Tearing up the Avenue

Dale DeLong

Description

Middle-aged loser Albert Lucky is stuck in a rut until a divine awakening leads him back to his former self and into an inspired new life he never imagined.
Albert Lucky has hit a wall. He’s a middle-aged loser, adrift in middle management in a big-box retail store. At work he has started talking to phantoms instead of customers. He has become unkempt and slovenly. Then, there is an awakening. Great energies pour into him from Divine places, harkening him back to miraculous visions he experienced as a teen.
Thus begins an epic journey of reconciliation that is graced with a bevy of characters, including the owner of a big-box retail behemoth, who happens to be a former live wrestling champion. Meet also a Native American woman, who is a paralegal in a run-down law firm; Albert’s wife, children, and unflappable dog; and an unorthodox private investigator who can’t decide if he’s Hindu or Mennonite. The unexpected happens in this gripping account of spiritual and psychological growth.
Tearing Up the Avenue is a novel about loss and the experience of terrible abuse, but also a book about love, prophecy, and mysticism at the highest level. Albert Lucky finds himself at the center of a whirlwind of profound vision and insight in the midst of what was a relentlessly drab life. Incredible events and revelations abound.

Sujets

• Magical Realism
• Fantasy (canción de Mariah Carey)
• Mysticism
• Magic realism
• Spirituality
• Prophecy
• Fiction
• Fantasy

Informations

• Publié par: Balboa Press
• Date de parution: 02 novembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9798765235928
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

TEARING UP the AVENUE
A BOOK OF TRANSFORMATION
DALE DELONG


Copyright © 2022 Dale Delong.
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
 
 
Balboa Press
A Division of Hay House
1663 Liberty Drive
Bloomington, IN 47403
www.balboapress.com
844-682-1282
 
Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
 
The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
 
ISBN: 979-8-7652-3591-1 (sc)
ISBN: 979-8-7652-3590-4 (hc)
ISBN: 979-8-7652-3592-8 (e)
 
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022919876
 
Balboa Press rev. date: 10/31/2022
CONTENTS
PART 1
Losing It
Visions
Poking the Bear
Retails, Retells, Re-tales
Butch’s Kingdom
Heartache, Neglect, and Loose Screws
Night Creature: The Shedding Begins
Tearing Up the Avenue
The Bear
Night Drive
Joy Ride
The Spirit Tree
Tree House
Awakenings
PART 2
A New World
The Poultice
Dysfunction
Autumn’s New World
A Meeting at the Doctor’s Office
A Walk on the Towpath
Metamorphosis
Retail Ministry
PART 3
Changes
God’s Speed
Dawn’s Early Light
Festivities
Awakenings
As the Seasons Turn
In Maurice’s Lair
On the Path
Out of Time
Flight to Freedom
A Time to Get Real
The Coronation of Autumn
Thunder and Lightning
The Aftermath
Albert’s Journey Home
Angelic Voices
A New Social Order
Homecoming
Within a Caduceus
The Great Messenger’s Words Made Manifest
Morning Time
Enlightened
Messages for a New World
Endings and Beginnings

 
 
The Dark Night of the Soul
Thus with Suso, as with St. Catherine of Siena and with other mystics we have considered, the travail of the Dark Night is all directed toward the essential mystic act of utter self-surrender; that fiat volundas tua which marks the death of selfhood in the interests of a new and deeper life. He has learned the lesson of ‘the school of true resignation’: has moved to a new stage of reality: a complete self-naughting, an utter acquiescence in the large and hidden purpose of the Divine Will.
— Mysticism , page 310, by Evelyn Underhill (1911)
I am,
Forms pass.
From me they go,
And again they come to me.
Their returning
Is what men call destruction.
Be not deceived thereby.
I tear down only to build anew.
Verily destruction is the foundation of existence,
And the tearing-down thou seest
Is but the assembling of material
For a grander structure.
— The Book of Tokens , page 156, by Paul Foster Case (1934)
PART 1
LOSING IT
P lanetary resident Albert Lucky was an excruciatingly normal man. He had a wife, two children, a slobbery dog, a bad mortgage, and a wan retail job forty hours a week that sometimes lasted seventy when the capricious conceit of his bosses whipped up. He was middle aged, middle class, middle management, and Midwestern, espoused middle-of-the-road politics, possessed a mediocre religious outlook, and of late had sprouted a paunch in his middle. Not surprisingly, he squeezed his toothpaste from the middle of the tube. In a bell curve sort of way, he was definitely one standard deviation from the middle either way on just about everything.
But speaking of deviation, there was (as we shall see) an added, tantalizing pinch of para normal and ab normal in his makeup that of late had exposed itself. And it was creating quite a ruckus.
For forty-two years, Albert had been blithely hitching a ride on great Mother Earth (along with six billion other souls), but of late, he had really lost his way. No, it wasn’t the sort of thing where one is directionally challenged; Albert was actually rather good at that in a mappy, topographical sort of way. His visual nonverbal skills were actually pretty good. Rather, it was an issue of his interior—the universe between his ears. Some camps of thought described it as clogged chakras. Others said it was mucked-up meridians of energy. But that is pretty fancy, esoteric stuff. Simply, Albert was descending into a messy, mental chaos. A vapid miasma of melancholy and despair had washed up onto Albert Lucky’s cognitive shore.
The long and short of it: Albert was losing it. A riot of moments, moods, and mental pictures of life that were not quite right, not quite the way Albert would have had them if he was in his right mind, had conspired and formed a fixed idea, an alien thought form, just about the size of a stretch limo Hummer (assuming one could actually measure such a thing). It had, after a fashion, parked in his consciousness. It was akin to, frighteningly, the relatives who come to visit for the holidays and decide they like it so much they want to make it permanent. This punishing view of life (it’s all relative!) was making him miserable and dark. And it was playing itself out in his head, or at least in the general location of his head. As a result, his heart was affected; a gooey web of sadness and spidery deceit enshrouded him. Dude was messed up.
In its beginnings, this deleterious demise plodded along at a geologic pace. It was slow, like watching dust settle. It had been fashioned and shaped by the infinity of small and big events that compose the days of our lives. Events as subtle as the pained, empty feeling he had when, one day, he happened to look up at a cloud of a dark gray marble color as it was rushing by. It left him empty and bereft, and he did not know why.
Events as grim as the unseemly force he felt from the perpetual stream of odious work that pressed in on him day after day after day, ad nauseum . Events as small and unpolished as the equal amounts of disgust and desire he felt when the disapproving glance of a beautiful, self-possessed young woman he had looked at for a moment too long made him aware he was ogling her. And as large and sad as the time when his best college friend experienced the onset of schizophrenia, and Albert watched in stupefied horror as his buddy started roaming the streets, bursting with paranoid madness, filthy and unkempt, looking in vain for his wife in strange people’s basements. And as heartrending and telling as the disconsolate despair he felt when he saw a man and a woman screaming at each other by a bus stop in front of thirty people.
“Get your things out of my house!”
“You never loved me!”
“You never cared!”
Their bitter sense of being betrayed, the loss of their dreams about and for each other, poured out of them and into him, Albert Lucky, on a gray, nondescript city street. Everyone who waited for the bus was affected: young mothers with their babies slung haphazardly on their hips; teenage boys littered with earrings and tattoos, who were quietly mouthing violent street raps; unsure old men and old women catching rides to doctors’ offices and libraries; and teenage girls with low-cut jeans and tops that exposed their belly button piercings (who were unsuccessfully trying not to pay attention to the boys). They were all caught breathless for a moment by the embittered cries of the shattered couple. Even the street, carrier of the human condition, buckled and cried out. And the human condition, in all its majesty, hypocrisy, and inscrutable wonder, was left to contemplate its state.
Our life breath left as we were seized by fear
And the belief that when things die
It does not give rise
To life
That the incident grabbed him in the pit of his stomach surprised Albert, but on he had walked, largely dismissive and unaware of how this moment had lingered and turned on him. As these seemingly random but subtly powerful feelings and experiences do with all of us if we have lost our way and do not go about the business of tending to them, they had started to show themselves. And, sensitive and gifted fellow that Albert happened to be (as we shall see), the physical manifestations on Albert were strange and even comic.
He had started walking differently—slouched over but oddly spread out from shoulder to shoulder. His walk began to take on a shuffling quality, particularly when he felt pressured. He began to squint unnaturally; when you saw him, it was as if he had been in the dark and had suddenly come into a brightly lit room. This crouching, slouching, squinting, spread-shouldered look required a lot of energy to cobble together, which may explain why he had been experiencing a sleepwalking fatigue. Albert began to feel as if something unexpected and shocking was always a