Ask Dr. Druid . Day 20
77 Qualities of Swift Gladness
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I know of some folks who have been meditating for a few years on the 26 qualities that the Gita’s Arjuna said were necessary to master for a noble life or somesuch. They have taken each quality like 'fearlessness' or 'forgiveness' and meditated &/or chanted it for forty days for each quality. Life-changing they claim. Well, who can gainsay that, per se?
I just happened today to be looking up ‘frolic’
to see if my latest e-dictionary fav Online Dict at DataSegment properly had the root meaning of ‘frolic’ as ‘swift gladness.’ This dict puts synonyms at the bottom of the definition page and there was:
Moby Thesaurus words for “frolic”:
antic, beam, caper, caracole, carouse, carry on, cavort, celebration, chirp, chirrup, clap hands, curvet, cut a dido, cut capers, cut up, dance, delight, disport, escapade, exult, festivity, flounce, fool around, frisk, fun and games, gaiety, gambado, gambol, glory, glow, have fun, hell, high jinks, horse around, horseplay, jollification, jollity, joy, jubilate, lark, laugh, lilt, make whoopee, merriment, merrymaking, mirth, party, partying, play, practical joke, prank, radiate cheer, rejoice, revel, revelry, riot, roister, rollick, romp, shenanigan, shenanigans, shines, sing, skip, skip for joy, skylark, skylarking, smile, sparkle, sport, spree, tomfoolery, trick, trip, waggish trick, wassail, whistle
Hmmm, I thought, Why not in some random periodicity, nimbly (imagine an sure-footed mountain goat on a steep hillside) improvise some commentarying on these 77 qualities of mischievous swift gladness, a non-creed, anti-creed, post-creed commentary? How droll and perhaps even glittering, sequined for all we know.
Since our babbling-brook stream of consciousness sometimes has the attention span of a firefly, relishes small delightful illuminations, this forty-day gig on a single quality ain’t on per se, but I thought I’d leave the timing in the legerdemains of the dear Greatest Deity Drolloa, patron deity of Vitamin I.
So, I thought I’d do my initial exploring and commentarying on ‘frolic’ for you.
Frolic is of course 1st & 4most my panbeloved cat palanddream Frolic who is like patting a sunwarmed nuage (new-ahj) – an iridescent pewter-colored cloud of silvery softness, so soft indeed that if you close your eyes you think your fingers are passing over a fluff of warmed, sweet, whipped cream. The root of ‘frolic’ is ‘swift gladness,’ a perfection of cat description that was fortuitous, a gift from The Blue, who pours presents upon us from the gigantic cosmic constellation, Cornucopia.
[[In the interests of the rollercoastering chaos which the 77 qualities of swift gladness of mischief and of fun foments for us, nuage & nuée both mean ‘cloud’ in French. At the other end of the cloud spectrum from the whipped cream nuage, we find Nuée ardente (new-hay are-daunt), that ferocious pyroclastic (broken fire) flow of burning cloud which violently pours down from a volcanic eruption and is more sudden, savage, and lethal than the lava flow. In the great volcanic death events(e.g. 79 Mt Vesuvius; 1902 Mt Pelée; 1980 Mt. St. Helens) in history, it is the nuée ardente that encases and incinerates people and cities, and no doubt goats and spiders and chickadees too. From Wiki, nuées ardentes are “fast-moving fluidized bodies of hot gas, ash and rock (collectively known as tephra) which can travel away from the vent at up to 94 mph. The gas is usually at a temperature of 212-1472 degrees Fahrenheit.”]]
If we weren’t grim, if we couldn’t be grim, grimy, tarnished of heart, if silliness were our unsolid state, our legerdepieds, then we wouldn’t and in deed couldn’t daggone kill collateral (aka people) damage. We would sicken ourselves. $820,000 per minute on the bloated insane Military-Corporate Budget and the additional $233,000 per minute flushed in a war like Iraq would have been better spent if troops of brightly costumed clowns with enormous bulbous-toed pink plastic shoes had just stood on the corner of al Thawra & al Kulafa streets and the corner of Qutuiba & Waqas streets in Baghdad and just handed out fistfuls of cash. In a mere 48 days, we could have given each of the roughly 5,772,000 Baghdadians $10,000 apiece. Does anyone think this wouldn’t have won more hearts and minds than the turning of gold into rubble and bones and Zones?
Instead of all this cordite, a ferocious fascination with the permutations of fun, the facets of silliness, obsidian and nuage, vulture and dandelion, would serve our darling planet so much more nobly in preposterity.
Grok on, Frolic on, dear reader. If LJC, Siddhaha, MoHam, Jehovaha et al can’t frolic, can’t be swift of gladness, can’t do a vaudeville turn or twain, fire’em and hire up some jollier and more insistently kind deities. I am become so allergic to faux piety that I break out into a fever of irritation if I’m exposed to one pppm (piety part per million) – gimme arsenic or heroin before killers’ piety, thanks.
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So, consider picking some qualities to contemplate in your log or of a musing afternoon or of a musing <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />midnight. I recommend keeping to the sillier side of qualities so you don’t get inadvertently drawn into the dreary or pompous seriousness so often falsely associated with ‘spirituality.’ Gods forfend we get bogged down in seriousness.
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Notes:
+ the 26 Arjuna qualities – most of these are much nicer and more serious than I am:
Gita, Ch. 16, Verse 1: The Blessed Lord said Fearlessness, purity of heart, steadfastness in Knowledge and Yoga, almsgiving, control of the senses, sacrifice, study of scriptures, austerity, and straightforwardness
Gita, Ch. 16, Verse 2 : Harmlessness (Ahimsa), truth, absence of anger, renunciation, peacefulness, absence of crookedness, compassion towards beings, freedom from covetousness, gentleness, modesty, absence of fickleness
Gita, Ch. 16, Verse 3 : Vigour, forgiveness, fortitude, purity, absence of hatred, absence of overweening pride – these belong to the one who is born with Divine treasures.
+ palanddream .. pal-and-dream
+ legerdemain .. light of hand, slight of hand in magic; cf coined legerdepieds, slight of feet, as a lamb gambols.
+ image of slithy tove above from drew bond, aka co nz
+ images of greys .. paul klee, google images.
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Ask Dr. Druid, 66 Days from Lead to Gold, Secrets of Alchemy You Can Use, a druid shaman’s playbook .. Intro; Prologue; Day 1; Days 2 & 3; Day 4; Day 5; Day 6; Day 7; Day 8; Day 9; Day 10; Day 11; Day 12; Day 13; Day 14; day 15 Review 2; Day 16; Day 17; Day 18; Day 19; Day 20; Day 21; Day 22; Day 23; Day 24; Day 25; Day 26; Day 27; Day 28; Day 29;
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.. keep your heart bright. beauty is rising.
.for bombadilobo.
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the education-obsessed world begins today with you ..
.. let’s spend the $820,000 per minute Military-Industrial Budget on education instead ..
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Thanks Mr. Pogblog for the reminder that the lighter things are the truer they tend to be.
Sadly we've been brainwashed to default to the notion that if it's 'really important,' it's gotta be serious. Piffle.
I often wonder why people who found Religions are so grrruellingly serious? As we go along in Ask Dr. Druid, I'll show that the less K, etherealler 'eternal' worlds that so many Religions hark to are fraught with hilarity, and, like baba au rhum, simply soaked with dark & deliciously distilled 100 proof Irony.
(Baba au rhum is a dense yellow cake not splashed with but divinely sodden with rum, muy yum. Topped with whipped cream, actual whipped cream that began in a cow not in a vat like the creamless, milkless [revolting] Cool Whip, a purely fake product. Perhaps one might say the most Religions are Cool Whippish.)
I like this contemplation of qualities idea. I might go with 'explore' and see where it leads me.
As we gambol down the paths, how to engage both sides of the brain either simultaneously or braidedly frequently is a delighted concern of the druids. One of the things I liked first about them is that they're terribly playful about terribly serious matters.
I like “the facets of silliness, obsidian and nuage, vulture and dandelion, [which] would serve our darling planet so much more nobly in preposterity.”
Of the educations I get from Ask Dr. Druid, it is this happy zoo of eclectic juxtapositions that particularly buoys me. It forces my mind to be more elastic.
It's always a challenge to be unflinchingly eclectic. Electric, eclectic, & elastic — that's the bag of druid tricks in a nutshell, or an acorn . .
(By eclectic I simply mean Choosing the best from all possible sources.)