Leftovers
There are no teachers, no coaches, no masters.
It is You who chooses to school your Self.
It is You who chooses to learn, or not to learn.
It is You who chooses to study, to observe, to realize.
It is You who chooses to put together an imaginary cosmos.
It is You who creates the frame of reference in which you will abide.
* * * *
All sense of self is but imaginary notion born of an evolutionary context.
Awareness, ever-present, without frames or boundaries, is the only reality.
Soundbites
Memory is the wellspring of consciousness, as dictated by the frame of reference.
Breadcrumbs
My Back Pages
by Michael Holshouser
A personal preface to Mark Bava’s essay – My Back Pages – about growing up as farm boys in the small rural town of Hughson during the 50’s and 60’s written for the 2007 Centennial:
I was born and raised in the small rural community of Hughson, California, working my way from kindergarten through high school with a little over a hundred peers at all four school sites: Hughson Elementary, Lebright Middle School, Emily J. Ross Junior High, and Hughson Union High School. For the first seven years of my life, our family of four (Horace, Beverly, and a sister, Ann, a little less than two years younger) lived on what was then a cul-de-sac on the east end of Pine Street. When my widowed grandfather, Horace Senior, married Martha Sinclair in 1960 and moved to her place, we moved to the thirty-acre family peach ranch on Hatch Road.
Suddenly, I was a farm boy living in an old wooden ranch house a mile northwest of town, and life changed dramatically. Within a year I was driving an old gray and battered Ferguson TE20 tractor, spring-toothing and putting up and taking down levies; staying up all night irrigating opening and closing gates, listening the water trickle toward the ends of checks with my father; hoeing weeds and pulling suckers off walnut trees interplanted between the peach trees; grading peaches during harvest, and picking up props at day’s end; walking rain or shine with my sister to the Mountain View bus stop a quarter mile away; watching three channels of black and white television reruns in the front living room; digging underground tunnel hideaways covered with plywood; shooting birds in the bushes and fish in the canal with a BB gun; climbing trees and frolicking with dogs and cats; exploring an aluminum corrugated shed filled with tools and whatever; wandering the surrounding countryside planted with planted with peaches, walnuts, almonds, and grapes; converting the second floor of the tank house into a fully-stocked-with-dirt-clods fortress keep; driving a Willy’s post-World War II civilian jeep on a winding and dusty orchard-wide racetrack with my little dog, Jerry, sitting in the passenger seat; sobbing my eyes out on a hot day digging a shallow grave in the roadside orchard, burying Macho, who had finally chased one too many trucks on the busy Hatch Road; carrying out pitched dirt clod sorties with other farm boys, and playing rousing games of tag with them all summer in the canal just across the road at the Tully Road bridge and upstream falls. It was a Mississippi out the front door, and a jungle out the back one. A blend of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Rudyard Kipling's Mowgli, without a Pap Finn or Shere Khan.
Breadcrumbs: Life Resume
http://michaelsbreadcrumbs.blogspot.com/2015/01/under-construction_68.html
Breadcrumbs: Photo Gallery
http://michaelsbreadcrumbs.blogspot.com/2015/01/under-construction_17.html
Ferguson Tractor, Old Commercial
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELQgEa_JXJQ
Willys Jeep Commercial
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7Sle8X4EZM
And the thing to realize about all the physicality of those younger years, is that all the pain and bother – all the hot and cold, all the choking dust driving the tractor, all the gnats and itchy peach fuzz grading peaches, all the splinters picking up props, all the cuts and scratches and tears and bruises and crunches and burns handling equipment, and all the tedious long hours of all of the above – is that the discipline to finish a task, the capacity to endure suffering, the ability to one-step-after-another abide a mundane pace, as well as the recognition of the intrinsic relationship with nature, have all played a huge underlying role in the life lived since. Gumption, grit, resilience, stamina, ingenuity, dependability, steadfastness, critical thinking, problem-solving, and can-do-it-will-do-it attitude, are concepts that ring true in this mind. And are significant factors in the evolution of the frame of reference that has sculpted the philosophical-mystical writings that have poured out since 1989.