MasterRabin

It's A Process

2011-12-01T17:54:00.000-08:00

It’s a process.

After years of talking about it, writing about writing about it, procrastinating and retreating from baby steps taken, I finally began the chapter-to-chapter work of manifesting my manuscript. I started November 1st, from scratch. I completed 50,000+ words by November 30th. My second NaNoWriMo win. (The prize is personal satisfaction. No money.)

For so long I just wanted to write it, beginning to end. I didn’t get to the end. There’s so much story left to tell, it’s just getting juicy. I can begin to see two distinct books arise and which will be first.

The best part of getting so far along in my writing is discovering my process for completing it to publication. Whew! That’s huge. Now that I have the complete story, I can outline the drama. It's totally backwards from what I expected. Write the story first, then outline. From the outline, I’ll be able to rearrange the scenes logically. I forget how planned and logical I am. I may be an “artist”, but I am so so logical.

Once the scenes are logically arranged, then go back and work up the details scene-by-scene. Most likely, sticking to the to the flow of the subplots for consistency.

Then finesse the writing.

Isn’t that funny. Opposite of my intuitive ideas. Worry about the quality of each sentence absolutely last.

A plan. Somebody probably wrote a book about this. Probably a great how-to. Some of us like to believe we invented the idea of sweet with peanut butter. Sure, someone else came up with the peanut-butter and jelly sandwich, but this is organic peanut spread with pomegranate-infused strawberry jam. This is the MasterRabin step-by-step guide to manifesting a novel.

NaNoWriMo 2nd Time

2011-11-03T18:23:00.000-07:00

I just want to express within the hallowed space of a public blog that I CAN NOT START WRITING!!!!!

Exhale. Deep breath. Longer exhale. I'm in my second NaNoWriMo. This time tackling, from scratch, the novel I've been talking about since 2007. Out wit the old chapters, in with the new inspiration. By November 30th, it'll be done. Just one thing...I haven't started.

I'm sitting at the computer. I'm stuck. This is why I did the Landmark Forum in 2008. I make this doggone thing so doggone significant. My Evil Ego Twin, she's a real you-know-what. She's on my shoulder insisting I am simply not big enough, not good enough and definitely not ready to take on THIS novel. It's too big and I am too small. Who do I think I am? A writer? "Hah!!" She laughs.

That's my Evil Ego Twin. I just needed to share her with you. We're wrestling over my integrity, my life.

My promise is to write 2000 words tonight. Her promise is that I'll be stopped by insecurity.

Thank God I know who wins.

It's great to allow my Evil Ego Twin to be heard outside my head. She seems small when I type her out and share. When I let her run free in the darkness of my fears and doubts she's large enough to disable.

Check out my page and progress throughout the month of November. I'll begin updating my word count after November 10th.

Heaven on Earth

2011-10-29T08:36:00.001-07:00

My first night and morning alone in over a month. I'm not gonna say marriage isn't for me, but waking up to only my thoughts and Chocolate sleeping at my feet seems closest to how imagine my mornings in heaven.

2011-06-11T18:02:00.000-07:00

The philosophy: Wish Only Well

I've only glanced around the main site. A first glance saw nothing that disturbed me, but I am not promoting the site. I just stumbled on the philosophy while checking on a recount of the 100th Monkey story.

A short version of the story is that there were monkeys on an island. A few learned to wash their sweet potatoes before eating them. (Sometimes the story is told around monkeys being taught to wash coconuts by researchers after a nuclear bomb was detonated on a Pacific island repopulated with monkeys to see how they fare.)

The young learn. Their parents learn. A few family members learn. At some point, parabolically, the 100th monkey on the island learns it. Suddenly, the entire population of island monkeys do the same. Instantaneously. Mass transformation. A new morphogenetic field that they all now have access to and/or live inside.

As a human being, if this is so, my daily thoughts and actions contribute to the growth and development of my species.

Even if my actions don't transform the world, they transform the world of those around me and with whom I interact. Reason enough to be purposeful, deliberate, loving and free.

Healing with color. How it works.

2011-06-05T23:17:00.000-07:00

Recently, I made prayer a consistent part of my daily life. At first, it was weird. All I'd ever seen were people who would speak a name, identify a need, a wish or an outcome and perhaps add a scripture or other authenticating phrase requesting God to intervene. For me, this was flat. Let me confess up front that I am not gifted with quick references to the Word.

I see colors, a representation of vibrations. Vibrations being a representation of health. I might begin praying for a friend in words, asking that she have peace in her life given that she is stressed beyond her coping mechanisms. As I say this prayer in words, I begin to see her with a flash of pink around the outside of her frame. Then red begins to stand out on her body and it locates itself quite clearly on her left side, center. I don't try to figure out what it represents or if it is some particular organ, I just notice it.

The next thing that happens is I'm lead to bring in some other color in a very particular way. Bolts of yellow just along the outer edges of the red. They push into the red and release it through her central nervous system to the top of her head where suddenly I sense an indigo that absorbs the red and transforms it into a green or pink or golden rays that emanate from her body. Don't get too caught up on the particulars that I described since it is a fictitious representation of the types of things that have been happening lately.

The best was yesterday. Two new things happened.

First, a new color. I was praying for someone. Archangel Michael was present and guiding me. I let my ego step aside to watch what happened before my mind's eye. There was a rust-red-gold-brown color that I have never seen before. It is a color that does not exist for us. Don't worry too-much if it sounds other-worldly. The simple science of color is that the spectrum we see is quite circumscribed relative to what exists along the electromagnetic spectrum. My mind's eye perceived this new color washing away energy at this person's feet. Of course, I speculate on what's happening, but there is no way to truly know. It is fabulous just to witness it in the way I do.

Second, a new healing. I've been confronted for a couple days now. God has been forcing me to clean out a few lingering old habits that I was taking my time giving up. Evidently I didn't hear the timer pop. Play time is over. I heard that my healing talents were needed and my pussyfooting around and playing with them as if they are a cute little hobby needs to end. With that, to emphasize the importance, I suddenly saw an image of a man I truthfully did not recognize. I'd like to say it is someone I don't know. What's more accurate is that I did not recognize this person in the state in which their vibrational shadow appeared to me.

It was filled with and blotches of black. I let the colors do their thing and acted as facilitator. Yellow lightning bolts struck at the outer aura loosening up the black blotches. Green and yellow attached to the red to transmute it. Soon, I began to see cracks in the overall aura such that a new glow of yellow tinged with a radiant glow of an unrecognized pink-purple began to glow like a sun. Intuitively I knew an illness was getting cleared out and most likely a mental illness. I understood, again intuitively, that this is a three year process.

In his real life, this healing process may look like fortuitous meetings with a person who refers him to a better doctor than the one he's been seeing. It might be as mundane as urges to exercise suddenly followed in the second year and later discovering a supplement that his brain function for the best, ushering a new period of optimized health.

I have no idea how it works.

I'm just delighted to play around in what some might call my active imagination. I call it the energetic field.

Colorful Healings

2011-06-04T20:19:00.000-07:00

A short blog to report that since the Angel Reiki attunements, my healing sessions are almost entirely with the use of color.

My intercessory prayers consist primarily of seeing some part of the body in a particular color and recognizing that the color is in need of adjustment. Intuitively, the correct colors make themselves known. It is as if my presence is merely to facilitate their work.

More later...

Timing is the Message

2011-05-23T21:31:00.000-07:00

Saturday the world was due to end. I spent the day at a workshop. At the event I learned that they’ll be offering a new workshop entitled: “Direct Access: Creating the Life You Really Want”. I signed up immediately.

The next day I attended a Reiki workshop. Year's ago this same instructor gave me access to a Reiki infused with the energy of the Archangels. Over time and due to other endeavors, the access to the Angelic Wisdom and guidance dissipated. It took a couple years, but the timing was finally right for myself and the instructor and the course was offered yesterday. The energy experienced during the attunement was amazing. Already I’ve begun to see areas for self-healing that were previously hidden from me: For one, my impatience. And, not entirely surprising, my desire not to alienate others or appear too different. This latter helped me appreciate why my intentions to share Reiki are met with an inner resistance to actually put action behind ideas, to lead more classes and heal more individuals. For a single day, it feels like quite a lot of revelation. My practice of Reiki is reinvigorated!

Which brings me to today: My books arrived. Two books assigned as part of the week long study of the Slave Trade in Barbados I'll embark on this July.

The timing is the message!
Saturday, register for Direct Access. Sunday, study Angel Reiki. Monday, readings on the Slave Trade. The universe conspires, again, to use timing to send a message. This year will provide an opportunity for intense healing of self and others. Connections will be made. Ideas will gel. Perhaps books finally written.

What matters to me is reconnection to Spirit, the experience of the Divine. This weekend portends a year of intense growth and development.

Earth is still here and my body still on it, but perhaps the predictions were right. My soul has swept up into a rapturous journey.

Reiki and Writing

2011-04-02T20:54:00.000-07:00

What may look like smog to outsiders in the Los Angeles basin, is really a haze of screenplay dreams that we all breathe in and incorporate into our cells. If you are within an hours drive of the Hollywood Sign you can't escape the occasional flash of certainty that a blockbuster screenplay is inside you waiting to be set free.

Yesterday marked the beginning of Script Frenzy, an international challenge to write a screenplay. The competition is entirely with oneself as all who finish win. Last November I took on a related challenge sponsored by the same organization and completed a novel in a month. I'd been suffering from writer's block for two years and hoped the freedom to write with abandon without the usual urgings to edit and make perfect would help. It did. I completed my 50,000+ novel with hours to spare.

Tonight I started my first draft of a screenplay. I downloaded free software.

All the tools it takes to get the lead out and make our dreams come true. Daily prayer and Daily Reiki are making a tremendous difference in my ability to write. Three years ago I began writing scenes for a book on a young African-American spiritualist descended from nine generations of spiritualists and healers.

Tonight I began the screenplay. The hope is that a friend's advice will prove true. Writing out a screenplay version will provide a great skeleton upon which to put a novel's flesh.

Post-blog note: I was looking up old blogs about the Luzca novel. The funny thing is I began writing at the exact same time three years ago.

More Compulsive Addictive Writing

2011-03-23T19:33:00.000-07:00

I signed up for the NaNoWriMo Script Frenzy. Writing 100 pages for a screenplay. I'm always in awe of circumstance, coincidence...fate.

A night of jazz, a friend brings a friend. He's a screenwriter. I'm a new novelist. He says scriptwriting software might be just the thing to get my next writing project organized.

I'm ready! I've signed up to turn the novel I've blogged about tons of times into a screenplay to get the thing better organized. Working backwards. Screenplay first, details and literature later. I've signed up to write a screenplay in April.

It's ridiculous, silly, maybe straight on stupid! I simultaneously will work, live, play, build up a website and business and take another Landmark seminar. And hopefully see my honey now and again.

Whoohoooo! Anyone else in for a screen play? Check out Script Frenzy!

Don’t fight the Universe

2011-03-22T11:36:00.001-07:00

At the beginning of the school year I found out I'd be teaching mostly government and a couple economics classes. Usually it's the reverse. I LOVE teaching economics. Don't get me wrong, I love teaching period, so teaching Government works, too. Given I have a law degree, I suppose it actually makes more sense.

But when I read the newspaper, it's the Business section I go to first. My favorite magazines? Kiplinger's, Wired and The Economist. I don't have time for subscriptions, but they're my go-to fav's when I'm in the airport or planning a relaxing day of pleasure reading.

I contacted the school's counselor, the scheduler, and asked to switch it back around. Why are they giving the new teacher my favorite classes??? Last year 3 Econ, 1 Law and 1 Gov. This year 3 Gov, 1 Law and 1 Econ. Though I initially considered fighting it, I just went with it.

Realizing that my Government instruction wasn't as beefy as my Econ, I signed up for professional development opportunities. My district was offering a series of lectures and materials on Constitutional Communities. I signed up. Then I saw something for a workshop series I'd considered year-after-year. This time I participated. The experience broadened my teaching.

So when an opportunity to apply for several grants for social studies to travel and study abroad showed up, I was in the spirit of it all and applied. Making a long story only slightly shorter…Because I was reassigned more government classes, I took on new professional development which made me a better candidate for the study abroad programs.

In July I'll spend a week studying the slave trade in Barbados.

Don't fight the universe. Just let it bless you.

Robin Davis Fesseha, JD, NBCT
Reid High School

Reiki III times 3

2011-03-21T22:12:00.000-07:00

Getting and giving Reiki attunements starts a twenty-one day transformation anew each time. The more of them you give, over time the less intense the cleansing experience may become, but there's always something new. It's the power of growth, of change and transformation. Can we admit that it is addictive? A wonderful design feature of the human being to help us evolve.

This past Saturday I was hit with a desire to tune up my Reiki healing energy. It started with a morning Reiki self-treatment to relieve a little stress I'd let build up over the rior week. After a few minutes of hand positions, I reached over and picked-up a spectacular green citrine point I purchased last New Year's Eve's Eve and placed it on my heart while I sent myself Reiki to calm and balance my energy.

Out of the blue, I started thinking about my experiences with Angel Reiki. I'd wanted to take this course from the same instructor who'd given me my Reiki Master attunements four years ago. The occasional energetic tune-up via giving or receiving an attunement always deepens the ongoing healing--a power burst. Knowing she gives the Reiki series a couple times a year through the local college I was curious to see when the next might be scheduled. Probably weeks or months away. I went online. She was holding a Reiki Master course the following day.

I signed up and sent off an email letting her know I'd be in her Reiki Master class a third time and that I wanted to take her Angel Reiki course. I didn't just want to take it, I was clear I would take it and we just need to work out the details! That strong an intention.

Yesterday's review of the Reiki Master course was phenomenal. The energy in the room, dynamic! We've got an Angel Reiki course scheduled for May 22nd and June 5th!

But the blessings from the course have already begun. I love the intense twenty-one days that follow. Already, I have experienced an incredible burst of healing for the planet. I sat in a crystal grid with my Shaman stones and a citrine point during nightly prayer/meditation. I was suddenly moved to draw the cho-ku-rei three times on my third-eye with the citrine's point. A new symbol that has come to me several times in the last few weeks then appeared in my mind's eye and I saw it go into the earth, wrap around and through it, and then I felt an intense healing energy surround the planet. New and powerful! And this is just the first day.

Oh, and one other note.

Reiki and religious practice. As noted in my last blog entry, my prayer life has become a daily practice. I was praying, but I wasn't moved to read The Word, The Bible. Tonight, there was a natural shift. Before my prayer time, I was enjoyed several passages of Luke and John. Folks sometimes wonder if Reiki takes away from religious or other spiritual practices. Truthfully, I sometimes ask myself the same. My experience however is always the same. It only deepens the religious context of the spirituality you already practice.

Fabulous!

Daily prayer.
Daily Reiki.
A life that works.

An Anniversary

2011-03-08T21:07:00.000-08:00

One month ago, I realized that my world needs to work for everyone in it. I'm not first to notice the truth in this. The idea isn't news. Yet, something shifted a month ago.

The recent experiences with a family member passing, two--now three--members of my family hospitalized within a few months time and the general stress that exists for friends, family and neighbors as the world transitions into a new economy overwhelmed me. I'm so grateful it did.

It renewed my commitment to prayer.

New View

2011-02-20T13:50:00.000-08:00

So different now. It started with my Aunt passing away in October. Then my 87-year-old grandmother was hospitalized, followed by a brief stay in a nursing home to recuperate before being allowed to return home. Then, just a couple weeks back, my mother was hospitalized for a week. Through the reflection of my aging elders, my own "aging" is sharply in focus.

Lately, hearing an old song brings on a different kind of nostalgia. In the past, I'd hear some old rhythm and blues or pop tune from my youth and fondly remember where I was or what I was doing decades back. I might remember being in the park for a huge family gathering with BBQ, volleyball, bikes and lots of running. Other times a first date, a kiss, a party, a walk with friends or just sitting around my room listing to 45s or 33s without a care in the world would come to mind.

Lately, though, when I hear some old beloved tune, I am struck by the fact that an old world is gone. It is as if there has been some permanent break I haven't experienced before. Before the break, I experienced myself as this continuity of an always-getting-older me that was just a few days, weeks or years away from a younger, care-free, can-get-back-my-high-school-figure-if-I-wanted-to me.

Over these last few months the reality of being mid-forty, headed-to-fifty has sunk in like bricks dropped in a sauna. Or maybe like bombs hitting an island or planes hitting skyscrapers. There's the life before and then the new, different life after. You can't go back. You can't pretend that things haven't changed. An entirely different point of view colors everything.

It isn't that nothing good lies ahead. I've enjoyed a great life and don't imagine that I am less incapable of creating fun, joy, success, love and beauty in my coming-quickly fifties as was done in my twenty and thirties. What is clear, though, is that it will not be an older version of the past. The break is realizing, internalizing that I'm not an older twenty or an older version of me at thirty.

It's a different life.
It's a different me.
Different rules.
Different goals.
Different mind.
Different body.

Shortly, I'll be all excited again about the possibilities and options I get to create for this maturer Robin. Some new impassioned life that invigorates. Right now, I'm appreciating this opportunity to mourn. Maybe even enjoying it a little. A little.

A different mood.
I feel like mourning a while.

Sunrises

2011-02-01T06:46:00.001-08:00

Sunrises seem to take forever when you're waiting for one. In the space of time it took the eastern skyline to go from gray to magenta to a hint of pink, I realized how much I've always hated to start my day without the sun greeting me first.

I just might try something new beginning now! Get the day warmed up for the sun's entrance. Instead of letting the sun make the day worth my time, I'm gonna try out having each of my days worth the sun showing up to witness it! I'll get the day going for it's entrance. Now that would be something different!!

Poem for Patricia

2010-10-21T21:23:00.000-07:00

Patricia’s Perfection

“Real as they seem, speak out your pains,
I’ll carry them straight to God’s ear.”
The wind whispered.

Eyes weary, parts swollen,
with lungs that loathe lonesome air,
she began

“Like her and like him, I had dreams.
Fragmented, imperfect.
They mattered. They did!

“Just that my body didn’t work well enough.
I could never do enough, try hard enough.
I lost a few things along the way.

“But there were times.
Times I lived fearlessly, Loved tirelessly.
Times I laughed heartily.
Times I knew myself as God’s own."

Sweeping up care and concerns,
pain and regrets,
Wind carried her words to His lap.
* * *

The Sun shone brilliantly,
beaming warmth along with reply.
“You perfect creation, my perfect expression.
Your love was enough, your body sufficient,
You planted the seeds as I asked.
My Love.
You were perfect for the tasks I assigned.
It’s I, not you
who grows seeds sown,
and blooms beauty from beneath dirt and dust.”

She sighed. Redefined
Free, clear, light.
Perfect.

Jammin with Aunt Pat

2010-10-19T21:20:00.001-07:00

Editing the poem.

My eyes were drawn to a Cameo CD. I remembered the times we'd dance
and sing and jam together.

I've never been loved by a ghost like this.

I've been communing with her all evening. She walked w/ me and
Chocolate. Insisted on a movie and them used it to show me that I
gotta be 100% me--still the message of perfection.

Then the editing, the music.

Then laying on the floor arms outstretched experiencing what no one
ever talks about. The experience of love being poured onto, over and
through you by a deceased love one like sitting under a waterfall.

You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make
it true.
You may have to work for it, however. --Richard Bach, Illusions

Patricia Ingram

2010-10-17T20:30:00.000-07:00

My aunt Pat passed away a few days ago.
Phenomenal. Death is such a magical experience for those of us left behind. An opportunity to reflect, to grow, to appreciate and to connect in ways we previously lacked incentive to try.

I volunteered to write a poem for the final service. I've written a few here and there, published a couple here on this blog in the past. They mean a lot to me. However, I am no poet laureate. I hesitate even to say poet. Though I am that. I write a poem or two every year. Enough, right?

I won't publish it here till after the funeral. Partly because it seems appropriate. Partly because I don't want to share my mediocrity. My ego prefers not to look too bad.

And yet, the best part of writing and publishing and reading this poem I wrote for Pat is how it affirms the great blessing she was in my life. She was unconditional support. If I said I was going to do something, go somewhere, be somebody she'd listen and encourage. If a suggestion came from her lips it was a way to do it bigger, shoot higher.

She had three children. Don't know if they'd say she was the same for them. Maybe yes, maybe no. For me, though, she was unwavering support.

As I got a little nervous about reading the poem that for sake of printing deadlines is unfinished but necessarily "completed", I imagined what she'd say if she were here. She'd say, "Well, I like it. You could probably do more with it with more time. Just do it. Get it in there." And then she'd smile, laugh or make some joke. Then she'd tell me about poetry she used to write or books she dreamed (literally, she dreamed epic novels).

We might say little else to each other for a long while. But I'd know she thought what I wrote was just fine. Perfect. Good enough!!!

God bless your soul Aunt Pat.
Truly I failed to appreciate how much you were my Champion!!

Pink Love

2010-08-18T19:12:00.000-07:00

Healing is a phenomenal experience. It's second only to love. Yesterday, I was blessed to experience one of God's daily miracles.

I was visiting my mother who cares for a two-year-old second cousin. Many toddlers his age speak more than their parents might prefer. Words are clear, points are made. Not so with this youngster. His mother experienced a rough patch. Rough enough that he lives with my mom through foster care for the past several months.

He's active. Some might even say a bit hellish in the way he loves to fight with his boy cousins. You know how some baby's are constantly smiling as if a camera is ever lurking around corners, chairs and couches? Not this kid. Smiles are judiciously given when earned by appropriate entertainment or indulgence.

He and I haven't exchanged lots of smiles. I don't really do the kiddie voices, crazy sounds or funny faces. I'd be offended to hear someone say it of me, but the truth is I don't really do "play". I do fun, happy, bliss, joy, jokes and carefree calm. Play, though...not so much!

This particular evening, I'm telling my mom a story about something that happened recently. I do dabble in the occasional animated storytelling :)

I get going pretty good on this occasion with lots of emotion and dramatic movements. He's rolling all over the place, laughing up a storm at my antics. There was a bit more connection between us.

A few minutes later he's in his booster seat between meal courses--chicken all gone, grapes on their way--and his eyes lock with mine. What a look! He's known for staring grown folks down. Emotionless dare in piercing eyes, a touch of curiosity hidden behind the iris.

I like a good game of stare-down. I teach teenagers. This is what I call fun. Not play, though.

We hold the gaze. No blinking. Then, I saw it so clearly. I saw the pain. Knew it was there. Who doesn't expect this kid to know pain, feel hurt in his experience of perceived abandonment.

Staring at it moved the healer in me. I began to send an inch-thick beam of pink from my eyes through his and into his heart. The miniscule muscle movement around his eyes confirmed something was felt. Pink is the color of love. I had to send this kid some love. If eyes are a window to the soul, send it in like the sun. Thoughts, our imaginings, impact the world around us. Why not expect something miraculous.

A few minutes passed. Then he glanced away to his approaching dessert, grapes cut with a mother's love.

He started speaking and as usual, his words were indecipherable. No matter. He kept going. Then, I thought I distinguished a name. I asked him if he'd called this cousin's name. Next thing I know he's going on and on.

And I listened. The words were no clearer, but my listening was keen. I looked in his eyes as he spoke and could feel the story he was telling. He was desperate to have someone hear him, get him, confirm and validate his expression of how life was occurring for him. Closest thing to speaking in tongues I've heard in a while.

He kept going for some time. I proffered a varieties of "no kidding", "what else", "and then what happened" for as long as his eyes said it mattered.

His eyes sent out the closest thing to pure appreciation, I've experienced in a while. He felt listened to and it absolutely melted his heart. Neither of us will be the same again.

Is there any one of us who doesn't crave to be truly heard. Not instructed, not criticized, neither ignored or tolerated. Heard!

Pink Love.
Miraculous Beams.
Communication.

Now, playing with words, with language. That, I do. That, I love.

Again and Again

2010-07-19T13:26:00.000-07:00

The joy of creation!

Moment by moment creating our lives.

Our thoughts, our words, our actions

Our choices.

I create peace, ease and bliss.

It showed up as me in a near-empty clearing at an oceanside park
reading a favorite book.

Father's Day

2010-06-20T15:26:00.000-07:00

I don't remember which year was the last time I visited my father's grave. In my mind, he's not in the decaying bones that are surrounded by satin and wood and dirt. If I want to connect with him, I can meditate, read his letters or just think of him for that matter. To be honest, for a long time I thought the idea of visiting a grave was a bit silly. Worse really. I arrogantly believed folks who visit grave sites just don't know how to connect with their beloved departed in prayer and thought.

I felt differently yesterday. As I drove down Cherry Avenue, I was struck with an urge to buy flowers and place them on my dad's grave for Father's Day.

It was such a beautiful day. High 70's, clear skies. I'd just dropped off an aunt who attended one of her grandson's birthdays at my mom's place. The mood was all love, peace and joy. A quick stop at the florist. Unable to decide on the right flowers, I imagined myself asking my father's spirit to pick what he'd like and point it out. A bright, beautiful mix caught my attention.

Back in the car, I'm ready to head to the cemetery. A button pops on my dress as I shift a few things in the front seat. Back inside to fasten a safety pin and I'm off to the cemetery. Too bad it'd been so long I couldn't find the grave right away. Too bad, further still, that the information office closed at 5 and it was approaching the 6pm closing time. No problem, I'll just bring them on Sunday--that's Father's Day anyway.

Another beautiful morning. Turns out, though, that I simply remembered incorrectly. Perhaps I should be embarrassed to share that it took three staff to help me find it because I was so sure I knew exactly where it was supposed to be. Never mind that all my knowing had me walking in circles for better than twenty minutes. And, yes, there was that moment, when I wondered if someone had moved it!

I find it. I've got a journal with me. I can't figure out why I'm staying so long. At one point, I decide that communing with him has been wonderful, but that we're done, anything left to "discuss", I'll do at home in prayer, meditation or imagination. I rise, but I sit back down. I can't leave yet.

Looking back, it's odd that I couldn't find it the day before or for so long in the morning. I'd found it on my own before after long absences. Odd.

Minutes pass and I just sit and enjoy the many people at a distance bringing deceased fathers flowers. Various thoughts cross my mind. At some point, I think, "You know, with this entire summer ahead of me and no major plans, no summer school, no classes for myself, nothing but the time to discover, I want to invite my father's spirit to keep me company, advise, help me to uncover or discover that passionate purpose I talked about in the prior entry." I invite my father's spirit to help me make the most of this opportunity to create life newly.

Doubt me or not, but no kidding, a breeze blew across my face. I'd been out there sitting for at least forty minutes with no discernible breeze. I think the invitation, then there's a breeze. It didn't alarm or scare me, but I did question whether I just imagined the difference. And then wind blew a little stronger.

I thought, "That's weird. OK. I won't question it. That's real. That's my father."

The next thing I heard was, "Come on, Bubba."

No way. Though born Robert, he was affectionately called Bubba by family and close friends.

"Bubba."

I turn and look and a two-year old Samoan is being alternatively called and chased by an uncle or older brother. They'd just arrived a few moments earlier.

You tell me. What are the odds that at THAT moment, my father's nickname would be called.

But maybe I just see signs everywhere.

Next Steps

2010-04-27T21:12:00.000-07:00

At a seminar I attended last night, the leader says, "...and now you're bored. You've created for yourself the life you wanted, you have it. It's perfect. And you're bored with your perfect life."

My life isn't everything I always ever wanted. It may not be the life any always ever wanted me to have. It is, however, exactly the life I created for myself. Plenty of free time to do with as I please. Close friends, but not an abundance of social events or an excess of active acquaintances. Not the beachfront home I wanted, but surely a roomy, quiet condominium with expansive enough decks and the perfect dog to join me when I soak up the sun on them. I even created for myself the exact lover I wanted. Not bad.

Bored.

I created the pay I wanted for a job that is essentially part-time and part-year. As a teacher my day ends at 1:37pm and, let's be honest, I work about eight months a year after summer, winter and spring breaks and holidays.

Bored.

Yes, I get to impact lives.

Bored.

Sure, there are those really cool Landmark classes I take. Sometimes I take them alone, some I take with my sweetheart. In fact we just started a new one.

This one is called "Creativity: Life By Design". That's the course where the speaker asserted some of us were there because we're bored with what we created and ready for "what's next".

I am. That's me.

I've been thinking about becoming a financial planner, a real estate agent or maybe just finally get off it and teach reiki classes for real and get the website up. A couple books when through my mind as usual. So many options.

Running from my boredom. Running to a fulfilling future. Running to the dreams I left behind when I began to believe that what I have is all I ever wanted.

And a wonderful notion entered my head when I did the homework. I'm unsure about what's next, what career, what business because I have no cause, no purpose, no inspiration greater than myself just yet.

Inspired by the homework, I begin to see that while I give lip service to wanting to help women gain their financial footing, I am not truly about the larger cause of empowering women.

I am embarking on figuring out what I stand for, what I care about.

A passion.

Boredome's antidote.

Freedom Accomplished!

2010-03-20T12:15:00.000-07:00

Freedom!!! In August 2008 I enrolled in The Landmark Forum. I loved it!! The three-day and one evening course opened my eyes to some habitual ways of thinking and behaving that were not working for me. Of course, we already know that things aren't working, no one needs a course for that. What I got, though, were rare glimpses into the very source of the underlying assumptions that had me think a certain way and choose habitual ways of being and acting. Cool stuff!!!

I signed up for the next course, then the next and the next. Nineteen months later I have completed The Landmark Forum (3 days), The Advanced Course (3 days), Commitment Seminar (10 evenings over 12 weeks), Self Expression and Leadership Program (approx one eve a week for 3.5 months), Introduction Leaders Program (7 months), Communication: Access to Power (2 days and 1 eve), Communication: Power to Create (2 days, 1 eve) and the Sex and Intimacy Seminar (10 evenings over 13 weeks). With some overlapping others, I completed all of these within 12 months.

Worth every minute and every dollar. The people are great, the information is unlike anything you find in a regular course or seminar. And it's fun. I wouldn't do it if it weren't fun! Do I recommend them? certainly! Do I think you need them? Nope! You don't need anything except food, water and, in most climates, shelter. Everything else just enhances our quality of living.

Twelve months after I'd walked into that first course, my new love and I were completing the seven month Introduction Leaders Program. It'd been intense, fun, exciting. As with all things, all the sweeter when done with a sweetheart.

But my sweetheart says he might be a coach in the next one. I think, "Hmmph. Good for you!" Then, I figured, if we'd gotten so much out of taking the class together, maybe we'd get even if we both coached it. He invited me to join him in the adventure. I said, "Sure!" We were now both coaches in the 7-month Introduction Leaders Program. We'd do it together.

Until he wasn't.

He stopped. Things came up in his life and he made a responsible choice to stop. I continued. I'd committed. Even in those times when it occured more as commitment than fun, I created a good time around it.

That commitment ended yesterday evening. For the first time since August 2008, I am neither enrolled nor coaching any course at Landmark Education. Whew! When I walked Chocolate this morning, I breathed deeply. The air seemed crisper, more oxygenated. Probably, it was just the sweet, relaxing sensation of being unscheduled after nineteen non-stop months of courses.

What I learned during these last seven months is that while I love being a consumer of the courses, being a coach is not where I get a joy buzz. It was a privilege, an honor and full of it's own insights and breakthroughs. I have zero regrets and leave it inspired to write. I've got a short novel I've been working on almost-daily since February 22nd.

(On February 22nd I saw the energy healer from whom I received my reiki II attunement. She works with Matrix energetics now. Fantastic results.)

When I signed up with Landmark in August 2008, I was looking for a breakthrough in relationships and a breakthrough in writing. I met my honey in one of the courses, and it is, by far, the most fulfilling relationship I've been in. The communication is unbelievable and he is everything that I asked the universe to provide.

Now that writer's block is busted, I'm feeling accomplished. Complete! Free! ...and unscheduled :)

Inhale. Exhale.

Believe

2010-03-18T19:53:00.000-07:00

What all of us have in common is belief. We may all believe different things. But whatever we believe, we believe wholly.

Anew Love

2010-03-07T19:42:00.000-08:00

The more I fall in love with you,
the more I am amazed by
who I get to be.
Loving you more,
I love who I see
Gazing upon you
newly.

Falling anew.
Deeper.
With you.
With me.

(for Steve)

ancestral stream

2010-02-04T23:08:00.000-08:00

My maternal grandmother has been incredibly tired of late. Dehydrated, too. After spending three days in the hospital to recuperate and rest, she returned home exhausted from all the interruptions to check this tube and that medication. When I called the evening she returned home, she sounded somewhere between drunk and delirious from the exhaustion.

When I called to check on her a couple days later, she sounded more like herself. Chocolate and I went by to visit. For whatever reason, I'd never given her a reiki attunement.

Normally, I prefer to do reiki attunements with crystals selected just for that particular client and almost always include my moqui balls. It was an impromptu attunement. Fortunately, there was an amethyst and quartz point there given to her as gifts a couple years back.

Crystals under the chair, Chocolate laying at her feet, I swept her aura and then began to pray before the attunement. That's when I saw them in my mind's eye. It first looked like white light. It wasn't a solid white light. Not a beam nor a flood. It was fluid, undulating and composed of individual parts.

The feeling was of so many spirits. Ancestors would be my guess. They came to share, welcome, comfort, guide.

More like a welcoming than visiting team. They surrounded her like a wall. I was behind her and I felt them streaming in at her front and sides, a couple feet out from her body. Like brilliant stars dancing downward and then back up.

I wonder how long they've been visiting. Wonder what they're telling her about heaven.

2010-01-21T18:34:00.000-08:00

"In this moment, I can say that what would make me feel like I've done my job on earth is if I mastered an understanding of the interrelatedness of the 12 dimensions; the ways and means of how crystals, Reiki and other alternative energy healing techniques work; past lives...etc., etc..."

I wrote that on Wednesday, March 28, 2007.

Bold, huh?
It comes to mind again today.

I'm fasting. Again.

Usually, I have something I want and then I turn in and "hear" when and what to fast along with prayer to make something happen. Kinda like a prescription. "God, I'd like a new home...huh?...fast, you say....fast for ten Fridays? done." And then, voila...a home! Not kidding!

Except, there's this other thing that happens when I fast. I lose weight. Sure one of the two pounds is back the next day, but when done week after week, versus when I don't do it week after week...fasting one day a week (water and tea only for 24-30 hours, gets long term results).

So the last couple weeks, post New Year's resolutions, I decide I just want to take on fasting for the weight management aspect. But I can't. I can't just fast and not pray, too.

Only, there's nothing I'm motivated to ask for. Go figure. Not saying I got all I could ever want, but there's nothing I'm moved to ask for just to be asking for something. My experience is that you'll be allowed to get it. It's just that when you ask, in my experience mind you, God hands it to you. When you grab hold, it's yours. The price tag, though, is underneath.

"God, I'd like a relationship that works."
"No problem. Fast 20 Mondays."
I'll tell you this. When you fast and pray. You really are in a space to confront yourself and hear God's voice.
And, yes, I'm very much in love with Mr. 20 Mondays. Thank you, God!!!

When I can't think of anything I want, I decide to dedicate my fast. I dedicated my last one to Mr. 20 Mondays, aka Steve. My prayers for him were answered.

This morning, I decided to do something new again. This time I asked God what I should pray for. Boy oh boy. Wasn't expecting it, but how did I not? He suggested praying for the world.

"The whole world???!"

Long story still longer, I did. But it was confronting. I had to confront that deep down, or maybe not even so deep, I didn't really think the world could work. Cynical? Just a bit. People never learn, governments always do the wrong thing, and love rarely triumphs. I didn't realize just how jaded I was. I knew I was jaded. Just didn't see how much so.

A day of prayer for planet earth.

Those books I'm always talking about writing. I'd forgotten that it was an opportunity to fulfill on my own fulfillment.

I'd forgotten that it was worth writing because what matters to me is worth sharing. It's worth sharing because the world is worth healing.

I'd forgotten that God loves this world, whether I do or not.

And I'd forgotten I love it too! The whole of it. It's imperfect governments, its irresponsible but still-striving human beings. It's easy to love dolphins, whales, mountains, wind and sea. Easy to love double rainbow days, buzzing bees, sunsets and even super-early sunrises. Harder to love the presence of hate, ignorance, greed and intolerance.

Fasting and praying for the whole world forced me to imagine a world that works. I imagined the world the way God knows it could it be. A world that works. A world of love.

return to bliss

2009-12-27T21:55:00.000-08:00

Aaaaaahhhh. Return to perfect bliss.

Long walk. Tea with the newspaper and the radio. Noon comes. For no reason than that I can, orange juice and patron. Yep. Followed by a short nap.

Short walk while Chocolate relieves himself for the evening. Short phone call. Off to Enriques for an authentic Mexican meal. Mmmmmmm.

Come home, putter around. Turn on the sauna. It took thirty minutes to work up to a steady sweat. Thirty more minutes of drenching sweat while I read bell hook's Wounds of Passion. Getting inspired. She shares the story of her writing life, her connection to the divine, her search for a path beyond organized religion and the final choice to live a life in love. She writes of the experience of being female, of being black of being black and female and educated and a seeker and sexual, feminist and straight and the struggle to reconcile it all.

The evening ends with a shower. Exfoliate with the new scrub my honey bought me and then slather on the body butter.

The experience of loving myself. What a gift, a blessing, to be able to tend to me fully and completely, to cherish my body, soul and spirit with pampering.

A perfect way to end the holiday season indulgences.

Tomorrow morning begin again the three mile walks, the regular sauna sessions, the planned meals of wholesome not-so-fattening foods.

a lense

2009-12-22T23:30:00.001-08:00

I write to see. Sometimes I forget that.

I lost my focus. Couldn't make out the signs. Wandering. Aimless.

Thank goodness. I've stumbled back on the path. Turns out having to complete online traffic school was a blessing.

I got it in just before the deadline. Seven months after the citation. And I finish it 23 hours before it's due.

Winter break is at the end of its 2nd day. Time, space, breathing...reading.

The pleasure of time to read Bell Hooks--Wounds of Passion. Writing, for me, is not passion.

I just write to focus in, to see.
The world's been blurry.

2010

2009-11-16T21:30:00.001-08:00

It's not even Thanksgiving yet, but why not start looking at what fabulous plans can be made for 2010. I went online to register for a creative writing course at the local college.

How crazily busy I've been this fall. Such a far cry from who I used to be, the little I used to get done. If you don't know, I really lived like the quintessential loner. A few close friends. Not too many engagements. Lots of time reading, contemplating, and, of course, a few favorite television shows.

Just recently, I began to accept that my life isn't changing back to the slower pace I used to embrace, revel in and hold sacred. My time was so precious to me. Not the kind of precious that leads to active living and loving. More like the kind of precious that has you guard, protect and enjoy as observer rather than participant.

Over the past year I've been busier and busier. Sometimes I'll tell myself, "I'm just going to continue this pace until..." and then, presumably, go back to that more restful state where I value time alone above all else.

I still love time to think and contemplate. I just don't love it more than time doing and being in action around what matters to me. How I loathed anything that interfered too consistently with my long evening walks. Now, I take them each day with Chocolate. More times than not I'm talking as well. So different. So lived. So wonderful.

This afternoon I was in between calls and a cousin from Texas rang. He wanted help with an algebra problem that he was helping his girlfriend solve. That was fun.

There's so much living to do. I still love time alone, time to contemplate and time to allow my body to regenerate itself. I just no longer love it MORE THAN all there is to do in life.

Writing classes.
Writing.
More healing classes.
Healing and sharing healing in classes I teach.
Loving my lover.
Cooking. Experimenting with cooking.
Drinking wine and enjoying it leisurely.
Time in my infrared sauna. Oooh-la-la, sweet healing heat.
Playing with my dog, Chocolate. Walking chocolate and enjoying the scenes.
Talking to my family, talking to friends.
Talking.
Listening.
Hearing the world. Hearing others.

Hearing, Healing
Talking, Listing

Writing.

Winter Wind's Kiss

2009-10-27T18:38:00.000-07:00

A cloudy evening walk with Chocolate through the neighborhood. As usual, I was also on the phone. As usual, talking with my buddy Gilbert.

"I have to stop. I can't move. I have to just be with something right now. Something's calling me."

I stood at the corner of a nearby street transfixed by the path. I stared down the sidewalk. There was no one walking, no cars driving. The only movement were leaves. The wind gently but with great intention, blew through them. It reminded me of scenes shown over and over and over during a particularly bad hurricane. e

The trees weren't bent over and the sound of rustling more melodic than foreboding. It only seemed alarming because of the contrast to five months of stillness.

It was winter wind's first hello. I had to stop and experience it, enjoy it. The light gray sky was a perfect nondescript background to winter whispering its coming.

Flashes of cold walks, falling rain and long, cozy evenings came over me.

All lovers should greet with such a captivating kiss.

Roots: ling qi, reiki

2009-10-15T21:54:00.000-07:00

I love research. I like discovering what others take for granted. More so, I enjoy finding the overlooked connections that explain what others have glossed over in an attempt to avoid uncomfortable uncertainty.

Ready to take on Reiki as an enterprise, I've been diving into it for a thorough understanding. There's a spiritual element to it. What's that about? When I tell a Christian that Reiki is a complement to any faith or no faith, I need to know what allows me to say so.

Without too much effort, I've learned that Reiki came to Japan via China and that it is most likely related to ling qi. In fact, I'm very comfortable asserting that this is highly probable.

So then, how did the Chinese get it? I love Ecclesiastes' refrain that there is "nothing new under the sun". So then, what was reiki before it was ling qi? Of course, there are many who point to the Egyptians. Yummy. More research.

photo shot

2009-09-23T21:01:00.000-07:00

The last classroom for my photography class was last night. In a little over a week, we'll have a show night. A collection of 35 to 45 of each students top shots will be organized and set to music. We can invite friends and family and it turns into a party at the studio.

I'm not so excited about my shots. I know what I could shoot. And I see what I have shot. There's nothing wrong with my photos. They just aren't spectacular.

Tonight, I went out with camera, determined to capture some amazing stuff before the final deadline of Friday. Determination wasn't enough. I got a few lovely shots.

Tomorrow, at it again.

The universe at work

2009-09-16T23:14:00.001-07:00

Today ends 30 days of daily blogging. How delicious it has been.

I've learned that I really can make time to write each day and that my writing doesn't have to be great to be worth doing.

As the universe would have it, a confluence of circumdtances has me ready to take on writing my novel again. To just do it.

Yesterday's post, the write-up on why I took the The Landmark Forum--wanting to write my novel.

Lat night, I was reading more of The Shack and came upon the lines where God emphasizes that we can do anything standing inside our being part of Him, as co-creators.

Then tonight, listening to the same person who lead my Advanced Course in January. It was there that I created the possibility of being Creativity Powerfully Expressed.

It's time to be that.

My Results

2009-09-15T21:25:00.000-07:00

No, not from any medical tests. And not from any kind of entrance exam for yet another degree.

Tonight, I completed a write-up on what I got from my participation in The Introduction Leaders Program. It'll be posted, along with a photo, in the Landmark Education's Newport Beach Center where I've taken a bunch of classes.

I've decided to share it here. Much of it is a re-working of things shared on this blog previously, but it pulls it all together.

Here it is:

A little about me
I teach law, government and economics to high school seniors. I love learning and love being an educator. I adore my Chihuahua, Chocolate, and can’t imagine life without international travel. I’m a Reiki Master/Teacher and an author.

Why I signed up for the Introduction Leaders Program
When I signed up for The Landmark Forum in August 2008, I was looking for a breakthrough in writing a novel and in creating a relationship. What I got was a breakthrough in creating ease and fun in my work as an educator and immense peace of mind. The benefits of The Landmark Forum were great, but I still wanted more. After my Advanced Course, my identity as a loner was falling away, but I still wanted more. The Introduction Leader Program’s promises of Full-Blown Self Expression and Remarkable Contribution appealed to me.

What I got
Between the distinctions covered in the classroom and my experiences assisting at Introductions to The Landmark Forum, I got the promise of Remarkable Contribution. Through assisting friends, family and strangers in registering themselves into The Landmark Forum, I discovered that I stand for love, joy and balance being present in the lives of everyone I know and meet. I began to experience instant relatedness with anyone and everyone. My teaching transformed. I became more related to my students and took on leaving them empowered and present to their own greatness. The quality and initiative in the projects they produced took off.

As a stand for the experience of love and joy, I also got Full-Blown Self Expression. Before the Introduction Leaders Program, I kept the benefits of reiki and energy healing to myself. I didn’t want anyone to think I was weird or silly for promoting energetic balance as a tool for health maintenance. Never mind my own results or what I knew to be possible, before the Introduction Leaders Program I’d only taught reiki to my mom and one friend. Now that I’m unconstrained in sharing myself and what matters to me, I’ve taught it to half my family and nearly all my friends. During the program I declared my commitment to empowering 100 people to take charge of their health through energetic balance before 2009 ends. It is now my business.

As for the results I was looking for in The Landmark Forum…I created the outline to that novel during the program’s first weekend. Come to think of it, that was the same weekend I began the relationship I was looking for when I registered into The Landmark Forum!

Personal transformation manifested for me in every area The Introduction Leaders Program promised. What I got is exactly what I was looking for…and more.

Robin Davis Fesseha

...nothing

2009-09-14T21:59:00.000-07:00

sometimes the best thing to say is nothing

So Cal Day

2009-09-13T22:24:00.000-07:00

We started the day with coffee at Starbucks. Then to Malibu for a 2pm rendezvous at The Getty Villa.

Arriving over an hour early, Steve and I drove further up the coast. Steve was first to spot the thousands of flags planted at the base of Pepperdine University. It was a memorial to the victims of 9/11. While most of the flags were American, there were flags of other nations to represent the citizenship of all the victims.

I don't doubt that there are still memorial services held in Hawaii's Pearl Harbor on December 7th. On the mainland, however, the day passes without much thought. Perhaps an article buried in the middle of the newspaper at the bottom of the page. Or, more likely, a photograph and caption showing flowers placed at Veteran's Hospital in recognition of the "Day that will live in infamy".

Ten years from now, will there still be a collective memory of 9/11? Either way, there will likely still be a war on terror.

A WAR on terror.

Is that like hating intolerance or killing murderers?

Still Enjoying Fall's Arrival

2009-09-12T21:21:00.000-07:00

This morning, when I opened the kitchen shutters onto the small deck, there were clouds in the sky and a faint wetness on the wood. Soon enough I'll open the shutters and see full blown rain bathing the wood and plants. I can hardly wait for winter.

This afternoon, I walked out onto the small deck and sat in the papasan chair. It was warm and sunny. Chocolate sniffed at the air, smelling which friends were out walking. I sipped my chai with a barely read newspaper at my side.

This evening, when I moved the kitchen shutters and stepped out onto the small deck to water the plants, I remembered that this is the time of year to order solar Christmas lights if I want to have them here by December.

Three years ago I balked at $100 for solar lights. Five years from now they'll have paid for themselves. Makes sense to use the sun's light to celebrate the end of shorter days and the coming of The Light.

_________

I missed my post last night. The second glitch in my plan to blog for 30 days. I had such a full day. It was the Friday of the first week of school. After wards to the airport for a pick-up and then straight to class. The last classroom for an intense course on leadership that I've benefited from greatly. It was an ending. From there twenty steps to a different classroom where I am now coaching participants who have just started the same course I that night completed. It was 10:40pm and I knew I wouldn't be home by midnight. Committed to not missing a day, I blogged from my phone. Not an Iphone. Not a Blackberry, either. I've had a Palm for years and years and now have a Centro. I guess I shouldn't make it their fault that I couldn't get my post to post. All I know is that I pressed publish but nothing showed up and there's no draft to be found anywhere. I've decided to be OK with knowing that I did in fact blog yesterday, but that I nonetheless have an interrupted 30 days of posting.

Commi

Carried Away

2009-09-10T21:54:00.000-07:00

"He had already been perched precariously on the precipice of emotion..." The Shack, WM. Paul Young.

I am beginning to recognize the work of certain muses. There is a zone that writer's enter into, swept in by a story, thought or idea. Until now, I thought we entered alone into this other dimension where words dance and play and dare.

Now, I know that we are escorted there by unseen helpers. Authors from the other side, perhaps. What I know is that when I got to a certain set of pages in The Shack, I recognized the zone, recognized the writing.

I'm not saying it's better than sex, I'm just saying that it is quite the magical ride and rollercoaster when the writing takes over and the words dance you.

Perched precariously on the precipice of emotion.

Access to Healing

2009-09-09T20:29:00.000-07:00

I'm working my way to 100. This afternoon, one of my aunt's came over to receive reiki.

What a difference it makes when we commit to something, declare it. The more often I share with friends, family and acquaintances alike that I'm committed to offering reiki as a tool for self-healing to 100 people before the year 2009 ends, the more action I take.

On the walk we enjoyed together last Saturday, my aunt shared the pain she's been in due to arthritis. The pain is so intense that it interferes with sleep. As soon as she shared her ongoing pain and discomfort, I suggested reiki. She knew that a cousin and my mother had received health benefits after I shared it with them. Plus, there was a Thanksgiving afternoon when I applied reiki energy to her back and it made it a difference. She didn't need a lot of convincing.

Today she came over after work. It was my only free evening and I was glad to do it.

Each time I do an attunement, I share the benefits I received from my own work with reiki. And each time, I am reminded of the potential to alter the experience others have of their lives.

More power, peace, health and balance.

The Flow of Energy

2009-09-08T20:59:00.000-07:00

I've been sensitive to energy for as long as I can remember. Things feel a certain way right off the bat--comfortable, chaotic, eerie, relaxing, intense or whatever. The cause isn't always obvious, but I definitely pick up the vibes of people, places and things. Not just the things themselves but their placement and synergy.
We're in a new home, a new campus just thrown together in the last year specifically for us--fourteen teachers another eight staff and three hundred students.

I'm in a new classroom. Over the years, I've moved into several new classrooms. Such a small school as ours is picked up and moved a bit too conveniently. The expectation is that our school has finally landed a semi-permanent home which is a step up from the temporary varieties we've shuffled in and out of over the last eight years.

With each new classroom is a new opportunity to create an idyllic space. Idyllic is different for every teacher. For me, it includes clouds and Caribbean scenes blending into the posted visual aids, announcements, maps and message posters. I've even put up clouds filtering florescent lights.

With each new classroom there is a new challenge to create a space where energy flows. Shamelessly, I'll admit that not only do I consult feng shui principles, but I rely most heavily on Feng Shui for Dummies. May sound a little cheesy, but it seems to enhance my sense of peace.

Sometimes it seems a little silly to spend so much time adhering to principles I don't claim to fully understand or believe. Yet, being sensitive to energy, I have found that using the tips and hints helps me find my sweet spot.

Where on earth is the best position for my desk. Not in front of the air conditioner vent. Not too close to the many student computer drops and all their electromagnetic emissions. Certainly not directly in the path of the doorway nor in any position that doesn't give me direct sight to the door. My back can't be toward the students or a large looming window. And that's just the desk.

After more than six days setting up bookcases, computers, odds, ends, media and so on, I found it, my sweet spot.

I know I've found it when I glance around the room with a few nods of satisfaction followed by a deep, lingering inhale and exhale. Bliss! The energy flows.

When my wooden desk, the students desks, posters, bookcases, computers, microwave, refrigerator, videos, crystals, coat rack, bulletin board and every little thing are placed just so, I sense energy flowing circularly through the room at a gentle, steady pace.

At 2:20pm, I felt that. At 2:22pm, I went to the office to pick up my classroom keys for the next school year. It was now MY room.

Tomorrow the students arrive. It'll still be MY room. I'll welcome them into OUR oasis of discovery and conversation.

Just figured out why I love teaching.

The flow of energy in my classroom is an invisible animate creature that coaxes the best out of me and my students.

All day I have the pleasure of dancing with energy. Each class, each unique combination of students assembled creates their own harmony of voices, thoughts, blues, bliss and hues. I move in and out of their concerns, their interests, their needs and their potential.

The flow of energy inspires bliss...daily.

Tomorrow...no longer a day away

2009-09-07T20:23:00.000-07:00

Twelve hours from now, I'll be back in my classroom. There will be no students until 35 hours from now.

Twelve hours from now, I'll have seen nearly all the teachers I last saw three months ago and see again the handful who've been on campus same time as me to get their classrooms ready.

Twelve short hours from now the traditional calendar 2009-10 school year officially begins.

Twelve minutes from now I'll be toasting the beginning of a fall that promises more wonder, surprise and fulfillment than I can imagine.

Fall Leaves

2009-09-06T22:38:00.000-07:00

It is officially fall. Fall leaves are all around. Seems a little early. Only September 6th?

This is my 2nd fall with Chocolate.

Falling in love with Chocolate all over again.

Pleasure in the Mundane

2009-09-05T22:56:00.000-07:00

There are some days, at the end of which, you feel delighted and proud. This is one of those days. There was pleasure in the entire experience, each moment.

The day was filled with extraordinary events that are extra ordinary in nature. Among my favorites was the choice to spend $5 on a chai tea and enjoy the newspaper outdoors sitting on a couch during the noon hour. It was warm, peaceful. Like being god of my world and ordering up the perfect temperature, interesting news stories, perfect soy chai, right amount of shade, minimum distractions and a clean, comfy couch to enjoy it all on. It wasn't my seat at the outer table on Provo island (the scene pictured at left on blog, but it felt just as idealic.

Then there was the cleaning of the washing machine and dryer. Since when is that fun or interesting? It was. The freedom to care enough, to have time enough and to know with great certainty that the wiping away of dust and gunk has a qualitative impact on the quality of my life. Really! The difference it makes to our subconscious whether our dirty clothes are plopped into an unclean or pristine washing machine. I even moved the wipe in and out of the hard-to-reach crevice where the lid rotates up and down. It was an exhibition of personal power and celebration of my freedom to create the context of my world.

Too drunk on delight? I think it has to do with the fact that school starts next week. Teachers back on Tuesday, kids back on Wednesday. This is the final weekend of a carefree summer. My last Saturday that isn't sandwiched between working Friday and Monday for some time. That's a large part of what made wiping down every nook and cranny of the washing machine such a joy.

Not one singularly spectacular event or achievement all day. Instead, an entire day of perfect peace because I chose each activity in each moment, including the choice to find it profoundly enjoyable.

I'm nearing the end of days that are entirely of my choosing. How'd I spend one of the precious few that remain?

8:30am Walk Chocolate
9:05am Meet my sister and aunt at my Mom's
The four of us walk at a regional park and then sit around and talk a while.
11:00am Go to bank and pick-up some cash. Wait in a line while listening to music.
11:20am Order a chai tea at Starbucks and sit on an outdoor couch in the shade reading the newspaper
Noon Call an old friend and catch up, still outdoors in the shade
1:00pm Coaching call to one of my four coach-ees.
2:00pm Leisurely, thorough cleaning around the house.
5:30pm Walk Chocolate
6:15pm Clean decks, water plants
8:00pm Get in Sauna. Inside, read a little of both Shock Syndrome and The Shack
9:00pm Talk with sis
9:30pm Talk with sweetheart
10:30pm Snack
11:00pm Blog

I'm sure starting the day with a walk with family around one of my favorite parks help set the tone. I can't remember the last time we all got together for a casual walk and talk. Four females sitting in peace and comfort content to hear what was on the minds of each. More love. A day seeded with love has to sprout magical moments.

Even I, fan of bliss that I am, end the day bewildered by the excess.

Empowerment

2009-09-04T21:28:00.000-07:00

Back in 1994, I read that year's edition of What Color is Your Parachute (Bolles). I did each of the exercises, plus the bonus points for actually creating a flower of my ideal career: Empowerment.

The funny and slightly disappointing aspect was that while it was clear I wanted to create and edit materials that I used to supplement my speaking about empowerment, the topic, the vehicle, was missing. No area was identified. It wasn't empowerment through medicine, or education or nutrition or financial freedom. Just empowerment! All kinds of people, all ages, all types of background.

Between my experience with my first paid reiki attunement and a conversation with someone I'm coaching this morning, I figured out that what has me prefer giving attunements over doing healing sessions, is that I seek to empower more than heal. I want others to have the ability to balance their own energy, to stop an unnecessary ache and so on. It's my goal that each person who receives an attunement from me is able to take greater charge of their health and their circumstances.

When I think of it as just about giving attunements, or "selling" reiki, I am not as motivated. I got no interest in selling anything. None. But when I remember that my motivation is empowerment, I get inspired.

I declared last month that I intend to cause 100 attunements by the time 2009 ends. I've got a lot to do to make that happen. When I think of doing 100 or selling 100, little action is taken.

When I think of empowering 100 people to take charge of their health, I make things happen.

I am empowered.

reading and writing, wondering and living

2009-09-03T22:06:00.000-07:00

In search of something, anything to write on day 18 of 30 days of daily blogging, I visually scanned titles on six book cases that line the walls of my "pink room" aka my "study" or my guest room. The fiction totals about five of twenty-six shelves. From Dostoevsky to McMillan (How Stella Got Her Groove Back). More than half the fiction is the result of college or post-graduate reading lists or super-cheap classics. The non-fiction ranges from religion to astrology, feng shui to cooking, finances to relationships, self-help to philosophy. Surely, something there, some insight, some treasure. I just need a little inspiration!

I've never contemplated all the words, the ideas, the lies and the stories I've exposed myself to over the years. That it informs what I believe. Just as it opens me to worlds, imaginings and avenues of action, it also, inadvertently, creates unacknowledged, imperceptible limits on my imaginings.

Which makes me wonder about the written books I haven't read. All the ideas I know nothing about and the lies and the stories that are alien to my view. In some cases I've spared myself, in others I've denied myself something delicious, inviting or enhancing.

Then there are all the conversations, the tales, the advice and admonitions. All the spoken words from people, from television, from radio, from eavesdropping, from being soothed.

Woven together from all that I've read, all that I've heard, is a unique filter coloring how I see and experience my world.

All those things no one ever told me, no one ever shared. Bad advice I've been denied the pleasure of ignoring and good advice that isn't adding more variety, spice, joy or love to my life.

It's worth considering that our world is built from the blocks of what we see and hear, what we read and listen. And after all that consideration, in the end...I have the books I have. I heard the things I've heard. I've lived the life I've lived.

And all that I've read and heard and lived tells me I can create whatever I want tomorrow.

I'm creating adventure.
Funny, I don't own a lot of lot adventure books. I lived it, but rarely taken time to read someone else's version of it.

Why?

2009-09-02T23:26:00.000-07:00

Why do we seek purpose in our lives?
Why does life seem so real?
Why does life seem like a dream sometimes?
Why don't we know all the answers?
Why don't we know if there are aliens or not?
Why do we die?
Why do we question existence?
Why are we all different?
If God exists, why doesn't He make it plain and just say so?
Why do we have the same concerns and issues?
Why does it matter?
Why do we want something else when we get what we want?

"Why are there no answers to all the why questions in life?"

--The young woman I attuned this evening was full of questions and was so fun about it. The last question is the last question she playfully asked.

Reflecting Light

2009-09-01T23:04:00.000-07:00

"You can't see light, unless it hits something."

That's what our instructor said in photography class. I'd never thought about it before, not that way. It's true. The spectrum of light is only made visible when it bounces off particles in the air or physical objects.

You can't capture it really, either. It moves and it hits something and we see it, recognize both it and whatever reflects its glory.

Makes me think of the value and function of human beings, mountains, seas and every glorious thing in our world. We can only see it in relation to how the light interacts with it.

How does the light interact with you? What is made visible? What stays in the shadows or casts shadows?

I reflect God's light. It lands on me and bounces out into the world. Radiant!

Other times, I've been caught sucking God's light in like a black hole and not allowing anything to come out. Black holes serve some function we don't understand.

More and more, I let God's light hit me so that others may see.

A life of choices

2009-08-31T21:27:00.000-07:00

A few hours ago I ran into one of my cousins. I gave her Reiki I and II attunements a little over a month ago. She'd suffered back pains and was not doing well with the painkillers.

She was happier than last time I saw her. "How's your back?" She went on to say that while it was better she was still dealing with it. I suggested she spend some time each day doing the self-treatments. "I do feel much better when I do it!"

The problem is making the time to do it. I know this myself. Just this morning I suffered a sinus headache trying to morph into a migraine and reached for the pills. For the last couple days I've known I needed to make time for self-treatment.

No wonder this healing art was lost. We don't make time for what works. We wait until there's a problem instead of practicing prevention.

How many Americans only integrate responsible diet and exercise into their daily lives after the diabetes diagnosis.

Tons of books explore a very simple truth. Our lives are made up a million minor choices.

Tomorrow morning, I'm doing reiki! And I'm not having more than a little piece of chocolate before I go to bed, either.

Love

2009-08-30T23:20:00.000-07:00

My post on fasting a few days ago generated several great conversations with friends. One of them decided to join the fun. He fasted this weekend. Funny thing about his fast, though. His fast was about adding something into his weekend rather than taking something out. He fasted love, the word love. His fast was to say love as often as he could throughout the weekend.

I'd never heard of a fast that lived in increasing some behavior. But if anyone could pull such a feat off, such a fast, it was him!

Over the last few years we've joked about my fasting. When I fast, he reaps blessings. I go a few days without eating and he suddenly gets some new understanding about something that's puzzled him for years, even decades. Or I fast 12 hours without telling him and he can't figure out why all of a sudden people who've been out of touch are all calling on the same day.

He had this phenomenon in mind when he "fasted" the word love. He wanted to see what I'd get out of his love fast.

What I got was a greater conscious awareness of loving others in my life. In particular, I'd been resisting the notion of being "in love". Why did I resist? I don't know. Scared, mostly. Making it mean something more than what it is. It's an experience of another person. That's all. I saw it as a gateway to the beginning of the end of a relationship.

Love is the experience of connecting with and intimately knowing the divine nature of another human being. I felt that this weekend.

Love fast.
Fast Love.

Perfect imperfection...

2009-08-30T00:25:00.000-07:00

It was to be 30 days of blogging.

And then a busy weekend, solidly scheduled tested my discipline, my planning.

My phone wouldn't let me access the login, constantly asking me, over and over and over, if I wanted to allow the page even though the security information wasn't current. I said yes, but my phone didn't agree.

At 10:30pm, I wasn't able to access the blog.

At 11:20pm, I'm home. Only I'm busy trying to attend to the needs of another.

And when it's all said and done, the clock says 12:09am. Saturday has come and gone.

There will not be 30 days straight unless I start over.

I might. I'll decide tomorrow.

Good night.

Old recipes with Love

2009-08-28T23:22:00.000-07:00

This year is the year of reinventing Rahbin. True, it's lifelong, ongoing and incessant, but last year and the view of this one coming are immeasurably new and exciting. Along with taking on photography and reiki as a business, I'm also exploring my creative expression through cooking.

A few weeks ago, I was struggling to come up with something different to cook for my sweetheart and I before a class. Having lived on my own for so long, I fell into the lazy habit of making healthful, affordable choices at eateries or relying on processed food warmed up. After combing through old memories of meals I'd made in the past, I remembered a recipe for a simple curry-flavored dish of ground beef and vegetables over rice.

The recipe comes from an old paper recipe book of my mother's, held together by three wire pieces that resemble stapes, but are circular. How I loved the recipe for bean soup as a child. I called my mom and she gladly read the recipe for kima (keema) over the phone. It was delicious and well received.

When I asked to borrow it for copying, there was hesitation. The pages are brown and some are on the way to crumbling in the hands. I promised to be gentle.

This morning, I took the pages to a local office supply store and made two sets of copies. It seemed logical to give my mom a more usable copy as well.

So...now I'm cooking, taking photographs and sharing reiki.

A reinvented Rahbin!

Midlife is fabulous!

Commitment to Heal

2009-08-27T20:12:00.000-07:00

MasterRabin is a word play on both my desire to master me as well as being a Reiki Master. It's been years in the making, but I'm finally ready to be an active, teaching Reiki Master. I've committed to enabling at least 100 individuals to turn on their innate healing power before 2009 ends.

The seed was planted five months ago when I realized a woman I see regularly at my local coffee shop would benefit from an attunement. Until then I'd only attuned my mom and one friend. Even though I've experienced immense personal benefit from the balancing effects of the reiki energy healing method, I was keeping it all to myself.

I've been going to this same coffee shop for the last five or six years. Sometimes I go in a couple times a week, other times only once or twice a month. Over the years I've noticed times when she's more happy and less happy, more enthused and less enthused and physically more healthy and other times less healthy. On that day five months ago, I knew in my heart that I'd made some promise in eternity, a vow before getting here from heaven, to offer her reiki.

It's been five months in the making, but I'm now ready to fulfill on that soul agreement.

Over a year ago, I gave my first Reiki attunement to a friend, Abby. She's a licensed massage therapist, acupunturist and herbal medicine healer. We bartered. I gave her Reiki I and II and she gave me a series of acupuncture treatments. She shared some of the benefits she noticed, including an enhancement when treating clients with massage and acupuncture. I began to realize my own benefits were not a fluke.

Months later, I gave my Mom Reiki I. More months, then reiki II. She too has reported a series of benefits, including lower blood pressure.

And that was all. Months passed without sharing it with anyone else.

In April, Abby suggests I call a guy who wants to barter his fashion consulting for reiki. We made arrangements. He somehow remained charming and tactful while being brutally honest. When all was said and done, 1/3 of my browns, blacks and tents were missing. In exchange he became a reiki master. He was my first.

And then I was on a roll. I turned on the healing power of my sister, a cousin, a former coach, a friend, my sweetheart, another friend and so on. All the while it was becoming clearer that I wanted to do more of this, needed to do more of this.

On July 26th, I declared myself in business, but have so far only accepted one paying client. And, I haven't even accepted the actual payment yet. I've agreed to be paid.

Today, I took a major step in truly stepping into what I declared as the newest aspect to my life's work. I am a healer. Truthfully, I am a gifted healer. It runs in my veins, inherited. I'm certain of this. The series of books I wanted to write on Luzca are in part about owning this truth.

No time for home-made chai this morning, I stopped by my local coffee shop before heading off to scope out used classroom furniture from the district warehouse. Several of us from my high school planned to meet there right at 9am when the doors opened with a new shipment. My students now have a nice wooden coat rack for their wet jackets in winter.

As soon as I walked in three familiar faces greeted me with warm smiles and hellos. As fate would have it, there were no customers behind me. Rare! Very rare! This place is always busy.

I recognized the set-up. Either walk through the door I've stared through for five months or let it close, walk away.

If there were any doubts about it being an opening, an opportunity, the young lady who inspired my desire to share reiki inquires with great interest and enthusiasm into what's new for me this summer. Not the polite kind of "what's new?", but the general interest that reeks of winking angels daring me to fess up.

As soon as the question left her lips, time and space expanded. For a coffee shop at 9am, it suddenly seemed particularly still and quiet. In the two second eternity it took me to muster the courage to answer forthrightly, I chose crossing through the threshold. I knew that if I did not mention reiki, if I did not own up to what I created, I'd have one more experience of knowing myself as a flake, as someone who shirks, as someone who was too scared, too timid to contribute powerfully to another human being and make a difference in her life.

I told her about reiki. I did not tell her that she was the inspiration for my choice to create a business around sharing reiki or that at that I practiced on a dozen others before acquiring the confidence to offer it to her. I did tell her that I knew she'd benefit and that I wanted to give it to her as a gift.

I walked through the door. I know myself as someone who is committed to enabling others to live balanced, healthy lives. I shared the benefits I'd received and those received by others I personally attuned over the last few months.

Then there was momentum. I told her that my services were free, but that I'd gladly accept paying referrals later if she benefited and wanted to share it. It's so huge that I was clear with myself and with her that I'm creating this as a business. Living my commitments out loud.

Ten minutes later I called to schedule the first client for which I'll be paid. It's quite a breakthrough in valuing what I have to contribute to others.

Light of The Morning After

2009-08-26T20:02:00.000-07:00

It's only natural for an artist to explore different mediums. Everyone's an artist. Everyone's exploring different mediums.

Yesterday I attended the first of a six session photography class. A college sweetheart had dabbled in photography and taken me into the dark room for processing. That was my first exposure.

There was one photo he'd taken of me smiling at him from his bed. I was fully dressed! It wasn't the Mona Lisa, but he had captured a mood, a smirk and a look of love. That was when I first recognized that the artistry of photography was available to anyone who took an interest in the subject. Expertise increases the odds, but the art is in the eyes. Anyone, everyone can be an artist!

I was nearly forty before I owned the artist in me. I'd written a book, attempted decoration, painted my home's interior, created jewelry and perfected the delivery of lectures to high school seniors...but I didn't consider myself an artist until a housekeeper came in, walked around a bit and offered an out loud observation of the obvious, "So you're an artist?".

Yesterday, this artist took her first photography class. This morning, as I headed off with Chocolate on our morning walk, the haze created as light plays off tiny particles in the air caught my eye. I've always taken moments to marvel at light. Today, the morning after, I ran back for my camera.

When you own being an artist, there's freedom to see what others don't, to marvel at it, and attempt to recreate it. Makes me acknowledge that all artistry is a testament to the divine, an effort to mix our creativity with God's in homage to magic.

I wouldn't submit this shot to photo world magazine for technical merits, but I share it here because I saw myself as an artist, as someone attempting to capture a moment marveling at the divine.

We are all artists. Chefs are artists. Most housewives, too. The usual suspects are painters, sculptors, musicians, graphic artists, photographers, authors, journalists, decorators, speakers, and so on. We forget about electricians, plumbers, salespeople, nurses, doctors and all the other professions whose members' products or performances incorporate artistry in less appreciated ways. There are electricians who take pride in how the finished product, the wires, the connections, the conduits, flow, look and function. There's artistry in efficiency, too. There's artistry in conversation. There's even artistry in bad art, whatever the medium.

We are all paying homage to the Light!

Photography Class

2009-08-25T23:44:00.000-07:00

Just got back from my first photography class. I didn't want to go. I've got too much to do already! And then I went. And it was fabulous. Expect to see more pics posted.

2009-08-24T23:45:00.000-07:00

He's been called an avatar, a guardian soul and a companion bar none. My calm, blonde chihuahua named Chocolate has been teaching me how to accommodate and to love without regard to my moods, d'ruthers, philosophical notions or momentary insights.

Pure, simple
love.

Movies that Moved Me

2009-08-23T00:08:00.000-07:00

I've got a long and wonderful day ahead of me tomorrow starting with a breakfast date with a cousin at 8am and then leaving at 10:15am with my sweetie for an event in Santa Barbara. Just in case I don't get a moment before Sunday becomes Monday, I'm posting before Saturday is barely noticed as gone.

I'm cross-breeding facebook notes with blog entries. The same friend that passed along the query of 15 favorite books has now inquired into 15 favorite movies.

Loving movies more than books, I hated stopping at 15. Taking liberties, I didn't.

1. The Godfather I
2. The Godfather III (ok, Godfather II, too, but I and III deserved distinct entries)
3. Training Day
4. Desperado (saw this one in the theater 8 or 9 times)
5. Phantom of the Opera
6. Very Bad Things
7. Requiem for a Dream
8. Contact
9. Matrix (just the first one)
10. Notes on a Scandal
11. Chicago (I know...something about it, though)
12. The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
13. The Dark Knight
14. Pirates of the Caribbean (1st and 3rd, especially)
15. The French Lieutenant's Woman

That list spilled out until I got to #15. Then I got stuck wanting to make the official last entry count. Others that came to mind:
Blue Velvet
American Beauty
2001: Space Odyssey
Bourne Ultimatum
Dr. Strangelove
Transformers
Blackhawk Down (?)
Kramer vs. Kramer

mmmm mmmm movies

I prefer action, dark comedy, vengeance and drama. Testament that I am created in my Father's image.

Writings of my Father

2009-08-22T16:03:00.000-07:00

My love of words to explore worlds is genetic. Paternal aunts, uncles and cousins all create exquisite poetry, musings and stories.

Had my father lived into the 21st century, no doubt he'd have a well-followed blog. To remember the year he died, I always have to first remember the year I got married. 1995? Graduating law school, meeting my ex-husband and introducing my then fiance to my dying father during his last day's in the hospital all happened within a year's time. December 1994 to 1996 was a period of significant transition.

I remember getting a phone call from my Aunt Mildred, "Robin, your father expired..." Inspire, expire, breathe in, breathe out, live, die, create, destroyed. Here, gone.

He was such an incredible man. He loved to philosophize about the occurences that make up what we call our lives.

I remember going to my Grandmother's home on the eve of the funeral. Everyone was passing around his journals, enjoying his commentary, letters and thoughts. These were collected and typed and distributed by my Uncle Therman so that the entire family would have a piece of "Bubba" to read and remember him by.

I still have the originals as well as my copies. Better than treasure.

One cousin, Jaha, shared a particularly special and close relationship with him and remains moved by the spirit of my father. She's posted several pieces from the collection on her blog at jahasworld.blogspot.com/. Put "from Bubba's journal" in the search box at the top of her blog to see the resemblance.

For ease...here are a couple:
History
Prayer
I'm a problem-solver if nothing else
Letter to a Woman--a taste of my father's "character"

The Flow....When you know

2009-08-21T15:40:00.001-07:00

Happy B-Day to me. I'm off to have dinner with my sweetheart. I know, I know. 30 posts, 30 days.

All I can make time to say today is that it's nice to be in the flow. I walked into a discount clothing store and scanned the blouses. A green and brown top called my name, practically yelled. I picked it up, gave it a few glances and sat it back down. It might work, but it might not.

As soon as I sat it down, something drew my hand right back to it. "Fine!" I said. It's $8.99 and I can always bring it back if it doesn't work. I put it on with matching pants and a scarf and voila!

It's a magical life.

Blessings to everyone.

Music Again

2009-08-20T21:45:00.000-07:00

I'm enjoying The Police's "Don't Stand So Close To Me" for the first time in months. Hate that I had to give away my tickets to their reunion concert a couple years back. Although, considering there was no clamor for an extended or second tour, I guess it's just as well that I enjoy the oozing sexual tension from their digitized youth.

"You know how bad girls get..."

I'll probably play it five or six times before I move on to "De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da".** (Greatest Hits CD)

Two, ok maybe three years ago, I bought a mega-MP3 so I could store all my ancient music in one convenient place and ditch the five-CD changer that makes rather loud clicking sounds when it switches from one CD to the next. A few months ago the smaller version I take with me on my walks was dropped in mud or water, muddy water I suppose.

You know how some folks will go to the refrigerator every couple hours or so to see if there's anything good to eat? No one's gone shopping, nothing's been added or taken away, and yet there's a return every few hours to see if there's something newly appealing or interesting in there after all. And then on the third or fourth opening and closing, the sighs begin to get audible, maybe a curse word or two lamenting that nothing has magically appeared. I do that sometimes.

Over the last few months I've plugged in the small MP3, charged it up and tried to turn it on. I did it a couple months ago and again today. When charging didn't do much, I tried wiping off the lingering muddy water streaks. Kinda like trying to wash death out and life in or applying electric shock to a corpse days after death has visited and gone.

I haven't walked with music all summer and today was to be the day. Fall is in the air and four additional pounds on my body. I love walking at dusk when the sun makes its way further south during the fall. I take the winter off and then back out in the spring when the sun comes back to kiss the wet away.

Glorious incentive! I charged up the dusty new mega MP3, loaded the software, transferred the 557 musical files and four hours later I sit here disturbing the silence with my sing-alongs.

Feels so good to use what I've purchased, I'm planning to reload my router's software so that I can free myself from the data-ready phone line in the back room.

A perfect early fall evening...come home from work, walk chocolate, drop him back at home and then give myself an extended walk with music and then settle in at the desk surfing and writing...and disturbing the silence with my singing.

** my favorite lines from De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da
Poets, priests and politicians
Have words to thank for their positions
Words that scream for your submission
And no-one's jamming their transmission
And when their eloquence escapes you
Their logic ties you up and rapes you

Fasting

2009-08-19T07:37:00.001-07:00

In all my postings about changing my relationship to relationships, I give credit to courses I've taken, energy healing and to my ability to manifest what matters to me. I've never mentioned fasting.

I love fasting! There was a short period in the late 90's when I belonged to a Church of God in Christ (COGIC). The pastor was a faster. Effectively! I'm impressed by results. And he looked great! Fasting was encouraged for both church and personal goals, spiritual and physical.

Fasting wasn't new to me. As a child, I'd watched Muslim family members observe Ramadan as well as fast periodically to cleanse the body. It wasn't a big stretch to take it on when Pastor Hill preached its virtues.

Back in 1999, my COGIC days, I once fasted for three days, having only water and a little juice or tea on the third day. The second day was rough, but the third day was fabulous. I was tired, but not fatigued; my mind was clear and my heart felt pure. Lovely!

Although I left COGIC, I continued to fast for both spiritual and material benefit. I remember fasting in 1999 for a condo I wanted to buy. It was perfect, 3 bedrooms, one a loft, high ceilings, huge deck and lots of natural light. I fasted and prayed and hoped and hoped, but also added that I only wanted it if it was God's Will and the right place.

My offer wasn't accepted. I took the next day off to recover from my crushed dream and called the realtor to see what had come up on the market in the three weeks I'd spent praying, fasting, hoping and waiting for the one that fell through. Three or four hours later we walked into this place I've now lived for ten years. I fell in love with it on sight. From that moment on, fasting has been a big part of my life. Yet, until now, I've not shared about it.

I've shared so much about Landmark Education, reiki, crystals and so on. The truth is that when I decided to create a committed relationship, I prayed about it and asked what kind of fasting would have me clear out the spiritual, mental and emotional debris that always gets in the way.

Oh yeah, a little detail...Sometimes a suggested fast finds it's way to my inner ear and I either say yeah or nay. Other times, I'll have an outcome in mind, a particular request, and I'll ask that inner voice what's recommended.

When I inquired internally for a fasting regimen to create the relationship I wanted, I heard 20 Mondays before my birthday. I don't remember when I prayed about the fasting recommendation or exactly when the answer came, but I know the first Monday was December 1, 2008. Glad I calendared it! The 20th Monday happened sometime in June. (They were generally midnight to midnight, but a few were 8am-8pm.)

In a conversation with a friend a few days ago, I shared that the stories of people, situations, movies and media are incredibly transparent for me of late. I mentioned again that while I have the converter box my Mom didn't need sitting in a closet ready to install, I haven't had a functioning television since they switched to digital in June. Haven't missed it much, either. "No wonder," he says, "you've fasted media and now you've got this gift of seeing things transparently."

I hadn't thought of it as "fasting" since it wasn't intentional or deliberate. That's happened before, though. I'll get super busy and not make time to eat and then decide to turn it into a fast. So, yes, let's make it a fast. I'll finally get satellite or something when the new school year starts, making the fast from television the entire summer break.

If you haven't fasted before, try it out. For me it goes hand-in-hand with prayer, but take it on however works for you. You feel better, your skin gets healthier and it enhances any weight loss activities.

What got me thinking about fasting this morning were thoughts of gifts, giving, finances and tithing. I'm fasting wasteful spending for my 43rd year. Ouch! That one's gonna hurt. I'll be spending the next couple days praying over exactly what that's going to look like.

The spiritual aspect is in unearthing and clearing out the hidden scripts and imperatives of which wasteful spending is a symptom. I can't wait.

**If there are any friends or family wondering why I didn't share about the 20 days of fasting sooner, it was simply because I was also fasting blabbing about it. There were times I wanted to share it, but it felt pretty clear that the instruction was to keep it to myself until it ended. It strikes me as peculiarly obedient that even though the actual fast was completed in June, the designated fasting period was until my birthday, and I was only moved to share about it now that the last Monday before my b-day has passed.

Obedience is highly underrated.

Intimacy

2009-08-18T11:24:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I noted that I'd taken eight* courses within the past year through Landmark Education. I finished the eighth last night--Sex and Intimacy.

The best thing I got out of that class happened during an exercise in which we uncovered what was the most likely future in the area of sex and intimacy if we continued to what we've always done.

The vivid images that came to mind brought me freedom. In one, I was 65 and lived in the "downtown" area of a lazy town or small city. I owned a downstairs storefront, probably a bookstore, and made my home in the large loft above surrounded by books and tons of favorite things. I imagined myself walking over to a window to listen in on a conversation taking place below. My gentleman friend was engaged in a conversation with a passerby or customer. He was friendly, full of energy, vibrant. I knew him to be a doting, caring man.

As I looked below and gazed at him fondly, I thought, "Wow! He's such a nice man. I really like him. He's wonderful to have around...Too bad he's..."

There's always a "too bad...", followed by an exit.

The exercise in class continued, I next saw myself in my late 80's living in a senior community. A new guy. Once again, my thoughts were "He's great. So sweet and giving and kind...Too bad he doesn't..." My exit cue.

Suddenly, there was clarity. I'm like a baker who creates a perfect tiramisu but then gets focused in on how the cocoa didn't fall just right on the plate in some sort of clearly distinguishable and pleasing pattern. "Look at that, there's a wee bit more cocoa on the left and front than on back and right. Almost perfect, though! Almost!"

I realized I was totally OK with it. My likely future was one where I'd keep dismissing great lovers because I found some one or two dissatisfying things about them. Seems odd, but I found that future not-so-bad. There's always someone around for me to find slightly dissatisfying.

And that created a breakthrough for me. When it wasn't so bad to live a lifetime of finding each successive partner slightly dissatisfying, I got over my fear of being stuck with some one dissatisfying person. In other words, since what I'm going to be is dissatisfied with something, since I'm looking for what's not perfect, I can stop letting what's not perfect make any difference or mean anything. In embracing my habit of mind to be dissatisfied, I have the freedom to enjoy what is satisfying.

Joy and Heaven and Love...sweet freedom.

The simplicity of not requiring absolute perfection in order to experience the thrill, the love. Now there's freedom and joy, even fulfillment, in relishing the way there's just a wee more cocoa on the left and front. Sure, I could make another, but then maybe the next has a wee more cocoa on right...or clumps on top. Now that I know that even if the cocoa fell evenly and perfectly on the tiramisu's top and sides, I'd just notice that the marscapone wasn't perfectly lined top to bottom when it was sliced.

Thanks to that exercise, now I get to take a few moments to look the tiramisu over, appreciate the perfect imperfections and dig in to enjoy the delicious taste and texture.

----
On my love of Tiramisu...
Almost nine years ago to the day, I'd spent a day on my own hanging out around Jerusalem during a ten day trip through Israel and Egypt. I decided to dine at Italian restaurant called Cielo before whatever it was I did with the rest of the evening. I don't remember what I did after I left Cielo. I don't remember what I ate there or had to drink. All I remember of that night was the Tiramisu. The chef whipped tiny specks of divine chocolate into the marscapone topping. Just as one of these tiny flakes of chocolate would register and my mouth began to savor it, it'd be gone. And then another would do the same. Like a perfectly choreographed interpretive dance created for the tongue's delight. The recollection makes my eyes widen and mouth water. Many physical sensations come up with that memory!

Yeaaaaaaah. So now relationships are like enjoying the perfect Tiramisu over and over and over again.

The Thirty Days Experiment

2009-08-17T09:29:00.000-07:00

What would it look like if I stopped worrying about what it looked like? What if instead of waiting till I had time to make it all sound just so or waiting till I felt I had something profoundly insightful to share, I simply shared? It'd look like the next 30 blogs.

I turn 43 in a few days. Forty-two was a great year, but I expect 43 to be even better. Of all the things that have happened during my 42nd trip around the sun, my favorite is moving from I to E. I took my first personality test in high school and consistently tested as an introvert. A few months ago I took the Jung-Enneagram test at www.similarminds.com and was surprised to see an "E" where an "I" had always been. ENTP--Extrovert, Intuitive, Thinking and Perceiving. I wasn't expecting that!

I'll be completing my eighth course with Landmark Education shortly. August 15th was the 1-year anniversary of taking the initial course--The Landmark Forum. What'd I get from all those classes?

When I started:
*I'd just taken on dating with purpose but mostly dismissed anyone I went out with after the first date unless they were quicker and dismissed me first.
*I showed up late most places.
*I rarely accepted without anxiety invitations to social gatherings.
*As much as I enjoy teaching, I spent a lot of energy analyzing how the school wasn't run properly, other teachers were too this or too that and the students didn't know how to do school.
*And even as I recognized that I had a gift for energy healing and work with crystals, only passed on Reiki as a healing tool to two people.

In this year, I created my ideal mate and allowed this relationship to flourish in new ways with ease and joy. I'm not yet someone who shows up early, but I am more likely to be only five minutes late if I'm late at all. I've signed up for a photography course that begins next week, something I've always wanted to do.

Of course, their's plenty that I thought I'd do while 43, but didn't. In October I repromised to myself that I'd get my finances on Quicken and use it religiously. Didn't! I'm taking that on again this week. I'll let you know how it goes.

I also planned to write my Luzca book, but haven't done much with it in five months. The almost-funny thing is that when I signed up for The Landmark Forum last August, it was to help me get my book written. In time, perhaps. In half the classes, I say I'm going to use what I learn to help me produce more writing...and then I transform some other area in my life.

They say a writer's home is never as clean as when they have to write. The prospect of writing this past year was incentive to work on everything else, transforming all hidden parts of my soul and spirit. Maybe that's as it should be.

Another blessing I'm celebrating on this anniversary of taking The Landmark Forum is the peace I now take with me everywhere, in every situation. Events, situation or people no longer cause me anxiety from my distaste of being an imperfect creature. I say yes to invitations effortlessly and easily, no worries about doing it wrong or being judged. That single result alone is priceless.

Here's my current fave: I am now a teaching Reiki Master. A few days ago I accepted my first paying client. A year ago I'd only passed Reiki energy healing along to my mother and a close friend who is also an acupuncturist and massage therapist. Now, I've attuned a dozen friends and family and am committing to taking it on as a business. For some crazy reason, I didn't want to charge anyone. Nevermind I found it valuable enough to spend money on getting reiki, I had some block around charging others. Considering the results I get from it, seems silly. Sure, at first glance, there's an admirable quality to not charging others if I don't need the income per se. But it also means I've no incentive to truly develop and share this remarkable tool for physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health.

Plus, there's something to be said for assigning value and having people exchange a representative amount of energy for what they receive. As great as the results I gained from Landmark, Reiki is what had me get off a variety of medications, heal unworkable patterns and drop 25 of the thirty pounds I lost over the last couple years. The results I gained in Landmark were atop the foundation of being energetically balanced.

Now I am ready to pass the gift of balanced energy and healing along to others in the form of classes for Reiki I, II and III. I'm working on the workbook I'll use and give to clients and creating a website.

I'm so excited.

Mmmmmmmm. Picture me stopping by God's office, peaking in with a smile from the doorway. "You were right, it is fun. Guess I got a little anxious there in my late twenties...Sure, 43 more sounds amazing!"

15 Books

2009-08-13T16:26:00.000-07:00

A literary friend suggested compiling a list of 15 books as a facebook note. I did. After I completed it, I saw that it was a mirror of Who I AM. I'd like to share it. Some are fiction, some are reference, some are religious. All of them are philosophical. Mmmmmmm. The pleasure to be found in contemplating the experience of human Being.

1. Illusions--Richard Bach
2. Atlas Shrugged--Ayn Rand
3. The Fountainhead--Ayn Rand
4. The Prophet--Kahlil Gibran
5. The Little Prince--Antoine de Saint Exupery
6. One--Richard Bach
7. Ecclesiastes--The Bible
8. Essential Reiki--Diane Stein
9l. Feng Shui for Dummies--David Daniel Kennedy
9. Tipping Point--Malcolm Gladwell
10. Their Eyes Were Watching God--Zora Neale Hurston
11. Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow --Eleanor Alexander
12. 1984 --George Orwell
13. A Course in Miracles --Foundation for Inner Peace
14, Siddhartha--Hermann Hesse
15. In Search of The Healing Energy--Mary Coddington

Re-reading the list reminds me what I stand for in the world.

Coincidental Love

2009-06-22T22:56:00.000-07:00

I had the pleasure of being loved powerfully yesterday. It's such a circle. Love's power flows in an unpredictable, ever-expanding, unbreakable circle. A circle that flows in and out of heaven and earth.

I was in Los Angeles taking a Landmark Communication Course. My Aunt Janice was taking The Landmark Forum upstairs. We'd seen each other about a year ago at my Aunt Mildred's 50th wedding anniversary. Before that, almost a decade.

On Saturday I wrote a short love note to let her know I was thinking of her. Sometime Sunday afternoon, our breaks from our respective courses coincided and we had a chance to connect. She shared the unexpected impact of my note. She received it as pure love. She returned the same in the extended embrace when we saw each other.

And none of it would have been possible without my late great Aunt Lucinda. She's the one who came to me and inspired me to write a book (that's nowhere near done) which inspired me to look through an old family reunion book for authentic turn-of-the-20th century black names...which caused me to say yes to a chance invitation to spend part of Thanksgiving with my paternal relatives...which caused me to be at my aunt's 50th wedding anniversary and get reacquainted with Angela...who took a stand that I take The Landmark Forum. She took the stand when she said, "When you sign-up tell me when you're doing it. I'll come out and take it with you." From Delaware? "Yes!"

About a year later, five or six Landmark courses later...my Aunt Janice and I have the sweetest embrace in the lobby on father's day. I'm sure it was the best present my father, Robert, aka Bubba, could possibly have enjoyed from Heaven.

Funny thing about the universe. My maternal Aunt Linda and paternal Aunt Janice end up in the same seminar and in the same small group within the seminar.
Aunt Linda: "You're from Long Beach? What do you do?" She thought Janice looked familiar.
Aunt Janice: "I teach at Poly."
Aunt Linda: "No kiddng. My niece teaches in Long Beach. Her name is Robin..."
Aunt Janice: "That's MY niece!"

I love my ever growing life!

2009-06-02T21:59:00.000-07:00

Helllllllooooooooooooo. Been a while since I posted. School is out next Friday. Yeaaaaaaaaah!!!!! Then there's more time. I'll be back online posting. I might even clear my inbox on all my email accounts down to zero. Might??? I WILL!!! I'm giddy with anticipation for a summer spent walking, chilling in my new infrared sauna and continuing to participate in Landmark Education programs. Me and my new honey are taking a couple of them together. More about that coming when I have more time to write. Wanted to share this email. It's verbatim as I sent it. It was to the members of one of the courses I'm taking about a breakthrough I had after we did our third weekend together--25 of the 150 or so that shared the third of four weekends spread out over 6 months. I'll be back

I said, “Good Morning.”
After a pause and faint gasp, the voice on the other end of the phone
responded with “You sound like God’s receptionist!”

That’s how the conversation with my buddy of 17 years started when I
called this morning on my way to work. He was the first person to hear
my voice the morning after disappearing BEING a failure.
We’ve talked almost every day since 1993 after a year or so of warming
up to one another. Sometimes it’s only five or ten minutes. Aside from
the times when either of us are on vacation, we must have a running
average of at least an hour a day…17 years of hearing my voice. He’s
heard my highs, my lows, my insights and my insanity. In fact, he knows
my voice so well, he can practically tell me what I’ve just eaten, whom
I’ve just spoken with or what I’d been doing from the first words I
speak over the phone. He’s off-the-charts intuitive, insightful and
colorfully articulate. He has me at hello.

The morning after the third weekend, after only “Good morning,” he heard
a new calm, a new peace, a new level of confidence and power that
inspired “You sound like God’s receptionist!” He likes to describe
things. Just in “Good Morning” he claims to have heard an “absence of
jibber jabber”. He’s the kind of person who hates when someone answers
“Fine” and hates more people who idly ask “How are you?” without
genuine interest.

Whatever we did this weekend caused how I occurred for him, down to the
timber and tone of my voice to shift.

That’s pretty doggone huge. I had asked several of you if you could
take my assisting agreement this evening. I have a scheduling conflict.

The conflict left me up-in-the-air and I was starting to be in this
space where there is confusion, anxiety and failure. Sometime last
night, things got clear. What I have is a prior commitment and a new
commitment. Being only one body, I’ll only be able to do one. There’s
no being failure. There’s only failure to be at one of the two places.
There was nothing left to do except perform. In this case performance
shows up as either successfully finding someone who will switch
agreements this week or making alternative arrangements for the new
commitment. I'm one person with demands to be in two places. There’s no confusion. I won't be at one or the other. A breakdown in performance.

That was last night.

This morning I sound like the kind of being who could handle the
incoming calls of angels, archangels, saints, spirits and human souls to boot.

In Action

2009-04-04T11:18:00.000-07:00

Things are really moving in my life. Unlike my usual, this entry will be short. I'm ready to take a sea salt bath and then a nap. I just ran/walked my first 5K. A big deal for me. I've been thinking about doing 5k's for years. I signed up for one in early 2005. When I got there, it was super crowded. I was told two different locations to check-in, and neither of them were correct. After walking around for fifteen minutes, I got back in my car and drove the twenty minutes back home.

Now, having reached my ideal weight, I'm ready to focus on keeping fit and becoming fitter. I've always enjoyed running, but never make time to do it. It requires taking on a regimen of strength training so that my knees don't give me any trouble. Running has been one of those dreams that I hoped might materialize without action. This week I decided to take action. Several colleagues were running in the Seal Beach, CA 5k/10k. When I heard about it, I committed to it.

Running a 5k isn't a huge strain, but in terms of doing the things I really want to do instead of putting them off, quite an achievement. (Time: 38:11.5)

I'm also finally writing. Actually writing. Doing it. (by the way...if you're wondering if I know I write with incomplete sentences all the time...I do. I just love them. I know they're wrong. Guess its my rebellious side.)

My coach in the Introduction Leaders Program had me take on a writing structure that is producing results.

I write for 15 minutes, 3-4 times a day. It's perfect because 15 minutes isn't enough to let the editor voice kick in. Instead of staring at sentences and trying to make them perfect, I actually just focus on creating and letting the images and ideas flow from my head through my fingers and onto the screen.

It feels great it is to be in action.

A Graduation Note

2009-03-28T07:58:00.000-07:00

On Monday, March 23rd, I completed my fourth Landmark Education course, and thus completed their "Curriculum for Living".

The following is an email I sent to my fellow participants:

This afternoon I was present to feeling accomplished.

Tomorrow is the conclusion of our Self Expression and Leadership Program, the end of the Curriculum for Living. Everyone who completes The Landmark Forum is a "graduate". And yet, it feels incredibly special, powerful, remarkable to have completed the Curriculum for Living.

When I was 22 I graduated from Stanford University. My mom insisted on seeing me walk across the stage. I have vague recollections of sitting outside. There were speakers talking. I'd taken a year off and wasn't sitting with my "friends". It was meaningless, and not in the Landmark way. Less than a decade later I was finishing law school. Once again, I hadn't gone straight through. I was eligible to "walk" in May with everyone else, but I didn't finish officially till December. I chose to sit in the crowd and watch everyone else. It just didn't seem like a big deal. And, importantly, I never invited anyone to either graduation. To be honest, I don't even remember if I had anyone besides my mom there with me when I sat in the audience at my UCLA Law graduation.

This afternoon I realized that if there were stands, I'd invite all my friends and family to come out and celebrate my completing the curriculum for living. This really is the first time I feel a course of study has been worth celebrating. This education has had a profound impact on my life. This is the first time I'm genuinely proud of Who I Am. (typing that line, tears fell)

If college or professional school had made promises; if they'd delivered on them the way Landmark delivers on theirs, perhaps I'd have comprehended the celebratory nature of a "graduation" earlier. Prior to this curriculum, I never completed anything in a way that was satisfying or empowering. And certainly, not with the level of integrity and intention that I now apply to every aspect of my life.

I am living life powerfully and living a life I love. I've done more in the last three weeks than I usually do in three months, maybe six. Even though there are still plenty areas in my life that could use greater integrity, I see the incredible difference in who I am since I began this curriculum with The Landmark Forum in August. My home is cleaner; repairs I'd put off for years are now completed; student work is graded; grades posted timely; my desk is cleaner...sometimes completely void of pending items instead of cluttered; my relationships are richer.

I won't be able to attend the following Monday's revelry due to a prior commitment to assist at the Breakthroughs Seminar. Just know that all of you--coaches, participants, Kathy and everyone who has assisted in our program--all of you have participated in generating my first taste of what it means to be truly empowered by a course of study.

Finally, a "graduation" that is incredibly meaningful even as it's meaningless, shared with people that matter to me.

Love and thanks to each of you.

Robin

Amazing...aka Finally

2009-03-01T23:50:00.000-08:00

On Saturday morning I sent an outline of my novel, chapter by chapter to my coach in the Self Expression and Leadership Program.

I feel amazing. I'll have to blog more later, but I just needed to share the success.

Angels at Work

2009-02-19T21:38:00.000-08:00

I love my life.

The universe constantly conspires to assist me with living the life I agreed to live, fulfilling the purposes for which I agreed to be born. Authoring. Creating.

Two wonderful things happened today. Both of them conversations that got me writing tonight. The first conversation was with a colleage, the second with a new friend I've made in my current Landmark course.

I can't recall what it was that got me talking about my current writing interests when taling with our site's newest teacher. I just remember that when the conversation was over I volunteered to send him a link to some back story for one of the upcoming writing projects. After a couple weeks with no link sent, he inquired.

I'm so grateful. He asked if I wanted some feedback. "Not criticism, just feedback, to talk about your writing." Of course I was nervous. I wanted to say, "Hey, this is just backdrop, not my "real" writing. OK, fine, what was wrong with it? I'd rather hear it from you than some stranger." My printer and that of another teacher's I normally use conspired to be inoperable at the same time, sending me straight into his classroom. He was the only other class on my end still open and occupied thirty minutes after the school day ended.

I got over my self-talk and doubt and asked, "So, what did you want to share about the link I sent?" He insisted he just wanted to provide an opportunity for me to talk about it if I was interested. I was. I did. Fifteen or twenty minutes later the story of a major character I named just last Friday spilled from my mouth.

Then, a few hours later, I finally called a friend that had sent an email checking in on me a couple days prior. She shared all these amazing coincidences happening in her life. More than that, she shared the incredible power she was experiencing as a result of our class. She is helping her husband take their business to a new level; she's working as a partner in a new store and simultaneously taking on transporting her elderly father to and from weekly doctor visits while he deals with a serious illness that he'll recover from shortly. In other words, she's making things happen and the magic of the universe is smoothing her path at every turn.

And I was soooooooo inspired. Then the conversation turned to me. She said some wonderful things about my writing and then gently but firmly let me know that the time for me to get out of my way is today...not tomorrow, not next week, not next year. When this powerful woman spoke, I listened.

And tonight...writing happened. Yeah!!!

I look forward to the day when saying "Hey, I wrote today" is about as unusual as saying, "Hey, I ate today."

I signed up for a twitter account tonight, too. I'm not using it yet, but will be doing so in the next week or two. I plan on updating my status with plenty of "wrote X today".

A Double Rainbow Day

2009-02-07T22:36:00.000-08:00

I'm so excited. I came online a short while ago and discovered that a friend I hung out with earlier just contributed a wonderful post to my community project--a blog for and by energy healers. A perfect ending to a great day.

The original plan for the day was major house cleaning. Her call was welcome relief. We drove to the Fairfax district for a fabulous Ethiopian meal.

It was rainy off and on all day. Nothing like spending that kind of day in a quiet restaurant with a girlfriend. On the way home there was an amazing rainbow. So rarely do you get to see where it ends. It rested it's northern end smack in the middle of the Hollywood Hills. No kidding. And it was a full ark. That's a rare treat.

As I kept glancing away from the freeway to marvel at seeing the clear colors descending into the near distance, I heard "Look! A double rainbow." Yep, two rainbows, complete arks and clear colors, which appeared to be a couple miles apart at most. The clouds were spectacular and a full moon sat high above it all perfectly centered in the late afternoon sky.

It was another of those blessed moments of bliss that descend upon me more and more frequently. The meal was void of liquor, dessert or soda. Aside from the effect of the food itself, a drug-free transport into the realm of bliss. I love those moments when I get to straddle the world of the five senses and this other dimension where the all things meld into a singular pulsating field of connection to the energy of all that my eyes survey. It's like viewing a painting and then being transported into it, becoming one with the paint on every nanometer of the canvas.

Hard to say if the double rainbows cast a spell that I fell into or if the state of bliss manifested the rainbows. I'll know for sure when I get to heaven and learn if first came the chicken or the egg.

Creating Relationship

2009-02-03T22:04:00.000-08:00

The possibility for my life that I am living into is that I am Creativity Powerfully Expressed. In my current Landmark course, Self Expression and Leadership Program, participants are assigned a coach--basically a life coach. The course's product is a project that participants create and make happen. My project: a blog for energy healers.

The project is just one channel for the true work of the course--continuing to create for yourself a life that leaves you enlivened and fulfilled. Everything in life comes up in the weekly one-on-one coaching conversations.

For me, this includes my interest in a committed relationship. My goodness. I have talked this talk for years. I talk it, but I haven't lived it...until now. I've been too afraid. My big fear has been that a relationship with any man will be confining, limiting--basically, the end of me. What a story!!! What a love-draining, life-limiting story to have told myself for years and years. And, yes, the short of it is that I based it on a couple bad experiences that I was loathe to let go. To credit every person, every experience and every event that helped me get over it would take a while, but suffice it to say that I give Landmark credit for its part, though I can't discount subliminal tapes, Reiki, crystal healing, past life work, prayer, fasting, friends, family, food, wine, bliss, long walks, sunsets, ocean, the Caribbean and a guy named...oh why start naming names.

But back to my coach and being Creativity Powerfully Expressed. On one of our first coaching calls of the three-and-a-half month course I was asked to name some life areas in which I could use coaching. Among them, I remember stating "I want to stop being wishy-washy about committing to commit to a relationship." I can see why my coach suggested I write up what an ideal relationship might look like. What a great tool to uncover where I was stopped.

After a bit of trepidation at making it real, I wrote up a little something. I shared it with him on a Sunday. At our class the following Monday evening, he asked me to read it to our small group of six. "I don't have it with me", I said. Whew!!

"No problem. I have it right here", my coach volunteered. Cell phones and their email storage capacity. A little self-conscious at the start, I read it aloud. The feedback was great. He then suggested I read to the class. No way!!! I just wasn't ready to call this person into being by speaking my description into existence.

Weeks passed.

This same insistent coach pestered me about sharing my description. I couldn't. I was still wishy-washy on committing to commit to wanting to bring a real man into my life. In my life, just thinking something has made things manifest, I certainly wasn't going to share it with a whole bunch of other people so they could add their thoughts and energy to it, too.

Did I mention the insistent, pestering nature of any good coach? Suffice it to say that I was pushed to consider what was in the way. What came up for the umpteenth time was that no matter what I'd written, I was still deathly afraid that being a committed relationship had to look like some traditional nothing-to-do-with-me version of what relationships are supposed to look like. I was stuck in a trap of believing that who I am and how I live is inherently problematic--Too independent, too this, too that.

My coach and I had this conversation during a long workday for our course. I went out during the break and thought it over. After a short while, I realized there was a single missing sentence that made all the difference. To my description I added one last line. Voila. I could now read my description to just about anyone. If they knew this person, if that person walked up to me and introduced himself, he'd be welcome...Now.

A few weeks later, I had an appoitnment with an energy healer to clear out some blocks I was confronting. She uses a very powerful technique that helps clear out old thought patterns and beliefs. I cleared out the idea that any relationship I entered had to fit some pre-existing, socially determined mold. I shared with her the description of the relationship I am now welcoming into my life. The following was within an email I received from her this evening:

"The description you wrote of your new special person was so beautiful. And it put into words what I have been wanting to say for my own relationship. I was wondering if you would be willing to share it with me? And I was also thinking that you might want to copyright it and share it as an article on your blog and on other blogs. I have a feeling it would get picked up and shared around the world!"

I am going to take her suggestion to heart.

The following is the description I created of the relationship, the person I am welcoming into my life:

Who he is for me is an intellectual, emotional, physical and spiritual companion. I am the same for him.

He is well-informed and well-read.
He:
-appreciates and enjoys various cultures, may be foreign born, and enjoys travel.
-has some area of life where he excels, maybe even near-genius, and I find that area fascinating but do not share his expertise.
-has developed his ideas about who he is and what works for him independent of societal or cultural norms
-has a strong desire to be in a committed, monogamous relationship
-lives a philosophy of life that while based on the spiritual foundations of all religions, is beyond religion
-believes in God, the idea of karma, and is open to discussions on the nature of truth, reality, existence, etc.
-lives a healthy lifestyle, all things in moderation
-is easy to talk to about nearly anything.

Physically, is a lot harder for me to describe beyond saying that he is healthy. He basically just needs to be in the general range of "normal". He is neither extremely small or large, not model gorgeous nor bordering on repulsive...in other words, doesn't stand out in a crowd, but upon a double take has a certain charm that is effortlessly inviting, calming. His sense of humor is a perfect combination of witty, dry and subtle. His ethnic origin doesn't matter because having the above qualities makes him perfect for me.

What he values most about me:
--being easy-going, laid back
--my independence
--my conversation and curiosity in a wide range of areas--philosophy, politics, economics, world cultures, spirituality, love, death...no topic off limits
--my love of concepts, ideas, the intangible and the inanimate
--my loyalty

Our mutual goal and what makes us a fantastic match is that we are both consumed with understanding our world and how we get along in it. We look at our relationship as a glorious laboratory to apply our best selves and inspire love in the other.

In furtherance of growing ourselves and our love, we allow wealth and prosperity into our lives individually and as a couple. We have an extensive family composed of family members, friends and our pets.

Not only am I supported, but Who I am and How I am is marveled at and celebrated. In return for such a gift, I support his wildest dreams coming true with my ability to inspire ceaseless miracles and joy. We just can't get enough of each other!
______

The "last" sentence that set me free, that now allows me to welcome whomever God has for me is no longer absolutely last. It was the sentence: "Not only am I supported, but Who I AM and How I AM is marveled at and celebrated." That sentence set me free. I am free to be loved as I exist at any given moment.

I MUST at this point thank one of my oldest buddies, Gilbert. There is no way that I could have come to know which words resonate with me best or even that words are a creative force that are trifled with at our peril, but played with and valued at our great reward.

The healer who suggested I share it validated that I am beginning to live my possibility--Creativity Powerfully Expressed. I'm sharing it because I truly believe that in your reading it, you add more power to it.

Please click on comment below if you have any thoughts or feedback. I'd love to hear. Thank you for adding your positive love and energy to the relationship I'm creating.

Not only am I supported, but WHO I AM and HOW I AM is marveled at and celebrated. YES!!

Update June 2009: I met this person on February 27th! We are currently in a committed relationship.

Born tonight

2009-01-13T22:47:00.000-08:00

I’ve begun a fantastic project. Through the current Landmark course I’m taking, the Self Expression and Leadership Program, I am endeavoring to create a community blog for healers. energyexpressed.blogspot.com

As I finished one of the first entries, I was moved to offer a closing and sign my name.

Blessings,
Rahbin

My legal first name has been the initial R for years now, maybe a decade, maybe longer. The “Robin” just hasn’t felt right. Rabin hasn’t felt right, either. Tonight it felt so natural to sign my name in that spelling. I only noticed it after I’d typed it. So there it is.

My name’s birthday, January 13, 2009 @ 10:23pm. Rahbin.

I didn’t see any angels or other signs, but that’s my new name. 2009 is going to be amazing!

Who I Am

2008-12-13T07:10:00.001-08:00

Who I am is the possibility of Creativity Expressed!

In one of the Landmark courses, the Advanced Course, participants have an opportunity to decide what they'd like to bring into their lives, into existence. Examples include the possibilities of being love, fun, leadership, joy, inspiration and so on.

I chose creativity expressed. Originally, I thought that choice was specifically about my trying to get MY creativity expressed. Books would finally get written, I'd blog more, I'd finally paint something and hang it on my wall. MY creativity expressed.

Over the course of the last week, I've gotten to know this possibility a little better. We snuggle up together and it whispers it's deepest hopes and dreams to me. Who I am is the Possibility of Creativity Expressed.

That's Creativity with a capital "C". And God said, "Let there be..." God created. Just go there with me for a minute: "So God created man in His own image, in the image of God he created him, male and female He created them." Genesis 1:27.

As humans we have this incredible capacity to create. The obvious stuff are the artistic expressions--poetry, paintings, sculpture. But every conversation, every moment, every version of reality to which we subscribe is likewise our creation. Too bad, that it's usually done on autopilot.

Imagine creating our lives, our experiences, our world deliberately and purposefully. Creativity Expressed.

Who I am is the Possibility of Creativity Expressed.

Transformation...ongoing

2008-12-13T06:53:00.000-08:00

Finally, I am starting to get it. Between my Landmark courses, conversations with old friends and the daily process of processing living with an attitude of marvel and wonder, I am starting to be ok with me. The real me that I've hidden under all those warm, friendly behaviors that were designed to make sure I was tolerated with the least amount of interference or undesirable attention.

I post so little because I fear so much. Sure, I'm busy, too. But mostly the reason it takes so long to add entries here is because I am always wanting to edit and sanitize to assure I've controlled the impression left. So I think, anyway. I fear being judged inadequate, flaky, weird, unacceptable, daft. And yet, people who are tempted to judge me that way will do so no matter how well I edit. I wrap my ideas in cellophane and think I'm keeping secrets.

And as much as I all those things, I am also each of their opposites. And, on top of that, a whole host of other things and their opposites. Complicated, complex being.

Time to move on from fear. In the past I've tried to come up with some central theme around which my handful of readers--friends, family and fellow healers--might find acceptable and predictable and thereby be enticed to revisit. Yep, I spent a lot of useless time trying to figure out what kinds of posts should be placed here.

Transformation. That's really the theme that has always been true. The only impediment to claiming it has been my need to share only the things that let me look good as I saw it. Challenges resolved instead of challenges ongoing.

Flaky!!! I started this blog writing about my experiences with Reiki and Crystals and the fantastic ways my life changed for the better. And then, blogs about my passion for writing. And so on and so on. It felt so inconsistent. And yet, the consistency was present and obvious to everyone but me. Transformation.

This is notice that my blogs will be transforming. I won't even predict into what. Let's see what happens.

Financial Opportunities

2008-11-21T22:36:00.000-08:00

From today's LA Times:
"With the S&P 500 index down 52% from its peak, it would have to rise 108% just to recoup its losses."

Time is on our side. After the Great Depression, stock values eventually multiplied by the tens. I'm not taking anything out of the stock market. Nope. Leave it all there. By the time I'm seventy or eighty, I'll be super-wealthy!

The article ended:
"The mood is that 'the stock market only has one direction now, and that's lower...Why buy today if you can buy it cheaper tomorrow."

Sounds like a plan. When do the tomorrow's end and that other, always better, future begin?

Transformation, Landmark Education

2008-11-18T21:58:00.000-08:00

It is amazing.

On my way to work this morning, I called and left a voicemail for a friend noting that I feel like a different person each day. I wake up and I'm not the same person I was the day before. Almost two weeks ago I took Landmark Education's Advanced Course. I'd gotten fantastic insights and results after taking their Forum. To say that I'd been looking forward to the Advanced Course would be an understatement.

They promised it would offer an opportunity to see your life differently, to break free of old patterns that weren't serving you and all the other usual benefits promulgated by self-help books, seminars and events. And they delivered.

New ways of being are showing up in so many areas. All of them wondrous, marvelous and miraculous. All of them catching me by surprise. It's like all my default settings got reset to something closer to powerful and further from resigned.

Not to give away their process or curriculum, but the course helps you identify a habitual go-to stance developed as a child in response to something unpleasant. It was a response that suited and served a little child trying to defend itself and survive in world not fully understood. Basically, you uncover your ego's main point-of-view.

I'd go into details about my particular go-to stance in the world and the experiences I suspect are at its root, but that would take three entries right there. Suffice it to say that somewhere along the way, sometime in early childhood, I learned to have the attitude "I don't have to" in response to anything unpleasant or potentially threatening. If I might fail, be rejected or found out as someone who doesn't truly belong, then my automatic ego response would kick in--more reaction than response. In the tone of a frustrated three-year-old: "I don't have to!!!" Picture the arms crossed forcefully, a foot stomp and pout as the words are screeched out.

What is fabulous, just amazing, is that having identified that unconscious fall-back ego attitude, I now have the ability to thank it for sharing and get on with whatever action I turly desire, freed from the constraints of what others will think or whether the action helps me fit in, belong and get along.

If you haven't done their course, it's hard to explain. I'll try. You know that voice in your head that drones on and on when there's something you don't really want to do? Imagine hearing it and knowing body, mind and soul that it is an automatic response and not you actually thinking. For example, I needed to attend to my budgeting and had been putting it off for quite a while. I hadn't been getting 10% into charities like I want because I'd been too busy indulging my whims. I needed to take an honest look at what lifestyle choices I can and cannot afford if I want to both save money and give the 10% that I believe blesses my life.

I woke up at 5:14am Monday morning. The old me would have stayed under the covers till 5:55am when the alarm went off. Being wide awake and fully rested doesn't trump "I don't have to" on most days. But this past Monday morning, I heard a little whisper say, "You could have a breakthrough right now." I got up, got my stuff organized and created the budget and financial goals I'd been putting off for months and months.

That can sound pretty basic, even simple, unimpressive and a bit shy of miraculous and amazing. Yet, for me, it was miraculous. My commitment came before my go-to ego-driven "I don't have to". Since the course, it's happening at work, around the house. I take more risks, too. I don't mind being told no or trying something and failing. It's so powerful!

Of course, it is also heady. I'm squeezing more into each day. I'm interacting with friends and family more frequently, less the loner persona that served my "I don't have to" act.

The result of this "success" is that I'm also a little off-balance. I'm me, but I'm a me I don't know very well.

Landmark is about transformation. I've been transformed.

I look forward each new day to getting to know a new me, a more powerful me than the day before.

Bee-ing

2008-10-18T09:34:00.000-07:00

I remember being afraid of bees when I was a kid. I know for a fact that one bumble bee got a great laugh as it chased me down the street. It knew what it was doing, knew I was scared out of my mind, and I'm certain it went back to the other bees with a story about a little pigtailed kid who thought it could sting her.

Thirty-something years later, me and the whole bee community are on better terms. In fact, now that I'm clearer on how important they are to our entire food chain, I love them. With all the talk of the disappearing honey bees, whenever I see one, I get excited.

This morning I was on a conference call while I walked my dog. For some reason doing two things at once made me more attentive than usual to little details I normally overlook when I walk Chocolate. At one point, I observed a dead spider on the ground and actually bent a little closer to check out what kind it was. Not that I know anything about the various types of spiders beyond their look, but intuitively I get some sense of them.

Later I happened to glance down and saw a bee. It was wiggling its little body and seemed to be doing a bit poorly. Just following my gut, I leaned down and extended a finger to its bottom half and sent it a little Reiki. It wriggled a little more. I got up and walked away.

A few seconds later, about twenty feet from where I'd barely touched it, the most beautiful thing happpened. He buzzed me. The bee came close enough to buzz right inside my ear and then flew off at a right angle. Maybe I too recently saw the Bee movie, but in that instant I intuitively understood it came close to say thanks. Before I processed it consciously, I sent off a telepathic "no problem" in reply. My heart was full.

Real or imagined, I love feeling and believing that the smallest gestures are grand in impact.

A Brand New Sei...Sei He Ki

2008-09-07T14:41:00.000-07:00

When I began my Reiki experiences two years ago, I did as I was told. I did my daily self-treatments every day for the first twenty-one days. Then, not so much. Then again before and after Reiki II and so on. Back in April I was reading Abundance through Reiki and again got in the habit of daily self-treatments. Why do we stop? I guess that's like asking why we aren't "perfect" in the conventionally rigid sense of the word.

(For those readers who haven't read my Reiki stuff, see the favorites and click on the That Cat stories and others in that time period. In short, Reiki is a healing energy most commonly associated with its use in hospitals and spas as an alternative healing therapy. My blog is for a bunch of different audiences, so if you're not into all that alternative stuff, click around to find my usual rants about writing.)

It's kinda like being in the habit of drinking water daily and eating your vegetables and you feel great. But then, there's sweets, fried foods, overeating, a little less water. And after a while, we ask "Why aren't I feeling as optimal as before?"

Well, for me there was another factor, as well. After a bout with some negative energy months back, I saw my own energy healer and she reminded me the importance of cleaning, clearing and sealing after each Reiki session. I get sloppy. I do Reiki here and there on this person and that or for places and situations. It's a very informal practice and so I slack off on the formalaties--like cleaning, clearing and sealing when I'm done.

Basically, my healer suggested I'd left the door open. Evidently, negative energy doesn't wait for an invitation. I wasn't sticking to the routine and it was costing me. Being a wannabe perfectionist, I can easily get the attitude that, "Well, if I'm gonna do it not-so-well, better I don't do it at all." If I was allowing the negative energy I was supposedly clearing to latch on and hang around, then better I just leave it sit around like stale air. Leave it and just move along out of its reach. A bit inconsistent with whole notion of using our healing techniques to be a blessing to ourselves and others.

Sure enough, after a while, I missed that healthy feeling. I've already explored Pranic Healing and TeraMai Seichem Reiki. They have their pluses, that's for sure. But I like the simplicity and effectiveness of basic Reiki. There are at least another 100 flavors of Reiki that purport to increase one's healing powers. Yet, every fiber in my being said that I already had everything I needed with the basic Reiki and their four symbols.

I successfully fought off the urge to dump hundreds or thousands of dollars for a new flavor, when all I really wanted was plain old feels-good, tastes-good and does a perfect job vanilla ice cream.

I returned to doing the self-treatments at night. But then I'd get nice and sleepy and well, back to where we started, I wouldn't particularly feel like doing the elaborate rituals for cleaning-clearing and sealing.

All that to say, I was praying for a simpler way.

Last week I took a moment to relax after walking my dog at one of the huge regional parks. It was a beautiful, clear day, about 80 degrees. It felt like being on a hike in the woods, except for the houses across the street. It was the perfect scene for a little Reiki.

And that's when the symbol, shown above and below, popped into my consciousness. There were some old ideas hanging around in my aura. Just bad habits of thought and expectation. Several small versions of that symbol went to the places in my aura where old energy was caked and lodged. The zig-zag part zapped it out of place and the two semi circles lifted it out, up and into the light.

When I inquired intuitively, I understood the sybmol to be my answer to a quick easy cleanse and clear after doing Reiki. Just use a larger version of same about my entire aura and voila, negative debris taken to the light for transformation. Like the twice sliding hand slap that says "well that's that and it's done".

Being a Leo with a healthy ego, I immediately imagined that I'd received some new symbol from the ethers. Yes, I even contemplated whether I should get a trademark like all the other "inventors" of healing symbols do. Then I decided to actually draw it out, not just see it in my mind. Turned out it was awfully similar to writing Sei He Ki.

Diane Stein's Essential Reiki gives the usual explanation of the uses of Sei He Ki. Additionally, "It can be used for protection and purification, to clear negative energy, to release spirit attachments... I was not taught these uses, and believe they are no longer generally known."

That helped explain it for me.

I'd be curious to know what anyone who uses the Reiki symbols thinks. Have you seen this version anywhere? I'm sure I'm not the first person to become privy to it.

Speaking of Dreams

2008-08-22T12:34:00.000-07:00

I've noted once or twice that I want to move to a Caribbean island, yes? I've also lamented my desire for security and my being very keen on continuing to contribute to my current pension system.

And for my birthday...last week a friend of mine shared her intention to go teach in Europe over the next few years. In fact, she'd shared this with me and another teacher over lunch a few months ago. After moving just two years ago to a teaching gig with great pay, circumstances have her back in the job market again. This time, she's considering all her options. Instead of chasing the money, she's going after her truest desires. So, she's applying for gigs overseas.

I remarked that it sounded fantastic and that I marveled at her ability to give up adding more years into the teacher pension system. We're decades in to one of the few pensions with a half-decent chance of surviving the economic upheaval.

She went on to say that she wasn't giving up a thing. The international school program she'll go through let's her keep adding up the years of credit to our same system.

Tears came to my eyes. I sat down my rootbeer to compose myself. You'd think I'd been told I was the winner of one billion dollars. No, not a million, not a hundred million. I was beyond choked up.

The single biggest obstacle to an immediate relocation to the islands was washed aside in one sentence. That was the day after I signed up for the Landmark Forum. That was the day after hearing that life has a funny way of responding to our commitment to our future, that for a lot of people, the moment they commit to the workshop, new possibilities start appearing before they even sit down for the first session. In the prior blog, I mention being spontaneous. I signed up for the workshop on a Wednesday evening. I had lunch with this friend on Thursday. I attended the three-day workshop that Friday. Today is a week later.

I just went to the international school site to see where they have sites--US Virgin Islands, Cuba, Cayman Islands, St. Kitts to name the ones I saw first.

When people have asked which island do you want to move to, I never know. I can tell you which I've been to that I liked, and which I didn't like so much. Loved Providenciales, Turks and Caicos, loved Grenada. Didn't like St. Thomas--too American, too tourist-driven.

Within the last week, as I've mentioned this new possibility for making my dreams come true sooner than later to anyone who'll listen, I've heard time and again that many people who get into this only stay at a given location for a couple years and then move someplace new. Imagine: I start in the Caymans, I do a stint on St. Kitts. Five or ten years later, I'm completely clear on which location feels most like home. Or maybe I come right back to my home here in Southern California feeling complete, feeling like I've had the experiences I needed.

The best part about it all. Unlike years past, when I might have jumped right in, I'm willing to give it due consideration. Actually, I think the truth is that I don't want to move in Fall 2009. The earliest I'd want to relocate is Fall 2010. Options, options.

And one more note on the way things have shifted for me. On the last night of the seminar, a guy sitting in front of me turns around and says, "I can see your passion for the book you're writing. I used to work in the industry. I don't do that kind of PR work anymore, but I'd love to sit down with you for a cup of coffee and help you plan it out, create a proposal, create what will appeal to publishers and can sell rather than you writing it first and then trying to figure out how to market it." His girlfriend was right there. He's really talking about my book.

I couldn't believe it. In a space of just four days, new routes to dreams coming true are walking into my life. Pretty soon I hope to experience Life banging at my door begging me to just say yes to my wildest dreams coming true. I can see it.

There was a spider plant at my front door that was in need of attention. It was sun-scorched and in need of being transplanted and tended. Well, I cleaned up half the plants at my doorstep. I'll take the soil out of the car and tend to the rest of the plants at the door and on my desks by weekend's end.

What accounts for all the change, and the new openings? Is it Feng Shui? Three weeks ago, I bought a new bed. My old one was bad Feng Shu--metal, bars, obtrusive. Not conducive to the flow of chi. My bedroom is in the wealth corner of my home for those of you into that stuff. I also bought some bamboo plants. I used to have them all over my place. I had them around when I wrote and finished Thirteen. Not that I want to be superstitious about it all. Maybe my chi is flowing smoother.

Reiki? I recently started practicing the self-treatments again. I'd stopped. If it doesn't explain the outer changes, perhaps it at least contributes to the energy and mental clarity for blogging again.

Crystals? I've moved these around too. After the new nightstands, I ended up moving them all around throughout my home in new combinations and a few to different rooms. A couple nights ago, I switched around what's in my pillow--no more peridot and charoite, now moldavite and rainbow obsidian.

If you can't buy the feng shui, reiki or crystals, how about my participation in the Landmark Forum? Or maybe it's just the momentum of a new birthday? Could even be just the rhythm of my life. How about ascribing credit to the Gratitude Journal I bought the Monday before the Wednesday before the Friday before my birthday?

Seeing it all here in front of me...I guess it's just who I am, what I do: Always looking for ways to experience more, better and share that possibility with anyone who'll listen.

I blog about it, brag about it, because I believe it is possible for everyone on the planet to be happier, more fulfilled. I share what I do and what seems to work in the hope that friends, family, loved one's or strangers might be inspired. Not necessarily to try what I've tried, just to keep trying.

Besides, someone shared Feng Shui, Reiki, Crystals, Landmark, gratitude journals and on and on with me. (Thanks Angie)

Loving 42

2008-08-22T11:30:00.000-07:00

Yesterday a friend asked how I was feeling about my birthday. She remembers the drama when I turned 35. I was no longer able to mark the "24-35" category. I was now obliged to check "35-44" and for some reason that more than anything meant middle age. Hot flashes followed within a few years, so I'd say the mid-life crisis complete with birthday sobbing on my 35th birthday was not entirely premature. Turning 40 was no big deal. Neither was this 42nd birthday. If history is any indication, I'd better plan something spectacular for 45 when I jump to the "45 to 54" category.

My response to my friend yesterday was that I feel like a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old. I feel like I've been spending the last few years getting ready to graduate. And I am in the confident, expectant place where the future holds open all possibilities. There's anxiety too. Well, not so much anxiety as a sense of being clueless about what lies ahead. Sure, I've got dreams and goals and watered down versions of "plans", but I'm really very close to the same place I was in the summer of 1983, the summer before my senior year of high school.

I knew I was going to college. A given. But where??? Probably UCLA. I was absolutely certain I would continue my love of math and science and become some kind of engineer. That was the thing in 1980's. If you were African-American and loved math and science, the engineering programs courted you.

In the end spontaneous decision-making sealed my fate. A friend of my mom's who heard I'd gotten in to Stanford insisted I had to go there. It would be stupid not to go there, he implied, forget UC Berkeley. Not a fan of being called stupid...When I got to Stanford and struggled in calculus, I was so delighted over my first and easiest college "A" that I switched my major to sociology so I could get more of that good feeling and less of the one that made me feel like a loser. In retrospect, I just didn't know much about discipline, sacrifice or nitty-gritty knuckle-down studying.

Impromptu. Spontaneous. I've so often made life-changing decisions based on a whim, a feeling. It hasn't been "wrong" and my life hasn't been terrible. I'm planning to experiment with choosing instead of just deciding. Not UCLA or Stanford, not what I expected to do versus what someone else says is better. This time I'm going into "senior year" with a real sense of Self. I've got an interest in choosing what I want from the field of all possibilities.

I took the Landmark Forum last weekend. It changed my entire perspective on life, on my life. That's a second entry coming soon. I'll be taking the next course in their series in November and will be attending a weekly seminar over the next few months as well. The seminar is on commitment. I can't wait to apply it to my Luzca book, to relationships...a wide open second act.

A huge thanks to all the wonderful well-wishing I received. Blessings!

Chocolate Love

2008-06-25T22:43:00.000-07:00

I woke up the other morning with dating on my mind. Not just dating, the beginning of what I hope will lead to my next great romance. A commited, deliberate and purposeful go, complete with dating a while instead of just settling with the first good-enough guy that comes my way, I woke up thinking it'd be a good idea to prep my family and closest friends. I left my bed and headed straight for the computer.

The bottom line is that I wanted to make sure those near and dear to me understood I was serious. I haven't been a big fan of sharing my space. No kids by choice. I've had a few pets, but lets just say they never really worked out.

In retrospect, an e-note saying I'm interested in exploring commitment in a way I've never contemplated before isn't particulary convincing. Nonetheless, the morning started with a journal entry disquised as a email. It took longer than I thought to try to explain myself. Go figure.

With the temperature expected to top 100 (38C), I couldn't put off my walk much longer. At 9am, it already felt like 80 degrees (27C). Off the computer and onto the street. A block or so away, I made sense of my unsent message. The relationship I'm ready to welcome won't be about me. It's about accepting into my life a love that best serves the growth of my spirit, the expression of love on earth and the master plan that created our unfathomably complex universe.

A couple blocks later, I saw a little chihuahua being called by it's owner. He did a dash into a gate that she couldn't enter immediately. As soon as she made her way to it's entrance, his eyes made clear he planned to hop back through the bars to the preferred destination she opposed.

I smiled, practically chuckled. She was not amused and met my glance sternly. Once she saw my eyes and knew I was simply enjoying the dance they were doing moreso than laughing at her predicament, she relaxed a few facial muscles and flashed a quick smile.

For the most part, all the folks around my community are friendly and pleasant. As I continued about my walk, there were plenty of greetings and warm hellos. It struck me that I was being showered with love all morning. Every time someone smiled, spoke or waved it was like a little Hershey's kiss from the universe. Sure enough, as I passed that favorite spot where the muses greet me, I was overcome with a new idea. Flavorsoflove. A new blog. A new series. An accounting of all the kinds of love that flows my way on a given day.

All of us are recipients of instances of love that we take for granted. Or maybe you don't take them for granted. Maybe you notice them all the time and are grateful. For the most part, I think few of us ever recognize the many little ways the universe sends us dallops, drops and kisses of love. We notice the avalanches, the waves, the pools. Noticable patterns point out the streams of love. But every little drop?

Each drop is its own unique flavor. Forget 31! As many flavors as there are moments in a day. As many as their are humans, bees, trees, flowers, birds and the countless creatures that cross our path or command our momentary attention.

Flavors of Love. What an awesome blog, I thought. Inspired, I bounced my way back towards home. Half a block from home, I see the cutest dog running onto the sidewalk after a car stopped to try to guide it out of the street. It was a small chihuahua and looked like the same smart, frisky dog that caught my eye earlier.

Before I go any further, know that I've never cared for a dog. I've had a rabbit, a chameleon, an incredibly smart conure parrot and a mated cockatoo pair. I've only begun to really appreciate dogs over the past few years. Last fall, I stopped by the local dog pound five or six times, but there was never that special click I require to bring anything or anyone into my own.

I remember one in particular came up and sniffed me. He was so cute. Then he turned back around. When a dog facing possible death has the courage to say "we're not a match" you notice. I finally decided to do what has always worked best for me. Leave it to the universe. What's mine always comes to me. If I'm to have a dog, it'll take a might special one for me to open up my home and share my space. Better not take any chances and just be ready to recognize what's mine when presented to me.

The temperature had risen another five degrees, at least, in the fifty minutes I'd been out. Since this striking creature looked like the dog I'd enjoyed watching earlier, I couldn't in good conscience just head on home and wish him luck. I figured I'd at least walk him back to his house.

It was surprising to me how readily he followed me. Folks on the street assumed he was mine. He seemed to have a slight limp on a rear leg, so after a block, I carried him. We bonded instantly.

It turned out I'd miscalculated the distance. It was a little further that I'd estimated. After a couple rings of the doorbell, I heard a dog rustling in the backyard of the home. I began to walk away. It wasn't theirs. The situation was entirely new for me. Now that I'd walked the dog all that way, I'd have to follow through with putting up signs. I'd need to get it back to its owner or take it to the pound or...something.

Before I was completely down the driveway, the woman came out and her pooch followed. Thank God. I wasn't crazy. The two did look substantially alike. At least, I hadn't imagined the similarity. Now that I'd involved myself, time for next steps.

Flavors of Love.

I carried him the half-mile back to my place. He came in and felt natural, comfortable. He was so at peace. Odd that such a beautiful, house-broken, well-trained and perfectly tempermented dog had no tags, no collar, no chip. Too much tv news. I immediately wondered if his owner had been foreclosed upon and forced to move to an apartment that wouldn't take pets. Or maybe, he just got lost and wondered too far from his home for the owner to locate.

I took him to hang out with my family today. They can't believe how perfectly suited we are to each other. It's about accepting into my life a love that best serves the growth of my spirit, the expression of love on earth and the master plan that created our unfathomably complex universe.

Flavors of Love. He's not the first good enough dog that passed my way. He's absolutely perfect for me. More like a cat than a dog. How often I've thought I'd love an affectionate, mild-mannered dog that was as quiet, stealth and calm as a cat. That's him!

I wake up at an otherwise unreasonable hour to make sure he gets a long, leisurely walk before I head off to arrive at summer school by 7:20am. If that don't say special, I can't imagine what would.

His name is K. Chocolate.

Mmmmmmmmmmm. Chocolate everyday.

Is the universe not perfect!

As for that human relationship...Is the universe not perfect! I'll do what I've always done. Go about my life and let perfection land in my lap.

Update: It's been a month. Chocolate is now officially adopted into my home. A friend sent an email exclaiming her surprise that three weeks later I still had the dog. I had to admit to her that it is my own way of speaking of my life that friends and family question my ability to commit. The following is an excerpt from an email to her. I include it here because it is so relevant to my process.

It has never occurred to me that I could take a non-Puritan approach to relationships and assume that my way is just as valid. By "my way" I mean accepting the gift of the lesson of each relationship, embracing it and then moving on. "Moving on" always sounds so horrible in our society. The mover-on is some sort of failure who can't stick it through, who doesn't have the balls, who lacks a sense of commitment.

I remember reading about a Native American tribe in Florida and the Caribbean (my favorite places, by the way). In their culture, when a woman wanted to end a relationship she simply placed all the man's belongings outside the teepee, hut or what have you. When the man came back and saw his stuff outside, he moved along. There's still plenty of room for drama and pain and suffering in such a system, but I was struck by whatever extent this culture, this community understood that relationships should work as long as their working. We are all in agreements with each other. When the agreements don't work any longer, either because they're outdated or because there's a breach on one side or another, why must we continue to enforce it? Why do we hold the agreement as more sacred than the parties?

Which brings me to the owner of the dog that I contacted.

She sent pictures. I shared with Gilbert that I saw a resemblance. It was enough that I planned to at least set-up a meet-to-see. She said the dog's name was Tiberius. I called the name, not a muscle moved. I called Chocolate, he turns and looks and awaits what I could possibly want to do--a walk, room change?

In the end, the dog was not hers.

How long will I keep Chocolate? Who is now K. Chocolate, Kenny C, KC or Sir Kenneth Chocolate if he meets the Queen.

I sadly have to admit that I've never entered anything with the intention of staying forever. I've entered with a commitment to stick with it for the long haul. Room to define long haul, I suppose. Maybe someone who sees lifetimes as one in a series is bound to see relationships the same way.

I've never entered anything with the intention of staying forever. Eternity is so very, very long. Forever seems at odds with evolution and progress.

I wonder if the earth will be here forever? If it isn't...does that mean that God, however conceived, was never committed to her? Then again, I suppose that's still under "till a natural death" stuff like Lola. Or...can anyone else see God packing up the spirits of the dinosaurs and carrying them back to the cosmic pet store and saying, "These didn't work out like I thought. Hey, what are those? Yeah, let me get a couple thousand of those Homo Sapien Erectus cuties and see what they do on that same blue marble."

We're all made in God's image.

As for Chocolate.

He's mine...now. I intend to keep him for the long haul. Thanks to what you inspired, I can take a first deliberate look at the possibility of a commitment that lasts not just one, two or three years, but ten or fifteen.

Which brings me back to when Chocolate came to me. How he came to me in the very spot where, outbound on my walk, I realized that my next relationship wasn't going to be about me and what I wanted, what my ego wanted, needed or felt it could handle. Clear as a blue summer sky, I knew that my next relationship was going to be about God's will, God's plan, spiritual growth and spiritual commitment.

So, I correct myself. Chocolate is not mine. Chocolate and I belong to one another. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaahhh. So glad you inspired all this.

That's what is different this time. This is why your comment about three weeks didn't ruffle my feathers. You were expressing that something seemed different with KC, Mr. Chocolate. Whether you knew the how or why or not, you were right.

Humbled Obedience

2008-06-14T08:49:00.001-07:00

With each day I get a little more obedient to the urgings and nudgings of the universe. I was to go to a Borders bookstore about twenty minutes away. I'd taken the time to talk a while on the phone before leaving and was considering a change in clothes to dress a little warmer for the evening.

Destiny, fate--"You'll be going there. No, not that other Borders. Yes, that far. No you can't go later, you should have left already." Still in my summer dress, I reached for my keys and headed out the door.

I get to the mall and entertainment complex and have the nerve to dilly-dally. Maybe I'll buy a jacket first. I go through a couple sale racks of jackets. There was nothing there for me. Back on the path of obedience, I finally head down to the bookstore.

I picked up a copy of the latest issue of Caribbean magazine; a copy of "A New Earth.." by Tolle; and a Creative Visualization workbook I didn't plan on, but which was part of the reason I was there. What was in it for me at the bookstore revealed itself within ten minutes of my being there.

There was a comfortable seating area near the front of store with six comfy chairs spaced in irregular intervals about a large bay-style window. I'd noticed them when I walked and took myself to one of the chairs with my reading material. There was a guy two chairs over who kept making this weird near-giggle sound as he read. I noted he must be reading something funny.

What turned out to be funny was the way his sounds were spaced in regular intervals. I've never known a book to rhythmically place the funny parts so that they're spread every minute or so. What was funnier still, was that as different people came and went in the seating area he would manage to contain his outbursts. It took a long time, till I was nearly done with my reading, before I realized that he was specifically doing it to either annoy me or get my attention. When someone was between us, he hardly made a peep. When a guy was on the other side of him, same thing. Thanks to the distraction he created, I took a moment to look up from my reading and pay attention to my surroundings. In particular, I took a few moments to notice the people in the immediate area. It's almost sad the way I can go through life and not pay the people around me any greater attention that I do the walls. I rarely go a day without thanking and blessing the sun or marveling at a tree. I'm not nearly so good about acknowledging the God in people, let alone making it a practice to see it.

What I saw upon glancing around:
A group of loud teenagers.
A pair of young lovers where the guys shows his devotion by pretending to enjoy sitting around while she reads.
An older woman unable to decide what to do--pick up the book she was glancing at or move along or sit down.

And then it hit me to anchor light into everyone in the store. It's not exactly practicing Reiki. I've been moving toward healing with light in place of the Reiki symbols. It's more intuitive and the energy feels cleaner, lighter. In this instance it was basically visualizing an increase in the white light coming through their crown chakras. I don't force the healing energy on the unsuspecting. Free will means everyone has the right to grow, progress and heal at their own pace. My role is simply to be a vehicle inviting the light down to each person. The light reaches down and is made readily available to any whose souls choose not to refuse.

As I focused my intention on visualing white light descending into each person, I had a wondrous experience. Energetically, I could sense the location and presence of every person in the store. Whether in adjoining rooms, behind rows and rows of shelves. After a few moments, I noticed my vision shifting and I was no longer looking at physical things. My perception shifted from my phyical eyes to, I'm guessing here, to my third eye. The density of people and things in the store shifted to something more akin to clouds. Instead of physical matter, everything thing looked like thick, heavy white clouds--the ones that move really really slow across the sky. There is shape, but no substance.

The funnels of white light that poured into these floating beings, formerly people, became overwhelming. I feared I might slip into a trance and look weird to anyone glancing my way. Talk about a new experience. Basically, it was a bit surreal, even for me.

In that moment, I suddenly understood why I had to go there, to that bookstore, at that time. I have no idea how the universe assembled that particular collection of individuals in the store at that moment. No idea who needed healing energy, who may have needed a blessing, or who may have even received some "miracle" of insight or inspiration by my going there to anchor in a little light for that brief interval. I did know with certainty afterwards, that I'd been of service.

Following an urge and being the means to someone else's blessing is something all of us do all the time. We don't always know it. It isn't always something that stands out to us while it is happening. As more than a handful of cutesy emails have suggested, something as simply as taking a moment to smile at someone and wish them a good day has the power to reverse a mood, change a day, perhaps a future.

After the experience with the light, I congratulated myself on my obedience and felt pretty fulfilled. I returned to my book. Anolder woman that sat between myself and the noisy gentleman for a while had come and gone, so he was back to making his periodic grunting chuckles.

Then a woman spoke above a whisper to ask another young lady if she could use her cell phone. That's a rarity. I can honestly say I've never seen a stranger ask someone to use their cell phone. She explained in tones that alteranted between frustration and agitation that she'd been waiting for her husband for a while now, didn't have her own phone, and wanted to check his status.

I'm fairly certain she was Persian and spoke Farsi into the phone. I don't speak Farsi, but I translated the conversation. "Where are you. You were supposed to be here already. I can't believe you had me waiting all this time." What I'd guess was unspoken but understood by her husband was, "you do this all the time, and though I have no way to get back at you this moment, you should expect to pay for this at sometime in the near future as soon as I can figure a way to stick it to you without jeopardizing the little power I currently have over my day, my self and my life." A loose translation.

She paced back and forth after she hung up and returned the phone to her benefactor. We are all saints and angels in the course of a day. Sometimes little demons, too.

She was so distracting, I couldn't read. I kept getting this image in my head of inviting her to sit in the vacant chair next to me and asking if I could hold her hand with the intention of sending Reiki in this way. Not surreptitiously mind you. Straight out ask, "Excuse me. Would you mind sitting here and letting me hold your hand a while? I practice Reiki and energy healing and would really like the opportunity to anchor some positive energy, some light into your being."

Having just finished being so self-satisfied with my obedience at anonymous healing, I was confronted by the limits of my obedience. Leave it to the universe to keep me from getting big-headed about my willingness to serve. When given an opportunity to step out of the shadows and into the light, to put my pride aside and open myself to a sideways glance or reasonable rejection, I cower and hide and send a little energy anonymously.

Oh, how I agonized. At one point, I thought I'd do it. I'd risk sounding and looking ridiculous. Funny thing, too. At the moment I thought seriously of breaking all social norms, she paced toward me, stood six inches just to the right of me and paused a long while. Long enough for me to have invited once, twice, three times...I wasn't going to do it. And she walked away. As if God, the angels said, "Here you go. Afraid to walk over, we'll make it even easier."

My email signature is a line that I hope becomes part of my current project: "In Heaven, we have a motto: It's no one's job to save the world. If everyone would do the job they're assigned, live their best life, the world wouldn't need saving."

If that was my job in that moment, to just step out of my comfort level and do what I do in the shadows in the light of day...I can see why God has to send saviors.

writing buddies

2008-06-01T21:54:00.001-07:00

A short blurb. I was hitting a wall and feeling a little frustrated. I wanted to download more details about my current writing project. I knew two things needed to happen. Both required crystal assistance.

The layout: 12 o'clock--celestite, transchanneling and blue halite. 2 o'clock-opalite. At 4, 6 and 8 o'clock my three moqui balls. Finally, at 10 o'clock-spectrolite sphere.

There was a hang-up. There was someone whose energy kept hanging around me. I couldn't figure out what to do about it. Finally, it dawned on me to send this person healing energy and free myself of the attachment. Fantastic.

I've been noticing that I no longer rely on Reiki symbols, but am progressively more intuitive. More and more I am using light as my primary healing tool. The colors, shapes and uses of different wavelengths of light present themselves in partnership with my intention. I still use symbols on occasion, but less and less so. These come intuitively as well.

I set-up my writing space for sketching out the novels big picture and scenes. I invoked a standard prayer and proceeded to send the healing. It felt successful. I sealed up both our auras and then prayed for my writing to progress.

Did it? I'll spare you the bulk of the details save this: There was one character whose name I couldn't make out. Keep in mind that about 15 characters, including eight of the nine major characters have come to me with names, birthdates and their backgrounds and major story lines. The one major character that held out I'd given a nickname in everything so far.

Tonight, while re-reading some of the stuff I'd written so far, I saw that I had written about her but used her daughter's name instead. I felt ready to hear her name. What exactly had been the block, I don't know.

I began to scribble something on the corner of the page. It was incomprehensible at first. Closer inspection and it began to look like some other language. This character is born and raised in Africa so I figured maybe I was playing around with how I'd expect to see her name in native script.

Further inspection and I began to recognize a couple shapes. Years and years ago I'd taken a Hebrew course at a local synagogue. A crew of African-American guys who were dabbling in Afro-Judaic studies had signed up. It sounded interesting so I tagged along.

Long story short, my right brain had to bypass my left brain to get me the name. I got so excited about it...and a little scared that I'm trippin'...when the name started to take shape I stopped.

Maybe the left brain still isn't ready.

Crystal Companions

2008-05-31T10:54:00.000-07:00

A few weeks back, I purchased a large Herkimer piece. The large central piece is nearly four inches long with smaller herkimers partially included. I hadn't visited the farmer's market crystal stand in a long while.

While at The Om my eye settled on a large piece. I can't recall exactly what it was, but it was something new. And it was expensive. Over $100. I didn't get the sense that it was unequivocally mine and that I needed to buy it. It's energy was commanding and I needed to hold it a while, but that was it. After several minutes I sat it down. As I've noted in an earlier post, I can generally tell by energetic scan which pieces are new. My physical eye is drawn to them by the impression they make on my third eye.

After scanning the whole of the farmer's market booth, my eye settled on a very large herkimer. It was one of two they had displayed. As soon as I saw it I knew it was going home with me. It is an amazing feeling that I've described on several occasions. The certainty and clarity of what belongs to us. There are certain stones that as soon as I see them, I know they are meant to go home with me. A favorite story of a friend that helps me act on these moments deals with an item that he saw in a market on a trip to Spain. He loved it at first sight, but hesitated to make such an expensive decision hastily. By the next day, he knew with all his being that it was exquisitely perfect for him, meant for him. Unfortunately some other soul concluded the same and made the decision without hesitation.

The failure to act haunts him to this day. It isn't that his life has suffered because the item didn't make it into his hands. It's the regret of having doubted what belonged to him. A version of the girl that gets away.

Not that the point isn't made, but it also reminds me of a jacket that a motorcycle-riding buddy of mine saw at a huge convention center expo years ago. He'd tried on dozens of jackets at several different booths. Finally, there was one that was gorgeous on him. He didn't seize the moment. The next day when he went back, it was gone. Five years later, he's still in search of the perfect jacket.

Perhaps its these stories of others that enable me to take seriously those moments of certainty and act on them.

This herkimer was what I'd come to the booth to buy. I was delighted that this was the stone. Part of the delight was that it was a herkimer and everyone knows these are pretty cheap. I thought, "yeah, I dodged the $100-plus item". And then I turned over the Herkimer to reveal the price underneath. We know what I found.

No time to be cheap. I'd already committed to it, already acknowledged we belonged together. It has proven to be priceless.

Among the many smaller pieces attached about the larger herkimer was an inch-long and 1/2-inch thick herkimer which sat atop it like a child resting on it's mother's belly. It was certainly my favorite part of the whole to gaze upon and finger. It's citrine-smokey flavor gave a distinct character from its mostly clear and white host.

I bought it a few days before my trip to Turks and Caicos (TCI) and knew I was meant to take it with me. I took it and five others to be cleansed in the Caribbean Sea.

Since purchasing it, I sleep with it every night. Just over a week ago, it managed to fall to the ground. I don't know if it hit the metal of my bed frame or the lamp post, but I know the impact was enough to break it apart. Three pieces came off. The first was this very lovely smokey-citriny flavored piece perfect for the pocket each day. My days have been much more peaceful and protected since I began carrying it around.

The other is a smaller herkimer, the more typical 1/4 - 1/2 inch variety. I'm planning to have it placed in a ring setting so that I can carry this energy with me all the time--either the pocket piece or the ring. The third piece that fell off was a small slab. As for the larger piece, it is with me as I sleep every night and has been since TCI.

Why tell the tale of the breaking herkimer? It feels like a writing companion. Since purchasing the Herkimer, my ability to communicate with the muses collaborating with me on Luzca's story has increased. I had it with me on TCI when the breadth of the story typed its way onto the page while I watched.

I've been writing regularly and have seen an increase in the integrity of my personal boundaries. Beautiful stuff.

Fate went to a lot of trouble to bring that special herkimer from a mine in New York to a farmer's market on the other side of the continent. It arranged an unexpected pocket of time for me to spend ten minutes at the same market the day after I'd booked my trip when I had a ton of errands to run.

It's not always easy to say yes to fate, yes to the universe when it gives us what we want and need. At some point we learn it is even harder on us if we say no.

New life

2008-05-24T12:14:00.001-07:00

The front half of my home is being painted as I type. Brighter colors, whiter colors. Clarity and insights.

They painted the ceiling first. It was the primary reason I embarked on painting the living room...again. I painted it a light shade of green four years ago, but left the ceiling the same drab color I erased from the walls.

A short while into spraying the ceiling the white with a slight tint of blue, the primary painter, Filiberto, asked me to come check it out. I did. Fantastic. When I saw the difference it made, just painting brightness onto the ceiling, I realized I probably could have kept the walls their green.

At the last minute I decided to ask him to do the kitchen too. In nine years living here, I never painted the kitchen before today. The nine years worth of yellowing on that tan was in as much need of lighter and brighter as the living room's ceiling. Now the place is so bright. A whole new life.

It is so fitting. Funny how I've been wanting to make my living room an attractive space for years now. The furniture I first bought eight years ago was a good start. For me, it was a good start. The painting four years ago with a light shade of green in the living area to match what I already owned made sense too.

Now, like my new vision of myself as artist
my new vision of myself as destined to live in the Caribbean
my new certainty and vision of Luzca's tale as a completed novel
I've got a completed and certain view of my living room.

The completed view made picking the right color easy. I've already got in view the furniture. When I bought the stuff eight years ago, I was open to whatever caught my eye. In other words, I had no purpose, no goal, no clue. And that worked out ok. Just ok.

Having the clarity of a complete picture works better. Buying new light fixtures will go a lot easier with a clear picture. The best way to describe the mood is light, relaxed and comfortable.

So I keep a clear a goal in my mind. I commit to it, starting at the top. Picking out the right accessory to shine my light becomes easy. The result is lighter living. Sounds about right.

As goes the home, so goes the soul.
As goes the soul, so goes the home.

Success...Shameless Bragging

2008-05-17T10:06:00.001-07:00

I stop in the middle of bliss to share my excitement. Finally, heaven right here, right now.

My many entries are testament to my struggle to live a more authentic life, a more God-centered, bliss-filled, confident and artistic life.

This morning, success.

The key. Following my heart, heeding intuition. Oh yeah, and loving, loving, loving everyone. The power of recognizing the love that is already present in our lives. A lot of words to say living a life of gratitude and freedom?

I haven't walked in weeks, not since I came back from TCI. This morning I was in the mood. I'd had a fitful sleep for two reasons. Firstly, it's hot. Not a fan of air-conditioning unless absolutely necessary, I slept with the windows open and ditched the blankets. The only problem with this is that as the air cools, I wake up every couple hours to add a layer of clothing or covering. The second reason would be an entry unto itself, but the sum of it was that the night before brought me even closer to understanding the power of accepting and appreciating the love in our lives in all its varied forms.

This morning I was able to follow my heart, take my walk. When I got home I didn't do my usual. Usually, after a Saturday morning walk, I take a shower while my chai tea steeps and then sit down all fresh and relaxed to read the morning paper. This morning my heart said do something different. I did.

After my long post-walk stretch, I did as my heart moved me, I turned on the computer to work on my book. Can you believe it??? Dear reader. If you've read anything of mine, you know that I talk about writing more than I write on most days. You've probably sniffed out that I am afraid of my power to write, that I fear my perceived inadequacy for the task, and that I come up with a ton of distractions, excuses and justifications for doing everything but actually writing this book for which passion burns in my bosom.

And here I was following my heart. I sat down to type. I don't actually "write" very often unless I'm sketching a scene or working out the plot lines through journaling.

This morning I worked on the writing. The words. This is the part I most fear, most dread. It is such a fine line between writing for an audience and simply writing from my heart while still taking care with word choice. The former creates trite dribble, the latter, when I can do it, creates stuff I love enough to fine tune in the manner a craftsman might work a block a wood until the sculpture waiting to be set free is allowed to display for all its perfected existence.

The intial scene I laid down on Thursday evening. I left work with a pressing need to hurry home and write. I heard and I obeyed. It was thrilling. I sat at the computer and began to type. That is what I was editing and expanding on this morning.

Thursday's pressing urgency made sense as I got home and started typing up the scene that came to me. The true gift I was to receive wasn't the scene itself but, finally, a view to the story's outline and structure.

I'm going to speak my truth and shame the devil: I shook and shivered and then stumbled from my back room where I type down the hall and then fell out on the floor in the center of my home. Dramatic, I know. And yet, it's the truth. It wasn't what I'd anticipated or expected. I thought I was just going to "receive" a scene. Instead, I got the book's structure, tone and a general sense of its organization and style. Unprecedented. It's like praying to God for a good meal when you've been having the same tired sustenance for days on end. You just hope it will be something hot and delicious...and different. He asks if you're willing to do what he asks for it. Desperate, you agree.

In this case, I agree to go home and type.

Having followed what he places in your heart, you open a door that you'd passed day after day after day, never noticing or giving it much attention. He says open it, you do. Inside is the spread of lifetime. Forget buffet. We're talking a refined, handsome waiter who delivers the most exceptional seven-course meal your imagination never could conceive. Only it's all the stuff you swore times past you didn't like. Turns out you like it just fine when the ingredients are fresh and the dish prepared with love. Good thing the chef chose the meal for you and you weren't given the option to dictate your own blessing.

Do you blame me for shaking, shivering and stumbling my way onto the ground in disbelief? The story isn't anything I'd have chosen for myself to work on and yet I am delighted with it. The way it is to be told scares me. (Yes, I'm deliberately evasive as I wait to fully make peace with it and receive a fuller vision.)

On the way home earlier that Thursday evening I listened to an National Public Radio show on books. An author was being interviewed. The universe at work. Something from the show combines with conversations I've had recently with a buddy and I realize I don't have to "like" what I write. I'm not saying I can write something horrid or that I'm detached from it. Just that I can stop waiting to absolutely, 100% love each and every aspect of my story. It isn't about me. It's a story. It's got it's own life. I was open to letting it be what it needed to be. Stumble, stumble, fall.

I've often equated works of art to children, and the co-creators--the authors or musicians or sculptors, etc.--to parent figures who nurse the work into existence, into maturity. I truly believe, even moreso now, that works of art, great or small, good or bad, are no less gifts given for safekeeping and care than children. Of course, I'm childless, so if I offend anyone who believes children are more precious than works of art, you are welcome to indulge yourself by considering it a reflection of my ignorance.

This morning the baby asked to be held. I didn't ignore it or make any excuses.

I sat at the computer and was shocked to see what beauty God had delivered to me for nurturance and development.

Success. The experience of writing. It's own joy. Bliss. Heaven on earth.

Co-creation is a joy.

Done writing about writing, back to bliss I go.

I'm a (true) believer...

It's happening.

2008-05-06T18:49:00.000-07:00

God truly places certain people in our lives to help us reach our goals. This isn't anything new to anyone who'd find their way to this blog. As commonplace and accepted a notion as this is, it still amazes me when I reflect on specific folks. Each and every one of my friends are uniquely important to me. I don't have a wide circle. I wouldn't even call it a circle. Not even a web, really. I have very specific individuals in my life who offer unique friendships. They are people who'd only find themselves all in the same room if it was a party for me. What they have in common is a desire to grow, to stretch themselves and to become their best person at whatever the cost.

These are folks who are willing to work at themselves. Continuously!

Tonight I had a fantastic time writing. Last night I went to a session on NLP, Neuro-Linguistic Programming. It was sponsored by newest girlfriend's new boyfriend. I went with an open mind. She only mentioned it to me the day before, after joining me for a meal at a Thai restaurant after church. She was such a good sport. I wanted that place and only that place, but wasn't sure I remembered the street. She was up for the adventure. I love that about all my friends.

As we got out she mentions that she'll be going to this gathering about NLP. I'd heard about it before and was immediately intrigued. I asked if it was OK to invit myself.

I share this and the importance of the people we draw into our lives, because in that workshop, they did a goal-setting exercise that included a 24-hour objective and one for a week's time. I set as my goal to allow my fingers and intuition to create at least one new scene within twenty-four hours.

That's just been done.

The week goal is to complete--build-up the details and edit--one of the scenes I typed up on Provo, TCI. I already began that process tonight as well.

It is amazing what can be done with the support of our loved ones.

Last weekend I shared the details for the first time with my oldest friends. Each of them offered unconditional support. The night before going to my new church, my "oldest buddy" spent the night. I have to put "oldest buddy" in quotes because technically I met another buddy eight months earlier. He is literally the oldest, that's true. But I also feel like he's the oldest because we always talk about going back so many lifetimes ago. We laugh about going back so far that he remembers the time I got kicked out of the cave for bringing back a still-on-fire lightning-struck branch. I couldn't figure out why no one else thought it was the coolest discovery. That was the first lifetime he had to save me from myself and from what I make others want to do to me when I go off all excited and blinded to consequences by the bliss of adventure.

This buddy spent the night Saturday night as a quick stopover between celebrating a big event with his family and driving several hundred miles back to the home he and his wife just relocated to a few months back. Like all my buddies, his encouragement was done in a style and manner uniquely his. He challenged me to make the most of this writing opportunity.

Long blog to say a public "THANK YOU!!!!" to all of you for listening to me and encouraging me and participating with me as I embark on this adventure. It is new territory. I spent more than a year fighting fear and doubt just to get to this point where I am willing to set a 24-hour goal to write a scene...and then do it.

Last night's NLP meditation and goal-setting session helped me actually visualize having two completed chapters by September. The funny thing, though, was that as soon as I tried to visualize that, trying to meet the suggestion of "realiztic", I found a deeper part assuring me that the storyline would be completed by then. Mind you, I said storyline. The development of the scenes into a format that has a singular, consistent and narratively sophisticated tone...

The NLP group meets again next week.

Separately...I've found MY new church.
She's been telling me about this church for months. As soon as I came back from my trip, I was interested, it was on my mind. Now I know why. It's exactly the environment I need as I dive into the process of writing this book from a place of commitment and working on finding my way to my island home.

Early into the service and all the way through to the end, I felt like I belonged there. That's never happened to me, by the way. Walk into a church and feel completely and entirely at home. She goes several times a year. I may eventually do so too, but for now plan to go every week for a while. I want to get a better feel for the entire ministry. It resonates with everything about me and my spirituality and beliefs. I'm good for love at first sight. We'll see in a month if it is all that I thought. My ex-husband and I were also love at first sight.

(now that I'm really spending time writing my book, expect my posts to read more and more like the first-drafts they are more and more likely to be. And if you can't tell the difference...keep that to yourself:))

Synchronicities

2008-04-30T18:47:00.000-07:00

Since returning from the Caribbean I've been giving serious thought to how I live my life here at home. The sheer joy I experienced being there has overwhelmed my complacency.

More than the centered peace, it was the ability to go at my own pace all day each day that most profoundly stirred reflection. Instead of waking up at six-something in the morning, I woke up at my natural hour of 8am. I'd rest a while, take a shower and then head off to a breakfast overlooking a magnificent turquoise sea. The icon on my blog was the exact view.

I've oh-so-often bragged about the ease and flexibility of the job I currently have. Compared to all the other jobs I've known, compared to all that I'd previously considered, it satisfies. But then I had this other experience. I did what I most wanted to do at any given moment. Freedom, joy, peace and love all rolled up into a timeless experience of pure present

Working has been hardest of all. I question how fulfilled I am with it. From where did I learn to value the lure of security over my present joy? In nearly every other area of my life, I am a risk taker. Not as much as others, but enough that it shocks me that I so readily use the promise of a pension as the reason I can't move on. Then, again, it is precisely because I have been one who follows her whims, that I've learned to value the wisdom of a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

Am I sacrificing present joy for an unknown future? Typing here is like therapy for me if you wonder why I do it. Just remembered the job from hell that I left UCLA to pursue. A very bad decision. I got a little frustrated and left something that had the potential to lead me into some sort of deanship at UCLA. Of course, everything I"m saying here suggests that I'd ultimately have left for more freedom and flexibility anyway. Nonetheless, the move looms large as a rash decision I'd like to avoid repeating.

---
Speakers from the local community college were scheduled to speak today. They'd been on calendar for over a month. In fact, they were supposed to speak before I left for TCI, but rescheduled for today. Their presentation was on careers. It was the same presentation I gave my kids a month ago using some websites on estimating living expenses and linking that with occupational choices. It's what my book was ultimately trying to share with teens and parents.

It is the presentation I consistently consider doing a few evenings each month at local churches or for other parent groups...and then don't. I was surfing through prior entries this evening, looking for something related to Reiki, and instead found a reminder about a profound experience. The title of the blog is unchanged from it's original. Ironic. Maybe I mean insightful.

There are no coincidences.

I can do the workshops without it taking away from writing my book. It's even possible that doing the workshops is a necessary and important step that puts me closer to the book's completion and publishing.

And then enters doubt.

What a difference love makes

2008-04-30T17:38:00.000-07:00

I met someone in TCI. Someone I became quite enamored with in a few short days. Talk about vivacious. I didn't even realize what had happened until it was too late. After being home two days, all I knew was that nothing was the same. Even if I could live without her, I wouldn't want to.

She enjoys waking up at a leisurely 8am. Follow that with breakfast, coffee and then time to work at her craft--lots of writing. A late afternoon swim in the salty sea takes her straight to heaven. After that a short siesta on the sand. Wake up to a view of shades of green-blue darkening into the distance until a vibrant cobalt touches the sky and softens her soul. It is a pleasure to behold.

It broke my heart when she left. She didn't return home. She left her home to return to the place she's resided most of her partially lived life. I didn't know this woman, this me, so free, was even on the menu.

The me that I was in TCI was on her own schedule, listened to her own rhythm, cared for nothing but each moment's opportunity, fully enjoying the present. All my life I've longed to be her though I never knew it.

That me I met in TCI...I am in love with her. She wants to live on a island. She wants to live that rhythm. The glow of her spirit in that place is too irresistible to allow a dull imitation to linger like stale air around her any longer than necessary. I am committed to ensuring her island dreams come true. It is a crime against her soul to claim to love her and do otherwise. I am in love with her. She is in love with the sea.

I've been talking about my need to visit, perhaps live in the Caribbean for years. Today I'm all the more certain of it. It's a constant movement toward greater certainty.
_____

This me I met deserves to have her dreams come true. Deserve??? That's a funny word to use. How is it that one deserves her dreams fulfilled when the dreams of so many others never see daylight? Does someone "deserve" to be fulfilled, happy, content or at peace? Does it have to imply that folks who suffer must "deserve" their pain?

I can't answer that age-old query. What I do know is that when we love someone we try to do all we can to minimize if not entirely eliminate their pain, suffering, discomfort or even minor irritations. We want for their joy, happiness and fulfillment. For those whom we have chosen to distinguish as "loved ones", we generally are comfortable saying they "deserve" the best life has to offer by mere virtue of being alive, being one of God's beloved. Because we feel something we call love for them, we hope they always enjoy life's best. We want to witness our loved ones in states of joy or contentment if not fulfillment and bliss.

What they choose, accept or settle for is another story entirely.
____

I've got nine scenes of Caribbean beachfront up in my classroom. Two more, framed, sit atop my two filing cabinets. My computer's desktop is again a Caribbean beach scene. In my home four of eight framed and mounted pictures in my living area are beachfronts.

My soul has tried to speak to me through images for years and years. And even as I hear its yearnings, I've said time and time again, "One day". Always waiting! It still isn't action time. I'm not ready to leap out on faith, sell my possessions, quit my job, move there and see what happens. It isn't that I doubt God will provide for me. My soul knows he would. But that isn't what Iâ m moved to do.
I have a plan: Finally, a real and serious plan. It's a three-year plan. Here goes.

Sell my home in three years. Purchase an island condo or home, whichever I can afford. I won't move there and rent. If in three years I see a way to live there year-round and earn my income doing something I truly love while living there, then that's what I'll do. Adios and goodbye. I won't need to keep my home here in the states, because it's unlikely I'd return to live. If I do, worry about that then. If I only come back to visit, staying in a hotel for even a couple weeks will be cheaper than trying to hold on to property here for the sake of holding on to a possession out of fear of letting it go.

If three years comes and goes and it still makes sense to earn my money here, then I still plan to buy there and live here on the cheap. I'll live in my slice of paradise summers and long breaks.

"As God is my witness" | God as Witness? More like God as facilitator, instigator and co-conspirator. Who else put this longing into my soul? This dream is at my core. It's phenomenal really! God's fabulous motivating tool to get me to do more than simply rest in complacency. Spending night after night staring at a colorful box is not going to cut it. Selling my soul year after year for the promise of a monthly check when I am too old to enjoy it is senseless since I have no idea how long I'll be around.

Makes me wonder what the face of God looks like when He witnesses the choices we make, choices that add to our suffering and pain rather than our joy and contentment. I speak of those choices within our control, of course. When He views me in this life, this moment, does He wonder why I wait for perfect circumstances before moving to the place that makes my soul sing? To the place where I take pleasure in marveling at His creation? Is He waiting for me or am I waiting for Him?

The artist's doubt

2008-04-28T06:16:00.000-07:00

I got in after midnight last night from my trip to Turks and Caicos' (TCI) Provo island. Of course, there are stories to tell and insights to share. I used some of the time at the airport to begin and outline a few entries.

This morning I opened an email from a fellow energy healer who has just finished the final chapter of her book. She is appropriately proud of it. I know that feeling. Unfortunately though, that feeling, for me anyway, comes only after blood, sweat and tears from wrestling with the angels. I am constantly on guard against self doubt.

One of the best parts of this trip was that I actually managed to get quite a lot done on the story. The generations are now complete. It is a chronicle of nine generations of women healers. The first a renowned, respected African Priestess delivered into the slave trade by a rival as a consequence of selfishness, using her talent and exceptional abilities for her own gain at the expense of another.

I always knew this was part of my main characters story, but hadn't been able to flesh it out until this week. Luzca, born in 1991 is ninth generation behind the powerful ancestor. I've always known that the book on Alice Dunbar Nelson was historical fiction--she really existed.

I'm starting to appreciate the extent to which I'll also be incorporating historical accuracy and perspective into this story. It too is turning out to be historical fiction. Lots of work ahead, which I look forward to doing.

The best part about what happened this past week was the way the story took its first unassisted breaths. Additional characters added themselves, their names, major events, how they died, the routes they took, the details on who took them in and on and on. It was more like collaborating with my right brain. My left brain sat typing while my right brain just dictated an already complete story. It really is a heady and wonderful experience that I hope to one day explore in print.

My role becomes much clearer after this experience. It is so clear to me that the story is already done. It exists in some other dimension and has been looking for a friendly human who'll lend themselves and help it grow into being here in this world. Much like music needs a willing musician or lyricist to welcome it through the dimensional doorway into our world, so too do stories and poems and so on. Seeing it this way helps control some of the overwhelming sense of inadequacy that I try to keep at bay.

Which brings me to one of the last experiences I had on TCI. I had a favorite spot at the hotel’s restaurant. It seemed odd that it was almost always available. My spot was at the restaurant’s edge, nearest the sea. It had the most direct view to the color of turquoise they must use to decorate heaven. I’d noticed another woman on several occasions who took her breakfast and lunch at the same times I did. She sat at the next best spot, at the restaurant’s edge but facing the opposite direction.

On this last morning when I went downstairs there she was. “Sorry, I know I took your spot. I thought you’d already eaten.” Now if this was my oldest buddy, he’d be quite certain that she’d wanted to get that spot for days after I made it look so attractive by the way I dawdled and stared out over the sea from my perch. He’d be even more certain that either she indeed tried to time it so that she wouldn’t have to compete with me for the spot or else hoped and prayed that by taking that spot, I’d do what I’d done any of the couple times it wasn’t free and sit in the next space over, hoping to engage me in a little conversation. I indeed sat adjacent. She indeed struck up a conversation.

It was morning, coffee time, and I’m not particularly conversational early in the day. But having opened with, “I took your spot,” how could I resist her? Turns out she owns a consulting business assisting companies who have large populations of downsized or laid off workers. She helps them relocate to newer, hopefully better jobs. When she asked the standard, “What do you do for a living?” I gave her the response I’ve grown more accustomed to over the past several weeks: “I make my money as a teacher, but my passion is writing.” I added my standard caveat that though I'm passionate about it, though I'm dedicated to it, I still question having the requisite skills to make my stories attractive to someone other than myself.

She immediately giggled. One of her gigs included working with a publishing firm that went through a major downsizing. She was assisting a project manager who’d worked with a series of best-selling authors in bringing their writing to market and on to success. (She gave me authors names, but best to respect their privacy.) My breakfast mate set about convincing the publishing executive that she was not only highly marketable but likely to find an even better job than the one she being forced to leave. I didn't ask what kind of "better"--more money, increased responsibility or perhaps greater fulfillment. As the publishing executive began to truly hear what my new friend was saying to her, she suddenly saw a parallel.

This publishing executive then relayed that every author she'd ever worked with thought their work sucked. “Sucked” wasn’t the word she used, but it conveys her point. She then said something about it being expected of artist types. That many artists underestimate their gifts until it is validated externally.

That helped. The universe at work. It was an absolute blessing that on my last morning in paradise, she'd share that tidbit. I rarely consider myself an artist. Seeing my life through the lens of artist fits better than when I insist on trying to view it through conventional lenses.

I recall being surprised when someone walked into my home to perform a service and within just a few minutes asked, “So, you’re an artist?” Since I hadn't owned it about myself yet, I thought she might be highly observant, maybe even psychic. I might as well praised her talent for recognizing that there is cola found in certain red cans with squiggly lines, and fancily arranged letters of C-O-K-E. Saying so might also mean, "next time try a professional decorator." The artist's doubt.

In the context of “artist type” my constant battles against thinking I can’t possibly write well enough to create an entire novel makes sense. It isn't every artist's issue, but enough of us have it.

Or maybe it's just a defense mechanism in anticipation of necessary constructive criticism. Clearly, the doubt doesn't keep me from continuing to pursue it. It just inspires a tendency to whine about it as I go.

BQMGDZ

2008-04-24T08:10:00.001-07:00

That was my confirmation. I mean that literally. That was my confirmation for my trip to paradise, to heaven on earth. My blue dream, Turks and Caicos' Provo island vacation. BQMGDZ was the airline confirmation code. I did a double-take when I went looking for it to request an upgrade.

As noted in my last blog entry it's my goal to get some sort of outline for my book while I'm here. I find myself so easily distracted. Some might say it's the work of the devil to keep me from my true task. It's just the ego seeking to avoid any kind of work.

BQMGDZ

Well, I have to be honest here. I was going to write all kinds of other things instead of what is really on my mind. I am in the midst of watching some of my more earthly desires pass away. I'm torn about it. It feels like leaving the world behind.

Or maybe this too is some devilish distraction, a form of procrastination. Make this about larger issues of good versus evil instead of just working on this book.

I bought a book entitled something like The Tipping Point. Very informative and interesting. The guy next to me on the plane asked how I like it. He's read it twice, finds it valuable in terms of being more effective as a marketer of his business. We talk a while. I note that I meet the requirement of "maven" more than the books description of "connector" or "salesperson."

"Oh, an authority."
"I guess so. I'm a teacher and an author."

I introduced myself as an author. It's certainly not the first time I've told someone I wrote a book or that I even referenced myself an author. It was different, though. There was something in the way I said so...authoritatively, so certainly, so convincingly, so much a part of my identity. It was new to own it that way.

I'm an author. I'm here to work on my next book. And it isn't about how many people eventually read it. It is about getting onto paper the the underlying ideas.

Finally, that tipping point has been reached for me. The process is just as important as the result. The book has begun to breath. A few weeks back I dreamt of being pregnant. The tipping point is that this life, this book, will only die if aborted. I can't judge what others do with the gifts of life presented to them, but for myself, abortion is not an option.

With that said, I'm leaving this internet cafe. I'm heading back down Grace Bay beach and to my room where the outlines and sketches await me. I'll turn on the computer and I'll do what I can. I'll get something written.

I'll BQMGDZ. I'll nurture this little life until it can stand on its own, exist on its own. And then I'll send it into the world infused with all the love I am capable of bestowing upon it.

Writing the Light

2008-04-20T11:22:00.000-07:00

I've been struggling with my writing. Not so much struggling as tolerating my passive indifference to moving forward with any one of three projects. Until tonight. I've pulled out the story sketches and event outlines and began a scene from Luzca's book tonight.

This is the first day of the third and final week of the 21-day post-attunement cleanse from repeating the Usui Reiki Master attunement. Amazing stuff has been going on. And today I am writing.

This day, just now, I began the arduous process of translating into fixed form these scenes and events that will eventually comprise my first work of fiction. So huge and tremendous. I've been talking about writing this and a couple other fiction pieces for a while now. Today I had that feeling I get when I am ready to brace myself for a long, arduous task. It's really more an action than a feeling. I pull at my hair.

When I pull at my hair while I write, it means I'm serious. It means I'm ready to wrestle with my myself, with my muses, with my vocabulary. It means that my heart and my intellect are going to try to work together, to hear each other out, to collaborate. And what it requires is confronting my ego at every sentence and sometimes at every word. The process of writing is hard for me because I let my ego run my intellect. I try to write from my head and it all sounds horrid. But until I learn a better way, my writing only proceeds from first putting down something, anything on the paper. The ego and the intellect tell a trite story. Then, at some unpredictable point in the future, my heart finds an opening and reworks the story in her image. Then there's beauty and fun, adventure and joy. Until then, and always before then, I have to watch myself put down crap.

I'm learning to appreciate that there are a bunch of steps before any harvest. Getting the initial draft down on paper is like the tedious work of tilling the soil. It has to be done. It isn't exciting. It's necessary.

So what brought on this willingness to dive into it finally? That deeper cleaning I referenced in the prior blog played a part. I should add that I also had a session with my own healer a couple days after the reattunement. A day or two after the session with her, I experienced a new sensation of God's love.

I'm hesitant to share it here. I'm hesitant to share that I had a new experience of feeling God's love out of fear of someone reading this and thinking, "Poor girl. She didn't know God loved her?" I knew it in the intellectual sense that everyone who claims to know God believes God loves them. Isn't the whole basis of Christianity that "God so loved the world..." Being part of the world, I was willing to entertain that God loved me too.

What was different last week, was the sensation and certainty of feeling it beyond knowledge and belief. That God loves me seeped into my soul, my body and my bones. On my evening walk it settled about me like a nourishing and vibrant cloud of light, melting away and transforming the fears that have hindered full pursuit of so many dreams, including writing these books.

For months I've been avoiding acknowledging that I quite simply felt I wasn't up for the task. I feared my inadequacy. I feared being unable to fulfill my own dreams. Nevermind my conviction that writing the Luzca tale is part of my life mission, something I must do, I still felt incapable of seeing it through. Translation? God set me up! He let me take on as my own a task I came wholly unprepared to complete.

Today I feel different. Something about that tangible peace from the greater clarity and certainty that God Loves Me has freed me from the constraints of fear. God wouldn't set me up. If I'm feeling the need to write this book, then I must be capable of doing so.

I feel willing to give it a try. I'm willing to do my best and let it do whatever it does.

Actually, there's lots more to say about it. I'm too exhausted to do so right now. I'll just add that I'm finally taking my Caribbean getaway in a few days and plan to use much of the time to outline this novel. If the process of completing my last book is any indication, this writing retreat will give rise to a clearer outline that will inevitably change beyond recognition by summer.

And that's the process. I guess this God Loves Me sensation has helped me come to peace with the process of writing. I was paralyzed by the knowledge that when I begin writing it won't come out wonderfully...at first.

There's pulling up soil, laying the seed and then the germinating that happens out of sight. Getting something written, beginning the story--that's tilling the soil. Planting the seeds is the details and outlining I do in an attempt to get the big picture and proceed in an organized fashion through the writing.

The germinating...that's when my heart sits back and does what it does in my dreams and in my subconscious. Then I come back to the story and begin to see sprouts of creativity, true love and genius. Then, much tending to the sprouts, lots of love and the plants begin to bear fruit.

It's very exciting.

Topsy Turvy

2008-04-13T08:39:00.000-07:00

It's been seven days since I re-attuned to Reiki Master. With all the healing and clearing I'd done after the first series through Usui Reiki, I somehow deluded myself into thinking that this would be a cake walk, that the cleansing process wouldn't be intense.

What surprises me is how deep we can go into cleaning out the cobwebs of outdated thinking. I guess the first round was like taking a duster and taking off all the obvious dirt. This one feels more like taking a damp cloth and a wee bit of pressure to the surface, getting down into nooks and crannies. Even this isn't the deepest level. Stripping down the old varnish to reveal the natural beauty of the God-made material before putting on a fresh protective and attractive coating to highlight and enhance that natural beauty.

I look back and can see how the universe was helping me prepare. A couple weeks prior I felt the urge to clear out a bunch of old energies. My jar of change broke from the weight of the change that I'd let stay in there for years. All that stagnant energy. It needed to recirculate. It broke on the day I treated my home to a thorough cleaning. Even the windows, inside and outside. I knew that I was doing so because I was ready to see my life more clearly.

I've got new motivation to complete the Luzca book. All indications are that it is a life mission task and not to be dropped.

Resurrection, return

2008-03-22T07:08:00.000-07:00

Talk about glory hallelujah. Resurrection Weekend. If I still did magical strawberries, I'd get myself to church tomorrow. That's where we go to meet with God, right? That's where we go to get right with God, yes?

For me it was yesterday, about 6:00pm, in the location of what I used to call His alter, the place where now stand four full bookcases.

I was on my way to get a book. Look something up. And on the way I got hit with metaphysical bricks-- well stones, crystals to be more precise--to just go directly God. On earth as it is in Heaven.

"Our Father...thy kingdom come...on earth as it is in Heaven." Funny how that is the one prayer to pray according to Jesus. Hard to believe it's all there. And yet it is.

I got on my knees in what in retrospect was repentance for not just going to Him in the first place. No, I didn't see it coming, even though I'd pulled out A Course In Miracles for the first time in years just a few hours earlier.

I'd let my ego creep back into the driver's seat these last few weeks, driving me crazy.

The most wonderful thing about the whole experience is the certainty of the pendulum motion. No matter how far I swing off-center, I'm heading back. I can count on it. Over time the pendulum swings go less far from center. It still swings. And I can't say that at this moment I have an interest in determining to stop the pendulum altogether.

Let me say that again. My process. Where I am at. I'm still learning from the pendulum swings. For me they feel important. I am fully aware that I could ask for the pendulum to stop swinging. But there's something beautiful about the motion, watching it, learning to trust in center by moving away from it. And then coming back every time.

If I had to guess, I'd say it is riding the pendulum away from center that moves out to the things that I came to own, to deal with and maybe stumble across clues to the keys to my existence. And on the way back to center, perspective shifts, I approach clarity, lessons get integrated.

The Blissed Experience

2008-03-02T12:15:00.000-08:00

This one started as one of those mornings. My absolute favorite weekend or vacation morning is to wake up leisurely with at least half-an-hour in bed to process my thoughts and dreams in quiet, followed by a long morning walk around the neighborhood. After that, a long, hot shower. Then the dessert--soy chai tea with the morning paper. (Do evening editions still exist?)

This isn't a guaranteed route to bliss, but it feels like four of any five blissful moments happen on days that start this way.

Today I noticed something that before seemed entirely random: I get inspired to write at a very particular length into my walk, on a very particular street.

I have four general walk routes, each with a bunch of minor variations. About thirty-five minutes into this morning's walk my mind catches the nuance and word choice of a particular tune's lyrics on the MP3. I'm inspired. I appreciate the lyricist's skill and art. A few moments later, I feel like a beam of flush white light has descended upon me. The Luzca stories I am sporadically devoted to flash before me. I can see myself going home to sketch one of the stories out. I glimpse a future where I spend nights writing it out, see it published and can imagine a girl somewhere reading the story.

It's hard to describe the feeling. Noting the flush white light sensation is a start, I suppose. It's joyously heady. A natural high. Reality seems more fluid. The illusion of time is washed away leaving only a clear sense of timeless eternity unfolding and unfolded all at the same time. Thrilling!

Imagine the book having a life of it's own. The words outline and then form its etheric body. It's breath, it's essence is an animated spirit. It's message is it's soul.

Such an entity crossed dimensions and merged with my body, soul and spirit. It felt like a tantric kiss. Oh, how it warmed my soul. Bliss.

Less dramatic moments of inspiration have occured five or six times on a walk. What stood out today was the realization that it happens on this particular route, on this particular street, but only when the direction I take on the route puts this street at the latter quarter and not the first quarter of my walk. Which made me wonder if it is bio-chemically induced. A walker's version of the runner's high.

An hour or so later, it happened again, but without the inspiration to write. I was outside on the kitchen deck sipping my tea in the spring sun reading the newspaper. Actually, it was the travel section. A write-up on Turks and Caicos islands. I've wanted to go there for a couple years. It's on my list. Perhaps being outside while reading about the island scene, the turquoise waters and the exquisitely detailed fresh-grilled fish eateries inspired the sensation. Again I felt transported into the land of bliss.

And that's when I got curious. Are other people having these experiences and keeping them to themselves? Am I just wired goofy? Something about the world makes me suspect it isn't normal to go in and out of heaven like that.

Funny thing, though. The next few days I felt like crap. And I have yet to turn that impassioned kiss from the muses into a single written word. Bliss without works...biblically ominous.

Time Enough

2008-02-23T08:00:00.000-08:00

It has been an ongoing puzzle for me. On the one hand, I believe that we choose to incarnate on earth. I believe that we have goals, objectives, lessons and dreams and fantasies about what we will accomplish, how we'll manage to remember God, remember our heavenly home or superconsciousness if you prefer.

But then, my own personal experience of finding this whole time requirement a bit of a wet blanket, I can't fathom why everyone isn't working hard as heck to get whatever lessons earth holds and move on. Why come back if it can in any way be avoided? Everything takes so long in this place, this dimension, this time-space continuum. And boy do I mean continuum.

Today was the very first time I ever glimpsed the allure of earthly immortality. Guess I could have figured it out sooner if I read a little Anne Rice now and again. The thrill of acquiring and mastering all known knowledge.

AOL had some pictures from the Hubble telescope on their news site. Most of them I'd seen before, but I can never see them too often. They sparked all kinds of wonder. Again.

One talked about the evidence for anti-matter from the distored view of enveloped galaxies. Another showed a mass of gas that brought to mind a floating angel contemplating where to move a galaxy or nebula to make the scene just so, the pattern a more clear reflection of perfection. The wonder of imagination.

Every so often I buy books, calendars and magazines on astronomy. I went outside the other night to stare at the lunar eclipse. I don't own a telescope, so I brought out the binoculars for whatever they might add. I find the view of the universe fascinating. The structure is so obviously a macrocosm of our bodies.

If I had ten years to devote to learning astronomy, to unearthing and assembling all the knowledge we earthlings have currently accumulated on dark matter, wave frequency, color, star birth, star death and black holes, then I'd be able to come up with my own unified theory of the universe.

Why not me?

And then I'd take another ten to twenty years to study all the best epics, all the best nonfiction, all the best fantasy and I'd then be able to take four more to write the equivalent of Star Trek meets Carl Sagan's best with a new style that would have Shakespeare's spirit taking notes. Why not? Why not me?

Because I'm too busy taking seriously what the world holds out as necessary and important. I have a job that keeps me in my home, I take care of this home, I take time to enjoy my friends when I can. I'm busy mastering the mundane realities of living.

But if I had a couple hundred years to live, I could spend the first hundred years creating for myself the perfect home, storing up the perfect investments, cultivating the best techniques for sane living. Then I'd have a few hundred more to study astronomy, history, languages and then chemistry and geology too. Then I could really work on that unifed theory of everything. Heck, I wouldn't just be able to describe dark matter, maybe I could create some too.

Uh-oh. Maybe going straight through without a break perverts perspective.

People often suggest sleeping over a major decision. The perspective that is gained from taking a breather, walking away for a moment. Perspective.

I'll just enjoy these 87 years the way a child enjoys each day. Learn what I can, do what I can and be grateful for the whole lot of it.

Then go to sleep awhile, dream awhile. Reawake to a new day as if reborn. Reborn, but with all the knowledge gained from the days that came before.

Maybe it isn't about the unified theory of everything. Who would such a book be for anyway? And what would the knowledge offer to the experience of living, the process of growing.

I'll look into an astronomy class. A primer couldn't hurt. Why not?

Expectations

2008-02-18T08:07:00.000-08:00

I went to the Tucson Gem Fair expecting to be awed. I was. It was exactly as I had imagine, but the experience was nothing like I'd expected.

The short version:
Though the trip spanned four days, I was only able to spend two of them shopping for gemstones. It was overwhelming. I didn't even make it into the convention center or the expo center to see the big dealers. I made it to more than a dozen of the nearly fifty shows, including several hotels that were set-up like mini-faires unto themselves.

I purchased just under ten pieces and found three of the five hard-to-find items I was seeking. Next time I'll plan a longer trip and set clearer goals. Turns out the fairs that swing through the Los Angeles area, while relatively tiny compared to the scale of the Tucson event, can probably meet nearly all my gem needs. As huge as the Tucson event was, it didn't offer a huge selection of the hard-to-find pieces.

The trip's greatest value was in helping me clarify what I am and am not. I'm not a buyer for gifts and I'm not a wholesaler (knew that one).

I'm also not a collector. I don't have the perspective of "collector" since I'm not looking at them in terms of their material value or unique physical attributes. I am only guessing, but I think the motivation of "collectors" is usually about owning the rare piece because of what it says about the collector's prowess, power or wealth.

Post-Tucson I'm clearer that my gems and I are about relationships. How we help each other on our mutual journeys. Those that belong to me will come to me. All the rest...I can still look and admire them for their unique qualities, their particular beauty and on and on, but ultimately, the universe does a fantastic job of bringing together that to which I belong and which belongs to me.

...

When I drove into Tuscon, I saw a string of outdoor shows off the freeway. It took several hours before I made my way over to the location, walking around. I'd bought a couple pieces and was just overwhelmed by the hundreds of booths I'd passed just in those couple of hours. Nearly in a stupor, I just let my glazed eyes land where they wanted, my feet moved as they pleased, dragging me along till my consciousness could catch up.

Amid all these crystals, I saw a flash of light. One of them caught the sun and seemed to wink at me. I walked directly to it. After looking it over, holding it a while, I knew it was one of the pieces I'd come all that way to take home.

It's a trans-channeling clear quartz with a surrounded crystal that grew into one of the faces. It reminds me of a diver jumping into the deep end. It looks like the smaller crystal was plunging into deep waters, diving directly through the primary facet. There's a bit of chlorite in it as well. It has a very powerful energy, a strong but supportive personality.

We resonate with each other. It seems impossible that the sun could have been anywhere else in the sky when I passed by, moving at any other speed, hitting her face at any other angle. How on earth did she manage to get me to walk directly to her? I passed tens of thousands of crystals that afternoon, maybe hundreds of thousands. That one, I was drawn to.

The proverbial eyes meeting across a crowded room.

And how did I know she was special. After I had her in my bag, I knew immediately that if I bought nothing else for the rest of the show, I'd have done what I needed to do on that trip.

The Winds of Change are Gusting

2008-02-02T08:56:00.000-08:00

Years ago, decades really, my sister gave me an amethyst cluster. She was probably ten or eleven. I was twenty or twenty-one. There'd been a crafts fair at her school--an opportunity to let kids buy reasonably priced gifts for family and friends. That was my first crystal.

It has sat on a nightstand near me over the years. For the first eighteen years or so of having it, I didn't acknowledge it as much more than a cute gift from my little sis and a decorative little stone. Yet, meaningful enough that it has remained with me while so many other gifts and keepsakes, decorative or otherwise, have long since been lost or abandoned.

It's certainly not the only thing my sister has ever given me. It is, I now realize, the most treasured. I believe it was the first gift she bought for me autonomously and purely out of love. She didn't get it on a shopping with my mother. It wasn't my birthday. I can't be certain of the memory all these years later, but I believe I saw in her eyes and heard in her voice that it was straight from her heart to mine. And so it stays with me, moves with me.

That was my first. I had a brief phase, several years later, when I purchased a few small stones and carried them around after reading about their supposed healing properties. I was skeptical. I couldn't imagine how a little rock could do more than look good. Yet, I can't deny that there was a stunningly bright malachite I carried for several years. It was an odd love-hate relationship if I recall. I'd hold it in my hands when I drove and mostly kept in the car. Didn't like having it in my home, though.

I spent one summer in the early 90's in Guanajuato, Mexico. Supposedly I was studying Mexican Law and practicing my broken Spanish. In reality, I was almost always recovering from ingesting the wrong food or water. Interspered with attending classes were bouts of traveling, drinking and the usual antics of young American tourists.

When I came back, I visited a new buddy I'd met the summer before at a part-time job. That's a story worth telling sometime. It was after my first year of law school when I should have pursued something in the legal profession. Instead I found myself working at a home for pregnant teens and young mothers. I'm convinced it was the universe answering a prayer that included meeting this buddy. He soon became my closest friend.

One day after returning from Mexico, drinking tequila at his home, telling my tales,I heard a loud crash. Turned out my little blue paid-for Toyota Tercel hatchback was rear-ended by a hit-and-run driver. It was totalled. Finito. And I never saw the malachite again.

That experience with the car was the first time I was consciously aware of a major energy shift taking place in my life. I didn't call it "energy shift" then, but I knew it was related to leaving behind an old me to walk forward into a new life with new skin. I knew my mind, body and soul was ridding itself of stuff I didn't need any more--including my car. I had to find a new apartment that was near a bus route. When I moved in, my amethyst cluster took its place on the nightstand.

Had I not been carless, I'd have never met the Turkish girl whose name sounds like the car Hyundai. (I'm sure she spelled it differently.) We met on the bus we took to our different schools. Her car worked when it felt like it. Mostly it didn't feel like it. We exchanged numbers. One Friday night when her car was in the mood and I'd come home to what a poor student considers an unexpected windfall--a partial tuition refund check--we went out dancing all over Los Angeles. At the last club we visited, I walked in and stood next to the man who became my first husband in this lifetime.

My malachite was gone. My car was gone. I got a new place. Then a new friend. And shortly thereafter, a husband.

Eventually, though, we moved from that place. I lost touch with that friend. I'm still in touch with the sweet soul I married a long, long time ago, but I moved on from the marriage. The malachite was long gone.

The amethyst still sits near my bed.

Two years ago I received a clear quartz cluster and smokey quartz point from a friend. I'd made a comment about not being particularly satisfied with a change I was experiencing in my life. He scanned his rather immense collection of "rocks" and handed me those two.

That started a sequence of events that reaquainted me with my soul's affinity for the crystal kindgom. I believe the connection has both ancestral and past life roots. I can't even count the many crystals I now have in my home--citrine, rose quartz, moldavite, spessartine, apophyllites, barite, spheralite, apatite, angelite...wands, fadens, channeling crystals, spheres, clusters, record keepers. Not including the dozens of pocket pieces, there are at least fifty. Not to mention the collection of beaded stones from a jewelry-making kick.

Last night, I heard a whistling sound in the air. I got the distinct impression while meditating with the clear cluster a friend dubbed "mother" to the rest that our time was ending. She isn't the first stone to leave me. Several smaller ones have let me know they belong elsewhere. My 12/2/07 posting on Customary Giving is about one such incident. I've given them to family, friends, students and colleagues. I just never thought that "mother" and I would part.

I consider her an integral part of my now two-years-old foray into energy healing and accelerated personal growth. I guess I was spoiled by my first amethyst. She's still here and I can't imagine our parting. I never imagined "mother" would move on.

The message in the meditation was that "mother" had done her job with me. My home and my heart were now fully open to the mineral kingdom. I'd taken on Reiki attunements and allowed my physical body to join me as a partner on my spiritual journey. That seems to be her thing. Reminds me of a crystal version of John the Baptist. Hails the kingdom, then moves on taking her message elsewhere.

As most of you know, I'll soon attend a huge mineral and gem convention that practically takes over the city of Tuscon, Arizona. I can intuit that there are three specific crystals meeting me there. I know that "mother" is only leaving because another comes to pick up where she leaves off.

I'm not entirely sad to be losing her. I know it is just part of the process. Truly, it's a sign of progress that the universe no longer has to cause things to get lost or broken or "accidentally" slammed by a moving truck in order for me to let go of what no longer resonates with my spirit. I understand and I am certain that her leaving is to make room for the new additions which will facilitate the next phase in my growth. Yet, the sense of loss is still present.

To be honest, I'm delighted that I was forewarned of the upcoming change. It gives me time to appreciate her more before she tells me to whom she belongs next. I tried asking who she's going to next and the only message I got was to take her to school with me for a time and her next home will make itself known.

A friend was over last night and "mother" seemed to want to do one last healing. This morning I sat her outside on the deck to enjoy the rain and soak up the sun for the next few days. Eventually, I clear of personal programs and send her off so that she can fulfill her personal journey.

I started this entry yesterday, but got busy. Life. The universe. I tried to get back to it this morning, but couldn't seem to get around to it. I took a nap. When I woke up and saw how long I'd slept I was able to recognize that I was processing something. There was something going on I needed to settle into and own. The buddy, the personal angel, the best friend over the years in front of whose house my car was totalled has left the Los Angeles area. It's been months in the making...actually years. It was this morning that I opened the email that said he and his wife had made it successfully with their-packed up possessions to their new destination. They've been in the process for months. Today it is done.

I could try to convey all the things that make him so special to me, but they could only betray the depth of love by sounding superficial. I've spent the last few Thanksgivings at his home, going straight there after the one with my family if that gives any indication on the significance he and has wife hold in my life. I'll add this one, too. He and I went shopping for my first huge dictionary together. That was twelve years ago. Sounds trivial at first glance.

He recognized before I did how much I loved words. Imagine someone seeing you more clearly than you see yourself...and not being afraid to share the view. There was a period of years when we talked practically every morning on my way to work and then another hour or two each day on weekends and holidays. I'm not naturally a big fan of phone calls and can honestly say he is the ONLY person with whom I have such a phone relationship. Couldn't tell you what magic he used. Oh, yes I can. Every conversation was engaging, deep, metaphysically, intellectually challenging and often emotionally draining.

Now we talk much less often. With his involvement in moving and the changes I've been pursuing energetically, we sometimes communicate only by email for weeks at a time. I don't worry about him. He's got more than enough buddies to keep up his conversational needs.

It wasn't until after the nap that I understood the connection between "mother" and my buddy. Two pillars leaving. Two pillars whose pending absence confirm that I am ready for something new, something big, something destined.

Energetic shift indeed. The winds of change are blowing at a nice clip.

And just as with mother, there is an absence of sadness. It feels right. It is right. There is the standard ego-driven sense of "loss" that wants to be comforted, acknowledged. This blog is that effort to comfort my ego, to own, admit and share that change, no matter how necessary, how welcome, how positive for all involved, is still change. It deserves to be noted, appreciated, embraced.

And that's when I noticed the importance of that acknowledgement. The moment I allowed myself to embrace the loss, to feel the residual sadness, I became free to sit faithfully in the certainty that, in my life, change has always opened to better.

I wonder with great anticipation and curiousity what wondrous blessings requires this much cleared space. They must be wondrous blessings indeed!

Of course, I'll share them with you.

Delving into Her, Mother Earth

2008-01-27T09:16:00.000-08:00

I had an amazing meditation yesterday. I felt myself dive right into earth, feel her and know her. (I detail which crystals were involved and the source of the meditation at the end--last two paragraphs.)

Southern California has just experienced a couple storms that brought lots of snow to surprisingly low levels in the nearby mountains. And, so Southern California, it was a perfect day to have the top down on the convertible to see the snow-capped mountains all the better as I drove around. Such a site is a rare treat here.

Their awe-inspiring beauty is probably the reason that during the meditation I was moved to try and place my consciousness within the mountains that are to the North of Los Angeles. And that started the incredible astral journey through the earth's inner planes.

I felt myself inside the cold inner core of the mountains, mixed in with the minerals, pressed within layers of rock and stone. With my affinity for the mineral kingdom's crystals and gems well-established, I found the experience refreshing. It was blissful to feel myself one with the mountain's guts.

From there I felt invited, perhaps called, not to stop with the mountains. My consciousness dove deep into the ocean. The spirit of a group of whales refered me to a few gems found on the ocean's floor, unique varieties still unknown to man. Their role as caretakers becomes clearer as I reflect on what was revealed to me in that visit. My astral floated alongside a few of them and then darted away to mingle with a colorful variety of fish. Imagine actually feeling the sensation of being thousands of feet below the ocean's surface, but without the pressure of the water's weight since you are there in consciousness only, your body comfortably above sea level in warm clothes in a warm home. Fascinating travels.

The best part of the ride though, was going to the earth's core. If you are inclined to think I'm crazy, you hardly need more proof, so I have no reason to fear telling you what I believe I experienced in placing my mind's eye there, my astal body right in the hot, molten center of this huge floating rock whose surface we crawl about upright, calling it earth.

There were beings there. They seemed to be about the business of tending to the earth's core fire. What was there job? I can't say. But whatever it was, they were enthusiastically busy being about it. They were huge if my perception was at all relative to my human perspective. If I were guessing, 10 - 20 ft seems right. I anticipate being thought a bit crazy by some. These being moved the way fire dances. Their shapes amorphous, but tall and lean. In fact, from a strictly visual perspective, they were nothing more than fire. But it was undeniable to me that they considered themselves to be working, to be engaged in some critical role that kees our planet alive.

Did that really happen?

I wonder what would happen if a skin cell from the top of a hand suddenly wonderd and then decided to wander about the larger world on which it was a part. Suppose this skin cell managed to find a way to "see" and "feel" to "travel" the body, it's earth. It communes with a liver cell, a blood cell, a stomach cell? What if she traveled in her mind's eye outside her humble plasma and sat herself, her limited consciousness, square inside the beating heart that pumped the river that it brought it's nourishment, a witness to the massive, powerful activity of rhythmic drumming.

When she returned to her "right" mind, her humble world, her plasma cell, would fellow cells believe her tale? Would they dare to imagine or conceive that such a thing exists? "Come now, we've heard of bones and some river of life that supports cells like us all over this massive moving being, but foolish child, you say you witnessed creatures of all types and purposes down in the core of this being which believed they had important jobs to do? Something that beats rhythmically with a power unimaginable to us?"

But since when can a skin cell shift her consciousness to the rest of the body? How could she possibly know what is happening anywhere else in the gigantic organism of which she is an infinitesimal and fleeting part?

Speaking of gigantic organisms...the earth does indeed have a heartbeat. A network of seismographs recorded the sounds of the planet sped up at a rate of 4 minutes equals 1 second. Check it out.

Anyway...that meditation was incredible. Every piece of our planet having it's own consciouness and purpose and open to being visited...and appreciated.

For readers who appreciate the influence of crystals, I was in a triangular grid of three Moqui Balls and had a small blue flourite double tetrahedron. I held the blue flourite under my tongue for several minutes at the beginning of the meditation and then sat it between my crossed legs during remainder of meditation.

The meditation is part of the 42-day program I've mentioned previously. That program comes from a book entitled Abundance Through Reiki (Paula Horan). Simplified, it is two sets of 21 day programs. Each set is comprised of repeating three times a seven day cycle of meditations attuned to each of the seven major chakras. I was in day 21, working on the crown chakra, "feeling fully how much (I) desire enlightenment; how much (I) want to become one with it."

Moving on

2008-01-13T20:41:00.000-08:00

This weekend I learned from a close buddy that his brother died unexpectedly.
she said he complained of a chest pain
went for a bike ride
and the next thing she knew
she got a phone call from his girlfriend's son
that he was in the morgue
that she could not claim the body cuz she was not his wife
and some other stuff like that
she knew no details whatsoever

except that he was dead.......boom

And that started a round of reflections that combined with my 42-day meditation program to produce the following clarity. Rather than re-think and re-type, here's the gist from an email:

I'm able to be much clearer that I don't have a desire to grow old in Los Angeles area. I've talked about Pismo and the Caribbean for years now. And it has all just been blah-blah-blah someday and maybe. All talk, no commitment, no clarity, no certainty.

Alfred's passing combined with your moving up North and all the work I'm doing to get in touch with ME and egoless wanting and Heaven on Earth and believing that my grandest dreams can come true...it all adds up to something.

I get along just fine here. I've got an easy life. It's full of peace and freedom. And yet, there's better, there's more. I'm confronting, consciously and deliberately and persistently, residual doubts of being worthy of my wildest dreams and any guilt issues that would make me question daring to want the more and better.

Finally, I can just admit the undeniability of wanting more. Thanks to Alfred checking out 1-2-3, I'm reminded that it's all just fun and games anyway. We're in, we're out. While I'm in, why not live somewhere that makes my soul sing???

(the brother)left town his way...

Thanks again, for pointing the flashlight to the exit sign. "You don't have to hang around here" is what his exit says to me.