Living as your Spirit

Living as your Spirit

The strange thing about living as your Spirit was the secrecy involved with it. Searching for Spirit within you was a popular series of disciplines. But to give your Spirit control over your humanity was a risk. Fleet and flighty, it shows itself in awkward manifestations albeit sometimes with Grace. But never with Malice for that has a physical manifest required for it to come to pass. In the Instant a Spirit lives to its fullest potential driving the old meat wagon around just one more time. I sure hope so…

James was the alpha male at the foundry. I saw that right away in the demeanor of his friend, Aster Futurus, another powerful male, who stayed by his side when he could. Keeping up with James was a problem but I saw that as an opportunity, maybe even a challenge, to get back in shape. He was twenty-five to my thirty-six and could party in New York City all night and show up that morning with a cup of coffee and an attitude. He had a rotating responsibility with another Staff Member named Joe Moran, and they hated each other, in a good natured way…heh…heh…whatever that may be from day to day. Their lives were chaotic, always filled with creating and very rarely subsiding. The fires of the furnaces saw to that. They keep you hot and running a temperature - it’s a good way to enhance the basal metabolism, I know.

I saw him spear a volkswagon with the swords of a fork truck. Hard to call them anything else as James raised the car into the air to clear the lip of the dumpster he was filling. He pitched a sculpture of his in the dumpster one day and I asked him if I retrieved it, could I have it? He smirked…yea…go dumpster diving. I dug out twenty pounds of iron in the abstract shape of a cricket’s leg. James’ unconscious homage to Claes O. The series he was producing then was decidedly different and his own and even tippy,too. He used sand to position them and I admired his solution like so many others he arrived at. His solution to coming to work and finding the door lock was, what else, to break in. I heard about this before I saw him do it.

Since I was so secretive I traveled in darkness. Very early I would careen down the back roads to Princeton Junction to arrive at daybreak. One morning I found myself alone. I was full of piss and vinegar especially when I decided to see for myself what James’ secret was. There was a door up on the roof was what I heard. I climbed the first roof with ease. The second flat roof could be reached with fingertips and you had to have the strength to bring yourself above your highest outstretched reach. Not easy, at least for me, but I did it. I looked around the roof and saw nothing that looked like a door. Giving up I realized that I had to come down the same way. Oh! Brother, I tell you, I did not like the thought of that first drop. From the sharp edges of that flat bastard roof I had to shinny down and then drop to a slightly peaked roof. Left or right, if you fell from the fall you were going to go far, my friend, for free. I managed to do it with the air filled by my pungent fear sweat. I think some apprentices had arrived and saw me get down…Katy was impressed, I remember and Lani may have heard about it. Well, I was still a huffin and a puffin when James showed up to start the day.

He went to the foundry door and I spoke first. “James, show us how you do it.”

“Do what?”

“Get in without a key.”

He smirked and came back down the stoop stairs to the macadam walking over to the single level block house projecting from the two story building at a right angle. He got up to the second roof, too in a swift and sure move that took his foot up past his finger tips, gaining purchase on the edge. We heard him walking on the built up roof and soon he opened the foundry door for us, tying it off and hanging there for me to come through.

“It’s a hatch, with a ladder down the wall behind the furnaces” , another smirk which I didn’t want to wipe off his face. I climbed up the ladder and looked out the hatch. It had a cap that looked like all the other protruberences, tarred and soft shapes, disguised except for it opened if you knew which way to lift.

My own experiences with so difficult a feat as raising yourself above your body was as a youth in swimming pools. If you were excited about escaping from your older sister and that included getting out of the water (Hey! No Fair!!) then the fastest way to do it was on the run. Starting a run by lifting yourself out of the pool with your hands and gaining terra firma equilibrium back was possible with adrenalin a burning. I learned that it took a certain measure out of you that took time coming back. You just couldn’t call that out of the woods anytime you wanted it. Since the steps were so far away normally, I’d climb out by first putting one knee over the edge and pull myself out of the water. With a rounded edge I could pull myself out and onto the edge in a kneeling position. Pulling up into an erect stand still required the use of hands although I tried to do it with my body alone and sometimes got away with it. Sometimes it made me all the more awkward to anyone who watched. If the rounded edge got my knee wrong I would sprawl and skin something. Yea, raising above your body was spiritual alright.

I believe that raising above your body from land is easier than from water. I stopped doing it in the pools I swam in just into my teens. It wasn’t worth the risk to use it to show off to the girls. And it didn’t impress the boys who felt they could do it, if they wanted to. By the time I was an adult it was a big deal…at least to me. My Spirit had insisted that my thirty-six year old body at least give it a try. I surprised myself but not my Spirit. Rejoice! Rejoice!

But that didn’t topple James from his perch..no, he did that himself. And I never was the alpha male in that group…went straight to silver back status in my own mind. Letting my Spirit take hold of me to produce art had my full attention and I let anyone who wanted to “Best Me” in just about anyway they wanted to do so. Spirit knows no competition.

Human physical and mental abilities are transcended when raised out of the body and into space above.

Just as we see the Spirit move the other animals so simply we can give in and meekly follow our alpha force. Beta minute, be damned, if we get in the way of our own self. Timid seekers of Spirit watch in thrall at giving in to a moment. Snapshots of the past that help make up their present adorn their altars. Following an alpha force with shear will power watching has so many other names that it is ridiculous to forget that Spirit means Well. Our religions all start out wanting to do good for anybody who has faith.

Living