Off On Our Own. Ted Carns
Чтение книги онлайн.
Читать онлайн книгу Off On Our Own - Ted Carns страница 7
Название: Off On Our Own
Автор: Ted Carns
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Дом и Семья: прочее
isbn: 9781943366118
isbn:
I wake up every day to choose between 25 different roads to excellent experience and 30 avenues to explore in pursuit of my independence. Not one of them requires a Porsche. I find in facing necessity that self-expression gains a unique and creative independence. It gets honed. Following desire does exactly the opposite.
Focus upon necessity brings a profound change and leads to a different reality. Desires are focused on the future; necessity is faced in the moment. That’s the key to creativity. The key to being able to fix, do, build and invent things is right there in the moment you face a problem or task. When you learn to give a thing permission to fix itself – a task permission to complete itself – you are made to dwell in the moment, with your faculties on full alert. Then the task itself – the broken thing itself – becomes the supervisor. Your only responsibility is to hand it tools. Those tools are your own unique and innate talents set to rest upon common sense. Humble yourself in subservience to the job. Allow the job to do the job.
When you discover this magic for yourself, you become less and less intimidated by life’s trials and labors, for now you have learned to work with things as opposed to against them. Have total faith in yourself. There are so many things we all can accomplish. There is so much we can do and so little that we cannot do. March forward with courage in yourself for you have found patience, you have met necessity. You have achieved the state of effortless effort. You have mystically penetrated to the heart of that saying: “Unless the Lord buildeth the house, the laborers work in vain.”
Every one of us is a tool chest of potential packed to the brim. Some may be missing a few screwdrivers but they are blessed with an excellent array of metric wrenches. Therefore, if you need a screwdriver offer your wrenches. Humanity has enough to fix itself, but if we fail as individuals to realize our non-dividual humanity, what good are the tools? You can’t wipe your ass with a crescent wrench.
It sure would be nice if we all abandoned desire and came to full focus on necessities. We’d all be yelling, “Hey, where’s the energy crisis? . . . Hey, how come nobody’s fighting? . . . Since when did everybody have health care? . . . Mind if I strip the drive train out of your Abrams Tank to make me a 27-foot-wide Rototiller?”
My personal spiritual, philosophical take on life is everywhere in this book, as you’ve already seen. If I don’t touch on some of those aspects you could end up simply trying to replicate things I’ve done and that could be fraught with limitations. My hope is to spark your unique creativity, to set you off on your own inventions. I want you to succeed and not get led down dead-ends. People have often remarked that I’ve done so much, but that’s not the case. I’ve just done one thing. I had one goal and focused all my efforts on it with relatively few sidetracks.
There’s a whole lot of spiritual contemplation behind the torque of my wrench. It’s about starting with baby steps. Everyone can take them and undergo a similar journey to a similar end, but see it expressed in an entirely unique way. Whatever inner self-independence/reliance/sufficiency I have achieved is reflected outward in my life. It colors everything I do. That, of course, coupled with a reverent stewardship. It’s the formula that’s important, and when you hit on it, you get to relax in a kind of self-propelled easy chair where magic happens and miracles are so commonplace you just smile at them, instead of jumping up and down screaming, “Look, did you see what just happened! Can you believe it!!!”
3
FROM FIRST LIGHT
“All I did was I refused to be told how to live.”
Let me lead you into a house where you climb trees instead of stairs, a house where toads, salamanders, newts, frogs and tiny ring neck snakes live and they aren’t in cages. If you find a cricket outside you can bring it in and the frogs will eat it right out of your hand. You’re in a house where you’re elated if a katydid finds its way in through the window because night after night it’ll lull you into a deep sleep with the sound it makes. You’re in a three-story house with no inside staircases, where instead you zip up and down on tree trunks from the forest that grew on themselves firm, knobby handholds and foot rests. You’re in a house where deer and a half-wolf once came in and out like people, and at least 17 species of wild animals have dwelt, both the invited and the uninvited. I haven’t counted species lately.
I once knew a person who lived on a secluded beachfront property. She had had some serious medical scare and survived. I remember she said each morning she would go for a walk on the beach and make an effort to see something new, a new seashell or a bird or a flower growing in the dunes.
Life here is similar but it doesn’t take much effort. From the moment I hear the first bird I perceive and sense change. My first duties take me outside, and opening the door is something akin to a surprise package. You don’t know if you’ll be screaming at deer, backing up from a bear or chasing a possum out of the chicken coop. All you know is that something new is gonna be waiting for you.
I’m usually up before Kathy, for two reasons. I maintain a drop-of-a-feather level of alertness all night, so I don’t sleep soundly and she hasn’t the option to nap at a whim during the day as I do. As day breaks I like to turn the news on low, softly rattle a few pots and pans and set the coffee water to heating so the stir of life coaxes her up to get ready to leave for work.
Most of the newness that enters my senses is both pleasant and subtle, but there’s always a vague foreboding that keeps me from floating off into bliss. “What could go wrong?” to me is like a constant background noise that my ears don’t see fit to call my brain to attention. It’s much like a productive haunting that keeps me watchful and grounded, but it doesn’t interfere with or dampen the enjoyment I get from a multi-colored columbine that has just flowered out of nowhere in some strange place. A brand new patch of painted trilliums that just blossomed can take my breath away. The other day I noticed a cluster of albino bluets amidst the large patch of common sky blue ones growing above Wayne’s World (the summer kitchen).
The other morning I was on my way up there to the propane fridge to get the soy creamer we use in coffee and the smoothie I made for Kathy the day before, when a gentle breeze coming down the mountain filled my nostrils with the scented bloom of the Canada Mayflower, wild Lilies of the Valley.
I’ve usually un-bear-proofed everything at first light, a little before Kathy gets up or the dogs even stir. I hang out the bird feeders and set out the cats’ food dishes, but I leave the chickens for Kathy to deal with because she likes to. If the dogs kept us up half the night howling and barking they’re at the door before I get my shoes on. Their noses tell me every step the bear took whose smell wafted through the window at 2 am. That means I also walk out back to see if another wall of a shed was ripped open or a door torn off its hinges.
I used to let them out to chase the bears at night until I saw Bethany grab “Cousin Vinnie’s” right back foot and saw him reel around to grab at her. Vinnie was a very, very large male bear with a big white V on his chest. He may have been the 900-pound one shot the past season a good distance from here. It had a V on its chest. Vinnie just wouldn’t scare. He’d walk toward you even if you were screaming at him and he cost me