New Wine, An Affirmation of Conscious Life

Each day being alive and conscious and able to act for one's self is like new wine that makes you, not drunk, but ever more sober and really alive. Life is beyond a right, it is a personal choice. A choice to be happy, sad or otherwise. Indeed, anyway, life is a choice. Anything can exist, even an amoeba, but happy, conscious life is always a choice. Like a new wine that makes you ever more sober. Sure, I could say grape juice, but no, I mean a very deep metaphor, an ancient metaphor. From time immemorial, wine has represented many things. I will go into some of that, but first I would like to ask in this article, what do you think of when you think of wine? I think of celebration, romance, and all the good things of life, especially when I think of the kind of "wine" I am thinking of.

Or the connotation of new wine in The Meters' song "Fire On The Bayou", "cool, cool wine, going down your throat..." like music that makes you feel good, something as basic as that. Or something as complicated as bottles of wine in Aramathea that Jesus talked about in the Bible in his metaphors about new wine. But more to the point, thinking is the ultimate sobering "new wine" going down your throat. Conscious, concentrated thinking automatically makes you more honest with yourself, even if you don't want to be. Hard thinking takes effort, but the results are more positively intoxicating than the most aged alcohol in any way, direction or sense. Charles Goodyear said something to that effect about hard thinking. Anyhow, back to the point. Using thought is like a good wine every time you do it right, it just gets better, better and better in every way; but it makes you more honest, sober, and non-avoiding in every way. The wine I talk about could have religious connotations, but I'd like to say that it has more honest spiritual connotations in the sense of consciousness.

Consciousness, I know, is spiritual when it is used right, from top to bottom, everywhere. So, that brings me to a point, and this is a poignant point: Development is the ultimate genuine sobering "intoxication" when you become genuinely proficient at what you do in any way. So, I once heard a song by Leonard Cohen saying that "love is the engine of survival", that is the reality of the situation when considering the kind of sobering "intoxication" I am talking about. For, this is real when you (or I) genuinely love what is being done consciously in life. To exist as a genuine conscious being is to have love on one's side, genuinely. When push comes to shove, love of life is the making of an existence. Love is an emotion without guilt, fear or misery. It just flows from the nature of reality genuinely smoothly when it really happens. But technical proficiency is one thing, without love of what you are doing, even the best technical proficiency means nothing and is absolutely nothing. What is everything, is that powerful "intoxication" that makes what is being done easy to love and respect.

So, I quote a true lie from the Beatles song "Strawberry Fields Forever": 'Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding everything that you see...'; I think that line should go: Living seems easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding everything that you see. But I know what John Lennon and Paul McCartney were trying to convey in that part of that song: If you rush through life without the sight and insight of love, you misunderstand it automatically and fully. Think about it honestly, this is average existence, especially poor existence. Excellent to perfect existence is a great marriage of love, understanding and honesty with reality underpinning it all and the whole thing working. Can you dig it? I know that I can. Life may be hard with eyes open, but at least I can see and understand what I love. Those are my feelings on the situation. The reality of my thoughts are about the same. Indeed, when all things unite right, everything gets somewhere, but, not only that, everything gets everywhere good and great.

My name is Joshua Clayton, I am a freelance writer based in Inglewood, California. I also write under a few pen-names and aliases, but Joshua Clayton is my real name, and I write by that for the most part now. I am a philosophical writer and objective thinker and honest action taker. I also work at a senior center in Gardena, California as my day job, among other things, but primarily I am a writer. As a kid I did construction work with my Dad which taught me many things like plumbing, hard labor and electrical systems, and I took notes for my Dad's home poker games at my Uncle Johnnie Gilmore's house, so I have a lot of life experience, sure. But I went to Cal State Dominguez Hills College, UCLA, and El Camino Junior College and learned a lot, but never got around to getting a degree, just lots of money spent, good grades and some credits. So, here I am currently freelance writing and working at a senior center for a living. But enough details of my life, what I do is not what I am. So here is what I enjoy, I enjoy reading, listening to music (everything from Beetoven, Strauss and Bach to The Meters, ELO and The Band and Dylan/Garcia and The Grateful Dead also, when they were the Grateful Dead. Well, as you can tell by SOME of the music I listen to, I am a very eclectic person. I am also a deep science fiction fan and as said before, a lover of books. If I were to go into everything it would take thousands of words and I only have about three hundred words here, of which I have used 290 of already. Well, I end here. Thanks. Joshua Clayton.