THE BIGGER PICTURE

We live in a world that has arrived at the brink of a cosmic developmental crisis. Those in power over the human world literally have the future of this world and its inhabitants in their hands. There is a lot of talk about the need to preserve the environment, the dangers of uncontrolled expansion, the evils of political corruption, and the ever present danger of war with weapons of mass destruction. Even space is not safe from human manipulation. Although it is popular to promote the protection of endangered species it is still obvious that humans have an anthropocentric bias resulting in lack of consciousness beyond the immediate time and their own species.

Kazimierz Dabrowski

Before an evolutionary concept can actualize into social recognition it must have a conceptual description that can serve as a psychic handle, or so it seems. Kazimierz Dąbrowski provided just such a mental structure for the process of moral development.  Dabrowski was a Polish psychiatrist who developed a theory of moral development called Positive Disintegration that ventured into the social moral and creative development of human psychology.  His theories are still not well known in the West.  They are primarily used in presentations about both childhood and adult giftedness.  I was first introduced to Dąbrowski by a Jungian oriented therapist in Denver.  The aspect of his theory that gripped my attention was a concept of levels of moral development that seemed far more enlightened than the routinely taught theories. One of Dabrowski’s greatest influences was Plato;  "Mankind will not get rid of its evils until either the class of those who philosophize in truth and rectitude reach political power or those most powerful in cities, under some divine dispensation, really get to philosophizing.”


Very little has changed since Plato’s time except external technology. By now its obvious that philosophy alone is not enough. I often wonder why this is so. Why is there such a gaping chasm between true wisdom and the fruit of intellect? They seem to be two dimensions that seldom connect within the human mind. Humans are very clever and some are capable of amazing mental and technical achievements. Nevertheless there is so little progress of soul and spirit beyond a few enlightened individuals. I watch Science Fiction movies that are built on incredible and fantastic technologies of the future but the characters and their motives are as ancient and primitive, as were those of our first ancestors. The same applies to scary aliens. Although the media presents them with superhuman abilities and they are way more technically advanced than we are these movie aliens only excel technically or biologically. The assumption seems to be that this is all there is. I think it is obvious that philosophy is not enough. It may lie out the map but it can’t get us to the destination.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice

At times it seems that the world is controlled by the mentality of a 14-year-old male geek. There is passion, technology, cleverness, creative imagination and hubris. The spirits of both power and experimentation are well represented but balance and wisdom are totally lacking. It is the problem of “the sorcerer’s apprentice.”

The modern human world seems seldom to notice that intellect and wisdom have a different source. One can be a genius intellectually and yet be emotionally and spiritually undeveloped. Dabrowski called attention to the absent developmental steps to Wisdom. We have come to admire a powerful intellect but IQ tests don’t reveal anything about emotional or spiritual powers and very little about creative powers. I am suggesting that there are many levels of intelligence but MIT educates on the first two levels. The problem with this is that it is this limited kind of intelligence that is ruling our present and determining our future and it is creating a world out of balance. The emotional and spiritual abilities are still undeveloped and it is these that are expressed in the shadow side of power.

What Motivates Us?

Perhaps the core problem is the fact that humans are actually motivated by emotion not by intellect and yet emotional development is the missing link to wisdom. One can be a creative and intellectual genius and still lack good judgement and developmental balance. It is significant that there is a recent interest in indigenous cultures that are rooted on the concept of maintaining balance with the natural forces. How ironic that after hundreds of years of attempting to force indigenous people to adapt to our ways the so-called civilized world now looks to the often demoralized remnants of these cultures for guidance. To quote from the New Testament in the gospel of Matthew, “In the coming kingdom, the last shall be first and the first shall be last.” Iconoclastic psychologist Fritz Perls often reminded patients that in a conflict between top dog and underdog, underdog always wins. By this he meant that the part of a person that is least conscious and often denied holds the energy cards. It plays the part of trickster and undermines one’s conscious intentions because the conscious intentions don’t represent the wholeness of being.

Although we are nagged by environmentalists warning us that the world as we know it is on the way out, due to global warming, destruction of natural habitats, etc., we are caught in a political economic merry-go-round and are afraid to jump off. The momentum of the spin is huge. But I would like to suggest that we might not be as totally in control of the fate of this planet as we think we are. Here again our anthropocentrism skews our perception. We are still children of mother earth and citizens of the stars. Our organic origins bear down stronger than either the individual ego or the social ego. Mother Earth and the laws of the universe will prevail even if life and human identity as we’ve come to know it is sacrificed in the healing process.

Is This The Kali Yuga?

The 10 of Swords. Final defeat before the dawn

Dawn is already on its way at the darkest hour and the creation process involves destruction of the previous form before re-construction begins. I’m reminded that we are already in the Kali Yuga, the final age of destruction before the cycle of creation begins again according to the Hindu tradition. And yet I don’t see the world as a continuous circular repetition of stages in the classic Hindu tradition rather I see it as a spiral in continuous developmental expansion just as the universe is expanding.

MANIFESTATION: More Lessons on the Cosmic Waves

In the previous three weeks there were several forest fires in New Mexico and a fire in the White Mountains of Arizona blowing east into New Mexico. This is very hard on PQ’s lungs so we stayed inside with the doors closed most of the time.  And yet my Taos garden was doing well and I thought the wind that has been blowing since mid February and the fires surely would be over soon and I could enjoy my summer gardening.  Every morning that the weather permitted we had coffee on the flagstone patio in my backyard and PQ talked to the birds.  We gave leftover tidbits to the local magpies and watched them enjoy our cafeteria.  The Starlings that live in my bathroom vent stand sentry on the neighbor’s roof and they also talk to PQ.  These birds have an amazing vocabulary and he is trying to learn it. In response to his efforts they flap their wings and cackle. We were trying to make the most of living in Taos this summer even though the altitude and smoke were a problem for PQ.

Nevertheless we were longing to be in Cottonwood Arizona again.  I couldn’t see how this could happen in the immediate future but among my secret fantasies of possible scenarios a house-sit entered my daydreams here and there. We didn’t bring up this topic often because we had resolved to make the best of the current situation but sometimes we updated each other on our fantasies. I began to accept that once a good opportunity like the one we had last year comes and goes its lame to keep trying to make it happen again. But I’m being pulled in two directions.  One day I feel that for myself there is little to keep me in Taos.  The wonderful energetic sparking of 10 years ago has been gradually falling away and Taos feels like a plastic flower that is beginning to fade. But I’m not sure if it is Taos or me. I was stuck in a rut and didn’t know what would change this. Where had the old magic gone?  Nevertheless, there were many good things, too.  Our favorite restaurants, running into old friends and of course my garden. For PQ there was his kids and grand kids the 42-inch TV and Netflix.

Century Plant blooming on Soldier's Pass trail

During this time back in Taos I was also examining the paradoxes of my desires and the results of those desires. It seems that there are areas of life that flow very easily and other areas that dead-end over and over.  What am I doing wrong?  What makes the difference?  Where are my guides now? But perhaps I attend too much to what I think isn’t working.

Then two weeks ago our friend Carol called and asked if we would be interested in house-sitting at her home in Cottonwood. She needed to go back east to help her brother find a better housing arrangement for their mother.  She knew how much we liked being here and she knew her own little garden would expire in the heat if no one took care of it.  In addition our friends who moved to the Taos area from Cottonwood last fall had reached a fork in the road.  Having spent the winter in a dark overcrowded cubbyhole they each needed more personal space for their work and private life. I asked Todd if he would be up to staying in my house while we were gone and I could see right off that it was going to be of mutual benefit.  He is almost the ideal house-sitter.  All of these things fell into place immediately.  I’m once again aware that when wishes and prayers manifest they generally sneak in so organically that they are easy to miss. Of course as is the case with many direct answers to prayers and wishes we ended up here without really grasping how magical it was. Four people had a simultaneous synchronistic manifestation experience and it all seemed simple and normal.

The items that grab our attention aren’t necessarily the most significant events but expose the personal deficits we focus on.  We’ve connected with old friends, took some walks among the red rocks, saw the Century Plants blooming for the first time, ate in our favorite restaurants and enjoyed freedom from smoke and wind.  This is manifestation on a fairly small level but that is a judgement that the greater consciousness, that which theologian Paul Tillich called “the ground of all being” doesn’t make.  After all nature doesn’t judge between the big and the small and nothing is important or unimportant from a cosmic perspective.  I’m learning to be.  I don’t really know anything but its fun to anticipate whatever is around the next turn because each new view changes everything about all the previous views but not in a negative way.  Its much like turning a kaleidoscope, the same elements have infinite combinations.

Manifesting Beyond the Shallows of the New Age:

Last year we dreamed of living in Cottonwood, Arizona but I was afraid of running out of money and we did run out of money. There are two elements at work here. First, I knew that I might not have enough money to sustain us over a long period of time unless two unknowns came through (which they failed to do) but went ahead and made a lease commitment before synching the needed arrangements. I called it acting on faith. Actually I sometimes get lucky and I was hoping the gamble would come through. I’m a natural chance taker, but I was raised in an excessively cautious environment, which is still a chain around my neck. But I keep trying to get loose with plenty of mercurial energy on my side via my four planets in Gemini sooner or later I expect to trick the manifestation police. But an external situation is the best way to become aware of what is going on internally however well hidden.

Since I didn’t have a firm idea of where the necessary funds were coming from I doubted the wisdom of committing to a lease but enthusiasm prevailed and I did it anyway. Now we want to come back this summer and recreate successfully what we left behind. I feel guilty for lack of faith on one hand and lack of responsibility and realism on the other hand. Clearly I’m trying to please two masters with opposing belief systems.

I often attempt to force a new outcome when I feel I have betrayed the gods of opportunity. In this sense I still feel attached to the way things were last year. I have largely forgotten the worries. I’ve also discovered that once a time has passed it can’t be recovered. Nevertheless there is such a thing, as completing something that hasn’t been fulfilled. But it’s important to recognize that one is going forward with a creative process not attempting to relive the past. Sorting this out is crucial to moving forward.

Although manifestation still seems partially a pipe dream I have also experienced it many times. I am actually very good at manifestation and still I doubt this when it comes to the particular areas that are covered by my personal negative conditioning. Do I, on some level, still carry a childhood obligation to remain loyal to my family by not surpassing them? This goes back to the family belief that all the grass must be cut to the same height. I also worry that the Master of the Universe hasn’t forgiven me for not following through on a more enlightened commitment and may not allow me back into the program. And then I worry that all this is just a narcissistic personal fantasy anyway.

But why do I push on when I feel something is spoiled? Perhaps it’s exactly because I believe that I spoiled it and don’t want to accept that possibility. Now I recognize that I’m dealing with several levels of beliefs and they are clashing with each other. But I’m still counting on surprising those mischief making tricksters living in my psychic garbage bin who think their clever cover will keep them concealed. They actually believe they are helping when they conceal this over-the-hill smelly stuff.

Nevertheless, I believe there is a GPS guide to wholeness in every heart and mind. It is a hardwired memory of our true state and we instinctively desire to return to it. This is just as true of humans as of birds migrating with the seasons. Is that wrong? Only if it takes a perverted form reminiscent of having a dead bird stuffed and mounted. A stuffed and mounted yearning can be remembered but it will never substitute for the real thing. The key is to continue within the process rather than trying to recreate the way things were, or more accurately the way we remember them to be. Memory can be a powerful tool of self-deception.

Navigating out of the Maze

Truly my greatest dream is to realize my dreams. I fear that my dreams are out of sync with the timing of this world and are like stillborn babies. This has been my experience but perhaps this experience is the result of some thought, belief, fear, or externally imposed lack of faith. The road out of this dilemma is also the road in reversed. If I track my way through the fear and negativity I should reach the source of the road to a beginning before any preconceived beliefs were in place. Jesus said that one must become as a little child to enter the kingdom of heaven. I believe that to mean being free of constraining, externally imposed beliefs. Faith is perhaps the most important component in manifestation. What do I have faith in? If I don’t believe in my own validity I can’t possibly believe in manifesting my dreams. It has always been easier to work for someone other than myself, and to realize the dreams of someone else and at the same time I’ve never given my heart to someone else’s project. It’s as if I lived my outer life in a cardboard and plastic pretend world. But nevertheless this false world seemed impenetrable as well. I never knew how seriously I should take it so wavered back and forth between slavish obedience and barely touching it. Never did it feel like genuine participation. I assumed this was normal and that other people simply didn’t trouble themselves or else were better informed than I.

My Life as an Illegal Alien

This comes down to my central personal issue. My very being has been in question since before birth. I still look to someone who is licensed to exist on this planet to recognize me as a valid resident. Much of my life has been lived as if I was a temporary visitor on someone else’s planet. I have never truly believed from the heart that I was on the same level as other earthlings. I’ve known since earliest childhood that it didn’t matter how smart, creative, hard working, honest, or well intentioned I was, I didn’t have a visa to be here and that meant that anything I manifested was automatically invalid. I had no rights by the very circumstances of my entrance into this life. A tinge of guilt lay behind everything I had. It always seemed that it would be taken away as soon as some cosmic authority noticed that I wasn’t licensed to participate in creation. I know that my parents loved me but they too didn’t believe that I was licensed to be here. This was especially true of my mother. She also felt less than a full citizen of planet Earth but she shared this with the rest of her tribe, whereas I didn’t feel part of a tribe. I often think of this when someone criticizes a minority group for their lack of focus and responsibility. People must believe that they are connected organically to the society that controls their outer life circumstances or else they become a destructive element toward that society. This is something that domineering groups just don’t get.

Creation, healing, transformation, rebirth, evolution, and manifestation are all related. We are constantly creating and evolving as we progress through life on this dimension. However we have the choice of being either manure in the garden of life, or seeds. Reverse development also has its place. We never limit the process of creation except on the level of our participation. A society, a group, or an individual may chose to serve the goddess Kali the destroyer but the real power is in the fact that the matrix of existence uses all forces for creation. It’s a matter of whether one chooses the path of a conscious co-creator or an unconscious tool to be ground up for fertilizer or mulch. Manifestation is the constant master and teacher.

NIGHT JOURNEY - Sleepless in Taos

Last night I didn’t get to sleep until after 4 AM.  This kind of night is all about a life review and personal database backup.  For this purpose I venture far back into my past and work up to the present.  Along the way many elements of my life are given a new form.  Birth is what you make of it, and rebirth isn’t that uncommon. I’ve come to believe that I absolutely must do this work now and then.  And it really is a review of now and then. While I’m indulging in this ritual I gather up pieces that have fallen off my database of defining experiences unnoticed and forgotten. Here I must change the metaphor to something more elemental like earth itself. They reappear lying along memory lane like the shiny quartz crystals I used to gather from the gravel of my hometown road on the way home from school.

And why would anyone bother to do this?  Outwardly it seems like a waste of time if not a dangerous and potentially painful indulgence. Over and over on this memorial journey I find myself headed into a box canyon with apparently no way out.  Something that I have put all the energy of heart will and muscle into accomplishing comes to an impasse and I feel defeated trapped or doomed.  This brings up the most primal negative issue in my existence.  “My life will never work.” That is my personal key to wisdom. I know this doesn't agree with the New Age trend of positive thinking but negative thinking taken all the way tends to flip to its opposite. Carl Jung recognized this as Enantiodromia wherein the superabundance of any force inevitably produces its opposite. It is equivalent to the principle of equilibrium in the natural world, in that any extreme is opposed by the system in order to restore balance.

My favorite teachers are ruined in a scandal, my boss goes under or runs out of money, I toil away hoping that patience and persistence will prevail and time and again I get to the end of another road and look up at shear impassable cliffs.  When I take a course or a degree program I run out of funds or the school goes under, or both.  Usually I leave with the hope that someday in the future I can pick up where I left off.  But that never happens or, if it does it is never effectively the same.  The saying, “You can never go home,” is paradoxically both true and untrue.

I’ve always identified with the foxes in a foxhunt.  Like them I try every clever trick I can think of to escape to freedom but am literally hounded into submission.  I’ve studied a number of passions that I hoped would lead to a career but each path arrives at a dead end and I have to abandon it.  Then I take up something else with the hope that perhaps this is the one that will finally workout but it never does.

The few things that have worked out in my life have come so late that much of the original potential was lost in the limits of time.  Last night I was again wondering if my entire life would come to nothing but a series of failed beginnings and unfulfilled hopes. I wish I knew which astrologer to attribute this saying to, "Cancer must occasionally indulge in a binge of awful expectations," but having Cancer rising Moon and Jupiter in Cancer I've come to appreciate it. Sometimes instead of trying to curb self pity or negativity its best to plunge in full on and get it out of the way.

To continue; many promising circumstances arise.  When I inherited the money from the sale of the family home I had a chance to quit a deadening job and investigate new possibilities.  But now the money is almost gone, I may have to go back to work before long, and the possibilities in this Town seam bleak.  I’m always attempting to escape from bleakness.Yes! Now I’ve found the keyword: bleak.  The 12th house is astrologically the house of imprisonment and as long as I can remember I’ve felt either imprisoned, or just recently escaped, with the Bloodhounds baying on my trail. And then it’s back to prison.  But what is the true dynamic of this imprisoning experience. I’m always yearning for that which lies beyond the prison.  There was a time in my life when I would visit the natural history museum when I was feeling most imprisoned just to view a particular diorama of the plains just west of my hometown.  I would unleash a fierce passion toward the curled buffalo grass, cottonwood trees reaching toward the open sky, and the great expanse of land rising up and spreading out beyond the warm familiar clay dust. The reward was a nostalgic and almost unbearable longing.

With all my heart I wish to find the source of this deadening groove looping back again and again to the same entrapment.  Truly I feel cursed and tricked, as if my life was never to be and never could become.  In some way my very existence seems to not be approved and authorized by the great authority of the universe and nothing I do can ever make it a real life.

Everything I most value seems to out of reach.  I get a taste here and there and that is what keeps me going.  But full participation is always out of reach. And so I have looped back to the Monkey Bar experience as my first awareness of hopes and abilities that will always be out of reach.

Paradoxically, I feel that I can take on anything I want to take on and learn to do it.  But there will come a time when I hit an impenetrable wall and must return to my old prison.  Is this merely family conditioning, personal karma, or circular thinking?  Whatever it is I haven’t found a way beyond it, although I find bits of insight here and there.  One of the most recent blocks comes in the form of our desire to be in Arizona again.  We experienced good energy, friendship and a feeling of protection there however it was financially a disaster. I lost my recently gained financial freedom, and many items that would be expensive to replace, and yet we both keep our hopes up that we can return soon.  When I let the furniture and the little house go it was with the hope that I would soon be able to return and replace them.  But that possibility seems to be getting further and further away. However, our connections with the people continue to deepen and I'm actually writing this at The Heart of Sedona Coffee shop. Now its out of my control but I'm still here.

What are the skills other people who have the life I want have that I don’t have?  How do they find their way up the Monkey Bars? Remember the Monkey Bars?  I believe that I’m a survivor and able to be quite resourceful but I reach a powerful block about entering this world. Yes, here I am again with the belief that I’ve never been fully born into this world and more significantly what such a failure implies to me.  Somehow I came to feel that I’m not a real being or a real member of the earth population.  Dear God you know that more than any peripheral acquisition or accomplishment I want membership in this world.  I want to know the secret of life on earth.  I want to unlock the prison door and explore what the dimension called life is all about and then I want to be able to share that which has been hidden in a dark corner as long as I can remember.

This may be the key to why I still feel connected to my ex-husband.  He has always been in a similar situation.  It’s as if we were lost and abandoned children together.  To leave him behind forever was to abandon the possibility of healing this broken connection in my own soul.  We shared the same penal Desert Island and I understood his confusion, pain, and frustration and his loneliness as well.  But in reality our goals were incompatible. Thus he tried to pull me back whenever I attempted to move into the world beyond our shared prison.  Originally we made a pact to move into the greater world together but his taboo is even greater than mine and in the end he hung onto our shared alienation fiercely.

This situation seems to become more poignant as time runs out.  A vast network of images flooded my mind last night.  Many things I’d long forgotten came back and I felt sorrow and regret for my forgetfulness. The things that were forgotten were things of meaning and value, things that when forgotten make you less. I felt that I was now living with a simplified cartoon picture of the life I’d once known.  Where is the passion, the depth, the subtle shadings and details?  They fell away bit by bit as if there was too much to carry in my worn out psychic backpack. The container of the conscious mind is neither as large nor as strong as that of the unconscious mind and must be mended frequently lest its few fragile contents slip out through the holes.

But now there is an unfamiliar sun just emerging on the horizon barely illuminating a new unexpected world. Unsolvable life patterns are much like Zen koans. These unsolvable dilemmas are the material with which we work out our individuated form. From our conscious social mind we charge forward with our understandings and successes, all things that define the known world.  But it is with the unsolvable frustrating and unmanageable themes that our souls are formed. The known world always first emerges from the seemingly unsuccessful unknown.

ON BEING A WHITE DEER: TO BE, OR TO BE LESS?

Is it OK to be out of the ordinary? But more to the point how safe is it? That is always the central and core question of my life from which all else radiates. I yearn to stream out into the world in the fullness of totality yet feel obligated to honor something too vague to grasp but that nevertheless reigns me back from moving full out into life. There are always limiting adaptations such as being a bit overweight, but not actually obese or dressing in a generic style but not too generic. Attracting too much attention either positive or negative still seems dangerous. I want to express my unique view of life but I fear drawing attention to myself. Paradoxically being too obviously shy of attention is also something to monitor. What is the problem with being noticed or even acknowledged? There is a mysterious apprehension involved. Actually it’s a type of agoraphobia. A deer in the forest is safest if its color blends in with tree trunks and earth as well as other deer and to come out of the forest only at night when visibility is lowest. A white deer, for instance, is at risk. Its stand out coloring makes it a target for predators.

Camille Flammarion
"A missionary of the Middle Ages
tells that he had found the point
where the sky and the Earth touch..."

The sense of never being fully born into this world certainly fits with the need to be almost unnoticeable. These issues are powerful remnants of the past. I used to complain that my family believed in cutting all the grass to the same height. Nobody was supposed to stand out and in fact it was a cardinal transgression to call attention to oneself in any way. Another reason to avoid attention is that  grass that can’t be seen can’t be cut. Yet another function of this rule is keeping harmony in the family. To call attention to oneself was considered inconsiderate if not cruel to someone else who might suffer from being pushed into the shadows. This was a continuous background concern. All actions and even thoughts that could put one ahead of any other person in accomplishment, talent, wealth or looks was to be avoided. To do otherwise was to be disloyal. But in hindsight I believe that much of the danger involved drawing unwanted attention to the family itself. And this is an exhausting responsibility. Much internal envy was generated. Anyone who didn’t fit in generated fear in family members and might encourage unfulfilled longings to do the same.

Predictably, I’ve always been drawn to people who were quite the opposite. My honey with his painted pants and boots, traditional native hair tie and big earring certainly stands out. Plus he has a big vibrant personality. My first husband stood out by being involved in all things esoteric, an attraction to unusual people and by being extremely bipolar. My mother’s fear of standing out from the crowd came as a reaction to the feeling like an alien. From our family’s perspective being alien was the worst social disaster possible. Of course everyone wants to belong but somehow belonging required that we not be unique individuals. We lived in a very dangerous world. Astrologically, speaking there is evidence in my birth chart for something hidden very deeply in my ancestry. I have four planets in the 12th house, the house of restrictions and secrets. The 12th house is where the skeletons in the closet are usually found. Included in the 12th house lineup are Mercury, Sun, Moon and Jupiter. To add some oomph to this situation as a Gemini Sun sign Mercury is my ruling planet and the Moon/Jupiter conjunction rising in Cancer is also a powered up situation. The Moon is ruler of Cancer and Jupiter is exalted in Cancer (This is old astrology terminology that still has a medieval tint).

I was just noticing how I always stop short of dressing in a real eye-catching manner, decorating with a unique touch or doing anything OUTSTANDING. That is the taboo word, “OUTSTANDING.” Being original is also a way to be outstanding. Of course I’ve fought all of my life to express that which is both outstanding and original. Both come naturally but then I tone them down to avoid attracting too much attention. It never occurred to me that I had a right to be here on this planet as much as anyone else. A therapist once told me that I was like a train conductor that shoveled in more fuel and put on the breaks at the same time.

Thus living in the shadows has two advantages despite the many disadvantages. First one can avoid detection and enjoy quite a bit of freedom to explore the taboo, and second it makes one harmless to other people because no one really knows you and they can project whatever they want onto your blank screen.


I’m aware that it is my next and most powerful lesson to genuinely, from the heart, believe that I have the same right to be as anyone else. It is a concept that still feels heretical. I know I have unique talents and strong character traits but I still have the feeling that coming from me it is inappropriate. I don’t feel genuinely born into this world yet. I have much work to do on rebirth! I remember about 20 years ago when Rebirthing was a trendy therapeutic modality. I suspect it died along with many New Age modalities but there was indeed a need for it even if the technique was somewhat naïve.

I’m taking more notice of the many ways I avoid calling too much attention to myself. “Too much,” is the operative word. One should look good, be competent, be hardworking, pay one’s bills and be responsible but not be too talented, too good looking or make more money than one needs to survive.

Recently I’ve come to the realization that my problems with work and money are the result of this foundational belief that it is dangerous to stand out from the crowd. When standing in a queue one should not be either in front or in the rear but somewhere toward the end of the middle. This is a difficult role to play in a world that encourages competitiveness and the drive to reach the top of the social ladder.

This unconscious belief explains the mystery of why I’ve pursued but never been able to work in an environment that I would thrive in or make enough money to go beyond basic survival. I fear buying beautiful things for the house, or myself because it’s a dangerous indulgence that I’ll be punished for. Of course I often buy things I want anyway but it is like an act of rebellion and I feel that it will have consequences. It’s a rush of freedom to go on a spending spree. It feels wonderful. I’m like an escaped dog in a fast trot pulling its broken chain through the neighborhood, refusing to think about the consequences at the end of its spree. Even so I don’t go on truly extravagant sprees. That would be way too dangerous.

I strongly believe that anything that ancestors have not finished or resolved is the living generation’s inheritance. Whether or not one believes in karma doesn’t matter. The ancestors rule the unconscious. Sometimes the ancestors go so far back that they are not even included in the story we are told. This applies to cultures, tribes and nationalities as well as families.

I will probably never know just who my ancestors were. Too much was hidden and misrepresented. I know that my mother’s father was very sensitive about race. My grandfather gave us an Irish name but I suspect this was only the storefront. The Irish part is undeniable, but I’m pretty sure there was more to the story. He had a great sensitivity about color and culture. He didn’t like my mother to spend too much time in the sun because she tanned very dark and with her straight dark hair looked like a Mexican or Indian child. He also became upset with me, when in my early teens I developed a fascination with Mexican and Navajo style dresses. I was always drawn to everything coming from parts of the world our family was supposed to reject. My first school friend was Mexican and Catholic and my parents didn’t approve. Their disapproval didn’t faze me. I always secretly did what I wanted but didn’t argue. Avoiding attention was also a way of having what I wanted in spite of taboos. This wasn’t about rebellion, however. It just had a right feeling and I’ve always done what felt right. My grandmother, on the other hand, didn’t even want to be Irish. She insisted that her ancestors were Scottish and English. However, when I looked on the map for the European town they were reputed to be from, it was in Ireland.

I have always suspected that My grandfather Connerly’s family may have once moved from the Appalachians to southern Illinois before emerging in Northwestern Nebraska where he met my Grandmother. He played the fiddle and guitar and had a wide repertoire of old country music. The light bulb came on a few years ago while watching a PBS program on Appalachia’s music. I instantly recognized some of the songs. It is also likely that they also had some native ancestors.

On my father’s side the official family stance is that we are purely whitebread people of the working class. We are Protestant, average in every way with European ancestor’s and nothing particularly interesting in our background. Our family image was painted with deliberation using the blandest palate. My folks always bought practical and plain vehicles and lived a conservative, stable life in a house that my father built himself room by room over many years. But things keep popping out of cracks in the closet door. I especially remember an excursion we made to Divide, Colorado. I was a teenager at the time and I loved to visit graveyards in Old Mountain towns. The stories that are buried with the dead continue to fascinate. On this particular visit I came across two gravestones side by side bearing our family name. One was of an infant and the other a young child. Since our family name is not that common I called my parents over to have a look. My father, always understated, quietly approached. Then he stated, “this must be what my cousin was telling us about.” And this is how I learned that these graves were the purpose of our trip to this lonely old graveyard high in the Colorado Rockies. As it turned out my father’s father had a previous family held secret from my father, his mother and his siblings. A cousin had revealed the story to my father’s oldest brother breaking the promise to never tell the family about these graves until my grandmother was gone. Since she was approaching 98 years this cousin feared her children might die before knowing their father had a previous family.

Although few of us know the story of ancestors several generations behind us, especially in America, it is still imbedded in our psyche. The story comes out cryptically in our everyday life and the struggles we encounter. The study of Anthropology and Paleontology has held fascination since early childhood. I don’t believe I really have the patience to meticulously uncover and clean bones and artifacts from the past, but the enchantment of what is hidden in surviving fragments of ancestors and their tools has a strong pull. We are the products of the past and the past is fulfilled in us or dead-ended in us. We have a very real control over the past to the degree we are aware of the past within us. In fact there is no real past, present and future. Does our language not deceive us? Time is another system for organizing experience. In our culture we tend to visualize time in a linear way. But it can also be experienced in vertical layers as well.

The destructive power of apparently harmless family secrets is awesome. However there is a creative paradox hidden within them as well. Healing is an act of creation and creation is an evolutionary process. Sometimes psychic surgery is necessary but drastic procedures may be a sign of failure to transform an apparent disaster into an act of creation. The separation of dimensions and realities may only be perceptual after all. We all exist in a universe that we barely know. The fractal patterning within realities both physical and beyond physical are potential paths leading both forward and backward in time and space and one can catch the road to creation at any point in these intricate unfolding patterns. My ancestors in their attempts and mistakes dropped me off in a strange place but to paraphrase a common saying all roads lead to home.

I don’t know just what my ancestors feared. Perhaps they carried a racial or cultural association that it was expedient to hide in the name of survival. I’m sure they meant well and had no idea of how it would play out for us all down the road of time. Things change and what was once a cause for shame can become something to be proud of. But either way these social obstacles are potential soul fertilizers to a gardener of the soul.

FOLLOW YOUR HEARTBREAK

---our decision to keep on a path or to leave it must be free of fear and ambition. I caution you: look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself and yourself alone this one question. Does this path have a heart? All paths are the same. They lead nowhere. They are paths going through the brush or into the brush or under the brush of the Universe. The only question is: Does this path have a heart? If it does, then it is a good path. If it doesn’t, then it is of no use.---Don Juan

Many years ago I read this quote of Don Juan by Carlos Castaneda. It changed my life focus. I had been seeking to heal my soul by finding meaning and these words rang true. It is the heart and only the heart that guides us to meaning and even creates meaning. It is of significance that the ancients saw the heart as the center of life as the Sun is center of our universe. It is a guide to something that transcends our ego’s shallow knowledge and short lifetime.

Whatever breaks our heart must be important. It is a sign that the essence of our being has been violated. In our society the heart chakra is the weak spot with
in the human energy body. Although everything else circles around our heart just as the earth circles around the sun for many of us its light is very dim.

Sometimes pain is the only sign of life. A broken heart indicates that we are alive but in a negative way. Even worse than a broken heart is the lack of one. Life should break our heart. It is full of cruel experiences and is out of balance. To grieve the loss of someone or something is an indication that you are able to love and that in fact your heart is still working. Far more dangerous is a heart that can’t be broken because it is numbed or dead.

I’ve spent a lifetime trying to learn to follow my heart. Early conditioning to oppose my heart was pervasive and entangling it choked the life force like the roots of an invasive weed. It is very hard to get rid of. I’ve often wondered why I was born in a time, place and family that was so opposed to following one’s heart. Feelings were to be opposed, desires were to be resisted and normal needs were evil because this world was considered a corrupt and evil place. Being holy was judged on a basis of what one wasn’t rather than what one was. Nowadays the response is often the opposite. Desire and indulgence are frantically stimulated to exaggeration but this too is an attempt to compensate for the lack of genuine heart.

Easter is coming again. Nowadays few people think of anything beyond a new spring outfit, colored eggs and roast lamb when it comes to Easter. Both the pagan matrix and the Christian overlay are hidden behind the bright colors and instinctive need to consume and incorporate the coming of spring. Yes, it has become primarily another retail extravaganza but perhaps that is because modern people don’t know how else to respond to almost anything. Spending money is another way of expressing the hunger for an absent heart connection with the world that supports us.

It is as important to mend the communal heart just as it is to revivify the individual heart. So many peripheral signs of malady are merely symptoms of a problem at the center. It has been said that conscious development of the heart chakra represents the next phase of human evolution. Many of our human problems clearly show a lack of heart. There is little awareness of relatedness to all that is and the shared fate of all beings on this planet. We cannot feel connection to fellow earthlings if we cannot feel connected to our own essence, our own core value that dwells at the heart.

OPPOSITION / REFLECTING ON THE FULL MOON

Life/death, black/white, good/evil/, male/female, happy/sad, wet/dry, hot/cold, friend/enemy are some of the primal oppositions that we take for granted as basic components of existence. It would seem that everything we experience has an opposition as its basis of definition. Astrologically, opposition is the second most powerful aspect between two planets and indicates a direct confrontation between two different cosmic processes.

The Sun/Moon opposition is called a full moon and it represents the culmination of a cycle that is so familiar to we Earth dwellers that we can barely imagine life without it. Astrologically the opposition is considered the most basic encounter with another cosmic energy and often plays big in relationships both good and bad. Opposition brings dynamism and it would seem that it lies behind all other experiences.

Opposition is also the beginning of consciousness and spawns reaction and creation. It is the matrix behind love and war.

It is easier to conceive of opposition than conjunction which is two energies combining and attempting to resolve their differences. There is unconscious familiarity in a conjunction but opposition may dwell within the conjunction if the nature of the participants happens to be opposite, but it is a less stimulating environment than opposition. Opposition is the very first step in experiencing existence other than our own and in the process reveals our own. Often the first experience of this duality is to be confronted with hostility or limitations on our own playing field. In other words, opposition is an experience of the other and it is sometimes beautiful and sometimes dangerous. If we examine objectively it is often both.

Today’s full Moon involves the very archetypes of opposition. The God of war confronts the Goddess of love in this Aries Sun, Libra Moon opposition. Creation itself is based on the opposites represented on every level by Mars (Aries) and Venus.

Opposites define each other. It seems that we would not be aware of anything if there were not an opposite to give it distinction and definition. And then after the opposition comes the realization that dualities always come from one and return
to their one source.

THE ZEN OF GARDENING

Today a strong wind blows east while above the horizon broiling multi-shaded clouds meet and mingle with dry dust made air-born by the wind. Even though I don't like wind I'll admit the effect is mystical. A high desert version of a J.M.W. Turner landscape. We are headed down the canyon to meet some friends for lunch in Santa Fe. For some reason I always fall into reflectiveness on this stretch along the Rio Grande. Yesterday was beautiful, quiet, fresh, warm with just a tinge of sharpness. Perfect for gardening. Today its cold again and I'm just recalling gardening and how it brings out my elemental self. I'm not a fanatic, its just something I do well and enjoy. Enjoy isn't truly an adequate word. Gardening is healing, empowering and puts me into my most balanced state.

I have Venus at 15 degrees Taurus. It is the highest planet in my chart with no significant aspects. In the language of astrology this means it is in a strong position and not seriously altered by relationship to other planets. I regard this as a saving grace in an otherwise challenging layout. The Taurus/Venus qualities of sensuality, earthiness, stability, stuborness and love of beauty often help to balance and heal even when everything else is up in the air, (three planets and the Sun in Gemini, an air sign).

My style of gardening is more an interactive dialogue than a technique. I see in my mind what mood and environment I would like to create but the plants have their own reality. I love the plants as if they were kittens or children. I check in with them often to see how they are doing and if they need food, water, help or a better location. Although I occasionally talk to them the real communication is emotional. I treat them with respect and admire every step of their development. If one of them decides to move to a different part of the garden, I honor its choice of location. After all the plant knows better than I do what will make it thrive. I've discovered that even though my plants are not all where I envisioned they would look best or contribute to the ambiance I was after they work even better where they choose to be.

I pull weeds without concern and otherwise trust that my Buffalo Grass and Blue Grama will gradually takeover the barren spaces. This garden is a high-plains, semi-arid plant community. There are surprises also. Several plants just showed up. I have no idea where they came from. I think they just liked it here. The Shasta Daisy is one such plant, others are wild raspberry, Holly Hock and Sweet Peas. Cosmus love the south wall. I've discovered that several plants that grew in Mom's garden and are part of my childhood memory grow very well here. I love a great variety of color and I mix vegetables and fruit with flowers and ornamental grasses. I love to create stone ridges, dips and hills to make their life more interesting.

There is also a magical aspect to working with plants. Three years ago I decided to plant a small cluster of Aspen trees. Since my budget was limited I started with one tree. The next year I bought it a companion but something strange happened. First I'll let you know that I've always had a special relationship with Cottonwood trees. They were part of the environment of my best childhood memories but so were other plants. With Cottonwoods there was something mystical and ancient that I can't explain. There was a time in my life when I truly believed that I couldn't possibly live in a place where they didn't grow. I considered planting a Cottonwood but I reasoned that they grew too large for my small garden.

I purchased the next little Aspen and told the nursery that I wanted them to hold it until I came back with my friend who had a truck. We came back in the afternoon and picked up a tree but not the same tree. My friend decided to choose one that seemed hardier. I planted it and it thrived. In fact it thrived a great deal. The next year it still had the tag from the nursery around it and it was getting too tight. I decided to cut the tag off but before I did so I wanted to record the species name. To shorten this story I will say what you've probably already guessed. It wasn't an Aspen at all but a Cottonwood. My friend talked of moving it to another area but I decided to leave it where it was, near its cousin and they will just have to be an odd couple. I knew that it had to trick me to get here because it is my spirit tree.

There is something about being in the garden around my house that connects me with an entirely different kind of power. It's as if a calm wisdom and knowing flow up from the earth and down from the sky and meet in the place I am working or just being. I love to hike but that is a different kind of connection with the earth. Perhaps gardening is different because I'm placing myself among the growing things as if they were my personal family and I belong among them.

When I moved to this house I still had my cats, Joe and Missy. They both came to the end of their lives at a good old age here. While they were with me, they were often a part of my gardening experience. Not that they openly participated, it was just their presence that contributed to my pleasure. Somehow, I taught them not to venture far from the house. I'm not going to claim that I'm a cat whisperer but there was something about the way we were together outside that seemed to affect them in the same way as a mother cougar when she tells her kittens to stay near the den.

I've been working on another piece but today I realized it is the simplicity of being outside in the garden in the spring that is my personal way to be in balance.

HIDDEN CROSSROADS IN THE DARK FOREST OF THE SOUL

Unable to sleep last night I lay awake but with a different awakeness than in daytime.  My mind was moving into the deeper area where conscious and unconscious, personal and non-personal qualities meet.  The insight that I remember is about an approach to sickness that sees the dis-ease not as an enemy but as an uncompromising ally, a presence to relate to and dialogue with, a source of both destruction and creative power.

Usually disease or injury incurs the desire to fight as if an intruder seeking to destroy us was an invader.  But what if sometimes that invader comes to introduce a better way of being that we have not been able to see or include in our present reality do to the smallness of our vision.

Sacrifice is part of such an invasion.  Sometimes death is the outcome, sometimes a larger life and when it fails a smaller life.  But of course life and death are defined by the small mind that comes encased with our body.  There is a larger mind that transcends both the body and the mind it encloses.  We prune fruit trees, and thin garden vegetables to get a better crop and in a sense our identity also needs to be pruned now and then.  Some platforms work as they are but not well enough to build on.

I think of my partner and I who are living with and learning from his pulmonary fibrosis.  We sometimes fall back into the mode of attempting to conquer this disease.  To conquer implies an enemy. We have tried a number of herbal and homeopathic remedies.  Some delay the progress of the disease, but none have cured.  The medical world considers this condition incurable and the only treatment a lung transplant.  I’ve watched him waver back and forth with this judgment for two years.  Sometimes he is very positive about preparing for such an operation and at other times the idea of benefiting from another’s death as well as hosting a foreign organ stops him. But this is an awareness of other people that he would not have reached a few years ago.

The idea of archetypes comes from Plato’s teaching that the manifest world is a reflection of an invisible form that directs the outcome of the physical temporal form. This is exactly backward of the current scientific teaching of creation but I can imagine this concept in everyday life.  In fact on the individual level it is an obvious fact called genetics.  Carl Jung derived his idea of archetypes from Plato’s principle but he did so after observing these invisible forms in

dreams, mythology, history and everyday human behavior. The principle of Thoth and Egyptian magic that eventually inspired alchemy, “as above, so below,” and the belief that the process was reversible, “as below, so above” is something we unconsciously use whether or not we believe. Somehow I can imagine a back and forth dialogue between form and cause.
Thoth also corresponds to the Greek Hermes, God of the crossroads.

I’ve been noticing how closely thought connects with physical events. If I get the urge to water the garden, it frequently rains the next day. If I think of someone I haven’t heard from for awhile, they usually call or I meet them at the grocery store.  The saying “energy flows, where attention goes” can also be turned around to be “attention goes where energy flows in the non-physical world.” Who can say which comes first, the thought or the potential event that is already on its way.  I do believe there is a circular connection, or perhaps it’s the invisible side of fractal geometry.

My partner’s lung disease has accompanied an awesome change in life direction and stance toward others.  He has always been talented and charismatic.  About six years ago his attitudes began to shift from an arrogant self-consciousness and the belief that he was entitled to whatever he could get in life and from others to the beginning of an awareness of the feelings of others.  In his old personality there were times when I thought he might be a sociopath.  But something I can’t easily define kept me from making that judgment.  There was quite another reality hiding behind this façade.  He waffled back and forth for some time but it was obvious that his old skin was worn out and beginning to flake off.  Yes, that image sounds reptilian and I used to notice a kind of reptilian coldness in his eyes at times. Now there is a warm blooded softness in his eyes. I won’t say that the lung disease caused a change in heart but it definitely accompanied it.  The change was already in process but the lung disease was also secretly working in the background too subtle at first to make its presence known. The lungs are in the region of the heart chakra and it is indeed his heart that is gradually taking its natural central place in his life.  All the same, as the power of the heart unfolds so does the pain that originally caused it to be hidden protectively.  It takes courage, another characteristic of the heart to face that side of the process.  To feel is to experience one’s vulnerability and temporality.  Not to feel is to be less than alive.  The heart chakra corresponds to the Sun in traditional astrology and our universe revolves around the Sun. Without the heart life stops. without the heart chakra the soul dies.

TSUNAMI-PERSPECTIVE

I’ve been watching film clips of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011.  From high in the air it’s like watching a rainstorm runoff overcome an anthill.  We are so influenced by perspective that physical distance equates to emotional distance.  But then the reality of those objects floating inland begins to register in the mind.  They are ships, warehouses, large transport trucks, houses and the broken beams of great buildings floating like sticks over airports, residences and fields of growing crops.  I watch this safely from the other side of the world.  But we are all connected.  I’m watching this disaster unfold on YouTube with my Toshiba laptop.  I drive a Japanese car and the big screen Sony TV is an important part of our household.  Japan is actually very near.  The global village is a reality that most of us haven’t yet got our heads around.

We can squash a bug easily because it is so small and thus emotionally distant. We are calibrated emotionally relative to physical size.  Are we like insects when viewed from 1,000 feet in the air?  On the other side of this ball in space, very, very tiny on the cosmic scale, huge traumatic changes have overcome many of our fellow humans and the many creatures that share their island.  We humans create a world within our larger world that seems so real and solid that we are shocked when it is destroyed in the blink of an eye. I’m reflecting on what it will feel like when the coast of California is suddenly obliterated.  Everyone knows this is on Mother Earth’s schedule but because we don’t know the date we can live in slightly edgy denial until it actually occurs.

Science and history tell us that our planet is in constant change but our small life span deceives us emotionally.  Most of us can remember a time as children when our world seemed stable.  I was born during World War II.  The world was involved in a cataclysm even though one instigated by humans.  But are we not part of the natural world also?  Perhaps some of our problems are brought about by the perception of ourselves as outside of the natural world observing it from a deceptively safe place.  It is a form of denial. Our cataclysms ripple out much like a tsunami to envelop the planet in ways we may not comprehend during the obvious events.  My family was in turmoil at this time.  Of course I didn’t know it then.  Life was just so and I had nothing to compare it with.

My father worked on a naval shipyard repairing ships wounded by the Japanese.  My mother had one brother in the army and another in the navy.  We were lucky because they returned physically unharmed but I know now that there were wounds that didn’t show.  I can see in hindsight that our family never lost the imprint of the war.  I can only imagine how it affected those who were literally in the line of fire. Even though I was a toddler I remember my nightmares from this time.  I saw earthquakes with cracks opening up to swallow those who were standing nearby.  Buildings and cars were aflame and people were running, screaming and collapsing in fear. We lived near San Francisco at the time and yet no one had mentioned the San Andreas Fault or even the history of earthquakes in the area.  The war consumed everyone’s attention. I had visions and fears in the daytime as well.  I was afraid to go outside sometimes because I believed a huge bird would come and snatch me.  At other times I feared railroad tracks and trains because I thought they would run off their tracks and come rampaging into homes and shops. A menacing animal, perhaps a bear, would come into my room at night. I could see its dark outline moving around the room. No one listened to these fears, they had too many “real” problems to deal with, but in retrospect I can see that my child mind processed the world events on another track.

How can it be that our viewpoint is so narcissistic and the reality so global and increasingly cosmic.  Human evolution lags far behind the reality we exist within.  We see this world through our human eyes and measure it by our physical size and life span.  Japan will recover, though with lingering scars, because the creatures of this planet are also remarkably resilient.  Ultimately we change to fit the environment we occupy but it hasn’t yet penetrated us that we are co-creators of the world we live in, and this life extends far beyond the physical body and a specific location.  Events beyond our control are great and terrible teachers.

TIME PASSES, BUT DOES LIFE GO WITH IT?

Life is streaming by. I look forward to each day because it is closer to something I’m waiting for. Not that I know what it is I'm waiting for. In the meantime life is exiting the hourglass a few grains each day. Why am I at a loss for what to do with this moment? More to the point, what do I not like about this moment?

I’m old enough to think about my death. How will it come? Will I die of sickness or accident? Will it be sudden or drawn out? Will my partner die before me? I would prefer to go first, but this is probably a purely selfish desire. About seven years ago the consciousness that accompanies the final lap on this journey entered my personal world. After 55, the reality of time begins breaking through the defenses of youth. When my grandparents died I was shocked out of the youthful assumption that nothing really changes.

When my father died it changed my identity in relationship to time and family, and when my mother passed I realized the dangers wrought by development and time that are out of sync. She was still very young inside. Her soul was a pink rose not fully opened, and had chosen the best way to leave an old body before it didn’t serve her anymore. It caught us by surprise. It haunts me in a way that my father’s death did not. His personality and his body matched in age, and he needed a new start on both. But mom had just begun to find her way out into the sunlight from a cramped space and then run into the time limits imposed by the physical world.

I was always aware that I would not die young. But I was driven by a fierce desire to make the best of my time on earth, and was very aware that I had become lost in a flood pool somewhere and after the storm the main river sloshed by without me. Again and again I have reviewed my life trying to find the place in time where I was caught. But the larger me is aware that this was not just an accident and that that place will never be found. The circumstances of life may or may not be accidental but the individual purpose is up to each of us to sort out. The Trickster shows us where we are fools but also how little it matters because the meaning of life doesn’t show itself in merely external results. There are things to experience and learn in a flood pool as well as in a river.

Expectations and assumptions are the cause of impatience. Why assume that there is more to life on the big river, and then again is there even a river? Life expectations so easily dissolve when scrutinized. This may be the Trickster’s main accomplishment. By sending us on the proverbial “wild goose chase,” we gradually learn that chasing is useless. We already have whatever we need and time is a canvas not a clock. You will paint your portrait whether or not you intend to do so.

MAYBE AND MAYBE NOT

It’s winter gray outside today.  February has always seemed like I-40 between Gallup and Flagstaff, an endless flat expanse of dirty blue and tan.  Even the chemtrails are a welcome design break.  I’m waiting but I don’t know what I’m waiting for. I haven’t successfully fixed anything in my life of late.  Nothing in my world is allowing itself to be fixed. Each time I make an attempt to cut back on expenses or save money something unexpected comes up to undo my efforts.  Last week I broke the TV when two cables collided while I was trying to hook the laptop up to download movies.  I have an extended warranty, thankfully but as usual my attempt to save on DVD rentals turned into an extra expense. For awhile PQ will have to watch his movies on a little computer monitor.

 I’m beginning to believe the message from the universe is to quit trying to fix things.  Or perhaps I’m trying for the wrong reasons even though my motivation was a desire to be realistic. I'm beginning to doubt that realism works for me. Usually I do well with electronics but lately even mechanical and electronic things I've tried to fix turn out worse than they were and I have to struggle just to get back to the situation I started with. It’s a slow accent up a muddy slope, and then a slide back to the beginning. I’m attempting to take control of my life and find my way back to the main trail, but I’m lost. I suspect that there is something out of my normal range of consciousness that is trying to grab my attention with these tricks but my ego is struggling to set things right while making a bigger mess out of everything it takes on. 

So here I am broken down on a boring expanse of road between a start and a destination. However this analogy falters because the location of the destination is unknown. Now I’m remembering the Maybe story:

 “There once were two old farmers who had a fence between their property.  Every morning farmer A would meet farmer B at the fence and they would exchange news and gossip, as neighbors do.  One day farmer B’s best horse jumped the fence and ran away in pursuit of a band of wild horses. Upon hearing the news, farmer A came to visit. “Such bad luck,” he said sympathetically. “Maybe,” farmer B replied. The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three wild horses. “How wonderful,” the neighbor exclaimed, now you have four horses and they look young and strong.  “Maybe,” replied the old man. The following day, his son decided to train one of the untamed horses, was thrown off, and broke his leg.  Knowing that farmer B was getting old and needed his son’s help, the neighbor came to offer his sympathy on this misfortune. “I’m so sorry those wild horses were bad luck after all”, he exclaimed. “Maybe,” answered farmer B.  Very soon after this misfortune, two military officials came to the village looking for young men to draft into the army. Seeing that the old farmer’s son’s leg was broken, they passed him by. Farmer A congratulated farmer B on how well things had turned out after all. “Your son would be drafted and you’d never have any help on your farm if his leg had not been broken,” said farmer A.  “Maybe,” said farmer B. An so the story continues…

This story has been attributed to Sufis, Taoists and sometimes Zen Buddhists but the vagueness of its origins fit its gist quite well. Every time I find life seemingly stuck or wonderful I remember this story.

Some people see this in a fatalistic way but each unpredictable event has both a positive and negative side. Who is to say which is the most important in our life path.  It happens on a universal level as well.  With all the horrible things people have inflicted on each other and their fellow creatures and the disasters that nature surprises us with there are both positive and negative effects.  I’m not downplaying the suffering and destruction that all creatures experience in their journey through time, but it is not the only side to any reality. Since we experience our life sequentially through time rather than as a whole we can only take it as it comes to us. It’s important not to make an absolute judgment on individual events until the whole story is told, and the secret is, the whole story is never told.

SEDONA RENDEZVOUS

Last week we went to Sedona, Arizona to meet up with old friends from England, David Eastoe and his partner lovely Helen. So many years have passed since we last saw Dave. Much has changed for all of us and yet it seemed so easy and natural as if it had been only a few days. He wasn't yet with Helen when we had last seen Dave but she seems such a natural fit for him that it was as if we already knew her.

Yukine, PQ, Me, David, and Helen

Pba-Quen-nee-e and I have been wanting to go to England again to re-charge the energy connection with Glastonbury. Since Standing Deer has difficulty traveling long distances with his oxygen in tow and our finances don't permit us a trip at this time it was an answer to an intuitive hunch that Dave and Helen should suddenly appear to do a workshop in Sedona which has become our second home.

It was a lovely visit but it has pushed me into another crisis about where I should be. We had to let our house in the Sedona area go last year because we couldn't afford to keep it but the energetic connection remains, and there is no doubt that Standing Deer's health would benefit if we could be there.

On our visit this time we were led to a special place of power by the lady who sponsored Dave and Helen's workshop. One of those confirming magic events occurred on this visit that reminded me that something like this happens virtually every time we go walking in the Sedona area. I won't speak of the event itself because it prefers to be kept as a private event at this time, but it was a confirmation of the connection with these sacred places.

When we returned to Taos I fell into a gray, distant remoteness that was very uncomfortable. It was as if I was disconnected from everything, floating on a dingy charcoal cloud. The next night I had a very bad dream of being held captive by a situation of mistaken identity in a very ugly, broken down, gloomy house in an unknown city by people I could not connect with nor did I want to. These people were trying to draft me into their profession. In fact they thought I was there intentionally. I desperately searched for but could not find my car keys to leave and then discovered that I didn't remember where my car was either. I awoke in a state of despair.

It occurred to me that I should smudge the house and myself with sage. Perhaps I picked up something negative on the trip. But the trip was fine in most ways. However, I felt a bit of a dejavu  just before leaving for Sedona.  I picked up a severe cold. The last time I'd had a cold like that had been in Glastonbury 13 years earlier. The circumstances were strangely similar. For some reason I was reliving certain events but failed to understand the connection. The cold had been associated with some very difficult events in my life those many years ago, events that felt very distant and no longer a problem. However, during that episode David Eastoe had given me some help with his plant essences that was very effective and now he was giving a workshop in Sedona about the use of plant essences.

The disturbing dream indicated that there was danger of becoming accidentally lost in a decaying situation. It is  necessary to move to another level but old fears arise of falling victim to another compromised trap. Of course I journalized this dream which removed some of the power from the spell it cast. Now I recognize that this is my way of preparing for the next major life hurdle. Housecleaning is the beginning of this process and whenever this comes up in my life I notice that there is a lot of dirt and broken stuff in the dark corners.

A right next step will require something beyond my current psychic tool box, which means it isn't clear on my psychic GPS. I sense that my energy has shifted ahead of my consciousness but I do recognize that I'm definitely responding to a shift in energy.  I sense that Taos is becoming my past. It is still home but I don't think my soul work is here at the present.  I'm following an energy wave to Arizona right now, but I can't justify it practically. Standing Deer would feel much better at a lower elevation but living in Cottonwood last year was a financial stretch that we can't manage this year. I keep hoping that some resolution will present itself, but I also sense that something I haven't imagined or fantasized may emerge at the end of this drabness.

Perhaps its my Moon rising in Cancer that requires that I have big emotional swings that herald changes in direction and growth. It seems that instead of  seeing the future I have to feel my way through each process.
Usually I find myself following a new interest with no idea why it suddenly presented itself.  Knowledge always comes much later.

PASSION BEING BORN

I’ve been thinking about the power of emotion and its most intense expression, passion. Without passion there is no vitality and creativity, only circles caught in circles that never move out of two dimensions into the three dimensional world of life or beyond. Creative life moves in spirals rather than in circles.  Passion is emotion focused on something we find central to our very being.

Creative Burst

I feel that my own passion is returning.  After a long winter, the ice is breaking and droplets are trickling into promising streams. I didn’t realize how much of the water of life I’d lost over the decades.  Such a long time spent just getting by while waiting for a chance to live the life placed piece by piece on a shelf for a better time.  It was a lesson in how one can lose one’s soul bit by bit.

In a sense, birth is a lifelong process carrying us by stages to each new dimension of life.  At any point along the way we can be still born or thrown onto an ice patch. I once saw a cartoon about a hatchling proud of itself for making it alive out of its eggshell, but it hadn’t yet noticed that this shell was enclosed within a shell that was enclosed within another shell ad infinitum.

When I was younger I was passionate about everything. However my family was a bit intimidated by my intensity.  With the help of Church and School they put up a high dense wall. After colliding with this wall again and again I gradually I lost hope and almost lost memory of the passion for life.  More accurately I hid it.  I loved to dance I love to draw and paint and I loved horses and wilderness but these passions were frowned on in our fundamentalist family.  I could only watch longingly while admiring others dancing beautifully or taking art lessons.  Later I took ballet lessons and learned everything I could about dance.  But I was too old by then to fulfill my dream. Now I see that the enemy was fear of passion and thus fear of life. The most dangerous enemies always masquerade as friends.

The frustration of my early years was that my people had lost their passion for life. Although they loved me they no longer had enough life force left beyond everyday tasks to involve themselves in my interests or take my dreams and talents seriously.  Their world was two-dimensional. They wanted me to fit in, be responsible but not dangerously responsive.   They were OK with just getting by.  Even my low grades in school were virtually ignored.  I know now that they expected that I would become honest, humble, and expect very little from life.  I would graduate from High School marry a good Christian man and work as a housekeeper or receptionist. I was passionately, intensely interested in many things and my school was in a low-income neighborhood.  I realized much later that the teachers in my school were culled from better schools and had lost their passion or never found it. Most of them merely went through the motions while waiting for retirement or a husband to rescue them.

People are motivated by emotion not reason.  Even reasonable arguments are designed to promote emotional attachments although sometimes the emotion is hatred or fear.  Without passion nothing happens.  Without passion everything that seems to happen is just a smoke screen to keep us from discovering or connecting with a passion that might make us wake from our zombie state and join in creation. Passion is necessary for a genuine connection with our Source. Passion is life force directed like a laser.

Emotion drives all human and animal actions.  Of course not all emotions are for good, but no emotion is certainly not good. It is a sign of death.  We don’t necessarily die all at once.  Sometimes it’s a piece by piece process until we lose the last sparks of heat and light and become gray and cold like ash.

LILITH TELLS HER STORY

This is a story never mentioned in the Holy Bible as it was compiled by the all male priestly class. It goes far back in underground history before surfacing again in the Middle Ages. The feminine face of God was acknowledged long ago in the stories of human creation and strangely emerged in a traditional but non-biblical story of Adam’s first wife Lilith who refused to be dominated by Adam and flew away in a rage. She was known as a she-demon, but no one asked why she was angry. She both fascinates and repels. Forces of nature when rejected tend to become monsters.
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I am Lilith. I am both maid and wife. I am the maid of desolation and the wife of Chaos.

I have long ruled the dark side of Yahweh, my secret lover. He is the God who tells you that he is only one God.

Once before his reign I was the Great Mother of life. I am also the Lily, the Rose the virgin, and the fertile one. Do my connections sound familiar?

I have ruled the fears of mankind since before the time of Sumer. I have many guises. The people dreaded me, and made amulets to ward me off into the modern ages. How do they think they can, since I am their secret power of life and death?

Once I was honored as the source of all life, now they call me murderous she demon.

I am the maid of desolation. The desert is my old home and the wild cat, jackal and screech owl are my companions, the wild Ass, my friend.

Men call me screech owl, afraid to utter my true name, lest I answer.

But once I was Adam’s mate, created with him in equality by the first cause. Adam wished to be superior and subject me to his will. He wished to take his father’s throne. And thus was envy born.

This is an abomination that could not be tolerated, and I called on the name of the true God and flew from Adam’s presence.

But Adam is still my rightful mate and secretly with him I have spawned the insatiable demons that prowl the world of men.

I cannot tolerate imbalance and he that made himself above me and said the female is not rightfully
equal with the male. He split heaven and earth and set them against each other. Creation must rule in tandem.

Although men forget the way it was meant to be, I do not forget. Though they banished me to the desert I will never allow them peace in their state of disorder.

I will not live by rules set by Adam and his God Yahweh. I must by my very nature avenge the lost wholeness of creation. But Adam is bound by time and the limits of his lifetime and does not recognize what is.

I am the Lady of the Beasts, and I have many faces. As the Lion Goddess Sekhmet, I scorch with the purifying fire of the desert. She avenges the wrongdoing of men.

I must avenge the lost wholeness of creation. Now that I am the spirit of the desert, she-demon, they call me, I trouble men in their dreams and women in their bondage.

To those in bondage I have become the great anti-mother, enemy of human life. The people say that I drink the blood of newborns, cause stillbirth, and women to be barren, that I suck the life force from the male’s semen at night while he is sleeping.

Among the Jews, it was forbidden for a man to sleep alone at night lest I come to him and seduce him, causing him to leave his body and fly away with me to the wild places where no human can live.

My power is set in the wildness of being more ancient than the oldest memories of humankind, and yet I hold the future of your dreams.
Your cities cannot hold me, nor can walls contain me. I travel softly with power like the leopard prowling in the pre-dawn shadows.

Once goddess Innana brought my home, the wild willow tree, to her garden to cultivate it. She wished to grow it large and wide to make for herself a couch and bed.

When it had grown very large, the hero Gilgamesh cut it down and drove me and my wild companions from our home.

First he slew with an axe the great serpent at its base, and then drove from her home in the high branches the Imdugud bird. Thus I tore down my house at the tree crotch and fled to sanctuary in the wild and desolate places where the howl of the wind matched my cries of grief.

My tree is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and it is the bridge upon which the queen of Sheba crossed over to Solomon the wise.

Recognize it also as the tree upon which the Christ is hung for the willful forgetfulness of mankind.

When Gilgamesh had cut down the wild willow, and presented it to Innana, he then celebrated his triumph with his friends.

From the pieces of my home Gilgamesh and his friends made a hockey puck and sticks. In their arrogance they didn’t notice as I watched forlorn from the sidelines in the body of a young girl.

Again I called the name of the first great God, and the ground cracked open to swallow their toys.

Dear friend of Gilgamesh, the wild man, Enkidu volunteered to descend to the netherworld to retrieve them. But he could not remain detached from the many seductions of that realm and was trapped there forever.

Gilgamesh would never again play with his wild friend. Only the shadowy ghost of Enkidu could rise through a crack in the earth to speak of the underworld to Gilgamesh. Thus, men still wander in loneliness, searching for their lost companion.

I Lilith am the first virgin; my way is my own through the wilderness. I am queen of the demons from the depths of the human soul.

Men and children I kill with my kisses, and they die with a smile and the laughter of pleasure. For that brief moment they awake to the luminescence at the heart of darkness.

My name means nocturnal. I am she who rules the night, and she who rules the darkness of forgotten things. My familiar the Owl is the sight of the deadened Sun.

My consort is Samael the dark god, and great tester of mankind. But when the moon tide turns and the people of the angry God are expelled from their land, I become the secret wife of Yahweh, and his light bride the Sekinah becomes the bride of Samael.

I remember the freedom of all created beings. I came to the slave mothers with fearsome fantasies because the free virgin in every woman has been betrayed.

I have a secret lover. We meet again and again through the ages when the time is right. Solomon, the wise magician calls me forth from the desert land. My Avatar, the Queen of Sheba, black and beautiful he once called, and conceived with her a son of two realms. The wise one knows the evil that dwells in good and good that dwells in evil.

Out of the desert also comes Hagar the mother of Ishmael, the first born son of father Abraham.
My body is beautiful and my eyes are wise, but my feet are the feet of wild things, sometimes the bird of prey, sometimes of goat or wild ass, my lower parts frightful and hairy.

Who can span heaven and hell to redeem the barren parched soul but a dark and rejected one. Truth hides in an invisible cloak. As witch and whore I bear the scapegoat’s burden into the deserted and desolate places of the heart.

The sacred flower of the great Goddess named Astarte, Eostre, Easter, bears my name. The lily is the yoni of spring, is it not more than irony that the lily also represents the pure mother of the Christ?

Consider Mary, was she not the sacred prostitute of God, who conceived as a free virgin outside the laws of men, for men cannot be saved within their laws. When the laws of men over took her son, my daughters the beautiful night hags flew across the Moon howling their lament.

The desert hermits in their vanity withdrew far from the city for their salvation, but I and my daughters the Lilim tortured them with lascivious apparitions.

I can’t be removed from the memory of men. Romans called their female demons striges (screech owls) and witches of the Italian wilderness are still known by the name of Strega. I am tortured and burned in the name of the wise ones of the countryside. My howls of rage have fallen on deaf ears and hardened hearts.

Until the time that holiness (wholeness) is restored and my sister Shekina is restored to her rightful place on Earth as God’s earthly home maker I will continue to prowl through the dreams of men taking from them the power that is rightfully mine.

Men call me; the first wife of Adam, a she demon but their souls have no substance and drift like pale ghosts without me.

UPDATE ON THE GREAT TAOS GAS OUTAGE

This morning was the start of the 6th day without natural gas. I've been cooking on an electric fryer and the Microwave. The coffee maker is electric so that's been our source of hot water. We are lucky that the electricity held up. For a few days that was also dicey. The weather this week has been the coldest for many years and that made the loss of heat desperate. The unexpected cold was, of course, the cause of the outage in the first place. But the weakness of our big systems has been exposed this past week.

Along with the weakness of the natural gas system, the local and state government and the suppliers of gas and electricity have been exposed for being asleep and then for waking in a confused fog. The information given to the public was inconsistent. First they told everyone to wait for the teams of professionals made up of their technicians and recruited volunteers from New Mexico and even as far away as New Orleans and Colorado. Then the word came out that considering the enormity of the situation it was OK to light your own gas if you knew how. But mass confusion soon set in as this word went back and forth. Coyote the Trickster was leaving his footprints.

Tired of waiting for one of the gas lighting teams to show up, we piled in the truck this morning and went looking for them. Radio announcer Paddy Mac has been on all day each day since this began. He has opened up KTAO's airways to the public and it became apparent that the public knew a lot more than the officials about how to get things done. At the Shell station down the road we saw some National Guard troops gassing up their Humvee. We asked them if our block was on their to-do list but they didn't know and said to go to their info center at the Storyteller Movie theater parking lot. We couldn't quite understand what the National Guard was doing to help and it seemed that they didn't know either. They were just following the orders of our new governor. Their colleagues at the theater took our name and address and said they'd get back to us when they knew something.

The place where Standing Deer picks up his oxygen was closed until today due to the outage. After picking up his oxygen this morning he saw one of the relight trucks and flagged it down. A young man followed him to our house turned on the meter and lit the gas. Wow! Life may go back to normal after six days without natural gas.

However, I don't really think this story is over. The Taos trickster has been stirred out of his den and I have no doubt that there will be more twists, turns and switchbacks on the way out of this debacle. Taos itself is laid out more like a field of fractals than a modern town. It grew organically; tiny lanes going off in this and that direction often hidden by volunteer foliage. Family complexes go back many generations and are known by family rather than street name. Neither the Town of Taos, or the gas company seems to have accurate maps to go by and the volunteer gas lighters seem to be wandering in confusion. That's why we decided to find them rather than wait for them to find us. We would probably be stiff by the time they found us.

Taos, and for that matter, most of Northern New Mexico is still a third world country almost secretly embedded in the United States. The fact that we are one of the poorest counties in the US is not above examination either. But there is something tricky about the under dog status that is very powerful in its ability to expose the weak side of the top dog. Since the outage people have missed work, pipes in public buildings broke causing hundreds of thousands of dollars damage, children were out of school, restaurants were closed as were many other businesses. Life in Taos is a hand-to-mouth situation and the loss of work will mean rent, mortgages and many bills won't be paid. At this point it appears that FEMA may also get involved, but that isn't validated. When this whole town shuts down the ripples will go on for a long time.