Imagine deep within your soul you want to give gifts to the world..but then life happens and you get tired.
Imagine having the passion of a Content Creator but not knowing how to put your thoughts into words.
What am I protecting? Is this modesty.. its own form of honesty?
In order to be a popular platform poster you need to “post every day” or at least a few times a week.
Ah
That might not work then.
Where is the passion I’m looking for? Where is the spirituality I once had or the zeal for living life as if this life is a rare commodity?
How do I take life for granted so much? How do I lounge in carefree boredom narcolepsy or not? Am I pregaming my midlife crises, getting ready for it, double fisting it?
Seems like a me thing to schedule such a thing rather than to be surprised by it.
Well why on earth am I surprised that there’s no element of surprise when I feel like I already know what the book of my life is about..like God and I deliberated and threw the book at me?
Sometimes I feel like I have some crystal ball or a blueprint to my life in my subconscious mind. I don’t want to see it. I don’t want the left hand to know what the right hand is doing. I’m tired of it. I’m tired of watching my movie from the outside.
Life and the enjoyment of life seems rather to be that the eyes and the ears and the nose would hear, see and smell what is here or at least whatever senses we have available to us. So strange that even Spiritual Doctors have remarked on sense “All knowledge comes through the senses.” Good job St. Thomas Aquinas for being like the Doubting apostle in your search for faith. I feel that heartily.
So there is that darkness in the soul of understanding (nous) to wit my life gives reference that I keep remembering that I don’t know and I do know. Part of me know my spirit though living in my body and not separate has separate agencies, faculties and ‘abilities’. I find it hard to be a gnostic because I’m an earthen vessel and yet though trying not to be “too heavenly minded to be of any earthly good” I find myself trapped between worlds, like a ghost with a preternatural stain on the ink blot tests of the collective unconscious of this age.
In my heart I watch kingdoms rise and fall revolutions turn and the sun set many a year. The ages of time acquiesce to an Apocalyptic dance that never seems to end. All of this is beautiful and is a verdict to my and the worlds mortality. I hope that I can learn lessons of this knowing that “the spirit gives life and the flesh is of no avail.” so that perhaps life can come to my dry bones again.
If 2020(all flowery philosophical and faith based sentimentality put aside)..
was an easy year for you then you might be a masochist or if you were not at all stretched by this year you might just already be perfect.
This is not to say one is a masochist if one has legitimately experienced new life blessings this year (We received our first baby girl into the world this year).
It is also not to say that faith based sentimentality is not often anchored in solid reasoning beyond mere emotion and thus… ‘a wash’.
What it does boil down to is a confession that the ‘perfect man’ sleeps through the storm and the imperfect man cries out in terror “Lord, we perish!”
There is a type of restful contented waiting that weighs heavier than any storm. They say that the “little ones” have the kingdom of God and I believe I have proof. This year I got to witness that contentment and peace first hand or rather ‘hand in hand’.
I named my daughter Eliza to be a female version of Elijah the prophet.
Well in her first year of life not only has she gone through the Coronavirus Pandemic and global economic upheaval but as of recent time, here on the Alabama, Gulf Coast she has gone through hurricane Sally (The most contrivedly and ill undermeasured Cat3 I’ve ever been through in my opinion).
Interestingly enough my wife and mother in law who are both from Venezuela had never been through a hurricane so while we sheltered at my parents home I had plenty of snuggles with my wife that easily matched that of a couple watching a horror film. My wife was a little spooked by the whole ordeal obviously.
Now on the other hand our daughter Eliza was definitely a little preacher by her actions. She like Elijah lived through the whirlwind and like Jesus slept through the storm! Thats right she slept through ALL of the worst hours of the storm where all the damage happened!
I know this amazed my wife but it personally deeply inspired me. Our little prophet weathered and slept through the storm and all throughout this year has never ceased to be the little chonk of joy she was.
So for the title of this blog post I want to explain it a little more because it was another little precious way my daughter deeply inspired me just by being her and that was by one of my favorite little encounters with her.
In the age of smart phones alot of us become dummies from time to time. I think my baby intuitively knows this and she returns my wife and I back to the human. Yes sometimes in the hodrum of everyday life and exhaustion even we can veg out on our phone. My baby on the other hand as a fresh human straight out of the oven won’t have it! If we are on a phone in her presence she will protest..she will return us to the now. The most precious example of that is if I am feeding her with bottle and putting her to sleep. If I have a phone she will get frustrated.
Just like God my baby innocently and purely demands my total attention.
When I feed her it’s all or nothing. It’s daddy and daughter time. It’s ‘contigo’. But the funny thing is though she demands that I look right at her little face and just be present with her she also demands that she can play with my hand while I feed her. She wants to hold my hand but she doesn’t always do so with consistency.
Sometimes she has a death grip and other times I feel like a goldfish is slapping me! But I have learned a very deep 2020 lesson from this encounter of love and relationship with our precious daughter. In these moments of connection and relationship building I have learned something splendidly transcendant!
I have learned that sometimes we might be inclined to impugn guilt on God for seemingly sleeping through our often stormy lives. I have learned it is easy to be jealous of those for whom storms seem to not shake their easy restfulness of spirit but with a shift of perspective one can be inspired by it! I have learned that God demands our attention with crystaline and 2020 vision (hindsight is 2020 and all that..) and I have learned that it is the connection that matters the most and that it is better to hold God’s hand even if like a little child He ‘holds our hand badly.’
(James Dillon Broxson born and raised in Alabama likes dark bold letters because why not? But seriously they really are much better right?! James is a father of one beautiful baby girl named Eliza born in 2020 and married to an amazing lady from Venezuela named Carolina.)
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Imagine that you were just getting things settled. You had your challenges and you had your pages well written. You weren’t perfect but life was by no means even close to bad. Things were going pretty well.
Yet somewhere lingering in the back of your mind was your desire to make a career change, to stand up for yourself.
You wondered when might life give you “a break”.
You do things a certain way all the time and the rythm of what you do is rythmic like praying on prayer beads or speaking in tongues. Even the things you loathe that pay the bills are the things that ironically give you time to connect to and to protect that same heart.
Then right when you are gearing towards having your first child with your wife you waited 31 years of your life to find and are beginning to find stablilizing routines, a Global Pandemic strikes.
You aren’t ‘entirely unhealthy’ but youv’e almost died of 2 viruses at once, had spinal meningitis, presently have various stomach and digestive maladies, and have had sinusitus since youth.
Youv’e underwent years of anxiety, depression and OCD. You had the secret wonder that maybe you were on the autistic spectrum for many years.
You recently found out why you were so cripplingly tired all the time and that you have narcolepsy and sleep apnea..with it’s happy symptom of insomnia.. Cherry on top ‘amirite’?
Youv’e been prepared for this test for it was the very first one.
Time to be a man. Time to survive whatever comes. You don’t complain for food shortages at the bum rushed super market…your fight or flight is too strong for that. Neither do you have a reductionistic view of surviving crises periods of history that only thinks about the obvious, trying to save money, trying to make more money.
You realise if push came to shove you can’t eat money.
You buy seeds along with your normal grocery. You save every seed from the refuse. You begin to compost and trial and error on learning to grow from seed.
You don’t think about comfort first. You are essentially reverted to your caveman effigy and your title is if you win war with the Mastodon.
However the Mastodon in this scenario is smaller than the angel dancing on a needle tip.
You wanted to learn coding for years and work from home for years and you also have immunocompromised possibilities, a new baby with similar, or some of the same, narcolepsy in one hand, anxiety coming from too much stimulation in the other leave you to figure out balance along with the false attributions you put on yourself out of false masculinity “You’re not a man if your staying at home with the baby right now!”. “Your were forced to be on unemployment right ..why isn’t that blog thing making money yet?!”
Time takes time from you with dividends. And for whatever you earn off of time the taxman likes to knock on the door.
Yes I don’t want a stranger watching my brand new baby during a global pandemic thank you very much and yes I am going to do everything I can to put life first.
If a rich man with a corporation has a bottom line so do I.
If a poor man can inherit the kingdom of God well so can I.
If the poor are close to God and the Kingdom of God is within the poor in spirit it seems pretty obvious that in the poor exists riches beyond comprehension.. hence the royalty and riches of a “kingdom” of the incomprehensibly glorious “God”.
Life keeps going and I keep on ‘recalcitrantly surviving’ in defiant joyful spite of if some think my life is expendable.
I do not ask them.
If they question me I can submit their questions to THE MANAGEMENT.
I am working on my project and I will succeed. Every once in a blue moon a memorandum should be made.
Every once in a while the Magna Carta written up, the ‘Terms and Conditions’ renewed.
They may change at any time mind you. Its a two way street this communication thing.
I am trying to keep motivated. I am going to make these dreams come true. And really I don’t know how to do any different. The subconscious is sandboxing. The Wiki is leaked. I am not afraid anymore.
I am tired but I have lost my edge. I am tired but I am not tired anymore.
I am growing. I am a warrior. I am motivated.
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I love what I do and I do what I love but for This Picture Frame Conversationalist I's gotta pay them bills y'all! If you like what you see feel free to give a like and a subscribe but also remember that for 12$ a year ( 1$ a month) you can be enrolled as a premium subscriber and have first access to previews of my content whether comics, art, books music or merch as well as half off any of my releases. For a one time donation I offer a bandcamp music download of my music as a thank you.
Around ten years ago or so I was going through my own “Love Supreme” conversion.
I had touched a darkness in my life that I didn’t know I could touch and I contacted a vital life inside of myself that I didn’t know I could contact.
Contrast. Light and Dark. The Logos that fills all things.
And yes I was truly jiving to some Coltrane as was I also giving Christ control again through the subtle and perhaps unwitting spiritual leadership of the mixtapes of my good friend Jonni Greth.
Having a taste for the Avant Garde, Jonni being raised in a very EVANGELICAL background had embraced Christ deeply but almost seemingly in spite of the spiritual milieu and atmosphere about himself. This I always respected and even if he didn’t know it it often made me receive helpful wisdom from him almost as if he were some closed off Jedi hermit.. Which for a hermitic like soul like mine made for an attractive candidate.
If that had not been enough he also had the gifting to express those life experiences of the ‘solitudinal’ heart through song.
Jonni Greth introduced me to Daniel Johnston and copious amounts of outsider art and music, the depth in the like which I was clearly hungry for and yet through all of this our friendship showed me a sense of desire to nurture the artist in me, something I often felt very few people in the world tried to nurture.
But in the years around 2009 existential miracles happened in my life. Some precipitated by a life fallen away from my faith at the time, being caught up with by youthful indecisions and the untimely wreckedness of far too much imbibing (of various substance); the God of my youth began to become something and better yet someone to me again.. the presence of an old long lost friend.
Somewhere between breakups with people I didn’t honestly date but merely had deep emo college infatuations with and the sentiment that some sort of Aspergian colored cloud contrasting between genius possibilities and social catastrophes was my plight, I would finally, somehow, gain a notch in my proverbial life belt.
All of my fellow musician friends knew me as ‘that dude who would probably never get ahead or make anything worthwhile happen with music’ but slowly, somehow, like the slow tick of the oil drip leaving my white Chevrolet Astro van dry, a dry artist through experience and near caveman from primordial goo level emerging, I came seemingly out of nothing into existence for the first time.
“I had a panic attack in psychology class but with the guitar on my back no confidence lacked.” (Excerpt from a song I’m working on.)
But indeed it was true. One day a college infatuation of mine, whom I had been sitting behind in psychology class on the first day of class, having a panic attack when the teacher merely called for me to introduce myself, would be the girl I got the confidence to sing my song I wrote for her in the parking lot there at Pensacola Community College (as they used to call it).
She said “How is it that you have panic attacks to introduce yourself but behind a guitar your so confident?!”
A song Hosea was born. Next was Bay Leaves. Next “crap!”.. one day in my inner battle to remain atheist I had my secular humanism lead me back to Jesus (we’ll save that one for another blog. Hyperlink will be updated!)
Then another day walking through the mall like an anthropologist studying people and buying nothing as I often did, I walked into a Ross Dress for Less and stumbled upon a fortune cookie paper that read as follows…
“You will make a name for yourself in the field of entertainment.”
Things slowly got weird. My car almost broke drown one day on the way to a fund raiser for a Church Hippy Coffee Shop known as the Ole Mug at the Genesis barn in Foley, Alabama but I was all out of money “bless my heart!”
So I stopped by a Tom Thumb right down the road from ‘Flora Bama Bar and Grill’ remembering my guitar in the back of my on-e Chevy Astro Van that was sitting in the seat of my road side salvaged, leather lazy boy for easy back seat sleeping (if I so desired) and with a glint of proverbial providence and road magic went inside and made my pitch to the manager.
I said “sir I am out of gas and I have no money but I have a guitar in the back of my van and I would be more than willing to buy gas if I made some money out on the curb.”
Finding this a different kind of request and looking somewhat amused he accepted my request. I played my heart out in the middle of that summer day and by the end of an hour or so I made 35$! I bought some gas and got at least half a tank and saved the rest for Taco Bell and some as a momento. The fund raiser was over by the time I got to Foley {Isn’t it Ironic}.
The one time event turned into my semi regular gigs on the Gas Station circuit round playing at any gas station or public place I could until one day I thought I might take a chance..again.
I walked into the City Grille in Gulf Shores, Alabama that was newly opened and asked if they ever had live music. They said that they had been looking into doing it but had not booked anyone yet and then asked me if I would like to be one of their first. I WAS IN!
My job was music! One gig turned to 2 turned to I’m playing all week and I was finally good at something..something before that among my friends I was the worst at. Friends had moved away to different parts of the country but even as far as Salt Lake City Utah the word was out that Dillon was writing music and somehow it didn’t suck! What a novel thought!
As time would go by (around 11 years or so now) I have seen my song writers hermit syndrome go way way deep.
That first year and a half or so on the Gulf Coast and I was quickly finding myself drained.
Notwithstanding the facts of my lifelong undiagnosed sleep disorders and other maladies of which I only knew so much.
I was an originals artist in a world ruled by cover singers and it mystified folks how I even got out there as an originals artist ‘gettin gigs’
in the first place.
Though my song writing instincts are deep and most definitely instinctual and though my songwriters hermit syndrome is even deeper I could only say succinctly that I never could have begun getting out there without ‘finding my supporting cast’.
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James Dillon broxson is an artist, musician and content creator. He is married to his wonderful wife Carolina originally from Venezuela and has a beautiful baby girl with her named Eliza. For enquiries email shastat78@gmail.com
I find it important to never quit learning. I often like to imagine the future and to imagine becoming proficient in a skill not generally associated with my public persona.
One such imagining is that of becoming a scientist.
I could see myself pouring obsessively, lost musing over medical mysteries and biological quandaries as my mind often obsessively does.
I could see myself as a mathematician pouring over formulae as if they were nature’s immutable song, an indivisible unifier to inherent non-divisible truths.
As a long time musician I have often dreamt of being a classical composer, of sharpening the higher faculties of my mind with the beautiful truth of song, expressing mathematical facts through the medium of tangible felt beauty.
Sometimes I imagine being a lawyer, an advocate, a public defender..knowing the law well so as to subvert it’s misuse by evil people in high places eager to destroy others life for a buck. I imagine protecting the innocent against those who would use the law against ‘they’ who are innocently unknowing of their schemes and to condemn those falsely accused with unfair and unjust punishments. I often imagine saving people through diligent study and erudition.
Sometimes I wonder about these things because I am sure that vocation isn’t the full description of who I am and yet I can’t help but think these desires of my soul describe some ineffable inner truth about myself.
What are some things you’ve dreamed about your life?
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Musings of a Picture Frame Conversationalist. 