First Thanksgiving

My husband-elect and I just bought about $256 worth of groceries and sundries for our (and my) first Thanksgiving. We have Turkey and ALL the fixings, and will have two friends over at our togetherment ('apart'-ment just sounds wrong), and maybe others who will drift through during the day.

But now I have to cook all this shit. And I've never roasted a turkey before! Though I have roasted chickens, and I hear that it's the same thing. And, ironically, easier.

Yikes. People will be coming over expecting a good meal! Ack. I've never used this little teeny oven to cook much of anything, much less a big bird. And all the over-the-top gay trimmings :-)

Eek. What have I done? I hope I can pull this off!

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Opening Doors

I just had an amazing telephone conversation with another shamanic practitioner friend of mine.  In ordinary life she is an accountant, living in the Bible Tourniquette of the South:  Ohatchee, Alabama. 

In Shamanic life, she is the new Dean of Shamanic Studies at a metaphysical school in Clearwater, Florida.

For whatever reason, doors and opportunities are opening like mad just now in almost all aspects of my life.  From my shamanic work, psychic readings, akashic readings, etc., it is clear that someday I'll open my own school of healing.  And when I do, I want people like this friend to be right there with me.

Open my own school.  O, lord!  When did I become the kind of person who would do such a thing?  It happened day by day, step by step over a long period of time.  And yet it feels totally right.  I've been opening and moving toward this for the longest time now; my shamanic journies have been hinting at this sort of thing.  It seems that every person I meet tells me what an excellent teacher I am, and actively encourages me to teach.

I do know that when I did teach massage therapy, I was more alive than I ever am when not standing on a stage and singing.  Singing and teaching seem to hook me right up to Spirit in the most direct way possible.

So, taking the easy way out, the downstream approach, one day soon you might be hearing about a very unique school of esoteric healing techniques Somewhere In The South.

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Siding

A couple of months ago I abandoned my project to scrape paint off my circa-1870's wood-sided house when I found out it was lead based paint.

That stuff is nasty and you totally don't want to mess with it.

The project began when I received a notice from the City that I was in violation of a residential code since I had "curling paint and/or exposed wood". So, we started the scraping project.

Five weekends into the project with two people working at least nine-hour days, we had scraped approximately 1/5 of the entire house. AND had most likely exposed ourselves to lead dust and lead fumes.

Oh, hell no! This was going to be waaay too big a project. So, I mulled it awhile, also turning my predicament over to the Universe. Shortly thereafter, my wealthy ex called me and asked how long it had taken me to get as far as I had gotten in the scraping project. When I told him, he said, "what if I paid for new siding?", to which I gulped and said, "yes, thank you".

Now, my house is little, as in less than 400 square feet, so it's possible to do nice things to it and still not pay a bloody fortune. The entire siding bill comes to less than $2,000, and I'm providing labor. His gift is being well received and well cared for! I found two local sources that still produce this exact pattern, so nothing will change appearance-wise, except that bare wood with ugly moldy curling paint will go away.

AND, I get to wrap and insulate the house and put on sheathing! So, double yay all around. I've joked that when I finally get done, I may have replaced every board in the entire house.

Last year: new roof.
This year: new floor joists underneath 50% of the house + new siding, sheathing, insulation, attic gable venting, gable exhaust fans, attic insulation, house-wrap.

Next year: lowered electrical bills, peace of mind, beautiful landscaping.

Ahh. My house becomes my home and my haven.

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Psychic reading

I had a psychic reading today via telephone with a wonderful psychic lady. It was a birthday gift from June from my intuitive hubby, and well-received. At the time it was hard to schedule, but as always, it has come at precisely the correct time.

Not to go into much detail, but the gist of it is this: remember who you are. Re-member yourself; put yourself together and actually see that amazing being that is you. Allow yourself to be as amazing as you actually are. Own it.

The more specific parts of the reading were directed towards relationships, and specifically with the relationships I have with my shamanic teachers who I host for workshops here. All I can say is: this lady nailed it. She couldn't have given me a more accurate description of what is going on between unless she had seen all of our communications over the past three years. And, she gave me insight into the why of it all. Others have hinted at these same reasons, but she gave me such a complete picture of it that it felt totally true to me.

Subjective, yes. Yet energetically she hit the bullseye so many times that I quit goggling at the whole process and just started asking my questions. Right now I feel energized, focused, and am armed with information that helps me make decisions about the direction that I'm taking my business, my healing practices, and my shamanic practices.

Pretty great stuff.


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Karma Bomb

Oy.

One of my shamanic teachers wrote me an email karma bomb tonight. WHY did I not {take care of his personal shit for him} since we've had to change up our workshop weekends since he and his wife are coming about four weeks early?

First of all,

You're Welcome.

I WHOMPED up a workshop out of NOTHING at all in less than three days' time, making the best of a VERY bad situation which said shamanic wife created back in early August. I should have been the Hero, yet, I have become the Villain.

For The Last Time.

I will no longer allow people to treat me as I was treated in tonight's e-mail. Above-mentioned bitchy shaman seems not to understand that he is a Guest Teacher at my circle. I am his employer; I sign his checks. I am NOT his minion, I am NOT his emplyee, I am NOT in any way his underling in this. He is ultimately MINE to command.

After the detritus of a very busy and stressful day at the FullTimeJob, I wrote a neutral response to his caustic missive, and will entertain him in normal style this weekend. After which I will sever our business relationship.

I love them as people, and I respect their teachings.

And I will absolutely not be involved in any business dealings with them from this time forward nor allow them to hold ANY sway over me in any way whatsoever.

Thus do I reclaim a portion of my soul and declare myself a Man.

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Poetry Monday (for my baby)

HOME

I have a need of silence and of stars ;
Too much is said too loudly ; I am dazed.
The silken sound of whirled infinity
Is lost in voices shouting to be heard.
I once knew men as earnest and less shrill.
An undermeaning that I caught I miss
Among these ears that hear all sounds save silence,
These eyes that see so much but not the sky,
These minds that gain all knowledge but no calm.
If suddenly the desperate music ceased,
Could they return to life ? or would they stand
In dancers' attitudes, puzzled, polite,
And striking vaguely hand on tired hand
For an encore, to fill the ghastly pause ?
I do not know. Some rhythm there may be
I cannot hear. But I oh, I must go
Back where the breakers of deep sunlight roll
Across flat fields that love and touch the sky ;
Back to the more of earth, the less of man,
Where there is still a plain simplicity,
And friendship, poor in everything but love,
And faith, unwise, unquestioned, but a star,
Soon now the peace of summer will be there
With cloudy fire of myrtles in full bloom ;
And, when the marvelous wide evenings come,
Across the molten river one can see
The misty willow-green of Arcady.
And then the summer stars ... I will go home.

~ William Alexander Percy

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Dealing with the Karma Storm

I facilitate shamanic workshops. The teachers with whom I have my business relationship are very good at the teaching part, and very, very bad at the communication and business parts.

Early this year we dared mightily and went ahead and scheduled a workshop for Thanksgiving weekend. Yikes. we all huddled and just said, yeah, let's see if it will go.

August 9th and without first consulting me, one of the teachers sent an e-mail to my entire shamanic drumming circle (we're about 600 miles away from her) to ask if we can reschedule the workshop. After I hit the roof and reasserted my authority, I began researching options, none of which (as I had clearly recalled) had much likelihood of working. BUT, I soldiered ahead. I even called a colleague who also hosts workshops with these folks and asked to swap weekends with him to accommodate this situation. His reply was that if he had to switch weekends, he'd never in a million years fill a Thanksgiving week workshop.

So, I said, let's keep it the way that it originally was, then; forget that I called you.

Wednesday night (yes, the Wednesday before Halloween!) I received an e-mail from the male teacher, female teacher's husband (they live in the same house, sleep in the same bed), to say that I needed to call said colleague in Virginia because somehow we both had workshops still scheduled for the same weekend.

Arg.

I called my Esteemed Colleague in the fifteen minutes that I had to spare between clients and discovered that he had never heard me say, "keep your date as it originally was". He had gone ahead and moved his workshop! Yikes. I quickly e-mailed all of my peeps and asked if, in an utter emergency situation, we could move OUR workshop to NEXT weekend. 8 of the 9 have said, Yes.

So despite having salvaged a situation, my teachers, as usual, are making extreme demands upon me such as - guarantee us a specific level of income, change my acupuncture appointment for me that I've made with the doc in your town, harrumph, harrumph, harrumph, etc., etc.

First, I find it incredible that in the three intervening months they never spoke of this date-switching issue either with my Esteemed Colleague OR amongst themselves. Second, I've just materialized a workshop equally as large as the original one and on one week's notice - the other one is also full, so ... what's the issue? Come here instead of there, go there instead of here. Be an adult and 1) understand that mistakes and misunderstandings happen, and 2) make your own damn acupuncture appointment change.

Dayum.

The flakiness of the alternative "healing community" sometimes makes my head spin.

For now, my dealing with the chaos merely involves letting them make their decision:  the workshop can go this weekend, or ... we can cancel.

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What to do, what to do

As a male massage therapist in the South, I'm often stymied as to how to successfully market my services. "Successfully" as in, not marketing myself as a gigolo. Which, honestly, would be very fun to be.

But since I'm not that, I sometimes get a little stuck. I'm in business with a classmate of mine, a wonderful woman who is very connected in the medical community, and we also have one other woman associate, a massage therapist who is not yet a partner. Additionally we are allied with three other women who do adaptive yoga, Feldenkrais, lymphedeme therapy, and a lady who does stress reduction classes. So, I'm the lone guy, albeit a gay one.

Whenever we market our services together, invariably the ladies get all the calls, or when people want to redeem their gift certificates or make an appointment, they want a gal and not me. Here's pretty much how it goes:

Last Wednesday we went to our local Senior Center to do an hour's presentation on massage therapy for the geriatric population. To work with seniors, a massage therapist has to know what not to do in order to avoid hurting the client. Too, seniors need a lot more attention and hand-holding in general; not true of everyone, certainly, but its'a trend that seems to hold true. It's a bit of a specialized population. Anyway, we gave a wonderful presentation, gave out gift certificates to everyone there for a half-price hour of massage ("first 1/2 hour free when you book an hour!" we crow), and waited for the massages to roll in.

Tuesday I took a call from a woman with whom I'd spoken to at the seminar, and she asked what we had available. I said I had blah, blah, blah open this week, and then she hesitated. She said, "do I get to pick my therapist? I really wanted a woman." to which I replied, "sure thing! No problem. I'll give you their numbers so that you can book directly with them." This seemed to rattle her a bit, and she went ahead and booked with me anyway. She came in Wednesday of this week, I spent at least 30 minutes doing an intake, and just before she was to get on the table as we were talking about all of her aches and pains she said "I'm not sure you can get to all of that in a half hour!" Arg. I explained that the appointment was for an hour with the first half hour free. She wasn't prepared to pay that day, she said, but she'd book an hour to make up for it. Ok, I said, and we proceeded with the massage. A very good massage, indeed.

Afterward she was very complimentary of my work, relaxed and happy with the massage and then she asked, "is it just Russian roulette as to which therapist I get when I call?" and I answered that no, she could request anyone she wished when she left her message requesting an appointment. To which she then replied that she'd come back in November for her hour massage "and give one of the ladies a try".

*sigh*

So. An hour's worth of marketing gone, at least an hour's worth of massage time gone with nothing at all to show for it except for bolstering my partners' businesses.

I've been looking at myself and into my beliefs, energetic setups, etc., as to why this scenario is so familiar and has happened to me so very many times in the ten years I've been a massage therapist. Being the Good Southern Boy, I do my best not to irritate a client, especially an elderly lady client, since if you irritate them, they just go away and don't come back. Then talk about you all over town behind your back.

In our business, our individual income streams are separate, so I do not get any money from massages that others do. For corporate accounts that we all do, it's a different story, however. But most of our income is individually derived. Hence my conundrum.

I feel sort of like Edison did when he said (to paraphrase), "I know 10,000 ways it doesn't work". And, like Edison, I keep casting about for ways, likely and un-, in which it might work. I wish I knew how he felt when he was searching, though. I feel almost a little desperate, especially in this economy: it's getting harder and harder to bring the ends together at the end of the month. Maybe I'll find the "magic filament" soon, though :-) It would be great if I could truly "turn my talents on" in a lasting, wonderful way. I keep searching.

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Dark Night and Golden Dawn

Spo spoke of his dark night of the soul, one dreary year in medical school. Mine lasted a lot longer: pretty much from the time we moved to Florida at age ten until I graduated High School, college, came out and finally emerged from a software career to become a massage therapist and healer.

For me, the dark night (all three, almost four decades of it!) has been about not being congruent with my inner self, about not being honest, about not coming out of all of the closets that I've put myself in.

Why is it all about the fucking closets? Why do I even care what others might think of me? Jebus, but it seems like this life so far is all about "lifting the veils", about uncovering the real me and having the courage to reveal it to ... me.

At age nine I was blissfully happy, connected to the world around me and to my beloved Blue Ridge mountains of Asheville. At ten, I'd been reviled and rejected by a next door neighbor kid who, despite his morbidly obese and threatening, domineering ways, his attention I nevertheless craved. I'd candidly told him about my sex play with cousins (which was perfectly fun, pleasant, and ordinary to me), and I thought he'd have a coronary. In that moment, on that sidewalk on a sunny day in the mountains, the concept of "I am not OK as I am; therefore I need to be different somehow" entered my world. If that were true, what else about me needed to be hidden?

I took the safe route and hid everything.

We moved to Florida shortly after this, and I was plopped into an alien landscape: weird trees, strange-tasting water, sand everywhere, flat landscape, and ... Public School. It was summer of '72, Nadia Comenici was the Olympic star, and I was just absolutely miserable, completely adrift and unmoored from everything that was recognizable in my life. But not as miserable as I would soon become when school started. It was Hell, and I cried every single day before going to that awful dungeon that was Fifth Grade.

I began my campaign to Become Invisible, to Blend In and Not Be Seen, definitely never Wanting To Stick Out In A Crowd. Thus I shut my first of many closet doors. I developed this weird notion that if I was a Good Boy and Never Had Emotions, I would be OK and everything would turn out All Right. It seemed to work at least passably well for a few years, but there was always the occasional scrape, the occasional threat from a much bigger, more testosterone-laden guy, from someone seeing me "play with the girls", or ridiculing me for being in the show choir, for being in musicals, for excelling.

I SO did not want to be different, "special", or in any way noticeable. At ALL. I dressed in ways that didn't bring the light of attention. I wore boring shoes. It was sheer agony trying to figure out how to be the person "they" wanted me to be! I kept thinking I got it right only to make some big mistake and ...

But you know what? I'm quirky! I stick out! I'm built like a little gnome, a dwarf who is far stronger than his stature might suggest. I was never fast in gym, but was always very, very strong. I may not have been the smartest one in class, but I was frequently the cleverest, frequently the guy who saw through the smoke to get to the point. Even I missed the signs, myself. I stuck with an Electrical Engineering major looong after I should have given it up.

NOT listening to the still, small voice cost me much, but the lesson has eventually been driven home with much force: know thyself. You can't change the deep inner nature of "thyself", but you can own it all, love it all, cherish it all. And then start putting it to most excellent use! I was listening to Carolyn Myss' "Sacred Contracts" on CD the other day, and she said something about when we incarnate that our soul shatters into a thousand pieces, and that it's our job in this lifetime to earn our souls back by reclaiming it one piece at a time. This jarred me a little bit, because I felt that this was precisely what I've been doing in life lately: I've been on my Knight's Quest, out in the woods and completely off the beaten path searching for and finding (!) my own Holy Grail, myself.

When I finally started listening to that still, small voice inside of me again, life became Good once more. I am learning to embrace all these thousand parts of my soul, each of which gives me more and more clarity about who I am and about what my chosen mission in the world is. I think we can go ahead and rule out "ordinary citizen" ;-) since that sure as hell won't work. I've always known that I was a catalyst, an element that forever stays apart, aloof from a reaction, but that is nevertheless necessary for the reaction to take place. Inscrutable and also familiar.

I'm just me. Wildly, exotically, amazingly me. I feel like the staid
English character Sterling in the movie "Jeffrey" as he wraps
himself in a cape and looks at himself in the mirror and says "Is this
really me? Can I *do* this?"

To which I answer myself: yes :-) (You have to! You must. You know
this, deep down inside.)

I think I'm just going to be wildly, fascinatingly, amazingly, me. And to hell with all those tiny-minded people I went to school with.

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What is shamanism?

Shamanism and shamanic practice is popping up more and more these days. What exactly is it? Well, "exactly" is a little difficult to quantify, but here is a road map based on where I've been on the shamanic road so far:

Simply put, the shaman is "s/he who knows" or "s/he who sees". The word "shaman" or "saman" comes from the Tungus of North Central Asia. It means, literally, "he/she who knows"; the shaman is the person who sees what others do not, who finds information from the greater world. The shaman acts as an intermediary between the ordinary world and the world of Spirit.

Entering a different state of consciousness in order to access information not ordinarily available in "ordinary" consciousness is to practice shamanism, to work with Spirit. By many accounts, it is an ancient practice practiced in some form in every culture so far studied. It isn't new, nor is it "New Age"; indeed, it is very "Old Age" with pictograms, records, and oral histories dating back tens of thousands of years. Check out religious historian Mircea Eliade's tome "Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy" for a mind-numbingly exhaustive survey of thousands upon thousands of existing sources, eyewitness accounts, interviews, etc. I had to read it as prerequisite for taking the two week shamanic healing intensive course last year; it's quite fantastic.

According to Eliade's work, entering a "shamanic state of consciousness" can be done in many, many different ways, with entheogens, hallucinogens, ecstatic trance dancing, ecstatic trance singing, sleep deprivation, or some sort of sonic driving mechanism like drumming or rattling. I use drumming and occasionally dancing, just because they're cheap and legal. And I love my drums. Once in the altered state, the shaman or shamanic practitioner interacts with big-'s' Spirit in the form of working with little-'s' spirits to ask questions, effect healings for self or others, to find out answers to questions, to help put things, people, relationships, souls back together again.

Shamans are healers.

This works because shamans believe a few basic things, most of which can be summed up by Tom Crockett's "five stones" of shamanism which I introduced a couple of posts ago:

• Everything is Alive
• Everything is Aware and Conscious
• Everything is Dynamic and Changing
• Everything is Connected
• Everything Responds

If everything is alive, we can certainly have a relationship with it. If everything is aware and conscious, everything is participating in Life as we know it, and can give insight and help. If everything is dynamic and changing, new conditions are arising all the time that we might need to know about. If everything is connected, we all affect each other, the earth, the cosmos. And it affects us, too. If everything responds, we can communicate and have conversation.

In a shamanic journey, the shaman literally communicates with anything; rocks, trees, water, mythic beings, the sun, cancer, AIDS viruses. In my first journeys to contact an Irish ancestor, I initially interacted with a red-haired female water entity. She showed me in no uncertain terms that she flowed West, and that she was very female. She turned out to be the River Shannon, which does indeed flow West. Only if all things are connected and if all things are alive, aware, changing and responsive could I have known this without every consciously knowing it.

How and why is shamanism done? Although this varies in form, the shaman does his or her work in a shamanic journey, a state similar to meditation that looks much like a self-guided meditation, fueled by one of the above methods. Time after time after time in Eliade's work, he reports near identical methods of healing and journeying to speak with the spirits. From peoples in Japan, Siberia, Tibet, the Pacific Northwest, Pacific Islands, Central and South America, Greenland, Iceland, Central and Eastern Europe to Native Americans, almost all methods share commonality, sometimes very closely. Regardless of background, the shaman journeys into a cosmology that is described as extraordinarily similar by all accounts: There is a World Axis that contains Lower World(s) and Upper World(s) and (most of the time), Middle World(s). The shaman works with a familiar ally with whom s/he has established a long and trusting working relationship to seek the answer to the client's question, find the cure, the remedy, or bring back an essential part of the client to initiate or effect a healing.

The shaman is the glue that holds a group together - by being himself consciously connected and in conversation with the world in a way that others are often not. I didn't understand this when I first started out with this practice; that's why I said at length in an earlier post that shamanism is teaching me community. I can't not do this for my peeps, for anyone who asks, really. It's almost like a compulsion, definitely a motivating force.

The flavor of what shamanism is like is described in an article by Tom Cowan of Riverdrum.com in the recent issue of Journal of Shamanic Practice (yes, we have journals!  Lots of them!) that talks about the language used to describe "otherworld" experiences.  Drawing on the work of many others, he states that since our western vocabulary consists mostly of nouns, and since language informs thought just as thought informs language, we may not have adequate language to describe what it is that we experience there.  He talks instead of the Algonquin verb-based language which might have better constructs through which to understand.

An example might be that English speakers would look at a garden and say, "Look at all the flowers."  The Algonquin speaker might say, "Look at all the flowering."  Another examnple:  we loo up at the night sky and say, "Look at all the stars."  The Algonquin speaker might say, "Look at all that shining."

Cowan, Tom.  Twisted Language. The Journal of Shamanic Practice volume 2 issue 2 (Sept 2009): 11-16.

This captures the essence of it for me:  when I journey, I am immersed in the being-ness, the becoming-ness, the unfolding of it all, and am able to communicate with that unfolding.  Shamanism is more about what the world is doing, how it is interacting with itself, and not about what it is. 
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The Song of Myself

These days I'm learning to sing the Song of Myself, strongly and harmoniously. As a Southerner, I was taught early on that We Don't Do That, and that Others Come First, and that To Brag was A Bad Thing.

But ... is it bragging if it's really, deeply true?  Methinks no.


Methinks also, though, that me hasn't learned the appropriate way of celebrating my own strengths, my own beauteous strengths and true joys.  What a paradox that someone else can say something good about us, but if we say the same thing, it's considered immodest braggadocio.


How interesting.


And what a double standard.


Ignoring that completely, I'm taking an honest look at myself, my succulent strengths and at my peculiar and unique brand of quirky goodness, and for the first time in my life I'm saying, "wow!  What a great guy I am!" and taking myself absolutely, deeply seriously as I say it.

At first this feels a bit like masturbating in public:  so good, and yet soooo wrong from society's standpoint.


And yet.   And yet ... it's something that feels really, really good to do; to honor one's self for what one really is.

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 does not serve the world.

There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other

people won't feel insecure around you.

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.

Our Greatest Fear —Marianne Williamson

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Community

Though I am very much a "people person", I am also a bit of a recluse; I have definite saturation limits as to how much people-energy I can take over a given time period. Massage therapy suits me well; the one-on-one is a good thing. I don't do well with crowds of people, though, so I avoid places like malls, loud concerts, big parties (at certain times).

Until recently, the idea of "community" did not appeal to me much. The compromise and consensus processes that I've witnessed in the few commune-style communities that I've been tangentially involved with have always bored and irritated me. Which probably marks me as somewhat antisocial. Part of this has to do with growing up in a family the emotions modeled were either suppression (my dad) or explosion (my mom), and it has taken me most of half a century to figure out how to safely embody other emotions and to speak my mind truthfully without screaming and having a meltdown.

Really. I still have to watch it, especially when I'm tired.

"Community" was something I never really wanted to have at all since to my inner child it meant "discussions" which meant "scary screaming arguments" or merely "seething, un-expressed emotion". So, it's come as a bit of a shock to me that for the first time in my forty-seven year life I'm cultivating an actual desire, a need to be connected to people. And shamanism is teaching me this. Last night I surprised even my own self when I saw one of the particularly difficult people from my shamanic drumming circle as I walked into a local buy-it-all-here retail store, and my first reaction was one of delight and to immediately yell "Hey! Good to see you!" and run over to her and give her a big hug.

In mid-hug I marveled a little at myself.

A couple of years ago when I was a shiny new student of shamanism, I came across the book Stone Age Wisdom by Tom Crockett. From a powerful journey, he espouses five simple "stones" or tenets of shamanism:

• Everything is Alive
• Everything is Aware and Conscious
• Everything is Dynamic and Changing
• Everything is Connected
• Everything Responds

I'm beginning to see the depth of the phrase, "everything is connected" :-)  If I am a true student of shamanism (which I sincerely hope that I am), I see how I am connected to everything, everyone, "all my relations".  Even connected to the particularly difficult woman from our drumming circle.  For the very first time, somehow I'm finding myself deeply drawn to this crazy, quirky group of people, and finding that I care about them.  A lot.  They are teaching me viscerally that we all are indeed connected, that I'm connected to everything, and that it really does matter what we all think, how we all feel, and it does matter if my brothers and sisters, any one of my relations is unhappy or feels disconnected.  Despite my own self, I don't want them to be disconnected or dispossessed - I want to help them become and to stay connected, too.

In that hug moment, I realized that I had somehow, over the past several months, shape-shifted into something different, into someone new. 

One thing that has helped this occur is that I've consciously tried to stop seeing what I want to see in others, and instead have been keenly observing what's actually there.  Who is this person, really?  Have I ever seen them clearly?  What I've been finding is that, no, I've never seen anyone clearly!  If I have seen them at all, I've seen them dimly, through the smoke of my own expectation and projection.  Giving up wanting people to be who I want them to be has been a relief, and has been fun watching these "new beings" unfold.  They're so much more wonderful, complex and oddly  beautiful than I could ever make up in my wildest dreams :-)

And so much more fun to have as friends and neighbors.

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Parsing

Life has been in High Gear lately: within the past month I've organized and registrared a 21-student massage therapy workshop with an internationally-renowned instructor, attended a 35-hour acupressure continuing education workshop, sung a weeks-worth of gigs in a remote city, moved my business office to a regional cancer center and set up my new therapy room, moved truckloads of office furniture, participated in no less than five major marketing endeavors, made two public speaking engagements, worked on clients, and have spent a couple of weekends with my husband-elect.

Though things have gone fairly well, I've remarked to myself that a lot of this karma-storm has felt as if I didn't have clarity about my therapy business, about who exactly I want to attract to it, how I want to incorporate my shamanic skills, etc.  I've been needing time to just sit down, think and examine, put things on paper.

As sometimes happens, my honey-to-be had a dream that perfectly expressed what it was that I needed (our dreams often have bearing on each others' lives, and are always vivid when we sleep together.  We were 136 miles apart last night when this one came through):

... had interesting dreams last night. The main part I remember was being on a cruise ship & some tour guide forcing me & you to take an excursion trip on a small boat. We seemed to be in Alaska... someplace wild & beautiful. Made us both take off our shoes thinking this would keep us from running off. What he didn't know was that you & I are both quite comfortable going barefoot, so we were still quite free. We exchanged a laughing look that said "He may think he can control us!" (Not sure what this symbolizes, but it seems to speak of being patient about our eventual living together... that it will happen ... our "barefootedness" indicates we're free even if others may think they control us.)

Another part of the dream took place in a foyer type entrance on the ship. There was an amazing device we'd heard about - something called a "parser" - that improved whatever it was aimed at. I was a airplane pilot looking for work & had a resume book of photos, paintings & writing I wanted parsed & [you] had something too. In the foyer was a water garden in a rectangular pool with plants & lilies in it. As a man wheeled the parser in (it was a large, black, boxy contraption "steam punk" style, with blinking lights. It had a coiled hose part with a wand type instrument with a directable flashlight on its tip), a ship worker was pointing out how the water looked milky & murky, despite his best efforts to keep the pool clean. The parser man said "no problem" & stuck the lit flashlight end into the water & turned knobs on the machine. This in turn adjusted the water's clarity, much as I can adjust color balance & contrast in Photoshop & soon the water looked sparkling clear & beautiful!

"You don't have to change the water," said the man, "just the frequency of the light passing through it." (That statement felt very important & I can think of spiritual metaphors galore...) I then had him pass the light over my resume book & everything in it clarified as well; still in my handwriting, but the words were more precise & descriptive, spell corrected & neat & all the photos & paintings had better composition, vibrant colors & were perfectly exposed. Amazing!

It didn't occur to me to put *myself* into this light until after I'd woken up...

Ah!  Just what I've been needing!  A parser :-)  The statement that you don't have to change the water, just the frequency is bullseye, spot-on.  It's how I'm looking that's most important; the content is already there, just maybe not in the right form yet.

Gosh!  Wish I had a parser in my office all the time!
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