I resolved to turn away from writing about Trump. There is no question his machinations are fascinating and dangerous. Others do a better job of dissecting politics than I. They are professional story tellers and politics is their forte. I’d prefer to reflect upon the journey that I have taken, playing the hand that Fate allocated to me. Having a look-back at the road I have taken in life, this passage from Nietzsche’s extended parable, The Three Metamorphoses, is like track-map. The change in elevation, pitch of curves, and the surprising G forces which I could not have imagined, – every moment of that made me.

The camel is the first phase of lived-experience that is referred to. The ‘load bearing,’ dutiful, fulfilling ‘the-will-of-God’ is replaced by a lion-like opposite, that roar of ‘Hell No’ to a divine rule constricted life. I broke free, and I know that never could have happened without a lot of help. The attitude, the outlook of the lion is captured by the MGM logo that everyone saw and heard at the beginning of so many old movies. You know, that king-of-the-jungle creature that looks you in the eye and roars. Camel, lion and at last the child.

The child is the point, the denouemont and finale of this magnificent gift, the singular life you and I were given. The exquisite language which describes the innocent/no-holds-barred play of the child is seductive. A child of three to five years old moves/plays in a robust “yes”, a sacred yes to life itself, by the style of its play. The child makes its own world out of its imagination. The child begins over and over to create new games, like a self-propelling wheel!

We simply must create, and recreate the world as a ‘yes saying’, over and over, a yes to life! Need we ever cease to play?

These thoughts came, after dwelling upon the course of my life…

And what about you my friend? Its your turn! After all, here at The Motley Cow we are allowed to play.

To create itself freedom,
and give a holy No even to duty:
for that, my brothers, there is need of the lion.

To assume the right to new values
– that is the most formidable
assumption for a weight-bearing and reverent spirit.

Truly, to such a spirit it is a theft,
and the work of a beast of prey.

It once loved “You Shall” as its most sacred:
now is it forced to find illusion and arbitrariness
even in the holiest things,
that it may capture freedom
from its love:

the lion is needed for this capture.
   But tell me, my brothers, what the child can do,
      which even the lion
         could not do?

Why must the predatory lion
still become a child?

Innocence is the child,
   and forgetting, a new beginning,
      a game, a self-propelling wheel,
         a first movement,
            a sacred Yes.

For the game of creating, my brothers,
a sacred “yes” to life is needed:
the spirit now wills its own will;
the one who had lost the world
now attains its own world.

Three metamorphoses of the spirit
have I told you:
how the spirit became a camel, the camel a lion,
and the lion at last a child.

-Thus spoke Zarathustra.
And at that time he staying
in the town which is called

The Motley Cow.

Thus Spake Zarathustra, by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by Thomas Common, The Three Metamorphosis

*Like the Baby Billy nude water ski scene in The Righteous Gemstones you know that is exactly the style in which you’d like to live, – if you were strong enough.

Be your own child!