11.07.13 daily reflections

Piles of Wood audio

They sit by the fire burning a few feet away in the hearth. It warms them and their eyes twinkle as the flickering light refracts off structures in their eyes.

She is comforted by the knowledge that there are stacks of neatly piled logs by the door, and is not distracted by the wind that chills and blows everything that is outside the cabin.

The cold has come.

She reaches out to sooth his thigh, the one with the broken bone beneath the pants, skin, and muscle, then stops herself– remembering that her caress, no matter how gentle, will only cause pain.

Reminiscing she thinks of the past summer, when he first brought her to this place. Thrilled by the beauty of it all, she laid in the field and talked to the flowers that grew there. On her back she looked up at the sky, thanked it for being a sky, and watched the clouds as they wafted sometimes, and billowed sometimes, and just were sometimes—fixed in the air. She did not need to know the dynamics of the weather, or where the low pressure zone was, she just enjoyed each moment.

He told her cold was coming.

Seduced by the babble of the stream, that’s what she listened to. Green leaves touched each other high in their branches whispering to each other, and to her, “I love you.”

She helped plant the trees next to the stumps in the forest–three for each one. She carried water from the stream (granted this was after pausing on the bank to get the morning gossip) to quench the thirst of the saplings.

She wiped the sweat from his brow that first drenched his hair, then in little ribbons met up with the beads on his forehead. Chopping wood was hard labor. She watched, and thought she should have a turn at the ax, but having done this many times before, he was a master chopper. She was the handmaiden, or the apprentice, or the muse—pick one, as she was each and all these things depending on the mood.

She could not imagine, nor did she try, that this place full of abundance, where words of love were spoken by each molecule, could go dormant.

He said the cold was coming.

She knew even then that he was wise to things that she was not. He knew about the high pressure zones, and the names of the clouds. Taking a break from all the chopping he would lay next to her sometimes, on the blades of grass between the flowers, and recite the names. Cumulus blah blah blah, tho the names sounded in her ears, she did not always welcome the distraction from the conversations her unnamed clouds were having with each other.

Propped up on one arm, he would sometimes, brush the hair off her forehead, as they laid one next to the other, and kiss that spot her bangs normally covered. Sometimes his lips would find hers, and all conversations with clouds and flowers became unimportant, or ceased, or never existed, whichever thing it was it didn’t matter.

Often while wrapped in a warmth that seemed as if it had no end, he would step away abruptly.
He said cold is coming.

She said whatever. Usually not out loud (no point in being rude) but she knows now that he always heard her just the same. She knows now that he humored her innocence and did not hold it against her.

As the embers glow before them, he gets up, and hobbles in baby steps to the other side of the room to bring them their dinner. Nourishment that had been set-out earlier for just this moment. She wants to spring up from the floor, tell him to let her fetch it…as she knows that with each small step he takes, the pain talks…but she knows this is part of his healing, that the muscles must remember how to do their job…and she remembers how good it felt when she realized she could chop the wood.

His screams had brought her running, she fell full on into the stream as she ran through it, she must have stepped on a dozen flowers in her panic, she heard nothing but his pain. When she reached him he was crumpled on the ground holding his leg. She knelt down beside him and asked his body to share some of the pain with her, so that his could be lessened. He yelled now at her, not appreciating in the least her offering.

She sat back. As a rhythmic breathing returned to her she realized that she was wise in things he was not. He had taught her the names of the clouds, patiently reciting them again and again, but she had never taught him how to hear what the clouds were saying. He did not know that she could hear his pain and share it for sometime till it eek ed down to a tolerable level. He did not trust the ability or desire in her offering.

As they struggled into the cabin, the sun passed behind the clouds and a chill hit the air.

The cold is coming she said to him.

She only had a few days to make the stacks of logs by the door. She worked those long days cutting down trees as she had watched him do. Her work was sloppy at first, but with practice, tho arms were aching, she developed a technique.

He sits back down beside her and they share the plate of fragrant sliced apples and chunky peanut butter. The warm summer days are coming, he said. She raises a finger and touches his forehead right above his brow. She knows now he always knew she was wise in ways he was not, and this is why he brought her here.

The spirit in her eyes flickered off the structure in his eyes for just a moment…and she saw that he just might want to know what the clouds have to say, and how to hear them.

She could imagine, how this place full of cold, would cycle back to to the world where words of love were spoken by each molecule.

Piles of Wood audio

There under the petals rests the babe.
Nestled in an embrace of fronds…
layers folded one after the other.

When the sepal relaxes its hold
(as it surely must from time to time)
the bloom reveals its core.

The little one….
free to engage in the cadence at last…
basks in true light

TENDER BEANS

It was repressed for eight years.

I made sure no one was there to see as the memories held tightly away for so long hit me. Nerve dripping off my thirteen-year-old shoulders–but yet–head dizzy with dread, I pulled large glossy pictures from a manella envelope labeled “1968 Volkswagon”–and looked.

There was dust in the air it glittered in the long sharp rays of the afternoon light. I could smell dirt as it sifted down–and gasoline.

Steam hissed as though it were angry for being pressured to change from what was perhaps, at one time, a cool lake, or a cheery bubble bath–escaping now.

My mind followed the sound.

The hiss from the pressure cooker–warning.

Each summer my mom canned batches of precious green beans. So dear were they that our very lives were risked in saving them.

The long vegetables were plucked carefully from scratchy vines.

Tender beans–I could break off each end with my thin little girl fingers.

The tops had tiny caps. Their bottoms were curved tails. There were a few crumpled brown blossoms—leftovers from the beginning of things.

With a pile of hats and smiles in my lap, I’d break the beans neatly
in half–my pale hands stained with dark sticky sap.

With what seemed to me to be true bravery, my mom placed the jars of beans into a pot.

A round gauge was attached to the cooker. Keeping track of something, like the hand on a watch, but instead of time, it measured the distance between us and the possible explosion of our house. At first the hand would rise quickly, then it would hoover for an endless time, just below the final edge of the red zone.

My stomach churned.

A harsh metallic taste was in my mouth and nose. The smell of burning rubber showed itself through little floating snakes made of smoke.
I could see three piles of clothes on the road through the windshield, one of them had long yellow hair.

A moan came from the front seat of the car, and I noticed for the first time that my mom was slumped there. She rolled her head to one side, her proud neck lay across the top of her shoulders.

A scream—sharp, shrill–burst from some broken creature sitting where my mom had been. A hand rose, and jerked. The long white neck, once a claim to beauty, was no longer able to support the weight of the monster my mom had changed into.

It screamed for hours or seconds, or an eternity.

The screams pinned me where I sat. I stayed very still trying to disappear, hoping I’d be absorbed into the cushions of the seat.

There were words in the screams.

I was suppose to get help.

I was seven.

I sat in place wishing it would all go way. Wishing myself away.

This could have worked I think, though we will never know for sure. My brother, not aware of the magic found in the world of wishing and disappearing, picked that moment to actually obey his mother. (Being five he didn’t understand his real mom was gone forever.)

He was still standing in his favorite spot behind the drivers seat of the Volkswagen van, holding onto a strap anchored above the window. The screams with words pushed legs into motion. He jumped out the side door– which was open.

Once I had been safe on a sunny afternoon.

My grandmother walked with me through the yard helping me find pastel colored eggs. We had dyed them the day before, then held them in care for the Easter Bunny to retrieve then hide.

She looked into my little girl blue eyes with her kind grandma blue eyes. She existed in that moment just to love me. She held me in her arms, I was her special child.

She talked to me up close, reading every word on my face before I could speak it, she bought me white gloves and a purse to match–little white shoes with shiny bows. White paper flowers were clipped into my fair hair she had styled into short curls to match hers.

My lavender dress, thought out in detail before being found with delight at JC Penney’s, suited me.

She knelt down on one knee. The black camera with two eyes, one on top of the other captured the moment.

Seeing the empty front seat for the first time a realized my grandma was missing. My baby brother had been riding in her arms.

My mind revved, but I did not move.

Finally, I turned my head very slowly, and saw, my 2 year old sister in the seat behind me, her brown eyes, open but not seeing.

My baby brother…had been riding…in my grandmother’s…arms!

After they brought him home that first time, my mom told the story that my dad had been so proud to have another son that he was showing him off to everyone at the hospital—beaming all the while.

My mom whispered to me woman to woman that my sister was the only child she ever wished for, but that she was unselfishly giving my dad his day.

I wanted to hold that baby, whose mom didn’t really want him.

Babies are very fragile, my mom had explained. I was only allowed to touch him while being watched, as surely I would break him. My mom showed me a place on the baby’s head that she referred to as “the soft spot.’ The baby would die if I touched this place.

I wandered in the tall grass looking for him. I do not remember getting there. I turned back towards the van that looked like a huge crumpled piece of paper.

There he was…lying on the road…beside the front tire of the car…he did not move. He had slept through the howling of the broken mom creature.

As I sat down beside him on the road, I noticed my dress was sticky. I leaned over and picked up the baby, whose mom was gone forever.

I held him in my arms, I held him tight to my chest…I heard my heart beating in my ears and I felt a love swell in me and then into him.

He moved but did not make a sound, I looked down at him and noticed his head looked funny. I held my hand over the soft spot…ever..so…carefully. I wasn’t really as careless and clumsy as my mom had said. I ignored her idea that this would make him die, and hoped she was wrong about that too.

A man and woman walked into my nightmare. They were real. They were talking to each other “She moved the baby, she shouldn’t have moved the baby, she’s touching the baby!”

I did not look up at them, I did not speak out loud, in my mind I said over and over again, “I am the baby’s mother now…I am the baby’s mother now…I am the baby’s mother now…”

A man in black shirt and black paints rushed up to me, accusing, yelling, “You moved the baby!”

I nodded, not ashamed, not proud either…I just nodded slowly.

“You should not be holding that baby! Where did you get him?”

Confused by his question I looked up at the man. I saw he was scared and that there was no anger in his face.

He knelt down beside me, he sat a box that looked like my dad’s fish-n-tackle case on the ground, he touched my arm, he asked kindly now “Where did you find the baby, where was he the first time you saw him after the accident?”

“Ac-ci-dent?” I repeated the word in my head, counting the syllables like in school.

Scenes smells sounds from the beginning of this dream twisted into one word.

“Where was the baby?” he whispered. I nodded towards the front tire.

The man took the baby from me carefully holding him at arms length. The baby was covered in blood.

I looked down at my lap and saw a big whole in the top of my leg, my pale hands stained–dark and sticky.

——————
I overheard through the years that followed the adults talking about how the baby’s skull had been split in three places. He had been thrown by the inertia of the head-on collision onto the pavement. The doctors claimed their miracle when the baby fully recovered.

It had taken twenty minutes for the rescue workers to reach us.

———–
Tender beans languished in the garden, no one there to save them. They died on their scratchy vines.

Audio for Sincerity of Foreshadowing

The darkness of the night rounds the corners of what is harshly sharp in daylight.

I had the road to myself, George Noory of “Coast to Coast” was sounding in my ears, my destination…casino. Life was grand.

Snakes and monks and their possible lessons far from my mind.

SWOOP! A truck came out of nowhere, passed me, moved over to my lane, and narrowly missed the front end of my mini-van. A sign on the rear gate of the truck boldly announced a name. This was the only vehicle I came across on the whole trip up.

My heart raced…the sound of it echoed in my ears.

I took several deep breaths…and willed my heartbeat back to a normal cadence.

My mind drifted to snakes and monks…

Years ago while talking to a client in my business office, I watched as the body of a translucent shimmering snake slithered around first her left shoulder, across her back and around–only to be absorbed quickly into the top of her right shoulder.

A creepy silver shawl that contorted, bent, and twisted, like a clear python filled with viscous water. Thankfully the snake’s head was never visible. (The universe knows my breaking point!)

During the few seconds it took for this incident to take place, my client sat there smiling rather greedily at me as I tried to mentally keep track of the business at hand and to coax my mouth into forming intelligible words. The snake was not spoken of, but I had the impression that she was showing it off, and wanted to lend it to me.

It is my frequent practice to reach over my desk and touch a client’s hand, accomplishing human contact without the formality of a handshake. I often even hug my clients if the moment feels right. In this case I was careful to do neither.

Shortly after, Snake Woman moved on to transact her business elsewhere, no longer requiring my services. I have seen her around town from time to time–her pet always tucked away.

Though I have daily experiences that would be defined by most as paranormal, this was my first and only entity. Recently however, I did have a moment that’s connected, though I don’t see the full concept yet.

Again, years ago, a dear client was in my office after being involved in a somewhat traumatic experience. He’s dear in general because of his sweet disposition, and dear to me specifically as he was my genesis.

That day long ago I hugged him to offer comfort. The next day, though he was not expected–there was no business reason for him to be there–he came to my office again.

After inquiring as to the reason for his visit, he told me that he came back for another hug. He went on to describe how the hug from the day before had made him feel so calm and in harmony.

Though I hadn’t known it seconds before that moment in time, I understood in an instant that I was a healer. I knew I had always been a healer.

So many bits of my life suddenly made sense.

Recently, while talking to Dear Client, I found my attention shift from the man sitting directly in front of me, to the peripheral space around him.

There was a twinkly light oscillating between the colors of tan and orange emanating from him. Though this is how I would expect an aura to behave, I had never seen one with my naked eye before.

I watched as the image shifted behind Dear Client as he moved. The glistening image was synchronized to his movements, but it was on a split delay. When he leaned to the right, the image also moved to the right, but I could see there a thicker outline of the image on the left during the second delay.

Dear Clients body was super imposed over a translucent shimmering…what? I couldn’t quite place what image I was seeing bobbing behind the man…then…I got it…a…Franciscan monk!

Hugh? Franciscan monk??

I asked Dear Client if he was aware of being a monk in a previous life–he giggled. I explained what I was seeing, and he took it in stride, he offered no wisdom.

This recent apparition, visually, was similar to the snake, all that shimmering and glistening, while viscerally, it was opposite.

Later that day I arrived at the casino. Thoughts of a particular truck, boldly announcing its name and demonstrating risky maneuvers far from my mind.

My heart beat a little faster, though this time from delighted excitement.

I see that there are no more then 20 cars in the parking lot, this is good as I’m enjoying my solitude. I walk around a corner to meet up with my slot my machine and our pending business, and who of all people do I come face to face with…Snake Woman!

After an hour or so of a less then fulfilling engagement with Lady Luck, I leave. I find my car and George Noory and try to reclaim the perfect mood.

Between the casino and home, a truck cut me off again, it came from no where, did not signal–no warning. A sign on its rear gate boldly announced a name. This was the same truck as before…how could that be? This was the only vehicle I came across on my return trip…well except for one other.

As I negotiate my last turn, I can see my house up ahead–almost home, my warm bed and rejuvenating sleep only blocks away.

Well not quite yet.

Red and blue lights flash in my rear view mirror.

The officer informed me: “You did not signal before turning, but this time I’ll let you off with just a warning.”

“In the future you need to signal every time.”

What the heck?
For the next few days I was on the lookout, made sure I warned everyone before turning…I was unusually cautious. Nothing happened…I never figured out what the signal before turning day meant.

In the movies you always get to know what fate is narrowly escaped when the universe gives its foreshadowing.

Audio for Sincerity of Foreshadowing

In the morning after being caffeinated, and spending time with Stacy–co-goddess/spiritual cosmic sister–I start to cross the street by her office to the bakery…a-spring-in-my-step and a joy-in-my-heart. Smiling…I look up at the morning…making eye contact with her, and I thank her.

Almost to the crosswalk, I glance down to check for cars that might be coming, and nearly bump into the Bible Police.

DAT DAT DAT DAH!

“Good morning,” says man #1, who I realize immediately is the leader–for today, “How are you?”

As I step more closely to him, I say, “I…am SO happy!”

Man #2 nods his head and smiles. I offer my right hand to man #1 reaching out towards his right hand but notice too late that he has a disability making him unable to lift his arm to take my hand. Realizing I made a social faux pas I feel myself flush.

Awkwardly I grab at his left hand and give it a little squeeze.
I want to show love to this man so I lift my arms and ask simply,”Do you do hugs?”
He loses his balance, perhaps from the weight of his huge bible purse stuffed with pamphlets–I see one peeking out–the strap of the purse digging into the shoulder of his otherwise meticulous polyester suit. He regains his footing, then rejects me by saying “No, I’m good,” in an informal conversational tone.

I turn towards man #2 and before I ask him the hug question, he says, “No, I’m good, too,” in an informal conversational tone.

I notice for the first time that man #2 has too much neck and not enough shirt. The rest of his get-up completes the full battle regalia armed for any event because he was unsure what phenomenon he would encounter on his route.

My spirit guides are taking this all in, they nudge me, I stay engaged.

Man #1, having remembered his purpose and all universal truth (I could tell by the knowing look on his face,) asks me with passion now in his voice “Do you have time to share a verse from the bible?”

I don’t answer for a second, my spirit guides nudge me to speak and I say, “Why, yes, I do. “

He pulls a bible out of his bible purse, and man #2 does the same–obviously we’re into the well-choreographed part of the presentation.

Man #1 begins reading in a loud powerful voice “AND THE LORD SAID….”

I glance down at my shoes, which are mismatched.  I have on pajama pants, a worn flannel shirt, and my uncombed hair is twisted on the top of my head, held in place with a ballpoint pen.

I am woefully under-dressed for such lofty pronouncements.

He goes on reading to me, in spite of my unworthy state.

Though I am trying hard to pay attention all I hear is, “blah blah blah blah XYZ blah blah, SO SAYETH THE LORD!”

Man #1 asks “Would you agree with that?” Man #2 closes his bible and looks at me kindly.

I turn my head to the side as if I’m thinking–contemplating, but what I’m really doing is listening. My guides say “tell them about the paint by number Jesus.”

So I look at man #1 and I say “I would like to share with you spiritual knowledge I have found.”
The two men look at each other and man #1 nods his head.
“My spirit guides have told me…” I begin (man #1 suddenly with the kind of expression on his face that I would expect if I had spilled something on him– but I keep going) “…that for me…if I followed any religious doctrine, I would be limiting myself to a paint by number Jesus.”

Man #2 smiled at me and gave a nod.

We all looked at each other we all blinked.

Man #1 regaining his composure for the second time, pulled a pamphlet from his bible purse saying as he did so “We would like to leave this with you.”

“No, I’m good,” I answered in an informal conversational tone.