An Ofrenda for 10,000 Souls?

The morning of Halloween, I tried to talk with Bob, but I couldn’t get a clear signal. “Hey,” I said, “It’s Halloween, the veil is supposed to be thin. We should be able to connect.” I had the impression that he was going Ooooooooo and waggling scary fingers at me!

Día de los Muertos is my favorite holiday, and I always try to make some observation of it. I would never have imagined, a year ago, how much it would mean this time. Here is the ofrenda I made for Bob, using the photo board my daughter, her husband and I put together for his memorial.

I had intended to give him this Snoopy (he was a fan) for his birthday on March 19, but wasn’t able to get it in time from my friend who was selling it on eBay. Then I planned to give it to him for Easter. So he never got it.

See the alabaster bird on a perch in the back? And the broken one lying next to it? We bought the bird sculpture on our honeymoon, and the two birds became the symbol of our marriage. (The pair of red birds in the front left is from our anniversary last year.) When one bird got broken, Bob joked, “Do we have to get a divorce now?”

I never figured out what glue to use to fix the poor thing, and it’s been sitting in the china cabinet waiting in pieces for years. Now, the condition of the sculpture is all too poignantly appropriate.

Rituals like ofrendas are supposed to help us process our pain. I think maybe mine is being reactivated more than assuaged right now, but the observance is still worthwhile and I’m still glad to do it. The light, fun touch of this holiday, the recognition that the dead can still dance, is a wonderful reminder of the deeper reality of our existence.

But this year is far from light or fun.

I don’t know how to begin to make an altar for the thousands and thousands of needless, tragic, murderous, cruel deaths in Israel and Gaza. As I write, bombs continue to fall on children and adults alike, the elderly, the hospitalized, the disabled, it doesn’t matter. All are targets. What started with unspeakable brutality was met with hugely more of the same, because our species is like that. Victims lose their lives or limbs, while combatants lose their souls, and we are all diminished. No matter what comes next, the trauma and desire for revenge will ripple and radiate throughout humanity. And our ability to respond to the crises that threaten our entire planet will continue to be hamstrung by our obsession with conflict.

Probably by the time you read this, close to 10,000 will have died in that one small corner of the world. Then there are all those being killed, maimed and emotionally devastated just as needlessly in Ukraine, Sudan, and elsewhere. We are all human and therefore both all responsible and all affected, because we are truly, fundamentally all one.

And within that oneness, each of us is uniquely precious and irreplaceable. It keeps striking me that each of those thousands of losses is just as painful to someone as the loss of my husband is to me. Far more so, I should say, because Bob’s death was a natural occurrence that was no one’s fault, not a murder perpetrated by some blind evil.

Our minds balk at understanding mass tragedies; we go numb to those, and react far more to stories of individual suffering. But each of those thousands is an individual. Multiply personal agony by those thousands. Feel that crushing your heart. Contemplate what humans do to each other in the name of some imagined lofty principles and shrug off as merely “the cost of war.”

In these pages I’ve pointed out that dead doesn’t mean serious and that the next world isn’t a place of sadness. Today I would like you to think of the opposite aspect, the shock and damage that must be repaired when people are killed so suddenly and unjustly and at such young ages, both for themselves and those they leave behind. The damage that is done to our collective heart. Think of what we can do to calm the rage and terror within ourselves and begin to radiate something better.

Bob would endorse that. He lived it.

Once I asked Fryderyk what he thought was needed for us to save ourselves from the future that is bearing down on us. I was asking about climate specifically, but his message is relevant here as well: “Your love of life must become greater than your love of death.”

Reblog: Not Left or Right but Up

https://elenedom.wordpress.com/2016/08/03/not-left-or-right-but-up-the-undivine-comedy-and-our-comedy-of-errors/
Not Left or Right but Up: The “Undivine Comedy” and Our Comedy of Errors

I have been thinking so often lately of this old post. When I wrote it back in 2016, I could hardly have imagined the insanity that would befall our country in the ensuing years.  But as usual, plus ça change….

The enduring, worsening division is not surprising, but I would not have expected the incredible persistence of the Big Lie or the general inability and unwillingness of so many to engage with reality. It’s far more fundamental than a simple left/right philosophical conflict, which could be dealt with by honest communication between people of good will. More and more I find myself in despair. I still have no better solution than the one outlined here: to rise above the current appearance of hopeless and eternal warfare and operate within a higher reality.

I’m reminded again, too, of the concept that our planet is going to split into two Earths, energetically speaking, with humans literally living in two different worlds— something that seems entirely too true. https://elenedom.wordpress.com/2020/10/04/sorting-medical-fact-from-fiction-part-i-the-two-earths/
“We’re often told that if we stay centered and calm, keep our minds on our spiritual values and on love rather than fear, and consume a solid information diet instead of mental junk food, we are a lot harder to manipulate.”

Some of my patients have also been talking about the necessity of connecting with a higher spirituality in order to cope with our extremely challenging time. I hope a great many people are thinking this way and that we will manage to make a meaningful shift.

The original post from August 2016:
In 1833, the young poet and playwright Zygmunt Krasiński penned Nie-Boska Komedia, the “Undivine Comedy,” which is still an icon of Polish literature.  Krasiński was a one-percenter who was acutely aware that things could not go on as they were in his intensely inequitable society. In the play, the fed-up 99%, led by the charismatic but cruel and unbalanced Pankracy, rises against the ruling class. Count Henryk, a character who has much in common with the author, is the central figure on the aristocrats’ side.

An apocalyptic battle ensues, taking place in a Dantesque, fantastical setting that could not be fully realized on a physical stage at the time. Henryk and his cohorts represent a tradition that has fallen away from its noble ideals and become vain and selfish. The revolutionaries are an unsavory rabble who espouse justice and equality, but are willing to destroy everyone and everything in their way. Neither side is worthy to lead the country into the future.

In the end, the revolutionary forces win the battle, Henryk dies, and Pankracy orders the execution of the remaining aristocrats. Suddenly he is overtaken by a brilliant vision of Christ, so brilliant that it paralyzes him and blinds him to all else. In the vision, the clearly displeased Christ is leaning on his cross as if on a sword, and lightning flashes from his crown of thorns. Pankracy cries out “Galileae vicisti!” (“Galilean, you have won!”) and drops dead on the spot. The end.

When I first read a translation, many years ago, I thought it was the most facile, brainless deus ex machina ending anyone could ever have come up with. Krasiński was only 21 at the time, I thought, and he was trying to deal with hopelessly intractable social problems; he must have just thrown up his hands and walked away. I couldn’t get this crazy, surreal story out of my mind, though. Eventually it percolated through my head long enough that Krasiński’s insight got through to me.

You may have figured this out a lot faster than I did. Krasiński was saying that humans cannot mend the injustices in their world through conflict, and that no human point of view is entirely right or deserving of victory. Only a spiritual awakening can bring about the needed transformation, and that can only happen within the individual.

Well. Obviously we are not there yet. It’s going to be a while before enlightenment strikes every human heart.

Krasiński wrote in a time of fundamental dissolution and transition. Poland had been obliterated as a nation by the Russians, and many of his compatriots had emigrated to form a sort of country in exile, rather as has happened with Tibet under Chinese rule. Poland had been in shaky positions before, but now it had officially ceased to exist. It must have seemed as if nothing could ever be normal again. Yet Romantic-period sensibilities included a robust belief that a utopian world could be created (at least on a small scale), along with a willingness to imagine the wildest of possibilities. We are not there, either. We are cynical and disillusioned and far beyond the naivety of the 19th century.

Despite his pessimistic portrayal of Henryk and his followers, Krasiński held to the view that an educated, cultured elite, steeped in old-fashioned values and Christian ideals, would be best suited to run society. He was bitterly opposed to the Tsar’s regime, but also opposed to radicalism and insurgency. He distrusted the disorderly mass of the 99%, preferring at least the possibility of a redeemed 1%.

In this dark moment we have our own kind of Pankracy, an uncouth, uncontrolled pseudo-revolutionary who claims (falsely!) to be an outsider and populist, and who has already succeeded in blowing apart longstanding power structures. On the other side we have an establishment figure who embodies the American version of aristocracy. Those of us who identify with the educated and cultured elite are horrified that anyone would even momentarily choose the former. We are appalled at his utter disregard for civility and for reality itself. Like Krasiński, we would much rather have one of our own in charge, someone with solid intelligence and broad knowledge of the world. But as in his time, hallowed power structures have become calcified and disconnected from the ideals they were originally intended to serve, and we no longer trust those who have found success within them, no matter how competent they show themselves to be.  So we have widespread frustration and discontent.

We find ourselves watching a drama as lurid as anything the Romantics dreamed up, rapt and hypnotized, unable to tear ourselves away. The only path out of this, I think, is not left or right but up. Awakening is the only possible solution to the national nightmare. And it is most difficult to achieve, requiring us to pull the beams from our own eyes when we would rather pay attention to the motes in the eyes of others.

May all our eyes open.

Here is a quick overview of Krasiński’s career: http://culture.pl/en/artist/zygmunt-krasinski

“Angel Mode” and Insect Visitors

A couple of weeks ago a patient was telling me how sensitive she is to picking up other people’s distress. She lives with someone who is dealing with anxiety and depression, and that person’s struggles add greatly to her own. I’m no stranger to the difficulties of being a natural empath, and I’ve never found a way to entirely shield myself, but I have learned a few tricks that help.

I think at one time I told you about “Angel Mode,” a phenomenon that showed up spontaneously in 2009, when I had taken a devastating empathic hit and was desperate to keep that from happening again. Suddenly, while doing energy work for a patient, I saw myself as turning into a golden angel with huge fluffy white wings. Seriously. That may sound like I was a bit full of myself, but it happened totally without my intending it and was quite a surprise. The image was vivid and persistent, and I felt expansive and much stronger, able to serenely rise above whatever was going on in the moment. It turned out that I was able to engage the angel image whenever I needed it, and for months I used that method pretty much every time I treated anybody, until eventually I didn’t feel so vulnerable anymore and gradually stopped.

The funniest part was that a number of patients mentioned seeing me as an angel. I hadn’t told any of them what I was trying to do.

So I suggested to this lady that we could try shifting her system into angel mode, if it was willing. She agreed. While working on her painful areas, I visualized wings sprouting from her back. Right away they did— lacy, shimmery dragonfly wings! A new kind of surprise.

“Your wings look different from mine,” I told her. “You have dragonfly wings.” She replied that dragonflies were very important to her. They had been her mother’s favorite, and she thought of them as symbolizing her. She used them all the time in her visual art. I was delighted to find that I had seen this accurately and that it was so meaningful for her.

As we continued to observe, a strongly delineated image of a complete dragonfly came into focus over the whole length of her body. A giant insect might seem disturbing to most people, but she was excited and pleased to think of it. She told me that she loves insects and wasn’t at all frightened by the idea that the dragonfly was covering her body. It seemed helpful and protective to me, too. I wondered whether it was a spirit animal manifesting itself, or simply an imaginary picture we were sharing. I didn’t have a sense of an actual entity being present.

This brought up a memory for the patient, though. When she was a child, she said, she often had dreams of giant grasshoppers who would come and take her away with them. They always went to the same place, a room she described as “gauzy.” The dreams were frightening, but the grasshoppers never hurt her, and she had the feeling they were trying to help in some way.

This gave me a start, because she seemed to be describing a common type of alien abduction experience (or what people commonly consider to be an alien abduction— not that anyone truly understands the nature of these things). I wasn’t sure if I should push for details, and I didn’t want to contaminate her memories, but I was so curious, I couldn’t restrain myself from asking.

“Um, could they possibly have looked more like mantises?” I asked.

 “Yes,” she replied, “mantises or grasshoppers.”

She confirmed that they were tall, like the insectoid types often reported in the UFO literature. But here’s the thing: she had never heard of anyone else having this kind of experience. She didn’t know that anyone else had memories of being taken somewhere by giant insects and having mysterious procedures done to them. She had never read or seen anything about abductions at all.

“I’m thinking those may not have been dreams,” I told her, gently. “If someone had looked for you, I wonder if you would have been in your bed.” Which is an open question. In some cases people who claimed to have had an abduction experience were observed to stay in one place the entire time, while psychologically they were being put through a major trauma. In others, they were verifiably, physically gone.

My patient seemed more fascinated than frightened by these concepts. I wonder if any more memories will come up for her, now that she’s been reminded of her childhood encounters. She has not had any such experiences as an adult, at least none that she knows of consciously.

The whole sequence, from the dragonfly wings through the insectoid visitors, was completely unexpected.

I have begun to wonder whether we create artistic representations of angels, humans with wings, because at some level we are all aware of our own invisible wings, just as we represent the subliminal glow of a powerful person with a halo. I’ve never figured out what angels “really” are, though I’ve met beings who were presented as angels or seemed like they must be such. I’ve never seen them with a clear image of wings, only felt them as energies or had a mind’s-eye sense of a person-sized patch of light and color. Usually I don’t see things as clearly as I did that dragonfly anyway. But the feeling of my own wings can be a lot like sensation of a physical body part. It feels like I can extend them or fold them, maybe even flap them a little.

I can hardly describe how exquisite it is to blossom into this powerful, glowing creature that is so much more than I usually am. I believe this phenomenon tells us something about our true nature. If we would pay better attention to it, perhaps it would help us to get past the pathetic pettiness of our daily interactions.

The angel mode experience is one reason I became such a fan of the Lucifer series. The gigantic, gorgeous, ultra-fluffy wings of the angel characters touched a chord in me. To manifest their wings, Lucifer and his siblings sort of shrug their shoulders, and the wings suddenly pop out. Each celestial being has an individual color and style of feathers; I note again that Lucifer’s wings are pure white, which makes total sense once you think about it for a moment.

In an episode of the final season, Lucifer suddenly gets a bout of alar erectile dysfunction, where he shrugs and shrugs and nothing happens. It has to do with doubting himself and his abilities. At about the same time, by coincidence (?) I found that my left wing was unwilling to show itself— apparently for a totally different reason, a musculoskeletal problem that blocked up the area. It was odd, another unexpected aspect of Angel Mode. Maybe it had occurred in the past as well and I hadn’t been paying attention. I think this deserves more study.

In the show, you can’t see the celestials’ wings until they intentionally unfurl them, but they’re always there in potential, just as ours appear to be. Why don’t you see if your own wings will show up? Let me know what you find.

Thanks to the late Babette Saenz for the dragonfly art; I don’t know the name of the artist.  I would like to acknowledge that person and the creator of the wings graphic if I can discover who they are.

WandaVision: Unconscious in Our Episodes

“So long, darling….”

“Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.”  — Marianne Williamson

The final episode of WandaVision has been in the past for a while now, so I’m figuring that any of you who were interested in seeing it already managed to do so. If not, I must add:

**SPOILER ALERT!**

I’m a rather vague and desultory fan of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. That is, I’ve seen most of the movies from the past decade, and I was heavily into Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., mostly because of my crush on Clark Gregg (Agent Phil Coulson), but I don’t have the wide-ranging background knowledge necessary to understand WandaVision with all its cross-references, or the memory to keep track of everything I have seen over the years.

So I wasn’t really expecting to be, but I was immediately enthralled with this oddest addition to the MCU, and now I’m seriously crushing on both Paul Bettany and Elizabeth Olsen.

We see the origins of a whole crew of super beings in this series, and those who knew them from the comics were excited to have them show up on the screen. The superhero tropes weren’t the point, though, and like some of the critics whose work I’ve read, I was a bit jarred and almost annoyed when the final magic-fire-smiting battle of the witches came along, iconic and necessary though it was. We were in it more for the small-screen, intimately emotional story at the core. 

Elizabeth Olsen’s Wanda Maximoff is incandescent even when she’s not throwing red fireballs around the neighborhood. She is catastrophically powerful, exquisitely vulnerable, and most of all profoundly broken. In her short life she has lost her parents, her home, her brother, her husband, and any chance at stability or normality. Unable to bear the latest and sharpest loss, she has retreated into a comforting world constructed from the American sitcoms that she enjoyed as a child, her last memories of happiness with her family.

It’s a perfect story for our reality-warped, grief-soaked, wrenchingly surreal time.

When the story begins, we’re confused and nonplussed. There is no explanation for the sudden appearance of these superhero characters in a ’50s-style sitcom. It doesn’t take long for the characters themselves to begin to realize that they don’t belong there and something is terribly wrong. At some level Wanda realizes that she’s creating this televised reality (including the pithy commercials) but she fights that knowledge with everything she’s got. Messages break through from the outside, but she rejects them. She has to be forced to understand what she has done.

It seems to me that this is pretty much what we’re all doing every day. 

Like Wanda, we are terrified of our own power and of the responsibility that comes with it. Wanda has been told that she is dangerous and will destroy the world. As individuals, we are unlikely to do that, but as a species, we know the destruction we are capable of, even as we protest our innocence.

The sitcom world is enticingly free of such concerns. Vision is the perfect husband, devoted, caring and empathetic, poetic and philosophical with a charming edge of goofiness— not to mention able to fly, walk through walls, and protect his family from sundry technological and supernatural attacks. Yes, he’s a synthezoid, but hey, we’ve made worse choices in romantic partners, right? Don’t judge.

And of course he is perfect; he is Wanda’s creation, everything she wants him to be, and he becomes acutely aware of that. In the series finale, just before the artificial world disintegrates and he is destroyed, he asks Wanda, “What am I?” She explains, ripping our hearts out: “You, Vision, are the piece of the Mind Stone that lives in me. You are a body of wires and blood and bone that I created. You are my sadness and my hope. But mostly, you’re my love.”

We do not, most of us at least, create our lovers’ physical forms. But I will argue that in a sense we create everything else about them. Do we ever know the true nature of anything we perceive, or only what we perceive of it? Demonstrably no. So do we ever know the true nature of the people in our lives, or only our perceptions of them? The answer is obvious.

(When I was a teenager, this truth slammed into me suddenly when I saw it in a play, before I was ready for it. I had a sort of nervous breakdown in response. I remember blubbering uncontrollably while my mother held me and wondered what in the world to do with me. Since then I have made peace with the fact that reality is slippery and undefined and no one quite exists as they appear.)

We all change form over time, and adjust to the programming necessary to live different lives. This is as true within one lifetime as it is across many. As Vision begins to dissolve, he recounts, with wonder, the very different forms he has taken over time. “Who knows what I might be next,” he concludes wistfully.

There is another truth embedded in this scene. Wanda has already stated firmly that “family is forever”— and that does appear to be the case in the real world, whether we like it or not! As Vision’s body dematerializes, the two agree, “We have said goodbye before, so it stands to reason…. we’ll say hello again.” Cheesy? Perhaps, but who cares? We needed it, and it’s true. Relationships don’t end with one lifetime/series/episode.  As for Vision, we know we can expect to see more of him in other stories, and most likely we’ll see the kids as well. 

I don’t know how to tell you what I was feeling as Wanda stood alone in the midst of the desolate lot that was all that was left of her dream home, or why I experienced that specific image with such intensity. It was visceral, a twisting in my chest, as if all the losses and griefs of the past year spun together into a black hole. All that even though I have not personally experienced the great losses that so many others have.  I believe that stories have been crucial to our emotional survival during the pandemic, but sometimes the processing they facilitate can be hard going.

So much more could be said about WandaVision, and so much has been.  Here’s a worthwhile example, an interview with someone at least as enthusiastic as I and way more knowledgeable about the MCU: https://news.yahoo.com/breaking-down-wandavision-thrilling-easter-235442212.html

I can’t end without mentioning everyone’s favorite quote, which we hear the real Vision say in a flashback: “What is grief, if not love persevering?”

Wanda is the heroine of this story, but she is also its primary villain. She has conscripted other living, conscious beings into her fantasy against their will, and that, too, is a fine metaphor for our time. The past year has felt like things just happen randomly, without our knowledge or consent, like we’ve been cast in someone’s movie for which we never auditioned. It’s good to be reminded that we are the writers, directors and producers.

Wanda says that she doesn’t understand her power, but she vows to learn. Let’s do that.

May the reality you create be beautiful and filled with love, and may it harm no one.

**********************************************************************

While looking for the Marianne Williamson quote above, I found some others that seemed relevant:

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”  — Carl Jung

“People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar.”  —Thich Nhat Hanh

“We are the sum of the things we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.” — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” — James Baldwin

And the rest of the quote from A Return to Love:  “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

A Small Experiment In Walking Through the Veil

Comments on my post about the SoulPhone project included a pithy “the veil is there for a reason.” This phrase came from a person who is very knowledgeable about after-death issues, and it stuck with me and begged me to explore it. I decided to have a look and find out whatever I could about the nature of the interface between the worlds on my own, not depending on whatever sources on either side have told me.

I simply asked to be shown an image of the veil. What I saw seemed to contradict some other information that’s been received from the other side over the years. In particular, we’re told that “postmaterial” folk experience themselves as being more or less the same as before they died, in terms of having a solid-seeming body much like the one they’d inhabited on the earth plane. Other evidence has supported that in my experience, but that was not what this vision showed me.

The interface itself looked like a thin, black, semi-translucent rectangle, rather like smoky glass, which I saw tilted horizontally with the far edge toward the left. It looked a lot like this Plexiglas panel being sold at Amazon, but a bit darker:

There was an arm reaching through toward the right, a somewhat vague cartoon-like structure, but solid, showing up in a sort of pale orange hue. To the left, there was a blank space. Whoever was reaching through was invisible on that side.

Meanwhile, there was a figure on the right side of the rectangle that appeared to represent me, and “I” was reaching my right arm through in the opposite direction, from the material to the immaterial world. As my arm penetrated the interface, it disappeared.

So the same being could appear in material form, at least more or less, in one world and not in the other.

I tried visualizing a being from the other world stepping entirely into ours. The image on our side was of a whole human figure, with a fuzzy glowing outline— clearly delineated, but not solid in the same way as an earth-plane denizen. Like a ghost, the way they’re often pictured.

Next I tried seeing myself step through from my side, and I disappeared on the other side. I tried experiencing that in my own body, walking through to the other world, and felt my body dissipating into a mist and diffusing.

I turned the elements of the vision in various directions and tried to look at the scene from different perspectives. Everything persisted, as if I were looking at a “real” scene. No dreamlike morphing, and nothing going away. It felt like I was seeing something truthful, though I don’t necessarily understand all of it. I am presenting the vision not as an absolute description of reality, but as the way my brain found to represent an aspect of reality.

Early in this whole process, the thought occurred to me that wherever you go, you find yourself. There was a sense of being able to reach through the interface and back around to oneself from either side. I’m not sure how that fit in with the rest.

2020 Vision

… is a joke that’s going to get old real fast, so I’ll try to use it quick before that happens.

A free-to-download version of the Kali Yantra from kalibhakti.com, empty of color and ready to receive your preferred reality.

I was going to write about the terrifying prospects we face in the next year and the next decade, and the way they’re battering mental health all over the planet. But you know about all that. What do we do with it? Here are a few musings.

Some interesting takes on how to cope with this apocalyptic Anthropocene era have crossed my screen in the past week. One was the “post-doom” concept espoused by Michael Dowd: “Post-doom: what opens up when we remember who we are, accept what is inevitable, honor our grief, and invest in what is pro-future and soul-nourishing.”
https://www.postdoom.com/

I heard about this in an interview by Steve Bhaerman, the alter ego of my guru Swami Beyondananda. 
https://omtimes.com/iom/2019/12/michael-dowd-post-doom/

It reminded me of the beautiful Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Inner Light,” in which a probe from a long-dead civilization causes Picard to experience the existence of a man who lived near the end, as the planet was being roasted by a malfunctioning sun. The people knew that soon there would be nothing left of their world, but they managed to retain their joy in living despite unimaginable tragedy.

Next I was introduced to “rewilding” by Micah Mortali, interviewed by Tami Simon:
https://www.soundstrue.com/store/weeklywisdom?page=single&category=IATE&episode=14107
Rewilding is a term for conservation efforts to return land to a wilder state, including the reintroduction of large predators, but Mortali was talking about human beings reconnecting to our natural environment, knowing ourselves as animals that belong within it. When Simon asked him how he would suggest that we deal with climate change, he said something I thought was striking and potentially very useful: we should go outdoors and be with nature, and pay attention, and the Earth will teach us what we need to do.

Mortali also pointed out something that it totally obvious but that people forget all the time, that we grew out of the primordial soup of this planet and we are entirely part of her, not separate. The dichotomy of “man” and “nature” is false. Thinking further, then, how is it that nature has led herself to a situation in which one segment of life on the earth threatens to destroy all the rest along with itself?

I remember that when I was a kid I heard adults talking about a time to come, not too far in the future, when the world would be shaken by earthquakes, terrible storms, upheavals of all sorts. They spoke as if this were inevitable and as if everyone knew it would happen. I have never been able to track down whatever they based this belief upon. Nostradamus, perhaps? At any rate, dang, here it is. I think I’ve always subconsciously expected it.

I was also exposed, from early childhood, to Gene Roddenberry’s vision of the future, in which humanity would go through a period of worldwide crises (around the 1990s, in the Star Trek canon), then emerge into an age of peace, enlightenment and prosperity. He is not the only one to imagine this, as far as I know. My impression is that it forms a strong thread in the current human psyche.

Can we say that, logically, whatever is happening must be what is supposed to be happening? And will we create that golden age that is supposed to show up afterward?

I would love to think that God/the Universe/Mother Nature will take care of us and allow us to survive, along with taking care of all the other creatures. However, we know there have been repeated mass extinctions, where nearly all life was lost. This is something Earth has done from time to time, and no doubt will do again. Then things continue in a different form. I think often of the Hindu concept of the Kali Yuga, when things go downhill and are destroyed, to make way for a new cycle. I think also of the goddess Kali (which I just found out is a different word from the above) who performs the necessary act of destruction, without which creation cannot occur. While looking up other information for this post, I became fascinated with reading about her.

I am beginning to consider that Kali may be a perfect image for our time and our response to it. Though she is fierce and bloody, Kali is also the most loving of mothers, in her guise as Kali Ma, symbolizing the ground of being that underlies all that is. She is ultimate darkness not because she is evil but because she embodies all possibilities; she is the void which can give birth to all reality. As the force of Time, she both brings everything into being and causes everything to pass away.

If you have been reading my work for a while, you may remember a book that describes encounters with the Goddess in her dark form, Waking Up to the Dark. https://elenedom.wordpress.com/2015/10/21/review-waking-up-to-the-dark/ It seems that She, like any loving mother, stands ready to discipline her children when they get out of line, but also as our mother, she will not abandon us in our time of need.

So many people perceive deities and entities of various sorts that are either working to protect us and back up our efforts, or are doing their best to sow discord and undermine anything positive we manage to produce. (I have encountered a range of beings myself, but for the most part they’ve been of the helpful type.) Some feel a certain complacency about things being monitored from behind the scenes, while others may despair in the face of evil forces they think are overwhelmingly powerful, controlling us without our having any choice. But even the most fundamentalist among us believe that humans must take responsibility for carrying out the will of God. I am very much a proponent of “the Lord helps those that help themselves.”

I submit that whatever cosmic beings are working for our good or ill, or their own, we are not separate from them. In the end all of reality is made up of the thought processes of One Mind. We are no more nor less important than the other myriad components of that Mind.

A while back, as I told you, I asked my friend Fryderyk if there was any help from the spirit world coming to us. ‘I wondered if they have any involvement with trying to help our dire situation on our dying planet. He said, firmly, that this is the responsibility of those who live on the planet at present, that we wanted and intended to be here and deal with this, that it is “your burden.”’
https://elenedom.wordpress.com/2019/09/17/things-you-can-do-when-youre-dead-and-some-you-cant/

As hard as it appears, this is the logical conclusion. We are here, at this time, because we wanted and needed to be here. We are the ones willing and able to take on the greatest challenge humanity has faced. We may feel utterly inadequate to the task, but it is our task.

We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We have to be. There is no one else.

 

While I don’t want to get overly exercised about these metaphorical ages, this very complicated explanation of the Yugas has some fascinating information about cataclysmic events within known historical periods. I think we can all agree that, one way or the other, the path of the Earth and life on it is more cyclical than linear.  
https://grahamhancock.com/dmisrab6/

 

https://www.hinduhumanrights.info/kali-as-the-yuga-shakti-the-power-to-create-a-new-world-age/
The gorgeous depiction of Kali with a tiny dragon on this site was made by Mei Huang: http://www.meihuangart.com/#/illustration/

The Scariest Thing of All

Connection/individuality

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Love and fear are strange partners
They have been together a long time
They know each other well
Where one is found, so is the other
Seeming opposites, they occupy
the same coin’s two aspects
and flip back and forth
as our hearts open and close.

 

I wrote that poem while embroiled in the most complicated relationship of my life. I often thought that it was like an Olympics of relationshipping, requiring huge stretches and leaps, unprecedentedly tricky psychological and emotional gymnastics, greater skills than I had ever had to develop before.

I did not stick the landing.

Last weekend I performed in one of our monthly dance salons sponsored by the Farfesha troupe. It was the Halloween edition, but I didn’t have anything specific to the holiday planned. Then it occurred to me that the gentle, lyrical song I was dancing to, “Lamma bada yatathanna,” was about one of the things that scares people the most: helplessness in the face of love and desire.

It ends by repeating Aman, aman… “Mercy! Mercy!”

Lots of things in this world are scary. Maybe it sounds a bit histrionic to say that love and desire are among the ones that give people the most serious cases of the heebie-jeebies. But as an empath, that’s what I’ve experienced. I’ve also been told about it in so many words, as in, “Sometimes I want to be close to you, too, but it’s just too frightening.”

With the anniversary of the sprained soul I sustained at the end of that overcomplicated relationship coming up, I am thinking again about love and fear. Can they be separated? Is it ever possible to have only love? I would say that this is the case with my husband and me, but then, there is always the fear of loss. Even though the loss of a person to death is not truly real— they only appear to be gone— the pain can be beyond what we can cope with, and that can go on and on. Of course we fear it.

I think that the fear associated with love is always a fear of loss— loss of control above all, perhaps loss of one’s definition of oneself. Fears about losing freedom, autonomy and safety are common, though in a viable relationship those things will not really be lost. All of these are in some way fear of change.

My husband thought I was a little nuts writing about love being frightening. “Well,” I said, “what about when a guy goes out with a girl and really likes her a lot, and then he never calls her? That’s fear, right?”

“Yeah, if she likes him, then he’s stuck.” (His life will change for sure.) “And if she doesn’t like him, she’ll step on him and smash him like a spider!” (Yeeks!)

In the case of my gymnastics partner, as far as I can tell, a fundamental fear was about having to change his view of himself and what was possible for him. He didn’t have the flexibility to manage that. I acknowledge that this is a pretty terrifying thing, and I don’t blame him for being nervous about it.

The fear that permeated that association, though, was beyond anything reasonable. It was pervasive and infected every moment. Every time I thought we had gotten past it, it reared its head again. It lurked behind every affectionate gesture and every sincere word of kindness.

All along I kept trying to identify and root out my own phobias and anxieties. I thought I was going through some intense and useful spiritual development. Being an empath, I was constantly attending to the messages beneath the surface as well as the overt ones. I came up with new skills and new methods to make sense of the odd things that went on. It seemed like all that would keep me out of trouble, but ultimately I was no better off.

It was an epic fail, and I can’t advise you on how to avoid the same. All I know is that when there is a choice between love and fear, the path of fear will never get you where you want to go. Loving more thoroughly, more clear-headedly, with less ego, is the better strategy, and that means applying love and compassion to yourself as well. It may be that continuing the relationship is not compatible with this kind of love, that the truly loving course is to let it end.

I remind myself that if something is impossible, failing to accomplish it is not a real failure. We know that no one ever passed the Kobayashi Maru test without cheating.

**************************************************************************

As I told you about last time, I had the great privilege to hear and meet Nadia Bolz-Weber at an event on October 20. I literally looked up to her— my goodness, she’s tall, and she was wearing 3” heels. Someone who makes no attempt to hide. She wasn’t always that way, though. Her book Shameless: A Sexual Reformation, which I’m rereading, describes her early life within a very repressive Protestant denomination.

 I was on the verge of tears all through her presentation that day, and wasn’t quite sure why. I felt that I had long since worked through the issues of shame and guilt and not-good-enough that she was talking about. While waiting for the event to start, I opened Shameless in e-book form on my phone, and my eye fell on the phrase “the inherent goodness of the human body.”

That is still an area of blockage for me. It struck me that for those of us struggling with or coming to terms with chronic illness, chronic pain, disability, or even just plain aging, finding ourselves in contention with recalcitrant bodies, it is hard to remember their inherent goodness. Even if we have cleared away millennia of religious asceticism and dualism that tell us our bodies are sinful and must be suppressed and disciplined, it can still be a real challenge to be friends with our physical forms. Rev. Nadia is talking about the goodness of the body in terms of its sexual and sensual nature, but there is far more to be found in that concept.

All this brings up questions of why we live in physical bodies to begin with, and what we are to make of our relationship with this physical world. But clearly our bodies are meant to touch other bodies, as Rev. Nadia points out. The desire to connect, it seems to me, can be seen in spiritual terms as a need to connect with our Source.

The dance of love and fear is based in the conflict between the desire for connection and merging and the desire for individuation. All beings want to connect and belong, and all beings have an innate drive to keep existing. The mistake we make is in believing that love and connection threaten our continued existence as individuals.

************************************************************************

A hypnotic choreography to the version of “Lamma bada” I used, by Lena Chamamyan:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxIj4ni07Q0&list=WL&index=6&t=0s

The song is a venerable one from the Andalusian tradition, in sama’i rhythm with 10 beats per measure. Here is one of many versions of the lyrics:

Lamma bada yatathanna… Hubbi jamalu fatanna
Amru mâ bi-laHza asarna
Ghusnun thanâ Hina mal
Wa’adi wa ya Hirati
Man li raHimu shakwati… Fil-Hubbi min law’ati
Illa maliku l-jamal
Aman’ Aman’ Aman’ Aman

https://lyricstranslate.com

And a couple of the many translations:

When he was bending, when he was bending (this means he is dancing or doing something graceful)
My love, his beauty struck us
Something about it captivated us
beauty, as soon as he began to bend

My promise, oh my confusion, my promise, oh my confusion
Who could be the one to alleviate my sufferings in love, from my torment, except the one of beauty
Oh mercy, oh mercy, oh mercy

http://www.arabicmusictranslation.com/2008/10/lena-chamamyan-when-he-looked-bent-lama.html

She walked with a swaying gait
her beauty amazed me

Her eyes have taken me prisoner
Her stem folded as she bent over

Oh, my promise, oh, my perplexity
Who can answer my lament of love and distress
but the graceful one, the queen of beauty?

http://www.qiyanskrets.se/lyrics.htm

Post from the Past: New Beatitudes for a Hurting World

I wanted to share this post with you again, after having the privilege of meeting Nadia Bolz-Weber in person a couple of days ago at Las Puertas in Albuquerque.  She was speaking on the ideas she brought forth in her 2018 book, Shameless: A Sexual Reformation.  The book is about the ways the churches and other entities in our society tell us that we are too this or not enough that or we want things we shouldn’t have or we don’t want what we’re expected to want, why we don’t need to listen to any of that, and how none of it is the voice of God.  You should read it.  You’ll feel better.

Her “New Beatitudes” socked me between the eyes last year.  I was socked again hearing her speak, teary throughout, grateful, disturbed, filled with grace and new questions.  If she still had a church, I’d get there somehow.

The post from July 3, 2018 is below.

*************************************************************************

Sometimes social media, for all the trouble it causes and all the time it sucks, can bring real inspiration and even be a transmitter of grace. I am grateful to have encountered Nadia Bolz-Weber, an extraordinary Lutheran minister and founding pastor of the House for All Sinners and Saints church, in a video on Facebook. I hope it’s OK with her that I transcribed her stunning distillation of Christianity:

Blessed are the agnostics.
Blessed are they who doubt,
those who aren’t sure,
those who can still be surprised.
Blessed are those who have nothing to offer.
Blessed are they for whom death is not an abstraction.
Blessed are they who have buried their loved ones,
for whom tears could fill an ocean.
Blessed are they who have loved enough
to know what loss feels like.
Blessed are they who don’t have the luxury
of taking things for granted anymore.
Blessed are they who can’t fall apart,
because they have to keep it together for everyone else.
Blessed are those who still aren’t over it yet.
Blessed are those who mourn.
Blessed are those who no one else notices,
the kids who sit alone at middle school lunch tables,
the laundry guys at the hospital, the sex workers,
and the night-shift street sweepers.
Blessed are the forgotten,
blessed are the closeted,
blessed are the unemployed,
the unimpressive,
the underrepresented.
Blessed are the wrongly accused,
the ones who never catch a break,
the ones for whom life is hard,
for Jesus chose to surround himself
with people like them.
Blessed are those without documentation.
Blessed are the ones without lobbyists.
Blessed are those who make terrible business decisions
for the sake of people.
Blessed are the burned-out social workers
and the overworked teachers
and the pro-bono case takers.
Blessed are the kindhearted NFL players
and the fundraising trophy wives.
And blessed are the kids who step
between the bullies and the weak.
Blessed is everyone who has ever forgiven me
when I didn’t deserve it.
Blessed are the merciful,
for they totally get it.
You are of heaven, and Jesus blesses you.

(Line breaks and punctuation are my best guesses.)

After the tears ran their course and I could see again, I looked at the comments on her presentation. (You know what a bad idea that usually is.) And yes, there were those who had to let everyone know how much more theological knowledge and biblical scholarship they had at their disposal than this trained and ordained minister, who they instantly labeled as a heretic. There was even a heated argument about some translations of the Bible being valid and others being heretical. Way to totally miss the point, folks.

What I found particularly shocking— even though I rather expected it to come up— was the view that God will not forgive everyone, only some who deserve it. I’ve seen it before, but I’ve never gotten used to it. A God who withholds love is a very weird God for a religion whose adherents like to say “God is love.”

Some even said that it’s incorrect to say that we are not supposed to judge others, that indeed we should and it’s biblical to do so. But one doesn’t need to have a great deal of scriptural knowledge to remember “Judge not lest ye be judged.”

It surprises me to realize that the rather stodgy and ordinary Catholic parish I belonged to as a child somehow didn’t infect me with the controlling, judgmental spirit exhibited by so many folks who claim to be Christians. I might have expected Catholicism to be far to the more rigid side of the spectrum of denominations, but it often seems to be relatively open. Not always, but often. At any rate, I don’t think it’s only in recent years that I got the idea that Jesus’ teaching is more like Pastrix (her term) Nadia’s words and less like judgment and shaming and inflexible rules that no one can really follow.

The Jesus that Nadia allies herself with seems like the one I’ve met, the one you heard about here if you were around to read this a year ago: https://elenedom.wordpress.com/2017/06/21/you-know-my-heart/
Maybe that’s the Jesus you know too. The one who championed the poor and marginalized while criticizing the rich and self-satisfied. How can inclusion and forgiveness be heretical for Christians?

I wrote in that post: “Perhaps the people I am complaining about have tapped into a pervasive field of fear and judgment, just as I connected with a field of love and acceptance. I would suppose that it is absolutely real to them. I know where I would rather live, and I know which is more likely to generate a world that is better for all of us.”

And now I have to go and work on tolerance myself:

Blessed are those who sincerely read their holy books
even when they ignore the parts they don’t like,
for they are trying to make sense of a crazy world.
Blessed are all of us with our preconceived notions.
Blessed are those who hurt so much inside,
believing themselves to be flawed,
that they must constantly point out the flaws of others.
Blessed are the judgmental,
who find themselves to be unworthy.
Blessed are the spiritually immature,
who rely on being told what to think,
for they will grow up eventually.
Blessed are they who see evil everywhere,
because in their way they are trying to be good.

And blessed are all those who love anyway,
no matter what, without question, without ceasing.

 

The Sarcastic Lutheran blog: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/nadiabolzweber/
http://www.nadiabolzweber.com/

Things You Can Do When You’re Dead! and Some You Can’t

Whatever he’s doing, it’s not this.

Lawrence Spencer wrote 1001 Things You Can Do While You’re Dead: A Dead Person’s Guide to Living, which looks absolutely hilarious.

Tricia J. Robertson wrote Things You Can Do When You’re Dead!: True Accounts of After Death Communication, which looks intensely interesting.

I haven’t read either of these books yet, but I can definitely say that both authors are among the not-dead. Descriptions of the lives of the dead— you can see that language gets tangled right away— by dead folks themselves are abundant, but not necessarily all that clear to those of us still on this side of the veil.

On 9/10/19, after reading through some short Mozart pieces that I hadn’t been familiar with at the piano, I got to wondering if Fryderyk has any kind of relationship with his idol, or ever sees him. I was pleased to find myself easily getting in touch with him and able to have a clear conversation, which is still a fairly rare occurrence.

It seems that nobody really has a relationship with Mozart or gets to talk with him these days, from what Fryderyk told me. He is something of a recluse (we both struggled to find the best word for his situation). I was surprised, since I think of Mozart as a pretty gregarious person. He is secluded in a kind of chamber in which he is in meditation and in communication directly with the Divine Source. The image of a huge column of light streaming down, cascading into him, was strong, but I can’t say I really understood this whole concept. It had almost a science fiction movie flavor.

I wondered if Mozart had become almost a sort of deity himself. I’ve thought of him as something like that, but at the same time, the original planet-based Wolfgang seems so down to earth. It’s interesting to contemplate.

I wondered if they have any involvement with trying to help our dire situation on our dying planet. He said, firmly, that this is the responsibility of those who live on the planet at present, that we wanted and intended to be here and deal with this, that it is “your burden.”

But obviously Fryderyk is involved heavily with the earth plane.

I asked about his relationship with Liszt, having recently heard a 1955 Leslie Flint track* in which the Chopin voice spoke of his friendships with Liszt and Mendelssohn. What is Liszt getting himself up to lately? Is he still involved with us groundlings too?

He showed me Liszt reaching toward us on earth, like a hand reaching down into the atmosphere to tweak things here below. 

How is that different from what he does himself? He works by entering directly into the human heart, from the inside, he said, instead of imposing something from the outside.

But seriously, I insisted, things are not looking good around here. I asked if he had any advice for those of us tasked with getting through the next few decades. He said, “Your love of life must become greater than your love of death.”

I was trying to ask about what they do all “day,” something I am endlessly curious about, especially since it is more or less what we all will be doing eventually. In the Leslie Flint session I mentioned, the Chopin voice described having a salon in which he and other musicians played over their recent works and gave each other suggestions. We’ve heard before that at least for the more recently dead, life feels much the same as it did when they inhabited physical bodies; they appear to wear clothes, live in houses, walk about in gardens, etc. At the same time, we are told that there are so many aspects of their existence that we can’t fathom with our limited senses.

Perhaps those two things are not contradictory. I’m reminded of an anecdote from Rosemary Brown, in which she described a visit with Debussy, who brought one of his new nonphysical paintings to show her. If I remember correctly, the subject of the painting was a peacock; whatever it was, it moved around and morphed in a way that physical paintings can’t manage. Apparently he was having a lot of fun with this art form.

Michael Tymn’s latest blog post uses the Eiffel Tower as a clever metaphor for the various planes or spheres in which spirits find themselves at different levels of development.
http://whitecrowbooks.com/michaeltymn/month/2019/09/
He also discusses the naive and fallacious supposition that spirits should be expected to know anything and everything simply by virtue of being spirits. This is useful. My only quibble with his construction is that it is overly linear; spirit communicators tell us that they do exist in “higher” or “lower” spheres, but we are also told that any one spirit personality (or personality here on the planet) is only a part of a larger entity, and that the parts of that larger entity may have more or less expanded awareness. I think we need to consider that linear time, which is necessary for the concept of development or evolution, is not really fundamental to reality, but more a product of our way of experiencing it. Again, I don’t pretend to have a thorough understanding of these matters.

*https://www.leslieflint.com/chopin-july-7th-1955
  There are a number of new Chopin recordings and transcriptions at this site since I last wrote about it here, and the website is easier to use. Note that they are using Mary-Rose Douglas’ beautiful and evocative transformation of the 1849 photograph for their portrait of Chopin, this one:

Our Lady burning

Delighted to see that these chandeliers still exist!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notre Dame means so much to me that I used some of my photos of her as the theme for this blog. Like so many around the world, I was stricken and in tears during the fire on April 15. It turned out that things were not as bad as we feared, and at least this time it was an accident, not another willful act of destruction. But as I worked on writing about it, the church and other sites in Sri Lanka were bombed, with great loss of life, on Easter morning. I threw out what I had written before, and wrote this instead:

 

Our Lady burning

At Sacré-Coeur I felt nothing.
That gorgeous edifice towering on its hill,
seen from everywhere, unable to be unseen,
never moved me.
I read that it was made
to bring back the flock,
rekindle faith in the heart of France.
Imposed as it is imposing,
it floats above the city
without root, it seems to me.

Notre Dame is my place,
central, home to my soul,
“where God lives,” as a friend said,
and Saint Michel hovers nearby.
The power must have simmered there
long before those stones were cut.
From the depths it infuses them,
rises like sap through those square towers,
spirit soaring despite the attenuated tops.
Imperfect beloved, at times unwell,
she has been clothed with misplaced additions,
but her identity has endured, her significance,
through violation and neglect.

Here, it’s been a hard time that has not stopped.
On the same day there was a local burning;
a child dead, others hurt, homes lost.
A small building but great importance.
The week before, death after death,
other children, a strange paroxysm.
My friend murdered by someone close,
leaving her own children.
Our city reeling, impossible events,
then more impossible events.
And Our Lady burned, and it seemed
nothing could be counted upon.

But that was not enough,
because this is the world
and it has humans in it.
To add to the month of churches torched,
we must have bombs,
and now we use them on Easter,
and more children and more mothers
must be blown away.
because the founders of our faiths
never got through to us
and we think God only lives
in our own kind of house.

(In the book it says, “Jesus wept.”)

The humans inside the churches
have also killed, also violated.
Hearing of Notre Dame,
some said good riddance.
A man entered another cathedral
with gasoline.

 

Hope

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notre Dame burned, by accident, on 4/15/19. On Easter, 4/21/19, a church in Sri Lanka was bombed during the morning services. All this followed arson attacks on churches and a social service organization in the south of the US. Here are some things others had to say:

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/4/15/1850518/-The-Barbarians-at-the-Gate-Rejoice-on-Daily-Kos-at-the-Death-of-Civilization

https://www.wired.com/story/the-notre-dame-fire-and-the-future-of-history/

Notre Dame Reminds Us That We Belong to One Another

https://www.thenation.com/article/notre-dame-fire-muslim-france-islamophobia/

https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/notre-dame-in-the-french-imagination
‘At moments of enormous and historic loss, one seeks, perhaps foolishly or with false reassurance, for some sense of continuity, including the continuities of disaster and renewal.’
‘…Still, the cathedral belongs to everyone, and everyone is rooting for its restoration. The French leftist and staunch atheist Jean-Luc Mélenchon wrote on Monday evening that, while he could not see the hand of God in the cathedral, nonetheless, “If it seems so powerful, it’s without doubt because human beings surpassed themselves in putting Notre-Dame in the world. Those who feel the emptiness of a universe deprived of meaning and the absurdity of the human condition see here the apotheosis of the spirit of thousands of women and men who worked over two centuries and eight hundred years.”’

http://www.sacre-coeur-montmartre.com/english/history-and-visit/article/the-origin-of-the-construction-of
(Sacré-Coeur will celebrate its 100th birthday this fall.)

And here are a few moments of heaven:
https://www.facebook.com/eleneguschdom/videos/vb.1579282359/10216830307341533/?type=3

 

Behind the cathedral

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In happier times