A TALE ABOUT TWO TREES

 Sixteen years ago, my beloved Cottonwood tree, I planted you in the finest location of my new property, the first home I owned in Taos. I was excited about this earth canvas where I could create my own sacred garden.  However, a problem soon arose. I didn’t know you were a Cottonwood when I planted you. Our story began when I purchased what I believed to be an Aspen at our local garden shop. I did so with the practical reasoning that although Cottonwood’s are my favorite tree, I had a small property, and an Aspen as your smaller cousin would be a more appropriate size, especially because I hoped to eventually plant two. Little did I imagine then that there is real danger in ignoring one’s heart. It is disrespect to the soul.

My then future husband, Standing Deer stopped by just as I was leaving for the garden shop to pick up the new tree I had just purchased. He suggested that his pickup truck would make transporting even a small tree much easier, than my little Mercury Tracer.  When we arrived at the nursery, he looked at the tree I had chosen and said, “I see a more robust one in the next row, and it’s the same price”. I had no objection, shrugged my shoulders, and we loaded up the larger one. The next morning, with determination and excitement I dug a deep hole in the hard earth of an unusually dry spring, grateful that I still could do this in my sixties, and then added plant food and water. I was proud of my new Aspen, and planned to buy another one the next year, as Aspens in the wild often grow in groups.

Still excited by the creation of my own garden, the next spring I planted an Aspen companion a few feet away. However, by the third spring, I realized something was not right. Although as saplings, you cousins almost looked the same, it was becoming apparent that you, as older brother was not behaving like an Aspen. My soulmate Standing Deer who had plenty of Hayoka Medicine in his soul, had played his role of trickster clown although unintentionally.  

Dear Cottonwood, several years went by and you and your Aspen cousin grew side by side. Then one summer you began to soar above the Aspen. One morning, I was shocked to see that its leaves were drying up. I tried to save it, but finally this case of mistaken identity proved fatal for your much smaller Aspen cousin.

 Standing Deer and I had lovingly watched the progress of you both from our patio each morning. It became a ritual accompanying  our morning coffee. The Taos summer sky is brilliant azure, and often overseen by towering cumulus clouds. In this sweet memory, Father Sky and Mother Earth shared their love with us.  Taos life in summer engages all the senses. The air is pleasantly filled with the sounds of chirping prairie dogs and singing birds, a few crickets and in the distance, someone’s chickens cluck contentedly as they search for insects and worms. With its brilliant contrast of light and shade, Taos is a glorious unpolluted world that still lives beneath a 21^st century world. The purity of air is like a magnifying glass and makes the mountains to our east seem close enough to touch. However, recent danger lurks on the main road through town, big new fuel station/convenience stores, so out of proportion and out style for Taos are popping up like invasive weeds. Is this the result of COVID’s damage to our world? So many iconic local businesses were casualties. 

Standing Deer loved to talk to the birds, each kind in its own language, and they answered enthusiastically as they hopped between you dear Cottonwood and your Aspen cousin. As a child of the Pueblo, he’d learned many bird languages, and you offered ample space for birds among your branches. At other times there was nothing more calming than the sound of your leaves flickering in a soft breeze. While the Aspens are called Quaking Aspen, both of your species have a soothing lambent music in even the softest breeze. It is a sound of love and peace. I might never have survived my childhood, If I had been an urban child only, but I knew Pacha Mama intimately and she sang soulfully through the voices of the trees, in harmony with the birds and insects.

During my childhood and adolescence, there lived a big Cottonwood tree that spread its generous branches over the wild west end of our family’s half acre. That tree was a dear friend. It was both a protector and companion, always reliable and steady. Me, my cousins and the neighborhood children ran free. Our world was invisible to adults. Yet, this was an earlier time when the hard and even tragic aspects of life were not hidden from children. When we went off into the wild on our horses, free from the need for social armor we touched the earth with caution next to trust. We were not naïve, or arrogant. We sometimes took chances but not stupid chances. In our rural, close to dirt and weeds world, life and death lived next to each other and thus life was more intense. Things in life collide and break into chaos when we lose step with our beloved elemental guides.

Dear Cottonwood, your Aspen cousin died that summer. Standing Deer and I cut it down and wept when it lay flat at your base. You are not to blame, we are. You tried to survive our ignorance. Beloved Cottonwood. That was a sad time, but very soon the place it had stood disappeared without a trace as if it was never there, and you Cottonwood Soul Friend sored and acquired the thick gnarly trunk, that makes Cottonwoods seem like wise and steadfast grandfathers.

Then, the year before Standing Deer’s illness worsened, you dear Cottonwood friend began to drop some of your smaller branches.  I was alarmed lest I also lose you . Then a year after Standing Deer moved out of this 3-D world, it became apparent that you were also mortally ill. I researched tree diseases and discovered that planting trees too close together makes them vulnerable to a fatal fungal infection. You were now succumbing to the same disease that killed your Aspen cousin, all because in my ignorance I planted you to close together. I was beyond sad. A vengeful spirit seemed to be taking everything I loved, and everything that gave me meaning and healing solace. Your decline preceded two of the most difficult years of my life. It seems that everything that could go wrong did so and yet, I know that it was a lesson plan carefully designed by my higher mind to shock me out of nostalgic but unlikely hopes. This background retreat no longer functions.

Some of your branches are still alive. I hold onto hope that somehow you will recover, and yet I know that our story together contains the essence of Nature’s Alchemy. You may die in physical presence, but your drama has already set the magic of transformation in motion. When Standing Deer knew he was dying, he told me that I had something more to do after he was gone.  He has been gone three years and two and a half months. He still works with me but in an entirely different way. He is the soul friend that left me with the task of following the thread of my own soul through another labyrinth. I've come to see past lives, present lives, and future lives as one story different chapters. Our soul is like a house. We paint the walls with different colors and sometimes add or subtract a room, perhaps update the plumbing and yet the basic structure stays.

Dear Cottonwood, I sometimes forget that you have roots hidden deep beneath the skin of Pacha Mama that extend as far below, as your above ground height. With that image comes the  memory of the great Cottonwood of my childhood. It lived near the back of our family property, and it was my solace. I climbed it, swung from it, and when I needed its steadying comfort, I would lay on my back staring up through your branches from the roof of an old cinder block chicken shed. I would climb on top at night to watch moonbeams sparkling like soft stars on its fluttering leaves. This backyard of our family home was the physical equivalent of the unconscious mind. I was the only family member who ventured there for comfort. For everyone else, it was just a place to store away tools and objects that might be needed some day. But the Cottonwood was not alone. It had companions. There were Chokecherry bushes, Wild Plum trees, sour cherry trees, apple trees and raspberry bushes. The outer edge of our vegetable garden touched an apple tree that marked the invisible boundary where the wild part of the property began or ended depending on which way you looked.

Many of the dreams I still remember and continue to learn from had this wild part of the family land as their backdrop. The Cottonwood tree was often the being on which my family conflicts settled. The more independent in thought and belief I became, the more this tree became a focus. Dad and I had an ongoing conflict/rivalry, and this tree became the symbol of our emotional wrestling match.

As I look back at my childhood, this struggle was an existential war. I had frequent dreams of trying to protect seedling cottonwoods from my father’s determination to destroy them. In one dream, mom caught me taking revenge for the seedlings he had destroyed by pulling up his vegetable garden. Mom shamed me and took my father’s side. She always tried to keep the peace but at my expense.

In  frequent  dreams, I was often a secret witch in the magician/healer sense, who snuck in and out of that old cinder block shed beneath the Cottonwood. I wore a deep red medieval dress, because I came from an ancient place, and no one knew about my secret life. Then one day, or more accurately one nightmare, some zoot suit wearing criminals found my little shed and threatened to expose my secret life, they knew it would destroy me.

 On yet another dream occasion, my father and I had a ferocious fight over the Cottonwood. He said, “it is half dead, it must come down”, and I said,” it is half alive and I will fight to save it until one of us collapses”. However, I was secretly afraid the dead side would fatally infect the living side. I felt doomed. Then one day, or rather dream, while standing near the cinder block shed beneath that Cottonwood, I was startled when the Bluebird character from the Cinderella Ballet, flew out of the sky and landed in front of me. After the first time I saw it danced, the Bluebird variation became my favorite male ballet solo. It is magic when executed by a virtuoso! This dream version of the Blue Bird was a seasoned, middle-aged magician. He obviously had the power of flight and offered to teach it to me. When he took my hand, we flew away.

As I looked down at earth, I saw many green fields within stone hedgerows and they were all made of semiprecious stones.  Although we had launched from Denver, Colorado, this was a bird’s eye view over somewhere on the British Isles, certainly not from where we took off, yet It all seemed reasonable, and flying was easy while holding the Bluebird’s hand. After we’d glided over many fields, he told me I could fly on my own. I tried for a few minutes but then lost altitude through self-doubt and had to take his hand again. I was weakened by an  inner conflict. I was attracted to this Blue Bird Magician, but afraid to admit it to myself, and certainly to him. He would surely discover that I was unworthy of his attention, and humiliation would make me crash.

 This ariel magician came from a world I didn’t deserve to know, and he would discover that I was only a sad lonely girl child, living in an abandoned chicken shed, alienated and completely unknown to the people who lived on the tame front half of the family property. I had no true friends or family only people who knew nothing of my secret life, and didn’t want to know. Yet strangely, I had no doubt of my witch ability to heal those who asked for help with strong intention, .

 However, this time the inner conflict was not resolved, and I landed back on the dirt where the Bluebird Magician found me. Nowadays, since cancelling regular TV service, I've gorged my mind/heart on visionary thoughts and a smorgasbord of intoxicating and intellectually challenging podcasts. Every evening, I go hunting with my Bluebird Magician. We have re established contact. They are the semi-precious hedgerows that he showed me as we flew above them.  When my mind is too full for even another bite, I turn YouTube on to favorite ballets and even dancers in their morning class. I love to see how things are made.

Dancers have class for two hours every morning, but it isn’t because they are immature students of dance but because Terpsichore their goddess asks for humble worship every day. Flying isn’t easy and they must maintain the highest fitness level to perfect their magic.  

After I left home, my father cut down the big Cottonwood. I knew it was only the symbolic victim of who he was really cutting down. Until recently, I thought he secretly hated me because of disappointment that I wasn’t a boy. Yet, as an only child, I learned to be dad’s boy and mom’s girl. I loved hardware stores, mixing cement, or nailing roofing, and target practicing with rifle and bow..But I also planted and harvested our garden.  

For mom, I became a good and adventurous cook and could design and sew my own clothes, or shop for antiques. I’ve let many of my earlier skills atrophy but could reawaken them if I needed to.  Both parents were dismayed, frightened, fascinated and curious about what they were dealt in their only child, but so was I. They loved, feared and prayed I'd outgrow being me. My very existence threatened to bring down the wall of safe compliance they struggled against their own nature to maintain.  However, it took me many years, to recognize that by embodying their alter ego non-compliant suppressed selves, I made it possible for them to keep their membership as keepers of the standard norm. Inside, we were all secret agents of the Divine Magician, and we had played our roles so long we believed it was reality.

They were Baptists and read the Bible literally. I tried to make peace with membership in that club, but I was terrified of heaven. As a youngster, I had panic attacks about the second coming of Jesus. The story was that our savior Jesus Christ one day would unexpectedly appear to take his believers to heaven. I had frequent nightmares of Jesus appearing on an angry black cloud ready to suck his followers up to heaven. I didn’t want to go. There was no one there I could wish to spend eternity with, while those I loved, and my animal family disappeared or went to hell. Nor did I want to walk eternally on jeweled streets in a lifeless paradise. A hard bleak place with no one for company but scared Sunday School students, arrogant preachers who feared that the big boss, God would detect their pretense. And many like my parents who had no joy or passion. Since I was baptized, I wouldn’t go to hell, but eternity in Heaven was only Hell-Light, to me.

 Then, one night he did appear full force. I resisted being sucked to heaven so desperately that I was turned inside out. It was the most painful and terrifying dream I ever had, but after that this Jesus kept his distance, and yet I was indeed turned inside out and never saw existence, society or God with normal eyes again.

In modern parlance, my system crashed, and I had to do a hard restart, but it was not the last one. It’s happened several times, and now it’s happening again, and, dear Cottonwood I’m standing beneath you looking upward at your leafless branches, on a few surviving lower branches remaining leaves are fluttering calmly in a gentle autumn breeze. Dear Cottonwood, I know you are dying in my place. We will meet again, although I don’t know if it will be in my world of memories, or magically after the next restart.

Aho! and it is so.

 

 

 

 

 

“Don’t put your light under a bowl”.

I’m writing today because six months ago I entered a death/rebirth event. My faith in the outcome is uncertain, as it must be if it is authentic (ouch!). After PQ died everything went smoothly, even though I missed him, and didn’t know what kind of future was possible. I went about cleaning up yard, house and car to renew the environment. Along the way, I discovered a new spiritual family, renewed contacts with old friends, and enjoyed new friendships. Now I’m at another life and death crossroad. I know that sounds dramatic, and it feels dramatic, but when I review my history, that is how life has always moved forward, and with each crossroad I must decide to walk into the unknown.

I meditate, and dialogue with my spirit guides every morning in the room where I’m writing this message. For several weeks, I’ve been examining the cross as the symbol of Christianity. Of course, it is far older than Christianity and it appears in many religions including Native American religions. That is one of the reasons, the Native people of the America’s let down their guard when encountering Europeans for the first time. Lately I’ve been meditating on the cross.

There are the four directions in our physical location, but most importantly a place where they all meet. In the Keltic Cross the meeting is encased in a circle. That is what we are invited to become. I now see this as a meeting of dimensions into the wholeness of the divine. That Christ died and was reborn into transcendence on the cross makes perfect sense to me. Truth is what awakens the multi-dimensional hologram of the cosmos within us. In this way we are all multi-dimensional holograms of God. We don’t know the facts about the literal crucifixion. There are those who believe that Jesus survived the crucifixion and went on to father children who themselves became great leaders. I think that is true whether one takes it literally or symbolically. Perhaps beginning with Egyptian hieroglyphics truth is multi-dimensional and that is why the Egyptian’s used symbols rather than words to convey sacred communications. Symbols radiate many facets of meaning about the multiverse.

We each have a divine story to explore facet by facet. I must be born again and again and again! I wasn’t completely born the first time, and now the next ultimatum has arrived. In my natal horoscope, the cheek to jowl 12^th house location of the Sun, Mercury (my ruling planet) Jupiter and the Moon, indicates astrologically that at birth I would not be entirely located in the 3-D vibration of the human world. There were many factors converging to make my entrance into this physical world fraught with doubt and uncertainty. I emerged into the historical world six months after Pearl Harbor brought America into WW2. My father was drafted as a skilled metal worker to repair war-damaged ships at the Mare Island Navel shipyard near Vallejo California. My parents considered abortion when the U.S. entered the war, but a decision was never made, and nature took its course, yet somehow, it wobbled on the “to be or not to be” list indefinitely. I’ve never felt entirely welcome here and am still trying to be born for real.

When we were in Vallejo, my little sister was born with a serious heart defect and lived only a few months. My naive mother succumbed to her church’s criticism that she must have done something to anger God. No one ever tried harder to do the right thing and avoid criticism than mom, and she lost her precarious grip on reality. I was an afterthought during this crisis and learned to follow my intuition and the input of some strangers that no one else could see. There were both good and bad “strangers.” The good ones helped me deal with the dangerous ones, by showing me how to shield myself.

This arrangement conflicted with my parent’s desperate attachment to rules and social constructs. God was watching us for any missteps. Ironically, we were taught that God loved us and that’s why he punished us.Thus, I learned to fear declarations of love as demands to give up one’s personal life and wellbeing. It was best to stay on the outside.  

Later my good guides decided to rescue me from this false God. But I couldn’t avoid the effects of the war in heaven. In recent years, I made great strides out of a huge inferiority complex that culminated in an emotional, psychological, and spiritual meltdown during my 15^th year. It was a second birth, much more difficult and powerful than the first birth. It defined the rest of my life. I’m surprised I survived and suspect that I did so because it was too powerful to resist, so I gave up. I’m still open to learning about the magic of surrender. The ego never gives up without a fight.

However, despite terror and pain, there was simultaneously a dazzling connection with a completely weird and novel set of perceptions, insights, interests and experiences. Alongside heart crushing terror, despair and shame, came an obsession to explore, and observe with a stunning new vision that emerged from a magical unknown source. It was so unlike my previous concept of reality, that I had to keep it hidden and take the chops of those who only saw in 3-D. My maternal grandmother was the only human that stayed emotionally connected to me, even though she didn’t understand what was happening.

 I became enthralled by art, music, philosophy, history, psychology, sociology and a new spiritual awakening. I didn’t read minds, but I could read souls with insight into other humans that seemed to come from another world, in fact it was another world. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I fell headlong into the sanity of a domain free of doctrine or belief. I didn’t even know words for what I was seeing reading and discovering. A gate swung open to a hidden reality I could never have imagined. In the 3-D world, I was as good as dead, so there was neither fear nor expectation. I fell into a different dimension and was swept away in a raging river. In fact, I often had dreams of flooding rivers, earthquakes and tsunamis.  However, I became saner and couldn’t tolerate the destruction, senseless, soul numbing forms and complicated falseness of bureaucracy. And yet, even though I retreated from that world, I felt a need to protect the people I loved from what I was seeing.

 The memory of my 16^th Birthday comes to mind. My parent’s and I were spending the weekend at a newly acquired cabin that was the culmination of my father’s dream. The cabin itself was just one room still under construction. My father was a master handyman and worked on both the cabin and property every weekend. As a country boy, forced to the city in his teens by the great depression, his dream was to “go home”. The new dream home was located on 40 acres of beautiful pristine forests and meadows. On this day, dad was a quarter mile away, chopping wood. I was on a hill near the cabin.  I heard my mother calling my father in a desperate voice that carried the whole story. I was immediately aware of exactly what was happening and what would happen next. I knew without a doubt that the cabin was on fire. I almost flew down the hill, briefly saw my mother trying to get my help with a large drum of water. I knew that wouldn’t work and instead, I ran into the cabin, saw the entire east wall in flames and knew I had about a minute to put out the fire before it was too strong to stop, then took a huge breath outside, and went to work inside. I jerked a curtained vanity with flames away from the wall, ran to the bed, pulled a blanket from it, even chose the oldest blanket in case it would be damaged and began smothering the flames as fast as possible from top to bottom, and then bottom to top. All the time, part of me was 50 feet above the building calmly watching.  The damage was superficial. The basic structure was intact.  Nevertheless, the effect was black and ugly. After the crisis was over, my dad walked into the mess.

I thought, “my dad is going to walk into this too late, and he won’t notice that his sixteen-year-old daughter just saved the cabin and our belongings and possibly the forest that began twenty feet to the west. He and mom will just look at the blackened wall, and some superficially scorched items and feel sorry for themselves”. I was very calm and focused through the entire time and then remained fifty feet above the cabin for several minutes, observing all three of us and our predictable reactions.  

My parents responded exactly as I expected. During this phase of my life, I was divided into two selves. One is what I now understand as my higher self, and it knew things that 16 years olds are not supposed to know and was feeding me insights and laying out a curriculum faster than I could find resources. It had separated from my lower self who believed it was ugly, worthless, not very bright, and unable to meet the basic requirements of human existence. This one hides from social interaction in shame. The other side often read a book intuitively several pages ahead of my eyes and presented questions and insights to the narrative as if I and the esteemed author were on the same level. In fact, I knew we were on the same level because I had been given the key to this world. Sometimes I fell into a dream state and continued via a 3-D conversation with the author, walked through the same landscape during the same timeline and conversed about the book.  I knew it was honest magic and I wasn’t inflated by this heady state because I knew it came because my troubles made me available to new perspectives. I considered my life in the everyday human world to be as good as gone. Being dead, I had nothing to lose.

Years went by, and the division between my two selves became smaller but remained. I forced myself into situations that terrified my lower self. However, my goal was always to bring both together into the physical world with the higher self in charge. However, with naive ignorance I set unrealistically high standards for membership in the outside world and judged myself a failure. I saw my persona on such an inferior level that I usually assumed that basic functionality required much more than turned out to be the case, and yet even now I aim low just in case I overshoot my rights and capacity. The result is that I habitually get demanding jobs with low pay.  At times I take on extremely demanding jobs that are entirely gratis. I suppose it is because of my unresolved guilt for having survived when my little sister was taken, that I put the most effort into the nonpaying jobs that I find interesting and important. Thus, I’m protectively penalized for not being miserable. Being miserable, has been a way of staying out of harms way. It isn’t working anymore.

I’ve had an amazing run in Taos, New Mexico. It was the first community in which I felt connected. for a long time, its people were my people. Although I still felt small and insignificant, myself and everyone else, rich or poor had membership in the same tribe. It was a world that tolerated humans in almost every form. If you didn’t fit into its unique weirdness, it kicked you out. Membership was not given on money, status, politics, or even law. It was open to mingling on all levels. I almost felt safe. Yet now I’m being forced to confront the fate I brought with me from before I was conceived.

Seven months ago, the familiar earth of Taos began to change. It was my fault. I started doing the personal work I’d neglected during my husband’s illness. Now he is gone, and I know he intends for me to complete us with my side of our partnership. He told me so several months before his exit.  Then last autumn I was working at the computer in the kitchen and turned to ask him a question, momentarily back in our world, unaware that he’d been gone for over a year. Shocked and confused, I walked over to the couch where he watched TV and was slammed with his absence.  For a few moments I was in two worlds at the same time. He was here in full high-definition color and Dolby sound, and then suddenly he wasn’t.

While I struggled to remember which world I was in, I heard a loud bang from the kitchen where my computer desk lives. I was afraid to turn around, in case the sound was going to be expensive. Of course, I couldn’t avoid facing the damage very long. When I got to the kitchen, I couldn’t see anything until I looked at the floor. The first hand-drum I bought some 35 years ago, had just leapt off the wall above my computer and landed on the kitchen floor. It made a great boom because it had been hanging nine feet above the floor and had largely been forgotten since I hung it there sixteen years ago. He used to talk to me through flying things before we lived in the same house. I had no doubt this was his warning that I wasn’t going to enjoy my dotage peacefully. I still had work to do, and he told me so before he left.

Since that message my life has been a custom designed hell. Before PQ’s interference at the bidding of my higher self I had been living a frugal but comfortable life.  I kept my fingers crossed that I could keep floating as long a necessary, but then my higher self gave up coddling me. Shortly before Christmas, I got up one morning and logged onto my laptop, only I couldn’t get in. it was strange, but I had a small laptop that PQ bought during his last year for computer emergencies. I couldn’t log on to it either. I tried restarts and then hard restarts to no effect. Panic set in. I didn’t have very much money and what if this was going to be expensive. My usual computer doctor was closed but I found one that was open and took both laptops with me. The expensive one was not yet paid off and I intended it to last as long as I did. The computer doctor was as mystified as I was.

Due to quirky behavior from Microsoft, everything on each computer was stored on the memory of both twice. I also hadn’t upgraded my internet connection from POP to IMAP and learned the difference the expensive way.   I ended up with a middle aged, refurbished Dell, lost my email lists and all the emails I had been saving with topics to write about, and a big bill.  I was terrified because I had recently lost the rent money to PQ’s rez house because one of his sons wanted it and I have no legal rights on the reservation. Now I didn’t have enough to cover my expenses, food and gas were out of the question. As I was feeling sorry for myself, I noticed that the heat wasn’t working in my house, and it was very cold outside. I had to do some research to find a company that handled radiant floor heat in Taos. I had a two week wait for parts and in the meantime had to use electric heaters which are expensive heat in a place that has serious winters like Taos.

I was quickly in over my head. Several of my friends helped me but some of the help was lost to overdraft fees because we were inexperienced in using Zelle to transfer funds. To sum it up I became a familiar figure at the bank, dealt with some scammers on the internet along the way, and had to learn all about food pantries, and where to get free cat food when I ended up with teenage cats born under my Honeysuckle vine. Catching 10 feral cats for a free spay/neuter program is also very challenging and finding food for them is even more challenging. All this time I felt put upon because the world foisted a huge litany of problems on this eighty-year-old widow who wanted to recover in peace from the loss of her soul mate and contemplate where her life should go from here.

I’m just barely getting the picture. I’m being forced out into society, forced to ask for help, forced, to live one hour at a time, and most importantly, I’m being invited to live with faith one hour at a time. I would a hundred percent rather give than receive. That is where the control lives. And it also means you have enough to feel secure.

I don’t know how this story is going to unwind, and I’m barely noticing the benefits. I’ve lost enough weight to fit into my mother’s beautiful clothes, as she was always trim and fashionable, I’ve learned to ask for what I need, I’ve met new people, and learned about available help for people (and animals) on a low income and I’ve been forced to put my shyness aside to get things done. I have no idea how this period of my life will end and I’m barely grokking the point. There is politics, wars, extreme weather and general tumult in our world, but we can only deal with it by becoming what the world needs by acting in our little section of the Earth. Always remember, we are all potentially holograms of God. How could it be otherwise in a holographic universe. Now I’ll go back to convincing myself. I must do this often, but I believe in the cumulative effect.

Namaste

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CAVEING: The Birth Canal to Godliness

I’m on a new trail searching for a special cave.  I’m an amateur explorer, but I wasn’t told this would require any special gear or training. After a long walk, I’m relieved to come across the entrance to a cave. It looks right according to my list of instructions, although the instructions were not very detailed, or perhaps I don’t remember all the details. 

I carefully approach the entrance and look inside. It does resemble what I’ve been told to look for. I’m thrilled, I’ve found it!  However, maybe I should examine the inside more carefully. I'll walk in. It looks right according to the instructions I was given. Although many things fit the instructions, I also see things I don’t remember being told to recognize.  I’m going to continue in faith and hope, and maybe the instructions I have will be validated.

I become enthralled but before long, I notice that it is beginning to get dark outside. I no longer recognize what I see, there are only lumps and holes. Fear and uncertainty grip me for the first time. What if I get lost and can’t find my way out? A decision must be made. Do I keep going or turn back toward the entrance. The sun is setting fast, and I notice that I’m no longer sure of which way is out. I’ve already waited too long. Maybe I really am lost. Am I half in, or half out.  I have no sense of how to back track without making the situation worse.  Fear is rising, but I tell myself to calm down because panic could be fatal.

I decide to keep going in deeper, but the suspicion that I’m lost is also growing stronger. My heart sinks to my stomach. I’m probably in real trouble but its too late to back out, since I don’t know where out it. This isn’t right. The points that seemed to indicate that this was the right cave begin to seem like evidence of deception but it’s too late to go back since I’m not sure where back is.

I continue walking in the dark, feeling sides and corners with my hands, and exploring the rocks and holes in the ground with my feet. I'm getting better at moving through the dark and yet with every corner turned, I hope to see a ray of light to guide me through this situation. This fantasy is all I have.

Existence before I entered this cave is now only a nostalgic memory. I don’t even know if I’m going in the right direction. I might die, lost in the dark forever, no matter what I do. Now and then I come to a split in the cave wall. Should I follow it? Will it get me free, or will I end up even more lost.  I follow two of these splits and find myself tired and even more lost but with luck I feel my way back to the main cathedral. I’m beginning to remember and follow textures on the cave floor and feel the different forms on its walls.

My eyes are useless now, and although I’m getting better at feeling my way along, I’m obsessed with the hope of sunlight leaking through a hole to bring an end to this misadventure. I can think of nothing but a way out. What if I fall into an unseen watery trap. However, my nonvisual senses are now growing stronger. Finally, I see a light. I’m afraid to believe my eyes, since they have been dormant for hours. As I approach, I’m thrilled to see a real light beam coming through the top of the cave. It is small and far too high to reach.

Eventually, I see other beams of light leaking through the top of the cave, but I quit believing that they meant solution to my situation.  Probably I’ll die here, but those tiny beams of light may someday be just the right size and close enough to the cave floor, to make an exit possible. I don’t have emotional peaks and canyons anymore. I just keep feeling my way through the dark. There is nothing better to do, and there is no one to help me through an emotional meltdown, I must stay focused.

If I die here, some archeologist may find my bones in a few thousand years and creatively speculate on what religious rite caused an ancient human to be sacrificed in this cave. He or she may well forget that they were also seduced into this cave in search of knowledge. I’ve often wondered if any archeologist ever dug up a former incarnation of himself or herself. He or she will forget that he or she was also seduced into this cave, because humans are always searching for the “Great Mystery”, if for no reason other than trying to solve it. Of course, the mystery is never solved, but the entrance to the cave is irresistible. Both humans and cats can’t resist dark holes, though possibly for different reasons. However, there is the possibility of finding something surprisingly delicious and juicy in both cases, and both are pulled through life by a hope called curiosity.

Perhaps we humans are agents of the divine creative urge. What is curiosity? It is a desire to find the next piece of a puzzle, even though we sometimes try to force the fit. Are we building each imperfect model toward a higher resolution of an original image? What if we fall into the depths of darkness while exploring for seductive treasures and we find ourselves in a hair-raising mystery that we might not survive? Perhaps, survival is relative. Will you live forever safe and happy if you walk on by the cave entrance? Or will meaningless predictable boredom freeze the mind and heart. Without danger we become mechanical.

Your shell will shrivel up and turn to dust as we all must. Anyone may lose courage and focus on any point inside that cave and become a mysterious pile of bones. No one is completely lost, but starting over depletes hope, and makes faith a bigger leap.

Perhaps you make it all the way through this cave until you find a beam of light bright enough and in climbing height to be an exit.  You pull yourself out of the cave, into the light and rejoice. Faith in your original instructions is restored and you are proud of yourself for carrying through. Perhaps you praise God and your brave ancestors for their example. Then you find a light filled trail where you can see all the rocks, and holes. You thank your lucky stars, and maybe God, drink deeply from a pure, bubbling stream and take a peaceful nap, to complete this glorious sunny day.  For me, the best came when I set off for home to meet my loved ones. Some of them were not home, but I’ll try again another time.

The next time I walked this trail I noticed another cave opening. At first, I think, “no way.” But curiosity and doubt overtake my fear. Could this be the cave I was originally intended to find?  Well, who knows? I survived the last cave. Maybe that means I’m lucky, or God is interfering here and there—maybe that's the same thing. Well, I have some experience now. Maybe I should peek into this new cave, (new to me) and see what secrets it may hold. Then I forget how confused and even terrified I was when I lost the help of sunlight in that first cave.

To be continued, Life is a dream, birth and rebirth are caving expeditions. May I become a better caver.