Thursday, September 20, 2007

Greetings from Tucson! Arrived here yesterday afternoon to stay at the high desert home of my old friends Todd and Scott from Jackson, Wyoming after a whirlwind visit with my old crone friend Elizabeth in her own high desert home near Desert Hot Springs, California. She's just painted the various outside walls of her home with gorgeous purple, yellow, green and pink colors to match her colorful and artistic personality that is well known in Palm Springs museum circles. Elizabeth had arranged for the local Peppertree Bookstore as a venue for a Palm Springs book event, and so we set up our circle of chairs in the back of the store and ten people, including three men(!) joined in for yet another intense, provocative, continuously spiraling and deepening discussion of the interdimensional realms that we can access when we allow ourselves to open the doors that beckon us through death and grief and loss. When I mentioned my sense that the entire culture is saturated by unprocessed grief, and that it may be responsible for addictions of all kinds, including our incessant need for speed of all kinds to fend off our feelings, one woman who is an addiction specialist echoed that comment, saying that she too, is realizing that grief, unprocessed grief, may be at the bottom of our collective dysfunctionality. And she brought up the idea that not only are we unable to deal with our own grief, but that we all may carry other people's grief, and that our first task may be to separate what is ours individually from what belongs to others.

At this point, when I tell people that my dead husband Jeff is working with me to set up the energy field for each of these events, the circle participants hardly bat an eye. Is it because I am more sure of myself in saying this as time goes on? Or is it because the veils betweent the worlds truly are thinning so that such remarks no longer seem strange?

Likewise, my feeling that Grief is a gate, perhaps THE gate to Love, the love of all for all, the field of vast being that surrounds us and we all float inside. This too, when I speak of it, seems naturally slide into intertisces of our minds as we speak with one another from within these larger dimensions.

Each time we must break the circle, must finish with the time we have with one another, it feels strange, incomplete. But then I must remember that the whole point is to start this conversation, not to put it into a tidy little box. That the feeling of incompleteness may be what we all need to continue to open to these worlds, to share our openings with each other and
especially, to open to them together. So many times during these events, I have felt myself in the presence of mystery, of a quickening that I'd like to reach out to grasp, to feel all the edges of, to KNOW what it is in all its details, to assimilate it consciously, but NO!

So LET GO! Just let go, I tell myself, and live through these moments, remembering them as precious and unknowable and infinitely rich in meaning that I and others will perhaps be digesting for years. Or maybe not that either! Perhaps our time for chewing our cud is over and we must learn to stay present, to forget analysis, to just open, open, open wide to more and more reality while holding our own clear center. That may be enough; that may have to be enough. That may be all we can do as time speeds up to warp speed over the next few years and swirls us all into its intoxicating vortex.

Tomorrow I begin the final five book events: one here in Tucson, two in Phoenix area, one in Silver City, New Mexico. Then one day off, then the final event in Albuquerque on September 26. From there I look forward to the three-day drive home to Indiana. And since I look forward to it, it may mean that I DO need to process and I will get my chance to do just that as I make my way across the endless flat, straight, I-70 monotony below, giant limitless sky above, that constitutes the heartland of America.

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