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.

Just Because

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

Is the first cell
that splintered into fusion
following the black path of the atom
still inside me?

Like rings in a tree
are there layers laced
beneath my surface
that formed during the social drought
of my teens?

Are my last good credit score twenties
still swiping cards for bills inside me or beside me
is the kid I once was hiding
waiting
for some impossible seeker to find.

When thirty-five year old
tired and self described wise
lets eyes wander and retire
does that ring on my index finger
pierced through the brow
or the split lip of my former self
see an opportunity?

A take-over.
And thirty-five year old I
deny and declare some crack up
like I don’t know what that was
where that came from
I might even say
it wasn’t me.

Albeit was.
When I was thirteen
and mean
just because.

The Purpose of Life

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

Chores to do. More to move. Horse to shoe. Oh wait.
Horsefly and shoo. Sure. I’m up. Not firing on all fronts.
It’s early. There is energy.
But here I sit. Front porch writing.
Trading grips between a pen and a ceramic lip.
Trading discomfort hip to hip on a hard wood rocker.
Seat of power seems oxymoronic.
Though I am sure that it isn’t.
If more people with power sat on it,
there would be less obstacles to the simple, family-centric
lifestyle poor folk have fought for far too many manly centuries.

It is crazy people pretend we don’t know the purpose of life.
Yet so many live identical expressions of it for the same motivations.
If life had a purpose, why would it be distant and hard to grasp?
No. It comes bubbling up out of us.
Grumbling deep inside of us when we do not feed it enough.
These chores. That bill. This meal. And its cost.
No one can give freedom. In that sense, freedom does not exist.

Freedom is the only sanctioned slavery.
It is ownership of the self.

Hide. (part 3 of 3)

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

But I’m here now.

We will peel apart the atom like an apple and discover a seed in its center that is carved somehow with the chicken-scratch autograph of what can only be called God. Though that moment will ruin the word, it will rescue the world, and religion will mean story again.

Every action you commit to in this place creates the brightest light. Burned, pulled into the electrons that energize and power you on. And you will remember, lest ye be remembered, by the lives of all you have eaten, the lives you ran down in the road, the lives you put your hands on without permission. There is life, and consciousness, inside the atom, and therefore memory, and the ability to make decisions.

Push. Pull. Hide. That is what an atom can do. 

Ask yourself. Is that so different from you?

Pull. (part 2 of 3)

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

All of our mass is here in the proton and neutron. They are together in the nucleus, but distinguished from one another, for example, one is electric, and one is, as far as can be seen, not. The proton pushes, positively charged, like a young dad with bulging arms carrying all the beach toys, neutrons follow his lead and hug his wake and bask his shadow all in tow. But he put his call over the ocean. Heard it answered. A push to pull, a negative to his positive, a farmer for the garden, the electron may very well be the only seed God planted before it slank back into the hammock that rocks above every barrier the beanstalk never broke. Yet.

Am I Jack? Climbing a hairy vine wrists wrapped in red rash, pulling, pushing, hiding when I have to, searching for a slithering piece of snake-like thread that unravels this shape and pulls it apart so completely, such a threat, the giant feels its hammock shift among the swayless trees, in the windless ether of the realm of all-observance, where life was once a dream, but now we’re hushed, because its favorite show is on the tv screen, I scream so that it finally drops both feet and shakes this blanket of blank grass and weeds we’ve been scattered across like a fist full of seeds. I will make the farmer show face and explain itself.

I don’t believe the answer can be found the way one can trace and track the color of a flower to the nutrients in the soil. Because of flaws in the equipment. Because of the limitations of perspective. Our minds weren’t molded to uncover transcendental, universal understanding and Truth. Just survival. That’s all.

To achieve enlightenment we busted apart a telescope and took out the bulbous lens and until now we’ve only been using it to burn ants. 

Push. (part 1 of 3)

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

Push. Pull. Hide.
I’ve been thinking about atoms again.
I’m thinking that they are alive.
They do things. They push. They pull. They hide.
Just those three things. Almost the same as me.
We fight. Take flight. Or die.
These three fundamental directions are the primary articles of atomic particles.
The invisible specks that make us tick. There is consciousness in the very brick.
So that the thoughts of this old house are like a roaring waterfall of individual droplets,
decisions being made by the foundations. The color of every flower was drunk up
from single cell mouths lapping the boots of Hades clean. Our eyes are the only thing
that makes this confusing. The brain has already drawn the most impossible thing
humans invented.

The straight line.

There can be three temperatures in one bottle of water.
Endless range within the spectrum of existence. But at the base.
When broken down to the source, it’s three. Always a trinity.
Never a traditional binary couple.
The threeway seems to be the preferred union of physics.
And all subsequent interaction, some kind of sex.
Conversation. Groping stars with eyes as light climbs deep inside your mind.
When you see something, the light off it, it touches onto part of you
and your eye converts it into an image the way mitochondria cook bread into sugar,
and it feeds pretty pictures like chocolate covered strawberries to your brain.
The light of every candle you ever lit, every shooting star, lives inside your head.
You’re pregnant with it.

Push. Pull. Hide. Proton. Electron. Neutron. I’ve tried to wrap my mind around it but it is quite like trying to define a term by other terms when all you’ve ever known is one term. It’s like constipation. I imagine it is like birth. Like feeling held hostage by what is inside you, and you know you will surely die if you fail to bring it forth. Why are the hardest pieces to break into pieces so obsessive over one another, why do they relationship so consistently in threes, so violently, hold themselves together by tearing apart their neighbors, or keeping their little triangular shapes but slamming jamming against identicals and forming larger globules and the eventual elemental structures which could in some ways be described as the ancient jagged originators of life. Why?

Not how. We can observe that. By pushing, pulling, and hiding.

Be Delicious

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

Fifteen thousand years of voices, one billion years of choices. How did forward and back and should I eat that lead to all this. Consciousness. But you can’t call her that. She goes by Beverly. And she would prefer to pretend all those voices off all her ancestors are actually her own. When they aren’t. She’ll call them fleeting feelings. We call all kinds of evidence chaos when we don’t understand it. There are no miracles here. Our perception is in motion. The subject we’re paying attention to is in motion. Ever lined up with a car on the highway going eighty five and you’re both just sitting still staring at one another and your stomach even sinks, settles, like it does only when the car is stopped. That, but on an elemental level, creates the weird quirks and magical powers we keep giving to electrons that are really just deficits in line of sight. The truth is we live in a perfect, flawless, as in, no other way it could be accomplished, creation. Try not to let your imagination undermine simple, unobservable truth. 

We don’t understand time yet. Its relationship to distance. And the clear obviousness that it is not a uniform progression. But like a runner who starts slow and speeds to the stop with several hundred breathers and water-breaks in-between, time chugs, like a fire starved steam train, we have good days where we feed it steady, and bad years, when the universe drinks too much, let’s her beard grow long and doesn’t wake up until she loses some animals. This whole shebang probably began when God went to start digging our grave. There’s the garden you plan. And then the one the land craves. And the farmer is a slice of deli meat squeezed hard between two pieces of bread: the living and the dead. And the purpose of life, I don’t know, be delicious. What is the purpose of sandwich meat, Beverly?

The Dishes

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

We are all too dependent on vision.

The house is a wreck but we’re still doing dishes. A warm dishrag smile wipes fresh tears off all our faces. When we trust our eyes too much, they show, they reveals us. Superficial. I know what you thought when you read that word. I know its most common usage. As insult. Negative. Self defense. That’s not even half of its definition though. Mostly because, there’s barely half a definition there to start with. Surface. Visible. In its truest meaning, there’s not one of us who isn’t superficial. It isn’t a choice. It’s biology. Evolution. Our anatomy. What’s crazy is, our eyes aren’t even that spectacular. But that never stopped us trusting them completely. 

Which makes us an easy trick, cheap, corporations are like abstract painters studying what certain colors opiate or infuriate or inspire us to work. What shapes set us at ease, what wall-patterns put us on the edge of our seats, grind our teeth. Look at our faces. We look like hoot owls and chimpanzees mated. We’ve made the entire surface of our skin one huge sex organ, with nothing more than time and boredom to work with. When they talk about enlightenment, about piercing some form of illusory perception and seeing true, pessimistic, hard pill to swallow, reality, this is what they mean. 

Just do the dishes. Not to get a good feeling or delight or ease or feel all put together for once. Anyone can put a suit on. You’re not the devil because you’re dirty and live out on the street. Wouldn’t it be so wonderful if all the important flaws we carry around could be seen. Well, that superficial dream has led us by the hand through the absolute worst chapters of the ongoing novel that is humankind. 

If skin color was a poker-tell, if skin color was a political persuasion, if skin color was a criminal confession, hot damn, wouldn’t that be easy. Wouldn’t that just please these predator eyes we feverishly and catastrophically feed. If the deepest, truest nature of a person could, just for once, be as superficial as an earring in one ear, or tattoo above the rear, or otherwise respectable young man too lazy to cut off his long hair. What if it was as simple as a pigment in someone’s skin? What if the dishes weren’t white? Would they be harder to clean, would you get the same peace of mind from warmly and tenderly washing them. The cleanest dishes in existence, it’s just, you can’t easily see that from a distance. Inside we find a simple, universal, colorful frustration, we find the tiny innocuous seed that grows into such destructive things, the worst of which has always been the thin permeating invasive vine of systemic racism. 

Maybe there’s hope in this, I don’t know, I don’t think there is, but it feels good to them, hate, they do it like a drug-user during the years they refuse to admit it’s a problem, back when they still call it medicine, being hateful, racist, alleviates some stressful condition we are in. Hate is not fire the way they would have it seem.
Believe me when I say, hate is a balm to the hateful. 

It sets their guilt at ease. 

I’m not saying it’s better, or that you should, I’m stating for fact that if you fully think it through, you’ll eventually feel what I feel when I think about myself, and people who were in truly hateful places in their lives while I knew them. Sympathy. I just see pain. Planted in the most fertile soil that exists. The misplaced human conscience. I kind of see them perpetually trying to scrub black dishes white, eternally, in some place that is so almost heaven. Eyeballs are for earth. This is the place of their birth. Their original intention. Heaven might not appear on the surface so pleasing to them. So try, strive, to glimpse something while you’re here without using your eyes. Practice.

That elusive deep down buried in the chest heart smile happiness.
No one got that from doing the dishes.

I have nothing new to say.
Eyes were never the only way.

There’s always been more than one definition for vision.

#LookItUp

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.

The Meal from the Cub (2 of 2)

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

We all start like seeds in our mother’s soil. 

Eggs are like seeds. So are planets really, bursting with roots of starved gravity.

Electrons are like seeds, the universe itself, spreading out from a mindbogglingly finite point of spatial dimension into this immeasurable, mystifying massiveness. Biology mirrors chemistry like a face in rippled water. There is a God. It was speaking to us in our anatomy long before it ever engraved a tablet or plagued a city. Clearly there is a loosely defined polarity to the universe, a general lightness and heaviness, a fiery push and gravitational pull, a female and male with all sorts of hybridized relationships in between.

The breeding we do just to exist as individuals, this is like a love letter written to us about how power transfers and expands itself within this universe. How much more important and potent relationship is than isolation and independence and general lone wolfedness. Enough so that plants even pretend to care about gender just to attract and entice us. It’s coupling. It’s power play. It’s essentially what happens at the heart of every atomic endeavor, as clouds of swirling electrons push and pull and shape and squeeze protons and neutrons between them, little bonds forming between things being stretched apart to the point of almost bursting and then held here, sustained, unlocking the energetic outpulse that engendered the universe and ultimately led to us: physical conglomerates sustaining projections of consciousness for sustained periods. Awake is something so difficult to do, it requires us to sleep half of every day, and eventually ages our bodies to the point of irrevocable exhaustion. 

I believe electrons are seeds of consciousness. And I believe their nature is agriculture, cultivation, provocation, stimulation. They accomplish a sort of guided husbandry between fertile elements, measuring the couplings and overlappings that work against those that don’t. I believe we, our anatomy, our minds, our instincts, our entire way of life, are organized in a zombie-like obedience to the atomic relationships going on inside of us. 

We see what they want us to see, and remember only what we need. And wouldn’t you know, the light learned early on the added benefits of keeping us in the dark.