All that is gold does not glitter.
Not all those who wander are lost.
The old that is strong does not wither.
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
- J.R.R. Tolkien
May 13, 2024
My dear son, it has been one month to the day since you left us. It still seems so surreal! Yesterday was Mother’s Day. Yesterday was, I think, the saddest day for me thus far. Other days were worse, perhaps. They may have been more hurtful days, or angrier days, or more resentful days, or, perhaps even, days more filled with a sense of loss, but yesterday was sad for me not only for my loss, not only for your loss, but mostly for your mother’s loss. It is just not right for a mother of two to have no children to write or say, “Happy Mother’s Day!”
Sure, I got your mother a gift – a really nice gift. It was a stainless steel compass from Dalvey in England. I ordered it last Friday, the 3rd of May, it had to be engraved, and it still arrived on our doorstep in Madison, Mississippi on Thursday, May the 9th. It wasn’t even supposed to be here until the next day, Friday. I was impressed! The compass has your initials engraved on the lid, “J D H”; it has your full name and the dates marking the boundaries of your earthly life on the inside of the cover, “John Dakota Hawkins March 20, 1997 – April 13, 2024”; and it has the short version of the Tolkien quote from the front of this journal book engraved on the back, “Not all who wander are lost.”
Son, so much has happened since you left us, but… that’s kind of like saying, “That wheel has sure made a lot of revolutions,” while it is stuck in a mud hole! Everything is just a big old mess! The whole point of life is to journey through it as the whole point of the wheel turning is to get on down the road. You were our wheel, Son – you and your sister. Now, our wheels have come off! There is no getting down the road, so I guess we will just sit here in a house full of pictures and spin our wheels until we run out of gas. Our abandoned vehicles will then just rust away in the wilderness through which we journeyed.
I love you, Son. I wish you and your sister were in the backseat of our vehicle, we were all cruising on down the road of life to some exotic vacation locale, and y’all were pestering your mother and me with, “Are we there yet?” every five minutes. Life has a way though, does it not, of adding insult to the injury it deals you? It sends a bird to fly over the windshield of your vehicle and release its droppings. You reach over to turn on your windshield wipers only to find that you have no washer fluid in your reservoir.
What do you do with that? Well, you can either cuss and fuss and let your journey be ruined… or you can laugh at the fact that you’ve just made the situation worse and limp on down the road with bird poop all over everything. Most of the time, we do a combination of the two – we fuss and cuss and lose our cool and then we laugh at the ridiculousness of it all and drive on down the road, straining to see just where it is we are going through that poop covered windshield. We shall drive on, my son. We shall drive on!
One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.
- Henry Miller
May 14, 2024
My dear son, our journey continues. Let’s see where it takes us today. I wonder – we wonder – we humans wonder just what is… on the other side? What is on the other side of the doorway through which you and your sister have passed? Are y’all together? Are y’all dancing and laughing? Are you hugging and crying? Are the two of you wrestling like you used to do in our living room when you were younger? Oh how I miss those days!
I have seen much in my 62 years upon this Earth. I shan’t enumerate those sights here, but the fondest and most haunting of my memories is of you, my family, going candidly about your business as a family, being watched, unknowingly, by a prideful father and husband. I so vividly remember sitting in the backyard of our house on Ina Drive while feeding Shadow and Angel after supper and watching you scoot around in your walker, chasing after your sister, while your mother cleaned the table of supper and washed the dirty dishes. We had a big old sliding glass door, and it was my movie screen to… The Greatest Show On Earth – Family.
Son, I never wanted to control your life or to decide for you what you should do, but I did wish for you to have what I had – family. There is no greater joy a man can have than to provide the matrix in which a family can grow. I did that. I was joyful! My garden is now sterile. All is withered. I guess it was not “old and strong” as Tolkien said that it must be. There shall be no replanting. It would do no good anyway with the “soil” so toxic now-a-days. I guess it’s a good thing the the pantry is full. We shall survive on that… until it runs out.
I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.
- Mary Anne Radmacher
May 15, 2024
My dear son, I’m afraid that today’s trip will be a short one. As soon as I opened this journal to enter upon its pages, my phone rang. It was your Auntie Jules with news about your grandmother. Who knows what’s real in today’s world where neither of the two words that make up the compound word “healthcare” even apply to the term “healthcare” any more. Apparently, Mammaw has an aneurism in her abdomen that is inoperable, and, while it may not be immediately terminal, it is terminal… according to the third doctor who examined her in the ER last night.
The first two doctors said that nothing was wrong with her – that is was just gas or something – and they were just going to send her home. Auntie Jules had to throw a fit to get the third doctor to actually lay a hand on Mammaw rather than just looking at the test results in the computer. He finally conceded that there was indeed… something wrong with her. Everyone else just stared into the computer screen and did whatever it told them to do. They will do more tests today, but, ultimately, it looks like they are going to get her on hospice care so that Auntie Jules will have some help in caring for Mammaw until… nature takes its course. Until tomorrow, my son.
You can never cross the ocean unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore.
- Christopher Columbus
May 16, 2024
Good morning, Son. I miss you. Though I missed you while you were in South Carolina as well, I miss you more now! There are no more text messages, no more conversations with your mom about her texts with you, and no more possibilities of future visits – whether that is you coming home to us or us coming up there to see you.
We started a project to build some memorial benches or swings on three or four locations up there in South Carolina. We’ve talked about putting one at Wildwater, one at Willie’s Tavern / Chattooga River Lodge, one at Belle Farms, and, possibly, one on the USFA land where you took the last few steps of your earthly journey.
We have also had some copper and silver coins made with a great picture of you on one side and your name, the dates of your life, and the Tolkien quote from the front of this journal book on the other side. Katelynn Morrison started a Go Fund Me page in your honor to gather the funds necessary for the memorial bench project, and Hallie Shumaker with Everlasting Memories has created SKU’s for the coins that we can link to with a portion of each coin sold going back to the Go Fund Me account.
I so wish that you could see how everyone has rallied around you in this, and maybe you can see it. I just wish you could have seen it… before. I love you, Son! The world is emptier without you wandering it.
Life is either a great adventure or nothing.
- Helen Keller
May 17, 2024
Son, I did not sleep well last night. I am on the fourth day of a fast, my mind is reeling, I am sleepy, and my emotions are numb this morning. I know those are a weird combination, but… there you have it. So I think I am just going to go for a run. I don’t think I could go back to sleep even if I did lay back down. My eye is twitching like mad to boot. That is another reason I did not sleep well. I love and miss you, Son. Maybe I will be more lucid tomorrow morning.
Sometimes it’s time to get away from it all and experience things in a completely different way.
- Kim Mance
May 18, 2024
Well, here it is, “tomorrow morning”, and, I am afraid, I’ll be lacking lucidity again today. It’s 3:30 AM, and I have been awake for about an hour. Even though I broke my fast last night, my mind is still reeling, my emotions are still numb, but, hey, at least I am wide awake this morning!
Son, there is so much I would do differently if I could go back in time, but, alas, such is not possible… at least so far as I know… for certain. I wish I had pushed harder, regardless of how much you would’ve pushed back, to get closer to you. I regret so much that I did not know you as your friends in South Carolina knew you. I hate that you did not feel you could confide in your mother and me the way you seemed to do with the people in and around Long Creek. It saddens me, beyond all else, to think that you were so alone amongst all those people who rallied in your memory on Wednesday, April 17th at Willie’s Tavern that you felt you had to do what you did do four days prior to that gathering.
That will be a ghost that haunts me the rest of my days! You were so very private. You were so private that none of us who you left behind to be haunted by the ghost of your final action upon this Earth will ever know, in all probability, why you took that final action or why felt that you had to take that final action. Some people spend days bobbing around on the surface of the ocean after a shipwreck, and you, it seems, drowned in a glass of water. I just don’t understand it!
If I could do nothing else – if I could not change one iota of the events that have occurred by going back in time, I would do just one thing regardless. I would hug your neck and tell you that I love you. My precious son, I love you !
Wherever you go, go with all your heart.
- Confucius
May 19, 2024
God orchestrates every “note” that his universe plays, but He does so, does He not, in very peculiar rhythms… or so it seems to the mere mortals who witness this great display – this… concert of the universe. He gave you and your sister to your mother and me. Two more precious children, you’d be hard pressed to find. Then… He took each of you from us in the same order that He gave you to us. He creates fantastic beasts (dinosaurs), allows them to roam the Earth for eons, and then… sends a great fireball of a meteor to end them. Strange rhythms indeed.
But, had the dinosaurs not ended, would we have ever been? Would all of humanity and all that humanity has done exist if the dinosaurs were still kings upon this planet? What purpose there seems to be in the weird rhythms God orchestrates with the “instruments” that make up the concert of His universe! I wonder what purpose He has for the gifts of Ashley Kaitlin and John Dakota being taken from the world to which He gifted them so soon – before either of them had the chance to be bearers of even more of God’s wonderful, miraculous gifts to the world?
I can’t help but think that you, my son, and your sister, were not… dead end streets – that there was purpose in your being here – that no matter that neither of you had children of your own to continue the cycle of life, that there was still purpose in your brief time here upon this Earth. I believe God is, even now, in the process of revealing the purpose of that weird rhythm that His universe made… and that He orchestrated. I love and miss you, Son – you and your sister both!
I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.
- Susan Sontag
May 20, 2024
Good morning, Son. It is Monday – time “orchestrate” a new week. I broke my fast Friday evening and ate way too much over the weekend! It seems I go whole hog or nothing at all. I can’t seem to moderate. Anyway, I am going to fast again this week… Lord willing. I feel so much better when I am not eating – physically, mentally, and spiritually. I am so much stronger… in all those areas. It is truly amazing how fasting works!
I just wanted to speak to you for a moment before I stretch out and go for a run. As fasting from food and TV is good for the body and soul, glutting on physical activity while doing so is also key. It is not only beneficial, strictly speaking, from the exercise aspect, but it also helps by filling in the void left by abandoning the routines of consuming so much food and useless screen time. So, I am off now to stretch out this old body of mine and run it down the road a mile or two. Wander on, my son.
It feels good to be lost in the right direction.
May 21, 2024
Rudy cat has taken up residence in your room. We’ve put two twin beds with really comfortable mattresses on them in your room now and a rustic-looking chest-of-drawers that seem to fit the spirit of your room. We are going with a mountain cabin / music theme in there. We are having your redbird print reframed and we bought a pair of guitar hangers for your two guitars. We will hang one over the head of each of the two twin beds.
It’s slow going. We’re not as young, energetic, or motivated as we used to be, but we are trying to get your and your sister’s rooms back to being… your rooms. We are trying to capture the spirit of your rooms in a way that honors your individual spirits. We are, of course, going with the fairy theme in Kait’s room. It’s funny, we settled on the turtle as your spirit animal, but the turtle is sorely missing from the décor in your room. We have tons of turtles elsewhere throughout the house and outside in gardens areas, but not, so far, in your room.
Weird how that worked out. Weird how people seem to so misunderstand what “spirit” is… or “soul”, for that matter. People seem to think that there is something magical about terms like these and other terms like “ghost” or “haunt” or “God” even. There is not. It is really very simple, but it may take some time to explain. It only took me 62 years to comprehend these… simple terms. Maybe I shall elaborate on this in the coming entries, but, for now, it’s time to stretch out and hit the road. I love you, Son.
The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
- Lao Tzu
May 22, 2024
It is midweek, Son, and today your mother and I shall take a break from the routine of work and head south to the coast where your grandmother languishes. Her condition has worsened to the point where the hospice nurse thinks she has but a few more days upon this Earth. We were planning on going down to see her on Monday (Memorial Day), but they think that, if she is still with us, she will likely not be herself by then, so… off we go for today. Until next time, my son. I love you.
May 23, 2024
We visited with Mammaw yesterday. She recognized us – knew our names and all – but she slept unless awakened, and then she would drift back off unless continuously engaged. Auntie Jules seemed to think that she would have some sort of grand reaction to me, but she seemed to be more genuinely happy to see your mother than anybody else. I was glad of that. I think your mother needed that as much as did your grandmother. Some healing was done, even if it was… on Mammaw’s death bed.
Cindi Eads drove over and brought food. It was really good to see her again. We ate and talked. Auntie Jules and Cindi seemed to have developed a good, close report. Your mom really got a lift out of seeing Cindi. It was a good day… despite the reason for it. We even got to return 6 turtles that were born (hatched) here (in Madison) back into their native habitat. We found a good area along Saucier Creek off of Highway 67 that was full of gullies and ferns. I think they will like it there. The day beckons. I must attend to it. Until tomorrow. I love you, Son.
It’s good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
- Ernest Hemingway
May 24, 2024
Today is Friday. Monday is Memorial Day. We are having a cook-out at work today. Afterwards, your mother and I will head home, pick up the dogs, and then head north. We will stop in Winona on the way up to Grenada to settle up with Davidson Marble & Granite Works about the headstone for your grave. It will, of course, match Kaitlin’s stone (only be a mirror image of it), and I think we shall have the full quote from Tolkien, “All that is gold does not glitter. Not all those who wander are lost. The old that is strong does not wither. Deep roots are not reached by the frost.” eternally etched upon it. Davidson said that it could take up to a year to get your stone in place. That’s just ridiculous!
Jean and James Kelley Williams visited your grandmother yesterday. Auntie Jules said that they had a good visit with her – that she was even more alert and for longer periods of time than when we were there on Wednesday. She said that Mammaw even made a little joke. When they asked her how she was doing, she said, “I am hungry, but my cook seems to have quit.”
Later, after the visit concluded, Auntie Jules sent me the sweetest picture in an email. Mammaw, on death’s bead, just had to have one of your memorial coins, so Julie ordered her one. It arrived yesterday. I am so glad that she got it while she was still able to appreciate what it was. Anyway, when Julie showed it to her, she said, “Awe,” and then clutched it in her fingers and fell back asleep. Auntie Jules took a picture of her nearly 91 year old fingers holding her brand new John Cody silver memorial coin. It’s a great picture. I think we shall have it framed.
Everyone seems to love your poem, “A Different Man”. They all say the same thing, “It’s beautiful.” I sent it to Mat Nelson at Chattooga River Lodge yesterday. That’s what he said too. He asked if he could display it somehow. I said, “Sure.” I guess I should get it printed out and display it in your room somewhere as well. I’d also like to get Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “If” printed out and displayed in there as well.
We have so much to do, but we can’t seem to get much accomplished because we have… so much to do. It’s a vicious circle! I need to get my butt back on the road. I need to quit eating, but you know how all these southern folks are – if you stub your toe, they bring you food! We’ve gotten so much food here, and I’m like, “Well… I will quit eating when this batch of food is gone,” and then… more food shows up – another vicious cycle! Oh well, such is life, my precious son. Hug your sister for me.
Why not go out on a limb? That’s where the fruit is.
- Mark Twain
May 25, 2024
It’s Saturday! I am sitting up here at Gateway Tires in Grenada. We had a flat yesterday, but, luckily, it was after we had already made it up here, so, at least, we weren’t stuck out on the side of the interstate, having to unload two hot dogs to try to get to the spare tire underneath them. Anyway, Mammaw has, more or less, slipped into a coma. I don’t know if that is technically the case, but she’s been “asleep” and completely unresponsive to any stimuli for over 24 hours now. I guess she will soon be with you and Kait and Granny and Papaw and Aunt Joan and, of course, all of your mother’s family that have gone on too soon.
Compared with all those others who have gone on too soon, Mammaw has had the longest run (90 3/4 years), and out of all those who have gone on too soon, you and Kaitlin have had the shortest runs (27 and 17 years, respectively). Go figure… I think I hear some more of God’s weird rhythms playing on within the background of His universe. Until tomorrow, my son.
Adventure is not outside man; it is within.
- George Eliot
May 26, 2024
It is a beautiful day here, Son. Breezy – not too humid – beautiful! Today we will come visit your final resting place for the first time since we laid your body there over a month ago. That is so hard to believe – that you and your sister now eternally rest on either side of the places where your mother and I shall eternally rest.
After we visit with you and Kait… and Papaw Wayne and Mammaw Connie and Uncle Bubby and Aunt Gayle and Granmommy Yvonne and Grandaddy SM (did I miss anybody?), we will swing through Greenwood to visit with Granny and Papaw Ayers to get measurements and pictures of their stones so that we can get Mammaw Hawkins’ stone ordered. It’s so weird – all this talk of death and graves and headstones. It’s not right! It’s just not right! We should be planning weddings, having showers of gifts, and looking forward to the births of new grandbabies, but no! God has other ideas.
Humans seem to think that the carrot is a more effective motivator than the stick. Well, apparently, God does not! Maybe that is why I revere God so much – I have never really been a “pat on the back” sort of guy. I’ve always been more of a “kick in the ass” sort of fellow. God seems, of late, to be a… “punch in the gut” kind of god. I guess we can either learn to roll with the punches… or just roll up into a fetal position and call it quits.
I’m in love with cities I’ve never been to.
- Unknown
May 27,2024
Oh, how I wish that you and I could have… “gee-hawed” better. Hell, I would have settled for you and God to have “gee-hawed” better. I don’t like that which God puts me through sometimes. In fact, I have spent much of the last decade hating God – not necessarily for taking Kaitlin from us, but for the way He took her from us.
Kaitlin has an MRI of her brain for a reason totally unrelated to the brain cancer that we were completely unaware of at the time, they find a “tumor” on the scan, and that is miracle number one. They do brain surgery to remove the “tumor”, they find no “tumor”, and that is miracle number two. A whole year goes by, and Kaitlin starts having all these weird symptoms. We have the braces removed from her teeth for the second (and final) time to get another MRI of her brain done, they find the tumor is now four times bigger than it was a year before, so they rush her down to perform a second brain surgery which just happens to be done one year, to the day, from the first brain surgery (not really a “miracle”, but definitely a big coincidence).
They removed 95% of the tumor (which was there… this time), and Kaitlin does a year’s worth of chemotherapy and radiation treatments and, supposedly, beats the cancer only to die from an infection that goes septic in her medically destroyed immune system. Do you think your mother and I liked God for that? Hell no! We resented Him for that. That festered within us for years, and we hardened our ourselves toward God. We… hated God for “toying” with us and with Kaitlin like that.
And now? And now, in the aftermath of the storm that was Kaitlin’s illness… and death, just as we have about picked up all the pieces and gotten most of the repairs made, we find out that we have lost you too… and possibly from injuries that were sustained in that storm that was Kaitlin’s illness… and death. Did it take twelve years for you to succumb to the wounds you sustained in that storm? Or were your… fatal injuries unrelated to that? Kaitlin’s cancer may not have killed either one of you… but it certainly seems to have contributed to both of your deaths.
If only we could have foreseen the extent of the injuries that that storm caused in you, perhaps we could have treated those injuries in a more effective manner. If only there had been some sort of “MRI” for the soul that we could have looked at and mapped out a treatment protocol for you. But, alas, there is just that sort of thing… only no other human can view it. That is what God does. He is the radiologist for the soul. He can map out a treatment protocol for you. He can fix you. He can fix what is broken in your soul… if you will but let Him.
Every few hundred feet the world changes.
- Roberto Bolano
May 28, 2024
Son, at 5:11 this evening, your grandmother passed through that doorway that you yourself passed through a month and a half ago. She died peacefully with Auntie Jules by her side and holding her hand. We got to see Mammaw again yesterday, or rather see the shell that she inhabited. Though she was still “alive”, she was not “there”. She was… standing in that doorway – neither on one side of it… or the other.
We took a bunch of century plants down there to Auntie Jules’s house. I planted the five biggest ones in the yard and twelve smaller ones in pots. The parent plant that all these come from came from your great-grandmother’s house in DeLand, Florida. We got it a little over 25 years ago when we all went down there to say our last goodbyes to her as she was knocking upon that very same door that has been opened to your sister, to you, and, now, to your grandmother.
This has been a very dark spring for us with all this talk of death and tombstones. I just found out today that our neighbor, Jimmy Sims, (two doors down) just lost his son on the 20th. He was 41 years old, in great physical shape and health, and yet he died in his sleep… from a heart attack! He was active duty military on assignment in Korea. He had been coerced into taking the experimental gene therapy injection, commonly (and mistakenly) referred to as “the vaccine”, to keep his “job” in the military.
They shipped his body to Hawaii to perform extensive postmortem examinations since he had no prior health issues and had passed all physicals and physical fitness exams with flying colors! The military has offered to fly the entire immediate family to Arlington and to completely cover the cost of a military funeral there since he “died in the line of duty”. In other words… they are in full CYA mode!
Perhaps I am being too cynical. Perhaps there are white hats trying to gather the evidence needed to put all the evil monsters responsible for the plannedemic in jail. Perhaps that is what they want us to think so that we will be just gullible enough to go along with whatever “official story” they come up with… you know, like with JFK or 911. I cautioned Jimmy not to just believe whatever they said that the autopsy said, but to receive it with a healthy dose of skepticism. He concurred.
Well, Son, I guess I shall turn in. It’s late – dang near 11 PM. You know, I can honestly say that you now have more of our family with you than we do with us. I just don’t know what to make of that! Good night. I love you, Son.
Not all those who wander are lost.
- J.R.R. Tolkien
May 29, 2024
Good morning, Son. Your mother and I were married 31 years ago today! I am sitting here (on your bed) drinking coffee from a cup that was purchased at Sykes in Kalispell, Montana some 20 years ago. Sykes itself was founded some 130 years ago. Time… it just keeps ticking away, does it not? Nothing can stop it. It is the eternal tsunami that just keeps building and eventually washes over everything. I once wrote a poem about time. I believe that was the name of the poem as well, “Time.” I wrote it when I first got to Fort Hood, right after I got out of basic training. I’ll have to see if I can find it.
Time
As water flows over the falls,
grains drop through the glass,
rock is turned to sand,
and sand, in turn, to glass.
So, Time, how shall we judge thee?
For everything is in your favor.
You control all, indeed…
our lives… our love… our labor.
If I could conquer light’s swift departure,
what a speedy ship I’d command!
If I could tear the atom apart,
even God would fear this man!
But above all there is to conquer and command,
the champion of champions is Time,
for no matter how swift or strong we are,
we can never be allies with Time!
Aaron Wray Hawkins
March 6, 1989
That eternal tsunami has taken your sister, you, and, now, your grandmother… just to name a very few of the total that I could name (particularly on your mother’s side). I guess I am now the patriarch of this family as Jeanie is the matriarch of hers. It is so weird to think that I am the senior person in this family now… at least this immediate family. There are cousins more senior, but…
Anyway, the world is awakening, the dogs need to be fed, and I must prepare for that most noble of duties – work! I must… so that others don’t have to. Don’t even get me started on that! So much of what we do is a waste! We work so much of our lives away for trinkets that we think we must have. Like everything else in life, we should work because it brings us joy to do so. We should work because we have a passion for it. We should work to leave the world a better place than we found it. Alas… I must… go to work. I love you, Son!
Wherever you are, be all there.
- Jim Elliot
May 30, 2024
We got your redbird print back from the frame shop yesterday. I hung it on the east wall. It’s big (32″ X 24″), but it’s a relatively big wall, so it works out. I hung your acoustical guitar over the head of the bed that is against that eastern wall, so that’d be on the southern wall for those doing the mapping. The hanging part was not difficult, but the centering part certainly was. You’ve got two hangers, a bulky guitar, and about half the space of the longest wall in your room to try to orient this thing at the right angle and with the right spacing between the corner of your room, the chest-of-drawers, the ceiling, and the headboard of your bed – whew! Yeah, that was difficult! I will probably need help hanging the electric guitar over the other bed if there is to be any chance of them matching.
Anyway, the redbird print looks great! It ought to for the money I spent on getting it reframed. The frame itself is a rustic-looking, rough-cut wood – sort of like your chest-of-drawers. I think we are really starting to get the spirit of this room going in the right direction. What is the spirit of a place anyway? We touched on this topic back on the 21st when I mentioned that we were getting your redbird print reframed. I said then that we would try to revisit this subject at a later time.
Can a place even have a spirit? Is the spirit of a place any different than the spirit of a person? The answers are: “Sure,” and “Not really,” respectively. The spirit of anything is the same as the… atmosphere of that thing. It is the combination of all that goes into it to make it… it. If you change what is in a person, place, or thing, you change it – you change its atmosphere, you change its spirit.
An empty, uninhabited building (or room within a building) has precious little in the way of atmosphere. It has a bleak spirit. The surface of the moon has a spirit. Bleak and bland as it is, it has a spirit. The surface of the Earth has much more atmosphere – much more spirit, but if one were to go from the surface of the moon to the center of the Sahara dessert, other than being able to breathe, he would find very little different about the “atmospheres” of the two places. However, if one were to go from the surface of the moon to, say, the middle of the Amazon rain forest or an alpine meadow, they would find a drastic change in the atmospheres of the two places or the spirit of the two places.
People are no different. If you fill yourself with certain things like sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll, you will have one spirit. If you fill yourself with something else like peace, love, and kindness, you will have a different spirit. Buildings (and the rooms within them) are no different. Fill the room with certain things, and it will have one spirit. Fill it with other things, and it will have different spirit.
The atmosphere of your favorite restaurant is that way it is because of what goes into it – the food, the décor, the music, the clientele, the staff, and the ownership all affect the atmosphere of the place – the spirit of the place. If you change any of that which is in it, you change it – you change its spirit – its atmosphere. Nothing affects this more than ownership – you change that and, more than likely, everything else will change! You are no different, Son. Who owns you?
The spirit of a person, place, or thing is the outward manifestation of what is in that particular person, place, or thing. Do animals have spirits? Do cats and dogs have spirits? Of course they do! They most certainly do – as do rainforests jungles, desserts, mountain meadows, lowland swamps, river deltas, and beaches. They all have spirits. They all invoke a certain feeling in others who experience them because they are… the way they are. Change the way they are… and you change their spirit and the way that they affect others. This is what spirit is. It is… the essence of a thing.
Now… do animals have souls? Do places or things have souls? That… is an entirely different question. A soul is the inward manifestation of what goes into something. It involves choice. It involves freewill. A room cannot choose to have its décor changed or its walls painted. Do dogs and cats have freewill or the choice to change themselves? I guess that could be argued, but I doubt the affirmative would win that argument. People are changed from without, to be sure – injuries leave scars, both physically and emotionally. We do have things thrust upon us from outside that can and do change us – that can and do change our spirits… just like cats, dogs, other animals, rooms, buildings, or entire ecosystems.
But… we can choose! We can choose to be changed… or we can choose to be unchanged by external happenings. We can allow the actions of others to affect our spirits, or we can choose to not allow what others do to us… to affect us – to affect our spirits. Animals, things, and places… simply cannot do this, and that is the essence of a soul. For now, my son, I must choose to answer the call of an awakening world and go get prepared to meet it. I love you.
Every adventure is worthwhile.
- Amelia Earhart
May 31, 2024
Wide awake I am, and it’s 3 AM! Ugh! I’ve been awake for about 30 minutes, and I finally just decided, “What the hell! Get up and get started.” So… I did. Before I get started again on the soul, let me revisit an aspect of spirit that I touched on yesterday but that I did not elaborate on, and that is… ownership. I had mentioned that if you change the ownership of a place, you are likely to change nearly every other aspect of the place that gives it its spirit. You, my son, are no different. We are animals. We are surprisingly little different from animals in most respects save one, and that, I did mention yesterday, was choice or freewill. We can choose to be or not to be affected in spirit by that which is thrust upon us from without. We can also choose our ownership – not in a legal sense as with some deed or other document that we would hold up in a court of law as proof of something or another, but in the sense that who owns us determines our spirit or, perhaps, helps to define our spirit.
As I said, we are little different from animals in that we have instincts, fears, preferences, phobias, psychologies, peer pressures, physical reactions, physical attractions, and physical revulsions… not to mention innate natures as well as societal preprogramming, and a host of other things that affect the way we behave. If we act on these… if we give ownership of ourselves to these… it affects our spirits. If we hole up in a cave and become hermits or monks or hide away from the mainstream in clans or cults, we give ownership of ourselves to these and that affects our spirits. We can claim ourselves. We can be our own owners, but, alas, we are just animals and we will act like animals if that is all there is to it. So… what else is there?
Is there any other choice to be made for our ownership? Yes. There is. I believe Jesus had the answer, but this is not so simple as the church would have you believe. Jesus was way deeper than the mere shallow end of the pool that the church leads you into to receive your baptism in water and your ticket to heaven. I think the prayer that Jesus prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane pretty well summed it all up. We are to be One with the Spirit of the universe as He was One with that Spirit.
Reading words in a book, whether that book is this journal or the Bible is like looking at the sleek, shiny, brightly-painted outside of a fancied-up, high-performance sports car. It may look cool, but it tells you nothing about how that car does what it does on the roadway or the racetrack. The engineers who design that car look at that car in a totally different way than do the masses of adoring fans who buy that car. There is more to that car than the brightly-painted, flashy, outside finish that meets and thrills the eye – way more!
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