My latest creative work… Prompt was “feathery and/or leathery”
Part A
Linda often harbored thoughts of conforming to society. Of wearing society’s clothes. But she knew she’d have to take the blue pill every morning, and highly preferred the red. She knew that the red pill was for reality, while the blue pill was for fantasy. It was obvious. Blue pie in the sky. Red was solid flesh, earth and life’s blood.
She finally tossed the blue pills in the trash.
Part B
Now Linda could think more clearly. Now her true thoughts came to the surface.
Linda’s nascent understanding of who she was started to grow.
She started to catch some of her perceptions on their way to being modified; on the way to becoming thoughts, feelings and knowledge.
Part C
Linda started to experience awe more often. She devoured the literature on consciousness. She learned that chimpanzees can covet their neighbor’s sexual partner. Chimpanzees can covet their neighbor’s social status. But chimpanzees can’t ask “Is there another I, besides the one in this body, limited to these sexual partners and this place in the social structure?”
Part D
Linda started seeing her limitations dissolve. Linda knew that she was no longer a toddler, a kid, a teen, a college student, an independent head of household, with all of those incumbent burdens.
Part E
Linda no longer saw the fields of green, the flowers of red. Instead she saw the blades of ancient grasses. She saw her far ancestors harvesting the few golden wheat seeds which clung to their stalks. She saw the flowers with the eyes of the bee, so much closer to their real glorious colors.
She saw, through the eyes of the mole, the worms wriggling under the dark earth.
She experienced the jubilation of Hypatia, at the knowledge stored in the modern library of Alexandria.
She experienced liberation from care, after sitting at the feet of Patanjali.
She saw the sunlight. She no longer needed artifice from a venerable human to create interest in the world.
Part F
Linda walked to the fridge. She still needed to eat. She saw that old magnet declaring Hare Krishna! This time she understood. This time she knew what awaited her, the next time she chanted the name.
Part G
This time she knew that she didn’t need to chant the name. She was home.
Part H
Scott’s Daily Prompt: Bang!
I hope this story makes a bit of a BANG!
Scott’s Daily Prompt: Direction
Direction is from ZERO TO SIXTY!!!!!
Mid-Michigan Word Gatherer’s Prompt: Phony!
Our group facilitator said I should call the original version (lost in cyber-space) SIXTY. So I did.
Sixty
Phony. Phony-ness. A wide-spread modern art-form.
Most humans project a protective image of themselves that reflects, as closely as their sub-conscious minds can, the idealized person of the culture in which they are embedded. The real person hides from the world, hides even from its own ego.
This is a distortion of our essence.
An ancient person was smart enough to keep their given name secret, to protect from the possibility of its use by antagonistic forces. This is legitimate camouflage, not phony-ness.
Early humans even learned to deceive by using the whites of their eyes to point others away from the tree with the ripe fruits, the precursor to the outright lie. But again, there is deception and there is deception. This type of deception was a natural outgrowth of our participation in the food-chain.
Development of complex language allowed humans to flourish numerically, multiplying varieties of adaptation and culture. Words power, and magic forms, the foundation of our high level ability to deceive and confuse, when we choose not to inform. Words, and the tones we use to utter them, underpin the modern phenomenon of phony-ness.
Ancient and pre-historic people couldn’t be phony. They could hide. As already noted, they needed to use camouflage and deception like most of their fellow complex animal life forms. But they weren’t phony. It never occurred to them to try to appear as something they weren’t to their tribal fellows, even as they were trapped in their roles within their community.
What’s the bottom line here? We serve ourselves when discerning between necessary deceit of the outsider, and trying to fool our nearest neighbors and kin.
Only modern people have the opportunity to be phony in this damaging way. It’s one of the curses of the modern world, stemming from the multiple groups which claim the allegiance of any modern person.
Phony people hide their true selves under layers of mirage. Or at least they try to. Programmed, from the day we are born, to take on the values of our cultural milieu, whether it fits with our particular karmic baggage, genetic predispositions, and family history, or not, we mostly do not even know our own true selves.