Leaving Town

Grateful this Thanksgiving week for the Athens community, a special place in my heart that feels hard to part with, when Athens has taught me so much thru schoolyards, classrooms, bar patios, and the most blessed days when I could write and draw on my father's collegiate blackboards anything in chalk, easily eraseable with a puff of chalk dust, and in my mother's office at Nelson and Hill play a version of civilisation and Castle of the Winds on a now oldfashioned computer, keyboard, and mouse. 

St. Mary's Hospital to my parents' and sister's loving arms, Parna's nursery, Athens Montessori for three grand years of playing duck duck go, singing "He's Got the Whole World, In His Hands"... playing on the old firetruck, the ropeway in the back, hiding in the overturned truck tire, breaking pecans with my shoes and learning tool use. David C. Barrow to follow, where we'd sing, "I love to go to Barrow school, to Barrow school I gooo, Five days out of every week, to Barrow school I goo," when we weren't singing the song with all the school sponsors named at school assemblies, where we received so much love from our teachers and Principal Wright, the unique moment of the 90s when multiculturalism was a blessed reality, shifting into Clarke Middle School and the joys of learning creatively, most of all in Mrs. Nagao's class, where I met future friends once we were separated from our Elementary school bonds in a haphazard way, thrown into the deep end of 9/11 on the TV in Mrs. Causey's class in 7th grade, Earl Ayers the bandleader teaching an entire class to play every single instrument single handedly, we in percussion pushing each other aside to get on that big bass drum or the snare and the cymbals. Bloody knuckles and Mossing each other on the playground, Yo Mama jokes that on this day I can understand the pain that could be inflicted on a peer if the joke hit home. Into high school where we all self-segregated into cliques, racial divisions in the cafeteria, College Prep, Advanced College Prep, and AP classes to divide us further. The humiliation of my peers having fallen behind in their studies and eeking out an existence far from the dreams of mothers and fathers envisioning their children going to college one day. Kids having kids and growing into the responsible parents as if it were destiny, wisdom I never have known. Dropping out of school and going on my experiments thru the woods, jumping over hedges, stacking chairs and trying to learn how to land...thinking I could feel the air to the degree to catch the winds and take flight. All foolishness, as were my many experiments with sound, sungazing, altered states of consciousness, and awakenings that had to be put to somnolence if not to sleep.

Leaving town for college at a private school on half scholarship, losing the connection to the peers who raised me in Athens, coming back to complete a masters in public health and a masters in social work, by the skin of my teeth, every year returning to a stupor once the delusions had been properly sedated. 

All this to say, working at Advantage must be my finest moments here in town, not to mention my marriage of which books could be written, where I felt I was giving back to the place that has given me so much, teaching me empathy and compassion in action, and recalibrating my playlist back to soul, Indian classical, and far from gangsta rap, some ill-informed rock, too, and their lures. Listening to the lyrics deeply and changing my mind to change my environment. Changing my environment to change my mind. And as I now depart to another world city, with the heavy feeling that I did not do enough for Athens, I embark on opportunity for redemption and reconciliation, non-violent communication, empathy and conflict resolution, courage and commitment, conviction and resilience, adventuring into the unknowns lurking in the shadows of the known, to complete my task I began 19 years ago, and maybe earlier- to make known the unknown, to know the demarcation of these in myself, to know in others for all good intents and purposes, and to get into the ground, plant the seeds to grow this tree, this tree of life that I hope to see one day as the fruition of public health, the indefinite lifespan, free of fear for all-too-preventable death. Because as the logicians said: "All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Socrates must die". Is it so unreasonable in this world of senolytics to dream of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? As I said in the beginning, so I will say in the end...seek no fame, no glory in the game, go against the grain, try to stay sane, entertain the untamed unnamed lion's mane, be Adam's outstretched finger, be God's brain. 

What is the Value of Love that Must Prove itself to its Beloved?

How can we on Earth bring ourselves closer together, or at whatever distance is most necessary to maintain an established harmony of our own, individual freedom, in a way in which we all personally find the happiness we may so easily reset and rest in? To begin each day, whether sunny or cloudy in nature, whether raining, thundering, or lacking in humidity; so that we go from what we are born to achieve as a species, a life of love, spread liberally around the globe without shame, from conversation to conversation; not seeking to convert others to our thinking, but rather seeking to understand and join with everyone in a way that will keep us bonded for eternity. I do the following:
Thinking of what situation others are in, listening to the stories travelling from the other side of the planet, protecting my innocence by judicious forethought and ultimate presence with each keystroke, footstep, thought, momentary forgetfulness. Reminded again, back on track, making no reference to anyone outside of my own self-knowing, knowing myself to the maximum limit of 24 hours, 7 days a week, and 365 days a year on my calendar.
Forgiveness is to halt and recover the perpetrators of intentionally malicious actors, to mould such bad actors in a way that allows them to understand the damage anyone fitting this description has done to our harmoniously envisioned ideal planet, and go on to participate in healing of immorality as sickness, and produce purification of heart, soul, mind, challenging of intellect, and enjoyment of the delight of living and knowing that we share our small blue and green and red and yellow and white Earth with billions of ones just like us in these universal desires:
To love and be loved, to build and maintain goodwill, to create and enjoy in fellowship, to choose our friends, lover, and the way by which we express our feeling of love and do the great work of loving, no matter what befalls us as a whole single civilisation in Modern time from the thoughtlessness of blind, unknowing nature.
To master our self and do what is right, what is the highest good, the ideal in each situation, every circumstance no mater how wide or narrow in scope, to persist effortfully and succeed effortlessly with a systematic rise in spirits, to feel hope, fearless desire for improvement of relations between entire parts of our whole and singular self, and likewise to make singular in being unassuming in our outlook towards our neighbours, compatriots, and global allegiance to universal siblinghood, universal responsibility of citizenry, whether as netizens or members of communities within communities within states, within nations, across all borders and with love, for all, by all, freely given, freely chosen as to what form fitting the instant in time, freely receiving of others’ positive intent, wholesome and fully real and touchable, sensible, thoughtful; patiently building foundations of non-violent inter-state solutions to what babies understand not about the complexities of world relations, as to the eye of the newly born blessed with sight, the light of the sun or a bulb may reign on an entirely new movement of love for the midwifes and parents’ and custodians and village members and that each newborn be given an equal treatment by all who support the movement of life’s defeating of death, the hope needed to prevail, the perseverance necessary to go on, and to continue to go on, and to look in any which direction but never to return to the foolery that has led us here to swiftly reinstitute our joint-family of hand-holding, fun-loving, expressive, all-feeling, all-knowing, all-respecting, all blessing and hoping for the peaceful, harmonious success of joint ventures.
I’m rooting for you and ya’ll, from the other side. EastWestNorthSouth and into the heavens and down through the middle of the earth (if one dares to dream)- I personally prefer the quiet of a simple life, organised home, and the privacy of love which only one can quite understand in their own way, as we swap pages and places, and get to task. Number one todo: Work to benefit and increase the benevolence of all who are other to me, a single human being together with all my human relatives known and unknown to me on a lonely planet listening to the universal fusion of music owing its masterfulness to in addition to tradition, a special novelty, original creation to the recognition of the breaking down of categories not of our own deciding, branded onto us at birth and cruelly regimented onto our life even as we begin to fight these vestiges of darker ages, when we did not choose, but allowed the notion of destiny to carry us away. Now the time has come to review words and escape the misinterpret able, to go deep into sleep and rejuvenation of the body, and to wake up tomorrow to think more deeply about where I am needed, who needs me, who does not need or want me, and who am I willing to become to advance my efforts towards solidarity for all those grieving those who never made it this far, and to prevent death from ever taking another of our human race, split apart by national borders and misgivings, when instead we could offer love for free, for what is the value of love that must prove itself to the beloved? All are welcome, and over the span of life, love truly will always prevail.