Saturn Returns And Passages

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The instructions on the wood glue bottle stated that the glue should be allowed to set for 24 hours before it was put under stress. The mandolin got a little more than that before I began tightening the strings on it. I decided to try to tighten them evenly across the bridge a little at a time, but it made me nervous. I expected the glue joint to bust open any time.

I got the strings to what I thought might be about half-way to what they'd need to be in order for the mandolin to be in tune and stopped. That worked out pretty good because late this afternoon Rainey came by on his way to his parent's house, and I asked him to see if he could tune it. He wasn't emotionally caught up in the repair like I was, and he went on about the business of tuning it without worrying about whether the newly glued joint was gonna hold or not.

Rainey had to stop messing with it too. The nut at the top of the fret board is not original and the makeshift doohickey that had been put in it's place was not glued down. the way it shifted kept the tuning unstable. I know what has to be done. I didn't know what material I was gonna use to make it happen until just this moment. A small piece of that purple wood my brother saved will do the trick. Its said to come from Brazil and is some of the hardest wood known to exist. For all practical purposes it has to be cut with a diamond-tipped saw blade. I might design a new bridge for the guitar out of purple wood too.

The the bridge on the body of the mandolin has got to be reworked too. A mandolin has eight strings, but only four tunings, E, D, G, and A. It's tuned just like a fiddle, but has two strings for each note instead of one. The problem with the walnut bridge is that the notches that the strings fit in as they pass over the bridge are not spaced right.

These bridge problems should be easy to fix, they're just time consuming, but I seem to be having more time than ever these days. For me, life seems to be about emotional investment. For a long time I thought it was about mind stuff, and from the perspective I view the world presently, I sure wish it was about mind stuff. I'm good at that. But, it's not about the abstract dimension much with me.

Perhaps what I'm reaching for as a descriptor has to do with keeping a certain emotional intensity in my relationship with the powers that be. There have been certain things that I got slack about in my sixties that made me realize I couldn't get slack about taxes and death.

I got audited by the State revenue department who demanded that I prove my employer paid my state taxes for the year 1997. I didn't take it so serious when they sent me these cheap little postcard requests for a copy of my tax returns. I thought it was a scam. Bad mistake.

I learned all over again not to fight city hall. The coldness with which they were gonna take my house and property and sell it on the courthouse steps to pay the penalties and fees they had assessed for my ignoring their cheap little postcards was a super wakeup call about getting slack with the government.

The very next year I got in trouble with the State for being late paying my car insurance policy. I ignored some mail again. I had to give myself some serious pep talks about paying my bills just as soon as I get them in the mail.

The fact that I live by myself means that I have to do everything that's gotta be done to protect myself again my own laziness and lack of moral careactor. Maybe it's moral character or maybe it's some sort of ethical dilemma, but sometimes I just don't play by the rules I unknowingly agreed to play by, and that causes problems.

For the first thirty years of my life I thought I was probably crazy because I had a lotta thoughts that didn't make sense for the claims I made to get the attention I so desperately needed.

I didn't really know what crazy was, so I had to find that out first before I could fulfill the requirements necessary to pass myself off as not having the wherewithal to be responsible for my own actions. By the time I got to be thirty years old I knew what crazy was, and knew I had nothing to fear but myself.

What I found out I needed to fear by the time I was thirty years old turned out to be the same thing I had to fear in my sixties, and my trifling, but intense encounters with the tax collectors. I got slack. Probably like learning to balance oneself on a slack rope as well as a tight rope. Two different approaches to the same end.

It wouldn't surprise me if I started wandering around and getting lost. I watched it happen to both my parents. They had people who would know they were gone and set out to find them. It could be days or even weeks if I wandered off and got lost in the woods before anybody would know I was missing.

It's no different than with my youngest brothers dogs. There have been a series of them that got old and wandered off to die. He'd get worried about them and find them and bring them back to the house to "save" them, but knowing full well that he wasn't really doing them a favor. That's how free-roaming dog die. Lots of dogs die tied to a chain or locked up in a cage. How indignant a way to die is that?

Both my parents were locked inside their houses to keep them from wandering off. Sometime they were aware they were prisoners in their own home. More often, it seemed, they were more concerned about not being allowed to go "home".

That's a weird process. My father nurtured a desire to go back to Mississippi in his eighties to feed the hunting dogs he had to leave with his parents when he moved to North Carolina in his mid-thirties. No amount of reasoning or logic could convince him the dogs had been dead for thirty odd years. He had to go "home" to feed them dogs.

So, I took him to Mississippi to find them hunting dogs. It was the only time we ever went to Mississippi alone together. It was not the most pleasant trip I've ever made. He had to tell me how to drive to show he was still in charge, and because he knew it irritated me.

That trip was like the sum total of our personal relationship of father and son. Cats and dogs. Apples and oranges. I only realized why that had to be so when I studied the sayings of the Gospel of Thomas via an e-mail discussion group I used for writing about my lifelong war with my father.

It took a long time for me to understand what individuation is. I knew for a long time before that it meant pretty much the same thing as the concept of enlightenment, but I didn't understand how one could imply the other.

The keystone for me was when I began to understand that my own quest was a quest for my true identity. Who am I? For a long time I felt as if I was on a fruitless sojourn, but I was wrong. I was "looking for" something I already possessed by revelation. That which satisfied my need for my true identity was revealed to me in a vision I generally call my remembering vision.

It took another thirty years for me to realize how my remembering vision revealed my true identity to me after the vision I experienced opened the floodgates of my true source as consciously as it's possible for a homo sapiens to experience.

In astrology these events are called Saturn Returns. The vision of how I came to Earth and of how I evolved into the entity that occupies this temporary body happened when Saturn returned to the spot it occupied at the mo-me-nt of my birth for the first ti-me, and my realization if what that vision meant happened when Saturn returned to the same place it was when I was born for the second ti-me.

I didn't know anything more about astrology than anybody else before my first Saturn Return. To me, as it seems to be to many people, astrology was something I looked up on the comic strip page in the newspaper. I'd never heard of or thought about the significance of Saturn completing it's first orbit around the Sun or that it took twenty-nine odd years for Saturn to do that.

In my late twenties, as in everyone's late twenties, if you follow the astrology gig whether for sport or fame and fortune, the final stages of Saturn's return to the place it was when I was born was terrifying for me personally. As far as I was concerned I was losing my mind.

It wasn't a joke to me. I really thought I was losing my mind, and I did, and I still believe it's the God's own truth that what I knew as the truth was nothing but a part of an even bigger, more global lie than merely a personal lie to deceive myself into thinking I was losing my mind.

Nobody believed me. When I told my so-called friends and family that I was losing my mind and going insane they pretty much laughed at me, and thought I was naive to think I could fool them with my acts of desperation.

I decided (with the "help" of a friend) to commit myself to the state hospital for the insane. I really thought that if I could just put on the right garments I that I would become believable. I'd become a patient and fit in with the people who were committed there by the State.

It didn't take long for me to realize that my fellow inmates at the State hospital for the insane didn't believe me either. I can't say they laughed at me too. Basically, they were even more dismissive of my trumped up behavior than the people outside of the State Hospital.

I stayed there for thirty days and left simply because I could. That was the deal when you commit yourself. You can just walk outta there anytime you like. Those people have too much on their plate as it is. If your craziness isn't hurting anybody but yourself, why bother them?

That happened just before I turned thirty years old. I never changed my mind about losing my mind. I was losing my mind. It really happened. The clarifying fact thirty years ofter the actual experience of wanting to be believed about how I was losing my mind was that it wasn't my mind I was losing. I lost the mind I seemed convinced I was supposed to have.

Good riddance! In my estimation it's true. My prayers were answered. It just took thirty more years for me to understand that the vision I had experienced had provided me with the information I needed to know in order to believe what I really am is truly me. Send in the clowns. It makes me feel like just another one of my brothers old dogs.

It's not like I'm gonna intentionally wander out into the swamps looking for a secret place to lay down and die. I figure I'll really believe I'm out there for a good reason. Like finding some good briar roots to carve into doodads, and get so embarrassed that I've forgotten where I'm at, that I'll just surrender and give myself up to the light.

Then, after three or four hours of feeling like an idiot I'll get up and come home.
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