Bye, with love.....

Well, yes…it’s been a while. Sorry about that. But—I can explain: I moved to another state and am working at a job I absolutely adore. There are two things about that that affect my blog. One is that I have very little time to write, mostly because forty to fifty hours of my week are now spent with words—writing, editing, reading, reviewing—and, much as I enjoy my work, in the other hours I’d like to do a few things that don’t involve words. The other is, as I said, I moved………and a lot of my blog had to do with being a world-traveling peacenik filmmaker California Girl finding herself in Kansas. And, well, I’m not in Kansas anymore.

About eight months ago I put this as my Facebook status: “I’m falling in love with Kansas….and no one is more surprised than I am.” One friend put the comment, “Oh, I don’t know about that—I’m pretty surprised.” Another friend later told me that when she read that, plus another status update where I was chuckling about the tornado sirens going off, she said, “I want whatEVER it is she’s on!”

When I first got to Kansas, I was madly in love with my then-fiancé/now-husband as well as my new step children, who called me “Mom” from the moment I moved there. But I am not a Midwestern dirt kind of gal. I’m just not. I love mountains, water, palm trees. Oh, I’m the kind of person (now, anyway, it hasn’t always been this way) who will make the best and most of practically any situation or place. But…that doesn’t mean I won’t complain about it from time to time. Living there has been the biggest—THE biggest—surprise of my life. I’ve been to all 50 states and almost 60 countries, including two long circumnavigations of the globe. And there I was in Kansas. It still makes me shake my head in surprise.

When I came here it was only going to be for two years. A few months before the two year mark, I knew it was going to be at least another year or two. A friend asked, “What if you landed there?” meaning settle in and accept that I was going to be there for a while. So I did. And then I fell in love….

I already loved the rolling thunder hills of northeastern Kansas. My sister was visiting once and I took her on a drive; we stopped at a scenic overlook (yes, there are scenic overlooks in Kansas—it’s not all flat) and she said, “Kansas is beautiful!” I already loved the ease of life here—no traffic, far fewer pressures, very peaceful. There are amazing people here, just like there are amazing people everywhere. My husband took me to his home town in Western Kansas and I fell in love with the wheat fields and the silos and down home cookin’ at the local digs. He showed me the tiny cemetery where many of the tombstones belong to his ancestors. This little town on the prairie was a world I’d never seen and was happy to explore.

My husband and I watched “New In Town” a few months ago. A hot shot, uppity city slicker (Renee Zellweger) goes to work in Podunk, Minnesota and ends up falling in love not only with the really hot guy but also with the small town. In one scene, during takeoff on a flight back to her big city, a man next to her says, “Back to civilization. Who in the world would live here?” We can see by Renee’s expression that while she certainly once agreed with that sentiment, she doesn’t any more. She appreciates the close-knit community and camaraderie, the upbeat but relaxed nature of the people, the Friday night fish fries, even the church socials. While I haven’t been to any fish fries, I would certainly have the same reaction if a fellow passenger said that to me upon takeoff from Kansas City.

And once I truly fell in love with it here…..I was free to leave. It’s so funny how that works. I love my new environs, and so does my family. I’m so grateful to life, which continues to turn out more amazing than I ever imagined.

Thank you for reading my blog. This will be my last blog for a while and the next one will come in a different time and place. I send you all my love and best wishes for everything. May 2010 be the best year of our lives, at least til 2011, then 2012, then…..

May all your dreams and visions come alive.

I honestly have no idea what in the world to call this blog posting....

About a month ago I saw a Facebook posting about helping to shut down a group that invited others to join and relieve stress by torturing small animals.

“Marianne, this is a joke,” a dear friend of mine wrote to me. “People couldn’t possibly be that cruel.”

We determined that it was indeed true and she wrote again, saying, “I have absolutely no idea how to fathom this.”

I have absolutely no idea how to fathom it either…except the other week my husband and I saw a movie about a present-day war, complete with holy wars, hate crimes, and total irreverence for life. Watching such unconscionable actions helped me recognize that many people are living their lives in a blind rage and perhaps were trained to be that way by parents and teachers who were trained to be that way, going back generations upon generations. They don't realize it and in their current state of consciousness they can't help it. It’s not just “over there” – i.e. the shooter at Holocaust Museum had his justifiable (to himself, anyway) reasons. It’s any hate crime, here, there, anywhere.

We are such fascinating creatures. I know a woman who is morbidly obese and….has her sweatshirts dry-cleaned. How can there be such blatant disregard in one area and such over-attentiveness in another? Witnessing this disconnect helps me understand - sort of, maybe, a little - how a prison guard could torment prisoners and then go home and lovingly play with her grandchildren. Or how a man could rape someone and then go home and be loving to his wife. Or how...well, you get the idea.

I have my strange blind spots too – we all do. We can be very strange…when we forget how beautiful we are. And when we forget, oh but we can be such confusing beings. Some of us eat until we can hardly move – the delicious numbness of the sugar coma winning out over the ability to walk. We smoke until we can’t breathe – the jolt of the nicotine winning out over the ability to take a deep breath. We torture animals and each other – the demented thrill of total control winning out over the desire for recognizing the true power that lives within us all.

Yes, there are genuinely unwell people among us that cannot be healed with our medical or psychological technology. There’s not a whole lot the rest can do about it…at least not at this level. What we can do is raise the overall vibration by shining more love and more light, and more, and more, from the other levels that all, all, all of us live at, even if we recognize it for only a fraction of a second at a time.

So here we are – beings of light and love playing in the 3D density. What exactly is it we’re trying to do here? Actually, it’s really quite simple. There are only two things to remember….

1) We are here to evolve our soul.
2) We are here to be a beneficial presence.

The first happens with everything we do…we can’t fail at that. The second happens without fail when we remember who we are.

Making light of....absolutely everything

I just wanted to talk about my friend whose sister had been murdered again. Recently she told me that she was working on forgiveness – of the killer, of herself for not being there, of God for allowing this to happen.

This is so…..enormous.

What a wild, wild ride we get on when we come here. We have no idea why anything like this really happens…..although back to The Little Soul and The Sun by Neale Donald Walsh, we set this up ahead of time to forgive each other. If you haven’t read the story or my earlier posts referring to it, a little soul wants to come to Earth to learn something new, and he decides on forgiveness. A soul pal of his agrees to come to Earth to do something for him to forgive. “You’d do that for me?” the first little soul asks.

That puts absolutely everything in a different perspective, huh?

But why? Why do we have to experience forgiveness? Why do we have to experience a different, separate life at all, if we’re all one with the Creator? Why do we have to experience the density of life here? Why do we have to experience the pain that comes from the density of life here, where the veils can be thick and we forget who we are and can’t see what’s really going on?

If it was always the same Heavenly realm, there would be nothing to compare it to.

We’re in the trenches here.

I once heard an author/teacher – I think it was Dan Millman – joke, “We’re going to bump into each other sometime down the line and laugh with each other and say, ‘Hey, remember Earth?’” The way he said Earth was like the disparaging way we sometimes say, “Geez, remember Junior High?” – a ridiculously hard time in some ways for many of us.

Maybe the whole idea is to bring the Heavenly realm to earth and to live there despite…..our poverty, our pain, our pollution, our you-name-it-but-they’re-bad things. To live in the peace that passes human understanding. To live in the joy we crave. To transcend the pain. To transmute the chaos. To transform….us, everything.

Sometimes I imagine us all meeting up in the afterworlds and just chuckling and playfully smacking our own heads – coulda-had-a-V8 style – and say, “Wow, that was you? You really had me going!” Or “Wow, what a show we put on!”

I don’t mean to make light of our personal and global tragedies….and I do want to thank and honor those who take on the very heavy journeys, like my friend…..but I do want to make light of us because that’s who and what we really are.

Say it's so, make it so...

A very dear friend of mine was forever calling psychics until one day I said to her, “Why don’t you decide what you want in your life and then go tell the psychic how it all turns out?!” She promptly burst into tears and said, “I don’t feel like I deserve the life I want!”

OK, now we’re on to something.

Actually, her sister was brutally murdered many years ago, so naturally my friend had some painful things to work out, and her case most notably in the deserving department. But her answer slipped out past her usual subconscious barriers, surprising even her. So that was the issue that needed to be addressed – not what the future portended in any particular instant. The future is always in motion, and what a psychic can predict is what might happen, based on the probability given the current state of conditions and consciousness. But consciousness can be transformed in an instant, which can open to a completely transformed future.

A minister friend of mine said from her pulpit a few weeks ago, “Ever notice that when you call a psychic and don’t like the answer, you’ll keep calling until one gives you the answer you want to hear?”

OK, now we’re really on to something again. This is absolutely nothing against psychics – some of my best friends are psychics! – I’m just against not relying on our own true inner knowing.

We do know what we want to hear….and we can go create it.

And a very fine line it is.....

We know our work is done when one particular thing happens: we don’t have a body any more. Until that time, we are all here to grow. There might be places where growth can happen without challenges. This does not seem to be one of them. But they say that’s why people come here, to this Earth school.

And really – there’s nothing we have to do. We already are….just by being here. But there’s a delicate balance between total gratitude for what is and passion for ever more. We can be utterly grateful for the miracles that fill our lives, including the ones we don’t ordinarily think about – being able to walk (all the way to the back of the store, where the milk case is), having a beautiful home (and having to clean it), our income (and income taxes), exercise (and being able to), and so on – all day long.

And Life is about ever more expansion of itself – ever more love, joy, beauty, expression, peace, wisdom, all good things.

So every moment can be a thank you, complete unto itself. And at the same time, every moment can be an opening of our arms to the even greater unfolding of ourselves and our gifts and our lives…with no angstful yearning for something we haven’t experienced yet, but a knowing that all is good and more good is always coming.

Raise it higher....

In my book Visioning I mentioned my friend who was puzzled when the other school children laughed at her because she’d so often raise her hand to answer the teacher’s questions. Her mother’s response? “Raise it higher!”

Well, when my friend’s sister won not just Homecoming Queen but Prom Queen as well, the mother chased the sister through the house until she finally yelled, “I know what you’re going to say – this and a dollar will get me a ride on the subway!”

Way cool mom – raise it higher, but don’t get so high you don’t remember what’s important.

She raised some way cool kids too, who are also raising some way cool kids. Coolness can certainly be inherited and passed on.

Alright, who's in charge here?

How do we know who’s talking in there – our ego or our high self? Well, if the answer to the situation is easy, grace-filled, and life-affirming, then chances are it’s our high self. If the situation is fraught with urgency, a need for haste or secrecy, involves harm of anyone or anything, then chances are it’s from some place else.

I’m not saying we disregard the urgent in times of emergency or crisis, but overall if that unpleasant huff-and-puff feeling accompanies a new idea, then this particular idea might not be in our highest good. Our spiritual work ultimately delivers us to a place of balance, understanding, and discernment, where we can tell who’s really talking in there.

If we set our intention and then stamp our foot – it does not happen. If we open our heart, come from the quiet place of high resolve, and then set our intention – it does happen.

If it feels like sliding downhill then it’s our high self, backed by high resolve. We can settle into a place of high resolve but not of demand…at least not of petulant demand. We can always place our demand on the universal supply, impress upon the law, on the law of attraction

When we run out of steam, it’s because we’ve been pushing with our own energy. But when we tap into the stillness of the center, where the all-powerful energy resides, it’s impossible to run out of steam. Steam – Energy, Life, God – is all there is!

Speaking of running out of steam, have you ever noticed that sometimes we’ve been running around our house, our day, and our life trying to accomplish as much as possible? Accomplishing as much as possible is not the point. The point is not racing through the grocery store to get it done quickly…..the point is smiling back at the clerk. The point isn’t eating dinner…it’s tasting it. The point isn’t getting the job done…it’s how much reverence we show in the process. The point isn’t how much we get done….it’s how much love we get it done with.

And it’s never what we do or say that matters as much as how we live our lives.