It has been a challenging time….perhaps no different from any other part of life where one makes compromises with ones very inner truth or being.  You would think that I would have gotten used to how this feels and avoid it, but there are still things to work on, to heal, to learn to be entirely true to without equivocation.

I had a long talk with my Mother about our lives as her children, as a family, about all the things that shaped us as a family so early, and how this all relates to what  has taken place the last few years in my own life, which, at the time, brought me to a feeling of being defeated. It was an icky feeling actually, one where I felt the voices of others telling me or suggesting something that I was simply not.  Actually, they were voices that matched my own sense of limitation and in hearing them, in mirroring them, they have been amplified.  Jane Robert’s Seth once said “Be careful of the gods you choose, for you will reinforce one another.”  And so it is with our negative karma.  Lucky us, though, that the same also applies to our positive karma too.  But feeling shitty about yourself when you know that there lies a divine template within you is a hard place to be. It is also one that does move, does get tumbled and turned in the self and eventually is healed, surrendered, transformed.

And so against this foggy backdrop something took shape as a result of weeks of meditation, intention, focus and bewilderment.  When you ask for help from within it tends to come.  It may not always be in that exact moment when you feel like you need it most, but in my own experience, because none of us does this alone, guides and helpers are there waiting in the wings of the ether to bring insight, aid, and a helping hand.  It just takes a little patience sometimes.

Today I noted that we will be getting unusually cold temperatures in our area, colder than they have been even in the last few weeks, which is saying a lot.  I finally had a free day where I could go out and begin work on a tree that I felled several weeks ago in order to make room for another tree that had begun to die so that it could be taken out before it begins to fall apart. I also need the wood, and while I felt bad about cutting a live tree, I prayed to that tree and explained what needed to be done.  I know, maybe that is funny to you, but I always do this because I have seen life force moving in trees for years and I know they have sentience even if the majority of people believe anything without a nervous system doesn’t FEEL. Well they do.  I was working on clearing away this tree and putting the much-needed fire wood into the van when it began.  It was a voice speaking to me.

For as long as I can remember certain vibrations seem to have encouraged an odd form of clairaudience in me.  Sitting on lawn mowers, tractors, and working chain saws and weed-eaters, I have had chapters of books dictated to me, poetry spoken, songs sung, and all kinds of amazing word spoken quite clearly and loudly for me to hear. This has gone on for years and I noticed it as a young teen when my grandfather first put me on his farm tractor and asked me if I could mow his fields for him.  How I experience it is as though a dual channel opens up inside of me or near my hearing centers. I can hear the noise of the equipment, yes, but I also hear this other thing just as clearly, and in some cases, even more clearly.  I once took to keeping a note pad as I mowed the grass not so long ago because the words that would be spoken to me would be so clear, so perfect, and sometimes, incredibly beautiful.  It seemed to be better than I could ever come up with and it seemed to flow flawlessly.  Sometimes I think that there is something odd about how I am wired and that when I get around sonorous sounds or loud vibrations of sound, it sparks this ability in me.  Who knows.

But this voice, which had an accompanying sense of presence, stood right next to me, behind me, as I sawed noisily away.  I had just been thinking about this junk I had been feeling in me and identifying that it isn’t really me, that somehow I have allowed others’ words about me to lure me into a way of being and feeling about myself that is not relevant anymore.  I was puzzling over how I could take all this one in this way when the voice spoke.  What was so odd were the words that it spoke, which at first had not meaning to me the way they had been spoken. It began with “You must learn how to take your suffrage….” which I knew to mean voting and yet, when I FELT the words, I knew it had nothing at all to do with voting.  And yet, I knew suffrage was a word that meant voting.  Suffrage was the right to vote.  Pure and simple.  Right?

However, when I looked up the word to see its etymology, I found that it had another lesser-known meaning that goes way back into antiquity.  It turns out that the word suffrage comes from middle English and while it was used mostly to describe the right to vote, it has another meaning that involves “A prayer or act of intercession or supplication.”  Now in the context in which what I was told while I was sawing away, this word followed the meaning of the rest of what had been said to me very well.  This inner voice spoke for several minutes and I recognized it as someone with whom I have had a long-standing relationship with in my life and had been speaking to this person over the last week as I began clearing my field of disruptive energies and beginning to heal from a time of difficulty. This is not a physical person, but a guide I have known for years throughout my life who has appeared at critical, sometimes even pivotal moments in my awakening.   The ability we have to dig deep and bring out the resources necessary for our own transformation is important…..sometimes it feels difficult, and sometimes it comes with the gentlest of grace, but it remains true that as you seek, and as you ask, it is given.  It might take a few days or weeks even, but if you keep asking and your aim remains true to your own inner purpose, need, and desire, nothing can stand in its way.  The meaning of this statement was something of an inside understanding for me and apparently him, which is that in the beginning he explained that if I called his name, he would be there.  He also probably observed how I did indeed call on my higher self during hard periods in awakening, willing to try ANYTHING in order to make the next breakthrough to help ease the suffering that can sometimes accompany such a vivid presence of energy that lights us up stem to stern and also makes us more aware of ALL of IT:  the good, the bad, the ugly, and beautiful.  I had done just that in the day prior to all of this a kind of prayer, supplication for the source of my own strength to be made clearer in my being, my heart, my mind.

Ultimately, finding your center, who you are without the distractions of what your own frailties might  drive in you, is the most important stretch of this journey for me and is so singular in its nature that nothing should get in the way.  I saw how the path I take is not one that will be easy or conventional, which has been one reason why I am simply not seen for who I am sometimes.  I am most often misunderstood because maybe there just aren’t many like me.  But to be overly concerned about what people think about me is only an invitation into their own distorted view of  how things are.  “Honor the humaness, do not pick fights with their error” the voice spoke.  This has been my problem all along…just letting people be themselves enough to be where they are and not worry or obsess. We all do this, we all see through lenses, and I must march to my own drummer if I am ever to find authentic happiness. There are many people all seeking it in ways they feel are going to bring them what they seek, and it may or may not do that, but for myself I know that my own joy and a happiness are so spare a thing that most people would miss it.  My soul is like a cedar windswept and spare.  I do not have many leaves or drink much water.  My soil is rocky and there is not a lot that seems to be of any value to sustain me.  And that is where most people would misunderstand. And if its understanding that I need more of, then it is me who must understand first and never worry about anyone else.  Ever.  Only in such simplicity is such a current tapped and known.  It is like glacial waters tapped from high in the mountains where no one sees or knows. It really isn’t for display at all.  It is better kept a secret.  If that makes me a monk, I say that’s fine.  But not like any monk you would ever meet.  I would blend into the rocks and leaves as my mind shifts to the mocassined feet of two hundred years ago as their footfalls tread softly over me and which lived a different kind of life. All things will speak to you if you will but listen.

So he was there, standing next to me, almost over my shoulder, and me feeling slightly cautious about all of this.  Afterall, I had a chain running at high-speed a foot or two from my face.  So I listened in while focused at the same time on the task at hand.  It seems we are wired for these dual kinds of things to happen like dreams inside of dreams.  And who knows, someone might discover that they too have this odd ability to hear things in the noise.  It may be why we drum or play music loudly.  There may be something that induces trance states or just enough dissociation to tap or tune into these streams of awareness.  Certainly most shaman used drumming as a way to achieve this.  Perhaps the modern version of it can be found with the weed eater or farm tractor or chain saw.  Whatever the case, I think it’s quite handy and fits me.  I like being outdoors, getting something done while communing with the universe!

So in every moment we choose how we feel, how we relate or don’t to the world.  The world is itself this amazing chalkboard upon which so much is writ and we take that writing to be the rule or law.  It can go like tears in rain, or chalk swiped with an eraser.  Its choosing a new way that is the alchemy, the transformative step into the new.  We must all be ready and I think it helps when we learn to listen to our inner voice, the one that lies deepest.  It isn’t always easy, but boy, for me, its been very consistent even if I haven’t been.  In every moment, though, lies the seeds of change.  It is time to tend that field…

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