Divine to define she is moving to define

Divine, to define, she is moving to define, so say so, so say so


The world moves on a womans hips


The world moves and it swivels and bops


The world moves on a womans hips


The world moves and it bounces and hops


A world of light...shes gonna open our eyes up


A world of light...shes gonna open our eyes up


Shes gonna hold/it move/it hold it/move it hold/it move it hold/It move it


A world of light...shes gonna open out eyes up


She is moving to describe the world


Night must fall now-darker, darker.


She has messages for everyone


Night must fall now-darker, darker.


She is moving by remote control


Night must fall now-darker, darker.


Hands that move her are invisible


Night must fall now-darker, darker.




From The Great Curve

I have had a lot of time to come up with my own religion and now I am going to describe it here, as insane as it may sound. Really the idea that we have come to worship a man who was nailed to a wooden object in the desert could sound crazy to those who don't know any better, so crazy is all relative. It is no great relevation to anyone who reads the stuff I write that the person who has had the biggest influence over my life the last several years is named Don Miguel Ruiz, and one of my favorite ways his philosophy is expressed is in this You Tube video which magically keeps showing up on the top of my favorites. How I do this - magically - is by continuing to add and remove it as You Tube has no way I know of to organize favorites differently. In my comment to the guy who assembled this video - beautifully set to two songs from Loreena McKennitt and with very fitting slide show images on top of it - I wrote : "I've already been in but one more time expressing my gratitude for this video - it is my favorite on on this site and I have come back to watch it several times - it is like drinking a glass of cold water on a very hot day", shortly following some guy asking someone else to suck his cock - as these types of primitive comments seem to show up all over You Tube. Ruiz writes very much to the point - no real big words - no need to show off how smart he is or how much knowledge he has - in fact he seems to think knowledge in itself is a weakness, as also pointed out by Ram Dass - my very close second influence behind Ruiz.

I was introduced to religion through Judaism, which being my first date so to speak, is something I have stayed with. I still believe in the idea of one universal being described as God. The idea that this being chose any one group of people as his people to me seems ridiculous, and believing that one individual as a person or group is better than others - unfortunately - sets up all sorts of horrible events such as gas chambers and mass executions. I am not saying we as a people were to blame for the Holocaust, but I do think such destructive mindsets can lead to bad things and made us pretty obvious targets for a desperate group of people looking to blame their own problems on someone. That is the problem I have with Judaism - we are chosen and you are a bunch of Pagans who need to be destroyed - as spelled out clearly in The New Testament. Now that I have some beliefs which fall into the realm of Paganism, I kind of have a problem with this. I also - wondered as I sat in this empty silent building known as a temple, why God happened to be listening to our prayers here - here only, as opposed to the prayers everywhere else - what gave us the right to be his sole petitioners. I had some of the most torturously painful and boring experiences of my life at a synagogue, and to this day I will never believe any type of building from a so called religious institution of any kind has the answer for me. Attending a communion here in town at a Catholic church, I was relieved to know Catholic services are just as torturously cold and empty as Jewish services. I also wondered why these folks from thousands of years ago were the only ones allowed to experience God directly, while all we could do was read about it.

At some point in my life I started having thoughts come into my head that I did not recognize as my normal everyday thoughts. They were magically inspiring - I had them in my home town, and often at times at college - and somehow in the face of all sorts of anxiety, depression, and self-doubt I found something inside of me to reassure me that despite all of the obstacles to success and happiness - that seemed overwhelming and impossible at times, that I was going to get through it and get to the places I need to go to. This voice seemed to be like God speaking to me. After much going back and forth about this, I am now convinced it was. I am not the only one who has the ability to speak to God - we all do - it is just that some of us may have these things happen more, or be more open to it. Obviously someone with a very scientific mindset is going to see this as the voice of the self, id - or whatever you want to call it - a deeper part of the brain that can all be explained by chemicals and atoms. That's fine - maybe it's that too, but that just is not going to be where it stops for me. At some point I have to surrender myself to my own intuition to think as a religious being as most of us are, and say whatever science has come up with does not rule out God and the spirit, even though I have a great respect for science and scientists.

The Grateful Dead - obviously the greatest musical force in my life - their concerts were a place where this force of God seemed to come out very strongly. I believe part of this was the music, and then part of this was the energy of a very charged group of artistic and creative folks, with a little hallucinogenic magic on top of it - and you had the recipe for a great source of inspiration that I could never find in the building of a religious institution. I could experience this either under the influence of some of mind altering substances, or not - and I would often find that it was hard to tell the difference - as I had some amazing mind altering experiences completely sober, with nothing but a contact high with those who were ingesting those things. After 120 plus Dead shows, 30 Phish shows, and God knows how many other shows I went to - I was into a local reggae group called the Cardiff Reefers in San Diego that I saw a bunch also - I believe that you take this magic and it stays in a part of your soul somewhere. I remember my friend Kirk who I saw more shows with than anyone else - telling me that he saw Dead shows as a kind of school, and at some point we were going to graduate. Graduation was forced on me with the very sudden and tragic death of Jerry Garcia, but my life changed as well. I believe the spirit of these concerts, and even a part of Jerry's spirit, lives on within me and I have stored it up somewhere so that when I play my own music it comes back out.

So cutting fast forward to where I am now, musical experiences still remain as my pathway to God. God to me is the sum total of everything - which all living beings are a part of - and together we are this entity - kind of like Jung's notion of Collective Unconscious. I don't adhere to the Bible's notion of a particularly pissed off old man up in the sky throwing down lightning bolts at us and sending us to hell when we don't do what he wants. That makes no sense to me at all. I have a higher regard for God than that. God to me is a being that transcends sexuality and even to a certain degree - existence in the form of any living being I can relate to. I can say he since it is a little more flattering than it, but it is only for reference, espeically since I mainly relate to God as a female Goddess being. I am presently reading a book by Deepack Chopra called How to Know God which honestly is a little hard for me to follow at times, but essentially talks about how God can be experienced at so many different levels - from the pissed off old man in the sky I described before, to a much larger and all embracing figure of love and acceptance - which is more the notion I buy into.

I make no claim to have any predictions of the after life. I am leaning toward believing in some form of it, but I wouldn't bet my life on what is coming next. I just know that to have faith in life and God as I do that whatever is coming next is the right thing - whatever that may be. What I have to work with are the days in front of me as a mortal human walking this planet, so those are of greater relevance than what is coming next. Somehow I think whatever that may be coming next will work itself out when the time comes. I am not believing in God because I believe it gets me preferential treatment, or a key to the doors of heaven - I believe because this is what I feel.

So let me just cut to the chase now and get into my religion. My religion is interactive. In the last book I read by Don Miguel Ruiz - at least a co-author anyways - a beautifully inspiring book called Beyond Fear - he said that the earth is a living being. (I see some people at Amazon just flat out didn't get this book and gave it bad reviews - and that should be encouraging to my brother that just because someone doesn't like a book there it really doesn't mean shit.) I actually posted my one sole Amazon review there saying I loved it. I experience the earth as a living being. I know all of the faces I have seen - from the faces in the cliffs at La Jolla, to the faces in the rocks eveywhere , the trees in my backyard, the mountain next to my house which seems to be magically alive - seem like living beings to me. While reading this section of the book on the flight to Nebraska, I looked down to see some incredible rock formations that seemed to be bursting with magical life and spiritual energy. Under the right amount of hallucinogens everything seems alive - but I no longer have to take them to sense that. To me the great Mother Earth is a magically alive being. I don't discount a "tripping" experience - if anything I think that "tripping" is the gateway to a new and magical reality that our present spiritually deprived awareness has a tough time taking in. Once this is experienced and you see Mother Earth as alive, you find it sad to see us as humans treating her so poorly, and it is heartbreaking to see all the smog, and smoke from fires, and the gradual destruction taking place to our beautiful mother, but I think that is a whole side point for now. When I am outside with my guitar and feel particularly inspired, I experience the wind as a living being that responds to my presence. The wind picks up at times in seeming response to what I am playing or feeling. I know - this could also be descrieed as random coincidence, but after enough of those random coincidences take place - that what if the wind is really alive notion takes over, and I believe as an element of the living being Earth that the wind is a part of this and she really does talk to me in in her own beautiful way. I don't care how irrational it sounds, this is my experience.

So now I slowly make my way back to the words and lyrics listed by David Byrne at the beginning of this post. I understand these words are a reference to a Goddess religion of a tribe or group of people who believed in a great mother female force and saw the world moving on a woman's hips. My connection to the life force, to God so to speak, is actually through the energy of the female or Goddess. It is no coincidence that I am a male and the female force has made me what I am. The perceived lack of loving female energy took me into a horrible depression, and knowing that this potential always exists, I see it as my task, both spiritually and emotionally, to constantly summon this force. Victoria and I have now been together 12 years - ironically the 12th anniversary of our relationship was the day I with great relief walked off of a cruise ship with an enormous sigh of relief. 12 years together comes one day after the 80th birthday of my mother. I got Victoria 12 peach colored roses (one for each year) with a note saying thanks for the best 12 years of my life. Not that it has not had its struggles, conflicts, and disputes over some of the lamest and dumbest reasons for a fight that ever existed - it has. I have had to redefine my desires - emotionally and physically - from the time when it seemed like the passion was happening constantly, to present times when being older and having a child to take care of, there was also an adjustment to an opposing desire level which is not always on the same page as mine - but I still believe my life is much better with a woman in it, than without. I love my wife, would miss her very much if she left for whatever reason that might happen, but I also have faith that if that were to happen I would be able to adapt to it. I do love her, want her, and have a need for her, but I don't need her to the point my life depends on it. I love her, but she is not essential to my being. I love her, but give her the freedom to do what she wants and go where she wants, even if she has to leave me altogether. At one point in my life that would have shattered me, but now - I know it would hurt and I would miss her , but I would be able to get by

And this in part is due to the "other" woman in my life. I am convinced that this woman - the woman so beautifully described by Jung as Anima - is a living being. How do I describe her? The first woman I ever experienced gave birth to me, so naturally the mother force as lived out through her shapes and influences this being. I wrote about my romantic experience of females in one of my songs that I recorded in Utah on my You Tube page (This is a song that...) - and I listed out names of women I have all been in love with - starting with Cathy - the flute player in my high school band. The subject of projection is interesting. I fell in love with a complete stranger, and filled in the blanks, imagining she was also in love with me. I believe she may have had some kind of attraction to me, but whatever it was - it was not enough for her to accept my nervous invitation to come to a dance with me. My projections of the feminine force go in both directions - the very beautifully all embracing love I experience at times, to the more ugly reactions to rejection ("you fucking bitch") - sometimes I here myself muttering the "bitch" word without even realizing it, and I see that the negative wicked witch feminine energy is taking over again. (I know there are good witches too) When I ask myself if these women who have brought me in tough with the anima - starting with Cathy in junior high, to Tracy in High School, and Christina in college - all women who I never experienced anything with other than fantasies - even if they were incredible fantasies - are these women real - the answer is yes and no. The Goddess force experienced through falling in love is the other person, but is also more than the other person, and sometimes completely separate from the other person altogether. At some point there is the realization that this is a human being after all, but without the face of a human being, The Goddess has a difficult time existing on her own as we relate to her as human beings through other human beings. So the best answer is yes and no when you want to know is that woman you are magically in love with really the one you think she is - because she is those things, and she is not at the same time. Any woman I interact with, from my wife to a woman I have sexual fantasies about - will become both sides of the experience of the feminine I have - the loving, accepting, warm embracing being on the one side, to the cold, cruel, hateful, critical, rejecting being on the other. That is my experience of the feminine - the yin and yang. One of them can bring me great joy and happiness, while the other has the potential on its own if unbalanced to literally bring me to depression and even suicide. So they seem to have to balance each other out. If I went too far into the ecstasy direction, "get too much you get too high" as the Sweet song points out, that could have consequences as well. Being in a full state of mania makes the basic essentials like holding a job and paying bills a little difficult.

So trying to sort of get back to what I was starting at from the beginning, this feminine force of love that I need as an essential to my being - just like I need exercise, food, and water - is the being that I summon now when I play my music in my yard. Sometimes she arrives, sometimes she doesn't. She is a real being which almost seems like a ghost, but I know she is real. To call her nothing but a figment of my imagination just doesn't cut it any more. Last night for example - I was playing certain songs that are like invitations "Crazy Fingers", "Help On the Way" by the Dead are too good ones, a beautiful romantic song by Syd Barrett called Terrapin, one called Broken Arrow that the Dead covered - that focus on love - and then add on others of my own like "Behind Me" and the one I wrote about "now's the time to treasure every precious breath alive" (whose title is constantly subject to change) - and one which I intend to You Tube soon called "The Witching Hour" - these are summoning songs. When I was experiencing the bitter cruel feminine rejection energy in the early 1990s, I would write very depressing songs to capture my experience - ones like There is No Love, hopelessly waiting for a love that would never arrive, or stuff like God damn I hate being alone and this really sucks (to paraphrase) and then that became my reality. The songs I write and sing now focus on the positive experience because that is what I need to have more than anything, (especially after 3 days on a fucking cruise ship). So yesterday, when I summoned and she came and I experienced the Goddess energy - it filled me up and made me feel very alive with love. Then I bring this energy back to my relationship here - I am not a desperate being seeking fulfillment from my wife, but I am a being glowing with love and I want to share this love with my wife rather than seek it from her, and I even concentrated on this notion during our intimacy last night (yes it still does happen from time to time) and even though I was obviously getting something out of it, I was not just taking something to get my rocks off, but I was focusing on giving back too - and I actually received a rare positive review of the experience from my wife. This to me is the key to relationships that Ruiz so beautifully nails down in Mastery of Love - when your cup is full - as stated in Ripple - may it be again. When you have something to bring to a relationship - something to offer - than you can share that without having it be the life end if it does not come from the other half. So even though sex can be a beautiful experience, I have to be willing to give it up for as long as I have to, so that I am not an overwhelming burden upon my wife, who may not be in the same frame of mind I am, and then have that faith that it will happen again when meant to, and that even if it is a long time, that I am still loved and nourished through my experience of the Goddess. Buddhism describes this in the emphasis on freedom from desires and giving up attachment. That way, when a real woman cannot be present, the woman of the Spirit is always not far away. She is experienced as the Virgin Mary in Christianity and other religions, and McCartney described her very well in Let it Be - she comes to you when you need her "in my darkest hour she is standing right in front of me".

When I am fulfilled - when my cup is full - when the Goddess energy is there, I feel love for human beings. Even with my parents - who I have every justifiable reason to despise - and I could go back over every single hateful past incident, or think about how much of a pain in the ass they can even be in the present, especially the way they treat my wife - I can still feel love for them in spite of it all. It helps though to not get so locked into the parent-son role - as Ram Dass talks about in a couple of books - and just see them as people. I was wondering if I had it in me to hug my mother after all the negative emotions and past experiences were stirred up in my head from the events leading up to the cruise, but it came naturally to hug her at the end, and to sing Happy Birthday very enthusiastically. I can go in either direction - the hate can be summoned very easily and I have every reason in the world to justify my hatred, but in the end - it just doesn't do much for me to hold onto it. Sure I will get angry, sure I will not be necessarily be happy with the way I was raised or even the way they continue to treat me, but I can love them even in spite of all this - just because they are human beings, not because they are my parents. I don't expect a damn thing from them and in a fit of anger they can cut me off any time they want to - cut me out of the will, cut me off of communications - and I'll love them anyways. I may not like what they do, or the way they handled this God awful cruise experience, but I love them. They may not like the way I write about the cruise, or see me as some ungrateful ass-hole for not gushing the experience with praise as some may have done. That's fine too. Some positives even came out of this - my sister Edie is going to come visit us and see Sara, I have been in touch with my nephewJosh, got to have a good talk with my nephews who I had lost touch with up to this time - and our family did need to come together in its own strange way, even if we spent a great part of the time avoiding each other - that's just who we are. Part of love is just accepting what life is, and who people are, even if on one level you can't stand them or feel disappointed by their actions, because once your cup is full, it really doesn't matter what they do. You love them anwyays, because your cup is full and you have love to offer. It then becomes an offering - I have this to offer you, and whatever you want to give back is fine - even if it is nothing at all.

So again - I am all over the place and not even quite sure if I accomplished what I originally set out to do in the first place - but hopefully I got something across here. I think I did. And I close with one of my favorite summoning Dead song lyrics from Help On The Way:

Paradise waits on the crest of a wave her angels in flame
She has no pain Like a child, she is pure She is not to blame
Poised for flight Wings spread bright Spring from night into the sun
Don't stop to run She can fly like a lie She cannot be outdone

Tell me the cost I can pay Let me go Tell me love is not lost
Sell everything Without love, day to day, insanity is king
I will payday by day anywayLock, bolt and key
Crippled but freeI was blind all the time I was learning to see

Help on the wayI know only this I've got you today
Don't fly away'cause I love what I love and I want it that way
I will stay one more day Like I sayHoney, it's you
Making it too Without love in the dream It will never come true