Welcome to my blog. Here you will find whatever is bringing me joy right now.
Please join me in this spiritual agreement, from my mentor and friend, Jana Massey:
"Together we agree that everything that we think, that we say and that we do at this time will be of the highest good. And together we ask for truth, the understanding of that truth and the wisdom to use it in our lives."
Thank you.
The images that our hearts and minds call up when we think of Paris are not congruent with what has happened this past week. We think of culture and great food, art and music. Now our minds are flooded with the impossible. Grief is everywhere. Unresolved questions abound. I remember reading years ago about a group of peacemakers, half men and half women, who would go into the hearts of areas of unrest and ask to hear the people's stories. Many of our great spiritual teachers tell us that it is not until we have heard each other's pain and seen each other's tears fall that we can begin to understand. Until then we think only of retaliation… for the retaliation… that came as a result of retaliation… and on it goes. This is at the heart of this kind of war. And in my book, the utter useless, wasteful futility of war is something whose time has come. In relationships, if I am vigilant, and if I do my inner work, I will always find an offense, that I did first, that caused the offense of the other. We in the West have some very heavy responsibility for much of the suffering in the rest of the world. As the takers, we have squandered and displaced many - world round - from their homes, their livelihood and their ability to be in happiness and peace. I'm not saying that that is what is at play here. I'm just saying that we need to take a look at our own selves. With open eyes. Who is bombing who? And why? And for how long? And where? We need to look at ourselves if we are going to create a world beyond war. The wisdom of this planet's human elders, those rare few who have lived in peace and in harmony for millennia, all hold within their knowledge the importance of the balance of the masculine and the feminine. The woman and the man are acknowledged as separate and different and yet both are equal and equally honored. And they serve to bring each other in check. One of my friends from South America said that the peaceful high Andean people, the Quechua, felt that they could only forgive the conquistadors. This was because the conquistadors came from a group of people who had no equal feminine. They referred to them as 'the ones who had no mother,' no woman to balance their vanquishing and larcenous purely aggressive unchecked masculine energy. The mother says, 'No!' to violence, aggression and war. And so does the Crone. When the masculine and the feminine are held in equal regard, they hold each other in check. My questions are, "Who is bombing who?" And, "Where is the mother?"
Over the last two weeks on this Blog/Video Log, I've shared with you how I've been blessed by spirit reaching out to help and protect me during some of the more challenging moments in my life. This week, I'd like to share with you one more story where a gentleman who had recently passed away was protecting his wife by reaching across the veil between life and death. This particular event took place when my husband, Frank and I were traveling in New Zealand in 2005. We had always longed to go there knowing how truly beautiful it is in so many ways. For our accommodations we preferred farm stays and home stays as this
gave us the opportunity to make friends and have more personal
interactions. New Zealand's people are bright, intelligent, creative and kind. The landscape is spectacular. And for me, as a working psychic, I was amazed and delighted to discover that my clairvoyant function was extremely heightened every day that we were there. I was able to avert danger, interact with nature and sense the presence of spirit at a much more profound level.
The story, that I'd like to share with you now, took place after we had crossed from one "island" to the next. At the ferry station we decided to take a taxi van with several other travelers to our separate destinations in the area. I helped the driver load our luggage into his enclosed trailer. Then off we went. After dropping off most of the other tourists, but with still a few to go, we arrived at our destination, the home of a woman whom we had contacted a day or two before. Frank jumped out to go to her door and be sure that we had arrived at the correct address and I got into the trailer with the cabby to sort out our bags and began placing them on the curb. Frank came and got a load of our cases and took them in. Then an older gentleman, presumably the husband of our hostess arrived on the curb full of appreciative and welcoming softly murmured comments. After a quick little exchange of smiles, I resumed my activity in the trailer and emerged a few moments later with the last of our bags. From the curb, I saw the elder gentleman enter the front door of the home and I then followed after him.
Once inside, I met our hostess, who was just showing Frank to our room, right near the entrance. I went on into the room to freshen up while she invited Frank to come upstairs and see the kitchen. After showing Frank around, she then went up to the third level to resume watching a very exciting tennis match on the telly, and invited us to join her, if we'd like, once we had settled in. After looking around, Frank returned downstairs and I asked how he liked meeting her husband. Frank was nonplussed by this and said that her husband and her two teen-aged children had all died the previous year in an automobile accident. Our hostess had shown him a photo of them. She also said that she was looking for a little more income and that we were her first home stay guests. It was right after that that she had excused herself to go upstairs to finish watching the game.
Hearing this I followed Frank up to the kitchen area to see the picture and there, in a photo, with two beautiful youngsters and our hostess beside him, was the older gentleman who had greeted me with smiles of welcome out in front of their home. Apparently the husband, unbeknownst to our hostess, had reached across the veil to greet us at the curb to see if wee would be suitable guests in their home. Evidently we passed his approval and received his welcome. I am touched to know that our loved ones can help us not only in life, but also in death. They watch over us, whether we are aware of it or not, just making sure that all is well.
This is the time of year when the veil between the worlds is thin and we can more easily connect with those who have passed on. Please enjoy these two stories about loved ones who have passed away and yet were able to reach across the veil between the living and the dead in order to help us.
Spirit is love and those on the other side can sometimes help us by reaching across the veil between life and death. Please join me in this little video as I share three remarkable ghost stories at this time of Halloween. These show how we can be helped by those who have died and who continue to give their love and protection to us while we are alive.
Cleaning up your act is a lifelong task, isn't it? Frank and I got started with this in our twenties. After a fine rebellious rising up in our late teens and early college years, we discovered, as most do, the toll that the fast life can reap. Dehydration and hangovers make poor test results both in the classroom and in life. So, we started back then, finding the more moderate road. Our thirties brought on some serious work and striving as we sought to meet our life goals. This begged an even cleaner home base from which to draw our strength. So, out went most of the toxins, found in commercial products: shampoos, cleansers, cosmetics, plastics and processed foods. We also realized that natural fibers and home cooking gave us a sturdier base to launch and land from. Our forties began the years of deep cleaning, to edge out the sludge of a lifetime's accumulation, not only mentally, by seriously rethinking who we are and how we wanted to be in the world, but also physically, regularly cleansing the internal organs through fasting and juicing, along with taking sabbaticals for inner renewal. Then came our fifties, the decade that determines how the quality of your later life will be. It's easy to drop the joys of physical exercise at this age and trade them in for a more restful and relaxing way of being, but it is so critical to step it up instead. Dancing, gardening, swimming, biking, walking, whatever it is, our activities keeps us flexible and alive. Enjoying regular movement holds that eventual downward pull toward the compost pile at bay for a few more decades. Now that we are in our sixties, we see that slippery slope beginning to claim our peers. The "Standard American Diet" (S.A.D.) of processed "food," lots of sweets and too many animal products along with sedentary days has been collecting it's toll. So we are conscientiously upping the ante with exercise classes and time spent with friends recreating. We've also gone nutritarian to compliment our periods of detoxification. It's not servings, it's pounds of vegetables, fresh and raw along with berries and seeds for clean sugars and proteins each day.
Recently we invested in a new super fast juicer. Frank calls it, "The Kitchen Chipper," because it can juice and entire head of celery in about two seconds. It only takes us five minutes to make our quart of breakfast juice and five minutes to clean and dry the machine. So now, it is no big deal for us to make our green juice and consume our pounds of veggies every day. Chia seeds, sunflower seeds, a few almonds and walnuts go into our berry and herbal tea smoothies at lunchtime, so we have more than enough protein without burdening our kidneys and livers. These delicious fresh drinks also provide tons of micro nutrients and complex combinations of bioflavonoids at a lower cost and with way more abundant bio-availability than stuff that comes in a bottle or a jar. With this and some nice raw sauerkrauts, kimchis and other fermented foods, we hope to round the bend into our last three or four decades with the glow of our own "health care" rather than being subjected to prescribed disease management. Wish us luck, as we continue to do our best and clean up our act year by year, decade by decade with love for our selves and for all.
As we make our transition into death, we move into a limitless state of being, full of neutral compassion. Our awareness broadens and we become one with everything. Please enjoy this short video featuring a beautiful story of a lovely near death experience.
'To thine own self be true.' Such a simple adage. Not always easy to follow. So often in life we find ourselves staying with what is familiar, long after it has grown cold. Our habit mind dutifully helps us to hold fast while our awake self yearns to let go. This can even happen with good things. I can remember a ceramics class that I was helping to teach. It was a delight, but it kept on going long after the time when it was supposed to stop. I felt conflicted and over burdened. Though I enjoyed it, I was not truly staying in my joy. I was beholden more to social duty than to my own true self. These lessons can come hard. And it's good to say "no," when it's time to let go. In this particular scenario, Divine Arrangement intervened in the form of an automobile accident that put me where I needed to be, at home, tending within. As rough as it began, it was there that I found my true joy again. Nowadays, I like to think that I make these types of choices more frequently and on my own, when it is time to listen within, take stock and re-access. It just seems so much more wise for me to do this before Divine Intervention sweeps in. I am reminded of my mother's laundry soap, made from her fireplace wood ash and kitchen bacon grease, bubbling slowly on the stove. With the flame of transformation beneath it, the two substances would begin to unite. Over time, large bubbles would slowly rise up, thick and sticky. Then with a sigh of release, they would pop and sink back down into the congealing, coalescing mass. Our creativity must rise, express itself and then return back down to the source in order to gather and rise again. And just like the fat and ash, we become forever changed into something even more useful and new. It's okay for us to let go. When a part of our lives gets too high and tight and thin, be it an addiction, a commitment or an unresolved dream, it may be time for us to go back down. Sometimes we just need to re-group in order to let ourselves take a little break, mix it up a bit and draw from what we know or have been before, in order to rise up and generate our own transformation once more.
