Not So Grounded

Grounded by the Snow

Anyone else felt utterly  ungrounded this past week?  I called Joanne Williams, of course, to get her otherworldly perspective on my scattered, unfocused, can't-get-a-dang-thing done brain.  Evidently, she had lots of calls from others in Boone with similar frustrations, so she checked in with those other dimensions to which she has access: 

Apparently, the base of Grandfather Mountain is jiggling (as in shifting underground energies not wreaking seismic havoc).  And while these consecutive storms seem normal (as in "Seriously?  More #$%* snow?") they're unique instead.  This snow has a subtle new molecular structure, designed to neutralize and cleanse unhealthy particles around us, particularly where the snow accumulates on the ground.  I'm wigged 'cause in addition to icy driveways and stir-crazy family members, I also have to contend with new energies flying around.

Plus, Joanne added, this snow and a complementary huge cone of golden light she "saw" perched over the middle of town are shepherding our community out of its old reality, modelling what other cities will soon encounter.  Anyone mistakenly expecting a return to normal -- whatever that is -- will be sorely disappointed.  Unsupported, were her words.

Rather than recovery -- from the snow, missed days at school & work, running out of milk ... to bigger things like recession, peak oil, birds falling dead from the sky -- we're supposed to pursue new creations instead.  Somehow blending ancestral wisdom that once nurtured communities effortlessly through snowy winters with present knowledge about nurturing unprecedented diversity of people, ideas, innovations and ways to find joy. 

In other words, turning our community into a place where instead of lost income, isolation, messed up schedules and wrecked cars, a winter snow invites shared bounty stored full from the summer, the slow pace required to incubate spring's creativity and freedom to sled, ski or drink hot-toddies to our hearts content.

Works for me.

(John gave me a new FlipHD for Christmas so here's my very first experiment; PS not a good experiment 'cause I didn't actually want me & the chicken ...)

   

 

 

Here and There All At Once

At the eastern entrance to I-40, on the outskirts of Wilmington, NC, an official green highway sign reads, "Barstow, CA 2,554 miles."  As I drove past it Friday, I happened to be talking to a colleague who lives near the western entrance of that same freeway.  On Monday I will fly over Barstow, in fact, when I head her way.  The fourth trip so far in my 9-bed September, my own absurd strategy for measuring the relative zaniness of my travel schedule.  I will sleep in 9 different beds between September 1-30, only one of which is technically my own. 

I am a "seasoned" traveler.  I know, for example, to avoid winter layovers in Denver or Chicago, that summer thunderstorms can paralyze east coast flight patterns, and that Houston and Atlanta are best avoided altogether.  I know I can get a quick nitrate-free spicy sausage near gate C-20 at Phoenix Sky Harbor. I know the women hired to clean the Charlotte Douglas rest rooms live on tips and a paltry $2-3.00 an hour. 

These are ridiculous things to know (except that women cleaning our airport toilets go home after 8 hours of unappreciated work with approximately $20 -- that fact is appalling.)  And while they engender a certain misguided travel pride, I cannot escape this fundamental dissonance:

At the same time my professional clients need a heightened personal presence, so do my family, friends and community.  California staff need hands-on help to improve some thorny processes, women cleaning bathrooms need generous tips, Appalachian farmers need folks to buy their delicious tomatoes, and my home needs a family dinner.  All at once.  We are past that euphamistic breaking point and need genuine, live, loving, consistent human connection.

This is not suggesting my presence is important.  Rather, I believe we all increasingly need to be both global and local, in multiple time zones, conversations & cultures and contributing to the wellbeing of many layers ... all at the same time.  

I don't know how to do that yet.  Oh I post, update, text and skype with the best of 'em, and I don't blink at a cellular call across opposite ends of a freeway or continent.

But I feel a universal tug to be all places at all times, as if the worn tethers securing my identity to gravity and locale are unravelling.  As if the seams of a self I once concretely defined as only my own, as only in this place or with that person, are being gently removed stitch by stitch.  I feel increasingly boundless, just beginning to imagine that maybe I can be Here and There at once. 

Sure, I'm momentarily freaked about a possible personal implosion.  But ultimately I'm comforted by a growing belief that I am -- we are -- so much more than these individual bodies & lives suggest.  That perhaps being Here and Everywhere all at once is our original blueprint.  That at some point I will, in fact, help a west coast clinic improve its health services, pick dinner fresh from my neighbor's garden, and nestle up to my husband in our own bed ... all in the same day.

 

Clean Water Experiment

Check this out.  Nothing to lose & it could be really cool.

Santa's Psychic

I just took the girls to their first psychic, my Christmas gift to my daughter, my niece, and my daughter’s best friend.   But let’s dispel any misconceptions that the trip started in some sacred way, complete with Enya music and New Year’s affirmations shared blissfully while passing a carved ceremonial totem.  Instead, the day began trying to roust three teenagers way too early on their last Saturday of vacation.  (Laurie went to bed at 2:00 am, Maddy and Lindsey even later.)  Maddy’s last-resort jeans (“Why can’t someone do laundry in this house!”) were evidently so baggy her “whole ass” showed if she bent down, which precluded her from cleaning up the mocha latte she accidently dropped to the floor.  Lindsey said breakfast was the second worst omelet she’d ever eaten in her entire life.  Laurie later complained I was asking her to get way too many things from my disorganized bag, that I should’ve pulled them all out before I started our two-hour drive.  Evidently, I took the mountain curves too fast, making them all nauseous.  Which made Maddy’s jeans feel too tight …

Thank god they fell asleep.

Of course, they turned angelic once we arrived: polite, interested, engaged, a bit nervous and eager at the same time.  As I suspected, despite their adolescent bitching they were genuinely into this. 

Woo Woo Wednesday Resumes

After a long summer hiatus, last night we resumed our weekly channeled-or-whatever-the-heck-we-call-this-weird-thing writing.  We ended up answering questions for each other about "what next?"  And everyone consistently banged me over the head (okay, ever so lovingly, but banged nonetheless) with these instructions:  fully choose & embrace one clear passion, do the impractical & what stretches you most, plow through your self-imposed rational prison, and pursue your essence with reckless abandon.  

I, of course, also interpreted that to mean, stop worrying if people think you're crazy ...

So in that spirit (damn, no pun intended) I'm sharing the message my dead sister-in-law sent me last night:

This is my spirit, your sister-in-law, eternally grateful and indebted to your willing partnership through my life and the process of my death.  I have re-connected to my self -- and a glorious homecoming it is! I will now be able to be of much greater help to you and to my children as they mature.  I felt so stymied and constrained while alive, my story (drama, alcoholism, mental illness, painful experiences) always interfering with my true essence and abilities.  But you have been my partner from the beginning.  And now I am so grateful that I can pull my equal weight and really help you.  We have some amazing things to do!  And don't worry -- I'll help John learn all his new graphics software.  

I read it to my niece last night, after "What are you talking about, channeled writing ... what?"  She loved it, especially the last line.  "That's my Mom," she said laughing.  I'm not sure what John's raised eyebrows meant ...

Coming Clean

Tuesday night I attended our monthly Professional Women's Network meeting - a wonderful, eclectic group.  We've strayed from more traditional topics the last few meetings, wild conversations ranging from energy fields, to intention, to the significance behind the political battle between Barack Obama and Sarah Palin.  And some wonderful questions that I'm happily pondering.

Here's the first question:  if we assume, as do many scholars, that Ronald Reagan's presidency initiated the huge shift in contemporary politics whereby facts were suddenly (and conveniently?) re-interpreted as ideology & political opinion and where profound cynicism first became a national epidemic ... then what ultimate gifts might that offer, as in "all is in divine order" kind of gifts ...?  I'm not sure yet (and suddenly faced with an emergency trip to Maryland so I can't ponder it right now ...)

Anyway, the whole conversation reminded me of another essay I published in All About Women so here it is for the archives.

Coming Clean

By Jeanne Supin

Ever been to meetings that seem civilized but feel dead?  People discuss things, share reasonable opinions, make rational decisions.  But everyone knows it’s a hoax.  Instant the meeting ends, the real conversation begins.  Folks cluster in the hallway or the parking lot, later gabbing on the phone or over drinks.  And suddenly the truth comes out.  People say what they really believe, grow lively and animated.  Then more intuitive, better answers soar.

This sort of sums up my life the last few years.  I have all these normal conversations … funny newlywed stories, tales of adolescent angst, how my house is a mess, I need more exercise, or I’m worried about the economy …

But thing is, although true, these conversations don’t tell my whole story. So I’m coming clean; I’m on-lining my off-line life.

I believe the world is changing … fast and huge and irrevocably.  Some of it’s like a parlor game.  I follow my “gut” instincts to slow down, and the hidden cop is revealed two bends down the road … I make a spontaneous marketing call that morphs into six lucrative contracts just when I need them … I email a friend out of the blue who said she had the exact same impulse … these serendipities are now so commonplace I barely register surprise.

Sometimes it’s bigger, and I can literally feel something rumble through every cell in my body.  I once had unexpected closure with a long-gone lover, and I subsequently felt every romantic abandonment drift permanently away.  I swear – it was like I re-did my past.  One moment I was simply thinking how nice the conversation was after so many years, and the next moment sensory images of one bad experience after another cascaded through me, each disappearing like vanishing debris from a defragged computer.  Absolutely gone, without a trace.  Leaving space for something brand new, which happened to be the first phone call – within seconds – from the man who would later become my husband.

I’ve seen occasional ethereal shapes move across my bedroom.  I’ve watched features in a painting change size and color.  Once in a famous Japanese Garden I actually felt miniature fairies and sensed the flowers so intensely it still makes me tremble years later.  I know people who routinely see energy swirls throughout a body with absolute clarity.  They can identify color, direction, and the type of physical or emotional congestion it blocks.  They can move those swirls, too -- whether they call them chakras, channels, meridians, auras, or energy flows – and lift away my back pain, sinus infection, or depression.

I also believe things are shifting far beyond my personal experience.  It is my understanding the world is merely tangible evidence of energy manifested:  e=mc² implies energy and matter are just different expressions of the same thing, and energy comes first.  Energetic frequencies shape matter – not the other way around.  Our world and our experiences are just functional representations of our collective imaginations, formed over millennia of human evolution.    And I believe our imaginations are changing, even if we don’t all consciously know it yet.

Here’s the condensed story best I can decipher it.  For evolutionary eons life was cool.  Then at some point we humans got scared, and we began to see everything as enemies – other species, other humans, and every “unseeable” chord nestled in nature and divinity.  So we started to fight, which led to more fighting, which caused destruction, hatred, and injustice.  Which sparked genocides and annihilation.  Our collective imaginations have trembled at that frequency, like some really rank note on a mangled tuning fork.  We created our world to match that vibration.  The horror sprang straight from our imagination.

But suddenly there’s a shift.  More people than in human history believe living out of fear (and its offshoots like anxiety, greed, or domination) is absolute madness.  Not everybody.  Not even a majority.  But enough.  Enough of us have imagined a different enough world to raise the earth’s vibration.  And so human-created garbage of lower vibrating frequency has to go.  Things like war, global warming and economic systems based on resource degradation.  Things like anger, worry and being mean to each other.  That doesn’t mean humans are destined to survive, mind you.  If we collectively don’t change our own thoughts and behavior, relentlessly jamming lower frequencies items -- like corporate greed or species superiority -- into the earth’s new vibration we’ll quickly obliterate ourselves.  But this shift in the earth’s vibration means the earth will survive regardless.  And if we get rid of our own crap, we can, in fact, live here in joy, peace, and love.

      Why a shift now?  There are a zillion proposed reasons, to name a few:

• The Mayan calendar mathematically foretold a cosmic shift in consciousness in 2012. 
• The earth’s magnetic poles are showing signs of repeating a long-ago reversal. 
• We’re moving from the Age of Pisces to Aquarius. 
• Humanity is demonstrating a natural immune response to the lethal destruction of its host, the earth. 
• Since the 1987 Harmonic Conversion new bands of light (i.e. frequency) have been able to penetrate and reconfigure the earth’s vibration and our DNA. 
• Crop circles depict consciousness-raising symbols. 
• Human’s own efforts to raise consciousness, like meditation or open-heart exercises, have created the right proportional critical mass to make the change.
• More conventional things, like the millions of people erasing poverty, oppression, and environmental disaster, have sparked the shift.
• God has said “Enough!”

      Maybe I sound crazy, but I no longer care.  I’m illuminating wide all those conversations I used to have in the darkened parking lot after those boring meetings.  And I’m not the only one.  I’m talking with people all over the place, in all professions and locations, people I never would’ve suspected to go “woo-woo.”  People looking for personal fulfillment who found enlightenment instead.  People recovering from cancer, alcoholism or a nasty divorce and quietly discovered cosmic love.  Artists searching for their muse who realized it was God.  Religious prayers that became spiritual conversations.  Parents who notice their children seem far more tapped in than mere intuition explains.  And over a million people from 139 countries watched Oprah’s online course with Eckhart Tolle.   We’re everywhere.  So I say forget the boring meetings.  Let’s move the conversations from the parking lot to the boardrooms, the classrooms, the living rooms, and make a difference.