I'm biased. I can't consciously remember taking a vow of poverty. Being poor just seemed part of the challenge I innocently accepted even before puberty. Of course, I didn't realize I had accepted this challenge until after it had cost me all domestic integrity and the support of the cultural systems I had accepted as status quo. But, I wasn't the one who criminalized the culture that shaped my childhood by an act of law, and so the challenge was accepted under protest. Mine. Aaaaiiiiiyeee!
I was forced by external circumstances to hate my parents and it had nothing to do with religion. They represented what the law of the land required of me as a citizen by enacting laws against the Jim Crow system my parents not only lived by, but taught me how to live by those unwritten laws until after I left their household by joining the Navy.
The Navy sent me to San Diego, California to go to boot camp there. It was like Dorothy finding out she wasn't in Kansas anymore. Being in the state of California in the late 1950s of the last decade of the last century of the last millennium, was no support to my deeply ingrained prejudiced ways at all.
Besides that, I was surrounded by teen-aged boys (for the most part) from all over the United States and it's Territories. The great majority of these young men had been taught from childhood that people from the deep South were ignorant hillbillies who, for largest part, could be ignored or kicked aside. Soon enow, within three weeks, with my childhood training of how to put people in their place and keep them there, I was promoted to be in charge of all of them, so it was very difficult for me to totally abandon the old ways. Why would I?
By unknowingly accepting the challenge of hypocrisy that was flung in my face before I even grew pubic hairs, I was personally confronted with the prospect of surviving on my own wit and grit as the only way to cope with my unending struggle to cope with The Terror. Some people, because or their own experience, understand just how much energy and attention it takes to remember to stay focused on the main chance (even though you might not rightly and lucidly gnow what that IS on a moment-to-moment basis). I couldn't bear to abandon marriage, but I couldn't have a marriage without working to get the money to maintain it. To live this way meant I had to abandon my spirit quest to man up to the responsibilities a domestic lifestyle required.
Finally, after I just gave up any attempt at leading a domestic lifestyle, and have lived alone in abstinence for several decades now. Granted, learning how to make time fly has been a great boon to my ex-is-tense type lifestyle. Abandoning my IS-ness to be-co-me a hue man (a color commentator) or a woe-to-man is a trial by fire. If it was easy, all the angles (angels) would
be doing it.
I seem to be having trouble with the spacing of my word processor. It even happens when I switch over to typing directly on this web site. Sorry if I'm not my usual meticulous editing self.
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
