Hearing the red “beet” of a different drummer

I will share with you a very small piece that I wrote in December and subsequently emailed to friends & family as a kind of 2018 Happy New Year's card.

I devised the title of this small piece from Thoreau's edict of non-conformity..."hearing the BEAT of a different drummer" and Tom Robbins' mystical red BEET properties.

Hearing the red “beet” of a different drummer….

For nigh on one score & 7 seven years, I inserted "drop dead gorgeous" quotes into a dog-eared journal that I kept haphazardly updated. These quotes often appeared on the printed page of a favored author, knocked me sockless & then I was left with no other choice but to scrawl them onto my tattered journal. Unfortunately, I haven't been engaging in this quote gathering process for quite a few years. Why do we quit doing things that seem so essential to us?

Anyway…occasionally, I will re-read them to see if they are still as spellbinding as they were "way back when". I am happy to report that they usually hold up very well. The following is an example of such an excerpt with genuine staying power. This excerpt is from "Jitterbug Perfume" by Tom Robbins and it concerns non-conformity/individuality.

"The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The onion has as many pages as War & Peace, every one of which is poignant enough to make a strong man weep, but the various ivory parchments of the onion & the stinging green bookmark of the onion are quickly charred by belly juice & bowel bacteria. Only the beet departs the body the same way as it went in. Beets consumed at dinner will, come morning, stock a toilet bowl with crimson fish, their hue attesting to beet's chromatic immunity to the powerful digestive acids & thorough going microbes that can turn the reddest pimento, the orangest carrot, the yellowish squash into a single disgusting shade of brown."

"At birth we are red-faced, round, intense & pure. The crimson fire of universal consciousness burns in us. Gradually however, we are devoured by parents, gulped by schools, chewed up by peers, swallowed by social institutions, wolfed by bad habits & gnawed by age; and by the time we have been digested, cow style in those 6 stomachs, we emerge a single disgusting shade of brown. THE LESSON OF THE BEET THEN, IS THIS, HOLD ON TO YOUR DIVINE BLUSH, YOUR INNATE ROSY MAGIC, OR END UP BROWN."

My challenge to you in 2018 is to stay divinely blushed and AVOID BROWN at all costs. So I exhort you to BLUSH ON……..THUS SPAKETH me, myself and I