When I was around ten years old, I worked hard one summer and saved my money up and bought myself a mini-bike. I bought most everything; my school clothes, my books, and my shoes. I didn’t know differently. I worked hard for everything I ever had. My grandfather had not paid taxes on those millions of dollars he made and ended up owing the IRS something like $600,000.00 and in 1970 that was a lot of money, and we were put on a budget of $600.00 a month, so we all worked and got paid from the farm and bought our stuff. Well, I did anyway.
I bought this wonderful Brand New Briggs and Stratton four horsepower mini-bike that would do about 25 miles per hour, and I was free! As soon as I was finished with my homework, out to the mini-bike and adventure. Our farm backed up against the Desert, and there were untold miles of virgin desert for me to ride in. And the desert is beautiful!
The warm wind is in my face as I ride towards my beautiful desert. The smell of green assaults my nostrils. We had a thousand acres on this farm, and it was irrigated, so everything was green. There was an Artesian well at the end of our runway, which the local planes used, and it kept the desert around it verdant and lush. I had trails all through this part of the desert. I remember riding along one of them and having a huge Diamondback rattlesnake strike at my legs as I rode by; I heard and felt its head strike the frame of the bike “Tink!” I just laughed at the beauty of nature and my good luck and kept right on riding. I didn’t wear a helmet when I was riding; I guess my father thought at twenty-five miles an hour how bad could we get hurt. Besides, my father taught me how to fall and to protect my head with my forearms. I had a lot of practice falling and never was seriously injured. My father insisted I use a helmet as soon as I bought a motorcycle.
In the wind, the smell of the creosote permeates the air rushing by my head. The smell of Alfalfa hay, it’s sweet green aroma is one of my favorites. The sunlight kissing my upturned face feels good on my skin. The packed dirt road is rushing at me as I speed my way to paradise; having time to ponder the Universe as I go. It was around this time when I started asking questions about God. What was God in my life?
I was raised, Southern Baptist and the God I was taught was an angry, jealous, vengeful God. And I could not understand how a God who is supposed to be Love, could be all of those bad things as well. I was a curious child and asked a lot of questions and could not get an answer that satisfied me. I know that I freaked my Sunday School teacher out when I asked adult questions with a child’s voice and age, but I wanted to know, I needed to know but no one could, or would tell me, this started me off on a lifetime search for the truth.
Although I was raised Southern Baptist, I was sent to Catholic School; I believe it was the only kindergarten in town at the time. And oh, did I get my fill of Catholic Nun’s and their idea of school and discipline. I would always finish my homework early and be fidgeting at my desk; I was a boy child after all. The Nun’s, however, did not care that I was a gifted child, they wanted children who obeyed every command and one day while I was fidgeting with my head down one of the Nun’s hit me on the back of the head so hard with a ruler that she gave me a bloody nose and that pretty well did away with the Catholic religion in my mind. Any religion that would allow someone to hit an innocent child in the back of the head so hard as to give him a bloody nose was not any religion that I wanted to follow.
After I had time to read up on the Catholic Religion and all of the people that it had killed in the name of God, it made me sick to my stomach. It took some sick bastard in The Church to come up with the children’s crusade. I mean what kind of a sick pup comes up with the idea that Muslim’s won’t behead children is one fucked up dude. If you had read as extensively as I had you would also come to the realization that it was another way to get rid of the waif’s from the countryside who were unceremoniously dumped in the cities by parents who could no longer afford to feed them due to the high taxes from the Church and the Lords and Ladies of Position.
All of this violence, spare the rod, spoil the child, type crap was confusing to me. Why would a loving God allow people to beat innocent children? It just made no sense to me, and if it didn’t make sense to me, I did not do it. My father was not a religious man at all, and so once I was old enough to work, I no longer was required to attend church, and so the outdoors became my Church and the pastor was Mother Nature, and I learned so much from nature. I learned why there was so much violence in the world, people were animals, and in the animal kingdom, violence was everywhere. But I also learned that people had the power to change their environment, and we also had the power to change the world for better or worse. Why powerful people changed the world so much for the worse was a People thing, not a God thing.
Science captured my imagination, and in science, I saw the power to change the world for the better. It took me some time to find that Science and Spirituality were not mutually exclusive. When I first started learning about science, I found many in the science community were Atheist or Agnostic, but in my studies I came across the Gnostic’s, and I found a home for many of my beliefs, the belief that God is in me and a part of me that it is up to me to discover; this appealed to me more than any of the others. God is an experience of both the male and female in each of us, and it is up to us to find it and experience it. And once you do, your life will be changed forever. It has been my experience that your life will be changed for the better. After experiencing true unconditional love how could one not be?
I would ride for endless hours out in the desert, and once in awhile, I would take the back roads to Stanfield which was about twenty miles of dirt roads away. There I would meet up with my friend Mark, who also worked and bought himself a mini-bike, and we would take off and ride together until the sun started to set and it was time for me to go home, my mini-bike did not have any lights on it so I would be home by dark. * Note: I was a boy child, so there were many a nights I made it home well after dark. It was life and I had to experience it.*I would get to see some of the most beautiful sunsets in the world; Arizona sunsets, beauty incarnate. This would fill me with love, love for my family and friends, love of the land, and love for the Universe. It did not dawn on me for about thirty-five years that I had found my God long ago wandering through the desert, the Universe and all that it means to me, and if I had to follow a religion, it would have been the Gnostics.
One summer I took off work on the farm and went to work for a crop dusting outfit as a flagger. We would have to get up at 2:30 A.M. and work until around 10:00 or 11:00 A.M. then grab a couple of hours sleep and then work until the job was finished, sometimes we would work until dark-thirty, using flashlights to guide the planes. Flagging was a dangerous profession, we worked around chemicals that were extremely toxic, and we would have our blood checked for toxin levels once a month. We had been thoroughly brainwashed by our fathers that living like this was okay; it was not until I was much older that I realized what an insane way to live! At the time, however, we just took it in stride and kept right on going.
During this time, however, I had time to sit and ponder the Universe, which I did a lot. The fact that I had deep thoughts even as a young man garnered me plenty of abuse at the hands of my Father’s friends and mine to boot. “Oh, Michelle is having deep thoughts again.” I know now that they meant it as fun and were taken back by my intelligence, but at the time I was super sensitive about my being “The Smart Kid.” I knew even then that most of it was just good natured fun, but there were those who were jealous of me, and they were the ones who abused me, I can think of one in particular. He ended up flying his plane upside down, while wasted out of his mind, into the side of a mountain, Karma is a bitch.
I spent the hours right before sunrise meditating,(although at the time I did not know what meditating really was) on the vastness of the Universe and all the beauty therein. While waiting for the planes to arrive, I would lean back in an empty ditch and thank the Universe for the beauty and all of the love that I had in my heart to give. I have always been a romantic, and these were not strange thoughts for me to have even though I was an athlete and a red-neck farmer. It seems as though there has always been that duality about me. I was a farmer and a Long Hair at the same time, a Poet and an athlete, a red-neck who smoked pot and hung out with old hippies. I did drugs and was spiritual and slept with married women while I was a teenager. But what I did more than anything, was, I enjoyed life, every breath of it.
I would wake up early and go to bed late. I crammed as much living in as I could. I lived life on the edge, and when you do, you occasionally fall, but the key is to pick yourself back up, learn from your mistakes and go back out and do better next time. And while this is not the only way to do it, it is the way I did it; I lived as if there were no tomorrow. The only drawback that I can see is that when you live as if there is no tomorrow you don’t plan long term, and you do not plan for the future. What happens when the future arrives? The only way I saw to do it was just to take one day at a time and do the best you can each day and let the future take care of itself. Which worked out fine if you are by yourself, but if you have a family? Well, maybe not so well if you have others to look after because you need to plan for the future. But these are thoughts best left for four in the morning:)
I still try to take it just one day at a time. If I do my best today, tomorrow will take care of its self. My best includes working out, praying and writing. I do them every day. And I pray and meditate a lot; this helps keep me in balance, which is very important to me. When I am in balance my stress level drops, and as stress is the number one killer in the USA, it is a good thing to have to happen.
I still have my visions, and as I have gotten older, I have been able to handle them better.
I live alone and probably always will, my way of life is none too popular with the opposite sex. Sitting in front of my computer, typing, reading, smoking pot and laughing my ass off, drinking coffee and working out at 4:14 a.m. does not usually make for a good LTR. But I love my life and would not trade it. And if this means I will be alone, I am just fine with that too.
My Two Cents 