This happens every time I have a day off and when I get off work as well.
The list is longer than I wish it was and as I get things crossed off the list it seems that there is something else waiting to fill the spot.

Some day I'm hoping that there won't be a list of waiting things, and I can take a vacation.
Some place I've never been before.
Some place that I've thought would be nice to get lost in for a week or so and have an entire life in that time.

It would be wonderful. That's the light I keep looking for in the sea of stuff that I'm drowning in daily.
Oh well, gotta get back to it.

In search of personal excellence.

That was and still is the goal that I keep reaching for.
That's what happens when a person embarks on a personal search for who they are.
People can say anything about you and to you and convince you that they know you better than you could ever possiblly know yourself.

People can believe anything about you and convince you that they know what they are talking about.

But unless you set out to find out who you are, you will find out things about yourself durring very difficult circumstances.

You may believe what you've been told, but the truth will show up and show you, you.
It's very dependable that way.

It seems to go easier on a person when they purpose to set out to find out the truth about themselves. Who they really are deep down inside.
Somethings we know, but pretend we don't around other people.
Our reaction to someone having a problem with us gives us some clues.

Most people take great offense to confrontation concering someone else's opinion of them.
The more truth you know about you, the less angry it seems to make you.
If you are hungry for truth, it will light your way.
You might want to run from what you see, but you will stay because you want the truth.

In the eyes through which we see our journey, everything becomes something we are noticing, simply because we are searching for clues.

Clues are alot like puzzle peices. We have no definable picture
to work from, only the notion that the truth is in there somewhere and we won't stop until we see the whole picture.

That's what sojorning has taught me.

I have learned to love truth no matter how much pain it brings to the surface.
Pain has it's own lessons. And they are part of the process as well.
Sometimes truth brings death to things that delay the process.
That takes acceptance that it is for the best.

To be the best, to be the strongest, to be who you are ment to be. All of these things take breaking everything about you.
So that out of the broken places, the light of truth will shine through.
I call that the grinder. Because that's what it feels like somedays.

Some places are more like brick walls. You are stopped dead in your tracks. And the same lesson comes again. If you make the same choice, you end up slamming into the brick wall again.
This process keeps repeating until you figure out that making a different choice is a better idea. It doesn't hurt so much.

I was thinking about the job I go to monday through friday.
A food service job. It's somewhere down on the food chain near the bottom of things.
It's not a job that you would look for when planning your life out.
But it's still ok if your going to college and need some money when you go back to school.
Most of our asperations have more to do with money than who we are ment to be.

It does have the bennefit to it that if you move somewhere new you can always find a job in food service to get you started.

Other than that it has no bennefits to it. At least on the surface it doesn't.
But what if you start thinking about it this way:
This is an opportunity for self discipline.
This is an opportunity to see how good you can be,or how fast you can move.
Something very similar to the diciplines that surround martial arts.

It's a place where you can learn to rise above the expectations and the gossip and the attitudes and lack of dependablity that is a common plague in food service jobs.

Doing this doesn't mean that you have to think of this lowly place as a life time thing.
It's just a different approach to doing something that very few people want to do, but end up doing over and over.
When you look at things this way, maybe the reason that some people never do anything but food service or any other lowly job again and again is because they keep hitting the brick wall, because what they are suppose to be learning they arn't.
So they have to keep doing it, no other doors ever seem to open for them.

Something to think about the next time you think about going to work and start complaining.
Why not choose to have the best day you've had in a while and see how the day goes.
You may have so many things thrown at you the first few times you decide to do this, and what this is doing is showing you things that need to be delt with inside you.

I'm finding the more times I make the decision to have a good day, the less exausted I am at the end of the day.
No matter what gets slammed my way, my purpose is to have a good day, so I have to just relax and let it slide past me.

There alot more good days now than difficult ones now.
Funny thing is about this, there has been so much stuff happen for the last few months that I now need to make the decision to have the best day I can just to get through stuff in one peice.

The truth that I have found in choosing to discipline myself in an area of my life is that it makes it alot easier to wake up with me in the morning.
And that's worth it.
If nothing else good comes from it, that alone is worth everything.
To be able to wake up not wishing I could unzip my skin so I could get away from me because I don't like what I'm being like or living like.

I still have a long road to go. But it gets easier to want the truth to do what it does. The end results are awesome.
That's what makes it worth all you go through too.

I hope someday when all is said and done that it will be said of my life, that I lived it well.

This post was edited by harold_maude on Mar 01, 2008.

I was reading through the forums and came across the question posed by Bunk about the little red hen.

I ended up doing some reading because I could see it being propaganda for both at first, but then as I looked deeper I found that it was more likely about something else.
I think if I was going to put it in the propaganda catagory I would have to look at it as propagana for religion.

That aside, where my reading took me was to the ideologies of both socialism and captialism.
There is definately alot of information about both!
Capitalism it seems is old. It's as least as old as the roman empire.
And socialism was birthed out of the need for change from a very soficating political and economic system in which the poor had nothing and the rich had everything.
Sounds alot like alot of the world today.
History keeps repeating it's self.

Seems that now all over the world resistance and revolution are happening because the goverments of the world as they operate now are more about the few who are privileged and less about the masses who have little or nothing.
No wonder Thomas Jefferson said that it is our duty to over throw the goverment. He realized, just as the people who were his contemporaries that govement tends tord coruption and oppression of the common man.

Most highly industrialized societies have goverments that are bigger than they should be, and end up being this thing that needs lots and lots of money just to keep going.

Being an american, I look at the goverment of this country as a prime example of that.
We have more buracrats, more unnessiary goverment intrusion and more waste than the people should ever have to put up with.
The man who is in the highest office for his second term has made things a whole lot worse by involving all of us in this crazy war that should never have been started in the first place.

I am very sure that there are people who will completely disagree with that, but that's ok. I do believe in freedom of speech.

The basis for going to war was a complete illusion. And in my opinion had more to do with oil than bringing democracy to a part of the world that really wasn't interested in democracy in the first place.
Who are we to decide what a country and it's people should believe?
We are not the surpreme monarchy of the world.

And now because of all this non sense, many countries of the world hate this country.
I can't say that I blame any of them for feeling that way.
He went off half cocked and took the rest of us with him, dispite what many of us tried to tell him.
The man was not listening, and now we have this mess.

I've heard that a couple of states have decreed that when he leaves office if he chooses to go to thoes states he will be tried for war crimes.
Good for them. I think every state in the union should follow suit.

Anyway, I'm getting side tracked.
Socialism it seems, at least in it's intent, is about people governing themselves in all areas of life.
I think that's what the fore fathers of this country had in mind when they chose that this country would be a republic.
It's not a democracy, it's a republic.
There is a difference, but people often think the united states is a democracy rather than a republic.

I think the forefathers understood that most people living here did not have enough education or need to understand the workings of goverment.
Goverment has little to do with raising food. Or survival.
Now it does of course, but back when this country was just cutting it's teeth on establishing what goverment in this country needed to or should mean.

The avarage person of the time had more important things to do than think about goverment.
George washington didn't want to be the leader of the goverment.
He didn't want to be another king george.
I'm pretty sure that's why it was decited that who ever ended up being president would only be allowed to serve a term of 4 years.

They worked hard to put down principles that the goverment needed to abide by.
The constitution.
The foundation on which this goverment which is now so corrupt and so huge that most of the time no one has much of an idea of all the stuff that goes on and how much it really is costing all of the people, was designed to keep goverment at a minum, not the biggest consumer of everything in the country.

Sounds like I don't like our goverment, doesn't it.
I don't like what it has become. Now we have to throw money at it because it's got a life all it's own and because it's so fat we are required to keep feeding it.

gotta stop ranting for a bit...

This happens with regularity now. The waves of a ceritan emotion will come, settle for a while and then disapate.

It changes with regularity as well, so it isn't something constant. Tonight a great sense of hopelessness has come.
I'm not sure why they come like they do, or what they mean.
I've had to learn how to tell what's mine and what isn't.

This falls into the second catagory. When it's mine there are
events that happen that touch me on some deep level and there the emotions come.
When this happens, there is nothing preceeding it. Just like someone turns on a light switch.

I've become somewhat acustom to this occuring.
It has been happening more and more lately.
When it's connected to someone I know, it will settle in a part of my body, like an arm, or one ear, or one foot and so on.
I know it's connected because when I go through the mental lists of people I know, the right person will make the feeling grow stronger.

When it's no one that I know, it just settles in around me.
There is no personal reason for me to feel this way tonight, but I have learned that it's a good idea to take as many observable notes as possible. I have found that to be a good way to get a better idea of what is going on.

There are immages that form sometimes to go with the things I feel. And all I can see with this feeling is children. Thousands of faces of children. Their eyes show so much pain.
I can feel that too.

It's times like these that I wish I knew how to follow through on this kind of thing so that it wouldn't feel so half done, as it were.

As I was thinking about this place today, this journal that I started a few years ago now, I wondered about the people that were so active when I was writing here alot.
Did their lives go according to plan, or are they still struggling with the same things they were some two years ago.
I will spend time reading to find out about these people.
It will be alot like picking up a book that got started and forgotten somewhere.

Comming back here and writing again made me think about the time after I no longer had net access, and then having it again.
The time when the world got too close to the door.
For thoes who have never lived in the country and have only
known city life, it's a strange shift.
I am very sure that it would be the same if a city person suddenly found themselves out in the middle of nature.

Very odd, and very scary. It was hard to sleep all night for the first 6 months.
Inspit of many nights at the farm there was some movie blasting away just a few feet above, when we got here, everything outside the door made me jump.

I finally learned to not listen so much and learn how to sleep through noises associated with city life.
I still have trouble with noises outside the door.
Animals come to the door in the country and make noise outside,
but they arn't like people.
People are unpredicitble when you don't know them and they don't know you.
So that's still a struggle.

I would love to go back to the country someday. Have a place where the city can't be heard or felt all the time.

I like people. I do. I just have trouble with much of the things they do, to themselves and to other people is all.
I enjoy babies, and small people too.
The kind who are so enthalled with everything. They are filled with wonder at everything.
Too bad that most all of them will loose that sense of wonder.
What it will be replaced with will depend on the amount of immitation life they are drown in.

Peer pressure too, will shape what they want to see and be surrounded with.
The establishment of pecking order. That's what happens when a child enters into school.
It's suppose to be about learning and growing mentally, and physically as well.
But I'm not so sure it's about anything more than learning that society likes carbon coppies of people that are suppose to be guides, that's what a teacher is by the way, a guide to higher learning.

Getting to know more than you did when you got up this morning, that's all higher learning in elementry and high school should be. Simple. The broading of the mind with new information.
And help remembering what you learned the day and days before this one.
But what I see is more about fashion.
More about things that children shouldn't have to be dealing with.
I have a few ideas of what happened along the way.

So, I like the little people. I just wish the adults they were with didn't love their cell phones so much.
Give a kid the idea that there really isn't anyone there, just someone they learn to call mommy and daddy.

I've seen the other kind of adult as well, the kind that is facinated with this short perfect copy of the big size person.
And that's beautiful to see.
A mom talking to her baby. A dad making a monkey of himself just to see his baby laugh.
Baby laughter is highly contagious.
It's infectious, and awesome.

I love it when I see families enjoying who their with.

I've seen frustrated children trying to become adults and the adults don't want them to grow up.
They just say they do. But what "Grow up" really means when thoes kinds of adults say it is "Do your life my way and then I will be proud of you. Anything else is not ok."

I've seen domineering mothers who refuse to let their thrity something child alone to figure out their own code of life.
They are constantly telling this adult how it should be done if it's going to be done right.
I've seen vacant fathers having nothing to say, when they should be talking about life to the person they helped bring into the world.

I've seen the over protective as well. Well meaning and terrified to let go.

That's the people. Human just like me.
I wasn't so great a parent growing up along side my kids who are now doing better at living life than I did when I made it as far down they road in age as they have.
Maybe it all came down to looking at how screwed up I was and making the decision that I wasn't where they wanted to go.
What ever the reason I'm happy they are both ok.
Both have lives they enjoy.

My daughter got married last summer to someone who is her balance and best friend.
Good for her. I'm happy that she knows herself well enough to understand what she was looking for.
And I'm happy that it didn't take her years to find that person.
It took him longer to find her though.

All that matters is that they found each other in a sea of so many.
I have no doubt that they will have many happy years of leaning about each other.
I'm not sure they will have kids or not.
I hope they do.
I think they'll both make good parents and good guides for their children.

My son is still looking. I hope he finds someone as well.
Time will tell.

I guess maybe I spend more time than I should thinking...can't seem to help it.
I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. It just seems to be the way things is, at least so far.

Trying to live a simple life when things just keep happening, sometimes seems more like trying to climb a mountian with no gear, just a pair of wrong shoes and a lite jacket.
That's what life ends up being like sometimes.

It's been like that for a while. I quit getting upset and have spent much of my time trying to figure out how to live simply anyway.
I figure I can't change anyone's mind about the distructive things their doing to themselves, but I can do something about me. And I choose to try to keep it as simple as possible, inspite of feeling time getting faster. Inspite of feeling emotions that come and go, most not making any sense at all and trying to figure out where they are comming from just makes it more difficult. Things out of the blue.
Life looks and feels strange most days.

I need balance. Life works when it's in balance. It may not be easy, but it works.
I like balance. I just really like it when it's in the mix,
seems to sort things out.
But everything in the world isn't in balance. And less so now.
With each passing day, the world seems more like a top spinning out of control and trying to careen into the nearest wall.

There has been talk about putting border checks between the states. There has been mention of needing papers to cross.
History is trying to repeat itself.
But the people who are thinking about doing all this, don't see that, all they see is that they have to do this.
Did someone forget to tell them that that's how facist states start? By making life more about having the "right" paperwork,
and making sure you don't say something anti this or anti that.

Freedom, by freedome striped away while we are all busy trying to live. Too occupied with things that are designed to help everyone forget history.

Very soon now they will require a chip to be put in the I.D. of everyone born after 1963, I think that's the year they are putting as the starting point with all this madness.
Scary stuff.

It's also scary that people seem content to just let it happen.
Instead of realizing that we are headed down the same road as many other civilzations that crashed, burned and fell, and going into a mass revolt against the few that would keep us as some kind of slave or prisioner population, the masses seem content with the status quo.
There is a revolt in process, but not nearly loud enough to stop the process.

And me, well I just would like to live a simple life. And that won't be possible if all this stuff doesn't stop.
None of us will know simple after a while.
Just a state of fear. We already have that going on. Terroist this and terrorist that.
Has anyone bothered to stop and remind these folks who keep screaming this cry to the rest of us, that terrorism has been around for alot longer than any of the currant population has been alive?
It's been present in every single major advanced civilzation, just before that civilization took a header to collapse.
It's not a new thing. It's old.
It happens when a person or group of people want to control the rest of the population, to persuade by terror for political purposes.

To rule the world. That's the goal. No balance. No reason. No freedom.
And that's scary too.
But history just keeps repeating itself, and humans keep doing it to each other.

And it just keeps comming. Maybe our great, great, great grandchildren will finally figure out how to stop this cycle from happening yet once again.
Hope so. Some group of people has to finally get it.

Hmmm...seems I got lost in a rant.
That seems to happen alot lately. History repeating.

Well, after a very long road full of all kinds of stuff, I am back here again.
Lessons have a way of happening inspite of us.
We moved out of the farm almost 2 years ago. We haven't had the net since then so this has just waited here. And I'm glad to see that this site is still running. That's something amazing in a world where the latest thing can't keep up long enough to stay alive as it were.
The fact that this site is still here is a testament to what it is to thoes who make it a part of lives.

Anyway, about the farm, that was where all this left off I think, not sure though, I'm going to have to go back and re-read over what was written.
We left after things got so bad that there was no other choice.
After we left we got word from another person who also left that things really got bad. The person who was causing all the problems for me, started in on the next person until they had enough and left as well.
It came to a head with the only person left kicking the problem child as it were out the door.
This individal passed away last year. He didn't pass away from
M.S., but rather all his obsessive anxiety about wanting to control everything and everyone finally culminated in a very large stroke.
When I was told, the person expected me to be happy about his death, but rather I was only happy that no one else would ever be subject of his insanity ever again.
Then just a few weeks ago, one of the people who lived there when I was there passed away after a relativly short bout with liver cancer.
I was sad to hear the news, but the knowledge that he is no longer suffering helps.

Winter here is almost done. Me and all the other people in this city are happy at the thought of spring comming and the changes that it will bring.
I'm still emersed in art. Doing sculptures now. Even something so deep inside me is subject to change.
I hope all of you out there are doing well, and that life has been kind over the past few years to you and yours.
Again, I am happy to see this place still here.
May your day be filled with things that amaze you and remind you
that you are made of star stuff.