The Voice

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

Take away the noise. The voice. The rippled ocean in the air. So that we are all ears. So that no one can hear. Except through the soles of their feet. Don’t pray with fingers intertwined but toes touching. Take a seat. Flee the heat. Fleet week. Anarchists in sailor’s uniforms. Soldiers by day, villains on the web. Spiders say thank you for your service while thinking damn I’m glad I’m not you, and I would send you into hell to save only the shadow of myself. Silhouetted soldiers on a bumper sticker on her car. It’s just a job. No one takes you so seriously as you do. No one is supposed to. Everyone will lie to your face and deny it under torture and declare they are honest. But in earnest, they disbelieve in the existence of the thing called truth. Some philosophical fragment encountered in their youth cautioned them into chaos. If education manufactured silent spaces, simply sought to take away the noise, no one would disbelieve the concept of truth. 

Swear on the past, equivocate the present, and promises for the future suture up the time in between. But no matter where you are looking, the proof is in the pudding. Can you imagine, coming to God, the real God, the only one we’ve got, having killed, murdered, in preservation of your own survival, and in reflecting on your own story, you can’t articulate the purpose of your life, the good you’ve done, the mountains you moved, nothing. You fought a war or sent soldiers into fire to save a forest you never explored. If a villain approached you with a blade and swore to end your life and you took nothing from them but the blade, you’d go to heaven with the real God there greeting you, beer mugs in both hands. If you went out on a frozen winter night and laid down in the woods and breathed in the roaring frothing air until it made you ice on the inside, God waits at the trailhead of your next adventure holding two glasses of wine. Take the pain because the pain came from the same thing the joy did and you’ll be there with all the ones you ever loved clutching sticky flutes of champagne. 

But if you go the other way, if you commit to kill a stranger because you are afraid to die, you could not enter heaven even cradled in the arm-crib of God itself. Even if that stranger was evil. It does not matter. The act of not desperately avoiding death would save a life, no matter the consequences, makes a better story. If you kill to stay alive, you better be able to articulate why. Why you. Why life. Life is an inheritance, not a recompense. You did nothing to deserve or earn this status. Killing picks up stones in the footbed of your soul. Which accrue, and grow, to become the very anchor that keeps you from ascending to the life that follows after life. You will be trapped in your own cocoon. Never taste nectar. Die a fat, insatiable caterpillar belly full of leaves, farmers cursing your name and gifting you blame. 

You call death what nature calls change. 

You are the powerful one in this equation. 

God is a third person omniscient narrator.

A disembodied voice offering us this choice.

You be my life after death, and I’ll be yours.

Craftsmanship

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

The most prevalent theological error seems to be believing God would use a human’s inner voice as a medium to relay instructions. How low and how little do you think of divinity? To choose a method with absolutely no objectivity. No. God is a real God and a God of the physical which the energetic plays like puppets on strings. It won’t whisper. God sings. God shakes the earth and lays down trees though they’ve never seen a saw. God moves in electrons within us all. And if God wants you to change, or do, or alter, or pick up an object and move, it will physically communicate that to you. And I argue, already is. But you don’t listen to your kids.

You graduated school. Now if anyone tries to teach you you defend your own intelligence and call them a fool. But you used to let yourself learn things, and chuckle at criticism. Your kids still do, and my best advice is listen to them. If I was a god, your inner voice would not be my first choice, I don’t know, I’d probably litter the sky with specks of light so dim they can only be seen at night. I’d give unparalleled powers to subatomic particles. And I’d make change subtle, slow, taken out of the hands of the individual and given to the dice-rolling, storm-blowing agents of chaos in the universe. I’d make it all about mutation. I’d put the germ inside the brick and set it loose on a leveled lot and sit back and watch. My favorite part of a garden is after the third weeding when the plants are tall enough to cast down a blanket of shade no lowly plant can evade, for a minute, the farmer’s useless. If I were God, omniscient, omnipotent, I’d create the whole universe in that image. Totally independent. I’d make it so perfect, my hands would stay so clean. My creation would not need me. Some would call it atheism. But I would call it craftsmanship.

Universe-Maker (Final – Part 5)

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

Our eyes saw no need to show us this, but there are two worlds laid out on top of one another to form our one. What part of God was alive died for this one to give us our first fertilizer and seeds. But the energetic dimension laid on top of it, God is very much alive in, and only able to manipulate and make changes imperceptibly through the microscopic pinholes of electrons. There is a God. And you pray to it with every choice you make, every step you take, the things you call dinner, the memories you have of others, and the stories they tell of you. 

God is still building, and the human being is a special sort of sentimental brick. This isn’t designed for happiness, heaven is not a reward, and hell is probably the furthest you can get from failure. 

Nothing happens without purpose. God did not give up its form because it was bored. I can only tell you that while energy moves and gravity pulls the universe is churning toward something. And we are not an accident. We are not a frivolous experience. We are a tool. We are resource. 

Being a good person is like being a good hammer.
Study yourself. Get to know your form. Take measurement.
You will find whose grip you were shaped for. 

You won’t miss the nail anymore.

Universe-Maker (part 4)

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

I don’t want to uplift your story if you’re unrepentantly racist and hateful. I don’t care who you like or don’t, rights are universal, existence comes from God and is not subject to critique, which would be like one chair leg accusing the other three of being wobbly. No one is going to select out your experience and give you credit and credence and apologize for your motives. You’re going to always be treated by the universe the way you’ve treated it. Always. No arguments. You know your heart is stagnate water, every time you brush against a running stream or silt choked river, you can feel your destiny is birthing mosquitoes and a sanctuary of scum.

It’s not that you’re a bad person, it’s just that you do things to others you actively pray never happen to you. The universe is confounded by you. It seeks to quarantine you and your toxicity like crude oil miles below the surface, or an infection buried in blister. No heart is broken because you’re bad, although religion has us thinking it was supposed to. In truth, no one cares. The instant you evaporate or rejoin a tributary back into moving water, we accept you no questions asked. The punishment should not prevent rejoining the herd. All crime and consequence religion does is feed the wolves.

Universe-Maker (part 3)

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

Tired of dreaming, there was only one way to wake up. One direction to move in. The wave of light already crashing, we decided to stop fighting and let it take us a different way. We died. Collapsed. Buried. Super nova implosion. And the instance we have referred to as ‘The Big Bang’ was the very first resurrection and ascension afterward. Life after death. Electrons fired from the grave like bullets from a gun and the age of material had begun. Weight. Separation. And gravity. Longing. Attraction. 

Matter is being farmed into atoms by hives of furiously swarming particles. Pushed and pulled and blended and churned. We’re not so different from carbon and hydrogen, you and I. God, however, is from another place and absence of time. What power it had to influence your life or address your prayers directly, is gone. It only exists after you have long studied and intentionalized your self and found the inert seed of God buried inside and given it up to soft soil and hard water. God didn’t give you a good world or a bad draw, just a self. And it’s mind blowing for a human to consider creating something without means of controlling it, but God did just that. God made true unadulterated freedom. Good. Evil. Right. Wrong. Timing and temperature and quantities and recipes. Evil is a handful of garlic instead of a pinch. Right is likely to be nothing, to do less, as in the greatest gesture of kindness and thanks we could offer the earth is to simply step more lightly on her. Doing less would be more righteous, but the absolute, anecdotal versions of these words would have you imagining a more oil and water situation, black and white, one or the other, all or nothing. I can not for the life of me find those clean dichotomies occurring naturally. I find spectrum. I find contingencies and potentialities based on unpredictable environmental factors such as timing and temperature and holding your mouth just the right way. 

Morality has nothing to do with God. 

Morality has more to do with gardening. Who wants to eat a rotten tomato?

Universe-Maker (part 2)

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

This place is all dark and gravity, and almost all of our outward propulsion and explosive movement is limited and measurable and waning, the gravity and its grip is the only constancy, and no one disputes that one day we will all be together in that great cosmic singularity again. God was light. God was you and me, but without the and in between. All electron. All bright, and charged, and fastidious, and unsettling. God was a great big electron with all electrons inside like water in an ocean and it could do nothing but dream. Dinosaurs. Mankind. Amoebas. Oceanic trenches. Gas giants. We’re all filling in forms from that ancient imagination like they were molds in cast iron. Johnny Cake conscious and not much more than a set of eyes trusted more than truth itself. You were there, inside the ball of light, the complete antithesis to the universe we now know. You remember.

When you fall in love. When you lose your you, and let your body carry you miles and miles before you wake up and ask yourself where you’ve taken you. When you cry for pain that isn’t yours. When you lust after joy that isn’t either, and even when you hate, when you hit, the whole world will wear a bruise you intended for you. We are one thing. We know it. We trust our eyes too much, and they don’t show it, but there are more than chemical bonds hovering in the spaces between us. 

We were there. We were just as much God as God ever was. And we grew bored.

Universe-Maker (part 1)

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

We have to understand earth before we can begin to explore the universe.
We need to study ourselves completely before we can know the difference between that and theology.

Foundation work. It’s not sexy. It’s no trophy. If you build it right, no one will ever see it again or know you did it. Atheism makes no sense to me. It assumes modern religion’s definition of God is accurate, so if the entity described isn’t detected, there’s no God. No God whatsoever because it pretty quantifiably isn’t an old gray headed man in the sky hurling lightning. The word God was intentionally kept small, monosyllabic, open to endless interpretation, definition resistant. No amount of robes, candles, poetic language or colored glass will change your worship of mystic confusion into true worship of creative divinity. God made the universe as we know it. Several cut-rate writers offer versions of a flimsy fallible god going back and doing rewrites. That was their own personal lack of self awareness invading their imagination of limitlessness. Well, I’m not cut-rate, I’m flat out unpaid, unpublished, unknown, and I have started with studying myself and learning the earth and here is what I can tell you about God and our universe.

It died to create us.

On Us

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

At some point, you submit. If it is happening this way, then it is on purpose, there was never any other order of things. I don’t know what this is, just what it isn’t, and primarily, this is not an accident. I know that is hard to read. I’ve lost people. I’ve failed at things. I know you may have told yourself it was a deviation from the plan, but it wasn’t. Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and God what is God’s. And blame for the things we do to one another falls in no way on the divine. Though the humans who use them would have you believe it’s out of their hands, all weapons are shaped for them. A thousand ways to feel washed clean. One form of filth.

The only sin is born in a decision you know you shouldn’t make as you make it. That’s it.
It has always been up to you. No matter how fervently you deny it.

Maybe God made a lumpy rock with saltwater licking shorelines. But it did not invent America. Or life. Or humans. Or the disgusting way a millipede’s legs all work together in waves.

Maybe God invented the perfect atom, brick, building block, with just enough consciousness written within, that this brick is one part mason, one part chemist, one part pragmatic technician, one part way back in the rear, engineer. Brick all the same.

Which would mean we truly own our choices.
Our hardfought, often unnested consequences.

I know this hurts. But we are doing this to ourselves.

I blame God for creating potential.
But this, reality, all of this.

This is on us.

Big Words

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

Love: A line of credit you’ve given very few people access to that has no spending limit, that despite your current situation, one way or a thousand installments after, you will eventually pay the balance.

God: A monosyllabic reminder that Mankind invented language, and when language fails to name something, the fallibility is in the vocabulary, not the universe.

Death: A superpower life discovered early on that allowed us to not just learn from our failures, but eat them up for supper also.

Cruelty: Doing to others, solely without second thought as you have had done to yourself. Severe lack of story. Caught up in some moment. A tangent. The overfermentation of desire. The flex of weakness.

Trust is a sail.

Faith is a paddle.

Hate is what anger becomes when it matures. Be careful not to make an enemy of hate.
The word enemy is a doorway for the hateful. Make them fuss at you through a window,
a good word for that is called a neighbor. Hate is a season. Hate is a debit account.
Once it’s spent it’s done and gone. The overdraft fee on hate is criminal.

Hope: long list of chores and an early start.

Indistinguishable

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

God is a memory that predates subatomic separation.
It is preproton. Preneutron. Preelectron. It existed.
Prior to what we call the universe.

And it is or was an entity comprised of pure consciousness.
Outward. Radiating expression and thought. You were there.
What I mean when I say the word I was there. Just indistinguishable.

God is a memory, like love, of a time, for lack of a fancier term,
back when we were still all one thing. And the instance
that was once affectionately called the big bang,
was the day this solidarity was broken. Up.
Into unending electrified pieces.
Like mothers into birth.
Soldiers into battle.
Christ and his cross.

God also learned the initial crucial lesson of growth and evolution.

Sacrifice.
The first lesson of life.
How much more we can achieve if at some point we concede.
We gain more through this loss than never-ending millennia
of nothing but consumptive, hungry living.

God had everything. And nothing,
Suspended in frosty isolation. Dreaming puritanical thoughts.
No fractured reality like puzzle pieces peppered in. No equals.
No friends. No criticism. And God made a decision.
To give life a shot. It died.

And I believe in God.
I believe the universe is its corpse.
As far as life after death.
There is nothing to fear.

We already are.