www.larryfarmerwrites.com

Still Surviving

Our chicken, Survivor, is still doing a good job of her thing. Still supplying lots of eggs and even though goatless goes out to the pasture a lot to look for food.

The boys want goats again and so we might get them one each to raise and breed. A hobby, etc. It was nice to hear that they wanted this.

I let my oldest have a pellet gun. He's fifteen and many in the country already have access to a rifle or shotgun somehow. But I'm just now allowing a pellet gun. He likes it in the country for things like this, and chickens and goats, and I like it for them.

The deer have returned to my pasture now with the goats gone. It is a big herd now, or whatever deer groups are called. I think seven now. The fawns have all grown up. I didn't see any new fawns though. Don't know when they breed.

The hay I had for the goats has spread hay grass into my pasture. It may spread even further, I would think so. It's pretty, full and very green.

So, we're still here, alive and kicking. Our dog has the rule of the place too. Goes all over. I guess life is good.

Elvis and Lennon

Over the Christmas holidays and then most of this week I've read on a lot of subjects, but also a great deal on Elvis Presley and the Beatles. Saw documentary of them on TV too.

You don't think of Elvis as an intellectual. Even as an Elvis fan that seemed a rather bizarre thought to me at one time. I heard a few things to the contrary through the years, but mostly wanted to believe it, I didn't really buy it.

A very detailed biography of him though stated otherwise. Indeed he was.

I'd heard and believed how brilliant he was. You couldn't tell it by his stupid jokes, his dumber movies, or his absurd appearance. But the one about judging the book through its cover.

Sure enough, he was an average student at best in high school. Didn't go to college, even before he was ever king. He drove a truck. Read comic books by the hour. All goes with vintage thoughts of Elvis.

But about his brilliance. It wasn't just through music, but he was indeed a musical genius.

So many singers and songwriters did not take him seriously in the beginning. A goon, a flash in the pan.

Until they met him. He usually knew every song they ever wrote or sang or wished they had. He not only knew it by name, he knew every part of the song, the music, the lyrics, the history of it. He would walk up to people upon meeting them for the first time excitedly and sing their songs and tell them exactly why he loved it. He usually knew the song by heart the first time or two he heard it. In his first movie he came on the set having memorized every line in the movie, his and everyone elses.

But to the intellectual he was.

He read by the volume. Comic books appealed to him because he fantasized along with them the Captain Marvel he dreamed of being. It suited his fancy and his fantasies which he set about making real.

But he read very deep philosophical books also. Stacks of books against the wall and at his bedside. Usually religious in orientation.

He was brought up Southern fundamentalist, in particular Assembly of God. That fit actually. The most charismatic of the charismatic movements. He was very spiritual and sang that way. At least in the beginnig before he became formulaed.

When the dogmatic creeds didn't always fit, he searched for what would. He searched through such as Kalil Gibran and Aldous Huxley. He stayed close to his roots, but also tried to fill in the crevices.

When I hear the verse in the Bible about what gains a man to win the whole world but lose his soul, I think instantly and more than anyone, of Elvis Presley.

Elvis was lost and lonely and died that way. Having gained the whole world, the worldly part of it, and gotten almost everything he wanted, he lost it. Lost it inside. He knew it. He was trapped and did a lot of it to himself. Drugs addicted him to the loss. Whatever chance he had to get out of it.

I don't at all think that all the worldly things he did doomed him. I think that so much of it did. He lost sight, balance, but the pull was there and incredible. He knew something, but lost grip of it. He needed someone so badly to trust, but everytime he found someone trustworthy, he betrayed them. It was hard to read about him.

I read a book on the Beatles, but last night saw a documentary on them. Lennon also was deep though not formally educated. And he also read on much philosophy and religion.

It was his claiming the Beatles were more popular than Jesus that got him into trouble. He went on to say he didn't know which would die first, rock and roll or Christianity.

I was raised Southern fundamentalist and Assembly of God. Very very religious and sincere. I had just graduated from high school, just started college summer school and came home for summer break, went to the Assembly of God church back home and heard my preacher condemning the Beatles for the above statement. The church and my preacher didn't much like the Beatles anyway, I did, I adored them, especially John Lennon. But until that statement the church thought them pretty much harmless, as far as worldly things were considered anyway.

When I heard my preacher condemn them and repeat what had been said, I had to hold back a snicker. I was on the way, as many sophists going to college were, especially in the sixties, to becoming an agnostic. A skeptic. I thought, John Lennon had to have said what my preacher accused them of and admired Lennon for it. Agreed totally with it.

But when I sought out the circumstances I was even more bugged with my church and even more supportive of Lennon. Lennon meant no harm by it. I admired him for thinking he did mean harm. But the truth was he was reading on religion and Christianity and wanting answers. He found little wrong with Christ, but had a hard time with what Christianity had become. He had little respect anymore for the church and found it superstitious and antiquated as I had. But the fact was, he was making a comment on how it was declining and honest about it and witnessing how it was on the decline in substance and popularity and how rock and roll, especially now the Beatles, had become. It was a fact, not that he was for it, not that he wasn't, it was a fact. It reflected as much on people and Christians themselves as it did on him.

I agreed and still do on his observations.

Lennon was also my hero, though like Elvis, I found a lot about him I didn't care for and also had a sense of pity for him and often disgust, how trapped he was too. But I admired the way, overall, he struggled with it. To get his feet on the ground. He even, like Elvis, knew he was trapped and in many ways phony. But you have to struggle with it and he did. I don't know if he won, but I loved his struggle and in many ways did come to grips with it.

I have had my own struggles and many times and in many ways come full circle with Christianity and my church. But I feel more a seeker than a traditional Christian. I am Christian because of the many ways it has always provided me with substance. I still have problems with Christianity though and Christians for where I feel they are more smug being Christian than finding Christ. But mostly I want to understand. I've defended and ridiculed. I want to know the truth. I feel God expects it of me. But I know I haven't found it yet myself and I was never trapped by being an earthly icon. We all have our own traps. We all have our own searches.

And happy New Year, I guess.

Girl

When I hear the song Girl by John Lennon it haunts with the unrelenting tormented rapture I spent those years with my first soulmate. I was stuck in the environ of an Elvis movie everyone expected us to live in those days, until John Lennon educated me about what life was really about. The song sums up perfectly my relationship with my soulmate as if it was the whole soundtrack of the movie never made about us. You can sum up the song and my years with her in one seductive sentence.

Life is for living.

And all that it implies.

We were both very religious and that made the relationship all the more intriguing. It was with religious wonderment that we entered the domain of sin and the deeper the sin the more it haunted us, but all the more was the allure. Somehow the depth of feeling seemed purer as we plunged where love was felt with more conviction knowing we shared a passion worth going to hell for.

And we went to hell and back.

It Could Happen To You

Been a busy time of late. Sort of enjoyed it though. Observing myself along the way too. Enjoyed that too. Took a breather last night. Listened to the Astros win on the radio, then watched one of my favorite not real old oldies. It Could Happen To You, Nicholas Cage and Brigitte Fonda with Rosie Perez.

I've always loved that movie. How the cop fell for the waitress and love prevailed. How love changed Brigitte Fonda's life and attitude. It was corny but in a believable way and it felt very good to believe it and it made me believe again.

I looked at myself now compared to when I first saw that movie. It's from the mid-nineties, and I saw it around 2000. How I've changed, even though I'm still mostly me. But I've changed from letting go of things more. Figuring out better what makes for happiness, the real kind, and what is trying to kill you.

And the way they loved people. That seemed believable too. That maybe you can't love everyone, but you can love so many more than you ever believed.

It was so heart warming to watch them fall in love, like it should be, but then to see them meet accidentally in the Plaza Hotel and then make idle chatter and small talk, looking for a reason to stay together a little longer, and then, not finding any, rushed to each other anyway to hold and kiss and exchange love vows. You cry for joy.

And when they are being sued in court and Rosie Perez' lawyer asks Brigitte Fonda what she thinks of Nicholas Cage and all the reasons she gives how he saved her life in a sense by being the things he is, generous, caring, warm, and when pressured how she just came out and said that she loved him. Pure Hollywood but pure perfect.

I want this in my life. That's what I want with my life. Who doesn't, but that's what I want. Highest priority in my life is for that.

To let go of the trivial things trying to kill you that makes them not trivial at all, and to see better what true happiness is. It equates with true lovingness. And true love.

Shabbatei Zvi

In the seventeenth century in the Ottoman controlled Levant was a manic-depressive Jewish mystic by the name of Shabbatei Zvi. The Jews had been persecuted throughout their history since they had been the nation-state of Israel.

Now in the diaspora they were persecuted as a minority in Asia, Africa, and Europe. Palestine was now controlled by the Ottomans.

In the town of Safed in Palestine had been a very prosperous and enlightened Jewish population, the leader of it's day, even over Jerusalem, which was impoverished. Ferdinand and Isabella had run out the last of the Moslems in 1492 and likewise with the Jews there, which had been the leaders of the Jewish world until then. Many of these went to Safed as it prospered spiritually, ecomically, and intellectually.

With the coming of the new economic and military powers of Europe, Safed began to diminish, with it's economic collapse coming suddenly and bluntly in the late sixteenth century, timed as a new movement of mystics came under the influence of Isaac Luria. Until him the mix of life and intellect and spiritual matters had a unique balance, very spiritual and practical at the same time. But with economic collapse that incurred and a tradition of hard times in their psyche, the Luria brand of mysticism took a definite outer realm manner. Though it was spiritually uplifting to tens of thousands, it lost all contact with the day to day of living in the world. It's head was in the clouds and feet following, i.e., not on the groud.

A disciple of this tradition was Shabbatei Zvi. His manic depressive psyche made for times of incredibly, almost hallucinary concepts of mysticism that attracted a huge following. His fits of deep, morbid, dark depressions made him unstable and contradictory. He began breaking many Jewish sacred traditions and would even say God's unutterable name in the Synagogue.

He was kicked out of Egypt and Palestine and in Turkey made an even greater impression. He proclaimed himself Messiah and that the world was coming to an end in 1666. He had been born on the anniversary of the destruction of the Jewish Temple and to him that also was a sign, not that it might have been interpreted that he was anything but that due to his dark birth date.

When the Ottoman authorities found out he was to be Messiah and also forecasting the downfall of the local Sultans and authorities, they arrested him and put him on trial. It had the makings of the Passion of Christ. But with one exception. His dark moods took over and instead of becoming a martyr and giving even more hope to the masses certain he was Messiah and savior for the Jews and that redemption was indeed coming on June 18, 1666, he was given the ultimatum of foresaking it all and converting to Islam.

And he did. He changed his name to Aziz Mehmet Effendi. They rewarded him by making him a Moslem scholar and gave him riches.

Many of his followers lost all hope, others defended him and said that this was just to join the oppressors for the sake of defeating them. Lowering himself to the depths to defeat them from within. But they still ruled when he died still a Moslem ten years later.

It makes you want to make a movie. Where are you Mehmet Gibson?

Sufis

I've heard about the Sufis for decades now. I knew very little about them than they were some kind of Moslem mystical group. I'm reading my first book about them and it's incredibly good. They are so much like other groups, mostly mystical ones, so much intertwined with Christian such, Buddhists, Taoists, Hindus, Jews etc. The underlying concepts.

These underlying mystical portions of the above religions have so much in common. I still was so amazed to read about it with the Sufi, so strongly anyway.

They see things as esoteric and exoteric. Three layers more apt. The law as the outer layer, a Prophet version of Christ as the middle, spirit mixed with outer layer, and then pure spirit as the third.

A Sufi saying is
Whoever has the outer law without the inner reality hs left the right way. *This reminds me of Saint Paul in the Bible.

Whoever has the inner reality without the outer law is a heretic.

Whoever unites the two of them has realization.

The orthodox Christians had problems with the Gnostics over the second part of the saying above.

The Sufis see faith as a knowledge of the heart. I love that.

It is the wahabis in the Moslem world that is so hooked on the law, the Sharia. The sufis see a need for the law, just like Christ and St. Paul did of Mosaic law. But to be so hooked on the law, the outer layer, without the inner knowledge, it is blindness and insanity. So, the Sufis are more in line with Christ spirit in this regard. Without this inner knowledge to apply the law it comes out like the Osama bin Ladens and al-Zarhawaris.

They see the individual as like a drop of water. A part of the ocean, which is God, separated through evaporation, coming down to earth as a drop of rain, then becoming part of the larger portion of rain that works it's way into the river, which winds it's way back to the ocean, or larger body of God. That is such a prevailing concept in these mystical religions.

The law purists, say the Sufis, are those that have a name, but no reality. A rose to them is only ROSE, not the fragrant flower itself.

When you are truly enlightened, there is not this dual world of the exoteric and esoteric, the outer and the inner, but only oneness. They are just parts of the whole. We on earth have a notion of consciousness that sees only the outer, even as we are influenced by the inner. To be in contact and harmony with the inner and it's link to the outer is the true Godliness.