“I exist as I am, that is enough, if no other in the world be aware I sit content, And if each and all be aware I sit content.”—Walt Whitman, Leaves Of Grass

Words of a man who has tapped into it. At the tender age of thirty-seven good old Walt has touched the heart of the matter (matter deriving from Mother, or as I think Goethe put it, the Mothers) and from that point on it’s all one long hymn to Life!

“The shaman represents this principle on the primitive level, as do the mystic, the poet, and the artist in the higher reaches of the culture scale.”— Joseph Campbell, Primitive Mythology

“Find the centre,” Xenon would say, “touch the core, and everything you do from that moment on will shine with Its light.”

But where is the core to be found? Where the centre? Where the answers to the Great Mystery? Within, of course, the sages inform us again and again. But that doesn’t stop us from rummaging through entire libraries. That’s something we’ve been taught, the rummaging that is. Taught by those who have rummaged the most, or let on they have anyways.

“Actually,…there is a formative force spontaneously working, like a magnetic field, to precipitate and organize the ethnic [local, historical] structures from behind, or within, so that they cannot finally be interpreted economically, sociologically, politically, or historically.”—Italics mine, Joseph Campbell, Primitive Mythology

Yesterday , fulminating on a post featuring quotes from Julian Barnes’ latest grouse, I wrote “stop pissing on the world and calling it art!” Forgive me, it was a moment of (inspired) weakness. But what has happened when the so-called artists give us such life-negating bilge? “Artist, heal thyself!” I say.

Back to the words of Xenon. “When you tap into the source, when you shine with the light of the Life that is flowing through you, then all who read your words, listen to your music, observe a dance, sculpture, or painting of your’s, if they are not too literal minded and caught up in surface effects, will catch a glimpse of that light through your work.”

And: “The epiphany occurs when it flashes in their minds that that light glimpsed through the work of art is identical with their very own light shining from within themselves!” Bit of a mouthful, but what worlds of wisdom!

The core and the periphery. The heart and the brain. Experience the core, the centre, the Life which is flowing through you, “and you”—in the words of Wally Whitman—”shall possess the origin of all poems.”

Head to school, learn the facts, fill your thoughts with ideas, concepts, and ideologies, and you earn a place out on the periphery, where complexities abound and everything becomes a matter of opinion. There nothing relates to anything else, or everything relates to everything else. All is chaos and disorder, a chaos and disorder, the wise would say, which is merely a form of order we have failed to comprehend. Can anything shine from within a soul solidly ensconced on the periphery but frustration, anger, despair, and overweening pride?

Alas, this post has run its course. It started as something of a follow up to my last effort on the humbling nature of blogging. But I was only having fun, lightening things up a little. At bottom, who gives a shite how many readers there are? Of course we would like more, but that shouldn’t be our concern in the least—we seekers after glimmers of Truth!

“I exist as I am, that is enough….” Bless you Walt Whitman.