Images

My Spiritual Overcoat

My coat of images I wrap it tightly around me for comfort

I think it was David Loy who recently pointed out to me (via one of his truly excellent books) that most, if not all, mental activities are undertaken to sustain and/or protect that elusive thing we think of as “Self.”

We live in our own worlds, mostly constructed to house this Self, to make it feel good, to give it goals, things to do, plans to execute.

Places to hide.

Or, to put it another way, we dress ourselves in multi-colored image-coats to protect us from reality’s sometimes chilly (as in sobering) winds.

I have an excellent Self-coat. Weather proof. Whenever the world begins to huff and puff to blow my castle down, I just wrap my coat a little tighter around me and thumb my nose at reality: is that the best you can do?

But reality and my image-coat are in cahoots. Reality huffs and puffs to “prove” to me that the coat (and the encased Self) is real, while the coat proves to the Self that the windy world is real.

The way out, as Dogen famously said, is to “drop body and mind” which to me translates to “drop both coat and reality”, which is oh, so much easier said than dropped.

Inspecting this coat sometimes yields unexpected fruit, such as discovering what self-images I cling to (wrap around me) for warmth and protection.

There are the song-writer images. Tons of those. Most of these show me, guitar on my lap, pen and paper nearby, melody rising and falling up the fretboard and me, draping myself in notes and what feeling and images they in turn evoke, now roaming language for the words to not only fit the feeling, the story, but also to rhyme — I just loved, loved, loved that game.

Yes, tons of those images: and they all prove it, don’t they: I sing, therefore I am; I write, therefore I am.

I wrote my last song some years ago now. I made a conscious decision not to write mor songs. My voice no longer held up its end of the bargain, and besides, I felt I had said, song-wise, all I came here to say.

Also, 123 is a cool number. One-Hundred and Twenty-Three songs. That’s where I ended up. To me that’s a good harvest, though I know some have written thousands, literally: thousands.

Each of these 123, though, is a well-gestated, nurtured and reared child of mine. Some took months from inception to birth. And over the years I have revisited them on and off to polish them a bit. My last polish-cycle was in 2015 when I chose the sixty songs that I’d record (again) and place on my site, my final statement (final lyric versions and guitar arrangements).

A bit of a non-event, to be honest, even though I actually believe (sure, I’m partial), that some of my own songs are the best songs I’ve ever heard, and if someone who can actually sing, and someone who can actually produce got together and recorded some of my songs (I think of them as song-poems, actually) I’d soon be a household name. Perhaps, yes, perhaps, it’s a gargantuan blessing that I am not — I’ve thought that at times and just thought that again.

Anyway, my song-writer coat, or shall we say layer, is pretty much wind-proof. Look, they all sing in unison, look, you did this, you wrote these, you sang and recorded these; ergo: you exist.

Thanks guys.

Then there’s the story-writer layer of images. Ah, look at that. A small mountain of stories, a respectable handful of novellas and novels. That, whisper the story-writer layer, is not a bad harvest, not for a Swede raised by Trolls writing in English. And some images rush me back to the real bliss of riding down the river of words where each seems to drop of out imaginary clouds and bounce just right. I was so alive then, so alive then. And I have the oeuvre to prove it, do I not? I wrote those stories, told those tales, constructed (that, in many aspects is the right word) those novellas and novels. So, obviously, I, me, myself exist, no?

While Dogen just smiles.

I’ve done bad things, too. But even those layers serve the purpose of keeping the worldly winds out. Yes, some of what I’ve done is none to easy to confront, much less be proud of — yes, I’d wish many of them undone. But still, I did them, and the images tell that tale, and gathered in a secret coat they serve their purpose very well — like an inner lining:

I am, I did those things, therefore I am.

While Dogen just smiles.

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© Wolfstuff