The Gift That Keeps On Horsing Around
Bienvenidos, Jazz Pickles. I hope your year is shaping up nicely enough to warrant a smiling selfie or two. In the US, it’s a great relief to have adults back in charge again, but this is still a big storm and the dam is cracked. I’m hoping for the best but keeping my rubber boots on for a while longer, for sure.
If you’ve read my previous couple of posts, you know that Olive Oyl and I are hanging out on a rural Oaxaca mountainside for a month, enjoying the sounds of nature when it has not been overrun by humans. My god, we can be annoying, can we not? To compare the natural sounds of this planet to the soundscape of an average day in an average modern city is to realize how deeply unpopular we must be with the rest of the life forms on earth.
On the bright side, the contrast has made O2 and I all the more appreciative of the insanely complex miracle that this planet is. Every plant, every insect, bird, rock, or breeze is the culmination of billions of years of events and combinations and reactions. It’s too big to fully wrap my brief, temporary brain around but I love thinking about it.
Over the years, I’ve come to see science as the study of God. I’m not talking about the mythological, bearded god who created everything in a week and set it off and running exactly as it is today. I’m talking about the actual thing for which that myth is a metaphor: whatever unimaginable thing—force? entity? being? committee?—started the universe in motion way back at the Colossal Kaboom. (The term “Big Bang” has sooo much religious baggage at this point, not to mention sit-com baggage.)
All of this quiet and lack of schedule has begun to help me to understand that “being present” is more than just a practiced mind technique; it can actually be spiritually revelatory. Lately, I’m seeing myself not as Dan Piraro, a finite person with this one lifetime to bang his head against the proverbial wall in an attempt to get what he wants out of it before he dies, but instead as an eternal being (for lack of a better descriptor without a lot of religious baggage), that is spending a brief time in the body of this human mammal whose parents named it Dan Piraro. And it is by no means the first mammal I’ve been in.
I’ve found this perspective to be pretty wonderful. By realizing I’m only here for a while and the things I learn here I can take with me—the real me, not the one I see in a mirror— I am more easily able to see each moment as a tremendous and temporary privilege.
A spiritual teacher dude I was listening to online the other day proposes that consciousness is not the same as mind. Your mind is your thoughts, but your consciousness is your eternal spirit looking through your eyes to experience the world. In a sense, it can be seen as God carnally experiencing its creation.
So, as I walk around the property here, I’ve been thinking that I’m taking God for a walk through its garden. I’ve been exhilarated by the kind of fresh perspective that gives to every moment.
Note that I do not use gender to refer to God. I’ve never been comfortable with that convention—what use would God have for sexual organs? I am much more comfortable with calling God an “it” because I’m also not convinced it is a single entity. Maybe God is the sum total of all the light (and enlightenment) and love and creative power in the universe and each one of us is a tiny cell of that enormous, unfathomable body? Maybe that’s where our endless creativity comes from. Why not? I find it’s worth trying on for a while at the very least.
When I return home in a few weeks, replace my computer gizmo and get back to work, my posts may become less mushy and lofty but until then, I’m afraid you’ll be seeing plenty of this metaphysical meandering in the coming posts. I’ve no doubt this kind of stuff will lose me a few readers but my belief has always been that the only way to find your best audience is to be your most authentic self and let them come and go as they may. Those of you who keep coming back each week and reading more than the cartoons are very special to me. Thanks for paying attention.
Now I will direct your attention to Wayno’s Bizarro cartoons for the week, which perhaps are viewing the world through our eyes…
Who doesn’t love a good pipe-heel shoe?
His biggest hit was “Bears Don’t Cry,” of course. (Wayno and I independently reached for the same revised song title in commenting on this cartoon, as you can see in his weekly cartoon blog post. He also includes a dandy Black spiritual song from the 1940s at the end of his post!)
Here’s a fun brain twister for students of English: The fly flies when the flies fly.
My favorite banjo joke is “That thing will never heal if you don’t stop picking it.” Wayno and I both have personal friends who play the banjo and so we know that they are quite used to being kidded about their choice of instrument. Not unlike bagpipe players and people who beat accordions with a two-by-four.
And now, if you’ll just download the surgery app…
If you enjoyed the Old West-themed cartoon at the top of this post, please consider pointing your see-balls at my graphic novel, Peyote Cowboy. It would really enjoy being read by you. And if you like it and would like to help me continue to post it online free for anyone to read, watch my short video about that here. (scroll down that page a bit)
That marks the end of this week’s comedy pratfall, Jazz Pickles. Thanks for tumbling all the way down the stairs with us. If you’re enjoying what we’re doing here, for free, without ads, help us keep it that way by tossing a peso or two into one of the links below. We’d be eternally grateful, in a literal sense. :^]
BIZARRO SHOP We have new stuff in the shop that’s fun and cheap!
…Signed, numbered, limited edition prints and original Bizarro panels
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