Did you know your Heart has a friend who follows him through life with only one goal- to protect? This friend is called The Heart Protector.
When you get heart broken or betrayed The Heart Protector can sink into depression. Where did he go wrong? How did he let his friend down?
Maybe he learns something, makes sense of his mistakes & goes back to work.
Or maybe he’s not sure what he did wrong. He moves into a state of hyper vigilance to ensure this never happens again. He builds new walls thick and crusty. The Heart lives inside these walls & starts to be deprived of light.
The Heart Protector builds walls in many ways. He may become paranoid & carry a magnifying glass looking for tiny red flags. He may become cynical & tell himself Love doesn’t exist. He may even reach the point of believing that Knights & Unicorns never walked the earth.
He can make you critical. Pointing out flaws in anyone who gets close. He can make you queasy at the thought of one day walking hand and hand with someone wearing matching pajamas.
He gives you reasons to reject people before they reject you. He fills your legs with adrenaline and tells you to run. Run to the river and drown yourself. He has a million ways of protecting his friend.
Recently my Heart Protector has been too tight & its hard to sing. I can’t catch my breath. I don’t want to go out and see people. I do it anyway but a part of me stays inside. I don’t want to write songs because there’s nothing to say. And no one to hear me.
I don’t know what I am supposed to have learned from my experiences or what I did wrong. I don’t know how to not let the same thing happen again. The Heart Protector is in a state of confusion. What to do? What to do?
So like the genius I am I’ve been trying to learn songs to make other people like me. My friend Arthur plays Sweet Home Alabama with me and Country Roads take me home. We play a gig which requires carrying 500 pounds of equipment for miles with the help of a grocery cart, setting up, playing for two hours, taking it down & carrying it back home. We make about 3 dollars each. I’m a bit worried about survival.
I can only hope popularity will help me survive. I want to reflect the culture back to itself so people will like me. Confederate flags are popular here. So are guns, knives, dicks, motorcycles, alcohol, drugs and nature.
Downtown Charleston West VirginiaA West Virginia Birthday cake. Do you see those two round cakes above it? It turns out they were boob cakes and I ate a slice when offered having no idea what I was eating. I am still trying to come to terms with this.The view from a West Virginia bar. If you combined this pic with one of a man driving 100 mph off a cliff in a motorized easy chair while high on mushrooms it would pretty much sum up the area.Giving a redneck hello to a guy(?) in a bar. My Yankee friends always assume the people down here are close minded. They don’t understand they are weirder than fuck.Burning a red candle in a desperate attempt to stave off the cold. The mug is resting on a tin of chewing tobacco.I finally had to decorate my bedroom because it was feeling too much like a prison cell. The theme is Friends. I am now expecting Dinosaurs and Elephants to come into my life.
Don’t go insane; don’t pull your hair Don’t you play the fool you poor poor girl now. The sky is dark; the stars are dots They are hiding in a black black swirl now.
You always knew that people smile They extend their hand but don’t take it no no. Because this life is never what it appears to be When you’re crawling so low.
Don’t let his hand reach for your heart- Have you asked yourself why he needs a friend? Because he likes to hurt them.
Some people lie; they like to smile And they’ll say the sweetest things that you crave You’re lying down; you’re getting soft You’re refusing to see things in a new way
From every side he’s moving in and you’re Lying there but where can you go now? You close your eyes imagining a new place Where life could be different somehow.
Don’t let his hand inside your chest- Have you asked yourself why he needs a friend? Because he likes to hurt them.
You’ll stand alone; you’ll find a way You won’t need nobody, no one, no no. The sky is dark; the moon is grey In that kind of way nothing’s certain oh no.
Crawl to the door, then stop & freeze- Have you asked yourself why he needs a friend? Because he likes to hurt them.
I just need to write a quick post in defense of a dear friend- Hatred. Just like Mr. Rogers, I am a big fan of all feelings. What are feelings really, but colors that enter our body, giving us the energy & wisdom to do what needs to be done? And what is hatred but a surge of red fire to our heart, enabling us to respond appropriately to extreme situations? To set aside our vanity, our social hangups, our desire to be pleasing and simply fight for something we care about?
Why has hatred has been so demonized? I hate hatred? Hatred has no home here? Do these people love hatred so much they are hoping to keep it all for themselves? Are they are prepping future victims to not have a swift and violent response to being attacked? Do they want men to be so impotent they won’t stand up for women? Women to be so zenned out they will walk over the murdered bodies of loved ones with a smile?
There is little chance a human will overdose on hatred. It simply consumes too much energy to be sustained over time- much like an erection. No one needs to worry that their erection will become permanent and live in their pants forever. Likewise, there is no chance that hatred will set up a permanent station in your heart. It is too combustible- flaring up under extreme circumstances and then dying down once released.
When hatred comes into your heart it should be embraced so that your red circuits can flow freely. If you try to smother it down with an extra scoop of white spirituality you will only end up with social impotence. Because a man incapable of hatred has no meaningful role to play in society. He can’t get married if he is unable to summon enough red to hate those who would threaten his wife. He can’t even stand up for his own life and can only hope that men who are capable of hatred will be in his vicinity if extreme circumstances ever arise. In essence, a man who cannot hate is a wuss.
Hatred comes to us to enliven the heart and give it courage. When you really boil it down- hatred is the flame of love, turned up so bright that it begins to hurt. You only hate when you love something so much you are willing to protect, destroy & sacrifice for it. It is a beautiful thing.
Values live on top of a person’s head. They are sometimes confused with goodness, but no set of values can make a person good. In fact, an excessive focus on values can separate a person from the actual seat of goodness- their heart.
The heart is good, but not Good. It is the fuzzy mammalian instinct we have to empathize with and help others. The heart is caring, but not Righteous. It doesn’t care because it should, but just because it is naturally furry and soft. It might not even be aware that it cares; it just reaches out a warm hand to others automatically. The heart expresses her warmth through actions.
Values, on the other hand, are cold and harsh. You could compare them to stars guiding a person through the desert. They offer no warmth nor coziness, but can provide austere guidance and possibly exhilaration. We turn to stars when we are lost and travelling through barren, inhospital places- such as the ocean. It is the same with values. If our whole life were a walk through a rose garden, they might never cross our mind at all. We think of them most when we have nothing else.
Values are useful so long as you choose the right ones. Like stars, values encircle the globe, existing at all locations. They are infinite, and all have polarities- opposites- which are equally valuable. Honing into the right value can help a person to stay focused on their spiritual purpose- like a soldier tuning into Bravery or a salesman into Enthusiasm. There are Soul Values which guide us throughout our life and relate to our deepest purposes, and other values which we may plug into temporarily to navigate an obstacle. Adopting the wrong values, however- such as a soldier plugging into Empathy- could make it impossible to fulfill our mission.
There are two ways to adopt a value. One is to mentally accept it as an idea that you *should* live by it. In this case, it is generally a value derived from our peer group. This can create strong feelings of anger as the foreign value and our nature continually clash. Eventually, this anger may be projected onto others whom the person sees as lacking the value, relieving the guilt they feel in being unable to live up to the value themselves. Ultimately, of course, the angry person needs to question the value of their value and likely trade it in for another, more suitable, choice.
In other cases, a person tries to actually live by a chosen value. I am not sure how common this is, but all our heroes, for example, are people who at least seemed to embody one value or another.
The beauty of a value is that it can unlock supernatural powers. By choosing to follow a value, you are connecting to a living set of higher powers who will set things in motion around you. If you choose the right value, they will be like winds that carry you to your destiny. Choose the wrong value, and it will be an exhilarating ride that leaves you dashed against the rocks.
Fly away in a little bit
Fly away in a cloud of strings
Like the sun on an icicle
You found your pair of wings.
When the time wasn’t over yet
When the time was ready to begin
When my heart was red lying in a box
Waiting for the sticking pin.
There you go, I know your eyes
Fire like a flash of pain
Feel it burn, feel it end
What is the name of this thing that remains?
Fly away in a little bit
Fly away in a cloud of strings
Like the sun on an icicle
You found your pair of wings.
There you go, the hand that wears the glove of velvet red
Like a woman, like a child, is the man afraid of his own death
Like a woman, like a child- the man who will never fight
Flickering beneath the sky and dying that same night.
Fly away in a little bit
Fly away in a cloud of strings
Like the sun on an icicle
You found your pair of wings.
There you go, the man I know whose legs are far too thin
Find the box and open it to push your stick pin in
Fire I know, death I know, I also know your eyes
Like a woman, like a child- the man who never lies.
Fly away in a little bit
Fly away in a cloud of strings
Like the sun on an icicle
You found your pair of wings.
