Spectrum of My Tears (reprise) 25 Year Death Song Indiegogo Project Blog Post 11

Two great and wonderful artists I cannot imagine my life without their lives and work touching mine

I rather like this litte piece of simple complexity I blogged here some years ago, and I want to present it here to you again because it so well illustrates that our perceptions are the root of the reality we have to live with. If we only change our perception in very small ways, we can see the changes in our life and our society go as we hope they will. And first I want to share this wonderful quote that so well expresses a man's suffering in his beginnings that so many of us share.



"We're both showing each other's experiences to each other. And it's like you say when you play Yoko's music or something, I had the same thing. I had to open up to hear it. I had to get out of the concept of what I wanted to hear--to allow abstract art or music in. She had to do the same for rock 'n roll; it was an intellectual exercise because we're all boxed in! We're all in little boxes. And somebody has to come in and go--[makes sound] rip your fuckin' head open for you to allow something else in!...Some artists can do it, but they usually have to be dead two hundred years to do it. All I ever learned in art school was about fuckin' Van Gogh and stuff! They didn't teach me anything about anybody that was alive now! They never taught us about Marcel Duchamp, which I despise them for, and Yoko has taught me about Duchamp and what he did, which is just out of this--fantastic! He got a fuckin' bike wheel and said, "This is art you cunts!""
 John Lennon  
San Francisco 1971



 John Lennon is so important to me because in so many ways he is me. A working class boy who never fit in, never recognized as the smartest boy in class, told to fit in to the expectations that they felt were fit for me. He transcended his class, station or whatever, and when those people who kept him down came around to praise and decorate him to let him into their upper class club John told them to shove off!  A man that can conquer the world and still be true to what he believed when he was a boy of eight is a hero to me, a man to be emulated in my own fashion.

I spent the morning with members of my Sangha, many who I haven't seen in a while. Sun laid out a delicious feast for us all and I had a great time catching up with friends. Sometimes in my monastic self- imposed isolation I can forget that many people do know and love me at whatever level they show it or I can see it. Simplicity and complexity merge in and out of one another in our lives. We may seek out or even fear one or another of these two, but still they are there in every aspect of every day just as we choose to examine or ignore them.

John recounted that 'Fool On the Hill' poured out of him fully formed. You keep 'Yesterday" Sir Paul