Soul food

The Friday morning cabeza jukebox featured this:

Other tracks of the mind wanted vintage eye candy in the form of Liberty of London prints.

Our hearts, our spirits know what we need.  We know, too, if we listen carefully enough.  It was definitely Neil Young and not a bag of Cheetos, a stack of Liberty prints and not anything else.  Correction:  it could have been a stack of faded vintage floral cotton, washed hundreds of times and somehow reaching back to touch a grandmother's apron, the nearly-flat heart-shaped pillow on her bed, sewn of a cloth so soft its touch brought tears..  The two bedrooms had a different wallpaper pattern on each wall, another on the ceilings.  I wish I'd taken time to count how many separate prints she used in the double wedding ring quilt.  We can't know until it arrives which magic carpet will transport us to our true home on any given day.

In another life there was a husband and recreational/useful, necessary thrift store shopping.  How those French cotton, tailor-made shirts reached Ventura remains on the list of wonders.  As does their price: fifty cents, the same cost as the Liberty of London tie, petite flowers in ecru and yellow with faint leaves in pale olive.  I guarantee no one else in the newsroom then or any other time in his life had one that even came close.  The pleated-yoke fronts of the formal, french-cuffed shirts were transformed with embroidery and paint for days away from the office, pairing with the patched, striped bell-bottoms.  The 70s were a love affair with DMC thread and its many applications.

This week I received a link to, as it turns out, a local astrologer/lecturer whose one video sent me to see if there were others.  Heidi Rose Robbins may be found on Facebook, and suggested YouTube as a better source for her multiple talks.  When I visited her FB page a few days ago, the newest topic was Mars in Scorpio.  In an alarming over-simplification of her description, I understood that we are in the throes of an epic internal struggle between personality and soul and that soul must be the victor.  If we are not that well acquainted with our soul, its needs and its mission, the odds of a good outcome diminish.

She suggested beauty - among other things which I cannot put a name to at the moment - as a vehicle to lift us above the worldly demands of our mind, our considerably less exalted self.  While I could proclaim myself as a daydreamer almost without peer, when the inner DJ is playing "Mr. Soul" and, between songs, talking about the visual, tactile fresh air of old cotton, I listen and obey.  Worldly - earthly - matters work on me like water over stone.  I don't want to end up but a nubbin of my true self, having let the bickering mind congress define my presence, masquerade as my purpose.  What I have to share today is that we must listen, listen deeply.  We need to follow the most odd and "other" urgings that send us off like 1950s teenagers on a scavenger hunt, innocent, no trace of cynicism, breathlessly excited to be racing down sidewalks after dark with new friends in search of a crocheted potholder or an ashtray made in kindergarten.

We really are all weirdos, as the Firesign Theater said, "We're all bozos on this bus."  Ram Dass told us, "We're all just walking each other home."  He also realized, “In most of our human relationships, we spend much of our time reassuring one another that our costumes of identity are on straight.” Not any more.